The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway read by Charlton Heston Vinyl Record Album popular LP Spoken Word
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway read by Charlton Heston. The classic tale brought to life on this two-record set. From the back cover: The following are excerpts from the chapter entitled “Home on the Sea” from How it Was by Mary Welsh Hemingway. We gave ourselves two cruises to Paraíso amounting to thirty days on the sea in February and March and I preserved in writing every precious fish we caught and every change of wind. We passed a tranquil night (no mosquitoes) behind the reef at the entrance of the great, deep bay, Bahia Honda, caught a couple of fish on our way westward the next morning and, rounding Gobernadora Light, watched from topside a phenomenon new to me, a loggerhead turtle eating a Portuguese man-of-war, the iridescent bubble which floats on the surface trailing yard-long, lavender-tipped fronds which are poisonous, even killing to both men and fish.
Continued below
------
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway read by Charlton Heston
Vinyl: VG++ glossy
Cover: VG+ edge wear and some ring wear. Split inside of gate-fold, split on top edge.
SIDE A: Beginning to Page 41
SIDE B: Pages 41 - 68
SIDE C: Pages 68 - 97
SIDE D: Pages 97 to end
TC 2084 Two Record Set
------
“Papa sweet and happy.” I noted.
We were living in a world of twenty shades of blue, wind from some seventy different directions, sunlight and moonlight ever changing on the water, sound varying from the gentlest slup of finger-sized wavelets against the hull to banging thunder of heavy seas against the outer reefs, the fishy smell of the beach at low tide and the lung-scouring cleanliness of the north wind to the sophisticated tastes of Gregorio's simple, exquisite food. We were caught in a web of endearments to our senses, from which no one wishes to break away.
But on the sixteenth, the outside world broke in upon us. After fishing in the morning I went with Gregorio through mangrove-bordered bays to the nearest village, La Mulata, and telephoned the Finca. All was well there, Rene said, but a telegram had arrived. Charlie Scribner had died unexpectedly of a heart attack the day we left home. Along with 1,500 pounds of ice and extra gas for Tin Kid, we took the unhappy news back to Pilar. Our lagoon with its evening light softening to violet and gray seemed a fitting place for remembering a friend and mourning. “We'll have to leave here," Ernest said, sounding sad. But the radio from Miami reported a Norther had struck there, and we expected it to reach us in about twelve hours. It did, and it was not until the twentieth that we got back to the Finca. The house was neat, clean and in order, as always after days in the popular confinements of Pilar, looked enormous, almost too big to control.
While Ernest attacked and demolished little hills of mail, I tried to dispose usefully of the greatest crop of tomatoes we had ever produced – sixty plants burgeoning with an embarrassment of riches.
Gary Cooper came for a night in which we talked until near dawn mostly about his private problems, and went on talking about them the next day. Leland and Slim Hayward appeared the following day to stay in our Casita. We dined in town, we lunched and dined at home, Ernest took them fishing and one evening Leland took away The Old Man and the Sea manuscript to read in bed. When he brought it into the sitting room the next noon, he had decided its future.
“You've got to publish this, Papa. It's a terrible waste of time to let it lie around here."
We were standing by the front door of the living room and Leland patted the manuscript which he had put on the long mahogany table there.
“It's awfully short to be a book,” Ernest murmured.
“What you've got here is quality. You couldn't put more in a thousand pages,” Leland said. “It must go into a big magazine, Life or Look."
“Scribner's wouldn't like that.”
“Scribner's will get millions of dollars of free advertising. It should have a big spread in a big magazine. I'll handle it.”
“You move fast, boy, Mister H.” Ernest was visibly overwhelmed by Leland's enthusiasm. His voice was soft and his glance downward.
Lelands, the Broadway producer – South Pacific, Mr. Roberts, Call Me Madam – was now the supersalesman and thinking fast.
“We'll time the magazine piece just ahead of the book. Or simultaneously.”
"A big circulation magazine? Scribner's won't sell a copy.”
