Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms is an important book
that has not aged well – at least not at first glance. It seems to be two books – a very good
antiwar story that is a thinly disguised Roman a Clef about Hemingway’s experience
as an ambulance driver in Italy during the First World War, and a very bad love
story that is also a thinly disguised Roman a Clef about Hemingway’s first
love.
The enthralling quality of the first book – including the
fabled dialogue – is overshadowed by the insipid quality of the book that
chronicles the love affair – especially the hollow dialogue that betrays s a
love that seems entirely imaginary and incredibly immature; the dialogue
idealizes hollowness and reeks of emptiness rather than charting the connection
between two people.
From a certain vantage point, though, this still remains a
powerful novel - including and partly because of the insipid love story. Hemingway, as his alter
ego, drinks like a fish, connects with men, and is toughened by war. He ages himself a few years in the novel and
makes himself worldly – as if that would make love (and war) more
manageable.
The war is brutal and nonsensical. Thrown back into the war after his injury,
Hemingway’s alter ego leads a small band through a chaotic retreat, and, in the
process, loses touch with what it means to be human. He orders death like he might order a
hamburger.
Ouch. He appears to
be death's master. He orders it instead
of suffering it. And this helps keep his
fear at arm’s length.
But then it gets weird. Because he is not the man he is pretending to be. He is a little boy who wants his Mommy. And she shows up. She nurses him.
Your Mommy is what you crave when you are far
from home, in a foreign country and people are wanting you to get back into a
war after you have been injured and after you have seen an army fall apart. You run away from war - with Mommy. And she takes care of you.
Or you do if you are writing a book and you are trying to
rewrite history. But it didn’t quite
work out that way in reality, so it rings false on the page. Mommy got tired of you being a baby and left
you. So in the book, you change
that. You get her back – and instead of
her leaving you, you do her in – and the baby that that would have replaced
you.
And this second book, then, is perhaps the better antiwar
book because it more clearly than the first shows the effects of war.
I don’t know which of Hemingway’s wars caused him to feel so
needy. It may have been a war that was
waged at home between his parents. Perhaps
his parents were too absent. Perhaps he
was too wild. But there was a war that
sent him to Italy at the age of 16 to study architecture only to get caught up
in an actual world war, one in which he was injured at too young an age.
The scars from the wars he was in show up in the insipid relationship
that he portrays as if it were mature love.
As if it were intimacy. It is
not. But it is what gets imagined and
then presented as love in a failed attempt to keep the horrors of war, and being abandoned, at bay.
As we recoil from the two dimensional quality of the love,
we recoil from the effects of the trauma.
We recoil from the painful efforts of his traumatized mind trying to set things
right by typing a missive to readers who can sympathize with the man behind the
bravado. He pulls for us to care for him
the way that his imaginary lover would done.
And 100 years ago, people did. But we don’t do that so much, now. Or at least I didn’t. We are not willing to watch him try to nurse himself back to
health with platitudes. We blanch at his
sense of privilege and his disregard for those around him who would help him, including the mother figure. His pretending to be mature feels like just
that: pretend.
I don’t know that we are more mature now, but we do have a
better sense of what trauma is. We also
have a better sense of what love looks like – something that takes us out of
ourselves, rather than driving us deeper within ourselves. The love in this book, this immature love, plainly caused by the stunted growth of this man, may be the best testament to the ravages of war, if we
can only hear it for being just that. When we witness perhaps the greatest writer of his generation being driven to write such
drivel it is surely cause for concern about the long term effects of war trauma.