PREVIEW： Chronicles #25 ｜ The Old Man and the Sea with Beau Dade
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Summary
Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea is a short novel about a fisherman who goes out to catch a fish, only to find that he has run out of food and is left with nothing left to eat.
Transcript
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Hello, and welcome to Chronicles, where today we're going to be talking all about
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The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, an absolutely fantastic novel. And obviously,
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I couldn't cover it without speaking to the man who recommended the novel in the first place,
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which is, of course, you, Mr. Bodade. How are you? Yeah, fine, thank you. Yeah, I always enjoy
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chatting to you, particularly about history and literature and stuff. So, yeah, you're sort of
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on the lookout for, there's sort of endless possibilities with your series. There's so
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many things. But one, it's quite a short novel. It's almost really a novella, really.
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You can read it. Two hours. Two and a half hours. The audio book is only a couple of hours or so.
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But it's one I've always loved. But it's very famous, isn't it? It won prizes and things.
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Yes. So it came out in 1952, and it won the Pulitzer Prize in 53. And it seems to have been
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something of a comeback for Hemingway as well. Because by that time in 52, I believe he'd,
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by 52, he had a book called Across the River and Into the Trees. And this was critically panned.
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He was just being told by critics, he's lost it. It's not as good. It's not up there with those
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Hemingway classics. You know, Farewell to Arms and all those incredible novels that first made his
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career. And so when he published The Old Man and the Sea, he said, I mean, it's very Hemingway of
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him, but he said, it's the best thing I've ever written. He just knew that he'd nailed it with this
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one. Yeah. So, I mean, a little bit about Hemingway's life or talk loads about Hemingway,
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an incredible life. But one of the things to say is that, yeah, this is right at the end of the
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career. He's an old man. Hemingway is an old man by this point. He sort of famously committed
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suicide, but he was getting on. And yeah, even by the war years, people had said he's over it,
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he's passed it. He did all his best work as a young man. Because Farewell to Arms is about World
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War I, isn't it? He was in World War I. Yes. So that's sort of his date. So by the 50s,
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he's getting on a bit. And where he was sort of a man's man in all sorts of ways, like he loved
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hunting and fishing and boxing, womanising, shooting, all those sorts of things. This story
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does deal with, among other stuff, getting old, being old. Yeah. And so it's sort of obviously his
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way of, one of his ways of dealing with it. Absolutely. And it's just a great story. I
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just think it's superbly written. Right. Like a lot of things, you just realise you're in the
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hands of a superb writer and storyteller. Yeah, absolutely. So honestly, on this particular
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occasion, I think it best to, normally what we do is, don't we, we just sort of talk through the plot
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and things as they occur. But really, I think for the sense of this one, actually, to just tell you,
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the plot is remarkably basic. It's just, you've got an old man and he's, there's a young boy that
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also helps him out in the, near Havana in Cuba and he's a fisherman and they go off. Well,
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they've had 80 days without a fish. After 40 days, the boy's parents pulled him away and told him,
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yeah, this guy's bad luck. He's the worst form of luck. He's unlucky. Go fish with someone who's
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actually out there catching fish. So the old man goes out alone, goes to catch a fish,
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finds a humongous marlin. And then in the process of taking three days to capture this fish,
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proceeds to start to bring it back to the land. And by the time he comes back, there's nothing left
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because the sharks have eaten it. In a nutshell, that's what happens. Goes out, gets fish, comes
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back, loses fish. But, but there's so much in it. It's such a deep story. And Hemingway layers it
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in that way that he was absolutely renowned for his iceberg theory of writing, where you leave lots of
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information on the surface, but you don't have to, you're not just constantly coddling the audience.
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You don't need to explain things to them. You've just left all of the information there at the front
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on the tip of the iceberg. And the further you go down, the more you realize what a philosophically
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rich story it is. Absolutely. I mean, I'll go so far as to say it's, it's like largely allegorical
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that there's, I mean, like the idea of, I don't know, maybe animal farms speaks to mind the most
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obvious example. If you think that's just the story about animals in a farm, well, you've missed the
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point. There's, there's, it's a, it's an allegory for loads of other things. And the
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same goes with the fisherman or the old man in the sea. Yeah. Um, but he's actually talking
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about lots and lots of other things about the entire human condition and the entire human
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struggle. It's not just about this one man trying to catch a marlin and the sharks eat
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it before he can get it back to shore. It's more, it's much, much more than that. Yeah.
