| Slainte |
04-24-2010 02:08 AM |
I was reminded of Steve Adams, one of my sister Allie's three sons my first wife Jane and I adopted after Allie's unlucky husband Jim died in a railroad train that went off an open drawbridge in New Jersey, and then, two days later, Allie died of cancer of the everything.
When Steve came home to Cape Cod for Christmas vacation from his freshman year at Dartmouth, he was close to tears because he had just read, having been forced to do so by a professor, A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway.
Steve, now a middle-aged comedy writer for movies and TV, was so gorgeously wrecked back then that I was moved to reread what had done this to him. A Farewell to Arms turned out to be an attack on the institution of marriage. Hemingway's hero is wounded in the war. He and his nurse fall in love. They honeymoon far away from the battlefields, consuming the best food and wine, without having been married first. She gets pregnant, proving, as if it could be doubted, that he is indeed all man.
She and the baby die, so he doesn't have to get a regular job and a house and life insurance and all that crap, and he has such beautiful memories.
I said to Steve, "The tears Hemingway has made you want to shed are tears of relief! It looked like the guy was going to have to get married and settle down. But then he didn't have to. Whew! What a close shave!"
Trout said he could think of only one other book that despised matrimony as much as A Farewell to Arms.
"Name it," I said.
He said it was a book by Henry David Thoreau, called Walden.
"Loved it," I said.
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