This page added June 18, 1999
In Hemingway's writings certain themes recur with such frequency and such power that is is natural to look at them more closely.
The hero is wounded. He bears outward, or in some cases inward, traces of violence and abuse. His battle consists of conquering dread, a dread which is connected with earlier experiences, and which appears as fear of death or fear of life—two apparently polar forms of dread, which in reality are the same. Since life ends with death—since death, in other words, is a constituent part of life—it is unthinkable to accept life without simultaneously recognizing death as life. Life includes death. The same applies to pain. It is a pitiful zest for life which does not at the same time rejoice in death. Hemingway's hero is placed in naked circumstances, where the human lot has cast off its veil: life, pain, death. You can't have the one without the others. If you keep accounts, pain and death become such dominant entries that they must be regarded as assets if life is to go on. In Hemingway's world, death begins in childhood, as described with unsurpassed mastery in the short story “Indian Camp”—in which the boy Nick is present while his father, the doctor, performs a Caesarean section on an Indian woman, without anesthesia, equipped only with a jackknife and fishing leaders to sew the wound up with. The Indian woman's husband lies in the upper bunk during the operation, with the woollen blanket drawn up over his head. When they lift up the blanket, he has cut his throat. The razor lies open on the blanket.
“Take Nick out,” says the father.
Here Nick meets life. Afterwards he asks his father three questions:
Does it always hurt so much to have a baby?
Do many people kill themselves?
Does it hurt to die?
It is here that Hemingway's long autobiography begins; this is how it feels to be human. Nick, the hero, has received his wound. He is scared to death, and all his later experiences are more or less repetitions and variations of the same theme. Nick has learned what it means to be a human being on earth; it was a boy invalid who left the Indians' hut with his father afterwards.
Do many people kill themselves?
Does it hurt to die?
Among certain literary critics there is a sort of tradition which assumes that the Hemingway hero, and hence Hemingway himself, is a kind of half-imbecile subhuman, incapable of thinking, interested in nothing but drink, whores and blood—a thoroughly stupid hero. Nothing can be more stupid than this judgment itself; and it is most clearly disproved by certain of Hemingway's writings on literature. They are some of the most intelligent things ever written about literature.
Does it hurt to die? Of course it hurts to die. Do many people kill themselves? Yes, many do.
Then it must hurt to live as well? Yes, it hurts to live.
Hemingway has come into the world, and at first cruelty, violence and pain fill his whole field of vision. It bids fair to become his only theme; but soon another one is added: What does one do to survive? Hemingway's father shot himself when the boy was fourteen or fifteen. But he had learned two things from him: to hunt and to fish. <.P>
In Green Hills of Africa he asks himself why he has always hunted so much, why he has killed so much. It was probably not right for him always to be killing animals. But, he says, if I hadn't killed so many animals I might have killed myself.
In the same book he approaches the matter from another side. After an open break of his upper arm, with inflammation and gangrene, he once lay sleepless for five weeks in a hospital. “Alone with the pain” at night he comes to understand how an animal with a gunshot wound feels if it gets away from the hunter. All night he lay and felt through how everything must develop, from the bullet which enters and crushes the shoulderblade until all is finished. And because he was “a little out of his head”, he thought that what he was going through was perhaps a punishment for everything that all hunters had done. When he was well again, he decided that if it really was a penalty he had paid, then at least in the future he would know what he was doing when he hunted. And he resolved to quit the day he could no longer shoot well enough to kill cleanly.
At bottom this is Hemingway's worst complaint against life—that we aren't killed “cleanly. ” All his war experiences are collected in A Natural History of the Dead, one of the most chilling of all the contributions to the 20th century's apocalypse, an implicit repetition and intensification of Nick's experience at the Indian camp.
The war, for Hemingway, is merely a summation of our true human circumstances and limits. Here life is more honest, because it has shed its mask.
Besides hunting and war, there is bullfighting.
Hemingway is himself a passionate observer, and he has also tried his luck as an amateur bullfighter. His account of his own efforts in the arena belongs to the few humorous lines in his writings.
He has written a whole book about bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon. It is one of the oddest documents any writer has left, and I must confess that it was heavy going, despite the fact that photographs and bullfighters' biographies take up a great deal of the book. It must be the most thorough work of nonfiction ever written about bullfighting, and has found particular appreciation, and buyers, in Spain. Here as always Hemingway is a specialist in the subject he writes about, a fanatical specialist, whose highest goal is to write so “precisely” and “purely” that what he has written will perhaps be relevant and true after his death.
