For Whom The Bell Tolls
Episode Stats
Summary
Ernest Hemingway's classic novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, is often designated as one of the greatest books about war ever written, and has appeared on the Marine Corps' recommended reading list. Today, we discuss the background of the novel, its themes, and the literary techniques used in writing it.
Transcript
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Rhett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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Ernest Hemingway's classic novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, is often designated as one of the
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greatest books about war ever written and has appeared on the Marine Corps' recommended reading
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list. Today on the show, I am packed For Whom the Bell Tolls with Hemingway scholar Mark Chirino.
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We discuss the background of the novel, its themes, and the literary techniques Hemingway
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employed in writing it. Win our conversation with our picks for the one true sentence in
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the book. After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash tolls. And just
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a heads up, we do talk about some spoilers with the plot in a general way. We'll let you know
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the point in the show to stop listening if you don't want to hear them.
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All right, Mark Chirino, welcome back to the show.
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So we had you on last year to talk about Ernest Hemingway. You are an Ernest Hemingway scholar.
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You've written several books about him. You have a podcast all about Ernest Hemingway and
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his work. I wanted to bring you back on the podcast to talk about one of my favorite Ernest
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Hemingway books, For Whom the Bell Tolls. This is often listed as one of the greatest war novels
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ever written. I know it was the late Senator John McCain's favorite novel. I'm curious,
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let's talk about this. Hemingway wrote this book in 1940. So this was about 14 years after he wrote
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The Sun Also Rises, about 10 years after he wrote A Farewell to Arms. How was Hemingway different
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from when he wrote those early novels? Like who was Ernest Hemingway when he published
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Yeah, that's a great question. So in addition to this being a wonderful novel in and of itself,
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For Whom the Bell Tolls in 1940 was something of a vindication or an act of redemption for
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Hemingway. As you mentioned, Brett, Hemingway's reputation was really launched between 1925 and
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1929 those five years with two really great books of short stories in our time and men without women
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and two iconic novels. The Sun Also Rises in 1926 and A Farewell to Arms in 1929. And so the American
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1930s were also Hemingway's 1930s, which you would think would be the prime of his career just as it is
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the prime of his life. But he really only wrote one very poor novel, which is called To Have and Have
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Not, and some nonfiction pieces, an uneven book of short stories. So there were people who considered
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Hemingway washed up past his prime. So when 1940 comes and For Whom the Bell Tolls comes out,
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it's almost like Hemingway's back. It's his great comeback. And I would only add just parenthetically
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that the next great book that Hemingway writes is The Old Man in the Sea, which is 12 years later.
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So if we're thinking of Hemingway as this iconic American novelist, he does go quite a long time
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Why did he go so far between his major works? What was going on in his life or his writing career?
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So I think in the 30s, he had a lot of distractions. He, first of all, his personal
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life, it was conducive to adventure and to experience. He wrote a treatise on bullfighting
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in 1932. He wrote a chronicle of his safari called the Green Hills of Africa in 1935. And as your
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listeners would understand, the 1930s in America was really calling for a writer to respond to what
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was going on at the time. The social and political unrest, the depression. This was something that
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John Steinbeck responded to. This was something that William Faulkner responded to. Hemingway was
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off doing his own thing. So a perfect example is For Whom the Bell Tolls. Hemingway spends the last
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few years in Spain covering the Spanish Civil War as a journalist. He writes a bad play about it.
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He writes a documentary about it. And of course, he yields this wonderful novel. So I would say that his
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lifestyle was given to experience that lent itself to writing, but could also take away from it.
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Okay, so let's dig into For Whom the Bell Tolls. It is set in the Spanish Civil War. This was a very
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complex, complicated conflict. But big picture, what was the Spanish Civil War about? And then what was
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Hemingway's connection to it? Okay, so the Spanish Civil War was fought between 1936 and 1939. And
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the adversaries were the nationalists against the Republicans. The nationalists were fascists,
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and the Republicans were made up of various factions, including socialists and communists.
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The nationalists were led by Francisco Franco, who had attempted a military coup in 1936.
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So the Spanish Civil War was essentially an extension of this plot to seize power. Another way we can think
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about this is that the Republicans were supported by the Soviet Union, and the nationalists were supported
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by Germany. And if you just look at Spain on the map, you'll see why those countries and the rest of
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the world had such a vested interest in the outcome of the Civil War.
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Gotcha. Okay, so a lot of people call the Spanish Civil War sort of a precursor,
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Yeah, you have Germany, the fascists there, and then you have the Soviet Union involved as well.
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And yeah, the Spanish Civil War, the outcome was the nationalists won. And that set up General Franco's
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rule from, I guess, the 1930s until 1975. Was that when it ended?
