[In the following essay, Watkins asserts that, in both theme and style, A Farewell to Arms sets up a conflict between abstract notions of patriotism and honor and the concrete world of individual choice.]

After describing every nation fighting in World War I as “cooked,” a British major in Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms tells Frederic Henry “Good-by” cheerfully and wishes him “Every sort of luck!” Henry reflects on the contradictions in the major: “There was a great contrast between his world pessimism and personal cheeriness.”¹ The major's world view epitomizes the theme and the style of this novel and even provides a good perspective on all Hemingway's fiction. The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls offer the greatest contrast. In the first of these novels personal cheeriness is the only refuge in a world of utter despair. In For Whom the Bell Tolls individual and small groups of men sacrifice personal happiness in a magnanimous attempt to improve the conditions of the world for all men. The generalizations of For Whom the Bell Tolls could not possibly be embodied in a style as factual, blunt, and noncommittal as that in The Sun Also Rises. And the earlier novel contains little hope or regard for the general welfare which could be stated in the didacticism and optimism of For Whom the Bell Tolls.

The variety of critical judgments on style and theme in Hemingway's writing is always amazing. Generally the most favorable views of his late fiction belong to critics who most desire some kind of glowing view of man. The early works, on the other hand, appeal to those who prefer art for art's sake and to those who object most strenuously to the explicit or the didactic. Some of the critics of A Farewell to Arms have praised the novel as the best of Hemingway, and others have damned it as an example of his worst. Robert Penn Warren regards it as his best.² For Carlos Baker it is his best except for For Whom the Bell Tolls.³ Although much of Hemingway “is the product of a somewhat uneasy attitudinizing,” writes D. S. Savage, A Farewell to Arms is “surprisingly genuine and unforced.”⁴ Some extremists have viewed the novel as too immoral or, by contrast, too brazenly philosophical or even didactic. The novelist Robert Herrick and Henry Seidel Canby were repelled by the “lustful indulgence,” “mere dirt,” “erotic fantasy.”⁵ E. M. Halliday finds too many “subjective passages” and too little “objective epitome,” too little “firm gaze upon outward reality.”⁶ David Daiches dislikes the “false simplicity” and “forced primitivism.”⁷ Edwin Berry Burgum does not have a high regard for the novel. “On the whole,” he wrote in 1947, “this novel is written in a more awkward style than any other work of Hemingway's.”⁸ And Frederick Hoffman judges the novel severely: its style is “perceptibly losing hold of the discipline”; the love affair is created in “sentimentality and romantic softness”; conversations are “embarrassingly naïve.” He objects to Hemingway's “philosophical interpretation” and “a note of softness and insincerity in the sentiments.” In Hemingway's treatment of values, Hoffman says, A Farewell to Arms represents “a half-conversion to an ideological religion and a degeneration of moral insight and artistic integrity.”⁹

Any considered view of this novel should be based on a careful examination of the unique style, the theme, and the peculiar blend of the two. Of all aspects of fiction, style is the most difficult to define and evaluate. Lists and categories of figures of speech say something about writing, but dissimilar manners of writing may contain the same kinds of figures of speech. And even if the style of a work could be exactly defined, the question of its appropriateness to a particular theme would still be exceedingly difficult. Hemingway's style has been described by Mark Schorer as “the very finest prose of our time. And most of it is poetry.”¹⁰ Burgum uses derogatory terms from several economic and social vocabularies to describe the style contemptuously as “the typical speech of the proletariat, taken over and stylized, as the last step in a process long under way in the American collegian and his elder brother, the sportsman of the mature world.”¹¹

The simplicity and the technical characteristics of Hemingway's prose enable the critic to describe it about as accurately as any style can be described. Even so, how Hemingway blended his manner of writing and his subject matter in A Farewell to Arms needs still further discussion. Indeed, the harmony between style and theme may be as perfectly demonstrable in this novel as in any work of literature. Robert Penn Warren describes “the close coordination that he sometimes achieves between the character and the situation, on the one hand, and the sensibility as it reflects itself in the style, on the other hand.”¹²

Like Jake Barnes and the heroes of most of the short stories, Frederic Henry rejects all the conventional words associated with personal ideals and love of country. Henry despises the words of orators and posters and proclamations—the words made so prominent by idealists such as Woodrow Wilson:

I did not say anything. I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. … I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at 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.

