Autobiographical elements in A Farewell to Arms

Introduction

Some, literature can be satisfactorily read and discussed taking the author into account. Other literature seems inseparable from the person who created it. To an extraordinary degree Hemingway and what he has written exist in a synergetic relationship, reinforcing and fulfilling each other; he has created a personal legend which serves as an ambience in which we read him.

Autobiographical Touches

The novel A Farewell to Arms autobiographical elements. The love-affair between Fredric and Barkley, the hero’s injury in the battlefield, his despair and frustration, the hero’s separate peace with life are some of the characteristics of Hemingway’s life. Hemingway himself had received the injury caused by the mortar-shell at Fossalta, and he was admitted into the Milan hospital for recuperation in the late summer and autumn of 1918. He fell in love with the nurse in the Milan hospital. Carlos Baker has thrown light on this fact. In A Farewell to Arms Hemingway was dealing imaginatively with his own first adult love affair which had taken place in Milan at the base hospital during his recuperation there in the late summer and autumn of 1918. 

Harold Lock alludes to it in The Way It Was, New York, 1959, stating, erroneously that the girl was English. She was in fact Agnes Von Kurowsky, an American of Polish ancestry working as Red Cross nurse. It was she who voluntarily ended the association by letter after Hemingway’s return to the United States early in 1919. I am indebted for materials documenting the episode to Mr. J. C. Buck. The Portrait of Catherine Barkley appears to have been influenced by Hemingway’s recollection of his first wife, Hadley Richardson. It is not only the love affair which is connected with the life of the author. The frustration, defeation, and despair and disgust with the war were also experienced by Hemingway when he had fallen a victim to it. He wished to drown his miseries in fishing in his native land. He was like a wounded animal and had hallucinations of the war.

There are similarities between the hero-narrator and the creator. Both of them are Americans. Both drive ambulances. Both are wounded in the war. When the bomb fell, “there was a flash as when a blast furnace door is swung open, and a door that started white and when red.”

Hemingway’s Love-Affair

Hemingway’s second experience was a love-affair with an American Red cross nurse in Milan. Her name was Agnes Von Kurowsky. She was experienced, young, beautiful and energetic. Hemingway fell in love with her in the hospital. It was his first adult love-affair. When Hemingway sailed for New York in January 1919, he planned to get a job in a newspaper, save money, and bring back his girl to the United States. But his plans were smashed. After second thoughts Agnes came to the conclusion that it would be wrong to live with peace with a war hero. She was also undecided over the issue whether she should give up her job or not. Her decision came as a heavy blow to Hemingway. He married, but he could not forget Agnes.

Caporetto Retreat

The Caporetto retreat narrated in the novel came of before Hemingway’s joining the Italian army. Hemingway had read accounts of this retreat in the newspapers. During the war working as a correspondent in Star Weekly, he could be a witness to the retreat of the Greek army following the attack by the Turkish forces. This experience of the retreat, had been incorporated in the novel. In the novel In Our Time he described the retreat thus:

Minarets struck up in the rain out of Adrianpole across the mud flats. The carts were jammed for thirty miles along the Karagatch road. Water buffaloes and cattle were hauling carts through the mud. There was no end and no beginning. Just carts loaded with everything they owned. The old men and women, soaked through, walked along keeping the battle vobbing along through them, Greek cavalry herded along the profession. The women and children were in the carts, crouched with mattresses; mirrors, sewing machines, bundles. There was a woman-having a baby with a young girl holding a blanket over her and crying. Scared sick looking at it. It rained all through the evacuation.

Changes in the Novel

In 1928, Hemingway revised the manuscript of A Farewell to Arms for publication. When he was in the final chapters, his second wife, Pauline, lay in hospital with labour pains on June 27, 1928. Her labour pains were terminated by Caesarian section on June 28. The new-born child was healthy. This event forms the climax of the novel. While in the novel the mother, Catherine Barkley dies along with the child in Caesarian section, in real life they survive. It is difficult to give reasons behind this change.

Three Elements

Thus three elements in Hemingway’s life shaped many of his attitudes, and indeed shaped much of his work; The fact that in World War I, he suffered a painful and terrible mortar wound; which made him conscious of the dread possibilities of the loss of manhood; The fact that his father committed suicide; and the fact of his growing old………and the fears created by old age itself. Similar to Fredric Henry in ‘A Farewell’, Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises and Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea. Hemingway was afflicted with the fear of letting go and fear of thinking. The nightmare of chaos, of passively, loss of will, loss of initiative, loss of masculine role—was a terrible nightmare and one to be’ avoided at all costs.