N o te s on Ernest H e m in g w a y 's
" F o r W h o m the Bell T o lls "
Rafael Koskimies, Helsingfors
I
The Communist Leader
In their novels dealing with the Spanisli Civil War, Ernest Hemingway and
André Malraux have both used the realism offered by the subject matter to
great advantage. Both of them had the opportunity of meeting important
personalities at the very centre of events among Government troops and political leaders. Many of them appear in the novels For Whom the Bell Tolls and
L'Espoir. Hemingway gives a particularly rich picture of some high-ranking
Russian Communists who were staying at the Gaylord Hotel in Madrid and
of the well-known French Communist André Marty, who appears in the novel
as André Massart. Similarly, Malraux draws a historically accurate portrait
of the proletarian leader called Lister; in the novel his name is Manuel.
It was the usual practice to call the troops of the Spanish Government
Communist or Red, whereas the revolutionary nationalistic army led by Fran­
co was most often called Fascist. Of course, neither name is accurate. As far
as the Spanish Communists are concerned, their party was relatively unimportant.1 The largest of the leftist parties in the country, the anarcho-syndicalist
group, was especially powerful in Catalonia. Among the leaders of the Gov­
ernment, there were, moreover, bourgeois liberals who accepted the support
of the leftist and extremist groups out of necessity rather than by choice. In
the long run the most effective aid was given by the Comintern, which meant
material and “expert” aid given by the Soviet Union. However, Stalin was
1. The relatively small number of Communists, especially compared to the Anarcho-Syndicalists, has been pointed out by, among others, the Duchess of Atholl, M. P. in Search-
light on Spain. Penguin Ed. 1938, passim.
Notes on Ernest Hemingway's “For Whom the Bell Tolls”
277
by no means ready to intervene at every juncture, and, when he was, he preferred to do so in secret for diplomatic reasons.
When the first volunteer troops arrived at Albacete from Paris, André
Marty was the official “commander” of the group together with the Italians
Luigi Longo and Guiseppe di Vittorio. Especially at the beginning of the war
his name, as well as those of some other representatives of the Comintern,
stood for idealism and acted as a source of encouragement among the Gov­
ernment troops. Tractor factories, villages, and co-operative groups were
called after him and, later, a battalion of the volunteer brigades was named
after him. But it was at the very beginning of the war that he had already
proved more of a hindrance than a help.
Marty, born in 1884, was the son of a French worker. His father had
been sentenced to death in absentia after the revolt of the Commune of
Paris, so he had inherited revolutionary traditions. He himself acquired his
reputation as a revolutionary in 1919. When he was sailing as a seaman of
the French Navy in the Black Sea, he incited the crew to mutiny while the
squadron was preparing to attack the Bolsheviks in support of the White
Russians. His popularity in Moscow was finally and permanently guaranteed
after that. His rank in France has apparently never been established. Accord­
ing to Hemingway’s novel he preferred to call himself “a gunner’s mate”,
although, according to a well-informed Russian he had been “a chief yeoman”.
Vague sources maintain that he was a machinist or engineer’s assistant (ac­
cording to Thomas, “seaman-machinist”). But, of course, the most important
faet was that after the Black Sea episode Marty became a prominent figure
in international communism and later a member of the executive committees
of the Comintern, a communist member of the French Chamber of Deputies,
and so on.2 In France he had rapidly advanced to be the leader of his Party,
mainly thanks to his antimilitarism, but when the brigade of Albacete was
being created he was appointed military commander, thanks to his assumed
military abilities. It was in the first year of the war that his mind was already
fatally clouded by his manic fear of Fascism and Trotskyism; from time to
time he imagined that he was surrounded by spies sent by the Fascists and
Trotskyites, chained hand and foot, threatened with death. This abnormal
condition influenced all his activities in Spain. His wife Pauline Marty acted
as an inspector of hospitals during the war.
2. Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War. Penguin Ed. 1965. Pp. 384 ff.
Rafael Koskimies
278
Suspicion soon developed into paranoia and it is solely in this light that
Hemingway has portrayed this arch-communist and Comintern man. Despite
the smallness of the Communist cadre the representatives of this party soon
acquired a leading position in the defence of Republican Spain mainly because
of their military ability acquired at the military schools of Moscow, their
strict discipline, and their obstinacy. As regards Marty, these undoubtedly
excellent military characteristics were accompanied, apart from suspiciousness, by an obvious cruelty, which often showed itself as bloodthirstiness.
Later critical opinion has almost unanimously been negative. Ilja Ehrenburg3
calls him a madman quite simply; Hugh Thomas, usually moderate in his
appraisals, has only negative comments to make about him. After the lost
battle of Corunna Road, Marty had demanded that a French officer, Major
Lasalle, be sentenced to death and he had got what he wanted; in this case
he also accused the man of espionage, although it was obviously only a
question of timidity or cowardice at the most. Referring to a source, albeit
unreliable,4 Thomas even mentions the possibility that the condemned man
had tried to discourage Marty’s revolutionary ardour during the famous Black
Sea episode.
Being stubborn by nature Marty often quarrelled with his comrades, but
apparently always coped with his problems by referring to his powerful Rus­
sian backing. History remembers him as a bloodthirsty mass murderer; as the
war continued his paranoia became more and more pronounced and the num­
ber of his victims can be counted in hundreds, perhaps in thousands.5 In his
well-known v/ork Der Europaische Kommunismus Franz Borkenau 6 writes:
“André Marty, unwissend, arrogant, vollig unfåhig, von Neid gegen alle
Besseren und Fåhigeren verzehrt, von allen gehasst, war dennoch auf Grund
seiner Beziehungen zu den Russen seit den Tagen der Schwarzmeer-Revolte
unverschiebbar wie ein Stiick angenagelten Mobiliars . . . ”
Borkenau links Marty’s activity closely with the famous period of purges
carried out by Stalin and the Chief of the OGPU, Jeshov, which coincided
with the years of the Spanish War. Marty, who was bloodthirsty, half mad,
3. Ibid., p. 384.
4. The uncertain informant quoted by Hugh Thomas is Esteban Vilaro, cf. ibid., p. 436.
5. Ibid., pp. 519, 629, 724.
6. Franz Borkenau, Der Europaische Kommunismus. Bern 1952. P. 96.
Notes on Ernest Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls”
279
and suffering from paranoia, began, as Borkenau says, to regard himself as
a ’little Jeshov’ and he had excellent opportunities for this second-rate hangman’s task in his high office as the political head of the international brigades.
Many of the thousands of members of that motley collection of people thus
went to Spain without knowing that they were just as much threatened by the
purges manipulated by Stalin and the Comintern as by the shells of the Fascist
and Franco’s Army. Borkenau 7 writes:
“Er hatte die Aufgabe, die Brigaden von allen ’Abweichungen’ zu såubern.
Diese Aufgabe erfiillte er vermittels eines wahnsinnigen Terrors, dem Hunderte von tapferen und ergebenen Kåmpfern zum Opfer fielen . . . auf Grund
der låcherlichsten Verdåchtigungen von einem Manne hingemordet, dessen
personliche Feigheit notorisch war. . . . Jetzt aber diese (liberale) Phase vorbei,
die Jeschowtschina, die grosse Såuberung hatte begonnen, und jetzt waren
Menschen wie Marty wieder die richtige Sorte Menschen.”
Robert Jordan, the central figure of Hemingway’s novel, who in many
ways reminds us of his creator, had got to know the personalities and events
behind the scenes in a hotel called the Gaylord that had been taken over by
the Russian leaders. While he was staying in Madrid Hemingway also natural­
ly heard about Marty and in Chapter 42 of the novel the characterization of
André Massart contains his own reliable and historically accurate portrait of
him.
