Modern Critical Interpretations
Ernest Hemingway's: "A Farewell to Arms"
Edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom Sterling Professor of the Humanities Yale University
(The full version of A Farewell to Arms, Modern Critical Interpretations
can be found at Questia's Online
Libary by clicking here
and searching for A Farewell to Arms).
Editor's Note
This book gathers together a representative selection of the best criticism devoted
to Ernest Hemingway's novel A Farewell to Arms. The critical essays are reprinted
here in the chronological order of their original publication. I am grateful to
Susan Beegel for her erudition and judgment in helping me to edit this volume.
My introduction begins by seeking Hemingway's place in American literary tradition
and then relates A Farewell to Arms to the aesthetic impressionism of Walter
Pater and Joseph Conrad. Daniel J. Schneider begins the chronological sequence
with a study of the poetic imagery or "imagism" of A Farewell to Arms.
An investigation of tragic structure in the novel by Robert Merrill is followed
by William Adair's Freudian account of A Farewell to Arms as Hemingway's own
interpretation of the dreams, fantasies, and compulsions resulting from his
early involvement in war.
Michael S. Reynolds compares Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage to Farewell,
and suggests that Hemingway, like Crane, relied upon imagination and not upon
the autobiographical experience of battle. The palpable hostility of Hemingway
toward women as the image of desire is traced in Farewell by Judith Fetterley,
who confirms the earlier analysis by Leslie Fiedler which is cited in my introduction.
In a textual study of the novel's much rewritten conclusion, Bernard Oldsey
attempts to illuminate Hemingway's choices among his multiple possibilities.
Scott Donaldson skeptically reads the passivity and "innocence" of
Frederic Henry as masking a wily self that calls the narrator's stance into
question.
In Millicent Bell's interpretation, A Farewell to Arms is a coded system of
feeling and judgment based upon Hemingway's war experiences on the Italian front.
In a previously unpublished essay concluding this volume, Sandra Whipple Spanier
sees Catherine Barkley as the true exemplar of Hemingway's code of heroism,
since she manifests courage, loyalty, grace in confronting death, and a true
ability to teach Frederic Henry what he badly needs to know. Spanier's argument
is both feminist and shrewdly kind to Hemingway; it provokes skepticism in me,
but itself shares in some of the qualities that Hemingway urged upon us.
(The full version of A Farewell to Arms, Modern Critical Interpretations
can be found at Questia's Online
Libary by clicking here
and searching for A Farewell to Arms).
Introduction
I
Hemingway freely proclaimed his relationship to Huckleberry Finn, and there
is some basis for the assertion, except that there is little in common between
the rhetorical stances of Twain and Hemingway. Kipling's Kim, in style and mode,
is far closer to Huckleberry Finn than anything Hemingway wrote. The true accent
of Hemingway's admirable style is to be found in an even greater and more surprising
precursor:
This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old
mothers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.
Or again:
I clutch the rails of the fence, my gore drips, thinn'd with the
ooze of my skin,
I fall on the weeds and stones,
The riders spur their unwilling horses, haul close,
Taunt my dizzy ears and beat me violently over the head with
whip-stocks.
Agonies are one of my changes of garments,
I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become
the wounded person,
My hurts turn livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe.
Hemingway is scarcely unique in not acknowledging the paternity of Walt Whitman;
T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens are far closer to Whitman than William Carlos
Williams and Hart Crane were, but literary influence is a paradoxical and antithetical
process, about which we continue to know all too little. The profound affinities
between Hemingway, Eliot, and Stevens are not accidental, but are family resemblances
due to the repressed but crucial relation each had to Whitman's work. Hemingway
characteristically boasted (in a letter to Sara Murphy, February 27, 1936) that
he had knocked Stevens down quite handily: "... for statistics sake Mr.
Stevens is 6 feet 2 weighs 225 lbs. and . . . when he hits the ground it is
highly spectaculous." Since this match between the two writers took place
in Key West on February 19, 1936, I am moved, as a loyal Stevensian, for statistics'
sake to point out that the victorious Hemingway was born in 1899, and the defeated
Stevens in 1879, so that the novelist was then going on thirty-seven, and the
poet verging on fifty-seven. The two men doubtless despised one another, but
in the letter celebrating his victory Hemingway calls Stevens "a damned
fine poet" and Stevens always affirmed that Hemingway was essentially a
poet, a judgment concurred in by Robert Penn Warren when he wrote that Hemingway
"is essentially a lyric rather than a dramatic writer." Warren compared
Hemingway to Wordsworth, which is feasible, but the resemblance to Whitman is
far closer. Wordsworth would not have written, "I am the man, I suffer'd,
I was there," but Hemingway almost persuades us he would have achieved
that line had not Whitman set it down first.
