I wanted to write a friend
who also has a father who is dead.
Perhaps there were things we could do for each other.
But perhaps he had already forgotten his father.
I go back to the time
my father used to check my body
for ticks, a job I still recoil from
though it is necessary to do.
Wise-Guy Narrator and Trickster Out-Tricked in Hemingway’s “Fifty Grand”
Robert P. Weeks
Although “Fifty Grand” is generally considered one of Hemingway’s finest short stories, the relatively small amount of critical and scholarly attention it has received sets it apart from other Hemingway stories of the first rank. Stories like “The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” and “The Killers” have been studied with remarkable thoroughness.1 In contrast, not only has there been less published criticism of “Fifty Grand,” but much of it focuses on extrinsic matters. The problem that most effectively sidetracks scholarly attention from the story itself is the long-standing effort to link the boxing match in the story to a specific championship fight. The efforts to solve that problem make it clear that the story was probably based not on one fight but at least two.2 But this finding throws little or no light on the story itself or the process by which Hemingway wrote it. In contrast, two aspects of “Fifty Grand” that contribute substantially to the story’s effectiveness as a work of narrative art have been virtually ignored: its innovative use of point of view and its rich comedy. Perhaps they have been for the most part ignored because no one has shown the remarkably interesting process through which “Fifty Grand” evolved. When this process is examined, one gets a revealing look at Hemingway’s growing skill, particularly in his handling of narrative point of view and the motif of the trickster out-tricked. And, most important, “Fifty Grand” is revealed, as a consequence, to be far more than a grim account of the sordid world of professional boxing. It stands, instead, as a minor comic masterpiece.
When Hemingway was sixteen years old, he wrote what is in effect the first version of “Fifty Grand.” It is a humorous story of a fixed prize fight entitled “A Matter of Colour.”3 From his high school years until his early twenties, Hemingway thought of himself as primarily a humorist. Much of what he wrote during this period has a comic intent: fiction, journalism, and occasional writing. His column in the school newspaper, for example, was an undisguised imitation of the humorist he most admired, Ring Lardner. “A Matter of Colour” resembles Lardner’s work in several ways: it focuses on the seamy side of professional sport, uses a vernacular narrator, relies on dialogue, and exploits the stupidity of athletes for comic effect.4 “A Matter of Colour” appeared in the April 1916 issue of the Oak Park (Illinois) High School literary magazine, Tabula.5 Its first-person narrator is not the protagonist but a “character” in the story. It is not without significance that “A Matter of Colour” and “Fifty Grand” are the only two pieces of fiction by Hemingway narrated in this way, a fact that has hitherto escaped notice. The link between the two is strengthened in two additional ways: the narrators in the two stories are nearly identical; each is a prize fighter’s handler with the outlook and speech of a tough, seasoned professional, a wise guy; the central episode in each story involves a trickster being amusingly out-tricked.
The narrator of “A Matter of Colour,” Bob Armstrong, a handler, tells of a scheme to fix a fight. The boxer he handles, Danny, is not in shape to win because of an injury incurred in training, yet he has bet heavily on himself. To make his money safe Danny and the handler devise a ridiculous but seemingly foolproof way of fixing the fight. The ring in which the fight will take place is on a stage at the back of which is a curtain just behind the ropes. They place a Swede with a baseball bat behind the curtain and instruct him to watch through a peephole until Danny’s black opponent is against the ropes, then to swing on the black man’s head with the bat from behind the curtain. When the fight begins, Danny rushes his opponent to the ropes at the rear of the ring, but nothing happens behind the curtain. The handler motions wildly to the Swede looking out through the peephole, but by the time the Swede gets the bat in motion, it is Danny who is up against the ropes, and the Swede knocks him out with the bat. The trickster has been out-tricked. Back in the dressing room the handler asks the Swede over Danny’s unconscious body, “Why in the name of the Prophet did you hit the white man instead of the black man?” The Swede replies, “I bane color blind.” It is a contrived O’Henry ending, but that should not be allowed to obscure an important fact: even as a novice Hemingway was exploring the comic possibilities of showing that things are different from what they are like in story books or on sports pages. And at the same time he was developing a prose style suitable to that fresh view of the world, one motivated, in Daniel Fuchs’ admirable phrase, “by a comic contempt of standard English . . . [and its] respectability, gentility, polite euphemism.”6 His first-person narrator, the handler, encourages Hemingway’s use of this prose style.
