A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway has been in the air lately because he’s the subject of Ken Burn’s latest documentary broadcast on PBS. I didn’t watch the documentary but knowing about it did get me thinking about this American author who I actually haven’t read much. Apparently I wasn’t the only one thinking that way because the Hemingway shelf at my local bookstore was pretty empty. I read The Sun Also Rises in college, and The Old Man and the Sea in high school. Those novels, published in 1926 and 1952, respectively, were Hemingway’s first and last. He won the Pulitzer prize for The Old Man and the Sea. He won the Nobel Prize in 1954. He was born in 1899 and died in 1961. This novel, his second, was published in 1929.

The setting is World War I. Frederic Henry is an American serving in the ambulance core with the Italian army, fighting the Austrians and later the Germans. Like The Portrait of a Lady this is a novel about an American in Italy. There’s a joke early on where one of the Italians is confused whether the narrator’s name is Frederic Henry or Henry Frederic. Mostly the soldiers call him Tenente, “Lieutenant.” I’ll call him Henry. He tells his story in first person, so the novel stays tightly focused on him. Hemingway bases the story on some of his own experiences in the war, but he borrows other episodes he heard about, and invents, also. It’s not autobiographical.

We learn, vaguely, that Henry had been in Rome studying to become an architect when the war started. He speaks fluent Italian. Family back home sends him money, which comes in handy later on. He never tells what prompted him to enlist. He says he was a “fool” at one point. Apparently the architect idea wasn’t working out, he never mentions it again or shows any interest in architecture in the rest of the novel. The novel begins in the middle of the war, late summer 1916 and ends before the war ends, in 1918. It’s a war story and also a love story.

The novel’s 41 short chapters are grouped into five, roughly equal, “Books” which track the location of the action. As in War and Peace, Hemingway’s story alternates between war episodes and scenes away from the war.

Book One begins in a little town in northeast Italy called Gorizia. I found it helpful to have a map of Italy available as Hemingway is very specific about the locations. We meet Henry and his friend and roommate, an Italian named Rinaldi, an army surgeon. Henry is not a doctor; his job is to manage the ambulance fleet, overseeing mechanics and drivers and organizing the transport of wounded soldiers from the front lines back to the hospitals. The men drink and joke. There’s a Priest that the men tease for his celibacy. There’s a joke about masturbation on page seven. Rinaldi has met a pretty nurse at the little local hospital named Catherine Barkley and hopes to woo her. He brings Henry to the hospital and instead it’s Catherine and Henry who start a romance and quickly fall in love. Catherine had loved and nearly married a boy earlier, killed in the war, so she’s vulnerable and a little overly-emotional to start. Book One ends with Henry sent to the front. The Italian position comes under shelling from the Austrians. Henry and his crew hunker down but are hit. One of his men dies in front of him. Henry is wounded and evacuated.

Book Two tells of Henry’s recovery at a hospital in Milan. Catherine has been reassigned to the same hospital so they continue and deepen their romance. Henry’s recovery takes several months. Catherine become pregnant. They begin to think of themselves as married although they decide to wait until after the war and when they can get away from Italy before they make it legal. When Henry’s injuries have healed he gets sent back to the war.

Up to this point the novel has been fairly calm. There’s only a little war action at the end of Book One before there’s the long section at the hospital and the romance between Henry and Catherine. In Book Three the story becomes dramatic and dangerous. Henry is back with his unit only a single day before he is sent up to the front. Then he’s only at the front for a day or so when the Italians order a retreat. At first the retreat is orderly, but it soon becomes a mess. The soldiers are joined by villagers also abandoning the territory. Too many people clog too few roads. It rains and the roads turn to mud and cars get stuck. There’s always the threat of the Germans shelling from the rear. Henry, in charge of three cars and his crew decide to veer off the main road in hopes of making better time on a side road. They bring with them a couple of Italian girls they picked up and two sergeants riding with them. And then there’s disaster. One of the cars gets stuck. The two sergeants disobey Henry’s order to help dig it out and walk away. Henry orders them to stop; they don’t. He shoots at them, killing one. Then Henry’s group is shot at, by Italians fleeing in front of them who mistake Henry and his group for the enemy. One of Henry’s men is killed. He gives some money to the girls and sends them off. Henry and the last two men find a farmhouse to spend the night, but another of Henry’s men steals away, thinking he’d have more luck being taken prisoner by the Germans than under friendly-fire from the Italians. After walking for miles, Henry and his last man are finally able to catch up with the Italian evacuees. They join a mass of people crossing one of the few bridges not destroyed. As they get to the opposite end of the bridge, Henry is recognized as an officer and pulled out of line. He is accused with other officers of abandoning their regiments. The officers are being summarily executed. Henry runs away. He leaps into the river and manages to hold his breath and cling to a log until the current has swept him away. He nearly drowns. Downstream he crawls out of the river. He’s able to stow away on a passing train that carries him into town. He’s safe now, but a deserter liable to be arrested. He says he’s done with the war. A friend gives him some civilian clothes. He learns the name of the town where Catherine is living.

Book Four reconnects Henry with Catherine in a little town in northwestern Italy called Stresa on Lake Maggiore. The lake extends northward into Switzerland. A friend learns that Henry is going to be arrested the next morning so Henry and Catherine pack their bags in the middle of the night and borrow the friend’s rowboat. For eight hours, in the dark, in the rain, Henry rows himself and pregnant Catherine northward through Lake Maggiore into Switzerland. When they come ashore in Switzerland they’re briefly detained, but he’s American, she’s British, they have passports, and money, so they’re given visas and allowed to stay.

The novel could end here. The war story is over, although not the war itself. Henry never returns to the war and the war is barely mentioned after this. And the love story, too, could end here with the couple free, and together, with a hopeful future ahead of them. But there’s one more book.

Book Five takes place in the Swiss town called Montreaux. Henry and Catherine stay at a little inn, just the two of them. They enjoy each other and the little town. Life, and the novel, is very calm again and the war and the adventure feels far away. Fall turns to winter, then early spring. It’s March, 1918. The time comes for Catherine to give birth. They travel to the hospital in Lausanne. But it’s a difficult delivery. Hemingway details Henry’s back and forth trips between the hospital and the cafe where he has breakfast, and then lunch. The baby won’t come so they decide on a caesarean. The baby dies. Catherine hemorrhages and she dies, too. And there the novel ends.

About that ending. Apparently Hemingway worked over it indecisively quite a bit. The edition I read (The Hemingway Library Edition) attaches an Appendix including 47 different endings, some just fragments, that Hemingway left. In some drafts the baby lives but Hemingway rejected that possibility feeling that would make for the beginning of another story rather than an end to the story he was telling. The novel was serialized in Scribner’s magazine before it was published as a book and the magazine ending includes a couple of final paragraphs in which Henry briefly mentions what he did immediately following Catherine’s death and sums up what happened to several minor characters later in their lives. Hemingway sent the draft of his novel with that ending to his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald and Fitzgerald sent the manuscript back with a lot of notes so there’s also an alternate ending called “The Fitzgerald ending.” Fitzgerald recommended taking some short philosophical passages from earlier in the novel and building an ending from those. Hemingway tried it that way, but rejected that, too. I think the ending he eventually published, cold and abrupt, is the stronger.

Hemingway’s idiosyncratic style is so much a part of reading him that I should say something. The Hemingway style has become a cliche. At first, it’s almost annoying. He’s probably more known now through parody than through his own writing, so it felt like I was sitting down to a sophisticated joke rather than a serious novel. Here’s the first paragraph:

“In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and 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.”

But very soon your reading ear gets used to it and the style becomes really beautiful. It feels clean, and dry. It’s deadpan. Henry almost never confesses to feeling anything, either fear or pain or sorrow. He says several times, in dialogue, that he loves Catherine. But mostly, events happen; Henry reports them; he moves on. There’s no regret or revulsion after he shoots the derelict Sergeant, just the stark horror of it. By refusing to indulge his own emotions the reader is allowed to feel our own responses for ourselves. I like it. It’s quite affecting.

In a few places Hemingway’s style comes close to Gertrude Stein in the use of simple phrases connected by “and”, the use of rhythm, and repetition. Here’s an example from Book One when he’s back with the troops after meeting Catherine but imagining he’s meeting her at a hotel, a single sentence.

“Maybe she would pretend that I was her boy that was killed and we would go in the front door and the porter would take off his cap and I would stop at the concierge’s desk and ask for the key and she would stand by the elevator and then we would get in the elevator and it would go up very slowly clicking at all the floors and then our floor and the boy would open the door and stand there and she would step out and I would step out and we would walk down the hall and I would put the key in the door and open it and go in and then take down the telephone and ask them to send a bottle of capri bianca in a silver bucket full of ice and you would hear the ice against the pail coming down the corridor and the boy would knock and I would say leave it outside the door please.” (page 32)

But Hemingway’s prose never leaves sense entirely behind. Stein is interested in playing with words as abstract pieces of sound sometimes only incidentally tied to meaning. Hemingway always links word to thought, taking most freedom in his prose only at the times, as in his fantasy above, when the thinking itself is the most free. He’s like Picasso or Braque using cubist technique to show us that seeing isn’t always as straightforward as a still picture in one-point perspective, that our thoughts, particularly when we’re excited, or in love, sometimes run on and over each other and that language could do the same.