It might be that no writer since the author of Genesis has been so terse and yet so powerful as Ernest Hemingway. He is the undisputed master of the simple sentence, the polar opposite of Proust and Henry James (both in prose and in testosterone), and, I long thought, the sworn enemy of the comma. But it’s not that; Hemingway uses commas—though probably fewer than anyone this side of e. e. cummings—he simply saves them for effect, for fireworks, when he is going to let a sentence run and damn well you’re going to know it.
Now that I see what he’s up to, I love it when Papa goes for the haymaker instead of the jab. Take this sentence for an example:
I loved to take her hair down and she sat on the bed and kept very still, except suddenly she would dip down to kiss me while I was doing it, and I would take out the pins and lay them on the sheet and it would be loose and I would watch her while she kept very still and then take out the last two pins and it would all come down and she would drop her head and we would both be inside of it, and it was the feeling of inside a tent or behind a falls.
Beneath her hair? Like being behind a falls? The studmo Hemingway we normally think of would never write such a sentence (he wrote Men Without Women, after all), but it can’t be denied, it’s gorgeous and extremely poetic. (See, ladies, you can actually like Hemingway!) That’s why I think A Farewell to Arms, his tale of Frederic Henry, an American serving as an ambulance driver for Italy in World War I, and his affair with Catherine Barkley, a Scottish army nurse, is Hemingway’s finest novel: it’s his most feeling, most romantic, and even most tragic. (I always cry at the end—the last two times at a Philly bar and on the New York subway, respectively. I guess that puts me in the Proust/James testosterone camp.)
Florid passages like this don’t come very frequently, so to appreciate Hemingway fully you have to realize that the simplicity of most of his writing is like the simplicity of Italian or Japanese cuisine: yes, it seems effortless, but when you try to re-create it, your version doesn’t carry as much flavor. Like Plato, Aristotle, or Thomas Aquinas, Hemingway knows that to come across simply is not to be simple; there’s an art to confecting clarity, and one only creates the illusion of simplicity with bonsai-tree pruning.
One of his mottoes was “the first draft of anything is shit,” and he subjected his prose to such merciless shears because he was striving for something very particular: a certain “it” that he refers to in many of his books. (In his tour-de-force story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” the dying protagonist thinks of life: “He had been in it and he had watched it and it was his duty to write of it; but now he never would. … There wasn’t time, of course, but it seemed as though it telescoped so that you might put it all into one paragraph if you could get it right.”) Hemingway’s “it” is the reality deep in the story, that thing that language at its best hopes to point to but can’t corral. Many writers speak of this (remember Dante’s “so from the fact the telling doesn’t differ”?), but it’s not just representation that Hemingway is after. There’s also a deep, grave, majestic essence to reality—a capital-b Being—that is gestured toward in all of his best work. Hemingway lived a restless, migratory, self-ended, daredevil’s life, but I’m not convinced it was adventure he was after; I think it was this “it” that captivated and drove him. He knew it when he saw it, he knew it probably couldn’t be expressed, but he knew also that there was no point in expressing anything else.
Hemingway’s “it” lurks behind A Farewell to Arms as well, haunting the protagonist, turning both him and the novel as a whole into a study in ambivalence: ambivalence to love, to the war, even to thinking itself. Each of these three things can and should contain the it, so when they don’t, the lack of profundity echoes all the louder. With war, as you’ll see in “Best Line” on the opposite page, the dates and sites of military battles have “dignity” for Hemingway, but terms like “glory” or “courage” or “winning” (“Perhaps wars weren’t won anymore. Maybe they went on forever”) or “victory” (“I don’t believe in victory any more … but I don’t believe in defeat. Though it may be better”) are hollow. What might appear on the surface to be an antiwar novel is actually just an insistence that the it of war, the poignant agonizing essence, not be lost in the rhetoric.
The authenticity of love, too, is in perpetual doubt in A Farewell to Arms. Toward the priest and his fellow ambulance driver Rinaldi, Frederic’s love is palpable and uncomplicated, but toward Catherine, the reader must decide. Most of the time, Frederic stays guarded: “Have you ever loved anyone?” “No.” Later: “You are sweet.” “No, I’m not.” Then: “You did say you loved me, didn’t you?” “‘Yes,’” I lied. I had not said it before … 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.” But then you read the scene in “What’s Sexy” or remember the hair quote from above, and it’s hard to believe that Frederic isn’t putting up a smokescreen. To my eye, his relationship to Catherine is similar to the affair late in Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree (one of my all-time favorite novels): it’s one of the few times these ultramacho writers take women and relationships seriously, allowing real sentiment to sneak through their chain-link, but then quickly closing the gate behind.
Watching the modulations of feeling in A Farewell to Arms is fascinating and gives us a dimension both of Hemingway and his “it” rarely seen in his work. And for that reason, I think it is his supreme achievement.
The Buzz: Like his protagonist, Hemingway himself served as an ambulance driver in the Italian army in World War I, giving him much of the material for the novel. A Farewell to Arms is sometimes called the best war novel ever written; I’d have to save that accolade for War and Peace, but it’s definitely among the top, a maximum-poignancy testament to the camaraderie and gravity of war, and to a soldier’s perpetual fight against the feeling of futility (see “Best Line” below).
What People Don’t Know (But Should): When most people think of Hemingway, they think of his first full-length novel, The Sun Also Rises, but in my opinion that’s actually not among his best books. A Farewell to Arms is obviously my favorite, but his short stories are also outstanding—and Hemingway was originally renowned for them among other writers. My favorite original collection is The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories, an all-time classic.
Best Line: Let this sink in: “I did not say anything. I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations, now for a long time, and 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. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiment and the dates.”
What’s Sexy: A Farewell to Arms contains a perfect Hemingway sex scene—our laconic author outdoes even himself:
“You mustn’t,” she said. “You’re not well enough.”
“Yes, I am. Come on.”
“No. You’re not strong enough.”
“Yes. I am. Yes. Please.”
“You do love me?”
“I really love you. I’m crazy about you. Come on please.”
“Feel our hearts beating.”
“I don’t care about our hearts. I want you. I’m just mad about you.”
“You really love me?”
“Don’t keep saying that. Come on. Please. Please, Catherine.”
“All right but only for a minute.”
“All right,” I said. “Shut the door.”
“You can’t. You shouldn’t.”
“Come on. Don’t talk. Please come on.”
Quirky Fact: After numerous previous attempts, Hemingway succeeded in committing suicide in 1961 at the age of sixty-one. Placing the butt of his double-barreled shotgun on the ground, he pressed the barrels to his forehead and discharged both at once. Sadly, it seems that a death wish might have been part of his genetic legacy; his father and two of his siblings also killed themselves.
What to Skip: A Farewell to Arms is short and straightforward; you’ll have no trouble gliding through it. By now you can probably guess that I’d advise you to skip The Sun Also Rises and instead read For Whom the Bell Tolls or the short stories or go back over Farewell again (and again).