Ernest Hemingway, Psalmist Author(S): George Monteiro Source: Journal of Modern Literature, Vol

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Ernest Hemingway, Psalmist Author(s): George Monteiro Source: Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Summer, 1987), pp. 83-95 Published by: Indiana University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3831342 Accessed: 06/01/2010 17:30

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Ernest Hemingway, Psalmist

THESUBJECT OF ErnestHemingway and the Bible has been touched on here and there in Hemingwayscholarship and occasionally acknowl- edged by the critics, yet the mattercontinues to call for extended treat- ment. It is clearly the subject for a book. Here, however, it may be worthwhileto sketch out one small segment of such a study: Heming- way's readingof one well-known piece of Scriptureand its effect on his writingsin the late twenties and early thirties.The Biblicaltext is King David's "Twenty-ThirdPsalm," and the Hemingwaytexts are "Neo- thomist Poem," publishedby EzraPound in The Exilein 1927, A Fare- well to Arms (1929), and "A Clean, Well-LightedPlace" (1933). By examining, in some detail, Hemingwaymaterials-in manuscriptand typescript-at the John F. KennedyLibrary, we can trace the genesis of an idea and relate it to Hemingway'svision.

Among the Hemingway papers at the Kennedythere are five texts included in four numbered documents that are relevant: documents 597a, 597b, 597c, and 658a. Two of these are typescripts(597a and 658a), the other two (597b and 597c) are penciled manuscriptsin Hemingway's hand. Of the typescripts, 658a presents Hemingway's "NeothomistPoem" as we know it from publicationin The Exile.The only one of these five texts that carriesthe poem's title, it now rests as part of a sheaf of Hemingway'spoems, eighteen in all, including the seventeen poems that appear in the several unauthorizededitions in which Hemingway'spoetry has circulatedfor decades. The eighteenth poem entitled "They All Made Peace-What Is Peace?" does not appear in those piratedchapbooks. The second typescript(597a), untitled, is a single sheet of ten lines. A clean copy of the longer version of

83 George Monteiro, "ErnestHemingway, Psalmist," Journal of Modern Literature,XIV: 1 (Summer 1987), 83-95. ? 1988 Temple University. 84 GEORGEMONTEIRO

Hemingway'spoem, this text is reproducedin facsimile on page 82 of Nicholas Gerogiannis'edition of ErnestHemingway: 88 Poems.' The manuscriptssurvive in two notebooks. Item 597b, the flyleaf of which contains the signatureand address"Ernest Hemingway/Note Book/1i13 Rue Notre Dame des Champs/ParisVI,"2 offers two tries-the earliestof those at Kennedy-at the longer version of the poem. The second half of the firstof these two (on the second manuscriptpage) is reproduced in facsimile in 88 Poems (also page 82), along with the complete second attempt at the longer version on the third page. These versions are untitled. Item597c is also an untitledmanuscript in pencil in Heming- way's hand. It appearsin a lined notebookwith writingon the firstfive leaves. The front flyleaf is signed "ErnestHemingway/69 Rue Froi- devaux/ 155, BouldSaint-Germain/Paris G." At the Kennedythis item is described, in part,

597c Manuscript. Untitled pencil manuscript beginning "The Lord is My Shepherd I shall not want. . ." 1 p. Also one page of sentences on the dust and dew in the dark in Italy.

This manuscriptoffers, in some ways, the most intriguingof the five versionsavailable at Kennedy.The descriptionof it, as I shall arguelater on, is misleading-as is, I think, the numbering.For reasons that I hope to establish, I now list the five texts contained in these manuscriptsand typescriptsin their order of composition and/or recording: Version 1, 597b (firstand second pages); Version2, 597b (thirdpage); Version 3, 597a (typescriptof ten lines); Version4, 597c; and Version5, 658a ("NeothomistPoem"). To begin at the beginning as we can best know it from the extant materials,here is Version 1, before Hemingway'scancellations:

