Study Guide to A Farewell to Arms and Other Works by Ernest Hemingway

Intelligent Education

• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645421139
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Study Aids
• Subtopic: Study Guides

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for selected works by Ernest Hemingway, winner of the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature. Titles in this study guide include A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Old Man and the Sea, and The Sun Also Rises. As an influential figure of 20th century fiction, Hemingway’s eloquent prose style had a powerful influence on American and British fiction. Moreover, Hemingway portrayed war as a symbol of society and life, as he evoked themes of honor, courage, pain, destruction, and morality throughout his works. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Hemingway’s classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons they have stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work
- Character Summaries
- Plot Guides
- Section and Chapter Overviews
- Test Essay and Study Q&As The Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

INTRODUCTION TO ERNEST HEMINGWAY

PREFACE

There has been no American writer like Ernest Hemingway. Perhaps it might be more accurate to say that there has been no American like Ernest Hemingway who was also a writer. For this enfant terrible of the World War I “loss generation” was in many ways his own best character. Whether as the young “Champ” or as the middle-aged “Papa,” Ernest Hemingway became a legend in his own lifetime. So completely has his name been absorbed into American culture, that he might almost seem a hero of folklore rather than a creative writer.

From New England campuses to Oregon lumber-camps, the name of Ernest Hemingway is known, and known well, even by men and women who find it difficult to remember when they last opened a book of serious literature. People who never read anything Hemingway wrote and cannot produce the title of one of his books will often know exactly what you mean by “the Hemingway type of man,” and are more than likely to know something about “the Hemingway style.” Whether Hemingway “belongs to the ages” certainly can be (and has been) debated. But there can be no doubt that he “belongs” to the people of America and the people of the world.

Although the drama and romance of his life sometimes seem to overshadow the substance of his work, the fact remains that Ernest Hemingway was first and foremost a literary man-a writer and reader of books. This is too easily forgotten amid all the talk about safaris and hunting trips, adventures with bullfighting, fishing, and war. That Hemingway enjoyed being famous is clear enough; he played in the public spotlight with enthusiasm. But he was also aware of the fact that any artist who makes “good news copy” is in danger of becoming little more than another Sunday-Supplement feature. And Ernest Hemingway was an artist-a man who knew very well that a writer might become a “celebrity” for all the wrong reasons.

THE ARTIST

It was not enough for Ernest Hemingway to be a “celebrity.” He was a writer and the job of the writer is to write. As a young man in Paris after World War I, he read voraciously and wrote deliberately with a kind of self-discipline approaching severity. Far from being the romantic soldier-of-fortune, the “lost” expatriate drifting from bar to bed to bullfighting arena. Hemingway, from the very beginning, was preoccupied with his craft, his art, his work. Literature was never far from his mind, so much so that Gertrude Stein once described him as being, despite his play-acting, a man of “museums” - an image which hardly fits the Sunday-Supplement portrait of Hemingway the Bearded (or unbearded) Adventurer. In Paris, Hemingway himself recollected, “I was trying to write, and I found that my greatest difficulty (apart from knowing what you truly felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, or what you had been taught to feel) was to note what really happened in action, what the actual things were which produced the emotion which you experienced…. I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things….”

This preoccupation, which must be the preoccupation of any artist, never deserted Ernest Hemingway. In the lean years when his work was going badly, no amount of hunting or fishing or bullfighting could drown the taste of his own future-or fear of failure. “He had destroyed his talent by not using it, by betrayals of himself, by drinking so much … by laziness, sloth, and by snobbery, by pride,” he says of the writer in The Snows of Kilimanjaro, adding that “the thought of his own death obsessed him….” This was a warning that Ernest Hemingway gave to himself many times in his life, with an intense honesty basic to the man no less than to his work. “You made an attitude that you cared nothing for the work you used to do, now that you could no longer do it.”

This would seem to be a peculiarly solemn self-reproach from a Romantic Adventurer-or perhaps not so peculiar after all. For Ernest Hemingway understood all too well that while many men can function in obscurity, it takes a strong man to survive his own fame-at least as an artist. In his brief message accepting the 1954 Nobel Prize, for example, Hemingway remarked that “a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.” And in this acknowledgement of essential loneliness, the ever-present danger of failure which must accompany true work, Hemingway was reminding his public - and himself - that every artist must indeed be Santiago the fisherman in The Old Man and the Sea: that is, an individual who attempts to transcend his own limitations.

