A Farewell to Arms.

Bookseller Notes

Henry Williamson's copy of Hemingway's novel of the First World War, published in the same year that Williamson also began publishing works based on his experience of the conflict ('The Wet Flanders Plain', followed by 'The Patriot's Progress' in 1930). Williamson, whose pencil when reading rarely alighted on the positive, reserves expression of his antipathy for the close of Hemingway's lauded novel: in the passage describing the child born by Caesarean, he calls Hemingway's descriptions 'untrue' and 'BAD ART' (p. 342), before condemning the dialogue on p. 348 as 'utterly unartistic & false', because 'dying people do not talk on that plane'. His final correction is a little odd; where the narrator responds that he has 'nothing to say' on p. 349, Williamson removes it from speech and amends to 'I said nothing'. An interesting record of critique between two major novelists of the Great War on either side of the Atlantic.