chapter 11

Befriending
The Old Man and the Sea

In May 1952, Hemingway accepted an offer to print the entirety of The Old
Man and the Sea in a single issue of Life magazine for the sum of $40,000.
When the magazine appeared in September, it sold 5,318,650 copies in two
days. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953, and, a year later, was singled
out for praise in Hemingway’s Nobel Prize citation. Within five years of its
publication, The Old Man and the Sea had been translated into twenty-six
languages. Reviewing the novel in Shenandoah, William Faulkner began
with a two-word sentence fragment: “His best.”
Faulkner’s words have an elegiac lilt, as if he were writing out of a
moment in which it had become possible to single out the pre-eminent
achievement of a now-finished career. As the 1950s wore on, and as no
additional books by Hemingway came into print, the sentence might have
been amended to read, “His last.” And Santiago’s story, to borrow a title
from In Our Time, can be read as “The End of Something.” Or, as
Hemingway wrote in “Big Two-Hearted River,” “It made a good ending
to the story.” It makes a good ending to the story of Hemingway’s writing
life because, in it, that which could be accomplished has been accom-
plished, and now the time has come to rest, and to dream of lions.
The Old Man and the Sea does not, however, conclude with a strong
sense of an ending. Once back in his shack, Santiago falls asleep in
exhaustion, and, when he wakes to find Manolin offering him hot coffee,
he tells the boy that he is not “lucky” anymore. But Manolin soon has him
talking about fishing together again and about the need to get a good
killing lance and how to grind it. No more did Hemingway, after finishing
his “best” book and receiving his prize, cease from his work. Given the
number of books quarried posthumously out of the pages written by him
during the 1950s, the almost ten years that remained to Hemingway after
the publication of The Old Man and the Sea can be regarded as one of his
most productive periods. A novel appearing to mark the end of something
had in fact opened the way for a late-life flourishing.
179

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 180 Forgiveness
The story of an old fisherman who catches a huge fish and then loses it
to sharks was first told by Hemingway in a 1936 Esquire article called “On
the Blue Water.” Three years later, Max Perkins received a letter about
some “very long” stories Hemingway intended to write, including one
about “the old commercial fisherman who fought the swordfish.” It was
to contain “everything he does and everything he thinks in all that long
fight with the boat out of sight of all the other boats all alone on
the sea.” Five years later, Hemingway again alluded to his desire to
write a “novel – not war book. It should have the sea and the air and
the ground in it.”
It was not until January 1951, however, that Hemingway actually began
writing The Old Man and the Sea. He worked at a furious pace, sometimes
more than tripling his normal output of five hundred words a day.
Completed in six weeks, the Santiago story was still being conceived of
by Hemingway as Part 4 of the big “sea book” that had preoccupied him
since the end of the Second World War.
In the eighteen months between the completion of the novel and its
appearance in print, Hemingway suffered three incalculable losses. His
mother Grace died in June 1951. Pauline Hemingway died that October, at
the age of fifty-six. After a violent telephone conversation with Ernest
about their wayward son Gregory, Pauline had gone to bed in tears.
Awakened by a “horrendous scream” in the early morning hours,
Virginia Pfeiffer rushed her sister to Los Angeles’s St. Vincent’s Hospital.
The doctors, aware that Pauline’s blood pressure had skyrocketed and then
dropped precipitously, but unable to locate the source of her pain, watched
her die of shock on the operating table. An autopsy revealed “a rare and
unusual tumor of the adrenal medulla.” The tumor could be stimulated to
secrete an abnormal amount of adrenaline in response to “a sudden
stressful incident.”
In February, 1952, Charles Scribner, Jr. died of a heart attack. Scribner
had replaced Max Perkins as a correspondent after Perkins’s death in 1947
and had been intimately involved in helping to prepare The Old Man and
the Sea for publication. Hemingway had written “Charlie” in the summer
of 1951, reassuring him that “if anything happened to him, Scribner could
safely publish ‘the old man and the sea’ as one small book.” “I was very
happy you liked what you read,” Hemingway wrote to Scribner in March
1951, “but I would have thought you a certifiable fool if you had not (he says
cheerfully).”
Michael Reynolds speculates that the losses suffered by Hemingway
during this period gave him access to memories and feelings that made it

