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We continue to fail to write well about Hemingway because we believe we understand him better than he understands himself. The truth is that Hemingway is deep and difficult, and the mind that operates in his fiction possesses "great subtlety and enormous powers of selective observation"-a keen perception that Allen Tate registered long ago and that we have yet to absorb. The subject of vast scholarship and criticism, Hemingway nevertheless remains hard to comprehend and describe. Drawn to but frequently distracted by his prodigious personality, we have underestimated the power and complexity of his thinking.
What Hemingway accomplishes in his fiction is evocative and highly suggestive, a matter of complicated feeling and insight, and the effects that he achieves are difficult to articulate. The challenge that Hemingway poses is especially formidable in the case of A Farewell to Arms (1929). It is a novel of love and war that on one level is straightforward and clear-a tragic story in a wartime setting of the passionate but doomed relationship between the ambulance driver Frederic Henry and the nurse Catherine Barkley, who cares for him in a Milan hospital after he is wounded. The plot is connected to and periodically develops Hemingway's own experiences in the Great War, including his near-death in a mortar attack in July 1918 and his relationship with Agnes von Kurowsky, an American nurse seven years older than Hemingway, whom he hoped and expected he would marry but who ended their relationship by letter in March 1919. But Frederic Henry is not Hemingway: the affinities between their experiences are intended by Hemingway to dramatize how different they are, how separate Frederic is from his creator.
A Farewell to Arms is narrated in the first person. It is not Hemingway's voice that we hear; it is Frederic Henry's, and he tells a story that he already has lived through. He knows the ending, and his knowledge of it informs every moment of his story. When he and Catherine are together as he recovers from his wound, he says "We had a lovely time that summer. When I could go out we rode in a carriage in the park. I remember the carriage, the horse going slowly, and up ahead the back of the driver...