SOURCE: “A Farewell to Arms: Pseudoautobiography and Personal Metaphor,” in Ernest Hemingway: The Writer in Context, edited by James Nagel, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1984, pp. 107-28.

[In the following essay, Bell uses drafts and revisions of the novel to show that, while not autobiographical in every detail, A Farewell to Arms is highly realistic as a reflection of Hemingway's state of mind.]

Autobiographic novels are, of course, fictions, constructs of the imagination, even when they seem to incorporate authenticating bits and pieces of personal history. But all fiction is autobiography, no matter how remote from the author's experience the tale seems to be; he leaves his mark, expresses his being, his life, in any tale. A Farewell to Arms can illustrate both of these statements.

Ernest Hemingway's novel is not the autobiography some readers have thought it. It was not memory but printed source material that supplied the precise details of its descriptions of historic battle scenes on the Italian front in World War I.¹ The novel's love story is no closer to Hemingway's personal reality. He did go to Italy and see action, but not the action he describes; he did fall in love with a nurse, but she was no Catherine Barkley. A large amount of the book fulfills the principle expressed in the deleted coda to “Big Two-Hearted River”: “The only writing that was any good was what you made up, what you imagined.”² Still, there is much that must represent authentic recall in the book. Innumerable small details and a sense of general conditions in battle, the character of the Italian landscape, the Italian soldier, the ambulance corps—all impressed themselves upon Hemingway in 1918 in the Dolomite foothills near Schio as surely as they might have further east around the Tagliamento a year earlier. And there are fetishes of autobiography, trophies of the personal, chief among these the famous wounding at Fossalta, which Hemingway often recalled.³

Why is this last episode reproduced so exactly as it happened—the shell fragments in the legs, the sensation of dying and coming to life, the surgical sequel? In the coda, Nick—who is Hemingway—had “never seen a jockey killed” when he wrote “My Old Man”; “he'd never seen an Indian woman having a baby” like his namesake in “Indian Camp.” But Hemingway had been wounded just as Frederic is. The answer may be that it was a trauma obsessively recurring to mind, irrepressibly present in his writing because of its crucial, transforming effect upon his life.⁴ Still, in the novel the wounding is not at all transforming, does not provide the occasion for the “separate peace” declared by Nick at a similar moment in chapter 6 of In Our Time, often incorrectly thought to be the novel's germ. It does not even cause the novel's hero to suffer from sleeplessness afterward, the consequence of a similar wounding for the narrator of “Now I Lay Me,” written only two years before A Farewell to Arms. Perhaps in life as in the novel the wounding was simply a very striking experience, the young man's first brush with death. But as an authentic, indelible memory it was deliberate evidence, in any case, that the fiction was not all made up. Perhaps, then, the authentic wounding is chiefly a sign, a signature of the author's autobiographic contract with himself.

Hemingway's style, his realist pose, suggests, guilefully, that much more has been borrowed directly from experience than is actually the case. Perhaps the testimonial incorporation of the real, which guarantees autobiographic realism, may also be mimicked. When the “real” is made up to become the “realistic,” when the seemingly accidental detail appears to have been stuck into the narrative for no other reason than that it happened, than that it was there, the writer has deliberately made it look as though he is yielding to memory and resisting the tendency of literature to subdue everything to a system of connected significance. In A Farewell to Arms, as elsewhere in his writing, Hemingway made the discovery of this secret of realist effect, and his art, which nevertheless presses toward poetic unity by a powerful if covert formalist intent, yet seems continually open to irrelevance also. The result is a peculiar tension requiring the strictest control. Only a manner which conceals implication as severely as Hemingway's can nevertheless suggest those coherences, those rhythmic collocations of mere things, in the manner of imagist poetry, pretend notation of what the witnessing eye might simply have chanced to see. And this restraint is reinforced by deliberate avoidance of the kind of comment that might impose significance or interpretation. It is even further strengthened by the often-noted qualities of Hemingwayan syntax, the simple or compound declaratives lacking subordination, and the vocabulary high in nouns and verbs and low in qualifiers. The frequency of the impersonal passive voice that presents events simply as conditions, as in the many sentences that begin with “There were,” suppresses not only the sense of agency but the evaluating presence of the observer. If, despite these effects, there is often poetic meaningfulness it is also true that the poetic is sometimes renounced altogether and the realistic detail maintains its irrelevance, refusing any signification in order to affirm the presence of the actual, whether or not truly remembered, reported, historical.⁵

But this stylistic contest only reflects the struggle of the writer between the impulses to tell it “as it was” and to shape and pattern a story; it is not that struggle itself. The “realistic” style is, in fact, most conspicuous and most successful in the most “invented” parts of the book, the war scenes. It is not so evident in those other scenes where Hemingway draws upon memory—the Milan and Switzerland sections. Hemingway had been a patient in the Red Cross hospital in Milan and had spent convalescent weeks in the city; and he had taken vacation tours in the Alpine lake region. But the action situated in those places in the novel has no authenticity to match that of the great Caporetto chapter in which Frederic participates in events Hemingway had not. Still, it is the war scenes, probably—to turn our paradox about once more—that express Hemingway's deepest feelings by way of metaphor, his sense of the war as an objective correlative of his state of mind. The love affair located in familiar, remembered scenes fails of authenticity though it takes something from the writer's experiences with his nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky, and something from his love for Hadley Richardson, and even Pauline Pfeiffer's caesarian operation; it succeeds less well than the invented war scenes in achieving either the effect of realism or the deeper autobiography of metaphor. It is as the latter that it can, however, be explained.

