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1. Whose Story Now?
In rereading Hemingway’s “The Killers,” it is hard for a person my age to forget the extensive analysis Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren put forward in their immensely influential college anthology, Understanding Fiction. This text and its attached commentaries shaped the views of college generations and helped make the New Criticism, so-called, the only significant critical achievement in twentieth-century literature. Brooks and Warren famously asked of the Hemingway story “what is the story about?” and noted that “the reader is inclined to transpose the question, What is the story? into the question, Whose story is it?” The detailed and meticulous essay that followed this query is a model of the methodology both men championed.
They continue, referring to the end of the story, “it is obviously Nick on whom the impression has been made. George has managed to come to terms with the situation. By this line of reasoning, it is Nick’s story. And the story is about the discovery of evil.” (304-05) The story is “about” Nick Adams, in an oblique way—“by indirections find directions out,” bowling on the bias. It is most obviously “about” Ole Andreson, victim-to-be of the two vaudevillian assassins in the title. And most readers assume it is not “about” Al and Max, even if they have top billing.
Most discussions tacitly assume the story is about somebody, one or more characters portrayed or mentioned. But this terse story, which beautifully illustrates Hemingway’s practice of cutting, editing and omitting (“the thing left out”), is as much about a place, a time, some actions—the old “classical unities,” now revised for the twentieth century—as about a given “central character.” It is about a state of mind and random events—chaos, absurdity, irrealism—for which the characters serve as vehicles, as a phrase in a metaphor is a vehicle for meaning.
As perceptive readers have noted (beginning with Edward C. Sampson in 1952), the story is a tissue of direct contradictions, a comedy of errors. It is somehow about “wrongness”—a condition in which (as Gilbert and Sullivan said) “nothing is as it seems/Skimmed milk masquerades as cream.” Camouflage, sometimes called “dazzle” in World War I. Hiding in plain sight. If the story is about “the discovery of evil,” it asserts that the reality of evil is masked by quotidian appearances, that what seems to be is not what is, that vicious murderers can seem harmless jokesters, that waiting for death is a blurred view of an indecipherable tragedy.
Hemingway, as was his practice in editing early stories, excised an initial passage of introduction and exposition that nearly made it one of his “up in Michigan” tales (Smith 139) and began in medias res, like a one-act play opening on a double entrance—“The door of Henry’s diner opened and two men came in. They sat down at the counter.” It is both a stage direction and a realized action, and the audience comprises Nick Adams, a customer, and his friend George, who runs “Henry’s,” a place which was once a saloon but is now a “lunch-room,” “lunch counter” or “eating-house.” It is Prohibition time, and places are not what they seem. Al and Max, the visiting gangsters, assume it is a speakeasy and are belligerent when denied a “real” drink (which can’t be named overtly because of the Prohibition laws). Speakeasy talk (“speakeasy” = whisper a password) is one kind of code in a net of disguised language about good and evil, justice and crime. We need to recall that the Volstead Act had the perverse effect of creating crime under the appearance of eliminating a social evil: the attempt to eradicate alcoholism created effective organized crime (including corporate-sponsored murder) on a national scale. Any tale of 1920s gangsters is “about” this overarching paradox.
The time is crepuscular—between light and dark, an autumn dusk. Street lights are coming on. But time is more ambiguous than this—it is downright indeterminate and unknowable:
“That’s the dinner,” George explained. “You can get that at six o’clock.”
George looked at the clock on the wall behind the counter.
“It’s five o’clock.”
“The clock says twenty minutes past five,” the second man said.
“It’s twenty minutes fast.”
Not only is it the wrong time for the dinner, it’s the wrong time! Al (“the first man”) has ordered “a roast pork tenderloin with apple sauce and mashed potatoes” but at this disordered time, eaters can only get binary foods—“ham and eggs,” “bacon and eggs,” “liver and onions”—because we are in a binary universe of twosies—Al and Max, Nick and George, Henry and George, Mrs. Hirsch and Mrs. Bell, and a room with a long saloon mirror that reflects everything as a reversed double. (Only Sam the “nigger cook” and Ole Andresen the Swede are outcast from the sociable pairings.) Everything visible can be seen backwards. Reality and anti-reality are housed in “Henry’s” saloon/lunchroom run by George.
The story is about other important binary combinations—food and eating (“they all come here to eat the big dinner”)—and terror and murder. The lunchroom is treated as a movie set, brightly lighted against the descending night. George watches the men eat (with their gloves on, as if fearful of the food). Max accuses George of “looking at him” in this room of lights, mirrors and metaphorical movie cameras, while Al peeps out a hatch (pass-through) from the kitchen and gives orders, arranging the men “like a photographer arranging for a group picture”:
“Listen, bright boy,” he said from the kitchen to George. “Stand a
little further along the bar. You move a little to the left, Max.”
Max explains their mission:
“We’re going to kill a Swede. Do you know a big Swede named Ole
Andreson?”
He then changes the subject (or does he?) by turning from a still portrait photographer to a cinematographer—“‘Ever go to the movies?’” He implies that George knows about gangster killings from the movies, and this seems just like a movie: “‘You ought to go to the movies more. The movies are fine for a bright boy like you.’” The movies are safe, vicarious adventures for a sissy like George, Max implies. Here is the reality of sudden death, and they are all stars.
We are about to witness a standard climactic scene from a gangster movie—a “hit” or professional assassination. George (“bright boy,” as Max persistently taunts him) is the central figure in this tableau. Nick and Sam, the “nigger cook,” are sequestered out of sight, offstage, with Al in the kitchen.
