American Literature books summary
p> A FAREWELL TO ARMS SOME INFO ON ERNEST HEMINGWAY The first son of Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, a doctor, and Grace Hall
Hemingway, Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in a suburb of Chicago. He was
educated in the public schools and began to write in high school, where he
was active and outstanding, but the parts of his boyhood that mattered most
were summers spent with his family on Walloon Lake in upper Michigan. On
graduation from high school in 1917, impatient for a less sheltered
environment, he did not enter college but went to Kansas City, where he was
employed as a reporter for the Star. He was repeatedly rejected for
military service because of a defective eye, but he managed to enter World
War I as an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross. On July 8, 1918,
not yet 19 years old, he was injured on the Austro-Italian front at
Fossalta di Piave. Decorated for heroism and hospitalized in Milan, he fell
in love with a Red Cross nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky, who declined to marry
him. These were experiences he was never to forget. After recuperating at home, Hemingway renewed his efforts at writing,
for a while worked at odd jobs in Chicago, and sailed for France as a
foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star. Advised and encouraged by other
American writers in Paris--F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound--
he began to see his nonjournalistic work appear in print there, and in 1923
his first important book, a collection of stories called In Our Time, was
published in New York City. In 1926 he published The Sun Also Rises, a
novel with which he scored his first solid success. A pessimistic but
sparkling book, it deals with a group of aimless expatriates in France and
Spain--members of the postwar "lost generation," a phrase that Hemingway
scorned while making it famous. This work also introduced him to the
limelight, which he both craved and resented for the rest of his life.
Hemingway's The Torrents of Spring, a parody of the American writer
Sherwood Anderson's book Dark Laughter, also appeared in 1926.The writing
of books occupied him for most of the postwar years. He remained based in
Paris, but he traveled widely for the skiing, bullfighting, fishing, or
hunting that by then had become part of his life and formed the background
for much of his writing. His position as a master of short fiction had been
advanced by Men Without Women in 1927 and thoroughly established with the
stories in Winner Take Nothing in 1933. Among his finest stories are "The Killers," "The Short Happy Life of
Francis Macomber," and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro." At least in the public
view, however, the novel A Farewell to Arms (1929) overshadowed such works.
Reaching back to his experience as a young soldier in Italy, Hemingway
developed a grim but lyrical novel of great power, fusing love story with
war story. While serving with the Italian ambulance service during World
War I, the American lieutenant Frederic Henry falls in love with the
English nurse Catherine Barkley, who tends him during his recuperation
after being wounded. She becomes pregnant by him, but he must return to his
post. Henry deserts during the Italians' disastrous retreat after the
Battle of Caporetto, and the reunited couple flee Italy by crossing the
border into Switzerland. There, however, Catherine and her baby die during
childbirth, leaving Henry desolate at the loss of the great love of his
life. Hemingway's love of Spain and his passion for bullfighting resulted in
Death in the Afternoon (1932), a learned study of a spectacle he saw more
as tragic ceremony than as sport. Similarly, a safari he took in 1933-34 in
the big-game region of Tanganyika resulted in The Green Hills of Africa
(1935), an account of big-game hunting. Mostly for the fishing, he bought a
house in Key West, Florida, and bought his own fishing boat. A minor novel
of 1937 called To Have and Have Not is about a Caribbean desperado and is
set against a background of lower-class violence and upper-class decadence
in Key West during the Great Depression.By now Spain was in the midst of
civil war. Still deeply attached to that country, Hemingway made four trips
there, once more a correspondent. He raised money for the Republicans in
their struggle against the Nationalists under General Francisco Franco, and
he wrote a play called The Fifth Column (1938), which is set in besieged
Madrid. As in many of his books, the protagonist of the play is based on
the author. Following his last visit to the Spanish war he purchased Finca
Vigia ("Lookout Farm"), an unpretentious estate outside Havana, Cuba, and
went to cover another war--the Japanese invasion of China. The harvest of Hemingway's considerable experience of Spain in war and
peace was the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), a substantial and
impressive work that some critics consider his finest novel, in preference
to A Farewell to Arms. It was also the most successful of all his books as
measured in sales. Set during the Spanish Civil War, it tells of Robert
Jordan, an American volunteer who is sent to join a guerrilla band behind
the Nationalist lines in the Guadarrama Mountains. Most of the novel
concerns Jordan's relations with the varied personalities of the band,
including the girl Maria, with whom he falls in love. Through dialogue,
flashbacks, and stories, Hemingway offers telling and vivid profiles of the
Spanish character and unsparingly depicts the cruelty and inhumanity
stirred up by the civil war. Jordan's mission is to blow up a strategic
bridge near Segovia in order to aid a coming Republican attack, which he
realizes is doomed to fail. In an atmosphere of impending disaster, he
blows up the bridge but is wounded and makes his retreating comrades leave
him behind, where he prepares a last-minute resistance to his Nationalist
pursuers.All of his life Hemingway was fascinated by war--in A Farewell to
Arms he focused on its pointlessness, in For Whom the Bell Tolls on the
comradeship it creates--and as World War II progressed he made his way to
London as a journalist. He flew several missions with the Royal Air Force
and crossed the English Channel with American troops on D-Day (June 6,
1944). Attaching himself to the 22nd Regiment of the 4th Infantry Division, he
saw a good deal of action in Normandy and in the Battle of the Bulge. He
also participated in the liberation of Paris and, although ostensibly a
journalist, he impressed professional soldiers not only as a man of courage
in battle but also as a real expert in military matters, guerrilla
activities, and intelligence collection.Following the war in Europe,
Hemingway returned to his home in Cuba and began to work seriously again.
