This post is about the decisions we’ve made that led to the full and complex stories our lives have told. We made these decisions, or so we believe. But maybe we didn’t. It could be that they were made by some other force or agency and occurred beyond or outside us, fatefully, through no conscious choice-making of our own.
There are literary examples that help to explain what I’m getting at, one from Ernest Hemingway, the other from Henry James.
In Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, first-person narrator Frederic Henry recalls his service as an American lieutenant in the Italian ambulance corps in World War I. He meets a nurse, Catherine Barkley, is nearly killed by a mortar blast, and recovers in a hospital where he is reunited with her. They fall in love, enjoy passionate times together, and seek “a separate peace” far from the nightmare of the battlefields. But their blissful relationship comes to a tragic end: the baby boy that Catherine delivers in a Swiss hospital is still-born, and she dies from multiple hemorrhages.
Hemingway gives us much to take in and reflect upon—intense passages of dialogue that dramatize, deepen, and complicate the desire and fulfillment the lovers share, and incisive descriptions of war-torn landscapes and events. But I’ve come to feel that the most significant moment comes early, in chapter IV, during a back and forth between Frederic and his friend Rinaldi. At the start, it’s Rinaldi who’s excited about Catherine Barkley and eager to pursue her. Frederic hasn’t met her and knows nothing about her:
I was very dusty and dirty and went up to my room to wash. Rinaldi was sitting on the bed with a copy of Hugo’s English grammar. He was dressed, wore his black boots, and his hair shone.
“Splendid,” he said when he saw me. “You will come with me to see Miss Barkley.”
“No.”
“Yes. You will please come and make me a good impression on her.”
“All right. Wait till I get cleaned up.”
“Wash up and come as you are.”
I washed, brushed my hair and we started.
The first-person narrator Frederic knows from the outset how his story ended, for he has already lived through it. Hemingway thus could have made his character say something here about the future, commenting on how crucial this change of mind turned out to be. If Frederic had stuck to his resolve not to accompany Rinaldi, he would not have met Catherine on that day. He might never have met her. There would have been no love affair, passion, sex, and baby—and no deaths.
Hemingway is touching on a reality familiar to all of us. It’s so familiar that even on a rereading of this passage, we might not notice it. Should we say that Fredric “decided”? Or should we say—in passive voice—that “a decision was made”?
Like Frederic, we make decisions that alter our lives forever. But at the time, we might have been unaware that we were choosing to do something momentous or even that we were choosing to do anything. What we said, what we did, could have been otherwise. But it didn’t occur to us to look ahead. Even if we had, what would we have seen? We didn’t know, we couldn’t know, that a hurried “All right” would create consequences that would transform us.
Is Frederic grateful that he agreed to accompany Rinaldi? He met Catherine and they became lovers, soul mates. But this period of extraordinary happiness was brief, a matter of months, and it terminated in two deaths. Fredric has been left brutally and bitterly alone, a traumatized survivor. It might have been better if he had said “No” to Rinaldi and remained where he was.
I’m reminded of a related point in a novel that Hemingway admired, Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. It opens with an account of young, pretty, and spirited Isabel Archer’s arrival at Gardencourt, her uncle’s country estate in England, and the men she encounters there, including her cousin Ralph Touchett and the English aristocrat Lord Warburton. James then interrupts the storyline to flash back to when Isabel was living in her grandmother’s house in Albany, New York. Unexpectedly, as if from a fairy tale, her Aunt Lydia enters and invites her to visit Florence, Italy, where she dwells “in an old palace”:
“In an old palace?” Isabel repeated.
“Yes, my dear; a very different affair from this. This is very bourgeois.”
Isabel felt some emotion, for she had always thought highly of her grandmother’s house. But the emotion was of a kind which led her to say: “I should like very much to go to Florence.”
If, as Frederic did at first, Isabel had said, “No,” she might have stayed in Albany her entire life—her aspirations and virtues never given the opportunity to emerge and flourish. On the other hand: this decision doomed Isabel, for it meant she would come to meet and marry Gilbert Osmond, who makes her life “wretched,” a “horror.”
Years later, defying her husband’s command that she remain with him in Rome, Isabel returns to Gardencourt to be at the bedside of the dying Ralph:
She became aware that she was walking about as her aunt had done on the day she had come to see her in Albany. She was changed enough since then—that had been the beginning. It suddenly struck her that if her Aunt Lydia had not come that day in just that way and found her alone, everything might have been different. She might have had another life and she might have been a woman more blest.
James could have written this passage differently. Isabel might have said to herself that she profoundly regrets the decision she made to follow her aunt to England and Italy. If she had remained in Albany, she wouldn’t have met Osmond, which means she wouldn’t have succumbed to his sinister charm and chosen to marry him.
But was Isabel’s decision to marry Osmond really a choice? James prepares the reader for it; he carefully leads up to it. Everything is in place for him to show us when and how Isabel decided to wed the “strange man” who captivates her. But the scene of interiority we anticipate isn’t there.
We hear about Isabel’s decision after it has been made. It comes up in an aside by the narrator amid a conversation between Isabel’s journalist friend Henrietta Stackpole and another man who loves her, Casper Goodwood: “He only asked, presently, when her marriage would take place.”
James describes the before and after in detail and depth, but not the sheer moment or moments when Isabel’s decision was made, and I think that’s because he believes it’s not something he or any writer could depict, represent, put into words. Isabel chose to marry Osmond, or at least it seems she did. But if she did, it’s invisible to us and may have been to her as well. Did she decide to marry him, or was it decided she would?
We try to shape our lives by making good decisions; that’s the injunction, the goal we’re always pursuing. Sometimes we’re fortunate in the outcome, sometimes not. But the deeper truth is this: when we make the most consequential decisions—those that set off life-defining ripples—often we don’t know what we’ve done. Only later do we begin to understand the meaning and extent of the choice.
The reason life is unpredictable is that it tends to take a course we did not and cannot control. A decision is an event, something that happens, and afterward we wonder how it came about. Perhaps it had to be the way it was.
William E. Cain is Mary Jewett Gaiser Professor of English at Wellesley College, where he enjoys teaching courses on Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and other American writers. His recent publications include essays on Edith Wharton and Ernest Hemingway.
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