The Great Themes in Hemingway: Love, War, Wilderness, and Loss

Abstract Hemingway’s appeal to the public far transcends his purely literary achievements. Hemingway has a place in American culture, even for many who have not read him. The Attenborough film was a workmanlike treatment of the young Hemingway’s 1918 love affair with nurse Agnes von Kurowsky, the real-life prototype for Catherine Barkley in Hemingway’s great novel of World War I, A Farewell to Arms. In Love and War had the singular misfortune to appear in the same season as Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient, a far more effective treatment of similar themes. Even so, In Love and War, based on von Kurowsky’s diaries of the time, still attracted considerable notice and prompted new attention to the facts-or stereotypes-of Hemingway’s life and work. Why should such interest continue, more than thirty-five years after the author’s suicide? Why should a respected director devote his time to such a production? Certainly a director of epics such as Attenborough is always in need of epic material, and the First World War and a love affair that may have propelled an author to world-class achievement might have seemed worthy of attention.