Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to describe and evaluate the importance and influence of “grace under pressure”in Ernest Hemingway’s life and work. Selected for analysis are his experiences and his famous novel, The Old Man and the Sea. Focusing on “grace and pressure”in Hemingway’s life and the old man’s courage in the novel, this author examines what Hemingway’s “grace under pressure” is, how Hemingway faces pressure with grace, and how this theory has influenced him in his writing.
　　Key words: grace and pressure, Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
　　［CLC number］I106
　　［Document code］A
　　［Article ID］1006-2831(2007)01-0064-5
　　
　　I.Introduction
　　
　　Ernest Hemingway, one of the greatest American writers, had a troubled and ever-changing life in which death and violence were the main constants. At the age of ten, his father gave him his first shotgun. Fifty-one years later, he shot himself with his beloved gun. Throughout his life, he hurt many people and many hurt him. But most of the time, the hurts seemed to be neither his nor othersfault. Sometimes life itself was against him. Hemingway “believed that life was a tragedy and knew it could only have one end” (Baker, 1962: 49), but he tried to show his “grace under pressure”all the time. With this faith, Hemingway wrote many famous works, which earned him a worldwide reputation.
　　Hemmingway admires strength of will as well as of body, courage, steadfastness endurance, hard work, simplicity, and skill. He values love, dignity, self-respect, beauty, nobility, and humanity. To him, man’s greatest achievement is to show “grace under pressure”, or “what he described in The Sun Also Rises as holding the ‘purity of line through the maximum of exposure’”. (McMichael, 1345)
　　This paper tries, by studying Hemingway’s experiences and analyzing his novel The Old Man and the Sea, to show what Hemingway’s “grace under pressure”is and how he shows his “grace under pressure”.
　　
　　
　　II. Pressure and Grace: Hemingway’s Life
　　
　　2.1 Early Life
　　Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. He was the second child, the first boy among six children. He had a typical American childhood. His father, Clarence Hemingway, was a successful physician. His mother, Grace Hall Hemingway, was a trained opera singer, who became a singing teacher and later a painter.
　　Hemingway was strong, handsome, and intelligent. He inherited a love of music, a strong will, and defective eyes from his mother. His father “bequeathed to his son a way of life, and of death, and initiated him into the ritual of hunting and fishing(McMichael, 1974, 1346). Under the influence of his father, he later became a fisherman, hunter, and woodsman.
　　In 1917, Hemingway graduated from Oak Park High School. He had a good background in English literature. He was active in the high school’s literary magazine and newspaper. He played football and boxed. He had a keen appreciation of art and was quick with a joke. These qualities, as well as his love of writing, made him know how to be graceful in later life.
　　
　　2.2 From Boy to Man: Life in World WarⅠ
　　After graduating from high school, Hemingway got a job with The Kansas City Star, then one of America’s best newspapers. America had entered World WarⅠ, but his parentswishes and his poor eyesight kept him out of the army. Important for his development as a writer, the Star had a style insisting that reporters use "short sentences, short first paragraphs, and vigorous English.(Hays, 1990: 18) This plain style would soon change the face of American literature and help Hemingway a lot in his later writing. At work, Hemingway covered the police and hospital beat often, but enraged his boss by failing to keep in touch with the newsroom. His being drawn to action inevitably took him overseas. At the end of six months in Kansas City he volunteered for duty as a Red Cross ambulance driver in Europe. He was assigned to Italy, and his first duty in Milan was carrying the dead victims of a munitions plant explosion.
　　His next assignment was in the Dolomite Alps, east of Milan, driving ambulances, but there was little fighting there. Not enough for a romantic young man. Hemingway volunteered for Italy’s eastern front. One midnight he crawled in front of the Italian listening post on the banks of the Piave River; there he was hit by an exploding trench mortar shell and badly wounded. He was the first American to be wounded in Italy and survive. American newspapers made him a hero and Italy awarded him two medals.