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 Befriending 181
possible for him to begin The Garden of Eden, a story deeply rooted in his
honeymoon with Pauline. Here is what Hemingway wrote to Scribner on
the day after Pauline had died: “The wave of remembering has finally risen
so that it has broken over the jetty that I built to protect the open roadstead
of my heart and I have the full sorrow of Pauline’s death with all the
harbour scum of what caused it. I loved her very much for many years and
the hell with her faults.”
If there is a rupture in the Hemingway story, a collapse of the defenses he
had built to protect himself from a tsunami of regret, it appears to have
occurred in the months after the completion and before the publication of
The Old Man and the Sea. It was time, as it is for David Bourne in writing
the elephant story in The Garden of Eden, to begin “attacking each thing
that for years he had put off facing.” While this act of facing would make
many things possible, including The Garden of Eden and A Moveable Feast,
it marked the end of something as well. That ending was at once a
culmination and a departure, a work of summation that stands wonder-
fully and terribly alone. It occurred in The Old Man and the Sea, and it
could only have happened there because the novel was completed before a
wave of remembering broke through the roadstead of its author’s heart.

Hemingway’s work can be read as a continual search for an ever-elusive

home, one expressive of a longing that achieves temporary satisfaction in
The Old Man and the Sea. “Let us take the stuff home,” Manolin says in the
opening pages, as he picks up the gear from Santiago’s boat. They walk up
the road together to the old man’s shack and “through its open door.”
There is a bed, a table, a chair, and a place on the dirt floor for cooking with
charcoal. On the walls are “relics of his wife,” a picture of the Sacred Heart
of Jesus and another of the Virgin of Cobre. “Once there had been a tinted
photograph of his wife on the wall but he had taken it down because it
made him too lonely to see it and it was on the shelf in the corner under his
clean shirt.”
After Santiago goes out “too far” and loses the marlin to the sharks, he will
turn back toward “the glow of Havana” and head home to his “good town.”
He finds the current and “knew where he was now and it was nothing to get
home.” He thinks about “bed” as “a great thing” and, once in it, falls asleep
with his arms out straight and his palms up. In the morning Manolin comes
to the shack, and, when he sees the old man’s cut and battered hands, he
begins to cry. When Santiago wakes up, Manolin brings him coffee and the
old man notices “how pleasant it was to have someone to talk to instead of
speaking only to himself and to the sea.”

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 182 Forgiveness
In the easeful and caring give-and-take between Manolin and Santiago,
Hemingway creates an indelible “fiction” of adoption. “If you were my
boy,” Santiago says to Manolin early on. “But you are your father’s,” he
continues, as if to chasten a wish so openly expressed. Manolin never uses
the word “father,” although he does once refer to “papa.” Otherwise, he
speaks only of his father as a “he”: “He is almost blind”; “I do not like for
him to waken me. It is as though I were inferior”; “He never wants anyone
to carry anything.” Santiago responds, “We’re different . . . . I let you carry
things when you were five years old.” As Carlos Baker writes, Manolin’s
love for Santiago is “the love of a son for an adopted father.”
Hemingway was never very big on blood ties. The primary bonds in his
fictions are affiliative rather than filial. In The Old Man and the Sea, this
activity of reaching out in a horizontal rather than a vertical way reaches its
extreme limit. The imagination of the book, which speaks for Santiago
even when he himself is not speaking, engages in a continual act of
befriending.
Given the pervasive heimlich mood, it is surprising to discover how often
Santiago uses the word “strange.” To Manolin he says, “I am a strange old
man,” and the claim is repeated after the marlin has sounded and he vows
to kill him in all his greatness and glory. “‘I told the boy I was a strange old
man,’ he said. ‘Now is when I must prove it.’”
But this strangeness has nothing to do with estrangement. It is in fact a
quality Santiago shares with the fish he must kill: “‘If you’re not tired fish,’
he said aloud, ‘you must be very strange.’” Once the fish has been lashed to
the skiff, Santiago recalls him hanging “motionless in the sky before he fell”
and is “sure there was some great strangeness.” The turtles, too, are “strange
in their love-making,” as is the water in “the strange undulation of the
calm.”
Hemingway’s use of the word “strange” provides a small example of the
controlling pattern of the book: the continual finding of likeness. This
work is forwarded most obviously by the use of simile. What makes this act
of finding likeness strange is that a hallmark of the early Hemingway style
had been its avoidance of figurative language. A marked change is being
announced when Hemingway chooses to end the opening paragraph of his
novel with a simile: “The sail was patched with flour sacks and, furled, it
looked like the flag of permanent defeat.”
A more relaxed approach to figuration is accompanied by an easing of
the strictures on what can or should be voiced. While vestiges of the old
superstitions remain – “he knew that if you said a good thing it might not
happen” – Santiago nevertheless talks a considerable amount. This

