I have to admit I read "A Farewell to Arms" a very long time ago, and it seems I should re-read it. But right now, I am reading "The Short Stories of Earnest Hemingway," a collection, and it reminds me once again what a genius he was.
First, let me address "how you read," and how that might be connected to certain kinds of education (as opposed to intelligence, which you obviously have). It's really a matter of what you are reading
for. Most people, without a lot of exposure to literature classes, read for plot -- the events, or "what happens next." Really good high school English and college courses get students to start thinking about the "message," of the story, beyond the plot. These courses also get you thinking about context -- what was going on in the world and in the writer's life and how these are reflected in the work. The writer is commenting about his world from his perspective, and A Farewell to Arms is basically an anti-war novel by someone who had seen the First World War first hand.
Also, For the last two years, I've been writing fiction and taking workshops for writers, and at a late age I am learning how to read fiction as a writer -- and it's a completely different experience yet again. Now I'm often focusing on "how did he do that?" or "why did he make that choice?"
So let me offer a bit of memory-fogged analysis of Hemingway's war stories.
The single most important thing I think to keep in mind when you read these works, is that World War I was possibly the most grisly, most wasteful of human life, most horrific, and above all futile and pointless war ever fought in the modern West, and Hemingway was right in the middle of it as a volunteer ambulance driver. As a "manly" young athlete from the American midwest, and then cub newspaper reporter, he wanted to go fight in the war, but was unfit due to poor eyesight, and so volunteered to be an ambulance driver. On one of his first assignments, he came to the assistance of a munitions factory that had blown up, and had to pick up the scattered body parts of dozens of Italians, mostly women.
Moreover, Hemingway was himself gruesomely wounded -- first blown up by a mortar, and then hit by a burst of machine gun fire. This ended the war for him and he then spent a lot of time recovering in a hospital.
When you read Hemmingway's war stories, therefore,
you are reading the work of a man suffering from an atrociously severe case of what we know now as post traumatic stress syndrome. In fact, Hemmingway never got over his demons, drank profusely for most of his life, suffered from bouts of depression, and eventually killed himself. Moreover, more perhaps than any other war, the First World War made no sense -- neither politically as to why it started, nor tactically, as to what the generals were doing, nor on the personal level of the soldier, who was told to run headlong into mass slaughter by machine gun nests for yards of useless territory. World War I brought everything into question by those who were there. It destroyed meaning -- religion, politics, heroism.
Have you ever seen the film, "Born on the Fourth of July"? Imagine if Ron Kovic -- the gungho kid who volunteers for war, whose body is destroyed in Vietnam, and realizes the futility of what he has done and the sacrifice of his own body, and becomes an anti-war activist -- had written fiction instead of becoming an activist. Hemingway's war stories are all about
shell shock and disillusionment.
It is oddly fortuitous that the style Hemingway honed as a reporter serves his purpose well as a disillusioned, almost nihilistic observer of violence, whether in war or the bullring. One aspect of reading that I was only vaguely aware of before taking writing classes, is that in addition to plot, point of view, etc., one of the things the writer is doing is creating a "mood" through language. The style that you think of as "see dick run, run dick run," actually can (if you let it) convey a mood -- the mood of a shell shocked story teller, a narrator with what psychologists would call a "flat affect," a person whose emotions have been drained or suppressed, or are controlled to maintain his sanity. When you let it catch you up, it's truly an amazing reading experience, but you have to imagine him and let him get in your head. You are being shown things by a narrator who has been to hell and back and is flatly and without emotion pointing out the pointless, useless violence of life -- gored bullfighters, wounded soldiers, washed up boxers.
I find it ironic that Hemingway is thought of as a writer who championed "manly" activities like war, boxing, bullfighting and hunting. In fact, Hemingway is often observing them in an ambivalent way. His bullfighting stories are often about washed up bullfighters whose spirits have been destroyed in the ring -- having been gored, they have become cowards or drunks, and are barely able to dispatch the bull without making a butchery of what should be a clean artistic kill. The war stories are universally anti-war, and the hunting stories reflect the nihilistic horror of recognizing that to live we have to kill.
Also, I agree with the iceberg theory of Hemmingway. There are things he simply doesn't mention, but that are obviously there, and he wants you to figure it out. For example, to be really blunt, in all those stories about soldiers recovering in the hospital during World War I, it is pretty obvious that some of the patients or even main characters are impotent, or worse have had their dicks shot off. The stories makes absolutely no sense unless you recognize that Hemingway wants you to know this without his telling you (they will hint darkly at it), or they are otherwise disfigured or disabled. So war, far from being a "manly" activity, is like bullfighting, a de-masculinizing, or even castrating, experience.
If you want to "get" Hemingway, you might want to start in smaller doses. His short stories (especially his "short shorts") are amazing, but you can't read them for "plot" -- that is for "what happens." One of his greatest masterpieces, "A Clean Well Lighted Place," on the surface, is just about two waiters arguing about the last customer of the night, an old man who continues to drink in their cafe, thus making them keep it open; but it's really about how anyone can possibly go on living after they cease to believe in God or any form of meaning in the universe (this being written in an age when most people believed in God). You might want to take a look at a few other short-shorts, and if you "get them," you could either decide he's great or a fraud, and whether you want to read more. Try "A Day's Wait," "The Capital of the World," and
"The Killers".
I was completely blown away by "The Capital of the World." On the surface, it's once again a story about a very cheap hotel-restaurant. Three waiters impatiently watch customers while wanting to be elsewhere. Hemingway seems to have been influenced by cinema (movies) which were still pretty new then, and were introducing new narrative techniques, which Hemingway adopted: He "jump cuts" back and forth between various rooms in the hotel, showing hearbreaking juxtapositions between a washed up bullfighter, priests, and two goofy young waiters who love bullfighting and eventually have a shocking gruesome accident. It's a masterpiece, and a bit depressing as a writer, because it makes me think, I could never do that!
One more quibble. When Hemingway's novel suggests that the main characters leave the war and can travel around Europe, it doesn't mean to suggest that they are rich or privileged. Europe was impoverished and economically devasted at the time, many countries still at third world levels of development. Hemingway spent some of the 1920s in Europe, where impoverished American artists could live and write or paint literally on pennies per day. Similarly, when you suggest, the main character could just leave the war, it's because, like the real Hemingway, he was a volunteer ambulance driver, not a conscripted soldier, and even so he barely escapes a firing squad, and the couple only manage to survive by escaping into neutral Switzerland, by rowing across a huge lake. This is not the story of the privileged opting out of war, but of refugees. This is an example of how historical context can completely change a person's reading of a story.
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