What I Am Reading: "For Whom the Bell Tolls" by Ernest Hemingway

“But are there not many Fascists in your country?”
”There are many who do not know they are Fascists, but will find it out when the time comes.”

It’s autumn again and I wanted to read my selections on the Spanish Civil War before the election. This was my first Hemingway book - I am self-conscious about the fact that he is on, for example, the list of “20 Authors I Don’t Have to Read Because I’ve Dated Men for 16 Years; but I also have a friend or two really into him, and had watched an HBO movie, “Hemingway and Gellhorn,” about Hemingway and his wife, war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, who met during the war and writing of the book. So, I took the plunge. 

I can see how this book contributed to the sad mythology of the Spanish Civil War, locking it in as history as written by the (foreign friends of) the romantic defeated. It is a story about an American demolitions expert linking up with partisans behind the fascist lines to blow a bridge, so that the enemy cannot reinforce against a forthcoming offensive. He falls in love with one of the partisan band, and literature ensues. 

Hemingway’s style was as terse as promised, but contrary to my expectations it didn’t hinder my reading at all. In fact, over the few days of reading, I had to remind myself not to address people as “thou,” (I can’t tell if this dialogue choice comes from the need to render Spanish differently, or the revolution’s abolition of hierarchical pronouns). The prose style also led to effective tension in critical moments.

The characters were all largely archetypical, to the extent that the American had a cowboy background (and also was an intellectual, but not too much of one). Pablo, the defeatist and shell-shocked leader of the partisan band, was the most interesting and “dynamic” character, in a literary sense, because you never know what he will do next, whether he will show courage or cowardice.

The book did get into the politics of the war, the factions on both sides, and the massacres by both sides. Contrary to other Spanish Civil War narratives (Orwell), the anarchists are not mythologized; they are shown as sloppy types who, like the worst communists, are more interested in their ideology than they are in winning the war, and show a lack of discipline. I find this to be a realistic analysis prima facie, but we’ll see how I feel after Homage to Catalonia. Neither side comes out well; and the protagonist, Robert Jordan, is like the protagonist of Graham Greene’s The Confidential Agent in that he fights now only for personal reasons, not for greater ideological causes beyond the victory of the Republic. Despite the flaws of politicians, the survival of the Republic is linked in the protagonists’ minds with the survival of humanity. And this story was set only in the war’s first year! Things got worse later on.

The story was tragic, but also brought moments of great satisfaction. These included (spoilers) the successful demolition of the bridge; but also when the other doomed band of guerrillas led by Sordo, flushed out by a cavalry unit, tricked their besiegers into coming into the open by playing dead. Another satisfying moment was the foiling of the other frustration of the Republic: the Communists. A critical dispatch is not in fact disrupted, as the reader is led to expect in one of many tense sequences, by a paranoid and egotistical Stalinist officer. I thought this officer, an executioner of his own men for ideological crimes, was a composite or veiled version of someone, but it was actual French officer André Marty, in a scathing portrayal. Marty’s serendipitous foiling at the hands of another doctrinaire communist character, a politically astute ally to the protagonist, brought me the most satisfaction of any scene.

In the end, though, every character met the fate that they were always destined for, and Robert Jordan learned to live life to the fullest in less than three days. Thus was the Spanish Civil War that Hemingway gave us. This book is so entwined with the memory of the war that it was good to go back to it as a wellspring of pathos; perhaps visited later for deconstruction, but visited for the first time at least for some literary satisfaction. 

Addendum: October 12th, 2020

I wrote this blog post riding up Route 302 in Maine, and as a result it is easily my most-revised post. I really liked the book, though, to the point of revisiting the last two chapters on a quiet evening.