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That is exactly right. And so Hemingway is chronicling the Spanish Civil War, which is
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what he sees as a noble battle that was lost. Let's keep in mind that Hemingway began writing
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the novel. So the Spanish Civil War was 1936 to 1939. Hemingway begins For Whom the Bell Tolls
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in 1939 as the war is still going on. He went there because he loved Spain. He first visited Spain in
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1923 at the behest of Gertrude Stein, mainly because of the bullfights. But he loved the
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Spanish people. He loved the countryside and nature in Spain, the fishing, the bullfights,
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the culture, so that when Spain was being torn apart by the Spanish Civil War, he was
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personally invested in it. He really had his heart in this battle. Now, if I can, Brad, I just want to
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say two quick things about that. So when you have a writer who really believes in one side depicting
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the war, this is really dangerous terrain for art. Propaganda, one-sidedness rarely leads to
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excellent art. So one of the things you'll find in For Whom the Bell Tolls is a concerted effort on
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Hemingway's part to present both sides. And I don't really mean both sides in terms of, hey, maybe
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fascism is a really good thing. No, what he's really suggesting is that there are human beings on both
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sides. And there are flawed human beings on our side, and there are flawed human beings on the other
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side. And so he's pretty concentrated about that.
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So something about Hemingway's work is, a lot of his novels are autobiographical. So The Sun Also
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Rises, famously autobiographical. We did a podcast about that novel. To what extent is For Whom the
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It's autobiographical in some really interesting ways. So for me, my favorite aspect of Hemingway's
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autobiography that appears in For Whom the Bell Tolls are the few mentions that Robert Jordan, the
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protagonist of For Whom the Bell Tolls, has of his family. So Hemingway's father committed suicide in
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1928. And the same thing happens with Robert Jordan's father. He comments about his father being a coward
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for killing himself. In fact, going as far as to say that Robert Jordan's mother bullied his father
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into suicide, which are the same accusations that Hemingway has of his own father. And furthermore,
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Robert Jordan's grandfather was a Civil War hero, as was Hemingway's. And so Robert Jordan,
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For Whom the Bell Tolls is saying, I wonder if courage skips a generation. Maybe if it went from
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my grandfather right to me. And then we see the scene or the memory where Robert Jordan throws
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the pistol that his father used off a cliff into the lake in Montana, which is the same thing that
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Hemingway does. I would also add that Robert Jordan is from Montana. He's a Spanish professor
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from Montana. Hemingway loved the American West. To Hemingway, the American West was essentially
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Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana. And he ended up dying in Idaho where he had a house.
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Yeah, I thought that was interesting. Another sort of autobiographical thing I saw in the Robert
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Jordan character, there's this moment where Robert Jordan's talking about, you know, I'm in this fight,
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but when I get back, I'm going to write the best book ever about this. And that's what Hemingway
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did. That's exactly. So that is a little cheeky, isn't it, Brett? A little self-referential. He's
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like, somebody's got to write the really great book about this war. So yes, Hemingway challenged
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himself to write the great book of the Spanish Civil War. I think he probably succeeded. Robert
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Jordan has those same ambitions. Well, let's talk more about Robert Jordan. So he's an American
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who goes to Spain to fight on the Republican side, falls in love with this woman named Maria.
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And when Robert Jordan initially goes to Spain to fight, he goes with these high political ideals.
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But then throughout the story, his reasons for fighting change. Why do people seem to respond
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to this protagonist so powerfully? I think John McCain, you did an interview with John McCain's
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speech writer and assistant. And he talked about how John McCain would say, Robert Jordan is as real
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to me as any other living, real human being. So what is it about this Robert Jordan character that
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people respond so viscerally to? Yeah, that's extraordinary. And you see really people across
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the political spectrum respond to this guy. Mark Salter was the guest of our One True Podcast who
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talked about John McCain's lifelong devotion to this book. And I think the title of John McCain's
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documentary is like worth the fighting for, which is from For Whom the Bell Tolls. Well, I think with
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Robert Jordan, he's become synonymous with an individual who puts a cause and other people above himself.
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In the most simplistic terms, that is what he has come to embody. As you know, Brett, the novel is
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much more complex than that. And it's not as heroic or as easy as that. But in basic terms, that is what
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he did. He had a fine life as a Spanish teacher in Montana. And he put himself in danger, essentially
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giving up his freedom and his life for other people. And that is something that is the definition
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of heroism for many people. Yeah, you see that throughout the novel, these internal dialogues
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that Robert Jordan has. He's just talking about duty. I've got this duty. I got to do this thing.
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And he's always kind of stealing himself up to fulfill this task, which is blowing up this bridge.
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Says, I got to do it, no matter what. That's exactly right. So that's his charge, right? He has to blow
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up a bridge to prevent a counteroffensive from the fascists. He knows that that's his job. But meanwhile,
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human emotions get in the way. And he comes to like this band of guerrillas that he is associated
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with. But of course, he comes to love Maria. And sort of the micro effect of putting your life
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in service of a group of people is also putting your life in the service of one other person in
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a relationship, in love or romantic relationship. So one of the things that Robert Jordan discovers
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through his love of Maria is that he himself with another person could be everything. It's a direct
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quote from the novel. He himself with another person could be everything. It takes him a long
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time to learn it, right? He learns it, takes him an entire novel and a few catastrophes to learn it.
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But that is something that he learned. And that really does seem to resonate with a lot of readers.
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Yeah, I thought that was interesting, the transformation of Robert Jordan. So he's,
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in the beginning of the novel, he's talking about the duty to this abstract cause, right? Freedom,
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republicanism. And that's still there at the end. But towards the end, as you said, he learned to
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love this group that he was with. And he learned to love Maria. And he says, I'm not just doing it
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for this abstract ideal. I'm doing this for these individual people as well. Yes. Here's a question
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I have. As I was reading the novel, I noticed that Hemingway, whenever he referred to Robert Jordan,
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he always used his full name. It was always Robert Jordan said this and Robert Jordan said that.
