One of his most frequently discussed tales, "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" is justly regarded as one of the stylistic masterpieces of Ernest Hemingway's distinguished career in short fiction. Not only does it represent Hemingway at his understated, laconic best, but, according to Carlos Baker, "It shows once again that remarkable union of the naturalistic and the symbolic which is possibly his central triumph in the realm of practical aesthetics."^ In a mere five pages, almost entirely in dialogue and interior monologue, the tale renders a complex series of interactions between three characters in a Spanish
cafe just prior to and immediately after closing: a stoic old waiter, a brash young waiter, and a wealthy but suicidal old man given to excessive drink.
Aside from its well-documented stylistic achievement, what has drawn the most critical attention is Hemingway's detailed consideration of the concept of nada. Although the old waiter is the only one to articulate the fact, all three figures actually confront nothingness in the course of the tale. This is no minor absence in their lives. Especially "for the old waiter," Carlos Baker notes, "the word nothing (or nada) contains huge actuality. The great skill in the story is the development, through the most carefully controlled understatement, of the young waiter's mere nothing into the old waiter's Something—a Something called Nothing which is so huge, terrible, overbearing, inevitable and omnipresent that once experienced, it can never be forgotten."2 Because the terrifying "Something caUed Nothing" looms so very large, and since "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" appeared in a 1933 collection in which even "winners" take "nothing," critics have generally come to see the piece as a nihilistic low point in Hemingway's career, a moment of profound despair both for the characters and the author.^
If this standard position does have a certain validity, it also tends to overlook two crucial points about the story. First is its relation to the rest of Hemingway's highly unified short story canon. In the same way that two of the three characters in "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" meet nada without voicing the fact, all of the major short story characters also experience it in one of its multiple guises. Thus "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," a rather late story written in 1933, is something of a summary statement on this recurrent theme; the tale brings to direct expression the central crisis of those that
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precede it—including the most celebrated of the Nick Adams stories-and looks forward to its resolution in the masterpieces that come later, "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" (1936) and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" (1936).
Second, because nada appears to dominate "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," it has been easy to miss the fact that the story is not about nada per se but the various available human responses to it.^ As a literary artist, Hemingway was generally less concerned with speculative metaphysics than with modes of practical conduct within certain fl pnon conditions. The ways in which the character triad in "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" respond to nada summarize character responses throughout the canon. The fact that only one, the old waiter, directly voices his experience and manages to deal successfully with nothingness is also indicative of a general trend. Those few Hemingway characters who continue to function even at the razor's edge do so in the manner of this heroic figure—by establishing for themselves a clean, well-lighted place from which to withstand the enveloping darkness. For these reasons, "A Clean, Well-lighted Place" must be termed the thematic as well as the stylistic climax of Hemingway's career in short fiction.
Although the difficulty of attributing certain individual statements in the tale creates some ambiguity on the subject, it is clear that the young waiter's use of the term nada to convey a personal lack of a definable commodity {no thing) is much too narrowly conceived. In his crucial meditation at the end, the old waiter makes it quite clear that nada is not an individual state but one with grave universal impHcations: "It was a nothing that he knew too well. It was all a nothing and a man was nothing too" [my italics]} According to William Barrett, the wc^a-shadowed realm of "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" is no less than a microcosm of the existential universe as defined by Martin Heidegger and the existentialist philosophers who came before and after him, principally Kierkegaard and Sartre.^ Barrett's position finds internal support in the old waiter's celebrated parody prayer: "Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada" (p. 383). The character's deft substitution of the word nada for all the key nouns (entities) and verbs (actions) in the Paternoster suggests the concept's truly metaphysical stature. Obviously, nada is to connote a series of significant absences: the lack of a viable transcedent source of power and authority; a correlative lack of external physical or spiritual sustenance; the total lack of
moral justification for action (in the broadest perspective, the essential meaninglessness of any action); and finally, the impossibility of deliverance from this situation.^
The impact of nada, however, extends beyond its theological implications. Rather, in the Heideggerian sense ("das Nicht"), it is an umbrella term that subsumes all of the irrational, unforseeable, existential forces that tend to infringe upon the human self, to make a "nothing." It is the absolute power of chance and circumstance to negate individual free will
