A Farewell To Arms – Ernest Hemingway, 1929 ★★★

Making the Case for a Subjective Classic

Some books carry associations that have nothing to do with their literary merits. So it is for me and A Farewell To Arms.

Ernest Hemingway’s sprawling tale of love and war was required reading in my final weeks of boarding school. For me, shellfire in Italy and a boozy convalescence became one with cinderblock dorm walls and muddy trails that stretched to and from my classes. Like Frederic Henry at mess hall I watched people I lived with vigorously rag on each other, sensing as he did that I would somehow come to love and miss these days, but wishing in that moment I was somewhere else.

In the classroom we were taught that familiar metaphor of Hemingway and the iceberg, that what he writes represents a thin wedge poking above the ocean’s surface, and what lies beneath becomes a vast unknown defined only by your imagination. This comports with my experience. I doubt my Farewell To Arms, splattered as it is across old memories of a school campus, is much like anyone else’s.

Is that what makes this book a classic? At risk of coming off hopelessly sentimental, I want to say yes.

Soldiers are constantly on the march in A Farewell To Arms: "...we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves."
Image from https://www.history.co.uk/italy-in-wwi

Hemingway does not fill in canvases. Even when he is on his game, which is often here, his choice of words feels less limited than strangled; his expression almost robotically terse:

The light had been dim in the room and when the shutters were opened it was bright sunlight and I looked out on a balcony and beyond were the tile roofs of houses and chimneys. I looked out over the tiled roofs and saw white clouds and the sky very blue.

As Hemingway’s second novel, A Farewell To Arms may be his purest demonstration of the iceberg principle in action. What else does it have going for it? I’m genuinely asking here, because I don’t know.

If I ignore its thin storyline, its one-dimensional characters, and those long deserty stretches where Hemingway does more typing than writing, I appreciate Farewell for its pleasures like the passage above and accept the fact it isn’t close in quality to The Sun Also Rises.

As a war novel, it’s mostly about the lulls between battles. As a romance, it expects more of a rooting interest in the male lover, Frederic Henry, than I can muster. But while it flows, as it does for several pages at a time with a strong running narrative or gripping commentary on the arbitrary nature of life, this book has the power to thrust me back into schoolboy mode, in awe and a little afraid of what I’m reading:

If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

Ernest Hemingway, recovering from wounds suffered under mortar fire while serving as an ambulance driver on the Italian front. His protagonist in A Farewell To Arms is also wounded, though the paths of author and subject diverge from there.
 Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Hemingway

When we meet Lieutenant Frederic Henry, it is 1916 and he drives ambulances for the Italian Army. His country, the United States, has yet to enter World War I. There is a winter pause in the fighting, and after some time of boozing and visiting whorehouses, Frederic follows his friend Rinaldi into a nearby town to meet nurse Catherine Barkley.

While not love at first sight, Frederic’s interest in Catherine is immediate, if not immediately returned. She has a lover in her past, a British soldier whose memory she is unable or unwilling to shake. “He didn’t have a sabre cut,” she tells Frederic. “They blew him all to bits.”

Catherine’s reserve melts before Frederic’s quiet persistence, until they are soon sexual partners if not quite lovers. Catherine talks about a long future together, while Frederic thinks he knows better:

I thought she was probably a little crazy. It was all right if she was. I did not care what I was getting into. This was better than going every evening to the house for officers where the girls climbed all over you and put your cap on backward as a sign of affection between their trips upstairs with brother officers. I knew I did not love Catherine Barkley nor had any idea of loving her. This was a game, like bridge, in which you said things instead of playing cards.

Modern objections to A Farewell To Arms often center on Catherine. Feminist academics see her as a fatally weak character, and they have a point, especially once Catherine gives herself over completely to Frederic: “There isn’t any me. I’m you. Don’t make up a separate me.”

Agnes von Kurowsky was a nurse Hemingway met while recovering in Milan, the model for Catherine Barkley. Unlike Catherine, Agnes rejected Hemingway, claiming to be in love with an Italian, though she wound up marrying another American.
Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnes_von_Kurowsky

Underneath the modernist groans, I think a key to accepting Catherine’s character lies in this very quote, of her representing a figment of a male imagination. It may be Hemingway’s own, as he was left heartbroken in real life by the rejection of a nurse he met recovering from war wounds who became Catherine’s model. Or she may be more broadly interpreted as a feminine figure of unconditional acceptance that all heterosexual men seek at some level but very few ever find.

