Book report: A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway

Book report: A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway

This is one of those books that I was assigned to read in school, but that I never did read. I have an ongoing project to try reading them now, to see if they’re actually any good. Most of the time, such books turn out to actually be quite worthwhile, although my teenage self would probably have not appreciated them. That’s not the case here. I was right to avoid this book then.

A Farewell to Arms (AFTA, hereafter) is the story of an ambulance driver during World War One, serving on the Italian front. It is supposed to be autobiographical, because Hemingway actually was an ambulance driver during World War One. The main character (Lieutenant Henry, a name we don’t learn until chapter 5) is a self-centered young man who thinks he knows everything about everything. In this sense, the story is either funny or pathetic, depending on your state of mind, because he is wrong about almost everything. Every decision he makes, every action he performs, turns out to be wrong. But I don’t think Hemingway thought so. Almost all the other characters in the story cater to Henry and give him special attention, for no apparent reason. The one character who ever challenges his behavior, a head nurse, is portrayed as a villain. Oh, right, there’s another minor character who challenges him. Henry shoots him. Hemingway is clearly on Henry's side.

Henry is fortunate enough to meet the most compliant woman on earth, a nurse in the hospital where he’s recuperating from a battle wound. They begin sleeping together immediately, and she spends the rest of the book apologizing constantly for no reason, and submitting to whatever he wants her to do. I happened to read, just before this book, a Jane Austen novel, and I can’t help thinking that this guy wouldn’t have lasted ten seconds with an Austen female character. She would have pegged him – correctly – as a self-involved narcissist, and dismissed him without a second thought by chapter 2. Unfortunately, this book was not written by Jane Austen.

I liked the parts about the war best. Hemingway’s style is suited to action, to short sharp shocks. Not so much to ordinary life or conversation. You could certainly never write comedy with language like this. And now that we’ve wandered into Hemingway’s style, it’s time to tackle the elephant in the room.

Hemingway, of course, writes in a very distinctive and well-known style. Simple declarative sentences with subject, verb, and object. Little description. Nothing to clutter up the dialogue like “he said” or “she said” or “inquired” or “with a raised eyebrow”. A very limited palette of words. And leaving out a lot of things, some pretty significant, from the story, and leaving readers to puzzle them out on their own.

Now, there are some pluses to this. It never hurts to cut back on your writing. Heaven knows, I could probably slash ten percent of my writing and not hurt anything, and maybe another ten percent, and another ten percent on top of that. And, true, one of the well-known dictums of writing is “Simplify, simplify”, for which Hemingway is the poster child.

But I think Hemingway goes overboard. The words “stark” and “spare” are probably the kindest way to describe his results. But closer to the truth are “dull” and “monotonous”.

He subscribed to a theory of writing that said: The more you cut away, the finer is the story that is left. Logically, then, if you cut away the whole thing, you would end up with the finest story possible. Unfortunately, Hemingway didn’t go this far with his writing. Instead, we’re left with a kind of literary homeopathy, where whatever is left is somehow supposed to be more powerful than the really interesting and significant material that’s been taken away.

Again, according to this theory, cutting the most important parts out is also supposed to strengthen the story. You see what this means, right? It means that what’s actually on the pages of AFTA does not include the most important parts. Which means that, really, we don’t know what this book is actually about. It seems to be about people coping with war. But that, logically, is not the most important part, because the most important part has been left out. Bottom line, nobody can possibly know what this book is actually about. It could be about soybean futures. It could be volume K of the Encyclopedia Britannica. It could be an early draft of Horton Hears a Who. There’s no way to tell.

Plus, that whole limited-palette-of-words thing gets to be unutterably monotonous. By the end of the book, I was so tired of reading the word “fine”. Everything is fine. The dinner is fine. The evening is fine. The room is fine. Hemingway would have fit right in with the 1984 Newspeak initiative. Being limited to a vocabulary of “good”, “plusgood”, and “doubleplusgood” wouldn’t have fazed him at all. But for a poor reader having to slog through a 350-page novel using only 47 words, it’s something like having to listen to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony performed on spoons. I’m sure it can be done, but, my gosh, why bother?

The fact is, I think that Hemingway was an intellectual bully. He would talk about whether writing was True or not, which would absolutely intimidate readers, writers, and critics into going along with whatever he said. If you didn’t, my God: you were going against Truth! So, now there’s an entire intellectual elite who pretends that reading the word “fine” every other paragraph is some kind of treat, rather than a failed experiment. Don’t get me wrong: if Hemingway wants to stake out the minimum-vocabulary end of the spectrum, that’s okay with me. Just let the rest of us have the million other words he isn’t using, without making us feel like we’re sinning against Truth.

It’s kind of like “The Emperor’s New Clothes” all over again. If you don’t pretend to see the emperor’s clothes – the excellence of Hemingway’s writing – you’re ignorant and uncouth, and certainly not among the intellectual elite. He actually won the Nobel Prize for Literature, which has got to be the ultimate example of “you can fool some of the people some of the time”. Well, I don’t see the clothes. I like plot. I like description. I like adjectives. And Hemingway just doesn’t deliver.

There are a few other nits I need to get out of my system with AFTA. People sure do drink a lot in this story. If the characters had all been clean and sober, this book would only be half as long. Hemingway seems to regard drinking a lot as some kind of an accomplishment.

He’s also laughably amateurish about expressing some things. Having painted himself into a corner with a 3^rd-grade vocabulary, he has a tough time expressing things like sadness or difficulty. So he makes it rain. Constantly. Whenever there’s a sad situation or a difficult situation, it rains. This is such a common thing in his writing that there’s actually a Hemingway version of the chicken crossing the road joke:

Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?

Hemingway: To die. In the rain.

Isn’t it possible for people to be sad when it’s sunny out? Or cheerful even if it’s raining? Not in Hemingway’s world. It makes me wonder if he had Seasonal Affective Disorder. I’m not kidding. He lived most of his life in Key West and Cuba, two very sunny places. Maybe he had to. Looked at this way, AFTA isn’t so much a novel as a cry for help.

Bottom line, AFTA is an unpleasant book, made dull by vocabulary and stylistic obsessiveness.

Recommendation: Leave it. In the rain.