A Farewell to Arms

[bluth co.]

I have to write an essay comparing A Farewell to Arms and The Wars by Timothy Findley, was just wondering if anyone had any thoughts or had read either book

[Mind Flayer Monk]

Harold Bloom's guide to a Farewell to Arms might help.

Bloom’s Guides; A Farewell to Arms

I dont know much about The Wars, but it sounds interesting.

[bluth co.]

thanks that helps : )  The Wars was a very interesting book, very similar to Farewell, very similar. Like, shockingly similar.

[Sardondi]

Hemingway. Cynic. Depressive. His family has five suicides in four generations. His father, sister, brother, daughter as well as himself committed suicide. (Sunday dinner at the Hemingway house in the early 1900's must have been a barrel of laughs.) He hated adjectives, adverbs and authority. He wrote at least three novels using no more than these words:
good
bad
true
man
woman
boy
priest
old
young
wine
big
little
bull
blood
kill
die
rectum
gerbil

Oh yeah, some critics think he was compensating for deeply closeted homosexuality (doctors use the formal medical description, "cryptofag") by engaging in a lifetime filled with uber-manly activities. Not that there's anything wrong with that. One school of thought believes it was no mere coincidence that Rock "I've Been Feeling A Bit Under The Weather Lately" Hudson got the movie role of Henry.

Your task now is to separate the bs from useful true facts...if any.

[Lovely Bones]

I call Hoax on "gerbil."  For realz.   

[Jasmine]

Rectum? His drinking and depression damn well killed him!

Speaking of closeted homosexuality, I haven't read The Wars since high school, and the first thing that popped into my head was when - if memory serves me correct - Robert Ross peeks through a door and witnesses his sergeant riding the big blonde Swede.

Amazing and frightening what tidbits lurk in one's mind.

[Sardondi]

Rectum? His drinking and depression damn well killed him!

Speaking of closeted homosexuality, I haven't read The Wars since high school, and the first thing that popped into my head was when - if memory serves me correct - Robert Ross peeks through a door and witnesses his sergeant riding the big blonde Swede.

Amazing and frightening what tidbits lurk in one's mind.

Yikes! A pesky memory. It's the same with me and Norman Mailer's Harlot's Ghost, a fascinating "fictional biography" of the CIA up until the JFK assassination, which has some disturbing sodomy/excrement episodes which I can not wipe from my brain!*

The Wars is some book to expect high-schoolers to digest. Maybe I'm wrong in assuming you read it as an assigned book in high school in Canada. I know it was a big deal in Canada and won many awards there; I assumed partly because it dealt with WWI which in the 70's was still very revered in Canadian life. 

I always wondered how many of the Canadians acclaiming The Wars really knew that author Thomas Findley was an "out" gay; or that one of the themes in that book was that male friendships are all homoerotic in nature. I just can't picture school boards in Alberta in the late 70's or early 80's including The Wars in the school curriculum if they really knew how much symbolic (and some actual, as you point out) buggering was going on in it! It had to be the horses that fooled 'em, at least in Alberta: there they had to figure that any book with so many horses had to have characters who were a bunch of good, strong, red-blooded, decent, God-fearing, patriotic Canadian cowboys!




* What is it about anal sex (both hetero- and homosexual) which fascinated Norman Mailer so?! From his shocking-for-the-50's short stories like "The Time Of Her Time" to sodomy-drenched 80's sextravaganzas like Ancient Evenings, Mailer simply could not write more than 5000 words without throwing in an episode of vigorous coitum per anum.

[Jasmine]

It's the same with me and Norman Mailer's Harlot's Ghost, a fascinating "fictional biography" of the CIA up until the JFK assassination, which has some disturbing sodomy/excrement episodes which I can not wipe from my brain!*

Was that an unintended/subliminal pun there, Sardondi? 

