War as Metaphor

...The mountain that was beyond the valley and the hillside where the chestnut forest grew was captured and there were victories beyond the plain on the plateau to the south and we crossed the river in August and lived in a house in Gorizia that had a fountain and many thick shady trees in a walled garden and a wistaria vine purple on the side of the house...

...And of course this sense of transitoriness and discontinuity is deepened to the point, sometimes, of agony by the disappearance from our general culture of those metaphysical absolutes, transcendental and eternal, which in traditional society tended to redeem the terror of time's winged chariot...

...The novel moves from room to Catherine's death through childbirth...

...But the narrator who delivers those sentences in the past tense has already been through the experience with Catherine, and it is she who first creates that linkage, and with very good reason...

...Chapter II introduces a variation, a reversal in fact...

...The battery fired twice and the air came each time like a blow and shook the window and made the front of my pajamas flap...

...The thing to do is to work and learn to make it...

...Then that great elegaic sentence: "I looked out at the rain falling in the fountain of the garden...

...Inside there is a comforting fire to warm the room...

...The town was very nice and our house was very fine...

...They tell us more about the meaning of Frederic Henry's experience than he himself understands, at least until the last page of the book...

...In Hemingway it is the perfection of art and of the experienced moment that resists the ravages of time...

...The chapter moves from room to rain and cholera...

...In due course, he meets an English nurse, Catherine Barkley, and commences an affair with her...

...At the end, Frederic is outside, in the rain himself...

...We will never ride back from Toledo in the dark, washing the dust out with Fundador, nor will there be that week of what happened in the night in that July in Madrid...

...This sparrow flies swiftly in through one door of the hall, and out through the other...

...It begins with the fighting, then moves into the room: The next year there were many victories...

...Wherever you look in modern literature- Faulkner, Camus, Proust, Pound, Fitzgerald-the sense of time, of transitoriness, of death and dying, is central and exigent...

...A plausible reading, yes, but also a superficial and sentimental one...

...In Chapter XII, after Frederic has been wounded, a chilling variation occurs-providing, in fact, a kind of explication for all the other window scenes: When they lifted you up out of bed to carry you into the dressing room you could look out of the window and see the new graves in the garden...

...We are all troops, marching to the front...

...I went to the window and looked out...

...Only a supremely calculated art could bring off an effect of that sort...

...soon, in one form or another, they will be firing directly at us...

...Never has more beautiful expression been given to these two stays against confusion and flux than in the concluding paragraph of Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon: Pamplona is changed, of course, but not as much as we are older...

...There is also the perfection of the experienced moment, which in Hemingway, as in Eliot or Pater, redeems "the waste sad time...

...It is left unspecified for a number of excellent reasons, chief among them to focus attention on that static observing consciousness inside the room...

...The reason Catherine, early in their relationship, says that she sees herself dead in the rain is that her first love was killed on the Somme, that vast slaughter in the mud, and she identifies herself with him, to the point of carrying his swagger stick...

...Eliot's poetry is time-haunted...

...After the chaos of Caporetto and his desertion, Frederic and Catherine establish a series of "rooms...

...Certainly Hemingway saw this...

...Everyone is familiar with the rain motif, introduced in the last two sentences of that first chapter by Frederic Henry: "At the start of the winter came the permanent rain and with the rain came the cholera...

...Then any part you make will represent the whole if it's made truly...

...It is established early, indeed in the opening sentences: "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...

...Not surprisingly, much or even most of modern art seeks to deal somehow with this sense of the transitory, attempting to move through and beyond it to some firmer ground on which to stand...

...We are all transients, soon-like the troops of the opening chapter-to move up to the front, whatever form it takes...

...Even the man who "owns" his house knows his children won't die in it...

...Catherine has taught it to him: " 'I'm going to die,' she said...

...After being seriously wounded, he recuperates in a Milan hospital and the affair deepens into genuine love...

...outside the wintry storms of snow and rain are raging...

...In A Farewell to Arms Hemingway brought to further development special techniques used earlier...

...I had long felt that the rain-disaster-death linkage in A Farewell to Arms had an arbitrary quality...

...In Hemingway this is a moment of aesthetic or sensual intensity...

...The story of the novel, now and when it was published, has been generally understood as follows...

...The war drags on, and Henry, like practically everyone else, becomes fed up with it...

...Now the fighting was in the next mountains beyond and was not a mile away...

...I could not see the guns but they were evidently firing directly over us...

...I know things change now and I do not care...

...Outside, in front of the chalet a road went up the mountain...

...Between such moments one can only endure stoically, with style...

...Like Three Soldiers and All Quiet on the Western Front, it reflects the general disillusionment with the Great War characteristic of the 1920s...

...Let those who want to save the world if you can get -to see it clear and as a whole...

...We tend to experience segments of other people rather than their full existence...

...An urban day is discontinuous and fragmentary, containing dozens of people and scenes we will experience once and never see again...

...Before Frederic achieves the appropriate style for dealing with his dark knowledge he must be twice wounded-first on the battlefield, then by Catherine's death- and he must absorb Catherine's own exemplary style...

...I looked out at th-e rain falling in the fountain of the garden...

...Only a flicker," wrote Eliot of people on a London subway platform, "Over the strained, time-ridden faces...

...War, rather, is a kind of metaphor for our actual circumstance...

...Across the street, which sloped steeply, was another hotel with a similar wall and garden...

...By the time Frederic makes the connection as narrator, he has absorbed Catherine's experience, indeed deeply identified himself with her...

...The guns are firing over us...

...We've seen it all go and we'll watch it go again...

...The traditional continuities have lost much and sometimes all of their psychological reality...

...The Frederic Henry who narrates that first, perfect, two-page opening chapter is not the same Frederic Henry who goes to pieces internally at the prospect of Catherine's imminent death...

