A Literary Legend

On Friday I finished A Farewell To Arms. The novel left me feeling morose and down. So much happens between the lines in Hemingways novels, to take his work at face value is a dramatic understatement of his considerable talent. It is truly his ability to say so much with so little that I love about Hemingway. The understated way he describes setting and the surface way lovers comunicate. I read the novel and never thought that the protagonist, Fredrick Henry, really new his lover, Catherine Barkley.

The nut shell: the novel is set in Italy in World War I and centers around a young American who is commissioned as a Lieutenant driving ambulances on the eastern front. He meets an English (Barkley) nurse and they fall in love. He is wounded, sent to Milan, and Cathrine Barkley follows him. While in Milan they engage in an affair which results in pregnancy. When Henry's wounds are healed he is sent back to the front. At the front the Austrians launch an offensive and the Italian line crumbles in dramatic fashion. A consequence of the retreat is the summary execution of nearly all the field officers involved. Henry deserts, meets his lover, and together they flee to Switzerland.

I feel that in Hemingway's fiction, he draws heavily from his experiences. I feel, too, that his male protagonists are extensions of the man himself. I have read enough Hemingway to recognize the stereotype men in his novels. They are athletes, they are sportsmen and excellent shots with rifles, shotguns, and pistols. They are aware and capable and they seem always to be on the losing side. This theme of his main characters losing is set early in his career as a writer. Without spoiling A Farewell to Arms his novels offer an almost telepathic foresight into the death of the great writer himself.

In A Moveable Feast he writes that he always started the days work with the truest sentence available to him, that way if the days work went to shit he had something true to fall back. To Hemingway, it seems, that the authentic components of the work, that which he new to be true, where safe, good, and capable of carrying his work. Perhaps that's why his writing captivates and moves me so much. It is authentic. The sparse nature of his writing only lends itself so much more to the rich understanding he had of insecurities, the brittle human nature, and the surface bonds of love that turn out to be, often, temporary, deep, and powerful.

I love Hemingway's work, in part, for the contradictions it brings to the contemporary style of literature. His characters are rich and complex but between the lines of text. His descriptions are powerful and full of color but between the lines of text. The stories and the characters speak for themselves and the plot is, as it should be for great writers, secondary to the readers relationship with the characters. I say, read A Farewell to Arms, read The Sun Also Rises, read For Whom the Bell Tolls, read Hemingways books and revel in the work of a literary legend.