Ernest Hemingway's FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS

I'm fifty years old.  I'm surprised that I never read Hemingway's great novel about the futility of war before now.  Hemingway's big three are The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell To Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls.  I was assigned to read A Farewell to Arms my senior year in high school.  I am sure that I will appreciate more than I did then when I read it again.

For Whom the Bell Tolls is Hemingway's novel about the Spanish Civil War.  The Spanish Civil War was the cause celebre of the 1930s.  When a coalition of left wing parties won a majority of seats in the Spanish parliament, a group of army officers, eventually led by General Francisco Franco, launched a rebellion.

Franco and the "Nationalists" were aided by Hitler and Mussolini who sent troops and equipment.
The "Loyalists" or "Republicans" were aided by Stalin and the Soviet Union.  If you considered yourself an intellectual in the 1930s, it was the in thing to be a Communist.  Having romantic notions about the struggle of workers and peasants fighting facists, artists and intellectuals flocked to fight for Republican Spain.

The reality was that neither side in the Spanish Civil War had a real claim to moral superiority.  Both sides were guilty of horrible atrocities.  When either side would take a town, the first thing that usually happened would be that everyone identified as being a member of the other side would be marched to the nearest wall and shot, or as happens in the novel, thrown off of a cliff.

In 1937 Hemingway went to Spain to cover the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance. Between battles and drinks, he had time to carry on an affair with fellow news correspondent Martha Gelhorn who became the third Mrs. Ernest Hemingway.  Soon after arriving in Spain, Hemingway announced that he was writing a novel about the war.  By the time For Whom the Bell Tolls was published in 1940, the Nationalists had crushed the Spanish Republic.  The Spanish Civil War had only been a dress rehearsal for a much more horrible conflict.

The hero of For Whom the Bell Tolls is Robert Jordan.  Robert Jordan is the stereo typical Hemingway hero.  Jordan is a professor of Spanish at the University of Montana who has taken a leave of absence to volunteer to fight in Spain.  He worries that he won't be able to get his job back after the war because he's been identified as "a Red."  Like his creator, Jordan says that he's not a Communist he's just in favor of liberty.  He has put himself under Communist command and submitted to Communist discipline because the Communists are the only ones who can organize the army and win the war.  At the start of the war, the Republican Army was composed of militias of various factions, including Anarchists, various kinds of Socialists, and Communists.   The Communists tended to be the best organized.

Ernest Hemingway with Ingrid Bergman who starred as Maria with Gary Cooper as Robert Jordan  in the movie version of For Whom the Bell Tolls

Jordan is a demolition expert.  He has been assigned by a Soviet General, Golz, to destroy a bridge in the mountains to keep the Nationalists from moving equipment across while the Republican forces launch a surprise attack.  Jordan makes contact with the Republican Partisans who are fighting a guerilla war behind the Nationalist lines.  The partisans are led by the ruthless Pablo and his mistress Pilar.

Even in peacetime, Pablo would probably have been a bandito.  Prior to the opening of the novel, Pablo's band has destroyed and sacked a Nationalist train.  They rescued Maria, a nineteen year old girl who was a prisoner of the Nationalists.  Maria was the daughter of the Republican mayor of a town.  Her father and mother were both shot.   The fascists shaved Maria's head and then raped her. This all happened not long before the opening of the novel.  Pablo believes, rightly, that the operation to destroy the bridge is a suicide mission.  Pablo would much rather loot another train.

Pablo's mistress, Pilar, is one of Hemingway's great characters.  The former mistress of a matador, Pilar is introduced in the novel as "an old woman."  We later find out that Pilar is forty eight!  Pilar relates how Pablo massacred the Nationalist Civil Guard in his village and then threw the town officials and land owners over the side of a cliff.  Hemingway based this on a real incident which occurred in the town of Ronda in Andalucia.

When I say that Robert Jordan is the typical Hemingway hero, he's an intellectual who's also a real man.  He drinks hard, is pretty much fearless in the face of almost certain death, and women cannot resist him.  The novel takes place over four days time.  Even though she is traumatized from being brutally raped, only a few hours after meeting Robert Jordan, Maria is getting naked and crawling in his bed roll.  What a guy!