Any first-person story must imitate the autobiographic situation, but there is particular evidence that Hemingway gave his narrator his own sense of the difficulty of reconciling Wahrheit and Dichtung. The novelist's struggles to achieve an appropriate ending to his book are visible in the manuscript drafts at the John F. Kennedy Library.⁶ They show that his chief problem was that he felt both that a novel needed formal closure and also that life was not “like that.” He rejected, in the end, the attempt to pick up dropped threads and bring Rinaldi and the priest back into the narrative from which they had been absent since the end of chapter 26, a little beyond the novel's midpoint. It may be argued that these two companions de la guerre are felt even in their absence, that there are no dropped threads, the priest in particular being absorbed into the transformed conception of love which the American lieutenant and the English nurse discover in the later portions of the book. But there is really no such absorption; Frederic and Catherine remain very much what they were at the beginning, this mentor and the skeptical doctor both being left behind. Of the “three people of any importance in this story” to whom Hemingway referred in the rejected opening for chapter 10, only Catherine persists.⁷ Hemingway must have decided this made an ending—the tightening isolation of his hero requires the loss of the larger human world—but in one of the discarded drafts he permits Frederic to express the misgivings of his creator. “I could tell how Rinaldi was cured of the syphilis. … I could tell how the priest in our mess lived to be a priest in Italy under Fascism,” the pseudoautobiographic narrator observes. But he knows that a story must end somewhere. That he realizes that his closure cannot be complete is due to his awareness that life does not have endings.

Things happen all the time. Everything blunts and the world keeps on. You get most of your life back like goods recovered from a fire. It all keeps on and then it keeps on. It never stops for you. Sometimes it stops when you are still alive. You can stop a story anytime. Where you stop is the end of that story. The rest goes on and you go on with it. On the other hand you have to stop a story. You have to stop at the end of whatever it was you were writing about.⁸

The rejected passage can be read not merely as a device to excuse the odd shape of the novel but as a reflection of Hemingway's personal dilemma, his desire to respect the claim of art and also to get back his own past like “goods recovered from a fire.”

Getting back his life by writing fiction was not, in this case, a matter of endings, of plot. The indeterminacy of remembered experience does not matter, because the coherence of events is not so important as the unity of the mind which is the container for them. If Hemingway was to fulfill the autobiographic expectation, the promise made by authentic transcriptions like the Fossalta wounding, it would not be by trying to tell, literally, “the story” of his past. The novelist wrote about himself, and perhaps never so truly as in A Farewell to Arms, but he did so by projecting, lyrically, an inner condition. Mood and tone, not events, provide unity, and these were more intensely the concomitants of the present life of the writer than of his younger self. The novel is about neither love nor war; it is about a state of mind, and that state of mind is the author's.

That plot is not dominant in A Farewell to Arms has not been properly recognized. Critics who have stressed the prevalence of poetic metaphors in the novel have failed, on the whole, to see that such patterns establish its “spatial” composition, minimize progressive effects.⁹ In fact, an unvarying mood, established by the narrative voice, dominates everything it relates, bathes uniformly all the images and levels events which are seen always in one way only. That the principal descriptive elements—river, mountains, dust or mud, and above all, rain—are all present in the opening paragraphs suggests not so much that later scenes are being predicted as that the subsequent pages will disclose nothing that is not already evident in the consciousness that has begun its self-exhibition.

The famous wounding is no turning-point in the journey of that consciousness. But even the later “separate peace” in chapter 32 after Frederic's immersion in the Tagliamento is not really a change of direction, a peaking of the plot, though Hemingway's hero does say as he lies on the floor of the flatcar that takes him to Milan, “You were out of it now. You had no more obligation” (p. 232). In chapter 7, even before his wounding, it should be remembered, he has already said, “I would not be killed. Not in this war. It did not have anything to do with me” (p. 37). It is impossible to tell at what point this narrator has acquired his conviction of separateness amounting to alienation from the events which carry him along the stream of time.

