A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

See if you recognize a famous quote here:

If people bring so much courage to this world that the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills.

The “broken places” phrase is one that I’d encountered earlier this year, when Dave Cullen invoked it for his book, Columbine, even titling a chapter with the reference. I’d forgotten that it’s the most often-quoted bit from Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, which is thought to be one of the greatest works of literature to emerge from World War I, if not the greatest.

It has a different angle on the war because it’s inspired from Hemingway’s experience in the Italian front, so it’s a waiting game within mountain ranges rather than the trench warfare you normally picture with this war. It’s still a nasty business.

The hero is Frederic Henry, a young American ambulance driver in the war. He’s not involved in the actual fighting, and for him the war is a dreary exercise until he meets Catherine Barkley, an lovely English nurse whom he falls in love with. Not long afterward, Frederic is wounded by a mortar and Catherine helps him recover in, well, any number of ways. But soon their love affair is complicated when he impregnates her and must return to the front.

There’s a lot to reflect on, so I’ll just say some things about the two major thematic storylines: the purgatory of war and the doomed romance.

A Damn Rotten War

WWI began as a catastrophic collision of chest-thumping jingoism and dragged down the stretch as a pride-preserving landgrab, and it’s at this dragging point where we find the characters.

For all the easily parodied machismo throughout Hemingway’s fiction, A Farewell to Arms is clearly aware of the senseless machismo happening on an international scale.

We were all cooked. The thing to do was not recognize it. The last country to realize they were cooked would win the war.

People have called this an anti-war novel. I can’t bring myself to do that. Maybe it’s because it so repeatedly complains about the war, yet at the same time it honors traditional combat bravery in its characters and scolds cowardice. Hemingway to me is one of those authors whose criticisms of a subject (in this case the hazards of stubborn manliness) are often complicated because he has an unshakable closeness to or an affection for the thing he is criticizing.

A Damn Fine Girl

If you’ve ever been in love together with someone, but to pause and think about what you’re doing with that person would have struck you with terror, the dialogue between Frederic and Catherine will ring like a bell of doom.

“I feel better now,” Catherine said. “I felt terrible when we started.”

“We always feel good when we’re together.”

“We will always be together.”

“Yes, except I’m going away at midnight.”

“Don’t think about it, darling.”

They persist in making these vapid affirmations, like this but usually much lengthier, to fill the air between them.

If you know Hemingway, then you know that the main concern of the dialogue is not what the characters talk about, but the thing they refuse to. This is especially true throughout A Farewell to Arms, where Frederic’s personal refrain is actually “I don’t want to talk about it,” whether it’s the war he fled or the baby he’s about to father with Catherine.

They are an obnoxiously in-love couple that’s about to have a thunderstorm bear down on them (never mind the fact it’s literally always raining in the book). I think this is appealing in two ways: either you sympathize with them (perhaps you’re obnoxiously in love) and brace yourself for an affecting tragedy, or you want to watch these lovebirds get plucked.

But I think if you’re the latter kind of reader you’ll agree, by the end, they’ve been punished far too much. After all, what’s a Hemingway novel without an ending so depressing it empties you out?

I’m surprised that of Hemingway’s novels, this one isn’t assigned more often to high school students (as opposed to The Old Man and the Sea, which is probably the most widely implemented Hemingway in this regard but I’ve yet to hear a high schooler praise it). Like The Sun Also Rises, it’s not terribly long and is a great introduction to his work. And, yes—a good read.

He Loved it When They Called Him Big Papa

Chuck Norris?

Please. Ernest Hemingway shoved aside tougher guys than him just to get to a fight. Here are some more facts about the deadliest author in the American canon:

-The famous Running of the Bulls first began in Pamplona with hundreds of thrill-seeking Spaniards, who ran from several bloodthirsty bulls, who ran from Ernest Hemingway.

-If Ernest Hemingway ever asked you if you’ve “got your tickets… to The Gun Show,” and you said yes, he’d take you over to his garage and you would see exactly that.

