Ernest Hemingway - For Whom the Bell Tolls

'Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.'

John Donne

Ernest Hemingway’s brevity has never been imitated or matched. His prose is fast, laconic, at times brutal and often breathtaking. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954, shortly after his celebrated novella, The Old Man and the Sea. Hemingway was awarded the prize ‘for his mastery in the art of narrative’ and modestly claimed the award was undeserving, due to the aptitude of his competition, but stated that the prize money was still welcome.

Hemingway lived a tumultuous life, riddled with violence, depression and war. A life filled with wonderful romances and woeful separations. He frequently claimed to be lonely and desolate and believed this was the perfect psychological state for all good writers. He said in his Nobel acceptance speech that ‘writing, at its best, is a lonely life’.

All these troubles, his failed romances, his experience of war and his sustained injuries arguably culminated in his suicide in 1961. However, it was later found that he had a rare genetic disease; hemochromatosis, which was passed down from his father, who tragically reached his own suicidal demise. The disease doesn’t allow the body to properly metabolize iron, which can result in mental and physical deterioration.

One can hardly speculate as to whether he was depressed because of the horrors he had witnessed in war-torn Europe, or whether his 4 failed marriages were to be held somewhat culpable, or whether his depression was solely attributed to this rare disease; one thing we do know is the hardships, the atrocities and those painful, woeful moments are immortalized in his terse, yet wonderfully explicit, semi-autobiographical prose throughout every page his wonderful oeuvre.

Hemingway writes with astonishing verisimilitude, and while his life was noticeably painful, he never neglects moments of spontaneity and always presents his audience with extraordinary romances and friendships. His novels are inextricably fluctuating, expounding the extremes of all emotions in his most idiosyncratic and distinctive prose.

For Whom the Bell Tolls is no different. In fact, it is probably the best example of this erratic prose. The story follows protagonist, Robert Jordan, empathetically know as ‘English’, through the violence and terrors of the Spanish Civil War. He is sent to a camp of republican guerrillas, who are fighting against Franco’s Fascists, in a conflict that tore Spain apart and eventually saw Franco in power. Jordan, a dynamiter, is sent there to blow up a bridge in order to aid the republicans.

As the narrative progresses, the protagonist is seen falling in love with a young girl living at the camp named Maria. Maria is a victim of the Fascists, who executed her parents and proceeded to sexually abuse and rape her. Jordan and Maria's attraction is instant, and provides gentler tones to a book that is quite sanguineous and horrific by its very nature.

Throughout the novel, Jordan argues with the old camp leader Pablo, a drunk, who was once a brave and ruthless soldier, over his conspicuous ineffectuality and his perpetual inebriation. Other than this, Jordan for the most part becomes friends with those in the camp and listens to their copious stories, anecdotes and tales of war, none more frightful than those from when Pablo was in charge.

One sequence in particular sticks with the reader, a sequence as merciless as any to be found in modern literature. Pillar, Pablo’s wife and current leader of the camp, tells Jordan of Pablo’s cold-hearted brutality in the days when he drank less and fought more. This particular story is somehow picturesque despite its palpably vicious inclinations. It displays how Pablo led men of a cliff after threatening their lives. How a group of guerrillas lined up and killed Fascists, one by one, in regimented yet horrific fashion.

If you have, or even hope to read For Whom the Bell Tolls, you will know of this scene. It is quite brilliant. The way Hemingway describes, in his distinctive brevity, the action of each man who is led to their deaths, down the tunnel of guerrillas towards the cliff. The ones who try to escape, who are then beaten continuously until they either die from such beatings or try their luck of the cliff. The ones who accept their fate, who walk proudly off the cliff as if straight into heaven. The ones, who scream for forgiveness, ask for exoneration and beg for mercy.

In these frightful scenes, Hemingway describes how Pablo is cold and fearless, which lends the reader a degree of admiration for the drunk who has fallen from glory, who once fought valiantly and boldly against a Fascist regime. And at the same time you sympathize with the devil, these Fascists, some hard-line, some nascent non-believers, all seemingly on a journey through perdition.

Much like Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, Hemingway volunteered for the Spanish Civil war, lending the novel its inevitable biographical content and its veiled realism. The book can be exceptionally cold and at times perhaps a little too masochistic, but for me, it remains permanently entertaining.

The book is neither for the fainthearted, nor for those who enjoy drawn out, leisurely, Proustian prose. This novel is almost 500 pages of pure, unadulterated emotion, always extreme and always enjoyable. It has action, love, friendship and brutality almost in repetition, all embroidered and implemented with Hemmingway’s incomparable brevity and distinguished style.

Hemingway is often praised, and rightly so, for the Old Man and the Sea and A Farewell to Arms, but it is here where his disparate style, his laconic prose and his truly desolate literature is best displayed. Out of all of Hemmingway’s work, this is the book that encapsulates Hemingway, this is the book that shows how truly astonishing a writer he really is.