Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War: For Whom The Bell Tolls

The Book Club

This episode of 'The Book Club' explores Ernest Hemingway's novel 'For Whom the Bell Tolls,' set during the Spanish Civil War and based on Hemingw

Key takeaways

• Hemingway's sparse, direct prose captures the emotional depth and existential weight of wartime decisions.

Main topics

• Spanish Civil War as historical backdrop
• Hemingway's literary style and narrative discipline

Notable quotes

Do you see anything rare?

Conclusion

While some listeners may find Hemingway's style challenging, the emotional intensity and

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:00) This episode is brought to you by Klarna. I Speaker 5 (0:03) for one know that I would much rather join a dystopian uprising or attend one of Jay Gatsby's fantastic parties than look at my bank statements. Speaker 4 (0:13) Yes, I want to use my brain power to focus on the really big questions. Was Heathcliff born evil? Was it the Moors who made them that way? And crucially, who is going to be the next fairy love interest? in a court of thorns and roses. But Speaker 5 (0:29) alas, because we do eventually have to look up from our books, Klarna is there to handle the real world money admin. Speaker 4 (0:36) So Klarna gathers your spending in one place. So that way, monitoring your payments doesn't feel like a psychological thriller. You can pay in a way that suits you. You can track your deliveries, get instant refunds, and you can even earn cash back on things that you were going to buy anyway. Speaker 5 (0:52) And there's buyer protection built in so you actually feel secure when you shop. Speaker 4 (0:56) Download the Klarna app to stay on top of your money so that you can think about, well, anything else. Klarna balance account required to receive cashback points. Limitations, terms and conditions apply. Speaker 1 (1:13) The Speaker 2 (1:14) city moves fast, but your vibe, that's different. Sharper, smoother, more alive. Speaker 1 (1:25) The new Speaker 2 (1:29) Honda City isn't just made to drive, it's made to feel. The new Honda City, all new vibe. Speaker 5 (1:47) What are you looking at? Speaker 4 (1:49) One brother, the one with the scar, asked. Thee, Robert Jordan said. Do Speaker 5 (1:55) you see anything rare? Speaker 4 (1:57) No, said Robert Jordan. Have a cigarette? Speaker 5 (2:00) Why not? These are like the other ad. He of the train. This is what we should do now, Speaker 4 (2:07) Pablo said. Speaker 5 (2:09) Another train. Speaker 4 (2:10) We can do that, Robert Jordan said. After the bridge. When he said the word bridge, everyone was quiet. After the bridge, he said again deliberately and took a sip of the absinthe. Do not go for the bridge, Pablo said, looking down at the table. Neither me nor my people. Robert Jordan now looked past the table to where the wife of Pablo was. was standing by the fire. Then Speaker 2 (2:36) we will do the bridge without thy aid, Robert Jordan said to Speaker 4 (2:39) Pablo. Speaker 5 (2:40) No, Speaker 4 (2:41) Pablo said, and Robert Jordan watched his face sweat. Speaker 5 (2:45) Thou wilt blow no bridge here. Speaker 4 (2:48) No. Speaker 5 (2:50) Thou wilt blow no bridge, Pablo Speaker 4 (2:52) said heavily. And thou? Robert Jordan spoke to the wife of Pablo who was standing still and huge by the fire. She turned toward them and said, Speaker 5 (3:03) I am for the bridge. Her Speaker 4 (3:05) face was lit by the fire and it was flushed and it shone warm and dark and handsome now in the firelight as it was meant to be. Speaker 5 (3:12) What do you say? Speaker 4 (3:13) Pablo said to her, and Robert Jordan saw the betrayed look on his face and the sweat on his forehead as he turned his head. I Speaker 5 (3:20) am for the bridge and against thee, the wife of Pablo said. Nothing more. So hello, everybody. As of course, I'm sure everyone can tell from my superb Spanish accent there. That was from For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway, named after a phrase from John Donne's. piece, Meditation 17. And it is a detailed and very moving, I think, portrait of war published in 1940. And it's set during specifically the Spanish Civil War, which Hemingway experienced firsthand as a correspondent for the North American Newspaper Association. And it follows Robert Jordan, played there by Dominic. And he is an American volunteer who is given a suicidal mission to blow up a bridge with an anti-fascist guerrilla war band. So hence the opening read. And it's definitely one of the landmark novels of the 20th century. So it was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and it's had a great impact further afield. It's particularly famous for the way that it portrays guerrilla warfare. So we've got a fascinating historical context and the author Hemingway himself is... very interesting and very, very famous. So we'll be digging into both. Now I first read it when I was at university and my brother Luke recommended it to me because he loved it and he was doing the Spanish Civil War at the time. And I knew nothing about the Spanish Civil War and I'd never read Hemingway. So I was pretty sceptical and it totally took me by surprise. I loved it and I've been trying to do it on this show ever since we started. But I know you, Dominic. You're very familiar with the context, and I'm sure Hemingway himself, but you've never read it. You've never read