Hemingway also highlights the incompetence and lack of organization which plagued the Republican forces.  Seeing the Nationalists moving a lot of equipment across the bridge, Jordan realizes that the Nationalists have been tipped off about the Loyalist surprise attack.  Jordan sends one of the partisans, Andres, back to advise General Golz that the attack will fail.  It is in the scenes where Andres is trying to deliver the message to the Soviet General that we see all of the stupidity and disorganization of the Loyalist forces which will ultimately doom their cause to failure.

Anarchist propaganda poster from the Spanish Civil War.

F.A.I. stands for "Federacion Anarquista Iberica" or Iberian Anarchist Federation

 First the anarchists on the front lines have to debate whether they are going to let Andres pass or just shoot him on the spot.   Next, an insane Communist Party Commisar arrests Andres and a loyal Republican officer on suspicion of being traitors.  Finally, Jordan's message gets to the General's aide but it is too late to stop the attack.

"They shall not pass!"  Republican propaganda poster.

As the 1965 Cliffs Notes summarize it: "So, here is the crowing irony of the book.  Jordan must blow up a bridge, the destruction of which will be absolutely of no value.  He must carry out his ineffectual assignment because of the ignorance, stupidity, indifference, and self-importance of people who should most logically have done all they could to help his courier get to his destination in time."

I have read on the internet that a lot of people do not like the style which Hemingway used to write For Whom the Bell Tolls.  In order to convey the flavor of the language spoken by the Spanish peasants Hemingway has used "thee" and "thou."  He also sometimes puts the word order the way it would be in Spanish which sounds unnatural in English.  This is the same device he will use for the old Cuban fisherman in The Old Man and the Sea.   Another device which is off-putting to modern readers is the device of not saying profanity.  Over and over again we hear the partisans say something like "I obscenity in your mother's milk!"   To modern readers this seems really silly.  We have to realize that had Hemingway actually come out and said "I piss in your mother's milk," his book would never have been published by a reputable publisher and would have been subject to censorship.

A fascinating sub theme that runs through the novel is the loss of God.  The Catholic Church in Spain was identified by the left as allied with the monarchists and large landowners.  The Anarchists and Communists believed that throughout Spanish history the Church had been used as a tool to oppress and control the workers and peasants.  Especially early in the conflict, many atrocities were carried out against priests, monks and nuns.  Many churches were looted and desecrated.  Even though the old religion is gone, the Spanish peasants fighting for the Republic still cling to the mystical heritage of Catholicism.  Pilar relates to Robert Jordan how disappointed Pablo was that the priest in his village did not die bravely.  Even though Pablo rejected the Church and all its teachings, he expected more from a Spanish Priest.

Republican propaganda poster seeking foreign help.

There is a reason that Ernest Hemingway has the reputation of being one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.  Hemingway's reputation has suffered a great deal in the last few decades because he is seen as a super macho sexist with outdated patriarchal attitudes.  Regardless of all that, I think that Hemingway's work lives up to his reputation.  I enjoyed reading this great classic and recommend it highly.

 

  

Graham Greene's It's a Battlefield

According to Humphrey Carpenter’s book The Brideshead Generation: Evelyn Waugh and His Friends, Graham Greene’s 1934 novel It’s a Battlefield is the only thing written by a member of Waugh’s set which took the politics of the 1930's seriously.

During the Great Depression, if you considered yourself to be an intellectual, it was the “in thing” to be a Communist. Greene alludes to this when one of his characters says in response to the statement that a former friend has become a Communist, “It’s fashionable.”

It’s a Battlefield is about Jim Drover, a bus driver and member of the Communist party, who has been sentenced to death for killing a police officer. Actually the novel is not really about Drover so much as it is about the impact of Drover’s death sentence. Drover’s imminent execution not only affects his immediate family but also the highest levels of the British government. Drover himself never really appears as a character in the novel. He is glimpsed at a distance in prison by officials and is discussed by his wife and brother, but never actually appears as a character in his own right.

