Hemingway's Perfect Paragraph (A Farewell to Arms)

Hemingway in a Red Cross Ambulance (1918)

A new edition of A Farewell to Arms (1919) has recently been published that contains a bunch of alternate endings and drafts of passages from the novel. Alas, I don't have a copy of it, but I have reason to get one, having just finished it and found it very moving a story. There was much I liked about the novel: the descriptions of the Italian countryside and the mountains, the lean dialogue, and the understated, sometimes corny but unsentimental romance between Lieutenant Frederic, an ambulance driver for the Italian army during WWI, and British nurse Catherine Barkley.

I'd say that the moments that stand out in Hemingway's writing are those that you don't realize at the moment of reading—they're little points in time that you keep thinking about after you've turned to the next page and are still thinking about in the back of your mind. There was one paragraph, though, I had to share—it's a tender moment between Henry and Barkley. It was something I knew I had to keep for myself: a piece of writing to for later reading, for sustaining oneself. 

      That night at the hotel, in our room with the long empty hall outside and our shoes outside the door, a thick carpet on the floor of the room, outside the windows the rain falling and in the room light and pleasant and cheerful, then the light out and it exciting with smooth sheets and the bed comfortable, feeling that we had come home, feeling no longer alone, waking in the night to find the other one there, and not gone away; all other things were unreal. We slept when we were tired and if we woke the other one woke so no one was not alone. Often a man wishes to be alone and a girl wishes to be alone too and if they love each other they are jealous of that in each other, but I can truly say we never felt that. We could feel alone when we were together, alone against the others. It has only happened to me like that once. I have been alone while I Was with many girls and that is the way you can be most lonely. But we were never lonely and never afraid when we were together. I know that the night is not the same as the day: that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started. But with Catherine there was almost no difference in the night except that it was an even better time. If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry. 

The last few sentences are the kind of thing that you might write on a piece of paper and tape up on your wall. They could also be the kind of thing that gets put on a motivational poster with some terrible sepia-toned image in the background, but hopefully this hasn't been done and/or will never be done to such a fine piece of writing:

     If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry. 

Rereading this after having finished the entire novel even lends this a special poignancy.

* * * * *

There's some other noteworthy stuff in A Farewell to Arms: sort of like my run-in with the slang term "lush" in Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift, I discovered where "Zinc Bar" comes from:

Outside it was getting light. I walked down the empty street to the café. There was a light in the window. I went in and stood at the zinc bar and an old man served me a glass of white wine and a brioche.

I had always assumed the NY club was called the Zinc Bar because it's a slick name to have, but after some quick Googling, it seems that zinc bars were pretty popular in Paris and elsewhere in the early 20th c., since bars with zinc surfaces were easy to clean and looked slick themselves. Of course, now the Zinc Bar in New York is home to the best jam session in the city every Tuesday, but it's also got some literary cred in a very slight, oblique way.

There was also a runner-up to Hemingway's perfect paragraph; check out this brief reflection on grand, over-used terms. I've had similar thoughts, as I'm sure many of my super-ironic generation have, but Hemingway puts it better than most any of us could:

     I did not say anything. I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene besides the concrete names of villages, the number of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates. 

Also, although I mentioned that there's plenty of beautiful and good stuff (some Hemingway adjectives right there) in A Farewell to Arms, there are also a few moments that had me laughing. This exchange is priceless, on getting war medals:

          “Because you are gravely wounded. They say if you can prove you did any heroic act you can get the silver. Otherwise it will be the bronze. Tell me exactly what happened. Did you do any heroic act?”

            “No,” I said. “I was blown up while we were eating cheese.”

And finally, a little bit of outdated laughing in a dialogue. LOL and ROFL probably wouldn't have quite the same effect in this context:

      “Is that barber crazy?”

      “No, signorino. He made a mistake. He doesn’t understand very well and he thought I said you were an Austrian officer.”

      “Oh,” I said.

      “Ho ho ho,” the porter laughed. “He was funny. One move from you he said and he would have—“ he drew his forefinger across his throat.

      “Ho ho ho,” he tried to keep from laughing. “When I tell him you were not Austrian. Ho ho ho.”

      “Ho ho ho,” I said bitterly. “How funny if he would cut my throat. Ho ho ho.”

      “No, signorino. No, no. He was so frightened of an Austrian. Ho ho ho.”

      “Ho ho ho,” I said. “Get out of here.”