What would Joe DiMaggio do? – Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea
by Steve
After this blog’s one moment of international fame, I thought I’d make a brief return to the work of your friend and mine, Ernest Hemingway.
So, to bring you up to speed on my Hemingway adventure, on the advice of this parish’s Steven Harris, I picked up the complete short stories late last year in one of those beautiful Everyman hardback volumes, using my Borders vouchers just before the place went belly-up. Then, for Christmas, as part of an array of writing-inspired gifts, my wonderful Significant Other gave me Ernest Hemingway on writing, a brilliant little book compiling many of Hemingway’s thoughts on writing and the life of the writer. So…I’ve been keeping up.
Last week I popped into one of those strange discount bookshops, that sometimes have some incredible bargains and other times have nothing but hopeless junk. This time, I got lucky. I picked up the slim The Old Man and the Sea, the story that won Hemingway a Nobel Prize for Literature.
My verdict? Well, I loved it. It is one of those stories that will stay with me a long time, hopefully forever.
And I used the word ‘story’ rather than ‘book’ quite deliberately.
Here we have a real tale, a fable even. Here we have an old man, a young boy, a fish and little else. Everything is honed down and necessary, like a good story should be. In its 100 or so pages there is no room for flowery prose, or padding. And while it is set in contemporary times, the 1950s, it feels like the kind of story passed from generation to generation, as old as the act of fishing itself.
The one concession to the modern-day is baseball. Oh yes, there’s another reason why I loved reading this, apart from Hemingway’s prose and its brevity (I do love a good short book to rip through). The Old Man’s mind often wanders to baseball, and in particular the great Joe DiMaggio, wondering how the Yankees’ great centre fielder would deal with the Old Man’s situation, being the son of a fisherman himself.
So, concise, timeless and it namechecks baseball. It’s as if this was written for me. Don’t you just love getting that feeling from a book?
I haven’t read a whole lot around the book yet, but it is clear that this is a book that divides opinion. There seems to have been a fair bit of criticism in terms of its symbolism, and if it veers too far from the writer’s famed realism.
I’ll just let the man himself reply:
“No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in. … I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things”.
Wait until next year 
Ha! Don’t let a high school student read that last quote. That was the perpetual argument, from what I can remember: how do we know they meant to do that? They want to say that writing is just writing, a story is a story, and every author they didn’t read meant nothing greater than the words on the page, the people in the story. I remember being skeptical.
And with Hemingway here, he might be telling us the truth. If he is, wonderful, but he’s not saying anything about writing in general, only this book. It would be dangerous to say that Hemingway speaks for everyone when he says this. We have to give authors credit for intentionally using symbols in order to give the readers a little bit more to chew on.
That being said, I think that in high school, teachers sometimes go a little far in giving the author too much “genius” credit, telling the students that they meant everything the teacher happens to come up with. Can we not just concede, at least a little, that the great authors we read are people, too? Capable of error, not necessarily geniuses all the time? Not every word is the golden breath of God, but we’re sometimes led to believe this.
Hemingway of course could be playful here, inviting people to explore the symbolism in his work. By saying there is no symbol, doesn’t it make us curious to find out if there really is?
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Funny about the high school students – when I was at school, many of my essays interpreting books or poems were labelled ‘obscure’, as I often seemed to go off on some sort of symbolic flight of fancy, looking for a deeper meaning. In fact, a lot of subtext was avoided at school. We studied A Streetcar Named Desire and pretty much ignored any possibility of there being a gay subtext. But then again, it was a room full of insecure teenage boys.
I think Hemingway probably was being playful. He seems to be such a careful writer, that it would all be planned out and thought through intently. There is that paradox of being plain-spoken actually creating more mystery.
I guess I think in any book the story should always be the focus, and should be strong enough to harbour any meaning, real or imagined. The real skill of a writer is integrating that meaning so it doesn’t just feel bolted on.
As for if subtext/meaning/symbolism is meant by a writer – I’m not entirely sure if it matters. I think whatever we get out of Art is pretty much valid. But I do think we give artists too much credit sometimes. Chance has to play a part.
Switching media, how many songs have been analysed to death, when the writer just came up with something off the top of their head in fifteen minutes? Or how many paintings have been intently studied that were just created for a commission, or were thrown together in a fit of inspiration with little dedicated thought?
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