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Way more. But we'll get into that, I guess, when we, we will, we will do it. Uh, also one
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thing to say as well is that this particular story, though it is very much, as you say,
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very allegorical, it also seems to have been deeply inspired, of course, like with much
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of Hemingway's writings by his own experiences. And you mentioned, um, just a minute ago, the
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fact that Hemingway was, um, loved fishing, you know, he lived in Cuba himself and, you know,
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he went sailing out into the North Atlantic, uh, and caught these types of marlin that
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the story deals with. And he could recognize all the fish to the point where he was winning
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all of the local fishing competitions and the locals were getting bit arsy at him, to
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be honest, you know, having this foreigner coming in and just winning our, taking the
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prize money from our local competitions. So Hemingway offered to settle it in the most
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Hemingway possible and just said, well, if you beat me in a boxing match, you can have
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the money. And, uh, let's just say none of the locals got that prize money, even older
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though he was by then. And so, yeah, a remarkable character. So you have, uh, characters in it
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like Santiago, the main character, the old man, uh, who was going to go into the sea. And
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he seems to have been very much inspired by a captain Gregorio Fuentes, who was one of
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the local Cubans that Hemingway knew very, very well, really respected them, was just
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an expert on fishing. And so there's also honoring an old friend as well. And the, the
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wisdom of someone that he's known in his own life amongst it.
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So just a couple of things to sort of hammer the point home about Heming, Hemingway's life.
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The things he loved most, absolutely loved most was hunting, shooting, fishing, uh, women's
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womanizing, drinking. I mean, he's an alcoholic and for a big chunk of his life, what he loved
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to do most was go out on a fishing boat and sort of drink all day. So that's what he loved
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most. So, um, a lot of the stuff about the, the actual fishing, like the, the detail is
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very technical is a bit technical and just very, very real. Right. Um, and so, I mean,
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even though the old man in the, in the story is based on someone, I feel like it's as well,
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it's Hemingway. Yes, it is. It is Hemingway. I mean, not that he was, he ever tried to fish
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essentially by hand in a small skiff like that. It's not, I'm not saying it's like a retelling
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an anecdote that happened to him in any way, shape or form, but the man's struggle is Hemingway's
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struggle is every man's struggles. Yeah, absolutely. And also, you know, coming at a time as well
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when Hemingway is struggling to write as well. And obviously that was his other, probably amongst
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all of the others writing was his first love. And he had a very consistent style of writing
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of course, which was, um, something, uh, that was first, um, inculcated into him, uh, when
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he first became a journalist. Um, and there was a particular style guide for the, um, journalistic
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outfit he was writing for at the time. I believe it might've been in Chicago. And one of the things
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was just short, clear, clear sentences and vigorous English. And that style to a T is exactly what
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you get in the old man in the sea. It's very George Orwell in that respect. It's not full
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of complicated, pompous language and words. It's very clear, very concise. And they also
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a wonderful style of repetition that just really powers through. And I find just barrels the story
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forward with this tremendous energy and urgency to it. Um, but it's so vivid, it's really unique.
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It's really unique. You can just read it and you, you kind of will just know subconsciously
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if you know what to look for, that you're reading Hemingway. It's so particular.
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Yeah. And it is, as you say, very sort of straightforward. It's not something where you need to, uh, be a
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reader particularly, or you need to get your ear in. Like there's certain things, you know,
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like Shakespeare maybe, or Edward Gibbon, or even like a 19th century novel. Like, um,
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I was reading as one of Disraeli's novels the other day, and it's, it's a little bit,
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you have to work a bit hard, or even Dickens sometimes. Yes. Yeah.
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I know Dickens less so, but even Dickens sometimes you have to really work at it a bit. You've got to
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kind of want it to power- You have to trust the process.
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To power through some of like the really long convoluted sentences and things.
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Yeah. Well, this is not what you get in Hemingway. No.
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It's very just short, sharp, boom, boom, boom. No, no potential. No really, really long, obscure words.
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Like at all. No. Really at all. And I'll just read this. So this is the second paragraph,
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um, of the text. And it just, it'll perfectly convey to people the, the sort of style that he
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goes for and how quickly Hemingway is able to set up the story. So he talks about the fact that it's
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been 40 days and 40 nights, and obviously the loads of biblical symbolism in the story as well,
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that we'll get to. But just for, uh, to read this passage. The old man was thin and gaunt,
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with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck. The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer
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the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The blotches ran well down
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the sides of his face, and his hands had the deep creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords.
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But none of these scars were fresh. They were as old as erosions in a fishless desert.
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Everything about him was old, except his eyes, and they were the same color as the sea,
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and were cheerful and undefeated." So all of a sudden, you understand so much about this man
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immediately. You understand he's old, you understand the fact, the limitations of his body,
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he's got skin cancer. And in some ways, he just looks like he couldn't accomplish anything anymore.