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 Befriending 183
speaking aloud allows Hemingway to externalize a drama largely interior.
Santiago thinks about the fish and the sharks, of course, but also about Joe
DiMaggio and the lions on the beach in Africa and about the time he won
“the hand game.” “Now he said his thoughts aloud,” Hemingway writes.
The point is to bring what is in the mind into the light by giving it the
shape and sound of spoken words. As Santiago performs this work, he
remembers, wishes, regrets, and, above all, ventures comparisons.
As early as December 1926, a reviewer of The Sun Also Rises had noted
“that neither in his short stories nor in this novel does Hemingway make
use of a single simile. To him things are not ‘like’ other things.” Years
later, as Max Perkins wrestled with Scribner’s over the use of four-letter
words in A Farewell to Arms, he expressed an awareness that “any
circumlocutions . . . would be inconsistent with the way you write. . . . I
pointed out as an instance that you almost never even used a simile.”
Of course, similes and metaphors can be found along the way, as when
in “The End of Something” Marjorie refers to the abandoned mill as “our
old ruin.” She then pushes her impulse toward comparison a little further
by way of an overt simile: “It seems more like a castle.” The sentence that
follows – “Nick said nothing” – indicates his impatience with this mode of
responding to the world and may form part of the basis for his feeling that
love “isn’t fun anymore.” As if to demonstrate his own expertise,
Hemingway follows Marjorie’s lazy comparisons with an audacious one.
A trout’s back comes up out of the water and makes the minnows jump
wildly. “They sprinkled the surface like a handful of shot thrown into the
water.”
So, yes, I can play this game, too, Hemingway’s lovely simile suggests. I,
too, can bring to the surface the mind’s continual seeking after similitude
in dissimilitude. That I will not continue to do so after this one instance of
showing that I can arises from my desire to leave such work to the reader,
who, in being asked to move through a verbal terrain where everything
seems so carefully noticed as to have to mean something, is to be left on his
or her own in the figuring out of what these meanings might be.
The pervasive sense of an overwhelming symbolic logic hovering just
below the level of the literal is a feeling Hemingway’s early style at once
arouses and suppresses. The uncanny mood of a story like “Indian Camp”
depends upon the way in which it insinuates without actually spelling out
the fact that something more is going on than meets the eye. From the
perspective of rhetorical decorum, Hemingway’s investment in “the
uncanny” thus acquires a stylistic as well as a psychological dimension.
In a metaphoric prose, a tenor (the subject) is accompanied by its vehicle

