New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

by Jackson J Benson

  In addition to the commentary of the nada theme, at least a dozen articles have been written on the difficulty of attributing certain portions of dialogue in "A Clean Well-Lighted Place." In perhaps the most provocative of them, Joseph Gabriel argues that the speeches of the old and young waiter were intentionally confused so that the reader might not only witness but actually experience the uncertainty of nothingness in the very act of reading the tale. See "The Logic of Confusion in Hemingway’s ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,’" College English 22 (May 1961): 539–47. For an overview of the dialogue controversy, see Charles May, "Is Hemingway’s ‘Well-Lighted Place’ Really Clean Now?" Studies in Short Fiction 8 (1971): 326–30.

  4 Annette Benert also stresses the response to nada in this particular tale, but only the old waiter’s, in "Survival Through Irony: Hemingway’s ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,’" Studies in Short Fiction 11 (1974): 181–89.

  5 The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (New York: Scribner’s, 1966), p. 383. All subsequent references to Hemingway’s stories and all page references are to this volume. Dates provided for individual stories refer to their initial publication.

  6 Time of Need: Forms of Imagination in the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper, 1972), pp. 83–92. for a useful, if overly systematic, study of Hemingway and existential thought, see John Killinger’s Hemingway and the Dead Gods: A Study in Existentialism (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, i960). See also Richard Lehan’s section of Hemingway, Sartre, and Camus in A Dangerous Crossing: French Literary Existentialism and the Modern American Novel (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973), pp. 46–56.

  7 For more detailed theological and linguistic analyses of the old waiter’s prayer, see John B. Hamilton, "Hemingway and the Christian Paradox," Renascence 24 (1972): 152–54; David Lodge, "Hemingway’s Clean, Well-Lighted, Puzzling Place," Essays in Criticism 21 (1971): 33–34; and Earl Rovit, Ernest Hemingway (New York: Twayne, 1963), pp. 111–114.

  8 Evidently leaning heavily on the old waiter’s statement "and man was a nothing too," Joseph Gabriel sees nada from a Sartrian perspective. In Being and Nothingness Sartre posits that the human self ("pour soi") is by its very nature a "nothing" with only the possibility of becoming "something." Although I claim no direct influence, in most of his stories Hemingway seems to be operating under the Kierkegaardian and Heideggerian senses of nada as an external "force." He does appear to be more Sartrian, however, in "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro"; I will treat the consequences when discussing those tales.

  9 "Ernest Hemingway: A Critical Essay," in Ernest Hemingway: Five Decades of Criticism, ed. Linda Wagner (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1974), p. 214.

  10 Irrational Man (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1958), p. 284. Carlos Baker seems to come closest to my viewpoint in Hemingway: The Writer as Artist. He sees a rather explicit appearance of nada in "Now I Lay Me" and connects it generally with the idea of "not home," a significant image in the short stories and novels alike. See especially pp. 133ff.

  11 See Frederick J. Hoffman, "No Beginning and No End: Hemingway and Death," Essays in Criticism 3 (January, 1953): 73–84, and Robert Penn Warren, "Ernest Hemingway," in Ernest Hemingway: Five Decades of Criticism, pp. 75–103.

  12 Without dealing directly with nada, Young traces Nick’s initiation and the frequent refusals of initiation in Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration (New York: Harcourt, 1966), pp. 29–55.

  13 Hemingway: The Writer’s Art of Self-Defense (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969), P. 130.

  14 For more information on their versions of nothingness and the existential "authentication" of the self, see Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, trans. D. Swenson and W. Lowrie (1843; reprint Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1944), and Heidegger’s Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (1927; rpt. London: SCM Press, 1962).

  15 "The Logic of Confusion," p. 542. See also John Hagopian’s discussion of the young waiter’s limited sensitivity to the word nothing in "Tidying Up Hemingway’s ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,’" Studies in Short Fiction 1 (1964): 141–47.

  16 "Character, Irony, and Resolution in ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.’" American Literature 42 (1970): 78. Reacting to Hemingway’s own claim that he often omitted the real ending of his stories, Bennett proceeds to speculate that the omitted ending here is the fact that the young waiter’s wife has indeed left him, presumably for the soldier who passes by the window of the café.