(FA, p. 191)

This passage has been quoted perhaps as much as anything Hemingway wrote; it is almost as well known as Faulkner's Nobel Prize Speech. Curiously, the two passages have four words in common: glory, honor, sacrifice, and courage. In 1950 Faulkner stated that it is necessary for the writer to write about these things. In 1929 Frederic Henry had been embarrassed by the same words. But Frederic denies the words more than he does the concepts they represent. He admires names of villages and rivers and numbers of roads and regiments and dates. On particular dates, numbered regiments fight battles on numbered roads and at named villages and rivers. The actions of individual soldiers might be loosely described with the abstract words that Frederic shuns. But the problem is that Henry and Hemingway cannot use these terms in telling the story of A Farewell to Arms.

But Frederic uses them in the very act of rejecting them. In the passage denying abstraction he is already more abstract than Jake Barnes, who was so embarrassed at the words that he did not even state his embarrassment and the words that could cause it. Mainly the words appear when Henry quotes someone who uses them abstractly and emptily. The battle police, for example, “had that beautiful detachment and devotion to stern justice of men dealing in death without being in any danger of it” (FA, p. 233). They know only the vocabulary, not the referents, not the “dignity” of facts and names and places. One who is positive and genuine may on occasion courageously use one of the abstract terms without embarrassment. The priest tells Henry that love means that “You wish to sacrifice for” (FA, p. 75). Henry assures himself that taking the stars off his uniform after his desertion is “no point of honor” (FA, p. 241). The concept may be real even if the word is false: Henry thinks of Catherine Barkley and people “who bring so much courage to this world” (FA, p. 258).

Henry's and Hemingway's embarrassment at abstract words controls the style and the meaning of A Farewell to Arms. If Henry were absolutely true to his principles, he could use only words that communicate sensuous impressions. Since polysyllables are usually more abstract than monosyllables, Henry uses a plain vocabulary. Many co-ordinate connectives are words which reflect abstractions and intellectual concepts. The more subtle the connector, the less likely it is to appear in the novel. Such words as therefore, however, moreover, furthermore, consequently appear seldom or not at all. Hemingway uses only simple subordinating connectives, the relative pronouns and where, when, after. Such words as if, unless, since, though, although, whereas represent conditions, causes, contrarieties—that is, sophisticated concepts, nuances, intellectualizations. And Frederic Henry never uses them. Even but may suggest antithesis or elementary paradox. When Henry does not avoid connectives, he usually uses and. His sentences are simple or compound—seldom complex. They are “staccato jabs” which “make many pages tedious”¹³ for many readers who cannot accept this “great leveling democracy of the and.”¹⁴ Francis Hackett regards the style in places as “patent infantilism.”¹⁵ Those who read merely for plot are untroubled by the metronomic rhythm, but after the odd sentences are pointed out they are disturbed by a style which makes them wish to bob their heads up and down as if they were first graders chanting in unison the words from a primer.

Because there is considerable variety within the dominant pattern, no paragraph selected to exemplify the style of A Farewell to Arms can be entirely representative. The shortest sentences are likely to occur when Frederic meditates or when there is great suspense or a crisis. The paragraph at the end of Book III just after his desertion illustrates the most unusual quality of the style. Fifteen sentences contain only eighty-three words—less than six words per sentence. Henry thinks about not-thinking, and the only suggestion of thought above the level of the senses is contained in the word go, which may suggest flight. Go is repeated several times, and it appears at the end of four sentences.

I was not made to think. I was made to eat. My God, yes. Eat and drink and sleep with Catherine. To-night maybe. No that was impossible. But to-morrow night, and a good meal and sheets and never going away again except together. Probably have to go damned quickly. She would go. I knew she would go. When would we go? That was something to think about. It was getting dark. I lay and thought where we would go. There were many places.