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 184 Forgiveness
(the metaphorical term itself). The abandoned mill is the tenor; “our old
ruin” is the vehicle. When he is operating on the iceberg principle, the
surface of Hemingway’s prose presents itself to us as the vehicle of an
unnamed tenor. In refusing overt figuration, Hemingway creates the
sensation that even the smallest detail in his prose may, in fact, be
figurative. When Hemingway turns to metaphor, or to the even more
obvious comparisons enforced by the “like” or “as” of a simile, he makes
explicit that implicit tension between the literal and the figurative that had
given his early work its air of suspicious calm.
In The Old Man and the Sea, the sail “like a flag of permanent defeat” is
followed by scars in the hand “as erosions in a fishless desert” and by eyes
“the same color as the sea.” There are clouds “like mountains” and clouds
“like friendly piles of ice cream.” As the first night falls, Santiago passes “a
great island of Sargasso weed that heaved and swung in the light sea as
though the ocean were making love with something under a yellow
blanket.” When he lashes the fish to his boat, Santiago notices that “the
fish’s eye looked as detached as the mirrors in a periscope or as a saint in a
procession.” The shark’s teeth also earn a double comparison: “They were
shaped like a man’s fingers when they are crisped like claws.”
Metaphors and similes extend human consciousness out into the
universe of things. Under their power, the disparate is brought close;
our figurations attempt to make a home out of the world. In so reading
the sea and the sky, the narrative voice of The Old Man and the Sea
continuously expands the territory that can be included in the good place.
This ongoing act of figuration forwards a work of befriending that allows
Philip Young to read the novel in his 1966 “Reconsideration” as issuing
from “a writer who is at long last completely at home in this life and
world.”
It is perhaps more accurate to say that the novel forwards a fiction of so
being at home. Early on, Manolin asks Santiago, “May I take the cast net?”
He asks the question even though he knows “there was no cast net and the
boy remembered when they had sold it. But they went through this fiction
every day.” In this offhand and seemingly inconsequential moment,
Hemingway signals to his reader that the way ahead will involve going
through a fiction together.
Santiago likes “to think about all things that he was involved in,” and
these relations appear to stop nowhere. Engaging in an ongoing and
unforced perception of linkages and family resemblances, Santiago’s
fiction of belonging expresses itself most openly through his repeated use
of the words “brother” and “friend.”

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 Befriending 185
In Concealments in Hemingway’s Works (1983), Gerry Brenner attempts
to read Santiago “antithetically.” He proceeds to question “why brother
dominates Santiago’s word-hoard” and reminds us of Santiago’s claim:
“There are three things that are brothers: the fish and my two hands.” And
he discovers a telling pun, arguing that “Santiago’s wishes for Manolin to
be with him are wishes for a brother, since a mano(lin) is literally a little
hand, figuratively a small brother.”
Bridling against the “halo” that seems to surround Santiago’s skiff,
Brenner proceeds: “An antithetical reading of Santiago’s fraternal ethic
finds it self-serving. It grants Santiago and any who embrace that brotherly
ideal a measure of irresponsibility not available to people who must fulfill
the role of parent, spouse, or child. Quite simply, a brother’s responsibil-
ities have only the force of religious commandment; psychologically
self-imposed, they are not obligatory. A brother can honor fraternal
responsibilities and bask, modestly or immodestly, in the self-satisfaction
of his supererogation. Or a brother can ignore those responsibilities
without feeling guilty.”
Hemingway was himself a master at making and breaking friendships,
and it is a question as to whether the fraternal relation was not his most
cherished human tie. He spent so little time with his three sons as to make it
difficult to conceive of him as serving as more than a fantasy father figure,
despite the idealizations that may have occurred after the fact. With both
friends and wives he was given to dramas of replacement, and it is sad and
moving to see him at the end of his life accompanied by so few of the people
he had loved along the way. Seeking always for continuity in his writing life,
Hemingway’s experience of human relationships appears to have called forth
in him, as Fitzgerald wrote, an intensity so powerful as often to burn itself
out. Still, and despite the ill treatment at which he was so expert,
Hemingway drew people to him. As Hadley was to remember, “men loved
him, women loved him, children loved him, even dogs loved him.”
We can perhaps lessen the harshness of Brenner’s judgment of Santiago
by returning to the word “fiction.” Any saintliness Santiago possesses is
being offered up by Hemingway not as an achievable identity but as an
aspirational ideal, just as the natural world’s responsiveness to Santiago’s
promptings is meant to indicate that we have once again entered into a
romance. To object to Santiago’s goodness or holiness or his conviction of
belonging is to object not to a failure of representation but to Hemingway’s
choice of literary mode.
“Wasn’t his lifelong subject saintliness?” Reynolds Price asks in his essay
on Hemingway. “His search was not for survival and the techniques of

