Title: A Farewell To Arms
Rating: 3 Stars
Hopefully, I’m about done with my World War I phase. I’ve seen two film versions of All Quiet on the Western Front, read the novel, and read an exhaustive history of WWI (from the perspective of the Central Powers). Along with All Quiet on the Western Front, A Farewell to Arms is considered one of the classic novels coming out of this period.
Before I start, as someone who has been reading semi-seriously now for coming up on forty years, how my reading tastes have changed is interesting to me. For instance, in my younger days, I was a huge Chuck Palahniuk fan. I devoured Fight Club, Survivor, Invisible Monsters, and Choke when they came out. I was all into transgressive fiction. There did reach a point where it just didn’t do anything for me. I continued to read them, but with nowhere near the sense of excitement and joy that I used to. I started to lose interest around Snuff and I finally tuned out after Damned.
Similarly, I was a huge fan of Ernest Hemingway. I’ve read The Old Man and the Sea and For Whom the Bells Toll several times over the years. In particular, I was amazed by the crisp succinctness of The Old Man and the Sea. Basically a novella, it feels as if Hemingway sweated over every single word. Not a single word in it appears wasted. Every word has a purpose.
Even though I’ve read Hemingway many times, it has now been at least fifteen years since I’ve last read one of his novels. I decided to give A Farewell to Arms a shot. A Farewell to Arms shot him to fame. The Sun Also Rises cemented his status as the voice of the lost generation. Having said that, A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises are not my favorite Hemingway novels. In fact, that’s one of the reasons why I now chose A Farewell to Arms to read. I’ve only read it once and that was probably over thirty years ago. I was hoping that I was just too unsophisticated or inattentive when I read it the first time.
Set during World War I in 1917, it’s the story of Lieutenant Frederic Henry. The first plot is Henry’s service in the Italian army as an ambulance driver. Many Americans volunteered for other nation’s armies in the years before the US entered the war. The second plot is a love affair with Catherine Barkley, an English nurse.
His time near the Italian front is noteworthy. Here you see a different view of the war. This is not the view of the historian dispassionately discussing the causes and effects of the war. This is not even the view of Erich Maria Remarque and his German frontline soldiers grimly fighting in the trenches. Henry is an American fighting in a war in which his country, at least at this point, has no stake. Not only that, but he’s not a frontline participant. His job is to drive an ambulance in to a near frontline position, load up the wounded, and then drive them to a hospital in the rear. You don’t have the immediacy fear of life and death of the trench soldier.
Even so, danger is present. In an Austrian attack, Henry and his fellow ambulance drivers are waiting in a dugout for the injured to begin appearing. A mortar shot hits the dugout, killing one of the drivers and severely injuring Henry. Henry has to be evacuated himself to a hospital.
Due to the severity of his knee injury, Henry has to spend months convalescing. This is another side to the war not often seen. Due to his injury, he’s treated as a hero. This feels undeserved to him because he was doing nothing heroic at the point that he was injured. Eventually he recovers enough to make his way back to his ambulance unit.
Once there, he notices that morale has changed. Before, the Italians seemed confident of victory. Now they seem resigned to defeat. Sure enough, the Austrians attack and the Italians fall back. Trying to escape the clogged roads of the chaotic retreat, Henry tries to find another path for his ambulances. Unfortunately, they all get stuck. When two of the Italian soldiers refuse to try to dig out the ambulances, Henry shoots and kills one of them. That is the only shot in anger he fires in the war.
The Italian military police, looking for scapegoats, begin to shoot officers that are part of the retreat. Henry has to hide to evade capture and then has to figure out a way to make a desperate escape to the neutral Switzerland.
As all of this is happening, he meets and falls in love with Catherine Barkley. At first resistant to Henry because of the recent death of her fiancé in the war, she very quickly swoons in love over Henry. As he leaves to go off to the front (where he gets injured), they pledge their eternal love. Once injured, Henry ends up at the same hospital that Barkley works. Their love affair immediately recommences. After some months, Barkley discovers herself to be pregnant. Even though not formally married, they rejoice at their future life together. Later, after he manages to escape from the Italian military police, they get together again, enjoy great happiness, and manage to escape to Switzerland together. There they enjoy their time together until she goes into labor. After that point, the novel descends into tragedy.
This novel is highly autobiographical. In 1917, at the age of eighteen, after being rejected by the US army for poor eyesight, Hemingway did go to Italy to volunteer as an ambulance driver. He was seriously injured by mortar fire. He spent six months recuperating at a hospital. There he met and fell in love with a nurse. However, here fiction diverged from reality because, when he went back to the US, he fully expected the nurse to follow him. Instead she got engaged to an Italian officer. It was a rejection that had a profound influence upon Hemingway.
Given that, it’s probably not surprising that the military action was grounded in reality. After all, he lived it. His fellow comrades in arms displayed a diverse set of beliefs ranging from socialism to patriotism to defeatism. He effectively captured the life of a soldier that was not on the front line but in close proximity to it.
Reading it again, it was the love story that fell apart for me. Catherine Barkley barely qualifies as a two dimensional character. She is the meek, servile, and eternally adoring woman that is the dream of every incel. She apparently only lives for Henry and wants nothing more than to keep him happy. She worships at the feet of her idol Henry. Spoiler alert for a nearly 100 year old novel, during her labor, her child is stillborn and she dies hemorrhaging blood. As she dies, she apologizes to Henry for the trouble that she is causing.
I’m not sure if this is some kind of writer’s revenge on the woman that actually jilted him during this time, but I found their relationship tedious if not actually ridiculous.
In fairness to Hemingway, he did have trouble coming up with an ending for this novel. He claimed that he wrote 39 different endings, but an edition was published that actually included 47 alternate endings. I have not seen any of these alternate endings, but I would have to guess that at least one of them was better than the one that Hemingway landed on.
So, fair to say, although I did enjoy sections of the book, several parts of the book did not impress me. This makes me a bit nervous. I still have great feelings for To Whom the Bell Tolls and even more so for The Old Man and the Sea.
Do I dare re-read those?
dorkenstein 