“He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish the boy’s parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky, and the boy had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish the first week.”
If you go to Key West you can see the house owned by the man who wrote that.
Ernest Hemingway’s style is remarkable, truly a wonder of modern art. He is unmistakable due to his brevity, lack of commas, and originality. He can say more in a sentence than I can in a book.
Actually, as the story goes, he was once asked to tell a story in one sentence, and he did it, only using six words: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” By the time you unpack that sentence, you’ll be 100 pages deep.
The opening paragraph above is somber, the beginning of his last major literary work of fiction, The Old Man and the Sea, a sad self-parody that paints a portrait of the artist’s pain.
(It’s common knowledge that Hemingway killed himself, but it’s not understood. The tour guides at his Key West house won’t tell you the backstory. One book, entitled Intellectuals by Paul Johnson, does provide some answers and gives backstory as proof. I’ll expand upon it here.)
The question is this: How come one of the greatest icons of success, artistry, and manly vitality ended his life so abruptly?
If we look at his last book, we get a clue.
The Old Man and the Sea is a book about futility, about an old man well past his prime, expending every last ounce of energy to haul in the catch of a lifetime, only to have it eaten up by sharks before he drags it to the shore.
It’s not a stretch to say that Hemingway saw himself as that dried up fisherman who set out to bag and tag life itself, on a totally unique and original quest, just to find out there was nothing there to uncover. It was all empty—vanity of vanities, says the preacher.
I have a replica of that little fishing boat in Hemingway’s story sitting on my desk in my home office, where I typically write these columns, as a reminder that no matter how important art seems, no matter how engrossed I can get in my pursuit of life’s biggest questions, it will all end very badly if I don’t continually grab hold of an anchor.
Hemingway’s Dad was a minister and he was raised on the Biblical narrative; he knew that the Christian Gospel was an “anchor for the soul” (Hebrews 6:19), but he was sick of hearing it—tired of trusting the same old story.
If the song were written then, at his funeral someone important would have sung “I Did it My Way.”
When it comes to the business of life, we have two options: we can go our own way, or we can attach ourselves to a narrative that already exists.
To Hemingway, the latter option was, well, not an option. Anchors aren’t original or very artistic.
But, I don’t know about you, but when I shop for something, I start by looking for reviews.
Hemingway’s way ended in a way that I don’t want mine to end.
If I could have one conversation with him today, in Key West, I imagine he’d be smoking a cigar on the top porch of his house and waxing eloquent about deeply artistic feelings and impressions, after which I would just ask him, “Was it worth it?”
There’s no business or investing or life, if there’s no anchor.
"We have this hope as an anchor for the soul.” ~Hebrews 6:19
“…He who doubts is like a wave of the sea driven and tossed by the wind.” ~James 1:6