The Genesis of A Farewell to Arms

THE GENESIS OF A FAREWELL TO ARMS Bernard Oldsey* One of the reasons A Farewellto Arms is critically esteemed is that it is a well-structured novel possessed of a poetically evocative opening and a dramatically understated conclusion. But before Ernest Hemingway reached the beginning and ending of the novel as eventually published, he was beset by considerable difficulties. These were not new with him: as George Eliot once confided in correspondence , "beginnings are always troublesome" and "conclusions are the weak point of most authors." Nor was he lacking in experience in dealing with a troublesome beginning. The story of how F. Scott Fitzgerald helped him through the initial difficulties of The Sun Also Rises is now well known; because of Fitzgerald's advice, Hemingway cut away a chapter and a half of otiose stuff and began the work wisely with Robert Cohn in the milieu of Paris.1 The story of how Hemingway wrote and rewrote the troublesome conclusion of A Farewell to Arms is also widely but less accurately known in respect to the manuscript facts (although estimates have varied widely, there are over forty extant forms of that conclusion in the Hemingway Collection).2 What is not known is that Hemingway made an even more drastic adjustment in the opening of A Farewell to Arms than he did in The Sun Also Rises and with even more radical results. No one has mentioned this radical change before because evidence of it was not known to exist. However, the Hemingway Collection, housed in the John F. Kennedy Library, now includes certain items not listed in Young and Mann's pioneer inventory, The Hemingway Manuscripts, and seemingly not available for Baker's Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story.3 Among these is a two-chapter fragment which is vital to any discussion of the means by which A Farewell to Arms was composed and constructed. This remarkable Item-240 is an early (perhaps the original) opening of the novel, and it corresponds with a section some eighty pages within the novel as published, corresponding with chapters XIII and XIV. What this indicates is that 'Bernard Oldsey is Professor of English at West Chester State College and editor of College Literature. He has previously published materials on Hemingway in such journals as Nation, American Literature, and Modern Fiction Studies. 176Bernard Oldsey Hemingway composed the opening and the eleven other essential chapters that constitute Book One of the novel as an aftertought, an artistically excellent and serendipitous afterthought. Item-240, unfortunately undated, consists of two chapters done in the author's hand. The first chapter of eight pages describes the arrival of the wounded protagonist in Milan, where there is much difficulty in getting him to an upper floor in an elevator, and where a flustered nurse is unprepared for this first, unexpected, American casualty. In substance this manuscript chapter corresponds with Chapter XIII of the published novel, although varying in some detail. The second manuscript chapter of six pages describes theprotagonist awakening the next morning in the hospital and being attended to by nurses. In substance it corresponds with Chapter XIV of the novel, althoughvaryingremarkably in detail of primary importance to the eventual plot. It might be best to summarize and then to explain the facts that indicate Item-240 is either the original or at least a very early version of the beginning of A Farewell to Arms: (1) although the first manuscript chapter is unnumbered, the other is designated "Chapter 2" in the author's hand; (2) at this stage of development the protagonist is named not Frederic Henry but Emmett Hancock (noteworthy when compared with Ernest Hemingway); (3) although "Chapter 2" contains attending nurses, it does not contain anyone resembling Catherine Barkley, or even the name; it has no reunion scene between thewounded protagonist and his inamorata (as of course Chapter XIV of thenovel does); and (4) Item240 is rougher in prose style and sketchier in detail than Chapters XIII and XIV. Separately each of these facts is indicative; together they represent good evidence that Item-240 is an "ur-opening" of the novel. It might be supposed that Item-240, consisting in substance of what now stands...