New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
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The old waiter definitely stands apart from the other two characters in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” If the running controversy over dialogue attribution has thrown some doubt on whether he or his young partner first learns of the old man’s attempted suicide, it has done nothing to contradict earlier assumptions on which of the two is more sensitive to the reasons for it. It is evident throughout that the old waiter’s insight into the word nothing he so frequently uses is much broader. He recognizes from the first that the old man’s despair is not a reaction to a material lack but to a basic metaphysical principle. Thus, he is unable to delude himself into a bogus “confidence.” When he responds to the youth’s boasting with “‘You have everything’” (382), he is clearly being ironic; the latter indeed has “everything,” except a firm hold on the “nothing” which underlies “everything.” They are “of two different kinds” (382) because the old waiter knows the ability to withstand the dark “is not only a question of youth and confidence although those things are very beautiful” (382). In spite of their superficial beauty, both the transitory condition of youth and the illusory confidence that so often goes with it are clearly inadequate tools with which to combat the darkness.
There is a closer connection with the old man, however, initially because the news of his attempted suicide begins the old waiter’s formal consideration of the reasons for it. In this sense, at the beginning of the tale, the old waiter is a representation of Earl Rovit’s “tyro” and Philip Young’s “Hemingway Hero” (as opposed to the “tutor” and “code hero”) in that he is in the process of learning about the dark underside of life. But while the old man’s plight is a necessary goad for the old waiter’s musings on his own situation, the latter certainly outstrips his “mentor” in the lengths to which he pushes his speculations on nada: “What did [the old waiter] fear? It was not fear or dread. It was a nothing that he knew too well. It was all a nothing and a man was nothing too. It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order. Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada” (382–83).
Like the old man, then, the old waiter sees clearly, in fact more clearly, the fearsome nothing, but he reacts far differently to his discovery. Instead of lapsing into despair or escaping into drunkenness, this character displays true metaphysical courage in raising the concept of nada to a central article in his overtly existentialist creed, climaxing with his mock prayer of adoration, “Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee” (383). Perhaps even more importantly, he refuses to limit himself to abstract speculation but willingly embraces the impact of universal nothingness on his own person. Thus, in response to the barman’s question, “‘What’s yours?’” he demonstrates the ironic sense of humor that typifies him throughout by unflinchingly answering, “‘Nada’” (383). No other statement in the tale so clearly designates the old waiter as the central figure of Hemingway’s 1933 collection: he is the “winner” who truly takes “nothing” as his only possible reward.
If his stoic courage in the shadow of the Void differentiates the old waiter from the old man, so does his method for dealing with it. Again, the old waiter provides some grounds for confusing the two modes of existence when he insists upon the importance of a purely physical haven: “‘I am one of those who like to stay late at the cafe. . . . With all those who do not want to go to bed. With all those who need a light for the night’” (382). Yet, he does more than merely accept the dubious protection of an already established “place”; he is, in fact, the keeper of the “clean, well-lighted place,” the one who maintains both its cleanness and its light. To cite Cleanth Brooks on this subject, “The order and light are supplied by him. They do not reflect an inherent, though concealed, order in the universe. What little meaning there is in the world is imposed upon that world by man.”21 Given the stark contrast between his café and the distinctly unclean and ill-lighted bar he frequents after work, his almost ritualistic efforts to furnish and consistently maintain these essential qualities are definitely not representative of those around him. Finally, the old waiter’s clean, well-lighted place is distinctly portable—transcending “place” altogether—because it is so thoroughly internalized. He carries it in the form of equanimity and dignity to the shabby bodega, and he carries it home as well.