  17 Delmore Schwartz expanded on this idea in his discussion of "Cross-Country Snow" in "The Fiction of Ernest Hemingway":

  Skiing and activities like it give the self a sense of intense individuality, mastery and freedom. In contrast, those activities which link the self with other beings and are necessary to modern civilization not only fail to provide any such self-realization but very often hinder it. The individual feels trapped in the identity assigned him by birth, social convention, economic necessity; he feels that this identity conceals his real self; and the sense that he is often only an enormous part of the social mass makes him feel unreal.

  See Selected Essays of Delmore Schwartz, ed. Donald Dike and David Zucker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 257.

  18 Tillich distinguishes between the three forms of "existential" anxiety (of death, meaninglessness, and condemnation), which "belong to existence as such and not to an abnormal state of mind," and "pathological" anxiety, which represents an escape into neurosis, in The Courage To Be (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1952), pp. 64–70.

  19 In using this term Kaplan underscores the unintelligent natural violence, the concentrated destructiveness of the bull. See The Passive Voice (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1966), p. 106.

  There are many who see Garcia, and the old man as well, as representations of the Hemingway "code hero" precisely because of their dignity in the face of potentially catastrophic external circumstances. These critics, and Kaplan is one, point to Garcia in particular because as a bullfighter he is in constant touch with danger yet maintains a certain grace by virtue of his role in the bullfight, a ritualistic form of order imposed upon the chaos of life.

  Granted, both the old man and Garcia display admirable courage, but they lack the firm internal order I see necessary for the true Hemingway hero. As his desperate attempt at suicide and very unsteady balance suggest, the old man’s place of refuge is now totally external. Garcia’s form has also eroded to the point that he can hardly be considered an exemplar of dignity. There is a certain desperate foolhardiness in his stubborn insistence on making a comeback and his unrealistic hope for "an even break" after his recent disasters in the ring; as his friend Zurito admits, these are signs of empty pride. On the other hand, the picador himself, though aged, is still a thoroughly professional craftsman. Thus, I agree with Arthur Waldheim’s view in A Reader’s Guide to Ernest Hemingway (New York: Farrar, 1972) that Zurito, along with the old waiter, is much more fully representative of the "code hero."

  20 Edward Stone, "Hemingway’s Mr. Frazer: From Revolution to Radio," Journal of Modern Literature 1 (1971): 380.

  21 The Hidden God (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1963), p. 6.

  22 See Malcolm Cowley, "Nightmare and Ritual in Hemingway," in Ernest Hemingway: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robert Weeks (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1962), pp. 40–52; and Sheridan Baker, "Hemingway’s ‘Big Two-Hearted River,’" in The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, ed. Jackson Benson (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1975), pp. 150–59. In addition to the ritual series in the tale, Baker finds a suggestion of desperate defensiveness against a shadowy threat in the image of Nick’s tent, "stretched as tightly as his own state of mind, equally protective in its static tension" (pp. 151–52).

  23 "The Snows of Kilimanjaro’: Harry’s Second Chance," Studies in Short Fiction 5 (1967): 58.

  24 Buber’s most detailed consideration of this ethics is in ƒ
and Thou, 2d ed. 1923, rpt. trans. R. Smith (New York: Scribner’s, 1958).

  Randall Stewart has also noted the old waiter’s proclivity for compassion and sees it as crucial both to the clean, well-lighted place and to the tale’s quasi-Christian ritual:

  The cafe is a place where congenial souls may meet. The older waiter, particularly, has a sympathetic understanding of the elderly gentleman’s problem. Living in a clean, well-lighted place does not mean solitary withdrawal so long as there are others who also prefer such a place. One can belong to a communion of saints, however small.

  See American Literature and Christian Doctrine (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1958), p. 135. See also Richard Hovey’s discussion of the need for communion in Hemingway: The Inward Terrain (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968), p. 25.

  25 Because of her faith in the transcendent forces "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" negates and her naive ambition for sainthood, Sister Cecilia seems an apt equivalent for the unrealistic young waiter. Indeed, as Paul Rodgers has pointed out in "Levels of Irony in Hemingway’s ‘The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio,’" Studies in Short Fiction 7 (1970): 446, her blindness-also the young waiter’s defect-is suggested by the very etymology of her name (from the Latin caecus, or "blind").