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A lot of the other characters, they just got their first name, Maria or Pilar.
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Why did Hemingway do that? Is there a reason he did that, you think?
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Did you find that distracting or did you like that technique?
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I didn't find it distracting. I just thought it was interesting because a lot of other novels you
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read, right? Like they'll say the character's full name at the beginning. And then after a while,
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it's just like, well, it's just Robert. You know, I know who you're talking about. Like
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Hemingway, you can tell this was conscious. Like he decided when I talk about Robert Jordan,
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So all I can tell you is the effect that it has. I don't know. Hemingway never said this is why
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I'm doing this. One way is it seems to add some kind of a grandeur to it. You know, Robert Jordan,
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Robert Jordan, or there's sort of something rhythmic to it. It kind of reminds us of the River Jordan.
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That's how it seems to me. To me, you know, being a 21st century reader, it reminds me a lot of saying
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Charlie Brown. You know, nobody ever says Charlie or Brown. They always say Charlie Brown. And so I'm
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not sure that I think Hemingway does, you know, maybe we'll talk about this at some point that
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Hemingway does do a lot of techniques in this novel that are kind of showy. And to me, that constant
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thing of Robert Jordan is a little bit calls attention to itself.
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I think it does, but I think you're right. It makes Robert Jordan, this almost mythical figure.
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You know, you don't, you don't, you don't just call him John. No, he's John Brown. Or you don't say
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That's a great point. I used, for some reason, my mind went to comic strip and yours went to
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American history. So take of that what you will, but no, no, that's a good point.
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So we've been talking about some of the themes in the novel, this idea of duty,
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fighting for people you love. What are some other themes in the novel? And are they typical
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I think the most typical of Hemingway is he wanted to examine how man's mind functioned at war.
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And he also wanted to examine how your relationship, let's say a romantic relationship,
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can intensify during the urgency or crisis of war. So this is true in A Farewell to Arms,
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this is true in For Whom the Bell Tolls, also in a later novel called Across the River and Into
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the Trees, when you know you only have a finite number of days left. How does that change the way
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you have a relationship? All the rules go out the window. And one of the things that
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Robert Jordan says out loud is, can you live your whole life in three days if you do it with
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this kind of intensity? So Hemingway's depiction of man at war was absolutely consistent with what
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is Hemingway-esque. I would also point to the title, For Whom the Bell Tolls, which is taken from
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John Donne. And what that title alludes to is we're all connected. All of humanity is connected.
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Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee. When something bad happens to one person,
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when one person dies, when something happens to one of us, it happens to all of us. Not just the
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people of our ethnicity or who are on our side, it happens to all of humanity. And so Hemingway,
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even though he's depicting a man on one side in a war, is also experimenting with the notion of
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for whom the bell tolls and that level of connection. Another thing that I saw,
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we discussed this in our last conversation that you see in a lot of Hemingway's work.
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And in fact, you wrote a book about it, Hemingway Thought in Action.
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How Hemingway, oftentimes he's seen as sort of this he-man who's just focused on action. But in the
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action, you actually see a lot of introspection. And you see this a lot in the character of Robert
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Jordan. A lot of the scenes are him just talking about, Robert, you got to stay focused, do this
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thing. You got to get the wires right for this bridge. And then there's a short story I think
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we talked about last time where a guy's building a camp and he's-
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Yeah. And that reminded, like some of those scenes in For Whom the Bell Tolls reminded me of that short
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Well, your point is really essential because what is the plot of this novel? The plot is man has to go blow
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bridge. How short do you think this novel could have been if all it was was the action of what
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Robert Jordan had to do? But you're exactly right. What we get treated to are the thoughts and then the
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thoughts about his thoughts, right? The metacognition. And Robert Jordan is showing doubt. He's weighing
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different sides of things. He's engaging with his memory and his emotions, his fears. So absolutely,
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if Robert Jordan were not a thoughtful person, this would be one of the most boring books ever.
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All it would be was, oh, I wonder if the bridge is going to get blown or not. There's a line really
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early in the book where he is thinking about the people that he's meeting. And then he says,
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you're not a thinker. You're a bridge blower. You're not a thinker. You're a bridge blower.
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So he's telling himself that his consciousness, his introspection, as you say, are not just
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extraneous, irrelevant. They're unhelpful. It's almost as if he wishes he were a robot or an automaton.
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Or a he-man. I will go blow bridge and I won't have any thoughts about it. But he's not. So he's
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wrestling with those two things. In fact, he spends the entire novel wrestling. Last episode where you
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and I talked about Hemingway more generally, we talked about the iceberg theory. And the iceberg
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theory, I think, is turned upside down in this novel. So the iceberg theory normally means Hemingway
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gives you one eighth of the information, the knowledge, the emotions, the facts, and you have
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to interpret, deduce the rest. I don't think that's the case in this novel. I think he turns it upside
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down. He gives you everything that's on Robert Jordan's mind, page after page. And some people
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like it. And some people, they prefer the earlier style.
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No, I actually, I think it's one of the reasons why I like For Whom the Bell Tolls so much is this
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metacognition. You see Robert Jordan's thinking about his thinking and thinking about his thoughts.
