I recently began an affair with audible.com. I decided to sign up, as it would mean another way to pass the time while running, cleaning the house etc., and they offered me THREE samples to try out, one of which was 'A Farewell To Arms'. Now, I remember reading something else of his in high school, and more recently, 'A Moveable Feast,' which I really enjoyed. But neither of these things where floating around in my brain when I decided to give 'Farewell' a whirl. No. What made me press DOWNLOAD NOW! Was who they listed as the reader: John Slattery. John Slattery, for those of you who who are living in a cave and still wearing animal pelt clothing, is an actor who plays Roger Sterling on the AMC series 'Mad Men', a show about the ad business on Madison Avenue in New York in the 60's. his character is middle-aged but charming, boyishly so, with white hair and three-piece suits. His character is also a shameless womanizer and raging alcoholic, both of which can be attributed to Hemingway as well, so I felt his narration particularly fitting. He turned out to be an excellent reader. His American, English, Scottish, Italian and Swiss accents were incredible, and his voices for the female characters sounded feminine without being cartoonish. I will listen to anything he reads.
But back to the book. 'Farewell' is the story of Lieutenant Henry, an American serving in the Italian army as an ambulance driver during World War I. He is injured and nursed back to health, and subsequently falls in love with Catherine Barkley, an English Nurse. To say more would spoil the plot, which I will do a little further down, but now I want to take a moment and talk about the writing itself. Here is what Hemingway himself says regarding style:
A writer's style should be direct and personal, his imagery rich and earthy, and his words simple and vigorous. The greatest writers have the gift of brilliant brevity, are hard workers, diligent scholars and competent stylists.
He honed his writing skills as a journalist, and that is always evident by his direct sentences and plain language. The first chapter opens with Hemingway setting the scene, as if he is just an observer, writing down everything as it is.
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.
It is very...list-y, isn't it? There was a river, dust, leaves, pebbles. But it is also beautiful in the details he decides to include, and even as it rambles on with every 'and', like the leaves themselves, swirling in the dusty breeze until they settle on the ground. Incidentally, Hemingway had something to say about the writing of this very paragraph. Below, an excerpt from 'Portrait of Hemingway' by Lillian Ross.
“As we walked along, Hemingway said to me, ‘I can make a landscape like Mr. Paul Cezanne. I learned how to make a landscape like Mr. Paul Cezanne by walking through the Luxembourg Museum a thousand times with an empty gut, and I am pretty sure that if Mr. Paul was around, he would like the way I make them and be happy that I learned it from him.’ He had learned a lot from Mr. Johann Sebastian Bach, too. ‘In the first paragraph of Farewell, I used the word and consciously over and over the way Mr. Johann Sebastian Bach used a note in music when he was emitting counterpoint. I can almost write like Mr. Johann sometimes—or anyway, so he would like it. All such people are easy to deal with, because we all know you have to learn.’”
Well. No one ever accused Hemingway of being modest. But I love how deliberate he is in his writing.
There is one thing though...his use of the word 'very.' I'm not going to pull a specific quote, because there are a lot of them, but he says things like this: 'the wine was very cold and very good.' You could play a dangerous drinking game with the amount of times he uses the word. He could have benefited from the following advice: "Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very'; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be." --Mark Twain
So, back to the plot! This is the Hemingway I knew, the Hemingway of 'The Old Man and the Sea,' the Hemingway that blew his brains out:
But this is Hemingway as a young lad of 19, an ambulance driver for the Italian infantry in World War I:
Meow! Look at that handsome man in uniform! Don't you want to know more about him?
I had read that 'Farewell' is the most autobiographical of his novels and I was interested to learn about a young Hemingway. I knew it was a love story, so I was doubly curious; Hemingway was famously married several times, the first wife being Hadley Richardson, who was most definitely not a British nurse. So what happened?
***spoiler alert!***
Let's talk about the book, then discuss the facts of Hemingway's life. Here is an extremely simplified plot synopsis of 'A Farewell to Arms.' Lieutenant Henry and Catherine Barkley fall in love. She gets pregnant, so they decide to run away and await the birth of their baby. The baby is stillborn, and shortly afterwards Catherine hemorrhages and dies. Lieutenant Henry walks out of the hospital. The End.
What? WHAT? I cannot remember being so furious at the end of a book. I felt like I was being punished. Punished for taking enjoyment in watching their story unfold, for being happy for them, social conventions of the era be damned. I felt like Hemingway was making fun of me almost, like it was all an elaborate prank, as if he were an adolescent boy nursing a wounded sparrow to health, only to crush it under his boot. I was mad at him. I am mad at him still.
Apparently, I am not the only one, because in the trailer for the new movie 'Silver Linings Playbook' Bradley Cooper's character finishes 'Farewell', throws it out the window and starts ranting about it to his parents. At four o'clock in the morning. 'What the f***!' He says. "'Lemme just break it down for you. The whole time you're rooting for this Hemingway guy to survive to war and be with the woman that he loves. Can't somebody say, 'Hey, let's have a good ending to the story!' (He pauses) I can't apologize. But you know what I will do? Apologize on behalf of Earnest Hemingway, because that's who's to blame here."
Why, WHY would Hemingway spend hundreds of pages developing a sweeping love story and then leave the reader with this?
"After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain."
The Guardian lists this as one of the 'Ten Best Last Sentences', along with The Great Gatsby ("So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.") and Wuthering Heights ("I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath, and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.")
It feels like a sucker punch! So, in my fury, I read about Hemingway's time as an ambulance driver for the Italian infantry and everything became crystal clear. Here's what Wikipedia says on the subject:
While recuperating he fell in love for the first time, with Agnes von Kurowsky, a Red Cross nurse seven years his senior. By the time of his release and return to the United States in January 1919, Agnes and Hemingway had decided to marry within a few months in America. However in March she wrote that she had become engaged to an Italian officer. Biographer Jeffrey Meyers claims Hemingway was devastated by Agnes' rejection, and that he followed a pattern of abandoning a wife before she abandoned him in future relationships.
Here is Agnes. Isn't she lovely?
And, again according to Wikipedia, she didn't even marry an Italian officer, she married an American! In 1928, well after The War. That marriage didn't last and she married again soon after, which lasted until her death in 1984, in New York City. Hemingway was famous in his own time, which makes me wonder...did she follow his career? Read his books? Regret her decision? I'm sure there must be books on this subject, right? 'The Paris Wife' is the fictionalized account of Hadley Richardson, but does anyone know about Agnes? Maybe that is the book I'm meant to write!
But back to 'Farewell'. Essentially, a spurned Hemingway kills the love of his life as quiet revenge, a way to lick his wounds and heal his wounded pride.
After The War Hemingway marries Hadley, who was eight years his senior, and per Wikipedia, 'with Hadley, Hemingway achieved everything he had hoped for with Agnes: the love of a beautiful woman, a comfortable income, a life in Europe.' He had to ruin it of course, by having an affair with a woman who befriended Hadley (likely with the sole purpose of getting close to Hemingway), divorcing her and marrying the woman, Pauline Pfeiffer. He marries twice more after that and ultimately blows his brains out with a shotgun in Ketchum Idaho in 1961.
Hemingway was not an easy man to live with, and his life was hardly a walk in the park, but one can't help but wonder if his experience in Italy and his relationship with Agnes helped lay the groundwork for his self-medication with alcohol, his misogyny. For if that is the case, under that grizzly beard and barrel chest there still lived a 19-year-old boy, scarred by the realities of war, seeking solace in the arms of his true love, only to be met with devastating betrayal and crushing heartbreak. And that is the saddest thing of all.
