Somebody Loves Us All: Hemingway and the Via Crucis
In his assessment of Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, William Faulkner surmised that the Gulf Stream novella that won Hemingway the Nobel Prize in Literature might turn out to be the best and most enduring work produced by their generation. It’s high—and deeply generous—praise from the author of such monumental works as The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom. Given that Faulkner’s own novels, or even Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises, are often named as the great modernist classics, The Old Man and the Sea might be a surprising choice. But perhaps what Faulkner saw as its greatness had less to do with the way Hemingway’s novel dwelt upon the problems of the modern world—sin, alienation, loss of faith—and more with how it seemed to offer their cure.
Indeed, Faulkner believed that The Old Man and the Sea was the greatest of Hemingway’s works because in it Hemingway had “discovered God, a Creator.” He had found whatever it is that “made and loves and pities” us. Santiago, the titular old man, is no Sartrean self-fashioner; he develops a nature for himself in accord with whatever vision of himself seems most apt. He is a creature, one deeply alive to the creatureliness of everything around him. He is a St. Francis of the Gulf, for whom the surrounding waves are all ablaze with meaning.
From The Sun Also Rises to the Nick Adams stories to Islands in the Stream, creatures were never far from Hemingway’s mind or his pen. Nor are the fish and beasts that appear in the pages of his books merely the objects of bloodlust or sport. Rather, these creatures share in the aesthetic contemplation whereby God sees that what is good is itself a share in the contemplative gaze of Father and Son upon each other. For the beauty of God, Aquinas says, is the cause of all that is. And we see slivers of that beauty in the lavender bars on a marlin’s sides or the mosaic spray of color on the back of a trout.
As someone with perhaps as much passion for the outdoors as Hemingway, but with far less facility in their pursuits, I often have recourse to his work as the next best thing. I was perhaps 10 when I picked up The Old Man and the Sea one night at the book shop with my parents. I selected it for the cover image, as I often had big game fishing magazines. Yet of the many pieces of first-rate fishing writing left to us by Hemingway, the one that continues to haunt me most is an account, first published in Esquire, of a shark fishing venture out of Key West in the company of fellow novelist John Dos Passos. It contains what to me is one of the saddest passages in all of literature, wherein Hemingway describes the process of gaffing a shark so that he could shoot it in the head before removing the hook, only to shoot himself through the calf muscle instead. He tells us that, should any of us dear readers like to see the man shot again, we should have to do it ourselves. Given Hemingway’s end, it’s a line that hurts more every time I read it—a line I imagine swimming in the woeful stew of paranoia and depression that overcame him in the end.
For those concerned with the relationship between the artist, his faith, and his work, Hemingway presents a number of hermeneutic difficulties. In some sense, his Catholicism is well known. He converted initially after taking a nightmarish load of shrapnel from an Austrian “ashcan” mortar shell while he was serving as an ambulance driver on the Italian front in the First World War. He stated feeling in the moment as though he were dead, his soul ripped from his body and fluttering about like a startled bird before descending again to corporeal life. Upon his baptism in extremis and subsequent recovery, he became ardently Catholic in practice. Though it was only in preparation for his marriage to Pauline Pfeiffer that his formal conversion was completed.
In some quarters, this conversion was never taken seriously. And the apologist for Hemingway’s belief—chiefly Hemingway himself—is immediately confronted with the facts of his drinking, inveterate skirt chasing, divorces, remarriages, and, most disheartening of all, his suicide. Turning the pages of his books, it is hard at times not to hear the sputtering ooze of those harpy-infested trees who populate the wood of Dante’s suicides.
Nor is it easy to paint Hemingway as a modern Cato, that bearded Mosaic figure Dante so tantalizingly places on the lower slopes of the mountain of Purgatory. Hemingway was no pre-Christian martyr in the cause of republican virtue who somehow, in Dante’s cosmos, is preserved by an extraordinary gift of grace. Hemingway was, he himself protested, a Christian—one whose faith evidently could not hold up to the madness that overwhelmed him.
That there was madness seems evident, and in that madness may lie a modicum of hope. Hemingway knew he lacked the strength to be what he professed himself. As he wrote to his friend Fr. Vincent Donavan, he did not like to advertise his Catholicism, as he knew very well the importance of good examples in faith and knew very well, too, that his own example was no such thing. Yet this knowledge of himself belies the kind of fundamental wrestling with God which has, since Jacob, marked the path of the believer, of the one who stakes all on the only one worth the stake.