Because this is a “serious novel” about the lives of the English lower classes during the Great Depression, there is a lot of misery and despair. Drover and his wife Milly go to a Communist Party rally which turns into a riot. Drover stabs the policeman to stop him from hitting Drover’s wife with a nightstick.

Greene intentionally draws parallels between the life of the inmates in the prison where Jim Drover is confined on death row and the life of the workers in a match factory where Drover’s sister in law, Kay, works. Because this is a Graham Greene novel, there is a lot of illicit sex which just makes everybody more miserable and nobody seems to enjoy.

The Home Secretary wants the Assistant Police Commissioner, who is never identified by name but is “the Assistant Commissioner” throughout the novel, to find out if it is better for the government politically to go through with Drover’s hanging or to grant him a reprieve. The leaders of the local Communist Party want Drover to be hanged because it will give them a martyr. Milly wants her husband’s life spared but is despondent because if he is reprieved he will serve a long prison sentence away from her. Drover’s brother, Conrad, is in love with Milly and wants to be with her. Conrad wishes that Jim would be hung so that he could marry Milly and be happy with her. Milly’s sister, Kay, has a dead end job in the match factory and her only consolation is to hop from the bed of one man to another.

Milly eventually goes to bed with Conrad. After committing adultery with her husband’s brother, Milly is miserable, which then makes Conrad more miserable. Conrad is already miserable because of the pressure of his job as the chief clerk in an insurance company. Because of Conrad’s low social status, he is always having to look over his shoulder because the middle class boys he supervises are always trying to take his job. Conrad was always jealous of Jim, so he buys a gun and attempts to assassinate the Assistant Commissioner. Conrad is mortally wounded by the police and dies shortly thereafter. Drover’s sentence is commuted to 18 years in prison. Knowing that his wife will never be able to remain celebate for 18 years and will cuckold him, Jim attempts to commit suicide. The Assistant Commissioner wishes that he was still a police official in India where life was a lot simpler. And they lived miserably ever after. The End.

In his immediately previous novel, Stamboul Train (1932), Greene had set about to write a pot boiler in order to make money. Stamboul Train was a success and saved Greene’s career as a writer. As a popular thriller, Stamboul Train is fast paced and entertaining, with interesting characters and situations. In fact, Stamboul Train is everything that It’s a Battlefield isn’t.

Throughout most of his career, Greene divided his long fiction into what he called “entertainments” and what he considered to be his “serious” novels. As opposed to the “entertainment” Stamboul Train, it appears that Greene was trying much too hard to produce “a serious novel.” Whereas the reader is sitting on the edge of her seat throughout Stamboul Train, the reader is mostly bored out of her skull throughout most of It’s a Battlefield. By the end of the novel, I actually came to hope that His Majesty’s Prison would go ahead and hang poor old Jim Drover on schedule and put him out of his misery. None of the characters in this novel gripped me to the point that I cared one way or the other what happened to them.

Although there were also a lot of characters in Stamboul Train, Greene did a good job of tying their stories together so that the reader cares about what happens to them. It’s a Battlefield, on the other hand, seems to have no real cohesion. We get to hear about Kay’s dalliances with the head of the Communist Party, who makes love to Kay underneath a portrait of his deceased wife who was a celebrated artist, and about Conrad’s lust for Milly and jealousy for Jim, and Milly’s misery that she knows that she will go on running around on good ol’ Jim while he’s in prison. We are placed inside the Assistant Commissioner’s brain for page after interminable page where he wishes that he were back in India where things were simple and he didn’t have to get involved in politics or make decisions about “Justice.” Although Graham Greene is one of the greatest English novelists of the twentieth century, this book just doesn’t seem to work. It has some good episodes, and there is a lot of good writing in it, but all together this is definitely one of Greene’s lesser efforts.

COMING SOON: Continuing our travels in Greeneland, the next stop will be Greene’s 1935 novel England Made Me.

Graham Greene's The End of the Affair

In my effort to read all of Greene's so-called "Catholic novels," I finally got around to The End of the Affair (1951).

