HAPPY ANNIVERSARY: ERNEST HEMINGWAY

JUST one year after Ernest Hemingway shot himself through the head with a hunting rifle, his literary legacy was being summed up by one New York Times critic thus: "He is a writer who gets smaller as you grow older." That the larger-than-life figure of "Papa", the booze- guzzling, womanising, hunting, fighting father of 20th century American fiction could recede in any way must have seemed a cheaply provocative remark at the time.

Exactly 50 years ago, Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, ostensibly for the novella The Old Man And The Sea, written two years earlier.

Hemingway found himself out of favour with the critics, who felt his love of battling with nature and cheating on his wives had superseded his love of writing. His 1950 novel Across The River And Into The Trees was savaged by the critics uneasy with the direction his work had taken since For Whom The Bell Tolls in 1940.

But The Old Man And The Sea reversed all that. Garnering glowing reviews, it was seen as a recall to past glories, an echo of the man before Hollywood and wealth corrupted him. This was the Hemingway the critics knew and loved, a muscular, pared-down stylist who exemplified all that was best about America and American writing.

It was based on an experience Hemingway had had in his beloved Cuba in the 1930s, when he found a fisherman far out in the Gulf Stream with the remains of a giant Marlin tied to his boat. (This real-life fisherman, Gregorio Fuentes, loved to regale about the writer until his death earlier this year.) In the fictional version an ageing fisherman, Santiago, who is on his last fishing expedition, catches a great Marlin after a struggle that almost kills him. But while he defeats the great fish, the sea defeats him. By the time he reaches home the Marlin is a carcass, devoured by sharks.

The Old Man And The Sea is still widely-read, as are For Whom The Bell Tolls and A Farewell to Arms. The public popularity of all three titles may owe something to reading lists but his place in today's literary canon is still pretty unassailable.

It's extraordinary that The Old Man And The Sea should still be regarded a "timeless classic" by a "genius" for it encompasses so much of what we have long been encouraged to think of as old hat, embarrassing experiments by another generation, nave and more than a little obvious. Full of "simplicity" and rich in "allegorical overtones", one American critical study of Hemingway published two years ago even praises its "absence of sexuality", to which, rather surprisingly, it attributes much of its popular success.

Absence of sexuality? This is a novella so steeped in Lawrentian imagery that old Freud himself would surely have sued for plagiarism. This is how Hemingway describes the moment that Santiago finally begins to overcome the great Marlin: "He took all his pain and what was left of his strength and his long-gone pride and he put it against the fish's agony and the fish came over onto his side and swam gently on his side, his bill almost touching the planking of the skiff and started to pass the boat, long, deep, wide, silver and barred with purple and interminable in the water." Recognising cigars, guns and harpoons as penis-substitutes is not merely the reading of a more cynical age. It suggests that the knowledge we have as readers hampers our appreciation of this particular kind of writing.

Given that the monumental themes Hemingway liked to explore would often result in an almost innocent use of Freudian images and simplistic portrayals of men and women, his all-too-often self- indulgent prose demands the question: does such an easily-parodied writer really deserve the respect of the readers from another age, however "grand" his subject matter? Should writers like Hemingway really be allowed to cast their shadows over the landscape of literature of the 20th century?

It would seem so. The Hemingway legacy is an industry now that will forever produce secondary material; biographies, previously undiscovered letters, half-forgotten manuscripts. His is a legacy that falls to few and it would seem that we need that select few to hold up as exemplars of literary excellence.

The Old Man And The Sea by Ernest Hemingway, Arrow, (pounds) 4.99 Gregorio Fuentes is said to have inspired The Old Man And The Sea Photograph: EPA

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