It's Never Too Late to Discover Hemingway (A Farewell to Arms, Part 2)

In Part 2 of our discussion on Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, Norton Library podcast host Mark Cirino returns to the guest seat (with producer Michael von Cannon stepping behind the microphone as host). The two discuss the cover design of the Norton Library edition, essential historical context for understanding the novel, and the ever-increasing political relevance of Hemingway's work in the twenty-first century. 

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

[Music] 

[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 second of our two episodes devoted to 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 discussed what we need to know about Hemingway as we approach this novel: the biographical and historical aspects of the narrative and its cast of many characters, including some fascinating minor ones. In this second episode, we learn more about Mark Cirino's relationship with Hemingway, his favorite line from the novel, his playlist, his hot take about the novel's relevance, and much more. 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 wonderful to have him on once again. Mark Cirino, welcome back to the Norton Library Podcast!

[Mark Cirino:] Good to see you again, Michael. Thanks for having me. 

[Michael:] We're going to talk about a number of things during this episode, including how you first encountered Hemingway, and challenges to reading this novel. But first, let's just go to the cover of the Norton Library edition. Why that cover? Why that color scheme? 

[Mark:] So, I think the designers at the Norton Library are phenomenal. I think that they're as good at designing books as Hemingway was at writing books. And certainly, better than I was—I am—at editing books. So, I love all the color schemes that they come up with. So, we're seeing a big field of yellow, and the lettering is blue and orange. So, the way that I—the short answer is, I have no idea why that color scheme is there. However, my sense is, the first edition of A Farewell to Arms, which was published by Scribner in 1929, had a blue and orange color scheme. So, I think our Norton Library edition sort of gestures towards that. And then the yellow, to me, is an ode to Catherine Barkley. Catherine Barkley is individuated in many ways. We remember many things about her, but there's that one scene where she unpins her hair, and there's a waterfall of hair that falls and, sort of, almost buries our protagonist, Frederic Henry. So, the cover kind of does that. We're sort of buried, awash in Catherine Barkley's beautiful, blonde hair. And that's one way that I can think about the color, although we're going to have to ask the experts. 

[Michael:] Can I volley an interpretation and see what you think about it? 

[Mark:] Yes. 

[Michael:] Last episode, I believe you were talking about Frederic Henry being wounded and he's eating pasta asciutta…

[Mark:] [Laughter] 

[Michael:] …do you think that the yellow, and maybe the orange, I don't know, it’s, uh—

[Mark:] It’s the cheese?

[Michael:] —is a “pasta-y” kind of color? And maybe, I don't know, if it's a red wine kind of color, but certainly, is there a pasta color to it? 

[Mark:] I just don't think the guys at the Norton Library are going to structure a cover around pasta…

[Michael:] You think the hair means more? 

[Mark:] I do. But we can—again, we can defer—I'll defer to whatever they say. It's a beautiful, striking addition—

[Michael:] It is.

[Mark:] —and I really, um, I really love it. 

[Michael:] It is beautiful, and the colors work really well together. 

[Mark:] Yellow and blue, yes. 

[Michael:] Mhm…You have been working on Hemingway for a number of years. When did you first encounter Hemingway? 

[Mark:] So, I came to Hemingway probably later than most Hemingway scholars. I didn't really read Hemingway seriously until after I graduated college—undergraduate college. And I was lucky, in the sense that my mother and older brother were good readers. They had lots of books on the shelves. So, I would just always have books that I could get. I always had access to them, and could steal them, or take them, or read them. And then there was one stretch where I just read Hemingway, and I read The Old Man in the Sea, For Whom the Bell Tolls, A Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises, the short stories—and I was just hooked. I caught—I sort of got what he was talking about. I really responded. You know, I'm not a drinker, or brawler, or womanizer. I don't like bull fighting, or hunting, or fishing. So, you wouldn't think that I would really respond to Hemingway's fiction or his content. And I really don't respond to the content as much as the language and the way that he describes things…captures a moment, the human experience. So, that's really—I really wanted to live in the world that he created. 

[Michael:] You came at Hemingway kind of late. Was Hemingway in your education? Was he in the classroom at that point, and you were just kind of resistant to him? 

[Mark:] Not at all. 

[Michael:] Was he just not there? He just wasn't there? 