(FA, p. 242)

The style here is about as remote from the usual manner of the stream of consciousness as any writing one can imagine, and yet it does suggest not only the urgency of Frederic's thoughts but also the processes of his thinking. Faulkner's Quentin Compson shows his weakness by the complicated process of his thinking, his excessive abstraction, and his intellectualizing. Frederic, on the contrary, demonstrates his strength by thinking only of the facts and the necessities without interpreting them. Quentin uses sense impressions to make himself remember; Frederic uses them to forget. Quentin's brother Jason does not think with the rapid and poetic associations of stream of consciousness, and Faulkner thus suggests his practicality, his lack of imagination. But the short sentences and the practical facts of Henry's thought process indicate his extraordinary strength and will power.

If abstract words are obscene, truly obscene words may indicate virtue. During the retreat from Caporetto, Aymo gives two young girls a ride in his ambulance.

“Don't worry,” he said. “No danger of—,” using the vulgar word. “No place for—.” I could see she understood the word and that was all. Her eyes looked at him very scared. She pulled the shawl tight. “Car all full,” Aymo said. “No danger of—. No place for—.”

(FA, p. 203)

A strange vocabulary to reassure a virgin. But Aymo, here a gentle man, reassures the virgins with whorehouse talk and escorts them as he would his sisters. His words make little difference. The facts and the deeds are right.

Sometimes in A Farewell to Arms abstractions and generalizations become almost necessary, but the characters use various strategies to avoid them. To express the ideals and aims of a profession would be as objectionable as to describe one's patriotic fervor. Though Frederic is a man of education, his studied vocabulary is not more extensive than that of a near illiterate. He shuns mentioning his civilian ambitions and ideals. He states that he is studying to be an architect only when he is escaping from Italy and is asked what he has been doing there (FA, pp. 250, 289). Never is any explanation of his reasons for joining the Italian army given. There are no indications of frustrated hopes for adventure during the war. Presumably he joined the ambulance corps for some humanitarian or even patriotic motive. Hemingway himself did.¹⁶ Soon after Catherine meets Frederic she asks him why he joined, and he answers, “‘I don't know. … There isn't always an explanation for everything’” (FA, p. 18). When another nurse asks the same question, he replies, “‘I was in Italy …, and I spoke Italian’” (FA, p. 22). When he denies the possibility of explanation, Catherine replies that she was brought up to think there were always explanations. The values have changed, but the words which once explained them have changed even more. Their conversation here is as much a discussion of language as of motive. John W. Aldridge explains the reluctance: “Abstract thoughts, like abstract words, seduce his mind away from essential experience, the true nature of things. …”¹⁷

Some restraint always prevails between Catherine and Frederic. Intimate feelings and thoughts of love itself almost always must remain unexpressed and incommunicable. Their restraint in language may make their love seem more casual and gross than it is. Frederic and Catherine's parting when he returns to the front from the hospital may be one of the most restrained emotional scenes in all fiction. He uses fewer words than a teen-ager fleeing from his first trip to a brothel.

“Good-by,” I said, “Take good care of yourself and young Catherine.”

“Good-by, darling.”

“Good-by,” I said.

(FA, p. 164)

But the refusal to state feelings is itself a sign of emotion. The throat-tightening comes simply because this is a novel and a world where the expression of sentiment is impossible no matter how real the sentiment is. Words are as inadequate as a handshake between an inhibited father and son after one has spent years in the horrors of a Buchenwald.

At times Frederic's friends and the world make it impossible for him to be silent or to use words that are meaningful only on the sensuous level. Occasionally when he is forced to speak in general terms, he picks and chooses words that are deliberately worn and trite and even vague. This too is a manner of self-defense. When he is compelled to refer to a world order, he uses the great impersonal they, which for him cannot have an antecedent. Nice and fine and lovely are words common in the novel. These counter words avoid the particular and the sentimental and the extravagant. They are so worn that they are not embarrassing when used genuinely or ironically. Catherine speaks vaguely of her “nice boy”:

I wanted to do something for him. You see I didn't care about the other thing and he could have had it all. He could have had anything he wanted if I would have known. I would have married him or anything. I know all about it now. But then he wanted to go to war and I didn't know.

