For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

Sittin’ around talkin’ about doin’ somethin’

Ernest Hemingway’s novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, published in 1940, is set during the recently concluded Spanish Civil War. Hemingway worked as a war correspondent in Spain during the war, and he references some real historical figures and events in the text. The narrative is informed by Hemingway’s own experiences of the war, as well as second-hand knowledge he gleaned as a journalist, but this is not an autobiographical novel like A Farewell to Arms.

Robert Jordan is an American who has volunteered to serve on the side of the Spanish Republicans in their fight against Francisco Franco’s Nationalists. The leftist Republicans have the support of the Soviet Union, while the right-wing Nationalists are backed by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. In his civilian life, Jordan is a professor of Spanish at the University of Montana, but in his guerrilla life he is an expert in demolitions. A Soviet general has tasked Jordan with blowing up a bridge in order to prevent fascist troops from thwarting a major Republican offensive. In order to fulfill his mission, Jordan needs the support of some locals, so he rendezvous with a band of anti-fascist guerrillas made up of Spaniards and Gypsies. Jordan joins them in their hideout in a mountain cave, where they plan their upcoming strike. Among the group, Jordan meets María, a young Spanish woman raped and orphaned by the fascists, with whom he falls in love. 

The first 270 pages of For Whom the Bell Tolls consist of Jordan and this band of partisans sitting around their cave talking about what they’re going to do. Frankly, the book really could have used a lot less of that. The last 200 pages of For Whom the Bell Tolls, however, consist of the characters actually doing what they said they were going to do, and those 200 pages make for a very good novel. One wonders why Hemingway waited so long to get the ball rolling. The answer, as I’m sure some lit critic would tell me, is character development. Much of that intended development, however, feels more like stunted growth.

Hemingway made some odd stylistic choices when writing this novel. The most glaring and persistent is that he decided to use the second person pronouns “thee,” “thou,” and “thy” throughout. At first, I thought this was his way of showing the contrast between the Spanish “usted” and “tu,” but that turned out not to be the case, since the word “you” isn’t used anywhere in the book, regardless of degree of intimacy. Another awkward convention that Hemingway employs is that whenever a swear word is spoken in dialogue, he substitutes the word “obscenity” instead, as in, “Go obscenity yourself!” It’s like the written equivalent of bleeped profanity on television. Was this really necessary in 1940? Apparently so, since the Post Office banned it as obscene anyway, but this stilted and sanitized language undermines the book’s realism. Another faulty dimension to the novel is the romance between Jordan and María, which now reads as a stereotypical story of a White Anglo male colonizing a subservient third-worlder. Despite portraying Maria as a survivor, Hemingway makes her dumber than she needs to be, which feels like he’s just fueling some shady male fantasy.

I’m not a huge Hemingway fan, and none of his books have ever really blown me away, but For Whom the Bell Tolls is the best work of his that I’ve read. Although there is enough depth to this novel to qualify as high literature, at times it often reads like a Clint Eastwood movie (Two Mules for Sister Sara and Where Eagles Dare come to mind). If you can endure the first half, the rest makes for a compelling read.

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

A beautiful trip with unpleasant companions

After having made a name for himself in literary circles with his short stories, future Nobel laureate Ernest Hemingway published his first novel in 1926. The Sun Also Rises is an autobiographical novel based on Hemingway’s experiences as a foreign correspondent in Europe. It centers around a group of American and British expatriates living in Paris who travel into Spain to go fishing and attend the Festival of San Fermín in Pamplona, which includes the famous running of the bulls. The novel is narrated by Jake Barnes, a wounded war vet and reporter from Kansas City. In Paris he encounters an old flame, Lady Brett Ashley, for whom he still has feelings. At least two other men in his social circle, however, are also in love with her. A thoroughly modern woman, she bestows her affections freely upon whomever captures her interest. This results in much in-fighting among the men in the traveling party as they booze their way around Spain.

Ninety percent of this novel isn’t really fiction at all but rather travel writing, and good travel writing at that. Hemingway is obviously recalling real travels that he undertook in Spain, and he vividly brings the setting to life with his descriptive prose. As for the fictional content of the book—the relationships between the characters—there is really only about enough plot here to fill a short story. Though the novel is set in France and Spain, it contains no French characters and only a few Spanish characters important enough to warrant names. The travelogue is heavy with tourist experiences of hotels, cafes, and trains. Mostly what the traveling party does is drink and get drunk, but in the background the week-long festival in Pamplona brings interest and vivacity to what would otherwise be a dreary narrative. The most effective passage in the book is Hemingway’s expertly rendered account of a bullfight. One can draw whatever conclusions they wish by considering this as a metaphor for masculinity, nature, or freedom, but even if one just takes the scene face-value as sports journalism it is an exceptional piece of writing, calling to mind the verbal artistry with which Jack London used to recount boxing matches.