[Mark:] Not at all. I think Hemingway is a prototypical dead white male. And he was, kind of, avoided in the classroom for many years. And I think that, that's probably a misunderstanding of who Hemingway is. And in fact, this novel might go a long way towards that: about how he creates female characters in all of their complexity. Uh, things might be other than they first appear. And you know, there's been Hemingway criticism that kind of corrected that prevailing stereotype of who Hemingway was. 

[Michael:] There's a moment in your edition where you say—and I think this is a note on the text—a note about the text. You say, "I have not corrected the errors Hemingway made when attempting to render the Italian language." And you know, one might just pass by that sentence there. But it got me thinking, you know, how do you, you, encounter Hemingway? How do you read him, appreciate him—maybe in a different way, as someone with an Italian heritage, someone who knows Italian? I wonder if you can speak to that aspect of approaching Hemingway as someone with that kind of background. 

[Mark:] Well, Hemingway gave himself a pretty interesting challenge with A Farewell to Arms, where we have an American protagonist in an Italian country who speaks to—mostly to Italians, in Italian. Sometimes, he speaks to Italians where it seems like it might be English. Sometimes, he speaks to English people. And Hemingway is always trying to render that level of linguistic complexity in a realistic way, so that you wouldn't have an American speaking Italian in exactly the same way that he would speak English. The vocabulary or the syntax would be stilted or a little bit awkward—something that would remind you that he is in another country, with all of its complications, all of its foreignness—even if he might speak Italian very well, which it seems like he does. It's still not the same. And so, I love that about him. And I would say, you know, Hemingway—because The Sun Also Rises takes place in France and Spain, and For Whom the Bell Tolls takes place in Spain—Hemingway really made this part of his fiction, which was to convey foreignness through language. 

[Michael:] What are some of the challenges to reading this particular novel? 

[Mark:] I think the big challenge to reading this novel is that most people don't know what happened in World War I. In the sense that, probably when I first read A Farewell to Arms, I had no idea that the Italian army was facing the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I had no idea who won or lost, what—if Italy won or lost the war, and how that would affect our characters. So, I think what my edition has tried to do, without intruding, is give some basic background about World War I, Italy's involvement, and where our character is in terms of time and place. So, I think a basic understanding—of course, I'm not a war historian or any kind of historian—but to understand the basic dynamics of World War I, I think, is a challenge that kind of puts the narrative into context. So, I think that is, what I hope is, really helpful about my edition. 

[Michael:] It sounds like what you're saying is, like, this is a novel where you have to have at least some kind of working knowledge, when it comes to the history of that period, to make sense of it. Or, does Hemingway help you to make sense of it while you're reading the novel in some way? 

[Mark:] I can only speak for myself, and when I read it the first time, I didn't know what was going on historically—I love the book! So, I wouldn't say what you were suggesting, which is that you have to know the war. But, I think it's helpful. Because I've read the novel without knowing what was going on, and then after I did learn what was going on, you appreciate it a lot more. You appreciate it a lot more just knowing where he is in the grand scheme of things. He's this little, one individual in this unbelievable movement that's going on in the war in Europe. And it’s, uh—so, anyway, that was really interesting to know. You know, here's another thing, Michael, is how many times during the novel does he mention a town, or a river, or a mountain—and as a normal reader, I would just go through it, I would just read it, and I didn’t—I never like looked at a map. It's like, “Okay, where are they?” What's he talking about? Is he right? How far is it from this place to this place? And the more that you really understand the specificity with which Hemingway rendered all of these details, I think that really contributes to a valuable reading of the book. 

[Michael:] There are so many good lines, so many good passages in this novel. What's your favorite? 

[Mark:] Wow, now I know how other people feel when I ask them that question. So, you gave a great one in the first episode, Michael, when you were talking about the abstract language, and that is, if we can be bombastic, maybe the most famous sequence that Hemingway ever wrote. I mean, that is like—that goes on the Mount Rushmore. I have a couple other favorites, and these are sort of, like, little. Every time I get to them in the book, I just go, “Oh, that is magnificent!” There's this one moment really, really close to the end of the book, so this is the last chapter. And…our main character, Frederic Henry, is leaving the hospital. He's in a hospital, and then he goes outside, and this is how it's described: “I went down the hall and then down the stairs and out the door of the hospital and down the dark street in the rain to the café.” I don't think there's another writer who would have written it exactly in that way, who would have stacked up all of those prepositional phrases one right after the other, without any punctuation. So, the rhythmic pattern is established. And Michael, I don't know what impression that leaves for you, but for me, it makes me feel like I'm walking with him. Or, that there's like a handheld camera over his shoulder. “I went down the hall and then down the stairs and out the door of the hospital and down the dark street in the rain to the café.” All he needed to tell us was that he went to the café. But, you know—if you told us you went to the café, we probably would have deduced that you went out the door, you know, and that you went down the stairs and, you know, all these things, we get—but no, no, it's plotting. It's marking time. It's taking you pace-by-pace. That's a really intimate experience for the reader. So patient and slow. 

