Bangus Book Blip - A Farewell to Hemingway's Arms

Ernie still with his head on

Yeah. I read this while flying. I hate flying. I get sick from being stuck in a metal tube and then being shot through the sky. It’s expensive and you’re treated like shit. I forgot to bring a book for the direct flight from Toronto to Phoenix. I couldn’t find anything to read in the bookstores at Pearson International, so I stocked up on different newspapers and three magazines. I went to the john before boarding and lo and behold, a tattered copy of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. I've always liked Hemingway without ever reading anything he ever wrote. I like the ‘idea’ of Hemingway. His name conjures up visions of the tropics, self loathing and psychosis.

On the plane I sat beside a guy who talked quietly to himself. I think he was slowly becoming unglued but as long as he talked to himself and not to me I was fine.

Published in 1929, A Farewell to Arms tells about a young American in the Italian Army during the big WWI. Lieutenant Frederic Henry. He’s an ambulance driver. Everyone drinks wine and speaks in short sentences. Henry gets his knee blown off in a friendly fire thing by some jittery Italians.While in hospital he impregnates a British nurse. He has a grand time convalescing. Then he goes back to the front but he’s not crazy about mud, blood and gore so he bails on the whole thing and meets up with the nurse and they have more grand times playing billiards and drinking wine and talking about wine while drinking brandy and talking about wine and playing billiards and so forth. Someone tips him off that he’s about to be arrested as a deserter so he rows across to Switzerland with his pregnant nurse girlfriend in a leaking rowboat. Apparently, the Swiss don’t give a shit about deserters.

Here’s a fanciful exchange:
“Has he the
syphilis?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’m glad you haven’t. Did you ever have anything like that?”
“I had gonorrhea.”
“I don’t want to hear about it. Was it very painful, darling?”
“Very.”
“I wish I’d had it.”

Oh yes, I almost forgot, she dies while giving birth as does the baby. While I sit on the tarmac with the engines running and that guy speaking to himself, this is how the book starts:

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.

Here’s how it ends: But after I had got them out and shut the door and turned off the light it wasn’t any good. It was like saying good-by to a statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.