I am at the point in my life that I have a bathroom book. Since I have committed myself to reading one classic of literature every year for the rest of my llife, these are perfect bathroom books. It means that I may take months to read some of these tomes, two or three pages at each "sitting." Think of me as a contemporary Leopold Bloom with a blog.
Andy Warhol has a short experimental film called Haircut that I can't help think of when I read Hemmingway. The film is just of a haircut, other than the haircut nothing really happens, and it is quite boring. At some point towards the end of the film, someone sneezes. That simple sneeze seems momentous only because your sense of time and action has been altered by the film. It slows your brain down. This is what it is like reading Hemmingway.
If you ask someone what For Whom The Bell Tolls is about, they generally say it is about a mission to blow up a bridge during the Spanish Civil War. I take issue with this description. It is really more of a book about a bunch of characters talking about a mission to blow up a bridge. They mention blowing it up on the first page, one hundred pages into the six hundred page novel they are still talking about blowing up the bridge ... page 350 they are still talking about the dam bridge. Nothing much happens, a lot of dialogue, but when the action happens, it just seems momentous, like Warhol's sneeze. The last chapter, the bridge is blown.
I knew this going in. Slowing your brain down is particularly difficult in the internet age, my brain seems to be hardwired to expect stimulus every few seconds. When I was younger I read The Old Man and the Sea, an entire short novel about a guy trying to catch a fish. I also read the very short story, "A Clean Well Lighted Place," about an old guy in a bar being talked about by waiters. Reading something with so little plot may not have been a problem decades ago, before the rewiring, but it is now. Maintaining my attention span is a task which I have to put work into. I can only read it in spurts, a few pages at a time hence the bathroom reading. My mind wanders too easily for Hemingway. I started reading For Whom The Bell Tolls in late November 2020, I started blogging about it, this post, in December. I expected that I would not be finished until March. I write this sentence today and it is April 2021, I am on page 350. I finally finished the book in early June.
I don't want to give the impression that I am not enjoying it. I am. Partially. I am saved by the beauty of the writing, here is the opening paragraph of Chapter 9:
They stood in the mouth of the cave and watched them. The bombers were high now in fast, ugly arrow-heads beating the sky apart with the noise of their motors. They are shaped like sharks, Robert Jordan thought, the wide-finned, sharp-nosed sharks of the Gulf Stream. But these, wide-finned in silver, roaring, the light mist of their propellers in the sun, these do not move like sharks. They move like no thing there has ever been. They move like mechanized doom.
Regardless of how well it is written, it is as boring as hell. It is a chore reading it, not an enjoyment. I have a completion complex. Once I start a book, particularly a classic, I have a thing about finishing it, so finish it I did. When I read a classic like this I always wonder what a modern editor would do to it. I've always thought that the middle third of Moby Dick would be removed completely if it were published now. If I were editing For Whom the Bell Tolls, much of the flashbacks seem unnecessary. The bullfighting would be yanked from this book. Some love the bravado of it all, but I am bored stiff with it. I'd move the last chapter to the beginning, parts of it, and make a flashback of the time in the cave.
This is a book about death, not about a mission to bomb a bridge. The mission plot is mere background. It chronicles the four days before the mission, the characters are stuck in a cave about half the time. They know their death is near. Death lingers among them almost as if it were a character in their midst.
This is a book with a lot of sex and a lot of violence, but it is written conservatively, not salacious or gory. Here is an example of how sexuality is handled, the opening paragraph of Chapter 33:
It was two o'clock in the morning when Pilar waked him. As her hand touched him he thought, at first, it was Maria and he rolled toward her and said, "Rabbit." Then the woman's big hand shook his shoulder and he was suddenly, completely and absolutely awake and his hand was around the butt of the pistol that lay alongside of his bare right leg and all of him was cocked as the pistol with its safety catch, slipped off.
Sometimes artists can used the limitations imposed upon them and make great beauty with it, as if the limitation are just another color in their pallet. Hemmingway does this with self-censorship.
Because there is not a lot of action, the dialogue drives the plot forward and it is a challenge. It was written in English but the characters are supposed to be speaking peasant Spanish. This presents a challenge to a writer because Spanish, like French, has a polite form while English has no such thing. Hemmingway resolves this by using "thou" and "thee" in dialogue. Here is an example of this from Chapter 25:
"He should learn to control them," Pilar said. "Thou will die soon enough with us. There is no need to seek that with strangers. As for thy imagination. The gypsy has enough for all. What a novel he told me."
"If thou hadst seen it thou wouldst not call it a novel," Primitivo said.
All the dialogue reads like this. It makes for odd reading until you realize why it is written this way.
Also, the characters are very foul mouthed, but not explicitly. Hemmingway censored himself, because he knew the book would not have been read or published otherwise. Instead of swearing he used words like "expletive" or "unprintable," or used words that rhymed with the real word, like "muck" instead of "fuck."
Here is a line from Chapter 35, this is the protagonist Robert Jordan talking to himself:
You're mucked, he told himself. You're mucked for good and higher than a kite.
It is odd at first but you get used to it.
Robert Jordan, our protagonist, is a stoic, tough and honorable character fighting Franco's fascists on the side of an underdog. He is constantly in a state of self-questioning and doubt. In chapter 39, he refers to another character, Pablo, as being "on the road to Tarsus." I am familiar with the "road to Damascus" but I really had to think about and research "the road to Tarsus." The "road to Damascus" is a reference to Paul conversion while he walked to Damascus. He changed his name from Saul to Paul and became a disciple of Jesus. Paul's hometown was Tarsus. The "road to Tarsus," is returning to where you came from, a pulling back from your conversion. Jordan may be referring to Pablo, but he is also referring to himself. He wonders what he got himself into. He is in love with Maria, a woman he just met and knows they will not have a life together because their mission is doomed. His challenge is one we all have, do we go with our convictions or do we play it safe? In those four days, they live in the moment and things get tense between the characters.
Jordan is full of shame. He is ashamed of his father for killing himself. He believes he is "flying above" his father when he joins the cause of the war, which America has no stake in. He is an American Spanish language professor and a munitions expert. Somehow he is pulled into this conflict. It is a losing cause and ultimately, him being there is a suicidal act but his cause is just, unlike his father's.
I would not recommend this book to everyone, but it is hard to see what American literature would be without it, or American film as well. I see Robert Jordan in Casablanca's Rick and even in Rocky. The film version just arrived in the mail, from my Netflix queue, and I am looking forward to seeing it. With Gary Cooper as Jordan and Ingrid Bergman as Maria, I am expecting to hate it.
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