Hemingway had supported the anti-fascist Republicans (and was rather played by the Soviets who were organising and more or less controlled the Republicans) and was praised for his honesty in the novel: both the Nationalists and the Republicans had committed atrocities and he did not skirt over it and portrayed ‘his’ side as equally as guilty.
When the novel appeared, it was almost universally praised by the critics and sold extremely well: by March 1942 just under half a million copies had been bought and that figure does not include the copies distributed as a Book Of The Month Club choice. It featured in bestsellers’ list for the rest of 1940 and part of the following year. It also salvaged Hemingway’s then declining career and reputation.
Neither Death In The Afternoon, his guide to bullfighting (and writing) nor Green Hills Of Africa, his account of an African safari (and of writing) were well-received in Depression-hit America. His third volume of short stories was
The consensus among the literary movers and shakes was growing that Hemingway was almost but not quite on the skids. Then came For Whom The Bell Tolls and Hemingway was back.
More than that, publishing the novel also made him independently wealthy. His first wife Hadley Richardson had income from a trust fund which supported Hemingway while he was living and writing in Paris (the income he earned in 1921 and 1922 from his freelance work would not have supported the life he and Hadley led).
His second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, came from a very wealthy family, and her money (as well as that of her childless Uncle Gus who took to Hemingway and paid for his East African safari) supported Hemingway throughout the 1930s.
Relying on Pfeiffer’s money came to an end when he divorced her in in November 1940 and married Martha Gellhorn, but now he had the royalty payments from his new novel to fund the rather grand life he enjoyed. He also sold the film rights to Hollywood for $100,000 ($1,882,000 in 2022) and this boosted his bank balance agreeably. Even better for a Hemingway, his reputation was back intact.
Reading back over the - glowing - contemporary reviews for For Whom The Bell Tolls, it is noticeable that they paid a lot more attention to the subject matter - how Hemingway portrayed the Civil War - than to the novel’s writing, literary and technical aspects.
Now that the Civil War is just another of many memories of wars and atrocities which have occurred in the meantime, that writing and the literary and technical aspects of the novel can get the attention they deserve. And it is not a pretty sight.
Certainly some critics commented and remarked on the odd decision by Hemingway to try to reproduce in English ‘Spaniards speaking Spanish’ and the even odder ruse he used to circumvent censorship when he wanted his characters to speak profanely.
Some critics were also less than convinced by the supposed love affair between the hero Robert Jordan and the nineteen-year-old Maria. But at the time the novel’s attempt to convey the horror of the recently concluded Civil War loomed large and swayed even them into praising the novel to high heaven.
Typical of their judgments was the relief many felt given that just a decade earlier they had all huzzahed the then young writer to high heaven, almost as literary messiah, but it all then seemed to be going a little pear-shaped. It was, as Edmund Wilson put it, that ‘it is like having an old friend back’. Wilson, though, was, one of those not quite as impressed by the novel and found the ‘love affair’ with Maria had ‘the too-perfect felicity of a youthful erotic dream’.
But that was then and this is now, and looking at the statistics on Goodreads, I’m wondering whether we had all read the same book: an astonishing 35% of those who rated it gave it five stars, 36% give it four stars. Really? Did they read the book I read? Just 20% gave it three stars.
I suppose it comes down to what a reader expects, what he or she believes makes a good writer and, naturally, what kind of books he or she likes to read.
As for those who give it two stars or even just one and don’t think For Whom The Bell Tolls is much up to snuff at all, there are very few. However, include me in that gang.
Am I being too harsh? Possibly. But possibly not, given we are dealing with Ernest Hemingway, who while still alive appointed himself as one of America’s greatest writers and who was for ever lecturing the world on what ‘good writing’ was and is.
Well, in For Whom The Bell Tolls, he seems to have completely forgotten his own advice on several matters, especially his condescending instruction to Scott Fitzgerald in the early 1930s when his star was waxing and Scott’s was waning ‘to leave out the irrelevant stuff’. Sadly, there’s a great deal of ‘the irrelevant stuff’ in the novel.
