[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 limitation necessarily makes Mr. Hemingway more important than he already is. Literature is not a matter of pleasing Aunt Susan. But we must also remember that it is equally not a matter of simply shocking Aunt Susan.

For some time now, good critics have regarded Mr. Hemingway as one of the most important of the younger American writers of fiction. He is in his thirties, was born in the Middle West, but has lived in Europe, chiefly in Paris, for several years, and most of his work is not about America at all, but has a European background. (And I believe that work will be even better than it is now when he goes home again to interpret the life of his own people. This is the customary thing to tell these American artists who have exiled themselves, but then, like a good many customary things, it happens to be true.) Mr. Hemingway is really very American; though he may be writing about boulevards and bullfights, he could not possibly be mistaken for an English writer. He has a curious manner and idiom which are based on characteristic American speech. He tells his tales in a succession of short, direct sentences, piling up the facts, and avoiding all obvious ‘literary’ airs and graces. You feel as if he were riddling his subjects with a machine-gun. But through the medium of this bluff, masculine, ‘hard-boiled,’ apparently insensitive style, he contrives to give you a very vivid and sometimes poignant picture of the life he knows.

He has done this superbly in A Farewell to Arms, which is the story of a young American who does ambulance work on the Italian Front during the War. This tough young man falls in love with an English girl who is nursing out there. He is wounded, returns to the Front only to participate in the famous and horrible retreat of 1917, finally escapes from Italy with his girl, only to see her die, after the birth of their child, in Switzerland. It may be objected that the figures of mortality after childbirth are already far too high in fiction, but I think even the objectors will admit the terrible poignancy and force of Mr. Hemingway's concluding scene.

Even better though, and quite new to us, are the Italian Front scenes, especially those during the retreat, which are horribly alive. And then, dominating the whole grim chronicle, is the queer, almost inarticulate love story of the two unfortunates, who, like so many chief characters in modern fiction, seem to be curiously lonely, without backgrounds, unsustained by any beliefs of any kind, hardly looking on further than the next cocktail, at heart puzzled and melancholy barbarians. Mr. Hemingway, setting every possible obstacle in his way, yet achieves a beautiful tenderness and pathos in this love story, heightened no doubt by the cunning suggestion throughout of inarticulacy. A Hemingway character, suddenly finding himself rapturously in love, cannot do neat rhetorical things with moons and stars and flames and flowers; he can only mutter: ‘Aw, what the hell!’; but the emotion comes through all right, perhaps with all the more force because there is no suspicion of deft literary juggling in the scene.

I implore every member of this society who has a good head and a stout heart to acquire at least this one additional novel this month. I believe it will not be long before readers will be able to boast of the fact that they bought a first edition of A Farewell to Arms.

Note

1. A family chronicle novel (1929) by the Canadian writer Mazo de la Roche.