Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (51 page)

Many tricks and resolution. That is how the field is shaped at this juncture of Santiago’s life—perhaps at every juncture of every life. In some sense, it expresses the elemental truth (or hope) of humanism: the human ultimately triumphs via brain, not muscle. Oedipus’s victory in front of the Sphinx, the giant animal-god, says the same thing: thinking is our trump card. How much truer still when weighed by an old man who knows his physical resources are not what they were? What will I do, Santiago wonders in midbattle, if the great fish decides to go down? What will I do if he sounds? “I don’t know. But I’ll do something. There are plenty of things I can do.” This little story is out to inventory the shrinking human tool kit, out to measure what you still have when age has taken its bite. Over and over, Santiago acknowledges he is too old for this kind of a contest; and over and over, he replies to himself: I will figure out something, I have plenty of tricks. There is something virtually Darwinian in this logic: to succeed as a species, you must possess survival skills that surpass those of the other denizens you share the stage with.

With Hemingway, these matters are wonderfully literal: this story is about living, embodied creatures having it out, engaged in mortal combat, and whether the two-footed one has the requisite resources to carry the day is an open and daunting question. There is no buffer and no frills here, nothing sublimated, nothing metaphorical. “Bare, forked animals” all humans are, as Lear realized, but Santiago’s situation would seem more primitive still. A man, a fish, the sea, and that’s it. Does the man have—does he
still
have—what it takes to prevail, what it takes to assert the dignity of his species? In this light, growing old is to be understood as a supreme challenge for our kind: are we still worthy? Even my term “worthy” seems too cerebral, and notions such as the Italian Renaissance concept of
virtù
or the French word
vaillance
seem closer to the mark: a gauging of human strength where the physical, the mental, and the moral are inseparable. Because this is Hemingway, it comes across as pure and clean, stripped of psychology, located on a small skiff riding the great sea, delivered as a ballet between man and fish, down to the bare essentials, each enacting the role nature has assigned it, leaving it for us, the readers, to assess the moral and existential stakes of what we’re witnessing.

What kind of ballet does an old man do? We know his glory days are in the past and that he relies a great deal on the assistance of the young boy, who idolizes him. We know he no longer dreams of fights or women. We are told that “[f]or a long time now eating had bored him and he never carried a lunch.” It would appear that he is postappetite, postpassion. Yet the novella stays in our minds as the saga of intimate contact, of an unforgettable bond between man and animal, of an encounter on the ocean that has as much bodily fervor, contact, and twinned fates as any fable of
Liebestod
you’re likely to read. I have no interest in eroticizing Santiago’s relation to his marlin, but I think it highly significant that he remembers a marlin romance, remembers it as something of great beauty and pathos. He had hooked the female fish—the male always let the female feed first—and the male stayed loyally with his desperate and doomed mate throughout the time she was being brought in—stayed, in fact, so close to the boat that there was a risk his tail would cut the line. He stayed by the side of the boat, playing his role in his passion play as the man gaffed and clubbed his mate and hoisted her on board the skiff. At that point, knowing she was dead, “the male fish jumped high into the air beside the boat to see where the female was and then went down deep, his lavender wings, that were his pectoral fins, spread wide and all his wide lavender stripes showing. He was beautiful, the old man remembered, and he had stayed.” That is one form of ballet.

Here, then, is a spectacle of natural love and fidelity proper to fish, rich in beauty for the old man who witnesses it. I wonder if Hemingway is not remembering the beautiful story of the bird couple that Whitman sang of in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” also a story of fidelity in the face of loss and death, of the natural world as our first lexicon for the most important lessons we are to learn. In Whitman’s poem, this event acquires a seminal importance for the young poet-to-be, for he now understands death to be nature’s primordial message, and he imagines the very sound of poetry as “song of the bleeding throat.” In Hemingway the story is accented differently, and one is to place great emphasis on those fine last four words: “and he had stayed.” One stays to the end. Santiago will do no less, himself. I’d also want to claim that the magnificent remembered display of the male fish’s dazzling body—his fins figured as wings, his entire form godlike—lends a ceremonial, mythical aura to this story of a man fishing at sea, and I believe that we can best grasp the stakes of Santiago’s minutely detailed, physically rending, emotionally rich encounter with the giant marlin as a kind of love/death match, as a maritime version of the
corrida
that Hemingway so often wrote about. That is what Santiago’s ballet consists of: being conjoined, bound body and spirit, to the beautiful undersea creature in the fullest embrace of his life. It begins with courtship, and it ends with death. It is a worthy exit gambit for an old man.

