The 1929 Ernest Hemingway novel A Farewell to Arms is an all-time classic and a personal favorite of mine.
Bradley’s Cooper reaction to reading this book in Silver Linings Playbook is probably the exact same as mine, but maybe just slightly less aggressive.
The novel centers around an ambulance driver, Lieutenant Frederic Henry, during WWI and the American campaign in northern Italy where he braves shelling from German infantrymen, botched Italian retreats, and escapes into Switzerland, all while embracing an enchanting love story with the English nurse Catherine Barkley.
The title of “a farewell to arms” comes from the sonnet by English poet George Peele of the same name.
Brief synopsis and history
As his first best-seller, A Farewell to Arms cemented the beginning of Hemingway’s illustrious writing career.
A lot of my own writing has been inspired Hemingway’s simplistic approaches, his tone and mood for his stories, his straightforwardness, his famous ‘Iceberg principle’, and the ability to strum up unforgettable lines at integral moments of every story, making him one of my favorite classic writers, so obviously I owe it a lot to this novel for being what it is.
His literature was among the first of the Disillusionment era to call out the absurdity of war and question why it is the old sit comfy and the youth must die. “[Henry] ‘That is why the peasant has wisdom, because he is defeated from the start. Put him in power and see how wise he is.’” (page 179).
Poignant but miraculous
The primary reason I love this book, though, is because of its tone on romance in war. It’s gritty, but fearless, and I’ve always adored the short-lived relationship between Catherine Barkley and Lieutenant Frederic Henry. It has that beautifully tragic sensation, the same bittersweet nature of stories like Casablanca (1942), Life Is Beautiful (1997), The Sopranos (1999-2007), Cowboy Bebop (1998-1999), and other alike works that garner such high praise.
The references don’t stop there. Similar sagas like A Time Of Miracles by Anne-Laure Bondoux where the protagonist Koumail escapes into France from the Abkhazian War or Joseph Heller’s classic novel Catch-22 where Yossarian escapes into Sweden from WWII’s catastrophically horrifying air raids, Lieutenant Henry’s departure into Switzerland is simply poignant but miraculous. The Italian front was incompetent enough to botch their own retreat by sabotaging and killing off their own soldiers under the irrational fear that German spies had infiltrated their ranks. Henry literally had to swim from out of a river while being shot at.
“I ducked down, pushed between two men, and ran for the river, my head down. I tripped at the edge and went in with a splash…
There were shots when I ran and shots when I came up the first time…
The shore was out of sight now.”
A Farewell to Arms, page 194
Frankly, he should have died even before this, when he was bombed at the railway station while sharing lunch with the other ambulance drivers.
“The adjutant, looking up from the paper, ‘What inflicted the wounds?’
The medical captain, ‘What hit you?’
Me, with the eyes shut, ‘A trench mortar shell.’”
A Farewell to Arms, page 51
Lieutenant Henry is not a romanticized protagonist braving heroic missions and saving lives. He runs away. He deserts. He shows us he’s human like us, and Hemingway portrays realistically like so many from the disillusionment era had done having experienced the horrors of World War I that many of us today couldn’t fathom.
Frederic Henry is realistic, broken, but most importantly, human
“[Passini] ‘It doesn’t finish. There is no finish to war. . . War is not won by victory. . . One side must stop fighting. Why don’t we stop fighting?’”
A Farewell to Arms, pages 50-51
The perseverance of man and the triumph of the human spirit is a recurring theme in a lot of Hemingway’s work that culminates in books like The Old Man And The Sea or The Sun Also Rises, but we see the real first traces of it in this novel.
We root for Henry for the same reasons we root for Yossarian, war is monstrous, inhumane, and senseless. Any man who can survive a war after being blown up deserves that simple amount of respect. There’s this underdog, fight-against-the-grain sense of urgency we see in Henry as he decides to escape the war.
Henry comes out of Italy a broken man, and tragedy awaits him at either end of his crossroads. Hemingway’s drunken bitterness bleeds through into this novel’s ending in such a profoundly depressing way, you’re left completely shattered by it.
Escaping into the mountains of a neutral country with the woman you love and a baby on the way for a man like Henry is a fantasy, but it was a fantasy he was able to reach, even if only briefly, for a fleeting moment before the tragic death of his lover and his child, there is at least a fraction of time where Henry felt truly at peace when all doubted him.
The sequences crossing the rivers into Swiss borders and the beautiful Alps in the distance, followed by Henry’s reunion with Catherine and their peaceful life while Catherine is pregnant, are the calm before the storm, where Henry finally feels a sense of glee.
The Catherine Barkley Controversy
The love story between Henry and Catherine simply isn’t traditional. It starts out without mutually expressed feelings of real love, just a game which turns to passion and lust, and finally matures into love once Henry is disillusioned.
“[Priest] ‘What you tell me about in the nights. That is not love. That is only passion and lust. When you love you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve.’”
A Farewell to Arms, page 63
One of the many criticisms of this novel – and really Hemingway in general – is the typically clunky, unnatural dialogue, run-on sentences, and the portrayal of women.
While I don’t fault people who have difficulty reading Hemingway’s style, you also have to consider that people talked differently 100 years ago.
If you take the work of Fitzgerald or Stein or others from his era, sure they don’t write the dialogue the same as Hemingway does, but they do write it differently than how people would talk today, which figures why a lot of film or theater adaptations of such works usually result in significant dialogue changes.
The run-ons do get tedious, but they also give the writing it’s idiosyncrasies and iconic feel.
I also don’t necessarily see Catherine Barkley as some “man-serving”, “bland” character without any “personality”. She’s the tragic figure in all of this, as the entire second half of the book is building to her childbirth, and her death. She’s written to be madly in love with Henry, a woman who’s entirely devoted to him and against the war.
“Twixt love and duty” Barkley and Henry understand their desertion likely won’t go unnoticed or unpunished forever, but for a brief time, they have each other and they’re in love, and sometimes that’s all a person can ask for when they’ve gone through what Barkley and Henry have gone through. In a way, loving Henry is the only thing she has left.
A Farewell to Arms is still a brilliant staple of American literature, and its legacy carries on nearly 100 years after it had been written. While it’s my wish that it can be more appreciated by literary scholars and bookworms and even BookTubers, I understand Hemingway’s controversy and how his writing doesn’t translate so easily to today. I still consider Hemingway to be among the Mount Rushmore of American writers, and I still have hopes of a more modern film adaptation of this novel that’s more recent than 1957, even if I must write and direct it myself.
Donovan Levine | Agent, Writer, Copyeditor 
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