Is there anybody going to listen to my story

all about the brooding Hemingway?

I know I said I didn’t care, and I don’t, really. But zero total views? Ouch.  But I don’t care. I’M JUST KIDDING, WHY DOESN’T ANYONE LOVE ME?! No, no. That was irony. I’M SO BORDERLINE. And I mean that in both the “edgy” and “personality disorder” sense of the word. OOH, DOUBLE ENTENDRE.

Seriously, though…my Hemingway binge continues. I finished A Farewell to Arms. The rain was a nice touch. Other than that, I’m not sure how I feel about the ending. I know Hemingway’s not one for sentiment, but it was so understated that it was almost cruel. I did like how Henry stayed with her in the hospital, though. I may be being sadly misled by my impressions of 50’s movies where men sit in waiting rooms and smoke cigars during the woman’s labor, but I don’t think that was all the common back then. I also particularly liked the part where he said “I felt no feeling of fatherhood”, especially contrasted with when he tries to say goodbye to Catherine and “it was like saying goodbye to a statue.” The comparison is interesting to me because at that point he wasn’t aware that the baby was born dead. Are we supposed to believe that he felt nothing for his son because he was so worried about Catherine? I don’t have an answer, but the near-complete absence of emotion for the child in the book seems mildly noteworthy (at one point, they even speculate about whether “the brat will come between us”). And the way they pretend they’re married – it’s like they’re children playing house, in a way, which gives the affair a quality that is both innocent and tragic.

It seems to me that the theme of the novel is that we can’t escape our fate. Henry tries to escape the war, chooses love and life instead, and is rewarded by having the only person he truly cares about wrenched away from him. But seen through the lens of the quote I posted the  other day, Catherine seems to me to be at least “very brave” if not also “very good” and “very gentle”, and, in a sense, unbreakable. I mean, think about it. She loses her childhood love to war, is willing to try again, hides her pregnancy for three months, demands nothing from Henry, always puts on a brave face for him, and even tries to protect him from seeing her in pain in the middle of childbirth. That’s a pretty amazing woman (and to think I found her annoying at first!). This also begs the question of whether Hemingway could only portray a woman admirably in a traditional gender role, but that’s an issue for another day. Running with this theory, Henry is able to survive because he exemplifies none of those characteristics – we can be sure that the world will kill him too, in no special hurry, but will he be strong at the broken places? He promises Catherine that he will never feel for anyone the way he does for her, but the more fascinating question, I believe, is that of whether he will ever feel anything again at all. It seems likely that he will revert to being the man Rinaldi described, “all fire and smoke and nothing inside.”  This is Hemingway’s masterstroke, the dagger at the heart of A Farewell to Arms: life is pointless except for the few people that give it meaning, and the world always breaks them first.