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| Hemingway in Milan during WWI |
I work for a publishing house that publishes, among other things, a lot of women's inspirational fiction. As a result, I read many books each year that involve young, beautiful widows on the frontier beginning unlikely relationships with tough-as-nails men, going through various trials and misunderstandings, and emerging triumphant with wedding bells ringing, all against a thoroughly described romantically wild landscape. As a former English major, reading all these sunny, happy endings can get decidedly old and one longs for the delicious complexities of tragedy.
This is why I rely on Hemingway for pleasure reading lately. Simple, to-the-point, unromanticized reality described through stark action and quick, realistic dialogue.
For the past month or so I have been inactive on this blog, but it is not for lack of reading. During that time I've been picking away at
A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway's second and perhaps gloomiest novel. Written in 1929,
A Farewell to Arms is largely autobiographical. The main character is an American who drives an ambulance during WWI (as Hemingway did). He is injured and falls in love with a nurse (in the story it's British Catherine Barkley, in real life it was American Agnes von Kurowsky). In the book Catherine must undergo a C-section, in real life Hemingway's then wife Pauline was undergoing the same. Etcetera.
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Original 1929 cover art - far cooler than
the lame late 1990s cover of my copy. |
Most of the chapters are rather short, and I believe that is why it took so long to read the book. I usually read in bed before I go to sleep. A long chapter forces me to stay awake to read it, but a short one encourages me to put the book down after just one rather than risk getting involved with a longer chapter and then be too tired to finish it. But like
For Whom the Bell Tolls, the last 50 pages of this novel forced me to keep up and keep reading no matter how many chapters it took.
The story is both a war story that shows the utter destruction, futility, and stupidity of war and a romance that shows, contrary to the inspirational women's novels I so often read for work, everything doesn't just "work out." The couple's affection is shown almost exclusively through dialogue, again unlike inspirational women's fiction that shows most of the emotion or affection between characters through those characters asking themselves questions like,
Could I be falling in love with this rugged, unsophisticated man? Mother would be scandalized!
Instead, you get quotes like these:
"Perhaps wars weren't won anymore. Maybe they went on forever."
"In September the first cool nights came, then the days were cool and the leaves on the trees in the park began to turn color and we knew the summer was gone."
"We were all cooked. The thing was not to recognize it. The last country to realize they were cooked would win the war."
"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 that were slapped up by billposters over other 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."
"The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry."
Bleak. Yeah, I know. But sometimes you just need some good, bleak literature to cleanse the palate.
Amazingly, this book has been made into a movie twice, once in 1932 and again in 1957. I say amazingly because it would take a very light hand and a dark sensibility to make this story into a good movie. Here are the movie posters for these two films:
Take a wild guess which one seems to be closer to the sensibility of the book. If you guessed the one on the left, you're correct. This is a tragedy. The couple on the right looks like they're on a weekend ski trip. Look at the font they use for the title, for crying out loud. Nothing tragic about that.
I'd like to see both of these films and see how they hold up to the book. Obviously the first was made in response to the book's popularity when it first came out, as it released just three years later. The second was obviously made in order to capitalize on Hemingway winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954 (for
The Old Man and the Sea).
By way of closing, I realize that Hemingway is not for everyone. But to me he is like a lifeline that connects me back to the world of the despondent and despairing, to the realities of this broken world. And I don't know about you, but I need that sometimes.
