For Whom the Bell Tolls

Of all Hemingway’s novels it is this book that demonstrates best, not only his writing style but also his own precarious personality which emerges in the central character, Robert Jordan. Hemingway spent his entire life creating his own myth; that of a dangerous existence. His style of writing, from a journalistic background, is succinct, terse and punchy, lending itself to the image he wished to create about himself.

“For Whom the Bell Tolls,” 1940

The novel is set near Segovia in 1937 and tells the story of Robert Jordan, an American Teacher, asked to help a band of Anti-fascist Loyalists blow up a bridge to halt the advance of the Fascists. The action takes place over a period of seventy-two hours that Jordan is in the guerrilla camp. He falls in love with Maria, befriends the guerrilla leader and his wife and between them they manage to dynamite the bridge and get away although Jordan is shot and decides to remain behind to give the group a chance to escape but facing his own inevitable death.

The metaphor of the bullfight was an obsession of Hemingway’s. It appears in The Old Man and the Sea,1952, (A story of an ageing fisherman and his epic battle to catch a giant marlin) and here again in this novel. The idea that Man confronted by any sort of creature or event in which death is inevitable and it does not matter who or what dies.

“Hemingway obliged his readers with the Hemingway myth. This myth helped to kill him.”

Anthony Burgess

The argument of whether Hemingway was a great writer or not, has not gone away. Avoiding the easier option of defining his style as simplistic, turgid and devoid of humour, it is more interesting to understand why he is still so popular today, to the point that he is seen, like Ian Fleming’s James Bond and J.K.Rowling’s Harry Potter, as a brand. Prices for first edition books by these three authors command very high prices. Fleming has been helped by the extraordinary success of the Bond films. Rowling combined the magical world of books and films to entice just about every child on the planet. Hemingway’s books have been made into films, including, For Whom the Bell Tolls,1943, starring Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman and the self-created myth of a man who could be defeated but never vanquished has some how stood the test of time.

The strange paradox of his life and literary style ending in suicide has only served to re-invent how he wished to be portrayed: an itinerant and dangerous, trigger-happy individual who used writing as his ultimate escape.