Hemingway’s Ultimate Metaphor

The Old Writer and the Sea of Words

Ernest Hemingway writing at campsite in Kenya (source)

The essay “Hemingway and Me”¹ by Paul Krause immediately caught my attention. The reason is simple: I share with the author the same emotional experience—generally negative—brought about by reading the literature of Ernest Miller Hemingway (1899–1961). Krause recounts that there was a time when he didn’t like the author of A Farewell to Arms at all. As he grew older, he began to become more open to his prose. As for me, reading the fiction of one of the most pessimistic writers of contemporary literature has never offered me the joy of a ‘eucatastrophic’ ending (as Tolkien would say). With one exception, the fatalistic outcome of the novels by the author from Chicago leaves you with a bitter taste. For the world of his characters is a world without sky.

Matured for such an encounter, Krause confronted the loves devoid of hope of Hemingway’s characters, through the distinction between “romantic realism” and “romantic tragedy.” Although he himself seems somewhat skeptical of such nuances, he managed to propose some reading keys that are more than interesting. In particular, the comparison between Hemingway’s romanticism, described as “a captive fugitive of a hopeless love,” and that of the Victorian-era writers exposes very well the difference:

Austen and the Brontë sisters may have plenty of tragedy, pain, and suffering running throughout their novels, but they end how we would want romance novels to end and expect romance novels to end because they shaped the course of how romance novels are to conclude. After all, they formalized our modern romantic sensibilities. Austen’s heroines eventually marry and are happy.

But the most profound note, as savory as an old Burgundy wine, immortalizes the contrast between Saint Augustine’s vision of love and Hemingway’s:

Love is hopeful in Augustine. Love is hopeless in Hemingway.

Minimalistic yet extremely dense, the above statement represents, for me, the core of Krause’s interpretation. The consequence that a love without sky, which permeates Hemingway’s vision, has on his characters is terrible:

Their love (…) cannot be sanctified because of the hopelessness they find themselves in.

Risking a hasty generalization, I dare to say that Krause’s interpretation can be applied to the majority of modern classic authors, older or newer. Love is also hopelessness for most of the characters in Stendhal, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Joyce, or in the novels of Fitzgerald and Murdoch (to name only a few renowned writers). It is a love that carries within it the burden of the curse of earthly eros, described by Plato in his Phaedrus. It is the only soul-energy available to those incapable of sanctity. However, it is precisely this wretched state, of perpetual and profound unhappiness among Hemingway’s characters, that prompts Krause to seek a way out of the labyrinth. His own virtue of hope has revealed itself to him in the form of sanctified and, at the same time, sanctifying imagination:

My hope lifts up tragic romance and turns it into a sanctifying romance. I, as the reader with a sanctified and sanctifying imagination, have the power to do this. Hemingway’s own imagination may not have been able to reach that blessed land for his characters, but my imagination has that unique and special power for his characters. I have the power to bestow life where life ends. Hemingway gives me that opportunity that other writers do not with their happy endings. I have come to appreciate him more for this very reason. Hemingway permits me to be hopeful for his characters, that I may one day meet Robert Jordan and María in the land of eternal love where peace and happiness without strife and struggle abound forever and forever.

The hermeneutic path opened by the above fragment is remarkable. Through it, the encounter with the author’s horizon found one of its most fruitful expressions. Accessible to any passionate reader, it deserves to be further explored even by literature critics. In the particular case of Krause and Hemingway, we are not dealing with a protocol meeting, external and polite, but with the creative symbiosis of two writers. The reading of the former gives unexpected prominence to the works of the latter.

Propelled by Paul Krause’s ‘invention,’ I began to reread Hemingway. I was immediately convinced: the sanctifying path of a sanctified imagination is indeed beneficial. (Probably Tolkien is the one who first intuited it in his famous essay “On Fairy Tales.”)

During these “experimental” readings animated by Krause’s interpretation, my eyes fell upon the speech that Hemingway prepared for the traditional banquet organized on the occasion of the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature for the year 1954. Here, the American author uttered a few words that not only offered me a major interpretation key but also transformed the novella The Old Man and the Sea into one of my favorites:

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

The quote above encapsulates the incredible struggle of the writer who aspires to achieve his artistic goal. The context helped me establish the connection between Hemingway’s words and the profound metaphor embodied by the tense navigation of the one who awaits until the end the encounter with the mysterious underwater creature: the magnum opus. In the absence of inspiration from the muses, there is no other intellectual work more demanding, exhausting, or solitary. Tireless sailor of letters, the American author has left us with the perfect description of the inner state of those who stubbornly await the great encounter.

The Old Man Santiago perfectly illustrates the writer’s solitude. Nothing can sweeten it. Days pass, turning into weeks, then months, sometimes even years. The big fish refuse to visit him. Even the part of him untouched by the pessimism’s malaise, symbolized by the young Manolin, the only faithful friend, smiles sadly when the word salao—the encrypted term that in the world of fishermen indicates the worst form of unlucky—comes more insistently before his eyes. In fact, the lack of inspiration made the burden of writing terrible from the start. Although sweet, it is always painful. Ask George Bernanos or Joseph Conrad. Nothing can explain the decision to remain a fisher of rare words, woven with labor into the intricate fabrics of provisional texts whose value is never certain. But the most precious fish—the novels or epic poems—refuse to show up. When the muses are silent, nothing remains but painful work, accompanied by the hope of better future expeditions.