“Nonsense. People will read the magazine and rush out to buy the book. Who's your man at Scribner's? I'll talk to him. We ought to aim at publication this fall."
When they left a day or two later Leland carried with him a copy of the manuscript.
In the clumps of accumulated mail at home was a letter from Marjorie Cooper in Tanganyika, explaining how her husband Dick, Ernest's friend from East Africa, 1933, had drowned while bird shooting on a lake on their estate. They had buried him in the rose garden near the house. Ernest murmured his phrase about people dying who never died before.
But good news was arriving too, Scribner's had telegraphed and written their enthusiasm for The Old Man and the Sea. Life was going to break its habit and publish it entirely in one single issue. The Book-of-the Month Club was interested, and Jonathan Cape in London wanted to publish simultaneously with Scribner's.
Various aspects of the publication of The Old Man and the Sea were pre-empting more and more of the man's attention, the marginal details – particularly correspondence from everywhere – intruding on his working time. On May 16 he wrote Jonathan Cape, his London publisher: “I have no English edition of Across the River and into the Trees but I have been told there were a number of deletions and some changes. In this book I want there to be no changes at all. ... Every word depends on every other word. ... I rely on you to see that prose is neither changed nor improved. . . . Am most anxious to hear what you think about the book. . . . I hope you will like it, Have plenty more coming.”
Harvey Breit had written suggesting an interview for his column in The New York Times Book Review and Ernest replied: “... with Cowley, Ross, Sammy Boal I had too damned much personal publicity. I ought to keep my damned mouth shut for a while. If the book is any good they won't forget you. If it isn't why should you want people to remember you for your extracurricular activities?”
More abrasive to our peace of mind was the short visit of Alfred Eisenstadt, the photographer Life had sent down to photograph the village of Cojímar, Pilar's old harbor town, similar to the Old Man's town. Eisie turned his various lenses onto the town, its people and the simple skiffs of the local fishermen loitering above their anchors in the bay. When we pointed out mano'war-hawks (frigate birds), all sail and no ballast with the greatest wing area in proportion to their body weight, the swiftest flyers of all sea birds, Eisie took their portraits in twenty or thirty different positions, the sharp dihedral angles of their seven-foot wings showing. Like all fishermen on the Gulf Stream, Santiago had watched and admired them. Eisie's photographs would provide the images from which Noel Sickles would make drawings to accompany Santiago's story in Life.
On a June afternoon of tormenting sun, Eisie, small, intent and quick-moving, walked Ernest all around Cojímar for a couple of hours, stationing him of various façades and views of the bay. Ernest muttering protests, wishing not to be obstructive, since he had agreed to work at this chore. But growing restive in the downbeating heat. Finally he said slowly to Eisie behind the cameras, “Eisie, you have competence. But you have no compassion."
Standing on the sun-blasted road overlooking the bay, Eisie heard it. “I never thought of it that way,” he said. That wrapped up the filming session. On the way home with the car's top up, Eisie, the dedicated pro photographer, said he had not really noticed the heat.
Everybody we knew in New York was reading galley proofs of The Old Man either from Life or Scribner's and the mail René brought up from the village grew bulkier by the morning. Scribner's official publication date was August 28 and Life's publication with Noel Sickle's strong sympathetic drawings was in the issue of September 1. But Life's promotion department had slipped out six hundred pre-publication sets of its galley proofs around the country, thus instigating a breeze of whispers and for a week, we heard, the chic thing in the trade was to have read the galleys. The bookshops were equally foresighted and around the country wrapped thousands of pre-publication copies for their favorite customers.
From London Jonathan Cape sent a couple of advance copies of his edition which upset us all. The quality of the paper and the niggardly use of space in the typesetting had improved a bit since World War II, but the dustcover – a figure with a Mexican wide-brimmed hat fishing backward, the mast of his skiff stepped, and a childish silly fish – affronted us and the book. Ernest wrote a stricken cable: I FEEL SICK OVER MY BOOK BEING DESTROYED BY THIS MISERABLE AND RIDICULOUS PRESENTATION. It was too late, momentarily. The book was already selling swiftly in England. But Cape conscientiously dumped the unfortunate cover quite soon, substituting a plain cover quoting flattering phrases from the British critics.