One of his main points is that bullfighting is not a sport. It is a tragedy, in three acts, where every slightest detail is determined in advance. Accidents, deaths, exaggerated foolhardiness or visible fear and cowardice have no place in the arena, and destroy the esthetic effect of the drama. It is wrong for the bullfighter to die in the arena; it is the bull who must die. Along with the bull and the matador there is a third person on the stage: death enters with them, and the amphitheater is one of the few places where one can study Death up close. Not a visible masquerade-death, not a theater-death, but the living, invisible Death, the majesty itself. But he is to take the animal, not the matador.
Hemingway adds that bullfighting is a good thing to write about, precisely because one meets death here, “and death is a good thing to write about. ” The same book contains the famous lines about how love can't end well, because—even if all other dangers are surmounted—one of the parties will outlive the other. And a man who has outlived a good wife is the loneliest of all human beings. The end is always very sad. He cloaks it in a conversation with “Old Lady”.
“It must be hard to be a man,” she says.
“Yes,” replies Hemingway; “very few survive it. ”
We must return for a moment to Hemingway's claim that a bullfight is not a sport but a tragedy in three acts, where every detail is determined in advance.
There is also an entirely different word for such a play, such a tragedy, in which all is predetermined and proceeds according to a fixed ritual, but we shall come back to that later.
Both in the hunting stories and in the bullfighting book it is evident that as a rule Hemingway's sympathy is partly, and sometimes completely, on the side of the game or the bull; he identifies sometimes with the man, sometimes with the beast, but most often with both. This gives the whole an inner and distinctive ambiguity, which I've found in no other descriptions of beast and man; they have life and death in common, and they meet there.
Hemingway's books teem with fishermen, and naturally these descriptions of nature are of a quite different, more ethereal character than the others; for good reasons they aren't so bloody as war, big-game hunting and bullfighting.
Fish and fishing have an entirely different function in his writings than game, beast of prey or bull. The lonely man with the rod fishing endlessly up and down a river seeks what all fishermen with a spiritual life get out of fishing: peace of soul. In its universality it quite simply belongs with being outside, with being alone in the woods and camping out, sleeping deeply, and looking at the river when you wake—the great, slow river. Fishing is to a much greater degree a convalescence than hunting can be.
Only against the background of the strangely dark pathos in Hemingway's work as a whole does it acquire its full meaning.
If you follow the main lines through Hemingway's writings, you will very easily discover that everything deals with a sick, mortally wounded man's fight to overcome the dread arising from his meeting with life. And in his later books, both in the vilified Across the River and Into the Trees and in The Old Man and the Sea, a figure emerges who is as liberated as a conscious human being can be. In any case the aging Hemingway hero is a wholly different person, and much more healthy, than the young one. It is also natural that in Across the River and Into the Trees we are transported, along with the old officer ready to die, back to the places where other Hemingway heroes—many years earlier, during the First World War—had their first and worst war experiences.
Let us sum up some of the chief themes in Hemingway:
Dread of life and death; overcoming that dread.
Big-game hunting. (War. )
Bullfighting.
Fishing.
A fixation on the Mediterranean region.
The last point, the fixation on the Mediterranean basin, also embraces—as a kind of substitute—Cuba and parts of Latin America. Most of Hemingway's books take place in Italian or Spanish-speaking countries, and he has an unusual command of both languages (as well as German and French).
Regarding the first point I shall merely note that Hemingway has never made a cult of his dread, on the contrary he has tried to hide it so far as possible; and this may well be the main reason for the snarling and almost inarticulate contempt he shows for T. S. Eliot and the modernism linked with Eliot's name. (Ezra Pound, on the other hand, he befriended and admired. ) Hemingway believes with all his might in a kind of “will to health”—and if this belief at times takes the form of a cult of the macho with clearly infantile features, it's worth bearing in mind the fifteen-year-old who found his father after a suicide by shotgun. In For Whom the Bell Tolls he touches on this indirectly by letting the hero think about his father, who also shot himself, and reminisce about how he had felt when he understood for the first time that his father was “yellow. ” It is undeniably strange to hear a grown man label a suicide as “yellow,” but a person must have some way to keep going.
It is necessary to state that Hemingway wants to be healthy; and this will to health despite everything must be regarded as the truly moral element in Hemingway's writings. It is in the deepest sense battle literature, where the battle in reality takes place within the hero, and only apparently outside him.