By the time he turns away from the war at the Tagliamento in October 1917, Frederic will have had two years in which to acquire the apathy of war weariness. But this is not his malady. Already on the opening page, in 1915, the voice that speaks to us exhibits that attitude psychoanalysts call “blunting of affect,” the dryness of soul which underlies its exquisite attentiveness. One has heard of the “relish of sensation” implied in this and other passages of descriptive writing by Hemingway. But “relish” is too positive a word for the studied emotional distance from the perceived world which is in effect here. For the view from Gorizia across the Isonzo, toward the passing troops and the changing weather, this narrator seems hardly to feel anything beyond a minimal “things went very badly.” An alienated neutrality governs the reiterated passives, the simple declaratives. “There were big guns. … There was fighting. … There were mists over the river. … There were small gray motor cars” (p. 4). The next year (chapter 2) is the same. “There were many victories. … The fighting was in the next mountains. … The whole thing was going well. … The war was changed” (pp. 5-6). The different character of military events makes for no change in the tone. We are prepared for the personality who emerges into view as he describes his leave. He had not gone to Abruzzi but had spent drunken nights when “you knew that that was all there was,” and he had known the “not knowing and not caring in the night, sure that this was all … suddenly to care very much” (p. 13), swinging from not caring to caring and back again, from affectlessness to affect and then again to its loss. If there is something that transcends this alternation, the ecstasy of either love or religion, it is so fugitive as to be almost unnameable: “If you have had it you know. … He, the priest, had always known what I did not know, what, when I learned it, I was always able to forget” (pp. 13-14).

“Always” is an important word here. There is no hint that Frederic has at any time had a beginning in illusion, that he ever started out like Stephen Crane's Henry Fleming in The Red Badge of Courage (something of a model for A Farewell to Arms) with a naive belief in exalted meanings. The well-known passage, “I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice, and the expression in vain” is not the culmination of a process by which these concepts have withered. His embarrassment goes as far back as he can remember. He has had it always. “Gino was a patriot,” Frederic continues, “so he said things that separated us sometimes, but he was also a fine boy and I understand his being a patriot. He was born one” (pp. 184-85). And the opposite attitude, disbelief in such things, may also be inborn. Rinaldi has told Frederic that for him “there are only two things”—drink and sex—and his work. Frederic hopes that he will get other things but the doctor says, “No. We never get anything. We are born with all we have and we never learn” (p. 171). If Frederic may be conceived of as having been also born with all he has, this explains why he is described as having enlisted in the ambulance corps for no reason at all, unlike Hemingway who was swept into the wave of American enthusiasm to aid the Allies. Frederic just happened to be already in Italy when the war broke out. He had been studying architecture. He has never had any belief in the big words. “Why did you do it?” asks Catherine, referring to his enlistment. “I don't know. … There isn't always an explanation for everything,” he answers.

And yet this sufferer from blunted affect can fall in love. It is one of the “givens” of the story, though it seems to demand a capacity which, like the emotion of patriotism, he was born without. “When I saw her I was in love with her,” he says when Catherine appears again at the hospital. “I had not wanted to fall in love with anyone. But God knows I had” (pp. 91, 93). Catherine, as well, had experienced this hardly credible conversion. Although we never get so direct a view of her mental operations—this is Frederic's story, after all—she appears, in the earlier scenes, to be as incapacitated as Hemingway's other English nurse who has lost a fiancé in the war, Brett Ashley. There is more than a hint that she too suffers the dissociation of feeling from sensation that accounts for her unfocused sexuality when Frederic first makes love to her. But now she feels. The raptures of both lovers, however, are curiously suspect.

Frederic has only delusively attached himself to an otherness. Far from the war's inordinate demand upon his responses, he has been converted to feeling in the isolation of his hospital bed, where, like a baby in its bassinet, he is totally passive, tended and comforted by female caretakers, the nurses, and particularly by this one. The image is regressive, and the ministering of Catherine, who looks after all his needs, including sexual, while he lies passive, is more maternal than connubial. The relation that now becomes the center of the novel is, indeed, peculiar enough to make us question it as a representation of adult love. More often noted than Frederic's passivity is the passivity of Catherine in this love affair, a passivity which has irritated readers (particularly female readers) because it seems to be a projection of male fantasies of the ideally submissive partner. It results from her desire to please. She is a sort of inflated rubber woman available at will to the onanistic dreamer. There is, in fact, a masturbatory quality to the love of each. The union of these two is a flight from outer reality and eventually from selfhood, which depends upon a recognition of the other; the selfhood that fails to find its definition in impingement upon the world at large and the establishment of distinction from it eventually proves incapable of recognizing the alien in the beloved and therefore the independent in itself. The otherness that Frederic and Catherine provide for one another is not enough to preserve their integral selves, and while the sounds of exteriority become more and more muffled in the novel, their personalities melt into one another. It is for this reason that Hemingway's novel, far from being the Romeo and Juliet he once carelessly called it, is more comparable to Anthony and Cleopatra, a play which shows that the world is not well lost for love, though nothing, of course, can be further from the masterful images of Shakespeare's adult lovers than Hemingway's pitiful pair.