One is struck by the decorousness of it all. Santiago virtually sings a love song to the animal in the deep. He begs the fish to eat the sardine and tuna offerings (with enclosed hook), he sings the praises of his dish: “Make another turn. Just smell them. Aren’t they lovely? Eat them good now and then there is the tuna. Hard and cold and lovely. Don’t be shy, fish. Eat them.” The fish serves himself well—to call this “taking the bait” is to miss its sweet civility—while the host readies his reserve line and urges his guest to consume still more, so that the hook will be fully ingested: “All right. Are you ready? Have you been long enough at table?” Once eating is over, more strenuous activities begin. Now the fight is on, but never does Hemingway construe it as a battle or a conflict; of course Santiago labors mightily to contain the enormous beast, but love is the driving force. Repeatedly, he refers to the marlin as his brother, his equal, even though that in no way alters the killing plot: “Fish, I love you and respect you very much. But I will kill you dead before the day ends.” Later: “I’ll kill him though. In all his greatness and glory.” Santiago evinces great empathy for the huge animal: he wonders how old the marlin is, how much the marlin can see at that depth; he knows that the “setting of the sun is a difficult time for all fish.” He knows the huge fish must be ravenous; and he is sensitive to the animal’s great pain, a pain that could possibly drive him mad. Above all, he is acutely aware of the fateful structural drama unfolding in front of our eyes: he is bound to the beast. For good. “Fish, I’ll stay with you until I am dead.”

As the struggle reaches epic proportions, lasting three days and draining virtually all of Santiago’s strength, the old man realizes ever more fully the nature of their bond: “Fish, you are going to have to die, anyway. Do you have to kill me too?” And a moment later: “You are killing me, fish, the old man thought. But you have a right to. Never have I seen a greater, or more beautiful, or calmer or more noble thing than you, brother. Come on and kill me. I do not care who kills who.” There is something deliriously egalitarian on show, and it makes perfect sense that the exhausted old man wonders whether, at the end, once the marlin is dead, he is bringing in the fish or the fish is bringing him in. They are mated, even though one has killed the other. This is not a poem of the earth but a poem of the sea, in which the creature on the surface and the creature in the depths fuse with each other in a final, consummate embrace.

Why is this? We see here the absolute severity of the Hemingway world, one with no hiding places or compromises. And perhaps
The Old Man and the Sea
is the purest of the entire lot, for Santiago articulates the elemental law at work, the elemental command given to humans: “The fish is my friend too, I have never seen or heard of such a fish. But I must kill him. I am glad we do not have to try to kill the stars.”
I am glad we do not have to try to kill the stars
. I can imagine no writer other than Hemingway with an ethos of this stamp. Killing is what is expected of us; it is the supreme act that enables us to give our measure, to truly enter the Creation. Santiago muses still further: “Imagine if each day a man must try to kill the moon … imagine if a man each day should have to try to kill the sun? We were born lucky, he thought.” There is an outright cosmic feeling to these remarks, positioning the lone old fisherman in a setting of extraordinary scope, yet a setting in which he is called upon to act. One is accustomed to romantic effusions about the stars and the moon, calling us to reverie or awe or worship. But murder? I see no paean to violence here, no hint of bloodthirstiness, but rather a bizarre homage to the Creation and the fierce requirements of those who inhabit it. The softer virtues have no place: man proves his mettle by pitting his very life against the elements. Now, in the contest of his life, he must prove it once more, for it is the code he has lived by. “The thousand times he had proved it meant nothing.… Each time was a new time and he never thought about the past when he was doing it.” DiMaggio, with his bone spur, did such things each time he came to bat; so too will old Santiago. One last time.

