20. Matthew Broccoli, ed., The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1989), 631-48.
21. Ernest Hemingway, "Living on $1,000 a Year in Paris," Toronto Star Weekly, February 4, 1922, in William White, ed., Dateline Toronto: The Complete Toronto Star Dispatches, 1920-1924 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1985), 88-89.
Fig. 1. A handwritten manuscript page from chapter 1, "A Good Cafe on the Place St.-Michel." In two places Hemingway has crossed out "you" and replaced it with "I" and then returned to "you." Ernest Hemingway Collection, Manuscripts, A Moveable Feast, Item 128, p. 3, at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston, MA.
Figs. 2-3. Two consecutive handwritten manuscript pages from chapter 2, "Miss Stein Instructs." Ernest Hemingway Collection, Manuscripts, A Moveable Feast, Item 131, pp. 3-4, at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston, MA.
Fig. 4. A handwritten manuscript page from chapter 13, "The Man Who Was Marked for Death." Ernest Hemingway Collection, Manuscripts, A Moveable Feast, Item 165, p. 1, at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston, MA.
Fig. 5. A handwritten manuscript page of an early draft of "The Pilot Fish and the Rich." Ernest Hemingway Collection, Manuscripts, A Moveable Feast, Item 123, p. 15, at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston, MA.
Fig. 6. An early typed draft of the foreword to chapter 17, "Scott Fitzgerald" with handwritten emendations by Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway Collection, Manuscripts, A Moveable Feast, Item 172, at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston, MA.
Fig. 7. Hemingway's final draft of the foreword to chapter 17, "Scott Fitzgerald." The handwritten annotation is by Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway Collection, Manuscripts, A Moveable Feast, Item 188, at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston, MA.
Fig. 8. The final handwritten manuscript page of "Nada y Pues Nada " dated April 3 (1961). At the bottom is inscribed by Mary Hemingway: "The part about Evan Shipman, now dead, happened in Cuba in 1956 or 1957. M.H." Ernest Hemingway Collection, Manuscripts, A Moveable Feast, Item 124a, p. 8, at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston, MA.
1. Ernest Hemingway as a young man
2. Hadley and Ernest Hemingway
3. Gertrude Stein in her Paris apartment, 27 rue de Fleurus
4. Sylvia Beach and Ernest Hemingway in front of her bookshop, Shakespeare and Company
5. Interior of the bookshop showing James Joyce, with Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier
6. In Ezra Pound's studio: Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce; standing John Quinn
7. Ernest Hemingway and Bumby
8. Zelda, Scott Fitzgerald and Scotty
9. Ernest Hemingway in the late 1920s
*The Torrents of Spring
*The following fragment was crossed out: "We had been armoured together by two things. The first was the loss of everything I had written over a period of four years except for two stories and a few poems. I was working at the Lausanne conference for the Toronto Star and two news services the International and Universal. Before Christmas I had arranged for someone to fill in for me for the news-services and had written Hadley to come down so we could go skiing together over the holidays. It had been an interesting conference and I had been working very hard running a twenty four hour service for the two agencies under two different by-lines, my own and an imaginary character named John Hadley who was supposed to be a middle aged and un-impeachable authority on European politics. My last dispatch would be filed sometime before three o'clock in the morning and I would leave a wire opener for the morning with the concierge at the desk when I went up to bed.
The morning Hadley's train was to get in I went down to go to the station to meet her and the concierge gave me a cable. She was coming on a later train."
*The following fragment was removed here: "When we lived in Austria in the winter we would cut each other's hair and let it grow to the same length. One was dark and the other dark red gold and in the dark in the night one would wake the other swinging the heavy dark or the heavy silken red gold across the others lips in the cold dark in the warmth of the bed. You could see your breath if there was moonlight."
Read on for Sean Hemingway's Introduction to Ernest Hemingway's
A Farewell to Arms: The Hemingway Library Edition
Also available from Scribner
Excerpt from A Farewell to Arms: The Hemingway Library Edition Introduction copyright (c)2012 by Sean Hemingway
Introduction
A Farewell to Arms is one of the great books of the twentieth century. Ernest Hemingway's ability to write short stories in a fresh, new, direct prose style gained the attention of the literary world in the 1920s. His first novel, The Sun Also Rises, about the generation of disillusioned ex-patriots living in Paris after World War I, was an immediate success, but it was with the publication of A Farewell to Arms in 1929 that he cemented his reputation as one of the great writers of his time. For many readers it is his finest novel.
A Farewell to Arms offers readers today an extraordinary glimpse of World War I--the experience of war and of love during war in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Hemingway's writing is clear and accessible, but generations of scholars attest to the novel's many complexities. I remember first reading A Farewell to Arms when I was in college. My experience then was quite different from reading it today, twenty-five years later, though no less enjoyable. Hemingway's novel repays close reading. The enormity of its significance slowly reveals itself when read again and again.