The wind blows in the fall and it is all over The wind blows the leaves

ErnestHemingway: 88 Poems,ed. NicholasGerogiannis (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/Bruccoli-Clark, 1979). 2 This and all quotationsfrom Hemingway'smanuscripts and typescriptsat the John F. KennedyLibrary, Boston,Massachusetts, have been permittedby MaryHemingway with the consentof the Library. HEMINGWAYAS PSALMIST 85

fromthe trees and it is all over They do not come back And if they do are We're gone. You can startit any time Butyou in ------It will flush its self. When it goes it takes everythingwith it The Lordis my shepherd I shall not want him long. He makethme to lie down in green pastures And lo there are no green pastures He leadeth me beside still waters And still waters run deep. Surelygoodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life And I shall never escape them ThoughI walk throughthe vale shadow of the shadow of death I shall return to do evil. Forthou art with me In the morningand the evening Especiallyin the evening The wind blows in the fall And it is all over When I walk throughthe valley of the shadow of death I shall (feel) fear all evil Forthou art with me.

In revisingthis version, Hemingwaycrossed out the firstthirteen lines, as well as lines 21-29. He also rearrangedlines 30-33 so that they would come at the end of the poem. The temporarilyfinal poem that emerges from these revisionsreads:

The Lordis my shepherd I shall not want him long. He makethme to lie down in green pastures And lo there are no green pastures He leadeth me beside still waters And still waters rundeep. When I walk throughthe valley of the shadow of death I shall fear all evil Forthou art with me. In the morningand the evening Especiallyin the evening 86 GEORGEMONTEIRO

The wind blows in the fall And it is all over

My first observation is that the poem appears not to have been con- ceived, if the opening thirteen lines constitute its true beginning, as a parodyof the "Twenty-ThirdPsalm." Yet when, with line fourteen,the poet moves in that direction, he remainson targetfor the remainderof the poem with the single exception of lines 29-33, which returnthe poem to its opening motif-the blowing wind. These four lines would remain in the poem, in some form or other, throughthe ten-line typed version (597a). Purgedof its first thirteen lines, the poem reads as a rather straightforwardif a trifle lachrymose rewriting of David's "Twenty-ThirdPsalm": The Lordis my shepherd;I shall not want. He makethme to lie down in green pastures:he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restorethmy soul: he leadeth me in the pathsof righteousnessfor his name's sake. Yea, though I walk throughthe valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou artwith me; thy rod and thy staffthey comfortme. Thou preparesta table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointestmy head with oil; my cup runnethover. Surelygoodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lordfor ever.

Thisversion of Hemingway'spoem parodiesthe "Psalm"only at certain points, namely verses one and two, and only the firstthree quartersof verse four. It does not touch verses three, five, and six. In the next versionof the poem Hemingwaymakes several changes in wordingand phrasing,adds lines (latercanceled), and insertsa treatmentof verse six of the "Psalm"(also largelycanceled). Some of the changes and addi- tions are significant: (1) Inthe line "Andstill watersrun deep" he crosses out "rundeep," replacing it with "reflectthy face." (2) As an alternativeto the line "Forthou art with me" he writes, "you are not with me," only to cross it out. (3) He writes and then crosses out "In the morning and in the evening." He then adds the line, "In the morning nor in the evening," which he changes, by adding "Neither"and crossing out "nor," to "NeitherIn the morningand in the evening"; and then he crosses out "Neither."(There may be a step here that I have left out.) HEMINGWAYAS PSALMIST 87

(4) He writes and then crosses out the line, "Nor in the valley of the shadow of death." (Itwill not reappearin laterversions.) (5) He writes "And," crosses it out, and then begins again, "In the nightthe wind blows and you are not with me," only to change, first, "you" to "thou" and "are"to "art,"then interpolatingthe clause, "I did not hear it for" so that the line reads: "Inthe night the wind blows and I did not hear it forthou artnot with me," and finally, puzzlingly, he crosses out "thou" and "not." (6) He writes, "You have gone and it is all gone with you," only to cross it out. (7) He writes, "Surelygoodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I shall never escape them. Forthou art with me" all of which he cancels. Here is what is left, the second extant version of the poem: The Lordis my shepherd I shall not want him long He makethme to lie down in green pastures And there are no green pastures. He leadeth me beside still waters And still watersreflect thy face. Forthou art with me In the morningand in the evening In the nightthe wind blows and I did not hear it for [thou]art [not]with me. The wind blows in the fall and it is all over

