28. Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War: For Whom The Bell Tolls

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2:19What are you looking at?

2:21Dominic Sandbrook: One brother, the one with the scar, asked. The, Robert Jordan said. Do you see anything rare? No, said Robert Jordan. Have a cigarette. Why not? These are like the other had. He of the train. This is what we should do now, Pablo said. Another train. We can do that, Robert Jordan said. After the bridge. When he said the word bridge, everyone was quiet. After the bridge. He said again deliberately and took a sip of the absinthe. I do not go for the bridge, Pablo said, looking down at the table. Neither me nor my people. Robert Jordan now looked past the table to where the wife of Pablo was standing by the fire.

3:07Dominic Sandbrook: Then we will do the bridge without thy aid, Robert Jordan said to Pablo. No, Pablo said, and Robert Jordan watched his face sweat. Thou wilt blow no bridge here. No. Thou wilt blow no bridge Pablo said heavily And thou? Robert Jordan spoke to the wife of Pablo Who was standing still and huge by the fire She turned toward them and said I am for the bridge Her face was lit by the fire And it was flushed And it shone warm and dark and handsome now in the firelight As it was meant to be What do you say? Pablo said to her And Robert Jordan saw the betrayed look on his face And the sweat on his forehead as he turned his head.

3:51I am for the bridge and against thee, the wife of Pablo said. Nothing more. So hello, everybody. As of course, I'm sure everyone can tell from my superb Spanish accent there, that was from For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway, named after a phrase from John Donne's piece, Meditation 17. And it is a detailed and very moving, I think, portrait of war published in 1940. And it's set during specifically the Spanish Civil War, which Hemingway experienced firsthand as a correspondent for the North American Newspaper Association. And it follows Robert Jordan, played there by Dominic. And he is an American volunteer who is given a suicidal mission to blow up a bridge with an anti-fascist guerrilla war band.

4:41So hence the opening read. And it's definitely one of the landmark novels of the 20th century. So it was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and it's had a great impact further afield. It's particularly famous for the way that it portrays guerrilla warfare. So we've got a fascinating historical context and the author Hemingway himself is very interesting and very, very famous. So we'll be digging into both. Now I first read it when I was at university and my brother Luke recommended it to me because he loved it and he was doing the Spanish Civil War at the time. And I knew nothing about the Spanish Civil War and I'd never read Hemingway.

5:17So I was pretty skeptical and it totally took me by surprise. I loved it. And I've been trying to do it on this show ever since we started. But I know you, Dominic, you're very familiar with the context and I'm sure Hemingway himself, but you've never read it. You've never read any of Hemingway.

5:34Dominic Sandbrook: I'd literally never read a word of Hemingway. From when we were first working together, Tabby, you're always going on about Ernest Hemingway and how much he loved him and how much I should read him. And I was always a tiny bit resistant, to be honest. I think partly because I feared there would be an awful lot of conversations about bridges. And that is precisely what transpired. Even when we were doing that conversation, which by the way, a glimpse behind the curtain for the listeners, took multiple takes. It's because you were being unprofessional. You kept corpsing. I was in the mode. I was doing my full Javier Bardem.

6:03But you...

6:04Dominic Sandbrook: I mean, if people were ever able to hear the outtakes of Tabby's variety of Spanish accents, which went all the way from kind of Moscow to Istanbul and back, but never anywhere near Spain. That was actually intentional. It's indicative of the various political leanings of those characters. The Spanish Civil War, I've always been fascinated by. One of the remarkable things about the Spanish Civil War is that it had this galvanising effect on a generation of writers, artists, intellectuals, George Orwell, obviously. And Hemingway's book, For Whom the Bell Tolls, is probably with Orwell's homage to Catalonia.

6:40Dominic Sandbrook: It is one of the literary sort of engagements with the war in Spain. And actually, I enjoyed reading the book, but I suspect this is one of those where I enjoy the episode more than the book. So you love it. I was a bit sceptical approaching it. I won't tell you, the listeners, what I thought until the end, have a little bit of suspense. But first, so I give people a sense of the story for people who haven't read it. I think you should. Robert Jordan, he's American. He loves Spain. He taught Spanish. He has volunteered for the Republican cause, that is the left-wing anti-fascist cause in the Spanish Civil War.

7:15Dominic Sandbrook: We're in 1937. We are in the second year of the war, basically the second full year of the war. He is in the Guadarrama, which is this sort of forested mountain range between Madrid and Segovia, sort of central to northern Spain. So basically the campaign, the nationalists, the Franco, the fascists are very keen to capture Madrid. and the Republicans are trying to push them back. And so the campaign is taking place in these mountains and Robert Jordan is an expert at blowing things up. So he's been doing a lot of train work, hence the mention of the train from Tabby in the opening reading. I do not care for the train.

7:54Dominic Sandbrook: Exactly. Because here's the thing, he's now got to blow up a bridge. Yeah. There's all sorts of exciting reasons why he has to blow this bridge up. The whole book takes place over four days. so it's basically them chatting about when they're going to blow this bridge up I have to say I because I was completely unfamiliar with the book they'd been in this cave for about 100 pages and I thought surely they could get out of this cave soon then the next time I picked up the book I idly flicked forward and I like glanced and I was like page 402 they went back into the cave I was like what they're still in the cave are you but they're plunging such emotional depths that the physical environment matters not at all you just don't get it so they're hanging around in this cave and it's basically Robert Jordan there's various characters your favourite character is Tabby you love this bloke Anselmo you love a mystical sage written by an American writer I do Lee in East of Eden I got a lot of grief for slagging him off you love him no no I wasn't I wasn't wild about Lee I do like Anselmo but my favourite is Pilar and we will get to why in due course yeah so Pilar is she was described in that opening reading as standing still and huge by the fire.

9:01Dominic Sandbrook: So her defining characteristics are she's very ugly. She's massive, but she's very sensual. And she's earthy and full of native wisdom, isn't she, Pilar? So she's there. There's her sort of partner. Lover, yeah. Yeah, Pablo. Pablo is the leader of this guerrilla group, but he seems to have grown disillusioned and he doesn't want to do the bridge and all this kind of thing. So Robert Jordan has joined them. He's the dynamite expert. But there's also a girl there called Maria who has escaped from the fascists. She was very badly abused by them. Robert Jordan and Maria fall in love. So that's nice.

9:37And basically, the book builds towards an exciting conclusion.

9:43Dominic Sandbrook: They're going to do this bridge job. But for various reasons, there's an act of sabotage. So Robert Jordan is going to have to blow up the bridge in a very intrepid and ingenious way that he's going to follow his orders to the very end, even if it means him losing his own life. So as we approach the end of the book, his death has been foretold earlier in the book, and we don't know whether that was just mad superstitious nonsense or whether he is really heading towards oblivion himself. So that's the story. But obviously hanging over this book, you know, we always talk about the author's backgrounds.

10:17Dominic Sandbrook: Hemingway, you know, of all 20th century writers. He is a contender to be the most fated, the most celebrated. He's a tourist industry. People love the details of his character and nobody loves his character more than Tabitha Syrett because you go on and on about Ernest Hemingway. I mean, he's so mythologized. He's one of those writers, as you say, who stands kind of outside of his work. So a lot of people wouldn't be able to name a Hemingway book, but everyone's heard of Ernest Hemingway. He hung out with a lot of famous literary types. He had an extraordinary life. And I think this is a bold claim, but I would say that of all the writers that I've researched for this show, I enjoyed doing Hemingway the most.

10:55Dominic Sandbrook: So the challenge for you, Tabby... Is to restrain myself, yeah, not to write a biography of Ernest Hemingway. You've literally got like between five and 10 minutes to tell us about Ernest Hemingway. And if it's 40 minutes, this is on you. So let's start at the beginning. So he's born on the 21st of July, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, Chicago. His family is large and affluent. He is one of six. His father, Clarence, is a physician. His mother, Grace, is a musician. An unexpected detail. She, for some reason, wanted he and his older sister to seem like twins. So I think until he was about three years old, he was dressed in the same clothes as his sister and his hair was kept intentionally long.

11:32So he looked like a girl. Anyway, he actually later said, and also his mother was always trying to get him to become a musician or learn music. He later said that he hated his mother.

