A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway - J. B. Priestley (essay date Winter 1929)
J. B. Priestley (essay date Winter 1929)
SOURCE: A review of A Farewell to Arms, in Now and Then, Vol. 34, Winter 1929, pp. 11–12.
[In the following essay, the Priestley recommends Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms to readers while expressing some reservations about its franker aspects.]
Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms is one of the very best novels that have passed through the hands of the Book Society Committee. Why, then, didn't we choose it? Well, I think anybody who reads our first choice, Whiteoaks,1 and then this novel will understand why. Whiteoaks, an equally good piece of writing, is one of those novels that all sensible readers can enjoy. A Farewell to Arms, far rougher and more outspoken, a brutally masculine performance, is not everybody's book. I am sorry about this, but, at the same time, I am not going to make the fashionable mistake of supposing that this...
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