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Chapter Four Hemingway’s Best Novel Hemingway often said that among his novels, A Farewell to Arms (1929) was his favorite. It represented a surprising development in his style, more lyrical than anything he had attempted before, moving beyond and enriching what had begun with the vignettes in the 1924 (Paris) in our time. There he had been searching for the perfect sentence: “Everybody was drunk. The whole battery was drunk going along the road in the dark.” . . . “They shot the six cabinet ministers at half-past six in the morning against the wall of a hospital.”These vignettes moved forward to become the numbered and italicized “chapters” appearing between the stories in the 1925 In Our Time. Yet the more lyrical prose of A Farewell to Arms retains the capability, as Edmund Wilson said about that earlier work, of casting a limpid shaft into deep waters. Its opening sentences demonstrate exactly that. In A Farewell to Arms Hemingway also achieved for the first time a comprehensive structure by using various motifs, most notably Frederic Henry’s spectatorial gaze outward from inside a window , repeated at intervals throughout. Important variations on this motif culminate in the final chapter with two lyrical and elegiac sentences as memorable as the words of any poem. The opening chapter, in length only a page and a half, begins with that gaze from a window and ends with death and rain: “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.” The brief opening chapter anticipates the shape of the novel as a whole, from a gaze out of the window to rain and—associated with rain—death. The narrator Frederic Henry’s mention of “only” seven thousand dead suggests ironic understatement as one way of facing catastrophe. In the final sentences of A Farewell to Arms, Frederic Henry himself is outside the window and in the rain, while Hemingway’s new heroine, Catherine Barkley, a heroine very different from Lady Brett Ashley, lies dead in the hospital.1 81 The opening sentences of A Farewell to Arms possess the qualities of a good poem. Their cadences imitate the movement of thought, here passive , contemplative. The images have a rare quality, river-plain-mountain sequence representing the movement of the gaze toward the mountains, as the clear and rapidly moving stream attracts the mind and offers a refreshing contrast to the dust to come as its water flows cleanly around the dry and white boulders. It would be a violation to change a single word, and after a few readings the passage becomes part of our minds: In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Lt. Frederic Henry, telling this story, feels the attraction of those boulders, dry and white, and the clear water. They seem a relief from subjectivity; they are clean, clear, permanent, independent of time and will. In their individual thingness they give him pleasure, reassurance. He wants to linger over each, and they also remain in the reader’s mind, as Hemingway’s monosyllables slow the pace, the individual words creating a space around each in which suggestion silently trembles and much is left unsaid. One thing unsaid is that Frederic clearly prefers to remain stationary there inside the room; he does not want to join those dusty moving troops outside: 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. The troops are gone, leaving no address, as it were, and the bare white road remains unchanged by their transitory presence, as if no one had been there at all. The leaves are going, like the soldiers. The repetition of and in the unfurling sentence creates a uniform rhythm without subordination, with Frederic Henry passively contemplating the scene...

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