11:41Dominic Sandbrook: But isn't the whole key to Hemingway, deep down he's actually a softy and he's just constantly pretending to be an outdoorsman. Yeah, this is the thing. And I think he often looked to quite nurturing women and he certainly had a lot of women in his life. His father was very outdoorsy, always took him fishing, took him on these great trips. And I think that stayed with him the rest of his life. Nature serves as almost a comfort to him for the rest of his life and it creeps into his writing. So he goes to school. He did very well. He's sporty, good grades, very handsome, a big bloke. But then he starts editing the school paper.

12:16And when he did, he tried to imitate the style of sports writers, which I think is interesting because we're going to get onto his style in a minute. But as we said, contrary to this very, you know, determinedly macho, masculine, no-nonsense, hellraiser, hard-drinking vision we have of Hemingway, he was actually a very private person and surprisingly introverted. And then after school, he went to work for the Kansas City Star as a reporter. And this had a huge influence on the famous style because the star's style guide was use short sentences, use short, fast paragraphs, use vigorous English, be positive, not negative.

12:55And I think you can see that in his writing ever since. And that brings us nicely to his style because he is famous for being the trailblazer of a very particular minimalist, very masculine style of writing that was very unusual to the writers that came before. And it was pretty revolutionary at the time.

13:12Dominic Sandbrook: Definitely seen as revolutionary. It's a style you associate really with the 30s and 40s, I suppose, a kind of hard-boiled writing. Yes. Very spare, all extraneous detail, unless it's a chat about a bridge, all extraneous detail removed. removed so shorn of adjectives and adverbs and things Robert Jordan said this is a good gun he picked up the gun it was a good gun that's basically how Ernest Hemingway writes so reductive well actually you say it's so reductive on my part it's that's true because actually he doesn't just write like that no he does not when he's excited so when he's writing about a sex scene or something there's loads of very very lush much lusher than you would expect a much more sensual writing a a lot of stuff with colours and a lot of stuff with, you know, the landscape and the body.

14:01Dominic Sandbrook: Like he really does like all that stuff. So there is a, the interesting thing about Hemingway, I think, is that inside this sense of real discipline and control in his prose, there is a much more romantic writer trying to get out, I always think. You've mentioned a couple of times to me when we were preparing for that tremendous reading, do it as Clint Eastwood. And the Clint Eastwood style, very laconic, taciturn, The style that you might associate with, I don't know, Raymond Chandler, or you might associate it with Cormac McCarthy or something. J.D. Salinger, who he was a huge influence on. They exchanged letters.

14:33Dominic Sandbrook: Hemingway is seen as the progenitor of that. And yet this idea that he has is what he calls his iceberg theory. So basically the iceberg is that I know loads of stuff about what's happening in this scene. I know loads of stuff about what the character is feeling and all that. But I'm not going to tell you all of it. What you see is just the iceberg above the surface. but you sort of sense that below that is this huge amount of stuff and if the writer is writing truly enough this is a quote then the reader will have a feeling of those things as strongly as if the writer had stated them now even though i've sounded a bit skeptical about hemingway i think that's a beautiful way of thinking i could not agree more i really passionately agree with that because i love a writer that doesn't patronize his reader or her reader and lets you interpret it and lets you read meaning and feeling and emotion into the gaps between what is said and what is not said.

15:27You know, he never directly articulates anything. He never says, I am afraid or he was afraid or everything, but he conveys a great deal regardless. I mean, so much is conveyed. He's also a big fan of slang and colloquialisms and repetition. And I love that because I think it creates this gorgeous rhythm and it actually does imitate thought, like the merry-go-round of thought, hence the repetition. We are rarely perfectly articulate in our minds. And I think that he conveys that in his writing.

15:54Dominic Sandbrook: Speak for yourself, Sabby. I knew you were going to say that. Of course you did. You have to think things three times over before you feel safe enough to say it. But that also makes Hemingway very much marmite to people. I think some people don't like the fact that so much is hidden, that it's so sparse and simple, that it's the bare minimum, and that perhaps some of the characters are emotionally restrained. I disagree. I love it. I think I'm actually really moved by, I'm moved by like a restrained, held back, masculine character, be that a woman or a man. So full of feeling when it comes out.

16:29He says at one point something like, she smiled and he wondered how far the smile went. And I just know exactly what he means. I know exactly what that means. So I'm a big fan.

16:38Dominic Sandbrook: After all these episodes, I know now exactly what kind of characters and what kind of writing appeals to you. You like strong men, strong taciturn men wrestling with their feelings. No, I don't. You do, but beneath the surface. So we don't know they're doing that. Okay. So how did he develop it? So it's probably partially born of the fact that he started as a journalist and that he wrote short stories. So Carlos Baker said he learned to get the most from the least. But he is also of the same generation of other experimental modernists. So James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf. and I think the First World War had a lot to do with this.

17:15It caused this rupture that meant the generation that followed lost faith in the central institutions that had come before. So as Thomas Putman writes, they had to find new ways to describe the world and Hemingway, one of his most famous kind of catchphrases is Baroque is dead. So i.e. the elaborate prose of the 19th century, they don't fit anymore. They don't fit the world that now exists. And because of that, he has come to be seen, which I actually find very interesting because I often don't associate Hemingway with that generation. For some reason, he feels much more modern. Anyway, he has come to be seen as a bit of a spokesperson for that generation, the First World War generation.

17:52And he himself had very traumatic war experiences, like all of them did. So let's get on to his time during the First World War because it had a big impact on his writing.

18:04Dominic Sandbrook: Hemingway, in World War I, he tried to enlist. He was rejected because his eyesight was not good enough. And so he ends up becoming an ambulance driver on the Italian front. So this is basically Austria fighting Italy. And he gets in the summer of 1918. He sees terrible things. He sees a munitions factory in Italy on his way there that has been blown up. He's wounded by mortar fire. Don't forget, he's a very young man at this point. So it has a traumatic, a defining effect on him. He has shrapnel wounds in his legs. He gets a decoration for helping very, very severely injured Italian soldiers.

18:46With the shrapnel in his legs.

18:48Dominic Sandbrook: Right. And he's sent off to a military hospital to recuperate. He meets the first of many women that he basically falls for, Agnes von Karofsky, who is a Red Cross. Hemingway, that is, not you. Who's this, me or Hemingway? Hemingway. Thank you. Not you. I was like, wow, where did that come from? He falls in love with her. He hopes she'll follow him to the end of the earth, but she doesn't. She's very sad. Oh, dear. She's engaged with somebody else. And basically, some biographers say of this, because this nurse left him and broke his heart, he determines this will never happen again. And so he will always leave the other women before.

19:27Dominic Sandbrook: He will never give a woman a chance to dump him first. Yeah, I guess it shook his romantic idealism. He was afraid of being abandoned the same way. So then he goes back. You know, the war is over. but he finds it very hard to adjust to normal life as you would. I mean, he's still very young. He's 20 years old. So then in 1920, he gets a job as a freelancer and staff writer for the Toronto Star Weekly. He moves to Chicago. He's still writing for them and for another paper, but it is in Chicago that he meets his first wife. This is Hadley Richardson. She's eight years older than him. And he actually apparently said that from the moment he met her, he knew that she would be his wife.

20:04She had kind of beautiful red hair.

20:05Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah. Not the last time he would say those words. Yeah, it's very true. So they get married in September 1921. They move to Paris two months later and he falls in love with Europe and the life there. He goes down an absolute storm with the literary set there. So this is also the year of his first trip to Spain. And this would be a love affair that would endure for the rest of his life until his death. He's captivated by it. He loves particularly bullfighting. He said he was fascinated by the kind of the grapple, the spectacle of life and death that he found everywhere in Spain. We'll come on to Spain later on.

20:43Dominic Sandbrook: But this is obviously, this is a period when people, as you say, they fall in love with Spain. They create a romantic image of it. Exactly. It's darkness and light. It's death and life. And the bullfight. It's passion. Yeah. Yeah. Picasso is doing all his bull pictures at this period. The bullfight has become abroad the symbol of supposedly the Spanish, primal Spanish soul that has been lost elsewhere in industrialization and stuff, but Spain still holds on. This almost medieval courage in the face of death. Yeah, exactly. But it's also in Paris that he becomes very close to someone that would play a huge role in his life, particularly as a writer, and that is Gertrude Stein.

