By Ernest Hemingway. Scribners. $2.75
ONE must he hesitant to apply the word ‘artist’ to a virile American writer. He is apt to fed that he has been insulted, that he has been ticketed as an escapist, or a literary embroiderer. However, here goes: Ernest Hemingway is an artist, and his new novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, is a rare and beautiful piece of work. It contains all the strength and brutality, the ‘blood and guts’ of all the previous Hemingway books (and more skillfully rendered profanity and obscenity than any of them); and it is written with a degree of delicacy which proves that this fine writer, unlike some other fine American writers, is capable of self-criticism and self-development. Hemingway has not been content merely to go on expending the huge natural force that is his, but has worked, and worked hard and intelligently, to give it form as well as substance.
He has succeeded magnificently and hearteningly and at the right moment.
There is in For Whom the Bell Tolls not only the immediate stimulus of which Hemingway has always been an open-handed provider; there is in it a curious sense of permanence and nobility of spirit. Its characters are not represented as exceptional, as strange refugees from space and time. They are the eternal fighters of all wars, and the eternal victims. Theirs is the lost cause that can never be lost, the sacrifice that can never be futile. Thus the novel justifies the John Donne quotation from which came the title: ‘No man is an Hand, intire of it selfe . . . any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’
For Whom the Bell Tolls is another story of the Spanish Civil War, and its extraordinary merits seem all the more extraordinary because of that. Hemingway was there, in that war, in that prologue to war, and he felt it with a degree of intensity which was felt, God knows, by too few others. He now writes of it with detachment and objectivity, and with hardly a trace of rancor. I know that too much detachment and objectivity and too little rancor can be fatal to creation. But in this book he has achieved the true union of passion and reason, and that is why it is so preeminently a work of art.
He has painted on a small canvas. He has not attempted to sweep over a vast panorama, as in the retreat from Caporetto in A Farewell to Arms. He tells of an exceedingly minor operation in the war; his central characters are few in number, and we see them during only seventy-two hours of their lives. But it seems to me that he tells the whole story of what was behind the Spanish tragedy, and what was to come of it for Spain and Europe and the rest of us. In one tremendous chapter (the tenth) he gives the story of how the movement started in one small town. Again, he tells of how an important message is delivered through the lines; and the difficulties involved in that delivery form the story of the centrifugal leadership of the Loyalist cause, which dissipated the hopes of the innocents of Spain. In these passages, Hemingway provides a masterpiece in the brief characterization of Comrade Marty, the political commissar, who was more eager to verify his own suspicions of his own associates than to gain victory over Fascism.
Hemingway’s hero is named Robert Jordan. He bears a superficial resemblance to other Hemingway heroes, the clever ones and the dumb ones alike, in that he is resolutely resistant to illusion. But I should say that he is a better man than any of them. He is more grown-up. His consciousness is clearer. The love scenes between Robert Jordan and the girl Maria, to whom the Fascists had done ‘bad things,’ are complete love scenes. Complete love scenes are rare in modern literature. Any writer with knowledge of his craft can write skillfully about sex, but it takes an artist to write thus beautifully and truly about love.
When I said that Hemingway has written without rancor, I meant that he wrote with aching sympathy for all the victims of Fascism, including the Fascists themselves. He took no time out for denunciatory editorials. He did not fed the need to insult the reader’s intelligence by telling him that Fascism is that which kills the spirit of man, which forbids man to be an artist. He has done his finest work, and, what is perhaps more important, he has dispelled any fears concerning his own limitations.
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