Whatever the case, Catherine’s lack of independent agency leaves a serious hole in the final section of the novel, where Frederic and a pregnant Catherine flee to Switzerland so Frederic won’t be shot for desertion. There is no interpersonal drama here, just Catherine’s meek acceptance of whatever Frederic wants while we wait for her to deliver their baby, an act Hemingway overtly hints will end badly:

When there was a good day we had a splendid time and we never had a bad time. We knew the baby was very close now and it gave us both a feeling as though something were hurrying us and we could not lose any time together.

There is a heady, fatalistic romanticism to moments like this which lend A Farewell To Arms a certain subjective power, augmented by the many sexual liaisons Hemingway describes. Even if this material, couched as it is, went way over my head as a student, I could not but sense some of the carnal passion Hemingway wrote of and wish it for my own. I think this helped the book score as well as it did with contemporary readers.

A first-edition dust jacket. One of only five novels by Hemingway published in his lifetime, A Farewell To Arms transformed the young author from critical favorite to commercial success.
Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Farewell_to_Arms

What pulled me in as a high-schooler and remains the signature takeaway from reading the novel today is something even more elemental, the proximity to tragedy underlying everyday life. It’s not the war itself, but the familiarity with death and dying that draws you in.

We know Frederic is safe from the war, not only from the first-person narrative voice but because he tells us so: “It seemed no more dangerous to me myself than war in the movies.” He will get wounded, and shot at several times, but for him the wounds of war will be less physical than observed:

…I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity.

Three years later, Hollywood adapted this as an Oscar-nominated film starring Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes, really underlining that anti-war idea to the point of the actors mawkishly intoning the word “Peace” at its finale. Yet the novel as a whole is no work of pacifism. Rather, it presents war as part of the human condition, regrettable but unavoidable.

Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes in A Farewell To Arms (1932). Though made before the Hays Code stiffened Hollywood movie morality, the film does make sure the cohabiting lovers get married, something they talk about but never do in the novel.
Image from https://www.film-foundation.org/hfpa-farewell

Even when he is in a train, limping from his knee wound, Frederic must be ready to fight to keep his seat. Conflict is everywhere: Rinaldi whines over losing Catherine to Frederic and Frederic kills a sergeant for running away rather than lending a hand, a wanton shooting which leaves him curiously unbothered. “That’s one thing I can always remember. I killed that – of a sergeant.”

That’s the iceberg principal, of course. We the readers can only guess at the true impact of the moment on the man who did the killing.

Unlike other celebrated novels set in World War I, like All Quiet On The Western Front or August 1914, the war itself is mostly in the background. It dominates only the third of the novel’s five sections, where Frederic, recovered from his wounds, is plunged into headlong retreat after the disastrous Battle of Caporetto of late 1917. Frederic is nearly executed by angry Italian troops, being as he is an officer and thus guilty of desertion, or at least fair game to be shot for same.

The Battle of Caporetto saw the Italian army go from advancing on the Alps to regrouping behind the Piave River near Venice in just a few weeks. German troops reinforcing their Austrian allies made the difference. A Farewell To Arms depicts the fallout.
Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Caporetto

After that Frederic declares “a separate peace” for himself, gets some civilian clothes from a friendly musician, and reconnects with Catherine. There is still a lot of book left, but for me all that follows is anti-climactic, all the way to a tragic yet predictable end.

A Farewell To Arms has a curiously deflated quality from first to last, yet I would not characterize it as depressing so much as lived-in. Hemingway was a master of mood, who never seems to stretch to make his points, even if it leaves one puzzled:

The head was mine, and the inside of the belly. It was very hungry in there. I could feel it turn over on itself. The head was mine, but not to use, not to think with, only to remember and not too much remember.

These words come off silly in isolation. Yet when I was a young teen getting ready to escape boarding school, I found there and elsewhere in A Farewell To Arms a kind of understanding that life was cruel but need not be without compensations when lived bravely enough. Though it does ramble and pose, the novel stands up for what it is, and challenges you to draw different conclusions, enough to be a classic for me.