Affective failure, then, shows itself not merely in the war sections of the novel but in the parts where one would imagine it to have been transcended, the love story of Catherine and Frederic. Catherine constantly reminds her lover of her resolution not to offer him otherness but to collapse her own selfhood into his. She asks what a prostitute does, whether she says whatever the customer wants her to, even “I love you.” She will outdo the prostitute: “But I will. I'll say just what you wish and I'll do what you wish and then you will never want any other girls, will you. … I want what you want. There isn't any me any more. Just what you want” (pp. 105, 106). The idyll of their Milan summer is spent in such games as this: “We tried putting thoughts in the other one's head while we were in different rooms. It seemed to work sometimes but that was probably because we were thinking the same thing anyway” (p. 114). She refuses his offer to marry her, and when he says “I wanted it for you” replies, “there isn't any me. I'm you. Don't make up a separate me” (p. 115).

Their solitariness à deux is only emphasized by their occasional contacts with others who are outside the war, those met in the Milan cafés or at the racetrack who are not the true alienated but the self-serving and parasitic, and even by their encounter with the genuine war hero, Ettore, who is wounded in the foot, like Frederic, and has five medals, and whom they cannot stand. After she becomes pregnant, Catherine says, “There's only us two and in the world there's all the rest of them. If anything comes between us we're gone and then they have us.” When the time comes for him to leave for the front, they walk past a couple embracing under a buttress of the cathedral, and she will not agree that they are like themselves. “‘Nobody is like us,’ Catherine said. She did not mean it happily” (p. 147). Not surprisingly, they both are orphans of a sort. Catherine has a father but “he has gout,” she says to Frederic; “You won't ever have to meet him.” Frederic has only a stepfather, and, he tells her, “You won't have to meet him” (p. 154). When they are waiting for the birth of their baby in Switzerland, she asks him about his family: “Don't you care anything about them?” He replies, “I did, but we quarrelled so much it wore itself out” (p. 304).

Book 3, the justly praised Caporetto section, returns Frederic to Gorizia where others have spent a different sort of summer. Rinaldi, depressed, overworked, perhaps syphilitic, says, “This is a terrible war, baby,” drinks too much, and is impatient of Frederic's acquisition of a “sacred subject.” The priest tells him how the terrible summer has made the major gentle. No one any longer believes in victory. But Frederic confesses that he himself believes in neither victory nor defeat. He believes, he says, “in sleep.” It is more than a joke, even though in a moment he apologizes that “I said that about sleep meaning nothing” (p. 179). The regressive process, the withdrawal from reality, the surrender of complex personal being, the limitation of relationship to that with an other who is really only a mirror of self approaches more and more the dreamless sleep of apathy, the extremity of ennui. There is a suggestion of the pathologic in the “I was deadly sleepy” with which the chapter ends (p. 180).

The retreat is reported by a sensibility already asleep, by an emotional apparatus already itself in retreat from the responsibilities of response. “The houses were badly smashed but things were very well organized and there were signboards everywhere” (p. 181). However much this sounds like irony to us, irony is not intended by the speaker, who does not mean more by saying less. His downward adjustment of feeling is the one often made by soldiers—or by concentration camp victims, or long-term prisoners—by which emotions are reduced to the most rudimentary since the others have become insupportable. His battle-weary companions express their own reduction by a preoccupation with food. The entire retreat is a massed legitimization of apathy and a symbol of it.

Frederic's affectlessness is climaxed by his “cold-blooded” shooting of one of the Italian sergeants who has refused to obey his order to move the stalled ambulance. “I shot three times and dropped one,” he observes, as though describing the pursuit of game, and Bonello then takes the pistol and “finishes him,” as a hunting companion might finish off an animal still quivering where it has fallen (p. 204). One may say that this is simply war—Sherman's war—and feeling has no place in it. But this does not make it less shocking that the perceiving hero is so matter-of-fact. Even Bonello expresses a motive: he is a socialist, and all his life he has wanted to kill a sergeant, he tells Frederic, who expresses no personal motive at all, and who has never felt that it was his war. Yet for giving up his part in it he has also no special motive. His case is not like that of the demoralized soldiers who are flinging down their arms and shouting that they want to go home. He cannot go home. And now a profoundly significant flash of memory comes to him as he rests in the hay of a barn:

The hay smelled good and lying in a barn in the hay took away all the years between. We had lain in the hay and talked and shot sparrows with an air-rifle when they perched in the triangle cut high in the wall of the barn. The barn was gone now and one year they had cut the hemlock woods and there were only stumps, dried tree-tops, branches and fireweed where the woods had been. You could not go back.

(p. 216)

The “separate peace” was made long ago. Again we must note the reference to a congenital disengagement when he says with what only looks like a newly acquired minimalism, “I was not made to think, I was made to eat. My God, yes. Eat and drink and sleep with Catherine” (p. 233). Removing his uniform after his escape, he strips himself of the last vestige of social self. He no longer can interest himself in the war news, as he had in the earlier Milan section, and does not give us summaries of military events. “I had a paper but I did not read it because I did not want to read about the war. I was going to forget the war” he says at the beginning of chapter 34. It is now that he says, “I had made a separate peace.” “Don't talk about the war,” he tells the barman at the hotel. And he reflects, “The war was a long way away. Maybe there wasn't any war. There was no war here. Then I realized it was over for me” (pp. 243, 255). But how committed to this war has he ever been?