(The full version of A Farewell to Arms, Modern Critical Interpretations
can be found at Questia's Online
Libary by clicking here
and searching for A Farewell to Arms).
II
It is now more than twenty years since Hemingway's suicide, and some aspects
of his permanent canonical status seem beyond doubt. Only a few modern American
novels seem certain to endure: The Sun Also Rises, The Great Gatsby, Miss Lonelyhearts,
The Crying of Lot 49, and at least several by Faulkner, including As I Lay Dying,
Sanctuary, Light in August, The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom! Two dozen
stories by Hemingway could be added to the group, indeed perhaps all of The
First Forty-Nine Stories. Faulkner is an eminence apart, but critics agree that
Hemingway and Fitzgerald are his nearest rivals, largely on the strength of
their shorter fiction. What seems unique is that Hemingway is the only American
writer of prose fiction in this century who, as a stylist, rivals the principal
poets: Stevens, Eliot, Frost, Hart Crane, aspects of Pound, W C. Williams, Robert
Penn Warren, and Elizabeth Bishop.This is hardly to say that Hemingway, at his
best, fails at narrative or the representation of character. Rather, his peculiar
excellence is closer to Whitman than to Twain, closer to Stevens than to Faulkner,
and even closer to Eliot than to Fitzgerald, who was his friend and rival. He
is an elegiac poet who mourns the self, who celebrates the self (rather less
effectively) and who suffers divisions in the self. In the broadest tradition
of American literature, he stems ultimately from the Emersonian reliance on
the god within, which is the line of Whitman, Thoreau, and Dickinson.He arrives
late and dark in this tradition, and is one of its negative theologians, as
it were, but as in Stevens the negations, the cancellings, are never final.
Even the most ferocious of his stories, say "God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen"
or " A Natural History of the Dead," can be said to celebrate what
we might call the Real Absence. Doc Fischer, in "God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen,"
is a precursor of Nathanael West's Shrike in Miss Lonelyhearts, and his savage,
implicit religiosity prophesies not only Shrike's Satanic stance but the entire
demonic world of Pynchon's explicitly paranoid or Luddite visions. Perhaps there
was a nostalgia for a Catholic order always abiding in Hemingway's consciousness,
but the cosmos of his fiction, early and late, is American Gnostic, as it was
in Melville, who first developed so strongly the negative side of the Emersonian
religion of self-reliance.
III
Hemingway notoriously and splendidly was given to overtly agonistic images whenever
he described his relationship to canonical writers, including Melville, a habit
of description in which he has been followed by his true ephebe, Norman Mailer.In
a grand letter ( September 6-7, 1949) to his publisher, Charles Scribner, he
charmingly confessed, "Am a man without any ambition, except to be champion
of the world, I wouldn't fight Dr. Tolstoi in a 20 round bout because I know
he would knock my ears off." This modesty passed quickly, to be followed
by, "If I can live to 60 I can beat him. (MAYBE)." Since the rest
of the letter counts Turgenev, de Maupassant, Henry James, even Cervantes, as
well as Melville and Dostoyevski, among the defeated, we can join Hemingway,
himself, in admiring his extraordinary self-confidence. How justified was it,
in terms of his ambitions?
It could be argued persuasively that Hemingway is the best short- story writer
in the English language from Joyce's Dubliners until the present. The aesthetic
dignity of the short story need not be questioned, and yet we seem to ask more
of a canonical writer. Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises and not Ulysses, which
is only to say that his true genius was for very short stories, and hardly at
all for extended narrative. Had he been primarily a poet, his lyrical gifts
would have sufficed: we do not hold it against Yeats that his poems, not his
plays, are his principal glory.
Alas, neither Turgenev nor Henry James, neither Melville nor Mark Twain
provide true agonists for Hemingway. Instead, de Maupassant is the apter rival.
Of Hemingway's intensity of style in the briefer compass, there is no question,
but even The Sun Also Rises reads now as a series of epiphanies, of brilliant
and memorable vignettes.
Much that has been harshly criticized in Hemingway, particularly in For Whom
the Bell Tolls, results from his difficulty in adjusting his gifts to the demands
of the novel. Robert Penn Warren suggests that Hemingway is successful when
his "system of ironies and understatements is coherent." When incoherent,
then, Hemingway's rhetoric fails as persuasion, which is to say, we read To
Have and Have Not or For Whom the Bell Tolls and we are all too aware that the
system of tropes is primarily what we are offered. Warren believes this not
to be true of A Farewell to Arms, yet even the celebrated close of the novel
seems now a worn understatement:
But after I had got them out and shut the door and turned off the light it
wasn't any good. It was like saying good-by to a statue. After a while I went
out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.