[Michael:] This is not a moment where Frederic Henry is at work, and he's hungry and going to lunch. This is an important moment where it looks like Catherine—she's in labor, she's at the hospital. So, do you read that as also significant to the fact that the sentence unfolds, and we are kind of in the process, kind of incrementally, of moving down and away. 

[Mark:] Well, he's focused on the physical…

[Michael:] Mhm. 

[Mark:] ...the literal, the real movement of this character, as opposed to—it's almost like focusing on the mundane movement of this character represses the danger of what his love interest is going through. 

[Michael:] Mhm. 

[Mark:] So, he's not thinking when he's focusing on what he's doing, and how he's moving. He's not focused on the emotions, the unhappy emotions of what's going on. 

[Michael:] Any reader who's going to encounter the novel will, of course, come to that shocking opening which, of course, begins, “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.” For a guy who's known for short, simple sentences, these are long-winded sentences. 

[Mark:] One thing that I love about that first sentence, Michael, is it teaches you that in art, there's a difference between being vague and being suggestive. So, he's not specific in that opening sequence, but he knows exactly what year it was. He's not ready to tell you yet, but he knows what year it is. And that—so he's being elliptical and suggestive, and it's like that long tracking shot of a landscape before we ever meet human beings and characters. 

[Michael:] I really like that idea. How do you teach this book? What are some favorite techniques? 

[Mark:] It depends if I'm teaching the novel in an American novel class. And sometimes in an American novel class, I will teach A Farewell to Arms alongside another war novel like Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried or Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage or there's, you know, The Unvanquished by William Faulkner. It could be any number of ones. It's always interesting to see how a writer conveys war and soldiers and veterans, and how they talk about war. So, that is something that I love to bring up in my class. Another thing would be, in any class actually, whether it's an introductory class, a Hemingway seminar, or an upper-level American novel class—it would be exactly what you're talking about, which is: find a sentence and find a paragraph, you know, and see what he is doing with it. What makes Hemingway, Hemingway? The sentence that we talked about, about the hospital to the cafe…I mean, he can have these moments in the middle of a paragraph, in the middle of a scene, that are not the first paragraph of the beginning of the novel, that really become prominent. But they are just magnificent in the way that he writes it. So, I hope when I teach, I never forget to focus on how he writes—just the language that makes him such an arresting writer. 

[Michael:] We ask people on the Norton Library Podcast to say something controversial, something maybe counterintuitive about the work that they're discussing. So, do you have a hot take about Hemingway or about this novel? 

[Mark:] I have a take, and it'll be up to you, Michael, to judge the temperature of it. So, I have a couple things. First of all, my first hot take is that A Farewell to Arms is more relevant in 2025 than it was in 1929. And I think that the way that Hemingway describes war, and how we talk about it, and—governments, politicians, patriots, and what patriotism is—I think a modern reader, a contemporary reader, will respond to it and see…the reaction will be, “This guy's really talking about today,” you know, “He's really talking about my life.” He's not talking about something a hundred years ago. In 1929, I think—of course, war stories have always been relevant. I'm not saying that it wasn't relevant in 1929. But I think in 1929, Americans were interested also—you know, a really topical novel would have dealt with the social issues, with the coming depression or with the economics of the 1920s. So, I think that this is an issue that's terrifyingly relevant. So, for Hemingway to write this in 1929 and to have it speak to us today is, I believe, what makes it more relevant today than it even was when he wrote it. 

[Michael:] To talk about contemporary relevance, I would imagine this being the kind of groundbreaking novel, in some sense, that made Hemingway, Hemingway. This had to have been adapted, performed, repurposed. There have to have been various film adaptations—

[Mark:] Yes.

[Michael:] —or films kind of based on it, so…what are some of those? Maybe, what are some of your favorite ones or ones that you might suggest? 

