New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

by Jackson J Benson

  In their dealings with the various faces of nada, then, the old waiter figures represent the highest form of heroism in the Hemingway short story canon, a heroism matched in the novels perhaps only by the fisherman Santiago. Those who manage to adjust to life on the edge of the abyss do so because they see clearly the darkness that surrounds them yet create a personal sense of order, an identity, with which to maintain balance on this precarious perch. The failure either to see the significance of the encounter with nada or, if seen, to constitute an inner cleanness vitiates the lives not only of the young waiter and old man of “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” but also of a host of similarly flawed figures throughout the canon.

  Because of the frequency with which nada appears in the short fiction, we can only assume that the Void also played a major role in Hemingway’s own life, whether as the shattering war wound or the countless subsequent experiences, both real and imagined, that threatened to make him a “nothing.” Carlos Baker concluded as much in his biography: “‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place’ was autobiographical . . . in the sense that it offered a brief look into the underside of Ernest’s spiritual world, the nightmare of nothingness by which he was still occasionally haunted.”27 But if we are justified in seeing Hemingway’s life in terms of his encounters with nada, are we not equally justified in following Earl Rovit’s lead and thereby treating his fiction as one of the by-products of these encounters—in fact, as a primary strategy for dealing with nada?28

  Both the fiction itself and the author’s comments on it seem to support us in this regard, for Hemingway’s basic aesthetic suggests precisely the sort of perspective symbolized by the clean, well-lighted place. The need for clearsightedness, for instance, is the essence of the writer’s celebrated remark on art in Death in the Afternoon (1932), a personal testament published just a year before “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”: “Let those who want to save the world if you can get to see it clear and as a whole. Then any part you make will represent the whole if it is made truly.”29 But unclouded vision alone, not uncommon among his fictional progeny, could guarantee neither a psychological nor an aesthetic clean, well-lighted place. A careful and conscious ordering of disparate material was also required in order to fill the Void of nothing (the blank page) with an enduring something. Thus, the characteristic Hemingway style: the clean, precise, scrupulously ordered prose that so often serves to illuminate shimmering individual objects against a dark background of chaos.30 As for his old waiter figures, the actual places that inspired the author’s descriptions pale against the deftly constructed “places” that are the descriptions; because the latter are no longer subject to the random, transitory world of fact but rather interiorized and subsequently transmuted into art itself, they are much more secure, and certainly more permanent, strongholds against nothingness.

  In spite of the apparent disdain for utilitarian art in the passage from Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway also performed some of that function, albeit indirectly, by probing the sources of our well-documented modern malaise and offering at least tentative solutions to it in the form of resolute personal conduct. In this way he too displayed some of the Buberesque qualities of his short story heroes. It should come as no surprise, then, that Granville Hicks’s summary of the author’s artistic mission has a rather direct applicability to that of the old waiter as well. For in their potential impact on an attentive audience, Hemingway and his extraordinary character are virtually one and the same. Like the latter, “The artist makes his contribution to the salvation of the world by seeing it clearly himself and helping others to do the same.”31

  Perhaps nothing so effectively demonstrates the difficulty of maintaining the clean, well-lighted place than Hemingway’s own failure to do so in the years immediately preceding his death. Like so many of his “old man” figures, he never lost sight of nada but did lose the essential inner cleanness, without which the light must eventually be overpowered by darkness. With his internal defenses in disarray, Hemingway turned to an old man’s despairing act. In effect, in his suicide, he opted for the release from turmoil offered by the metaphorical “opiums” of Mr. Frazer: “He would have a little spot of the giant killer and play the radio, you could play the radio so that you could hardly hear it” (487).

  “Only Let the Story End As Soon As Possible”: Time-and-History in Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time

  E. R. Hagemann

  The sixteen italicized Chapters in In Our Time are in five states with some ninety variant readings and total 2552 words but only 759 different words.1 Because Ernest Hemingway expended so much care in so few words, we should expend equal care (but not in so few words) to examine the interchapters as an artistic unit: time-and-history, hyphenated; time-and-history as record and imagination, for not every detail or event is verifiable. No less than fiction, history is in direct proportion of the writer, a rearrangement of reality and, above all, time. Time-and-history is a product of memory and desire and necessarily fragmented and disarranged.