THE UNITY OF HEMINGWAY'S SHORT FICTION 93
and the entropic tendency toward ontological disorder that perpetually looms over man's tenuous personal sense of order. But the most fearsome face of nada, and clear proof of man's radical contingency, is death—present here in the old man's wife's death and his own attempted suicide. Understandably, the old waiter's emotional response to this composite threat is mixed. It "was not fear or dread" (p. 383), which would imply a specific object to be feared, but a pervasive uneasiness, an existential anxiety that, according to Heidegger, arises when one becomes fully aware of the precarious status of his very
being.^
That the shadow of nada looms behind much of Hemingway's fiction has
not gone entirely unnoticed. Nathan Scott's conclusions on this issue serve as a useful summary of critical opinion: "Now it is blackness beyond a clean, well-lighted place-this ^nothing full of nothing' that betrays 'confidence'; that murders sleep, that makes the having of plenty of money a fact of no consequence at all—it is this blackness, ten times black, that constitutes the basic metaphysical situation in Hemingway's fiction and that makes the human enterprise something very much like a huddhng about a campfire beyond which looms the unchartable wilderness, the great Nada."^ The problem with this position is that it tends to locate nada somewhere outside of the action, never directly operative within it. It is, to William Barrett, "the presence that had circulated, unnamed and unconfronted, throughout much
of [Hemingway's] earlier writing" [my italics] } ^
The clearest indication of nada's direct presence in the short stories is to
be found in the characters' frequent brushes with death, notably the characteristic modern forms of unexpected, unmerited, and very often mechanical death that both Frederick J. Hoffman and R. P. Warren consider so crucial in Hemingway.^ ^ Naturally, these instances are the climactic moments in some of the best known tales: the interchapters from In Our Time, "Indian Camp," "The Killers," "The Capital of the World," and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro." But death or the imminent threat of death need not be literally present to signal an encounter with nada. What Phihp Young and others have called Nick Adams's "initiation" to life's trials is actually his initiation to nada.^'^ In "The End of Something" and "The Three Day
Blow," Nick must cope with the precadousness of love in a precarious universe; in "The Battler," with the world's underlying irrationality and potential for violence; in "Cross-Country Snow," with the power of external circumstance to circumscribe individual initiative. In several important stories involving the period in Nick's chronology after the critical "wound," nada, as the ultimate unmanageability of life, appears as a concrete image. In "Big Two-Hearted River," it is both the burnt-out countryside and the forbidding swamp; in "Now I Lay Me," the night; in "A Way You'll Never Be," a "long yellow house" (evidently the site of the wound).
Other imagistic references to nada appear in the non-Nick Adams tales. In "The Undefeated," it is the bull, a particularly apt concrete manifestation of active malevolence in the universe, also suggested by the lion and buffalo in "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber." These particular images,
however, are potentially misleading because nada does not usually appear so actively and personally combative. An example to the contrary may be found
94 ESSAYS IN LITERATURE
in "The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio" where nada is the distinctly impersonal and paralyzing banality of life in an isolated hospital, as well as the constant "risk" of a gambler's uncertain profession. Regardless of its specific incarnation, nada is always a dark presence which upsets individual equilibrium and threatens to overwhelm the self. And, as Jackson Benson has pointed out, "A threat to selfhood is the ultimate horror that the irrational forces of the world can accomplish."^ ^ In that each story in the canon turns on the way in which particular characters respond to the inevitable confrontation v^th nada, the nature of that response is particularly important. The only effective way to approach the Void is to develop a very special mode of being, the concrete manifestation of which is the clean, well-lighted place.
Again, it is the old waiter who speaks most directly of the need for a physical bastion against the all-encompassing night: "It is the light of course but it is necessary that the place be clean and pleasant. You do not want music. Certainly you do not want music. Nor can you stand before a bar with dignity" (p. 382). In direct contrast to the dirty, noisy bodega to which he repairs after closing and all the "bad" places that appear in Hemingway's fiction, the pleasant cafe at which the old waiter works possesses all of these essential attributes: light, cleanness, and the opportunity for some form of dignity. Perhaps the most direct antithesis of this legitimate clean, well-lighted place is not even in this particular story but in one of its companion pieces in Winter Take Nothing, the infernal bar in "The Light of the World" (1933). Here, light does little more than illuminate the absence of the other qualities, the lack of which moves one of the characters to ask pointedly, "'What the hell kind of place is this?'"(p. 385). Thus, in an
inversion of the typical procedure in Hemingway, Nick and his companion are impelled outside where it is "good and dark" (p. 385).