(The full version of A Farewell to Arms, Modern Critical Interpretations
can be found at Questia's Online
Libary by clicking here
and searching for A Farewell to Arms).
Contrast this to the close of " Old Man at the Bridge," a story only
two and a half pages long:
There was nothing to do about him. It was Easter Sunday and the Fascists were
advancing toward the Ebro.It was a gray overcast day with a low ceiling so their
planes were not up. That and the fact that cats know how to look after themselves
was all the good luck that old man would ever have.
The understatement continues to persuade here because the stoicism remains
coherent, and is admirably fitted by the rhetoric. A very short story concludes
itself by permanently troping the mood of a particular moment in history. Vignette
is Hemingway's natural mode, or call it hard-edged vignette: a literary sketch
that somehow seems to be the beginning or end of something longer, yet truly
is complete in itself. Hemingway's style encloses what ought to be unenclosed,
so that the genre remains subtle yet trades its charm for punch. But a novel
of three hundred and forty pages ( A Farewell to Arms) which I have just finished
reading again (after twenty years away from it) cannot sustain itself upon the
rhetoric of vignette. After many understatements, too many, the reader begins
to believe that he is reading a Hemingway imitator, like the accomplished John
O'Hara, rather than the master himself. Hemingway's notorious fault is the monotony
of repetition, which becomes a dulling litany in a somewhat less accomplished
imitator like Nelson Algren, and sometimes seems self-parody when we must confront
it in Hemingway.
Nothing is got for nothing, and a great style generates defenses in us, particularly
when it sets the style of an age, as the Byronic Hemingway did. As with Byron,
the color and variety of the artist's life becomes something of a veil between
the work and our aesthetic apprehension of it. Hemingway's career included four
marriages (and three divorces); service as an ambulance driver for the Italians
in World War I (with an honorable wound); activity as a war correspondent in
the Greek-Turkish War (1922), the Spanish Civil War (1937-39), the Chinese-Japanese
War (1941) and the War against Hitler in Europe (1944-45). Add big-game hunting
and fishing, safaris, expatriation in France and Cuba, bullfighting, the Nobel
prize, and ultimate suicide in Idaho, and you have an absurdly implausible life,
apparently lived in imitation of Hemingway's own fiction. The final effect of
the work and the life together is not less than mythological, as it was with
Byron and with Whitman and with Oscar Wilde. Hemingway now is myth, and so is
permanent as an image of American heroism, or perhaps more ruefully the American
illusion of heroism. The best of Hemingway's work, the stories and The Sun Also
Rises, are also a permanent part of the American mythology. Faulkner, Stevens,
Frost, perhaps Eliot, and Hart Crane were stronger writers than Hemingway, but
he alone in this American century has achieved the enduring status of myth.
IV
If A Farewell to Arms fails to sustain itself as a unified novel, it does remain
Hemingway's strongest work after the frequent best of the short stories and
The Sun Also Rises. It also participates in the aura of Hemingway's mode of
myth, embodying as it does not only Hemingway's own romance with Europe but
the permanent vestiges of our national romance with the Old World. The death
of Catherine represents not the end of that affair, but its perpetual recurrence.
I assign classic status in the interpretation of that death to Leslie Fiedler,
with his precise knowledge of the limits of literary myth: "Only the dead
woman becomes neither a bore nor a mother; and before Catherine can quite become
either she must die, killed not by Hemingway, of course, but by childbirth!"
Fiedler finds a touch of Poe in this, but Hemingway seems to me far healthier.
Death, to Poe, is after all less a metaphor for sexual fulfillment than it is
an improvement over mere coition, since Poe longs for a union in essence and
not just in act.
(The full version of A Farewell to Arms, Modern Critical Interpretations
can be found at Questia's Online
Libary by clicking here
and searching for A Farewell to Arms).
Any feminist critic who resents that too-lovely Hemingwayesque ending, in which
Frederic Henry gets to walk away in the rain while poor Catherine takes the
death for both of them, has my sympathy, if only because this sentimentality
that mars the aesthetic effect is certainly the mask for a male resentment and
fear of women. Hemingway's symbolic rain is read by Louis L. Martz as the inevitable
trope for pity, and by Malcolm Cowley as a conscious symbol for disaster. A
darker interpretation might associate it with Whitman's very American confounding
of night, death, the mother, and the sea, a fourfold mingling that Whitman bequeathed
to Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, and Hart Crane, among many others. The death
of the beloved woman in Hemingway is part of that tropological cosmos, in which
the moist element dominates because death the mother is the true image of desire.
