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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
Muted allusions to second sight and revenants are crucial to the method and meaning of A Farewell to Arms. Like Joyce, Pound, and Eliot, Hemingway draws on European sources—particularly ballads—for his folkloristic motifs; like them, he uses these motifs to invest chaotic contemporary scenes with order and universal significance. For him to adapt the “mythical method” of these writers, however, is a formidable problem, since his vernacular rhetoric cannot accommodate their open, bookish allusions. Consequently, his references to prophetic gifts and returns from the dead, while undeniably present, are not prominent enough to have attracted the critical attention they deserve. For they point and contribute to an unresolved dialectic, between skeptical male and “croyante” female, that is characteristic not only of the Catherine-Frederic relationship but, Hemingway implies, of all love relationships between men and women.
1 Our discussion of the vernacular tradition in American literature is indebted to Henry Nash Smith, Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1962), pp. 1–21. Hemingway's place in that tradition is discussed in Harry Levin, Contexts of Criticism (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1957), pp. 140–67.
2 Michael S. Reynolds, Hemingway's First War: The Making of A Farewell to Arms (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1976), p. 283. Our essay draws background information about Hemingway's reading not merely from this definitive study of the novel but also from Reynolds' “Hemingway's Reading (1913–40),” a work in progress that the author generously shared with us by letter (5 Sept. 1977).
3 See Charles R. Anderson, “Hemingway's Other Style,” Modern Language Notes, 76 (1961), 434–42; Richard P. Adams, “Sunrise out of The Waste Land,” Tulane Studies in English, 9 (1959), 119–31; Edmund Wilson, The Wound and the Bow, rev. ed. (London: Allen, 1952), p. 198. Reynolds discusses skeptically the Romeo comparison and cites the relevant critics (pp. 262–63).
4 Baker, Hemingway: The Writer as Artist, 3rd ed. (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1963), p. 90.
5 A Farewell to Arms was first published in late 1929; there is no definitive edition. Our quotations are from the Modern Standard Authors edition, made important by Robert Penn Warren's Introduction (New York: Scribners, 1949).
6 For recently published evidence of Hemingway's interest in androgynous relationships and his fetishistic preoccupation with hair styles, see Aaron Latham's “A Farewell to Machismo,” New York Times Magazine, 16 Oct. 1977, pp. 52–55, 80, 82, 90, 92, 94, 96–99. Latham's interpretations of Hemingway's published and unpublished works are, however, rather simplistically biographical, and they do not take the mediating influence of his reading seriously into account.
7 See Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (New York: Scribners, 1969), pp. 199 and 630. Hemingway used the first edition of Arthur Quiller-Couch, ed., The Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250–1900 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1900), which is the source of our own citations.
8 “To His Coy Mistress,” referred to on p. 161 (Quiller-Couch, Verse, pp. 387–88); “Western Wind,” referred to on p. 204 (Quiller-Couch, Verse, p. 53). Charles Anderson, in “Hemingway's Other Style” (p. 440), has pointed out a further allusion to Tennyson's “Sweet and Low,” but see also the refrain in Quiller-Couch (Verse, pp. 5–7).
9 Cited here, for obvious reasons, from QuillerCouch's Verse (pp. 415–20), but it should be pointed out that this is a dubious version. Quiller-Couch's editorial principles for ballads (Oxford Book of Ballads [Oxford: Clarendon, 19101, pp. ix-xii) involved extensive rewriting and reduction of the versions to a single intuitively determined “idea” of the original. Though he does not cite sources, Quiller-Couch's version of “Clerk Saunders” (in both anthologies) must be drawn from Scott; Scott himself cobbled up his version from two different texts in the manuscripts of David Herd, an eighteenth-century collector and editor of Scots songs, and from his own additions, omissions, changes, and three stray traditional stanzas “recovered” from somewhere else (Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, ed. T. F. Henderson [Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1902], iii, 220–31 ). In The English and Scottish Popular Ballads ([Boston: Houghton, 1882–98], II, 156–67; iv, 468–69), Francis J. Child printed the two texts from Herd (69 A, B) but considered the revenant ending of A to belong to “Sweet William's Ghost” (as does Henderson) and printed it as 77 ? and Scott's “recovered” stanzas as 77 G. Because of Child's decisions, “Clerk Saunders” is not generally considered a revenant ballad today, and yet the Scott-Quiller-Couch text is aesthetically pleasing and has at least some authority in the first of Herd's versions (Child's 69 A plus 77 B) and in Child's 69 G.