Marty-Massart becomes one of the active characters in the novel when the
writer tells how the guerilla messenger Andrés sent by Jordan, after many
difficulties reaches the headquarters of General Golz, commander of the
attacking division. Very near his important objective, he and his escort, an
officer from the front, meet their most formidable adversary, the great commissar A. M., who coldly takes their papers and has them detained. His
appearance is described in the following way:
“A large man, old and heavy, in an oversized khaki beret, such as chas­
seurs å pied wear in the French Army, wearing an overcoat carrying a map
case and wearing a pistol strapped around his greatcoat, got out of the back
of the car with two other men in the uniform of the International Brigades.
The tall, heavy old man looked at Gomez with his out-thrust head and
considered him carefully with his watery eyes. Even here at the front in the
light of a bare electric bulb, he having just come in from driving in an open
7. Ibid., p. 159.
280
Rafael Koskimies
car on a brisk night, his grey face had a look of decay. His face looked as
though it were modelled from the waste material you find under the claws
of a very old lion.”
The image in the last sentence which is, perhaps, not one of the most lucid
has aroused the particuiar interest of critics.
Massart-Marty has a spécial and strange kind of reputation even among
the front-line troops, and it is not one of the best. The corporal on guard
tells the “suspect” messengers: “That old kills more than the bubonic
plague .. . But he doesn’t kill fascists like we do .. . Not in joke. He kills
rare things. Trotzkyites. Divagationers. Any type of rare beasts.” “When we
were at Escorial we shot I don’t know how many for him . .. We always
furnish the firing party. The men of the Brigades would not shoot their own
men. Especially the French. To avoid difficulties it is always us who do it.
We shot French. We have shot Belgians. We have shot others of divers
nationality. Of all types . . . Always for political things. He’s crazy . . . Fie
purifies more than Salvarsan.”
Without going into the matter any further, without even examining
Andrés’ message or pass, Massart-Marty comes to the conclusion that Gen­
eral Golz — Hemingway’s name for the Polish Communist General who
went under the pseudonym of Walter — has got into touch with the Fascists
and that the letter on its way to him will naturally expose him as a traitor.
What the corporal said about the purges carried out by Marty on Stalinist
and OGPU lines is perfectly valid in Hemingway’s harsh but accurate portrayal of Marty. But Hemingway has added to this orthodox Communist
cruelty an extra quality by letting Marty, while pondering on the Golz case
in which he comes to an entirely wrong conclusion, at the same time feel
human sympathy and pity towards his “former” erring comrade and fellowsoldier. “Golz, he thought in a mixture of horror and exultation as a man
might feel hearing that a business enemy had been killed in a particularly
nasty motor accident or that someone you hated but whose probity you had
never doubted had been guilty of defalcation. That Golz should be one of
them, too. That Golz should be in such obvious communication with the
fascists.”
In passing, Hemingway lets Marty recall to mind Golz’s merits as a
revolutionary and Bolshevik. As if by accident he also remembers Golz’s
relationship with Tuhatshevsky, who, as is generally known, had perhaps
been the most important personality to be swept away by the purges of
Notes on Ernest Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls'
201
Stalin and Jeshov. These references alone prove that Hemingway was well
aware of the question of Marty’s passion for executions and the part he
played in the general political trend.
Marty plans how he will show the message to Golz in person and at the
same time observe its effect on this “traitor”. But it was ail to turn out
quite differently, as readers of the novel will remember: the influential editor
of Pravda and the representative of Stalin, Karkov, who is a friend of Robert
Jordan, the sender of the message, compel Marty to hand the papers back
to the messengers. They deliver them — but too late.