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 186 Forgiveness
survival but for goodness, thus victory.” If such a search was in fact
Hemingway’s, it is an effort made all the more poignant given the honest
admissions of the fallings short. Santiago, in Faulkner’s words, is “a might-
have-been which is more true than truth” – a supreme fiction – and it is
against his achieved saintliness that Hemingway is asking us to measure
both the deficiencies in our characters and in his own.
If there is a saintly model here, it is Saint Francis. Santiago feels “sorry
for the birds” he sees “always flying and looking and almost never finding.”
The porpoises are called “brothers,” and “the wind is our friend.” Cosmic
distance itself is abolished when Santiago calls the stars his “distant
friends.”
The old man even finds a way to collapse an aboriginal distinction on
which Hemingway exerts an ever-increasing pressure as his career unfolds:
the distinction between the slayer and the slain. “You are killing me, fish,”
he thinks to himself, as his hands begin to cramp and his back starts to
ache. “I do not care who kills who,” he goes on to admit. As he does so
often, Santiago then turns upon his thought. “Now you are getting
confused in the head, he thought. You must keep your head clear. Keep
your head clear and know how to suffer like a man. Or a fish, he thought.”
In this thought, two animals are seen as comparable by way of a shared
capacity for suffering.
Santiago imagines that he can talk to the world. After the sun has risen
on the second day with the fish, “a small bird came toward the skiff from
the north.” “How old are you,” he asks the bird. He plays with the surmise
of affinity for a few more sentences, noting that “the bird looked at him
when he spoke.” Then his mind turns to thoughts of the hawks that come
out to meet sea birds. “But he said nothing of this to the bird who could
not understand him anyway and who would learn about the hawks soon
enough.” Once again, Hemingway allows a character to extend and then to
retract a surmise. In doing so, he represents Santiago’s perceptions of
affinity as self-critical rather than sentimental.
While Hemingway fills his novel with open and embraced comparisons,
he is less invested in the truth value of these affirmations than in the activity of
making them. Perceiving likeness is Santiago’s way of entertaining the fiction
of the world as a sufficient home. The emphasis falls upon the act of the
mind, not upon the objects of thought. Yet a number of readings of The Old
Man and the Sea have attempted to convert perceived likenesses into fixed
symbols: the sea is a careless goddess, the sharks are critics, Santiago is Christ.
In the closing paragraphs of his novel, Hemingway anticipated the
readings to which his novel would be subjected. A tourist sees the marlin

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 Befriending 187
skeleton affixed to Santiago’s skiff and mistakes it for a shark. As Thomas
Strychacz argues, the “several different groups of spectators” at the end
“restore the act of interpretation as an element of plot. And, retrospec-
tively, they invite readers to compare their experience of the text with those
offered within the fictive world of the novella.”
Carlos Baker initiated symbol-hunting in Hemingway when he isolated
the images of mountain and plain in A Farewell to Arms. “Once the reader
has become aware of what Hemingway is doing in those parts of his work
which lie below the surface,” Baker maintains, “he is likely to find symbols
operating everywhere.” Hemingway was in any case opposed to any such
reading of The Old Man and the Sea. Writing to Bernard Berenson in
the month of the book’s publication, he maintained: “there isn’t any
symbolysm (mis-spelled). The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man.
The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and
no worse.”

But when is a hand only a hand? Santiago worries a great deal about the
condition of his hands, and his continual references to them gather into
a powerful structure of imagery. In order to understand all that
Santiago’s hands can and cannot do for him, as well as to appreciate
Hemingway’s deft refusal to convert one of his recurring images into a
definable symbol, it may be useful to trace the history of his writing
about hands.
The image of the hand surfaces as early as “Indian Camp,” where “Nick
watched his father’s hands scrubbing each other with the soap.” The hands
do not mean something here; what is meaning-bearing is Nick’s falling
back on synecdoche so as to bracket off a manageable part of what is
happening from the unmanageable whole. The image resurfaces in “In
Another Country” (1927), where a man who has lost the use of a key body
part proves able to rise above, through moral or physical compensation,
men in the book who are much more whole. Before the war, the major had
been the greatest fencer in Italy; now he brings his “withered” hand to a
hospital for treatments in which he has no confidence. The deeper injury,
however, is internal and surfaces as a kind of postscript, when the major
tells Nick, “A man must not marry,” and leaves the room. He returns,
apologizes, and says, “I would not be rude. My wife has just died. You must
forgive me.” The major then begins to cry. He cries openly and unasham-
edly, “his head up looking at nothing, carrying himself straight and
soldierly.” Few of Hemingway’s characters are at once so dignified and so
undefended.

