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Oldsey, Bernard. "The Sense of an Ending." In Monteiro, George, ed. Oldsey counts between 32 and 41 "elements" collected at the John F. Kennedy library, handwritten or typed, from a couple sentences to a few pages, with some of the smaller bits used in the larger ones--but his reason for studying these is to learn Hemingway's process of selection and rejection in formulating an ending to what some consider his finest novel, illuminating perhaps the entire novel. In every attempted ending, Catherine dies. Oldsey sorts the attempts into 9 categories and details each, starting with the last "miscellaneous" batch of five. Miscellaneous Endings: A couple of these echo the image of rain and lots of people dead from the "overture," chapter 1. In another, Frederic compares Catherine's death to his wounding, realizing that only pain remains afterward. Another is based on the saying "See Naples and die," which leads to bitter philosophizing about Italy. The last in this category considers suicide but rejects it. Oldsey notes that this option really foreshadows Hemingway's demise. The Nada Endings: Three ending attempts vary on the idea of nothingness remaining for Frederic after Catherine's death, akin to the negative tone that actually ends the novel. The Fitzgerald Ending: F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote nine pages of suggestions for the typescript of A Farewell to Arms. Fitzgerald suggested that Hemingway move to the ending his passage about the "killer world" that "kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave." In a letter to Hemingway, Fitzgerald recalls his advice that Hemingway end with a "burst of eloquence," but he also recalls that Hemingway believed a novel should reach an intensity of emotion and then let the reader down from that. The Religious Endings: These attempts echo the passage in Chapter 3 where Frederic says cryptically of the priest, "He had always known what I did not know and what, when I learned it, I was always able to forget." Many readers assume this passage concerns the priest's theory about love as sacrifice. Oldsey suggests these endings were dropped because they would make the priest more important than Catherine and because Frederic wonders in a couple of these endings whether the priest is lucky or wise, fearing one has to be born loving rather than learn it. The Live Baby Endings: These endings provide a sort of consolation for death in that birth is a new beginning, even if Frederic still sounds bitter about the boy in these endings. Oldsey realizes this sort of ending would be for a very different story than A Farewell to Arms is. The Morning After Endings: Oldsey sees that Hemingway really tried to make this sort of ending work, counting up 10 attempts, including one that actually almost got published when the novel was serialized before being brought out as a book. In some versions, Frederic returns to the hotel exhausted and falls asleep to wake on a sunny spring morning, not at first remembering Catherine's death. In other versions, the light on in the hotel room when he wakes up reminds of his loss. The Funeral Endings: Each of these three attempts talk about Frederic about to make arrangements for Catherine's burial but choosing not to tell about it. Like other passages in which Frederic seems to edit his story in an authorial way, Hemingway dropped these. THE Ending[s]: Oldsey spends some time trying to figure out in what order these various endings might have been tried. One labeled by biographer Carlos Baker as "The Original Scribner's Magazine Ending" includes elements of many of the others and was actually set in galleys, though not printed, so it must be one of the most recent. The galley had a Hemingway note on it asking for a hold on it, and the actual ending took its place in the novel. Writing on the novel stopped by August, 1928 [almost ten and a half years after the March, 1918, ending in the novel, but only about a year after composition began]. Galleys show a few "adjustments" in June, 1929, but still dissatisfied, Hemingway was working on THE ending on June 24, 1929. There are five versions of this ending, including the one that was published as the last page of the novel. Oldsey says these five are basically alike, but notes and cross-outs show Hemingway's efforts at getting the wording finalized. All five include the rain, clearing the hospital room to say goodbye to the dead Catherine, and the observation that it wasn't any good anymore. All include the sentence: "It was like saying goodbye to a statue," which appears last in at least one version. Oldsey cites critic Kenneth Burke's praise of the actual last sentence of the novel: "After awhile I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain." [The symbolic rain is here literally the last word.] Hemingway considered and deleted a twist on the Beatitudes: "Blessed are the dead that the rain falls on." Dropping this pseudo-religious line, says Oldsey, lets Hemingway get "the flat, nihilistic, numbing conclusion that the novel now has." Citing Hemingway's iceberg theory, he sees the bases of things excluded from the ending as consistent with protagonist Frederic Henry's personality--no religious consolation, no hope for the future, no eloquent abstractions, no suicide. Oldsey even quantifies the force of rejection in the novel's ending. Of 197 words, 16 are negatives, used by Frederic to turn aside the doctor, the nurse, and even himself. Hemingway doesn't remind us that when Frederic turns out the light in the hospital room he is trying to recapture what she gave to him that made the nights better; we all visualize him either hugging or kissing the lifeless Catherine, but Hemingway doesn't spell that out either. So how should a novel end? Oldsey mentions E. M. Forster's complaint that most novels end in death or marriage. More seriously, he considers Frank Kermode's notion about a novel ending in some sort of transformation, not just an ending but a transcendence, which Oldsey sees as "apocalyptic," as was the ending of The Great Gatsby. But Oldsey looks to Martin Heidegger's zero and Henry James's circle to understand Hemingway's accomplishment in ending A Farewell to Arms. One praiseworthy trait Oldsey notices in the last fourth of the last chapter is that, unlike the previous three fourths, which marked time with Lt. Henry's meals and the slow progression of Catherine's labor, there are no time reminders in the ending. Oldsey defines the "dramatic compression" of the last segment by listing four actions achieved in less than 200 words: rejecting the doctor, kicking out the nurses, turning off the light to salvage that old feeling and failing, and exiting toward the hotel. But Oldsey is most admiring of that final image: "It was like saying goodbye to a statue." There's no literary analog for the line; Hemingway made it up. Henry James admitted that real relationships don't exactly end, but the novelist has to make it look as if they do in order to end a novel. Oldsey appends samples of five kinds of endings. [A Reflection: While summarizing Oldsey's praise of Hemingway's ending (58-61), reading between the lines of his summarizing of Heidegger, I re-saw the depth of the abyss that Hemingway leads us to at the ending of the novel. In the context of World War I, of course the baby has to die, because millions of "babies"--the youth of several countries--were killed by the millions. In view of such a holocaust, the point of life might be to love, as suggested by the bloated speaker in Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach." But love in A Farewell to Arms only "ruins" Frederic Henry for all other women for all time. Every time it rains, the love and loss of Catherine will blind him and hurt him and numb him all over again. So what is the point of life if the effort of nations and the effort of individuals leads to nothingness? I've always suspected that if someone could give Frederic Henry a choice--to go through the whole experience all over again or to avoid it and just skip to March, 1918, that he would choose the former. Maybe that's a romantic notion, but I'd rather call it an artistic inclination. Even if we are left with nothing, loving is a necessity. So what is the meaning of life in the face of loss? That the loss doesn't matter; the living matters, bringing existence out of nothingness, creating a temporary order out of the chaos, even if we have to let it go before we are ready.] |
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