any Hemingway. I'd Speaker 4 (5:02) literally never read a word of Hemingway. From when we were first working together, Tabby, you were always going on about Ernest Hemingway and how much you loved him and how much I should read him. And I was always a tiny bit resistant, to be honest. I think partly because I feared there would be an awful lot of conversations about bridges. And that is precisely... Speaker 5 (5:17) Yeah. Speaker 4 (5:17) That's precisely what transpired, even when we were doing that conversation, which, by the way, a glimpse behind the curtain for the listeners, took multiple takes. Speaker 5 (5:26) It's because you were being unprofessional. You kept corpsing. I was in the mode. I was doing my full Javier Bardem. But you... Speaker 4 (5:33) I mean, if people were ever able to hear the outtakes of Tabby's variety of Spanish accents, which went all the way from kind of Moscow to Istanbul and back, but never anywhere near Spain. That Speaker 5 (5:43) was actually intentional. It's indicative of the various political leanings of those Speaker 4 (5:48) characters. Speaker 5 (5:50) Spanish Speaker 4 (5:50) Civil War, I've always been fascinated by. One of the remarkable things about the Spanish Civil War is that it had this galvanizing effect. on a generation of writers, artists, intellectuals, George Orwell, obviously. And Hemingway's book, For Whom the Bell Tolls, is probably, with Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, it is one of the literary sort of engagements with the war in Spain. And actually, I enjoyed reading the book, but I suspect this is one of those where I enjoy the episode more than the book. So you love it. I was a bit sceptical approaching it. I won't tell you... The listeners, what I thought until the end, have a little bit of suspense. But first, shall I give people a sense of the story for people who haven't read it? I Speaker 5 (6:32) think you should. Speaker 4 (6:33) Robert Jordan is American. He loves Spain. He taught Spanish. He has volunteered for the Republican cause, that is the left-wing anti-fascist cause, in the Spanish Civil War. We're in 1937. We are in the second year of the war. Basically the second full year of the war. He is in the Guadarrama, which is this sort of forested mountain range between Madrid and Segovia, sort of central to north and Spain. So basically the campaign, the nationalists, the Franco, the fascists are very keen to capture Madrid and the Republicans are trying to push them back. And so the campaign is taking place in these mountains. And Robert Jordan is an expert at blowing things up. So he's been doing a lot of train work, hence the mention of the train from Tabby in the opening reading. Speaker 5 (7:20) I do not care for the Speaker 4 (7:21) train. Exactly. Because here's the thing, he's now got to blow up a bridge. There's all sorts of exciting reasons why he has to blow this bridge up. The whole book takes place over four days. So it's basically them chatting about when they're going to blow this bridge up. I have to say, because I was completely unfamiliar with the book, they've been in this cave for about 100 pages. And I thought, surely they're going to get out of this cave soon. Then the next time I picked up the book, I idly flicked forward and I glanced and I was like, page 402. They went back into the cave. I was like, what? They're still in Speaker 5 (7:52) the cave? Are you joking? Speaker 4 (7:53) But Speaker 5 (7:54) they're plunging such emotional depths that the physical environment matters not at all. You just don't get it. Speaker 4 (8:00) So they're hanging around in this cave and it's basically Robert Jordan. There's various characters. Your favourite character is Tabby. You love this bloke Anselmo. You love a mystical sage written by an American writer. I do. Lee in East of Eden. I got a lot of grief for slagging him off. You love him. No, Speaker 5 (8:15) no, I wasn't wild about Lee. I do like Anselmo, but my favourite is Pilar. And we will get to why. in due course yeah Speaker 4 (8:22) so Pilar is she was described in that opening reading as standing still and huge by the fire so her defining characteristics are she's very ugly she's massive but she's very sensual yes and she's earthy and full of and full of native wisdom isn't she uh Pilar so she's there there's her sort of partner lover Speaker 5 (8:43) yeah yeah Speaker 4 (8:45) Pablo. Pablo is the leader of this guerrilla group, but he seems to have grown disillusioned and he doesn't want to do the bridge and all this kind of thing. So Robert Jordan has joined them. He's the dynamite expert. There's also a girl there called Maria who has escaped from the fascists. She was very badly abused by them. Robert Jordan and Maria fall in love. So that's nice. And basically the book builds towards an exciting conclusion. They're going to do this bridge job. But for various reasons, there's an act of sabotage. So Robert Jordan is going to have to blow up the bridge in a very intrepid and ingenious way that he's going to follow his orders to the very end, even if it means him losing his own life. So as we approach the end of the book, his death has been foretold earlier in the book, and we don't know whether that was just mad superstitious nonsense or whether he is really heading towards oblivion himself. So that's the story. But obviously hanging over this book, you know, we always talk about the author's