The next version of the poem is the ten-line version in typed clean copy. My hunch is thatthe poem went throughadditional intermediate stages, but at this late date we can only speculate idly as to the nature and the numberof steps by which Hemingwayarrived at the shape of the last four lines. The Lordis my shepherd I shall not want him for long He makethme to lie down in green pastures and there are no green pastures He leadeth me beside still waters and still waters run deep the wind blows and the barkof the trees is wet fromthe rain the leaves fall and the trees are bare in the wind Leavesfloat on the still waters Thereare wet dead leaves in the basin of the fountain

(In the eighth line, incidentally,Hemingway had firstwritten "bare in 88 GEORGEMONTEIRO the rain,"crossed out "rain"and writtenin "fall,"and then crossed out "fall" in favor of "wind."3) Between the final revisionsof the second manuscriptversion and the typing of this version Hemingwayreinstated some of the firstversion's cancellations. Hence the second version's "And still waters reflectthy face" becomes here (once again)"and still watersrun deep," while the second-version lines "In the night the wind blows" and "The wind blows in the fall" are replaced(with a specific echo of the firstversion's referenceto "leaves") by "the wind blows and the barkof the trees is wet from the rain / the leaves fall and the trees are bare in the wind / Leavesfloat on the still waters/ These are wet dead leaves in the basin of the fountain." The poem, too, is wet and dead. Fortunately,Hemingway did not publish it in this form, althoughit is possible that it was this versionthat was firstoffered to Pound for The Exile. If so, it might well have been Pound, famousfor his editorialblue pencil, who cut the poem down to its published form and who made the crucial decision on how to ar- range the words of the poem on the page:

The Lordis my shepherd,I shall not want him for long.4

It is of course in this "truncated"form that the poem appears in typescript (658a) in the sheaf of eighteen poems that constitutes, chronologically,the final text of this poem at Kennedy,a text the prep- arationof which, I suspect, came afterthe publicationof the poem in The Exileand was undertakenfor the possible purposeof an authorized collection of Hemingway'sverse that never materialized.

3 The aesthetic/biographical function of the echoes here of two other texts-although of sufficient significance to call for close investigation-cannot be taken up at this time. I refer to (1) the anonymous sixteenth-century poem beginning: "O Western wind, when wilt thou blow / That the small rain down can rain?" (for an analysis of the way allusions to this text-already present in this discarded opening-work at certain points in A Farewell to Arms, see Charles R. Anderson's "Hemingway's Other Style," Modern Language Notes, LXXVI[May 1961], 434-42); and (2) Ezra Pound's "In a Station of the Metro"-"The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough"-a poem which, suffice it to say here, also resulted (as in Hemingway's case) from its author's success, to quote Hugh Kenner, "after several decreasingly wordy attempts, over a period of months . . . in boiling away the contingent distractions of the original experience" (The Poetry of Ezra Pound [New Direc- tions, n.d.], p. 73). 4 The Exile, I (Spring 1927), 21. If the layout of the poem cannot be definitively attributed to either the author or his editor, we can nevertheless find the precedent for so breaking the opening line of the "Twenty-Third Psalm." The line is so broken, of course, in the King James Version of the Old Testament: "The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not / want." This traditional line-break is maintained even in the New International Version of the Holy Bible: "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall lack / nothing." HEMINGWAYAS PSALMIST 89

