Not in Our Stars

To call A Farewell to Arms a “first” study in doom might seem unfair to The

Sun Also Rises. But the total effect of the first novel, whatever its author’s

intention, is closer to that of tragicomedy than of tragedy. The tragic sense of life exists in the undertones of The Sun Also Rises. Its surface tone is, however, somewhere within the broad range of the comic. Reading it, one is oftener reminded of the tragi-comic irony of a work like Chaucer’s Troilus

and Criseyde than, say, the tragic irony of the Greeks and the Elizabethans.

The operation of pity—again as in Chaucer—is carefully equivocal, some- how in itself a phase of irony, and under a restraint so nearly complete that it can scarcely move. Possibly because of the nature of the material, possibly because of the cultivated habit of understatement, one does not find in The

Sun Also Rises the degree of emotional commitment which becomes visible

in A Farewell to Arms.

After the experience of writing and revising his first novel, Hemingway worked more wisely and more slowly on his second. The preparation of the first draft took six months instead of six weeks. It was begun in Paris about the first of March, 1928. Through the spring and summer the work went on in Key West, where Hemingway made himself relax by deep-sea fishing while writing some 40,000 words. He continued the draft in Piggott, Arkansas, and Kansas City, Missouri, where he ran the total number of words to something like 87,000. The book was completed in preliminary form near Big Horn, in Sheridan County, Wyoming, about the end of August, 1928.

Following a brief interlude, he began revision, an extremely painstaking job of cutting and rewriting which filled another five months. On January 22, 1929, he wrote Perkins that the final draft stood complete in typescript, and by mid-February it had been decided to serialize the book in Scribner’s

Magazine, beginning with the number of May, 1929. Still Hemingway was

dissatisfied. In Paris during the spring he continued to labor over the galley- proofs of the magazine version, rewriting some portions and keeping them by him until the last possible moment. Book-proof reached him in Paris on June 5, 1929.2 _{By the twenty-fourth, when he had finally satisfied himself}

that everything possible had been done, he was able to report to Perkins that he had at last achieved a “new and much better ending” for his novel. There is

a persistent tradition that the present ending was rewritten seventeen times before Hemingway got the corrected galley-proof aboard the boat-train.

In the midst of life, runs the Book of Common Prayer, we are in death. “During the time I was writing the first draft” said Hemingway in 1948, “my second son Patrick was delivered in Kansas City by Caesarean section, and while I was re-writing my father killed himself in Oak Park, Illinois. . . . I remember all these things happening and all the places we lived in and the fine times and the bad times we had in that year. But much more vividly I remember living in the book and making up what happened in it every day. Making the country and the people and the things that happened I was hap- pier than I had ever been. Each day I read the book through from the begin- ning to the point where I went on writing and each day I stopped when I was still going good and when I knew what would happen next. The fact that the book was a tragic one did not make me unhappy since I believed that life was a tragedy and knew it could only have one end. But finding you were able to make something up; to create truly enough so that it made you happy to read it; and to do this every day you worked was something that gave a greater pleasure . . . than any I had ever known. Beside it nothing else mattered.”3

The appearance of A Farewell to Arms in book form on September 27, 1929, marked the inception of Hemingway’s still lengthening career as one of the very few great tragic writers in twentieth-century fiction. His next book,

Death in the Afternoon, furthered his exploration into the esthetics of tragedy.

Through the 1930’s he continued at intervals to wrestle with the problem. To

Have and Have Not (though with limited success) examined the tragic impli-

cations of social and political decay. For Whom the Bell Tolls attacked a similar problem on an epic and international scale. Ten years after that, at the age of fifty, Hemingway rounded out a full twenty years of work in tragedy with his character-study of Colonel Richard Cantwell.

The position occupied by A Farewell to Arms among Hemingway’s tragic writings may be suggested by the fact that he once referred to the story of Lieutenant Frederick [sic] Henry and Catherine Barkley as his Romeo and

Juliet.4 _{The most obvious parallel is that Henry and Catherine, like their Eliza-}

bethan prototypes, might be seen as star-crossed lovers. Hemingway might also have been thinking of how rapidly Romeo and Juliet, whose affair has begun as a mere flirtation, pass over into the status of relatively mature lovers. In the third place, he may have meant to imply that his own lovers, caught in the tragic pattern of the war on the Austrian-Italian front, are not far different from the young victims of the Montague-Capulet family feud.

