Scott Lankford
Sep 7, 2018 · 2 min read

Years ago in grad school at Stanford in the 1980s, I repeatedly TA’d for the English Dept’s most popular lecture course at the time, “Hemingway and Fitzgerald,” taught by the late/great novelist and scholar Arturo Islas — who not coincidentally wrote several of the most important Chicano novels of that era. Note that “Hemingway and Fitzgerald” was one of those university courses attended by several hundred undergrads, a virtual English Major rite of passage. Professor Islas was an exceptional showman on the lecture platform, and we were good friends outside of class. Unlike many profs, Islas also generously “allowed” his TAs to disagree and debate with him publicly. So anyway we had a kind of friendly ongoing public schtick involving my admiration for The Old Man and the Sea, and his often extremely witty and cutting disparagement of it. Note that in academic circles the novella still enjoys what might be called at best provisional/shaky status as part of the standard canon, so Professor Islas’s distaste for the work was by no means unusual. Like many scholars then and now, Islas genuinely admired Hemingway’s early work but wanted nothing to do with the rest. This was complicated by Arturo’s own identity as a bilingual Latino American author: hence he (not surprisingly) resented what he considered Hemingway’s many awkward attempts to ventriloquize or represent Spanish-speaking characters in ways he found condescending or just plain silly. The Old Man included. Indeed his favorite adjective for this particular novella, carefully spelled out on the black board, was “meritricious.” By contrast, much like you, I find this novella quite different than the “bad Hemingway” passages so memorably mocked elsewhere. So it’s genuinely fascinating for me to return to this debate many decades later. Poignantly, it was also my own grad-student-level efforts to emphasize that the Old Man knows full well that he’s dying — coughing up blood, etc. — which had the most impact on Islas’s opinions of the book. For as it turned out later, Professor Islas (like too many of my profs) secretly knew that he was dying of AIDS long before he told the rest of us knew the truth. Hence the novella retains a bittersweet ache in my own memories of those days, and a good man gone.

    Scott Lankford

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    Author, Adventurer, Activist. Stanford PhD ‘91. Foothill College Prof. “Tahoe beneath the Surface” was named Foreword Magazine Nature Book of the Year in 2010!