26
PARTISAN REVIEW
political creeds have been so discredited by the events of recent years. Mr.
Wilson ends his review: "That he should thus go back to his art, after a
period of artistic demoralization, and give
it
a large scope, that in an era
of general perplexity and panic, he should dramatize the events of 'the
immediate past in terms, not of partisan journalism, but of the common
human inritincts that make men both fraternal and combative-is reassur·
ing evidence of the soundness of our intellectual life."
Of course, posing the alternative in these terms, one must agree that
For Whom the Bell Tolls
is vastly preferable to the "partisan journalism"
of
The Fifth Column.
But there is· another alternative, namely the treat·
ment of revolutionary struggle as Malraux and Silone have treated it in
their novels, on the level of political consciousness. Mr. Wilson describes
Hemingway's political understanding as "not so highly developed as it is
with a writer like Malraux," adding "but it is here combined with other
things that these political novelists often lack." Just what are these "other
things''? I find at least as profound an understanding of "the kind of
people people are" in Silone and Malraux as in Hemingway. Far from
there being an antithesis between these two kinds of understanding, the
human and the political, in these European novelists the one illuminates
the other and is integrated with it. Politics is simply one category of
human behavior-to the novelist who is writing about a revolution, the
most important one.
To Mr.
Wils~m,
however, "politics" seems to mean the threadbare,
vulgarized formulae, the treacheries and lies of Stalinism. Thus he actually
describes the Hemingway of
The Fifth Column
as infused with "the semi·
religious exaltation of communism," whereas in fact Hemingway in that
period expressed the most tepid sort of Popular Frontism. And Mr. Wilson
can write of the new novel: "Thus we get down out of the empyrean of
Marxist political analysis, where the leaders are pulling the strings for the
masses and see the ordinary people as they come.'' It has never occurred
to me that the defects of
The Fifth Column
could be attributed to a too
close study of the Marxist classics. And as for the leaders pulling the
strings for the masses-Mr. Wilson should read again the passages in
For
Whom the Bell Tolls
dealing with the necessity for "discipline," and with
the "crazies," the Anarchists.
THE POLITICS OF
ANTI-POLITICS
This mi sconception of the nature of politics leads
Mr. Wilson-and many others-to conclude that
since Hemingway in
For Whom the Bell Tolls
explicitly rejects the political catchwords of Stalinism, he has therefore
liberated himself from 'politics' in general and from Stalinism in particu·
lar. Hemingway himself, whose conception of politics is essentially that
of Mr. Wilson, may well suffer from the same delusion. But those who see
no further into a political program than its catchwords are likely to
imagine, when they lose faith in the catchwords, that to reject them is also
