In an essay published in The New York Times in 1989 (incidentally, the year I was born), Ken Kesey recounts a writing lesson he once received from short story writer James B. Hall in a fiction writing class at the University of Oregon, a lesson he described (in a somewhat odd phrase) as “one of the keyholes of literature.” The class was reading a Hemingway short story, “Soldier’s Home,” about a young man named Krebs who, as the title suggests, returns home from World War I and struggles to readjust. According to Kesey, Hall pointed to a single line towards the end of the text, in a scene where Krebs’s mother is talking to him about finding a job and telling him she’s worried and praying for him to get better: “Krebs looked at the bacon fat hardening on his plate.” This line, Hall argued was the key to the whole story.
“That’s what the story is about! That one line is the key. That line sounds the note for all the rest of the story. The whole composition would be in disharmony without that key to tune it. See?”
Kesey writes that this moment was a revelation for him. “That key unlocked for me the door to the resounding hall of real literature. A couple of short stories won me a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to the famous Wallace Stegner writing class at Stanford.”
I was fascinated by this account, apocryphal or exaggerated though it might be, especially given that Kesey’s revelation had apparently been profound enough to cause him to win a Stegner Fellowship just “a couple of short stories” later. So what was it that Kesey had seen in that class about Hemingway’s story? What was “the keyhole” that he’d suddenly understood? I decided to take a look at “Soldier’s Home” to see if I could unlock the secret myself.
The line that Hall identifies didn’t stand out to me on my first read. It felt simply like a small bit of description to break up the dialogue, a vivid detail that flows in a nice rhythm, but otherwise nothing particularly significant. If anything, the emotional heart of the story was more evidently a few lines later, the climax of the narrative, when in the course of that same conversation Krebs’s mother asks (rhetorically she thinks) whether he loves her and Krebs replies with a sharp and sudden “No.” His mother cries and Krebs apologizes, but the damage is done, since Krebs had of course inadvertently revealed the truth, that war had utterly desensitized him to even his mother.
But then, going back, I began to understand how Hall and Kesey were correct. In the whole conversation between Krebs and his mother, which takes up the last half of the story, that image of the bacon fat hardening in his plate is really the only striking visual detail. Everything else is either a line of dialogue or the kind of reserved and clinical description Hemingway is famous for. Thus, the line is more significant than I first realized. Moreover, it comes just after Krebs’s mother gives the following speech:
“I know the temptations you must have been exposed to. I know how weak men are. I know what your own dear grandfather, my own father, told us about the Civil War and I have prayed for you. I pray for you all day long, Harold.”
Thus, Krebs staring at the hardening bacon fat isn’t just a detail designed to create a rhythmic pause—it’s a response to his mother telling him that men are weak and reminding him of the longer history of what war had done to his family. Beyond that, the hardening fat can be read as a symbol for Krebs’s own hardening, something we see play out a few lines later when he tells his mother he doesn’t love her. And once we understand that the line is a symbol for Krebs’s emotions, it becomes clear that Hall was right in his analysis: this line is the key to the story’s central emotion, as well as the note that brings the story into its tragic harmony—the image of hardening bacon fat is after all tonally consistent with the bleak and melancholy note of the rest of the story.
So the revelation Kesey experienced, then, the “keyhole of literature” that he understood in that Oregon classroom, was that in a good story there has to be a single line that encapsulates the central emotion through tone. This makes sense, since short stories often build to a stark, sharp emotional climax—and once I understood this, I began seeing these lines in every short story I read: single lines, often towards the end of a story, that captured its tone and emotional core. Sometimes, such a line occurred just at the story’s structural climax. In Jorge Luis Borges short story “The Secret Miracle” (which I’ve written about in detail on the blog before), the key line is clearly the one that describes how Hladik composes his play in his head in the moment before his execution, when time has miraculously stopped for a year: “Painstakingly, motionlessly, secretly, he forged in time his grand invisible labyrinth.”
In other stories, meanwhile, the line occurs after the climax. In Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find (a short story frequently taught in creative writing classes) the key line that captures the story’s dark and unsettling tone comes right after the Misfit shoots the grandmother: “Then he put his gun down on the ground and took off his glasses and began to clean them.” Three simple actions linked only with the word “and,” chilling in how methodical and anticlimactic they feel. Similarly, in Tobias Wolff’s Bullet in the Brain (another famous creative writing class story), the key line has to be the one in the final paragraph, after the scene has already shifted to the baseball field of Anders’s memory, when Wolff comes back to the bullet to remind us of its inevitable trajectory: “In the end it will do its work and leave the troubled skull behind, dragging its comet’s tail of memory and hope and talent and love into the marble hall of commerce.”
Of course some might argue for a different line in each of these stories, and perhaps even in Hemingway’s “Solider’s Home.” But that really isn’t Hall or Kesey’s point. Instead, what’s important is simply that there is a line that readers (and writers) feel has this function, a line that acts as the emotional and tonal key to the story and without which the whole piece would fall to “disharmony.” It’s a deceptively simple idea once you realize it, and perhaps we all unconsciously strive for this effect in every story we write. But after seeing this concept crop up in so many short stories I read, I feel a little like Kesey, like I’ve had a profound revelation about literature. And so, every time I read a story now, I look for a key line of the kind that Kesey describes—and whenever I find it, I feel like I’ve unlocked something, which is a wonderful thing to feel when reading literature.