A Tale of Love and a Tale of War (A Farewell to Arms, Part 1)

In Part 1 of our discussion on Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, we welcome Norton Library podcast host Mark Cirino to the guest seat for the first time (with producer Michael von Cannon stepping behind the microphone as host). The two discuss the balance of autobiography and fiction in the text, situate A Farewell to Arms in the establishment of Hemingway's literary reputation, and explain the censorship of certain language. 

Mark Cirino is Melvin M. Peterson Endowed Chair in Literature at the University of Evansville (IN). He is the author or editor of several books, including Ernest Hemingway: Thought in Action (Wisconsin, 2012); Reading Hemingway’s Across the River and into the Trees (Kent State, 2016); and, most recently, One True Sentence: Writers & Readers on Hemingway’s Art (Godine, 2022), which was written with Michael Von Cannon. Cirino and Von Cannon are the creators of One True Podcast, the official podcast of the Ernest Hemingway Society.

To learn more or purchase a copy of the Norton Library edition of A Farewell to Arms, go to https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324059424.

Learn more about the Norton Library series at https://wwnorton.com/norton-library.

Have questions or suggestions for the podcast? Email us at nortonlibrary@wwnorton.com or find us on Twitter at @TNL_WWN and Bluesky at @nortonlibrary.bsky.social. 

Transcript

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[Michael Von Cannon:] You are listening to the Norton Library Podcast, where we explore classic works of literature and philosophy with the leading scholars of the Norton Library, a new series from W. W. Norton that introduces influential texts to a new generation of readers. I’m the producer and your stand-in host, Michael Von Cannon, and today we present the first of our two episodes on Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, as we interview its editor and the host of the Norton Library Podcast, Mark Cirino. In Part 1, we discuss what we need to know about Hemingway as we approach this novel. We take note of how biography, war history, and fiction are all intricately woven into the narrative. We explore when and where he wrote it, and why it became a literary phenomenon. And we discuss why Hemingway was so very good at writing minor characters. Mark Cirino is Melvin M. Peterson Endowed Chair in Literature at the University of Evansville in Indiana. He is the author of several books including Ernest Hemingway: Thought in Action; Reading Hemingway’s Across the River and Into the Trees; and One True Sentence: Writers and Readers on Hemingway's Art. Mark and I co-wrote that last book, and also co-created One True Podcast, the official podcast of the Ernest Hemingway Society, and it is so great to have him today. Mark Cirino, welcome to the Norton Library Podcast!

[Mark Cirino:] Thank you, Michael. I feel welcome! 

[Michael:] And I should say, welcome to the guest side.

[Mark:] This is disorienting, but I’m really excited. And I’m honored and flattered to be here, so thanks so much Michael.

[Michael:] You know, today we're talking about Hemingway's masterpiece A Farewell to Arms, published in 1929. And before we talk about the novel, we should, of course, zoom out and talk about who Hemingway was during that year, kind of, at the tail end of that decade: where he was, what he was writing, you know, what was going on in his life during that period of time.

[Mark:] Verna Kale already did a beautiful job on our previous episode with The Sun Also Rises—and A Farewell to Arms is three years later. What we can think of with Hemingway in 1929 is that…from 1925 to 1929—so, a period of five years when Hemingway was from twenty-six to thirty years old—he published four absolutely magnificent books: two novels and two books of short stories. So, 1925, In Our Time, his first book of short stories; 1927, Men without Women, also a book of short stories—it has “Hills Like White Elephants,” “The Killers,” you know, classic short stories; 1926, The Sun Also Rises; in 1929, A Farewell to Arms. So, four books, in a span of five years, that really established Hemingway's reputation. They made him Hemingway. And A Farewell to Arms, as we were saying, comes at the very end of this. So, I would—when you pick up A Farewell to Arms, the way to really conceive it is that it is the kind of apotheosis or pinnacle of an unmatched stretch of writing in Hemingway's career. Of course, in 1940, he'd write For Whom The Bell Tolls—that's a decade later. And then, a decade after that, The Old Man and the Sea. He wrote magnificent short stories in the 1930s. Uh, that's not to say these five years are the only thing that he ever did, but it's really this concentrated stretch of his writing.

