Ernest Hemingway – She Reads Novels

I’ve never read anything by Ernest Hemingway before, partly because he’s one of those classic authors I’ve always felt intimidated by, but when I was offered a review copy of this beautiful new hardback edition of A Farewell to Arms (with a cover image replicating the original 1929 cover and lots of additional material) it seemed a perfect opportunity to give one of his books a try.

A Farewell to Arms is narrated by Frederic Henry, an American ambulance driver who is serving as a Lieutenant (or ‘Tenente’) in the Italian army during the Italian Campaign of World War I. Early in the story he meets a British nurse, Catherine Barkley. When Henry is injured by a mortar shell he has to spend some time in hospital and during this period his relationship with Catherine develops. What will happen when it’s time for him to return to the front? Part love story, part war story, this novel is based on Ernest Hemingway’s own experiences in the Italian ambulance corps where, like Henry, he was injured and fell in love with one of the nurses at the hospital. The fact that the story is semi-autobiographical gives it a realistic, unsentimental feel.

Hemingway’s writing style is very simple and direct, he gets straight to the point and avoids flowery language and long, detailed descriptions (though he still manages to choose just the right words to evoke the settings he is writing about). You might think that such plain, simple prose would be easy to read but for me, the opposite was true; it was distracting and it took me a long time to get used to it. Some passages are written in an almost stream-of-consciousness style, which is something I often struggle with, and there are also lots of very long sentences consisting of a string of short clauses all joined together by the word ‘and’. His writing is very distinctive and you’ll either like it or you won’t.

Hemingway rarely tells us anything that is not completely essential to the plot and so I finished the book feeling that I never really got to know either Henry or Catherine – neither of them are described in any great detail, we are only given very basic information about their backgrounds, and we aren’t even told the narrator’s name until several chapters into the book. Instead it is left to us to read between the lines, work things out for ourselves and use our imagination, and I think it’s intentional that we are told so little about the lives of Catherine and Henry before the war. However, the fact that the characters were not fully fleshed out meant that Catherine in particular didn’t feel like a real three-dimensional person; I liked her, but seen through Henry’s eyes she was very sweet and submissive, and it would have been nice to have had more insight into her personality.

Frederic Henry’s narrative style is detached and factual, almost as if things are happening at a distance and as if he sometimes feels very disconnected from the events going on around him. This works though, because it helps to portray the futility and harsh reality of war, and it reflects the way Henry feels; he is a person who has seen so many terrible things they no longer have such an emotional effect on him. The problem with the combination of terse writing style and detached narrative voice is that it made it hard for me to form any kind of emotional attachment to the characters, but the story was still quite poignant and moving in places, especially the final chapter.

Apparently Hemingway wrote the ending of the book thirty-nine times before he was satisfied with it. This new edition of the book includes an appendix with the text of all thirty-nine different endings. I read some of them, though not all (I think this type of supplementary material might be of more interest to someone who is studying Hemingway or considers themselves a fan of his work rather than to a first-time reader like myself) and although I did like some of the alternate endings, in my opinion the one he finally settled on was probably the right choice. I had tears in my eyes at the end and I’ve always thought that if an author can make me cry he or she must have done something right!

I’m not sure if I’ll want to read more Hemingway novels in the future but I’m glad I’ve had the chance to try this one and have now had some experience of an author I had heard so much about.

Thanks to William Heinemann for the review copy of A Farewell to Arms

This year I have been taking part in a Classics Challenge hosted by Katherine of November’s Autumn. Every month Katherine posts a prompt to help us discuss the classic novel we are currently reading. The prompt for October is:

Chapter Musings

Jot down some notes about the chapter you’ve just read or one that struck you the most. It can be as simple as a few words you learned, some quotes, a summary, or your thoughts and impressions.

The classic I’m reading at the moment is A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, the story of an American ambulance driver on the Italian front during World War I. This is the first Hemingway book I’ve read and I wasn’t sure what to expect, as he seems to be one of those authors people either love or hate. I’m only seven (very short) chapters into the book so it’s really too early to tell, but so far I’m finding it a lot more readable than I had thought it would be.

Chapter 1, which is the chapter I’ve chosen to focus on for the purposes of this post, is less than two pages long yet it has a lot of significance as it sets the scene and the tone of the novel. We learn almost nothing about our narrator in these two pages, not even his name, and although it’s obvious that he is involved with the army in some way, he seems very detached from what is going on around him.

“Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.”

I’ve included the quote above because I think it’s a good example of Hemingway’s writing style. He uses simple, direct language and seems to like stringing together very long sentences using the word ‘and’! He also manages to paint vivid pictures of his settings while avoiding flowery descriptions. I’m not sure yet whether I like his writing or not, but I’ll see how I feel after reading a whole book written in this style.

Chapter 1 ends with the following two sentences:

“At the start of the winter came the permanent rain and with the rain came the cholera. But it was checked and in the end only seven thousand died of it in the army.”