To put it bluntly, For Whom The Bell Tolls has not weathered at all well over the past 80 years. As a workaday adventure story it might just about pass muster, although it would not be up anywhere close to the best.
But given that Hemingway insisted he was a serious artist and a writer of literature (as opposed to a literary hack turning out ‘mere’ entertainment), the novel is risible if it is intended to be taken as respectable ‘literature’.
Let me put meat on those bones. What Hemingway needed was a fearless editor at his publisher’s who would have pointed out and dealt the novel’s many, many weaknesses. Had such a man or women done a reasonable job, For Whom The Bell Tolls would have been half as long, yes, but brighter and tauter, more gripping and more engaging, and a better read.
But he didn’t have a fearless editor. By 1940 and despite the comparative ‘failures’ of his 1930s work, Hemingway was still the star writer in his publisher’s - Scribner’s - stable and the editor who always worked with him, Max Perkins, was too lenient. Partly because of Hemingway’s customary bombast and fury whenever Perkins tried to edit ‘his work’, partly because of his public profile, Hemingway was regarded - not least by himself - as untouchable.
Ditch the ‘love affair’, Perkins should have told him. Not only is it embarrassing and extremely badly written, but it adds nothing at all to the novel. It is superfluous. And if you don’t ditch it, at least make it relevant. But do something with, don’t let it through as it is.
To circumvent censorship problems when reproducing the foul language used by pretty much everyone, Hemingway resorted to inserting the word ‘obscenity’ for ‘dirty words’ and tried other means (‘fucked’ became ‘mucked’ for example) rather than use the then customary blanks, dashes or asterisks. He also translated literally Spanish profanities.
But the technique he adopted fails in several ways: it looks ridiculous and makes much of the dialogue quite silly. It is confusing when the reader has to read a passage or line several times to understand it, and finally it simply is not shocking. Keep it simple, Perkins should have said. Your ruse does not just not work, but it spoils what is on the page, so ditch it.
The same advice should have been given about Hemingway’s attempt to convey in English the sense of his Spanish characters speaking Spanish. It does not work, either. It is unwieldy and it, too, confuses, and it doesn’t just come across as ridiculous but as faintly pretentious: Hemingway is partly saying ‘look how well I understand and speak the language’ (with, of course, the necessary subtext ‘and you, dear reader, don’t’.)
Dorothy Parker, a lifelong Hemingway fan (even though he was once very unkind to her, composing and reading aloud at a party a ‘satirical’ poem in which he ridiculed her for attempting suicide) once observed that the writer was a better short story writer than a novelist. For Whom The Bell Tolls might prove to bear out that suggestion. It is also a point made by Edmund Wilson.
The novel is shapeless and ill-constructed. Outstanding - as in ‘standing out’ but also rather good - is Pilar’s account of the massacre in her adopted village of the Fascists. It might well have stood on its own and been all the more effective for it. Equally, Andres’s attempts to get Jordan’s message through to General Golz was far more interesting, entertaining and engaging than a great deal of the rest of the novel. But somehow both get lost in the overall mix and are diminished.
The same is true in the context and organisation of the novel of two chapters based at the Gaylord Hotel. They are either superfluous and could thus more usefully have been junked, or more should have been made of them: expand them and give them more relevance and context, or lose them completely, that fearless editor should have advised. As the novel stands they are neither here nor there.
Then there’s Jordan’s ‘love affair’ with Maria, the ‘romance’. Not only as presented is it wholly unconvincing, but as a part of the novel it has no relevance or purpose at all. Worse, it is onanistic adolescent stuff of the worst kind and the several passages of lovemaking might well have been written by a 16-year-old on heat. But they were not, they were written by a 40-year-old writer who considered himself one of the best around.
I suspect part of the trouble was Hemingway’s way of working. By his own account he wrote ‘straight ahead’, making it up as he went along and, initially at least, having no idea where he was going (he liked to find out, and there is nothing per se wrong with that approach if the end result works).
Presumably at some point something coalesced in his head and he ‘had his story’: I suspect that point perhaps came just before Jordan sent Andres off to get General Golz to call off the attack. From that point on, though already three-quarters of the novel ‘has passed’, it all takes on a rather different character and the prose seems more focused.
