A Farewell to Arms

As a byproduct of a completely insane school assignment Jason has received through his online Freshman Composition course, I am frantically reading three of Hemingway's works in order to help him produce a final paper that was assigned when the students had only a week to produce it. Personally I very much resent the fact that the professor chose to give the students a difficult and complicated task in so short a time. Yes, I know it was a truncated course being completed in only seven weeks instead of a full semester, but in that case I think it behooves the instructor to recognize this fact and not give out an assignment that is nearly impossible for students who after all have other things going on in their lives to complete.

So, I am lending a major hand this time around, and I have just finished reading A Farewell to Arms. For me, not Jason, this assignment may be a blessing in disguise, because I never read this book before. I seem to recall reading something by Hemingway years ago but now I have the opportunity to read three Hemingway novels at breakneck speed.

I did see the movie a few years ago but it did not convey Hemingway's writing style, nor did it give me the opportunity to see behind the words. I have to say I am immensely grateful to Hemingway for forever changing the style in which American (and I daresay international as well) novels are written. I find the novels of the nineteenth century going backwards in time to be cumbersome, overwritten and flowery to the point of being nauseating, with a few exceptions. Hemingway introduced the stripped-down modern lean and mean writing that is so much easier to read and read quickly. In fact, his style is a great help in making it through these novels in so ridiculously short a time.

A Farewell to Arms is a tragic love story set during World War I, in Italy and later in Switzerland. Against the backdrop of the war on the Italian front, the lovers Frederick Henry and Catherine Barkley meet and begin their doomed love affair. At first Henry is a man without direction, and without love for any human being on the planet. He spends his leave time getting drunk and playing with prostitutes in the officers' brothel. He knows this is not a worthy pursuit, and he longs for a more disciplined life. He's different from the other men in that he does not taunt the priest with dirty jokes making reference to the priest's celibacy, but instead admires the part of the country that the priest comes from.

When he first meets Catherine he simply sees her as a better alternative to the prostitutes and tries pretty quickly to seduce her, but she slaps his face. Then she apologizes. So he knows he may get somewhere with his seduction as she does not stay outraged at him for making a pass. At this time Catherine is missing her dead fiance who was killed in the war, and for a short while she engages Henry in a brief fantasy of being that lost love. The first time they declare love to each other they both know they are lying, but it seems to satisfy something in her heart.

For a while Henry has thought that the war "has nothing to do with him" and that he will never be killed in it. He is in charge of a group of ambulance drivers and has not faced much danger yet. That abruptly changes as he is sitting in a dugout enjoying macaroni and cheese and rusty tasting wine with his companions. Before his eyes, one is killed by a shell, and Henry himself is gravely wounded. He's brought to the hospital and Catherine is an assistant nurse so she is able to visit him on the night shift.

Henry realizes he is falling for her and she seems to sense his change in attitude also because she takes to making love with him in his hospital bed. Others at the hospital cover up for her so she won't be found out and dismissed. Henry is sent to Milan for his recuperation and he has a bit of an idyllic time with Catherine, staying up all night to eat, talk and make love, and then sleeping into the morning.

We don't learn much about the history of either of them. Hemingway writes his novel with very spare prose, very spare dialogue. He gives us few details about their former lives other than that Catherine had a fiance who was killed. Henry has relatives in the States but they are apparently not important enough to him to warrant his writing to them on a regular basis. Hemingway's writing is very much attuned to the five senses, showing his audience exactly what they would experience if they were on the scene. His style appears to have come from his background as a journalist. He gives the reader who, what, when, where and how, but he often does not spell out why. Only a few of Henry's internal thoughts and emotions make it to the printed page; we are often left to decide what he must be feeling, even when Catherine dies and he says saying goodbye to her was like saying goodbye to a statue.

Henry returns to the front when his leg wounds have healed but by then the war on the Italian front has taken a turn for the worse. The Italian army is in retreat and his little group of ambulance drivers is broken up by death and by the confusion of the retreat. Loyalty does not extend beyond each unit's little group, which is shown when the engineer sergeant refuses to cut brush so the ambulance can move forward, saying that Henry is not his superior officer and he doesn't have to obey him. Instead he runs and Henry shoots him down without any emotion, and leaves the body behind as he and his men move on. This same callousness comes back to haunt him when he is arrested by the battle police for having become separated from his men, and is almost shot as a "deserter" from his officer's post because he has lost them in the confusion of the retreat. The battle police are just as callous toward the officers they are shooting as he was toward the engineer sergeant he shoots down.

