Notes on A Farewell to Arms

Ah, Hemingway. Papa. Big Ernie. The great patron saint of tough-guy sentimentality, godfather to every bitter drunk who put pen to paper. Used to be Hemingway was the great spine holding up all the ribs and meat of 20th century literature. That was when I was a kid, anyway. Today maybe not so much.

But he wrote novels. There's this novel here, with a real story and everything. It's set during World War I, a conflict fading now into distant memory. A Farewell to Arms finds Lt. Henry, a young and adventurous American, working as an ambulance driver on the entrenched fronts of Italy. Despite the shelling he's bored, spending his time in whorehouses or drinking with the Italian officers, mocking the local priests. Then he falls in love with nurse Barkley, the Austrians make a brutal push, and his life goes to heck.

Mind you, this was 1929, about a war that took place in 1918. Back before America became a world power, when Americans had to sneak into foreign armies to find war, back before the great Cold War and our lives of constant conflict. A Farewell to Arms introduced America to what America at war was like. And A Farewell to Arms was about stupid kids trying to become men, and the surprise and heartbreak they felt when the men they turned into was nothing like what they imagined they'd be.

But, yeah, I get it. Tough guys writing about war. Not very PC. Plus, the patriarchy, and dead babies. And the later Hemingway, the drunk bitter asshole. And now here he is on Goodreads, getting his chops busted by every kid forced to read him in junior high. Not that great, they say. Catherine is boring, a shallow bitch who just wants to please Lt. Henry, then dies. Why is this a classic? How has it endured, they wonder?

Well, Hemingway tried to tell you himself, in the most famous passage from this, one of his greatest novels: "The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills." I think that's it, man, that heartbreak right there, how this is the story of one woman who was killed, and one man who was broken and forced to live.