backgrounds. Hemingway, you know, of all 20th century writers, he is a contender to be the most fated, the most celebrated. He's a tourist industry. People love the details of his character. And nobody loves his character more than Tabitha Syrett. Because you go on and on about Ernest Hemingway. Speaker 5 (10:01) I mean, he's so mythologized. He's one of those writers, as you say, who stands kind of outside of his work. So a lot of people wouldn't be able to name a Hemingway book, but everyone's heard of Ernest Hemingway. He hung out with a lot of famous literary types. He had an extraordinary life. And I think this is a bold claim, but I would say that of all the writers that I've researched, for this show. I enjoyed doing Hemingway the most. Speaker 4 (10:24) So the challenge for you, Tabby... Is Speaker 5 (10:25) to restrain myself, yeah. Not to write a biography of Ernest Hemingway. Speaker 4 (10:29) You've literally got like between five and ten minutes to tell us about Ernest Hemingway. And if it's 40 minutes, this is on you. Speaker 5 (10:35) So let's start at the beginning. So he's born on the 21st of July, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, Chicago. His family is large and affluent. He is one of six. His father, Clarence, is a physician. His mother, Grace, is a musician. An unexpected detail. She, for some reason, wanted he and his older sister to seem like twins. So I think until he was about three years old, he was dressed in the same clothes as his sister and his hair was kept intentionally long so he looked like a girl. Anyway, he actually later said, and also his mother was always trying to get him to become a musician or learn music, he later said that he hated his mother. But Speaker 4 (11:09) isn't the whole key to Hemingway? Deep down, he's actually a softie. And he's just constantly pretending to be an outdoorsman. Speaker 5 (11:16) Yeah, this is the thing. And I think he often looked to quite nurturing women. And he certainly had a lot of women in his life. His father was very outdoorsy, always took him fishing, took him on these great trips. And I think that stayed with him the rest of his life. Nature serves as almost a comfort to him for the rest of his life. And it creeps into his writing. So he goes to school. He did very well. He's sporty, good. Good grades, very handsome, a big bloke. But then he starts editing the school paper. And when he did, he tried to imitate the style of sports writers, which I think is interesting because we're going to get onto his style in a minute. But as we said, contrary to this very, you know, determinedly macho, masculine, no-nonsense, hell-raiser, hard-drinking vision we have of Hemingway, he was actually a very private person and surprisingly introverted. And then after school, he went to work for the Kansas City Star as a reporter. And this had a huge influence on the famous style because the star's style guide was use short sentences, use short first paragraphs, use vigorous English, be positive, not negative. And I think you can see that in his writing ever since. And that brings us nicely to his style because he... is famous for being the trailblazer of a very particular minimalist, very masculine style of writing that was very unusual to the writers that came before. And it was pretty revolutionary at the time. Speaker 4 (12:40) Definitely seen as revolutionary. It's a style you associate really with the 30s and 40s, I suppose, and kind of hard-boiled writing. Speaker 2 (12:47) Yes. Speaker 4 (12:48) Very spare, all extraneous detail, unless it's Speaker 2 (12:51) a Speaker 4 (12:51) chat about a bridge, all extraneous detail removed. Speaker 4 (12:56) shorn of adjectives and adverbs and things, Robert Jordan said, this is a good gun. He picked up the gun. It was a good gun. That's basically how Ernest Hemingway writes. So reductive. Well, actually, you say it's so reductive on my part. That's true. Because actually, he doesn't just write like that. No, he does not. When he's excited, so when he's writing about a sex scene or something, there's loads of very, very lush, much lusher than you would expect, and much more sensual writing. A lot of stuff. Yeah. colors and a lot of stuff with you know the landscape and the body like he really does like all that stuff so there is a insight the interesting thing about hemingway i think is that inside this sense of real discipline and control in his prose there is a much more romantic writer trying to get out i always think you've mentioned a couple of times to me when we were preparing for that tremendous reading do it as clint eastwood And the Clint Eastwood style, very laconic, taciturn, the style that you might associate with, I don't know, Raymond Chandler, or you might associate it with Cormac McCarthy or something. J Speaker 5 (13:58) .D. Salinger, who he was a huge influence on, they exchanged letters. Speaker 4 (14:01) Hemingway is seen as the progenitor of that. And yet, this idea that he has is what he calls his iceberg theory. So basically, the iceberg is that I know loads of stuff about what's happening in this scene. I know loads of stuff about what the character is feeling and all that. but I'm not going to tell you all of it. What you see is just the iceberg above the surface. But you sort of sense that below that is this huge amount of stuff. And if the writer is writing truly enough, this is a quote, then the reader will have a feeling of