Thus, it is the old waiter, a man who can see clearly the darkness surrounding him yet so order his life that he can endure this awareness, who most fully attains the attitude symbolized by the clean, well-lighted place. In the society presented by this tale, and in the Hemingway canon as a whole, he is indeed “otro loco mas” when set against a standard of sanity epitomized by an egotistical partner, unfeeling barmen, lustful soldiers, and suicidal old men. Both realist and survivor, epitome of “grace under pressure,” he is by the end of the tale an exceptional man and very much a representation of the highest level of heroism in Hemingway’s fictional world, whether it be denoted by Young’s “code hero” or Rovit’s “tutor.” Even his insomnia, which he regards as a common trait (“Many must have it”), is a mark of his extraordinary character: his vision is too clear, his sense of self too firm, to allow him the ease of insensate slumber. One need only compare this insomnia with Nick Adams’ pathological fear of sleep in “Now I Lay Me” to appreciate the qualitative difference between the old waiter and other men.
Some of Hemingway’s most important tales also contain characters who either presage an achievement of or actually attain the old waiter’s clean, well-lighted place. A notable early example is the Nick Adams of “Big Two-Hearted River” (1925). Again, the confrontation with nada is critical here, but the appearance of nada is more artfully veiled than in other tales. There are hints of the Void in the description of the burned-over countryside at the beginning, in Nick’s vision of the trout “tightened facing up into the current” (210) shortly thereafter, and in the methodical series of tasks that comprise the central action of the story. As Malcolm Cowley first suggested and Sheridan Baker has since amplified, the ritualistic series connotes a desperate attempt to hold off something “he had left behind” (210); in Philip Young’s reading the “something” is the memory of the traumatic war wound that so discomfits other versions of Nick in “Now I Lay Me” and “A Way You’ll Never Be.”22 But nada is most overtly suggested by the forbidding swamp: “Nick did not want to go in there now. . . . In the swamp the banks were bare, the big cedars came together overhead, the sun did not come through, except in patches; in the fast deep water, in the half light, the fishing would be tragic” (231). Aside from the old waiter’s prayer, this is Hemingway’s most detailed characterization of nada: it too is dark; its depth is ungauged but considerable; and, with its swiftly moving current and bare banks, it is most assuredly inhospitable to man.
As the “patches” of sunlight suggest, though, the nada/swamp can be discerned and therefore analyzed by human vision. And by the end of the story Nick seems to have gained the light necessary to see into the Void—at the very least, to realize that he can never truly leave it behind him. Yet Nick still lacks the inner cleanness to delve further into nada; he is still too dependent on a distinct physical locale as a buffer zone. As he says early on, “He was there, in the good place” (215). But the very ritualistic behavior that alerted Cowley to the possibility of a mind not right also suggests progress toward an internalized order. Like the trout’s in the potentially destructive current, this discipline could hold Nick steady in the dangerous eddies of life and so enable him eventually to enter the swamp. Thus, while the tale ends with a temporary withdrawal from direct confrontation, Nick strikes a positive note when he says, “There were plenty of days coming when he could fish the swamp” (232).
Two characters in the late short stories actually do “fish” the swamp of nada, the sportsman Macomber in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” (1936) and the writer Harry of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936). The two men approach the clean, well-light
ed place from different directions, however: Macomber from an old man’s despair and Harry from a young waiter’s naive faith in transitory material security. For Macomber, the master of “court games” and darling of drawing rooms, it is necessary to leave the protective enclosures of the rich to meet his nada in the African tall grass in the figure of the wounded lion, an epitome of pure destructive force: “All of him [the lion], pain, sickness, hatred and all of his remaining strength, was tightening into an absolute concentration for a rush” (19). The brush with externally conceived nada triggers Macomber’s cowardly flight, but more importantly leads him to an appreciation of his own inner emptiness, a Sartrian version of nothingness, as well as a Sartrian nausea at his inauthenticity. Granted, Macomber responds to the threat with fear, but it is also more than fear, “a cold slimy hollow in all the emptiness where once his confidence had been and it made him feel sick” (11). Thus Macomber comes face to face with the fact that nada need not destroy the physical being to make man a “nothing”; man is a nothing unless and until he makes himself “something.”
