61 The Camouflage of the Sacred DOI: 10.2478/abcsj-2013-0020 The Camouflage of the Sacred in the Short Fiction of Hemingway ALI ZAID State University of New York Abstract This essay examines the short fiction of Ernest Hemingway in the light of Mircea Eliade’s notion of the camouflage of the sacred and the larval survival of original spiritual meaning. A subterranean love pulsates beneath the terse dialogue of Hemingway’s characters whose inner life we glimpse only obliquely. In the short play (“Today Is Friday”) and four short stories (“The Killers,” “A Clean Well-Lighted Place,” “Old Man at the Bridge,” and “The Light of the World,” discussed here, light imagery, biblical allusions, and the figure of Christ, reveal a hidden imaginary universe. This sacral dimension has been largely overlooked by critics who dwell on the ostensible spiritual absence that characterizes Hemingway’s fiction. Keywords: Ernest Hemingway; Mircea Eliade; short story; the sacred Ernest Hemingway’s short fiction deserves to be viewed in light of Mircea Eliade’s notion that “the camouflage or even occultation of the sacred and of spiritual meanings in general characterizes all crepuscular eras” (Autobiography 153). In the short play (“Today Is Friday”) and four short stories (“The Killers,” “A Clean Well-Lighted Place,” “Old Man at the Bridge,” and “The Light of the World”) discussed here, light imagery, biblical allusions, and the figure of Christ, reveal a hidden imaginary universe. This sacral dimension has been largely overlooked by some critics who fail to see the subterranean love that pulsates beneath the terse dialogue of Hemingway’s characters. American, British and Canadian Studies / 62 Born into a devout Christian family, Hemingway grew up in Oak Park, Illinois, a town with so many churches that it was known as “Saint’s Rest.” As an adolescent, Ernest rebelled against the moral strictures of his parents, ridiculing his mother’s religious material as “moron literature” (McDaniel 21, 40). Although he distrusted sonorous pieties and theological abstractions, Hemingway acknowledged that he learned to write from the Bible (Maurois 49). The biblical influence was not confined to style, for Christian imagery permeates his fiction. Deep down, Hemingway remained a Christian, such as in his reluctance to write on Sundays because it brought bad luck (Hotchner 149). Hemingway’s fiction, like life, remains elusive and inchoate. We glimpse the inner life of the characters only obliquely. In an interview, Hemingway explained this fragmentary characterization: “I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven eighths of it under water, for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg” (qtd. in Plimpton 34). This fictional technique is a distinct feature of modernism which Peter Faulkner describes as part of the historical process of disassociation from nineteenth century assumptions that posited “a stable relationship in which the writer could assume a community of attitudes, a shared sense of reality” (1). In the late nineteenth century, the literary sense that we are transcendentally connected to one another, which had reached its apotheosis in the novel, finally began to unravel. Matthew Arnold expresses a consequent feeling of loss in the final verses of “Dover Beach” (1867): the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night. (517-18) 63 The Camouflage of the Sacred Hemingway’s first collection of stories, In Our Time (1925; expanded edition 1930), conveys, like “Dover Beach,” a sense of violence and chaos. It borrows its title from a passage in the Book of Common Prayer: “Give us peace in our time, O Lord” (Maurois 43). In one vignette, the narrator repeats the name of Jesus amidst the shelling, holding it close like a talisman: While the bombardment was knocking the trench to pieces at Fossalta, he lay very flat and sweated and prayed oh jesus christ get me out of here. Dear jesus please get me out. Christ please please please christ. If you’ll only keep me from getting killed I’ll do anything you say. I believe in you and I’ll tell every one in the world that you are the only one that matters. Please please dear jesus. The shelling moved farther up the line. We went to work on the trench and in the morning the sun came up and the day was hot and muggy and cheerful and quiet. The next night back at Mestre he did not tell the girl he went upstairs with at the Villa Rossa about Jesus. And he never told anybody. (Collected Stories 109)1 The narrator