New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

by Jackson J Benson

  The man who does achieve the clean, well-lighted place is truly an existential hero, both in the Kierkegaardian and Heideggerian senses of the term. In the former he is content to live with his angst and, because there is no other choice, content to be in doubt about ultimate causes. Nevertheless, he is able to meet the varied and often threatening circumstances of day-to-day living, secure in the knowledge that he will always “become” and never “be.” In the latter he can face the unpleasant realities of his own being and the situation into which he has been “thrown” and can accept with composure the inevitability of his death. In both instances he is an “authentic” man.14

  Two of the main characters in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” as well as a host of analogous figures in other tales, fail to develop this attitude either for lack of “light” (the young waiter) or for lack of “cleanness” (the old man). As is evidenced by his inability to grasp the full impact of his partner’s use of the word nothing, the egotistic young waiter has not even grasped the fact of nada—has not seen clearly—and therefore can hardly deal with it. “To him,” comments Joseph Gabriel, “nada can only signify a personal physical privation. Nothing refers simply to the absence of those objects capable of providing material satisfaction. And by extension he applies the term to all behavior which does not grant the sufficiency of things.”15 Unable to see that the old man’s wealth is a woefully inadequate bulwark against the Void, he is, in his ignorance, contemptuous both of the man and his predicament. Perhaps as a direct outgrowth of this lack of light, the young waiter also violates the principle of cleanness by sloppily pouring his customer’s desperately needed brandy over the sides of the glass. Thus, he easily loses himself in a fool’s paradise of blindness and illusion. Still young, secure in his job, and, as he boasts, “‘I’m not lonely. I have a wife waiting in bed for me,”” (380), he is “all confidence”: as such, a particularly patent example to the old waiter of those who “lived in it [nada] and never felt it” (383).

  Yet, in the course of the story, even this naif has an unsettling glimpse of the fundamental uncertainty of existence and its direct impact on his own situation. What else can account for his sharply defensive reaction to the old waiter’s joke? [Old Waiter]: “‘And you? You have no fear of going home before your usual hour?’” [Young Waiter]: “‘Are you trying to insult me?’” [Old Waiter]: “‘No, hombre, only to make a joke’” (382). The youth’s subsequent grandiose claims to security notwithstanding, the force with which he objects to the merest possibility of marital infidelity clearly underscores the shaky foundations of his “confidence.” This bogus self-assurance does not emanate from a mature awareness of himself and his world, but is based on the most transitory of conditions: youth, present employment, sexual prowess, and the assumed loyalty of his wife. The young waiter depends for his very being on factors over which he has no control, leaving him particularly vulnerable, in the case of marital uncertainty, to what Warren Bennett calls the “love wound,” a common form of deprivation in Hemingway.16 But because he is essentially devoid of light or insight, he is not cognizant of the significance of his testy reply; his vision is so clouded by putative “confidence” that he fails to see through the ephemeral to the underlying darkness in his own life. Consequently, he cannot even begin to reconstruct his existence upon a more substantial basis.

  Hemingway must have reveled in such naifs, aflame with so obviously compromised bravado, for he created many of them. Perhaps the most notable is Paco, the would-be bullfighter of “The Capital of the World” (1936), who even in the face of his own death is “full of illusions.” For many of these characters, moreover, blindness is not a natural state but a willed escape from nada. Conscious flight from reality is particularly prevalent in the early stages of the “education” of Nick Adams. In “Indian Camp” (1924), for instance, one of the first segments in the Adams chronology, Nick has a youthful encounter with nada both as the incontrovertible fact of death (the Indian husband’s suicide) and as human frailty, the intrinsic vulnerability of mankind to various species of physical and psychic suffering (the Indian woman’s protracted and painful labor). The pattern of avoidance set when he refuses to witness the Caesarean section climaxes in his more significant refusal to recognize the inevitability of death itself at the end. Lulled by the deceptive calm of his present circumstances—a purely fortuitous and temporary clean, well-lighted place—he maintains an internal darkness by retreating into willed ignorance:

  They were seated in the boat, Nick in the stern, his father rowing. The sun was coming up over the hills. A bass jumped, making a circle in the water. Nick trailed his hand in the water. It felt warm in the sharp chill of the morning.

  In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die. (95)

  In another early story, “The Killers” (1927), the somewhat older Nick is again faced with harsh reality, but his reaction to it has not appreciably altered. Again, death (the Swede’s) is the primary manifestation of the Void. But here the manner of its coming is also particularly important as a signature of nada. As represented by the black-clad henchmen who invade the café—another inadequate place of refuge—nada is totally impersonal; in the words of one of the killers, “‘He [the Swede] never had a chance to do anything to us. He never even seen us’” (283). Moreover, nada displays its tendency to disrupt without warning any established external order, and, ironically, is visited upon its victims not without a certain macabre humor. Naturally, as Nick learns from the intended victim, its effects are totally irremediable. Thus, in spite of their suggestive black clothing, the killers do not represent forces of evil unleashed in an otherwise good world, as so many critics have claimed; rather, they stand for the wholly amoral, wholly irrational, wholly random operation of the universe, which, because it so clearly works to the detriment of the individual, is perceived to be malevolent and evil.

