The Bookworm: A Farewell to Arms

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway. 332 pages. Scribner. 1929.

I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.

Here’s a tip: don’t start a new book before flying to Hawaii, or during March Madness.

I started reading A Farewell to Arms at LAX as I waited for my flight to Honolulu. It was good reading, and helped pass the three-hour wait. (I hate airports, and like getting checked-in and through security early.) It also helped pass the time during the flight there and back. However, in between, Farewell remained in my backpack. I was busy touring Oahu, and, after returning to the mainland, watching basketball after work. (I also didn’t ride the bus much in the past two weeks, which took away two hours of reading time each day.)

It took me a while, but I finally finished Farewell, the second of my classic Hemingway re-reads, this morning.

If I remember right, I read Farewell after finishing The Sun Also Rises during my freshman year of college. Unlike Sun, I never read Farewell again until now, so most of it, except certain poignant scenes I could recall, was unfamiliar to me. It was like reading it for the first time all over again.

Although mostly fictional, Farewell is a thinly veiled account of Hemingway’s experience in World War I. The main character, Frederick Henry, is an American ambulance driver for the Italian army along the Austrian-Italian front. He falls in love with Catherine Barkley, a British VAD (a kind of subordinate nurse) at a local hospital, and is injured in the knee by a mortar explosion. The book follows Henry’s recovery, his love affair with Catherine, an ill-fated return to the front, his desertion from the military, and an escape to Switzerland to avoid persecution in Italy.

A tale of love and war, Farewell is about the similarities and tragedy of both. (No spoilers here. You’ll have to read it yourself.) It is, I think, an anti-war novel, as evident from the lift-out quote I used above (which is a damn good quote). After his recovery, Henry takes part in a massive retreat, and its scenes and descriptions were incredible, highlighting the agony of defeat and contrasting it with the glory of victory and war decorations.

Honestly, this is the first time Hemingway’s writing really annoyed me. There were times when it was precise and beautiful, but the run on sentences and awkward (though maybe just antiquated) syntax chafed me. From a contemporary perspective, it’s sloppy and unwieldy; based on his writing alone, I doubt Hemingway would have been able to get published today. (Of course, Hemingway is the reason the American style of writing is where it is, so I could be wrong.) Hemingway is no doubt a great writer, but his style, at least from Sun and Farewell, is beginning to feel so outdated; it’s starting to take on that stuffy, stilted, and cumbersome veneer I once associated with Victorian literature.

Cool new words I learned: All descriptions courtesy of my MacBook dictionary. Edify: “instruct or improve (someone) morally or intellectually.” Bower: “a pleasant shady place under trees or climbing plants in a garden or wood.” Wallah: “a person concerned or involved with a specified thing or business.” Felicitation: “words expressing praise for an achievement or good wishes on a special occasion.” Shopworn: “(of an article) made dirty or imperfect by being displayed or handled in a store.” Epithet: “an adjective or descriptive phrase expressing a quality characteristic of the person or thing mentioned.” Mufti: “plain clothes worn by a person who wears a uniform for their job, such as a soldier or police officer.” Quay. I have always wondered what this word meant, and came across it in Farewell: “a concrete, stone, or metal platform lying alongside or projecting into water for loading and unloading ships.” Chamois: “an agile goat-antelope with short hooked horns, found in mountainous areas of Europe from Spain to the Caucasus.” Petcock: “a small valve, esp. in the pipe of a steam boiler or cylinder of a steam engine for drainage or testing.” Choucroute: “pickled cabbage; sauerkraut.”