21:22Dominic Sandbrook: Gertrude Stein, modernist writer, classic figure of the kind of interwar years. She knows everybody. She introduces him to all sorts of people like James Joyce and Ezra Pound. We mentioned already Picasso, the Fitzgeralds. So F. Scott Fitzgerald, you told that tremendous anecdote in our Great Gatsby episode about Hemingway being invited by F. Scott Fitzgerald to... Phallus bants. Yeah, to commentate on the size of his equipment. The size of his appendage. Yeah. Correct. And he said, no, it's middling. Right. But it's still a huge gesture from you, Tubby. high expectations anyway he's carries on he's writing loads of journalism he's doing all this what he actually wants to do though is to be a big writer so he does short stories he writes the sun also rises a novel which is partly inspired by the bullfighting that he's seen in pamplona that's actually where he immortalizes that term that is very famous now the lost generation which gertrude stein called this this kind of literary group that she surrounded herself with exactly so So Hemingway, he's moving on now from Hadley.

22:33Dominic Sandbrook: He's had an affair with a woman called Pauline Pfeiffer. And they go back to America. This is the end of the 20s. They have kids. Doesn't his father shoot himself around this point? He makes a big move after writing The Sun Also Rises because it means that he signs up with Scribner's, the publishers that would be his book. And he becomes close to Maxwell Perkins, very famous editor, discovered Fitzgerald Wolfe. Yeah, so then through that, Pauline Pfeiffer comes into his life. so he splits up with Hadley he becomes a Catholic they move to Key West in 1928 they then have two children so Patrick and Gloria and Gloria is actually born Gregory but she identifies as a woman most of her life anyway this will come back later because they had a very strange relationship so then yeah as you say in 1928 Hemingway learns that his father had shot himself this is what happens to robert jordan's father in for whom the bell tolls and it's something that he really really wrestles with and it is also something that will haunt hemingway for the rest of his life because he exactly and his two of his siblings suffer from severe depression and mood swings and it gets worse and worse throughout the course of his life not helped probably by the heavy drinking and you can see that he's having manic episodes from his letters very early in his life.

23:53Dominic Sandbrook: You know, Hemingway's a man of massive demons, but like a lot of writers that we've talked about in this show, actually, but he is still writing. You know, he's writing good stuff. He writes A Farewell to Arms in 1929. He does lots of short stories. He writes a book about Africa. Is that right? I didn't even know this. Yeah, he spends a lot of time in Kenya. Right. There's actually a place that we used to go on holiday called Hemingway because he used to... Really? He used to, yeah, drink there. Yeah. It's brilliant to have that local knowledge. It is. Yeah. Well, when a local. Yeah. But then he is drawn back to Spain.

24:29Dominic Sandbrook: And before we completely run out of time, we should give a little bit of an overview of what's been happening in Spain and why this is such a landmark conflict. So I'm not going to give a massive lecture about the Spanish Civil War, but Tabby, would you like a little bit of context? Surely you would. Indulge me. So Spain has not been involved in the First World War at all. It's been a backwater, Basically, it's been really politically turbulent. There is a king. It's normally a parliamentary system. Most of Spain is untouched by the modern world. So it feels like there's these huge estates called the Latifundiae, which go back to the Roman period.

25:08I found this extraordinary. I had no idea until I started reading up for this episode.

25:12Dominic Sandbrook: Well, this is true of Spain and Portugal, actually. They would have absolutely gigantic rural estates run by landowners almost kind of feudal system. The peasants are enthralled to the landowner and to the church and whatnot. There are parts of Spain that have industrialized the Basque country, the North, and Catalonia. But those are obviously places with separatist movements. So Spain feels very fractured. And there's lots of labor unrest. There's a big anarchist movement. There was a socialist movement. There's a communist party. In the 20s, there was a coup and a general took power called General Miguel Primo de Rivera, you know, under the king.

25:53Dominic Sandbrook: But that didn't really work out. They brought back democracy at the beginning of the 1930s, but it's incredibly polarized and unstable between right and left. There are terrible strikes. So for example, in the north in 1935, there are assassinations there are kind of paramilitary movements and what not the son of the previous dictator Primo de Rivera sets up a little fascist party called the Falange which actually sort of gives its name really to it's then co-opted by the right, by the conservatives who win the Spanish Civil War I mean whether they're really fascist or whether they're just basically using the fascist label is an interesting question.

26:32Dominic Sandbrook: Right so it all comes to a head in 1936 there's an election at the beginning of the year which means that a popular front which is a kind of left-wing alliance of liberals socialists you know sort of left-wing parties uh some of the separatists or more nationalist groups from the areas like the basque country or catalonia they come to power and there's a lot of social unrests because they want to push through radical changes and the right don't like that. And in July 1936, the army launches, right-wing elements within the army launch a coup. The reason the Spanish Civil War happens is the coup doesn't fully work.

27:10Dominic Sandbrook: So basically the trade unions, the big cities in Madrid, Barcelona, and so on, stay loyal to the elected government. So Spain is divided between the rebels, the coup people in the army, and their allies who are often like big land owners the catholic church and so on who want to defend the status quo they've got half the country um often kind of rural areas more conservative and so on but the big cities and catalonia and so on so madrid barcelona places like that they stay loyal to the elected government so on the one hand you have what are called the nationalists and these are the forces of the right the army the coup plotters and so on effectively from day one They have very, very strong international backing from Mussolini in Italy and then Hitler in Germany.

27:57Dominic Sandbrook: And then on the left, you have the elected government, who are the Republicans. And they get help eventually from the Soviet Union, which is something of a poison chalice. And they do appeal to Britain and France for help, but they don't really get it. And they have help from foreign volunteers. And this war becomes incredibly bitter and incredibly bloody. I mean, this is always the way with civil wars, because people feel it's an existential struggle. The future of their country is at stake. They come to believe, you know, their neighbors, the people in the next town, the landowners or the priests or the anarchists or whoever are going to kill them and their families.

28:39Dominic Sandbrook: So we've got to kill them first. people in some places there are horrendous horrendous sadistic massacres and things i think they found something like at the end of maybe start the 21st century or something that spain had the highest number of mass graves after cambodia yeah i can well believe that but it becomes this cause celeb across the world you know it's sort of like ukraine and gaza rolled into one. It attracts intellectuals, journalists, artists from everywhere. And they're not even all communists. A lot of them are just opposed to fascism. So like Robert Jordan in this book. But then alongside the official international brigades, you've got some foreign anti-fascist volunteers like George Orwell, who served in smaller anarchist Marxist militias.

29:28Anyway, the war rages until March 1939. And then there's a coup in the Republican zone, and it leads to the surrender of their army to Franco's forces. And this was taken very badly by a lot of leftists and intellectuals all over the world. Like Albert Camus, I think he wrote about it. He said it was the first time that people had learned what felt like the right cause can be defeated. He said it explains why so many the world over feel the Spanish drama as a personal tragedy.

29:59Dominic Sandbrook: And Hemingway is writing in the aftermath of defeat. And that actually, there are a lot of moments in the book where they say, if we just follow our orders and we stick to our cause, we will win. And for Hemingway's readers in 1940, those would have had a really bittersweet effect, those words. Especially as in 1940, fascism is on the march across Europe. But Hemingway has been following the war from the beginning, really. and then he goes there in 1937 to cover it as a journalist and this forms the basis obviously for whom the bell tolls he took with him his latest lady friend uh writer and journalist Martha Gellhorn who would become his third wife yeah great war correspondent exactly he's in Madrid when Franco's army are bombarding it he took a particular interest in these foreign and particularly American volunteers you know and then he would stay and this comes up in the book in a version of it in the Hotel Florida, Madrid.

31:00And lots of intellectuals and artists would gather there and talk. And he wrote a play about it, his only ever play. And then two more trips to Spain in 1938. He went to the site of the Battle of the Ebro. And this is the last stand of the Republican forces. He finds sort of tellingly that a bridge has been destroyed and he has to escape across the river Ebro in a boat rowing desperately. And so he came to know, obviously, many of the Americans who went to fight in Spain. Among them is a guy called Robert Hale Merriman. He's a young Californian doctoral student, and he's an International Brigade volunteer.

