Books
AN AMERICAN IN SPAIN
FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS. By Ernest Hemingway. Scribners.
$2.75.
To anyone who has been at all interested in its author's career-and
who has
not?-For Whom the Bell Tolls
will first give a literary emotion,
for here, we feel at once, is a restored Hemingway writing to the top of
his bent. He does not, as in the period of
To Have and Have Not
and
The
Fifth Column,
warp or impede his notable talent with the belief that art is
to be used like the automatic rifle. He does not substitute political will for
literary insight nor arrogantly pass off his personal rage as social respon–
sibility. Not that his present political attitude is coherent or illuminating;
indeed, it is so little of either that it acts as the anarchic element in a work
whose total effect is less impressive than many of its parts. Yet at least it
is flexible enough, or ambiguous enough, to allow Hemingway a more
varied notion of life than he has ever before achieved.
With the themes that bring out his skills most happily Hemingway
has never been so good-no one else can make so memorable the events of
sensory experience, how things look and move and are related to each
other. From the beginning of the novel to· the end one has the happy
sense of the author's unremitting and successful poetic effort. So great is
this effort, indeed, that one is inclined to feel that it fs at time even too
great, that it becomes conscious of itself almost to priggishness and quite
to virtuosity. About some of the very good things--they are by now famous
-one has the uneasy sense that they are rather too obviously "perform·
ances": I mean things so admirable as the account of the massacre of the
fascists by the republicans as well as things so much less good because so
frankly gaudy as the description of the "smell of death." The really
superlative passages are more modestly handled and the episodes of El
Sordo on his hill and Andres making his way through the republican lines
are equal to Tolstoy in his best battle-manner. But the sense of the writer
doing his duty up to and beyond the point of supererogation is forced on
us again in the frequent occurrence of that kind of writing of which Hem–
ingway has always allowed himself a small and forgivable amount to deal
with emotions which he considers especially difficult, delicate or noble.
Obtrusively "literary'' and oddly "feminine," it is usually used for the
emotions of love and it is always in as false and fancy taste as this:
Now as they lay all that before had been shielded was unshielded.
Where there had been roughness of fabric all was smooth with a
smoothness and firm rounded pressing and a long warm coolness, cool
outside and warm within, long and light and closely holding, closely
held, lonely, hollow-making with contours, happy-making, young and
loving and now all warmly smooth with a hollowing, chest-aching,
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