A Farewell to Arm

On the theory that only what is most fundamental will survive, the Hemingway of posterity may well be Hemingway the short story writer, not the novelist. His greatest strength is in the short form, the remarkable precision of what Barbara Kingsolver has called the main attribute of the short story: the telling of "large truths delivered in tight places." Hemingway revolutionized the modern short story with his vernacular and tight-lipped cadences and a strategy of indirection that suggests depths through omission. Such a narrative plan is less effective in the novel, a form that depends on continuity and amplitude. Hemingway's is an art of intensification by a lyrical narrative artist who shunned the epic. With this said, it still seems a grave omission to exclude Hemingway the novelist from consideration here (Hemingway, 45 - 78).

There are few better depictions of the values that defined the post-World War I generation than Hemingway's. A Farewell to Arms unequivocally announces the writer's essential themes of war and survival that he will return to again and again, whether on the battlefield or in symbolic or ritualized versions in bullfighting, fishing, or big-game hunting. Hemingway's essential strengths are also unmistakably on display here: the vivid scenes and the brilliantly authentic dialogue. However, not all readers have joined in a chorus of praise for the novel's achievement. Even Holden Caulfield in J. D. Salinger's A Catcher in the Rye dismisses AFarewell to Arms as "phony," while others have resisted both its protagonists and its tragic theme. For Wyndham Lewis, Frederic Henry, the novel's narrator, is a "dull-witted, bovine, monosyllabic simpleton."

The autobiographical coordinates for A Farewell to Arms matter, if only to underscore the degree of Hemingway's invention and artistic control. First and subsequent readers have assumed that the novel's eyewitness quality and remarkable authenticity must have derived from firsthand experience. Like Frederic Henry, the novel's narrator, Hemingway served on the Italian front in an ambulance corps, though under the Red Cross, not the Italian army. The novel commences in the summer of 1915 with Italy's entry into the war and covers the 1917 Caporetto retreat through the spring of 1918 and Catherine Barkley's death in childbirth. This precedes Hemingway's summer 1918 arrival in the war zone. Hemingway's much-admired reconstruction of the Caporetto debacle, regarded by many as one of the most authentic depictions of war in literature, was based, therefore, not on firsthand observation of the actual event but imagined with the help of details Hemingway derived from his coverage of the Greek retreat in the Greco-Turkish War of 1922. Like Frederic Henry, Hemingway was wounded in a trench mortar explosion and hospitalized in Milan, where he began an affair with a nurse. Hemingway's autobiographical experiences, however, are closer to what he revealed in "A Very Short Story" in the collection In Our Time (1925) in which a wounded officer is humiliatingly dumped by his nurse lover. The writer, therefore, had no direct knowledge of the Italian front from 1915 through the ...