But DiMaggio had only to hit a speeding ball coming at him; Santiago is locked into a
danse macabre
with his great marlin, connected to it by a taut line that will snap if overpulled, a line that is becoming etched into the old man’s flesh and exerting monstrous pressure on his shoulders, his hands. But it is also a kind of umbilical cord, exquisitely sensitive to each of the giant fish’s moves, moves that Santiago reads as if he had X-ray vision. Their love/death relationship lives through this line, makes them a couple, takes every single bit of the old man’s strength. But we are to remember: he has, on his side of the ledger, “tricks and resolution,” for they are the trumps, the only trumps, of old age. Will he win by smarts, by having more savvy than the creature on the other end of the line? Will experience carry the day?

No, it will not, in itself, be enough. Strained to the utmost, no longer as powerful as he was, Santiago knows he must make that tired body of his into something stronger. Arguably the single most striking feature of this story is its depiction of eating as the primal act of living creatures. Remember the hungry child we saw as far back as Lazarillo and Pablos; customarily we assume such matters to have less urgency as one ages and grows old. But Santiago, whose appetites have waned, who finds eating boring, also finds that he must eat if he is to be the equal of this giant fish. We learn as well that he had feasted on shark liver oil and turtle eggs aplenty in the old days. Time to start again. With great simplicity and cleanness, Hemingway writes of Santiago slicing his own tuna bait into large strips and eating it raw; and when that does not suffice, when the struggle is still at its most intense, he eats the flying fish as well; and when that too is not enough, he eats raw a dolphin, a sweet-tasting fish whose flesh may well cause him to vomit when ingested like this. Each time the old man puts sliced raw fish into his mouth, he chews it with utmost care, then swallows it carefully, and we the readers can virtually
see
the chemical breakdown of raw fish flesh into human energy.

Eat or be eaten; that is how the wild ones live, and it is how Santiago must live if he is to capture the marlin. Yes, the sharks will make their evil appearance in the final act and set about devouring the beautiful great fish—and Santiago hates sharks, sees them as divested of dignity, as utterly unlike the godlike animal he has caught—but we readers are struck by the parallels on show, the absolute command to eat that tyrannizes all life. And it works. He feels the calories, the raw sustenance and oomph entering into his bloodstream and his muscles. It is hard to be more primitive than this. “I could not fail myself and die on a fish like this,” Santiago says, and we can almost put a sexual stamp on this performance. Almost. It is instructive reading, in a time of athletic and sexual mania, a time of steroids and Viagra, to see that no pharmacy is required, that the ocean has what you need if you’re resourceful enough to get it.

Yet the spectacle of an old man gathering every resource imaginable—knowing how to position his body, how to use his lines, how to read the winds and the currents, how to gauge the movements of his silent partner the marlin, how to wrest raw food from the sea—in order to meet his challenge is perhaps not what one most remembers in Hemingway’s story. Hemingway’s genius was always a talent for dialogue, for wry, playful, muscular, tight-lipped, almost elliptical dialogue that required reading between the lines. Santiago is a man who talks aloud to himself, the gift of old age. But he also listens to himself: “Aloud he said, ‘I wish I had the boy,’ ” which is followed by this: “But you haven’t got the boy, he thought. You have only yourself.” From speech to thought, from thought to speech: Santiago suddenly feels fear about this huge, “calm, strong fish” who “seemed so fearless and so confident.” Now the riposte: “You’d better be fearless and confident yourself, old man.”

I want to call this the language of maturity; it displays a capacity to hear and to respond to one’s own thoughts and words, to take possession of one’s verbal being, to inventory one’s resources. Its repetitions are rich as the adjectives move from fish to man, from assertion to doubt. It also displays the sinuous beauty of Hemingway’s style, a style that looks taut and monosyllabic but can surprise us by its turns and forkings. We overhear Santiago in this tale. We watch him do his tally, take his findings, establish his bearings, reestablish them. Here is a form of doing that goes beyond ingesting flesh or bearing pain. Late in the story, once the sharks have begun mutilating the great fish and old Santiago knows that worse is on the way, he moves along just this verbal axis toward a kind of wisdom: