On “A Farewell to Arms”
“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.”
-Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
I started reading this book on December 21, 2022 at 430am as I waited to pass through security at JFK Airport. We were en route to visit family in California and I carried the book in the back pocket of my jeans, reading wherever I went - hotel rooms, restaurants, buses, cars, and flights. I finished reading at 9am on New Years Day. I wasn’t sure what to expect when I grabbed it from my bookshelf to take on this trip. I’d read The Nick Adams Stories in 2020 and back in high school, I’d read The Snows of Kilimanjaro and The Old Man & the Sea. A Farewell to Arms completely captured me - it shocked me, brought me to tears, made me laugh, and taught me why Hemingway is one of the greats.
Published in September 1929 when Ernest Hemingway was just 30 years old, A Farewell to Arms became his first bestseller, cementing his status as one of the great American writers. It was serialized by Scribner’s Magazine from May to October 1929. The June issue was banned by the Boston police department for being too salacious.
The novel is a first-person story told by Lieutenant Frederic Henry, an American medic in the Italian army during World War I. Frederic meets an English nurse, Catherine Barkley, and a romance begins. Frederic is wounded and sent to a hospital in Milan where he and Catherine fall in love. Catherine becomes pregnant. Frederic is sent back to the front and evacuates after the Italian army’s defeat at the Battle of Caporetto. Frederic escapes the killing of officers after the defeat. He makes his way to Milan, hoping to find Catherine, but she has gone to Stressa. They reunite in Stressa and Frederic decides he is done with the war. To escape Italian police who want to arrest Frederic for desertion, the couple row a boat to Switzerland and live there peacefully for several months until Catherine goes into labor. Catherine delivers a still-born baby and dies during childbirth.
In Hemingway’s trademark style, learned from his days as a journalist, the book is sparse in description, dialogue and narrative but full of life. As the story crescendos, Hemingway reveals how the horrific events of the war shape and change the characters. The novel has a subtle complexity. Hemingway manages to simply put into words those indescribably tragic and beautiful moments of war, death, love, and life.
Shortly after finishing high school, Hemingway hoped to join the U.S. Army fighting in World War I. He was rejected for poor eyesight and instead joined the Red Cross as an ambulance driver. He was sent to the front in June 1918 and by July, he was wounded and sent to a hospital in Milan. While there, he fell in love with his nurse, Agnes. Hemingway returned home with plans to marry Agnes, who was almost 8 years older. She wrote him a letter saying she cannot marry him.
Hemingway began to write an autobiographical novel based on the experience, but abandoned it. He didn’t start writing what would become A Farewell to Arms until almost ten years later. He finished the novel in 15 months, writing while traveling abroad and within the United States. He rewrote the ending 47 times (his drafts can be found in this edition). Ken Burns’s series Hemingway describes how at age 30 Hemingway ‘had survived his war wounds, married twice, fathered two children, published five books and became the most famous writer in the United States.’
Until next time,
KW
