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Hemingway and Stendhal: The Matrix of A Farewell to Arms

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Robert O. Stephens
Robert O. Stephens*
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina, Greensboro
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Abstract

The degree of Hemingway's frequently confessed debt to Stendhal as master and model is best seen in his adoption of The Charterhouse of Parma as the matrix of A Farewell to Arms. His use of Stendhal's novel is consistent with his esthetic practice of finding imaginative models to extend the meaning of autobiographical experience. He employed the battle and retreat experiences of Fabrizio at Waterloo as the paradigm of Frederic's experience during the Caporetto retreat. Both protagonists play the roles of outsiders in their armies, endure the suspicions of others, leave their retreating columns and seek survival in smaller groups, desert their routed armies, seek refuge in Switzerland, and later attempt to understand through reading and reflection the changes worked in them by their experiences in the debacles. Hemingway also followed Stendhal's lead in depicting the way in which language becomes a casualty of military catastrophe. In his larger development Frederic builds on the example of Fabrizio, changing from a man initially unable to love because he has no religious belief to one who loves and believes passionately and finds his destiny in his identity as a believer.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 88 , Issue 2 , March 1973 , pp. 271 - 280
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1973

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References

1 Lillian Ross, Portrait of Hemingway (New York: Simon, 1961), p. 35.

2 F. J. Hoffman, The Twenties (New York: Free Press, 1965), p. 220; W. M. Frohock, The Novel of Violence in America (Dallas, Texas: Southern Methodist Univ. Press, 1957), p. 188; Philip Young, Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1966), p. 185, all have recognized in general that Hemingway learned from Stendhal to manage perspective and to present the confused violence of war but have not examined the close analogies between the two works. See also Malcolm Cowley's review, New York Herald Tribune Books, 6 Oct. 1929, pp. 1,6, for an early note of this debt.

3 (New York: Scribners, 1935), p. 21.

4 “Monologue to the Maestro,” Esquire, Oct. 1935, p. 174B.

5 “Remembering Shooting-Flying,” Esquire, Feb. 1935, p. 21; “Monologue to the Maestro,” pp. 174A-74B; Ross, p. 18; “The Art of Fiction” (interview by George Plimpton), Paris Review, 17 (Spring 1958); rpt. in Hemingway and His Critics, ed. Carlos Baker (New York: Hill, 1961), p. 27.

6 Green Hills of Africa, p. 71.

7 “Introduction,” Men at War (New York: Crown, 1942), p. xx.

8 A Moveable Feast (New York: Scribners, 1964), pp. 133–34.

9 Leicester Hemingway, My Brother, Ernest Hemingway (New York: World, 1962), pp. 43–44; Carlos Baker, Hemingway: The Writer as Artist (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1963), pp. 98–99; Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (New York: Scribners, 1968), pp. 46–56, 198–207; Young, pp. 88–95; CharlesFenton, The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway (New York: Mentor, 1961), pp. 59–61.

10 Fenton, p. 145.

11 Toronto Daily Star, 19 Oct. 1922, p. 4; 3 Nov. 1922, p. 10; 14 Nov. 1922, p. 7.

12 Green Hills of Africa, pp. 108–09.

13 Hoffman, p. 219. References to A Farewell to Arms are to the Scribner Library ed. (New York: Scribners, 1962) and will be given in the text.

14 Fenton, p. 59; Baker, Life Story, pp. 49–51.

15 The Charterhouse of Parma, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff (New York: Liveright, 1925), i, 73–74. Subsequent references to the novel, unless otherwise indicated, will be to this edition and will be given in the text. I am indebted to Nat Wartels, President of Crown Publishers, Inc., for identifying the edition used for excerpts in Men at War. My assumption is that this is the edition Hemingway knew best, as he chose it for his war anthology and his comments on the language in the passages from Stendhal seem to match the phrasing of this edition. I find no indication that Hemingway read Parma prior to 1925. His remarks to Morley Callaghan on Stendhal in 1923 seem to refer to The Red and the Black rather than to Parma. Baker, Life Story, p. 120.

16 The Writer as Artist, p. 129.

17 Men at War, p. xx.

18 See James Meriwether, “The Dashes in Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms”PBSA, 57 (1964),449–57, for identification of the cryptic omissions.

19 This is “the insulting compound,” Meriwether notes (pp. 451–52), “which other authors or publishers slightly more explicit have abbreviated as ‘c……..r’ or paraphrased ‘vernacular for fellator.‘ ”

20 Margaret R. B. Shaw notes, “His temporary withdrawal from society at the period of Clelia's marriage and his sojourn at the Carthusian monastery at Velleia are among other indications that his mind was tending that way,” though she admits that the evidence is unstructured and scanty, “Introduction,” The Charterhouse of Parma (Baltimore, Md.: Penguin, 1967), p. 12.

21 Shaw, p. 18.

22 Robert Penn Warren, “Introduction,” A Farewell to Arms (New York: Scribners, 1949), p. xiv; Young, p. 93; Ray B. West, The Art of Modern Fiction (New York: Rinehart, 1949), pp. 622–33; M. F. Moloney, “Ernest Hemingway: The Missing Third Dimension,” in Baker, Critics, pp. 180–91; James F. Light, “The Religion of Death in A Farewell to Arms,” in Baker, ed., Ernest Hemingway: CritiquesofFour Major Novels (New York: Scribners, 1962), pp. 37–40; R. B. Hovey, “A Farewell to Arms: Hemingway's Liebestod, ii,” University Review, 33 (Spring 1967), 163–68; and John Edward Hardy, Man in the Modern Novel (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1964), pp. 13336, all argue essentially that Frederic is left at the end of the novel with no basis of belief and no sense of grace. William Glasser, “A Farewell to Arms,” SR, 74 (Spring 1966), 453–69; S. F. Sanderson, Ernest Hemingway (New York: Evergreen, 1961), p. 56; and Earl Rovit, Ernest Hemingway (New York: Twayne, 1963), pp. 98–106, see Frederic's preparation throughout the novel for a turn to religious belief in the manner of the priest.

23 Glasser, p. 469.

24 See Glasser, pp. 461–65, for an analysis of the process of Frederic's developing passion.

25 Pp. 196–97. See also Charles R. Anderson, “Hemingway's Other Style,” MLN, 76 (1961), 434–42.

26 Glasser, pp. 464–65; Norman Friedman, “Criticism and the Novel,” Antioch Review, 18 (1958), 355–56.