While preparing this new edition with Patrick Hemingway in Montana last November, he remarked to me how carefully the novel was constructed and on the patterns that occur within it. As we were talking we looked out the window of his home on the Missouri River, and Patrick commented that his father's writing could be compared with nature--a starkly beautiful and complex world that is richly patterned. At that moment two young whitetail bucks ambled up to a willow tree not more than fifteen feet away--a bucolic scene. Patrick moved closer to the window and suggested we watch to see what the two bucks did next. He explained that the annual whitetail rut was just beginning--a time when young males like the two before us typically sparred, instinctual behavior that was a kind of training for when they would compete for a mate. No sooner had he finished his explanation when the two deer squared off and began locking their antlers in playful combat. A few minutes later three young does arrived to watch. Patrick later told me he had never observed this ritual before "in the flesh."
In A Farewell to Arms, like in the world of nature, much of significance lies beneath the surface, and yet it is all there if you know what to look for. My grandfather said that he always tried to write on the principle of the iceberg. For the part that shows there are seven-eighths more underwater. A particularly important example of Hemingway's iceberg principle in A Farewell to Arms, one which civilian readers may not immediately recognize, concerns the pistol that Lieutenant Frederic Henry carries. The primary function of an officer's pistol is to ensure that the enlisted soldiers under his command perform their duties as instructed. General George S. Patton Jr., commander of a vast army during the Allied invasion of Europe in World War II, always carried two pistols--a Smith & Wesson .357 and a Colt .45 model 1873 with matching ivory handles. When Lieutenant Henry is wounded and loses his pistol, he goes out of his way to purchase another before returning to the front. In the course of the Italian retreat from Caporetto, he uses this pistol to stop two men from abandoning their duties. Ironically, Frederic Henry is later nearly shot for being taken as a deserter, which he then becomes in order to save his life. There are many resonances to Hemingway's novel, some of which read like ancient Greek tragedy. In Euripides's Medea, the heroine defiantly cries that she would rather go to war three times than go through the pain of childbirth once. In A Farewell to Arms Hemingway juxtaposes the experiences of war and childbirth with tragic consequences
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There have been many introductions to A Farewell to Arms. The most important one was written by Hemingway in 1948 to accompany an illustrated edition published that year by Scribner's. The author's 1948 introduction is published in its entirety in the present edition. The first introduction, however, was written by Ford Maddox Ford, Hemingway's former employer at the Transatlantic Review, in 1932 for the Modern Library Edition. Despite Hemingway's nearly pathological dislike for Ford made explicit in A Moveable Feast, Ford heaps praise on the novel, describing his excitement as he began reading the first sentence. What amazed Ford was the power of the writing:
Hemingway's words strike you, each one, as if they were pebbles fetched fresh from a brook. They live and shine, each in its place. So one of his pages has the effect of a brook-bottom into which you look down through the flowing water. The words form a tessellation, each in order beside the other. It is a very great quality.
As Ford observed, the novel is a masterpiece of literary crafts- . manship. It achieves what only great art can do--it brings the reader into the experience. Ernest Hemingway aimed to write so well that the story almost becomes a remembered experience for the reader. A study of the manuscripts makes it clear that the author worked incredibly hard at his craft. This new Hemingway Library Edition enables the reader to dig deeper into the author's creative process, to understand how Hemingway achieved his art with the inclusion of early drafts and the lists of titles that Hemingway considered for his novel.
In his 1948 introduction, Hemingway explains how he wrote the book in many different places over the course of two years and that he paced himself differently from when he was writing The Sun Also Rises. Each day he reread the book from the beginning to the point where he went on writing, and each day he stopped when he still knew what would happen next. He also typically rewrote as he went along. The more than six-hundred-and-fifty-page original handwritten manuscript is remarkably clean, without many revisions. Certain key passages, however, such as the opening lines of the novel (Figure 1) or when Frederic Henry is wounded (Figures 2-3), were revised extensively. Other passages, the most significant of which are included in the first appendix of this edition, were judiciously cut by Hemingway. His revisions were mostly a reductive process. As he once wryly observed, half of what he wrote was what he left out.
Many readers, even people who had been at the retreat from Caporetto, assumed that Hemingway based his account on his own experience there since his description is so realistic. In fact, Hemingway did not come to Italy until long after the retreat in June 1918. Furthermore, he had never visited that particular part of Italy. He later wrote:
In Italy when I was at the war there, for one thing that I had seen or that had happened to me, I knew many hundreds of things that had happened to other people who had been in the war in all of its phases. My own small experiences gave me a touchstone by which I could tell whether stories were true or false and being wounded was a password.
It is certainly true that some of the experiences related in the novel were drawn in part from Hemingway's own experiences. Hemingway was wounded while he was an ambulance driver at the Italian front in 1918. He met and fell in love with an American nurse named Agnes von Kurowsky at the hospital in Milan. The earliest extant draft of the book, included here in the first appendix, begins with a version of chapters 13 and 14 suggesting that Hemingway originally may have thought to begin the novel with the scene when he arrives at the hospital in Milan. In the early draft, the protagonist's name is Emmett Hancock (E.H.) and Catherine Barkley is not yet present. Originally, he began with a scene that draws heavily from his own experience. When I was growing up, my parents always told me that my grandfather said write about what you know.
