'A Farewell to Arms'

choi

James Campbell, The Stories Papa Told; 'A Farewell to Arms' announced Ernest Hemingway's arrival as a major force in American letters. Wall Street Journal, Feb 22, 2025, at page C12
https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture ... ay-arrives-4877fe84
(book review on Robert W Trogdon (ed), Ernest Hemingway; A Farewell to Arms & other writings 1927-1932. Library of America, Jan 7, 2025)

Mote:
(a) letter (n): "letters plural in form but singular or plural in construction: LITERATURE"
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/letter
(b) Library of America
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_America
(1979- ; based in Manhattan)
(c) Agnes von Kurowsky
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnes_von_Kurowsky
(She was 26 when she met Hemingway, 19, in 1918; section 4 Personal life)

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Ernest Hemingway’s World War I novel, “A Farewell to Arms” (1929), is an exception among products of early 20th-century Modernism. While it is innovative in its rendering of conversation and painterly descriptions of nature, it proved to have huge popular appeal by virtue of the subject matter. Courage under fire, romantic love, near-death experience, flight from danger, a tragic denouement—all are related in intimate detail. Some of the writing now reads like a Hemingway parody of the kind that flourished later, and much of Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley’s love talk would have been spiked by True Romances (a magazine established as Hemingway was coming to the fore). But the substance holds. The novel sold by the tens of thousands, was widely translated and was adapted for the screen in 1932, three years after publication. Hemingway disliked the film, despite the presence of Gary Cooper, and made efforts to sidestep the fame the film brought him, though he succumbed to it, with few good outcomes.

Hemingway was a teenager when he volunteered to serve as a Red Cross ambulance driver in Italy late in the war. He arrived in the north of the country in June 1918 for noncombatant duties that involved the distribution of cigarettes and chocolate to soldiers struggling against Austrian and German forces near the Piave River. His service was barely a month old when he was wounded. The explosion changed his war, changed his life and eventually changed the way large numbers of American writers and readers regarded the art of fiction.  

The damage occurred when a trench mortar blew up a few feet from where he was standing. The man next to him was killed. More than 200 fragments of the bomb lodged in Hemingway’s legs. His heroic action in ferrying wounded men to shelter was rewarded with a medal. While in a hospital he fell in love with an American nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky. In letters home, and in the tales he told, he embellished his actions at the front, as he admitted; nothing serious but characteristic of a man who could be as deceitful as he was faithful, vengeful where he had been loving, obsessed by violence and gleeful when inflicting it, on man and (particularly) beast.

Each of these qualities went into “A Farewell to Arms,” Hemingway’s second novel (third, if you count the misguided “Torrents of Spring”). He began writing it a decade after his brief encounter with the war zone. The book contains passages of wonderful descriptive writing, including the accounts of the blast that temporarily incapacitates the narrator, Frederic, landing him in a hospital, and of the strategic disaster of the retreat from Caporetto. Because the novel is partly autobiographical, some readers assume that Hemingway witnessed the retreat. He didn’t, but the hospital sections are based on firsthand experience. Frederic’s nurse, Catherine, is not American, like the real-life Agnes; nor is she English, as is often supposed. “I am Scotch and crazy,” she says, although her dialogue has not the faintest Scottish tinge—a failure on Hemingway’s part. In fact, Catherine exhibits little personality, far less craziness: Her role is to reflect Frederic’s wishes and desires.

My bookshelves support various editions of “A Farewell to Arms,” each differing in certain respects from the others. The first British edition was published in the same year as the U.S. original, and both were subject to the suppression of profanities and obscenities. Hemingway complained ceaselessly about what he called “the words,” claiming that they accurately represented soldierly talk and that his realism was dented by the censorship. While he protested in polite terms to Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Scribner’s, he was enraged at Jonathan Cape in London, who had gone further. “I think I am through with them I hope to God for good,” he told Perkins. “I’m disgusted with his yellow deletions. They cut sentences out without a word to me.” Cape continued as Hemingway’s publisher until the end.

Next to the defective British version sits “L’Adieu aux armes,” published in Paris in 1931. When he learned that the novel was to be translated by Maurice Coindreau—also responsible for introducing French readers to Faulkner, Dos Passos and Steinbeck—Hemingway delivered a personalized copy, with all the publisher’s maddening dashes filled in. He hoped that Coindreau would give the soldiers back their dirty dog talk and crude despair. My copy suggests that Gallimard was willing to risk the common “merde” and some mild profanities but, like Scribner’s and Cape, drew the line at obscenity.

These editions are now joined by what is likely to stand as the definitive text of “A Farewell to Arms,” in the second volume of Hemingway’s works to be published by the Library of America, featuring writings from the period 1927 to 1932. The book includes the short stories written in France in the mid-1920s and collected as “Men Without Women.” Among them are “Now I Lay Me” and “Hills Like White Elephants,” allusive tales that demonstrate the iceberg technique (seven-eighths of the emotion is below the surface). “The Killers,” 10 pages long, was made into a film with Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner. The fictional works are followed by Hemingway’s anatomy of bullfighting, “Death in the Afternoon” (1932), and a selection of letters.  

An odd note is struck by the information that “A Farewell to Arms” is “copyright 1929 by Charles Scribner’s Sons” and that the novel appears “by arrangement” with the publisher. The Library of America compendium was published in late 2024. Its editor, Robert W. Trogdon, has evidently prepared the texts with expertise over a number of years, but it happens that “A Farewell to Arms” emerged from copyright on Jan. 1, 2025, and may henceforth be published, abridged, amended—even censored—without consultation with anyone. Copyright protection in the U.S. extends for 95 years after the end of the year of publication. Thus “Men Without Women” entered the public domain in 2023, “The Sun Also Rises” the year before. “Death in the Afternoon,” first published in 1932, remains in copyright, as does each of Hemingway’s subsequent works, according to the 95-year plan.

Copyright law may vary from country to country. In Europe, literary works are protected for the lifetime of the author plus 70 years. Hemingway died in 1961, which means that “A Farewell to Arms” is not yet in the public domain in Britain and France. Faulkner’s greatest novel, “The Sound and the Fury,” also shook off U.S. copyright on Jan. 1—but in Europe the event must wait until 2032. What this means for the reader in London accepting an American offer of a copyright-free download of these novels remains to be seen. The arrival of the internet has already made a mockery of the law in other areas.

The Library of America edition restores Hemingway’s preferred language for soldierly talk (not the first to do so) and comes with an informative essay on spelling and punctuation habits. His stylistic awareness is illustrated by the deliberate omission of the question mark in certain rhetorical utterances. In the story “Che Ti Dice La Patria?” this sentence occurs: “ ‘Isn’t he nice,’ Guy said.” A well-meaning editor replaced Hemingway’s comma with a question mark but, as Mr. Trogdon observes, this alters the “flatly ironic” tone. The most substantial error in the first edition of “A Farewell to Arms” was a distracted typist’s transposition of two paragraphs near the start of chapter 12, a mistake that was carried over into “all subsequent printings.” Given Hemingway’s obsession with textual meddling elsewhere, it is remarkable that he failed to notice it.

Cheap editions of great works have long been readily available. A book is a book is a book, right? Wrong. A book may be easy on the eye or ugly, with print that is accommodating or hard to read, pages laid out well or badly. Most readers are familiar with the glued binding that snaps (“perfect” binding), spilling pages. The reader opting to buy this edition of Hemingway’s works is unlikely to regret it. Sometimes it comes down to what feels good to hold in the hand. And a free download doesn’t make much of a gift.

Mr. Campbell’s biography of James Baldwin, “Talking at the Gates,” was reissued in a new edition in 2021.