Among the European conflicts of the 20th century, the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath is probably the most neglected relative to the space it takes in history books. In 1936, a number of dissatisfied generals of the Spanish Republican Armed Forces conspired to turn their units, stationed in Spanish Morocco, against the recently elected national government, decidedly leftwing. Subsequently they consolidated a force of monarchists, religious conservatives and fascists, all hostile to the government. Three years of brutal fighting followed, ending with the complete defeat of the Republican forces. A fascist dictatorship was established, which emerged unblemished from World War II, having watched from the sidelines. It took the death of General Franco, the dictator and one of the original putschists, to bury fascism in Spain. Nearly forty years had passed.
It is fair to say that the Spanish Civil War foreshadowed World War II, though at the time few outside observers realized what was at stake. What's worse, two dozen leading nations agreed a non-intervention pact, probably in the vain hope that another world war could be avoided. This inaction all but sealed the fate of the Republic because fascist Italy and Germany were quick to circumvent the agreement and support the rebels with equipment and troops. Support for the government came from communist organizations that coordinated a drive to recruit volunteers to the other side of the divide. They came in large numbers, from all European countries but also the US, to fight in the International Brigades.
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway follows one such volunteer, the explosives expert Robert Jordan from Montana, on a mission behind enemy lines. Jordan is sent to liaise (1) with a guerilla band and destroy an important bit of infrastructure to facilitate a Republican offensive in the area. Knowing this much is unnecessary detail. Agostín, one of the guerrilleros, has the following understanding of what's about to happen: "That we blow up an obscene bridge and then have to obscenely well obscenity ourselves out of these mountains." This one sentence contains the entire novel, plot, language and all.
In a stunning example of literary density, not quite Ulysses but coming close, the five hundred pages of the novel cover three days of very little going-on. Jordan arrives at the guerrilla camp, talks with and befriends the guerrilleros, scouts the bridge and plots its destruction, has a few flashbacks, and hits it off with a girl rescued by the guerrilleros in an earlier raid. The novel ends after the attack when the getting out of the mountains that Agostín is worried about begins, but the action is of secondary nature. What define the novel are the depiction of guerilla warfare, the dialog, and the language.
The life of irregular fighters is wildly romanticized. There is always enough wine, tobacco and bread. The meals, cooked by the two women in the band, are delicious and anchor the days. The cave they camp in is comfortable enough, dry and warm even when it snows outside because of "a blanket that hung over the opening". People wash and sleep; there are no complaints. Conditions couldn't be much better in an expensive prep school's summer camp.
This pastoral symphony is glowing enough to drive any young idealist to join the fight for freedom in a jungle somewhere remote. Before leaving, that idealist should watch Guerrilla, Steven Soderbergh's second Che movie, which paints a much dourer picture, with heroes filthy and unshaven, stuck knee-deep in the mud with no place to go, suffering hunger and thirst, deprivation and betrayal, sustaining painful injuries and eventually unglorious deaths. That picture is miles from the bucolic idyll of the novel but all the more realistic for it.
Hemingway was in Spain during the Civil War, but he was a newspaper correspondent not a fighter, and he didn't go into hiding behind enemy lines. His lack of first-hand experience with guerilla fighting combined with his devotion to the Spanish Republic to create the idealized setting of the novel. He wanted to see fascism defeated and his loyalty shows. Friendship, passion, a sense of duty and the willingness to make sacrifices for freedom run supreme.
While most volunteers on the Republican side were communists, Hemingway wasn't. He accuses both sides of the divide of brutality and evil. Chapter 10, the second longest of the book after the culminating destruction of the bridge, describes in gory detail the massacre of suspected fascists after the liberation of a small town by Republican forces. One by one, the established townsfolk – the mayor, the feed store owner, the big landowners – are send down a narrow lane of peasants armed with sticks and flails and bludgeoned to death in a bloody frenzy. Then they're thrown off a cliff and into the river beyond the plaza.
Readers run the risk of not getting that far in the book, repulsed from the first page by the dialog, which is stiff, wooden, awkward and clunky – to an extent that cannot be exaggerated. To say that it takes the reader some getting used to doesn't do justice to just how atrocious it is. The conversations are often banal, there is no flow, and the choice of words appears inept. Archaisms abound; there are countless thee and thou and doest and art and hast, as if a neophyte Shakespeare impersonator had taken his blunt pen to the page. There is talk about milk. It is enough to drive the most eager reader to abandon the novel.
It would be a great loss to put the book down after a few dozen pages. With some effort, the realization comes that the bumpy dialog is meant to represent spoken Spanish as understood by Jordan. Some writers render accents in writing, which nearly always results in unreadable prose. Hemingway chose to directly approximate Spanish in English. The archaisms express the differentiation between the formal and friendly you (tú and usted). The phrasing derives from the structure of the Spanish sentence. False friends abound: People that are bothered ask not to be "molested". Unusual things are said to be "most rare". One can see Hemingway sitting in his hotel room in Havana hanging on to a glass of rum and imagining how the characters would say in Spanish the things he wants them to say in English – and then literally translating this back into English. He must have had a blast.
The dialog is befouled with obscenities, quite literally, though every potentially offensive English word has been purged. Instead, in an example of self-censure that you might consider visionary or cowardly, Hemingway replaces all obscenities with words like "obscenity", "unprintable", "unnameable", and the like. I'm not quite sure what to make of this. It is certainly unique. But if Hemingway considered foul language necessary to define and differentiate his characters, why didn't he use it? Did he want to avoid causing offense? Did he have a Mormon publisher?
On the other hand, all swearing is in Spanish and, as described above, Spanish is rendered unconventionally throughout the novel. The outflanking, in true guerilla style, of the obscenities is just another aspect of that. It might be meant to suggest that English readers wouldn't get the details of the obscenities anyway. The milk mentioned earlier, for example, derives from a rather common Spanish curse (me cago en la leche) that translates to "I shit in the milk". English speakers would realize that buckets of invective are emptied but remain ignorant of the literal meaning and thus unoffended. This is what the dialog delivers with style.
Taken together, I don't think the dialog is brilliant but the approach is certainly brave. It's a highly creative way of dealing with the difficulty of making foreignness and distance palpable to the reader. The banality of most exchanges is probably reflective of the kind of people in the fight, average Spaniards, peasants, uneducated. There are only two problems. The dialog could flow more smoothly and there could be fewer repetitions. Why do shoes inevitably have to be specified as "rope-soled"? But overall, Hemingway's boldness with the language works and turns the novel into an extraordinary read
(1) To liase is a tremendously ugly word, but here it's rather fitting. Etymonline's Online Etyomology Dictionary entertains the possibility that the back formation from liaison was a coinage of British military men in World War I. It thus ticks the boxes for time and context.
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