For Whom the Bell Tolls

Background

Ernest Hemingway wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls in Havana, Cuba; Key West, Florida; and Sun Valley, Idaho in 1939. In Cuba, he lived in the Hotel Ambos-Mundos where he worked on the manuscript. The novel was finished in July 1940 and published in October. It is based on Hemingway's experiences during the Spanish Civil War and features an American protagonist, named Robert Jordan, who fights with Spanish soldiers for the Republicans. The characters in the novel include those who are purely fictional, those based on real people but fictionalized, and those who were actual figures in the war. Set in the Sierra de Guadarrama mountain range between Madrid and Segovia, the action takes place during four days and three nights. For Whom the Bell Tolls became a Book of the Month Club choice, sold half a million copies within months, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and became a literary triumph for Hemingway. Published on 21 October 1940, the first edition print run was 75,000 copies priced at $2.75.

Title

The book's title is taken from the metaphysical poet John Donne's series of meditations and prayers on health, pain, and sickness (written while Donne was convalescing from a nearly fatal illness) published in 1624 as Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, specifically Meditation XVII. Hemingway quotes part of the meditation (using Donne's original spelling) in the book's epigraph, which in turn refers to the practice of funeral tolling:

No man is an Iland, intire 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.

The poem is often found in anthologies and literature textbooks.

The point made by the choice of this title and epigraph is that the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939, a major topic of debate in Western intellectual and political circles, is not of importance only to Spaniards; it matters to everyone.

Plot summary

The novel graphically describes the brutality of the civil war in Spain during this time. It is told primarily through the thoughts and experiences of the protagonist, Robert Jordan. It draws on Hemingway's own experiences in the Spanish Civil War as a reporter for the North American Newspaper Alliance.

Jordan is an American who has lived in Spain during the pre-war period, and fights in the International Brigades for the Republic against Francisco Franco's fascist forces. An experienced dynamiter, he is ordered by a Soviet general to travel behind enemy lines and destroy a bridge with the aid of a band of local anti-fascist guerrillas, in order to prevent enemy troops from responding to an upcoming offensive. On his mission, Jordan meets the rebel Anselmo who brings him to the hidden guerrilla camp and initially acts as an intermediary between Jordan and the other guerrilla fighters.

In the camp, Jordan encounters María, a young Spanish woman whose life had been shattered by her parents' execution and her rape at the hands of the Falangists (part of the fascist coalition) at the outbreak of the war. His strong sense of duty clashes with both the unwillingness of the guerrilla leader Pablo to commit to an operation that would endanger himself and his band, and Jordan's own new-found lust for life which arises from his love for María. Pablo's wife, Pilar, usurps Pablo's leadership and pledges the allegiance of the guerrillas to Jordan's mission. However, when another band of anti-fascist guerrillas, led by El Sordo, is surrounded and killed, Pablo steals the dynamite detonators and exploder, hoping to prevent the demolition and thereby avoid fascist reprisals. Although he disposes of the detonators and exploder by throwing them down a gorge into the river, Pablo regrets abandoning his comrades and returns to assist in the operation.

However, the enemy, apprised of the coming offensive, has prepared to ambush it in force and it seems unlikely that the blown bridge will do much to prevent a rout. Regardless of this, Jordan understands that he must still demolish the bridge in an attempt to prevent Fascist reinforcements from overwhelming his allies. Lacking the detonation equipment stolen by Pablo, Jordan and Anselmo coordinate an alternative method to explode the dynamite by using hand grenades with wires attached so that their pins can be pulled from a distance. This improvised plan is considerably more dangerous because the men must increase their proximity to the explosion. While Pablo, Pilar, and Maria create a distraction for Jordan and Anselmo, the two men plant and detonate the dynamite, costing Anselmo his life when he is hit by a piece of shrapnel. While escaping, Jordan is maimed when a tank shoots his horse out from under him. Knowing he would only slow his comrades down, he bids goodbye to María and ensures that she escapes to safety with the surviving guerrillas. He refuses an offer from Agustín to shoot him and lies in agony, hoping to kill an enemy officer and delay their pursuit of his comrades before dying. The narration ends right before Jordan launches his ambush.

Characters

Robert Jordan – American university instructor of Spanish language and a specialist in demolitions and explosives.

Anselmo – Elderly guide to Robert Jordan.

Golz – Soviet officer who ordered the bridge's demolition.

Pablo – Leader of a group of anti-fascist guerrillas.

Rafael – Well-intentioned yet incompetent and lazy guerrilla, and a gypsy.

María – Robert Jordan's young lover.