31:37He's killed in 1938, and it's widely suspected that he was the main inspiration for Robert Jordan, the protagonist of this book. So Robert Jordan volunteers because he, like Ernest Hemingway, has a genuine deep love of Spain and its people, an idealized view of it, as we were saying.

31:55Dominic Sandbrook: So there's two separate sorts of idealism that inspire Hemingway's book and indeed Robert Jordan's mission. So Warn is the idealism of the cause, stopping fascism, fighting for, you know, they think they're fighting for a better world, a more equal world, and they think they're fighting forces that are diabolical, that are evil. that what General Franco and the military rebels and the church and the old elite, what they represent is kind of cruelty and oppression and so on. And that's why your Orwells and your Hemingways go. But also for Hemingway, it's about, and indeed for Robert Jordan, it's about Spain.

32:28Dominic Sandbrook: It's the combination of the ideals and the land. And he sees Spain, doesn't he? You know, the landscape, the people, the history, the culture, as ancient and primal and authentic and red-blooded and it's all about death and sex. And rich and passionate. Yeah, exactly. All of that kind of thing. And the whole book, the imagery of the landscape runs through that and the sensuality, the heat. It's the only time his writing becomes almost, I mean, like lyrical, almost quite romantic is when he's describing Spain, the country. And that's that character Pilar. We'll talk about her a bit more after the break, but she represents that for him because of her sensuality.

33:11Exactly.

33:11Dominic Sandbrook: Do you know what I think? Exactly. No, definitely. So he sees the Spanish as affectionate, proud, intensely alive. They have the potential for great loyalty as well as great lethargy. So they're blunt and they're emotional, but he also doesn't entirely romanticize them. He says that there are saints and monsters on both sides. I mean, he's slightly in love with the violence of it all. I think so. Yeah. And because bullfighting particularly represents for him, He sees them as a culture with tremendous courage in the face of death. And I think that his writing style is particularly interesting in For Whom the Bell Tolls because of the Spanish.

33:45Because essentially what he's trying to do is translate English into Spanish sounding English. So in a sense, Robert Jordan's English in the book, his thoughts, his descriptions are being translated from Spanish. And it gives the language a very strange, unfamiliar, almost archaic feel. So for instance, he says things like, what passes with thee? Or rather than say, oh, that's strange, he says, how rare. And then he imitates the forms of you in Spanish. So it's thee, thou, thy. And so it can make the prose of the book almost unnaturally formal. But I love it.

34:21Dominic Sandbrook: So go back to that reading that we did. So people recall when Tabby was reading in her Romanian accent. My Soviet accent, yeah. Yeah. One of the Spanish people in the reading we did says to Robert Jordan, why not? These are like the other had he of the train. Obviously, they're not speaking broken English. They're speaking Spanish. But what Hemingway is trying to do is to find a version of English that mimics the rhythms of Spanish. I do not go for the bridge, neither me nor my people. Thou wilt blow no bridge here. I am for the bridge. I am for the bridge and against thee. All of that kind of thing.

34:56Dominic Sandbrook: And it is, well, there are two different schools of thought on it. One is that it's slightly insisted on itself and it's a bit jarring. And the other, it does have a kind of power and it does have the archaicism of it, makes it feel, I mean, Hemingway wants us to feel that this is a timeless story as well as a contemporary one, doesn't he? that this is expressing not just the contemporary realities of the Spanish Civil War, but eternal truths about life and death and courage and suffering and so on. And so his slightly weird Tolkien-esque dialogue does do that, I think. But it's also a book about Spain and he wants to root us firmly in Spain.

35:34So he visits Spain for the last time in November 1938. And then he writes For Whom the Bell Tolls between 1939 and July 1940. He thought initially it would be a short story, but no.

35:44Dominic Sandbrook: He wrote it in Cuba, didn't he? A lot of it in Cuba. He wrote it in Cuba. Yeah, he wrote it in three different places. Yeah, exactly. And he said of it, it's the most important thing that I've done and it is the place in my career as a writer where I have to write a real one. So it's published in October 1940. It's an instant hit. Half a million copies are sold in months. It re-establishes Hemingway's at that point slightly flailing literary reputation. Graham Greene, he said, it was a record more truthful than history in terms of its portrayal of war. And interestingly, Fidel Castro said he used For Whom the Bell Tolls as a kind of training manual for his military insurrection in the southern mountains of Cuba between December of 1956 and 1959.

36:26And I was a bit sceptical too, so I kind of looked into it. It was something to do about how to position machine guns. You know all about machine guns, Dominic. You get it.

36:35Dominic Sandbrook: Totally, totally. But I also know how these things work, which is basically a load of journalists turned up and they said, do you like Ernest Hemingway? And Castro's like, yeah. And they said, did you maybe use this book as a training manual? And he's basically like, yeah, okay. And I think that's kind of how that conversation went, whereas the genuinely they're pouring through Hemingway's novels when they're out there. No, no, no. I believe it. I believe it. I never launched a military campaign without, first of all, consulting for whom the bell tolls. But in some quarters, it's this strange dialogue and its prose absolutely panned and it's criticized for being way too partisan.

37:07So particularly, obviously in Spain. So it was treated with great suspicion. It wasn't allowed to be published there until 1968. And the film adaptation wasn't allowed to be shown in Spanish cinemas. So obviously because the Franco regime is still in power. Now, I think we better get to a break. And then after the break, we will get into the book and its characters and the violence behind this whole story.

37:31Dominic Sandbrook: I genuinely cannot wait. What are you doing on the 4th of September? Oh, you're still free. Why? Haven't you heard that me and me are all going to be at the Southbank Centre? We have four weekend live shows for you, all from your favourite goal hanger podcasts. Hello, old ship. I'm going to be there with Tom Holland talking about the most scandalous housewives of Regency England. And I'm going to be sitting down with the wonderful Anita Anand, my co-host on The Empire Pod, to talk about the history of modern Iran with the absolutely brilliant Ali Ansari. And Dominic and I will be telling a thrilling Victorian adventure on the Friday night to kick things off.

38:13Dominic Sandbrook: And it's not just us. Mary Beard is coming. Stanley Tucci's coming. You really couldn't ask for a better guest list unless you were on it. If you want to join us, head to southbankcentre.co.uk for the full lineup. Buy your tickets now. See you there. See you there.

38:32Fall never arrives all at once. first the air then the light and slowly the things you love begin to find each other a jacket meets a dress a hoodie slips beneath a blazer an old cap finds a new scarf because you don't simply step into the season you create it layer by layer until it finally feels like fall find fall your way at Ross

39:06Hi, everybody.

39:06Dominic Sandbrook: Welcome back to The Book Club. Now, before we get into the details of For Whom the Bell Tolls, a little bit of housekeeping, just a reminder to sign up for our free newsletter book club notes. So what this does, you just sign up and it will arrive completely free every Saturday. We have further reading about the book. About Hemingway, in this case. About Hemingway and about the Spanish Civil War and stuff. There are reviews from other listeners, a bit of a chat going on. Lots of warnings about future books coming up. Sort of advance notice so you can get ahead of the reading. There's loads of interesting thoughts from Tabby about how to read in case you don't know how to read.

39:45Dominic Sandbrook: That's kind of Tabby. But I need to learn first. So you can sign up to this at thebookclubhq.com and even though it's actually our newsletter I can say objectively I think the newsletter is really good. Oh it's absolutely fantastic. Yeah. Dare I say it's the best in class Goalhanger newsletter. I think it's the best part of this show, to be honest. It's way better than the stuff we do on air. Again, Tabby speaks for herself. Right. You love Robert Jordan. He's the main character. We don't see everything through his eyes because there are moments when other characters are telling stories and there are moments when the narrative voice leaves Robert Jordan's consciousness and we're with somebody else.