[Michael:] And where is he doing that writing?

[Mark:] So, A Farewell to Arms is quite interesting because he was moving all over the place. He's on to his second wife at this point, and he writes A Farewell to Arms—he begins it in March 1928. He's writing in Paris, and Key West, Wyoming, Arkansas, and so, he's—he's kind of writing it and editing it, and he's really obsessive about the process of composition and the process of editing it. His father commits suicide in December of 1928 during this stretch. He has a second son, which is delivered in a kind of a dangerous emergency Cesarian operation. So, these are really kind of fraught times in Hemingway's life. And this book shows some of this tension in his personal and romantic life, and also the memories that he's having about his World War I experience. I should point out, Michael, that when he's writing this in March 1928—that's about ten years after this really seminal experience that he had, which was in July of 1918, when he's only a very young man, eighteen years old—he is wounded, seriously wounded, when he is serving the Italian army as a Red Cross volunteer. And it took him, although he tried many times to fictionalize this traumatic experience, it was really with A Farewell to Arms where he was able to elaborate on it in its fullest form. 

[Michael:] You know, in the chart at the end of the book, you're referring to some of the chronology of what's going on historically, what's going on in the novel. And you just brought up what happens to, um, Hemingway historically. And in that chart, you know, he's not showing up until, um, like you said, 1918. A lot of this happens in the book during—what period of time?—I think the chart shows 1917. So, I think this leads to a question that you're getting to, which is: how autobiographical is the war theme in the book? How much is Hemingway drawing on from his own war experience? And then, you know, maybe even beyond the war itself: how autobiographical are some of the other aspects of the novel?

[Mark:] Yeah, those are great questions, and really important ones with A Farewell to Arms. So, the flip answer that I’m going to give you, Michael, is it is autobiographical, and it isn't. And the more serious answer is that as you begin to peel off the layers — what Hemingway chose to keep as autobiographical and what he chose to fictionalize or use his imagination—is really the mark of such artistry. It's such—it’s such bravery that Hemingway was able to use his imagination in places where you'd think he would rely on his autobiography. So, when the novel begins in the famous phrase that the novel starts “In the late summer of that year,” it is 1915. In 1915, Hemingway is a high school student. So, he had never been to Italy and, of course, was not a member of the army or the Red Cross. So, he's starting the novel in a time—during a time period where he had absolutely no personal familiarity with it. And, because the Italian front of World War I was all the way to the East in modern-day Slovenia, Hemingway had never been to that—in fact, when he was writing the book in 1928, he had still never visited that part of the world. So, he is—he is fictionalizing. He arrived in Europe in June of 1918, which is at the very end—in fact, it's after the action of the novel. There is no temporal overlap. And so, the question becomes, why? Why would he have done that? It's like, if you and I set—if we wrote a novel, and then we set it like three years before we were born, or something—what—why—what would be the advantage? Well, with Hemingway, the real answer is he wanted to make the dramatic centerpiece of A Farewell to Arms the Battle of Caporetto. The Battle of Caporetto took place in October of 1917. It was when the Austro-Hungarian army decimated the second Italian Army and forced a massive retreat all across Northern Italy, from East to West. Hemingway had zero personal experience in that. He was, as I said—he was, in Oak Park, Illinois, uh, having nothing to do with the Red Cross or the army at the time. But because this historical situation provided so much tension and tragedy and emotion, he said "I’m going to put my protagonist in the Second Army during Caporetto." It would be like if I lived in New York in 2003 or 2002, you're like, "You know what, if I put my main character in during 9/11, that would give a historical event that could represent the emotions that my individual character is going through.” Writers do that all the time, they—the thing that makes this unusual is Hemingway shifts it only a couple of years earlier. So, I think it's a really brave and shrewd artistic decision. 