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Because I think everyone experiences that when they're going through something, they're not blowing
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up a bridge, but something stressful. We talk to ourselves and we say things like, man, snap out of it.
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You got to stay focused on what you're doing and quit thinking and quit worrying about this because
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it's not doing any good. I think that's one of the reasons why Robert Jordan is so relatable.
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Like, of course, most people aren't in extreme situations like the character Robert Jordan,
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but we've all experienced that. And that's probably why it's considered one of the great war novels,
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like why a lot of soldiers relate to the novel. Because I'm sure they had the exact same thoughts
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So Hemingway once said, the worst thing that a soldier can have is imagination.
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But it's the most important thing that a writer must have. And right there, that is the tension
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right there. You're absolutely right. And what I would just direct your attention to,
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and Brett, I don't know how you feel about spoilers.
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No, yeah, go ahead and do spoilers. We'll give the spoiler alert before the show starts.
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Okay. If you look at the last, see, I'll talk about it in general terms, look at the last two pages.
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So really what we're thinking of, it's the last 15, 20 pages when we're not sure if the bridge is
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going to get blown or not. It's exhilarating and inevitable. It's such a wonderful last sequence
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of a novel. But the reason it's so protracted is that Hemingway is letting us into Robert Jordan's
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thoughts and then his thoughts about his thoughts. So he's coaching himself. And I just, I'll read just
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a few sentences. Think about them being away, he said. Think about them going through the timber.
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Think about them crossing a creek. Think about them riding through the heather. Think about them
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going up the slope. Think about them. Okay. So this is almost ridiculous. He's thinking about
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what he should be thinking about. And that's how the, that's essentially how the book ends.
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Yeah. No, the ending's really, it's, I think the first time I read it, I was like, that's it.
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But then it kind of, it sits with you for a while. You think about it afterwards, like, oh, actually,
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that's actually a really great way to end that novel.
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So I think we could have talked about this when we talked about other themes. But now that we're
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talking about the ending, maybe one of Hemingway's most famous notions is grace under pressure.
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And Robert Jordan does exhibit grace under pressure. And in that, so he has to blow the bridge and this
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rascal in his gang, Pablo, ends up absconding with the explosives. So when, when they gets the
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explosives back, they're not really, they don't have the detonators. They don't have exactly what he
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needs. So he has to sort of do a makeshift device. And then when he's wounded at the end of the novel,
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he has to either quit or behave with honor and help his team anyway, help his side anyway.
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And so it's really Robert Jordan exhibiting grace under pressure under all of these doomed
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circumstances that also make this, that, that a really a quintessentially Hemingway-esque theme.
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Yeah. The scene where Pablo runs off with the explosives, I think it's a great example. One
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of my favorites of Hemingway using this metacognition because, you know, once Robert Jordan figures out
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that Pablo ran off, he gets really angry, like super angry. And he's like saying, Hemingway uses the
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word muck. I imagine he even meant he's probably substituting that for the F word. It was like,
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muck, muck this guy, muck the Spanish people, muck Pilar, like muck, muck, muck, muck. And then he
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said, Robert, get ahold of yourself. You can't get angry. Like anger is a, he basically calls it, it's
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a, it's a luxury that you can't afford. And you had to just, this is the new situation you find yourself
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in. Yeah. Robert Jordan exhibited that grace under pressure and he improvises. And I find that
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really admirable because I think everyone's encountered that experience where someone does
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something really stupid, just mucks up all your plans. And you want to get angry, but you realize
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getting angry is not going to do anything. You just have to face the situation you have now and
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act accordingly. He's filtering everything through what is going to help me blow the bridge.
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What is my duty? What is my objective? And he has to stay so disciplined. And of course,
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Hemingway being a good novelist gives a lot of distractions and a lot of impediments. Robert
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Jordan deals with those impediments admirably. We're going to take a quick break for a word
00:25:56.560
from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So we've mentioned this metacognition idea. So
00:26:04.620
this is an innovation or narrative technique that Hemingway uses. He also did the reverse
00:26:09.360
iceberg theory. So typically in a Hemingway novel, he would just say this one line and then leave
00:26:15.180
everything else out. And it was left to the reader to figure out what that meant. And for whom the bell
00:26:20.000
tolls, he actually just, no, here's, here's what this means, right? You get to see the protagonist's
00:26:24.680
thoughts. Any other narrative or narrative innovations Hemingway used in For Whom the Bell
00:26:30.440
So maybe the most conspicuous one, and I'd love to hear how this landed for you, Brett. So
00:26:37.260
as in The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms and The Old Man in the Sea and Across the River and
00:26:44.020
the Trees, Hemingway's setting his novel in another country. And so he had to convey the language,
00:26:52.380
everybody is speaking Spanish. And so what Hemingway does, I haven't seen quite done in this
00:27:00.400
way before. In For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway kind of pre-translates Spanish into English. So he is
00:27:10.400
saying, the woman of Pablo. And it's like, what? And so in other words, he's using the Spanish phrase
00:27:18.680
and translating it literally into English, which gives it a kind of a stilted effect. It almost
00:27:24.900
sounds like, let's say, a Spanish person who has recently learned English and is using some foreign
00:27:33.060
syntax or foreign vocabulary. And you can totally understand what they're saying, but you can also
00:27:40.220
identify them as a non-native speaker. And so Hemingway, you know, my edition of the novel is
00:27:46.680
471 pages. He does this literally for 471 pages. Robert Jordan does not speak to another American
00:27:53.960
during the course of the novel. So was that distracting or did you, were you charmed by that
00:28:00.440
No, it was interesting. So I noticed that as well. And I, when he did the translation,
00:28:04.300
like he would use thou, right? Because in Spanish too, and you know, the informal is actually thou.
