Books This article is more than 21 years oldGoodbye to all that?
This article is more than 21 years oldA Farewell to Arms reviewed in the Guardian, December 13, 1929There is something so complete in Mr Hemingway's achievement in A Farewell to Arms that one is left speculating as to whether another novel will follow in this manner, and whether it does not complete both a period and a phase.
The story starts brilliantly with the love-making between the young American hero, Henry, a volunteer in the Italian Ambulance Service, and Catherine Barkley, an English nurse in the British hospital at Goritzia. There is subtle feminine charm in the Englishwoman's response to the man, who, at first, is just amusing himself, but the affair soon develops into real passion.
Henry, whose good relations with the Italian officers in his mess are drawn with delightful freshness, is wounded, with a smashed knee in a night assault near Plava, and is sent down from the field hospital to the American hospital at Milan, where he is the first case, and here Miss Barkley gets a transfer to nurse him.
All the descriptions of life at the front and in the hospitals, the talk of the officers, privates, and doctors, are crisply natural and make a convincing narrative, though the hero is perhaps already a little too mature and experienced. Catherine (who might be a younger sister of the heroine of Fiesta) is most skilfully modelled as the eternal feminine in nursing dress.
In the scenes in the Milan hospital, where love laughs at matrons and maids, the author increases his hold over us. And the story deepens in force when Henry, patched up, returns to the Isonzo front. The year has been a serious one for the Italian army, and the breakthrough of the Germans at Caporetto brings disaster.
The last 50 pages of book three describe the Italian army in retreat, the block of transport on the main roads, the bogging and abandonment of Henry's cars on a side road, the Italian privates' behaviour and their hatred of the war, and finally the shooting of the elderly officers in retreat by the Italian battle police at the Tagliamento - these pages are masterly.
The American hero escapes death by diving into the river and, later, arrest by concealing himself in a gun truck till it reaches Milan. Thence in mufti he gets to Stiesa and meets Catherine, and the lovers escape to Switzerland by a long night row up the lake. The scenes on the Italian plains hold more atmospheric truth than those of the mountain roads, but all are admirably wrought.
The impartiality of the presentation of war is as remarkable as the sincerity of the record of love passion. With remorseless artistic instinct Mr Hemingway proceeds to match the horrors of human slaughter by his final chapter of Catherine's agony and death as, "a maternity case".
Here he rises to his highest pitch, for Catherine's blotting-out is but complementary to the massacre of the millions on the fronts. Henry's coolness of observation in its detailed actuality is perhaps too stressed in the last pages, for in hours of great emotional strain material fact seems to detach itself as a separate phenomenon, and Henry remains too set; but the author's method prevails and triumphs in the last line.
ยท This article is drawn from the archive at the Newsroom
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