He also traveled widely, and on a trip to Africa he was injured in a plane
crash. Soon after (in 1953), he received the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for
The Old Man and the Sea (1952), a short, heroic novel about an old Cuban
fisherman who, after an extended struggle, hooks and boats a giant marlin
only to have it eaten by voracious sharks during the long voyage home. This book, which played a role in gaining for Hemingway the Nobel
Prize for Literature in 1954, was as enthusiastically praised as his
previous novel, Across the River and into the Trees (1950), the story of a
professional army officer who dies while on leave in Venice, had been
damned.By 1960 Fidel Castro's revolution had driven Hemingway from Cuba. He
settled in Ketchum, Idaho, and tried to lead his life and do his work as
before. For a while he succeeded, but, anxiety-ridden and depressed, he was
twice hospitalized at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, where he
received electroshock treatments. Two days after his return to the house in
Ketchum, he took his life with a shotgun. Hemingway had married four times
and fathered three sons.He left behind a substantial amount of manuscript,
some which has been published. A Moveable Feast, an entertaining memoir of
his years in Paris (1921-26) before he was famous, was issued in 1964.
Islands in the Stream, three closely related novellas growing directly out
of his peacetime memories of the Caribbean island of Bimini, of Havana
during World War II, and of searching for U-boats off Cuba, appeared in
1970.Hemingway's characters plainly embody his own values and view of life. The main characters of The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and For
Whom the Bell Tolls are young men whose strength and self-confidence
nevertheless coexist with a sensitivity that leaves them deeply scarred by
their wartime experiences. War was for Hemingway a potent symbol of the
world, which he viewed as complex, filled with moral ambiguities, and
offering almost unavoidable pain, hurt, and destruction. To survive in such
a world, and perhaps emerge victorious, one must conduct oneself with
honour, courage, endurance, and dignity, a set of principles known as "the
Hemingway code." To behave well in the lonely, losing battle with life is to show "grace
under pressure" and constitutes in itself a kind of victory, a theme
clearly established in The Old Man and the Sea.Hemingway's prose style was
probably the most widely imitated of any in the 20th century. He wished to
strip his own use of language of inessentials, ridding it of all traces of
verbosity, embellishment, and sentimentality. In striving to be as
objective and honest as possible, Hemingway hit upon the device of
describing a series of actions using short, simple sentences from which all
comment or emotional rhetoric have been eliminated. These sentences are
composed largely of nouns and verbs, have few adjectives and adverbs, and
rely on repetition and rhythm for much of their effect. The resulting
terse, concentrated prose is concrete and unemotional yet is often resonant
and capable of conveying great irony through understatement. Hemingway's
use of dialogue was similarly fresh, simple, and natural-sounding. The
influence of this style was felt worldwide wherever novels were written,
particularly from the 1930s through the '50s.A consummately contradictory
man, Hemingway achieved a fame surpassed by few, if any, American authors
of the 20th century. The virile nature of his writing, which attempted to
re-create the exact physical sensations he experienced in wartime, big-game
hunting, and bullfighting, in fact masked an aesthetic sensibility of great
delicacy. He was a celebrity long before he reached middle age, but his
popularity continues to be validated by serious critical opinion. Context Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois, in the summer of 1899.
As a young man, he left home to become a newspaper writer in Kansas City.