  Upon closer examination, two other stories reveal a similar triad, "The Undefeated" has its own version of the old waiter (Zurito) and the old man (Garcia), but it also has a young waiter in the person of the young bullfight critic. He too neither empathizes nor sympathizes with the victim’s plight and thus engages in facile criticism of him. Moreover, like the young waiter, he is far more interested in a midnight tryst; consequently, he too hurries away, leaving the old man figure to his fate. In "The Battler" (1925) the naive Nick Adams meets only confusion in his encounter with the despairing, jumbled Ad Francis (old man), and fails to fully appreciate the compassionate efforts on both his and Francis’s behalf of the eternally watchful Bugs (old waiter).

  26 Time of Need, p. 94.

  27 Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (New York: Scribner’s, 1969), p. 305.

  28 Rovit convincingly argues that nada was both a challenge to and a stimulus for Hemingway’s art in Ernest Hemingway, pp. 168 ff. See also Jackson Benson, Hemingway: The Writer’s Art of Self-Defense on this point.

  29 Death in the Afternoon (New York: Scribner’s 1932), p. 278.

  30 See Ihab Hassan’s illuminating discussion of Hemingway’s literary pointillism in "Valor Against the Void," in The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature (New York: Oxford, 1971), pp. 80–110.

  Tony Tanner makes a similar point about the Hemingway style in The Reign of Wonder (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1956), pp. 241–50. In Tanner’s terms Hemingway characteristically resisted disorder by erecting a verbal "cordon sanitaire" around each individual image, thus creating any number of miniature, aesthetic clean, well-lighted places.

  31 The Great Tradition: An Interpretation of American Literature Since the Civil War, 3d ed. (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1969), p. 277.

  E. R. Hagemann, “‘Only Let the Story End As Soon As Possible’: Time-and-History in Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time”

  1 Without going into too much detail, the five states are "In Our Time," Little Review 9 (Spring 1923): 3–5, six chapters; in our time (Paris: Three Mountains Press, 1924), eighteen chapters; In Our Time (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1925), fifteen chapters and L’Envoi, First American Edition; In Our Time (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930), fifteen chapters, L’Envoi, and "Introduction by the Author," pp. 9–12, Second American Edition; and The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (New York: Modern Library, 1942). This text for this article is the 1925 edition.

  2 Incidentally, the Star robbery story, "Death Breaks Up a Gang," was immediately followed by the regular column, "Gossip of Society," the first item of which read: "Mr. and Mrs. Ford will entertain with a dinner tonight in compliment to Mr. and Mrs. W. L. Velie of Moline, 111."

  3 Not only did Hemingway change the ethnicity, he also changed the Kansas City street geography. The police station was not on 15th Street but at 1420 Walnut; the cigarstore was not at 15th and Grand, although there are three stores elsewhere on Grand.

  4 Oddly, Hemingway does not describe Cook County Jail but Jackson County Jail in Kansas City, and this may have led Fenton and others astray when they say that Cardinella was hanged there. In 1917 capital punishment was forbidden by law in Missouri.

  5 William White, ed., By-Line: Ernest Hemingway (New York: Scribner’s, 1967), pp. 51, 59; the dispatches are headlined "A Silent, Ghastly Procession," October 20, 1922, and "Refugees from Thrace," November 14, 1922.

  6 White, By-Line, p. 96; "Bull Fighting a Tragedy," October 20, 1923.

  7 Villalta was born on November 11, 1898. He received the alternativa, the ceremony in which a matador de novillos graduates to matador de toros, at San Sebastian on August 6, 1922. It was confirmed in Madrid a little over six weeks later. See Barnaby Conrad, La Fiesta Brava (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953), p. 176, and throughout the book.

  8 Maera was born in 1896. Before his success as a matador, he had worked as a banderillero for Juan Belmonte. His alternativa came on August 28, 1921 at Puerto de Santa Maria; it was confirmed in Madrid on May 15, 1922. Bullfighting details have been derived from Cossio, cited above.

  A Note to the Reader: Rather than inundate this article with footnotes, I have chosen to cite historical data only occasionally. One can be assured that the facts are as accurate as possible. They have been taken from both standard and specialized histories of the period as well as from contemporary accounts. Spellings of proper nouns are of the time.