  In spite of the clearly educational nature of his experience, Nick once again refuses initiation. Only now his unreasoned compulsion to escape is more pronounced than that of his younger counterpart. Deluded into thinking that this is the kind of localized danger that can be avoided by a mere change in venue, Nick vows not only physical flight (“‘I’m going to get out of this town’”) but psychological flight as well: “‘I can’t stand to think about him waiting in the room and knowing he’s going to get it. It’s too damned awful’” (289). Both versions of Nick Adams, then, are “young waiter” figures because they neither will allow themselves to look directly at the fearsome face of nada nor recognize its direct applicability to their own insecure lives.

  That such an attitude is ultimately insupportable is exemplified by a third early tale, “Cross-Country Snow” (1925). Here, yet another Nick employs a physically demanding activity, skiing, as an escape from yet another incarnation of nada, entrapping circumstance. This appearance of the Void is also ironic in that the specific circumstance involved is the life-enhancing pregnancy of Nick’s wife. Nevertheless, its impact on the character is much the same as before in that it serves to severely circumscribe independent initiative, even to the point of substituting an externally imposed identity—in this case, fatherhood—on the true self.17 Once again misled by the temporary security of the “good place,” this Nick also attempts to escape the inescapable and, at the height of his self-delusion, is moved to raise his pursuit of physical release to the level of absolute value: “‘We’ve got to [ski again]. . . . It [life] isn’t worth while if you can’t’” (188).

  The ski slope, however, offers only apparent protection from nada, for even in his joyous adventure, Nick encounters its own form or hidden danger: “Then a patch of soft snow, left in a hollow by the wind, spilled him and he went over and over in a clashing of skis, feeling like a shot rabbit” (183). Unlike the others, this story ends with clarified vision, and Nick does come to terms with the inevitable external demands upon him. Finally, he is no longer
able to pretend that the pleasures of the ski slopes—themselves, not always unmixed—are anything more than temporary, in no way definitive of human existence or even a long-lived accommodation to it. Thus, in response to his companion’s suggested pact to repeat their present idyll, Nick must realistically counter, “‘There isn’t any good in promising’” (188).

  In his relationship to nada, the old man of “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” is cast as the polar opposite of the young waiter. Said to be eighty years old, virtually deaf, and recently widowed, he is “in despair” in spite of his reputed wealth and has attempted suicide shortly before the story begins. Unlike the young waiter, he has the light of unclouded vision because he has clearly seen the destructive effects of time and circumstance on love and the self and directly witnessed nada in its death mask. But unlike the old waiter, he has not been able to sustain a satisfactory mode of being in the face of these discoveries. He therefore seeks escape from his knowledge either through the bottle or the total denial of life in suicide. Undoubtedly, the old man senses the importance of the clean, well-lighted place, but to him it is very literally a “place” and thereby no more helpful in combating nada than Nick’s ski slope. That it is inadequate is suggested imagistically at the outset; darkness has indeed invaded this character’s “place,” for he sits “in the shadows the leaves of the trees made against the electric light” (379).

  What seems to offer the old man the little balance he possesses, and thus helps keep him alive, is a modicum of internal cleanness and self-possession, his dignity or style. Of course, this is an issue of great import in Hemingway in that an ordered personal style is one of the few sources of value in an otherwise meaningless universe. The old waiter draws attention to this pitiful figure’s style when he rebukes the young waiter for callously characterizing the old man as “‘a nasty old thing’”: “‘This old man is clean. He drinks without spilling. Even now, drunk’” (381). But even this vestige of grace has been compromised over time. While the old man leaves the café “with dignity,” he is “walking unsteadily” (381).

  The product of a series of encounters with nada, the old man’s despair is mirrored in two Nick Adams stories on the period immediately following the critical war wound. In “Now I Lay Me” (1927) the emotional dislocation stemming from his brush with death is continued in an almost psychotic dread of the night and sleep. Nada is imaged both as the night itself and, as Carlos Baker has suggested, by the disturbing and seemingly ceaseless munching of silkworms, just out of sight but most assuredly not out of Nick’s disturbed mind. Paradoxically, the protagonist’s abject terror in the face of potential selflessness—permanent in death; temporary in sleep—has resulted in a severe dissociation of the self. Using Paul Tillich’s descriptive terminology from The Courage to Be, one can say that he is burdened by “pathological” anxiety: a condition of drastically reduced self-affirmation, a flight from nonbeing that entails a corresponding flight from being itself:18 “I myself did not want to sleep because I had been living for a long time with the knowledge that if I ever shut my eyes in the dark and let myself go, my soul would go out of my body. I had been that way for a long time, ever since I had been blown up at night and felt it go out of me and go off and then come back” (363).