Evidently, well-lighted places in Hemingway do not always meet the other requirements of the clean, well-lighted place. Moreover, since the cafe in "A Clean, Well-lighted Place" must eventually close, even the legitimate haven has distinct limitations. These facts should be enough to alert us to the possibility that tangible physical location is not sufficient to combat the darkness. The clean, well-lighted place that is, is not actually a "place" at all; rather, it is a metaphor for an attitude toward the self and its existential context, a psychological perspective which, like the cafe itself with its fabricated conveniences and electric Ught, is man-made, artifical. The "cleanliness" of the metaphor connotes a personal sense of order, however artifical and temporary, carved out within the larger chaos of the universe, a firm hold on the self with which one can meet any contingency. By "light" Hemingway refers to a special kind of vision, the clear-sightedness and
absolute lack of illusion necessary to look into the darkness and thereby come to grips with the nada which is everywhere. At the same time, vision must also be directed at the self so as to assure its cleanness. With cleanness and light, then, physical locale is irrelevant. Whoever manages to internalize these qualities carries the clean, well-lighted place with him, even into the very teeth of the darkness. The degree to which the Hemingway character can develop and maintain this perspective determines his success (or lack thereoQ
THE UNITY OF HEMINGWAY'S SHORT FICTION 95
in dealing with the Void.
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.^^
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-h^s not seen clearly-and therefore can hardly deal with it. "To him," comments Joseph Gaibne\,''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."^^ 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. 1 have a wife waiting in bed for me,' " (p. 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" (p. 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' " (p. 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.^^ 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
ii
96 ESSAYS IN LITERATURE
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, afiame 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 fiight 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 fraility, 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. (p. 95)
In another early story, "The Killers" (192/), 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 cafe—another inadequate place of iQ{\xgt—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' " (p. 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
THE UNITY OF HEMINGWAY'S SHORT FICTION 97
about him waiting in the room and knowing he's going to get it. It's too damned awful' " (p. 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.^^ 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' " (p. 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" (p. 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' " (p. 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 combatting 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" (p. 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
98 ESSAYS IN LITERATURE
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' " (p. 381). But even this vestige of grace has been compromised over time. While the old man leaves the cafe "with dignity," he is "walking unsteadily" (p. 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 Tlie 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:^ ^ "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" (p. 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" (p. 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 post-battle 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" (p. 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" (p. 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 UNITY OF HEMINGWAY^S SHORT FICTION 99
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 oi nada.''^^ 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' " (p. 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 fuUy 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,"^^ 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 wjcffl—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 release leads Frazer through the opium haze to the terrible truth that lies beneath:
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ESSAYS IN LITERATURE
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 wasa 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 (pp. 485-87).
The old waiter definitely stands apart from the other two characters in
"A
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' " (p. 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" (p. 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" (p. 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" (p. 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" (p. 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.
Clean, Well-Lighted Place." If the running controversy over dialogue
THE UNITY OF HEMINGWAY'S SHORT FICTION 101
Thus, in response to the barman's question, " 'What's yours?'" he demonstrates the ironic sense of humor that typifies him throughout by unflinching answering, " 'Nada' " (p. 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' " (p. 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 refiect an inherent, though concealed, order in the universe. What little meaning there is in the world is imposed upon that world by man."^^ Given the stark contrast between his cafe 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-Ughted 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 regard 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" (p.2\0) shortly thereafter, and in the methodical series of tasks that
102 ESSAYS IN LITERATURE
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" (p. 210); in Phihp 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."^^ gy^ ^^^^ jg rnQSt overtly suggested by the forbidding swamp: "Nick did not want to go in there n o w . . . . 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" (p. 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/swdimp 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" (p. 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" (p. 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-lighted 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" (p. 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" (p. 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
THE UNITY OF HEMINGWAY'S SHORT FICTION 103
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" (p. 33). The jeep is indeed useful as a means for facing nada analogous to the old waiter's cafe 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] " (p. 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" (p. 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" (p. 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 O(?cupied space" (p.