00:28:13.240
It's, it's formal in our, in English, but it's informal in Spanish. And so whenever, you know,
00:28:18.080
the Spanish people would be talking to each other to be like thou, thou, thou, thee. And it is,
00:28:22.560
it is interesting. Like it reminded me as I was reading the English translation, then the Spanish
00:28:26.660
reminded me of Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy, when he would have Spanish speakers speak Spanish,
00:28:32.460
he just like, I'm just gonna have him speak in Spanish. And you have to figure it out.
00:28:36.520
Hemingway didn't do that. Actually, I find, I found Hemingway's, I actually liked that.
00:28:42.960
I know Spanish. And so I, McCarthy novel doesn't bother me when they're just Spanish there,
00:28:47.700
but I actually liked how Hemingway incorporated the English as well.
00:28:51.780
One of the guests that we've had on One True Podcast is Elon Stavins.
00:28:56.660
Who is a Mexican scholar. And we talked about that exact thing about Cormac McCarthy.
00:29:04.380
And Cormac McCarthy, he'll go a page or two with it. They're just talking, they're just speaking
00:29:10.540
Spanish. And since I don't speak Spanish, it's like I'm in a room with two people speaking Spanish.
00:29:17.460
And I try to pick up what I can. And McCarthy must've been totally comfortable with that effect.
00:29:24.000
And Hemingway wants to give a slightly different effect. Well, I don't want them speaking Spanish
00:29:29.260
for 471 pages. Otherwise you won't get anything. So I will give you a sense of foreignness without
00:29:36.900
completely alienating you. It's great to see that these two writers are just having different
00:29:43.700
techniques. It's kind of like watching an old movie and you see the two Nazis like talking in kind of a
00:29:49.660
weird accent. It's like, it's not quite a German accent. They're speaking English, but just in kind
00:29:55.420
of a wacky way that conveys foreignness. It kind of subconsciously reminds you that we're not in
00:30:01.840
America and we're not speaking English. In fact, the nickname that they have for Robert Jordan is
00:30:07.200
Inglés, right? It's like, just as a, as a, to denote that he is not a native speaker.
00:30:12.880
Any other, oh, go ahead. Yeah, no, no. I was going to, I anticipated that you were going to ask
00:30:17.660
if there's any other techniques. The, the only other one I wanted to mention, and it is kind of
00:30:22.480
an important one is narrative perspective. So narrative perspective simply means who is telling
00:30:29.600
the story and what is that person's relationship to the story emotionally, time and space? How is that
00:30:37.200
person related? And so in Hemingway's first two great novels, it was a first person narrator. And so
00:30:46.160
that person controlled the entire story. In For Whom the Bell Tolls, it is a third person narrator. So
00:30:52.620
Hemingway, when he started writing For Whom the Bell Tolls, he started writing it in the first person, and
00:30:57.580
then he changed it to third person. And the benefit of that for Hemingway, and even though Hemingway
00:31:04.740
during the writing of this novel said, I don't like writing like God, I don't like being omniscient.
00:31:10.320
But in this case, he was. And we have several moments in the novel, especially towards the end,
00:31:16.800
where we're following an entirely different character during a scene where Robert Jordan
00:31:23.220
would not be present, would not have been able to witness what was going on. In fact, one of the most
00:31:29.260
famous scenes is El Sordo's Last Stand. This is the scene that gave Metallica the inspiration for
00:31:37.480
For Whom the Bell Tolls, that song. Well, it's a very famous set piece. Robert Jordan is not present.
00:31:44.940
And then the other thing towards the end, one of the big tensions in the plot is, will this guy Andres
00:31:52.660
be able to deliver a message to the general, which will call off the attack? Will he be able to get
00:32:00.640
through the bureaucracy and through the Republican lines? And we follow Andres. We leave Robert Jordan
00:32:09.820
entirely. And that is a kind of comfort that Hemingway did not have in his first two novels,
00:32:20.080
Yeah, this reminded me, writing in the third person, reminded me of, we had a podcast guest
00:32:25.640
on, we talked about Jane Austen. And then Jane Austen, one of her innovations was free indirect
00:32:30.600
style. So it's, you narrate in the third person, but the narration is sort of percolated through the
00:32:40.040
consciousness of one of the characters. And so this happens too, with For Whom the Bell Tolls,
00:32:44.520
Hemingway is using free indirect style. Whenever you see the narration in third person,
00:32:50.060
going on for Robert Jordan, like it's coming through Robert Jordan's eyes and like all his
00:32:57.220
That's exactly right. And then we'll get to a moment where he'll say, oh, this character did
00:33:02.560
not know that then, or would come to know this. So you're sort of plotting their consciousness and
00:33:08.860
their knowledge through time. So it's a little bit more of a complex thing. This is a sprawling war,
00:33:14.980
as we were saying at the beginning, is very complex. And Hemingway must have found it beneficial
00:33:19.980
to be able to, you know, investigate and enter into the motives and consciousness of various
00:33:30.420
Okay, so literary techniques, narrative styles use the reverse iceberg theory, the metacognition,
00:33:35.480
that's my favorite part. That's what makes this novel so gripping for me, at least,
00:33:39.460
and so appealing. Using the Spanish mixed with English, and then the third person kind of
00:33:44.700
different type of free indirect style. There's all sorts of famous episodes in this novel,
00:33:50.920
episodes of violence, like graphic depictions of violence. The one that stood out to me is Pilar.