The black despair that follows his initiation to nada without and within is not Macomber’s final stage. Through the ministrations of the hunter Wilson and the familiar, secure place (the jeep), he undergoes a significant and almost miraculous change at the buffalo hunt. As Wilson describes it, “Beggar had probably been afraid all his life. Don’t know what started it. But over now. Hadn’t had time to be afraid with the buff. That and being angry too. Motor car too. Motor cars made it familiar. Be a damn fire eater now” (33). The jeep is indeed useful as a means for facing nada analogous to the old waiter’s café and Nick Adams’ peaceful campsite, but Macomber’s real “place” is distinctly internal. Again, Wilson furnishes the analysis: “Fear gone like an operation. Something else grew in its place. Main thing a man had. Made him into a man [italics mine]” (33). Macomber’s real achievement, then, is the creation of an ordered “something” to fill the inner void. It not only prepares him for the buffalo hunt but enables him to see clearly, as if for the first time, his inauthentic condition, not the least important facet of which has been his sacrifice of personal identity to an unfulfilling marriage and social expectation. With his “place” securely inside him, he can face with dignity and courage another brush with nada in the “island of bushy trees” (35), a hostile testing ground certainly reminiscent of Nick’s swamp.
In “Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Harry too has multiple confrontations with nada, the first of which is with the ultimate manifestation of the Void, death: “It came with a rush; not as a rush of water nor of wind; but of a sudden evil-smelling emptiness” (64). As we learn later, this appearance certainly fits Carlos Baker’s oxymoronic designation for nada as the “nothing that is something,” for “It had no shape, any more. It simply occupied space” (74). The immediate effect of the experience is to lead Harry to an appreciation of the underlying absurdity of an existence that could be doomed by such a trivial injury—a small scratch which becomes gangrenous for lack of proper medication. With this awareness of his radical contingency, the protagonist can defuse death of its terror: “Since the gangrene started in his right leg he had no pain and with the pain the horror had gone and all he felt now was a great tiredness and anger that this was the end of it. . . . For years it had obsessed him; but now it meant nothing in itself” (54).
Like Macomber’s, Harry’s brush with imminent death also awakens him to a second face of nada, the inner nothing caused by his failure to preserve artistic integrity, his very self, against the lures of the inconsequential: material comfort, financial security, hedonistic pleasure. Every bit as much as Macomber, this most autobiographical of Hemingway’s short story characters suffers a hollowness at the very core. Therefore, the basic thrust of the tale is Harry’s effort to cleanse and reorder his life through a pointed self-criticism. Gradually he manages to “work the fat off his soul” (60) by jettisoning the excess baggage of a young waiter’s facile confidence in the material and replaces it with something more substantial, a pledge to take up his writing once more. Again, the process is facilitated by his being situated in a tangible clean, well-lighted place: “This was a pleasant camp under big trees against a hill, with good water, and close by, a nearly dry water hole where sand grouse flighted in the mornings” (53). But again, the important “place” is actually within. According to Gloria Dussinger, Harry’s difficult rite of purification leads, as it should, to a reclamation of his own identity: “Harry is left with his naked self, the irreducible I am that defies chaos.”23 Though the climactic dream flight from the plain is decidedly ambiguous, it does seem to vouchsafe Harry’s success at this endeavor, for the author allows him imaginative entry into the cleanest and best lighted of all the places in the short story canon: “great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun, was the square top of Kilimanjaro. And then he knew that there was where he was going” (76).
Although Harry and Macomber both achieve the clean, well-lighted place, their premature deaths deprive them of the opportunity to bring additional value to their lives, as the old waiter most assuredly does. Having controlled his own life through the implementation of a clean, well-lighted place, he fulfills the remaining provisions of Eliot’s “Waste Land” credo by sympathizing with the plight of others and aiding them in their own pursuits of this all important attitude. In so doing he becomes an existential hero in Martin Buber’s particular sense of the term, a champion of the “I-Thou” relationship. His “style” is essentially compassion, the willingness to treat others as valid, subjective “Thous” rather than depersonalized “Its.”24 This facet of his personality is implicit as early as his expression of sympathy for the pleasure-seeking soldier who risks curfew violation. As he himself comments on the risks involved, “‘What does it matter if he gets what he’s after?’” (379). But his capacity for true compassion is made most explicit near the end, particularly in his admission, “‘Each night I am reluctant to close up because there may be some one who needs the café’” (382).
