New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

by Jackson J Benson

  “Christian” interpretations of “The Light of the World” have followed some familiar patterns. Bruccoli saw in Ketchel elements of a Christ-figure: his godlike appeal to Peroxide, his role as “saviour” to the two women, his being shot by his father in Peroxide’s account (sacrificed for his father).18 Thomas cited the “Christ-analogue” and saw Ketchel’s loss to Johnson as Christ’s “defeat” by the dark forces of human evil.19 Several of Peroxide’s remarks do of course reinforce the notion of deity in Ketchel: “There never was a man like that,” “I loved him like you love God,” “he was like a god.” Both Thomas and Barbour saw a nun’s spiritual marriage to Christ in Peroxide’s love for Ketchel.20 But the Christ symbolism does not seem broad enough to include all the implications of the story. Ketchel’s brief fame as the Great White Hope of boxing carried an almost religious appeal to both whores, especially to Peroxide, who stressed his whiteness:

  “I never saw a man as clean and as white and as beautiful as Steve. . . .” (44)

  “He was the greatest, finest whitest, most beautiful man that ever lived. . . .” (44)

  “He was like a god, he was, so white and clean and beautiful and smooth and fast like a tiger or like lightning.” (45)

  This combination of whiteness and godliness suggests still another deity in Ketchel, the one depicted in Madame Tellier’s “salon of Jupiter,” the lounge of her establishment, with its drawing of “Leda stretched out under the swan.”21 Ketchel is thus the Swan, the whitest of the gods (Zeus, Jupiter). More like Swinburne’s pagan deities than Christ, however, Ketchel has “visited” these mortals, or so they claim.

  The “light” of Hemingway’s title has of course been the target of every explication of the story. The most obvious biblical source is Christ’s comment in John 8:12, “I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.” Yet this applies to Nick only in the negative sense. He has found no Christian light in the bar, none in the station, and he will literally and figuratively walk forth into the cold Michigan darkness at the end. Furthermore, in the full context of John 8:2–12, Christ offers the woman taken in adultery her only option for salvation—to “follow” Him, an option that Nick is rejecting. Christ’s comment in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:14), “You are the light of the world” applies, but only with telling irony, to everyone in the station—there is no one worth emulating. Hemingway might have intended a pun upon Alice, who is addressed by the cook as, “You big disgusting mountain of flesh,” by Peroxide as “You big mountain of pus,” and likened by the lumberjack to “a hay mow” (italics added, 41, 46, 42). But Alice hardly sheds Christian light upon her fellows, as the evangelist urges; critics have struggled to see Christian quality in her.22

  Hemingway surely was, among other things, deploring the betrayal of Christian love in our culture, as William B. Stein has argued persuasively,23 but as Hemingway himself said of this story, “It is about many things and you would be ill-advised to think it is a simple tale.”24 Efforts to relate either P.P. Bliss’s gospel hymn or Holman Hunt’s painting of Jesus with a lantern—both also entitled “The Light of the World"—to the story seem oversimplified. Hemingway, as his mother’s son, was aware of the Christian suggestions in his title, but also as his mother’s son, he very much realized that his views of life and art had moved beyond them, as Nick’s had begun to do. Michael S. Reynolds shows that Hunt’s painting had considerable satiric value for Hemingway (his mother’s vanity in presenting a copy of it to her church in memory of her father), in addition to whatever religious values it held for him.25 Beyond this, the prevalence of irony in the religious imagery undercuts the Christian intention of the story. In fact it is chiefly in inverted or ironic sense that “light” has meaning, for there is very little Christian value or sentiment to be found in the surface of the story. Critics who have looked for meaning in a specific biblical text have failed to recognize the extent of Nick’s revolt and the secular character of the world Hemingway is sending him into. If anything, “The Light of the World” shows the failure of Christianity for Nick at this time, just as it is failing (and being failed by) the whores and lumberjacks who call on Christ so often.

  The world Nick walks through is anything but Christian. The brutality of the bar and the stale carnality of the railroad station bespeak a world without hope or honesty or even meaning. This is a place of illusion and contradiction: Stan Ketchel is “Steve,” four Indians become three, the man in the stagged trousers is at first the cook, but later the man who calls him “sister.” And there is no promise of release from this world, where the five heterosexual white men retreat before the five grotesque whores, who live in memory (if at all), and the two groups join only in the derision of the cook. Sex has become a sick joke, and love a lie, here. As Sheridan Baker observed, the story makes masculine sexuality “the light of the world,”26 and that is the false limelight that plays alternately upon Peroxide and Alice. It is Nick’s growing excitement over Alice, as well. Martine identifies this light with the red light, “the archetypal light in the archetypal houses of the oldest profession in the world.”27 Still, it is the only force that rouses this crew from its lethargy.

