For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway
“I wish that I were going to live a long time instead of going to die today because I have learned much about life in these four days.”
(1940). Robert Jordan is an American volunteer, apparently of the International Brigade, during the Spanish Civil War in 1937. He’s not a communist but simply and fanatically an anti-fascist. Yet he demands to be called comrade, and will sacrifice everything for and turn himself solely into an instrument of his Red Army superiors. And, at present, the purpose of this instrument is to blow up a strategic bridge in the mountains of central Spain. While holed up in a cave behind enemy lines with the other Loyalists awaiting the attack, amidst all the claustrophobia and paranoia of cave life, the dynamiter falls in love with a young woman named Maria, who had been rescued during a previous skirmish after being imprisoned and gang-raped by Moroccan fascists.
I never realized it before but Hemingway’s oeuvre is refreshingly manageable. Turns out I already read most of it when I was 12. This was my second reading of this unusual war novel. But maybe all guerrilla wars involve drunks and lovers, mystical insurgents, and portentous spats at camp.
The novel is mostly mundane, then suddenly tense as hell, then mundane again, lulling you into a stupor in order to slay you with a sentence, as Hemingway likes to do. The ending is, as in A Farewell to Arms, yet another punch in the gut. The action scenes are vivid (the man could write) and concisely edited, like in a Hitchcock movie. The quasi-epic tone, repetitive and incantatory, is basically just Hiawatha, for some strange reason. A lot of times, though, the dialogue and extensive interior monologues are very robotic-sounding, as if the war had necessarily turned the characters into machines. You can feel the numb desperation behind it as Jordan stubbornly tries to stay focused on his mission. And then what happens is the repetitions start to develop an almost symbolic quality. “The bridge,” for example, gets echoed so many times you begin to think it has some metaphysical meaning. It’s a pretty weird book! But one thing you can’t accuse Hemingway of is carelessness. You can feel the deliberation he puts into his craft.
More about the style, because it is a curious blend. Though frequently undercut by vulgarities, the language is heightened, without being flowery. The author is not shooting for realism, despite the grim subject matter. He takes a lot of poetic license, such that his peasant characters will occasionally seem to go into protracted trances full of run-on sentences, as if channeling their maker. By using literal translations of Spanish idioms, Hemingway gives you some of the soul of Spain, the at once mannered grandiosity and rusticity of its people. The whole production is so stylized it can easily sound silly, and often does. It boils down the style of Hemingway’s previous novels at the risk of self-parody. I thought maybe he was influenced by The Grapes of Wrath too, since this novel was written on the heels of it in 1940 and both have the same scope and important airs.
The author mostly keeps his gunpowder dry, but this makes his poetic explosions more potent, like during the love-making “to nowhere” scene. The passage is very tenderly written, a little Gertrude Stein-interlude, and with subtle artistry imitates the rhythms and dark probings of having sex with someone for the first time, that feeling of searching for something, blindly. You assume, as the clauses rise and fall but continue to build, that what Jordan will finally find in the end is an orgasm, yet what appears at the climax (culminating in a lovely rhyme) is not his own gratification but… the other person, Maria:
“For him it was a dark passage which led to nowhere, then to nowhere, then again to nowhere, once again to nowhere, always and forever to nowhere, heavy on the elbows in the earth to nowhere, dark, never any end to nowhere, hung on all time always to unknowing nowhere, this time and again for always to nowhere, now not to be borne once again always and to nowhere, now beyond all bearing up, up, up and into nowhere, suddenly, scaldingly, holdingly all nowhere gone and time absolutely still and they were both there, time having stopped and he felt the earth move out and away from under them."
That’s what he was searching for. The woman he loves. That’s intercourse in the ideal.
The romance is wonderfully open and simple. We could all learn a lesson from it. Jordan doesn’t let shame get in the way of making his interest known, despite the lack of privacy. The woman likes her hair to be stroked by him, like a pet. The situation they’re in is too dire to let any pride or embarrassment get in the way of their love.
Hemingway keeps the motivations of the players in his drama as clean as he can, with only a couple wrinkles to bring them to life. I became involved in the character of Pablo, the leader of the guerillas, once I was shown his vulnerability. I hated him, as I’m supposed to, for his opposition to Jordan, and yet like the villain in a good western his position is nuanced. Again and again we’re told Pablo is smart, the smartest of the bunch, and that bears out. Actually, as Jordan himself notes, the disillusioned old drunk is the only one trying to save everybody from Jordan, our presumed hero. Evil Pablo is the one we should arguably be rooting for, not the American with his suicide mission.
Hemingway seldom flinches before human nature, even when it’s ugly. At one point the novel suddenly discusses the sexual dynamics between old, gross Pilar and young Maria, despite the former being a mother figure to the girl. For all the mockery he receives about his simpleton machismo, show me another writer so willing to stray into uneasy emotional territory if that is where the honest path should lie. Hemingway simply doesn’t think we should dwell there. He also doesn’t shy away from showing the corruption and cruel stupidity of the anti-fascists.
So, what drives the plot? Most of the nearly 500 pages is them waiting to do the big job. Part of the tension derives from watching these people try not to break under the strain as the attack draws near. Pablo is another monkey wrench, as the growing tensions with him pose a danger to the mission. From Pilar’s palm-reading on down, Hemingway keeps diligently tamping down any suspense that might build up about the outcome. Thus the bulk of the novel becomes an inquiry into impending doom, with Jordan juggling his responsibilities to the cause while absorbing new ones in his love for Maria and these people. But it never quite presents a dilemma to him.
His math is brutally utilitarian. Robert Jordan will fight alongside these good people even unto certain death in order to defeat a future full of death. He doesn’t care about politics or which system of governance wins, he just wants to stop the killing, and must kill to achieve that. Briefly, Jordan does question if it would indeed matter, in the long run, if the fascists won, but all he has to do is recall the atrocities the enemy has committed to decide that it would.
Of course we now know the fascists did win, and it didn’t make a difference in the long run. Franco ruled for decades, oversaw liberal reforms, became a US ally, and all Robert Jordan’s extinction-level rhetoric quickly became dated. I respect the way the character often relies on rationality to force himself to face reality, but in this case he was misguided. The fact of the matter is people can be butchers during a war and then hang up their cleavers once it’s over. The Republicans all died for nothing and Robert Jordan should’ve absconded with Maria and lived a peaceful life in Sun Valley, Idaho or wherever.
Pablo was right.