those things as strongly as if the writer had stated them. Now, even though I've sounded a bit sceptical about Hemingway, I think that's a beautiful way of thinking. Speaker 5 (14:40) I could not agree more. I really passionately agree with that because I love a writer that doesn't... patronize his reader or her reader and lets you interpret it and lets you read meaning and feeling and emotion into the gaps between what is said and what is not said you know he never directly articulates anything he never says i am afraid or he was afraid or everything but He conveys a great deal regardless. I mean, so much is conveyed. He's also a big fan of slang and colloquialisms and repetition. And I love that because I think it creates this gorgeous rhythm. And it actually does imitate thought, like the merry-go-round of thought, hence the repetition. We are rarely perfectly articulate in our minds. And I think that he conveys that in his writing. Speak Speaker 4 (15:22) for yourself, Tabby. Speaker 5 (15:24) I knew you were going to say that. Of course you did. You have to think things three times over before you feel safe enough to say it. But that also makes Hemingway very much Marmite to people. I think some people don't like the fact that so much is hidden, that it's so sparse and simple that... you know, it's the bare minimum and that perhaps some of the characters are emotionally restrained. I disagree. I love it. I think I'm actually really moved by, I'm moved by like a restrained, held back, masculine character, be that a woman or a man. So full of feeling when it comes out. He says at one point, it's something like. She smiled and he wondered how far the smile went. And I just know exactly what he means. I know exactly what that means. So I'm a big fan. Speaker 4 (16:06) After all these episodes, I know now exactly what kind of characters and what kind of writing appeals to you. You like strong men, strong, taciturn men wrestling with their feelings. No, I Speaker 5 (16:18) don't. Speaker 4 (16:18) You do, but beneath the surface. So we don't know they're doing that. Speaker 5 (16:22) Okay. So how did he develop it? So it's probably partially born of the fact that he started as a journalist and that he wrote short stories. So Carlos Baker said he learned to get the most from the least. But he is also of the same generation as of other experimental modernists. So James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf. And I think the First World War had a lot to do with this. It caused this rupture that meant the generation that followed lost faith in the central institutions that had come before. So as Thomas Putman writes, they had to find new ways to describe the world. And Hemingway, one of his most famous kind of catchphrases is, Baroque is dead. So i.e., the elaborate prose of the 19th century, they don't fit anymore. They don't fit the world that now exists. And because of that, he has come to be seen, which I actually find very interesting because I often don't associate Hemingway with that generation. For some reason, he feels much more modern. Anyway, he has come to be seen as a bit of a spokesperson for that generation, the First World War generation. And he himself had very traumatic war experiences, like all of them did. So let's get on to his time during the First World War, because it had a big impact on his writing. Speaker 4 (17:32) Hemingway, in World War I, he tried to enlist. He was rejected because his eyesight was not good enough. And so he ends up becoming an ambulance driver on the Italian front. So this is basically Austria fighting Italy. Speaker 5 (17:47) Yeah. Speaker 4 (17:47) And he gets there in the summer of 1918. He sees terrible things. He sees a munitions factory in Italy on his way there that has been blown up. He's wounded by mortar fire. Don't forget, he's a very young man at this point. So it has a traumatic, a defining effect on him. He has shrapnel wounds in his legs. He gets a decoration for helping very, very severely injured Italian soldiers. Speaker 5 (18:15) With the shrapnel in his legs. Speaker 4 (18:17) Right. And he's sent off to a military hospital to recuperate. He meets the first of many women that he basically falls for, Agnès von Karovsky, who is a Red Cross. Speaker 5 (18:28) Hemingway, that is, not you. Speaker 4 (18:29) Who's this, me or Hemingway? Hemingway. Thank you. Not you. I was like, wow, where did that come from? He falls in love with her. He hopes she'll follow him to the end of the earth, but she doesn't. She's very sad. Oh, dear. She's engaged to somebody else. And basically, don't some biographers say of this, because this nurse left him and broke his heart, he determines this will never happen again. And so he will always leave the other women before. He will never give a woman a chance to dump him first. Speaker 5 (18:59) Yeah, I guess it shook his romantic idealism. He was afraid of being abandoned the same way. So then he goes back, you know, the war is over, but he finds it very hard to adjust to normal life as you would. I mean, he's still very young. He's 20 years old. So then in 1920, he gets a job as a freelancer and staff writer for the Toronto Star Weekly. He moves to Chicago. He's still writing for them and for another paper, but it is in Chicago that he meets his first wife. This is Hadley Richardson. She's eight years older than him. And he actually apparently said that from the moment he met