This book is about adultery, sin, redemption and the nature of faith. Elements of the book may be loosely based on Greene's notorious real life carryings on with various of his mistresses, especially Lady Catherine Walston.

The End of the Affair doesn't involve a love triangle, it involves a love rectangle. The four lovers being Sarah Miles, her husband Henry, Maurice Bendrix, and God.

The book is primarily the story of the lovers Sarah Miles and Maurice Bendrix. Sarah is in a loveless marriage to a civil servant named Henry Miles. Then just before the outbreak of World War II, Sarah becomes involved in a passionate love affair with the novelist Maurice Bendrix.

The love affair reaches its climax during the London blitz. In 1944, while making love in Bendrix' apartment, a German V-1 rocket lands near by and Bendrix is hit by a falling door. Thinking that he has been killed, Sarah, who is an agnostic, sinks to her knees and promises God that if Bendrix lives she will give him up.


Ralph Fiennes and Julianne Moore as Maurice Bendrix and Sarah Miles

Sara ends the affair with Bendrix. After two years, in 1946, Bendrix happens to run into Sarah's husband Henry. Henry confides in Bendrix that he thinks that Sarah is having an affair. Jealous at the thought that Sarah had left him for another lover, Bendrix hires a private detective to follow her.

Sarah is indeed involved with another lover for whom she has left Bendrix: God. A big theme of The End of the Affair is the nature of faith. Sarah is desperately unhappy in her marriage and wishes to leave Henry to be with Bendrix. She rationalizes that if God doesn't really exist then she is free to do as she pleases. In order to try to convince herself of God's non-existence, she begins studying with a notorious atheist intellectual. Unfortunately, atheist arguments against the existence of God only convince Sarah that God is real and that she must keep her promise.

Sarah begins taking instruction from a Catholic priest, and performs random acts of kindness. At one point, she prays that she could take Christ's place on the cross and suffer for the redemption of humanity. Her wish is granted, as shortly thereafter, Sarah dies from pneumonia.

After Sarah's death there are several miraculous healings associated with her intercession in Heaven. (Apparently, the long-term enthusiastic commission of the sin of adultery doesn't cause Sarah to have to spend much time in Purgatory, since she seems to zip straight to the presence of the Beatific Vision!). In other words, it turns out that Sarah Miles was a Saint.

After finding out that his girlfriend left him for God, who then proceeded to take her away permanently, Bendrix, who has been an atheist, hates God. Bendrix realizes that he cannot hate God and remain an atheist since hate is just the other side of love. In order to hate God, Bendrix must first believe in Him.

The End of the Affair is rightly recognized as one of the greatest novels of the 20th century.

GRAHAM GREENE'S BRIGHTON ROCK

In trying to catch up on my reading, I just finished Graham Greene’s classic Brighton Rock first published in 1938. The Heart of the Matter left me unsettled, but I really don’t know what I think about this book.

The title refers to hard candy sold at the beach in the town of Brighton in England. Brighton Rock is the story of a teenage gangster named Pinkie Brown, his hapless girlfriend Rose, and a busybody named Ida Arnold. Sound like a bizarre plot? Well, Brighton Rock is a bizarre book.

The plot of Brighton Rock is readily available elsewhere on the internet so I won’t bother everyone with it here. What I want to focus on are the much heralded theological aspects of the novel. Brighton Rock is considered to be one of Greene’s “Catholic Novels,” the others of which are The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair, and The Power and the Glory. Although Greene habitually throws in some reference to the Church or Catholicism in his thrillers and “entertainments,” like the daughter who goes to Catholic school and says her rosary in Our Man in Havana.

Greene has said that when he started writing Brighton Rock he intended it to be a conventional thriller or detective story, hence the exciting opening chapter which describes a chase and a murder. The novel’s famous opening line sets the stage for what follows:

“Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him.”