And how quite perceptive of you re Canada/Canadians and Timothy Findley. I'm suitably impressed, sir! I was born in Montreal, Quebec, but have lived in the States since I was 17. My father is Canadian-Austrian (transferred to the States with his career); my mother is American-Parisian French.  Anywho, yes, our eleventh grade English lit class was required to read The Wars, along with another Canadian literary great, Robertson Davies (Fifth Business, The Manticore, etc.), and I honestly didn't find it difficult to follow, especially given the plethora of allegory. Granted, I had to take it to the mat a couple of times, but I rather enjoyed Findley's
darkened war theater of the mind. ("theatre" - Canadian/British spelling). The Wars is still required reading for many Canadian high school students today. I think a lot of people miss the pacifist leanings in The Wars...weird as that may sound.

I didn't discover Findley was gay until much later, but funny you bring this up, because when I found out, it's as if the written words on the pages of The Wars and its characters suddenly came into diamond sharp focus, and acquired even more depth and an additional dimension...you know what I mean? Once I discovered Findley's sexual orientation, his modus operandi charged up from the rear to the front lines. I believe Findley suffered from the drink, like Mailer and a host of others.

Canadians discovering Findley was gay was similar to the collective *forehead slap* of Americans when they discovered Liberace fingered that white grand piano for his own team! 

One wonders if the homoerotic flavor in The Wars was simply character driven or rather a result of Findley's repressed bathhouse yearnings during the tension filled and homophobic late 60's and early 70's?

“People can only be found in what they do.”
― Timothy Findley, The Wars

As for Albertans and Findley...LOL! Oh, God, those critters out west in Dallas/Texas North were most probably the unintended "victims" of Findley's subterfuge...after all, the man had to make a livin' somehow, no? You're probably right that they were fooled by the horses and good ol' Canuck boys. Sadly, Alberta is still, for the most part, a very homophobic province. Even though I have lived in the northeast U.S. for many years now, I still venture up to Canada many times, and I keep a close tab on my homeland, courtesy of cousins, The Globe & Mail online, and CBC Radio (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) on Sirius.

As for Mailer, perhaps he was a closeted gay who battled his inner demons. Imagine being gay AND a writer in that era - of course their pent up sexual desires were safer in literary alleys than in literal practice, and risk of facing the vice squad, the organized religious Wrath of Chaka Khan (William Shatner is God), and literary shame and ruin?

But I digest.

coitum per anum. It's none of your damn business how much money I earn in a year, buster! 

[bluth co.]

Speaking of closeted homosexuality, I haven't read The Wars since high school, and the first thing that popped into my head was when - if memory serves me correct - Robert Ross peeks through a door and witnesses his sergeant riding the big blonde Swede.

Yeah we had a discussion in class about whether or not Robert was gay. There are arguments to be made either way but the consensus was that he was infact not gay, just really messed up .

[Eddie Coyle]

         Oddly, Mailer's book about a perennial jailbird, Executioner's Song, had very little sodomitic content. Then again, that work was non-fiction, and not coming from Mailer's creative cesspool of a mind.

[Sardondi]

Was that an unintended/subliminal pun there, Sardondi? 

And how quite perceptive of you re Canada/Canadians and Timothy Findley. I'm suitably impressed, sir! I was born in Montreal, Quebec, but have lived in the States since I was 17. My father is Canadian-Austrian (transferred to the States with his career); my mother is American-Parisian French.  Anywho, yes, our eleventh grade English lit class was required to read The Wars, along with another Canadian literary great, Robertson Davies (Fifth Business, The Manticore, etc.), and I honestly didn't find it difficult to follow, especially given the plethora of allegory. Granted, I had to take it to the mat a couple of times, but I rather enjoyed Findley's
darkened war theater of the mind. ("theatre" - Canadian/British spelling). The Wars is still required reading for many Canadian high school students today. I think a lot of people miss the pacifist leanings in The Wars...weird as that may sound.

I didn't discover Findley was gay until much later, but funny you bring this up, because when I found out, it's as if the written words on the pages of The Wars and its characters suddenly came into diamond sharp focus, and acquired even more depth and an additional dimension...you know what I mean? Once I discovered Findley's sexual orientation, his modus operandi charged up from the rear to the front lines. I believe Findley suffered from the drink, like Mailer and a host of others.