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 188 Forgiveness
The “thing of the hand” haunts For Whom the Bell Tolls, where it refers
to reading the future in one’s palm. Like many of Hemingway’s heroes,
Robert Jordan spends his time trying to see ahead. At first, he is open to
Anselmo’s question, “Can you read in the palm of the hand?”
“No,” Robert Jordan said and he dipped another cup of wine.
“But if thou canst I wish thee would read in the palm of my hand and tell
me what is going to pass in the next three days.”
Anselmo recommends Pilar, she reads the palm, and, correctly foreseeing
Robert’s end, refuses to speak of what she sees. While its ending has been
effectively given away, the novel settles into a debate over whether a man
truly carries his fortune in his hand. This debate expands to cover all forms
of divination and culminates in chapter nineteen. To the question “Do you
believe in the possibility of a man seeing ahead what is to happen to him?”
Robert replies that such forebodings are “evil visions,” projections of what
one fears, and therefore need not be accepted. “Seeing bad signs, one, with
fear, imagines an end for himself and one thinks that imagining comes by
divination.” While Pilar marshals counter examples, she will, under the
pressure of the attack on the bridge, finally renounce them: “In regard to
that thing of the hand. That is all gypsy nonsense.”
Robert’s father has killed himself with a hand gun. Afterward, Robert
throws the Smith and Wesson into the deepest lake he can find. He sees
the reflection of himself “holding the gun” as he does so, sees himself
pointing a gun at himself in the moment of disposing of it, and so has a
premonition that he will repeat his father’s act. It is against this “evil
vision” that Robert’s resistance to divination is meant above all to
defend. And the novel upholds him in his resolve. Lying wounded at
the end, Robert will refuse “to do that business that my father did.” On
the contrary: one of Robert’s last acts is to touch “the palm of his hand
against the pine needles where he lay.” He uses his hand to extend his
life. The novel literalizes the metaphor of the hand as fortune in order to
reject it.
Writing is also a business of the hand. As we watch Robert sketching the
bridge, “glad at last to have the problem under his hand,” we encounter the
sense of relief Hemingway may well have felt in 1939 in finally starting to
write For Whom the Bell Tolls. There was no such gladness in writing Across
the River and into the Trees. Hemingway’s blustering denials of doubt in the
project (“for Christ sake have some confidence,” he wrote Charles
Scribner, Jr. after receiving page proofs) are enough to suggest diminished
confidence in his creative power.

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 Befriending 189
More striking is the way in which this anxiety finds an objective
correlative in a part of Colonel Cantwell’s body. He makes love with his
“big, long, strong, spatular fingered hand.” The need for such dexterity has
been contrived by Renata’s indisposition, and the Colonel’s hand proves
useful despite having “been shot through twice”:
The wind was very cold and lashed their faces but under the blanket there
was no wind nor nothing; only his ruined hand that searched for the island
in the great river with the high steep banks.
“That’s it,” she said.
The Colonel searches and finds twice more on the gondola ride. The
injured man’s prowess has been anticipated in To Have and Have Not,
where Harry Morgan makes love to Marie with an arm from which the
hand has been amputated. “Go ahead,” Marie says. “Go ahead now. Put
the stump there. Hold it there. Hold it. Hold it now. Hold it.”
In Across the River and into the Trees, a gathering anxiety about what the
hand can still do leads Hemingway to convert it into an object of fantastic
power. While the Colonel downplays its sensitivity, Renata assures him,
“There is very much sensation in that hand.” It has become the stuff of her
dreams: “last week, every night, or I think nearly every night, I dreamed
about it, and it was a strange mixed-up dream and I dreamed it was the
hand of Our Lord.” Renata may confound the Colonel’s hand with that of
the Creator, but creation is the one thing the Colonel refuses to do with it:
“But you got your hand honorably?”
“Yes. Very honorably. On a rocky, bare assed-hill.”
“Please let me feel it,” she said.
“Just be careful around the center,” the Colonel said. “It’s split there and
it still cracks open.”
“You ought to write,” the girl said. “I mean it truly. So someone would
know about such things.”
“No,” the Colonel disagreed. “I have not the talent for it and I know too
much.”
The Colonel is more comfortable using his hand for sex than for writing. In
his last memory of Renata, he beats up two sailors with a fist possessed of its
own miraculous refractory period. “There is nothing broken in it and that
sort of swelling always goes down.” Attention here is displaced from one
kind of tumescence to another: “I love you with two moderately swollen
hands and all my heart.” Hemingway thus asks a character to act out a
fantasy that the hand can both stand in for and prove more resilient than
the penis. Writing for the Colonel is at best a terminal occupation: “He