(FA, p. 19)

Some words are so general as to be puzzling. Yet author and character do not wish definition. The priest, Frederic says, “had always known what I did not know and what, when I learned it, I was always able to forget” (FA, p. 14).

The positive unbeliever, curiously, can use more abstractions in his evangelical denial of his faith than a believer. The priest-baiters say such things as “I am an atheist” and “shook my faith” (FA, p. 7). The priest does not say “I am a believer” and “found my faith.” On him is the burden of demonstration without declarations. As a friend of the priest, Henry can only change the subject. Even the priest uses concrete images when he wishes to spread the gospel to Frederic. The mountains of the Abruzzi represent home to the priest; they suggest the things of religion. Tactfully, he couches his invitation to Frederic in concrete terms. He promises “good hunting,” a land that is cold and clear and dry, and a place where the peasants take off their hats and call you Lord—suggesting but not stating order and tradition.

A social historian reading A Farewell to Arms and deliberately searching for its subject matters would find a variety of topics: war, love, religion, mores and attitudes of a time and place. But the critic should indicate how these subject matters, if one may call them that, become integral parts of the over-all action or plot of the novel and how “subject matter,” plot, and style are harmonious. In general, Hemingway's treatment of his subject matter rejects exactly the same abstractions as are shunned in the style. This is that almost perfect harmony of techniques and subject toward which all works of art aspire and which none ever perfectly attains.

Style and subject yearn for the one (singularity) and reject the many (plurality). The subject of war is one of the best vantage points from which to see the distinction between the one and the many. In pulp fiction perhaps and certainly in romantic fiction the tale-teller may not distinguish between the individual and the great and glorious cause. An almost perfect example of such a yarn is Thomas Nelson Page's Marse Chan, where the hero's individuality is entirely submerged in his fight for God and country and cause and his love. But modern soldiers or perhaps all sane soldiers truly seen in fiction cannot wholly submerge themselves in the general cause.

Every aspect of the art and the meaning of A Farewell to Arms establishes a conflict between the concrete, the particular, the individual on the one hand and the abstract, the general, and the mass on the other. The larger theme is figured in several ways: the individual caught in the toils of the war; lovers trapped by their own bodies or by the mortal world in which they love; the individual's solipsism and terrible need for religion in a world without belief and without an order or a pattern which might provide evidence of something in which to believe. Plot, image, character, event—the minute details of the novel reflect the whole.

The themes of love, war, and religion dominate the patterns of meaning in A Farewell to Arms. Only one of these is perfectly comprehensible and without mystery—war. Love and religion remain complex, mysterious, inexplicable. An army and battle police can more definitely represent a society than love and a priest can represent the divine and the mystical. One may desert the army and make his separate peace, but he cannot withdraw from his own body without death; nor can he simply by proclamation separate himself from chaos or rule himself outside the theological order. The theme of war in A Farewell to Arms, therefore, because of the very nature of the problems involved, most clearly reveals the over-all design of the novel.

Only the naïve patriot in the novel may believe wholeheartedly in the cause of his country. Such a man is Gino, who provokes Frederic to think of his embarrassment at words: “Gino was a patriot, so he said things that separated us sometimes, but he was also a fine boy and I understood his being a patriot” (FA, p. 191). Ettore was worse—“a legitimate hero who bored everyone he met” (FA, p. 129). Gino provides an opportunity for Frederic to examine himself. Until the retreat from Caporetto he is more disturbed by the words than he is by the patriotism which they represent. That he himself was something of an idealist is indicated by his talk with disgruntled soldiers. As concretely as he can, he tells them that “defeat is worse” than war, and again he says, “I believe we should get the war over” (FA, pp. 51, 52). But the restraint of these abstractions indicates only the vaguest kind of patriotism. Even these minor symptoms of belief disappear after his desertion, and always they are made to seem insignificant in comparison with the other soldiers' hatred of the war. The triviality of Frederic's little patriotic displays is also made apparent by the contrast with his ardent feelings about his men. Personal relationships are comparable to facts, the words of the senses, the names of places. Under artillery fire, Frederic takes food to his men. Told to wait, he says, “They want to eat” (FA, p. 55). Here are sacrifice, honor, courage; but even to name the virtues is to diminish the force of the deed. If a character used the words, he would be a bore like Gino. A shell hits the group; and Manera, one of the most disgruntled and mutinous of the men, tenderly leads in the rescue of Frederic after he is wounded. One could say of him (like the major) that there is a great difference between his “world pessimism” and his personal loyalty.

