How many times have you read a scene (or seen it in a movie) that only works because a character is temporarily dimwitted enough to make it possible?
Sometimes the virtual lobotomy is extended over several scenes–even throughout an entire story. The groom in My Best Friend’s Wedding goes through scene after scene perversely NOT getting it that Julia Roberts, his “best friend,” is desperately in love with him.
Rereading Hemingway’s best (in my opinion) novel, A Farewell to Arms not long ago, I thought I had caught Papa in a variation of this fundamental boo-boo.
It’s WWI, Italy: Fredric Henry, newly recovered from a war wound, is lusting after his convalescence nurse, the beguiling Catherine Barkley. Fredric’s 1st-person narration makes it bluntly plain that, though he’s madly attracted to this woman, his emotional commitment is zero. No better than the average frat boy’s. In today’s slang, Fredric wants to score.
But it quickly becomes apparent to the reader that, cocky though he seems, Fredric is just a big handsome American kid. He’s inexperienced in love affairs, and Catherine is by far the older and more worldly one.
The love scene (and it’s a good one) begins on page 29. Fredrick has been away for a couple of days. He leads Catherine into a dark, moonlit garden, they make out fairly heavily, and she teases an “I love you” out of him. Here’s the exchange:
“You did say you loved me, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” I lied. I had not said it before.
At least Fredric is a reliable narrator, no matter how sleazy his own words make him seem. Catherine may be crazy, he reflects, but the experience is better than going to a whorehouse. He doesn’t try to varnish it over. I knew I did not love Catherine Barkley nor had any idea of loving her.
All this will prove to be baloney, of course, since the entire book (if you exclude the military combat portions) is the story of a great, doomed love affair. But a first-time reader will be excused for wondering if Hemingway was really going to allow Catherine Barkley to be stupid enough to fall for this line. A weaker fiction writer than Hemingway might have gone for that option here, reasoning that it would cause no harm as long as he let Catherine bounce back to even the score later, when Fredric falls more and more in love with her.
But Hemingway isn’t about to take the cheaper option: having worked hard to build a fascinating, unpredictable, and emotionally smart character in Catherine, he isn’t going to sell her out.
Watch how he takes the high road:
Fredric, comparing the flirtation to a bridge game “in which you said things instead of playing cards,” finally makes his Big Move: “I wish there was some place we could go…”
Ladies, how many times have you heard that? Is Catherine Barkley really going to be swept off her feet by that classic bit of masculine roguery? In terms of the novelist’s job, wouldn’t that make a smart, interesting character way less smart, way less interesting than the reader has been led to think she is–merely for the convenience of the author? Hemingway isn’t really about to let this train wreck happen, is he?
The answer is…a resounding, reassuring NO! Observe.
“This is a rotten game we play, isn’t it?” Catherine says suddenly, completely flipping Fredric on his ear.
“What game?”
“Don’t be dull.”
“I’m not, on purpose.”
“You’re a nice boy,” she said. “And you play it as well as you know how. But it’s a rotten game.”
There is a pause–one of those Hemingway moments that DON’T have to be written–and you know Fredric’s head is spinning. As the scene continues, here’s the best he can come up with:
“Do you always know what people think?”
“Not always. But I do with you. You don’t have to pretend you love me. That’s over for the evening. Is there anything else you’d like to talk about?”
GAME OVER for Fredric.
For the rest of us, here’s the lesson: Fiction Writers, Respect Your Characters
Your commitment to the people you’re allowing to live and breathe in your story must be total. If Catherine is smart, don’t ever make her stupid, even for a moment, to finesse a plot move. Conversely, if you’ve set a character up as “IQ challenged” don’t bump his brain power up 50 points just because one scene requires him to be the smartest guy in the room. (But that’s a subject for another day.)
Think about this: if Hemingway had made Catherine Barkley stupid enough to fall for Fredric’s stuff, you would immediately have lost respect for her intelligence. Worse than that, the confusion it caused would jar you out of the flow of the story. Literally, you would no longer quite believe. It might even begin to dawn on you that the writer was trying to get away with a cheap trick.
Any or all of the above would certainly cause a huge nosedive in reader empathy, dooming the book to the “mediocre” pile. Worst case: we would never have heard of A Farewell to Arms: you wouldn’t be reading this, I wouldn’t have written it.
But by simply doing the right thing by his character, Hemingway ended up writing a classic exchange that crackles with the eternal electricity of two wonderfully attractive characters equally matched for the game of love.
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