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It's his time's over. You know, the best days of his life are spent. And yet in the eye,
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Yeah, I was going to say that he's old and broken in many ways, but completely undefeated. That's the
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thing, that he has still got strength. He has still got strength. And that's sort of, again,
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unless you're truly, truly ancient, truly, truly sort of bedridden.
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When you get a bit older, like in your 50s, 60s, maybe even a sprightly 70-year-old,
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You're not prepared to just completely roll over and just be bedridden. You're not wheelchair ridden.
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Right. Well, you look at actors like Anthony Hopkins or Ian McKellen, who are in their 80s,
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but they still act because they just have that fire in them to still get up, to still live, to still
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And that type of person that has spent their life doing something physically hard, like being a
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fisherman out in the open in the Caribbean or wherever. Or, yeah, any sort of laborer that's
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spent, and they're not, yeah, they're obviously nowhere near their prime, but they've still got
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And that's sort of a vast experience and just, yeah, undefeated. Not quite done.
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There's still a spark of energy, of life still in there.
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And so that's exactly what we have in this particular story. And so obviously, let's just
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say you've got the whole thing of, well, they were out at sea for 40 days and managed to find
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nothing. And obviously you've got Jesus in the desert for 40 days. You've got Noah on the ark
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for 40 days as well. This feeling of trial, of patience, of endurance, of waiting, of trusting
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that eventually your look is going to change, that something good is going to come on the other side
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of this. And so already we get the sort of temperament of Santiago before he's even said anything,
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just through knowing what these past few months have been like for him and the fact that he's
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still going out there every day and trying to do it.
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Yeah. I said before the boy is forced to leave him because I think he says it's like 80 days,
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After he finally gets back, it's like 83 days. So it's more like 80 days. And yeah,
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it gives you, again, with very few words, it gives you, some of his short stories are excellent,
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some of the best writing. It's like really, really economical with words to a sort of a
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masterful degree though. Yeah. Where it paints this picture of like a fishing community. And if you
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keep going out to sea day after day and coming back with nothing, you get this reputation as
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being unlucky. And then that's like a really real thing. It's not just like, yeah, it's not just like,
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like a bit unlucky and people say it as a joke. No, it's very real that you're unlucky now.
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The boy's parents don't want him being with the old man because he's his unlucky company.
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And it's also just another point as well as for Hemingway's writing style, how he just simply says
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something along the lines of the old man taught the boy how to fish and the old boy loved him.
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That's all you really get as to how these two characters have come together. There's not
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paragraphs and paragraphs. There's not flashbacks. You just, you feel the relationship. You feel the
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history. You feel the warmth, the respect. All of it just comes through in their dialogue, in their
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routine, which is not even the bulk of the story. Obviously the old man's on his own for the most part.
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Yeah. But he builds up this relationship so quickly.
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So just to say that the vast majority of this story is the old man alone at sea in this battle
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with a giant marlin. But the first quarter of it, or maybe the first third, something like that,
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is before that. And it's much more about the boy. And there's some dialogue with the boy. They talk
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about baseball. I guess it's set in the 40s. It never explicitly says what year it's supposed to be.
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It must be the 40s or the 50s because he's talking about Joe DiMaggio. And yeah, this
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relationship with the boy is very rich because the old man, you get the impression that he's
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basically destitute. Like he's got some sort of hovel, some sort of broken down little hut.
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And if it wasn't for the boy, the generosity of the boy and the boy's parents, every now and again,
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giving him a morsel of food, he may well be starving to death because it's the sort of
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society, the sort of person where if you're not catching fish, you don't eat.
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Yeah. It's fish to sell to make money and your own food. So if you go 40 or 80 days without
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catching any, if no one gives you any help, you would be starving to death. So he's actually relying
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on this boy, his apprentice, to actually stay alive. Yeah. And obviously, the old man, again,
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even though it's not really explicitly said, or if it is, it's only like once or twice in passing,
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and then with a soft touch that obviously there's a touch of humiliation to that,
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that you're supposed to be this, this great fisherman, you're supposed to be the best of
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the best. You're passing down your, your, all your great knowledge. And yet you can't even catch any
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fish. You have to rely on the charity of a boy. Yeah. And you also get little hints to the fact that
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there's a, a old portrait or paint, sorry, a photo of his wife that's turned away and she's
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obviously since gone. So he had a wife and we've obviously got imagery of, of Jesus and Christianity
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in the, in the room as well. But also, yeah, as you say, absolutely destitute and poor shoving a
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newspaper, rolled up newspaper into his clothes for pillows and just putting newspaper over the broken
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springs of his bed. Yeah. Just absolute poverty, absolute poverty. And yet the old man never really
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makes a great deal of comment about his actual material prosperity. You can tell that the things
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that actually plague the man the most in the story is the sense of loneliness that he's feeling at this
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particular time in his life, that people are disappearing from it, that he doesn't speak.
