A parallel speculation may shed some light. In the summer immediately following completion of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain lost considerable time attempting the sequel Huck promises, a fragment Life magazine published in 1968 as “Huck and Tom Among the Indians.”5 Huck in that fragment finds himself being instructed as usual by the romantic notions of Tom, this time about Indians. Tom’s opinions are shared as well by a luckless band of travelers the two fall in with, and the notions lead to the murder by Indians of all the travelers except the inevitable blond girl, who is carried off. The remainder of the fragment recounts the attempts of Huck, Tom, and the blond girl’s fiancé, a frontiersman wise in the ways of Indians, to catch the fleeing band. Tension mounts between the naive musings of Huck and Tom, who think only of freeing the girl, and the studied silence of the frontiersman, who knows quite well what Indians do to white women. With the trio close upon the band the excerpt ends. Apparently Twain never attempted to complete the manuscript.
Writing of the fragment, Walter Blair speculates, “Almost in spite of itself, the story was moving toward a head-on collision with a deep personal taboo. . . . recounting such an atrocity [rape] was unthinkable.”6 Hemingway is not, of course, Mark Twain. But while Hemingway would have no special difficulty confronting another of the many instances in American literature of rapes by Indians, confronting the rape of Littless may be something very different. “The Last Good Country” is almost entirely fiction. The biographical incident upon which it is based is a slight one involving a warden, his son, and a blue heron the young Ernest had shot. It was straightened out quickly with a fine. But if Nick’s escape into the woods with Littless is wholly fiction, the character of Littless is certainly not. She is clearly a representation of Madelaine (nicknamed Sunny by Hemingway), Ernest’s younger sister with whom he did have a special relationship. It is just possible that the nostalgic Hemingway, remembering his kid sister, kept getting in the way of the artist Hemingway, who knew just exactly where the story was to go.
When in February 1953 Ernest Hemingway was finally published, Philip Young sent Hemingway the first available copy. Hemingway just as quickly returned it, but later comments make it clear that Hemingway did indeed read the book (“How would you like it if someone said that everything you’ve done in your life was because of some trauma?”7 he asked one reporter), and surely he knew the gist of it long before that. Is it not at least conceivable that Hemingway, on returning to Nick and Michigan, chose (partly in response to Young) to make Nick, this time, an active, untraumatized character? If so, the failure to continue the work may have been due to the direction the story has turned—more of a substantiation of Young’s thesis than a refutation. Disregarding the possibility of an assault on Littless, the reader still must confront the inevitability that something is going to happen to her, and that something spells yet another injury for Nick. “I ain’t agoing to tell all that happened—it would make me sick again if I was to do that,” Huck says at the end of the Shepherdson-Grangerford section of Huck Finn. One wonders if Hemingway quit “The Last Good Country” because to continue would be to place Nick again in the same position as Huck, and he himself in the position of contemplating, once again, an end of something—this one not so easy to write about.
Nick Adams and the Search for Light
Howard L. Hannum
Despite Hemingway’s ranking of “The Light of the World” as one of his personal favorites, the full story has seldom been studied in the context of Nick Adams’ adolescence. First of all, critical attention has too often focused on the dialogue between the whores Alice and Peroxide and the love which each claims to have enjoyed with the famous middleweight boxer Stanley Ketchel. Several critics have followed Matthew Bruccoli into analysis of this dialogue and the fascinating Ketchel-Jack Johnson prizefight which underlies it, then have fallen into the trap of trying to decide the argument between the two women.1 But this has usually involved some loss of perspective, and the impact of the whole story on Nick has been minimized. A second tendency in the criticism has been the effort to relate the “light” of the title to one specific biblical text and to see this light chiefly in Christian terms in the exchange between Peroxide and Alice, again losing sight of the overall effect upon Nick. Oddly enough, after all the critical effort expended to show that “The Killers” was centered on Nick Adams and that it depended upon his response, the importance of the narrator in this story (assumed here to be Nick) has often been obscured.