André Massart-Marty in Hemingway’s novel is an eloquent proof of the
writer’s imagination falling back on reality. But this character is undoubtedly
something more than a reported likeness to a real person, for the perceptive
reader can sense something strongly emotional, a breath of the demonic
which in its satanic quality reaches almost Shakespearean dimensions. In
other ways Hemingway’s Spanish novel also contains much realism, both
seen and heard. This impression one also gains from some details given by
his contemporaries, for instance Hotchner.8
When he was describing Marty’s sick, predatory soul Hemingway could
not foresee that before his death he himself was to suffer from the same
disease: the symptoms of his nervous breakdown were not far from paranoia.9
II
The Matador Finito
Chapter 14 of the novel includes an unforgettable episode that is one of the
absolute peaks in Hemingway’s narrative art. It is Pilar’s story about Finito
de Palencia, the Matador, her lover for many years. Some parts of The Sun
Also Rises had already become a real literary monument to bull fighting and
Death in the Afternoon, the long essay that Hemingway published in 1932,
even more so.
Pilar tells in a way at once shocking and penetrating about the last
triumphs won by the fatally ill matador just before his death. “He was not
a good matador”, is the comment of the company that Robert Jordan has
also joined. Thoughtfuliy, Pilar admits that perhaps Finito was not one of
the greatest of matadors. He was too short of stature and it was difficult for
him to penetrate the neck of a large bull with his sword during the last
8. A. E. Hotchner, Papa Hemingway. 4th Ed. New York 1966. Pp. 131, 182.
9. Ibid., pp. 292 and passim.
282
Rafael Koskimies
phase of the fight. He was very serious by nature, so much so that he hardly
ever smiled, even in the intimate company of his mistress. His rise to the
rank of matador had brought with it terrible sufferings caused by poverty,
disappointment, and humiliation. He suffered from tuberculosis, so common
in bull fighters — the most common disease apart from syphilis — but his
untimely death was caused by a bull hitting him in the chest with the flat of
its horn. Even this incident, not by any means the first or unique, was partly
caused by Finito’s height. However, he won several great victories. One, and
perhaps the greatest, was celebrated at the Club of the Aficionadoes in one
of the cafés of Valladolid with great gaiety. But Finito, smiling and nodding
dutifully, was spitting blood first into his handkerchiefs and finally into his
own and then into Pilar’s napkin. Onto the wall the stuffed head of the great
bull that he had last killed had been fixed. But when it had been unveiled
and the Chairman of the Club had made his harangue poor Finito’s strength
was at its lowest ebb and, horrified, he gazed at the bull without being con­
scious any longer of what was going on around him. Later the same winter
he died, the cause of death being the blow of the horn he had sustained
before the triumph at Valladolid when fighting in Zaragoza.
The story of Finito de Palencia’s celebration dinner is one of the highspots of the novel. One could say more: it is one of the great triumphs of
modern story telling, deeply moving and with an intensity and subtlety of
treatment.
And behind this strangely suggestive power there is the clearly discernible basis of solid, expert knowledge. It is typical of Hemingway that even
in this novel he links the characters and events to their historical counterparts. Thus somewhere in the book mention is made of the Gypsy Rafael
Gomez y Ortega, who was one of the great matadors, known as El Gallo.
His rich characterization is included in Death in the Afternoon.10 Heming­
way notes the extremely interesting characteristic of how this really great
matador was often overcome by panic fear and how he hated both bulls and
death as such.
Hemingway tells how El Gallo, panic-stricken, would often flee from
danger. However, this usually happened only after the real danger was over,
when the bull was in its death throes: “— his divings over the barrera were
fits of panic after the danger was over, never necessities.” — The reason for
10. E. Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon. 1932. London Ed. 1963. Pp. 27 and passim.
Notes on Ernest Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls”
283
this fear of death was, according to Hemingway, rather the fear of losing
face than life. Was he then more afraid of losing the former than the latter?
“He never admitted the idea of death, and he would not even go in to look
at Joselito (his brother) in the chapel after he was killed; killing El Gallo
would be bad and prove the bullfight was wrong, not morally, but aesthetically.”