The retreat from Caporetto reveals best the difference between the world and the individual. Different episodes in the retreat indicate a change in Frederic's view of the self, the war, and the world. The first of these, the shooting of the sergeant, is the most complex moral situation in the novel; and though it is a key to meaning in A Farewell to Arms, it has been ignored in almost all interpretations of the book. Henry's men invite two sergeants to ride in their ambulances during the retreat. From the moment when the two join the ambulance drivers, Hemingway begins preparing for the climactic desertion of the army by Frederic, and he juxtaposes several moral systems: the responsibilities of the individual to himself, to his group of friends, and to his general military or patriotic cause. The whole situation has been interpreted as mere selfish inconsistency on the part of Frederic: “Though he does not hesitate to kill a deserter,” writes Francis Hackett, “he himself deserts when offered the same dose of medicine. …”¹⁸ The medicine is the same, but the disease is not. First of all, the sergeants violate the code of a group by eating first without sharing. (Contrast Frederic's carrying food to his men during bombardment.) The sergeants enjoy the ride for a long time, but they are unwilling to share the ill fortunes of the group. When the ambulances are stuck in the mud, the sergeants refuse to push or to cut brush to put under the wheels. Thus they betray those who have helped them and disobey the orders of a superior officer. At a moment of desperate crisis they violate military law as well as the laws of common human decency. Frederic shoots at both as they flee and hits one. At this moment he has two different kinds of justification, but obviously he does not debate his reasons and offer explanations. Later, after his own desertion, he might. Bonello, the most brazen, cocksure, and unpatriotic of Frederic's men, administers a coup de grâce mostly for the pleasure of killing. “‘The son of a bitch,’ he said. He looked toward the sergeant. ‘You see me shoot him, Tenente?’” (FA, p. 211). Bonello and Frederic act with all “the beautiful detachment and devotion to stern justice” of the carabinieri who try to execute Henry later. But they also have a personal and particular justification. What Frederic should have done, indeed, what he would have done, about the sergeants after his own desertion, remains a point more for contemplation than solution.

After the killing of the sergeant all obligations and responsibilities to group and to military cause begin to disappear. Events make personal loyalty seem less meaningful. Before crossing a bridge, Bonello cares more for his own safety than that of the group: “‘It's probably mined,’” he says. “‘You cross first, Tenente’” (FA, p. 216). Faith in the general world becomes as meaningless as the words which might describe it. The loyal Aymo is shot by his own countrymen. Words and the world have failed Frederic, and about the death of Aymo he can only say, “He looked very dead. It was raining. I had liked him as well as any one I ever knew. I had his papers in my pocket and would write to his family” (FA, p. 222).

Bonello leaves the group because he wishes to be a prisoner. Piani stays even though he does not believe in the war. He does not wish to leave Frederic. Even before Frederic is finally convinced by the carabinieri that he should make a separate peace, the loyalty of Piani is all that is left to cling to. Personally devoted to Frederic, Piani respectfully calls him “Tenente,” but the retreating troops have their own “beautiful detachment and devotion to stern justice.” Piani therefore calls his lieutenant by his first name because the men may shoot officers. At this point Frederic still feels enough loyalty to the general situation to voice to Piani his objection to the troops' throwing away their rifles.

At the end of the retreat with the army Frederic encounters the battle police. They have “all the efficiency, coldness, and command of themselves of Italians who are firing and not being fired on” (FA, p. 231), “That beautiful detachment and devotion to stern justice of men dealing in death without being in any danger of it” (FA, p. 233). They still can mouth the abstractions like in vain, glory, courage, and honor. One of them refers to “the sacred soil of the fatherland.” But these men know nothing about the facts, the concrete actions which the words are supposed to describe. Of all the characters in the novel, they are the best representatives of abstraction and generality.

