You don’t expect to find a hidden message in a book you first read when you were a teenager. Not when it’s part of the canon, analyzed for decades, with critical opinion on it a settled matter. But when I was asked to write an introduction to a new Vintage Classics edition of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, that’s what I discovered: a secret, wrapped in an elegiac novel of love, war, and loss whose quasi-autobiographical overtones turned out to be both more and less than they seemed.
Anyone who knows the facts of Ernest Hemingway’s life has heard the story: how on the night of July 8, 1918, in the last summer of World War I, the 18-year-old Hemingway, an ambulance-driving lieutenant with the Italian Red Cross, was wounded in an Austrian mortar attack on Italian positions at Fossalta di Piave, in the Veneto. He’d been in Italy for little more than a month, and at Fossalta for only three weeks, when a shell exploded in the trench where he was delivering chocolate and cigarettes to the troops. “I died then,” he’d say later: “I felt my soul or something coming out of my body, like you’d pull a silk handkerchief out of a pocket by one corner.”
He didn’t die, of course, though his knees were full of shrapnel and his legs badly cut up. Instead, transported to a hospital in Milan, he fell in love with the 26-year-old nurse who took care of him, an American named Agnes von Kurowsky. Despite the difference in their ages, they began a romance that lasted until December, when Hemingway returned to America after the armistice. He hoped she would follow him, so when he received a letter from her breaking off their attachment because she planned to marry an Italian major, telling him, “I am now and always will be too old, & … you’re just a boy—a kid,” he was devastated, as much from hurt pride as from a broken heart.
“I died then,” he’d say later: “I felt my soul or something coming out of my body, like you’d pull a silk handkerchief out of a pocket by one corner.”
It’s accepted in Hemingway studies that this failed relationship became material for the writer’s fiction, beginning with a vignette about a nurse named Ag and an anonymous wounded-soldier narrator that he later expanded into “A Very Short Story” in his first collection, In Our Time. In the sketch, the couple’s liaison roughly follows the path of Hemingway and von Kurowsky’s, although in a maneuver that would become characteristic of Hemingway’s art, he recasts personal history to give the jilted narrator, no longer a devastated boy but a cynical man, the last word: “The major never married her, and I got a dose of clap from a girl in Chicago riding in a yellow taxi.”
Almost a decade later, not being a writer to let a good grudge go to waste, Hemingway picked up this old subject matter again. He was at a professional and personal crossroads. He’d published two books marking him as a literary talent to be reckoned with: In Our Time, whose clean, sharp prose and episodic structure seemed almost to define literary modernism, and The Sun Also Rises, less a novel than an extended character sketch and travelogue that introduced readers to the disaffected expatriate youth of his generation—much as, decades later, Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney would do with overprivileged, self-medicated Los Angeles teenagers in Less Than Zero, or clubgoing New York yuppies in Bright Lights, Big City. Now he had to deliver on this promise, but his new manuscript, a picaresque novel about a father and son, seemed to be going nowhere.
The Making of a Masterpiece
In the meantime, his 1921 marriage to Hadley Richardson, with whom he’d shared life among the Left Bank expatriate literati in Paris, had come apart. She’d filed for divorce in 1927 after she discovered he was having an affair with her friend Pauline Pfeiffer; he’d married Pauline; and after Pauline became pregnant the couple made plans to leave Europe, where Hemingway had lived since 1922, and return to America. It was at that point, in March 1928, on the eve of sailing across the Atlantic and into a new life, that Hemingway abruptly abandoned his frustrating picaresque and turned again to the old tale of his wound, the war, and his lost love.
The move was a breakthrough; writing his new novel, Hemingway later said, made him “happier than I had ever been.” During the months to come, while he and Pauline established themselves in the U.S. and Pauline endured a difficult birth by Cesarean section, he expanded it, fleshing out his own memories, or such recent experiences as Pauline’s delivery, with facts and impressions gleaned from research, or conversations with former comrades. The result was a novel in which all his manifest gifts as a writer—his precise observation of places and things, his ear for revelatory dialogue, his athletic handling of language—came together in service of a true narrative arc, spanning five acts, like a classical tragedy.
Hemingway abruptly abandoned his frustrating picaresque and turned again to the old tale of his wound, the war, and his lost love. The move was a breakthrough.
In it, his callow alter ego, the Red Cross lieutenant Frederic Henry, begins a flirtation with the nurse Catherine Barkley that deepens into love when she becomes pregnant and he, disillusioned with the war, deserts his post to flee with her to Switzerland. Briefly they imagine a life free of the cynicism and destruction of the war, until her death, in childbirth, transfigures him into a tragic hero and the speaker of one of Hemingway’s finest aphorisms: “If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them.”
Neither of the books that had made Hemingway’s name had hinted at this kind of sustained plot or character development; In Our Time didn’t aim for it, and The Sun Also Rises didn’t achieve it. Nor did the discarded picaresque manuscript he’d been working on for so many months. So what triggered the transformation? What freed Hemingway from the modernist’s curse—form over feeling—and encouraged him to risk emotion and vulnerability? The answer, I thought, might give me a new way of thinking about the novel. And then I heard it before I saw it: Catherine’s whispery, confiding, compliant voice, which reminded me of someone. Not the “too old” Agnes; not clever Pauline, the Vogue editor whose Cesarean delivery had given the novel a plot point; but Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley, whose diction he indelibly rendered in his posthumous Paris memoir, A Moveable Feast.