Inthis chronologicalconsideration of the extanttexts of "Neothomist Poem," I have so far skipped document 597c, even though I would place its date of composition somewhere between that of the ten-line typescript(597a) and thatof the publishedversion in The Exilein 1927. I consider it now, seeminglyout of order, mainlybecause in manuscript 597c this "text" is squeezed in at the top of the first page of Heming- way's notebook in this form: "The LordIs My Shepherd I Shall Not Want/ him / for / long," with the lastthree words writtendown the right margin horizontally,one word to the line. Crammedin as it is, with each word in the top full line showing an initialcapital, it is obvious to me that this is not the text of a poem but the title for the piece of fragmentarywriting that follows it. And what is that piece of fragmen- tary writing?Whatever it is, it is not a parody of the "Twenty-Third Psalm," one might be surprisedto learn, but an entirely differenttext unmistakablyin prose: Now that I know that I am going to die none of it seems to make much difference there are a few thingsthat I would like to think about. When you have them you can not keep them y but maybe afteryou have gone away they are still there. You can not keep them but if you try but later,when they have gone, they return come come again and sometimes they will stay. You can not keep them but afteryou are gone they are still there. In the fall the leaves fell fromthe trees, and we walked It was very dusty Towardevening it was not so hot but it was still dusty and the dust rose fromthe road When it was darkthe dew came and settledthe dust on the roadthat we marchedon. In Italywhen it was darkthe dew came settledthe dust on the roadwand the men that the troops 90 GEORGEMONTEIRO

marchedon in the dark and beside the roadthere were poplartrees in the dark In Oak Park Illinois

Hemingway would cross out all but two of the first thirteen lines, ex- punge the whole of lines eighteen, thirty, thirty-one, and thirty-five, and cancel individual words and phrases in lines seventeen, twenty-eight, and twenty-nine, thereby leaving this residual text: The LordIs My ShepherdI Shall Not Want him for long. When you have them you can not keep them y You can not keep them but afteryou are gone they are still there. In the fall the leaves fell fromthe trees Towardevening it was not so hot but it was still dusty and the dust rose fromthe road When it was darkthe dew came and settledthe dust on the roadthat we marchedon.

In Italywhen it was darkthe dew settledthe dust on the road and beside the road there were poplartrees in the dark

To Hemingway's attentive readers there will be something undoubtedly familiar about this unpublished text, crude as it is, with multiple starts. Dating from 1926, it is the forerunner (quite possibly the very first version), I would propose, of that famous text with its memorable opening lines: Inthe late summerof thatyear we lived in a house in a villagethat looked acrossthe riverand the plainto the mountains.In the bed of the riverthere were pebbles and boulders,dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troopswent by the house and down the roadand the dust they raisedpowdered the leaves of the trees. The trunksof the treestoo were dustyand the leaves fell earlythat yearand we saw the troopsmarching along the roadand the dust risingand leaves, stirredby the breeze, falling and the soldiersmarching and after- ward the road bare and white except for the leaves.5

5 ErnestHemingway, A Farewellto Arms(Scribner's, 1929), p. 3. All furtherreferences to the novel will be to this edition and will be indicatedin the text by page number. HEMINGWAYAS PSALMIST 91

Here, with its evocative referencesto falling leaves and dust risingfrom the road (there are three attemptsat getting the imagery right in the manuscriptnumbered 597c), we have the ur-textfor the opening of A Farewellto Arms(as well as the opening of Chapter25, with its echoing imageryof "baretrees" and "wet dead leaves"), one that can be dated considerablyearlier than any so farsuggested.6 In any case, if I am right in seeing this as the ur-textfor the novel, we would do well to mull over the fact that Hemingwayhad originallybegun his book with the clear indicationthat the narrator(and hero) is convinced that his death (suicide, perhaps)is imminent.Taken in combinationwith the sardonictitle (crammedin at the top after,as I have alreadysuggested, the authorhad set down the prose text), this rejectedtext suggestseven more strongly that the context in which ex-LieutenantFrederic Henry sets down his own retrospectivenarrative of his losses in war and love is one of personaldespair and acedia.7 As such, then, the line, "The LordIs My ShepherdI Shall Not Want Him For Long"should not merely be ac- knowledged as another of the titles, considered and rejected, for the novel that would eventually be called A Farewellto Arms but recog- nized as the very firstof that stringof titles (at least the earliest one so far uncovered)to be set down.8 In this case, I suspect that the author would have rejected the title soon after crossing out the opening six lines about the narrator'simpending death as soundingtoo orthodox a religious note. But having considered the opening lines of his poem parodyingthe "Twenty-ThirdPsalm" as a title for a work of fiction he proposedto write and isolatingthem for thatpurpose, he may well have discovered, I would venture,the poem he (or Pound)would laterentitle "NeothomistPoem."9

