Fatalism and Futility: Hemingway’s ‘A Farewell to Arms’
In the introduction to A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway’s grandson records that he wrote “on the principle of the iceberg. For the part that shows there are seven-eighths more underwater”.
The story follows Frederic Henry, an American lieutenant serving as an ambulance driver on the Italian front in WWI. He is wounded while eating cheese in a trench, gets a medal for bravery, and falls in love with a typically beautiful and devoted English nurse, Catherine Berkeley, while he is recovering. Inevitably, she falls pregnant, and he returns to the front where he is caught up in the great Italian retreat south in 1918 as the Germans boost the Austrians in a sweeping offensive. However, the Italian soldiers think the war is over and begin to execute their own officers. Henry manages to escape by plunging himself into the icy darkness of a nearby river, which he travels in for days before fleeing to Switzerland with Catherine in a daring venture across a stormy lake.
It is here that the novel could have ended – on a soaringly uplifting note of hope and second chances. But in all honesty this would have felt fundamentally inadequate thematically. And so instead Catherine dies during childbirth, haemorrhaging after a Caesarian section, and her baby is stillborn. No sooner are these events related than the curtain falls:
After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.
It is perhaps the most viscerally eviscerating ending to a novel I have ever read. Hemingway’s style of writing is as surgically precise as Salinger’s or Joyce’s – sparse, purposeful, thrumming with potential energy. In the very opening paragraphs this technique emerges. If Emily Brontë’s writing was a sprawling yew tree twisting deep into the earth, Hemingway’s would be a stark acacia on a golden plain.
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.
He weaves this bewitching spell of a scene by anchoring us in several recurring sensory images: the dusty leaves, the pale bedrock, the marching troops, all distilled beneath a clear, hot sky. There is almost a whispering undercurrent of assonance to the words through the repetition of ‘leaves’ and ‘river’ and ‘trees’ and ‘dust’ and ‘troops.’ It is hypnotic.
And this introduces us to the setting throughout the novel, the war-ravaged orchards and towns of Italy in summer. But the rain. It was perhaps a few chapters into the novel that I realised how he was using the rain to directly convey action. Whenever the rain started, something bad happened. This got so extreme that as soon as the sky clouded over dread seeped through me. But we must interpret Frederic Henry’s narrative while bearing in mind that there are in fact two Henrys, the man living out the events and the man recounting them an unknown number of years later (as it is first person past tense). So we see the world through a lens of bitterness and pain, lending a slightly detached and almost frigid air to his words.
In his own introduction Hemingway summarises this sentiment:
I believe that all the people who stand to profit by a war and who help provoke it should be shot on the first day it starts by accredited representatives of the loyal citizens of their country who will fight it.
The very fact that he rewrote the ending of the novel forty-seven times demonstrates the urgency, or at least the intention, with which he wishes to convey the overwhelming futility of war.
We see this too in Henry’s daring journey across the Italian countryside as he desperately tries to escape the rebelling soldiers, and again as he rows all night through coalescing rainclouds down the lake to try and cross the Swiss border before dawn using an old umbrella as a sail. But amidst these symphonic and often darkly comic moments, we are also confronted with the most quietly tragic. During their escape across the countryside, Henry’s friend is shot by distant Italian snipers fearing they are Germans. One moment he’s Henry’s vivacious comrade-in-arms bursting with youth and energy, the next he lies motionless in the mud. Hemingway’s message blares like the evening bugles beneath the Menin Gate.
I have had a month or so now to recover from the end of A Farewell to Arms and to try to work out why this most heartbreaking and bitter of novels is such an enduring treasure in the Western canon. It’s not, I think, the literary poeticism itself that makes it so raw and painful and hypnotic and perfect, but how it traps the human condition in amber and exposes the brutal reality of war and the sheer inevitability of death. For in the end there is always death. Like birth, the one true constant we all share. Mortality. The common human experience. From the moment Henry gets that pointless wound while eating cheese in a trench to the moment Catherine begins haemorrhaging, I was transfixed and tortured in equal measure. Alongside the meaningless slaughter of millions life goes on and by definition so does tragedy, of even the most natural kind. For me, the most powerful moment is when Henry contemplates being a “messiah” and lifting a log of ants from the fire and certain death, but instead simply empties his water glass over them to fill it with whisky. The ants just burn and sizzle faster.
But is there any cool glimmer of hope in the flames?
Perhaps it’s just that life marches inexorably on, and ultimately by allowing it to break us we become stronger at the broken places. Like the ancient Japanese art of kintsugi, mending broken pottery with seams of gold, survival is a strength not a secret, and so scars should never have to be hidden. They’re part of our history.
If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. 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.
