In 1940, after covering the Spanish Civil War with the North American Newspaper Alliance, Ernest Hemingway took his notes and sat down to write arguably not only his greatest novel, but also one of the greatest war novels of all time.
What resulted was For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Equal parts pro-Republican treatise (in this case, Republican being not the American right-wing), engaging love story, Spanish elegy and guide to heroism, the novel is the pure embodiment of the myth of Hemingway: loud, abrasive and courageous.
For Whom the Bell Tolls follows the journey of former American university professor Robert Jordan as he and his group of Spanish guerrillas hide out in the mountains, combating fascists and their allies.
Jordan’s mission is to blow up a bridge, cutting off the forces of Franco from the besieged Republican front.
Within the group of guerrillas he joins we meet Maria, Jordan’s love interest and the embodiment of the resilience of Spain; Pilar, the elder mother of the group, who has seen and taken part in the lunacy of war; and Pablo, Pilar’s lover, and a possible Judas figure to the cause of the Spanish left.
Before the end of the novel, the reader becomes smitten with these characters and anxious to see the outcomes of each one.
While the character studies are highly interesting throughout the course of the novel, as is Hemingway’s classic style of terse sentence structure when it comes to descriptions of combat, the real power behind this work is that it serves as a requiem for the people of Spain.
Hemingway had expressed that he felt as though the people of Spain had been betrayed not only by the conservatives in the country, but also by the major powers of the world.
The United States and United Kingdom did nothing to halt the flow of supplies to the Hitler and Mussolini-backed Spanish fascists, with the exception of the individuals who joined the International Brigades.
This sense of betrayal is made abundantly obvious within the novel through each main character. Maria coldly recounts the abuse she received at the hands of the falange (fascist movement), while Pilar almost gleefully recounts the town-wide slaughter of suspected fascists in her village.
Pablo drinks incessantly while Jordan takes it all in, eventually channeling his rage into explosives and firepower.
In true Hemingway fashion, each character is stoic in his or her dealings with war.
There is no excited speech or endless shouting and no character acts out of line. Rather, they accept the challenge before them and perform it dutifully in the light of the glorious leftist cause.
There’s almost a strange acknowledgement to Teddy Roosevelt’s famous line “speak softly, carry a big stick” in Jordan’s ability to keep his emotions from clouding his judgment.
He is there merely to do a job and that job happens to be destruction.
If you really want an exciting time with this book, check out a biography on Hemingway in the library.
You will be able to see how much of a carbon copy Robert Jordan is of Hemingway himself.
Though it was illegal for journalists to brandish weapons in the Spanish Civil War, Hemingway was known for dropping his notes and picking up a rifle to assist in the fight.
I pose a challenge to the reader: forget everything you thought you knew about Hemingway.
The bullfights, the machismo, the accusations of misogyny, the pension for wanton violence and hunting everything.
This is Hemingway as you’ve never seen him before.
This is not The Old Man and the Sea and this is not The Snows of Kilimanjaro, but this is the super-passionate Hemingway.
This is Hemingway with a real sense of purpose, justice and definite ideas of right and wrong.
This is Hemingway at his best.
Read this book now.
Conner McDonough can be reached at cmcdonough@spartans.ut.edu.