A Moveable Feast
Page 21
For Ernest Hemingway, giving a title to a book always came at the end after the writing was finished. He typically wrote out lists of possibilities, and he liked to say that the Bible was a great source for titles. The some forty titles that he considered for A Farewell to Arms are preserved in the Hemingway Collection and are included in the third appendix to this volume. It has been observed that many of them come from works in The Oxford Book of English Verse. The title that he settled on was taken from a sixteenth-century poem by George Peele of the same title about a knight's transition from a warrior to a husband in peacetime. For young readers, a story about World War I might seem as antiquated as a story about a knight in the sixteenth century, but part of the wonder of reading A Farewell to Arms is being transported back to that time and place, and sharing in the experience of true love that knew both joy and utter despair.
Sean Hemingway
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