　　From July to October, he met and fell in love with Agnes von Kurowsky, an American Red Cross nurse. In January 1919, he left Italy without Agnes, but believed she would follow him to America. The result was that Agnes fell in love with an Italian officer. Hemingway knew this fact in March, and was ill in bed for several days. He was deeply hurt, mourning the loss of his first love for a long time, but he was not defeated. He was not so handsome or lucky a boy any more. War had made him a man. He began trying to write stories for magazines, but none were published.
　　
　　2.3 From a Famous Writer to a Master
　　What failure gave Hemingway was not depression, but courage. He began understanding life in depth. In the summer of 1920, Hemingway moved to Chicago, and became a writer for the Cooperative Commonwealth, a monthly magazine. That autumn he met Hadley Richardson, whom he married a year later. He also met and was befriended by short story writer and novelist Sherwood Anderson.
　　Ernest and Hadley lived briefly in Chicago and then sailed for Paris, following the advice of Anderson. Anderson wrote a letter of recommendation to Gertrude Stein, who became Hemingway’s mentor and opened the door for him to the Parisian Modern Movement. Ezra Pound, the founder of Imagism, was his other mentor. Hemingway once said, "Ezra was right half the time, and when he was wrong, he was so wrong you were never in any doubt about it. Gertrude was always right.(Lynn, 1987: 13) At that time the Paris crowd interacted on both a personal and professional level. They were friends and artists who pushed one another towards excellence. Paris became the best place for Hemingway to develop his literary skills. Besides Stein and Pound, Hemingway also made friends with other excellent persons such as James Joyce and Ford Madox Ford. Influenced by these masters, Hemingway started a successful beginning.
　　In the summer of 1923, Hemingway visited Spain and saw his first bullfight. He was enamored with the sport and returned to Spain many times for that reason. It became the topic of several stories and books. A number of short passages describing bullfights appeared in Hemingway’s first collection of short stories. That year in Spain, he published his first work: Three Stories and Ten Poems. Three years later, The Sun Also Rises was published. It was Hemingway’s first true novel. It “brought light on a whole generation after the First World War and drew a vivid portrait of 'the Lost Generation .(Warren, 1973: 2251) Hemingway became the spokesman for that generation and began to be well-known.
　　But life would not always go smoothly. In Lyon, France, his manuscripts, including A Farewell to Arms, were stolen. It was a great stroke to him. However, Hemingway accepted the fact and turned the loss into a gain. He improved the novel a lot by spending more time thinking and re-writing it. A Farewell to Arms, which was finally published in 1929, "marked not only the change of Hemingway’s role from that of the promising young writer to that of the “success” , but it also marked the change of the world in which he lived(Warren,1973: 2253). The book itself was not a war novel, but as Anthony Burgess said, “a complex statement about the nature of human commitment presented against a background of war widely caught(Warren,1973: 55). In the novel, Hemingway dealt with the unity of life and death, which became one of the main themes. After this novel was published, the years of struggle were coming to an end. Hemingway became a world famous author.
　　Just before A Farewell to Arms was published, Hemingway’s first marriage was wrecked. His wife’s best friend, Pauline Pfeiffer, arrived in 1926 and decided that Hemingway was the man for her. After thinking, Hemingway chose a Catholic marriage with Pfeiffer. Because of his Catholic faith, some conscientious conflicts arose, but were finally overcome. But the next hurt went much deeper. His father committed suicide because he could not bear the burden of his incurable illness any longer. At the same time, the Depression was on, and “concern with the individual fate was being replaced by concern for the social fate(Warren, 1973: 2253). Moreover, his luck in business and art was overshadowed by some serious attacks on his health. He had toothaches, a glass-gash in his forehead and kidney trouble from fishing. His fingers were gashed to the bone in an accident, and his arms, legs and face were lacerated from a ride on a runaway horse. Later, in a car accident, his arm was broken. His friends and reviewers gave him great pressure. Some complained that his books were immoral, lacking respect for human values; others asked for new books.
　　For several years, Hemingway lived under the pressure, but faced it with courage. He continued writing and traveling. In 1937, he finished the novel To Have and Have Not, which announced his discovery of a social conscience.