40:23Dominic Sandbrook: But he really dominates the book. And you love this bloke. I do. So he's a young American. He taught Spanish in America before he becomes committed to the Republican cause and he volunteers. He says at one point, I believe in a people's right to govern themselves. And he is, which is probably why I find him so attractive and actually quite moving. He is a very Hemingway-esque protagonist and he reflects many of Hemingway's ideals. So he's Spartan, he's ironic, he's brave. He is a professional idealist, but he's stoical and he has this wonderful ironic inner dialogue. And in this book especially, he is almost existential in his utilitarianism.

41:03There's something Camus about him, I think. So he says at one point, no man has a right to take any man's life unless it is to prevent something worse. But he's certainly far from one dimensional because he has a profound emotional development over the course of the book, over the course of what actually only turns out to be four days, because the jeopardy of his situation, his reflections upon his past, give him a much deeper appreciation of life and means that he grows closer to his comrades in the guerrilla band far more quickly than one would normally.

41:35Dominic Sandbrook: You feel that he has learned something about himself and about life. Yeah, he has a journey. He's been on a journey. He's been on a journey. Now we do find out about his past through flashbacks as the book goes on, don't we? So he thinks a lot about his father and his grandfather. His grandfather fought in this American Civil War, brilliant, he loves his grandfather, he was witting on about his grandfather's sword or something. and then his father he thinks of as a bit of a dead loss because his father didn't fight in any wars and actually the one thing he remembers about his father I actually find this a really touching moment he went away to school and he remembers his father crying at the station as he went away his eyes damped with emotion Robert Jordan had been so embarrassed by all of it by his father kissing him goodbye that he felt suddenly so much older than his father and so sorry for him that he could hardly bear it I think that's really nicely observed that that's what would go through a child's mind I wondered if that was drawn.

42:25I mean, you can't sort of over psychoanalyze these things, but I did wonder if that was kind of drawn from Hemingway's own life because Robert Jordan's father commits suicide and it's something that he really battles with. He's ashamed of it because he sees it as weakness and obviously Hemingway's father also committed suicide. So at one point, for instance, Maria and Pilar are asking him, how did your father die? And he says, oh, he shot himself. And they say, oh, to avoid being tortured. And he says, yes, because he can't bring himself to admit the truth. And he's terrified that he will inherit this weakness and wonders throughout the book if he really has courage.

43:02And this is a tension that he wrestles with on over and over. the tension between courage and the refusal to admit to fear so he says at one point turn off the thinking now old timer old comrade you're a bridge blower now not a thinker so he's determinedly detached and practical as a way to avoid feeling the fear of which he is ashamed and i think that hemingway's prose really reinforces this the emotional discipline

43:28Dominic Sandbrook: really works with his writing the thing is that hemingway's prose is doing is hemingway's prose it's an exercise in controlling strong feeling through very sparse language and Robert Jordan himself is trying to do that isn't he in the way he behaves he is a man of great Miss Hemingway in his iceberg Robert Jordan is a man of great emotional passion and depth but he is laconic and he's afraid of showing it maybe yeah he's very fatalistic isn't he well I was about to say that that runs through it doesn't it this sort of sense that we just have to follow our orders we have to go to the end no matter what the end will bring at one point he says to himself doesn't he this bridge can be the point in which the future of the human race can turn yeah as it can turn on everything that happens in this war and you have only one thing to do and you must do it and what that captures is simultaneously the sense of fate that he is the prisoner of fate but also this sense that was so common between 1936 and 39 that the spanish civil war was an apocalyptic existential clash between good and evil and the future of the world depended upon it but it also harkens back to the title so for whom the bell tolls which is taken from this line from john dunn because it's basically about how all mankind is united and everything you do you do if your fellow man reflects upon your fellow man and yes the more that he commits himself to the people around him in this guerrilla war band the more attached he grows to them anselmo pilar maria it makes him increasingly emotional.

44:54The emotion starts leaking out of his stoicism and it makes him very nostalgic. And I like this because he's nostalgic about the past and then later about the future that he may never know. And he thinks about America and Spain. He's recalling both with great love and affection. And I like that because they're all confused. He feels at home in both places. He feels connected to this great whole, but he's a slight outsider in both. And I love this section, the tangled longing that comes out of it. That must be the odour of nostalgia, the smell of the smoke from the piles of raked leaves burning in the streets in the fall of Missoula.

45:28Which would you rather smell? Sweet grass the Indians used in their baskets, smoked leather. So the odour of the ground in the spring after rain, the smell of the sea as you walk through the gorse on a headland in Galatia. I like it because he feels connected to everything and everywhere.

45:43Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah. And he feels this deep sense of connection, doesn't he, as the book goes on. So he's only just met them when the book starts they're sort of spanish gorillas uh there's a distance always between him and them because he's an outsider they they speak at one point about his spanish you know so obviously he's an american who knows spanish very well and they say oh where do you come from where do you sound like you know so he's not entirely one of them no exactly but you know again if i was being slightly skeptical i would say he like hemingway has completely drunk the old spain yeah yeah and The person who embodies this is this character called Anselmo.

46:18Dominic Sandbrook: You mentioned him briefly. He's an old man. You've seen him in a thousand films. He's old. He's craggy. He's loyal. He's strong. He's dependable. He's simple. He's Samwise Gamgee. He's like an aged, yeah, sort of aged Samwise Gamgee, I suppose. He doesn't like killing. He hasn't succumbed to the violence. He says, I don't like to kill men, but he has killed. I mean, this is how the book works. But still, thou hast killed, says Robert Jordan. Yes, Anselmo said, many times and will again, but not with pleasure and regarding it as a sin. Because he's meant to embody the pure, uncorrupted principles of the Spanish peasantry and thereby the best part of the Republican cause.

47:07And so it's not that he ever falls in love with the gratuitous violence of the war. he only does that as a sense of duty and a sense of necessity. The other interesting thing about Anselmo is that he is a former Catholic and he misses his faith and praying a great deal. And obviously the cause that he fights for is very anti the Catholic Church. So it highlights the complexity of those fighting on both sides of the struggle. So for Robert Jordan, amidst the violence that both sides are committing, for Robert Jordan, Anselmo is a constant reminder of why he fights.

47:40Dominic Sandbrook: Well, also because Anselmo articulates a sort of merciful vision, doesn't he, of life after the war. So he says, my dream is basically we win the war, we shoot nobody, we govern justly, that all should participate in the benefits according as they have striven for them, and that those who fought against us should be educated to see their error, i.e. we don't kill everybody after we win. and Anselmo is perhaps a contrast with some other people on the Republican side who have yielded to their sort of baser instincts. Exactly, exactly. But another one who does not and reinforces this noble vision of the Republican cause and its peasantry is Pilar.

48:21So the character was nicknamed for Ernest Hemingway's second wife, Pauline. And it's also the same name as his beloved fishing boat, which he kept for the rest of his life. So she is the voice of authority. She's the moral anchor of the band. She's fierce and maternal. She's very harsh, but she's kind. She also is the voice of the shared memories of the war and the atrocities both sides commit. And I think she is a magnificent character. She's so visceral. She's such a physical character. So she describes ugly and huge, but she's very sensual and womanly. She's constantly describing past interactions with lovers by the beach or whatever it may be.

48:59Dominic Sandbrook: She is. And she's genuinely devoted to the Republic, but her eyes are open to its many failings and flaws. And her belief in the communal good personifies kind of the ethical core of For Whom the Bell Tolls. I believe in thee and in this cause, but a man must not place his life above the lives of others. She's kind of responsible for the group. She cooks for them. She admonishes them. She looks after them all. But she's also become the de facto leader of the group because her husband, partner, lover, Pablo, the purported leader has lost his mojo. He is disenchanted. He doesn't believe in it anymore.

49:35But he used to be barbarous. He has committed many, many, many bloody crimes over the course of the war. He went from being a fierce revolutionary leader to being disenchanted, afraid, cynical, bitter.

49:50Dominic Sandbrook: Well, somebody said to him, didn't they? They say at the start of the movement, Pablo killed more people than typhoid fever. It's a very nicely observed portrait this. he is suffering from basically ptsd yeah and he is full of regrets for all that he has seen and done he says at one point i'm sorry for the people i've killed i would bring them all back everyone even the basically even the fascists it's so it's so nuanced because you're kind of led to believe that he's the villain of the book and so far as there is one but it's hemingway so there is no such thing as kind of black and white good and bad morality and he totally personifies that he's just afraid.