The rest is a “fugue” in the technical psychiatric sense of a period during which the patient, often suffering loss of memory, begins another life from which all his past has been drained. Thus, the “all for love” that remains for Frederic and Catherine is qualified by the lovers' knowledge that the whole empire of normal being has been surrendered. “Let's not think of anything,” says Catherine (p. 252). The lover boasts that he has no wish to be separate from his beloved: “All other things were unreal.” He tells her, “My life used to be full of everything. Now if you aren't with me I haven't a thing in the world” (p. 257). Their universe of two is reducing itself further, and their games continue to suggest this constriction. He might let his hair grow longer, she suggests, and she might cut hers short so that even their sexual difference may be lessened. “Then we'd both be alike. Oh, darling, I want you so much I want to be you too.” He says, “We're the same one,” and she, “I want us to be all mixed up. … I don't live at all when I'm not with you.” He replies, “I'm no good when you're not there. I haven't any life at all any more” (pp. 299-300).

These scenes are a drift toward death, which is why the novel must end in death, Catherine's and the baby's, though Hemingway considered allowing the child to survive. Such a survival would have contradicted all that has gone before by introducing a new otherness when its parents are losing the otherness of each other. The two lovers already live on the margin of life. Count Greffi is an even more mythological figure than Mippipopolous in The Sun Also Rises, whom he resembles. The very old man, so close to death, is a fit sentinel upon that border they are about to cross before they pass, by a symbolic boat voyage, out of Italy. Their Switzerland is not on the map, notwithstanding the fact that it resembles the Switzerland of Hemingway's vacation tours. In their chalet, wrapped in the cottony blanket of the winter snow, cared for by their good-natured landlord and his wife, whose lives have a reality with which they make no connection, and in contact with no one else, they are united as before in his hospital bed. Their destiny is out of their own hands as they become, quite literally, patients awaiting surgery, playing bedgames. Perhaps Frederic will pass the time by growing a beard. Their loss of connection with human modes of being produces fantasies of an animal identity, like that of the fox they see in the snow who sleeps with his brush wrapped about his face, curled in the regressive fetal position. What would they do if they had tails like the fox? They would have special clothes made, or “live in a country where it wouldn't make any difference” to have a fox's tail. Catherine says, truly, “We live in a country where nothing makes any difference. Isn't it grand how we never see anyone?” (p. 303). The country is, of course, the country of the dead, toward which she is bound.

If indeed “all fiction is autobiography,” no special demonstration is required to support the idea that A Farewell to Arms expresses the author's inner being, his secret life. Yet there is particular reason to suppose this in the case of this novel which is the presentation of a state of mind, a mood and condition of being. These, it may be arguable, belonged to the writer himself at the time of writing. As a war novel, it is curiously late. In 1929, American society was preoccupied with other things than its memories of the battles of the First World War. Hemingway, already the author of a novel dealing with a later period and married for the second time, had come a long way from the naive nineteen-year-old of 1918. Any such analysis is speculative, but there is reason to suppose that for the writer as for Frederic Henry the barn was gone where he had lain in the hay as a boy: “You could not go back.” This realization must have been particularly acute when this novel was being written. Since 1925 his life had been one of personal turmoil. He had found himself in love with Pauline Pfeiffer, forced to decide between her and the woman whom he still claimed also to love and who had been, he would declare, a faultless wife. In 1927, he had remarried and, in the following year, while Pauline was pregnant, he was struggling to make progress on this second novel, plagued by various accidental disasters—an eye injury, head cuts from a fallen skylight—such as he always seemed prone to. Pauline's baby was delivered by caesarian section after a labor of eighteen hours during a Kansas heat wave. The first draft of A Farewell to Arms was finished two months later, but before Hemingway began the task of revision, his father, Dr. Clarence Hemingway, who had been depressed for some time, committed suicide by shooting himself in the head.

Beyond the immediate strain and horror of such events must have been their power to intensify Hemingway's most buried anxieties. His remarriage, which he did not quite understand, created a keen sense of guilt in him along with the recognition that he contained compulsive forces he was powerless to restrain. Marriage, moreover, could be destructive not only because it had resulted in pain and divorce in his own case; as a child he had seen its effects in the secret contests of will between his parents. Pauline's dangerous, agonized parturition seemed to confirm his feeling that death as readily as life was the consequence of sexuality. He may well have felt what he had imagined the Indian father to feel before cutting his throat in “Indian Camp”. That early story suggests that Hemingway had always seen something terrifying in the birth process. Now he incorporated a birth process fatal to both fictional mother and child in the conclusion of his novel.