[Michael:] So, the only thing that tangentially connects him to it is that he's in Italy during the war? I mean, if we're talking about Hemingway as serving—

[Mark:] When Hemingway entered the war, in the sense that when he began really serving the Italian army, he was not a soldier. That was July of 1918—June and July 1918—and that was when Italy was beginning its improbable comeback. So, the Battle of Vittorio Veneto, when Italy forced the surrender of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which, given what happened previously, it was quite unexpected, it shocked people. Um, Britain had a lot to do with it in the way that they helped the Italian army. America had very little to do with it, there was slight—there was some support. But it was really England who understood how important it was that Italy not succumb to Germany. However, Hemingway realized, “If I do my 1918 experience, what that would do is provide a triumph and optimism—and this is not the novel for triumph and optimism.” A Farewell to Arms, without giving you any spoilers, is a tragedy.

[Michael:] It's a novel about love as much as it is about war, and I wonder if for a few minutes, you can talk about the way Hemingway is also thinking about his own experiences? Maybe turmoil, when it comes to love and how that might show up in some way?

[Mark:] So, in July of 1918, after Hemingway is wounded, he recovers at a Red Cross hospital in Milan. And his nurse is the American V.A.D., a voluntary aid detachment, which is like a nurse but under the hospices of the Red Cross. Her name is Agnes von Kurowsky. And Hemingway and von Kurowsky had a—some kind of a relationship where, depending on how we're going to view it, it was anywhere from a “flirtation” to “they dated,” to “it was a very serious commitment to each other.” And the outcome of that is that when Hemingway returned home to America in January of 1919, he was still very much in love with Agnes von Kurowsky. And then, in March of that year, he received a “Dear John” letter where she wrote him and said, "Ours is just a boy-girl sort of infatuation, it's not really serious." And she blows him off because she meets an Italian. And you know how that goes, Michael. So—and Hemingway was distraught. In fact, he—in one of his letters, one of his early letters of that year, he tells his friend, “Life wouldn't be worth living if Agnes ever broke up with me." So, he was—he was totally believing that this was going to last forever. Um, we might just take a step back and realize that, like, you and I are talking about 1918, 1919—and he doesn't write this novel for a decade. He literally—you know, he writes The Sun Also Rises before that—so, he writes his post-war novel before his war novel. It's almost like this really needed a decade to marinate, so that he could sort out his feelings. Maybe he got—he was too close to it. “How do I articulate this in a way where it will be coherent?”, where he could universalize it for all of his readers?

[Michael:] You're talking about him being too close to it. Now, I’m wondering about the public at that point when it's published. You know, how was it received in 1929? Was it an immediate success? Did it kind of shoot him to the stardom that we associate him with today, or…?

[Mark:] Yes, it did. It was wildly successful and just went through printing after printing. And it made him an absolute star. Now, 1929 was—in American history—was not a great time for books, and not a great time for entertainment. Uh, people had less disposable income than they would have four or five years earlier. Hemingway loved to tell people that his book was published the day the stock market crashed—that's just not true. But it probably felt that way to him. You know, 1929 is so interesting in American literature because you have Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe. You have, The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner. And—and this one. So, you have three pretty big heavyweights. I think, even though people might not have wanted to do a post-mortem about World War I, this is a classic trajectory in terms of dramatic narrative, which is: a tale of love, and a tale of war. And I think readers and consumers have responded to that since the beginning of time. 

[Michael:] Is this an anti-war book? Can we treat it that way? Or is it maybe more complicated than that?

