Man, Woman, War

This story of Lieutenant Fredric Henry, U. S. ambulance officer on the Italian Front, of his campaigns and leaves of absence, of the swarming Caparetto retreat, of the Lieutenant's affair with Catharine Barkley, an English nurse who died in childbirth when he had deserted the wars and taken her to Switzerland, is infused with the chaotic sweep of armies and tenderly quiescent love. In its sustained, inexorable movement, its throbbing preoccupation with flesh and blood and nerves rather than the fanciful fabrics of intellect, it fulfills the prophecies that his most excited admirers have made about Ernest Hemingway. His mannered style, consciously bald, may still be annoying to some, but its pulsing innuendo cannot be denied:

"Outside the post a great many of us lay on the ground in the dark. They carried wounded in and brought them out. I could see the light come out from the dressing station when the curtain opened and they brought someone in or out. The dead were off to one side. The doctors were working with their sleeves up to their shoulders and were red as butchers. There were not enough stretchers. Some of the wounded were noisy but most were quiet. The wind blew the leaves in the bower over the door of the dressing station and the night was getting cold. Stretcher bearers came in all the time, put their stretchers down, unloaded them and went away. As soon as I got to the dressing station Manera brought a medical sergeant out and he put bandages on both my legs. He said there was so much dirt blown into the wound that there had not been much hemorrhage."

In its depiction of War, the novel bears comparison with its best predecessors. But it is in the hero's perhaps unethical quitting of the battle line to be with the woman whom he has gotten with child that it achieves its greatest significance. Love is more maligned in literature than any other emotion, by romantic distortion on the one hand, by carnal diminution on the other. But Author Hemingway knows it at its best to be a blend of desire, serenity, and wordless sympathy. His man and woman stand incoherently together against a shattered, dissolving world. They express their feelings by such superficially trivial things as a joke, a gesture in the night, an endearment as trite as "darling." And as they make their escape from Italy in a rowboat, survey the Alps from their hillside lodgings, move on to Lausanne where there are hospitals, gaze at each other in torment by the deathbed of Catharine, their tiny shapes on the vast landscape are expressive of the pity, beauty and doom of mankind.

The Significance
The boredom and inertia so frequent in Author Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (TIME, Nov. 1, 1926) never occur in A Farewell to Arms . He has gone back to the cause of that weariness--the desolating conflict of nations. In that time bravery and rapture were gloriously commonplace, scarcely aware of the exhaustion which was to follow.

The Author
Ernest Hemingway's father, a doctor of Oak Park, Ill., last year committed suicide while in ill health. He saw little of his son, for the novelist, following athletic U. S. schooldays, Wardays on the Italian front during which be was severely wounded, has lived in France. Burly, laconic as his prose, he is fond of bullfighting, fishing, winter sports. Once he entered the bull ring himself, emerged with several ribs broken. Besides his two novels he has written two books of short stories ( In Our Time , Men Without Women ), a satiric novelette ( The Torrents of Spring ). He is by no means "litr'ry" in talk or thought, but his writer friends include Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, Thornton Niven Wilder.