Canadians discovering Findley was gay was similar to the collective *forehead slap* of Americans when they discovered Liberace fingered that white grand piano for his own team! 

One wonders if the homoerotic flavor in The Wars was simply character driven or rather a result of Findley's repressed bathhouse yearnings during the tension filled and homophobic late 60's and early 70's?

“People can only be found in what they do.”
― Timothy Findley, The Wars

As for Albertans and Findley...LOL! Oh, God, those critters out west in Dallas/Texas North were most probably the unintended "victims" of Findley's subterfuge...after all, the man had to make a livin' somehow, no? You're probably right that they were fooled by the horses and good ol' Canuck boys. Sadly, Alberta is still, for the most part, a very homophobic province. Even though I have lived in the northeast U.S. for many years now, I still venture up to Canada many times, and I keep a close tab on my homeland, courtesy of cousins, The Globe & Mail online, and CBC Radio (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) on Sirius.

As for Mailer, perhaps he was a closeted gay who battled his inner demons. Imagine being gay AND a writer in that era - of course their pent up sexual desires were safer in literary alleys than in literal practice, and risk of facing the vice squad, the organized religious Wrath of Chaka Khan (William Shatner is God), and literary shame and ruin?

But I digest.

coitum per anum. It's none of your damn business how much money I earn in a year, buster! 

That has to be one of the funnerest postifications I've read here (although you pointing out a scatalogical reference might not have been an intentional pun, but it most certainly was cringe-inducing).

But a well done post! As for high-schoolers having to read Findley - ye gods and little fishes, you guys, er, Canadian students definitely had a far greater literary maturity level than their counterparts to the south. Hell, they were still fighting about obscenity in Catcher in the Rye and whether Jonathan Livingston Seagull would turn kids into Satanists overnight when I came through school.

And Robertson Davies for high school?! Again I'm knocked out. I was well into my 20's when I read a couple of the Deptford Trilogy as well as What's Bred in The Bone and The Lyre of Orpheus. I found Davies a contradiction: with a biblical beard he looked like a classic "Empire Forever!", steel-spined Scots-Canadian conservative; but although they're no way similar, I experienced the same spacey, floating, almost hallucinatory fantasy experience I had reading about Davies' daimons and collective consciousness as when I read Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (!!!!). So go figure. Conservative he wasn't.

So you're Canadian-Austrian and American-Parisian? I've got it figured that your paternal grandfather was a Canadian squaddie doing occupation duty in Vienna and found the prima ballerina with the Vienna Ballet....; and your maternal granddad was a Yank tanker who can be seen in one of the famous film clips of ecstatic French men and women celebrating liberation as he pulled a particularly beautiful Parisian girl up and into his tank...Those would be cool stories. But maybe the genders are reversed, and your Dad's father was a soldat in Rommel's Afrika Korps who was captured at El Alamein and sent as a POW to grow wheat for the Allies in Alberta, and there he met a farmer's daughter...; and then your Mom's dad was a member of the Free French Army who was wounded liberating his native land, and was taken to an American Army hospital in Paris where he was cared for by this American nurse...

As for your socio-cultural map of Canada I've always thought Montreal & Quebec particularly were aesthetically just too cool for words, and thought it incredibly beautiful, especially in winter; although I'm probably attitudinally more aligned with my Scots and English Canadian cousins, and do have a soft spot for those Alberta rough-riders (or maybe it's "rough trade" if we go by Findley?), although my family did include some Huguenots who escaped having their throats slit in Paris in the St. Bart's party and over the next couple of centuries slowly made it to the dominion.

As for Mailer being gay, I dunno. Does this look like a guy who'd like to hang out in the men's room at the bus station?

Rip Torn vs Norman Mailer - the infamous "Maidstone" brawl - UNCUT!

Of course, there's always that hyper-masculine gay style. Or maybe Normy just enjoyed passive penetration. About which sales in the gazillions of dollars for dildos and strap-ons tell us, "Not that there's anything wrong with that"!


"coitum per anum. It's none of your damn business how much money I earn in a year, buster! "

Heehee!