Analysis of secondary sources on Hemingway's "A Clean Well-Lighted Place

¶ … Clean, Well-Lighted Place

Due to his famous -- or infamous -- reticence and the sparse detail of his stories, few American authors have inspired as much academic controversy and debate as Ernest Hemingway. One especially aggravating -- or ingratiating -- aspect of his short stories is a consistent omission of standard dialogue markers, which can often create confusion for the reader. This confusion can be worsened by Hemingway's use of anti-metronomic dialogue; that is, dialogue which does not always switch back and forth between speakers when a new line and a new set of quotations begins, as is standard. Volumes worth of scholarship have been devoted to one of Hemingway's short stories in particular. "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" has been a subject of debate nearly since its publication in Scribner's Monthly in 1933, and the battle has been given renewed vigor several times by the emergence of drafts, typescripts, and notes which have been used by scholars both to argue for the emendation of what they see to be Hemingway's mistakes, and by others to demonstrate that Hemingway's irregularities were intentional stylistic choices.

The controversy in this story centers on several patches of dialogue between an old and young waiter. As published, it appears that at least one of the speakers becomes confused, or that Hemingway is showing a major break with convention by having the same speaker speak two consecutive lines of dialogue marked off by separate quotation marks, the normal way of denoting a new speaker. Due to a letter written to Hemingway by a curious professor, some believe that Hemingway did this on purpose (his response to the professor's claim that the dialogue as published did not make sense earned a reply of, it makes sense to me. Sorry.") Many others believe that the confusion in the dialogue is an error, either on the part of the printer, publisher, or Hemingway himself, and that his response to the letter -- written just a few years before the author's suicide -- is not to be trusted. The question for scholars that believe this becomes who made the error, and why it was allowed to persist, and of course how the dialogue was meant to appear. Those who believe that the dialogue appears correctly avoid this problem, but have to decide exactly what this confusion and/or break with tradition is supposed to signify. Some critics, such as John Leonard, avoid the problem altogether.

In his article comparing "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" to "A Man of the World," he reflects on the characters of the waiters in question, and the old waiter particularly. These are the two speakers to whom the various lines of dialogue might be attributed, and their reflection on the speaker changes drastically depending on who said them. This does not matter for Leonard, however, for whom the stories illustrate the same principles regardless of the attribution of the dialogue. He recognizes that the difference between the two characters is paramount to the story, and that the main discernible difference between the old waiter and the young waiter is their age: "and it is the older characters, the old man and the older waiter vs. The younger waiter...who carry the ideological burden" (Leonard, 63).

The issue of the dialogue confusion is such a non-issue for Leonard that he doesn't even mention it. He even notes the theme of social isolation in the story, which is certainly reflected in the unmarked dialogue that makes it difficult for a reader to attribute lines of dialogue to specific characters even when there is no real confusion, but does not bring up this well-known controversy (Leonard, 66). Frankly, Leonard's assessment of the characters in "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" would not be much altered by any system of attribution, and no critic suggests that the few disputed lines would completely alter the meaning or import of the story. Leonard's article reminds scholars that these details, though cause for examination and reflection, should not overshadow the greater impact and meaning of the works as a whole. Though much has been written about the possible error and emendation of the dialogue in this story, there is still much to be said about the story as a whole, and Leonard is speaking his bit.

On the opposite extreme is Paul Smith, who focuses solely on the possibility of Hemingway or someone else along the long road to publication having made an error -- a possibility he regards with skepticism. He briefly outlines the argument: at one point in the story, the older waiter says "She cut him down," referring to the old man's (a customer) niece. The disputed but of dialogue is a later line that according to convention would be attributed to the older waiter: "I know. You said she cut him down." In the one existing copy of the manuscript, this line appears to be a late addition, and some scholars believe that the publishers made an error in attribution. Smith counters this by claiming that "Hemingway read carefully whatever proofs he received of the publications in 1933" (Smith, 36). Smith then reveals that a typescript had recently surfaced which bridged the gap between penciled manuscript and published page, and that this typescript also attributes the line to the older waiter, exonerating the publishers (Smith, 38). He becomes embroiled in a reflection on who could possibly have typed the typescript, as evidence indicates it was not Hemingway, but he ultimately concludes that it was Hemingway who attributed the dialogue either by design or accident, and that no error was committed by anyone else (Smith, 38). Of course, this still leaves the question of the intended attribution wide open.

C. Harold Hurley and David Kerner each attempt to resolve this issue, both largely by responding to the work of critic Warren Bennett. Hurley makes this response almost an attack starting with his title, "The Manuscript and the Dialogue of 'A Clean, Well-Lighted Place': A Response to Warren Bennett." He starts out, however, by agreeing with some of Bennett's attributions based on the manuscript. He takes issue with Bennett's interpretation of the dialogue and its attribution at another point in the story, though, where the two waiters are discussing a soldier with a prostitute (Hurley, 17). The lines at issue involve a warning that the soldier will get picked up -- that is, arrested -- and the other waiter--presumably -- saying it wouldn't matter if he (the soldier) gets what he's after. The most common interpretation, and the one of which Hurley is in favor, attaches the cautionary lines to the older waiter, and the lusty justification to the younger. Hurley notes, however, that John Hagopian reversed this attribution, calling it Schadenfreude on the part of the young waiter and nihilism on the part of the older one (Hurley, 18). Bennett, Hurley notes, agrees with Hagopian's attribution scheme, ignoring earlier work Hurley has published that Hurley believes conclusively proves that the standard interpretation is the correct one (Hurley, 19). His evidence is the differentiation between Hemingway's use of "the one waiter" versus "the waiter." Which he claims can readily identify older and younger based on their usage in other passages where attribution is not questioned.