A Transwoman’s Defense of Ernest Hemingway: Why I Loved The Old Man & The Sea

Several years ago, while writing for a brand-name web publication that paid very well, I received a direct note from the editor-in-chief that gently suggested I recall that Stephen King once said that “the road to hell is paved with adverbs” and that my copy was excellent but at times verbose.

“And re-read Hemingway,” he said. “Journalism is all about short declarative sentences without special effects.”

I bristled at the suggestion that I should “actually read Hemingway.” While I have a BA in Creative Writing and Hemingway is considered the father of modern fiction, when I was in school in the early 1990s, the father of anything meant the patriarchy, of course. Dead white men in general were not at all in vogue at my school, (the New College of California, doors closed permanently in 2006) but as I am older now and more confident in my ability to see the world through my own lenses, I find blanket dismissal of any writer or artist an abhorrent herd pastime that fails to take into consideration that every creative endeavor has a time and a place from whence it springs, as well as a personal history that informs their personal and creative decisions, for this is the nature of artistry in general, and certainly creative writing is not an exception.

In defining the Maginot Line between the politically correct and more open-minded scholars, one couldn’t find a better subject of 20th century writing than Ernest Hemingway. Just recently, I tossed a blanket dismissal of my own about Hemingway into the global void that is Twitter, after getting half-way through “The Nick Adams Stories,” and following a tortured read of the first story in “Men Without Women.” That story, “The Undefeated,” was about an old matador going back “into the ring” for what should be the final time, and I was coming to the conclusion that all Hemingway knew what to write about was manly sports stories like boxing, bull-fighting, and fishing.

“Does anyone care about this kind of shit anymore?” I groused, hating this assignment I’d given to myself, and I was ready to conclude that yes, he was an outdated macho-centric chauvinist just like the mid-1990s Women’s Studies department at my college had maintained.

So why would I bother reading Hemingway so long after my editor’s suggestion? Why would I start with these two collections? I recently decided I wanted to try writing fiction myself and felt that I should really study some of the roots of modern fiction. I chose “The Nick Adams Stories” first since I was assigned it in high school and hated it then, and wanted to see if anything had changed. And I chose “Men Without Women” because it was a short story collection of Hemingway’s on the shelf at the local library.

But after my bitter complaint at the Twittersphere, and halfway through “The Nick Adams Stories,” I came across a story that opened a door for me ever so slightly, and that was “The Last Good Country,” about a young man on the lam for poaching game who brings along his younger sister while he goes into hiding, and I’m kind of a sucker for stories about runaways — but particularly ones that contain clues to forbidden romances like incest.

The set-up of this liminal relationship rings a bell about how incest tends to appear in family situations where healthy roles don’t exist. Nick and his sister Littless refer to the rest of the family as “the others” who are always fighting and that they are only able to find meaningful love and companionship with one another..

Nick’s interest in his sister may be genuine, but it is primarily directed towards protecting her and making her safe. Littless, for her part, wants very much to kiss him, and talks about marriage and having children with him. In some respects, the two of them are perhaps mimicking the stereotypical male and female approach to romantic love, but Nick’s actions are the most appropriate given that he and Littless are siblings.

I found myself reading more slowly to capture what really amounted to beautiful story about outdoorsmanship and “living off the land” and in slowing my pace to catch perhaps tell-tale signs that the allusion towards an affair between brother and sister was no accident as Littless brought along two books to read, “Lorna Doone” and “Wuthering Heights,” both of which contain elements of incestuous relationships.

While some critics have written that Nick Adams is Hemingway’s fictionalized autobiographical self, the issue of whether he actually had an incestuous relationship with his sister (he had several, including Marceline, with whom he was close to growing up) was less relevant to my read, but instead that he grew up in a family barren of a meaningful emotional landscape.

Through this understanding, for a moment I was able to cease to see an icon for #ToxicMasculinity (as if the totality of a human being, his personality and history, can be reduced to a hashtag) and began to see him as a person like any one of us, fighting to define himself given the tools and modalities of his time and place — something that as a transwoman, I found I could relate to despite the clear differences between my central conflicts in personality definition and Hemingway’s.

Much of what else remained within “The Nick Adams Stories” added depth to Nick that would later inform my experience with “Big Two-Hearted River,” at the beginning of the section of stories titled “Soldier at Home.” As other stories in the book show insight into Nick’s experiences of war and his sense of dislocation when it ended, the two hearts within the title likely refers to the two parts of the story. The first is where “Nick looked at the burned-over stretch of hillside” which is both a descriptor perhaps of what he sees in front of him in the present moment, but it could also be a memory of his experiences at war, an alliteration regarding the state of his own heart and psyche after all he engaged in what was certainly a defining experience of his life.

But in part two, what begins as a retreat to the woods of his Michigan homeland, becomes like a dream whereby the act of fishing again as he did as a boy, the wounds in his heart are given a chance to heal amidst the solitude of the natural world. As he follows the river flowing forward, he realizes it forms into a swamp, and it is here that his decision not to go near it shows a reluctance to return to a place where “You would have to keep almost to the ground to move at all,” which brings to mind men moving from trench to trench on the battlefields of the Great War that he is aiming to leave behind him.

What’s #Toxic about a man wanting to leave the war in the past where it belongs?

