For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

What a business. You go along your whole life and they seem as though they mean something and they always end up not meaning anything. There was never any of what this is. You think that is one thing you will never have. And then, on a lousy show like this, co-ordinating two chicken-crut guerilla bands to help you blow a bridge under impossible conditions, to abort a counter-offensive that will probably already be started, you run into a girl like this Maria. Sure. That is what you would do. You ran into her rather late, that was all.

So a woman like that Pilar practically pushed this girl into your sleeping back and what happens? Yes, what happens? What happens? You tell me what happens, please. Yes. That is just what happens. That is exactly what happens.

Robert Jordan is a Spanish professor from Montana who has joined with Republican forces in Spain to fight in the Civil War. He's earned the reputation as an excellent dynamiter, and is tasked with blowing up a bridge to help keep fascist reinforcements from arriving during a Republican ambush. The process involves reconnoitering with small bands of guerillas in the mountains around Segovia, and among these bands are a collection of indelible characters with whom Robert becomes intricately involved: Pablo, the disgraced guerrilla leader who opposes the blowing of the bridge; Pilar, his headstrong "woman" and the band's true captain; the loyal old man Anselmo; and Maria, a girl with whom--despite all his warnings to himself--Robert falls deeply in love. There is a cinematic aspect to their love, coming as it is too late, and on the evening of a mission whose chances of success are slight, and for which the odds of a gruesome death are high.

Killing and dying are the subject of For Whom the Bell Tolls. When is it permissible to kill? When is dying a noble sacrifice? The characters all carry the burden of past killing, past dyings: for Robert, it is the bullet he put through the skull of a dying comrade. For Maria, it is the death of her parents in a gruesome fashion at the hands of the fascist, and her own repeated rape at the same hands. (Her short hair, shaved by the fascists and described as unbecoming to her face, is a symbol of the still-recent torture.) For Pablo and the other guerillas, it is the massacre of those same fascists; Pilar describes in long and gruesome detail the way the band laid siege to a group of local dons, slaughtering each one in turn, and the deep ambivalence of hindsight. The Spaniards are keenly aware that, in this conflict, the people they kill are their countrymen, and yet they know that they must continue on; the principle by which they live demands it. And they know that they, too, will likely be killed in turn, and thus live in a fashion close to their own deaths.

For Whom the Bell Tolls has superficial associations, perhaps, with his other great war novel, A Farewell to Arms. Among other things, there is a keen sense of the ways that the people at the bottom of the chain of hierarchy are abused and ignored by the people at the top. A subplot involves a messenger, sent by Robert to inform the Republican brass that they've been spotted by fascists and the ambush is foiled, who gets repeatedly waylaid by checkpoint guards and even thrown in prison by a petty French general who resents the ambush's commanding officer. It's not just that war involves death on a mass scale, it's that so many of the deaths are so pointless. For every heroic death that helps obtain a strategic advantage, there are a hundred others that are the result of poor judgment or sheer accident, and which result in no strategic advantage whatever. When, in the book's final moments, the destruction of the bridge finally takes place, the advantage of surprise has been lost, and the characters know they face death for little reason other than the need to follow orders--and for the broader principle of the war in which they fight.

Despite this, For Whom the Bell Tolls reminded me more of The Sun Also Rises, another story about a small group of people, set over a few days. Its scope and scale are so reduced, save for a few memories, stories, and gestures toward the wider war, that it feels almost like a closet drama. It's within this space that Maria and Robert live an entire romance, which they do with the special intensity of those for whom life seems very short. Hemingway haters, no doubt, may find much to despise in Maria, who attaches herself to Robert in a way that might seem naive. But you can't ignore the image of Maria with her shorn hair, taking up a machine gun and expressing her keenest desire to kill the fascists who murdered her parents, either. Nor do the haters have a response, I think, to Pilar, a battle-hardened badass whose resolve is the anchor of the small band of guerillas--whereas her husband, Pablo, represents the fickle Judas.

As I understand it, the novel's dialogue has come in for a lot of criticism over the years: Hemingway puts a lot of high-flown anachronisms in the mouth of the Spaniards, like "thees" and "thous." But I thought this worked. Partly, it's a way of elevating the guerillas, who are largely poor, rural people cast into world-significant circumstances they have not chosen, to the dignity of epic heroism. Partly it's an interesting way of transliterating the Spanish usted for an English audience. The novel--whose central character, if not sole viewpoint character, is a professor of Spanish--makes some really interesting decisions about how to present Spanish as English, relying on several false cognates and overly literal translations that I read as quite purposeful, and far more effective than trying to colloquialize everything they say. Among other things, it emphasizes the way in which Robert, though fluent in their language, is not quite of them, a stranger.