The American Adam.

Questions about what might happen were one to move the American Adam’s garden of Eden from the frontier to Europe are answered in Earnest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. Though the wilderness requires creative re-imagining to be newly represented with the winter, the experiences, lessons, and morality of the myth of the American hero are fundamentally unchanged when shifted from the United States to the Italian theatre of the First World War.

Eden.

Hemingway’s wilderness – his place to escape – is the winter. We understand spring as a time of rebirth and renewal, but in Italy during the First World War the spring brings with it the rain, and the rain brings with it the war. In this topsy-turvy world, the green months are the months of violence, and rain is symbolic of trouble to come. Hemingway’s descriptions of the winter world, in contrast, are reminiscent of Twain’s river – an idyllic, Edenic paradise in which the hero can escape, free at last from the burdens of society.

This is portrayed more than once, the first time near the beginning of the book. As Henry reflects upon his winter leave, he comments on his failure to travel to Abruzzi, in the mountains, where “it was clear and cold and dry” and “the peasants took off their hats and called you Lord,” saying that the night is better than the day, “unless the day was very clean and cold.” Henry’s way is escape – ideally, into winter; but if necessary, into drink. These sorts of ideas carry through the end of the novel, as Henry and Catherine flee into Switzerland and ascend to a mountain cabin and live blissfully alone from the world for the winter, where “at night there was frost so that there was thin ice over the water in the two pitchers on the dresser in the morning.” This is a blissful, innocent life, free of the world’s troubles and judgments. It is Eden for the American Adam and Eve.

Adam.

Just as winter fills the role of Twain’s river, so too does Henry stand in for Huck Finn. Though Henry may be somewhat immature at the start of his journey, he quickly begins to intimately experience the worth of humanity – and find his beliefs about the deep flaws in society and the world wholly vindicated. It is even easier to find the parallels in the protagonists than in the environment, and it is not necessary to go into great detail about the characteristics of the American Adam. What matters most is that Hemingway’s hero, like the quintessential American hero, finds most important not what society says it values (“I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice, and the expression in vain” ) but instead in the integrity of truth as lived by each individual (“the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates” ).

Eve.

And it is in one individual in particular that our hero finds his truth. Even if the American hero cannot be allowed to leave with a partner in the end, that partner is nonetheless instrumental in his life. And it is worth arguing that in Farewell to Arms, the partner is more of an equal than most American heroes are allowed to have. When paired with a British female – the transatlantic “special relationship consummated” – the American male is matched with what is more of a mirror image than it first might seem.

It is easy to reject the relationship between Henry and Catherine as shallow, and many do. However, I would put forward that to do so is intellectually lazy at best and ideologically dishonest at worst. Catherine makes clear at the start of their relationship that she is not interested in playing games (“This is a rotten game we play, isn’t it? … You don’t have to pretend you love me. … Please let’s not lie when we don’t have to.” ) and stands up for herself quite well, leaving that evening after only a kiss. This is not written as the reflections of a man who was merely searching for easy sex. Our hero makes clear that has rarely had a problem finding that in a variety of other places. Instead, it is a woman approaching a man as her equal (or offering herself as his), demanding more than the typical platitudes to which women are supposed to respond.

This is core to the relationship of Catherine and Henry. He occasionally fails to pay her sufficient attention, but that is not because he lacks love for her. He is her equal and no more; and she is his and no less. Catherine may use more terms of endearment than does Henry, but that does not stop him from admitting to Rinaldi that he is in love and stopping him from speaking of their relationship in crude, sexual terms. Henry’s affections for Catherine are further made clear by his decisions – he is free to run away from her at any time, yet he chooses instead to run away from society to find her and escape from the world with her. It is true that Catherine finds herself worrying about baby clothes and decorating the room while Henry reads the paper and thinks about whiskey, but 1917 was not the peak of the women’s liberation movement, and it can be argued that the entire exchange has a certain romance about it anyway. Despite the somewhat traditional gender roles, both male and female in the story appear self-reliant, electing individually to stand alone together. The extent to which this rings false is the fault of society, not our heroes.

Society.

Hemingway does not stray from the American tradition of casting the world at large as the villain. From Catherine’s first love who is “blown to bits” to Henry’s reminiscence of how the world seeks to break people, and “if people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them,” at no point is the world at large portrayed in anything but a negative light. This is portrayed most obviously in the book through the absurdity of the war – an absurdity that is painfully easy to portray when one has the experience of the Italian army during a rout to draw upon. All of this is ultimately rejected by Henry when he makes the decision to take the plunge, diving into the river in a last-ditch attempt to escape the insanity of MPs that would shoot any officer on retreat.

Conclusions.

Despite this attempt, though, Henry ultimately fails to escape. He runs away with Catherine to Eden, but he cannot return. His time in the mountains must end, and as the winter turns to spring, death returns to his life. Henry, like all American heroes, is ultimately left alone. When Catherine is killed during childbirth, both Henry and Catherine each find their cynicism vindicated. She lost her first love to the war. He lost his first love to childbirth. Approaching the story from the viewpoint that all relationships are meant to teach their participants something, it is clear that Catherine has drawn on her own experience to demonstrate to Henry why life must be lived whole-heartedly, without a second wasted. Unlike Twain, Hemingway does not leave us with a deus ex machina to redeem his hero’s partner, and it is here – in death, not in life – that one can no longer deny that Catherine and Henry are ultimately unequal.