To escape execution by the battle police, Frederic jumps into a river and swims to safety. In words that suggest baptism Henry later reflects on his escape: “Anger was washed away in the river along with any obligation” (FA, p. 241). This sentence has been the delight of many critics. First was Malcolm Cowley: “When Frederic [sic] Henry dives into the flooded Tagliamento …, he is performing a rite of baptism that prepares us for the new life he is about to lead as a deserter from the Italian army; his act is emotionally significant, but it is a little unconvincing on the plane of action.”¹⁹ Acknowledging his indebtedness to Cowley, John W. Aldridge calls the escape in the river “an act of purgation symbolizing the death of the war and the beginning of a new life of love.”²⁰ And Robert Penn Warren refers to “baptism” and “the significance of a rite.”²¹

This is, however, a strange kind of baptism. Frederic's mental state does not resemble that which should accompany the Christian sacrament. In the river during his escape he thinks almost as a hunted animal. Even after he has found a hiding place in a railroad car under a canvas with guns, he does not reflect on the battle police, his desertion, his perilous situation, his justification. Before thinking about the general world, he ponders over the performance of his stiff knee. “The head was mine, but not to use, not to think with; only to remember and not too much remember” (FA, p. 240). The ceremony is an ironic parody of baptism, a travesty of the ceremony. The change and dedication that should precede baptism is a change in the appearance of the world, not in Frederic. Saint Paul's blinding light here is the threat of unjust execution. The newly baptized Christian assumes obligations; Frederic now can deny them. It is more initiation than baptism. Instead of subscribing to a new belief in the transcendent life of the spirit, Frederic uses his own personal principles to act in a new way because he has learned new things about the disorder of the world. Not only is he embarrassed at the words sacred, sacrifice, and in vain, but now he also doubts the existence of the facts that the words might describe. He had seen the sacred implicit in the names of places; but Caporetto can suggest only the profane. Whatever verities there may be exist only in the personal, in the relationship of love, in himself and Catherine.

The escape in the river does almost complete Frederic's knowledge about the war and the great world. “My life used to be full of everything,” he tells Catherine. “Now if you aren't with me I haven't a thing in the world” (FA, p. 266). When a friendly bartender asks him why men go to war, Frederic for the first time can reply factually, although he will answer the question only for himself: “I don't know. I was a fool” (FA, p. 264).

The climactic escape and desertion marks a sharp change in the structure of A Farewell to Arms. The style and the general theme are the same but the love of Catherine and Frederic replaces the war as the vehicle of narration and meaning. Before, Frederic had to define the place of the individual in society and the world; the moment of definition came with desertion; now, he and Catherine must define the place of lovers in creation. If the individual can only try and fail to make a separate peace in a world, lovers ultimately can attain only separation and death. Disaster comes early for Catherine and Frederic, but sooner or later, they learn, it comes to all.

But before the death of Catherine and Frederic's realization of the place of love in the world, the two are almost as alone in the mountains of Switzerland as Eve and Adam were in the Garden. And as innocent. Frederic's desertion was but an early bloom on the tree of knowledge. Although innocence is an odd word to use in describing Catherine and Frederic, their love in a sense exists apart from the world. “‘I wish we could do something really sinful,’ Catherine said. ‘Everything we do seems so innocent and simple. I can't believe we do anything wrong’” (FA, p. 160).

The priest describes such a love as that of Catherine and Frederic in terms that are idealistic but not sexual: “When you love you wish to do things for” (FA, p. 75). But this sentence, concrete as it is, borders on abstraction, and the two lovers avoid such statements of what they feel. When Frederic realizes that he loves Catherine, he lets all the meanings remain in physical terms: “Everything turned over inside of me” (FA, p. 95). The lovers' refusal, indeed, inability, to talk about love in terms of the embarrassing words leaves much unsaid, and here may be a reason for what many regard as Hemingway's failure to characterize Catherine. John W. Aldridge, for example, regards the love affair as “strangely inadequate.” “Instead of emerging as a human personality,” Catherine he believes, “became merely an abstraction. …”²² Hemingway had set himself a difficult task in trying to portray an individual woman who rejects all the words that the women of the world use to describe the raison d'etre of marriage and womanhood.

