For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

“Ask not for whom the bell tolls” is the misquoted end of a sentence from John Donne that begins with the famous line, “No man is an island.” Hemingway uses the quote as the epigram for his novel.

“No man is an Iland, entire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; 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.”

Hemingway’s novel, then, is a novel about comrades, friends, lovers, community action organized around a cause, and the necessary sacrifices individuals are sometimes called to make in service to the common good. The novel is also a novel of death and of killing, in the context of a civil war: the Spanish Civil War sometimes viewed as the prelude to World War II, a proxy war between fascist forces, supported by Germans and Italians, and leftist Republicans, supported by Russia. The hero of Hemingway’s novel, an American fighting as a partisan for the Republic, knows that individuals sacrifice for the community both when they die for a cause and also when they must kill for it. “Any man’s death diminishes me” includes both friends and enemies. Though the cause may be important, and the world won eventually good, the battle to win it destroys both the victor and the vanquished.

Hemingway originally conceived the novel as a short story and it retains that character even as it grew to novel length. The action takes place entirely over three days, Saturday afternoon through Tuesday morning. The novel spools out practically hour by hour, the timeline broken only when a character recalls a story from the past or imagines a future. With rare exceptions all the action takes place among a small band of guerrilla fighters camped on the side of a mountain and centered on the experience of the American allied with them, Robert Jordan.

Jordan is an explosives specialist, a “dynamiter” commissioned to blow up a bridge, carefully timed for the start of a surprise attack. Saturday afternoon Jordan arrives at the guerrilla camp. He meets the guerrilla band and we meet them, too. Pablo, the ostensible leader of the group, once a fierce fighter now reduced to drunkenness and cowardliness; Pablo’s allegiance to the mission will waver. Pilar, Pablo’s woman who asserts command of the group in a tense battle of wills with Pablo. Anselmo, a loyal and reliable older man. There are a dozen or so other men more briefly sketched but all of whom we will know well and care for by the end of the story. And there’s a girl, Maria, who the band rescued following an earlier operation. Robert and Maria fall in love immediately and deeply.

Sunday morning, Robert, Maria, and Pilar, hike across the ridge to a second guerrilla camp. They meet with the leader, Sordo, working to enlist his group’s aid in the bridge operation. During the hike over the three rest beside a stream and Pilar recounts a harrowing story from the first days of the war when Pablo organized his village to exterminate the fascists among them. He and his men, including Pilar, attack and execute the civil guard, then, in the village square, Pablo arranges the villagers into two lines leading toward a cliff, then one-by-one, drives the fascists rounded up earlier through the two lines where they are beaten by the villagers with flays and other farm equipment until they are dead or thrown, still living, off the cliff. Her story is brutal, and riveting.

Coming back from the meeting with Sordo, Pilar goes on ahead allowing Robert and Maria to make love. It’s in this scene that Hemingway coined the phrase, “I felt the earth move.” (pp. 164 and 178).

Sunday evening the group reconnects at their camp. Their camp, by the way, is in a well-outfitted cave, big enough for the whole group to meet inside, walk around, sit at tables, sleep (although Robert prefers to sleep outside). There’s a cooking fire in the cave with a convenient hole in the roof for the smoke. There’s seemingly endless amounts of wine drained from an animal skin and scooped up in cups from a bowl. Robert also has a bottle of absinthe, and Sordo gives him a bottle of whiskey. It snows Sunday night.

Monday morning, Robert is awoken by the sound of an enemy calvary soldier. Robert shoots the soldier and they capture his horse. But the incident evokes coming danger. Sordo, the guerrilla leader had gone to steal horses for the operation during the evening. In the snow the tracks are easy to follow. Robert and his group move to the top of the ridge and set up a defensive position with their machine gun. Pablo takes the captured horse and creates fresh tracks to divert the enemy away from the cave. On the mountain ridge Robert and his group encounter the enemy calvary but are unseen. Sordo and his band are not so lucky. In one of the few scenes in the novel that breaks away from Robert’s point of view we get the story of Sordo’s small band sieged by the calvary at the top of the mountain. They hold off for awhile until enemy planes are brought in and they are bombed. Robert and his men hear the slaughter but realize there is nothing they can do to help.

The planned surprise attack has been ruined. The fascist calvary and the planes have discovered the Republican positions. Monday evening Robert writes a dispatch and sends one of his men to take the message to the general, hoping that the general will call off the now doomed operation. This is the second major sequence in the novel that occurs outside of Robert’s experience as, in alternating chapters, Hemingway gives us the action on the mountain and the sequence of the courier attempting to deliver his message to the general. The courier eventually arrives but minutes too late.