His father's suicide must have awakened further all his most inadmissible emotions, above all his feelings of hostility and guilt toward his parents. Readers of Carlos Baker's biography do not need a review of Hemingway's childhood and youth with its history of rebellions and chastisements.¹⁰ The spirited boy, adoring and striving to emulate his father, also incurred this father's disciplinarian severity, and young Ernest's resentment of his punishment was so intense that he would sometimes, when he was about eighteen, sit hidden in the doorway of a shed behind the house drawing a bead on his father's head with a gun while the doctor worked in his vegetable garden.¹¹ Yet it was this same father who had taught him to shoot, initiated him in the craft and passion of killing animals. His feelings toward his mother, whose musical-artistic inclinations might be thought to be the source of his own impulses toward the life of art, would, in the end, prove more bitterly hostile. As he grew to manhood he felt, it would seem, more betrayed by her attempts to control his behavior, especially after the war had proved him a man and even a hero. There is the well-known incident of youthful high-jinks in the woods, shortly after his twenty-first birthday, which resulted in his expulsion from the Hemingways' summer cottage at Walloon Lake. But more hurtful must have been his parents' moralistic censure of his writing. First In Our Time and then The Sun Also Rises received their uncomprehending disapproval, against which he politely pleaded.

Beneath the politeness there was sometimes a threat. After receiving her criticism of his first novel Hemingway wrote his mother with only half-concealed scorn, “I am sure that it [the novel] is not more unpleasant than the real inner lives of some of our best Oak Park families. You must remember that in such a book all the worst of the people's lives is displayed while at home there is a very lovely side for the public and the sort of which I have had some experience of observing behind closed doors.”¹² Behind what doors but those closed upon the conflicts he had known between his parents themselves? Hemingway was prone to hint for years that he might write an Oak Park novel that would tell all: “I had a wonderful novel to write about Oak Park,” he said in 1952, “and would never do it because I did not want to hurt living people.”¹³ After his father's death in 1928 he wrote his mother offering her some advice about how to handle his uncle George, whom he held responsible for his father's money worries, and he also added menacingly, “I have never written a novel about the [Hemingway] family because I have never wanted to hurt anyone's feelings but with the death of the ones I love a period has been put to a great part of it and I may have to undertake it.”¹⁴ It is a curious statement, with its slip into the plural “ones” when among his near relatives only his father had died. And was not his mother to be counted among the “ones I love”? There seems to be an unclear implication that she as much as his uncle—whom he had always disliked—might be exposed by his writing. The Oak Park novel was never written. Yet if he rejected the temptation to write about his family life—except in the hints given in such a story as “The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife”—he did not stop writing works that might convey his insight into the “unpleasant” and defy his mother's moralistic hypocrisy. And the covertly autobiographic impulse persisted.

From the time of his father's suicide, he must have felt himself to be just such an orphan, though with a living parent, as Catherine and Frederic describe themselves. “My father is the only one I cared about,” he wrote Maxwell Perkins after the doctor's suicide.¹⁵ He then may already have believed what he later stated to Charles Scribner, that his mother had destroyed her husband, and his bitter sense of having been unloved by her fused with his identification with his father: “I hate her guts and she hates mine. She forced my father to suicide.”¹⁶ But such liberations from filial love are never quite complete. Underneath must have been the longing for approval, for a lost infantile security. Hemingway's own sexual history, that ultimate personal expression, may have taken some shape from the mixture of need and anger which probably composed his emotions toward his mother. The need to reject as well as the need to be wanted again may explain the course of his love life, with its three marriages and, as his life advanced, its rather greater propensity of promiscuity. Promiscuity, of course, may also be based on the fear that one cannot feel at all. Beneath the intensely expressive, even violent personality of the visible Hemingway there may have been a self that was haunted by the demon of boredom. Apathy, which might seem the least likely affliction of this articulate and active man, may have been what he feared most, knowing his own inner indifference. If so, then A Farewell to Arms does have a special relation to the mind of the maker, is autobiographic in a metaphoric way.

Some confirmation of this view may be gained by study of Hemingway's text as the result of revision and excision in accordance with his well-known iceberg theory¹⁷ In looking for the submerged element that supports a style so economic, so dependent upon implication rather that explication, one is prompted to consider the nature of what has been pruned away. Obviously, the Hemingway esthetic promotes the elimination of the merely redundant, the detail that adds nothing, the explanation that can be supplied by the reader's own surmise, the additional episode which may thicken the reality of the story but also complicates its meaning too much. Some of this discard may well supply autobiographic clues to the intentional process by which the work was molded. Sometimes, one suspects, the rejected matter comes out of the too-exact transcript of memory.

Even before the manuscript of A Farewell to Arms had been studied, it was obvious that Hemingway might have planned his novel at some earlier stage to include other elements besides those finally selected. Julian Smith has argued that two stories written in 1926 just after the breakup of Hemingway's first marriage amplify the novel so precisely at certain points that they may have been conceived of as part of it at one time.¹⁸ One of these is “In Another Country,” whose title, with its reference to Marlowe's Jew of Malta (“Thou hast committed—/ Fornication—but that was in another country; and besides, the wench is dead”), Hemingway once considered using for the novel.¹⁹ The second story linked with the novel is “Now I Lay Me,” entitled “In Another Country—Two” in a late draft.²⁰ Both short stories fulfill the title of the collection in which they were printed in 1927, Men Without Women, which attaches them in an interesting way to the novel begun soon after, the novel about the failure, in the end, of the sexual bridge over the gulf of solitude.

