Ernest Hemingway was the most influential American novelist of the twentieth century. I’m sure some people might beg to differ, but I don’t think their objections would be completely serious. Sure he’s fallen somewhat out of fashion due to his machismo chest-beating and well-publicized misogyny. For which defects in his character a lot of people, most often women, would like to “cancel” him. But that’s his personal life, not his art, and love him or hate him, it does not negate his influence, which stems not from his attitudes about masculinity or femininity, but from his literary style.
Hemingway’s was the first truly “modern” style in America, and it came as a direct result of his—and Western culture’s—experiences in the First World War. The unprecedented carnage and disillusionment of that war, whose casualties reached the tens of millions, left the surviving and future generations with a distrust of the ideals and the abstract and empty creeds of the Victorian era. Hemingway’s simple, clear, concrete and non-judgmental style, reflecting a cynical view of all things claiming to define the world, became the dominant style of the rest of the twentieth century. In his wake, other writers tended to adopt a similar style—from Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Chandler to John Steinbeck to Norman Mailer or Kurt Vonnegut, or adopt a style in stark contrast, like a Faulkner or a John Barth.
The best description of Hemingway’s style as he forged it during the 1920s is found in a passage from what I think is his greatest novel, A Farewell to Arms. In the words of the novel’s narrator and protagonist, Frederick Henry, soldiers in the war had become so distrustful of the patriotic cant of generals and politicians that they had become cynical about language itself:
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, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and things that were glorious had no glory, and the sacrifices were like the stockyards of 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. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.
Several of Hemingway’s fictions are candidates for inclusion in a list like mine. His first novel, The Sun Also Rises, about “lost generation” American expatriates in Spain and France after the Great War—featuring Jake Barnes as a modern day Fisher King in a modern day Wasteland, is a strong candidate that I almost went with—it appears on the Modern Library’s list of the top English language novels of the twentieth century (at number 45), on Time magazine’s list of best novels since 1923 (as number 17), on the NPR list of greatest novels in English (at number 23) as well as the Guardian list of greatest English language novels. His late novella The Old Man and the Sea appears on the list of greatest world novels compiled by the Norwegian book clubs in conjunction with the Nobel committee—which makes sense because it was this 1952 novel that seems to have sparked the Nobel committee to award Hemingway the prize for literature in 1954, even though he had essentially earned the award with his work from the 20s. The Observer’s list of greatest world novels included Hemingway’s second volume of short stories, Men Without Women—an odd choice since it was In Our Time, his first collection of short stories, that really introduced his revolutionary style to the world. A Farewell to Arms is named only on the Modern Library list, at number 74. But I find this second Hemingway novel a more compelling one than his first: I find the plot of The Sun Also Rises a bit rambling, whereas that of A Farewell to Arms has a clear arc toward an inevitable conclusion. Farewell focuses on a pair of lovers caught in a brutal war, and deals with the plight of two individuals in the face of a worldwide cataclysm. Further, the first person narrative compels the reader to empathize more closely with the protagonists. For these and other reasons, this is the book I’m choosing as number 46 (alphabetically) on my list of “The 100 Most Lovable Novels in the English Language.”
As most people know, A Farewell to Arms is a semiautobiographical novel. Hemingway himself had tried to join the American army at the age of 18 in order to fight in the European war the U.S. had just entered. He was rejected because of poor eyesight, but volunteered for the American Red Cross ambulance corps in Italy. On July 8, 1918, like his protagonist Lieutenant Frederick Henry, Hemingway was wounded by a mortar shell and taken to a Red Cross hospital in Milan, where he fell in love with the nurse Agnes von Kurowsky, seven years his senior (who apparently did not return his ardor but felt more of a motherly affection for him). Nevertheless she was clearly the inspiration for the heroine of the novel, the British nurse Catherine Barkley.
Hemingway divides the novel into five sections or “books.” In book one, Lieutenant Henry is serving in the Italian ambulance corps. It is winter and a cholera epidemic is killing thousands of Italian soldiers. Henry has leave and visits the town of Gorizia, where Hemingway describes the two brothels—one for officers and one for enlisted men—immediately giving the reader a glance at the realistic lives of soldiers at war that he intends to depict in this novel. When Henry returns to his unit, his friend Rinaldi, a surgeon, takes him to meet a beautiful nurse who has just arrived at the British hospital. Henry is immediately attracted to her, though she tells him about her fiancé’s death in battle, which makes her disinclined to start a new love affair. Eventually, though, she begins to soften toward him. When Henry returns to the war, he is wounded and taken to the hospital.
