A Farewell to Arms: What Changes When the Lovers Escape

Part of: The Deep Reader

Spoilers ahead for A Farewell to Arms.

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. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.

Joan Didion opens “Last Words” with this paragraph from Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. Her reading traces foreboding to its cadence and omissions, including the withheld names that make the landscape seem more specified than it is. This precision supports her objection to posthumous intervention in Hemingway’s writing. I agree: the arrangement is inseparable from what we feel.

The nurse, the wounded officer, the approaching end of his leave: for much of the novel, love takes its shape from lives already organized by war. Catherine Barkley and Frederic Henry come together under conditions that also threaten to separate them.

Their escape to Switzerland is fully intelligible, and the account of their happiness there has considerable beauty. What troubles me is the change from that particular entanglement of love and war toward the more general vulnerability of people who have something to lose. The opening already prepares us for loss; that preparation leaves room to ask what the completed novel makes of it.

The word Catherine refuses

When Catherine tells Henry she is pregnant, she tries to make the news easy for him. She promises to arrange things, imagines a lovely time together, and says she will write every day when he returns to the front. The future they can offer each other already contains his absence. Then she reaches for his hand and asks whether he feels trapped. Henry answers by moving from their situation to a condition of life: “You always feel trapped biologically.”

“She went away a long way without stirring or removing her hand.” Hemingway gives the withdrawal a distance that the bodies do not register; the touch continues after its intimacy has been interrupted. Her answer identifies the word that caused it: “‘Always’ isn’t a pretty word.” She has never had a baby and, she says, has never even loved anyone. Henry’s generalization has placed her first experience among things that happen all the time. The disagreement occupies a few lines, but it prevents their declarations of unity from making them a single consciousness.

Later, Henry rejects the public words used to dignify the war. Glory, sacrifice, and honor cannot survive beside what he has seen; names of villages, roads, rivers, regiments, and dates retain meaning. The long enumeration makes the alternative to a slogan something we can locate. Yet his exchange with Catherine has already shown that a general word can fail in private too. A statement may sound seasoned and sensible while missing what matters to the person hearing it.

The Italian setting acquires much of its force through these practical particulars. Roads determine the retreat; officers and military police impose demands; Henry’s accent helps make him suspect. I sometimes want a fuller sense of Italy beyond the foreign officer’s passage through its hospitals, roads, and military life. That reservation remains limited beside what the setting already does. Injury brings him into Catherine’s care, recovery returns him toward the front, and their available time must be fitted around obligations neither has chosen for the sake of the other. The place and the war are active in the relation.

The days they can keep

After the escape, the opening of the Swiss mountain chapter gives us cold water in pitchers, a porcelain stove, hot water brought upstairs, and breakfast in bed. These provisions arrive in an exact order. Mrs. Guttingen first lights the fire, returns with more wood and hot water, then brings breakfast when the room has warmed. The narration settles into actions that can recur. We begin to know the household by what a morning will provide.

Henry and Catherine learn card games, walk in nailed boots on frozen roads, and go to bed early. When Henry wakes in the night, he knows how to put the discomfort right: he quietly shifts the feather bed so that Catherine can sleep and he can lie under lighter covers. Such small adjustments make safety available to the body. The cold is outside, warmth can be renewed, and the next day promises more of this life.

Then the war enters through a comparison: it seems as distant as “the football games of some one else’s college.” The college belongs to somebody else; the games have no claim on his attendance. In the next sentence he reports that the newspapers still describe fighting in the mountains because snow has not come. The fighting continues. In the paragraph’s sequence, its news arrives after the comforts of sleep, at the edge of an account of a day the lovers can repeat.

Their intimacy also has work to do during this freedom. Catherine proposes changing their hair so they will look alike and says she wants to be Henry too. When he insists they are the same person, she confines that sameness to the night. Later she suggests falling asleep at exactly the same moment; Henry remains awake long after her. The wish to abolish separation keeps encountering two different people. These exchanges give the Swiss life a vulnerability before the hospital supplies its catastrophe.

There is a strong argument for this interval. The lovers have escaped immediate danger long enough for the reader to experience what they might preserve. A book concerned with their attachment needs some room in which attachment can become a life. My point begins with the altered emphasis: days once organized by duties, wounds, and separation become days organized around maintaining their happiness. War reaches them as news, remembered acquaintances, and a subject Henry would rather avoid. Pregnancy supplies the approaching event. The novel remains causally connected, but the sources of its suspense and feeling have changed.