Until then we had to wade through page after page after page of set-pieces. Those passages, pretty much the majority of the novel, all drag and each overstays its welcome. One of Hemingway’s strengths was said to be his dialogue. Yet, to be effective dialogue must be, well, effective. Far, far, far too many of the early passages (which consisted almost entirely of dialogue) are longwinded, meander nowhere in particular and are utterly banal.
Some might argue that these long passages ‘establish character’, but that’s a matter of opinion. About half of the characters are more or less defined - Pilar, Pablo, Anselmo and Andres - but the others are not, and even Jordan himself, for all the muddled, confusing and equally as banal and often incomprehensible ‘soul-searching’, is curiously and oddly unfocused.
One final query: Virginia Woolf once remarked (though over ten years earlier) that Hemingway was a ‘modernist in manner, but not in vision’. That sums it up well. Whatever happened to the ‘lean, athletic prose’ Hemingway was initially praised for?
I suppose it comes down to what a reader expects, what he or she believes makes a good writer and, naturally, what kind of books he or she likes to read.
As for those who give it two stars or even just one and don’t think For Whom The Bell Tolls is much up to snuff at all, there are very few. However, include me in that gang.
Am I being too harsh? Possibly. But possibly not, given we are dealing with Ernest Hemingway, who while still alive appointed himself as one of America’s greatest writers and who was for ever lecturing the world on what ‘good writing’ was and is.
Well, in For Whom The Bell Tolls, he seems to have completely forgotten his own advice on several matters, especially his condescending instruction to Scott Fitzgerald in the early 1930s when his star was waxing and Scott’s was waning ‘to leave out the irrelevant stuff’. Sadly, there’s a great deal of ‘the irrelevant stuff’ in the novel.
To put it bluntly, For Whom The Bell Tolls has not weathered at all well over the past 80 years. As a workaday adventure story it might just about pass muster, although it would not be up anywhere close to the best.
But given that Hemingway insisted he was a serious artist and a writer of literature (as opposed to a literary hack turning out ‘mere’ entertainment), the novel is risible if it is intended to be taken as respectable ‘literature’.
Let me put meat on those bones. What Hemingway needed was a fearless editor at his publisher’s who would have pointed out and dealt the novel’s many, many weaknesses. Had such a man or women done a reasonable job, For Whom The Bell Tolls would have been half as long, yes, but brighter and tauter, more gripping and more engaging, and a better read.
But he didn’t have a fearless editor. By 1940 and despite the comparative ‘failures’ of his 1930s work, Hemingway was still the star writer in his publisher’s - Scribner’s - stable and the editor who always worked with him, Max Perkins, was too lenient. Partly because of Hemingway’s customary bombast and fury whenever Perkins tried to edit ‘his work’, partly because of his public profile, Hemingway was regarded - not least by himself - as untouchable.
Ditch the ‘love affair’, Perkins should have told him. Not only is it embarrassing and extremely badly written, but it adds nothing at all to the novel. It is superfluous. And if you don’t ditch it, at least make it relevant. But do something with, don’t let it through as it is.
To circumvent censorship problems when reproducing the foul language used by pretty much everyone, Hemingway resorted to inserting the word ‘obscenity’ for ‘dirty words’ and tried other means (‘fucked’ became ‘mucked’ for example) rather than use the then customary blanks, dashes or asterisks. He also translated literally Spanish profanities.
But the technique he adopted fails in several ways: it looks ridiculous and makes much of the dialogue quite silly. It is confusing when the reader has to read a passage or line several times to understand it, and finally it simply is not shocking. Keep it simple, Perkins should have said. Your ruse does not just not work, but it spoils what is on the page, so ditch it.
The same advice should have been given about Hemingway’s attempt to convey in English the sense of his Spanish characters speaking Spanish. It does not work, either. It is unwieldy and it, too, confuses, and it doesn’t just come across as ridiculous but as faintly pretentious: Hemingway is partly saying ‘look how well I understand and speak the language’ (with, of course, the necessary subtext ‘and you, dear reader, don’t’.)