Neither in Romeo and Juliet nor in A Farewell to Arms is the catastrophe a direct and logical result of the immoral social situation. Catherine’s bodily structure, which precludes a normal delivery for her baby, is an unfortunate biological accident. The death of Shakespeare’s lovers is also precipitated by

an accident—the detention of the message-bearing friar. The student of es- thetics, recognizing another kind of logic in art than that of mathematical cause-and-effect, may however conclude that Catherine’s death, like that of Juliet, shows a kind of artistic inevitability. Except by a large indirection, the war does not kill Catherine any more than the Veronese feud kills Juliet. But in the emotional experience of the novel, Catherine’s dying is directly associ- ated and interwoven with the whole tragic pattern of fatigue and suffering, loneliness, defeat and doom, of which the war is itself the broad social mani- festation. And one might make a similar argument about Romeo and Juliet.

In application to Frederick and Catherine, the phrase “star-crossed lov- ers” needs some qualification. It does not mean that they are the victims of an actual malevolent metaphysical power. All their crises are caused by forces which human human beings have set in motion. During Frederick’s under- standably bitter ruminations while Catherine lies dying in the Lausanne hos- pital, fatalistic thoughts do, quite naturally, cross his mind. But he does not, in the end, blame anything called “Fate” for Catherine’s death. The pain of her labor reminds him that her pregnancy has been comfortable and apparently normal; the present biological struggle is perhaps a way of evening things up. “So now they got her in the end. You never got away with anything.” But he immediately rejects his own inference: that is, that her sufferings in labor are a punishment for sinful pleasures. Scientifically considered, the child is simply a by-product of good nights in Milan—and there is never a pretence that they were not good. The parents do not happen to be formally married; still, the pain of the child-bearing would have been just as it is even if they had been married fifty times. In short, the pain is natural, inevitable, and without either moral or metaphysical significance. The anonymous “they” is nothing but a name for the way things are.

A little later Frederick Henry bitterly compares the human predicament first to a game and then to a swarm of ants on a log in a campfire. Both are homely and unbookish metaphors such as would naturally occur to any young American male at a comparable time. Living now seems to be a war-like game, played “for keeps,” where to be tagged out is to die. Here again, there is a moral implication in the idea of being caught off base—trying to steal third, say, when the infield situation and the number of outs make it wiser to stay on second. “They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you.” One trouble, of course, is that the player rarely has time enough to learn by long experience; his fatal error may come in the second half of the first inning, which is about as far as Catherine seems likely to go. Even those who survive long enough to learn the rules may be killed through the operation of chance or the accidents of the game. Death may, in short, come “gratuitously” without the slightest reference to “the rules.”

It is plainly a gratuitous death which comes to the ants on the burning log in Frederick’s remembered campfire. Some immediately die in flame, as Catherine is now dying. Others, like Lieutenant Henry, who has survived a trench-mortar explosion, will manage to get away, their bodies permanently scarred, their future course uncertain—except that they will die in the end. Still others, unharmed, will swarm on the still cool end of the log until the fire at last reaches them. If a Hardyan President of the Immortals takes any notice of them, He does little enough for their relief. He is like Frederick Henry pouring water on the burning campfire log—not to save the ants but only to empty a cup.

Catherine’s suffering and death prove nothing except that she should not have become pregnant. But she had to become pregnant in order to find out that becoming pregnant was unwise. Death is a penalty for ignorance of “the rules”: it is also a fact which has nothing to do with rule or reason. Death is the fire which, in conclusion, burns us all, and it may singe us along the way. Frederick Henry’s ruminations simply go to show that if he and Catherine seem star-crossed, it is only because Catherine is biologically double-crossed, Europe is is war-crossed, and life is death-crossed. 5