Hale is indeed murdered. At Hale’s sparsely attended funeral, the Anglican priest mouths the platitudes of modern religion of the “I’m OK, You’re OK, God’s OK” type:

‘Our belief in heaven,’ the clergyman went on, ‘is not qualified by our disbelief in the old medieval hell. We believe,’ he said, glancing swiftly along the smooth polished slipway towards the New Art doors through which the coffin would be launched into the flames, ‘we believe that this our brother is already at one with the One.’ He stamped his words like little pats of butter with his personal mark. ‘He has attained unity. We do not know what that One is with whom (or with which) he is now at one. We do not retain the old medieval beliefs in glassy seas and golden crowns. Truth is beauty and there is more beauty for us, a truth-loving generation, in the certainty that our brother is at this moment re-absorbed in the universal spirit.’

It astounds me that Greene was already able to poke fun at New Age babble like this in the late 1930's. This kind of stuff sounds good but has no real content. This is not a religion that a person will give his life for.

Ida Arnold, who was a woman that Hale picked up in an attempt to avoid being killed, becomes obsessed with finding Hale’s killer and bringing him to justice. Ida represents the modern person. She has no religious beliefs to speak of, she just believes in “right and wrong.” However, Ida finds no fault in anything which brings her pleasure. Ida sees nothing wrong with casual sex, for instance. “It’s natural” she says, and there’s nothing wrong with it.

“She wasn’t religious. She didn’t believe in heaven or hell, only in ghosts, ouija boards, tables which rapped and little inept voices speaking plaintively of flowers.”

So while “the good guys” in this novel are not religious, “the bad guys” are very religious. Hale’s killer Pinkie was reared as a Roman Catholic, sings parts of the Mass to himself, and believes in all of the doctrines of the Church. Outside of the fact that Pinkie is also an evil psychopathic killer, he’s not a bad bloke.

Pinkie believes in Hell and knows that when he dies in a state of mortal sin that he will certainly go to it. In the back of his mind, Pinkie hopes that he’ll be able to make a confession and be granted absolution before his death. If Pinkie dies and goes to Hell in the meantime, well, as they said in The Godfather, it ain’t personal, it’s just business.

Pinkie kills Hale for being involved with the murder of the gang leader Kite. Then he kills a member of the gang named Spicer so that Spicer can’t talk. Pinkie seduces the hapless Rose, a 16 year old waitress in a greasy spoon who can give incriminating testimony against him, and convinces her to marry him.

Rose is also a Roman Catholic. Before their civil marriage ceremony, Rose goes off to confession but then realizes that marrying Pinkie in a civil ceremony outside the Church is a mortal sin so it doesn’t make any difference anyway. Rose and Pinkie are very moral in a bizarre kind of way. Rose knows that Pinkie is a murderer, but makes a conscious decision to go to Hell with him.

Although neither Pinkie or Rose believe that their civil marriage is valid in the eyes of God, they refrain from sex until they are married. In fact, Pinkie has a revulsion of the entire idea of sexual intimacy from listening to his parents make love through the thin walls of a poor tenement apartment. Pinkie says that listening to his parents in their bedroom disgusted him so much that he swore he would become a priest. However, when the time comes on the wedding night, Pinkie overcomes his disgust and does his duty.

Since Rose is convinced that she is going to Hell by living in sin with Pinkie anyway, she is ready to commit the ultimate mortal sin by taking her own life when Pinkie asks her to. Rose winds up throwing the gun she is supposed to kill herself with away and Pinkie accidentally splatters acid all over his face (in grim preview of where his soul is headed) before he plunges over a cliff and dies to avoid capture by the police.

If any of the above makes sense to you, then you may be either (1) a deranged lunatic, (2) a Graham Greene fan, (3) a Catholic, or (4) all of the above.

Greene seemed to be obsessed with mortal sin and damnation. This led George Orwell to famously opine that Greene apparently viewed Hell as an exclusive high class nightclub open only to Catholics.

I can’t really say that I enjoyed reading Brighton Rock, but it certainly provided much food for thought. Graham Greene was a one of a kind author. It may just be that Brighton Rock is a great work of literature.


Pinkie & Rose in a film version of Brighton Rock



Graham Greene