　　During that period of time, Hemingway stayed mostly in Spain, the country that stood for almost everything that mattered to him, including his life principles and his struggle between life and death. There he became war correspondent for NANA, the North American Newspaper Alliance. Thus, he saw much of the fighting and could collect experiences for a new novel. After a short stay in Paris due to liver troubles, he came back to Spain and then returned to America to organize the experiences he gathered in Spain into a novel. In 1940, his experiences from the war were worked into For Whom the Bell Tolls. The novel was widely proclaimed as his masterpiece. Hemingway thus became a real master with a worldwide reputation.
　　
　　2.4 Honor and Death
　　On December 7, 1941, the United States entered World WarⅡ. For the first time in his life, Hemingway took an active part in a war. He was fiercely anti-Nazi, even offering his services to the FBI. Early in June 1937, in a speech, Hemingway stressed he was anti-fascist:
　　There is only one form of government that cannot produce good writers, and that system is fascism. For fascism is a lie told by bullies. A writer who will not lie cannot live and work under fascism. (Baker, 1962: 224)
　　However, he was more in love with the adventure of war than the issues involved. In the war, the Fascists led him to take drastic actions. He killed a man who stood face to face with him and was seriously shocked.
　　After the war, he started and abandoned a novel about the earth, the sea and the air. He went to Italy to gather materials for Across the River and into the Tree, but the novel was widely disproved, and the majority of reviewers accused him of bad taste. It showed that Hemingway had grown old. Fortunately, one section of another long sea novel, which was also started and abandoned, was published under the title The Old Man and the Sea. This short novel became Hemingway’s best-selling book, won him the Pulitzer Prize, and led him to win a Nobel Prize in 1954. The Nobel committee declared:
　　We express our admiration for the eagle eye with which he has observed, and for the accuracy with which he has interpreted the human existence of our turbulent times, and for the admirable restraint with which he has described their naked struggle. (Carter, 1999)
　　Then, his bad luck struck once again. On a safari he was the victim of two successive plane crashes. The injuries he got were grave and numerous. He sprained his right shoulder, arm, and left leg, and temporarily lost his vision in the left eye. The physical pains caused him to crack up, and his strength was entirely gone. He was in so much pain that he could not sit down. Add to this high blood pressure, diabetes and liver damage brought on by years of drinking. He had shrunk from over 250 pounds to 165. His eyes stared blankly. Worst of all, he could not write. Finally, he could not bear these pains any more.
　　On July 2, 1961, at home in Ketchum, Idaho, Ernest Hemingway put his gun to his head and fired.
　　“years before he had written, ‘All stories if continued far enough end in death, and he is no true storyteller who would keep that from you'” (Carter, 1999).
　　
　　III. The Old Man and the Sea: The “ Best Workin Hemingway’s Eyes
　　
　　3.1 Preparation for the Book
　　The Old Man and the Sea was finished in 1952. It is a short story about an old Cuban fisherman, Santiago and his losing battle with a big marlin. It is a representation of life as a struggle against nature and a respect for the struggle of mankind.