00:33:57.220
So she's one of these guerrilla warriors. And Hemingway has her recount this execution
00:34:03.560
of fascists in her, I guess it was her hometown. Is there any significance to the fact that Hemingway
00:34:09.340
had a female character recount this story of violence?
00:34:13.160
Yeah, I think that's extraordinary that she's essentially the leader of their gang. And when
00:34:21.240
Robert Jordan comes and presents the mission, I'm here as an outsider, and we have to blow this
00:34:28.560
bridge, which is going to be amazingly dangerous. If Pilar had overruled it, they wouldn't have done
00:34:34.700
it. Jordan would have had to find other people to do it. So Pilar is sort of, she finds herself,
00:34:40.720
she believes in Robert Jordan, and she's aligned with him. And she is a strategist. So in many ways,
00:34:48.480
she is protecting the rest of the cast of characters that we've come to know. So whenever Hemingway is
00:34:56.360
derided for some of his female characters, and there's certainly, we can have that debate and
00:35:03.440
go on a case-by-case basis, Pilar is a woman of great strength, of enormous heart. And so she's just
00:35:14.300
a wonderful character. I don't know who that would make people think of. The way she's described it
00:35:21.580
almost is like Hemingway is describing either Gertrude Stein or his own mother. If you just
00:35:28.880
look at her physical description, that actually resonates. Those two very powerful figures in
00:35:36.360
Hemingway's life that he would have a sort of a love-hate relationship with. There's also the figure
00:35:42.640
of La Passionaria who was a female kind of rabble rouser, somebody who galvanized the Republic during
00:35:51.480
the Spanish Civil War. And Pilar might be emblematic of a figure like that. So she's essential to this
00:35:59.500
novel. Yeah, she's one of my favorite characters. I like her a lot. And so Brett, the moment that
00:36:05.580
you're talking about is also, maybe we can talk about it for just a minute. The episode that she's
00:36:11.200
describing is the way that the Republic in a small town, which is not mentioned, overthrows
00:36:21.060
the fascist control of that town. And the way they do it is essentially by massacring the town leaders,
00:36:28.900
including the religious officials. So I guess one of the motivations for the Spanish Civil War is that
00:36:37.280
the workers of Spain, the disparity between the owners and the laborers was so egregious that this
00:36:46.440
motivated this kind of dispute. And so when the workers, the peasants are trying to overthrow the
00:36:55.400
fascists, and Pilar is recounting this anecdote in painstaking detail. These guys go through a gauntlet
00:37:04.960
where they're essentially stabbing them with pitchforks, shooting them, tossing them off cliffs,
00:37:13.320
and it's doing it, it's really being described in painstaking detail that really impresses Robert
00:37:21.720
Jordan. He's really learning about the brutal nature. In fact, and just to extend the point,
00:37:28.180
Hemingway is not shying away with talking about the brutal nature of Republican tactics.
00:37:36.840
So I think that's an important advancement of this novel, that he's not suggesting that everyone
00:37:44.560
on my side is noble and pure, and everybody on the other side is evil. When he talks about this
00:37:53.840
episode that Pilar is telling about the massacre of the fascists, you can gain sympathy for the people
00:38:03.140
who oppressed all of the townspeople. It's a very slippery presentation of this moment.
00:38:09.900
Yeah, I thought it was interesting how Pilar described it. I think Hemingway did a great job
00:38:13.900
of capturing how violence can be. At the beginning of this massacre, the townspeople weren't really into
00:38:21.120
it. They were kind of like, oh, you know, I don't feel good throwing this guy off a cliff and
00:38:25.460
stabbing him. But then he said there reached a moment where it all turned. The crowd mentality took
00:38:31.820
over and no one had a problem with it. It just became, it wasn't like individuals doing this. It
00:38:37.080
was just like this new crowd entity that was doing this. And so it dispersed, it dispersed accountability.
00:38:43.940
It's mob mentality. And they were drunk. And they were laughing. And so Pilar is really disquieted
00:38:54.640
by this. I mean, she's obviously, nobody needs to say, she's obviously on the side of overthrowing
00:39:01.200
the fascists so that the town can get liberty back. But on the other hand, she's saying it's making me
00:39:08.820
sick to my stomach. And, you know, Brett, you'll remember that Robert Jordan has these discussions
00:39:14.600
with other characters in the novel. It's like, how do you feel about killing people? How, you know,
00:39:19.840
how does it make you feel, even if it's the enemy? And some people say, I love it. And other people
00:39:24.700
don't think about it. And then other people, it tortures their conscience to do things like that.
