The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Ernest Hemingway · a novel in five books and forty-one chapters · Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1929 · scored on Hemingway’s English, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
War novel and love story built on refusal; a retrospective first-person account in which the flatness of the telling is the grief
Mythos
The rain from the first chapter to the last word; the plain as war and the mountains as the clean country; the river as a baptism; a garden in the mountains and the expulsion from it into a hospital
Phase
The war years on the Isonzo front, a summer in Milan, the Caporetto retreat of October 1917, the flight into Switzerland, and a winter ending in the spring of 1918 at Lausanne
Presentation
Fiction; five books and forty-one chapters, told throughout in the first person by Frederic Henry, from after the end
Register
The exact noun and the joined clause; the declarative sentence as an ethic; Italian talk carried in English cadence without dialect spelling; the lovers’ private idiom
Scale
One army in a lost season, one man and one woman, and at the end one room
Governing Proposition
Frederic Henry, an American lieutenant in the Italian ambulance service, is wounded on the Isonzo front, falls in love with Catherine Barkley through a summer in a Milan hospital, goes back to the war, deserts in the rout of Caporetto, rows with her up Lake Maggiore into Switzerland, and loses her and their son in childbirth at Lausanne. The wager of the novel is that a narrator who refuses the abstract words of the public cause can make that refusal his whole form, and that a love story given a separate peace can show the separate peace to be no exit: the world that breaks every one does it by the body as surely as by the war.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains.” The first chapter is about two pages, a single movement of a season and a year in which nobody is named and the narrator speaks only as “we”. Troops march past on the road, the dust rises, the leaves fall, and then the rain comes. The chapter closes on cholera, and on a figure given as a mercy: “only seven thousand died of it in the army.” The arithmetic is its own terror, and the book has set its measure in a page of “and”.
The narrator is Frederic Henry, an American lieutenant in the Italian ambulance service on the Isonzo front, and he tells the whole novel in the first person from after its end. The first book is the front at Gorizia and Plava: Rinaldi’s banter, the priest’s quiet and his talk of the Abruzzi. At Plava a trench-mortar shell falls on the ambulance post, and Passini dies with his legs gone. Frederic is wounded, and the five strands of the army’s “we” draw together into one man.
Charles Scribner’s Sons published the novel in New York in 1929, after its serial run in Scribner’s Magazine from May to October of the same year. The title is taken from George Peele’s poem. The unit is the novel as published, five books and forty-one chapters, with the ending Hemingway chose; he told the Paris Review in 1958 that he rewrote the last page thirty-nine times, and the Hemingway Library Edition of 2012 prints the alternative endings from the manuscripts. Those are context, not part of the work.
Movement II
The second book is Milan: the hospital, the summer, and the love of Frederic and Catherine Barkley. It is the slackest stretch of the novel. The horse races at San Siro with the fixed horses and the Meyerses, the café talk with Ettore Moretti and the American singers, the rounds of drinks, and the lovers’ talk in the hospital bed, “darling” and “lovely” said until the words empty out: these repeat a state rather than move it, and about a tenth of the book says one thing several times.
It is long, not idle. The Milan summer is the cause of the pregnancy and the measure of the loss, and the lovers’ private idiom, repetitive and childish, is the form of a world shrunk to two. The wound is the price of the idyll. Catherine says she is afraid of the rain, because sometimes she sees herself dead in it; the symbol is announced by a character, and the book will keep the promise she makes for it.
The charge that holds is Catherine herself. She is disclosed less than she is required, and the quarrel over whether she is a person or a projection is the oldest in the criticism of Hemingway and still live. The novel’s women and its lovers’ idiom are the part of it most fixed to its moment, and many in the academy read the book against its handling of gender. The book does not settle the question; it makes the reader carry it to the last chapter.
Movement III
Back at Gorizia, in chapter 27, Frederic sets down what the war has done to words. “I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain.” And then: “Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages.” The passage is quoted in nearly every account of the war’s literature, and it is the novel’s method stated once. The declarative sentence is that ethic made into syntax, and the book is built of the concrete names.
