64
PARTISAN REVIEW
tight-held loneliness that was such that Robert Jordan felt he could
not stand it. . ..
Yet the virtuosity and the lapses of taste are but excesses of an effort
which is, as a whole, remarkably successful. And if we cannot help think–
ing a little wryly about how much tragic defeat, how much limitation of
political hope was necessary before Hemingway could be weaned from the
novel of arrogant political will, neither can we help being impressed by
what he has accomplished in the change.
I speak first and at some length of the style of
For Whom the Bell
Tolls
because it seems to me that the power and charm of the book arise
almost entirely from the success of the style--from the success of many
incidents handled to the full of their possible esthetic interest. The power
and charm do not arise from the plan of the book as a whole; when the
reading is behind us what we remember is a series of brilliant scenes and
a sense of having been almost constantly excited, but we do not remember
a general significance. Yet Hemingway, we may be sure, intended that the
star-crossed love and heroic death of Robert Jordan should be a real trag–
edy, a moral and political tragedy which should suggest and embody the
tragedy of the Spanish war. In this intention he quite fails; he gives us
astonishing melodrama, which is something, but he does not give us
tragedy. The clue to the failure is the essential, inner dulness of the hero,
for Jordan is dull because he does not have within himself the tensions
which,
1n
historical fact, the events he lives through actually did have.
Because Jordan does not reproduce in himself the moral and political
tensions which existed in the historical situation, his story is at best
cinematic; and since his story must provide whatever architectonic the
novel is to have, the novel itself fails, not absolutely but relatively to its
possibility and implied intention.
This failure illustrates as well as anything could the point of Philip
Rahv's essay, "The Cult of Experience in American Writing"
(Partisan
Review,
November-December 1940). For here again we have the imbalance
which Mr. Rahv speaks of as characteristic of the American novel, on the
one hand the remarkable perception of sensory and emotional fact, on
the other hand an inadequacy of intellectual vitality. Consider as an illu–
minating detail the relation which Hemingway establishes between Robert
Jordan and the leaders he admires, Goltz the general and Karkov the
journalist. Both are cynical and exceptionally competent men, wholly
capable of understanding all the meanings of the revolutionary scene. But
they are Europeans and Robert Jordan is not; like the hero of Henry
James's novel,
The American,
he knows that there are machinations going
on around him, very wrong but very wonderful, which he will never be
able to understand. Nor does he really want to understand as his friends
do; he wants, as he says, to keep his mind in suspension until the war is
won. He wants only to feel emotions and ideals, or, as a technician and a
brave man, to
do
what he is told; the thinking is for others. Yet, like a
Henry Ja"lles character again, he must penetrate the complex secret; but