At first, he tried the trickery of sweetening solitude by inviting a witness into his meager boat. When his good friend returned the manuscript, he read his notes and comments with bated breath. But in the end, he had to decide, to cut, to reformulate, to correct, to rewrite. Alone. Always alone. No friend can replace the author’s aesthetic magisterium. The writer is the sole king of his imaginary worlds. No one else in the mortal world can participate in the genesis of the offspring of his soul animated by an obscure vision. Resigned, he continued to fish. Alone. Always alone.

Embarking on a late expedition, he sinks the lines of several fishing rods at different depths. Floating above the abyss of phantasms, he contemplates diffuse worlds unfolding before his inner eye. Sometimes, when the waters are transparent, he can see into the depths. Even if the scenario becomes clear and the faces of his characters take shape, this does not mean that he will easily make them burst onto the surface of the pages of the future story. Hours pass, and the signs of the times herald imminent changes. He watches and waits. Enclosed in his office, floating on the vast expanse of the ocean of his imagination, he only confirms, over and over again, the perfect characterization of the fisherman’s work left as a memory by another hunter of rare marine creatures: “the cursed and blessed craft of words” (Tudor Arghezi).

Remembering the passions of his old romanticist confreres, he gazes at the intermittent shimmer of the stars, hoping that the moon’s rays reflected in the thousands of mirror-like scales of the waves will animate his imagination. However, the tranquil breeze from outside cannot replace the unique and unpredictable gusts of wind from within – inspiration. No matter how much he thinks of Odysseus sailing towards Ithaca, Homer’s secrets remain hidden from him. Weary of so much turmoil, occasionally electrified by the specter of bad luck—salao—he eventually falls asleep. But his closed eye outwardly watches inwardly. He sees a beach caressed by the silvery waves of the ocean. The long green leaves of the palm trees tremble under the touch of a hesitant breeze. What will follow? He sees and hears, simultaneously, something unexpected. The robust silhouettes, moving majestically, of lions disturbing the peace with their martial roars emerge from the bushes. Thin and slow, but no less dignified, lionesses follow closely, pausing only to gaze at their cubs. Free and powerful, unburdened like him, they begin to frolic in the sand mixed with shells and stones, causing the water to rise in splashes. Their spontaneity does him good. How powerful they are... How free they are...

Awakened, he will remain under the spell of the dream for hours. As he gazes at the fishing lines, his inner eye still scrutinizes the remembrance, vaguely imprinted on the retina of his memory, of the beach and the giant felines. With the palm of his right hand cupped, he splashes the cold liquid of the ocean on his face. Slowly, he wakes up for real, fully returning to the harsh world of his nautical journey. And just then, as he wipes his face covered in salty liquid, he feels the boat being jerked by a power from the depths. Hastily, he checks the lines to identify the one to which the mysterious creature has clung. The struggle is only just beginning. And he is alone, alone and stubborn in the midst of the aquatic abyss.

Once the lucky line is discovered, he begins to maneuver it, wearing out his prey. What will his double look like at the submerged end of the line? Without forcing it, he allows himself to be dragged along the waves of an unparalleled tale. The passage of time increases his tension. Slowly, he begins to pull to bring the creation to the surface. When, after days and nights, the first draft of the story’s core is ready, the unseen reveals itself for the first time. The gigantic form leaps above the waves of increasingly fierce emotions. It is shining like the silver from which the moon of his sleepless imagination is made. Composed of the sum of the novel’s characters, the outline of the gigantic marlin reminds the stormy face of the ancient wise, Merlin. A seasoned strategist, the writer will eventually pull it towards the vessel where he will permanently tether it.

The killing of the creature will only mean the transfer of its substance into the life of the new fiction. Entitled The Old Man and the Sea, it will convey to readers the author’s erratic breath caught in his struggle with the words. But the difficult battle does not end here. The journey to the refuge shore is fraught with dangers. The reactions of critics, justified or unwarranted, benevolent or merely envious, will gnaw at the author’s flesh, who, in the end, will calmly await the outcome.

Reluctantly indifferent to attacks from outside, the gigantic body will be torn apart by its own remorse. No true creator has ever spared himself. The severity of self-criticism is all the more acute when the author is more gifted and when his work has been more sustained. In the end, despite assistance and relentless modifications, he will only reach the shore with a gigantic skeleton. Here lies the most authentic message of the old Hemingway, saddened by the declines of his own creations. In our fallen world, words are nothing but a dream of a shadow. A shadow of essences reflected in a vision which can never be brought to light and kept pure and alive, like the perpetual play of lions on the shore of a lost continent.

1. The full title of Paul Krause’s essay is “Hemingway and Me: Or How I Learned to Love Hemingway and Stop Worrying About His Hopelessness:” https://voegelinview.com/hemingway-and-me-or-how-i-learned-to-love-hemingway-and-stop-worrying-about-his-hopelessness/ [Accessed: 03 December 2024].