Both stories are really about marriage. In “In Another Country” the narrator, recovering from his wounds in a Milan hospital and receiving mechanical therapy—like Hemingway and Frederic Henry—is warned not to marry. An Italian major who has just lost his wife tells him that a man “cannot marry” because “if he is to lose everything, he should not place himself in a position to lose that.” Had Hemingway chosen to include the story as an episode in A Farewell to Arms it might have served to predict Catherine's death as well as the conclusion that nothing, not even love, abides. In “Now I Lay Me” the hero has been wounded in the particular fashion and with the particular sensations Hemingway remembered from his own experience and attributed to Frederic. He does not sleep well—because of the sound of the silkworms and because he is afraid of dying—and passes restless nights thinking about two kinds of boyhood experience: trout fishing and the quarrels between his parents, with his mother's hen-pecking of his father. He is advised by his orderly to marry but does not, and does not intend to, unlike the narrator of the companion story, who tells the major that he hopes to be married.

There are any number of ways in which both stories can be related to Hemingway's personal experience, but it is clear that together they suggest a fear associated with marriage—either one will somehow kill it oneself, as he had done with his own first marriage, or it will kill you, or at least emasculate you, as his mother had emasculated his father. Despite the seemingly positive assurance of the orderly in the second story that marriage will “fix everything,” the effect of both tales is to suggest that death and destruction arrive in the end. Love cannot heal the Hemingway hero who longs to return to some presexual condition in the untainted woods of boyhood.

The connection of the two stories with the novel written so soon after them is a matter of conjecture, but Hemingway's manuscript drafts of A Farewell to Arms may justifiably be searched for evidence of his compositional intentions and his autobiographic sources. The draft indicates that Hemingway had, for example, included a much more detailed version of the description of wounding already used in “Now I Lay Me” and also a more detailed and more emotional description of Frederic's sensations on waking up in the hospital in Milan. The final version screens out autobiographic irrelevance, for Frederic, in the draft, makes on Hemingway's behalf one of those representative comments that show him struggling against the flood of memory: “If you try and put in everything you would never get a single day done and then the one who made it might not feel it.”²¹ In the end the writer made these occasions consistent with the rest of the novel as a representation of the state of mind that is the grounding of his hero's being. In the first three books, as Reynolds has observed, the revisions nearly efface Frederic as a personality.²² He becomes an almost completely apathetic sufferer. Though self-expression is allowed to emerge in the love affair, it does not really make for reversal of this condition, for in the place of the grand afflatus of love, the language of amorous avowal that these lovers speak is self-diminishing.

A complex revision of a crucial passage is the alteration of the conversation between Frederic and the priest in chapter 11. In the manuscript draft Frederic lists some of the things he loves, and adds at the end, “I found I loved god too, a little. I did not love anything too much.”²³ In the revision there is no such list or remark, but there is, instead, the priest's statement: “When you love you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve” (p. 72). Hemingway may be thought to have promoted by this addition the hope of moral growth in his hero, who then asks, in the printed text, “How about loving a woman? If I really loved some woman would it be like that?” He cannot answer his own question nor does the priest answer it, and though, much later, Count Greffi calls love “a religious feeling,” Frederic, still dubious, can respond only, “You think so?” (p. 263). Can we analogize the love of God and Frederic's love of Catherine, in fact? Does human love acquire the highest possible meaning for him? Not really. He cannot be said to attain the priest's ideal of service and sacrifice. Nor does the formula apply to Catherine herself. Her death is not redemptive, is not a true Imitation of Christ. It is not voluntarily offered and does not save Frederic from anything or give him faith. Only irony attends the sequel in which the surrender of self seems the consequence of weakness rather than the bounty of strong love. The revision removes the small assertion of faith that Frederic makes, “I found I loved god too, a little,” and when the priest declares, “You should love Him,” the answer is simply, “I don't love much,” or, as the draft has it, “I did not love anything very much,” which seems a statement of affective deficiency in general, a general inability to donate emotion.

