Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

This man can create moods and crystallize certain fundamental emotions in a way few writers have ever been privileged to achieve.  And it is these moods and these emotions that the reader generally remembers, not the people who live through them—the futility  of the life of the expatriate, his emptiness and his frantic search for a kick; the horror of the retreat from Caporetto; the loneliness that surrounds the death in childbed of the heroine in A Farewell to Arms, the brutality of "The Killers", and the frustration of "Fifty Grand"; the loneliness and incongruity of drunkenness, and the sense of decay that pervaded all his work up to To Have and Have Not....

Many expected that Hemingway’s experience in Spain would so inflame his heart and talents, that his long-announced novel of that war would be both his finest achievement and ‘the’ novel about Spain. It is not. It is his finest achievement only in the sense that he has now perfected his extraordinary technical facility and touched some moments of action with a fictional suspense that is literally unbearable. But depth of understanding there is none; breadth of conception is heartbreakingly lacking; there is no searching, no probing, no grappling with the truths of human life that is more than superficial. And an astounding thing has happened, that anyone who was even remotely concerned with what happened in Spain will find almost incredible: Hemingway has treated that war (in an essential way) exactly as he treated the first world war in A Farewell to Arms.... The Farewell was so bitter a condemnation of imperialist war that it aroused the ire of Archibald MacLeish, who found that it had been largely responsible for destroying the new generation’s faith in its misleaders....

Examine For Whom the Bell Tolls, and see what the author... has done with one of the greatest human facts of our century--the two and a half years during which the Spanish people held in check, with their bare hands, the forces of international fascism.... The action takes place in three days’ times.... Jordan’s horse is wounded, falls upon the man, and breaks his leg. He is too badly injured to be carried, and must be left behind to do what damage he can with a light machine-gun, and then to end his life. This is a story of action, and the action is fast and furious, fused with a suspense that is magnificently handled in every incident. But... the total implication of the novel is, again, the necessity for the virility, the pervasive horror of death, the futility—nay, the impossibility of love.... The cause of Spain does not, in any essential way, figure as a motivating power driving, emotional, passional force in this country. In the widest sense, that cause is actually irrelevant to the narrative. For the author is less concerned with the fate of the Spanish people, whom I am certain that he loves, than he is with the fate of his hero and his heroine, who are himself....

There are many references in Bell to various political aspects of the struggle in Spain. And few of these references do more than obscure the nature of that struggle. Robert Jordan, his American anti-fascist fighter, wonders ‘what the Russian stand is on the whole business.’ If Jordan, who is pictured as an utterly inflexible anti-fascist, did not understand what the Soviet Union felt about Spain, surely his creator did and and does.... Hemingway’s sins of omission in the Bell allow the untutored reader to believe that the role of the Soviet Union in Spain was sinister and reprehensible....

He, an inflexible supporter of the loyalists and avowed admirer of the International Brigades, can conceive and execute as vicious a personal attack upon Andre Marty, the organizer of the International Brigades, as could be and has been delivered upon him by French fascist deputies themselves! This attack upon Marty, who is portrayed in the novel under his own name, and upon whom Hemingway exercises the presumption (both personal and artistic) of thinking for him, is entirely irrelevant to the narrative. To understand it all, one would have to know, at first hand, the nature of Hemingway’s personal contact with this man—a revolutionary figure of the first magnitude, organizer of the Black Sea mutiny of the French navy (an achievement that could scarcely have been conceived and executed by the criminal imbecile Hemingway portrays), a monolithic representative of the French working class, and the man who was the organizational genius and spirit of the Brigades....

He cannot plead that his intentions in attacking Marty were good; that it was his honest conviction that Marty was a part of the incompetence, the red tape, and the outright treachery that strangled Spain, for such ‘facts’ simply will not hold water; they are lies...