THE HEMINGWAY CULT

That Hemingway’s work has limitations is obvious enough, and it is unfortunate that efforts to define these limitations have often aroused passions which have nothing to do with the work itself. Something of a “Hemingway cult” has arisen, a sort of club encouraged by men who often seem more like cheer-leaders than literary critics. Hemingway himself, of course, was partially responsible for this development; haunted by fear of failure all his life-failure of art, failure of nerve, failure of other and perhaps more intimate areas of existence - Hemingway could tolerate little criticism. Too often he reacted to challenges either with bellowing denunciation or adolescent sulking, and questioned the motives, not to mention the manhood, of those who actually cared enough to read his work instead of merely praising it. His use of baseball-boxing-hunting jargon in the most absurd circumstances indicated that Hemingway had come to believe in his own “colorful” public image; unleavened by self-perspective or self-humor, the mannerisms had become the substance. “I trained hard and I beat Mr. de Maupassant,” he bombulated to Lillian Ross of The New Yorker; “I’ve fought two draws with Mr. Stendhal and I think I had an edge on the last one.” Only Hemingway could have said it, and only Hemingway could have believed it.

It is always difficult, of course, to know when a writer’s subject becomes an obsession, but Hemingway’s insistence on “virility” and “manhood” does have its ludicrous aspects; and, one cannot escape the conclusion that his perpetual assertion had its basis in some murky sub-stratum of anxiety. Certainly, the Hemingway hero is often a refugee from what is ultimately the most “dangerous” area of existence: the complexities of the human soul. Action itself, after all, may be a narcotic-a way of making it unnecessary to “confront” any experience that cannot be handled as one handles a gun or a trout-line. It is possible for a man to be so frightened of life that he has to run out and shoot something, and in this sense Hemingway’s work has been termed, with some justice, an “art of evasion.”

LIMITATIONS

Throughout Hemingway’s work there is a panic-stricken flight from all complexity, human or non-human, and this produces a thin aesthetic. It is one thing for an artist to translate complexity into simplicity; it is quite another thing to ignore the complexity altogether, and to limit one’s work to those areas where “thinking” is no longer necessary. This reservation applies to his language as well. It may be true that, as Hemingway said, good prose is like an iceberg, with only a small part showing on the surface. But it is also true that icebergs must remain in chilly and arctic waters-or they turn to mush. If the “hard” surface of Hemingway’s prose is in some ways admirable, in other ways it is the product of weakness rather than strength.

This is not to say that Hemingway’s work is to be dismissed as insignificant. Indeed, it was precisely because Ernest Hemingway was an artist that he could turn his own failures, his own fears, into an art which is both significant and true. But in order to understand what he did produce, it is necessary to understand what he could not produce. In short, Hemingway made the best possible use of his limitations, but we must clearly define these limitations in order to appreciate the use to which he put them.

Two episodes in Hemingway’s life - the fact that he was “blown up” in World War I, suffering a painful and terrible wound without any “stance of manhood” whatsoever, and the fact that his father committed suicide-shaped many of his attitudes, and indeed shaped much of his work. Like Frederic Henry in A Farewell to Arms, like Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises, like all of his heroes in all of his books, the fear of “thinking” and the fear of “letting go” was always close to Ernest Hemingway. The nightmare of chaos and passivity was a terrible nightmare, and one to be avoided, at all costs. That Hemingway evolved his own solutions to this nightmare, and based his art upon them, is something for which everyone interested in people and books must be thankful. But we need not assume that his solutions were universal ones, nor need we shrink from examining the art itself.

Each man exists in his own skull, and this is true of readers no less than of writers. Those critics who attempt to bully readers into awe-stricken admiration, who intimate that anything but praise of Hemingway is in some way tantamount to a failure of “virile imagination,” do no service to Ernest Hemingway, and even less service to literature. The present book is an attempt to help readers understand Hemingway’s work, and to perceive the weakness and strength which made this work possible. It is neither a tribute nor a confession of faith.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park Illinois, the second of six children, His father, Dr. Clarence E. Hemingway, a physician and enthusiastic outdoorsman, helped shape Hemingway’s love for hunting and fishing. This influence was not unopposed by Hemingway’s mother, Grace Hall Hemingway, who was a religious and pious woman; she wanted Ernest to learn music. But the young Hemingway followed his father’s example; he spurned the church organ and took to the fishing rod and gun. Dr. Hemingway, however, despite his pursuit of outdoor sports, was rather sentimental and over-domesticated at home-a fact which the young Hemingway resented and remembered in later years.