Once noticed, the similarity seemed inescapable. “Such a silly boy,” Catherine calls Frederic, affectionately, or “a wise boy”; Hadley says her husband is “such a literal boy.” “When should we leave? I want to right away,” says Hadley, when her husband suggests a trip to the Alps; in A Farewell to Arms, she has the same response to the same proposition: “I’ll go any place any time you wish.” Both women bounce from the romantic to the practical: “I do love you,” says Catherine, “and Valentini [a surgeon who will operate on the wounded Frederic] will make you a fine leg”; “we’ll never love anyone but each other,” swears Hadley, before saying, “Now we’d better have lunch.”
The likeness wasn’t accidental. For in re-purposing his old unrequited love as a tragic heroine, Hemingway gave her a name that was already attached to someone else: Catherine, or Cat, or Katherine Kat, or Feather Kitty, was what he called Hadley, and what she called herself when writing to him. (He’d even employed it as code to record her menstrual cycle—“Kitty commenced”—in his notebooks.) As he worked on his new novel, Hemingway made this character more and more like his first wife, and less like the nurse who had jilted him. In an early draft, Catherine is short and dark, as Agnes was; then she becomes tall and fair, like Hadley, and her hair—blonder than what an admirer described as Hadley’s coppery “raw gold”—is long, as Hadley’s was in the early days of the Hemingways’ marriage. At one point Catherine proposes that Frederic Henry grow his long as well, “and I could cut mine and we’d be just alike only one of us blonde and one of us dark.” It’s the same thing Hadley says to Hemingway in a previously unpublished sketch included in the 2009 edition of A Moveable Feast: “I thought maybe it [your hair] could be the same as mine.... I’ll just get it [my hair] evened tomorrow and then I’ll wait for you. Wouldn’t that be fine for us?”
There are other similarities: Frederic says Catherine’s skin is “soft as piano keys,” and she replies that his cheek is like “emery paper, and very rough on piano keys”; Hadley was a pianist. Catherine and Frederic take a nighttime walk past the Duomo in Milan that exactly retraces Hemingway and Hadley’s steps during a 1922 journey to the city. Their brief idyll in Switzerland mirrors what Hemingway recalls in A Moveable Feast about his and Hadley’s sojourns in the Austrian Alps: the nights are cold, the mornings are warmed by a porcelain stove, and Frederic Henry and Hemingway each grow a beard.
What freed Hemingway from the modernist’s curse—form over feeling—and encouraged him to risk emotion and vulnerability?
Most unsettling of all, when it’s time for their baby to be born, Frederic and Catherine relocate to Lausanne; it’s there that Catherine dies after undergoing a Cesarean section at the hospital. And Lausanne is also the place where, in 1922, Hadley confessed to Hemingway that when she was traveling to join him, she’d lost a valise she was bringing to him containing the only copies of most of his early manuscripts. He never forgave her for the loss—“I remember what I did in the night after I … found it was true,” he wrote ominously in A Moveable Feast— and, according to her biographer, Gioia Diliberto, she could never mention it without crying.
Hemingway would spend a career taking people and incidents from his own life and transmuting them into fiction, not just for the purposes of art but to enact some alchemy that would transform his personal experience into a truth he preferred, or needed. Perhaps, then, he used A Farewell to Arms to figuratively (if not necessarily consciously) put his former wife, and the life they had shared, behind him in the most decisive way possible, acting out what the critic Malcolm Cowley would describe as a “farewell to a period, an attitude, and perhaps to a method also” as he sought to deliver the novel that he and his critics were expecting—a book whose surface brilliance was secondary to its heart.
He more than succeeded in doing so: when A Farewell to Arms was published, in September 1929, it was greeted by critics as a kind of coronation. “It fulfills the prophecies that his most excited admirers have made about Ernest Hemingway,” said The Atlantic, to which The New Republic added that “A Farewell to Arms is worthy of their hopes and of its author’s promise.” It sold 36,000 copies in the first month after publication and became Hemingway’s first best-seller, something that gave its author enormous pride. (He always cared deeply about his sales figures.)
Years later, when Hemingway was attempting to write the episodic memoir that became A Moveable Feast, he struggled with its introduction, leaving numerous fragmentary drafts that weren’t included in the initially published text but have been added to the restored edition, edited by his grandson Seán Hemingway. In them, Hemingway refers again and again to Hadley as “the heroine of the stories.” By then he was suffering from depression, and possibly from dementia, and his old clarity of expression often eludes him. But when he says that “Hadley would understand I hope why it was necessary to use certain materials or fiction rightly or wrongly,” it sounds as if he’s trying to explain why he had to turn her into Catherine Barkley in order to make A Farewell to Arms a masterpiece.
Amanda Vaill is the author of several books, including Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War. Her next book, Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in October