[Mark:] So, if people like audio books, I would recommend the performance by John Slattery in the Simon & Schuster audio edition. He's great. He does all the accents. He does the humor. It's dramatic. I think it's a wonderful performance, and I've listened to that several times, and I think he does a great job. Um, as far as movies go, there were really two movies, and neither of them, to me, are excellent. I would love if somebody would remake A Farewell to Arms the way somebody just remade All Quiet on the Western Front, you know. Uh, it was—there was a 1932 version starring Gary Cooper, a Hemingway friend, and Helen Hayes. And then another one in 1957 starring Rock Hudson and Jennifer Jones. And I also have to add that, apparently, there was a BBC edition starring Vanessa Redgrave and George Hamilton, like a miniseries, but—it's been lost. It's been destroyed or thrown away. And so, I've never met anybody who's ever seen it. I would love to see it. That would be such a treat, but unfortunately, it seems to be lost to time. I think they used to throw away stuff and not resolve to keep it. And the only other movie, and this might also interest some listeners, is there was also a movie directed by Richard Attenborough, starring Chris O'Donnell and Sandra Bullock and Mackenzie Astin, called In Love and War, where it talks about—where it sort of dramatizes Hemingway's actual wartime experience, as well as his love with Agnes von Kurowsky. That's not really a historically accurate movie. It's really been romanticized with—by Hollywood. But it is a beautiful depiction of the Italian countryside, and I still would—it's still worth a watch. 

[Michael:] Just really quickly, that title, In Love and War, reminds me that we haven't really homed in on this question here: why is this a war novel, and a novel about love? It seems like there are war novels that are war novels, and love stories that are love stories, and—maybe there aren't works that are both of those things? Why did Hemingway try to tackle both? 

[Mark:] A Farewell to Arms has five books within the novel. And Book One is war, Book Two is convalescence, Book Three is war, and then Book Four and Five is more about the relationship. But it’s—I think what Hemingway is doing is saying, “How do you go to war when you're in love? How do you find love and maintain love after you've been through such a brutal war experience?” So, it's how one affects the other, how one compromises the other. You know, I think there's like a cliché like, “Oh, after World War I, love became impossible.” I think it's a lot more complicated than that. Hemingway said something in 1932, or he wrote something in 1932 in Death in the Afternoon, which was his bull fighting treatise. And he said, "All stories, if continued far enough, end in death." And I know that sounds pessimistic, even by his standards. But think about it. Think about what he's saying. Let's say there are two people who fall in love, and they have a seventy-year marriage where it's complete bliss the entire time. Somebody is going to predecease the other…even if it's by an hour. And so, somebody is going to end up mourning the other person. And so, just as Hemingway—the reason I don't like calling A Farewell to Arms an anti-war novel is because in describing the reality—the complication, the trauma, the brutality of war, the confusion—it's just like in love, in a love plot: if it doesn't end well, it's not an anti-love novel. It's just accepting the harsh realities that life presents. 

[Michael:] Mark, I know how much you love music—

[Mark:] I do.

[Michael:] —and so, I imagine you might have many answers to this next question. What music does this novel inspire? What songs would you put on an A Farewell to Arms playlist? 

[Mark:] Wow…I would start with Caruso. Enrico Caruso: famed Italian tenor who, during World War I, would have been like Elvis. And some of the soldiers talk about Caruso. You know, this recorded music was just beginning to be a thing. And so, uh, they want Caruso records. So, let's start with Caruso. I also think the Guns and Roses song, “November Rain.” “Nothing lasts forever, even cold November rain.” I think that is— 

[Michael:] That's great. 

[Mark:] —that is the anthem that really depicts this. There's also a song by Bob Dylan called “Farewell” that—I'm kind of saying it because it's the word “farewell” there. But it's such…an elegy. You know, it's the song that the guy plays at the end of Inside Llewyn Davis where you just see that one young Bob guy, and he's like—it's talking about leaving one phase of your life and having to face the uncertainty of another. And so, Hemingway characters do that. There's comfort, and then they have to break from the comfort and face the travails of a new experience. So, I would do that one. 

[Michael:] I was just listening to “November Rain” yesterday, and I was not thinking about this novel, and now when I do, I'm going to be thinking about this novel. So, I appreciate it. 

[Mark:] Doesn't it suggest itself, right? 

[Michael:] It does. And, you know, rain shows up so much—

[Mark:] It does.

[Michael:] —I would imagine it was important historically to Caporetto—

[Mark:] Yeah.