After the reality of their love has been expressed by the flesh, marriage becomes a convention, a religious or civil institution, a generalization. Catherine's friend Ferguson accuses Catherine of having no honor, but Fergy still thinks with the immoral world's embarrassing words (FA, p. 256). Frederic wishes marriage more than Catherine because in the priest's terms he might be doing a thing for the one he loves. In keeping with his rejection of the world, he wishes to be “married privately some way” (FA, p. 120), but Catherine reminds him of the meaninglessness of marriage in the moral terms of the book when she tells him that “‘There's no way to be married except by church or state” (FA, p. 120). And in a happy moment the concrete good feelings of love are so predominant that Catherine says they are already married—and given a chaotic world like that in this novel, any ceremony would be love's sacrilege.

Love therefore is a refuge from the failure of all generalities. And the world vanishes during the Edenic life in Switzerland. After Catherine and Frederic leave Italy in a small boat on a lake, the two think only of the concrete things of the sensations which they endure and enjoy. There are no thoughts of a separate peace, not even talk about the war. Switzerland is “a grand country,” “a splendid country,” where “The war seemed as far away as the football games of some one else's college” (FA, p. 301). In Switzerland they eat pretzels, drink beer, enjoy the weather, and read “about disaster” (FA, p. 302). The idyll which Hemingway has written about the days of Catherine and Frederic in the mountains is one of the simplest and most beautiful passages in his works.

But the world cannot be denied. In A Farewell to Arms it works out destinies with little or no regard for the meanings of the embarrassing words it uses. The individual is not freely given that prerogative of decision. The hard paradox is that Frederic on the one hand has every right to say farewell to arms; but the world will not let him exercise the right with impunity. Though there be chaos and evil, the individual must act in the terms of duty and honor. Already years before For Whom the Bell Tolls Hemingway is aware that no man can be an island. But a chaotic world still forces a man to try to be an island, and paradoxically even as he flees from evil he is wrong in his flight. Trapped in a mortal world, faced with social obligations, man must accept. There is no way to sign a separate peace with all creation and life itself. Robert Penn Warren describes well the doom of the lovers: “the attempt to find a substitute for universal meaning in the limited meaning of the personal relationship is doomed to failure.”²³ Love, which helped to carry them out of the world, makes them return when Catherine goes to the hospital in Lausanne to bear her child. Always the baby reminds them that they cannot deny the press of the world. When the time of birth is near, Catherine and Frederic share a “feeling as though something were hurrying us and we could not lose any time together” (FA, p. 321). Whether Hemingway or Henry regards the baby as the agent of the world or whether Henry's attitude is merely that of a father-to-be who does not yet know and love his child is never clear. In a sense Frederic and Catherine have even been isolated from their own unborn child. And he is so much worried about her that he has no time for concern about the baby. After Catherine and the baby die, Frederic still cannot define his role in creation. He knows that in a sense the baby also has been “biologically trapped.” If he thought in Christian terms he would recognize the biological trap as mortality, the fall of man. And the trap indicates that Nature—or God if there is One—rather than man brought death into the world and all our woe. “Poor little kid. I wished the hell I had been choked like that” (FA, p. 338). Though he has no religion, he prays for Catherine and recognizes that the baby should be baptized.

By this time the words glorious and sacred are meaningless as well as embarrassing. The particular facts to which one may cling are that the words mean little and sometimes nothing in the world, that the individual cannot speak the words, but that he must act with sacrifice and courage and pity and pride. He must endure in a world without explanations.

In the war Frederic learns that the individual is trapped in a society that mouths words without knowing the meanings. Only the relationships between individuals in small groups can be true. In his love affair Frederic learns that he is mortal, that he is “biologically trapped.” In religion he never learns anything. From the beginning to the end of the novel he yearns for a faith like that of the priest. Like the words, religion remains vague and abstract. The ultimate in Frederic's knowledge of religious things is expressed by Count Greffi, who tells him that love is a “religious feeling.” But religion is too vague for Catherine, who tells Frederic that he is her religion. Hemingway's doomed lovers never know whether love is a substitute for religion because there is no God or whether it is a concrete and ideal experience which may enable them to become very devout when they are old. Even in religion they maintain a world skepticism and a personal cheeriness. Frederic's lack of faith allows him to blaspheme although he prays in moments of fear and he cannot put away religious things.

