Hemingway and the power of Midnight downpours

A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway's devastating tale of romance between an American volunteer in the Italian army and a British nurse, set during the First World War, is among my favorite books by one of my favorite authors. Hemingway's prose is terse and insightful, muscular yet somehow lyrical. Few writers have the ability to deliver an emotional gut-punch to me like Hemingway can.

Mired in a stalled Italian military column, Hemingway's ambulance-driver protagonist sits in his vehicle in the dark, a heavy rain pouring down, and slides into a dream. What follows is one of the loveliest passages Hemingway ever put down on paper, capturing the fey logic that exists between waking and dreaming, where the border between awake and asleep becomes porous. The ache of loneliness for an absent lover, the hypnotic drumming of night rain, a need to be up and away from where one is...Hemingway captures all this and more:

In bed I lay me down my head. Bed and board. Stiff as a board in bed. Catherine was in bed now between two sheets, over her and under her. Which side did she sleep on? Maybe she wasn't asleep. Maybe she was lying thinking about me. Blow, blow, ye western wind. Well, it blew and it wasn't the small rain but the big rain down that rained. It rained all night. You know it rained down that rained. Look at it. Christ, that my love were in my arms and I in my bed again. That my love Catherine. That my sweet love Catherine down might rain. Blow her again to me.

Just perfect.

No-Frills Books

There was a "generic" product craze in the early 1980s. Black-on-white labels covered products from soap to beer. In 1981, I remember seeing generic books appear in the check-out counter racks of grocery stores. They were a buck-and-a-half, less than sixty pages, covered four genres: Mystery; Romance; Science Fiction; Western, and promised a story with exactly the conventions you would expect from their respective genres. I read the Western and the Science Fiction volumes. They were definitely done tongue-in-cheek, but were good enough that I was disappointed that only the four were published.

Recently, I got on a nostalgia kick and tracked them down. I had to use the internet to do so; in all the years since 1981, I never, not once, saw any of them show up in used bookstores. They had always been a bit of a mystery to me, but the internet being the wonder of our age, I was able to run down some info about them. This blog, especially the comments section, is one of the best sources of information I've seen about them.