[Michael:] —but maybe this leads to a follow-up question. Why is the rain so important? Is it a symbol? Is it factual? Is it a historical kind of phenomenon?

[Mark:] I think, yes. The answer to all of those questions is, yes. It rained during Caporetto, which added to the chaos of the retreat—and the notion that the guys, and the mules, and just everybody—wet and soggy and cold and humiliated. But it also rains during the crisis of the love plot. So, rain is omnipresent in this novel. The really wonderful moment is—we should also look for moments when the rain becomes not threatening or ominous, but welcome. So, in some moments, rain means—or the change in the weather—means a change in military strategy. And sometimes rain means—if you're happy and it's raining, it's happy rain. If you're sad and it's raining, it's sad rain. Actually, let's add “Rain” by The Beatles, right? “I can show you that if it rains or shines, it's just the state of mind.” So, it's all subjective. So, rain is, as you say, it is an objective, historical fact. It did rain during Caporetto. But it's also a subjective thing to be experienced by our characters. 

[Michael:] To one of your footnotes here, you say that this is one of the most famous phrases in Hemingway's career. That's a bold—

[Mark:] Wow.

[Michael:] —yeah, you said that. That's a bold statement. [Laughter]

[Mark:] Somebody must have written that and put it in my book. [Laughter]

[Michael:] And here, here's what it is. It's about Hemingway's phrase, “a separate peace.” And I wonder if you could kind of follow up with what you meant there. What does “a separate peace” mean? Why is it one of the most famous phrases in his career? 

[Mark:] So, one of the reasons—we can work our way backwards—one of the reasons the “separate peace” is such an important phrase is because of the John Knowles novel called A Separate Peace which used to be, kind of, a staple of high school classrooms, I want to say. It's a very popular novel—I'm not sure it's been assigned much anymore…But “a separate peace” was a historical, geopolitical term that meant two countries declaring a truce amidst a wider war that is still ongoing. So, in other words, even if everybody is having a fight, everybody's in a conflict, “you and I are going to declare a separate peace,” irrespective of what is going on in the larger globe. Does that make sense? So, our character, though, takes this geopolitical term and makes it a personal attitude or stance towards his war experience. In other words, saying “You guys can fight all you want. You, governments, can fight all you want. Generals, prime ministers, and kings can declare war all you want. I am out!” And so, when Hemingway first, you know—Hemingway was first trying to—he loved this phrase. He used it in 1924, in his book of vignettes called in our time, lowercase in our time. He used it in 1925, in his first real book of short stories called In Our Time, uppercase In Our Time, where his character tells his friend, also named Rinaldi, “You and me, we made a separate peace.” And that's what that means. It's the moment of separation between an individual and an organization to which he has pledged. And that could be a religion, it could be a country, it could be a family—some moment where you have to detach, where things have gone beyond the acceptable limit. And so, for Frederic, he declares a separate peace and—so, when that happens in A Farewell to Arms, that is a really resonant moment, in all of Hemingway. And you know what? Just hearing my explanation, Michael, I stand by that declaration [Laughter] that it is in the top 10 “most famous Hemingway phrases of all time”. 

[Michael:] You know, a little while ago during your hot take, you were making the argument that this novel—it may be more relevant now than it was in 1929. And I want to finish, maybe, by going back to that idea. What other contemporary relevance does the novel have? Um, how do we read this book differently in 2025 than we would have if we were transported back to 1929? 

[Mark:] I'm really interested in how the character of Catherine Barkley has aged over the last hundred years. And, I think she has, kind of, mirrored the way we view female characters in literature and female characters in society. So, I think in the 1960s and ‘70s and ‘80s, Catherine Barkley would be pretty controversial, kind of objectionable, in the way that she acts. On the surface she is—you use the word “obsequious” or “subservient”—and I think that's probably, in some moments, that's probably accurate. I think a more penetrating reading will look at what Catherine does, what she says, and what her attitude is, in a broader context of, number one: what she has already suffered in war, the crisis that is about to happen. She is a flawed character, but so is Frederic Henry. We allow Frederic Henry to be a flawed character. And I think Catherine Barkley—as a twenty-first century reading of Catherine Barkley—is very exciting. So, I think that is something that, you know, we get to experience in a contemporary consideration of A Farewell to Arms, is we get our own Catherine Barkley. 

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

[Mark:] Michael, you were great. Thanks so much! 

[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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