Once The Sun Also Rises was sent off to the publisher, Hemingway wrote in his notebook in early 1926 that he wanted to write short stories “for four or five months.”7 The most memorable of these was one in which he fully exploited the comic possibilities that he had explored in “A Matter of Colour.” Following the example of the earlier story, he made his comic intent clear at the outset through the use of a first-person, wise-guy narrator. Like Old Bob Armstrong, the cocksure narrator offers an insider’s vivid picture of the seamy details of the world of professional boxing, but because of the way it is narrated the reader is not shocked but amused. The story of a fixed fight whose comic potential he had crudely exploited in high school is now finally realized. The story is, of course, “Fifty Grand.”
“Fifty Grand” is the story of Jack Brennan, skillful, quick-witted, stoical, aging welterweight champion of the world. It is narrated by his long-time trainer and friend, Jerry Doyle, a wise guy of limited sensibility but vast ring experience. The insider’s view of the tough, tawdry world of the training camp and Madison Square Garden that Jerry provides is realistic yet edged with comedy. When it is comic, it is so in part because of the narrative angle from which this world is presented. Jerry’s limited view, as against the reader’s broader perceptions, frames and colors the sordid details and gives them a comic cast, a point perceptively made by Sheridan Baker.8 Another source of humor is Jack himself. He is a worrying cheapskate. The aging champion is having great difficulty getting into shape to defend his title. He cannot work up a sweat; he cannot sleep; he worries about his property in Florida, his stocks, his kids. And he misses his wife but is too cheap to telephone her. The sports writers predict the challenger, Walcott, will tear him in two. The day before the fight, two underworld sharpshooters visit Jack at the training camp and make a deal with him to throw the fight. Jack, convinced he cannot win, bets fifty grand on Walcott at two to one odds. “I got to take a beating,” he tells Jerry, then asks, “Why shouldn’t I make money on it?” What Jack does not know is that the sharpshooters’ gambling syndicate has arranged for Walcott to throw the fight. So, while Jack’s fifty grand will be bet on Walcott, the gamblers’ money will be bet, at more favorable odds, on Jack.
During the first eleven rounds Jack boxes doggedly, mechanically; as Jerry says, “he don’t move around much and that left hand is just automatic. It’s just like it was connected with Walcott’s face and Jack just had to wish it in every time.” Jerry also sees Walcott as a mechanism, but of a lower order; he says he’s “a socking machine.” Before the eleventh round begins, Jerry acknowledges that despite Jack’s skill, the old champion is taking a whipping. He says to Jack of Walcott, “It’s his fight,” but Jack insists on standing up to him: “‘I think I can last,’ Jack says. ‘I don’t want this bohunk to stop me.’” To bet on his opponent does not, under the circumstances, violate his code, but to fight badly does. Durin
g the twelfth round Walcott’s handler signals him to foul Jack, which he does “as hard as he could sock, just as low as he could get it.” Jack is seriously hurt, but he is also instantly aware that he has been double-crossed and must act fast and effectively if he is to save the fifty grand he has bet on his opponent. It is a farcical situation, for now it is a contest to see who can lose. No longer a machine, Jack is alert, analytical, shrewd. He dumbfounds the dull-witted Walcott by saying to him, “it wasn’t low. It was an accident. . . . Come on and fight.” Walcott remains a machine: he’s been signaled to deliver a low blow; he’s done it; now he stands there baffled as the man he has fouled insists upon fighting on. When the referee orders the fight resumed, Jack is equal to the ludicrous situation. He swings wildly at Walcott’s head, Walcott “covers up,” and Jack drives his left into Walcott’s groin and follows it through with a right. Walcott is now the winner because he has been unmistakably, decisively fouled: he has been beaten into the championship. Back in his dressing room, waiting for a doctor, Jack observes, “it’s funny how fast you can think when it means that much money.” When his manager responds, “you’re some boy, Jack,” Jerry reports Jack’s rejoiner, which is the last line of the story: “No, it was nothing.”9 Despite his disclaimers, Jack has done much more than protect his fifty grand; he has, through his quickwittedness and stoicism, prevailed without loss of his self-respect.