This “apparently” is significant, for it reveals Hemingway's use of symbols. We are used to a “modern(ist)” symbolism (e. g. Tarje Vesaas in this country) in which the “symbols” are not an organic part of the action, but are artificial contrivances labeled in big red letters: NOTE: Symbol! —In Hemingway the symbols are implicit; they follow the laws of reality to such a degree that in themselves they form a whole, full-blooded story, completely “right” and “exciting” on the external plane as well. The reader is at liberty to discover that he is dealing with very profound and true, really durable symbols. Most readers don't discover it at all, and read Hemingway approximately the way they read ordinary adventure yarns. Consciously and unconsciously Hemingway trusts that reality itself is built up of symbols which possess sustaining power; and this gives his writing the ambiguity which makes it true myth, and hence alive and lasting literature. On the writer's part it's a matter of treating reality with respect, and then using his eyes to see with. Just as you do in Rilke you will find in Hemingway that the words “precision,” “exactitude,” etc. continually recur when he writes about writing. Without this trust in reality a writer might as well let his pen be. The world will get along splendidly without him.
This use of real symbols is what makes literature both an exact science and an art. Without it no truth can take up residence in a book, and what you write will never serve on several planes. It will never become truth in the full meaning of the word. Every book must be built on one of the primal mythic themes which we know from fairy tales, myths, legends. etc. In literature there is no other possibility than the retelling of myths; the old motifs must be rediscovered, the world deciphered.
In The Hunt lies one of the great motifs, in the primitive hunt, the fight between human and beast. Ancient heathen and Christian pictorial art contains one of the most powerful and richest motifs in existence. The true fight between man and beast takes place within the person—in the inner forest, jungle or what you will. That is the locus of the fight. Within the individual the feral forces and the human forces meet. The animal is dread, savagery, rapaciousness, often of majestic size and beauty. The hunter follows the spoor, fights, kills or tames the beast. It is strength, speed, nature meeting thought, cunning, perseverance. It is a game, but a great and serious game. A drama. The next stage of the relation between man and beast is that of the shepherd, who doesn't kill but protects. Only then is the human master of the beast.
Hemingway says of bullfighting that it is not a sport; it is a tragedy with a precisely predetermined plot. We have another word for the content of such an expression, namely: cultus. The Spanish bullfight descends from three sources: the ancient Roman arena, the circus—which was spread all over the Mediterranean basin; from the bullfights in Crete; but above all from the Mithraic mysteries, which were widespread around the Mediterranean and had their origin in Asia Minor.
The cult of Mithra went through a great expansion within the Roman army in the period before the birth of Christianity. Mithra was the god who was born on earth in a cave, and became the master and conqueror of the “bull” which represents the human instinct and passion. He was the victor over the bestial nature.
That bullfighting has remained alive in a particular corner of Europe, in Spain, Portugal and Southern France—and in parts of Spanish-speaking America—must be bound up with deep-seated traits and needs in the psyche of the people itself. In any case one is dealing with a passionate and violent national character, stamped by the Inquisition, wars, vendettas and violence, strangely combined with a high and unique, complex culture. The church knew what it was doing when it allowed bullfighting to live on.
It is obvious that in bullfighting Hemingway has met a symbolic world which reaches very deeply into whole subconscious which drives him on so violently—and which is clearly divided from his conscious being by a very thin layer, precisely because of his lability, all the terrified sensitivity which has been his inborn torment.
The book about bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon, is—to a stronger degree than any of his other books—written by a sick and despairing man. Death is present on practically every page, and Hemingway's need to see it whole both from the bull's and from the matador's side is never denied. He feels himself one with them both.
I know no other writer who evokes the mood of the decadent world of antiquity so strongly as Hemingway does; an infinity of darkness, passion and suffering forms a sounding board behind practically everything he has written. All of The Sun Also Rises could have taken place during the last days of Pompeii. And no one else shows a stronger need to escape from it. The road from the Michigan woods where Hemingway grew up to the amphitheaters of the Roman empire is not so long as one would think. But the bloody sand from the arena, and the cold clear water in the trout streams and in the Black River, are very different things.
It looks as if what for Hemingway unites modern America with the decadent Roman empire is first and foremost cruelty—a total absence of everything which one in the deeper sense can call Christianity. Lynching of Negroes, violence and murder—that is Hemingway's picture of America. He hates his homeland more ardently than any other American writer. Only the woods and the Black River are different.