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 190 Forgiveness
reached into his pocket and found a pad and pencil. He put on the map
reading light, and with his bad hand, printed a short message in block
letters.” Almost the last thing the Colonel does is to write something, in a
sort of child’s hand, and it is his will.
In The Old Man and the Sea, Santiago worries about nothing so much as
the “treachery” of a hand. “If he cramps again let the line cut him off.”
Amputation is here a melodramatic extension of a deeper threat: a man
who brings up things from the depths feels in danger of losing control of
“the working part of his hand.” Santiago’s struggle is less against the marlin
or the sharks than against his hands. So, when he addresses his hands as his
brothers, it may be less an act of befriending than a token of the looming
possibility of self-alienation. “There are three things that are brothers: the
fish and my two hands.” In the logic of the metaphor, Santiago can be seen
as standing outside this announced brotherhood, one in which his hands
seem to side with the very opponent they are meant to master. “‘How do
you feel, hand?’ he asked the cramped hand that was almost as stiff as rigor
mortis. ‘I’ll eat some more for you.’” The “you” is here reduced to the body
part by way of which a man makes his living. Having no appetite himself,
Santiago has become the feeder of his hands and keeps himself alive in the
hope that they will return to his control.
Almost all we know of Santiago’s past comes from his one extended
memory of the hand game:
They had gone one day and one night with their elbows on a chalk line on
the table and their forearms straight up and their hands gripped tight. Each
one was trying to force the other’s hand down onto the table . . . . They
changed the referees every four hours after the first eight so that the referees
could sleep. Blood came out from under the fingernails of both his and the
negro’s hands and they looked each other in the eye and at their hands and
forearms and the bettors went in and out of the room and sat on high chairs
against the wall and watched . . . . And at daylight when the bettors were
asking that it be called a draw and the referee was shaking his head, he had
unleashed his effort and forced the hand of the negro down and down until
it rested on the wood.
The prose here evokes a time when the power of a man’s hand held him
“dead even” or better with his competitors. And it raises the question of
how long a man can remain willing or able to “sweat blood” over the labor
of his hands.

Until he is dead, perhaps. “I’ll stay with you until I am dead,” Santiago says
to the fish. He then imagines the fish to have answered: “He’ll stay with me

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 Befriending 191
too, I suppose.” In saying these things, Santiago not only reconfigures the
marriage ceremony but reminds us of the experience on offer – one of
staying with something.
“Stay with them,” Santiago tells Manolin only a page in. He can allow
his adopted son to stay with the lucky boat because he knows he can carry
him with him in his heart. After Santiago cuts the working part of his hand
and considers eating the bonito, he extends the reach of his promise to the
fish: “you can stay with him forever.” And, later, if the fish “stays down
forever,” “then I will stay down with him forever.”
The drama of fidelity here being invoked has already been enacted in a
scene where Santiago remembers hooking one of a pair of marlin. The
panic-stricken female makes a wild, despairing fight and “all the time the
male had stayed with her.” Then the refrain begins: “He had stayed so close
that the old man was afraid he would cut the line with his tail . . . the male
fish had stayed by the side of the boat . . . the male fish jumped high in the
air beside the boat to see where the female was and then went down deep,
his lavender wings, that were his pectoral fins, spread wide and all his wide
lavender stripes showing. He was beautiful, the old man remembered, and
he had stayed.”
He was beautiful, the old man remembered, and he had stayed. On
re-reading The Old Man and the Sea, this was the sentence that stayed
with me. My admiration for it only increased when on inspecting the
manuscript I saw that it had been added by hand to Hemingway’s
typescript as one more evidence of the workings of a second will (See
JK/EH 190, pages 26–42).
Of course, the old man’s wife has not stayed. All we know of her is that
she is gone and that looking at her photograph makes him feel too lonely so
he keeps it on a shelf under his one clean shirt. The loneliness is the token
of having kept her in memory. Near the end, Manolin says to Santiago,
“I will bring you your clean shirt.” If he carries through on the promise, it
will involve an uncovering of loss.
Manuscript evidence suggests that Santiago may have lost his wife before
she left him. As he approaches the little harbor, he finds himself thinking
about various kinds of friends. “The wind is our friend, anyway, he
thought. Then he added, sometimes. And the great sea with our friends
and our enemies. And bed, he thought. Bed is my friend. Just bed, he
thought.”
Hemingway had originally allowed Santiago another thought, one
taking the form of a question. It came after “Bed is my friend.” In Item
190, the manuscript of The Old Man and the Sea, the question reads as