Then the rout of Caporetto, in October 1917. The column stalls in the rain. Aymo is shot by Italian rearguards; a sergeant is shot with Frederic’s own pistol; Bonello leaves. Logistics, mud, fear and murder are told in one level voice, and the narrator does not say how far he answers for the deaths he passes on the road. How reliable he is about his own part in them is a question the book leaves open.
On the Tagliamento bridge the battle police take officers out of the retreat, question them by flashlight and shoot them. Frederic goes into the river. “Anger was washed away in the river along with any obligation.” The book names the baptism for what it is, and he comes out of the water reborn as a deserter. On a flatcar he makes his separate peace, and the patriotic register of the war romance has been refused in every term.
Movement IV
The fourth book is flight. Frederic and Catherine are together again, in Milan and then at Stresa, and in chapter 34 he says what the book has learned: “The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills.” And, reaching for a generality the method elsewhere forbids: “If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them.” The second disclosure is here partly asserted in a reverie rather than shown, and the last book will have to show it.
At Stresa there is billiards with Count Greffi, lovely and dispensable, in a softer register than the rest. Then the night row up Lake Maggiore into Switzerland, the lovers alone on the water, one of the book’s cold heights. The plain was the war; the mountains are the clean country the priest’s Abruzzi promised, and Switzerland grants it.
The fourth book achieves the escape. That is its work in the shape of the whole: war, love, rout, flight and death, five books each required, and the last undoing what this one achieves. Without the third the separate peace is never earned; without the fifth the love story is a romance with a happy exit, the very form the book was written to refuse.
Movement V
The fifth book is the winter above Montreux. It is long by design, an idyll before the end, a garden in the mountains, and its quiet is the thing the last chapters take away. Then Lausanne in the spring of 1918, the hospital, and the rain. The son is born dead. Catherine haemorrhages. The cholera of the first chapter and the haemorrhage of the last are the same “they”: the world breaks every one, by the plain’s war or by the body, and the separate peace cannot hold.
In the last chapter Frederic tells of ants on a burning log and glosses them as his own parable. Then: “You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn.” He never says what he feels about Catherine’s death. The form is a man refusing the abstract words the book has shown to be obscene, and the flatness of the telling is the grief.
“After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.” The book that opened on a collective “we” on the road ends on one “I” walking alone, the separate peace rendered as a narrowing of grammatical person. The ending was rewritten many times and the alternatives are now printed; ninety-seven years of readers have gone back to it, to Catherine, to the narrator’s evasions, to the “they” who kill, and the omitted feeling grows heavier once the end is known.
Act III · The Twelve
The spine is tight and the five books are each required: war, love, rout, flight and death, and the last undoes the escape the fourth achieved. Remove the third book and the separate peace is never earned; remove the fifth and the love story is a romance with a happy exit. The subtractive test bites in the second book. The Milan summer runs long: the horse races at San Siro with the fixed horses and the Meyerses, the café talk with Ettore Moretti and the American singers, the rounds of drinks and endearments in the hospital bed, which repeat a state rather than move it. The billiards at Stresa with Count Greffi could go. The Swiss winter is long by design, and passes the test better than Milan, because its quiet is what the last chapters take away. What holds the axis is about a tenth of the second book that says one thing several times.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Two disclosures can be stated, and both hold. The first is that the language of public causes became obscene beside the facts of the war: “I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain” (chapter 27), and “Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages.” The book does not only state this; its whole prose is built of the concrete names. The second, and deeper, is that the war’s logic is the world’s: “The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills” (chapter 34). The separate peace is shown to be no exit, and the body does what the battle police did not. Held off the top because Catherine is disclosed less than she is required, and the second disclosure is partly asserted in Frederic’s reveries rather than shown.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The book rises often and coldly. The first chapter’s season of dust, leaves and marching troops closes on cholera with an arithmetic that is its own terror: “only seven thousand died of it in the army.” The trench-mortar shell at Plava, and Passini dying with his legs gone. The Caporetto retreat: the column stalled in the rain, Aymo shot by Italian rearguards, a sergeant shot with Frederic’s own pistol, and the battle police on the Tagliamento bridge questioning officers by flashlight and shooting them. The night row up the lake. The last chapter, the hospital and the rain, and the last sentence. The lift comes in the first, third and fifth books and falls away in the second, where it is mostly the lovers’ and the language goes slack. The height is real but restrained, rarely the transport of the very top.