6 See Michael S. Reynolds, Hemingway's FirstWar: The Making of "A Farewell to Arms" (Princeton Univer- sity Press,1976), p. 285, who suggeststhat Hemingwaybegan the novel in earlyMarch 1928. 7 Reynoldsdevotes an appendixto rejectedtitles (Hemingway's First War, pp. 295-97). To this list, Bernard Oldsey adds three other titles in his Hemingway's Hidden Craft: The Writing of "A Farewell to Arms" (Penn- sylvaniaState University Press, 1979), pp. 21-22. PaulSmith presents a still longerlist, one numberingforty-three titlesin "AlmostAll Is Vanity:A Note on Nine RejectedTitles for A Farewellto Arms,"The Hemingway Review, II(Fall 1982), 74-76. I wish to take this opportunityto thankPaul Smith for his advice regardingthe manuscriptsat the Kennedy Library. 8 My readingof this discardedopening is not at all at odds, in my opinion, with MillicentBell's telling interpretationof A Farewellto Arms."The novel is aboutneither love nor war; it is abouta stateof mind, and thatstate of mindis the author's,"asserts Bell. "Alreadyon the openingpage, in 1915, the voice thatspeaks to us exhibitsthat attitude psychoanalysts call 'bluntingof affect,'the drynessof soul which underliesits exquisite attentiveness"("A Farewellto Arms:Pseudobiography and PersonalMetaphor," in JamesNagel, ed., Ernest Hemingway:The Writerin Context[University of WisconsinPress, 1984], pp. 111 and 112). 9 No one seems to have paidsufficient attention to the factthat it was EzraPound who explainedin The Exile that "Mr. Hemingway'sPOEM refers to events in what remainsof the Frenchworld of letters"(91-92). It's 92 GEORGEMONTEIRO

Ill

Echoes of the "Twenty-ThirdPsalm" and Hemingway'sparodies of that Old Testamentpoem would resurfacestill again. And they would reappearcreatively in combinationwith the dual themes of death and suicide in what would turnout to be one of Hemingway'sfinest stories: "A Clean, Well-LightedPlace." Considerthat in this darkparable there are not only nihilisticparodies of "The Lord'sPrayer" and the Catholicprayer to the Virginrecited by the so-called older waiter, but also a context for those culminating prayers,the conversationbetween the two waitersabout an old man (a "client")and his unsuccessfulattempt at suicide: his failureto commit, in short, the unpardonablesin against the Holy Ghost, an act under- taken in the first place because, as the older waiter explains, the old man was in the state of despair. "He was in despair,"the waiter says wryly (in what is, afterall, a privatelygrim joke), about "Nothing."'? Threetimes on the opening pages of this storywe are told that the old man, in a deliberateechoing of the shadow image of the "Twenty-Third Psalm"("though I walk throughthe valley of the shadow of death"), is sitting there in the "shadow" made by the leaves of the tree (17-18). (But note as well the even closer echo of Luke1:79 on the purposeof John the Baptist:"To give light to them that sit in darknessand in the shadow of death.") The old man, deaf and alone, ordersanother drink of brandy.The youngerwaiter pours him one, filling up his glass. But then, in a remarkableliteralization into action of one of the most familiar metaphorsemployed in the "Twenty-ThirdPsalm"-"my cup