The finale for the two killers involves a careful visual catalog of their strange, absurd appearance: “The cutoff barrels of the shotgun made a slight bulge under the waist of his too tight-fitting overcoat.” They exit into the night like a vaudeville comedy team, like Jimmy Durante walking into offstage darkness through a chain of stage spotlit pools as he intoned, “Goodnight, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are.”
George then takes Nick to see Ole Andreson, and Nick says he will see him. He follows the gangsters through the spotlights (“arc lights”) in the darkness:
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. Three houses up the street was
Hirsch’s rooming-house. Nick walked up the two steps and pushed
the bell. A woman came to the door.
The first woman in the man’s-world story, who asks if Nick wants to see Ole Andreson.
2. Disorder and Early Sorrow
At Andreson’s room, Nick views the ex-fighter around whom the story revolves. We are told, “[Andreson] did not look at Nick.” Seeing is a one-way operation in this mirror-world. When Nick offers to describe the killers—“‘I’ll tell you what they were like’”—Ole says, “‘I don’t want to hear what they were like.’” Ole only looks at the wall next to his bed: what we can’t see can’t see us or hurt us.
Nick meets the “landlady” again downstairs, and it transpires that she is not “Mrs. Hirsch” but “Mrs. Bell”: “‘She owns the place. I just look after it for her.’” Like “Henry’s,” “Mrs. Hirsch’s” is a false front (it sounds almost like a brothel, as “Henry’s” has the whiff of saloon in it), like a movie set, to be filled with identities from both sides of the looking-glass: what you see is not what you get.
Nick follows the street-car tracks (his path or yellow-brick road) back to the “eating-house” (where people find sustenance not sudden death, as in “Eat lead, varmint!”). He tells George he saw Ole.
Then Nick and George trade euphemistic comments about “it” and the “thing” at hand, punctuated by a direct admission:
“They’ll kill him,”
“I guess they will.”
“He must have got mixed up in something in Chicago.”
The story ends with Nick, like a surrogate for Ole, saying he will flee the town. Ole has refused to run away:
“Couldn’t you get out of town?”
“No,” Ole Andreson said. “I’m through with all that running around.”
Nick, to expunge “it,” this awful “thing” from his mind, from his mirror-surrounded, arc-lit theatre of memory, recites the vision from which he will flee:
“I can’t stand to think about him waiting in the room and knowing he’s
going to get it. It’s too damned awful.”
The story cycles back to the tension—between seeing and not seeing, between being onstage and offstage, in or out of the arc-lit circles—that defines it.
Nick now has had unfortunate knowledge thrust on him. While he sat bound and gagged and helpless, like a dream ridden by a nightmare, he has endured terror and the immanence of death—his own, another’s, the generalized night-terror of another story like “Now I Lay Me.” (Hemingway evidently suffered from insomnia and night terrors all his life after World War I.)
Brooks and Warren compared “The Killers” to Macbeth by comparing Mrs. Bell to Macbeth’s Porter (recalling De Quincy’s masterly essay). The story also echoes Shakespeare’s domestic murder tragedy through the idea that “Macbeth hath murdered sleep,” the healing oblivion of nightly rest. Nick has been transported from the sleepy, inconsequential hamlet of Summit to a sleepless and haunted Nighttown in which clown-like killers in tight suits may step at any moment from the blackness of unconsciousness to the klieg-lighted, mirror-surrounded clarity of everyday consciousness.
Rather than asking “Whose story?” it is better to ask “What story?” That is, the startling effect of the story, as in most of Hemingway’s early narratives, is the sting in the tail. It is a story of empathy (Nick lives now in Ole Andreson’s state of consciousness) and concomitant loss of innocence. To know what Ole feels, Nick must cease to live in a little world of naivety. Like “bright boy” George, Nick has been inducted into full adulthood by the injection of terrible knowledge only to be borne by stoic self-denial. Sam the cook, when he counsels Nick not to see Ole Andreson, is disappointed by Nick’s determination: “‘Little boys always know what they want to do,’ he said.”
The terror is absurd and unnamable, so deep that it cannot be explained or rationalized. When Nick tells the tale to Andreson, he realizes this:
“I was up at Henry’s,” Nick said, “and two fellows came in and tied
up me and the cook, and they said they were going to kill you.”
It sounded silly when he said it. Ole Andreson said nothing.
He has learned a horrifying secret that is comically simple and obvious but which is unbearable to possess alone.
The story is about the absurdity of death: why are we gifted with the miracle of life if it is so evanescent and brief? What a dirty trick to take it away so soon, so easily! It is about the burden of fear and sleeplessness, like Macbeth’s, in a world filled with cruel but foolish assassins. No one ever wrote better than Hemingway about night fears, the horrors of the shadows around the bed, the sense that the arc-lights of our brief scene onstage (“a walking shadow, a poor player/ That “frets and struts his hour upon the stage”) are controlled by gloved hands, by the twinned and interchangeable Al and Max and their whimsical cruelty.
In the midst of the story, in the midst of life, George poses the eternal question:
“All right,” George said. “What are you going to do with us after-
ward?”
He receives the eternal answer:
“That’ll depend,” Max said. “That’s one of those things you never
know at the time.”
This is the wounding knowledge Nick flees, while George chooses the dark path of self-prescribed stoical ignorance: “‘You better not think about it.’” ###
WORKS CITED___________________________________
Brooks, Cleanth, and Robert Penn Warren. Understanding Fiction, 2nd ed. New York:
Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1959, 296-312.
Hemingway, Ernest. The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. New York:
Scribners, 1988, 215-22. (Because the story is so brief, individual passages are
not cited in the text by page number.)
Sampson, Edmund C. “Hemingway’s ‘The Killers.’” Explicator 11 (1952), Item 2.
Smith, Paul. A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. Boston:
G.K. Hall, 1989, 138-53.
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