  Awakened to the fact of his own death, Nick experiences angst so strongly that he is virtually paralyzed. Unwilling to sleep in the dark and not yet able to develop an internal light and cleanness to cope with his trauma, he depends entirely on external sources of illumination: “If I could have a light I was not afraid to sleep” (363). In the absence of this light, however, he attempts to pull back from the awareness of nada by reliving the happier times of his youth, a period of cleanness and assured order. But the search for a good “place” in the past is ultimately fruitless; his memories of favorite trout streams tend to blur in his mind and inevitably lead him to unpleasant reminiscences of his father’s ruined collection of arrowheads and zoological specimens, a chaotic heap of fragments that merely mirrors his present internal maelstrom.

  In “A Way You’ll Never Be” (1933) Nick’s dissociation has not been remedied and is suggested initially by the postbattle debris with which the story opens. Plagued by a recurring dream of “a low house painted yellow with willows all around it and a low stable and there was a canal, and he had been there a thousand times and never seen it, but there it was every night as plain as the hill, only it frightened him” (408), he is close to an old man’s despair. He now intuits something of the significance of the vision: “That house meant more than anything and every night he had it [the dream]. That was what he needed” (408). But he is still too traumatized by the experience there to examine it more closely and can only ramble on in self-defense about the “American locust,” another familiar item from his childhood. In his present condition Nick is an oddly appropriate choice for the absurd mission on which he has been sent, to display his American uniform in order to build morale among the Italian troops. At the moment his “self,” like the entire American presence in the region, is solely the uniform; the clothes are as dimly suggestive of a more substantial identity as they are of the substantial military support they are designed to promise. For the present, though, this barely adequate package for his violently disturbed inner terrain is Nick’s only semblance of the clean, well-lighted place. Still insufficiently initiated into the dangerous world in which he is doomed to live, he desperately clutches at any buffer that will hold nada in abeyance.

  The other side of Hemingway’s “old man” figure is epitomized by Manuel Garcia, the aging bullfighter of “The Undefeated” (1925). After numerous brushes with death in the bullring, he too depends for his very being on style. Garcia’s style has also eroded, leaving him defenseless against the bull, Harold Kaplan’s “beast of nada.”19 Banished from the brightly lit afternoon bouts, he now performs in the shadowy nocturnals for a “second string critic” and with bulls that “‘the veterinaries won’t pass in the daytime’” (237). The performance itself is merely “acceptable” if not “vulgar.” Largely as a result of his diminished capabilities, he is seriously (and perhaps mortally) wounded and at the conclusion is left with only his coletta, as is the old man his shred of dignity. With these all-important manifestations of internal cleanness sullied, the fates of both are equally uncertain: Manuel’s on the operating table and the old man’s in the enveloping night.

  Of all Hemingway’s short story characters, however, the one who most fully recapitulates the “old man” typology is Mr. Frazer of “The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio” (1933). Confined to a backcountry hospital as a result of a riding accident, Frazer too experiences nada, “the Nothingness that underlies pain, failure, and disillusionment alike,”20 in the form of his own incapacity and that of the broken men who share his predicament. He also experiences banality, one of the less overtly disturbing but nonetheless ominous visages of nada, in the form of the numbing routine of this claustrophobic, but clean and well-lighted place. If Frazer has an old man’s clear perspective on nothingness, he is no better able to achieve the cleanness of character necessary to cope with it. As is suggested by Hemingway’s first title for the story, “Give Us a Prescription, Doctor,” Frazer too seeks external anodynes for his nada—induced pain. His compulsion to monitor random radio broadcasts and so imaginatively transport himself from his present circumstances is analogous to the old man’s drinking because each involves a flight from, rather than a confrontation with, reality. His very choice of songs—“Little White Lies” and “Sing Something Simple”—serves to underscore the escapism of this pastime.

  In the end, however, neither escape succeeds. The old man remains in despair, and Frazer is given to periodic fits of uncontrollable weeping. In the same way that the former cannot entirely banish the specter of loneliness and death from his consciousness, neither can Frazer, nor any man, completely cloud his view of nada with the various “opiums” at his disposal. The very consideration of the question of releas
e leads Frazer through the opium haze to the terrible truth that lies beneath:

  Religion is the opium of the people. . . . Yes, and music is the opium of the people. . . . And now economics is the opium of the people; along with patriotism the opium of the people in Italy and Germany. . . . But drink was a sovereign opium of the people, oh, an excellent opium. Although some prefer the radio, another opium of the people, a cheap one he had just been using. . . . What was the real, the actual opium of the people? . . . What was it? Of course; bread was the opium of the people. . . . [Only] Revolution, Mr. Frazer thought, is no opium. Revolution is a catharsis; an ecstasy which can only be prolonged by tyranny. The opiums are for before and for after. He was thinking well, a little too well. (485–87)