[Mark:] I think Hemingway would be, sort of, either offended, or, he would be tickled that somebody would call this an anti-war—I just think my sense, speaking for Hemingway—Michael, I realize that might be audacious—I think he didn't view the world in those terms. I think he didn't view art in those terms. So, an anti-war novel, or anti-war protest song, in my opinion, it's like the writer wants to convince the listener or the reader that war is bad or war is wrong. And Hemingway, I think, is going deeper than that. I think he's saying, “If I chronicle World War I realistically, well, of course it's going to be anti-war.” In the sense that, the horrors of war are going to be revealed, are going to be dramatized, are going to be vividly depicted. So that is, of course, a given. But I think Hemingway, throughout his entire life, believed that war was an element of humanity; probably since the beginning of human beings, war has been—there's been some aspect of war. And I bet, Michael, if you and I went to the newspapers today, we would find—somewhere, someplace, somehow—there's some kind of war going on, some kind of violence going on. So, I think to write a novel in 1929 and believe that anti-war had—was a priority, I—that's not how I would look at it. In fact, I would say that he's “anti-profiting-off war”. He's anti-amoral leaders suckering us into war—that bothered him. He loved and respected and honored soldiering. It was how wars come about that made him very, very angry, actually.

[Michael:] I wonder if you could talk about that, maybe in connection to what is probably the most famous—or one of the most famous—um, passages in the book itself, which is—and I’m not going to read the whole thing, but,—“Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments, and the dates.” If someone refers to a passage from this novel, I imagine, nine times out of ten, it's going to be that passage. Is that one of those moments that reflects what you're saying here? That he's against war profiteering or the way that the leadership during a war might be corrupted or misguided, or—how do you read that? 

[Mark:] I agree with you. I think what he's saying is, uh, anytime there's like the rumblings of war, listen to how people start talking. Listen to the language that they use. Words are very important. And when you hear people start talking about glory and sacrifice and…be careful! Ask yourself: what are they trying to get you to do? And once you start being—you know, maybe we can think about it this way, Michael. We've said that war has been a thing since the history of humankind. So, when writers have been trying to depict it, or even painters or anyone trying to—or filmmakers—you can do it Romantically, with a capital ‘R,’ where you show war to be a glorified activity that can bring about honor and triumph, and…you know, trophies and medals. You can do it in a post-modern way, which kind of shows the sort of surrealness and the chaos of it. Hemingway tried to show the reality of it. So, he's a Realist writer, with a capital ‘R.’ And I think if you're going to show World War I in a Realist way, you can't spare the reader any of the violence and the gore and the injury that is going to come about. So, I think what he's saying is, he's going to be a Realist writer, and he really does notice when people talk about war in a Romantic way. You know, we might think of like the Gettysburg address; you know, in the Gettysburg address, you can't blame Abraham Lincoln for talking like that—that was during the Romantic era, right? But maybe to our ears, our twenty-first century ears—and maybe even to Hemingway's twentieth century ears—it sounds a little off-tune, right? It sounds out-of-step with the way we think about war in the modern era.

[Michael:] In just a minute, we probably want to talk about the two main characters, who are Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley, and then talk about some of the other important characters who make up this story. But you just said Hemingway is a Realist writer. He doesn't want to romanticize or see the war through, uh, maybe uh, rose-colored kinds of glasses. And I think what's interesting to me, just to kind of follow up, it seems like, on the one hand, Hemingway does censor himself a few times. And there, I think you mentioned in your introduction, there are like, what, sixteen moments where he does, and—I wonder if he was, um, happy about that, or just conceded it. But also, the book was banned in a few different, uh, place. Um, Italy it was banned; in Boston it was banned. So, these might be Realist depictions, but at that moment in time, the publication of the book did not find an audience in certain places, for certain, maybe political, reasons. So, I wonder if, for a few minutes, you can maybe talk about that.

