BOOKS
65
he has no wish to use it, only to "experience" it, for he likes, a& he says,
the feeling of being an "insider," which is what one becomes by losing
one's American "chastity of mind" telling political lies with the Russians
in Gaylord's Hotel.
Hemingway himself, then, is wholly aware of the moral and politi–
cal tensions which existed in actual fact. Again and again, and always
pungently, he brings to our notice the contradictions of a revolutionary
civil war-describes the cynicism and intrigue and shabby vice of the
Russian politicos, pointedly questions the political virtue of La Pasionaria,
paints Andre Marty, in a brilliant and terrifying scene, as a homicidal
psychopath under the protection of the Comintern, speaks out about the
sins of Loyalist leaders and has only a small and uncertain inclination to
extenuate the special sins of the Communists. Indeed, there is scarcely a
charge that anti-Stalinists might have made during the war whose truth
Hemingway does not in one way or another avow. Yet by some failure of
mind or of seriousness, he cannot permit these political facts to become
integral with the hook by entering importantly into the mind of the hero.
Robert Jordan, to he sure, thinks a good deal about all these things but
almost always as if they were not much more than-to use the phrase of
another anti·fascist-a matter of taste. He can, in Mr. Rahv's use of the
word, "experience'' all the badness, but he cannot deal with it, dare not
judge it.
In the end it kills him. And Hemingway knows, of course, that it
kills him, for it is certainly true that of all the things that prevent Robert
Jordan's despatch from arriving in time to halt the ill-fated attack and
preserve his own life, it is the atmosphere of Gaylord's Hotel that is ulti–
mately culpable; it is Marty's protected madness that makes it finally
impossible to cancel the attack and that seals Jordan's fate. Were this kept
in focus we should have had a personal tragedy which would have truly
represented the whole tragedy of the Spanish war-the tragedy, that is,
which was not merely a defeat by superior force but also a moral and
political failure; for tragedy is not a matter of fact, it is a matter of value.
To Robert Jordan his own death is hitter enough, but it is only the last
incident of his experience; of its inherent tragic ·meaning, of its signifi–
cance in relation to its cause, he has no awareness. Nor is his lack of
awareness an intentional irony of which the reader
is
to he conscious ;
Hemingway lets the significance fade and the event becomes very nearly
a matter of accident. It is, I find, rather terrifying to see where writing
from naked experience can take an author; Hemingway knows that his
hero must die in
some
moral circumstance and he lamely and belatedly
ntrives for Robert Jordan a problem of--courage. And so we get what
we all like in the movies, a good fighting death, hut in the face of all the
tential significance of the event it is devastatingly meaningless. Courage,
we are told as a last word, is all: and every nerve responds to the farewell,
e flying hooves, the pain and the pathos, but we have been shuffled quite
