Reading Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea: Glossary and Commentary ed. Bickford Sylvester, Larry Grimes and Peter L. Hays (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Reading Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea: Glossary and Commentary ed. Bickford Sylvester, Larry Grimes and Peter L. Hays Ricardo Landeira, Emeritus Bickford Sylvester, Larry Grimes and Peter L. Hays, eds. Reading Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea: Glossary and Commentary. Kent State UP, 2018. 136 p. Over 5 million copies of the September 1, 1952 issue of Life magazine, which carried the complete text of The Old Man and the Sea, sold within 48 hours, notes Carlos Baker in his critical EH a Life Story (Scribner's 1969, 504). However, it was not only this unheard of runaway success which virtually guaranteed that Ernest Hemingway would soon be first in line for the 1954 Nobel Prize in literature, since in the minds of both readers and critics, he had at last produced a "nice book," one that everyone could admire and enjoy simultaneously as great literature. Never mind that it was among his shortest full length narratives, barely one hundred pages, labelled a novella, a genre which no lesser a canonized figure than Henry James had notably made respectable decades earlier. Until The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway's novels and short stories had garnered praise for their direct and stark language, a style well suited to the male protagonists that populated them, rough-hewn individuals who lived and fought by a code all their own, although never quite capable of measuring up to the standards set for and by themselves. Some of these characters died trying (Francis Macomber), others ended up deserting their cause (Fredric Henry), while yet others had to be content with pyrrhic victories signaling one last loss—as is the case of septuagenarian Santiago, hero of The Old Man and the Sea. The title of Hemingway's 1933 collection of fourteen short stories, Winner Take Nothing, identifies precisely the plight of the novella's ill-fated protagonist, a man alone at sea who endures a three-day struggle against a formidable prey, yet whose victory is negated by loss—the very definition of Pyrrhic. Given the work's brevity, any attempt to place it alongside other sea tales in which the hero single-mindedly confronts overwhelming odds against a monstrous marine creature, such as Melville's voluminous Moby Dick, serves no purpose, regardless of the shared common themes. [End Page 88] We must forget too, for any purpose of enlightenment, the film version that casts an overfed Spencer Tracy as Hemingway's malnourished hero—a Hollywood treatment the author hated. Wholly apart, The Old Man and the Sea is written in almost allegorical fashion with frequent stream of consciousness monologues, recurrent flashbacks of symbolic tropes, oneiric lapses attributable to sunstroke and dehydration, as well as subliminal references to subjects as diverse as marine life, baseball and the passion of Christ. Thus, what first appears to be a short, easily read fish story—and surely it can be read as such—the novella is so layered and polysemious that any veteran Hemingway reader will be glad to have this companion volume within easy reach at all times. Its four-hundred and fifty-nine explicatory entries--ranging from a single word to several pages—not only make it more interesting but also more meaningful. Sylvester, Grimes and Hays put on full display many of the work's narrative strategies, its subtexts and intertexts, its genesis from incipient beginning as mere fish log entries dating back to the early 1930's, when Hemingway first discovered deep sea fishing, to the baseball pennant games of the 1950 season. Because The Old Man and the Sea had likely been incubating in the back of the author's mind for the better part of two decades, its complexity, compounded by its succinctness, demands a tutorship that Hemingway chose not to supply. Not only are there no footnotes in the original Scribner's edition, but in fact, there are no chapter or other textual or typographical divisions of any sort. The three co-editors not only fill in this lacunae and much needed complementary information, but also clarify myriad veiled references to arcane specialties such as navigational charts, Gulf Stream currents, marine measure indices, seagoing...