In A Farewell to Arms, style and the major subjects of the novel (war, love, religion) form an almost perfect harmony in the rejection of the general and vague and the acceptance only of the particular, the things of the senses, the knowable. Both style and theme reject the words which do not refer to a material thing. In historical terms A Farewell to Arms is very much a book of its time. The two lovers desire what Alfred North Whitehead has described as an “Order of Nature. …” “It does not matter what men say in words,” Whitehead wrote in 1925, “so long as their activities are controlled by settled instincts. The words may ultimately destroy the instincts.”²⁴ He might have been writing of Catherine and Frederic when he wrote that the “new tinge to modern minds is a vehement and passionate interest in the relation of general principles to irreducible and stubborn facts.” Hemingway and Frederic and Catherine admitted the possibility of the existence of principles and mind and spirit, even with capital letters, but for author and characters the instincts could not be expressed in the embarrassing words which have been destroyed. Words change in every age; but in Hemingway's early career, he said, “words we knew were barred to us, and we had to fight for a single word. …”²⁵ In these respects A Farewell to Arms is one of the best manifestations of an attitude in an age, but, more significantly, Hemingway has created a novel that will be a lasting work of art. Most of Catherine's and Frederic's soul-searchings resemble those of any thinking individual in any period, and they are embodied in a vehicle so appropriate to the theme that style and subject become indistinguishable and inseparable.

Notes

1. Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, Modern Standard Authors (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953), p. 140. Hereafter cited in text with abbreviation FA.

2. Robert Penn Warren, “Introduction,” A Farewell to Arms, Modern Standard Authors, p. xxv.

3. Carlos Baker, Hemingway: The Writer as Artist (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952), p. 116.

4. D. S. Savage, The Withered Branch: Six Studies in the Modern Novel (New York: Pellegrini & Cudahy, 1952), p. 32.

5. Robert Herrick, “What Is Dirt?” The Bookman, 70 (November 1929), 261. Henry Seidel Canby, “Chronicle and Comment,” The Bookman, 70 (February 1930), 643.

6. E. M. Halliday, “Hemingway's Narrative Perspective,” The Sewanee Review, 60 (1952), 210.

7. David Daiches, “Ernest Hemingway,” College English, 2 (May 1941), 734.

8. Edwin Berry Burgum, The Novel and the World's Dilemma (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), p. 185.

9. Frederick J. Hoffman, The Modern Novel in America 1900-1950 (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1951), pp. 98-100.

10. Mark Schorer, “Mr. Hemingway & His Critics,” New Republic, 131 (November 15, 1954), 20.

11. Burgum, p. 190.

12. Warren, p. xxvi.

13. Francis Hackett, “Hemingway: ‘A Farewell to Arms,’” Saturday Review of Literature, 32 (August 6, 1949), 32.

14. Joseph Warren Beach, American Fiction 1920-1940 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1941), p. 101.

15. Hackett, p. 32.

16. Charles A. Fenton, The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway: The Early Years (New York: Viking Press, 1954), p. 61.

17. John W. Aldridge, After the Lost Generation: A Critical Study of the Writers of Two Wars (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1951) p. 8.

18. Hackett, p. 33.

19. Malcolm Cowley, “Introduction,” Hemingway, The Viking Portable Library (New York: The Viking Press, 1944), p. xvii.

20. Aldridge, p. 9.

21. Warren, p. xxxii.

22. Aldridge, pp. 38-39.

23. Warren, p. xxxi.

24. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, Lowell Lectures, 1925 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1925), p. 5.

25. George Plimpton, “An Interview with Ernest Hemingway,” in Carlos Baker, Hemingway and His Critics (New York: Hill and Wang, 1961, 1963), p. 26.