Hemingway garnered praise for his sparse use of language, particularly in this novel. His economical, journalistic style of prose employs few words to say what he wants to say and deliberately leaves much unsaid, leaving the reader to deduce many of the characters’ inner thoughts and emotions. Hemingway’s modern rapid-fire style does make for brisk and addictive reading that propels the reader through the narrative. On the other hand, one could argue that The Sun Also Rises is awfully repetitive with its endless scenes of alcohol consumption and often pointless dialogue. Of course, many conversations in real life are pointless too, so in that sense the characters are more a reflection of reality than those of the romantic literature that prevailed before Hemingway’s modern era. The blunt shallowness of the characters, however, does make many of them unlikable and difficult to care about. There’s also an anti-Semitic portrayal of a Jewish character that tarnishes the book and reflects poorly on the author.

The Sun Also Rises was likely a groundbreaking novel for its day, one that took critics and readers by surprise for its modernist innovations. By now, however, we’ve lived through two generations of writers who grew up reading Hemingway and trying to emulate him, so much of the book’s cutting-edge originality is lost on readers of today, as is the author’s commentary on the “Lost Generation” of our grandparents and great-grandparents age. Stripped of that context, this is a very good piece of realist writing about a time and place, but it is inhabited by a group of characters who fail to move the reader with their angst, self pity, and disillusionment.
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A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

Deadpan delivery through dangerous times
Ernest Hemingway’s 1929 novel A Farewell to Arms takes place during World War I and relates the experience of the war through the first-person account of an American serving in the Italian Army. The narrator is an ambulance driver, holds the rank of lieutenant, and supervises a small squad of fellow paramedics serving on the Italian front. This is all revealed slowly over the course of the book, and it isn’t until about halfway through that we learn his name is Frederic Henry. Early in the book, Henry is wounded and spends time in a hospital in Milan, where he meets Catherine Barkley, an English nurse.

A Farewell to Arms is the first novel I’ve read by Hemingway, although I have read some of his short stories. I generally prefer older books of naturalist and romanticist literature, and I was worried he might be too modern for my tastes. To my pleasant surprise, Hemingway uses modernist techniques like stream of consciousness sparingly, only in the most emotionally tense moments, when it is most appropriate. A Farewell to Arms is quite modernist, however, in another respect: its deliberate avoidance of drama. It is almost as if Hemingway goes out of his way to deprive his audience of any satisfying dramatic moments, as if to deliver a thrill or a tear would be a cliché. The narrator relates the most frightening and stressful moments of life like war, birth, and death with a delivery so deadpan he could be reading the phone book. This happened, and then this happened, and then this happened—in feelingless monotone. I don’t require a war novel to contain combat scenes, but there ought to be some moments of emotional power that illustrate the effect that war has on human lives, instead of just a series of meals and pointless conversations. At one point, a person is shot and killed (not by the enemy) and the event is merely glossed over in a sentence or two as if nothing ever happened. That should have been a shocking moment in the character’s development, but to shock would be too conventional, so instead it is treated as a commonplace occurrence.

This deliberate eschewing of emotional stimulation is most evident in Henry’s romance with Barkley. They have sex, drink wine, and engage in terrible dialogue which makes her sound stupid. Henry repeatedly says he loves her, but it is difficult for the reader to see why, other than she’s beautiful and available. It is not easy to care for such a thinly drawn character, which makes any scene in which the two are in danger that much more difficult to become emotionally invested in. All bets are off in the final chapter, however, which is far more visceral and moving than the book that precedes it, even though it has nothing to do with the war. Though the outcome is predictable, Henry’s reaction to it is the best writing in the book. If the entire novel were as good as its final chapter, its status as a masterpiece of American literature would be easier to understand.

The novel is based on Hemingway’s own experiences as an ambulance driver in Italy, which would explain why he chose such an unusual perspective on the First World War, rather than something more indicative of the typical Doughboy’s experience. For all its faults, A Farewell to Arms is a pretty good war novel. It is worlds better than John Dos Passos’s boring and overly poetic World War I novel Three Soldiers, yet doesn’t succumb to the sensationalistic macho excesses of Norman Mailer’s World War II epic The Naked and the Dead. To some extent, I don’t see what all the fuss is about, and given Hemingway’s reputation, I doubt this is his best work, but it is good enough to make me want to give For Whom the Bell Tolls a try. 
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