Ernest Hemingway: For Whom the Bell Tolls:

“Swing up now.” He turned his head, sweating, and looked down the slope, then back toward where the girl was in the saddle with Pilar by her and Pablo just behind. “Now go,” he said. “Go.” She started to look around. “Don’t look around,” Robert Jordan said. “Go.” And Pablo hit the horse across the crupper with a hobbling strap and it looked as though Maria tried to slip from the saddle but Pilar and Pablo were riding close up against her and Pilar was holding her and the three horses were going up the draw.

“Roberto,” Maria turned and shouted. “Let me stay! Let me stay!” “I am with thee,” Robert Jordan shouted. “I am with thee now. We are both there. Go!” Then they were out of sight around the corner of the draw and he was soaking wet with sweat and looking at nothing. Agustín was standing by him.

“Do you want me to shoot thee, Inglés?” he asked, leaning down close. “Quieres? It is nothing.” “No hace falta,” Robert Jordan said. “Get along. I am very well here.” “Me cago en la leche que me han dado!” Agustín said. He was crying so he could not see Robert Jordan clearly. “Salud, Inglés.” “Salud, old one,” Robert Jordan said. He was looking down the slope now. “Look well after the cropped head, wilt thou?” “There is no problem,” Agustín said. “Thou has what thou needest?” “There are very few shells for this máquina, so I will keep it,” Robert Jordan said. “Thou canst now get more. For that other and the one of Pablo, yes.”

He looked down the hill slope again and he thought, I hate to leave it, is all. I hate to leave it very much and I hope I have done some good in it. I have tried to with what talent I had. Have, you mean. All right, have. I have fought for what I believed in for a year now. If we win here we will win everywhere. The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it. And you had a lot of luck, he told himself, to have had such a good life. You’ve had just as good a life as grandfather’s though not as long. You’ve had as good a life as any one because of these last days. You do not want to complain when you have been so lucky. I wish there was some way to pass on what I’ve learned, though. Christ, I was learning fast there at the end.

I can’t wait any longer now, he said. If I wait any longer I’ll pass out. I know because I’ve felt it starting to go three times now and I’ve held it. I held it all right. But I don’t know about any more. What I think is you’ve got an internal hemorrhage there from where that thigh bone’s cut around inside. Especially on that turning business. That makes the swelling and that’s what weakens you and makes you start to pass. It would be all right to do it now. Really, I’m telling you that it would be all right. And if you wait and hold them up even a little while or just get the officer that may make all the difference. One thing well done can make—— All right, he said. And he lay very quietly and tried to hold on to himself that he felt slipping away from himself as you feel snow starting to slip sometimes on a mountain slope, and he said, now quietly, then let me last until they come.

Robert Jordan’s luck held very good because he saw, just then, the cavalry ride out of the timber and cross the road. He watched them coming riding up the slope. He saw the trooper who stopped by the gray horse and shouted to the officer who rode over to him. He watched them both looking down at the gray horse. They recognized him of course. He and his rider had been missing since the early morning of the day before. Robert Jordan saw them there on the slope, close to him now, and below he saw the road and the bridge and the long lines of vehicles below it. He was completely integrated now and he took a good long look at everything. Then he looked up at the sky. There were big white clouds in it. He touched the palm of his hand against the pine needles where he lay and he touched the bark of the pine trunk that he lay behind. Then he rested easily as he could with his two elbows in the pine needles and the muzzle of the submachine gun resting against the trunk of the pine tree. As the officer came trotting now on the trail of the horses of the band he would pass twenty yards below where Robert Jordan lay. At that distance there would be no problem.

The officer was Lieutenant Berrendo. He had come up from La Granja when they had been ordered up after the first report of the attack on the lower post. They had ridden hard and had then had to swing back, because the bridge had been blown, to cross the gorge high above and come around through the timber. Their horses were wet and blown and they had to be urged into the trot. Lieutenant Berrendo, watching the trail, came riding up, his thin face serious and grave. His submachine gun lay across his saddle in the crook of his left arm. Robert Jordan lay behind the tree, holding onto himself very carefully and delicately to keep his hands steady. He was waiting until the officer reached the sunlit place where the first trees of the pine forest joined the green slope of the meadow. He could feel his heart beating against the pine needle floor of the forest.