alternates between upper and lower case letters when he invokes the name of Jesus Christ as if mediating between intimacy and respect. His brush with death is an experience both physical and spiritual, at once degrading and uplifting. The image of Jesus would continue to permeate Hemingway’s fiction. The presence of the sacred in Hemingway’s first book was not readily apparent to his parents. Clarence Hemingway promptly returned his copies of In Our Time to the publisher while Grace Hemingway, in a letter to Ernest, called it “one of the filthiest books of the year.” She nonetheless added, “I love you dear, and still believe you will do something worthwhile to live after you” (qtd. in de Koster, “Biography” 25). Indeed his next collection of stories, Men Without Women (1927), contained some of his best short fiction, including “The Killers.” In that story, Hemingway withholds knowledge from the reader, limiting our view of his characters. Two hitmen, Al and Max, enter a diner to await their intended victim, a former boxer named Ole Andreson. Their speech has a sinister banality. Michael F. Moloney states that “Hemingway’s fictional world, whatever its locale, is the deadly, stale, monotonous world of modern positivism and modern industrialism from which all spiritual leaven has been removed, and he is consistent in giving American, British and Canadian Studies / 64 a universal flatness to the speech of his characters” (184). However, the spiritual is not so much removed as camouflaged in “The Killers.” We detect the spiritual in the image of light that is embedded in the intimidating words of the mobsters: “This is a hot town,” said the other. “What do they call it?” “Summit.” “Ever hear of it?” Al asked his friend. “No,” said the friend. “What do you do here nights?” Al asked. “They eat the dinner,” his friend said. “They all come here and eat the big dinner.” “That’s right,” George said. “So you think that’s right?” Al asked George. “Sure.” “You’re a pretty bright boy, aren’t you?” “Sure,” said George. “Well, you’re not,” said the other little man. “Is he, Al?” “He’s dumb,” said Al. He turned to Nick. “What’s your name?” “Adams.” “Another bright boy,” Al said. “Ain’t he a bright boy, Max?” “The town’s full of bright boys,” Max said. (“Killers” 216) Behind the brazenness of gangsters lies the anomie in towns across the United States and the communal malaise of those who “eat the big dinner,” a phrase that recalls the last supper of Christ. The repetitive speech of Al and Max underscores their banal and interchangeable quality (Lamb 190-91). However, the reiterated phrase “bright boy” also prefigures young Nick Adams as a light in the ethical darkness of Summit, a Chicago suburb whose name anticipates Nick’s moral stature. The killers tie up Nick and the cook but depart after Andreson fails to appear for dinner. After being freed, Nick ignores the cook’s admonition not to get involved and runs to the boarding house where Andreson lodges. The imagery reinforces a sense of Nick as a bearer of light: “Outside the arc-light shone through the bare branches of a tree. Nick walked up the street beside the car-tracks and turned at the next arc- light down a side-street” (220). Nick finds Andreson lying in bed, staring at the wall. Gripped by a tragic expectancy, Andreson registers no surprise when Nick warns him that two men intend to shoot him. The light 65 The Camouflage of the Sacred imagery recurs when Nick returns to the diner: “Nick walked up the dark street to the corner under the arc-light, and then along the car-tracks to Henry’s eating-house” (222). Neither George, the cook, Nick, the hitmen, nor the reader, knows why Andreson has been marked for death: “Did you tell him about it?” George asked. “Sure. I told him but he knows what it’s all about.” “What’s he going to do?” “Nothing.” “They’ll kill him.” “I guess they will.” “He must have got mixed up in something in Chicago.” “I guess so,” said Nick. “It’s a hell of a thing.” (“Killers” 222) Andreson appears to know but he tells Nick nothing about it. In an unpublished manuscript, Hemingway commented that “The Killers” “probably had more left out of it than anything I ever wrote” (qtd. in Johnston 247). The reference to hell in the final line of the above passage is more than a colloquialism. It expresses despair and explains Nick’s resolve to leave town: “I wonder what he did?” Nick said. “Double-crossed somebody. That’s what they kill them for.” “I’m going to get out of this town,” Nick said.