  Much more work is needed on the interchapters. At present I am engaged on a book-length rhetorical-thematic analysis, some elements of which are stressed herein, for example, the Wall and the Procession.

  Then there are the bullfighting episodes. Perhaps someone with better research facilities at hand will be able to identify the events and the participants.

  I wish to acknowledge the pioneering work by Michael S. Reynolds in his article, "Two Hemingway Sources for In Our Time," Studies in Short Fiction 9 (Winter 1972): 81–86.

  Robert W. Lewis, “‘Long Time Ago Good, Now No Good’: Hemingway’s Indian Stories”

  1 Peter Griffin’s biography reveals that in Hemingway’s junior year in high school he worked on an "Indian Passion Play," "No Worst [sic] Than a Bad Cold" which is an unfinished satire of Indian clichés foreshadowing The Torrents of Spring (pp. 27–28, 233). Griffin also notes that Longfellow’s Hiawatha was the young Hemingway’s favorite poem (p. 233).

  2 Clarence may have been honored with an Indian name, "Nec-tee-ta-la—Eagle Eye," but Griffin cites no source and "Eagle Eye" would not be "Nec-tee-ta-la" in any Sioux dialect (p. 6). Hemingway himself seems never to have acknowledged his father’s stay among the Sioux. (I am grateful for my colleague John Crawford’s help on the linguistic point.)

  3 Nor indeed in the United States at all except for the Caribbean periphery in To Have and to Have Not.

  4 For instance, in a letter to Robert M. Brown, from "The Finca," Hemingway described his initiation to an African tribe: "I was the first and only white man or 1/8 Indian who was ever a Kamba, and it is not like President Coolidge being given a war bonnet by a tame Blackfoot or Shoshone." Jeffrey Meyers goes so far as "Everyone believed that Hemingway had Indian blood" (p. 240). The usual one-eighth Indian blood that Hemingway claimed would have been only one-sixteenth if his arithmetic as well as his history were accurate, for in a letter to Charles Scribner he claimed "a Cheyenne great-great-grandmother" (Letters, p. 659). The tribe is further specified as Northern Cheyenne in a prideful letter in part about youngest son Gregory, "a real Indian boy (Northern Cheyenne) with the talents and the defects," both of which Hemingway associated with his own youth (Letters, p. 679).

  5 Lloyd R. Arnold, High on the Wild with Hemingway (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton, 1968), pp. 36, 37, 50, 53–5
4, 59, 67–68.

  6 Curiously, in The Sun Also Rises, published four years after Hemingway’s poem, "There Are Seasons: Translations from the Esquimaux," Jake thinks, "The English spoken language—the upper classes anyway—must have fewer words than the Eskimo. Of course I didn’t know anything about the Eskimo. Maybe the Eskimo was a fine language. Say the Cherokee. I didn’t know anything about the Cherokee either" (p. 149).

  7 Montgomery, p. 93. The youths are seventeen and nineteen. Nick is actually not named in the story, but Montgomery and other Hemingway scholars identify him on the basis of parallels and circumstantial evidence.

  8 Carlos Baker (Life, p. 26) suggests that Hemingway did not have his first sexual encounter with Trudy or any Indian counterpart. But according to Mary Hemingway, Hemingway perpetuated the myth with her (p. 102). For a careful analysis of the writing and revisions of "Ten Little Indians," including information and speculation on the pregnancy and subsequent suicide of the Indian girl Prudence Boulton, the model for the girl in the story, see Paul Smith.

  9 Twenty years later these last words were still on his mind. In a letter to Bernard Berenson, Hemingway writes that he has "complicated blood. . . . One time when I was out at the Wind River reservation a very old Indian spoke to me and said, ‘You Indian boy?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ He said, ‘Cheyenne?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ He said, ‘Long time ago good. Now no good’" (Letters, p. 815). He had virtually the same lines in a 1949 letter to Malcolm Cowley: "Us old ex-Cheyennes have various things that we believe in but as an Indian said to me one time, ‘Long time ago, good, now no good’" (Letters, p. 681).

  10 Just as, he wrote to Maxwell Perkins about For Whom the Bell Tolls, the Gypsies "in this book are not book gypsies anymore than my indians were ever book-indians" (Letters, P- 513).