-The cartoon character Popeye was very closely based on Ernest Hemingway—only they removed the beard and replaced Jim Beam whiskey with spinach.

-During WWII, the U.S. Navy paid Ernest Hemingway to hunt for u-boats in his wooden yacht.

-The rifles Ernest Hemingway holds in the pictures where he poses with his safari kills are just for show. We all know the lions actually died from his hard left hook.

-Have you ever seen a cartoon where a very strong man ties another man’s rifle barrel up in a pretty bow? This was Ernest Hemingway’s favorite thing to do during WWI.

-The novel Ernest Hemingway always thought was his greatest was Across the River and Into the Trees. If any of his other works are your favorite, then you are wrong.

-Moleskine journals advertise that they were once used by Ernest Hemingway, yet they leave out the fact that he mainly used one to beat a critic to death.

-They say if you put a dozen chimps in front of typewriters, eventually they would produce even Hamlet. But they could never do The Sun Also Rises. Not in a billion goddamn years.

-Mark Twain famously said that to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. As it happened, Ernest Hemingway had a hard left hook and thought everybody looked like a douche bag.

-Your grandfather doesn’t like to talk about the war because he saw Ernest Hemingway.

Now here’s a challenge for all you dainty Francis Macombers out there. One of these tidbits is actually the focus of a newly published Hemingway biography. Can you guess which one?

What is the What by Dave Eggers

Dave Eggers’ What is the What is a fiction novel that’s very nearly the precise life’s story of a Lost Boy of Sudan. This fact makes it terribly urgent for a novel—almost too urgent to be enjoyed as such.

Thankfully, there’s enough heart here in the characters and drama (and a good measure of humor, too) that this book is more than educational. I don’t often know what people mean when they praise a book for its “humanity”, but the term certainly comes to mind when I think about what makes What is the What worthwhile as both an enjoyable epic and an informative call to action.

By the end of the book, you actually do get an idea of what the What is.

When he was around nine years old, Valentino Achak Deng was forced to flee his southern Sudanese town of Marial Bai as it was raided by Arabs. He was separated from his family and friends as he began a trek that almost spanned Sudan into Ethiopia, facing famine, predators, disease, and aerial attacks from government helicopters and jets.

The waves of displaced children (mostly male) who made this trip out of Sudan became known as the Lost Boys—thousands of whom later were accepted into the United States. Valentino himself now lives in America, and this book is the story of how he got here (against all probability) and what he struggles to do next.

(NOTE: The reason What is the What is labeled fiction rather than biography, as explained in the preface, is that Valentino lacks the details of many early childhood memories, so too much reimagination was necessary to call it straight non-fiction.)

“God wants us dead. He’s trying to kill us.”

In his odyssey Valentino encounters, of course, truly evil people, from the various militant ethnic group members who hunt the boys to the rebel army leaders who don’t understand that executing war prisoners in front of the nine-year-olds isn’t a good tool for recruiting them. What you don’t expect, and then find powerfully heartening, is the sheer goodness in others that emerges, even thrives, in the poisoned landscape of genocide.

It’s clear that Valentino’s life is saved time and again by his friends and by some truly heroic adults, like Dut, the economics major who organizes and tirelessly leads the hundreds of boys in their trek. There are many adults, perhaps partly out of the despairing loss of their own children, who eagerly take Valentino and other boys under their wing, if only temporarily.

Some benificent encounters are surreal. It’s hard to forget the “Man Who Was Not There,” who gives him ice-cold water and teaches him to ride a bike in the middle of the desert, and is never seen again.

Valentino’s situation in present day America, though, is complicated. The book ingeniously opens with his first experience of being robbed in his Atlanta apartment, and he is shown that for all the material comforts life in the U.S. provides, it certainly lacks in community. Left bound and alone, Valentino kicks at his door for hours, to no avail:

This is impossible, that no one would come to this door. Is the noise of the world so cacophonous that mine cannot be heard? I ask only for one person! One person coming to my door will be enough.

