Haiku Status Update - 1 June 2010

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"Why did the chicken

Choose to cross the road?" he asked.

"To die.  In the rain."

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A dumb poem built around a dumb joke. but there's an element of truth to it.  I'm close to half-way through A Farewell to Arms, by the legendary, Nobel prize-winning  Ernest Hemingway.  Legendary because of what he did as much as what he wrote.  The book is, in part, based on his own experiences on the Italian Front in the First World War, or the Great War, as it came to be known as the dust settled.

Straining to see the text through contemporaneous eyes, I can see what an impact it might have had - there's a raw, visceral quality that comes through with the stark, banal imagery and the drawing of the readers attention to little, inconsequential, irrelevant details. It must have been a departure for most readers.  The books's treatment of sex, also, is a long way from the confronting language of Henry Miller, but it is quite up-front about the subject and the sensations and emotions it elicits, while all the time avoiding the kind of language that got Ulysses burnt on the New York docks.

Still, in nearly every line, there's a sense of contrivance that I can't shake, no matter how I try to let myself be immersed in the story.  In A Movable Feast, Hemingway talked about how he would write.  When he started a story, he would write a paragraph.  Then he would look for the best, most honest sentence in the paragraph, put a new sheet of paper in his typewriter, and start again with that sentence. 

A Farewell to Arms reads like he did that with every line.  It comes out most in the dialogue.  In trying to capture the broken cadence and repetition in real speech, his dialogue comes across as forced, like a Persian rugmaker weaving imperfection into his product as to not offend God, only without the humility.  It's a shame that such a compelling, human story is - for me at least - reads like an overkneaded dough.  It's a shame Hemingway didn't have anyone to save him from himself.