10 See esp. Child, v, 499, (Index, s.v. “Troth”) and for discussion L. C. Wimberly, Folklore in the English and Scottish Ballads (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1928), pp. 255–60, 343–45, and the references there.
11 See esp. Child, v, 476 (Index, s.v. “The Dead”) and L. C. Wimberly, Death and Burial Lore in the English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Univ. of Nebraska Studies in Lang., Lit., and Crit., No. 8 (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1927), pp. 77–79, and Wimberly, Folklore, pp. 264–68, 282–91.
12 Reynolds' letter adds that, while it cannot be proved that Hemingway owned and read QuillerCouch's books before writing the novel, “he certainly had read them by the time he finally got the ending.” Other evidence of his acquaintance with ballads goes back as far as Oak Park High School and will appear in Reynolds' book on Hemingway's reading.
13 Quiller-Couch, Ballads, pp. 140–41 (Child's 78 A).
14 A good example is Child's 25 ? 8 (i, 506); further references are cited in Child's Index (v, 470). Wimberly discusses the “austerities” as signs of grief (Death, pp. 103–05). The fact that in one version of “Clerk Saunders” the girl dreams of “cutting [her] yellow hair” (Child's 69 D 11 [n, 162]) is without significance here, and Quiller-Couch's “Clerk Saunders” lacks the austerity topos, though other versions of that ballad have the topos in classical form (Child's 69 A 20–22, D 13–15, ? 17–20, G 23–25).
15 Discussed in Wimberly (Death, pp. 113–14; Folklore, pp. 231–32).
16 Winters, Maule's Curse (Norfolk: New Directions, 1938), pp. 18–19. Winters points out that Hawthorne, in openly suggesting the possibility that various occurrences are supernatural, offers this interpretation “whimsically and apologetically, professing to let you take it or leave it.”
17 Young, Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1966), p. 92. Did the ironic inversion of the “natural” association of rain and life originate in the communal war experience of older contemporaries like Edward Thomas (“Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon”)? Whatever its source, such an inversion loses its apparently arbitrary quality in a novel where “life” cycles so irresistibly into “death” (see, e.g., p. 338).
18 For example, a good general treatment that Hemingway could have known begins: “Though we hear most of the ‘second sight’ among the Celts of the Scottish Highlands (it is much less familiar to the Celts of Ireland), this species of involuntary prophetic vision, whether direct or symbolical, is peculiar to no people …” (Andrew Lang, “Second Sight,” Encyclopœdia Britannica, 1911 éd., p. 570). Within the Englishspeaking world the special associations with Scotland, which go back at least to the fourteenth century, formed the subject of a good deal of learned interest as early as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
19 Hemingway's use of “crazy” in the novel generally imitates the loose usage of a modish word, though the word is used of the barman of Stresa in connection with a “prediction” (p. 275); but the barman has his information from eavesdropping (not from second sight) and therefore is believable, not “crazy.” The only important collection of folklore from the general area of Hemingway's youthful haunts includes some tales of second sight (Richard Dorson, Bloodstoppers and Bearwalkers: Folk Traditions of the Upper Peninsula [Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1952], pp. 139–43), one of them, by chance, containing an informant's description of a seer as popularly regarded as “crazy” (p. 142).
20 For Whom the Bell Tolls (New York: Scribners, 1940), p. 27.
21 “As if Hemingway were looking back for contrast to the Circean figure of his first novel, Rinaldi refers to Catherine as ‘your lovely cool … English goddess.‘ But she is a woman, not a goddess” (Baker, Writer, p. 112).
22 Sveinn Bergsveinsson, “Sagaen og den haardkogte roman,” Edda, 42 (1942), 56–62.
23 T. S. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” The Dial, Nov. 1923; rpt. in James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism, ed. Seon Givens (New York: Vanguard, 1948), pp. 201–02.
24 Tiresias appears prominently in Cantos i and XLVII; The Waste Land m (“The Fire Sermon”); and Ulysses, the Hades episode.
25 The Last Post (New York: Literary Guild, 1928), pp. vii, 171–72, and 264–70.
26 The Great Gatsby (New York: Scribners, 1925), p. 145.