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Myth here is partly built. The rain is load-bearing, from the first chapter’s rain and cholera, through Catherine’s fear that she sees herself dead in it, to the last word. The plain is war, and the mountains are the clean country that the priest’s Abruzzi promises and Switzerland grants. The Tagliamento is a baptism the book names as such: “Anger was washed away in the river along with any obligation”, and Frederic comes out of it reborn as a deserter. The garden in the mountains and the expulsion from it into a hospital is Eden built, not alluded to. Held below the bar because the patterns are more steadily made than deep: the rain is announced by a character, Frederic glosses the ants on a burning log as his own parable, and the lovers never take on the archetypal weight of the great doomed lovers. Built, but at a smaller scale than the summit asks.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The inheritance is the war novel and the war romance: Stendhal’s Waterloo, Tolstoy, Crane, and the patriotic love story of the nurse and the soldier. The departure is real. The book refuses every term of the patriotic register, makes its hero desert and calls it peace, and ends its love story not in reunion or sacrifice but in a death with no meaning, told without comfort. The stake was high in 1929: a bestselling romance that withholds the consolations of romance, and a war book that indicts an allied army from inside. Held below the bar because the instrument was already proven. The style that does the work, the concrete noun, the sentence joined by “and”, the omission, had been made in In Our Time (1925) and The Sun Also Rises (1926); here it is applied at full length to the great subject. The wager is placed on a path Hemingway had himself proven.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The first person is retrospective, told from after Lausanne, and the flatness of the telling is the grief: the narrator never says what he feels about Catherine’s death, because the form is a man refusing the abstract words the book has shown to be obscene. The declarative sentence is the ethic of chapter 27 made into syntax. The five books move from the collective “we” of the first chapter to the single “I” walking alone in the rain, the separate peace rendered as a narrowing of grammatical person. The lovers’ private idiom, repetitive and childish, is the form of a world shrunk to two. Charged because that idiom sometimes reads as limitation rather than as form, and because the drift of the second book is structural slack, not designed stillness.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Ninety-seven years supply the evidence. The questions stay open: whether Catherine is a person or a projection, the oldest quarrel in the criticism of Hemingway and still live; whether the “they” who kill you is fate, biology or the narrator’s evasion; how far the retrospective narrator is reliable about his own desertion and his own part in the deaths of the retreat, the shot sergeant, Aymo, Bonello’s flight; and what the rejected endings, now printed, say about the one he chose. The book rewards return at the sentence, where the omitted feeling grows heavier once the end is known. Held near the bar rather than above it because much of the yield runs through the style and the ending, and the middle of the novel gives up most of what it has on the first reading.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The field is the novel in English of the 1920s and the European novel of the First World War, which in 1929 alone brought Remarque’s Im Westen nichts Neues, Graves’s Good-bye to All That and Aldington’s Death of a Hero. The intrinsic force is high: the book turned the anti-rhetoric of the war into a novel’s whole method, and showed that the plain style could carry tragedy at length. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the passage of chapter 27 on the abstract words is quoted in nearly every account of the war’s literature; the book was Hemingway’s first great commercial success, made the style a model for the novel in English for decades, and passed into film in 1932 and 1957. What holds it here is that much of the redirection of prose is owed to the earlier stories and to The Sun Also Rises, and is credited to those books; this novel extended the reach more than it made the turn.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over ninety-seven years. The text survives whole as published, and the manuscripts and the alternative endings are public; form and fabric take no charge. Presence is wide and continuous: in print without a break, taught in schools and universities, translated into the major languages, and filmed twice. Its surface is partly fixed to a moment. The lovers’ idiom and the novel’s women are dated, and that is charged in presence, where the book is read by many in the academy against its handling of gender. The figure credits wide presence at the upper end of what its span earns, and withholds the step that belongs to the books read without that quarrel.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Judged on Hemingway’s English, with no translation between. The command is of the exact noun and the joined clause. The first chapter is as finished as any opening in the century’s English: “In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains”, and then the dust, the leaves, the troops and the rain in a page of “and”. The retreat chapters are command of another order: logistics, mud, fear and murder in one level voice. The dialogue carries Italian in English cadence, Rinaldi’s banter and the priest’s quiet, without dialect spelling. Charged: the lovers’ talk, which repeats “darling” and “lovely” until the words empty out; Frederic’s occasional reach for a lyric generality the method elsewhere forbids; and the longueurs of the second book. The making is load-bearing in the first, third and fifth books.