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The boy is really his only company at this point. And they'll talk about the baseball and Yankees and
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Joe DiMaggio, who he admires, which is obviously, obviously has some sort of, I mean, I'm no baseball
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expert, but obviously I know Joe DiMaggio. And, you know, being one of the most remarkable baseball
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players, of course, to have ever lived, but also just that willpower as well, right? He, he sees
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qualities in DiMaggio that he obviously wants to find in himself as well. And this all comes together
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when he says, the boy says something on the lines of, oh, the Yankees didn't win. He says, yes, but DiMaggio
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is, uh, he's back on the form again and he'll carry it, you know, that actually the strongest member
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of your team can just change your tide. And so that's what this is. This is him going out there
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to try and be the DiMaggio of the sea. Yeah. In a way. I think there's an interesting,
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well, another sort of interesting thing in the first bit of the story, but before he goes out to sea
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in the Marlin, the whole Marlin episode, which is the vast majority of the story,
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is that he's obviously living in this complete poverty, but he's never, there's nothing,
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there's no real hint that he feels particularly sorry for himself or that it's, that he's in a
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complete, complete despair and just ready to, no, it's always like tomorrow I'll, I'll catch a fish.
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Tomorrow I'll catch something. It's sort of the, the mountain to the, every person has to climb
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in life is that no matter really what gets thrown at you or no matter, um, how much of a dry period
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you go through, um, never feel sorry for yourself. Just, it has, you have to be in the mindset of
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tomorrow's going to be better. Yeah. Um, yeah, definitely. And also a really interesting aspect
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to the fisherman's life as well is that he, there's a particular quote where he basically
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says something along the lines of, but, you know, I, I was destined to be a fisherman, right?
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There's never any idea that actually, okay, well, you've been out in the sea for 80 days and caught
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nothing. Maybe it's time for a train change of job. Maybe it's time to go work for someone else,
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you know, to do something to, no, I, I was born for this. This is what I am. Um, there's the sense of
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destiny and actually that he, he is in the right place within the universe. He just needs to endure
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this bout of bad luck that he's going through. And so there's a real stubborn level of stoicism
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in the admirable, of course, but, but stubborn. And again, isn't there the allegory of it or that
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the every man element of it is that, uh, nearly everyone in life, unless you're born to wealth
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or you win the lottery or something, nearly everyone is staring down the barrel of, um,
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trying at something constantly every day, maybe for years and years and years, maybe for most of your
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life, attempting things, trying things with no guarantee whatsoever of success. In fact, you failed
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over and over and over again. Yeah. Uh, but what else is there? What else is there? What other choice
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have you got? Yeah. Um, so you, you have to keep going like whatever your thing is, you may, may well not
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be fishing, whatever your thing is to make it in any field. Um, and there's absolutely no guarantee
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of success. And you've actually been working at it for a long time with still no real results.
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Hmm. But, um, that's the human condition. You've got to toil away anyway. Yeah. You've got to keep
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going. You've got to keep going. Just keep moving forward. Um, there's, there's also, before we actually
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get to him, uh, taking off in his little skiff, let's also just, um, have a moment to talk about
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this paragraph as well, which is where he says, he no longer dreamed of storms, nor of women, nor of
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great occurrences, nor of great fish, nor fights, nor contests of strength, nor of his wife. He only
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dreamed of places now, and of the lions on the beach. They played like young cats in the dusk,
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and he loved them as he loved the boy. He never dreamed about the boy. He simply woke, looked out
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the open door at the moon, and unrolled his trousers and put them on. He urinated outside the shack, and then
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went up the road to wake the boy. He was shivering with the morning cold, but he knew that he would
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shiver himself warm, and that soon he would be rowing. Within that one particular paragraph, one,
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this is something that reoccurs over and over again, the dream about the lions, um, which is obviously very
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simple. I mean, some people obviously, you can interpret very easily. The cry, uh, the lion is Christ.
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Um, but I also think, um, I think my own personal view is that it's symbolic of the virtues of youth,
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right? And strength and pride and, um, capability. Yeah. Sort of like that masculine, um, sort of those
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qualities that Hemingway admired in himself that he liked in other people. And obviously the old man saw
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those lions on the beach many, many decades ago by this point. That's the story, isn't it? Yeah.
