Sunday Salon: A lifetime in a sentence.

I started reading The Old Man and the Sea with my students last week.  Like last year, when I posted a long account of how this went, my current 7th graders are doing very well with the book.  I'm having a great time with it, too, but I'm not sure that I'll do it again after this year.  I find the book is really getting to me this time around.

Take this sentence:

Once there had been a tinted photograph of his wife on the wall but he had taken it down because it made him too lonely to see it and it was on the shelf in the corner under his clean shirt.

I think this sentence is a masterpiece, a wonder of economy by the master of economical writing.  From it we learn enough about the old man, Santiago, to make him real and to break our hearts.  A tinted photograph, not black and white because he spent money on this particular picture, color tinting would have been extra.  It would probably have been a wedding photograph since only a wedding could justify the expense of a  tinted photograph in the days when tinted photographs were made.

How long ago did his wife die?  Did she die or simply leave him?  What matters is that he still loves her, so much that he keeps this photograph, one of his very few possession, and so much that he cannot bear to look at it day in and day out.  He keeps it under the one clean shirt that he still keeps.  He can bear to look at his wife's picture as often as he needs to wear his one clean shirt, not very often.

Grammatically, this should be two sentences, at least.  There really should be a period after "see it."  There are four "it"s in this sentence.  And a comma after "on the wall."

Of course it's the better the way Hemingway wrote it.