The verbal battle between the whores is the most exciting part of “The Light of the World,” but only a part of the whole shocking experience for Nick. Some of the other parts, especially entrances and exits, not only characterize Nick in this story, but also relate to complementary incidents or scenes in stories treating the same period of his life. “The Light of the World” (1933) shares many striking similarities with “The Battler” (1924) and “The Killers” (1927). Despite their different composition dates, all three are initiation stories, as Bruccoli observed,2 in which Nick (or a central consciousness very much like him) learns by indirection. Further, the stark, brutal experiences of these stories are unlike anything else in the Nick Adams stories, even the war stories. Each of these three stories shows the transient Nick walking along tracks (streetcar tracks, in “The Killers”) through autumn darkness and ends with Nick walking (or about to walk) out into that same darkness.
The experience really seems to begin in “The End of Something” and “The Three-Day Blow,” as Nick breaks off his late-adolescent love affair with Marjorie and breaks out of the whole context of his boyhood and youth.3 The trip by which he accomplishes this takes him through northern Michigan in “The Light of the World” and “The Battler,” with a stay in Summit, Illinois, in “The Killers,” though we know now that Hemingway’s manuscript originally showed the town as “Petoskey” (Michigan). These five stories carry Nick up to the time of his military service. Where the slightly older Bill had seemed the architect of Nick’s conduct back at Hortons Bay, the slightly older Tom is his guide in “The Light of the World.” In “The Battler” he is completely on his own, and in “The Killers” he disregards the advice of George by warning Ole Andreson. His personal involvement and response show a gradual increase with the stories in this sequence. Still, the lesson learned in each story is more apt to be stored and ruminated upon than to issue soon in direct action. This seems particularly true for the entranced Nick at the end of “The Light of the World.”
The “light” of Hemingway’s title certainly contrasts with the prevailing darkness of the story. Tom and Nick find no “light,” physical or spiritual, in their entrance to the bar at the outset. Their youth works against them here. Hostile and suspicious, the bartender denies them free lunch, even beer, until he sees their money, then insults them by placing the bottle of rye whiskey out on the bar for his regular customer. Here Nick controls the angry Tom well enough to avoid a brawl but submissively shows his money and suggests departure just before being ordered out. Uncharacteristically, Hemingway offers scant description or visualization of scene. Only the bar and the hands playing across it come into focus: guardedly serving beer, serving rye, reaching for free lunch, reaching for the unrevealed pistol, placing coins on the wood. The dialogue is monosyllabic, curt. This is a place where men drink in catatonic silence. If “light” involves such qualities as love and hope and truth, this bar is properly dark.
At the railroad station the boys’ entrance is met by apparent indifference from everyone but the homosexual cook. The group includes five other white men, apparently all lumberjacks, five whores (the three-hundred-and-fifty-pound Alice, two two-hundred-and-fifty-pounders, and two peroxide blondes, “just ordinary-looking”), and four Indians, who diminish to three (40, 43). The bartender’s use of the word “punks” for the boys has been oddly prophetic, for its Elizabethan meaning anticipates the whores in the station. The boys’ youth ironically works “for” them with the cook, and their reactions
to him show their levels of experience. Angry and disgusted, Tom turns him aside with a crudity about “sixty-nine” when he asks their ages, but Nick naively tells the truth and talks to him “decently,” an unintentional encouragement. Tom chides Nick for this, but himself naively asks the whores their names. Hemingway does visualize the scene this time, though he restricts it to the bench near the stove. The whores, like the iridescent dresses three of them wear, attract what light there is in the room, turning the bench into a stage. The cook’s evident interest in the boys sets off some automatic antagonisms: of the heterosexual men toward the cook, of the whores toward the cook (their “natural rival” for men), and of the whores toward “mossbacks” (men who don’t spend money on whores). Hemingway’s dialogue here, and in much of the story, has the quality of counterpunching in boxing, with a brash assertion met by a brash response. This is a place where men and women badger each other; the potential violence implicit in the bar is vented here. Again, “hands” are in focus, as Alice and the lumberjacks turn the cook’s white and delicate hands into a humorous symbol of his effeminacy. Alice has begun to shake with laughter at the attacks on the cook and on the mossbacks (the lumberjacks and the boys). Ridicule of the cook is in high gear when the shy lumberjack mentions “Steve Ketchel” and touches off the dialogue between Peroxide and Alice. Then for a time a false “light” plays over the scene, as each of the two argues the love of her life.