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And so it's always there in his memory. Yeah. He says at some point when he was a young lad,
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or even a child, or certainly a young man or child, he once saw some lions on a beach somewhere.
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I don't think in Cuba. No, it was in Africa. All right, right. So he's in Africa and he saw
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on the beach, these lions walking along and it's like sort of some sort of indelible image in his
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mind. Yeah. And, uh, yeah, Hemingway, uh, recalls back to that a few times. Um, and you know,
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that is actually one of the few, few sort of kind of ambiguous bits about the whole story.
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Uh, well, or not obvious, should we say exactly what Hemingway's saying or doing there, but I think
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you may well be right that it's just, uh, it's just an image of, I don't know, like youthful strength,
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virility, or just some sort of incredible otherworldly. Um, just, yeah, just like some
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sort of incredible image. Um, yeah, someone from Cuba would, would, doesn't, doesn't have lions on the
00:24:56.820
beach. Right. So if you saw something as incredible as that, when you was a child in what the very,
00:25:03.220
very early 20th century or late 19th century, um, obviously where there isn't, there isn't, uh,
00:25:08.820
multimedia and you're not bombarded with images in any way, shape or form, that would have been
00:25:13.220
something that would have stuck with you for life. Um, definitely. Yeah. Also just this part towards
00:25:19.700
the end as well, where he just talks about, again, so many sentences like this with, he was shivering
00:25:25.140
in the morning cold, but he knew he would shiver himself warm and that soon he would be rowing.
00:25:29.940
Just things like that. Oh, I've got a problem. I'm cold. Well, you won't be cold when you do this
00:25:34.340
thing. Right. Santiago does this all the time. This is a problem. This is a solution. So just do this
00:25:42.100
thing. Right. He always is just giving himself practical advice or doing away with things. It's
00:25:49.220
like, you know, don't focus on what you don't have, focus on what you do have and what you can work with.
00:25:53.700
Just all the time. You're like, there's a, you can tell he's very, very mentally sharp.
00:25:58.260
There's a lot going on up there all the time. He's not dithering. He's not, it's not Biden. He's
00:26:04.260
really, really on it still. And it's the most simple sort of poverty, uh, solutions to everything.
00:26:12.740
Yes. It's like there's some sort of, uh, hardship or problem or whatever. And, uh, well, I can just
00:26:19.140
manage, I can just do without it. I can just, I'll be fine. To jump ahead a little bit, a few
00:26:25.380
times in the stories, he says something like, um, there's like pain or misery or hardship, but I'm
00:26:31.620
okay. Cause that means nothing to me. Essentially one way or another says something like that. Yeah.
00:26:35.860
It's like, I'm cold. Well, that's okay. Men handle cold. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, uh, yeah,
00:26:43.940
I know, I know in a minute that, um, I know for a fact that me in and of myself, um, I can just hack
00:26:50.580
it. So it's not a problem. I always, I've always hacked it. Yeah. And I always will. Yeah. Yeah,
00:26:56.180
absolutely. And then there's also just this other, um, paragraph as well that I really think is worth
00:27:01.380
dwelling on because I think, again, there's a lot of, um, symbolic meaning in it where he says,
00:27:06.500
he always thought of the sea as Lamar, which is what people call her in Spanish when they love her.
00:27:12.660
Sometimes those who love her say bad things of her, but they are always said as though she were
00:27:18.100
a woman. Some of the younger fishermen, those who use boys as floats for their lines and have motorboats,
00:27:24.420
bought when the shark lovers had brought much money, spoke of her as Elmar, which is masculine.
00:27:30.900
They spoke of her as a contestant or a place or even an enemy. But the old man always thought of
00:27:37.300
her as feminine and as something that gave or withheld great favors. And if she did wild or
00:27:43.620
wicked things, it was because she could not help them. The moon affects her as it does a woman,
00:27:49.220
he thought. So I think there's a lot in that because obviously the gendering of the sea, I mean, yeah,
00:27:57.060
since the dawn of writing, of course, things have had taken on kind of a spiritual femininity or a
00:28:03.220
spiritual masculinity, whether it's Apollonian or Dionysian, you know, in Greek tales. And I think
00:28:10.340
with this as well to really the man's skiff being on board there where things are ordered and he has
00:28:16.900
his tools and it's structured and everything against the untamed chaotic feminine of the sea
00:28:24.340
and sort of its swings and moods and the lunar cycles that obviously Hemingway is very, very clearly
00:28:30.900
alluding to there. There's this whole symbolic fight in it between feminine and masculine.
00:28:37.860
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