Wildly popular in my high school. I went to a second tier city public exam high school, technical and scientific matters were supposed to be our focus. So, a short book with short declarative sentences was a choice for many when a choice was offered.

I did like the idea of Hemingway’s fiction as I understood it when I was a high school student. He wanted to get to the point, and he did not clutter up the text with a lot of flowery descriptions of unimportant things. Hemingway did not make arcane convoluted sentences that were as long as paragraphs. So, the 15yo me liked the abbreviated style of E. Hemingway.

I was a good reader in high school. I went to the public library in my neighborhood on my own and got a wide variety of books out to take home and ponder.

In college I became a Comparative Literature major and studied European books and started to look down on Hemingway as someone who seemed to be famous for being famous. Yes, he had simple sentences, but…so did Dr Seuss.

As I began to read more books about the Spanish Civil war I thought that Hemingway was wrong to blindly follow the Stalinists who controlled the International Brigade and organized a lot of the pro-government Leftist Loyalist media of news reports, radio reports and movie making. I saw one six hour miniseries on Hemingway’s life around 1990 and I thought he was a radical tourist simply following fashionable Left wing causes and writing his simpleton sentences for an uncritical media and public.

I knew Hemingway got in trouble for being anti-fascist in the 1930’s before WW2. It seemed to me that he redeemed himself as a supporter of the US and allies in WW2 and advancing through France as a glorified reporter in 1944-45 with a pistol in hand commanding his own jeep.

Somehow I saw ‘The Old Man and The Sea’ as Hemingway’s ultimate surrender to respectability and harmless depictions of colorful underdogs.

The book does not have the radical leftist ideas of socialism and armed defense of workers and peasants that is found in “For Whom The Bell Tolls” for instance.

I wanted to see the movie of “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and ordered the DVD but it was delivered ‘to my back door’ the company said. So, I think someone next door got to learn about the Spanish Civil War.

A few years later the same actor was in a movie about Ayn Rand’s Right Wing Libertarian ideas – The Fountainhead.

Last night I decided to close my laptop and avoid Youtube and utilize my television screen and DVD/VCR player. I grabbed the DVD case for the Anthony Quinn version of “The Old Man and the Sea” and was happy to find the DVD disc in the case. The movie loaded when I put it in the player that I had not used in months. So, I watched a movie straight through without pauses or switching and twitching as I am wont to do when I am using a computer screen with more control.

I wanted to find the trailer for the Anthony Quinn version of “The Old Man and the Sea.” I seem to have found the complete movie on Youtube – the minor inconvenience of subtitles in – I’m not sure what. Is that Hindi?

I had a chance to reconsider what I thought about this work by E. Hemingway. I lent the DVD to L__ a while back because she was reading it for a class. When she gave me back the DVD she gave me her copy of ‘The Old Man And The Sea.’ The slim volume that was so attractive to high school illiterati.

I searched around in my room and on the dresser in front of a mirror under books and DVDs and discs and papers I found the paperback copy of “The Old Man And the Sea.” Wow, it is very thin. I can see how a high school student wanting to get his assignments over with would choose that book over ‘1984’, or ‘Brave New World’ some of the other choices I remember from the time along with Ralph and Piggy in _____.

I thought Hemingway was giving a mild mannered man lost at sea and in his memories performance with ‘The Old Man and The Sea.’ That’s why the early 1950’s establishment could rush to give him awards as he helped the world return to normalcy after the Depression and WW2. A little aimless populism and vague cheering for the underdog did not mare the general tone of ‘The Old Man and The Sea.’

There are various scholarly and general critic ideas about what Hemingway’s story meant. Who cares what they think? In order to survive at the academic and literary institutions they haunt they must produce a certain style understanding of the world.

Some of the ideas in the two videos below discussing Hemingway books….

I published a video I made of a lake view with an audio explanation of ‘The Old Man and the Sea.’

So…what does it all mean? What have I learned from the old man and the sea? That life is hard in the beautiful tropics? That catching a fish is only half the battle? That there are sharks everywhere? What is to be done about all this? Who knows.

Poor Hemingway decided to leave the problems in the tropics and go to ….rural Idaho? What was he thinking? He was followed and monitored by the US secret police – the FBI. His past as a leftist who supported the Stalinist Communist Party of Spain was not a past for the FBI. The secret police followed Hemingway to his new home when he left revolutionary Cuba in 1960. Hemingway told friends and colleges that he was being followed by strange men. Hemingway pointed out a car to one friend. No one believed him. The US was a ‘free country’ and the secret police would not follow a famous writer like Hemingway. The FBI was following Hemingway. There were sharks after that old man even if he was far from the sea. One day Hemingway was found shot to death. It looked like suicide, they said. Score one for the sharks and the secret police.