Who does the killing

At the hospital, after learning that the baby has died, Henry tries to make the event manageable in thought. He tells himself the child was never alive, then remembers feeling it move inside Catherine. He wishes he had died in the same way, then immediately retracts the wish: “No I didn’t.” These corrections preserve the mind’s resistance to its own attempts at consolation. The short sentences keep undoing conclusions as quickly as they produce them.

His thought then reaches for an agent broad enough to explain every loss: “they.” They give you rules and kill you when you make a mistake, or kill you without reason, as they killed Aymo. He adds the disease he suspects Rinaldi has contracted, then imagines the same end for everyone. A battlefield death, possible illness, and the danger to Catherine enter a single account of what happens to people. Earlier, concrete names had protected experience from the public language of glory. Now a pronoun without a named referent can absorb differences that names might force him to confront.

I agree with the critique that tests this fatalism against Henry’s own violence. During the retreat he shoots and wounds an engineer who refuses his order to help; Bonello kills the wounded man. Henry later faces execution by the battle police and escapes. His story therefore contains an occasion on which the killing begins with his own decision, yet that victim has no place in the final account of arbitrary death. The omission limits his explanation. It does not turn Catherine’s death into a punishment, and Hemingway has supplied the very sequence that allows us to question his narrator’s summing up.

Universality itself is hardly the problem. In War and Peace, Prince Andrew’s encounter with the wounded Anatole, whom he has regarded as an enemy, passes through pity into renewed love for Natasha. Bodily suffering changes his relation to particular people before his thought expands toward love of everyone. When Natasha comes to him later, pain and delirium interrupt the understanding with which he tries to receive her. The general feeling remains entangled with a wound and a difficult reunion. That is one way war can transform intimacy from within. It helps specify what I find more compelling than gathering different injuries into a common fate.

The room at the end

Hemingway’s final chapter also makes Henry’s account insufficient. During Catherine’s labor, the doctor lets him control the gas. At first the permitted action is a relief: there is something he can do. Later, as Catherine asks for more, he turns the dial beyond the number he has been told to use and becomes afraid. The same handle offers help and reveals the limit of his competence. His movements have consequences without giving him control of the outcome.

After Catherine suffers a hemorrhage, Henry’s apparent certainty about death gives way to bargaining prayer. He offers anything in exchange for her survival. His repeated requests cannot settle into the acceptance his earlier explanation seemed to promise; each one begins the effort again. The scene restores urgency to a particular life. A belief that everyone will die provides no answer to the prospect of Catherine dying now.

Catherine keeps her own distinctions. She says she is not afraid and hates what is happening. She first refuses Henry’s touch, then allows it. She asks him to preserve the words and gestures that belonged to them, even while telling him she wants him to have other women. Her last wishes continue the problem of the earlier “always”: what happens to many people does not exhaust the meaning of what has happened between these two. The exchanges resist the smoothness of any philosophy we might extract from them.

Finally Henry sends the nurses out, closes the door, and turns off the light. He can arrange the conditions for a private farewell. He cannot make the farewell take place as he needs it to. Saying goodbye to Catherine has become like addressing a statue, and he leaves. The ending gives grief a practical sequence whose failure we can follow, without requiring Henry to explain it correctly.

These pages are stronger than the fatalism through which he briefly tries to understand them. My reservation concerns the larger movement that has brought us here.

In Italy, loving Catherine changes Henry’s relation to his duties, while the war changes the opportunities and forms of their love. In Switzerland, more of the novel’s attention goes to sustaining an enclosed happiness before a loss neither lover can prevent. That is a coherent and often moving design.

For me, its tragic completion never quite recovers the force of two lives changing each other under the pressure of a particular war.

Sources

Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929), Project Gutenberg 75201. Opening quotation from chapter 1; close readings principally from chapters 21, 27, 29–30, 38, and 41. Quotations checked against this English transcription; chapter references avoid pagination differences.

Joan Didion, “Last Words”, The New Yorker, November 9, 1998. Source of the opening discussion of cadence, omission, and posthumous intervention.

Margot Norris, “The Novel as War: Lies and Truth in Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms”, Modern Fiction Studies 40.4 (1994), 689–710; credited text consulted through eNotes. Her argument connects Henry’s fatalism to the killing he omits. That contribution is adopted here without adopting her complete account of the novel’s ideological work.

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, Book Ten, chapter XXXVII, and Book Eleven, chapter XXXII, translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude, Project Gutenberg 2600. The comparison is confined to these two chapters.