One hundred years ago, a teenage Ernest Hemingway was wounded on the
banks of the Piave river while volunteering in the Red Cross ambulance
service during World War I. Later, in the mid 1990s, his 1929 novel
inspired by those wartime experiences made its way onto my high school
summer reading list.
For those who didn’t do their summer reading, A Farewell to Arms is
the story of Frederic Henry, an American ambulance driver in the
Italian Red Cross, who is wounded and then falls in love with Catherine
Barkley, his British nurse. During a chaotic retreat, in which the
Italian soldiers turn on their own officers, Frederic deserts and
escapes to Switzerland with Catherine, who is pregnant with his baby.
Catherine suffers through a difficult birth. Both she and the baby die
at the novel’s end. I remember lying prone on the floor as I read,
weeping as Frederic walked away from her corpse and into the rain.
I have reread the book many times since, though the affective
experience changes with time. Anyone who has read the book can
understand my teenage self’s response. But what if I told you that when I
read it now I laugh as much as I cry?
I can see that this claim might be a hard sell — Hemingway is not
known as a humorist. One need only read his contract-busting,
deliberately-dreadful, mentor-parodying novella, The Torrents of Spring (1926),
or his poems (yes, he wrote poems; no, they are not very good) to see
why. One particularly awful poem, which pokes fun at Dorothy Parker’s
attempted suicide, was so tasteless it ended a friendship — though not,
oddly enough, his friendship with Parker herself. The offended friend, New Yorker humorist Donald Ogden Stewart, said of Hemingway “written humor was not his dish.”
However, as the ongoing project to publish Hemingway’s complete
correspondence shows, in his daily life Hemingway was a good-natured,
self-deprecating guy always ready with a witty remark. The latest volume
in the Cambridge University Press series the Letters of Ernest Hemingway, edited
by Sandra Spanier and Miriam B. Mandel, offers up some prime
Depression-era snark: “Key West is increasingly unprosperous altho the
sponging industry is reviving,” he writes; “I dont know whether this
means more people are taking up bathing or whether sponges are now being
used to manufacture home brew.”
Of the A Farewell to Arms film adaptation he grumbled: “I
suppose they will have the girl Catherine give birth to the American
flag at the end — And change the title to Star Spangle Whoopie.” One gets the impression that he might have been good at Twitter (and not just because of his famous economy of style).
Hemingway could take something very serious, such as his father’s
suicide, and deadpan it in such a way that the humor, through
antithesis, makes the tragedy that much worse. His use of the relative
clause in this letter to Laurence Stallings, the playwright who adapted A Farewell to Arms for
Broadway, takes my breath away: “My father, who was a marvelous shot at
grouse, ducks, quail and clay birds, shot himself with equal success
last year and ever since I have been broke as hell.”
In a 1941 Saturday Review article, E.B. and Katharine S.
White refute the idea that humorists are sad people, arguing that,
“there is a deep vein of melancholy running through everyone’s life and
that a humorist, perhaps more sensible of it than some others,
compensates for it actively and positively. […] Humorous writing, like
poetical writing, has an extra content. It plays, like an active child,
close to the big hot fire which is Truth.” ... [mehr] https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/whats-funny-farewell-arms/
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