　　To write the novel Hemingway tried very hard. The seed of the story existed in Hemingway’s mind for about15 years. As early as 1939, Hemingway wanted to write the story of an old fisherman. He based the story on many experiences. He had his own experience of fishing marlin in the Caribbean. He acquired a reputation for bringing his fish in quickly before sharks had time to damage them. He once wrote in an article in The New York Times, "I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things(Tao, 1992). The nucleus of the old man’s experience was recorded in an article by Hemingway and reprinted by Carlos Baker in his study of Hemingway:
　　An old man fishing alone in a skiff out of Cabanas hooked a great marlin that, on a heavy sash cord handline, pulled the skiff far out to sea. Two days later the old man was picked up by fishermen 60 miles to the eastward, the head and the forward part of the marlin lashed alongside. What was left of the fish, less than half, weighed 80 pounds. The old man had stayed with him a day, a night, a day and another night while the fish swam deep and pulled the boat. When he had come up the old man had pulled the boat up on him and harpooned him. Lashed alongside the sharks had hit him and the old man had fought them out alone in the Gulf Stream in a skiff, clubbing them, stabbing at them, lunging at them with an oar until he was exhausted and the sharks had eaten all they could hold. (Baker, 1956: 294)
　　
　　3.2 Santiago: Courage Is Grace under Pressure
　　In The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway presents old age facing life and death with courage, hope and wisdom. Hemingway tries to demonstrate this attitude towards life in his work. The old man’s search for his fish and success is Hemingway’s favorite ingredient. It requires physical strength, skill, experience, and courage. Santiago has the qualities that Hemingway has admired. Santiago is proud, but old. He has learned that humility can exist with true pride. Though failure is bitter, he faces it and accepts its pain, as he accepts loneliness. Beyond the suffering and disappointment, the old man sees hope, “Hope is the duty of man”(Hemingway, 1961: 21). In Santiago, Hemingway is telling us courage is “grace under pressure”.
　　The old man has a special relationship with the boy, with the sea, and with the creatures in the sea. Hemingway spends a good deal of time describing this relationship. The old man sees the boy at the beginning and at the end. He makes the boy feel mature and responsible, and regards the boy as his refreshment and hope. The boy, in return, is protector as well as pupil, providing refreshment, companionship, and hope. The old man spends the rest of the time with the sea and its creatures. He thinks about the sea and the creatures in it. He has tender love towards them. He loves the beauty, power and mystery of the sea. “He always thought of the sea as ‘Ia mar'which is what people call her in Spanish when they love her(Hemingway, 1961: 21). For the old man, most creatures in the sea are his brothers. To kill them is only when there is need or a fair contest. They are not as intelligent as we who kill them, although they are more noble and more able(Hemingway, 1961: 53). So the old man thinks the creatures should be killed skillfully and cleanly. For Santiago, success and failure are two equal facets of the same existence. They are transitory forms that capriciously arrive and depart without affecting the underlying unity between him and nature. As long as he focuses on this unity and sees himself as part of nature rather than as an external antagonist competing with it, he cannot be defeated by whatever misfortunes befall him.
　　Hemingway has his own understanding of “hero”. His vision of heroism requires continuous labor for ephemeral ends. What the hero does is to face adversity with grace. He emphasizes self-control and the other facets of his idea of manhood. What people achieve or fail at externally is not as significant to heroism as comporting ourselves with inner nobility. As Santiago says,“Man is not made for defeat...A man can be destroyed but not defeated”(Hemingway, 1961: 103). Hemingway also has an inseparable idea from the ideal of heroism. That is manhood. To be a man is to behave with honor and grace: to not avoid suffering, to accept one’s duty without complaint, and to display a maximum of self-control. The representation of the sea is characterized by its caprice and lack of self-control: “if she did wild or wicked things it was because she could not help them(Hemingway, 1961: 30). Santiago gets rid of his pain by telling himself,“suffering likes a man or a fish(Hemingway, 1961: 34). In Hemingway’s ethical universe, Santiago shows us not only how to live heroically, but also in a way befitting a man.
　　What is also important is Hemingway’s treatment of “pride”. A heroic man like Santiago should have pride in his actions, and as Santiago shows us, “humility was not disgraceful and it carried no loss of true pride(Hemingway, 1961: 14). It is Santiago’s pride that presses him to travel dangerously far out into the sea to catch the marlin. While he loves the marlin and calls him brother, Santiago admits to killing it for pride. Some have interpreted the loss of the marlin as the price Santiago has to pay for his pride in traveling out so far in search of such a fish. On the other hand, one can argue that this pride was beneficial as it allows Santiago a challenge worthy of his heroism. In the end, Hemingway suggests that pride in a job is positive, even if pride draws one unnecessarily into the situation.