50:27He's afraid of death.

50:28Dominic Sandbrook: He's afraid of death, but also he doesn't want people to die unnecessarily. He thinks, I mean, this is the thing with Pablo. Pablo was set up for us as sort of the antagonist. You're absolutely right. From the beginning, we're led to believe that he will betray them. That's made explicit really in the first 50 to 60 pages of the book. Characters kind of say to Robert Jordan, hey, this bloke's clearly going to betray, you know, he's a complete loose canon and actually pablo will make decisions that undermine their cause but as we discover he's made he's not making them because he's just a sort of you know generic traitor he actually is making decisions because he cares more about keeping them alive than they care themselves yeah you know he has not yielded to this thing about like you know fate you just do you follow your orders, you go to the end.

51:19Dominic Sandbrook: He's riddled with doubt. Self-doubt about their cause, self-doubt about what he's done in the war, all of that kind of thing. So he's a more nuanced character than you would expect if you're a third of the way through the book, I guess. Definitely. But this nuance, I think it brings us to the politics of the book, because obviously Pablo goes from being an ardent Republican to losing faith in everything bar humanity, I suppose. And I think this nuance, the politics of the book, it reflects Hemingway's politics, because he's relatively indulgent towards the communists. I would say that he probably takes their side.

51:55Dominic Sandbrook: He does. Robert Jordan, he accepted their discipline for the duration of the war, we're told, because in the conduct of the war, they were the only party whose program and whose discipline he could respect. And so the portrait, I mean, this is such a contentious issue in the Spanish history, the Spanish Civil War, were the left undone by their own side because the communists were basically, the Stalinists were basically too busy purging people to actually get on with the job of, yeah, of fighting fascism. And historians massively argue about this. Hemingway does seem to be leaning on the more pro-communist side, doesn't he?

52:28Yeah, but also his publishers, they urged him to tone down the Marxism, Robert Jordan's Marxism. So in this, you get the sense that he is a Marxist, a communist, whatever it may be, in so far as it serves Spain, but not external to Spain.

52:43Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, that's fair. And it's not a simplistic portrait, because there are times when he says, for example, there's a scene set in Madrid, in the hotels where they're all congregating the international people. And Hemingway's characters reflect on the lies that the Republicans or the communists in particular are telling about their own revolution and their own campaign. In a revolution, you could not admit to outsiders who helped you, nor that anyone knew more than he was supposed to know. He had learned that. If a thing was right, fundamentally, the lying was not supposed to matter. There was a lot of lying though.

53:20Dominic Sandbrook: Now, what's so interesting about this is we did a book earlier in the show, 1984 by George Orwell. Orwell served in Spain, was completely transformed by his experience in Spain. It was Spain that made him an anti-communist and anti-Stalinist because Orwell said, the communist stuff is full of deceit and lies and treachery and I will not accept it. Sometimes you just have to stand up for the truth and all of this. Hemingway, well, at least his characters, and I think Hemingway himself actually, do not follow a war down that road. They say the communists are the only serious people here. Yeah, they're lying and whatnot, but you just have to follow them.

53:59Dominic Sandbrook: At one point, a character reflects on Orwell's own group, the POOM as they were called, this militia, and they describe them as a heresy of crackpots and wild men and infantilism. There were some honest misguided people, but basically they're useless. Now Orwell, if he had read that, would have been driven absolutely mad because he would have said, you have fallen for Stalin's propaganda. You know, it's people like us who are trying to do the right thing because the communists turned on these militias and basically violently repressed them. And so that argument between Hemingway and Orwell, I mean, these are the two most famous books, fictional books about the Spanish Civil War in English.

54:36Dominic Sandbrook: And they would have absolutely, even though they're supposedly on the same side, they would have hated each other. But I think in Hemingway's defence, I think he's also keen to point out the inconsistencies in the politics of the communist side as well. Like some scholars, like this guy called Ben Stolfus, he argues that the book is just as critical of the Communist Party and actively rejects the ideology because no one's politics are pure. And politics is rarely linked to idealism. So at one point, Franco is called a bad fascist. At another point, a member of the Republican guerrilla band that they're all with, Augustine says, they say the government moves further to the right each day, that in the Republic, they no longer say comrade, but senor and senora.

55:16Are we to win this war and lose the revolution? And it's a fascinating tension at the heart of the Spanish Civil War because a Republican camp is made up of so many different groups, socialists, liberals, communists. So winning the war doesn't necessarily equate to any sort of social revolution, landist redistribution, the destruction of ancient hierarchies, anything like that. It's different degrees of idealism in many of the characters. So Robert Jordan says of himself, you've always been a bad Marxist. And when asked at one point, if he is a communist, he says, no, I am anti-fascist. And that's an important political distinction in the book.

55:48He's not motivated by political tribalism, rather Spain. He's devoted to Spain. He fought in this war because it started in a country that he loved and he believed in the Republic. I wouldn't say that's Marxist.

55:59Dominic Sandbrook: Exactly. I don't think it is a Marxist book. I think you could argue that Robert Jordan and indeed his creator are perhaps more indulgent on the communists than some writers would be. But I agree with you. I have to say it does not feel like it's a politically preachy book particularly. And actually for me, this maybe brings us to the bit of the book that I think I will remember the most. I hadn't read For Whom the Boltholes for a long time and this bit and another bit were really what stuck in my mind so the most horrendous atrocities in the book interestingly are committed by the republicans yeah i mean there are atrocities of course committed by the nationalists including the rape of uh the love interest maria but the one that is the most visceral the described in the greatest detail one of the most celebrated scenes that Hemingway ever wrote, is a scene that is being recalled by this character, Pilar, who you love, who is the embodiment of earthy womanhood and the Republican cause.

56:57Exactly. But she is voicing the moral ambiguity at the heart of the war. I mean, Ernest Hemingway, he's so famous for his war coverage, but he considered war to be a crime against humanity, you know, no matter what you believe in. So at one point, Pilar describes how Pablo orders the mass slaughter of fascists, many civilians included, after winning back their village. It starts as sort of a collective punishment of people that are apparently guilty, they have it coming, the victors believe it to be necessary. But as it continues, and the Republicans get drunker and drunker on wine and bloodlust, it just becomes this melee of gratuitous death.

57:41So she says it was like a carnival, but it was a carnival of death. And I actually was reminded so forcibly when I read that of the French Revolution, you know, when you hear about how drunk all the revolutionaries were and how it just escalated. And there are these just appalling, hideous scenes told in this sort of unsparing, matter-of-fact way that it just, it really, it really hits home.

58:03Dominic Sandbrook: It does. And it reminded me a lot of, there's a brilliant history for people who are interested in the history of the Spanish Civil War called the Spanish Holocaust by the great historian of this war, Paul Preston. And I remember reading it about 15 years ago and it always stuck in my mind because it's basically, he was like, let's just get straight to it. Let's get really deep into the violence of the Spanish Civil War, stare it in the face. Atrocities carried out in villages by people who had lived alongside each other for maybe 40 years. And now they're settling debts and they're, you know, all of that.

58:35Because of the foreign brigade thing, I think it's quite an idealised war as well. So it's good to get into this stuff.

58:42Dominic Sandbrook: So here you have a village. Pilar is recalling it. As you say, Tabby, it's a village that's just been recaptured. They all know each other. All the people who are being massacred are people who are... It's not a big place, right? They're known to everybody in the village and they decide to kill them. And a lot of them are... They're the mayor. They're the bloke who ran a shop. They're a glider who was a landlord. some of them um are fascists or very right-wing some of them just happen to be rich some of them just happen to have been on the other side because for family reasons or yeah or they were just this bloke ran a shop everyone owes him money let's kill him there's one guy who's just a catholic he's a sweet old man who goes to his death very bravely because what happens is they have to run a gauntlet and as they do it they've been beaten by clubs and flails and basically their head and then they're pushed off a cliff.

59:32This old man, he's a Catholic purely because his wife was a Catholic and he loved his wife and his wife watches him go to his death and calls out to him and he's crying, but he continues and faces his death bravely.