Dorothy Parker, a lifelong Hemingway fan (even though he was once very unkind to her, composing and reading aloud at a party a ‘satirical’ poem in which he ridiculed her for attempting suicide) once observed that the writer was a better short story writer than a novelist. For Whom The Bell Tolls might prove to bear out that suggestion. It is also a point made by Edmund Wilson.
The novel is shapeless and ill-constructed. Outstanding - as in ‘standing out’ but also rather good - is Pilar’s account of the massacre in her adopted village of the Fascists. It might well have stood on its own and been all the more effective for it. Equally, Andres’s attempts to get Jordan’s message through to General Golz was far more interesting, entertaining and engaging than a great deal of the rest of the novel. But somehow both get lost in the overall mix and are diminished.
The same is true in the context and organisation of the novel of two chapters based at the Gaylord Hotel. They are either superfluous and could thus more usefully have been junked, or more should have been made of them: expand them and give them more relevance and context, or lose them completely, that fearless editor should have advised. As the novel stands they are neither here nor there.
Then there’s Jordan’s ‘love affair’ with Maria, the ‘romance’. Not only as presented is it wholly unconvincing, but as a part of the novel it has no relevance or purpose at all. Worse, it is onanistic adolescent stuff of the worst kind and the several passages of lovemaking might well have been written by a 16-year-old on heat. But they were not, they were written by a 40-year-old writer who considered himself one of the best around.
I suspect part of the trouble was Hemingway’s way of working. By his own account he wrote ‘straight ahead’, making it up as he went along and, initially at least, having no idea where he was going (he liked to find out, and there is nothing per se wrong with that approach if the end result works).
Presumably at some point something coalesced in his head and he ‘had his story’: I suspect that point perhaps came just before Jordan sent Andres off to get General Golz to call off the attack. From that point on, though already three-quarters of the novel ‘has passed’, it all takes on a rather different character and the prose seems more focused.
Until then we had to wade through page after page after page of set-pieces. Those passages, pretty much the majority of the novel, all drag and each overstays its welcome. One of Hemingway’s strengths was said to be his dialogue. Yet, to be effective dialogue must be, well, effective. Far, far, far too many of the early passages (which consisted almost entirely of dialogue) are longwinded, meander nowhere in particular and are utterly banal.
Some might argue that these long passages ‘establish character’, but that’s a matter of opinion. About half of the characters are more or less defined - Pilar, Pablo, Anselmo and Andres - but the others are not, and even Jordan himself, for all the muddled, confusing and equally as banal and often incomprehensible ‘soul-searching’, is curiously and oddly unfocused.
One final query: Virginia Woolf once remarked (though over ten years earlier) that Hemingway was a ‘modernist in manner, but not in vision’. That sums it up well. Whatever happened to the ‘lean, athletic prose’ Hemingway was initially praised for?
Whatever happened to eschewing adjectives and especially adverbs? ‘Frightenedly’? Really, Ernest? What happened to ‘short, declarative sentences? And what happened to ‘show, don’t tell’ (as every ‘creative writing’ student is told)?
This novel is deeply, deeply conventional: we get the old, old technique of the author telling us the characters’ thoughts and feelings as a ‘God’ might know them. There’s nothing wrong with that if the author can pull it off. But Hemingway didn’t and couldn’t. Apart from Jordan, we get the thoughts of at least four other characters. Very modernistic, eh?
One of Hemingway’s boast was that he took infinite pains over writing his prose and went over it again and again. He also insisted he re-wrote it endlessly. Well, he does not seem to have done when he produced For Whom The Bell Tolls. Surely ‘one of America’s best writers would have spotted all-too-obvious flaws in the novel and done something about them?
I can only conclude that he might have re-read his manuscript (and would certainly have done so when going through the galley proofs), but that the outcome was merely that he reflected on how bloody marvellous it all was and metaphorically slapped himself on the back. Well, Ernie dear chap, it wasn’t.
In sum: sorry, but this novel does’t work. Generously, it would get three stars as an adventure story, but it seems Hemingway intended it to be more. So I’m only giving it two stars. And I’m glad I finished reading it, because it was a slog.
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