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 192 Forgiveness
follows: “Why did I never love bed when I had her? You did, he thought.
But then you loved too many beds. But beds were all the same and the sea is
a greater whore than all.” After writing these sentences, Hemingway
decided to cross them out. This was not the book in which to explore
the plight of a husband who has loved too many beds.
Santiago’s work is what there is left to stay with. All his other attach-
ments are a kind of “fiction,” a poem of the act of the mind. But his work is
what he has, and, at the end, it is easy for Manolin to talk him into
acquiring a new good killing lance as a replacement for his broken knife.
After the first shark hits, Santiago talks to himself. “But I must think, he
thought. Because it is all I have left. That and baseball. I wonder how
the great DiMaggio would have liked the way I hit him in the brain?” All
the talk about baseball in the novel comes round to the great DiMaggio
and his bone spurs. After his hand begins to cramp, Santiago tells himself
to “be worthy of the great DiMaggio who does all things perfectly even
with the pain of the bone spur in his heel.” Santiago persists in the
comparison despite his ignorance of the nature of the ailment. “What is
a bone spur?” he goes on to ask himself. He thus acknowledges the power
of a pain of which he cannot conceive. And he and DiMaggio are linked in
another way, since Santiago will be required to swing at the sharks with any
weapon that comes to hand, until all are lost or broken. “If I could have
used a bat with two hands I could have killed the first one surely,” he will be
driven to say.
While working through pain makes the two men comparable, there is a
difference involved: unlike DiMaggio, Santiago will not be forced by his
pain into early retirement. Bone spurs were foremost among the injuries
and ailments compelling DiMaggio to leave the game of baseball in the
year in which The Old Man and the Sea was written. Hemingway saw
baseball, like writing, as a game being played for mortal stakes, and his
invocation of a great artist no longer able to finish out his stint because of
inconceivable pain was to have for him a premonitory force.
But Santiago is finally not that done-for artist. For all his pains and
losses, he is working and planning to work up until the end. And the
promise of continuous creation is made fully present to the reader in the
moment of first seeing the fish:
The line rose slowly and steadily and then the surface of the ocean bulged
ahead of the boat and the fish came out. He came out unendingly and water
poured from his sides. He was bright in the sun and his head and back were
dark purple and in the sun the stripes on his sides showed wide and a light
lavender. His sword was as long as a baseball bat and tapered like a rapier

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 Befriending 193
and he rose his full length from the water and then re-entered it, smoothly,
like a diver and the old man saw the great scythe-blade of his tail go under
and the line commenced to race out.
When the fish finally rises, it is as if the motion of a career has been
completed – and re-begun. At the beginning, dignity had demanded that
seven-eighths of the iceberg be kept under the surface. Then, as Hemingway
opened himself to the task of making the dark things plain, the contours of
the iceberg began to be revealed. Here, in The Old Man and the Sea, the
prolongation of the moment through a series of “and’s” and prepositional
phrases is familiar enough. There is the old joy in looking and the descrip-
tions it enjoins. “In the sun,” Hemingway writes, “in the sun”: he is still a
master of repetition. The casual and compounding comparisons – a sword
like a baseball bat and a rapier, a fish “like a diver” – are, however, new. The
fish himself is the possessor, through simile, of the humanly fashioned tool
Santiago will later come to wish for: so the process of identification begins.
Unendingly, however, is the truly astonishing touch. This act of surfacing,
like the effort to bring the iceberg to light, is one expressed as being without
end. In one prophetic utterance, and against all the upwelling exhaustions
and anxieties, Hemingway sums up the history of his life-work and foresees
the fate to which it would be consigned, as those of us who continue the
attempt to catch his meanings find ourselves participants in the making
of an unending career.

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