59:44Dominic Sandbrook: I mean, we don't need to sort of read all the quotes and stuff, but I mean, it's really, it's described in this very apparently simple colloquial, really matter of fact prose, which makes it so much more powerful. Don Guglielmo did this don guilemo did that then they took don bonito they dragged him by the shirt they did this and it just becomes it's hypnotic writing you can't look away but it's horrible and then she describes how the people who basically people stop coming out of the town hall they've been held in the town hall made to run the school and they don't want to come out anymore because you know they're going to be killed so the mob basically invades the town hall to kill them and she describes people i mean they're killing them with pitchforks and with the flails they use yeah the stuff they use for threshing and things and the priest is there and they're chopping at him they're chopping into his back with the sickles and things it's really it is it is absolutely horrific and it stays with you i mean that's probably actually one of the things that i'll remember most in the book and i guess again that is to hemingway's great credit yeah that the simplistic thing to do would have been to make this an atrocity story committed by the nationalists against the Republicans.

1:00:55Dominic Sandbrook: He turns that round and he makes it the good guys who are carrying out this horrible thing. I think it's very much to his credit. The fascists don't get let off either, to be fair. Pilar says that the horrors of this day are matched only by what follows when the fascists take the town back later. And obviously there's the appalling mistreatment of Maria. So she's raped. She has her head shaved. Her family is shot against a wall. And she describes it all in bed with Robert Jordan and her voice is dead and flat. And she says, there were things done to me. I fought until I could not see. I fought until, until.

1:01:28So the word rape is never actually used in a very Hemingway like way, but we know exactly what he means. We know exactly what is done to her.

1:01:38Dominic Sandbrook: His portrait of Maria, who is this very wounded character, maybe we'll come on to her in a second. My one question with her is whether some people might read that and say, a character who's a victim of rape in war and then she's sort of redeemed by the love of a good man who sleeps with her and it's all fine. I would be a tiny bit anxious about that or uneasy about it. I don't think we're meant to see that as her redemption. I think we're meant to see it as almost his redemption. He finds new meaning through her. She is naive, damaged, hurt. I suppose she's just looking for a sliver of life and comfort.

1:02:14Right. But, you know, as we will discover, her life goes on after the book. We don't know what becomes of her. I think she's a brilliant character because she does suffer. She feels pain, physical pain, but she has a sense of humour and she's brave and she continues. So this is basically, I think, really at the heart of the book. It's about the corrupting force of violence in war, how it can deprive anyone of their humanity, but how it can also deprive anyone, even the bravest of men, of their courage, like Pablo. and then there's another story that I know you really liked that Pilar tells about a bullfighter.

1:02:48Dominic Sandbrook: This is Hemingway bingo now. This is Hemingway bingo. Come on, we haven't done any bullfighting. He's a bullfighter and he was my lover. Yeah. Yeah, but he became afraid of the bull. That's exactly. He looked into the bull's eyes and he said, I am afraid of you, bull.

1:03:06Dominic Sandbrook: Sammy, you should actually get a job. Forget the podcasting. It's a Hemingway prose impersonator. I should. I should. I should. She's remembering they have a big banquet for this, this like Finito is a champion bullfighter. And they bring the bull's head out and Finito cracks and he sinks into his chair and he just says quietly, no, no. And then you see blood coming out of the bull. And he says, I mean, this is again, the slightly sort of pigeon Spanish all season. Yes. To make money. Yes. To eat. Yes. But I can't eat. Hear me. My stomach is bad. But with the season finished, no, no, no. and he's just staring at this bull's head and the bull's head staring back at him but basically this is about how you lose your a man this is so heavyweight a man can lose his virility his self-belief yeah his courage because he can be the bravest man in the world but there's a point when he cracks and there's too much violence and there's too much killing yeah and this happened to this matador called ironically finito and it's happened to her bloke pablo and i guess robert Jordan, part of the discipline of the prose, the discipline of his approach is that they've all got the seeds of this in them and he's trying to keep it at bay himself because he's fighting his own fear, isn't he?

1:04:20There is another actually, I think, very touching element of this recollection that Pilar has because I think you feel forcibly how much she loved this man, this man that was later broken, the tenderness of that. And it's a necessary contrast to the harshness, the starkness of so much of the book. And another element of that, another, you know, gentle reprieve is the relationship between Maria and Robert Jordan. As I've said, I find Maria to be a very endearing character. She's almost naive. She has a light spirit in spite of her suffering. And it's really interesting because when they are together, particularly when their lovemaking is described, it's the only time that Hemingway really indulges in nature writing.

1:05:06You know, it's much more descriptive. The prose suddenly becomes malleable. It's beautiful, actually. And the first description we have of her is very tender and gentle and, as I say, descriptive. High cheekbones, merry eyes, a straight mouth with full lips, golden hair, brown of a grain field that has been burnt dark in the sun. So it's quite unusual for Hemingway.

1:05:26Dominic Sandbrook: It is unusual. And it stands out compared with the descriptions of the others. Again, if you were being sceptical, you would say, isn't it interesting that Hemingway really, he fires up the engines when the sexy love interest enters the story. However, maybe I'm being too harsh. I think you are because I think he uses that same much, much more romantic writing when he's describing Pilar's encounter of the past as well. In a world that is harsh, when you're fighting a war and there is jeopardy everywhere, you would feel particularly tender to whom you feel tender. You know what I mean? Like it wouldn't be masculine and macho.

1:06:00And Robert Jordan really does fall in love with Maria because it turns into a very sweet romance, but it is intensified by the sense of approaching death that hangs over everything. So in the night, he woke and held her tight as though she were all of life and being taken from him. She brings new meaning into his life and she belies his utilitarianism. And the more he begins to feel for her, he begins mourning the time that he will not have, which he didn't do before. He didn't indulge in that before. So he says, you have it now and that is all your life is now there is nothing else but now and there's this journalist jeremy bowen who writes about for whom the bell tolls and he says hemingway's great achievement is in capturing the swirling grinding intensity of the feelings that consume human beings as they realize that the longer they stay in danger the more likely they are to get hurt and i couldn't agree more because he and maria have to create in the space of four days an entire life so they start calling each other a husband and wife.

1:07:01He says to himself in his mind, why not marry her? Sure, he thought, I will marry her. Then we will be Mr. and Mrs. Robert Jordan of the Sun Valley, Idaho, or Corpus Christi, Texas, or Butte, Montana. Spanish girls make wonderful lives. And there's this terrible, I find agonizing, mournful sense of the discovery of love and meaning just as time is running out. It makes me feel like that bit in Tess of the D 'Urbervilles when she and Angel Claire have their last night together before she gets executed, essentially. I think it's very touching.

1:07:33Dominic Sandbrook: You found this really moving, didn't you? The relationship between Robert Jordan and Maria. I do. I'm wiping away tears as I describe it. Usually so cynical. And now people see the different side of you. Amazing. It's the magic of Hemingway. Well, yeah. You're going to be all sceptical and British about it. Normally I reveal myself in this podcast to have an absolute heart of gold, to be a very soft-hearted person. That's true, actually. That's true. I guess it is moving. I mean, because there's an earnestness to it. There is a real feeling that they have striven for some sort of human connection in the face of approaching death.

1:08:09Dominic Sandbrook: And I suppose this takes us back, doesn't it, to some extent towards the meaning of the title. Yeah. Because the title, John Donne's Meditation 17, any man's death diminishes me because I'm involved in mankind. And therefore said not to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee. Meaning one man dies and you hear the bell ringing and you don't say, who's that for? Because every man's death is a death for you because all human beings are connected. And meaning comes from our connections with other human beings. So Robert Jordan, who begins the narrative quite self-contained, doesn't he? He's just the dynamite guy.

1:08:48Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah. By the end, he's fallen in love with Maria. But in a way, he's fallen in love with all these characters. He feels we're bound together by this comradeship in the face of terrible danger. So he says, you know, Anselmo, Pilar, all of them, they are brother, mother, sister, wife. I mean, it's a little bit tangled, but, you know, they mean everything to him. They mean more to him than the people that he's known all of his life because the jeopardy of their situation, that which they are bound by, their connection to each other, has made them go closer together than they would have done if they'd lived a whole life together.