[Mark:] Yeah, sure. The process that you're talking about was the subject of really spirited debate between Hemingway and his editor at Scribner’s, Maxwell Perkins, where Hemingway was really being told that he couldn't use a certain vocabulary. And this is the same vocabulary that he had heard soldiers use, and he wanted to put in the book. And so, how do you do it? And…he determined that in those sixteen places, which are always the dialogue of soldiers to one another, and mostly—actually, during the retreat of Caporetto—he puts a long hyphen. And so, what I've done in the Norton Library edition is I've annotated it in the back where I tell you the word that Hemingway wanted to use, or he put originally, before he, uh, substituted it with a hyphen. Now, most people would be able to figure it out on their own, but I thought, just to make it completely certain, I did annotate it, uh, in an endnote at the end. And, you know, you mentioned Italy. Well, the outcome of World War I, after Italy's great victory, was Italian fascism. So, Italy didn't become a democracy until after World War II, which means that no Italian read A Farewell to Arms in Italian until the mid to late 40s. It just wasn't translated because it was critical of Italian military leadership, because it talked about Caporetto, which was—you weren't allowed to speak the word Caporetto, much less publish a novel about it, during fascist Italy. So, yeah, Hemingway really did—and he didn't visit; Hemingway loved Italy, but then after 1927, he said, “I’m never going back, as long as it is a fascist country,” and he was true to his word. And then, he came back in the late 40s. 

[Michael:] I know this is an impossible task: we have two main characters; we also, to my mind, have the priest and Rinaldi to discuss; and, maybe, a kind of side-ish character of, uh—you know, there are remarkable ones here—

[Mark:] There are.

[Michael:] —and Count Greffi might be one. Or, Simmons. And we can discuss who we might want there. But if we start with someone like Frederic Henry. For people who are just encountering this novel, you know, for the first time, what do we need to know about each of these characters—but what do we need to know about Frederic?

[Mark:] So, Frederic is an American who has volunteered to serve in the Italian army. He was in Italy studying architecture. They ask him why he joined the Italian army, and he says, "Uh, ‘cause I spoke Italian [Laughter] and I was here!" So, it's not—he doesn't say “because I wanted to end this,”—no. He has no main, no political, agenda. He thinks it's something that he should be doing, and he—so, he kind of wanders into the war plot of the novel. Likewise, at the beginning of the novel, he visits whorehouses. He is promiscuous in that way. He, uh, then meets Catherine Barkley, the beautiful nurse. And he falls in love almost by accident. At first, he's like, "Well, I might as well start seeing her because it's better her than a prostitute." So, in the two major trajectories of the novel—the war plot and the love plot—Frederic kind of just wanders in. He's almost like…we don't even respect his motives. And it's interesting to see, in this novel, how that changes, how it becomes complicated. That's what I would keep in mind with Frederic Henry.

[Michael:] And his war wounding is kind of remarkably depicted, isn't it?

[Mark:] Oh, it's great. It's so great. So, he's sitting there, and he's, uh, I almost don't want to—I don't want to spoil it for anybody. But when he gets wounded, it's in a way that we might consider anti-climactic or anti-heroic. He's doing something random, he's eating pasta asciutta, right? He's not storming a hill, or—he's just sitting there. And when he does get wounded, he describes the physical sensation, but he also describes the metaphysical sensation, which means, he feels his soul exit his body. He has a near-death experience, and—he explains it—he explains what his psyche…what happened to his psyche or his soul, not just the injury that his legs went through. 

[Michael:] And you've just mentioned her—who is Catherine Barkley?

[Mark:] Okay, so Catherine Barkley is not American in the novel. She is British, and she is an excellent nurse. Everybody likes her. She's funny. She is devoted to Frederic. And, in fact, I would say—Michael, you tell me if I’m wrong about this—but I think in all of Hemingway's studies, she might be the most maligned female character. In the sense that, people call her “wish fulfillment,” “like a rag doll,” she's “two-dimensional.” I don't believe—I think that's overstating it. She…there are—there are some episodes where she kind of apologizes for her feelings, and that's kind of frustrating and disappointing. But the last thing I'll say, she has gone through war trauma herself. She had a fiancé die at the Battle of the Somme, and—so, she's having her own negotiation with war. We shouldn't forget that women had war trauma in their own way, even if they weren't soldiers.