In the course of this exchange both whores will claim to have known Ketchel as “Steve,” though the boxer Peroxide refers to clearly was Stanley Ketchel, the fabled “Michigan Assassin,” middleweight boxing champion from 1908–10.4 However, identification of Ketchel in the story is complicated by two elements: Stanley Ketchel apparently did in real life like to be called “Steve” by close friends,5 and a boxer using the name “Steve” Ketchel did fight Ad Wolgast in 1915,6 five years after Stanley Ketchel’s death, but before the time of Hemingway’s story. Thus, it is possible that Alice is referring to the second “Ketchel.” Peroxide turns aside the suggestion that her Steve’s name was Stanley and calls him “the finest and most beautiful man that ever lived,” “the only man I ever loved.” Her pipe dream and perhaps the only romantic “light” of her pathetic life is that he knew and loved her but that she nobly passed up marriage rather than “hurt his career.” She climaxes her performance with the claim: “‘We were married in the eyes of God and I belong to him right now and always will and all of me is his. I don’t care about my body. They can take my body. My soul belongs to Steve Ketchel’” (45). For the moment Peroxide has affected everyone in the room (except the Indians, who have bought their tickets and gone outside to the platform!). Nick is so deeply involved in the scene that he does not perceive any satire. Alice is shaking now with tears, not laughter. But just as suddenly as Peroxide had seized the floor, Alice strikes back at her, “You’re a dirty liar. . . . You never laid Steve Ketchel in your life and you know it.” Alice, now calm, bores forward like a boxer and, despite a quick exchange of insults, controls the floor, which Peroxide seems to abandon in favor of her “true, wonderful memories.” Alice, whose moods are now changing like the colors of her iridescent dress, signals her triumph with a smile at the boys.
Critics have felt compelled to take sides in this argument, generally finding the ring of truth in Alice’s words. Carlos Baker set a pattern by declaring for the common sense of Alice, against the sentimental love of Peroxide.7 Sheridan Baker thought Nick saw the light of truth in Alice’s face.8 James F. Barbour found Alice drawing on the strengths of truth, because she was a realist who had paid for her memories, where Peroxide was a romantic who had only imagined things.9 Joseph M. Flora saw “heart’s truth” in Alice’s words, as opposed to Peroxide’s “bilge.”10 And so the analysis of the dialogue has gone.
Despite her initial hold on the audience, Peroxide is objectively caught in a lie about being in California with Ketchel:
“Were you out on the coast with him?”
“No. I knew him before that.” (44, italics added)
but then
“I thought you said you weren’t on the coast,” someone said.
“I went out just for that fight.” (44)
and she is wrong about Ketchel’s being shot by his father, but she does know the vital details of his fight with Johnson:
“Steve knocked him down,” Peroxide said. . . .
“Steve turned to smile at me and that black son of a bitch from hell jumped up and hit him by surprise.” (44–45)
She might indeed have gotten this (except her invention of the smile) from newspaper accounts, as Alice charges. But her words seem to have their own ring of truth when she challenges Alice’s oft-repeated compliment from Ketchel (“You’re a lovely piece, Alice”) with the statement, “Steve couldn’t have said that. It wasn’t the way he talked.” Alice, for her part, shows no verifiable knowledge of Ketchel’s life and career, and there is no objective evidence that she is telling the truth, only her determined manner. Nevertheless, she does hold sway; Alice levels several charges (including venereal disease and drug use) at Peroxide, who seems simply to drop the argument, as much as to lose it. There is no clear winner in logical terms.
The real point of the dialogue is that Nick is being taken in by Alice, is in fact beginning to respond to her personally, even sexually, and will have to be rescued from the situation by Tom, reversing the roles in the bar earlier. Both whores are lying, either inventing whole cloth or at best exaggerating what was a casual encounter to Stan (or Steve) Ketchel (possibly both) into a major love affair, which of course never took place. What “love” has always come down to for Peroxide and Alice is sex, bought and sold. Both now pathetically glorify a supposed relationship that gives dignity and self-respect to their lives.