At school Hemingway was a “loner” although he edited the school paper. Not especially popular, he learned through his school experience that life is hard, and that only the toughminded survive. Hemingway’s life at this time reflected his growing restlessness. He learned boxing and suffered a broken nose and serious eye injury; he ran away from home twice and spent months “on the road,” working at a variety of jobs.

When the United States entered World War I in 1917, Hemingway tried to enlist, but was rejected because of his eye injury. After working as a cub reporter on the Kansas City Star he served as a volunteer ambulance driver in Italy where he was “blown up” by a mortar shell and received a wound which was to leave serious scars on his mind and spirit.

NEWSPAPERING

On his return to the United States, Hemingway worked as a newspaperman for the Toronto Star and Star Weekly. He came to know many good writers, among them Sherwood Anderson. In 1921 he married Hadley Richardson and returned to Europe, getting to know and love Spain, Switzerland, Austria, and France. At the age of 23 he covered the Greek-Turkish war as a journalist; by the time he was 25 he had interviewed such world-famous figures as Lloyd George, Clemenceau, and Mussolini.

After covering the war Hemingway went to Paris with an introduction from Sherwood Anderson and met Gertrude Stein. He was seriously trying to write at this time but all was not going well with his marriage: Hadley was pregnant and wanted to return home. Meanwhile, Hemingway’s stories had began appearing in avant-garde and popular magazines (including Atlantic Monthly). In 1923 he published Three Stories and Ten Poems; in 1924 In Our Time-a series of 32 fragments-was published in Paris. The collection of Nick Adams stories, In Our Time, was published in the United States the following year, and in 1926 The Torrents of Spring appeared, as did Hemingway’s first successful novel, The Sun Also Rises.

Divorced from Hadley in 1927, Hemingway married - that same year - Pauline Pfeiffer, an editor of Vogue. In 1928 came a great shock: the suicide of his father, an event which affected him profoundly.

Later in 1928 Hemingway left Europe and took up residence at Key West, Florida, where Patrick Hemingway was born in 1929 and Gregory in 1932. A Farewell to Arms, which had appeared in 1929, sold 80,000 copies in four months and assured Hemingway of financial security. Hemingway now had three children (John Hemingway was the son of his first marriage), and was well into the role of “Papa.”

In 1932 appeared Death in the Afternoon, and in 1933 Winner Take Nothing. During 1933 Hemingway also published the first of thirty-one articles and stories which were to appear in Esquire during the next six years.

Never one to stay put for long, Hemingway then traveled extensively, and the result was The Green Hills of Africa which appeared in 1935. With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil war in 1936, he devoted himself to the cause of the Loyalists, and in 1937 served in Spain as a correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance. That same year marked the appearance of To Have and Have Not - three related stories, two of which had been published separately. In 1938 Hemingway published The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories - a volume containing the title play, and all the stories of his previous collections, in addition to seven published but uncollected tales.

TOWARD THE END

Hemingway completed For Whom the Bell Tolls in 1940, but his marriage was once again heading for the divorce court, and in 1940 he and Pauline separated. Hemingway promptly married the writer Martha Gellhorn (also in 1940), and began new travels with his new wife; after visiting China, they settled in Cuba. When World War II erupted, Hemingway leaped into the fray. After editing Men at War in 1942, he served as a war correspondent, accompanying American troops as they pushed the German forces back across Europe. Hemingway took to the war with enthusiasm; known as “Papa” by respectful troops, and a celebrity everywhere, he helped “liberate” the Ritz Hotel in Paris, actually posting a guard at the entrance with a notice: “Papa took good hotel. Plenty stuff in cellar.”

Divorced from Martha in 1944, Hemingway had married Mary Welsh, a Time Magazine correspondent; after the war they settled in Venice. In 1950, Across the River and Into the Trees appeared, and met with much critical disapproval. This response infuriated Hemingway; The Old Man and the Sea, which appeared in 1952, was seen by some readers as an attack on the critical “sharks” themselves. Again Hemingway traveled, and in 1954 narrowly escaped death in an airplane crash, an event which occurred in the same year that he received the Nobel Prize. After a period of illness, Ernest Hemingway met his death as the victim of a “self-inflicted gu...