The title of the second collection, “Men Without Women” brings to mind a boy’s club where “no girls are allowed,” and suggests liminal homoeroticism, but stories throughout the book point to the loneliness of the heart in a world where heterosexual parntering is the norm and all that is outwardly displayed.

While only two of the stories within it really interested me, others were pointedly about men left alone without a wife. I wasn’t really a fan of “The Undefeated,” where one can feel the old matador is not only bereft of a career but that there is no one left to care for him, while this is explicitly the case for the Major in “Another Country.”

So it is likely no accident that “Hills Without Elephants” briefly held my attention as it contained a female character, and while she seems empty and hollow as a person, so too does her male partner. In a banal discussion over drinks, it’s clear the pair are in a dead-end relationship having a discussion about an abortion. Because it’s Hemingway and the time in which it was written, (likely 1925) the word is never mentioned, but phrases like “will you have the operation?” are clues as to what is being discussed. Those of us who grew up post Roe vs Wade might not recall such stilted subterfuge about abortion in our own lives, but which we may have heard about as warnings surrounding any return to the criminalization of the procedure. {And given the current situation with Roe & the Supreme Court, many might do well to assign and read this short story again soon.}

Finally, I sat down with “The Old Man and the Sea.” Likely as not, it was a book that I had in fact been assigned in high school, when I was the weird kid in the back of the room hiding out with Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” and Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl and Other Poems” from City Lights Books. By 14, the Beats and their stories and concerns had already captured my heart and imagination, and a story about an old man fishing likely struck me as something boring and “literary” in a way that wouldn’t hold my attention.

Chances are very good that at that time, I would have missed all that unfolded before me very recently in these scant 125 pages that deliver a classic of 20th century writing for which Hemingway won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and in this reading I not only understood why that was the case in 1952, but exactly what made the book fresh and relevant for me seventy years later.

My assumption as a youngster had been that the book would merely be about “a man against nature,” but “The Old Man & The Sea” is a love story of the most beautiful kind, between a man and his livelihood, its provider, the sea, and in the end, about the love that arises in someone passing on their vocation to an heir. Finally, within its pages, one can see Hemingway revealing that for himself and perhaps all of his stories and novels, nature is not a force to be battled and tamed, but represents the feminine within that Hemingway’s time kept him from exploring in either his personality or overtly in his work.

Santiago is a fisherman neither for a hobby or as a test of endurance, but because it is his livelihood and that of his father before him. Considered “unlucky” by the other fishermen for having gone 84 days without a catch, he is without a son of his own, but he has Manolin, a boy of sixteen whom he trained since age five, but who no longer fishes with him because his father insists he fish with luckier boats. Manolin remains loyal, checking on him everyday, helping him with his gear, bringing food, and on the day he comes to see him in the story, he brings him dinner and remains to visit, talking to him about baseball and fishing.

The following day, Santiago goes out to sea for the 85th day, believing he will catch a fish. His line is pulled by an enormous tug, and he is convinced it’s a marlin, as it begins to drag the boat for what becomes a three-day trial of man and quarry. Using his remaining hooks to catch a few fish and a dolphin to stay alive, he stays with the marlin, whom he comes to feel is his brother.

Santiago’s time with the marlin provides him with time to consider his life, the fish, the boy, and the sea. At one point it is mentioned how he thinks of the sea, not as el mar, which is the masculine form in Spanish, making the sea into a man with whom he must battle with, but as la mar, the feminine form, and that thereby the sea is a woman of which he feels he is a part of when he is fishing, illustrating perhaps a sentiment that may be found in other works of Hemingway where nature plays a part, where rather than nature being a force to be tamed by a man, it is a force taming a man, and allowing him to integrate his masculine and his feminine through his living and his activities within it.

While he labors mightily with his body and reminds himself that he is a man and still tough enough to fish, several times he is heard to say “if only the boy were here,” exposing his own vulnerability as a human being, struggling to stay alive on his own, but lamenting that if he had help, he could land the fish and continue to live as he knows best — as a fisherman who believes that he is a part of the sea.

After three days, the marlin begins to tire and begins to circle the skiff. Santiago is able to pull him in, tightening the circle until the marlin is close enough to be harpooned. The fish is longer than the skiff and can’t be pulled inside, so he lashes the fish to the side of the boat and heads home. But along the way, the blood of the marlin draws the attention of sharks, and he battles them as well, but by the time he reaches home, there is nothing left of the fish, and his battle is but a memory.

And yet, he returns home a hero, for while the meat of the fish is gone, the fishermen can all see from what is left how big of a fish it was that was pillaged by the sharks, and Manolin is there to see it also, and he cries with happiness that Santiago has returned. He tells Santiago that had the two of them been together, they would have been able to bring the fish home, and he tells Santiago that he will join him again the following morning.

“The Old Man & the Sea” is a love story about Santiago and his love of the sea and of life itself, but also his love for the boy and the simple human desire for companionship, family and assistance that we can at times find within our occupations and livelihood. It’s a love story of a man living in a dire situation but maintaining his dignity, grace, courage and humility in regards to forces larger than himself.

While Hemingway may have been stilted by his times and its sensibilities regarding male and female roles and sensitivities, this book illustrates to me that he was at least interested in developing a character in “The Old Man and the Sea” with an integrated self of feminine and masculine within the soul of this old man. Rather than being a story about man versus nature, it is really a story about a man who lives within nature, wrestling with his masculine role as a fisherman and a provider, but also his feminine self that is vulnerable and in need of human help and companionship.