In placing “Fifty Grand” in its developmental context as the final version of an earlier effort to tell a humorous story about a fixed prize fight, two important things about “Fifty Grand” became clear. First, because the earlier version of the story, despite the relative feebleness of its power to provoke laughter, is unmistakably humorous in intent, one is alerted to the possible presence of humor in “Fifty Grand,” and given the fact that of all literary modes comedy is probably more powerfully affected than any other by the context in which it appears, such an alert should not be ignored. Second, and considerably more important, one recognizes two narrative elements in “Fifty Grand” that served comic purposes in the earlier version as they do in the final one. The two are the first-person narrator who is not the protagonist and the trickster out-tricked plot. The first of these, the first-person narrator, is not, of course, inherently comic, but it is used for comic purposes by casting as narrator a wise guy, a savvy insider whose vivid but limited view is incongruously at odds with the reader’s broader perceptions. He sets up the humorous situation much as the humorless first-person narrator does who tells “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.”
Of the story’s two chief comic elements, the humor of the trickster out-tricked plot is both easier and more difficult to account for. It is easier to the extent that it involves a clear case of the doubling of the double-cross with the familiar pleasures of observing the triumph of the underdog being provided by Jack’s outsmarting of the big-time gamblers and their dull accomplice, Walcott. But a close examination of Walcott’s behavior makes it clear that he is funny not merely because he is dull but because at the climax of the story when the demands on his resources are the greatest his behavior is ridiculously mechanical.
Bergson’s claims that the essence of comedy is the mechanical are unconvincing; certainly no such claim is being made here. Mechanical behavior, however, can serve in a comic situation as a reinforcing device. For example, in the best-known version of the trickster out-tricked in American literature, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” a mechanical motif heightens the comic effect. Jim Smiley is the consummate trickster: shrewd, greedy, ruthless, contemptuous. And his bull-pup, Andrew Jackson, is sheer mechanical artifice: a fighting machine. Andrew would wait for Smiley to set up the bet, “but as soon as the money was up on him he was a different dog; his under-jaw’d begin to stick out like the fo’castle of a steamboat, and his teeth would uncover and shine like the furnaces.” Andrew Jackson won every fight with the same mechanical tactic: he would make “a snatch for his pet holt,” the hind leg of his opponent, then he would “freeze to it, not chaw, you understand, but only just grip” like a vise. Confronted, finally, by an opponent without any hind legs, Andrew Jackson “‘peared surprised, and then he looked sorter discouraged-like, and didn’t try no more to win the fight.”10 The machine stops. As fighters, Andrew Jackson and Walcott have more than a little in common. Each of them traces the comic rhythm of the trickster out-tricked plot, and at the crucial moment the trickster’s victory is snatched from him because of his stupidly inflexible, mechanical behavior. The parallel between the two stories does not end there. In each story the mechanical ineptitude of the trickster is humorously contrasted to the quick-witted adaptability of his opponent. This occurs most pointedly at the climax of each story. Jim Smiley’s frog sinks into defeat with a “double-handful of shot” that “planted [him] solid as a anvil.” He becomes a cast-iron device through the quick-wittedness of the stranger in the same way that Walcott is shown to be less a man than a machine manipulated by the syndicate in contrast to quick-thinking, adaptable Jack Brennan.
