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In his treatise On the Nature of Things, the ancient Roman philosopher Lucretius once wrote: “Life is one long struggle in the dark.” What I think he meant by that is there is so much that we do not know.
Cuba and the Gulf Stream then were like an Eden for me, and returning to boarding school always felt like being sent into exile from paradise. Fishing trips with Papa aboard the Pilar in pursuit of marlin, exploring the sea by snorkeling with some of the first single-lens goggle glasses, and the trove of natural history books in my father’s library awakened me to the world in all of its beauty and complexity.
In my view, a great achievement of this novel is how my father, drawing on his own formidable experience and talent, managed to create for us the world of the Gulf Stream so completely. It is a powerful evocation of a precious ecosystem, one sadly undergoing terrible changes today due to human intervention, and one very much worth protecting.
The Old Man and the Sea is arguably the greatest fishing story of all time.
I made my own path along the bright red earth between sharp wind-etched, low-lying stones and patches of purple flowering thyme, their gnarled roots clinging to the surface. Suddenly a Cretan wild hare bounded from a nearby bush, startling me. I stopped and watched him tear off for about sixty yards before disappearing into the landscape. Moments later as I continued on my way, a covey of partridges shot out with the wind, their fluttering wings making a great whirring noise next to me. I thought again of The Old Man and the Sea and how Santiago is able to read the sea, which to the untrained
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He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.
He did not remember when he had first started to talk aloud when he was by himself. He had sung when he was by himself in the old days and he had sung at night sometimes when he was alone steering on his watch in the smacks or in the turtle boats. He had probably started to talk aloud, when alone, when the boy had left. But he did not remember. When he and the boy fished together they usually spoke only when it was necessary. They talked at night or when they were storm-bound by bad weather. It was considered a virtue not to talk unnecessarily at sea and the old man had always considered it so
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Untitled short story preserved as a twenty-two-page typescript with pencil corrections in the author’s hand (see fig. 11). Ernest Hemingway Collection, Item 733, Manuscript Series, Box 59, Folder 19, at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.
“Why don’t you write good short stories about Europe or Out West or when you were on the bum or war or that sort of thing. Why don’t you write one about just things that you and I know? Write one about what the Anita’s seen. You could put in enough social life to make it appeal to everybody.”
“N.S.L.,” Mr. Josie said to me. “No social life,” I confirmed. “You have secrets?” one of the girls asked. She was an awfully nice looking girl and on this profile you could not see the slight imperfection where some early friend’s right hand had marred the complete purity of the line of her rather beautiful nose. “The Cap and I are talking business,” Mr. Josie said to the two girls and they went down to the far end of the bar.
Just then one of the girls waved to us from the far end of the bar. It was a slow night and there was no one but us in the place. “N.S.L.” Mr. Josie said. “N.S.L.” I repeated ritually. “Constante,” Mr. Josie said. “Ernesto here wants a waiter. We’re going to order a couple of big rare steaks.” Constante smiled and raised his finger for a waiter. As we passed the girls to go into the dining room one of the girls put out her hand and I shook it and whispered solemnly in Spanish, “N.S.L.” “My God,” the other girl said. “They’re in politics and in a year like this.”
Selected edits written in Ernest Hemingway’s hand from his typescript of The Old Man and the Sea. The typescript is Item 90 of the Ernest Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. The handwritten additions are italicized below. The page numbers refer to the typescript.
Figure 1. Ernest Hemingway, Carlos Gutiérrez, Joe Russell, and Joe Lowe aboard the Anita with a marlin, 1933. Ernest Hemingway Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston, MA.
Figure 2. Ernest Hemingway’s fishing log from 1932. Page with notes from talks with Carlos Gutiérrez about marlin fishing. Ernest Hemingway Collection, Oversize Materials, Box 14, Folder 13, page 9, at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston, MA.
Figure 7. Cuban fishing skiff. Photo by Ernest Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston, MA.
Figure 9. Fishermen from Cojímar, Cuba, bringing back a marlin, 1955. Photo attributed to Ernest Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston, MA.
Figure 11. First manuscript page of the short story “Pursuit As Happiness.” Ernest Hemingway Collection, Manuscripts Series, Box 59, Folder 19, page 1, at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston, MA.
Figure 12. First page of Hemingway’s typescript of The Old Man and the Sea. Ernest Hemingway Collection, Item 90, Manuscripts Series, Box 27, Folder 5, page 1, at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston, MA.
Figure 13. Page 96 of Hemingway’s typescript of The Old Man and the Sea. Ernest Hemingway Collection, Item 90, Manuscripts Series, Box 27, Folder 8, page 96, at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston, MA.
Ernest Hemingway did more to influence the style of English prose than any other writer of his time. Publication of The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms immediately established him as one of the greatest literary lights of the twentieth century. Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. He died in 1961.
