Hello, all. This is Mackenzie. Nice to meet some of you.
Before we go much further into our next adventure, here's some of the stuff I found on
Farewell. It’s overdue, and I know we're excited about Brideshead, so I’ll try to keep in brief.
One of the topics I had hoped to chat about last week was the censorship of
Farewell. Not only was the published text censored, leaving to imagination what letters might have best filled those -----dashes, but the first installment of the 6-part serial publication of
Farewell was banned from newsstands in May 1929 by Boston’s police chief. He found it “salacious”. His efforts to protect the minds of young readers actually worked to the advantage of publisher and author when the book was sold a few months later. See, it turns out that if someone prohibits you from reading something, you’re probably going to REALLY want to know why. The 1991 article “Censorship” by Scott Donaldson discusses all this as well as the topic of high literature and high morals and how it’s kind of hard to say when they equate and when they don’t.
Ok, next I read about what Tim referred to as Hemingway’s "free style rap". Hem’s known for his very succinct and well chosen language, and Michael S Reynolds wrote about it “The Writing of the Novel” (he’s succinct too, I guess). This essay actually shows the way Hem edits his work to paint really specific pictures, or just make careful suggestions. This time Hem also wrote some very fluid (what’s the opposite of lucid?) passages to depict Henry’s thoughtstream when injured, dreaming or just really hungry, which are super exciting to read because we’ve all been there. He's really just the best.
The topics of love and war are most obvious, and that’s perhaps the reason that our ever-so-sophisticated group did not even get into them too much(did we?) The basic composition of the book is said to devote about half its chapters to Henry’s war experience and half to the love thing with Cat. In "Loser Take Nothing", Philip Young argues that there are six parallel stages of these journeys. Henry has “an affair” with the war, then becomes involved seriously and gets wounded, he recuperates in Milan, then travels “to a retreat which leads to his destruction”. Catherine’s journey leads from “a trifling sexual affair to actual love and conception, then through her confinement in the Alps to the trip to the hospital which leads to death.” Hmmmm. Also, did any one find a pun in the title: the “arms” of battle and the “arms” of a woman? Well, I hadn’t, but Norman Friedman did in his essay which shares its title with my little blog post here.
I’m sure many of you all put these things together on your own, and sorry if it's been a bore. I know I'll continue to ponder these and other things brought up in the book; patriotism, foreign involvement in war, the glorification of, and disenchantment with, war and its intrinsic ideals. I look forward to our next convo.