Pilar – Pablo's wife. An aged but strong woman, she is the de facto leader of the guerrilla band.

Karkov – Soviet agent and journalist in Madrid, and a friend of Jordan's.

Agustín – Foul-mouthed, middle-aged guerrilla.

El Sordo – Leader of a fellow band of guerrillas.

Fernando – Middle-aged guerrilla.

Andrés and Eladio – Brothers and members of Pablo's band.

Primitivo – Young guerrilla in Pablo's band.

Joaquin – Enthusiastic teenaged communist, a member of Sordo's band.

Main themes

Death is a primary preoccupation of the novel. When Robert Jordan is assigned to blow up the bridge, he knows that he will not survive it. Pablo and El Sordo, leaders of the Republican guerrilla bands, see that inevitability also. Almost all of the main characters in the book contemplate their own deaths. Before the operation, Pilar reads Robert Jordan's palm, and after seeing it, refuses to comment on what she saw, foreshadowing his untimely demise.

Camaraderie and sacrifice in the face of death abound throughout the novel. Robert Jordan, Anselmo and others are ready to do "as all good men should" – that is, to make the ultimate sacrifice. The oft-repeated embracing gesture reinforces this sense of close companionship in the face of death. An incident involving the death of the character Joaquín's family serves as an example of this theme; having learned of this tragedy, Joaquín's comrades embrace and comfort him, saying they now are his family. Surrounding this love for one's comrades is the love for the Spanish soil. A love of place, of the senses, and of life itself is represented by the pine needle forest floor—both at the beginning and, poignantly, at the end of the novel—when Robert Jordan awaits his death feeling "his heart beating against the pine needle floor of the forest."

Suicide always looms as an alternative to suffering. Many of the characters, including Robert Jordan, would prefer death over capture and are prepared to kill themselves, be killed, or kill to avoid it. As the book ends, Robert Jordan, wounded and unable to travel with his companions, awaits a final ambush that will end his life. He prepares himself against the cruel outcomes of suicide to avoid capture, or inevitable torture for the extraction of information and death at the hands of the enemy. Still, he hopes to avoid suicide partly because his father, whom he views as a coward, committed suicide. Robert Jordan understands suicide but doesn't approve of it, and thinks that "you have to be awfully occupied with yourself to do a thing like that."

The novel explores political ideology and the nature of bigotry. After noticing how he so easily employed the convenient catch-phrase "enemy of the people," Jordan moves swiftly into the subjects and opines, "To be bigoted you have to be absolutely sure that you are right and nothing makes that surety and righteousness like continence. Continence is the foe of heresy." Later in the book, Robert Jordan explains the threat of fascism in his own country. "Robert Jordan, wiping out the stew bowl with bread, explained how the income tax and inheritance tax worked. 'But the big estates remain. Also, there are taxes on the land,' he said. 'But surely the big proprietors and the rich will make a revolution against such taxes. Such taxes appear to me to be revolutionary. They will revolt against the government when they see that they are threatened, exactly as the fascists have done here,' Primitivo said. 'It is possible.' 'Then you will have to fight in your country as we fight here.' 'Yes, we will have to fight.' 'But are there not many fascists in your country?' 'There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the time comes.'" In the same conversation Robert Jordan is having with the others, he also realizes how there are populist policies right in America, namely homesteading which was widely used by American settlers to settle the West from 1863 onward: "Robert Jordan explained the process of homesteading. He had never thought of it before as an agrarian reform. 'That is magnificent,' Primitivo said. 'Then you have a Communism in your country?' 'No. That is done under the Republic.'"

Divination emerges as an alternative means of perception. Pilar, "Pablo's woman," is a reader of palms and more. When Robert Jordan questions her true abilities, she replies, "Because thou art a miracle of deafness.... It is not that thou art stupid. Thou art simply deaf. One who is deaf cannot hear music. Neither can he hear the radio. So he might say, never having heard them, that such things do not exist."

Imagery

Hemingway frequently used images to produce the dense atmosphere of violence and death his books are renowned for; the main image of For Whom the Bell Tolls is the automatic weapon. As he had done in "A Farewell to Arms", Hemingway employs the fear of modern armament to destroy romantic conceptions of the ancient art of war: combat, sportsmanlike competition and the aspect of hunting. Heroism becomes butchery: the most powerful picture employed here is the shooting of María's parents against the wall of a slaughterhouse. Glory exists in the official dispatches only; here, the "disillusionment" theme of A Farewell to Arms is adapted.