  These interchapters, drypoints (that is, intaglio) Edmund Wilson once astutely called them, haphazard as to time as printed in In Our Time, become an entity when rearranged chronologically (see Appendix at end of article); for what Hemingway has done is to reconstruct a decade, 1914–23. His choice is not random. The Great War and its aftermath were, collectively, the experience of his generation, the experience that dumped his peers and his elders into graves, shell-holes, hospitals, and onto gallows. These were “in our time,” Hemingway is saying, and he remarks the significant and the insignificant.

  And time, to quote the best definition I have ever read, is “the system of those relations which any event has to any other as past, present, or future. This relationship is realistically conceived as a sort of self-subsistent entity, or object of contemplation” (The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia [1897]). Hemingway moves about in time and gives us sixteen vignettes for our “contemplation.”

  To iterate: the decade is from 1914 to 1923 inclusive. I will reconstruct it and present the what, the where, and the when so that the reader can conceive of the years as Hemingway does: “a stream flowing through the field of the present,” to quote again from Century’s definition.

  Time-and-history begin in In Our Time with Chapter IV (“It was a frightfully hot day”) and Chapter III (“We were in a garden in Mons”). The terse narrator is Lieutenant Eric Edward Dorman-Smith, Royal Northumberland Fusiliers (Fifth Fusiliers), First Battalion, dedicatee of the 1924 edition, and a personal friend of Hemingway.

  It is Sunday, August 23, 1914; the place is Mons, Belgium, where the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) has set up defense along a sixteen-mile stretch of the ruler-straight Mons-Condé Canal, spanned by eighteen bridges. (Hemingway errs when he calls it a “river” in Chapter III.) Dorman-Smith’s battalion is responsible for the Mariette Bridge which he so jollily speaks of in Chapter IV. The German right wing under Alexander von Kluck went after the bridge early, despite the barricade, and sustained fearful losses as the Tommies “potted” them from “forty yards.” The skirmish at the “absolutely perfect barricade” occurred prior to 5 P.M. at which time the English had to fall back and Dorman-Smith and his fellow Fusiliers were “frightfully put out.”

  The location of the garden, Chapter III, is unclear and unverifiable, nor is it known when the incident occurred during the battle. It is possible the garden was in Mons, but the city was not in the Fifth’s sector. Unfortunately, it is not mentioned in official dispatches, but then neither is Dorman-Smith. What is important is that Hemingway introduces one of the controlling metaphors in the Chapters: the Wall. “The first German . . . climbed up over the garden wall. We waited till he got one leg over and then potted him.”

  Mons at once entered the realm of the Glorious in English history; to the BEF, however, it was to be but the first battle in four years of Pyrrhic warfare which drained England of her manhood.

  The French were drained over and over again, and Chapter I (“Everyb
ody was drunk”) points to the Champagne. The identity of the kitchen corporal will never be known, but in 112 words this hapless poilu relates a desperately comical incident as he heads for slaughter. The Champagne was not a wine but a frontal assault against an intricate German defense. After a terrific artillery preparation on September 25, 1915, the French attacked and engaged the enemy until Christmas Day. In three months they lost 145,000 men, 120,000 in the first three weeks. The Germans suffered as heavily. A French tactical victory, military experts call it. This depends on one’s viewpoint; plainly, the Champagne was mass execution.

  “Everybody was drunk” and no one can blame them, while the insignificant kitchen corporal wrestles with his mess in the dark, and the drunken lieutenant tells him to put it out. It can be seen. “‘It was funny going along that road,’” muses the corporal, the road that led to the Champagne.