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 aU 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 (p. 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, fmancial 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" (p. 60) by jettisoning the excess baggage of a young waiter's facUe 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" (p. 53). But again, the important "place" is actually within. According to Gloria EKissinger, Harry's difficult rite of purification leads, as it should, to a reclamation of his own identity: "Harry is left with
104 ESSAYS IN LITERATURE
his naked self, the irreducible / am that defies chaos."^^ 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" (p. 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 hfe 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."^^ 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?' " (p. 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 cafe' " (p. 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' " (p. 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 WUson of "The Short Happy Ufe 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 multi-faceted 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, WeU-Lighted Place.""
THE UNITY OF HEMINGWAY'S SHORT FICTION 105
That the gambler does attain the exemplary attitude is implicit in William Barrett's summary characterization of him: "Cayentano 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."^^ Cayetano, of course, earns his heroism 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" (p. 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, and face them 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 analyses the untreatable 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' " (p. 482). Evidently this self-described "victim of illusions" (p. 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' " (p. 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" (p. 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.
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
106 ESSAYS IN LITERATURE
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."^^ But if we are justified in seeing Hemingway's life in terms of his encounters withrtjdfl,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 nadal^^
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."^^ 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. ^^ 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 modem 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 quahties of his short story heroes. It should come as no surprise, then, that Granville Hicks' summary of the author's artistic mission has a rather direct applicabihty 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."^^
Perhaps nothing so effectively demonstrates the difficulty of maintaining the clean, well-lighted place than Hemingway's own failure to do so in the
THE UNITY OF HEMINGWAY'S SHORT 1 ICTION 107
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" (p. 487).
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
NOTES
^ Carlos Baker, Hemingway: The Writer as Artist, 4th ed. (Princeton, N.J : Princeton Univ. Press, 1972), p. 128.
2 Baker, p. 124.
^ Of course, "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" is not the only story in Winner Take Nothing (New York: Scribner's, 1933) that conveys the sense of desolation. "After the Storm," "The Light of the World," "A Natural History of the Dead," and "A Way You'll Never Be" are apt companion-pieces and Hemingway's epigraph firmly sets the tone
for the entire collection:
Unlike all other forms of lutte or combat the conditions are that the winner shall take nothing; neither his ease, nor his pleasure, nor any notions of glory; nor, if he win far enough, shall there be any reward within himself.
In addition to the commentary of the nada theme, at least a dozen articles have been written on the difficulty of attributing certain portions of dialogue in "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place." In perhaps the most provocative of them, Joseph Gabriel argues that the speeches of the old and young waiter were intentionally confused so that the reader might not only witness but actually experience the uncertainty of nothingness in the very act of reading the tale. See "The Logic of Confusion in Hemingway's 'A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,' " College English, 22 (May 1961), 539-47. For an overview of the dialogue controversy, see Charles May, "Is Hemingway's 'Well-Lighted Place' Really Clean Now?" Studies in Short Fiction, 8 (1971), 326-30.
Annette Benert also stresses the response to nada in this particular tale, but only the old waiter's, in "Survival Through Irony: Hemingway's 'A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,' "Studies in Short Fiction, 11 (1974), 181-89.
^ The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (New York: Scribner's, 1966), p. 383. All subsequent references to Hemingway's stories and all page references are to this volume. Dates provided for individual stories refer to their initial publication.
" Time of Need: Forms of Imagination in the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper, 1972), pp. 83-92. For a useful, if overly systematic, study of Hemingway and existentialist thought, see John Killinger's Hemingway and the Dead Gods: A Study in Existentialism (Lexington: Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1960). See also Richard Lehan's section of Hemingway, Sartre, and Camus in A Dangerous Crossing: French Literary Existentialism and the Modern American Novel (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 46-56.
For more detailed theological and linguistic analyses of the old waiter's prayer, see John B. Hamilton, "Hemingway and the Christian Paradox,"/?e«fl5ce«ce, 24 (1972), 152-54; David Lodge, "Hemingway's Clean, Well-Lighted, Puzzhng Place," Essays in Criticism, 21 (1971), 33-34; and Earl Rovit, Ernest Hemingway (New York: Twayne, 1963), pp. 111-14.