Early in 1918, he joined the Italian Red Cross and became an ambulance
driver in Italy, serving in the battlefield in the First World War, in
which the Italians allied with the British, the French, and the Americans,
against Germany and Austria-Hungary. In Italy, he observed the carnage and
the brutality of the Great War firsthand. On July 8, 1918, a trench mortar
shell struck him while he crouched beyond the front lines with three
Italian soldiers. Though Hemingway embellished the story of his wounding over the years,
this much is certain: he was transferred to a hospital in Milan, where he
fell in love with a Red Cross nurse named Agnes von Kurowsky. Scholars are
divided over Agnes' role in Hemingway's life and writing, but there is
little doubt that his affair with her provided the background for A
Farewell to Arms, which many critics consider to be Hemingway's greatest
novel. Published in 1929, A Farewell to Arms tells the story of Frederic
Henry, a young American ambulance driver and first lieutenant ("Tenente")
in the Italian army. Hit in the leg by a trench mortar shell in the
fighting between Italy and Austria-Hungary, Henry is transferred to a
hospital in Milan, where he falls in love with an English Red Cross nurse
named Catherine Barkley. The similarities to Hemingway's own life are
obvious. After the war, when he had published several novels and become a famous
writer, Hemingway claimed that the account of Henry's wounding in A
Farewell to Arms was the most accurate version of his own wounding he had
ever written. Hemingway's life certainly gave the novel a trenchant
urgency, and its similarity to his own experience no doubt helped him
refine the terse, realistic, descriptive style for which he became famous,
and which made him one of the most influential American writers of the
twentieth century. SUMMARY Book I, Chapters 1-6 Frederic Henry begins his story by describing his situation: he is an
American in the Italian army near the front with Austria-Hungary, a mile
from the fighting. Every day he sees troops marching and hears gunfire;
often the King rides through the town. A cholera epidemic has spread
through the army, he says, but only seven thousand die of it. His unit moves to a town in Gorizia, further from the fighting, which
continues in the mountains beyond. His situation is relatively enjoyable;
the town is not badly damaged, with nice cafes and two brothels--one for
the officers and one for the enlisted men. One day Henry sits in the mess
hall with a group of fellow officers taunting the military priest. A
captain accuses the priest of cavorting with women, and the priest blushes;
though he is not religious, Henry treats the priest kindly. After teasing
the priest, the Italians argue over where Henry should take his leave;
because the winter is approaching, the fighting will ease, and Henry, an
ambulance driver, will be able to spend some time away from the front. The
priest encourages him to visit the cold, clear country of Abruzzo, but the
other men have other suggestions. When he returns from his leave, Henry discusses his trip with his
roommate, the surgeon Rinaldi. Henry claims to have traveled throughout
Italy, and Rinaldi, who is obsessed with beautiful girls, tells him about a
group of new English women and claims to be in love with a Miss Barkley.
Henry loans him fifty lire (Italian money). At dinner that night, the
priest is hurt that Henry failed to visit Abruzzi. Henry feels guilty, and
tells him that he wanted to visit Abruzzi. The next morning, Henry examines the gun batteries and quizzes the
mechanics; then he travels to visit Miss Barkley and the English nurses
with Rinaldi. He is immediately struck by Miss Barkley's beauty, and
especially by her long blonde hair. Miss Barkley tells Henry that her
fiancee was killed in the battle of the Somme, and Henry tells her he has
never loved anyone. On the way back, Rinaldi observes that Miss Barkley
liked Henry more than she liked Rinaldi, but that her friend, Helen
Ferguson, was nice too. The next day, Henry calls on Miss Barkley again. The head nurse
expresses surprise that an American would want to join the Italian army,
and tells him that Miss Barkley is gone-- but says that Henry may come back
to see her at seven o'clock that night. Henry drives back along the
trenches, eats dinner, then returns to see Miss Barkley. He finds her
waiting with Helen Ferguson; Helen excuses herself, and Henry tries to put
his arm around her. She refuses, but allows him to kiss her. Then she
begins to cry, and Henry is annoyed. When Henry goes home, Rinaldi is
amused. Three nights later, Henry sees Miss Barkley again; she tells him to
call her Catherine. They walk through the garden, and Henry tells Catherine
he loves her, though he knows he does not. They kiss again, and he thinks
of their relationship as an elaborate game. To his surprise, she suddenly
tells him that he plays the game very well, but that it is a rotten game.
Henry sees Rinaldi later that evening, and Rinaldi, observing Henry's
romantic confusion, feel glad that he did not become involved with a
British nurse. Book I, Chapters 7-12 Driving back from his post, Henry picks up a soldier with a hernia;
they discuss the War, and Henry arranges a way to get the man to a
hospital. Henry thinks about the War, and realizes that he feels no danger
from it. At dinner that night, the men drink and tease the priest; Henry
nearly forgets he had promised to go see Catherine, and before he rushes
over, Rinaldi gives him some coffee to sober him up. At the nurses' villa,
Helen Ferguson tells Henry that Catherine is sick and will not see him.
Henry feels guilty and surprisingly lonely. The next day an attack is scheduled. Henry goes to see Catherine, and
she gives him a Saint Anthony medal. He spends the day driving to the spot
where the fighting will take place.Henry and his men wait in the trenches
as the shelling begins. They are hungry, and Henry risks being shot to
fetch some cheese. As he sits down to eat it, he hears a loud noise and
sees a flash and believes he has died. A trench mortar shell has struck him
in the leg. Wounded men fall all around him.
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