  From execution in battle Hemingway switches to execution in the streets of corrupt Kansas City, Missouri, in Chapter VIII (“At two o’clock in the morning two Hungarians got into a cigar store”). Maybe Hungarians did at some time but not on November 19, 1917, when two Italians, “Cap” Gargotta and Joe Musso, were killed by the cops as they fled after robbing the Parker-Gordon Cigar Company at 1028 Broadway. “They were shot on the seat of a covered wagon in which they had cigars valued at $3,000. . . . The men attempted to drive their team over the detectives [“Jack” Farrell and Carl Grantello] when ordered to stop,” reported the Kansas City Star later the same day, not on page one but page three, so unimportant were the executions. Like Boyle says: “‘They’re crooks, ain’t they? . . . They’re wops, ain’t they? Who the hell is going to make any trouble?’”2

  Why Hemingway, who was in Kansas City working as a cub reporter on the evening Star, changed the ethnic origin of the robbers, although the cops in Chapter VIII do not, can be partially explained as a thematic tactic. The piece leads directly to the cryptic story, “The Revolutionist,” which considers a Hungarian Red who is a political refugee from Regent-Admiral Miklós Horthy’s arch-reactionary regime in Hungary. If this is so, this direct carry-over, then it is the only time that such occurs in In Our Time.3

  Out there on our Western home front, Italians were dead on the pavement. Wops! Out there on the Italian war front thousands upon thousands of Italians—Wops! to connote the lowly victims and not to impart ethnic slurs—were dead on the ground defending the tawdry House of Savoy on the throne of Italy in the unimpressive person of Victor Emmanuel III, Prince of Naples.

  In Chapter VII (“While the bombardment was knocking the trench to pieces”) the final Austrian offensive of the war in Italy has just begun, June 15, 1918, and initial success brings them to Fossalta on the west bank of the Piave River on the 16th; their heavy mortars batter the Italians, and the narrator (not, I insist, Nick Adams) madly prays to “dear Jesus” to keep him “from getting killed.” He has every reason to, for the Austrians were well equipped to reach their ultimate objective, the industrial heart of Italy. They failed. Perhaps the prayer helped. Whatever, the narrator never tells of Jesus when he is safe in Mestre and ascends the stairs with a whore in the Villa Róssa (Red Villa), the officers’ brothel. “And he never told anybody.”

  The time is early July 1918 in Chapter VI (“Nick sat against the wall of the church”); the place is still the Piave, but now the Italians’ counterattack is underway (“Things were getting forward in the town”). Nick Adams is seriously wounded, and from his quasi-articulate words to his felled Italian comrade, Rinaldo Rinaldi, comes the germ of A Farewell to Arms: “‘You and me we’ve made a separate peace. We’re not patriots.’” This is the sole appearance of the word “peace” in the Chapters. And this is the only time Hemingway permits one of his characters to speechify, if that is it, about The War. As he observed in his “Introduction” to Men at War (New York: Crown Publishers, 1942): “They [the various writers] had learned to tell the truth without screaming. Screaming, necessary though it may be to attract attention at the time, reads badly in later years” (xvi).

  The incident is fictional; the battle is actual. The Austrians sustained, overall, 200,000 killed and wounded, 25,000 prisoners; the “victorious” Italians, 90,000 killed and wounded. In his brief combat duty in 1918, Hemingway served at Fossalta di Piave and was badly shot up during the night of July 8.

  In Chapter VIII the Irish cops called the Hungarians Wops; in Chapter VI, Rinaldi, an Italian if not a Wop, is close to death, “breathing with difficulty”; and in Chapter XV (“They hanged Sam Cardinella at six o’clock in the morning”) there is another Italian, doomed long before. “They” hanged him in Chicago not at six but shortly after nine in the morning on April 15, 1921, and it required eleven minutes for him to die of a broken neck. He died for the murder of one Andrew P. Bowman not quite two years previous. Cardinella was thirty-nine years old, the leader of a gang operating out of a pool room at 22nd and Clark Streets, and the father of six children. Hanged with him, but not members of his gang, were Giuseppe Costanzo and Salvatore Ferrara; a fourth victim, Antonio López, had been awarded a temporary reprieve. No Negroes died that day, Chapter XV to the contrary; rather, they died the following week. “They” hanged people in those days in Illinois, but not so many at one time since 1912 as “they” did on April 15.