Evidently leaning heavily on the old waiter's statement "and man was a nothing too," Joseph Gabriel sees nada from a Sartrian perspective. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre posits that the human self ("pour soi") is by its very nature a "nothing" with only the possibility of becoming "something." Although I claim no direct influence, in most of his stories Hemingway seems to be operating under the Kierkegaardian and
108 ESSAYS IN LITERATURE
Heideggerian senses of nada as an external "force." He does appear to be more Sartrian, however, in^ " T h e Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" and ' T h e Snows of Kilimanjaro"; I will treat the consequences when discussing those tales.
^ "Ernest Hemingway: A Critical Essay," in Ernest Hemingway: Five Decades of Criticism, ed. Linda Wagner (East Lansing: Michigan State Univ. Press, 1974), p. 214.
^^ Irrational Man (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1958), p. 284. Carlos Baker seems to come closest to my viewpoint in Hemingway: The Writer as Artist. He sees a rather explicit appearance of nada in "Now I Lay Me" and connects it generally with the idea of "not home," a significant image in the short stories and novels alike. See especially pp. 133 ff.
See Frederick J. Hoffman, "No Beginning and No End: Hemingway and Death," Essays in Criticism, 3 (Jan. 1953), 73-84, and Robert Penn Warren, "Ernest Hemingway," in Ernest Hemingway: Five Decades of Criticism, pp. 75-103.
12
^"^ Without dealing directly with nada. Young traces Nick's initiation and the frequent refusals of initiation in Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration (New York" Harcourt, 1966), pp. 29-55.
^^ Hemingway: The Writer's Art of Self-Defense (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1969), p. 130.
^ For more information on their versions of nothingness and the existential "authentication" of the self, see Kierkegaard's Either/Or, trans. D. Swenson and W. Lowrie (1843; rpt. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1944), and Heidegger's5em^
and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (1927; rpt. London: SCM Press, 1962).
^^ ' T h e Logic of Confusion," p. 542. See also John Hagopian's discussion of the young waiter's limited sensitivity to the word nothing in "Tidying Up Hemingway's 'A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,' " Studies in Short Fiction, 1(1964), 141-47.
^" "Character, Irony, and Resolution in 'A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,'" Literature. 42 (1970), 78. Reacting to Hemingway's own claim that he often omitted the real ending of his stories, Bennett proceeds to speculate that the omitted ending here is the fact that the young waiter's wife has indeed left him, presumably for the soldier who passes by the window of the cafe.
^ ' Delmore Schwartz expanded on this idea in his discussion of "Cross-Country Snow" in "The Fiction of Ernest Hemingway":
Skiing and activities like it give the self a sense of intense individuality, mastery and freedom. In contrast, those activities which link the self with other beings and are necessary to modern civilization not only fail to provide any such self-realization but very often hinder it. The individual feels trapped in the identity assigned him by birth, social convention, economic necessity; he feels that this identity conceals his real self; and the sense that he is often only an anonymous part of the social mass makes him feel unreal.
See Selected Essays of Delmore Schwartz, ed. Donald Dike and David Zucker (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 257.
^° Tillich distinguishes between the three forms of "existential" anxiety (of death, meaninglessness, and condemnation), which "belong to existence as such and not to an abnormal state of mind," and "pathological" anxiety, which represents an escape into neurosis, in The Courage To Be (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1952), pp. 64-70.
^^ In using this term, Kaplan underscores the unintelligent natural violence, the concentrated destructiveness of the bull. See The Passive Voice (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1966), p. 106.
There are many who see Garcia, and the old man as well, as representations of the Hemingway "code hero" precisely because of their dignity in the face of potentially catastrophic external circumstances. These critics, and Kaplan is one, point to Garcia in particular because as a bullfighter, he is in constant touch with danger yet maintains a certain grace by virtue of his role in the bullfight, a ritualistic form of order imposed upon the chaos of life.