　　In the novel, Hemingway draws a distinction between two different types of success: outer, material success and inner, spiritual success. In order to achieve success, Hemingway makes the old man have grace. The characteristics of spirit are those of heroism and manhood. This valuable possession is a testament to the privileging of inner success over outer success. At the same time, being heroic and manly are not merely qualities of character that one possesses or does not. One must constantly demonstrate one’s heroism and manliness through actions conducted with grace and dignity. Santiago is obsessed with proving his worthiness to those around him. He proves himself to the boy: “a thousand times he had proved it meant nothing. Now he was proving it again. Each time was a new time and he never thought about the past when he was doing it(Hemingway, 1961: 66). And he proves himself to the marlin:“I‘ll kill him...in all his greatness and glory. Although it is unjust, but I will show him what a man can do and what a man endures(Hemingway, 1961: 66). A heroic and manly life requires a constant demonstration of one's worthiness through noble action and requires one to have “grace under pressure .”
　　Hemingway is the spokesman of the Lost Generation . The generation was “lost” in the sense that its values were not relevant after the war. “His works have sometimes been read as an essentially negative commentary on a modern world filled with sterility, failure, and death. Yet such a nihilistic vision is repeatedly modified by Hemingway’s affirmative assertion of the possibility of living with style and courage(Wu, 1990: 243). Hemingway shows this kind of style and courage by the example of the old man. Santiago shows Hemingway’s courage, which is, in Hemingway’s mind, “grace under pressure . To Hemingway, man’s greatest achievement is to show
　　‘grace under pressure’” (Wu, 1990: 243).
　　Unity, heroism, manhood, pride and success are the themes of The Old Man and the Sea. Of these themes, “grace under pressureis the soul. It is the soul of the novel, of the old man’s life, and of Hemingway’s attitude towards life. Each of Hemingway’s books is an experiment. In the speech written to acknowledge the Nobel Prize, Hemingway said:
　　For a true writer, each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed. (Baker, 1962: 293)
　　Obviously The Old Man and the Sea has great luck.
　　
　　IV. Conclusion
　　
　　Generally speaking, Hemingway’s life was full of change, hurt, sadness, and violence. The general public never did know Ernest Hemingway, who was a human with a human’s problem. Burgess wrote in his study of Hemingway:
　　He’s a good writer, Hemingway. He writes as he is. He’s a big, powerful peasant, as strong as a buffalo, a sportsman, and ready to live the life he writes about. He would never have it if his body had not allowed him to live it. But giants of his sort are truly modest; there is much more behind Hemingway’s form than people know. (Hays, 1990: 39)
　　The pressure throughout Hemingway’s life was very great. It was so great that he himself even could not afford it. So he shot himself to end his life. However, during his lifetime, especially the time he met troubles, he never gave up easily. Hemingway was proud of his manhood, his capacity for drink, and his talents as a fisherman. He believed in art, in sport and in nature. All these gave Hemingway courage, which was “grace under pressure . For him, “loss was inevitable: fate, circumstance, something always dwindled, youth and vitality crumbled through the years; life itself was nothing more than an unpredictable feast of the senses. His philosophy is both stoic and existential: one should not complain, one should show grace under pressure’” (Hays, 1990: 41).
　　Perhaps, The Old Man and the Sea is not Hemingway’s best novel, but it is the best novel to show his “grace under pressure . This theory is actually an attitude towards life that Hemingway had been trying to demonstrate in his works. Zhang Boxiang, an expert in studying American literature, stated in his work:
　　In the general situation of his novel, life is full of tension and battles; the world is in chaos; man is always fighting desperately a losing battle. However, though life is but a losing battle, it is a struggle man can dominate in such a way that loss becomes dignity; man can be physically destroyed but never defeated spiritually. (Hays, 1990: 622-623)
　　Hemingway’s end was not a happy one, but the end of a person’s life does not judge a writer. Hemingway’s life was filled with death and violence, which gave Hemingway deep pain both physically and mentally, though in some aspects, they benefited him by teaching him priceless philosophies. However, Hemingway gained a worldwide reputation and great success, which was mostly due to his talent and his “grace under pressure .
　　
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