1:09:19in Montana.

1:09:19Dominic Sandbrook: He's thought forward about what will happen, but we kind of know it probably never will. You know, the life they'll have when they've escaped and all of that. And at the end, he follows through and it's his belief in mankind and his belief in comradeship that means that even though actually blowing up this bridge, it's going to be incredibly risky, probably futile. It's probably going to kill them all. The final lines of the book, we won't spoil it too much but basically he is forced to take a decision that he knows could have disastrous consequences for him doesn't he i think you should read those final lines because i think it's some of the loveliest writing in the whole book and actually i have to reveal myself here i actually did weep the first time i read this robert jordan lay behind the tree holding on to himself very carefully and delicately to keep his hands steady he was waiting until the officer reached the sunlit place where the first trees of the pine forest joined the green slope of the meadow he could feel his heart beating against the pine needle floor of the forest oh that are all chills well it starts with him in pine needles doesn't it and then in the forest and it ends with him back in the forest it is very moving the decision that he's made to have you try to hold yourself together i just can't i'm gonna need to take five

1:10:42Dominic Sandbrook: so hemiway let's talk about hemiway hemiway he went back to america he ended up moving to cuba he divorces i mean i've lost track where he is with his wife he divorces pauline he marries martha gellhorn who'd been a war correspondent with him in spain then i'm reading your notes tabby you've written the words in pearl harbor at december 1941 What do you want? Hemingway went mental. He did go mental. He used his boat, Pilar. He turned her into a, like, counterintelligence, I don't know, surveillance ship. And he'd go around. To patrol for U-boats, right? Looking for U-boats. Not only that, he created a counterintelligence unit in his guest house to survey potential phalanges and Nazi sympathisers.

1:11:28And the FBI thought this was so dodgy and suspicious that they kept a file on him because they thought he was a communist.

1:11:34Dominic Sandbrook: Now, at this point, he's off his face most of the time, isn't he? Because he's drinking so much. Oh, he's drunk as a skunk, yeah. He's also very fat. He's developed diabetes. He's fighting with Martha. He is my male counterpart. He's your male counterpart? I thought you were going to say he's your dream man. He's my dream man. So anyway, he goes back to Europe as a war correspondent. He's at D-Day. He's on Omaha Beach. he tries to set up his own resistance unit in France gets into massive trouble big slap on the wrist people say like are you meant to be writing stories about this not leading your own guerrilla band people are like your whole thing is you're not meant to be interventionalist you're literally just a war correspondent didn't he claim that he'd personally liberated Paris like he got there first and all this yes he did but it was yeah no bueno not true so Martha Gale Hornbites the Dust he treats her very badly he's fallen in love with someone else and he tries to she says oh can you get me to London can you get me a press pass?

1:12:31And he's like, no, get it yourself. So she has to travel across the Atlantic in a boat with live ammunition or something because he won't get her a press pass, won't fly her over.

1:12:40Dominic Sandbrook: I think he's a poor husband, frankly. He gets really miserable because his friends die, like Fitzgerald and all these people. There's the whole issue with his son, initially Gregory, later his daughter Gloria. Gregory stroke Gloria is arrested in a women's bathroom dressed in women's clothing. Hemingway does not take a 21st century view of this. No. And is very displeased. He goes full like Hemingway, you know? Yeah. The macho side. But the very next day, Pauline dies, like who was Gloria Strait Gregory's mother. So that's not good. And he blames Gloria for her death. So they have a very bad relationship.

1:13:19Dominic Sandbrook: Then the 50s, I mean, it just never ends with him. He has two plane crashes, basically, what, like a few days apart in Africa? Yeah, yes. Very nearly dies. But he does manage to win a Pulitzer Prize for Old Man of the Sea in 1952. Then he has to leave Cuba because the Bay of Pigs is on the horizon. Lots of political unrest. By this point, he is seriously, seriously ill and addled and depressed. He's on the verge of a breakdown. So he's taken to a clinic. He receives electroconvulsive therapy. after this he returns home and he shoots himself in the head with his favorite shotgun on July the 2nd 1961 and actually two of his siblings do the same thing and it's likely that they all suffered from a hereditary condition which results in sort of mental and physical deterioration so I think it's a really sad end to a remarkable life but in some ways it's foreshadowed throughout his prose and obviously his father committed suicide.

1:14:15Dominic Sandbrook: Robert Jordan's father and all of that. Yeah, you can sort of see that this was an end that he'd almost, in an odd way, he's kind of willed for himself, I think. Yeah. I mean, no one loves anybody more than you love Ernest Hemingway, shall we? I think you might be right. Do you think you would have got on? I think you would, actually. I think we would have gotten on famously. Yeah, I think we would. Yeah, smoking, drinking, you know, hanging out in Spain. Would have been great. Yeah, both of you enormously fat and addled. We would have had a great time. It's sad. There's no change from your normal life, frankly.

1:14:50Yeah. So let's give this a rating. What are we going to rate it out of?

1:14:54Dominic Sandbrook: I think you should go first because I think you're going to give it a higher mark and I don't want to influence you. I mean, you wouldn't anyway, but I'm going to give this nine. I love, love, love Hemingway's writing. I love the characters. I love the sense of Spain. It made me want to go to Spain all my life after I read it. gave me a real fascination with the Spanish Civil War. I find it poignant and touching. And to use a very hackneyed phrase, I think it's genuinely moving and authentic and rewarding in the extreme. But I am going to minus one point because I don't really care about the passages when we're not with Robert Jordan.

1:15:26You know, when we go over to other guerrilla groups or whatever, or when we go with Anselmo.

1:15:32Dominic Sandbrook: Okay. Oh God, what are you going to do? I told you that I couldn't decide between six and seven. I told you that a few, like a week ago. And so I left the ball in your court. I thought, let's test Tabby's power. Yeah. And I'm happy to say you've come up trumps because I'm going to go with seven. So I'm basically marking this down because about half the way through, I thought, Christ, there's much more of this and they're still in this bloody cave. I do, we had this issue with Steinbeck in East of Eden. Yeah. I'm not a great one for this slightly performative, uh oh this is very profound mid-century american prose oh it doesn't really speak to me however there is beauty in the writing particularly when he actually let when hemiway lets himself go when he perhaps relaxes the discipline of their very sparse spare sentences and the bits when robert jordan is with maria i actually agree with you tabby i was only i was only playing devil's advocate i do find their relationship really quite sweet and i think it's very very nicely written um i think i'm i mean you've got to deduct marks for the mad way they speak no i like it i like it i find it very effective are you the one of the bridge are the one are thou all that like that's just that's how i now talk at home it's i mean it's how you how is thou will i pass me the milk are thee of the bridge i think basically if you've listened to the show and you haven't read the book you can tell now whether you're going to like this or not there'll be some people who say god that sounds brilliant bullfighting mad talking yeah pine needles you know extreme violence i love it and there'll be other people like i'll never read that book bring me more of the hunger games okay so we have our own guerrilla band of alcoholic malcontents don't we we do the people who subscribe to our newsletter book club notes and we want you to do that at the book club hq dot com.

1:17:27We do.

1:17:28Dominic Sandbrook: And Tabby, I'm sure people would like nothing better than to hear what's coming up on the show. Well, if that is indeed what they want. Coming up we have Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, The Lord of the Flies by William Golding, A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr, American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, Goldfinger by Ian Fleming, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, White Night Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky. The Shining by Stephen King. That is accurate reading this. It is an incredible lineup, I have to say. I got tingles as I was reading that. All right.

1:18:04Dominic Sandbrook: Thank you very much, everybody, for listening to the show. Thank you so much for all your comments that you send in, which we always enjoy reading. Thank you. We really appreciate it. And we'll be back next time with Daphne Dubournier and with Rebecca. Bye-bye. Adios.

1:18:28Fall never arrives all at once. First the air, then the light, and slowly the things you love begin to find each other. A jacket meets a dress, a hoodie slips beneath a blazer, an old cap finds a new scarf. Because you don't simply step into the season, you create it layer by layer until it finally feels like fall. Find fall your way at Ross. Thank you.