Through all the dark and heavy, bloody production which Hemingway now has behind him, there runs the story of the fisherman; the boy with the fishing pole, the war veteran by the trout stream, and the last, great image: the old man and the sea.
What is the fish?
What happens to a person when he has taken a fish up out of the clear deep cold down there?
The fish stands as one of the most meaningful symbols from Christian antiquity. It was the chief sign, the secret mark by which the Christians recognized each other. The symbol built on the letters in the Greek word for fish: ichthos. I and Ch which stand for the initials of Jesus Christ, and the three next letters for the initials in the Greek words for God's son, the savior. The fish itself, drawn or carved on stone and brick, is one of the most common relics we have from the life of primitive Christianity. Yet the image “fish” is by no means exhausted by a mere explanation of the literal meaning. Too much lies behind and beneath. The Fisher King in the Grail legend. The apostles were fishermen. Somewhere deep down in the unconscious we know what “fish” means. Franz Werfel says in a poem about a healing spring that this radioactive, healing water comes from a source lying so deep under the earth that the Fall didn't reach it. Something similar applies to the fish.
All who have really fished know that when the line sinks in the water, then one is in another world. So deep, so primal is the very activity of fishing, that it still has complete mastery over the soul. It is an image of the sort which C. G. Jung calls an archetype; it has endlessly deep tracks in the psyche, and the action reaches down into our most archaic layer. The fly, the hook, or the spoon bait which enters the water sinks in reality down into the mind.
Everyone who has fished knows that fishing yields some of the loveliest material for our dreams. Only in dreams is one a true Fisher. A dream about fish and fishing is the highest blessedness; the great, dark, arrow-swift shadow down in the air-clear water is life itself.
It is just because fishing is such a strong and symbolic activity that it is such a thoroughly therapeutic part of life. The fish is from before the Fall, and everything around it is purity, health, life and blessedness. And it lives in the pond, in the river, the lake, in the ocean. The fish has purity as a life element. Watch a trout moving between the stones at the bottom of the river!
The ocean and the lake and the river are not merely purity; they are also life's first dwelling-place; they are nature's mother-world, all things' origin, ground and source. The great healing doctor. The point and the surface, the star and the ocean—all meet here.
The Old Man and the Sea is the modern book which in my perception comes closest to Greek tragedy. Not in exposition, peripeteia, catastrophe, etc. , but in its purely inner attitude. Here the man and his fate are all alone. Man. Sky. Sea. Boat. If these four words don't mean more than man, sky, sea, and boat, then there isn't a word in the world which means anything whatsoever. All external circumstances are taken away, only the human and the battle remain. Deep, deep under him, down in the darkness, blue, there moves a being, wet, shiny, big and strange. What kind of thing is it?
It is the Fish.
Who knows it? Who has seen it? Who knows where it comes from? It is life's mystery itcarnate which he has beneath him. The mystery itself, everything strange on earth—the only, only thing which counts. Everything else is babble, gibberish, dust and ashes. He is on the ocean with life. He has contact, connection with it; through the thick wet line he feels the vibration of its secrets.
Who has understood the expression in a fish's eye?
Who is the swordfish? It is the ocean's proudest, most dignified, bravest, noblest possession. It is strong enough to swim more than 60 miles an hour, strong enough to drive its sword through oak planks two feet thick. The man pursues it from the jolly boat. Alone. Alone. For three days it drags him out to sea, farther out than any fisher before him. This is a fairy tale, a fable, just as deep and true as “The Fisherman and his Wife” in Grimm. He talks to the fish, and he understands it. He is close to the very inmost, ultimate thing in life. And he takes the fish.
Then he sails back to land with the fish lashed to the side of the boat. It is bigger and more beautiful than any fish he has ever seen before. And there is no doubt about it: This is the fish; the last proud beautiful secret of life.
Then come the sharks. He defends the fish, but they take it, piece by piece. They come, bite, go. They “come like pigs to the trough”—and the ones he kills with knife, harpoon and club use their last death throes to swallow the mouthful they have taken. When he sails into Cuba's harbor at night, nothing but the skeleton remains of the fish.
But it is the skeleton of the biggest swordfish seen in Cuba in human memory.
The story of The Old Man and the Sea is the truest and deepest portrayal ever achieved of Hemingway and his writings. It is the first victory signal he has sent, and it tells us everything we can know about Hemingway: No one has been further out to sea. No one has caught a bigger fish. And no one has brought less home with him.
This page added June 18, 1999