Reading from L-eft to Right
Dwight Macdonald
-
FWTBT
Hemingway's publishers advertise his new book as "the novel
that has something for everybody." This seems to be an accu–
rate statement. It is the b!ggest publishing success since
Gone With the
Wind:
almost half a million copies have been sold and it is selling at the
rate of 50,000 a week; Paramount has bought the movie rights at the high·
est price yet paid by Hollywood for a novel, and Gary Cooper, at Heming–
way's insistence, is to play the hero; the initials FWTBT promise to
become as familiar journalistic shorthand as GWTW. At the same time, the
book has been extravagantly praised by the critics, from Mr. Mumford
Jones of the
Saturday Review of Literature
(who describes Pilar as a
"Falstaffian" character and thinks it is "at least possible that
For Whom
the Bell Tolls
may become the
Uncle Tom's Cabin
of the Spanish Civil
War") to Mr. Edmund Wilson of the
New Republic.
It is seldom that a
novelist gathers both riches and reputation from the same book.
In the face of all this enthusiasm, I have to note that my own expe–
rience with
For Whom the Belt Tolls
was disappointing." The opening
chapters promised a good deal: they were moving, exciting, wonderfully
keen in sensory description. They set the stage for major tragedy. But the
stage was never really filled, the promise wasn't kept. The longer I read,
the more of a let-down I felt, the more I had a sense that the author was
floundering around, uncertain of his values and intentions, unable to come
up to the pretensions of his theme. One trouble with the book is that it
isn't a novel at all but rather a series of short stories, some of them excel–
lent-Pilar's narratives of the killing of the fascists and of her life with
the consumptive bullfighter; the description of Gaylords Hotel; Andres'
journey through the Loyalist lines; and the final blowing up of the bridge
-imbedded in a mixture of sentimental love scenes, too much talk, ram–
bling narrative sequences, and rather dull interior monologues by Jordan.
So, too, with the characters; they are excellent when they are sketched in
just enough for the purposes of a short story, as with El Sordo, the digni–
fied Fernando, and the old man Anselmo. But when Hemingway tries to
do more, he fails, as with the character of Pilar, which starts off well
enough but becomes gaseous when it is expanded.
*Elsewhere in this issue, Lionel Trilling reviews
For Whom the Bell Tolls
at length.
Here I am concerned primarily with its political rather than its literary significance-–
as I shall try to show, its shortcomings in both respects are organically connected.
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