I was not a fan of Hemingway in high school. I had to read The Old Man and the Sea for American Lit Honors and The Sun Also Rises for AP English. I didn't like either book much at the time. [Aside: Do they assign The Old Man and the Sea to high schoolers because it is short? Because it has a young protagonist? Did the powers that be realize they were picking out both Hemingway's first successful novel (yes, I know that The Sun Also Rises was published after The Torrents of Spring, but that collection of stories, a parody of Sherwood Anderson, was not well-received) and the last that was published before his death for our curriculum?]

Whatever the reason for reading those particular works, I did not like Hemingway at first. However, in college I was assigned The Sun Also Rises in an American Lit class and I loved it. Somehow, in just a year or two, my attitude about Hemingway did a complete 180. I'm not sure why, but I suddenly liked his lean prose, his decidedly un-flowery descriptions, his flawed characters. I appreciated his talent in a way I hadn't before.

After my grandmother died in the summer of 2008, I helped my mother go through her things. I took a few books from her house, including what I think is a first edition copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls. It is missing the jacket, but the paper and printing quality and the copyright page suggest to me that it is from 1940. The surname Foote is written on the inside first page, my maiden name, and I assume this book belonged to my grandfather Charles and was kept by grandma Lorraine after his death. Chuck served in the Philippines during WWII and as I read Hemingway's descriptions of his main character Robert Jordan's thoughts during a few days in the Spanish Civil War, I thought of my grandfather living those same thoughts.

The book is a window into the mind of Robert Jordan, an American Spanish teacher who volunteered to fight the fascists in Spain. It was written after Hemingway covered the Spanish Civil War as a journalist. Jordan serves as a dynamiter and his mission in the book is to find support among the guerrilla fighters in the mountains and blow a bridge when the big attack begins in a few days time.

The first 2/3rds of the book, very little actually happens. Robert Jordan (who is always referred to by the narrator with his first and last name) finds the bands of guerrillas, they eat and drink in a cave, they tell stories of how they came to be there, they worry about loyalty and bravery, and Robert Jordan hooks up with a young woman, variously referred to as "cropped head," "rabbit," or "Maria."

But as I got to the last 1/3, I realized what was really happening when nothing was happening. Slowly but surely, Hemingway was introducing characters, easing the reader into identifying with one or another, and, most importantly, building tension. The characters are tense as they wait impatiently for the time to act and yet fear the bullets and bombs that will come. There is tension as Robert Jordan discovers who he can trust. There is tension as he falls for a girl during war time, knowing that they have to pack everything of a life together into just a few days before they must risk death.

And this tension never completely resolves itself. Some of it does. But in the end, Hemingway leaves his reader looking for another chapter that will finish the story. Which brings to mind one of the things I ended up loving about Hemingway. His writing genius, I think, is in what he does not tell the reader, in what he leaves out. Too many writers (practically everyone I've read in the last five years at least, with a few notable exceptions) of every genre (though some are more guilty than others) do their readers the disservice of explaining too much. They tell their readers everything their characters are thinking and why they are thinking it. They explain every action. They resolve every tension. It's as if they are stuck in literature essay writing mode where they need to explain all their points to a professor.

I work in publishing as a copywriter. All of my writing must be pithy and to the point because I have limited space (the back of a book) and a very specific goal (sell this book). I'm an expert at making sentences shorter, at getting rid of the unnecessary (though interesting) bits of information. I am usually fairly merciless when it comes to editing. I think a good deal of novelists would improve their work by removing a quarter of their manuscripts through cold, hard use of a red pen (or, as in most cases today, liberal use of the highlight and delete functions).

The other thing I like is the short time frame and limited setting in which the story takes place. Three or four days on a mountainside, with much of the story happening in and around a cave. Sweeping epics are nice once in a while, but to boil a story down into a few days takes talent. Give me a story that takes place during one week, one season, or even one year, and I'll usually enjoy it more than one that covers years or even generations. Long time frames often make for just a list of activities. He did this then she did that then they went there then their kids did this blah blah blah. In For Whom the Bell Tolls the blowing of the bridge is the mechanism for telling the story, but the story is not, in my opinion, about the bridge, about the battle, or even about the war. It's about what people do to survive. It's about the qualities of courage, perseverance, working for the common good, and vulnerability. It's about the way we reason with ourselves and justify our actions. It's about all the ways we are the same, one of the main ways being that we die. It's about death.

Another distinctive literary characteristic in this work is the way Hemingway attempts to transliterate particular Spanish dialects in English, using words like "thou" when Castilians speak. He also finds non-obscene ways to portray swearing, a favorite phrase being something like "Que va, I obscenity in the milk of thy fill-in-the-blank." Like Shakespeare, this language seems foreign at first (and I guess it should since it's depicting a foreign language) but becomes normal after a few chapters. Hemingway also succeeds very nicely, I think, at writing about sex without writing about it. Worth checking out.

All in all, while I didn't start out enjoying the experience of reading this book, in the end I do like the book. I've attempted to write this little commentary without too many spoilers. Let me know if I've ruined it for you or piqued your interest. Anyone who likes war stories or psychological stories would probably enjoy reading this book. If you like stories that involve flowery descriptions of lovely pastoral settings or lavish homes or lovely silk gowns, you're probably going to want to skip it. And the rest of Hemingway's works.

And for those who would like to read the words of John Donne from Meditation 17 of Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions that inspired the title of this book, they are below in original prose form (though with the spelling modernized):

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.