The Indians in the station have rendered the actual “decision” in the dialogue between Peroxide and Alice by walking out on it: it was not worth listening to, it was a fake, as in all probability was the prizefight it was partly based upon. At Colma, California, on October 16, 1909, middleweight Stanley Ketchel fought the heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson, for the latter’s title, in what has long been regarded as a “fixed” fight—in an era when boxing was generally illegal and unregulated and many fights were fixed. Ketchel was one of a series of boxers billed as The Great White Hope, to regain the heavyweight title for white America, from the black Johnson. At least four inches taller and at least forty pounds heavier, Johnson was supposed to “carry” Ketchel (not really attack him) for the benefit of the newsreel cameras and the white fans. In an apparent deception Ketchel suddenly charged Johnson in the twelfth round and knocked him down with a vicious punch, but Johnson rose and knocked the charging Ketchel out with three punches.11 Even the weights recorded for the bout have been suspect: Ketchel’s normal 154 pounds was given as 170¼, and Johnson’s “official” 205½ was regarded by many as deflated.12
Hemingway’s fight between Peroxide and Alice is also being staged. Clearly, both women are performing for the group in the station, Peroxide in “a high stagey way” (44). But more than that, Hemingway has the two whores reenacting the Ketchel-Johnson fight here. As at Colma, the lighter, blonde Peroxide (Ketchel) is being sent up against the much heavier foe, Alice (Johnson), in a fight that is determined by one flurry from each antagonist, with the mountainous Alice definitely winning. Her hammering prose, with its Anglo-Saxon monosyllables, finally dominates:
“This is true, true, true, and you know it. . . .” (45)
“No, its true, true, true to Jesus and Mary true.” (45)
“. . . I’m clean and you know it and men like me, even though I’m big, and you know it, and I never lie and you know it.” (46)
Alice’s “and you know it” marked her first attack upon Peroxide and is like a boxer’s one-two punch as she applies it. Peroxide’s complete withdrawal into her memories suggests Ketchel’s condition at the end of the fight: Johnson knocked him completely “out” for several mi
nutes, so that he had to be carried back to his corner. Further, Ketchel soon began to drift off into his memories, for his career waned sharply after the Johnson fight. Often dissipated, he had only three fights and was in temporary retirement for his health when shot to death. Peroxide’s embellishment that Ketchel was distracted and smiling at her when Johnson hit him is contrary to the facts of the fight, as the film shows, but Hemingway may well have borrowed it from the account of Ketchel’s fatal shooting almost a year later: Goldie (Peroxide?) Smith, the cook whom Ketchel had just “insulted” the day before, switched his usual seat at the breakfast table, from one that faced the door, to one that put his back to it, so that her paramour, Walter Dipley, could take him by surprise.13
There is a precedent for thinking that Peroxide and Alice are putting on a show. Hemingway identified part of his imaginative source for “The Light of the World” as Guy de Maupassant’s “La Maison Tellier,” a story about five whores and their excursion to Madame Tellier’s native village in Normandy to attend the Confirmation of her niece. In the process they unsuspiciously make a spectacle of themselves and dissolve in emotional memories of their own Confirmation days. Hemingway’s whores, likewise on some sort of excursion, perhaps to Alice’s Mancelona, look back to the one sexual encounter for each that had spiritual, meaningful quality, and they too make a spectacle of themselves. Many specific parallels between Maupassant’s story and Hemingway’s have been brought out by Martine, Peter Thomas, and Flora.14 However, Madame Tellier’s experience was essentially comic, Nick’s is not.15
As the dialogue on boxing develops, the earlier stress upon “hands,” in the bar and during the ridicule of the cook, becomes relevant. One way or another, hands, gloved and ungloved, play important parts in “The Battler,” with the brakeman and Ad Francis, and in “The Killers,” with Al and Max and Ole Andreson. Most often boxing is involved. Hemingway, as a lifelong boxing fan, who “taught” boxing to his literary friends in Paris and fought spontaneous bouts right into middle age, knew the sport and knew the legend of Stanley Ketchel. Gregory Green has cited Hemingway’s use of the famous “sandbag trick” or “gimmick” in his high school story “A Matter of Color.”16 In this trick one boxer, with an accomplice hidden behind a curtain, would maneuver his opponent against the ropes in that direction so that the accomplice could hit him on the head from behind. As George Plimpton points out, Ketchel was associated with the use of this trick in one of the best known of boxing anecdotes.17 Furthermore, Ketchel was most probably something of a hero to the younger Hemingway, for Ketchel, at sixteen, set off on a tour very much like that of Nick Adams in “The Light of the World” and “The Battler.” Like Nick, and Hemingway himself, Ketchel started from Chicago and went north. Though he went across Canada to the Pacific Coast, Ketchel then “rode the rails” from Seattle to Butte, Montana, where he became the bouncer in a bordello. He, of course, got the look at life that Hemingway tried to give Nick.
New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway Page 44