For this important contrast between the two boxers to be communicated clearly and reliably to the reader, everything depends on the narrator. He must discern Walcott’s mechanical behavior and Jack’s lightning-quick response and report these to the reader if the contrast—and the accompanying comic effect—is to be produced. When one sees how markedly Hemingway’s narrator has been misapprehended, it is not surprising that most critics have failed to identify or account for the comedy in “Fifty Grand.” One critic describes Jerry as a “non-committed first-person narrator (tyro),” and another calls him “naive and innocent.” Virtually no evidence is or can be cited in the story in support of such views, whereas the story abounds with evidence of Jerry’s commitment to Jack and, more importantly, of his being not a tyro but a seasoned veteran.11
Building on Old Bob Anderson, the handler-narrator of “A Matter of Colour,” Hemingway endows the narrator of “Fifty Grand” with the wise guy’s limited yet knowing view of the world of boxing. It is thanks to Jerry’s perceptive account that during the first eleven rounds of the match Jack and Walcott engage in a kind of Bergsonian ballet mechanique. And the way in which Hemingway establishes this comic element is through a masterful fusion of his two chief comic resources: the unfolding of the trickster plot as observed by the wise-guy narrator. It is savvy, perceptive Jerry Doyle who describes Jack’s left hand as “automatic” and who sums up Walcott’s boxing style in a vivid, pithy comment: “He certainly was a socking machine.” When Jack tries to tie up Walcott in the twelfth round, Jerry makes use of another graphic machine image, commenting, “it was just like trying to hold on to a buzz saw.”12 The climactic machine image appears when Walcott, on cue, fouls Jack, then stands there “planted solid as a anvil,” as incapable of action as an untended machine when Jack fails to collapse. That Jack is less machinelike than Walcott should not obscure the fact that during the first eleven rounds and up to the instant in the twelfth round when Walcott fouls Jack, the fight, as vividly described by Jerry, is a comic duel between two machines. Moreover, to emphasize how remarkable it is that Jack has summoned the human resources to respond to Walcott’s low-blow swiftly, intelligently, and decisively, Hemingway has Jerry observe that immediately following his quickwitted response to Walcott’s programmed betrayal, Jack slips back into his mechanical mode. Jerry describes him returning to his corner “walking that funny jerky way,” and later quotes Jack’s apt description of his injury: “I’m all busted inside.”13 But when it was necessary to transcend his mechanical behavior, Jack was able to, and that transcendent moment is the measure of his resolve and strength as an athlete, just as it is the source of the rich comedy at the expense of the dull, mechanical Walcott who, like the bull-pup, Andrew Jackson or the frog Dan’l, ends the fight a baffled automaton.
The wise guy narrator is, of course, present throughout the story as Jerry Doyle’s “tight lips give us the wisdom of the ring as if it were t
he wisdom of the world,”14 in Sheridan Baker’s fine phrase. But none of the comic strategies in “Fifty Grand” is dominant; they are skillfully combined. The plot of the trickster out-tricked rises in a curve of what Susanne Langer, writing of comedy in general, refers to as “the upset and recovery of the protagonist’s equilibrium in his contest with the world and his triumph by wit, luck and personal power.”15 Its comic nature stands by itself but is enhanced by Jerry’s telling. Another source of humor as well as an underpinning for the trickster plot is Jack’s stinginess. It is ridiculous but not vicious, hence what Aristotle called a comic deformity. Finally, there is the comedy provided by Jack’s and Walcott’s mechanized boxing and Walcott’s stupid persistence in that mode.
In talking with students of the University of Mississippi in 1947, William Faulkner was asked to rank modern American writers. In a list of five, he placed Hemingway last because “he lacked the courage to get out on a limb of experimentation.”16 Nearly half a century later, Faulkner’s characterization of Hemingway’s achievement is for the most part accurate. For it is one of the commonplaces of Hemingway criticism that Hemingway’s virtuosity is narrow. But it is this tendency to see a sameness, however excellent, in Hemingway’s fiction that is largely responsible for depriving “Fifty Grand” of the critical attention that it deserves. Whether it possesses as much merit as “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” or “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” is not the point-What needs to be recognized, first of all, is that it is for Hemingway a successful experiment in narrating a story by means of a first-person narrator other than the protagonist. Moreover, its success results in large measure from the skillful use of Jerry Doyle as the wise-guy narrator whose vision is both reliable and comic. Similarly, although storytellers since Chaucer—and probably before him—have used the trickster out-tricked formula for comic purposes, Hemingway makes fresh use of it, artfully adapting it to comment humorously yet realistically on the world of professional athletics as well as on the larger world in which it is often not easy to satisfy the rival claims of self-respect and pecuniary gain.
New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway Page 38