Hemingway's one "funny" story
"The Light Of The World" - an unforgettable rite of passage tale
Of the 70 mostly wonderful short stories penned by Ernest Hemingway, the one element that is generally — maybe intentionally — missing in most of them is humor.
Not that he doesn’t have some great stinging lines here and there. A master of dialogue, there are all sorts of sarcastic, ironic quips that can make you laugh out loud. Like in the great story “Fifty Grand” where, early in the story as the author is establishing his main character champion Jack Brennan, one drunken, perhaps fallen woman chides the champion for being such a cheapskate.
"K——-(A Jewish insult)," this broad goes on. "Whoever saw you ever buy a drink? Your wife sews your pockets up every morning. These Irishmen and their k——! Ted Lewis could lick you too."
“Sure,” Jack says. “And you give away a lot of things free, too, don’t you?”
“We went out. That was Jack.” Hemingway writes. Point made.
In his generally overlooked story “The Light of The World,” Hemingway gives us a very effective and to me, at least, a funny rite of passage story about two full-of-themselves teenage boys who suddenly have “the light of the world” revealed to them at the end of an evening they won’t soon forget. It might mean even more.
To put it another way, through their innocence/ignorance/immaturity, they discover what a harsh and bitter world is out there waiting for them when they grow up. It is implied, there is no rush to do that.
Through just a couple of scenes, one in a saloon, the other in a train station, Hemingway pulls back the blinds on an existence that — at the moment — is foreign to these young men. In a true test of a rite of passage story, they are changed by stories’ end.
The story opens with the two of them wandering into a saloon where they get into it with the bartender who insults them, calls them “punks.” That’s significant because their next stop is a train station where there’s a gay cook, some ladies of the evening and some rough-looking men. The real adult world.
Through the hilarious interaction between the naive boys, the cook, the ladies, especially the biggest one, Alice, who might be over 300 pounds, a verbal battle breaks out between Alice and one of her rivals. Despite her size, she seems to almost mesmerize the narrator, who sits open-mouthed listening to Alice and “Peroxide” battle about their romantic connection — real or imagined — with one of the boxers.
Cleverly — I’d never really seen another writer do this in quite the same way — Hemingway uses a real event, the Jack Johnson-Stanley Ketchel boxing match of 1909, to help develop his story and characters.
Interestingly, we even have Hemingway’s own explanation of what he was trying to do with this particular story. In March of 1959, five years after he’d been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, his publisher Charles Scribner suggested Hemingway put together a student edition of 12 of his stories most often anthologized and asked him to write a preface.
He did but his editor didn’t like the tone of the work, thinking perhaps his readers might “misinterpret it as condescension,” so Hemingway’s preface was held back until the Paris Review re-printed it in 1981. Reading this first paragraph, you can perhaps see why the editor — some 65 years ago — might have winced.
“This story is called ‘The Light of the World’. I could have called it ‘Behold I Stand at the Door and Knock’ or some other stained-glass window title, but I did not think of it and actually ‘The Light of the World’ is better. It is about many things and you would be ill-advised to think it is a simple tale. It is really, no matter what you hear, a love letter to a whore named Alice who at the time of the story would have dressed out at around two hundred and ten pounds. Maybe more. And the point of it is that nobody, and that goes for you, Jack, knows how we were then from how we are now.”
His point, I think, is that in our minds, we see ourselves one way and in reality, people see us completely differently. That certainly is the case for the two young men and perhaps for Alice.
“This is worse on women than on us, until you look into the mirror yourself some day instead of looking at women all the time, and in writing the story I was trying to do something about it. But there are very few basic things you can do anything about. So I do what the French call constater. Look that up. (Editor’s note: It means ‘notice.’) That is what you have to learn to do, and you ought to learn French anyway if you are going to understand short stories, and there is nothing rougher than to do it all the way. It is hardest to do about women and you must not worry when they say there are no such women as those you wrote about. That only means your women aren’t like their women.
“You ever see any of their women, Jack? I have a couple of times and you would be appalled and I know you don’t appall easy. What I learned constructive about women, not just ethics like never blame them if they pox you because somebody poxed them and lots of times they don’t even know they have It—that’s in the first reader for squares—is no matter how they get, always think of them the way they were on the best day they ever had in their lives. That’s about all you can do about it and that is what I was trying for in the story.”
Think about that line, which you’ll see is borne out in the story. “No matter how they get,” he writes, “always think of them the way they were on the best day they ever had in their lives.” It is a moment of grace, isn’t it? Despite the coarse setting and dialogue, is Hemingway sort of setting us up, alluding to a higher cause?
In the case of Alice, it’s a moment where a famous boxer, one involved in the famous bout Hemingway alludes to, hands her a compliment, one that might make some swallow hard but in her hardscrabble life and her world, truly meant something. And, brilliantly, Hemingway used it as a vulnerability, an opening that one of her rivals quickly pounced on, just the way Stanley Ketchel pounced on a perceived opening by Jack Johnson in the 12th round, double-crossing the champion.
In 1909, the middleweight champion Ketchel (160 pounds) had beaten all potential opposition. Heavyweight champion Johnson (209) was in the same predicament. There was nobody left for either one to fight so the two agreed to fight one another. Supposedly they had a gentleman’s agreement to fight to a no-decision, essentially a pay day for each fighter without risking their championships.
As the 12th round opened, Ketchel, however, tried to flatten Johnson and did knock him down. But Johnson quickly fought back and knocked Ketchel out in short order, actually dislodging Ketchel’s two gold front teeth with the KO punch. The teeth weren’t found until much later, still embedded in Johnson’s right glove.
A colorized version of the Stanley Ketchel-Jack Johnson fight that Hemingway refers to.
Why this fight was relevant to the story was Alice’s alleged relationship to Ketchel. In the “combat” that takes between Alice and Peroxide in full display of the boys as the story winds down, the two ladies of the evening mix up his first name “Steve,” argue about whether they were actually out in California for the fight, etc. and so on and on, Peroxide trying a “sneak attack” on Alice, just as Ketchel had. Their insults are wild and funny and give the boys an idea of the adult world that awaits them.
Ultimately, Alice prevails and as Hemingway makes clear, the narrator is in her corner all the way.
“Alice looked at her and then at us and her face lost that hurt look and she smiled and she had about the prettiest face I ever saw. She had a pretty face and a nice smooth skin and a lovely voice and she was nice all right and really friendly. But my God she was big. She was as big as three women. Tom saw me looking at her and he said, “Come on. Let’s go.” “Good-bye,” said Alice. She certainly had a nice voice. “Good-bye,” I said.
‘Which way are you boys going?” asked the cook. “The other way from you,” Tom told him.”
What isn’t often noted or understood was Hemingway’s penchant for using Bible references in his stories. From “The Sun Also Rises” to “The Old Man and The Sea” Hemingway weaves these into his stories and that may well be the case for “The Light Of The World.”
Despite the low-life status of the principals, was he referring to “the light of the world” in Matthew 5:14-16?
“You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.”
Was Hemingway suggesting Alice, Tom, the narrator, the cook, even Peroxide, were all God’s children? And that by him shining “the light of the world” on these rough-and-tumble characters from the hard side of life, bringing them into our lives through his stories might be, in a way, a holy act?
As Hemingway himself told us, “It is about many things and you would be ill-advised to think it is a simple tale.”
Here is a link to the story:
https://www.douban.com/group/topic/31129081/?_i=6602523Jbdr7ij
Here’s a link to all Hemingway’s short stories:
https://antilogicalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/hemingway.pdf