Last month, an old, unpublished story by American writer Ernest Hemingway surfaced. ‘A Room on the Garden Side’, written in 1956, is set in a Paris hotel he loved, the Ritz. The Strand Magazine , a quarterly which has published it, includes an afterword by a board member of The Hemingway Society, Kirk Curnutt. He said the piece “contains all the trademark elements readers love in Hemingway” and though “the war is central... but so are the ethics of writing and the worry that literary fame corrupts an author’s commitment to truth.” Hemingway ended his life in 1961.
Struggling souls
He wrote about war, Paris, boxers, bullfighters and soldiers, many of whom were lonely souls struggling to eke out a living. The epitome of this struggle was showcased in his 1952 novella, TheOld Man and the Sea . In fact, in 1954, when the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Hemingway, the citation picked out the book for special mention. The Nobel academy said it was honouring him “for his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea, and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style.”
The story begins with the narrator saying that the old man “who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream,” had gone 84 days without catching one. In the first 40 days, a boy he was very fond of, and vice-versa, had been with him. But the boy’s parents, much to his annoyance, told him “that the old man was now definitely and finally salao , which is the worst form of unlucky.” He was ordered to go on another boat, which caught three good fish the first week. He missed the boy who looked out for him.
A pot of yellow rice
On most of the days the old man came in empty-handed, the boy guided him home. “What do you have to eat?” the boy would ask. “A pot of yellow rice with fish,” the old man replied. “May I take the cast net?” “Of course.” “There was no cast net and the boy remembered when they had sold it. But they went through this fiction every day. There was no pot of yellow rice and fish and the boy knew this too.”
So, on the 85th day, the old man set sail with bait (sardines, which the boy got him) and little else to net a fish. “And the best fisherman is you,” the boy told him. The old man hopes no fish will come along that will prove the boy wrong. The rest of the novella is the story of the old man's struggle with nature, a huge fish (swordfish) and himself. As the duel goes on, the old man thinks aloud: “I wonder if he has any plans or if he is just as desperate as I am?” He won’t give up and fights against all odds — “...man is not made for defeat... A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”
The writer looks back at one classic each fortnight.
