with attentions being paid to the smallest rituals of camping and fishing, as if this is all the story were about.
Many years later, no longer a young or well man, in a Paris memoir as elegant as it was often cruel, the author would say of that story, without naming it: âI sat in a corner with the afternoon light coming in over my shoulder and wrote in the notebook. The waiter brought me a café crème and I drank half of it when it cooled and left it on the table while I wrote. When I stopped writing I did not want to leave the river where I could see the trout in the pool, its surface pushing and swelling smooth against the resistance of the log-driven piles of the bridge. The story was about coming back from the war but there was no mention of the war in it.â The author remembered that he wrote the story, with everything beneath the surface, at the café table in blue-backed notebooks, with two pencils and a dime-store sharpener beside himâto sharpen your writing instrument with a pocketknife was too profligate. When his so-called fish story was finished, the excited young husband and father, twenty-five years old, who lived with his wife and baby boy above the sawmill on rue Notre Damedes Champs, wrote to his bohemian literary friends, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, sounding exactly like the rube of the middle border he essentially still was. He told them heâd been âtrying to do the country like Cezanne and having a hell of a time and sometimes getting it a little bit. It is about 100 pages long and nothing happens and the country is swell, I made it all up, so I see it all and part of it comes out the way it ought to, it is swell about the fish, but isnât writing a hard job though?â
A Farewell to Arms
, coming three years after
The Sun Also Rises
, a longer, more mature, more moving novel (Hemingwayâs finest sustained literary achievement, in my view), was published in September 1929, two months after heâd turned thirty. Heâd started the novel in Paris, had worked on it in Key West; in Piggott, Arkansas; in Kansas City; on a ranch at Big Horn, Wyomingâother places, too. His wife gave birth to his second child by difficult cesarean section while he worked on it, and also his father killed himself. âI remember all these things happening and all the places we lived in and the fine times and the bad times we had in that year,â he once said. âBut much more vividly I remember living in the book and making up what happened in it every day. Making the country and the people and the things that happened I was happier than I had ever been.â Living in that book, making the country, a man still so young had written a passage so immortal as this, about a retreat from a place called Caporetto:
I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity.
From a beginner at long-form fiction to a master of it inside of three yearsâthis was the impression that the world had formed of him, and it wasnât altogether wrong. âVeteran out of the wars before he was twenty: / Famous at twenty-five: thirty a masterââ the poet Archibald MacLeish would say years later in a poem, but also saying, in the line immediately above: âAnd what became of him? Fame became of him.â
But now it was the thirties, and
his
thirties, and suddenly the critical âswineâ were