[In the following essay, Hackett asserts that Hemingway's hero in the novel represents a false concept of male dignity.]

In one detail time has dulled the luster of Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. He had gone through the First World War with the Italians and he put much of his own experience into that brilliant book. When he issued it in 1929 the story was still fresh but familiarity with war material now makes it a little trite. A wholly imagined experience, as in The Red Badge of Courage, is the kind that keeps its salience, though Stendhal and Tolstoy triumphed in spite, of knowing the actuality of war.

As an artist, however, Hemingway turns the background of war to his special purpose. It is a defect that his hero's enlistment with the Italians is given no weight. He seems to have gone along out of masculine camaraderie. But by keeping it relatively tame and incidental, Hemingway uses it as a springboard for the real story, which is a love story. Tension mounts from the moment when the narrator is wounded until, after his cure and his sharing in the Caporetto retreat, he becomes AWOL and breaks away to reunite with his former nurse. He had left her pregnant, without any visible distress, but he throws off the war as an obstacle to his romantic reunion. In this way war and love are inverted—deliberately.

It is easy now to see why Hemingway did this. The primitive mood of war gave him his chance to dig down into himself for a native primitiveness that peace had long ruled out of bounds in polite American fiction. The American male egoist, with a pioneer code and a greed for direct experience, was long circumvented in novels by those who took their cue from England. Not since Byron had made his postwar protest did any male writing in English hurdle all the polite barriers in an effort to vindicate natural appetites. If A Farewell to Arms has created an epoch it is because Hemingway had the art to do this trick.

The staccato jabs with which the hammered it home make many pages tedious, but his report of actual be havior as against any polite hint at it proved a great boon to a generation in transition. “I was not made to think,” says Hemingway's hero, which is all too true. “I was made to eat. My God, yes. Eat and drink and sleep with Catherine. Tonight maybe.” The frank eagerness of desire and the heightening of its keen moments Hemingway carries off with its best weapon, which is veracity in accent and detail. Except for the patent in fantilism at the beginning, with over thirty “and”s on the first page, he achieves singularly clear and bold lines time after time. That is his prime distinction. It gives us plausible behavior, if not elucidation.

The disadvantage of the method is evident only on reflection. By bestowing on his hero a superb alimentary canal, a sufficient income from home for an undisturbed love life, and an adoring girl to complete it, Hemingway is extremely telling. He suggests the desirable no less vividly than Maupassant and as a storyteller he gives examples of narrative skill—as in his hero's escape from an execution squad, his fight into Switzerland with Catherine, and his vigil in the maternity hospital—which the author of “Bel-Ami” might well have envied. He can make such comment palpitant, exciting horror or disgust or shock of recognition events pushing against the protagonist until he takes his own part.

But tragedy does not reside in events, however vivid. It gets its value from the dignity of the protagonist, and to eat, to drink, to sleep with Catherine do not constitute a full human destiny. Hemingway's hero is not a cur but he is a puppy, a destructive puppy whose gamboling comes high. Take his part in the Italian campaign. Though he does not hesitate to kill a deserter, he himself deserts when offered the same dose of medicine and then discards Italy like a wet bathing suit. His only claim to dignity is a certain masculine prowess very attractive to the girls. But it is with irony that Maupassant depicts a more extreme case of this egoism in Bel-Ami. And not even Odysseus, highly attractive to the girls as he was, could have been a triumph of the storyteller art had his masculine prowess had no greater object outside itself. His dignity is not diminished by his eating and drinking and fighting, but he transcends those. He has intercourse with the gods.

Catherine is the nearest to a divine object in A Farewell to Arms, but she is essentially the male egoist's dream of a lover, a divine lollypop. At no time is she led to measure her strength against her hero. She is never individualized.

Hence the poignant end is a crushing blow from fate, not a true and inevitable outcome of destiny, unless we accept Hemingway's immature nihilism.

It is a tribute to his art, so succinct and so conscious, that he hits the bull's eye he aims at, if we accept the pose he has adopted. But the primrose path down which he has led so many young novelists in their attempt to offer the masculine protest is in reality a dead end, and Ernest Hemingway's lyrical novel, for all its excellences, shows how sterile the primitive protest really is.