00:39:31.160
So Hemingway is, you know, for whom the bell tolls really does capture that kind of complexity.
00:39:37.260
And I also think you did a good job of describing how in war, there are some people who aren't
00:39:42.580
fighting or doing violence for any ideals. They're just doing violence because they like
00:39:46.620
violence. There's a lot of people, a lot of these peasants, they were anarchists, basically. They
00:39:51.320
didn't care about the Republican cause. They were just glad they got to do some stuff for a while
00:39:56.900
and get away with it. That's exactly right. Yep. And these scenes of violence,
00:40:01.380
this is connected to Hemingway's aesthetic of witnessing violence. What is that?
00:40:05.620
Yeah, I think this is, to me, one of the most important career-long challenges that Hemingway
00:40:12.260
gave himself. So in Death in the Afternoon, which is that bullfighting treatise I was talking about
00:40:19.600
earlier, he said, I wanted to go to the bullfights because I wanted to look at death. I wanted to look
00:40:26.680
at violence and challenge myself not to turn away. No writer can turn away from violence. You have to look
00:40:34.280
at the world in all of its gruesome horror. And I mean, that may sound a little bit over the top,
00:40:42.500
but you know, that was Hemingway. And so one of the things that emerges from Pilar's scene, and there
00:40:48.240
are other examples too, is Pilar is always careful to talk about what she saw, what she tried to see
00:40:58.900
and couldn't see, what was kept from her view. And so she actually talks about standing on a chair so she
00:41:06.600
could look through the window and see other people being executed. It's almost like she wants to bear
00:41:12.180
witness. She wants to take that responsibility. One of the great examples of this, and oh, and before I want
00:41:21.020
to mention one aspect of this in Hemingway's life, but just one final point about that episode, Robert
00:41:27.660
Jordan, for his own part, tells a story about when he is a child. And apparently there was some kind of
00:41:36.020
a racial lynching. And Robert Jordan was a little kid and wanted to see it. And his mother pulled him
00:41:43.300
away from the window, pulled him away from it. He says, so I saw no more. But it shows that his instinct
00:41:49.060
was there. He wanted to see it. He had the curiosity. He didn't want to turn his eyes at
00:41:55.020
violence. And just to punctuate this idea, in his posthumous novel, The Garden of Eden, there is an
00:42:04.440
unbelievable unpublished sentence that says, I've been to the Boulevard Arago at 5 a.m. and I've heard
00:42:12.160
the thud. And I love that sentence because, so the Boulevard Arago was where they had the public
00:42:19.880
guillotine in France, in Paris. And for Hemingway to say that he went there at 5 a.m.,
00:42:29.120
obviously he went there intentionally, right? That he sought out a public execution. He wanted to see
00:42:37.260
it happen. That he wasn't, he's like, I'll just absorb the good things in life or the pleasant
00:42:43.400
things. If he wanted to be a real writer, a war writer, somebody who told the truth, a realist,
00:42:51.720
you have to observe the world in all of its unpleasantness and all of its horror.
00:42:59.420
Okay. So the killing of the fascist, great scene of this aesthetic of witnessing violence.
00:43:03.520
You talk about one of my other favorite scenes, just Robert Jordan prepping to blow up the bridge
00:43:07.700
and actually blowing it up. It's just so gripping. Once you get to that point, you can't put the book
00:43:11.580
down. You want to keep reading because you get to see Robert Jordan's thoughts as he's doing this
00:43:16.180
high stress thing. He just becomes instantly relatable in the way Hemingway uses that metacognition
00:43:21.680
to describe it. I'm curious, are there good guys and bad guys in this novel? Like what's the moral code
00:43:27.740
in for whom the bell tolls? So I don't want to equivocate Brett. I want to answer this in two
00:43:34.080
ways though. I mean, of course there are good guys and bad guys and a fascist is never going to be a
00:43:39.200
good guy and we're always going to root against them. The second, the other hand is that there is
00:43:48.380
humanity in both of them. He's not presenting one as a monster and the other people as angelic.
00:44:00.040
It's helpful to remind ourselves that the bad guys think they're good guys and the bad guys think
00:44:07.260
the good guys are bad guys. So it's moral subjectivity, right? A bad guy doesn't wake up
00:44:14.140
in the morning and say, I'm going to go do bad things. He thinks he's doing good things. And I mean,
00:44:20.660
I think most of the time that's, that is the case. And so people on the other side of
00:44:27.840
the war, on the other side of the line are fighting for something that they believe in just like you are.
00:44:36.660
And you have every right to call that evil and despicable, but there is a humanity to it. And a great
00:44:43.580
example. And this is, this is the reason why I believe for whom the bell tolls kind of transcends
00:44:49.360
any kind of a propaganda or didactic book. Do you remember that moment where Robert Jordan and Maria,
00:44:57.460
they wake up in the morning and there's a cavalry man that Robert Jordan has to kill.
00:45:03.600
So, okay, good. He killed one of the bad guys, right? We're all happy that he killed one of the bad guys.