Score: 8.9 / 10
One law governs: the world breaks every one, by the plain’s war or by the body, and the only peace is a separate one that cannot hold. Take the two most distant elements, the army on the road in the first chapter and the delivery room at Lausanne. They obey the same law. The cholera of the first chapter and the haemorrhage of the last are the same “they”, and the rain runs through both. The Milan idyll obeys it too, since the wound is its price and the pregnancy its consequence. Charged: the interlude with Count Greffi and the comedy of the race track sit in a softer register the law does not fully govern, and the lovers’ private world sometimes reads as an escape the book indulges rather than tests, until the last book tests it. The range of tone is wide, from Rinaldi’s farce to the battle police, and the law holds across it.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Judged as a short novel held tight around few orders. War and the state: the Italian army, its officers, the Carabinieri executing their own at the bridge, the disaster of Caporetto as history. Love, and the family that does not form: the pregnancy and the dead son. The sacred, argued between the priest’s Abruzzi and Frederic’s unbelief, and Catherine’s saying that he is her religion. The natural order: the mountains, the rain, the lake, and birth become death. Consciousness, through one retrospective voice. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what the form leaves out: labour hardly at all, class only as officers and drivers, with the socialism of Passini and Bonello, and society only at the edges of Milan. Everything is routed through one man and, at the end, one room. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.1, then The Made at 8.9, and The Unconcealment and The Living Form at 8.8. Ninety-seven years of wide and continuous presence with the text whole; a command of the exact noun and the joined clause that carries the retreat and the last chapter in one level voice; a disclosure that public words became obscene beside the war and that the world breaks every one; and a retrospective first person whose flatness is the grief.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.1: war and the state, love and the family that does not form, the sacred, the natural order and one consciousness, but labour hardly at all, class only as officers and drivers, and everything routed through one man and one room. Next above it, The Inevitable at 8.3: a Milan summer of which about a tenth says one thing several times. Then The Archetypal Deep and The Swerve at 8.4: a myth of rain, river and garden built at a smaller scale than the summit asks, and a turn made on a style the earlier books had already proven.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 8.9, The Living Form at 8.8, The Inner Law at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.1, The Unconcealment at 8.8 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.4 and The Swerve at 8.4 each fall a tenth short. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.3, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.1. Four of the five summit conditions are met; the summit is withheld on the Epochal Gate, and the aggregate, at 8.6, stands below it as well.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, serialised in Scribner’s Magazine from May to October 1929 and published by Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, in 1929; scored as the novel as published, in five books and forty-one chapters, with its published ending. The alternative endings from the manuscripts, printed in the Hemingway Library Edition of 2012, are context, not part of the work. No text of the novel was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Hemingway’s English, with no translation between. Events are paraphrased, and English is quoted only where its words are certain: the opening sentence and the close of the first chapter, the two sentences on the abstract words, the sentence of the river, the two sentences of chapter 34, the two short sentences of the last chapter, and the last sentence. The films of 1932 and 1957 are not part of the work. Facts that could not be verified, among them the length in words, the year in which the action opens, the number of the alternative endings and the wording of Catherine’s last words and of her fear of the rain, are not given. Citations are by chapter; the chapters are numbered through the five books.