  Nick’s journey in this story may well be the trip into town Saturday night that he talked of in “The Three-Day Blow” (216), his consolation that he might still see Marjorie again,28 but what he finds instead is the realization of his earlier comment to Marge, “everything was gone to hell inside of me” (184). He is in Hell. The lumberjacks, cook, and whores suggest The Carnal, who have betrayed reason to their appetites, in Dante’s Inferno. With its pervading darkness, and the bar and station its only features, the whole landscape suggests the underworld. A many-sided metaphor, the station shades back through the Walpurgis Night of Hawthorne’s Major Molineux to merely sordid reality. Indeed, the story carries echoes of many literary works. The bar is like one in Jack London’s On the Road,29 and Nick and Tom’s forced departure is like Robin’s from the dark tavern in old Boston. Nick’s fascination with Alice recalls Robin’s with “the silvery sound of a woman’s voice,” and the giant whore’s alternate sobbing and laughing suggest the “murmur” and “laughter” in the background of Hawthorne’s story. Alice, as Carlos Baker noted,30 is much like her near-namesake Alisoun, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath. The argument that Nick and Tom provoke in the station recalls the one touched off by Christian and Faithful in Bunyan’s Vanity Fair. Barbara Maloy has suggested a number of parallels between the story and Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland-Looking Glass world.31 More significantly here, the town and the railroad station are an Alice-in-Wonderland reversal of the life Nick knew at Hortons Bay. The shifting characters and identifications suggest Carroll’s work, and Hemingway’s Alice also “shrinks” to a sexually attactive size for Nick, a disturbing new measure of his sensuality. But Nick is the protagonist of this tale, and for him there will be no waking from a dream, safely back at home. More like Hawthorne’s Robin, Nick has left home and will not return to it until after the war.

  Pulled away while still under Alice’s spell, Nick should find the cold night air salutary. He has come a long way from Marjorie and her castles on the shore at Hortons Bay, but, learning by indirection, he needs time to realize this. “Light” still eludes him. It might be up the track with Ad and Bugs or outside Ole Andreson’s boarding house or on beyond that. Nick has made more progress than he knows, but he still walks through darkness.

  “Nobody Ever Dies!”: Hemingway’s Fifth Story of the Spanish Civil War

  Larry Edgerton

  Composed in 1938, “Nobody Ever Dies!” appeared in the March 1939 Cosmopolitan and, except for two translations and a “timely” April 1959 reprint by Cosmopolitan editors responding to the new Cuban government (the text arrives with photographs of Castro and his revolution), has not been published elsewhere, unlike the four other Civil War stories written in 1938 and 1939 on the heels of The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories.1
These other war stories Scribner’s appended in 1969 to a new printing of The Fifth Column.2 Save for a paragraph in Baker’s biography on Hemingway,3 as Benson notes in his bibliography, the story has generated no criticism. Among the published Hemingway canon, even including the two uncollected Atlantic stories4 and the fables,5 “Nobody Ever Dies!” has been singularly ignored. Apparently it is the last unturned stone in the broad field of Hemingway short-story commentary. Although the story periodically surfaces as an entry in bibliographies and footnotes, it remains unknown and buried in Cosmopolitan’s pages, where in 1939 it served as a companion piece to fiction, similarly illustrated, by Faith Baldwin, Paul Gallico, A. J. Cronin, and Dorothy Kilgallen.

  The plot is this: Enrique, a soldier fighting Spanish Fascists, returns to Cuba after fifteen months’ absence and is secreted in a house which contains a weapons cache and which officials have had under surveillance. Through part of the day that the story covers, Enrique listens for intruders and observes a straw-hatted Negro who is standing under laurels near the house. At last comes a sympathizer, Maria, bringing food. She and Enrique are lovers. She learns, through him, that her brother has been killed in the war. Embittered, she challenges Enrique to tell her why her brother’s death has meaning: why one should fight and die in what seems meaningless war. To prove that war deaths have meaning, Enrique first provides philosophy (“Where you die does not matter, if you die for liberty”), then shows his battle wound. Though the maxim does not move her, the wound does; she asks to be forgiven. Enrique and Maria embrace, and, as they do, sirens go off: officials are coming to the house. The lovers’ escape into an adjacent lot is unsuccessful. Submachine guns kill Enrique, and Maria is taken prisoner. She appeals to the dead (her brother, the war dead, Enrique) for help. Because nobody ever dies, the oxymoronic living dead can rescue her, filling her with a new, peaceful confidence, not unlike the confidence that animated Jeanne d’Arc. The police drive Maria away. The Negro informer who has been watching the house and turned them in is unnerved by her calm confidence. He fingers his voodoo beads but finds no peace. His magic has no primacy over her “older magic,” which is to say, Maria’s knowledge that her death will have meaning, just as Jeanne d’Arc (Hemingway says) understood that her death would become meaningful.

  The story’s scene-building calls to mind many Hemingway openings:

  The house was built of rose-colored plaster that had peeled and faded with the dampness and from its porch you could see the sea, very blue, at the end of the street. There were laurel trees along the sidewalk that grew high enough to shade the upper porch and in the shade it was cool. A mockingbird hung in a wicker cage at a corner of the porch, and it was not singing now, nor even chirping, because a young man of twenty-eight, thin, dark, with bluish circles under his eyes and a stubble of beard, had just taken off a sweater that he wore and spread it over the cage. The young man was standing now, his mouth slightly open, listening. Someone was trying the locked and bolted front door.

