![]() ![]() Good as they are, none can match the spare grandeur of the one he actually chose. This edition provides myriad alternate endings Hemingway came up with. Auden encapsulated in his great poem “Musee des Beaux Arts” a decade later: That while even the most earth-shattering events take place, everyday life goes on.Īnd the novel’s ending, as heart-rending to read today as the first time I encountered it a half century ago, revolves around an everyday tragedy, nothing to do with war or its consequences. Graves may have captured the bitter cup of war and Remarque the indelible image, but Hemingway had the greater wisdom. In the end, it’s the writing, that spare prose packed with layered emotions, that makes it a true classic. Unlike Robert Graves’ “Goodbye to All That” and Erich Maria Remarque’s “All Quiet on the Western Front,” which both appeared the same year, it soars to another level way beyond pacifism. Which is why “A Farewell to Arms” has stood the test of time. But there is something so authentic, so profoundly true about the story he wrote that none of this matters. Thanks to assiduous biographers, we all know that Hemingway didn’t actually serve as a soldier in World War I, that he didn’t marry the American nurse Agnes von Kurowsky on whom he based the tragic English heroine Catherine, that their fates were very different. ![]()
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