In book two, Rinaldi visits Henry in the hospital and tells him he will be moved to an American hospital in Milan. He is also visited by a priest, and begins to discuss his anti-war views. When Catherine transfers to the American hospital, she and Henry fall in love in earnest, and consummate their affair. Henry has an operation on his knee, but then contracts jaundice, and gets another three weeks convalescent leave. When he is finally called back to the front, Catherine reveals she is three months pregnant. Henry vows to return from the front and marry her.
In book three, Henry, now with the troops at Bainsizza, is bombarded by Austrian artillery. Morale among the troops has sunk to a new low, and when the Austrians break through in the Battle of Caporetto, the Italian army retreats. The retreat turns into chaos and Frederick, leading a few enlisted men from the ambulance corps, takes an alternate route that he thinks will be faster and safer. They become lost and most of his men desert. At the Tagliamento River, he himself is arrested by military police who are shooting all officers for not staying in place to fight the Austrians. Henry is able to escape by diving into the river, and is ultimately able to jump a train heading for Milan and Catherine.
In book four, Henry reaches Milan only to learn that Catherine has gone to Stresa. Changing into civilian clothes, Henry goes to Stresa and finds Catherine, but learns that Italian police are looking to arrest him, and he and Catherine decide to flee to Switzerland. In a storm, he and Catherine set off one night in a rowboat, and Henry performs the Herculean task of rowing the length of Lake Maggiore to arrive in Switzerland.
In book five, our lovers have a few quiet and blissful months the Swiss Alps, then move to Lausanne to be near the hospital when Catherine’s baby arrives. To avoid spoiling the ending, I won’t go into it here, though most of you probably already know what happens, and even if you don’t you can probably guess. Hemingway called the novel his “Romeo and Juliet” story, and the five books do suggest the five-act structure of an Elizabethan tragedy, with the crucial turning point in Act Three (with Lieutenant Henry’ rejection of the war and dive from the bridge to freedom) and the tragic denouement in Act Five. Some critics have found the novel closer to pathos than tragedy, but it could be argued that Lieutenant Henry’s “anagnorisis” or tragic knowledge in the end may not be an insight into the meaning of suffering as much as it is insight into the meaninglessness of suffering in the Wasteland following the meaningless war. Hemingway famously claimed to have rewritten the ending of A Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times. Lest you think this an exaggeration, scholars have since established forty-seven different endings to the novel. But the one we have, the one that passes for Henry’s tragic knowledge, brutally summarizes the value of love in the face of meaningless world:
So that was it. The baby was dead. That was why the doctor looked so tired. But why had they acted the way they did in the room with him? They supposed he would come around and start breathing probably. I had no religion but I knew he ought to have been baptized. But what if he never breathed at all. He hadn’t. He had never been alive. Except in Catherine. I’d felt him kick there often enough. But I hadn’t for a week. Maybe he was choked all the time. Poor little kid. I wished the hell I’d been choked like that. No I didn’t. Still there would not be all this dying to go through. Now Catherine would die. That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo. Or gave you the syphilis like Rinaldo. But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.
Upon its first publication the novel was blasted by censors for its language, its blunt descriptions of war and the daily lives of soldiers, as well as its depiction of extramarital sex, though there is nothing graphic. And of course, there were those who objected to its anti-war message—though interestingly enough, Hemingway’s book came out the same year as Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, an equally vivid anti-war novel about the First World War. But it was Hemingway’s first real best-seller, and its disillusioned view of war went on to influence other war novelists like Kurt Vonnegut, Tim O’Brien, Evelyn Waugh and Joseph Heller—it might be said, indeed, that without A Farewell to Arms there’d have been no Catch-22. And that would be the real tragedy.
There are two pretty lousy film versions of this novel. The 1932 version starred Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes, but Hemingway hated it. I did also, mainly because Adolphe Menjou as Rinaldi has a big speech containing all the patriotic cant about war that the novel actually condemns in that passage I quoted above. David O. Selznick’s 1957 remake, starring Rock Hudson and Jennifer Jones, was a bloated mess that Hemingway also hated and was a box-office bomb, and as a result was Selznick’s last film. Apparently a British TV miniseries from 1966 starring Vanessa Redgrave and George Hamilton was quite good, but has been lost and so we can’t view that one. There is apparently a new film version to be written and directed by Michael Winterbottom now in pre-production. Let’s hope for better things from that one. Meantime, you really ought to read the novel. It truly is one of the best.