This paper examines the enduring academic controversy surrounding Ernest Hemingway's short story "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," first published in Scribner's Monthly in 1933. At the center of the debate is a series of ambiguous dialogue exchanges between an old waiter and a young waiter, which scholars have long disputed as either intentional stylistic choices or editorial errors. The paper surveys several critical positions, including those of John Leonard, Paul Smith, C. Harold Hurley, David Kerner, and Warren Bennett, weighing manuscript evidence, typescript discoveries, and textual analysis. It concludes that the controversy, though unresolvable, reflects the productive tension between authorial intent and interpretive freedom that keeps literary scholarship alive.
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 quotation marks 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. These materials have been used by scholars both to argue for the emendation of what they see as 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 waiter and a young waiter. As published, it appears that at least one of the speakers becomes confused, or that Hemingway is making a major break with convention by having the same speaker deliver 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 was simply: "It makes sense to me. Sorry." Many others believe that the confusion in the dialogue is an error — 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 who hold this view becomes: who made the error, why was it allowed to persist, and how was the dialogue meant to appear? Those who believe the dialogue appears correctly avoid this problem but must 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," Leonard reflects on the characters of the waiters and the old waiter in particular. These are the two speakers to whom the various lines of disputed 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 attribution. 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 does not even mention it. He 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 to specific characters even when there is no real confusion — but does not raise 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.
"Smith uses a newly found typescript to trace the error"
"Hurley challenges Bennett's attribution using internal textual markers"
"Kerner argues Hemingway's dialogue irregularities were intentional"
The controversy surrounding the dialogue in "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" will never be fully cleared up; the one man who could have given a definitive answer died without feeling the need. It is unlikely he would have cleared up the issue even if alive, however. Beyond simply being against his character, it is this type of debate that keeps literary scholarship alive and keeps people reading, and for that Hemingway might even be grateful.
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