Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms – A brief report

 

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.

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