[Michael:] I see that there are moments where there's kind of this, maybe subservience, and you said, “wish fulfillment”. Do you think it's partly also because it's a first-person narrative from Frederic's perspective? Is that something that we have to account for if we're thinking about the kind of role she takes on in the novel?

[Mark:] Anytime there's a first-person perspective in literature, I think, Michael, you should always account for it, and then further observe that he's probably telling the story a decade after the events that have happened. So, he is thinking about all this from the past. Nevertheless, you can bring up, “Well, even if it is from his perspective, why would this be his wish?” Why would it—why would it be wish fulfillment to have somebody saying, “There isn't me anymore, there's only you.” And so, feminists and feminist critics have really taken issue with Catherine Barkley. It’s—it's a very interesting thing to look at it through twenty-first century lenses. The only thing I want to urge readers to do is contextualize the horrific experiences that she has had. So, in a way, I would call Frederic and Catherine the most codependent relationship I've ever experienced in American literature. 

[Michael:] There is the priest, there is Rinaldi. Are these two very different kinds of philosophical points of view, are they diametrically opposed to each other? 

[Mark:] Yeah. So, these are two really important side characters and sounding boards for Frederic. Rinaldi is a doctor, so he's a surgeon. He's Italian. But Rinaldi is a typical, or stereotypical, rakish Italian who loves women, wine, and song. [Laughter] And he represents the earthly pleasures of life. And he loves talking about whorehouses, and so forth. The priest loves to talk about divine pleasures, the sublime love of God. And one of Frederic's challenges in this phase of his life is to, sort of, triangulate these things. Could it be that loving another person has divine—even though the priest has never done that? The priest has never had romantic love in that way. And Rinaldi has never had divine love. Is there a way to triangulate these things, so that to love another person is that sublime experience? 

[Michael:] There are so many side characters, and we could go on for maybe another thirty minutes when it comes to just this question here. But there's this singer, Simmons, who shows up throughout the novel. Pretty humorous character, um. Who is Simmons? What should we know? How does that character work with the cast of other characters? 

[Mark:] Yeah. Well, first, Michael, to speak to your larger point, I think Hemingway, especially in this novel—maybe you can also say The Sun Also Rises — but especially, to me, in this novel, Hemingway is like Shakespeare in the sense of using a character that maybe you'll only see for a scene, or maybe two, and you never forget that character. And so, Michael, you mentioned Simmons. But there could have been forty other characters that you would have mentioned that he passes through during these experiences: nurses, doctors, soldiers, civilians, clerks in stores, just random people that he sees. And he has individuated them to make them so memorable, really indelible. Ralph Simmons is an American opera singer in Italy. And he's bad, he's really bad. [Laughter] And I’m not sure if he's bad at singing per se, but his “Americanness” makes it impossible for Italian audiences to accept the way he sings Italian opera. And so, Simmons is living this life of constant frustration of being in a field that he's almost biologically not disposed to succeed at. And one of the things that the Simmons character really, uh, helps us with is that it emphasizes the national divide. So, we're in another country: different language, different culture, different feelings towards the war, different feelings towards everything. And, you know, Frederic Henry is an American fighting in Italy; Robert Jordan is an American fighting in Spain; uh, Colonel Cantwell, in Across the River into the Trees, an American fighting in Italy. Like, this matters that you're fighting on their turf. So, it doesn't mean that the bullets hurt less. It just means that the war means something different to your native country. When your native country is attacked versus what Frederic, and ultimately what Hemingway, was doing. Simmons kind of provides a comic parallel to that, kind of, disjunction. 

[Michael:] Mark Cirino, thank you for joining us on the Norton Library Podcast to discuss your edition of A Farewell to Arms. 

[Mark:] Thanks, Michael. 

[Michael:] The Norton Library edition of A Farewell to Arms, edited by Mark Cirino, is available now in paperback and eBook. Check out the links in the description to this episode for ordering options and more information about the Norton Library, including the full catalog of titles.

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