Tuesday morning is the day of the battle. The group moves down to the bridge. Robert and Anselmo prepare the bridge to be blown. Pablo, Pilar, and their group attack a separate target. When the planes appear, signaling the start of the battle, Robert and Anselmo blow the bridge. After so much build-up, this centerpiece of the operation and the driving goal of the novel, comes as an anti-climax. The destruction of the bridge takes up merely a paragraph in the middle of a chapter; it’s successful, but meaningless, now.

Nearly all the guerrillas are killed during the operation. Those remaining mount up and begin their retreat up the mountain. As they make a dangerous crossing across an open road, Robert’s horse is shot and falls on him, crushing his left leg. He’s done for, and knows it. He gives a heartfelt goodbye to Maria, telling her that she must go and that he goes with her, now, wherever she goes. Robert is left alone, waiting for the enemy to arrive and kill him, or maybe he should kill himself, first, but perhaps he will have a chance to take one of them with him and create a little more time for Maria and the others to get away. No man is an island. Any man’s death diminishes me. The novel ends with Robert still alive, and the enemy lieutenant just coming into range.

The novel is tense. The beat by beat focus over the three days generates suspense. And there’s a pervading sense of dread. As in The Old Man and the Sea the tragedy comes ceaselessly in small drips as one thing goes wrong and then another. The operation becomes more and more impossible. Here also there is Pilar, and others, who claim an ability to tell the future, and they predict doom. Robert senses it, too, in a more matter-of-fact way. Knowing that he will die he regards these final three days as the whole of his life. His affair with Maria is his whole life with her and his whole experience of love. This work with the bridge is his whole life’s meaning and his entire contribution to humanity. His relationships with the guerrilla band his only opportunity to prove his courage and worth. Is three days enough to make a life, to have a life? Hemingway asks and answers yes.

The style is Hemingway style: short, declarative sentences, much repetition. But there are two affectations here. The characters all speak Spanish, including Robert Jordan, who we are told was formerly a teacher of Spanish at a university in Montana, but they speak an archaic dialect of Spanish Robert calls “old Castialian” (p. 11). And so the Spanish dialogue is rendered not in contemporary English but in an old style English using “thee” and “thou” and so on. It’s off-putting, but it also serves to preserve the foreignness of the setting and the story. This isn’t Robert’s world after all, nor his war; it’s the Spaniard’s.

The second affectation in the writing occurs when the characters swear (and one in particular, Agustin, swears a lot). Because it’s supposed to be a translation from Spanish instead of translating the swear word to its English equivalent, Hemingway substitutes “obscenity” or “unprintable” or some such. Like this:

“That we blow up an obscene bridge and then have to obscenely well obscenity ourselves off out of these mountains?” (p. 45)

Later there’s a long passage when Robert, to himself, after a serious betrayal by Pablo, despairs of the whole operation, and in his interior monologue Hemingway substitutes “muck” for its obvious counterpart.

“Oh, muck my grandfather and muck this whole treacherous muck-faced mucking country and every mucking Spaniard in it on either side and to hell forever. Muck them to hell together…” (pp. 377-8).

It’s funny to think of Hemingway, so manly and tough-talking, being so prissy with “muck” and “thee” and “thou.” I’m sure he had a long talk with his editor. But that’s the way the book was published.

At one point Hemingway makes a joke at Gertrude Stein’s expense. Robert and Agustin are eating sandwiches and Robert is slicing an onion. Agustin doesn’t want any.

“What hast thou against the onion?”

“The odor. Nothing more. Otherwise it is like the rose.”

Robert Jordan grinned at him with his mouth full.

“Like the rose,” he said. “Mighty like the rose. A rose is a rose is an onion.”

“Thy onions are affecting thy brain,” Agustin said. “Take care.”

“An onion is an onion is an onion,” Robert Jordan said cheerily and, he thought, a stone is a stein is a rock is a boulder is a pebble. (p. 294).

For Whom the Bell Tolls was nominated for the Pulitzer in 1941. It was the unanimous choice of the jury but was vetoed by the chairman. No Pulitzer for fiction was awarded that year. Despite the carefully obscured swear words the chairman found the book offensive and profane. Hemingway did win the Pulitzer for The Old Man and the Sea, in 1953, and he won the Nobel prize in 1954. He died in 1961.