Henry escapes from his captors and runs away to find Catherine. She agrees to go away with him and after one night of lovemaking they learn he is about to be arrested, so they flee by boat to Switzerland. Henry has known for some time that Catherine is pregnant by him, and in fact Catherine's friend, nurse Ferguson, is quite angry at Henry for getting her pregnant. But Catherine is unconventional and plays by her own rules, and she does not care that she is having a child out of wedlock, nor does she press Henry to marry her. In fact at first when he says he wants to marry her she does not wish to, saying she is already his wife (in her own mind). The only time she seems to care is later, near to her delivery time, when she agrees to marry Henry but says she will not marry him while her pregnancy is showing but will wait until after the child is delivered.

In Switzerland they enjoy a happy life together until Catherine's labor begins. Then it all falls apart. She is not able to deliver the baby by natural means and is in such pain that the doctors have supplied her with a gas mask to ease the pangs. A Caesarian is performed and the child is a large, robust-looking male, but he is stillborn. Henry does not seem to even realize this at first but when he learns his son never even took a first breath he seems pretty much unaffected. His only fear is that Catherine may die. And in fact she does.

Although Henry has to be heartbroken, Hemingway keeps the final pages of his book in a strictly realistic and sensory tone. Henry describes his last look at his dead lover as being like saying goodbye to a statue. He doesn't talk to her or openly grieve. Probably he is in shock and is not able to fully react to his loss yet.

Catherine's death is foreshadowed in several places. Ferguson, or Fergy, Catherine's friend, says that people don't get married, they fight or die. She warns Henry that he'd better not get Catherine in trouble and give her a "war baby." Catherine has an irrational fear of the rain and when pressed for her explanation, says that sometimes she sees herself dead in it, or sees her beloved Henry dead. She also mentions to Henry that the doctor has told her to keep the baby small (by not drinking too much beer) because her hips are narrow. When she does die, and Henry leaves the hospital, it is indeed raining.

Death hangs over everyone in this book even as it hangs over all living things. Even though Henry is the most obvious target because he is in the army as an ambulance driver and could easily be killed, it is ironically Catherine who dies in childbirth, in Switzerland where the couple fled in order to be "safe" from the war. But death is everywhere and there is no safe place to escape from death. All people can do is to meet it bravely, and Catherine does. While she is afraid of the rain, when she is really about to die she doesn't cry or get hysterical. She doesn't complain or mourn for what could have been. All she says is that it is a dirty trick.

Hemingway shows some of his own opinions through various personalities in the book. Henry is searching for something better than drunkenness and running around with prostitutes. He admires people who have self-discipline and are brave. He admires competence, doctors and anyone else who knows his job and does it well. He shows that Henry and Catherine do not have much religious feeling even though Catherine gives Henry a St. Anthony medal as he leaves to return to the front, and even though at the last when Catherine is dying Henry prays for her. Instead Catherine worships Henry and says he is her religion. This is similar to Juliet, who was also a doomed lover, saying that Romeo was the "god of her idolatry."

Both Henry and Catherine do not care about abstract ideals. They care about the people who matter to them; Catherine for Henry, and Henry for Catherine as well as his small group of ambulance drivers. Henry isn't a patriot and he doesn't even seem to know why he joined the Italian army (especially since he is American). As soon as his group is destroyed and scattered he has no more loyalty to the army anymore and he runs away to save himself from an unjust execution.

Hemingway was considered to be a part of the "Lost Generation," young people who lost their idealism as a result of the war. So he shows his characters as not caring much about conventional morality or religion but seeking some other set of "clean" values they can make their own. Probably his own experiences in the war, getting badly wounded and also being an ambulance driver in Italy, shaped some of the episodes in A Farewell to Arms.

Hemingway's attitudes to women were probably pretty standard at the time, however. He makes Catherine appear to be the ideal woman. She is beautiful, loving, sensual and heroic. She also puts her man at the center of her universe and promises to be and do whatever he wishes. Several times in the book she refers to herself as a "good girl" when she serves Henry or does as he desires. While Hemingway broke with tradition in a number of ways I think he would be pretty surprised by modern women and their independence.

As for men, Hemingway's manly ideal does what we would call "guy stuff" today. He hunts, fishes, fights, struggles to survive in a difficult world. A number of years ago there was a book written by the title, Real Men Don't Eat Quiche. Hemingway would have related to this. His characters, even Catherine for the most part, say very little about their emotions. There is almost no drawing on their psychological past. This is in keeping with the notion that men do not enjoy talking about their emotions or about relationships, but Hemingway considered this a good thing while today men are criticized by women for "not being in touch with their feelings."

Because of Hemingway's streamlined writing style I was able to read this in one day, but I recommend that the reader take his or her time and appreciate it more slowly than I did.