The fascist planes are especially dreaded, and when they approach, all hope is lost. The efforts of the partisans seem to vanish and their commitment and their abilities become meaningless, especially the trench mortars that already wounded Lt. Henry ("he knew that they would die as soon as a mortar came up"). No longer would the best soldier win, but the one with the biggest gun. The soldiers using those weapons are simple brutes, they lack "all conception of dignity" as Fernando remarked. Anselmo insisted, "We must teach them. We must take away their planes, their automatic weapons, their tanks, their artillery and teach them dignity."

The novel also contains imagery of soil and earth. This imagery appears rather famously at the start of chapter thirteen. Jordan and María have sex in a meadow in the forest. He feels "the earth move out and away from under them." Then afterwards he asks María, "Did thee feel the earth move?", to which she responds affirmatively. Variants of this phrase have become a cultural cliché, often used humorously.

Language

Since its publication, the prose style and dialogue in Hemingway's novel have been the source of controversy and some negative critical reaction. For example, Edmund Wilson, in a tepid review, noted the encumbrance of "a strange atmosphere of literary medievalism" in the relationship between Robert Jordan and Maria. This stems in part from a distinctive feature of the novel, namely Hemingway's extensive use of archaisms, implied literal translations and false friends to convey the foreign (Spanish) tongue spoken by his characters. Thus, Hemingway uses the archaic "thou" (particularly in its oblique and possessive form) to highlight the differences in Spanish between the more formal and archaic, but popular "vos" (singular) and "vosotros" (plural) forms from the pronominal "tú" (familiar) and "Usted" (formal). Additionally, much of the dialogue in the novel is an implied direct translation from Spanish, producing an often strained English equivalent. For example, Hemingway uses the construction "what passes that", which is an implied translation of the Spanish construction lo que pasa. This translation extends to the use of linguistic "false friends", such as "rare" (from raro) instead of "strange" and "syndicate" (from sindicato) instead of trade union. In another odd stylistic variance, Hemingway referenced foul language (used with some frequency by different characters in the novel) with "unprintable" and "obscenity" and substitutes "muck" for fuck in the dialogue and thoughts of the characters, although foul language is used freely in Spanish even when its equivalent is censored in English (e.g. joder, me cago). The Spanish expression of exasperation me cago en la leche repeatedly recurs throughout the novel, translated by Hemingway as "I obscenity in the milk."

Narrative style

The book is written in the third person limited omniscient narrative mode. The action and dialogue are punctuated by extensive thought sequences told from the viewpoint of Robert Jordan. The novel also contains thought sequences of other characters, including Pilar and Anselmo. The thought sequences are more extensive than in Hemingway's earlier fiction, notably A Farewell to Arms, and are an important narrative device to explore the principal themes of the novel.

Pulitzer Prize controversy

In 1941 the Pulitzer Prize committee for letters unanimously recommended For Whom the Bell Tolls be awarded the prize for that year. The Pulitzer Board agreed. However, Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University at that time, overrode both because he found the book offensive, and instead no award was given for letters that year.

Adaptations and in the popular culture

A film adaptation of Hemingway's novel, directed by Sam Wood, was released in 1943 starring Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman. It was nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Actress; however, only the Greek actress Katina Paxinou won an Oscar for her portrayal of Pilar.

In 1959, a television adaptation, directed by John Frankenheimer, was broadcast in two parts on CBS's Playhouse 90, starring Jason Robards and Maria Schell as Robert Jordan and Maria, with Nehemiah Persoff as Pablo, Maureen Stapleton as Pilar, and Eli Wallach as the gypsy Rafael.

In 1965, the BBC produced another adaptation, as a four-part serial (miniseries in American English).

In 1978, Takarazuka Revue adapted the novel as a musical drama, produced by Star Troupe and starring Ran Ootori as Robert Jordan and Kurara Haruka as Maria. Cosmos Troupe revived the show in 2010.

Metallica's second album Ride the Lightning (1984), features a song entitled "For Whom the Bell Tolls," which can be seen as a lyrical adaptation of a particular scene from the book (chapter 27).

In 1988, the film of 1943 was rereleased with the inclusion of scenes cut from the original release.

The 2012 film Hemingway and Gellhorn depicts Hemingway's time in Spain during Spanish Civil War when he was completing work on For Whom the Bell Tolls, and his relationship with the American novelist, travel writer and war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, who he credited with having inspired him to write the novel, and to whom he dedicated it.

In October 2014 the novel was dramatised in a two part series on BBC Radio 4.

J. Cole's fourth album 4 Your Eyez Only (2016), features a song titled "For Whom The Bell Tolls".