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Home , Carlos Baker, Death in the Afternoon, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Maxwell Perkins

14

EVERYTHING COMPLETELY KNIT UP:SEEING WHOLE

You see every damned word and action in this book depends upon every other word and action. You see he’s laying there in the pine needles at the start and that is where he is at the end. He has his problem and all his life before him at the start and he has all his life in those days and, at the end there is only death for him and he truly isn’t afraid of it at all because he has a chance to finish his mission. But would all that be clear? to (1940) 1

The most important thing in a work of art is that it should have a kind of focus – i.e. some place where all the rays meet or from which they issue. And this focus should not be capable of being completely explained in words. This, indeed, is the important thing about it good work of art, that its basic content can in its entirety be expressed only by itself. Tolstoy reported by A.B. Goldenwesier 2

In confiding to Maxwell Perkins the hope that For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) would exhibit a clear interdependence of all its essential detail – “everything completely knit up and stowed away shipshape” is an earlier phrase in his 1940 letter – Hemingway showed himself singularly acute about what, and what not, ought to count in his

1 to Maxwell Perkins, 26 August 1940, in Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-61, ed. , NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1981, 514. 2 Tolstoy reported by A.B. Goldenweiser, quoted in R.F. Christian, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962, 104 and reprinted in War and Peace, Norton Critical; Edition, NY: Norton, 1966, ed. George Gibian, 1456. The original appeared in A.B. Goldenweiser, Vblizi Tolstogo, Moscow-Leningrad, 1959. 280 Gothic to Multicultural novel. 3 The issue he calls attention to, whether Robert Jordan embodies a sufficiently credible and inclusive viewpoint through whom to refract the drama of the Civil War and the Spanish soil itself, offers a wholly reasonable point of departure. For does Jordan’s three-day partizan mission at the bridge begun and ended “on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest” (1) serve altogether convincingly as the book’s fulcrum, the means through which its widening circle of other concerns is brought to overall imaginative order? More precisely, can it not be said that Jordan’s consciousness and his undertaking behind enemy lines establish a sufficient centre for its portraits of Pablo, El Sordo, Maria and the others as expressions of the human spirit under press of war and beleaguered by ? Hemingway’s long-standing preoccupation with Spain begun in (1926) and the shorter stories and carried forward through (1932), (1937), the political film documentary written with John Dos Passos, and The Fifth Column (1938), had always served him as an essential arena for the conflict of good and bad faith. But in the case of For Whom the Bell Tolls, his longest novel, had he made “every damned word and action” depend upon “every other word and action”? Opinion generally agrees that For Whom the Bell Tolls marks a more ambitious effort than The Sun Also Rises and , but that equally it falls down in several key aspects. Even among enthusiasts who greeted it on publication as a landmark achievement, the at last made over into epic and a work to be put alongside George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (1938), the murmurs were frequent. Although Hemingway’s own comments on the novel do not provide the only measure for its success or failure, they do give a pointer to how he himself hoped For Whom the Bell Tolls would be best approached. Had he or not achieved Tolstoy’s “focus”, “a place where all the rays meet or from which they issue”?4

3 Quotations and page references throughout are to the first edition: Ernest Hemingway, For Whom The Bell Tolls, NY: Charles Scribner, 1940. 4 For relevant discussions, see Philip Young, Ernest Hemingway, NY: Rinehart, 1952, 75-82, and Carlos Baker, Hemingway: The Writer as Artist, Princeton, NJ: Press, 3rd edn, 1952, 242-59.