The ability to extend outward to others from a firmly established self is once again in direct contrast to the narrow, selfish pride of the young waiter, who is unmoved by the needs of the old man and sees love as a matter of blind loyalty (verging on bondage) and physical gratification. This inclination is made all too clear by his insensitive comment on the old widower’s plight: “‘A wife would be no good to him now’” (381). The old waiter’s attitude is also contrasted to that of the old man, who is so absorbed by his own misery that he is barely cognizant of others. This admirable figure passes beyond Rovit’s “tyro” stage to that of “tutor” when he humorously, but pointedly, attempts to instruct the youth on the evanescence of “confidence” and the latter’s serious misuse of love (e.g., by the joke). Moreover, he tries to provide the morose old man with some basis upon which to reconstruct his shattered life by rendering to this wretched figure the respect and sympathy he so desperately needs. Thus, in Buber’s sense as in Heidegger’s, Kierkegaard’s, and Sartre’s, the old waiter “authenticates” his life by fulfilling his responsibilities both to himself and to others.
The picador Zurito in “The Undefeated,” the dignified major in “Another Country” (1927), and the guide Wilson of “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” all transcend the limits of self-sufficiency by sympathizing with and proferring aid to those who most need it. But the character who most closely approximates the old waiter’s multifaceted heroism is Cayetano Ruiz, the luckless gambler of “The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio,” a story whose three main characters (Ruiz, Frazer, Sister Cecilia) form a triadic grouping analogous to the hero, victim, and naif of “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.”25
That the gambler does attain the exemplary attitude is implicit in William Barrett’s summary characterization of him: “Cayetano is the absurd hero who carries on his code, even if it is only the code of a cheap gambler, defiantly and gracefully against the Void.”26 Cayetano, of course, earns his h
eroism in that he too encounters the death mask of nada. Like Harry’s, his wound comes totally without warning and, given the rather unreliable aim of his assailant, almost totally by accident. Yet even before this crisis, the perspicacious gambler with eyes “alive as a hawk’s” (468) has undoubtedly sensed its presence in the form of chance and the ever-present risk of his chosen profession. In spite of the fact that his work takes him into places that are anything but clean and well-lighted, he has so internalized the “place” that he can calmly face external hostility and internal suffering with honor and exemplary courage. Consequently, he refuses to inform on his assailant and also refuses opiates to dull the physical pain that serves as metaphor for the metaphysical pain nada induces.
But Ruiz is far more than Barrett’s “cheap,” albeit heroic, gambler because he strives to communicate his insights on life to others. Indirect proof of his compassion is to be found both in his embarrassment over the offensive odor of his peritonitis and in his considerate silence even in periods of terrible pain. Direct evidence is available in the conversations with Frazer. Here Ruiz incisively analyzes the unbeatable ills of the human condition—the absurd irony, the prevalence of accident and risk, and, most of all, the difficulty of maintaining a self amidst the vagaries of fortune that have driven his auditor to tears. Like the old waiter, he is quite capable of humbling himself, denigrating his own considerable courage, in order to provide comfort to one less able to withstand nada. Surely he consciously misstates fact when, in an attempt to assuage Frazer’s shame at lapsing into tears, he declares, “‘If I had a private room and a radio I would be crying and yelling all night long’” (482). Evidently this self-described “victim of illusions” (483) also possesses the old waiter’s ironic consciousness, for it is at the very heart of his dispassionate self-analysis, also delivered principally for Frazer’s benefit: “‘If I live long enough the luck will change. I have bad luck now for fifteen years. If I ever get any good luck I will be rich’” (483). Although he fully realizes that “bad luck” will continue to predominate, like the other residents of the metaphoric clean, well-lighted place, the gambler is content to “continue, slowly, and wait for luck to change” (484). In the interim he will continue to try to instill in others some of the light and cleanness essential to the authentication of the self.