Granted, both the old man and Garcia display admirable courage, but they lack the firm internal order I see necessary for the true Hemingway hero. As his desperate attempt at suicide and very unsteady balance suggest, the old man's place of refuge is now totally external. Garcia's form has also eroded to the point that he can hardly be considered an exemplar of dignity. There is a certain desperate foolhardiness in his stubborn insistence on making a comeback and his unrealistic hope for "an even break"
THE UNITY OF HEMINGWAY'S SHORT FICTION 109
after his recent disasters in the ring; as his friend Zurito admits, these are signs of empty pride. On the other hand, the picador himself, though aged, is still a thoroughly professional craftsman. Thus, I agree with Arthur Waldheim's view in A Reader's Guide to Ernest Hemingway (New York: Farrar, 1972) that Zurito, along with the old waiter, is much more fully representative of the "code hero."
^^ Edward Stone, "Hemingway's Mr. Frazer: From Revolution to Radio,''' Journal of Modern Literature, 1 (1971), 380.
21 The Hidden God (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1963), p. 6.
22See Malcolm Cowley, "Nightmare and Ritual in Hemingway," in Ernest Hemingway: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robert Weeks (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1962), pp. 40-52; and Sheridan Baker, "Hemingway's 'Big Two-Hearted
River,' " in The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, ed. Jackson Benson (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 150-59. In addition to the ritual series in the tale, Baker fmds a suggestion of desperate defensiveness against a shadowy threat in the image of Nick's tent, "stretched as tightly as his own state of mind, equally protective in its static tension" (pp. 151-52).
23 " 'The Snows of Kilimanjaro': Harry's Second Chance," Studies in Short Fiction, 5(1967), 58.
2^* Buber's most detailed consideration of this ethic is in I and Thou, 2nd ed. 1923, rpt. trans. R. Smith (New York: Scribner's, 1958).
Randall Stewart has also noted the old waiter's proclivity for compassion and sees it as crucial both to the clean, well-lighted place and to the tale's quasi-Christian ritual:
The cafe is a place where congenial souls may meet. The older waiter, particularly, has a sympathetic understanding of the elderly gentleman's problem. Living in a clean, well-lighted place does not mean solitary withdrawal so long as there are others who also prefer such a place. One can belong to a communion of saints, however small.
See American Literature and Christian Doctrine (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1958), p. 135. See also Richard Hoving's discussion of the need for communion in Hemingway: The Inward Terrain (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1968), p. 25.
^-^ Because of her faith in the transcendent forces "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" negates and her naive ambition for sainthood, Sister Cecilia seems an apt equivalent for the unrealistic young waiter. Indeed, as Paul Rodgers has pointed out in "Levels of Irony in Hemingway's 'The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio,' " Studies in Short Fiction, 1 (1970), 446, her blindness-also the young waiter's defect-is suggested by the very etymology of her name (from the Latin caecus, or "blind").
Upon closer examination, two other stories reveal a similar triad, "The Undefeated" has its own version of the old waiter (Zurito) and the old man (Garcia), but it also has a young waiter in the person of the young bullfight critic. He too neither empathizes nor sympathizes with the victim's plight and thus engages in facile criticism of him. Moreover, like the young waiter, he is far more interested in a midnight tryst; consequently, he too hurries away, leaving the old man figure to his fate. In "The Battler" (1925), the naive Nick Adams meets only confusion in his encounter with the despairing, jumbled Ad Francis (old man), and fails to fully appreciate the compassionate efforts on both his and Francis's behalf of the eternally watchful Bugs (old waiter).
26 Time of Need, p. 94.
2^ Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (New York: Scribner's, 1969), p. 305. 28
Rovit convincingly argues that nada was both a challenge to and a stimulus for Hemingway's art in Ernest Hemingway, pp. 168 ff. See also Jackson Benson,
Hemingway: The Writer's Art of Self- Defense on this point.
'^^ Death in the Afternoon (New York: Scribner's, 1932), p. 278.
See Ihab Hassan's illuminating discussion of Hemingway's literary pointillism in "Valor Against the Void," in The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern
Literature (New York: Oxford, 1971), pp. 80-110.
Tony Tanner makes a similar point about the Hemingway style in The Reign of
Wonder(New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1956), pp. 241-50. In Tanner's terms, Hemingway characteristically resisted disorder by erecting a verbal "cordon sanitaire" around each individual image, thus creating any number of miniature, aesthetic clean, well-lighted places.
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