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Bell, Millicent. "Pseudoautobiography and Personal Metaphor."
In Monteiro, Bell first suggested that this novel can illustrate two seemingly opposite propositions in the book, Ernest Hemingway: The Writer in Context, edited by James Nagel (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984: 107-128)--
Bell notes that Hemingway's novel, especially the battle scenes and account of the retreat from Caporetto are based on research. This position was established by biographer Michael S. Reynolds in his book, Hemingway's First War: The Making of 'A Farewell to Arms' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976). Still, observations of the milieu and accounts of wounding [though they vary in some details from Hemingway's own wounding] apparently are captured in the novel. For Hemingway, the wounding was a transformative experience, but not for the character, Lt. Frederic Hemingway. Oddly enough, Hemingway's style seems most realistic in describing the retreat, in which Hemingway himself did not participate, and less realistic when describing a hospital in Milan and Switzerland where he had actually been (147). Hemingway did love a nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky, and his first wife, Hadley Richardson, and his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, did deliver their baby by caesarean. Bell refers to some passages that were cut out of the novel by Hemingway to illustrate the dilemma that novels end even though life goes on. The unity of the novel comes from its tone more than from the plot lines of war or love (148). So when Frederic gives away the fact in chapter 7 that he "would not be killed," he is the person who has already separated from the war [and lost Catherine]. So the opening in 1915 and the desertion in October 1917 have the same "studied emotional distance" from the world (149). Frederic, unlike Henry Fleming in Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, was never a patriot, was "always embarrassed" by abstractions. Catherine, too, is detached [though she has undergone a transformation from naive to shocked observer of the war when her fiancé is "blown to bits"] (150). "The union of these two is a flight from outer reality and eventually from selfhood" (150), so there's a kind of passivity in Frederic as there is a sort of submersion of herself from Catherine. Their story is less Romeo and Juliet and more Anthony and Cleopatra, though these are not masters of the universe. Everyone apart from them is a stranger; if no other couple is like them, it is because they both "are orphans of a sort" (151). "The whole retreat is a massed legitimization of apathy and a symbol of it" (152). The retreat into sensation and detachment from the war may explain the shocking shooting of the sergeant by Frederic; after his official "separate peace," he can't stand to hear news of the war. The remainder of Frederic's life in this book is a "fugue," a life devoid of past (152-153). In their "universe of two," the couple consider changing their hairstyles to look similar, which would minimize even their gender differences. This dissolution of self is "a move toward death," and Hemingway prepares us for death in other ways, such as Count Greffi, and if they live in a country where they never see any of their old crowd, perhaps it is "the country of the dead, toward which she is bound" (153). Perhaps the tone of the story, published in 1929, but first drafted in 1927, derived not just from memories of World War I but also from the turmoil of Hemingway's own life in the last half of the 1920's.
Bell spends a couple pages surmising that Hemingway didn't like his parents, so he must have felt "like an orphan" when his father died, that he blamed his mother for loving neither of them. His marriages, Bell speculates, derive from his need for approval from a female figure (155-156), deducing, finally, that all of this resentment and feelings of being betrayed contributed, in a backhand, autobiographical way, to the tone of A Farewell to Arms. She justifies her thesis by examining what Hemingway cut out of the novel and earlier writings, especially two stories in the collection published before the novel, collectively called Men Without Women, characterizing A Farewell to Arms as a "novel about the failure, in the end, of the sexual bridge over the gulf of solitude" (156). From Pauline's pregnancy and c-section, Bell infers Hemingway developed a horror toward childbirth; from the stories "In Another Country" about a recuperating wounded soldier who was advised not to marry and "Now I Lay Me," which includes an out-of-body experience like that felt by Hemingway and Frederic Henry when they were wounded, Bell infers that Hemingway associates something frightening with marriage (157). In the draft of Frederic's conversation with the priest about love, Hemingway removes a small affirmation of his own love of God; from this Bell deduces that neither Fredric nor Catherine every actually achieved the priest's ideal of self-sacrifice, but simply "affective deficiency" (158). To be "true to life's inconclusiveness," Hemingway ends the novel with "simply the hero's numb survival without insight" (159). |
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