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‘A Farewell to Arms’ Created a Stir
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Saturday, September 8, 2018
 

STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

Ernest Hemingway’s novel “A Farewell to Arms” is considered by some to have been the great American author’s greatest love story.

But the World War I novel of the love affair between an American ambulance driver and his nurse attracted a barrage of criticism when it was published in 1929.

Some critics retitled it “A Farewell to Decency.”

Others said it was not fit to be on any table where boys and girls have access.

“Of course, most people believe this sort of publicity helped book sales,” said Suzanne del Gizzo, editor of the Hemingway Review.

Del Gizzo, associate professor of English at Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia, served as the keynote speaker launching Community Library’s 2018 Ernest Hemingway Seminar on Thursday night. The seminar, which has attracted a hundred Hemingway fans from as far away as Maryland, concludes today.

“Farewell to Arms” came in wake of “The Sun Also Rises,” which put young Hemingway on the map of literature. But “The Sun” sold less than 10,000 copies.

“A Farewell to Arms” by contrast, sold $100,000 worth of copies in the United States during its first year,  even though it was banned in Boston.

Hemingway wrote “A Farewell to Arms” as he was grieving over the dissolution of his marriage to Hadley, going through the traumatic C-section of his second wife Pauline and trying to wrap his head around his father’s suicide.

“No one saw this coming,” said del Gizzo about the audaciousness of the book.

One critic asked: “What are you going to call it? An unwed mother at the front?” she said.

And readers were rocked by the hero’s desertion, as well as gory medical details and vulgar language.

The Italians found the description of the Italians’ retreat from Caparetto so odious that they banned  sales of the book in Italy until 1948.

And there was confusion over which arms Hemingway referred to in the title--the arms of war or the arms of a woman—since Catherine dies and Frederic deserts, del Gizzo added.

Still, the book was adapted for the stage and made into three movies, including the 1932 version starring Helen Hayes and Gary Cooper, where the couple did end up with rings on their fingers.

A 1957 film starred Rock Hudson and Jennifer Jones, and a 1966 miniseries starred Vanessa Redgrave and George Hamilton.

To say that del Gizzo is a student of “A Farewell to Arms” would be an understatement.

Her paperback copy has no cover. Its pages are so worn they feel like cotton sheets.

“I can’t throw it out—it has my notes from college. It has notes from when I read it at 25, 35—my life is in this book,” she said. “Someone told me you don’t read the same book—every time you read it it’s different for you because you’re different.”

That said, she noted that many of those at the conference were reading the book long before she was born.

“Louella, who calls it her favorite Hemingway novel, has been reading it every five years since 1971. That’s the year I was born so what do I have to tell Louella?” she said.

In response, del Gizzo told her audience that Hemingway explored ways in which war and love are connected in “A Farewell to Arms.”

“It’s pretty complicated and pretty interesting,” she added.

She quoted Linda Wagner Martin, professor of English at the University of North Carolina: “The book is about war but the war scenes exist to remind readers that the greatest loves are doomed to death.”

Nurse Catherine is a clingy, crazy woman who has just lost her fiancé, del Gizzo said. She wants to be romantic, but she’s dogged by a new cynicism created by the reality of having her fiancé blown to bits rather than coming home a war hero.

Del Gizzo noted that the book contains some corny quotes, including:

“You don’t have to pretend you love me.”

“But I do love you.”

And: “There isn’t any me. I’m you. Don’t make up a separate me.”

But, she noted, if someone were recording our private conversations we might sound just like them.

“Ernest felt bad over his divorce from Hadley but he was very much in love with Pauline,” she said. “It was when he had another affair with Martha Gellhorn that he realized there was something in himself... He struggled, pondering: How much is love a ritual we enact and how much is authentic? He was interested in vulnerability and intimacy.”

Hemingway was eager to join the ambulance corps to have an experience of war, Del Gizzo said. He believed he couldn’t miss the war because he believed that writers have to see everything, even the ugly things.

He did not take part in the battle of Caparetto, which the story revolves around, but he was a prolific reader who studied maps, newspaper accounts and history of World War I to compose the story as if he had been there.

Serving as a correspondent in World War II traumatized him—he came back looking older and drinking more heavily. And it didn’t help that his son Jack was held as a prisoner of war during that war, del Gizzo said.

“He did not like war and he was critical of it,” she added. “He wanted to tell it like it is and not sugar coat it.”

“A Farwell to Arms” resonates in Ernest Hemingway’s last home, given that this is the hundredth anniversary of the conclusion of the Great War, noted Library Director Jenny Emery Davidson.

Many Austrians fled their country following the war, some coming to Sun Valley where they became ski instructors, she noted. “And Hemingway finished it in the American West in Sheridan, Wyo., so there’s a palpable connection.”

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