  The beginning characteristically uses sentences that are compound (“The house . . . and . . . you could see the sea”), packed with information (colors, sounds), and that introduce leitmotivs (the mockingbird, “in the shade it was cool”). It tells who and where and demands answers to why: why is somebody trying a locked and bolted door, why is the door locked and bolted? Why has Enrique, the young man with “bluish circles under his eyes,” covered the mockingbird’s cage? The bird, we notice, is caged, like Enrique, and when he releases the bird, his own captivity is mocked. Later, when he tries to convince Maria of his sensitivity, he tells her about releasing the bird, and she, too, mocks him: “Aren’t you kind!” We are also told, at about this point in the narrative, that “The wind was fresh now in the trees and it was cold on the porch.” The cool winds in the story parallel Enrique’s dry heart, the heart which war has deadened, which Maria calls a book (“You talk like a book,” she says. “Not like a human being”), yet which can still be touched, “hurt deeply.” Though Maria justifiably doubts Enrique’s sensitivity of heart, his physical senses have not been dulled. The second paragraph escorts the reader through a catalog of the sounds to which Enrique pays attention—the wind in the laurels, a taxi’s horn, children playing, the turn of a key in the bolted door, and the smack of a bat against a baseball. Enrique must examine each noise, just as he must carefully watch the street, in order to stay alive. War has sharpened his external senses while blunting his spiritual. When a siren on the radio falsely alerts him to danger, his reaction is a wave that crawls over his scalp “like prickly heat” and then disappears “as quickly as it came.” What he experiences is not fear, but the physical vestiges of old fears long overcome. He behaves courageously, committed to a war he believes in.

  The catalog of sounds functions in the story, then, and is not Hemingway’s idle demonstration of technique nor a hollow recital to plug space before beginning the story proper. It tells something about Enrique’s character through describing what he hears and sees. Description sets the stage and thematically suggests what is to follow. The statement “in the shade it was cool” points out a coolness that will be woven into the entire story, from the cool laurel shade to Enrique’s cool heart to the Negro’s cool treachery.

  Similarly, the Negro, an ominous figure literally in the shadows in the beginning of the story and not fully seen until the last three paragraphs, is associated with the laurel trees described in the second sentence of the initial paragraph. The laurel trees begin innocently but pick up malevolent hues as they are attached to the cool wind and the Negro. The freed mockingbird flies into the laurels—the laurels now associated with the Negro; the mockingbird, an emblem for Enrique, by landing in the laurels links Enrique to the evil trees—the trees from which the Negro will later emerge to effect Enrique’s death. The Negro is Chekhov’s gun that, if mentioned in a story’s first lines, must be fired by its last. Hemingway draws the story to a close around the Negro, who must consider, as engineer of this tragedy, the significance of his actions. What the Negro sets into motion, he witnesses and evaluates. He will contemplate Maria’s confidence, wonder about the meaning of her death. The story thus begins and ends with the Negro, for all intents and purposes. It has the circular organization Hemingway often employed: the reappearance of opening material, reviewed from a new perspective, ripe with fresh nuance. From the point of view of form there seem to be no loose ends in “Nobody Ever Dies!” Elements introduced early are not forgotten and crop up later in the story. There are no superfluous actions or characters. Through the progression of sentences, pregnant words or phrases (“it was cool”) are manipulated. Much of the dialogue is written with Hemingway’s wonted skill. The famous style, evident in the lovely first paragraph, is at work on every page, usually as tuned as ever to modifiers, rhythms, and cadences. The normal prose is limpid and musical.

  Superficially, then, “Nobody Ever Dies!” is a quick, dramatic narrative about lovers who argue, finally reach an understanding (physical and psychic), yet have their agreement fractured—here by gunfire and death. Yet, despite the resemblance of any Hemingway story to conventional patterns—pulp stories about bullfighting, boxing, and fishing—his imagination ordinarily travels past surfaces, so that rugged, dramatic, and even conventionally violent actions often have “larger meaning.” Given, then, Hemingway’s ability to invest common plots with philosophical depth, the reader should peer past Cosmopolitan’s frowzy graphics and the examples Miss Baldwin and Dr. Cronin have set, beyond the gangster machinery and clichés of romantic love in the story, for a retrievable ideology which may force this piece to be more serious than standard Cosmopolitan fare.

  Yet Baker calls the story “one . . . in his worst vein of tough sentimentalism,” and says Hemingway’s plot choices are “inept.”6 Perhaps harsher than Baker’s voiced judgment is the forty-four-year critical silence. However tidy its crafting, the story has not provoked commentary. It is ignored, and no doubt for good reasons. I agree with Baker’
s charge of sentimentalism and should like now to identify those aspects which justify that charge and also explain the story’s lack of interest for scholars as anything but an entry in bibliographies.

  The story is roughly at its midpoint when it disintegrates. Maria has been granted entrance into the house upon completing a pass phrase. She has learned from Enrique of her brother’s death, expressed her inability to understand war’s vindications, and challenged Enrique to answer why the deaths of her brother and other young men, in an unsuccessful operation in a foreign country, have purpose.