The Finito of the novel was also said to have had a panic fear of bulls,
and this strange characteristic is clearly illustrated in the inimitable description of the sick matador’s behaviour at the celebration arranged by the
aficionadoes. According to Pilar, the quality of his fear was somewhat simpler than that of the great El Gallo, but it was a typical professional fear:
“He was short of stature and he had a thin voice and much fear of bulls.
Never have I seen a man with more fear before bullfight and never have I
seen a man with less fear in the ring. — Finito was afraid all the time and
in the ring he was like a lion.”
In his extensive work dealing with the nature and forms of the bull fight,
Hemingway has discussed these realistic features and enigmatic psychological
factors thoroughly. Perhaps it is just this complete and expert knowledge
that gives the exceptional emotional strength to the Finito episode of the
novel. The primitive guerrillas and fighters in the novel are all from time to
time overcome by the fear of death. But Robert Jordan, a kind of alter ego
of the writer, is not afraid. Was there in him and in his creator some kind of
metaphysical courage, courage in the face of death when, thinking of his
brave grandfather, he releases the safety catch of his gun to kill the enemy in
the last lines of the novel?
But this idea of death expresses the manifold aspects that the poet has
sensed and interpreted and it is also a kind of mystery, which deepens his
characterization throughout. John Atkins11 describes it profoundly when
he says:
“— One phrase I have already recorded is significant: ’death and its
occasional temporary avoidance which we describe as life’. Death not only
on the battlefield but also in the afternoon and in the bedroom and in the
Gulf of Mexico, death providing the background for life and not vice versa.
11. John Atkins, The Art of Ernest Hemingway. His Work and Personality. London 1952.
P. 116.
284
Rafael Koskimies
In the back of his mind, perhaps, the feeling that we are dead much longer
than we are alive.”
III
Robert Jordan and Maria
When, long ago, I read Hemingway’s novel A Farewell to Arms for the first
time I could not avoid gaining a strong impression of something new: it was
no doubt a question of a brilliant writer’s new style and new way of feeling,
of a new lack of illusions, which was not only a result of the war but also
of ’the lost generation’ and the American attitude towards it. Hemingway
described love in an entirely different way from previous writers. This was
certainly partly due to his war experiences but it also signified what one
might call the American point blank methods: describing love as a simple
faet in wnicn explanations, conditions, alternatives, plans, concern for the
future, financial questions, even the idea of the simple social contract, i.e.
marriage, were lacking. I he lovers do talk about the possibilities of a normal
marriage right at the beginning of the affair. When the “I ” of the story, the
man, suggests a legal union, the women replies typically:
What good
would it do to marry now? We’re really married. I couldn’t be any more
married.” And even this is not enough, because in the course of the same
conversation the woman, Miss Catherine Barkley, confirms the idea of
matter-of-factness: “— You’re my religion. You’re all I ’ve got.”
One must admit that this love affair that is taken for granted impressed
the reader meeting it for the first time as somehow bleak and strange. Now,
35 years later, it seems quite understandable when seen against the background of Hemingway’s extensive life-v/ork. The themes of life (and love)
and death have become more and more clarified in his hands; a direct psy­
chological approach has reached monumental dimensions and been placed
against a natural background. Although the descriptions of the relations
between the sexes have partly preserved their originally very simple and
straightforward character, something new has been added, especially in the
novel on the Spanish War. In his penetrating analysis of Hemingway, Tho­
mas R. Goethals12 comments on these new characteristics: “Indeed, we notice
a rather drastic shift from the attitude expressed in A Farewell to Arms. In
that novel, Frederic Henry objected bitterly to the great abstractions —
words like sacred and glorious — for which men fought and died in World
12. Thomas R. Goethals, A Critical Commentary. For Whom the Bell Tolls. A Study Master
Publication. New York 1963. P. 39.
