'He looked like a man cut away from the stake, when the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them, or taking away one particle from their compacted aged robustness. His whole high, broad form, seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped in an unalterable mould, like Cellini’s cast Perseus. Threading its way out from among his grey hairs, and continuing right down one side of his tawny scorched face and neck, till it disappeared in his clothing, you saw a slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish. It resembled that perpendicular seam sometimes made in the straight, lofty trunk of a great tree, when the upper lightning tearingly darts down it, and without wrenching a single twig, peels and grooves out the bark from top to bottom ere running off into the soil, leaving the tree still greenly alive, but branded.'
In the movie Quint's appearance - like Ahab's - is a wonderful coup de theatre. Scratching his nails on a chalkboard, he creates a sound like the "high-pitched screaming" of a shark victim, prefiguring his own fate just as the childlike chalk doodle behind him does. His speech - delivered between bites on a cracker - is a masterpiece of economy, and achieves a sort of poetry through its rhythms ("I'll find him him for three, but I'll catch him, and kill him, for ten.") and workingman's vernacular.
In the book - even though Benchley follows Melville's example and keeps the character in the background until the end of Chapter Ten - Quint's entrance is a little underwhelming. Brody looks him up in the phone book - where he is listed enigmatically only by his surname - and gives him a call. In choosing the name itself, perhaps Benchley was intending to suggest something of the abrasive nature of the character, or perhaps referencing other hard men with similarly-sounding names such as Flint or Clint. It's unlikely that he was thinking of the character of Peter Quint, the ghost in Henry James's The Turn of the Screw.
Strictly speaking, Quint's first appearance comes on page sixty eight, in one of the several random codas with which Benchley ends some of his chapters. There he is described as "a tall, spare man" and - like The Man With No Name - seems to be a man of few words. He makes one prophetic statement about the shark ("We'll find one another, all right. But not today.") and then disappears from the text until page one hundred and ninety five when he picks up the phone. Quint's use of the plural pronoun we implies that fisherman and shark are fated to meet whereas in the film the use of the singular pronoun ("I'll find him....) suggests more the nature of a quest.
Clearly Quint has a reputation that extends beyond Amity. Bill Whitman of The New York Times has heard of him. Whitman returns in Chapter Ten so Harry Meadows can lecture him on the parasitic nature of the town's relationship with its summer visitors and also to cue up some more National Geographic-type speeches from Hooper. Hooper himself has already formed a low opinion of Quint ("You'd really do business with this guy?"), which one assumes must stem from some kind of fore-knowledge about his questionable attitudes towards ocean wildlife.
In the movie Quint's terms of employment are established in two scenes. The principal sum of ten thousand dollars is put on the table at the town hall meeting. The finer details of the contract (a per diem of $200, the apricot brandy, the Iranian caviar and the colour TV) are hammered out with Brody in Quint's boathouse. The chief eagerly agrees to all the captain's demands like a rock star's manager who has been given a list of outrageous riders. Quint's playful needling of Brody and his blue collar resentment of Hooper establish the uneasy triangle of relationships before the three men set out on the hunt.
In the book Brody feels that he is being ripped off ("Come on, man. Why are you holding me up?"). When Quint tells him he needs an "extra pair of hands" on board, Brody volunteers himself for the mission and is stung by the fisherman's derision ("You? Ha!"). Tellingly, Quint says, "I'm gonna need a man with me", and, with his manhood questioned, Brody has no option but to step up. Hooper also signs on for the voyage with an ironically prophetic phrase ("I'll probably live to regret it."). The fish expert has little faith in the fisherman and sneers: "He doesn't even have a mate? What a half-assed operation." Not much of Chapter Ten makes it into the movie, but at least that compound adjective was preserved, albeit in a different context.
