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. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.
                                                      — opening paragraph of Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms

It's research paper time again for Lynn. Last year's experience took place during what I came to call "the siege," a period of illness and bewilderment that left me with little capacity for anything other than maintaining basic life functions. Nevertheless, it seems I "shepherded [Lynn] through a six-page paper on the effect of Stalinism on the work of Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn (work such as I was not expected to do until I was a junior in college)." I've reread the paper recently, impressed at its sophistication. Lynn is a competent writer but an inexperienced researcher. Thus my  "shepherding" consisted mostly of helping her choose brief passages for study in the vastness of those authors' works and finding citation models in the MLA handbook.

This year the assignment calls for the same level of research and reporting, but the focus is more narrow. The students are to choose a twentieth century American author and study the cultural and historical influences on a representative work. Lynn has chosen Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. She's assembled some biographical and critical works from her school library and the community college library, and she's begun reading the novel itself, using the copy I acquired in 1970 for my own first exposure to this work.

Lynn is seventeen and in eleventh grade. In 1970 I was twenty-three and had just completed my first year of teaching eleventh grade. I had moved out of my parents' house and into my first solo apartment and resigned from the first school I'd taught at (where my father was an administrator) to take a similar job at a different school. I wasn't yet enrolled in a formal graduate degree program, but I taking was my first step toward earning post-baccalaureate credits for my permanent teaching certificate, as well as my first step toward [shaping] [forging] [living] [creating] what would turn out to be my "real life."

I've spent about ten minutes playing with the verbs in that last sentence. None of them seems quite right. For a long time I didn't so much plan or forge or shape my life as I just lived through what fell on me. See, taking a graduate class at an extension campus in the town I grew up in was not how I'd envisioned the summer of 1970. Instead I thought I'd be planning a wedding and a move across the state to teach there for another year or so while I supported my husband's graduate education before I started popping out babies.

Well, the man in question was actually going ahead with those things, but he'd chosen a different partner, a fact he informed me of on my birthday. I sulked for two months or so and then started to get on with my life. I sent best wishes and a wedding gift, found the new job and the new apartment ten miles east instead of two hundred miles west, and signed up for "Twentieth Century American Novel." Yes, it's true. My idea of summer poolside reading is Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Hemingway, and about 3000 pages of Thomas Wolfe.

Taking that class was the best thing I could have done to keep myself from from dwelling on my disappointment and falling into an irreversible depression.. I experienced instead the fall into fiction as a reader that I keep trying to recreate as a writer. Of all the books I read that summer, A Farewell to Arms became my favorite, and remains so.

It's the story of Frederick Henry, a young American in World War I serving not in his own country's army but volunteering as an ambulance driver in the Italian army. He sustains "a great wound" and during his recuperation begins a love affair with an English nurse, Catherine Barkley. A sensitive, thoughtful man, Lieutenant Henry is beginning to feel the disconnection from his soul that fighting in a war can bring on. When he returns to the front he becomes even more disillusioned. He is forced to kill another soldier and he is arrested, but he escapes. He finds his way back to Catherine, who tells him that she is pregnant. He makes "a separate peace," that is, he comes to understand that he is doing the only honorable thing in deserting the war effort. He and Catherine flee to Switzerland and spend an idyllic time living together in a villa, planning the life they will have after the war is over. Catherine endures a difficult labor that neither she nor the infant survives, and at the end Frederick Henry walks away from the hospital in the rain, which has fallen on 284 of the book's 325 pages.

There you are — all my favorite themes: love, loss, the stranger in a strange land, the desire to be known and remembered. My 1970 copy of the book is a trade paperback edition which cost $1.95, about the price of five gallons of gas then. (A current edition — updated cover and new introduction — can be had today for $9.60, about the cost of five gallons of gas.) My original copy is on acid-laced paper that retains molds and cat dander so that Lynn sneezes several times during every reading session. But she likes using it because of my copious annotations, done in red felt-tip marker. In one place I spell "desparate" wrong, in others I note "C" or "F" in the long passages of unattributed dialogue Hemingway is known for, and I scrawl definitions of unfamiliar words, chart occurrences of the famous symbols (the night, the rain, and Catherine's long dark hair), and ask myself questions (Why the hell does she need a nightgown? I wonder in a place where Catherine whines that she's unhappy because she hasn't packed a nightgown).

I've had this experience with many books I've owned for a long time. The heft, the shape, the notes in the margin allow me to touch and hold the person I was at another time in my life. In the case of Farewell, I have not only the copy I read, but the actual paper I wrote about it that summer.

In those days I used crinkly erasable bond twirled into a portable electric Royal typewriter that had the l and the s out of alignment. The cap on the z key was missing -- you don't realize how often you use the z key until its cap is gone. I don't know what the assignment was, but it must have been something along the lines of tracing the use of a symbol through the novel. I wrote about darkness and the night, and my thesis was that the night represents to Frederick Henry the fear of confronting the truth of what he comes to believe -- that we are alone, we are born alone, we die alone, and that the hell of war must be fought alone. (Hemingway is not known for his unquenchable optimism.) 

I suggest that Catherine represents an attempt to forge a connection with another human being that ultimately fails because Frederick Henry himself is incapable of sustaining such a connection. "I did not love Catherine Barkley nor had any idea of loving her. This was a game, like bridge, in which you said things instead of playing cards," Hemingway has his hero say. Frederick uses Catherine, I assert, and in his service she gives up her honor, her homeland, her baby, and ultimately her life, while Frederick is free to ponder all this loneliness as he walks through the rain toward the resumption of his own life.

It's a good paper, carefully planned and argued and dependent on no source other than the novel itself, and it got an A. But I can tell you, given my personal struggles at the time, it wasn't about Frederick Henry.

Oh but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now. I've reread Farewell several times since 1970, most recently in 1993 when I wrote a long memoir for a graduate course in the nature of autobiography. I've made a separate and lasting peace with the sorrows I experienced in those days, as well as with the person who appeared to cause them. Reading the novel now, I am finally able to see the more universal themes -- courage and fear in a time of war and the struggle to find the grace to go on in the face of certain loss. I judge Frederick less harshly now, because every night I see him on the news in the brave and beautiful faces of the young Americans serving in the desert and in the anguished faces of those who wait at home.

Last year Lynn read and loved All Quiet on the Western Front. This year it's A Farewell to Arms. Next year, in AP English, it will be Tim O'Brien's powerful fiction out of Vietnam, The Things They Carried. It's the same story over and over — a young man goes away to war, does what is asked of him, loses something of himself, and spends the rest of his life trying to get it back. I know she'll ask me why this is. It's part of the human condition, I'll say, that each generation must learn the same truths for themselves. I wish it were not so.