...We'll all be gone before it's changed too much and if no deluge comes when we are gone it will still rain in summer in the north and hawks will nest in the Cathedral at Santiago and in La Granja, where we practiced with the cape on the long gravelled paths between the shadows, it makes no difference if the fountains play or not...

...In one important instance, Frederic feels the "outside" coming in at him through the window: The room I shared with the lieutenant Rinaldi looked out on the cburtyard...

...Ezra Pound made a similar observation in the Paris Metro: "The apparition of these faces in the crowd;/Petals on a wet, black bough...

...The great thing is to last and get your work done and see and hear and learn and understand...

...Only a few lines earlier, however, the orderlies had been carrying a corpse...

...however, I do not know that anyone has noticed what amounts to a related and perhaps more important motif, which is absolutely central to the deeper meaning of the novel- the key to its psychological rhythm and to Frederic Henry...

...One of the greatest passages in the novel occurs-it should now come as no surprise -in the last room shared by Catherine and Frederic, at the hotel in Lausanne...

...The gravel paths were moist and the grass was wet with dew...

...Hemingway plays marvelously on that window image...

...Let it all change...

...The Venerable Bede recounted the opinion of an advisor to the medieval King Edward that the present life of man [is] like the swift flight of a lone sparrow through the banqueting hall where you sit in the winter months to dine with your thanes and counsellors...

...I'm going to die,' she said...

...then waited and said, 'I hate it.' I took her hand Catherine winked at me, her face gray...

...Frederic desperately seeks the shelter of those rooms, and he seeks the security of Catherine's love-but there is no security and no permanence...

...But, as noted earlier, he now has the style with which to deal with such knowledge...

...I found that if you took a drink that it got very much the same as it was always...

...When he has- recovered from his wound he returns to the army, just in time to get mixed up in the Caporetto disaster, during which he narrowly escapes being arbitrarily shot as a deserter...

...It contains the flux and transcends it, long surviving the dying artist...

...A Farewell to Arms is thus an antiwar novel...

...then waited and said, 'I hate it.' " I think that Frederic's moment of illumination, the moment when he absorbs the style, comes at just that point where Catherine "waited...

...Yeats was sharply aware of "those dying generations Whatever is begotten, bqrn, and dies...

...Rhetorically, the entire novel resembles that first chapter, a kind of overture...

...The ever-recurrent cycle of the seasons is much less real for the modern city dweller than for an earlier farmer or rural artisan...

...It is of the first importance to understand that the narrator who tells the story is much changed from the man who undergoes the experience...

...Like Keats' Grecian urn or nightingale's song, like Yeats' golden bird or dancer, art, in this case A Farewell to Arms, aspires to imperishable perfection...

...There is the comfort and luxury of this final room, but the window looks out on that wet garden, and so do the windows of the other hotel...

...We are all moving up, up to the front...

...But if the transitoriness of things is an age-old and universal theme, it has acquired special urgency during the modern era...

...A young American, Frederic Henry, who had been studying architecture in Italy, has enlisted in the Italian army for reasons by no mea is clear...

...The battery in the next garden woke me in the morning and I saw the sun coming through the window and got out of bed...

...There is less continuity in our personal relations now than in traditional society...

...Here the window and the rain motifs come together ominously but also beautifully...

...We grasp the essential perspective of this novel only when we understand how the art of the book actually works...

...Virgil wrote of the tears at the heart of things...

...Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees.'' The "we'' who lived in the house is not identified here...

...The entire novel endows with power two of the most perfect and suggestive sentences Hemingway ever wrote, and they occur in a passage of almost deliquescent beauty: The windows of the room looked out on a wet garden with a wall topped by an iron fence...

...A Farewell to Arms may be Hemingway's finest and technically most accomplished work, though the present critical consensus tends to place his excellence earlier...

...In one of his most widely-read and admired-but least understood-novels, A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway gave profound and lyrical expression to the sense of transitoriness: We all live in rented rooms and check-out time is not far distant...

...While he is inside, he is safe from the winter storms, but after a few moments of comfort he vanishes from sight into the darkness whence he came...

...Throughout the early chapters, Hemingway plays like a musician on that scene...

...The prose rhythms of Frederic's Montreux description recall those of the opening of Chapter I: That fall the snow came very late...

...The rain motif is important...

...Against the vast public disaster of the war, A Farewell to Arms asserts the private and lyric values of the romance, which, however, ends tragically...

...Not surprisingly, when Hemingway's art failed and when ill health ruled out any more redeeming moments, he blew his brains out...

...The novel is thus not finally about the First World War, or about war in general...

...But it was checked and in the end only seven thousand died of it in the army...

...We lived in a brown wooden house in the pine trees on the side of the mountain and at night there was frost so that there was thin ice over the water in the two pitchers on the dresser in the morning...

...Here, Frederic has been seriously wounded and comes close to death...

...Again and again the window-with-a-view scene recurs...

...and there are both social and metaphysical reasons for this...

...For that sense is at the heart of modern experience...

...Catherine, first wounded psychically, then killed, is Frederic Henry's stylistic superior throughout the novel-until Frederic, on the last page, absorbs her style, marries her stylistically...

...He now does desert and manages to reach neutral Switzerland with Catherine, where, after a brief idyll, she dies in childbirth...

...it refers, of course, to his Italian army comrades and principally to Rinaldi...

...It's all been changed for me...

...Hemingway's use of the room-and-rain motif echoes beautifully, though no doubt unconsciously, the great sparrow-banqueting hall simile from the Venerable Bede, Hemingway's response, however, is not the Christian transcendence toward which Bede's narrative drives...

...and he proposed an answer to that sharp modern sense of final mortality, an answer that was perfect and tragic...