DWIGHT MACDONALD
are some things we all know, but we don't take 'm out and look
at 'm very often," says his stage manager, sucking ruminatively
on his pipe. "We all know that
something
is eternal. And it
ain't houses and it ain't names, and it ain't earth, and it ain't
even the stars.... Everybody knows in their bones that
some–
thing
is eternal, and that something has to do with human
beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us
for five thousand years and yet you'd be surprised how people
are always losing hold of it. There's something way down deep
that's eternal about every human being." The last sentence
is
an eleven-word summary, in form and content, of Midcult. I
agree with everything Mr. Wilder says but I will fight to the
death against his right to say it in this way.
The Old Man and the Sea
was (appropriately) first pub–
lished in
Life
in 1952.
It
won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and
it helped Hemingway win the Nobel Prize in 1954 (the judges
cited its "style-forming mastery of the art of modem narra–
tion"). It is written in that fake-biblical prose Pearl Buck used
in
The
Good
Earth,
a style which seems to have a malign fas–
cination for the midbrows-Miss Buck also got a Nobel Prize
out of it. There are only two characters, who are not individual–
i~ed
because that would take away from the Universal Signifi–
cance. In fact they are not even named, they are simply "the
old man" and "the boy"-I think it was a slip to identify the
fish as a marlin though, to be fair, it is usually referred to as
"the great fish." The dialogue is at once quaint (democracy)
and dignified (literature). "Sleep well, old man," quothes The
Boy; or, alternatively, "Wake up, old man." It is
also
very
pbetic, as The Boy's speech: "I can remember the tail slapping
~n~
banging . . . and the noise of you clubbing him like chop–
ping a tree down and the sweet blood smell all over me." (Even
the Old Man · is startled by this cadenza. "Can you really
remember that?" he asks.) In the celebrated baseball dialogues
we have a fusion of Literature
&
Democracy;