The book doesn’t claim that life for the Sudanese is nearly as unjust in the U.S. as it was in the African war zones, but through Valentino you see an America falling far short of its purported ideas of wholly accommodating the tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to better their lives.

Moralizing? Yeah—you got a problem with that? It’s at times even shaming, but when it comes to America and the rest of the global community needing to be ashamed of itself over a lack of response to Africa, I’ve been quite on board with that for a while now.

“The Collapsible Space Between Us”

By no means should you, or would you, expect an unchallenging read of this subject matter. Starving boys are bombed by their own government’s jets. Refugees flee across an Ethiopian river as they are massacred by rifle-toting tribesmen. But the book never dares you to shut it in horror. Valentino’s voice and Eggers’ light hand keep it all from seeming overwhelming or emotionally manipulative.

I felt this book where it counted. Few lines have ruptured me so beautifully as, “How blessed are we to have each other?”

It’s terrifically accessible and readable, but what’s regrettable about What is the What is that it hits many dips in the story where it’s not exactly a page-turner. As the novel progresses, more of that dark area between Valentino’s exodus and his eventual settling in Atlanta is filled in with anecdotes. But the more that’s filled in, the less that’s left for you to learn, and there comes a point where the most gripping portions of his journey have all but been revealed. Your interest in the story might diminish as it goes along.

I hate to say it, but What is the What had a weakening gravitational pull, which is how I floated off and read several other non-related books within the span of this one.

If you’ve read Eggers’ earlier works, this book becomes very impressive on an artistic level. Maybe you became acquainted with this author via his dementedly exuberant voice in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (which for many Generation Xers was their A Catcher in the Rye). He said that once he’d written his memoir, though, he was pretty much done talking about himself and was eager to tell someone else’s story for a change. How stunning then is the discovery that the crazy avant-garde Dave Eggers vanishes completely within Valentino’s plain-spoken, subtle amiability.

So you won’t be getting Eggers here, and for the very best of reasons. Every facet of What is the What is commanded by the book’s Purpose: getting this story told and having it reach as many people as it can (part of the reason its paperback was published by Vintage as opposed to Eggers’ more esoteric brainchild, McSweeney’s). Fortunately, Purpose also dictated that Eggers write an enjoyable novel that everyone can, and ought to, read.

On Avoiding Elitist Assholism

I came across a review by Brian Deleeuw (whose debut novel for which I recently posted a praise geyser) written for Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste. The book was familiar: its author, Carl Wilson, is a music journalist who decided to investigate why the hell people listen to Céline Dion.

The premise goes much deeper than that, of course, since it allows Wilson to discuss what “taste” is, and how much culture or perceived quality in music affects its appeal, and so on. But that was sort of lost on me when I was first exposed to the Let’s Talk About Love.

My girlfriend and I watched this author on the Colbert Report and thought his book sounded mildly amusing. (See, how’s that for elitism? Being mildly amused?) All I can say I remember is him admitting that after his journey into the world of Céline Dion fandom, not only does he tolerate her music now, he actually kind of likes some of it. Kiersten and I looked at him as if he’d radioactively mutated before our eyes.

I had trouble listening to what the three-tentacled wombat was saying about musical taste afterward, so fortunately I found Deleeuw’s analysis on Let’s Talk About Love. He focuses on the project’s greater aesthetic goal, which is, as Wilson himself put it, “To give Céline’s album Let’s Talk About Love a sympathetic hearing, to credit that others find it lovable and ask what that can tell me about music…in general.”

This would bother self-appointed guardians of culture even more than the fact that people hang Thomas Kinkades on their wall. Really—not just accept schlocky art as valid, but sympathize with its admirers?

By keeping the kind of blog I do I’ve already appointed myself one of these guardians of culture, haven’t I? (And as far as guardians go, I’m as of yet maybe a Tom Thumb waving a toothpick) Some elitists are content with being assholes. I’m not entirely, and I don’t think DeLeeuw is either, which is why Let’s Talk About Love seems to speak to him.