For Hemingway, the rain replaces the sea, and is as much the image of longing
as the sea is in Whitman or Hart Crane.
Robert Penn Warren, defending a higher estimate of A Farewell to Arms than
I can achieve, interprets the death of Catherine as the discovery that "the
attempt to find a substitute for universal meaning in the limited meaning of
the personal relationship is doomed to failure." Such a reading, though
distinguished, seems to me to belong more to the literary cosmos of T. S. Eliot
than to that of Hemingway. Whatever nostalgia for transcendental verities Hemingway
may have possessed, his best fiction invests its energies in the representation
of personal relationships, and hardly with the tendentious design of exposing
their inevitable inadequacies. If your personal religion quests for the matador
as messiah, then you are likely to seek in personal relationships something
of the same values enshrined in the ritual of bull and bullfighter: courage,
dignity, the aesthetic exaltation of the moment, and an all but suicidal intensity
of being—the sense of life gathered to a crowded perception and graciously
open to the suddenness of extinction. That is a vivid but an unlikely scenario
for an erotic association, at least for any that might endure beyond a few weeks.
Wyndham Lewis categorized Hemingway by citing Walter Pater on Prosper Merimée:
"There is the formula . . . the enthusiastic amateur of rude, crude, naked
force in men and women.... Painfully distinct in outline, inevitable to sight,
unrelieved, there they stand." Around them, Pater added, what Merimée
gave you was "neither more nor less than empty space." I believe that
Pater would have found more than that in Hemingway's formula, more in the men
and women, and something other than empty space in their ambiance. Perhaps by
way of Joseph Conrad's influence upon him, Hemingway had absorbed part at least
of what is most meaningful in Pater's aesthetic impressionism. Hemingway's women
and men know, with Pater, that we have an interval, and then our place knows
us no more. Our one chance is to pack that interval with the multiplied fruit
of consciousness, with the solipsistic truths of perception and sensation. What
survives time's ravages in A Farewell to Arms is precisely Hemingway's textually
embodied knowledge that art alone apprehends the moments of perception and sensation,
and so bestows upon them their privileged status. Consider the opening paragraph
of chapter 16:
That night a bat flew into the room through the open door that led onto the
balcony and through which we watched the night over the roofs of the town. It
was dark in our room except for the small light of the night over the town and
the bat was not frightened but hunted in the room as though he had been outside.
We lay and watched him and I do not think he saw us because we lay so still.
After he went out we saw a searchlight come on and watched the beam move across
the sky and then go off and it was dark again. A breeze came in the night and
we heard the men of the anti-aircraft gun on the next roof talking. It was cool
and they were putting on their capes. I worried in the night about some one
coming up but Catherine said they were all asleep. Once in the night we went
to sleep and when I woke she was not there but I heard her coming along the
hall and the door opened and she came back to the bed and said it was all right
she had been downstairs and they were all asleep. She had been outside Miss
Van Campen's door and heard her breathing in her sleep. She brought crackers
and we ate them and drank some vermouth. We were very hungry but she said that
would all have to be gotten out of me in the morning. I went to sleep again
in the morning when it was light and when I was awake I found she was gone again.
She came in looking fresh and lovely and sat on the bed and the sun rose while
I had the thermometer in my mouth and we smelled the dew on the roofs and then
the coffee of the men at the gun on the next roof.
The flight of the bat, the movement of the searchlight's beam and of the breeze,
the overtones of the antiaircraft gunners blend into the light of the morning,
to form a composite epiphany of what it is that Frederic Henry has lost when
he finally walks back to the hotel in the rain. Can we define that loss? As
befits the aesthetic impressionism of Pater, Conrad, Stephen Crane, and Hemingway,
it is in the first place a loss of vividness and intensity in the world as experienced
by the senses. In the aura of his love for Catherine, Frederic Henry knows the
fullness of "It was dark" and "It was cool," and the smell
of the dew on the roofs, and the aroma of the coffee being enjoyed by the anti-aircraft
gunners. We are reminded that Pater's crucial literary ancestors were the unacknowledged
Ruskin and the hedonistic visionary Keats, the Keats of the "Ode on Melancholy."
Hemingway too, particularly in A Farewell to Arms, is an heir of Keats, with
the poet's passion for sensuous immediacy, in all of its ultimate implications.
Is not Catherine Barkley a belated and beautiful version of the goddess Melancholy,
incarnating Keats's "Beauty that must die"?
(The full version of A Farewell to Arms, Modern Critical Interpretations
can be found at Questia's Online
Libary by clicking here
and searching for A Farewell to Arms).
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