What is the old life of an old man in Ernest Hemingway's "A Clean, Well Lighted Place"?

Like most of s
stories, A Clean, Well Lighted Place is full of dialogue and not much summary or description.
Hemingway writes in a very plain, spare style that leaves more to the imagination of the reader
than most writers would dare to do.

In A Clean, Well Lighted Place the
reader is not given much information about the old man. He is sitting at a table drinking
brandy. We learn from the waiters conversation that he comes in very frequently and often stays
until he is drunk. They dont want him to get drunk because sometimes when he does so he leaves
without paying.

When one of the waiters says he wants the old man to leave so
that he (the waiter) can close up and go home to be where his wife is, we learn that the old man
once had a wife also. This is actually the only fact we get about the old mans old
life.

The implication, based on the waiters conversation, is that the old man
is lonely because he no longer has a wife to go home to and that he likes the caf© more than he
would like a bar. We do find out that he recently tried to commit suicide by hanging, but that
was not part of his old life since it happened recently.

Hemingway actually
seems more intent on describing the older waiter than the old man customer. We see that he has
compassion for the old man, and that makes him a sympathetic character. However, we do not learn
anything about the old waiters old life, only that he too has no one to go home to and suffers
from insomnia.