00:45:07.860
And, and maybe 30 pages later, I'm guessing he goes through the letters and the, the material from
00:45:16.780
this dead cavalry man's body. And he learns about him and he learns about his family and who he was,
00:45:23.640
what town he's from. And that extra step reminds Robert Jordan that he's just killed a person,
00:45:31.640
right? He's just, of course, he's done his job. He did a really good thing. He saved his friends,
00:45:36.860
but he killed somebody else's friend who was doing his job. There's a great sentence in this
00:45:44.640
novel. There's no one thing that's true. There's no one thing that's true. It's all true. You don't
00:45:52.140
own the only truth. And what the other person holds to be true is not false necessarily, right? That we
00:45:59.300
have this, life is a lot more complex than that. And even war is more complex than that.
00:46:05.860
So Hemingway had this idea of writing one true sentence. In fact, your podcast called one true
00:46:10.660
podcast. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. And you asked your guests, you know, what's your favorite one
00:46:15.260
true sentence from Hemingway? Right. What do you think was Hemingway's one true sentence in for whom
00:46:20.000
the bell tolls? Okay. So mine is in chapter 42. So I think there's only 43 chapters in this novel.
00:46:28.160
And I find this to be one of the most beautiful moments. So please allow me to read from chapter
00:46:34.680
42. In their steel helmets, riding in the trucks in the dark towards something that they only knew was
00:46:43.020
an attack. Their faces were drawn with each man's own problem in the dark. And the light revealed them
00:46:51.360
as they would not have looked in day from shame to show it to each other until the bombardment and
00:46:58.240
the attack would commence and no man would think about his face. Now, I wonder, taken out of context, how
00:47:06.200
many people would identify that as a Hemingway sentence? Because it is so long and so detailed and
00:47:14.580
complex, but it is also so insightful into the psychology of the man at war. What I love about this is
00:47:24.180
their faces were drawn with each man's own problem. It's almost like you can look at somebody, you can
00:47:31.800
look at a group of people and you can see that they're concerned. You can see that they're worried or even
00:47:38.000
scared. But then you go the next step and say they're all scared in a separate individual way.
00:47:45.520
I find that so incredible. So that is my choice for the sentence that rings truest and for whom the
00:47:53.020
bell tolls. Okay. So mine was, this actually, this was John McCain's favorite sentence. Oh, great.
00:48:00.260
The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for. And I hate very much to leave it. I like that
00:48:06.420
sentence because it reminded me of another one of my other favorite sentences and another one of my
00:48:10.340
favorite novels, Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. The character there, Augustus McRae, he says,
00:48:16.480
it's a fine world, though rich in hardships at times. I just like that idea. It's, it's, I love the idea
00:48:22.820
that the world can suck sometimes, but even though it can be terrible, it's still, I don't regret being
00:48:31.040
here. I love it. I think it's fantastic. And you have to embrace, like you said, there's no one true
00:48:36.100
thing. You have to embrace all of it. And I just like that idea that Robert Jordan conveys.
00:48:41.400
I love that. And Mark Salter is in, is in our book, One True Sentence. And that's the sentence
00:48:46.700
that he chose. It's the world is a fine place and worth the fighting for. And yeah. And Gus in Lonesome
00:48:52.840
Dove has that sort of world weary, but sort of a broader acceptance to it. And I, I think that is,
00:49:00.880
that's a great, it is a great philosophy. I also want to kind of juxtapose that with
00:49:05.820
A Farewell to Arms, where Frederick Henry is the protagonist. And why did he get into the war?
00:49:13.740
He's like, I don't know. I was in Italy. I spoke Italian. You know, why not? He kind of like
00:49:19.020
stumbled into the war. And meanwhile, you have Robert Jordan saying, blowing this bridge
00:49:24.720
is the pivot point of the rest of the world. The whole world will depend on the successful
00:49:32.300
execution of this action. So the commitment to a cause, and there's that episode where he's saying,
00:49:38.660
being part of something bigger than yourself is like being at Chartres Cathedral. It's, you know,
00:49:47.800
seeing great art. It's these moments of transcendence when you give yourself, when your life gets
00:49:55.060
enriched because you're giving yourself to something greater than just yourself. And I think that's what
00:50:01.520
McCain was getting at. And that quote really does exemplify that. Well, Mark, this has been a great
00:50:06.500
conversation. Where can people go to learn more about your work? Well, the first wave of One True
00:50:11.580
Sentence choices and episodes is in a book called One True Sentence, Writers and Readers on Hemingway's
00:50:19.960
Art. And Mark Salter is in there discussing that McCain quote. So I would urge that book if you're
00:50:28.480
interested at all in Hemingway. And our podcast is One True Podcast, which is available anywhere you get
00:50:34.880
your podcasts. Fantastic. Well, Mark Torino, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:50:39.820
My guest today is Mark Torino. He's a Hemingway scholar and the author of multiple books on
00:50:44.460
Hemingway. His latest book that he edited is One True Sentence, Writers and Readers on Hemingway's
00:50:49.200
Art. It's available on Amazon.com. Also check out his podcast, One True Podcast, available on all
00:50:54.180
podcast platforms. And check out our show notes at aom.is slash tolls, where you find links to
00:50:59.000
resources when we delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM
00:51:06.620
Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanlies.com, where you find our
00:51:09.780
podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that we've written over the years about pretty
00:51:13.260
much anything you think of. And if you haven't done so already, I'd appreciate it if you take
00:51:16.480
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00:51:26.620
Until next time, it's Brett McKay, reminding you to not listen to the AOM Podcast, but put what you've