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“A Very Short Story” 1924

Commentary

What struck me about this Hemingway story was the way he presented it:  a series of facts, this happened and then that happened, as a reporter might have written it.  Mostly simple declarative sentences, dispassionate in tone, without any dialogue, descriptive adjectives or adverbs. We know the soldier and Luz, second-hand only, through an objective third person narrator. And yet, I was very moved at the end. How did Hemingway accomplish this?

     What he did give us, through carefully selected, external details, was enough background to fully appreciate the characters and their situation.  We learn quickly that “he” was a seriously wounded soldier (Padua, 1918), “They carried him up onto the roof,” but the atmosphere was tranquil, “There were chimney swifts in the sky” and that he had a female companion, Luz, who “was cool and fresh in the hot night.”  She was his nurse, for she “stayed on night duty for three months” and assisted in his operation when he “went under the anesthetic holding tight to himself…” Later, when back in the ward, he “got on crutches to take the temperatures so Luz would not have to get up from the bed.” The nature of their relationship, mutually caring, unselfish, is being created by the surrounding events, not their feelings.

     The next paragraph introduces more significance to their relationship, a greater depth.  The narrator tells us they went to the church, praying together, wanting to be married, afraid of losing what they had.  When they had to separate, Luz wrote him “many letters,” about “how much she loved him “and “how it was impossible to get along without him.”  This was to be a life-long love, not a very short story.

     After the armistice, the plan was that he would go home and get a job and they could marry.  But Luz’s response dramatically overturned the plan: she would not come home until he had a job.” That must have been devastating for the soldier. But we’re informed only of the outcome, a quarrel on the train, a perfunctory kiss, and, as close to emotion as we’ve read, “He felt sick about saying goodbye like that.”

     The story winds down with the narrator reading, matter-of-factly, a subsequent letter to the soldier from Luz, relaying that she has become involved with a major and considers their affair a “boy and girl love.” She’s going to marry the major in the Spring and she’s sorry, but “it was for the best.” 

We’re not told about his reaction.  But we are told about the two of them some months later.  The major did not marry Luz “ in the Spring, or any other time, “and she wrote a letter to the soldier which was never answered.  And the soldier, a short time later, “contracted gonorrhea from a sales girl in a loop department store while riding in a taxicab through Lincoln Park.”  From the sublime to the tawdry.

     Without any first-hand expression or description, I felt terrible for the soldier. The relevance of the details, told objectively, gave us the information we needed to feel the characters’ humanity.  Our imaginations filled the voids and absences and we responded with our own emotions.