The Death of Love in A Farewell to Arms

We continue to fail to write well about Hemingway because we believe we understand him better than he understands himself. The truth is that Hemingway is deep and difficult, and the mind that operates in his fiction possesses "great subtlety and enormous powers of selective observation"—a keen perception that Allen Tate registered long ago and that we have yet to absorb. The subject of vast scholarship and criticism, Hemingway nevertheless remains hard to comprehend and describe. Drawn to but frequently distracted by his prodigious personality, we have underestimated the power and complexity of his thinking.

What Hemingway accomplishes in his fiction is evocative and highly suggestive, a matter of complicated feeling and insight, and the effects that he achieves are difficult to articulate. The challenge that Hemingway poses is especially formidable in the case of A Farewell to Arms (1929). It is a novel of love and war that on one level is straightforward and clear—a tragic story in a wartime setting of the passionate but doomed relationship between the ambulance driver Frederic Henry and the nurse Catherine Barkley, who cares for him in a Milan hospital after he is wounded. The plot is connected to and periodically develops Hemingway's own experiences in the Great War, including his near-death in a mortar attack in July 1918 and his relationship with Agnes von Kurowsky, an American nurse seven years older than Hemingway, whom he hoped and expected he would marry but who ended their relationship by letter in March 1919. But Frederic Henry is not Hemingway: the affinities between their experiences are intended by Hemingway to dramatize how different they are, how separate Frederic is from his creator.

A Farewell to Arms is narrated in the first person. It is not Hemingway's voice that we hear; it is Frederic Henry's, and he tells a story that he already has lived through. He knows the ending, and his knowledge of it informs every moment of his story. When he and Catherine are together as he recovers from his wound, he says "We had a lovely time that summer. When I could go out we rode in a carriage in the park. I remember the carriage, the horse going slowly, and up ahead the back of the driver with his varnished high hat, and Catherine Barkley sitting beside me. If we let our hands touch, just the side of my hand touching hers, we were excited." The only way that Frederic can bring Catherine Barkley back to life, touching her hand again and feeling the thrill and sexual excitement of her, is through telling the story in which ultimately she dies. He remembers her as he causes her death.

Frederic also remembers waiting for Catherine again and again that summer in his hospital bed where they would make love. His verb tenses evoke what he had and what he has lost: "She had wonderfully beautiful hair and I would lie sometimes and watch her twisting it up in the light that came in the open door and it shone even in the night as water shines sometimes just before it is really daylight. She had a lovely face and body and lovely smooth skin too. We would be lying together and I would touch her cheeks and her forehead and under her eyes and her chin and throat with the tips of my fingers and say, 'Smooth as piano keys,' and she would stroke my chin with her fingers and say, 'Smooth as emery paper and very hard on piano keys.'"

To say that Frederic Henry is idealizing Catherine—or that Hemingway is—is misleading. Frederic naturally idealizes her since she no longer exists, except in his account. What is noteworthy here is the delicacy—beautiful, rarified, and strange—of the images, the shine of the water, the smooth surface of her skin. This is what he had. Now he has lost her and everything connected with her. The first time through the novel, we do not know what happened to Catherine. We can sense, however, that something has happened to...