The mail had always been more than half discomforting – "Help!” “Give!” “Read and tell me,” “We need” - hundreds of demands we could not meet. Now nearly all of it, thirty to forty letters a day, brought such bright cheer that if I happened into the sitting room at mail time Ernest might pop out of his chair to give me a hug-a-lug (a super-hug) and show me a letter from Italy, France, Montana, or Bimini, from Berenson or Bob Sherwood or Cyril Connolly or Quent Reynolds, all of them kind and appreciative or enthusiastic and loving. There also came scores of letters from G.I's, high school kids, housewives and fishermen in Montauk and Norfolk.
In two weeks the little book, priced at $3.00, had sold some 50,000 copies with reorders reaching Scribner's at a rate of 1,500 or more a day reaching 2,400.
“We ought to do something to celebrate," I said, stretched out one evening on the living room sofa. “Oh, I don't forget, ‘Director, Internal Revenue Service, Baltimore, Maryland.' But you should have some little extra fun, my lamb.”
“Plenty good big fish in the Stream now,” Ernest said.
Besides his heavy correspondence, Ernest's business reading was augmented by sheafs of clippings, literary critics' comments which Scribner's kept sending us. He read them with attention even though he insisted he disapproved of so doing and wrote Berenson: “... one does not care about the reviews. I cared about yours. But reading the others is just a vice. It is very destructive to publish a book and then read the reviews. When they do not understand it you get angry; if they do understand it you only read what you already know and it is no good for you. It is not as bad as drinking Strega but it is a little like it."
Lee Samuels, ... had snapped dozens of photos for the back of The Old Man's dustcover - Ernest muttering, “Even you and your magic box can't make a pig look like a poet -”
Copyright 1951 © 1956, 1963, 1965, 1976 by Mary Welsh Hemingway.
From HOW IT WAS. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
Charlton Heston, whose name is synonymous with excellence in the entertainment industry, made his Broadway debut as a member of Katharine Cornell's Anthony and Cleopatra company. He first drew Hollywood's attention after playing Anthony in David Bradley's widely acclaimed 16mm version of Julius Caesar. Immediately after he played the lead in Hal Wallis' Dark City, Cecil B. DeMille signed him for The Greatest Show on Earth, and Charlton Heston was on his way. Over the years, Heston has proved himself equally competent in a wide range of roles. He won the Best Actor Academy Award for Ben Hur and has received numerous international equivalents of the Oscar, including Germany's Bambi; Italy's David di Donatello; and Belgium's Uilenspiegel. A few of the more than forty films Heston has starred in. are Ruby Gentry, The President's Lady, The Ten Commandments, The Big Country, El Cid, The Pigeon That Took Rome, The Agony and the Ecstasy, Planet of the Apes, The Three Musketeers, Earthquake, Midway and many more. Heston, active in community and industry affairs, has made a number of overseas tours under the State Department's Cultural Presentation Program; visited American troops in Viet Nam three times; contributed his services to the President's Council on Youth Opportunities; served six terms as president of the Screen Actor's Guild; and is chairman of the American Film Institute and of the Center Theatre Group, Los Angeles. With his wife Lydia and two children, he makes his home in Beverly Hills, California. Charlton Heston performs as “Ahab” on Caedmon's MOBY DICK (TC 2077) with George Rose as Father Marple, and Keir Dullea as Ismael.
Visit my shop for more great vintage items:
7" Record Boxes - http://etsy.me/1QelcPL
10" and 12" Record Boxes - http://etsy.me/211lMlu
Movie Soundtracks - http://etsy.me/1O8qJzy
Movie Novelizations - http://etsy.me/1SolPGE
Classic Books - http://etsy.me/20v9ik6
Spoken Word Recordings - http://etsy.me/1PuIm0P
Records - http://etsy.me/1Ln0oht
Miscellaneous / Stickers / Record Cleaners - http://etsy.me/1PJVn4w