  “When the death march time arrived,” said the Chicago Tribune on April 16, “[Cardinella] fought his guards like a maniac. . . . Finally he was carried to the scaffold in a chair, unable to stand erect, and gibbering insanely in Italian. . . . [S]till cringing in the chair, he was executed. “So Hemingway does not exaggerate Cardinella’s physical collapse.4 The Tribune does not mention the two priests, and we can surmise that Sam’s final prayers (the “gibbering”?) went unrecognized by a man of God, but there was no one to respond to the young ufficiale’s prayers in the Fossalta trench, either.

  In this episode Hemingway alludes to a procession and a wall—“they came out onto the gallows through a door in the wall”—and in Chapter II (“Minarets stuck up in the rain”) he expands his processional metaphor.

  Evacuation of Eastern Thrace began on October 15, 1922, pursuant to an armistice signed at Mudania between the Turks and the Greeks. Turks would occupy the district within forty-five days. Terrorized Greek Christians—giaours to the Muslim Turks—thousands of them, spilled onto the road through Adrianople and beyond to Karagatch, on the other side, the western side, of the Maritza River in Western Thrace, Greek territory.

  Hemingway, on assignment for the Toronto Star, arrived in Constantinople on September 29. Some time subsequent to October 15, the 16th is a safe guess, he was in the melee on the Karagatch road: “twenty miles [thirty miles in the Chapter] of carts drawn by cows, bullocks and muddy-flanked water buffalo. . . . It is a silent procession,” he wrote for the paper, October 20. Greek cavalry herded the Christians along like “cow-punchers driving steers,” not dissimilar to the lieutenant herding his poilus in Chapter I. Hemingway walked in the rain for five miles, dodging camels. Under the bridge the Maritza was running “a brick-red [yellow in the Chapter] quarter-mile wide flood.”5 And behind them “minarets stuck up in the rain.”

  Greeks again appear in Chapter V (“They shot the six cabinet ministers at half-past six”), and Hemingway ingeminates the “wall” in the Cardinella vignette. As elsewhere in In Our Time what he recounts is true and less than true, an impression based on fact; fact, in turn, readjusted to respond to memory and time, “in our time.” On November 22, 1922, at approximately 11 A.M., Demetrios Gounaris, Petros Protopapadakis, and Nicholas Stratos, former prime ministers; George Baltatzis, Nicholas Theotokis, former ministers; and George Hadjanestis, former military commander in chief in Ionia, were shot as they stood against a wall of the new Municipal Hospital in Athens, having been removed from the prison where they had heard the death verdict by a military court martial which adjudged them guilty of high treason and responsible for the debacle in Asia Minor.

  Accounts differ and none agrees precisely
with Hemingway, who was not a witness. Gounaris was stricken with typhoid and had to be supported to the wall, but he was not sitting in the rainwater with “his head on his knees.” Hadjanestis, having been degraded, stood at attention. The six of them were slain from a distance of six meters, one infantry firing-squad per victim, and coups de grace were administered to all by pistol shots through their heads. They were hastily buried by their families that afternoon in an Athens cemetery. “They” shot people in those days in Greece like “they” hanged people in Cook County.

  Chapters IX through XIV translates us from the hospital wall to the barrera, the red wood fence (wall) around the bull ring in Spain. Grouped together as they are, these six Chapters comprise a miniature tauromaquia derived ultimately from Francisco Goya’s thirty-three etchings of 1816. There are three subgroups of two Chapters each: IX-X (the kid, the horse, and the bull; all perform but not brilliantly), XI-XII (the bad torero and the good torero), and XIII-XIV (the drunken torero and the “death” of Maera). Every one is tripartite. This structural device, not used any other place, is significant in that the bull ring is divided into three imaginary concentric circles and the fight itself into tercios, thirds. As Hemingway once wrote in the Toronto Star, October 20, 1923, “Bull fighting is not a sport. . . . It is a tragedy. A very great tragedy . . . played in three definite acts.”6