During the time Hemingway was writing the book, his second wife, Pauline, my grandmother, had a difficult pregnancy and delivery. In fact, my uncle Patrick's birth inspired the writing of the final chapter, although of course, the outcome of his birth was different from that of the baby in the novel. The author's own experiences were only partial inspiration for the novel. Hemingway once wrote:
A writer's job is to tell the truth. His standard of fidelity to the truth should be so high that his invention, out of his experience, should produce a truer account than anything factual can be. For facts can be observed badly; but when a good writer is creating something, he has time and scope to make an absolute truth.
Michael Reynolds has shown that Hemingway did extensive research to make his accounts of the war in A Farewell to Arms historically accurate by including a range of precise topographical and meteorological descriptions. He also looked to literature for inspiration. To point out just one example, the passage where Frederic Henry jumps into the river was inspired in part by a similar scene in Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," as Linda Wagner-Martin has astutely observed. Hemingway was happier than he had ever been when he was writing A Farewell to Arms. In his own words, he was "living in the book and making up what happened in it every day. Making the country and the people and the things that happened." Having just completed my own first novel, I understand something of that elation. There is no more satisfying feeling in the world than being able to create a story, living in it as you write it, and rereading it to see that you got it right.
Nowhere, however, is Hemingway's creative process more evident than in the ending of A Farewell to Arms. In an interview for the Paris Review in 1958 Hemingway told George Plimpton that he rewrote the ending thirty-nine times to get the words right. The numerous manuscript drafts preserved at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston more or less support Hemingway's statement. When the Hemingway Room opened in 1979, it made available to the public nearly all of my grandfather's extant manuscripts as part of the National Archives. Since then, a favorite exercise of high school groups visiting the collection has been to see the many draft endings that Hemingway wrote for A Farewell to Arms. With the present volume, readers can have a similarly exhilarating experience since all of the alternative endings are published here for the first time.
Depending on your definition of ending, since some of the drafts are just fragments, there are as many as forty-seven different attempts at the ending. The original manuscript draft endings were not preserved in any meaningful order, but here they are organized by theme and in a general progression toward the final ending arrived at by the author. Hemingway considered many different possible endings, which have been grouped under nine headings in the second appendix. There is an existential ending titled here "The Nada Ending," after the Spanish word for nothing (Figure 5). It can be summed up in the statement: "That is all there is to the story. Catherine died and you will die and I will die and that is all I can promise you." There are also a few halfhearted fragments that look to God and religion for a meaningful ending and these are grouped under the heading "The Religious Ending." Hemingway also considered an ending in which the baby lives (Figure 6), but eventually abandoned this idea. He felt that such an ending really ought to be the beginning of a story, since "birth," in his words, "is the only beginning."
In "The Funeral Ending," by contrast, Hemingway writes about the dreary realities of dealing with a person's physical remains after death, but in writing this he sees that it is not what matters. "The Morning-After Ending" focuses on Frederic Henry's waking the next morning still in a state of shock, and then realizing that Catherine and the baby are dead. The drafts included in the appendix are fascinating documents that show how Hemingway developed this scene through a process of continuous revision. This poignant passage and the dismissal of the funeral ending are incorporated into "The Original Basis for the Scribner's Magazine Ending," whose final version was the first published ending that Hem.ngway wrote for the book (Figure 7). The decision to serialize the novel had been made long before Hemingway finished writing it. As he continued to work at achieving the right ending, he thought that having a different version in the magazine would increase interest in the book.
Hemingway sent a copy of the manuscript with the Scribner's Magazine ending to F. Scott Fitzgerald for his comments. He had looked to Fitzgerald for advice when he was writing The Sun Also Rises, but with A Farewell to Arms he did not want to consult his friend and early mentor until the book was nearly complete. Fitzgerald replied with numerous pages of handwritten comments, now preserved in the Hemingway Collection at the John E Kennedy Library. He praised the novel but, at the same time, offered serious criticism, even fearing that their friendship might not survive his comments. Fitzgerald suggested many cuts. In particular, he believed Catherine to be too glib in comparison to Frederic. Most notably, he suggested a gentle ending for the book using the passage (Figure 4), "the world breaks everyone . . . ," which he considered to be one of the finest ever written in the English language. Hemingway clearly took Fitzgerald's suggestions seriously and attempted an ending based on this passage, which is here called "The Fitzgerald Ending." However, he decided against it, trusting his own instincts instead. At the end of Fitzgerald's notes, where he comments what a fine book he thinks it is, Hemingway scribbled: "Kiss my ass. EH."
Numerous drafts of "The Ending" document how hard Hemingway worked at getting the words just right (Figure 8). Taken together with the many other versions, the last page of A Farewell to Arms is perhaps the finest example of his iceberg principle. He reduces the story to its essence but maintains all of the emotional effect that is spelled out in the many different previous versions. The reader feels Frederic Henry's pain and utter sense of loss.
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