Notes on Ernest Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls'
235
War I. Yet in For Whom the Bell Tolls these very abstractions now appear
throughout Jordan’s interior monologues.----”
True, Goethals and i are talking here about slightly different themes.
But Hemingway’s descriptive method itself, which we are both referring to,
is our real mutual problem. No change took place for well over ten years in
that eroticism and sexuality in Hemingway were still the simple coming
together of two lovers without any inhibitions or reservations: a man’s rela­
tionship with a woman only acquired more poetic and lyrical emphasis as
Robert Jordan works out long tirades when lying in his sleeping bag next to
the women he loves, the form of which has been noted to contain nothing
less than Elizabethan tones and imagery.13
Robert and Maria’s love affair begins with some casual and fleeting
caresses; it only lasts for the few nights that Robert spends in the cave of the
guerrilla group in the mountain range of Sierra de Guadarrama, preparing
the destruction of the bridge, and indirectly his own death while fighting. As
a portrayer of women Hemingway has often been severely criticized: he has
been seen as the poet of idealized womanhood not of the individual woman.
Men take the leading roles, women are only something belonging to men.
One of the severest critics is Goethals,14 who says: “For example, once he
removed the two pairs of lovers in A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the
Bell Tolls from the repressive environment of the wars that defined them,
once he freed them to take action on their own, to affirm their love, they
become so idealized and abstract that they strike us as nebulous creatures
of a wishful and lyric fancy rather than as concretely realized individuals of
the imagination. This remains true of all the women in Hemingway’s long fic­
tion: they are not sufficiently objectified to exist as individuals in their own
right. They are all merely extensions of the hero’s wish, infinitely pliable,
utterly submissive, and falsely sentimental.”
It is quite true that the reader of the Spanish novel is not told more about
Maria than that Pablo’s group, and Pilar above all, have saved her from
torture at the hands of the Fascists, at the last moment and at the risk of
their own lives, and that the girl whose hair the enemy has cut to humiliate
her lives as a spiritual cripple among the outlaws of Guadarrama. When
Pilar brings lier and Robert Jordan together and the love affair begins, she
13. Carlos Baker, Hemingway. The Writer as Artist. 3rd. Ed. Princeton 1963. P. 248.
14. Goethals. op. cit., p. 36.
286
Rajael Koskimies
is compensated for the humiliation she has suffered as a woman and fulfils
the ultimate function of a woman. The description is poetic to the extent
that the reader cannot any longer remember the strange insufficiency of
detail often pointed out by critics. However, as far as I have seen, one or
two of the critics have quite correctly pointed out the crux of the matter:
Eros and Woman as a great natural force, an absolute idea. Carlos Baker
and the French Georges-Albert Astre15 touch upon this subject. Baker
writes: “One might argue, of course, that the normal male-female situation in
Hemingway is something like what took place in the Garden of Eden just
after the eating of the fruit of the tree, but before the malediction. All these
Eves are as pleasurably ductile as the Adams are hirsute and sexually vigorous.----” Astre gives a beautiful description of the symbolic and univer­
sally poetic significance of these women.
The range of Hemingway’s women is of course quite extensive, but,
undoubtedly, in spite of the monotony, a certain development has taken
place: one only has to remember Brett Ashley (The Sun Also Rises), Catherine Barkley (A Farewell to Arms), Maria Morgan (To Have and Have Not),
Maria (For Whom the Bell Tolls), Renata (A cross the River and into the
Trees). Whatever differences one might find in this series of sharply delineated poetic figures one faet is certain: they have all been created by a
powerful poetic imagination. But what about the monotony, the lack of
nuances? The problem becomes slightly more complicated for the critics if
Beatrice, Juliet, or Margareta, for instance, are taken as points of comparison.
In Hemingway’s works, as in all great poetry, the ultimate question is one of
the “eternally feminine”.
15. Baker, op. cit., p. 257; Georges-Albert Astre, E. Hemingway (German Edition). Rowohlt
1966. P. 127.