possiblethat Pound actually got this notionfrom Hemingway himself, but the earlymanuscripts/typescripts of the longerversion of the poem indicatenothing of the sort.That these draftsare untitledas well suggeststhat it was not until 1927 that either Hemingwayor Poundthought up the title. When the poem appeared,its title was garbled:"Nothoemist Poem." Poundpenciled in a correctionin every copy of The Exile,an act that perhaps indicatedthat he was the trueauthor of the poem'stitle. (See PhilipYoung, Ernest Hemingway [Rinehart, 1952], p. 236.) LaterHemingway would seeminglyecho Pound'sexplanation in TheExile by insisting:(1) thatthis title referredto the "temporaryembracing of churchby literarygents" (Louis Henry Cohn, A Bibliographyof the Worksof ErnestHemingway [Random House, 1931], p. 89); and (2) that (in a letterto PhilipYoung, June 23, 1952) "hispoem was meantto 'kid'Jean Cocteau, who hadthen just switched from opium to Neo-Thomism.He addedthat the poem did not expresshis own personalbeliefs." (Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A LifeStory [Scribner's,1969], p. 596.) Evenbefore Hemingway sent in his poem, however,Pound had assuredhim that in his projectedmagazine "thereshall be absolootlyno neo-Thomism(will thotcontent you ?)." Inthis letterdated 3 November1926 (and only recentlypublished: Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin, "Ernest Hemingway and EzraPound," Ernest Heming- way: The Writerin Context,p. 194), Poundgoes on to describethe sort of contributionhe would like from Hemingway:"Re yr own stuff. as I sez , thereis no use me payinga printerfor to set up stuffyou can sell to Scribner.What one wantsfer this kindof show, is shortstuff, so shortthat space ratescant makeit worthwhile carryingto market; and odd sizes , and unvendablematter ." o1 WinnerTake Nothing (Scribner's, 1933), p. 17. All furtherreferences to the storywill be to thisedition and will be indicatedin the text by page number. HEMINGWAYAS PSALMIST 93 runnethover"-Hemingway writes, "The old man motioned with his finger. 'A little more,' he said. The waiter poured on into the glass so thatthe brandyslopped over and randown the stem into the top saucer of the pile" (19). Ifthe talk of suicide and the imageryof shadows caused by the leaves of trees recall the discardedopening for A Farewellto Armsthe second sentence of the story echoes closely the opening of the novel as published. Here is A Farewellto Arms: "the dust they [the troops] raised powderedthe leaves of the trees. The trunksof the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell earlythat year and we saw the troopsmarching along the roadand the dust rising. ." (3). In "A Clean, Well-LightedPlace," we read: "In the daytime the street was dusty, but at night the dew settled the dust .. ." (17). At one point in "A Clean, Well-LightedPlace," the older waitertries to spell out just how his situationdiffers from that of his fellow-waiter. When the latterasserts, "'I have confidence. I am all confidence,"' he replies, "'you have youth, confidence, and a job"' (22). As for himself, he is no longer young, he acknowledges, and he has never had "confidence." Even as it was for HermanMelville, "confidence" is a key term here. If it can mean something like self-assurance(as it does, undoubtedly,for the youngerwaiter), it also means "faith"-the Span- ish term confidencia. Indeed, if the older waiter has never had such confidencia, such "faith,"then I am even more certainthat his expres- sions of nihilism are a form of displayinghis acedia. The consolations to the believers-to men of faith-that are the "Lord'sPrayer" and the prayer to the Virgin Mary are not available to those who lack "confidence," even as the "Twenty-ThirdPsalm"-sometimes described as "David'sconfidence in the grace of Cod"-serves only as a repositoryof sentimentsand imagesthat can only be taken ironicallyby the author who not only constructed parodies of the "Twenty-Third Psalm,"but also wrote A Farewellto Armsand "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place." To the expansive pastoralconsolations of the "Twenty-Third Psalm"-its "still waters," "paths of righteousness,"the "table" pre- pared "in the presence of mine enemies," and the promise of anoint- ment-man can only counter with the narrowvirtues of a localized cleanliness and man-madelight. Forthe "house of the Lord"in which the psalmist,confident in the grace of God, shall "dwell ... for ever," Hemingway'solder waiter offers only the cafe, "clean, well-lighted," which, though he would "staylate," will perforceclose each each night while the night is still darkand will remainso long, ostensibly, afterthe firstglimmer of "daylight.""It is probablyonly insomnia,"the waiter 94 GEORGEMONTEIRO says to himself; "Many must have it" (24). And indeed they must in Hemingway'speopled world, from the rattledNick Adams of "Now I Lay Me" (with its ironic titularreference to still another prayer)to the authorwho himself compulsively parodiedthe "Twenty-ThirdPsalm" in the late 1920s, both in his poem and in his fragmentaryfirst try at writinghis novel about the loss of confidence in war, love, and self. Yetthe storyis not a simplerretreatment of the implosivematter of the novel. Althoughthe themes of faith and confidencia appear and reap- pear thematicallyin the novel, the emphasisthere is more secularthan in the story. In fact, the novel and story differ in this matternowhere more distinctly than in the way each of the texts handles the shared matterof empty high-mindedness,bankrupt idealism, and the words and beliefs attendingboth. Althoughit is not common to relatethe two passages, I shall juxtaposehere two of the best known excerpts in all of Hemingway. I have in mind the passage from A Farewellto Arms in which Lt. Henry identifiesthe words that embarrasshim, along with those that do not, and the sentences from "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," in which the older waiter uttershis prayerto "nada." The first quotationcomes from the novel:

I was always embarrassedby the words sacred, glorious,and sacrificeand the expressionin vain. We had heardthem, sometimesstanding in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through,and had readthem, on proclamationsthat were slappedup by billpostersover other proclamations,now for a long time, and I had seen nothingsacred, and the thingsthat were glorioushad no gloryand the sacrificeswere like the stockyardsat Chicagoif nothingwas done with the meatexcept to bury it. Therewere manywords that you could not standto hearand finallyonly the names of places had dignity.Certain numbers were the same way and certaindates and these with the namesof the places were all you could say and have them mean anything.Abstract words such as glory, honor, cour- age, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbersof roads, the names of rivers,the numbersof regimentsand the dates. (184-85)

In "A Clean, Well-LightedPlace," it should be noted, there are no words that seem to convey "dignity."Indeed, the first time the word "dignity"appears in the story, it is used to describe the old man, who, as the waiterwatched him, "walk[ed]unsteadily" down the street"but with dignity," while laterthe word is used to indicate not its existence but its absence: "Nor can you stand before a bar with dignity." As for the realitybehind "words," here is the older waiter's utteranceof the "Lord'sPrayer":

Our nada who artin nada, nada be thy namethy kingdomnada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us HEMINGWAYAS PSALMIST 95

our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. (23-24)

To make clear just what is at stake in this prayerfulblasphemy of a prayer,we need only recallthe Catholicprayer itself. I have underlined the words the older waiterhas replacedby his nadasto bringto the fore just what he is denying: Our Fatherwho art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name; Thy Kingdom come; Thy will be done on earthas it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread: and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespassagainst us; and lead us not into temptation,but deliver us from evil. Amen."1

Denied here-not just their value but their very existence-are not the abstractwords of A Farewellto Arms-such as sacred, glorious, and sacrifice, along with the virtuesencoded in the expressionin vain-but words such as Father,heaven, hallowed ("hallow"does appear in Lt. Henry'slitany), earth, day, bread, trespasses,forgivelness], temptation, and evil. Father,heaven and hell, in this context, might well be considered conceptualized abstractions,but surely earth, day, and bread would be considered by most to be at least as real as those proper names and nominative numbersthat still carry meaning for Frederic Henry. If it can be said that the strongestsubtext of A Farewellto Arms is religious, it is equally clear that in "A Clean, Well-LightedPlace" Hemingwaymakes that theme fully explicit. In the story he again suc- ceeded in drawingon the same emotional pressureand spiritualcapital that had energized his novel about a young soldier'sacedic experience of war and love.

11 New BaltimoreCatechism No. 1, OfficialRevised Edition (Benziger Brothers, n.d.), p. 3.