Frederic's estrangement from feeling is not the consequence of any particular wounding or of war disgust, or of any experience of adulthood, but of deeply founded sense of loss. A passage Hemingway took out of the novel gives confirmation. It begins with the opening sentence of chapter 40, “We had a fine life” (p. 306), followed in the finished novel by a brief description of the way the couple spent their days during the last of their winter stay in the Swiss mountains. Hemingway decided not to use the long passage that originally followed this opening sentence in which Frederic reflects, anticipating the tragic conclusion, “wisdom and happiness do not go together,” and declares his reductive certitude: “The only thing I know is that if you love anything enough they take it away from you.” In this discarded passage, as in the rejected ending of the novel, Hemingway felt the need to refer once again to Rinaldi and the priest, those seemingly forgotten mentors of contrary wisdom, and it is plain that Frederic cannot accept the latter's faith, though he says, “I see the wisdom of the priest in our mess who has always loved God and so is happy and I am sure that nothing will ever take God away from him. But how much is wisdom and how much is luck to be born that way? And what if you are not built that way?” Earlier in the novel Gino is described as a patriot because he is “born that way” and Rinaldi is a skeptic for the same reason. But here, in the excised passage, Frederic speaks of himself: “But what if you were born loving nothing and the warm milk of your mother's breast was never heaven and the first thing you loved was the side of a hill and the last thing was a woman and they took her away and you did not want another but only to have her; and she was gone, then you are not so well placed.”²⁴ For Hemingway, too, cannot it have been true that “the warm milk of [his] mother's breast was never heaven”? Is this the underwater knowledge of self which supports the poignancy of what remains in the final text of the novel?

Hemingway's difficulties with the ending can now be seen to have been caused by something besides his desire to be true to life's inconclusiveness. His hero's emotional or philosophic nada threatened the very process of making sense, achieving illumination. Hemingway decided to eschew any hint of apocalypse, rejecting even Fitzgerald's suggestion that he place at the end the passage in which Frederic describes how all are finished off impartially, though the good, the gentle, and the brave go first—as dark a revelation as one could imagine, but still a revelation of sorts. What would do best, he realized, would be simply the hero's numb survival without insight, his notation without catharsis.

Notes

1. The dependence of A Farewell to Arms on Hemingway's research rather than on direct observation is comprehensively demonstrated in Michael S. Reynolds's Hemingway's First War: The Making of ‘A Farewell to Arms’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976).

2. The Nick Adams Stories, ed. Philip Young (New York: Bantam, 1973), p. 217.

3. As related, for example, to Guy Hickok: “I felt my soul or something like it coming right out of my body, like you'd pull a silk handkerchief out of a pocket by one corner. It flew around and then it came back and went in again and I wasn't dead anymore.” “A Portrait of Mister Papa,” by Malcolm Cowley, Life (10 January 1949), repr. Ernest Hemingway: The Man and his Work, ed. John K. M. McCaffrey (New York: Cooper Square, 1969), p. 35.

4. It is Philip Young's influential thesis that “one fact about this recurrent protagonist [the Hemingway hero] as about the man who created him, is necessary to any real understanding of either figure, and that is the fact of the ‘wound,’ a severe injury suffered in World War I which left permanent scars, visible and otherwise.” Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1966), p. 6.

5. A typical example of such calculated irrelevance might be the sentences that conclude the opening paragraph of chapter 9 which describes the hero's pause, with his ambulance drivers, on the way to the battle location where he will be wounded: “I gave them each a package of cigarettes, Macedonias, loosely packed cigarettes that spilled tobacco and needed to have the ends twisted before you smoked them. Manera lit his lighter and passed it around. The lighter was shaped like a Fiat radiator.” A Farewell to Arms (New York: Scribner's 1929), p. 47. All further references to the novel will be to this edition.

6. The variant manuscript endings are described by Reynolds (Hemingway's First War) and by Bernard Oldsey, Hemingway's Hidden Craft: The Writing of ‘A Farewell to Arms’ (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1979).

7. Reynolds, Hemingway's First War, p. 22.

8. Reynolds, Hemingway's First War, pp. 46-47.

9. The most influential description of the novel as a system of imagery has been Carlos Baker's in Hemingway: The Writer as Artist, rev. ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), pp. 94-96. But Baker's contrasted symbology of mountain and plain suggests a dynamics of psychological and moral movement correlated with physical description. In my own view there is no such movement.

10. Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (New York: Scribner's 1969).

11. Baker, A Life Story, p. 54.

12. Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961, ed. Carlos Baker (New York: Scribner's, 1981), letter to Grace Hall Hemingway, 5 February 1927, p. 243.

13. Charles Fenton, The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway (New York: Farrar, Straus & Young, 1954), p. 1.

14. Hemingway, Selected Letters, letter to Grace Hall Hemingway, 11 March 1929, p. 296.

15. Hemingway, Selected Letters, letter to Maxwell Perkins, 16 December 1928, p. 291.

16. Hemingway, Selected Letters, letter to Charles Scribner, 27 August 1949, p. 670.

17. “If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.” See Death in the Afternoon (New York: Scribner's, 1932), p. 192.

18. Julian Smith, “Hemingway and the Thing Left Out,” Ernest Hemingway: Five Decades of Criticism, ed. Linda W. Wagner (Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1974), pp. 188-200.

19. Reynolds, Hemingway's First War, pp. 295, 296.

20. Cf. Philip Young and Charles W. Mann, eds., The Hemingway Manuscripts: An Inventory (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1969), p. 44.

21. Reynolds, Hemingway's First War, p. 33.

22. Reynolds, Hemingway's First War, p. 59.

23. Reynolds, Hemingway's First War, pp. 286-87.

24. Reynolds, Hemingway's First War, pp. 40-41.