Since the lover of literature in America today exists in a more or less constant state of ‘grappling with people and things not like me,’ it seems more important to realize that such an oppositional stance can be mined for both knowledge of others (but not in a condescending way) and self-knowledge (but not in a narcissistic way), rather than just the usual—for me, at least—cocktail of irritation and self-righteousness.

The “oppositional stance” comes up a lot at the bookstore. Now, I treat all folks kindly whether they come in asking for Joseph Conrad or James Patterson. The difference in my reactions is mostly internal: in one case the elation in discovering a fellow member of the Joyous Brotherhood of Great Books, in the other case a spike of bile.

So maybe my tastes in literature haven’t changed, but my attitudes have. I used to assume that people read crap not because it’s mental junk food, but because they must think it’s freakin’ Dante and don’t know what else to read. (“James Patterson takes up two whole shelves—must mean he’s really good, right?”) But I learned that it’s mostly because other people don’t read books for the same reason I do.

I’ve gone about it backwards: I learned to enjoy the classics first, and the genre stuff second, and the bookstore exposure has been integral to the second part. My idea of a “fun book” used to be Candide. But you know what’s a really fun book? World War Z.

I don’t think you have to forfeit your ideas of good or bad art, but I think if you become obsessed with aesthetic value and cultural significance and contributions to the great conversation of mankind, you can miss a really awesome book about zombies.

And the classics knowledge is still handy. When I hand someone their requested Nicholas Sparks novel, I’ll probably ask if they’ve read My Antonîa. No? Well then, follow me this way to the C’s…

Chuck Norris vs. Ernest Hemingway

I’m not saying necessarily who would win the fight, but we’re going to look at some facts uncovered by yours truly about the toughest Nobel Laureate son-of-a-bitch who ever lived:

-The phrase “The pen is mightier than the sword” was first coined by Ernest Hemingway as he used one to kill a matador.

-Every time you light a cigar, the ghost of Ernest Hemingway strangles another emo kid to death.

-Shakespeare’s plays were actually written by Ernest Hemingway while he was blackout drunk in Barcelona.

-It isn’t true that your great-grandmother was the best lay Ernest Hemingway ever had. It really pissed him off when she’d go around saying that.

-Ernest Hemingway brewed the best beer you’ve ever tasted.

-When Ernest Hemingway drove an ambulance in WWI, he ran over three Austro-Hungarians for every Allied soldier he rescued.

-Ernest Hemingway came up with his famous Iceberg Approach for writing literature when he hunted for orcas under the Arctic with a knife in his teeth, and noticed that icebergs went really goddamn deep.

-Ernest Hemingway called Gertrude Stein a bitch.

-During the years Ernest Hemingway was alive, a hard left hook was the leading cause of death among literary critics.

-When Skull and Bones alumni were present and someone said “Skull and Bones,” they all had to leave the room. When Ernest Hemingway was present and someone said, “The Old Man and the Sea is boring,” nobody left the room alive.

-Ernest Hemingway jumped on a grenade to save his comrades and the blast was safely contained in his billowy chest hair.

-Ernest Hemingway trimmed his beard with a machete.

-In 1972, a rugby team crash landed in the Andes and reportedly resorted to cannibalism to stay alive—eighteen lived to tell the story. The ghost of Ernest Hemingway has been finishing off the survivors one by one ever since.

-“The Lost Generation” actually refers to the thousands of young Frenchman Ernest Hemingway killed in barfights.

-Ernest Hemingway never wanted his unpublished works to be released after his death, but his backstabbing fourth wife did it anyway. What she didn’t know is that he placed a curse on them. Now anyone who reads A Moveable Feast is never to experience love again.

So there’s the tale of the tape for Ernest “Big Papa” Hemingway—the man who popularized the word “Macho.” And nothing counters a roundhouse kick quite like a hard left hook from the father of the American short story.