Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms: A Reference Guide (review)

Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms: A Reference Guide is yet another indispensable addition to Hemingway scholarship by Linda Wagner-Martin. In a mere 172 pages, Wagner Martin synthesizes the extant range of scholarship, providing through her insightful commentary and exhaustive documentation an essential handbook to perhaps Hemingway's most intriguing novel.

A key strength of Wagner-Martin's work is her ability to organize a diverse range of material efficiently. This reference guide is no exception, as she uses the categories of "content," "texts," "contexts," "ideas," "narrative art," and "reception" to provide a blended methodology with which to explore the novel. For most Hemingway scholars, the chapters on "content" and "text" will provide little new information; what is satisfying, however, is the exhaustiveness of the footnotes. It is there that most scholars will dwell, reviewing the thorough listing of articles, ticking off in their head topics and titles that encompass generations of scholarship. Thus, on the topic of Frederic and Catherine's "sexualized relationship," for example, Wagner-Martin provides in a long footnote a detailed, provocative exploration of Hemingway's "sly syntax" throughout Catherine's labor. (126-127) By drawing on previous scholarship and her own familiarity with the manuscripts of the novel, Wagner-Martin creates an authoritative roadmap for future criticism.

The most rewarding chapter of the book is entitled "Contexts," and here Wagner-Martin really flexes her muscles as a scholar of modernism. Her exploration of this subject is perfect; she neither oversimplifies its complexities, nor dwells too long in minutiae and rarified definitions. Situating Hemingway's novel in the complex intellectual geography of Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, e.e. cummings, William Faulkner, and Sinclair Lewis is no easy task, and it is to Wagner-Martin's credit that this section of her reference guide is satisfying to both a general student of literature, and a Hemingway specialist. One may quibble with how she stresses the connections between Hemingway, Cather, and Wharton; Hemingway of course paid scant tribute to female writers in the early stages of his career. She states: "Wharton was one of those influential writers that Hemingway would never have acknowledged any respect for"(58). Wagner-Martin seems firmly convinced that since the lending cards at Sylvia Beach's bookstore indicate he borrowed books by Cather and Wharton, "one can infer that he was studying [them] as well as reading [them]"(57). Whether one agrees with this interpretation or not, Wagner-Martin is at her most provocative when she treads across this intricate terrain.

One of the great pleasures of this reference work is to appreciate the generational shifts in Hemingway scholarship. Wagner-Martin pays tribute to Ray B. West, Earl Rovit, Carlos Baker, Philip Young, Charles Fenton, Sheridan Baker, Arthur Waldorn, and others, and one can see how their work fed into Michael Reynolds's Hemingway's First War: The Making of A Farewell to Arms. Published in 1976, Reynolds' work has, until now, stood as the most complete investigation of the novel. Indeed, Wagner-Martin's work has deep roots in Reynolds' thorough study; so many facts about the text were first uncovered by him. Wagner-Martin, however, creates a bibliography that draws on the innovative work of the present generation of female scholars such as Linda Patterson Miller, Sandra Spanier, Kim Moreland, Rena Sanderson, Susan Beegel, Hilary Justice, Miriam Mandel, Rose Marie Burwell, Lisa Tyler, Debra A. Moddelmog, and many others. The complex genealogy of scholarship on A Farewell to Arms is carefully laid out by Wagner-Martin, and this act of cataloging previous scholarship is in itself a remarkable achievement. Gender and feminist theory, medical technology, and lesbian and gay studies are all given heightened attention here, making this a text that all future scholars writing on A Farewell to Arms will need to consult.

The genre of the "reference guide" does not...