Hemingway’s life was not entirely void of the works of faith. In his later years, he quietly donated the sum needed to put a new roof on the Catholic Church in Hailey, Idaho. And, bolder still, given the man’s reticence in talking about writing, he agreed to meet with the students of the parish and field their questions on his art and life. (The conversation is recorded by A. E. Hotchner in his book Papa Hemingway.)
But it is in his works themselves that we find the depth of Hemingway’s faith. It is there that, by Faulkner’s reckoning, Hemingway himself plumbed that faith and encountered the creator. The struggle with belief is there in Jake Barnes, praying feebly in the church in Pamplona. It is there in the very title of For Whom the Bell Tolls as well as in its magnificent ending. And it is there in the hands of Santiago, the old man bound for three days to the beautiful and doomed blue marlin.
Ernest, Pauline, Bumby, Patrick, and Gloria Hemingway in Bimini, 1935
Santiago’s story, like Christ’s, is one played out in the shadow of the Cross, a shadow mysteriously illuminating the long Camino of the old man’s life. Two scenes near the end of The Old Man and the Sea help us to read the rest of the novella from the vantage of Calvary. The first occurs when Santiago sights a pair of shovelnose sharks following the blood trail of his great fish. “Ay!” Santiago cries. “There is no translation for this word and perhaps it is just a noise such as a man might make, involuntarily, feeling the nail go through his hands and into the wood.” Here is an echo of Dante, crying “Ahi!” at the outset of his Inferno as he faces the prospect of telling us the way of that wood—so savage, harsh, and strong—where he was lost.
Between this cry and the image of the old man carrying his furled mast up from the beach, the novel’s denouement casts a cruciform light back along the rest of the tale, so that new parallels emerge between Santiago’s passion and the Paschal Mystery. For instance, he hooks the great fish at noon, the hour when Christ hangs on the cross as darkness comes over the land. Throughout the battle in the boat that is little bigger than a tomb, he bears the heavy line across his back, his arms spread out as though upon a cross. And it is not until the morning of the third day that he brings the fish alongside his skiff and plunges a harpoon into its heart.
Santiago is not the only Christ figure in the book. The fish, too, receiving the iron in its beautiful side, spilling its blood into the vastness of the sea, is a kind of Christ as well: one who has borne the fisherman’s wire leader across its back throughout the fight, has gone without eating throughout his ordeal, and gives his flesh to Santiago in the end, strengthening him for the journey home and the battle with the sharks. It is the hour when, as Luke has it, darkness prevails.
And yet Santiago’s soul is awash in light. Practically everything he sees is steeped in meaning, from the strange light of the sun in the sea that tells of good weather to the warbler whose weary alighting on his boat occasions a reflection on the fragility of animal life as well as the high cirrus clouds that promise a favoring wind for home. Nature is alive with messages. Every bird and fish and breeze bears words to Santiago’s spirit. Like St. Benedict with his raven or St. Kevin with his blackbird, Santiago is, to borrow from William Cullen Bryant, one “who in the love of Nature holds / Communion with her visible forms,” and nature in turn speaks to him “a various language.” Santiago hears the Word at work in all that is.
For all its parallels to Christ’s passion, The Old Man and the Sea is no allegory but something deeper, a tale which reveals how suffering may be spun into wisdom. It reveals how a seemingly chaotic world may show grace to the attentive gaze, how beauty gives herself to man over the long span of life God grants.
My students always like hearing, as I did, that The Old Man and the Sea is in some sense a true story, one Hemingway had from the old man found off the coast of Havana, half-crazed with sun and hunger and loss, with the ravaged spine of an enormous marlin lashed alongside his skiff. It is no mere fish story, though it remains a fiction—a well-made thing into which the maker poured his soul. Santiago promises that if he lands the marlin, he will make a pilgrimage to the Virgen de Cobre, just as Hemingway himself did when he left his Nobel medal as a votive offering.
It does no good to canonize one’s heroes. Dante refrained in the case of Virgil. But he did reserve a place in the brow of his celestial eagle for the Aeneid’s Ripheus the Trojan. Though the Mantuan poet himself would spend eternity in Dante’s limbo, his poetic creation found a place in paradise. Dante’s paradise may not be God’s, but it points to certain features of the divine largesse. And the light of its empyrean irradiates Santiago, the marlin, and the vast ocean concealing monstrous beauties we can hardly dare to dream, calling us to cast out into the deep.
Daniel Fitzpatrick is the author of two novels, a poetry collection, and a translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. His book Restoring the Lord’s Day is out now from Sophia Institute Press. He is the editor of Joie de Vivre: A Journal of Art, Culture, and Letters for South Louisiana, a member of the Creative Assembly at the New Orleans Museum of Art, and a teacher at Jesuit High School in New Orleans, where he lives with his wife and four children.