EACH of these essays/entries is intended to stand alone, so there is a certain degree of duplication in them as it is unlikely they will be read in sequence or even that all will be read by a visitor to these pages. This is intentional: someone reading an essay/entry must not be puzzled by some allusion she or he might not understand because they have not read the other essays/entries.
[For Whom The Bell Tolls is] a tremendous piece of work. It is the most moving document to date on the Spanish Civil War, and the first major novel of the Second World War. As a story, it is superb, packed with the matter of picaresque romance: blood, lust, adventure, vulgarity, comedy, tragedy.
New York Times review.
When Hemingway was being lionized as America’s foremost writer, it was often the clipped dialogue that won him praise. So when Max says, ‘The bed is good,’ he’s speaking pure Hemingway. The same can’t be said of the play, though. As Papa might have penned: ‘It is not good.’
Review of The Fifth Column.
[Hemingway was] full of hearty and bogus bonhomie. He sat himself down behind the bullet-proof shield of a machine-gun and loosed off a whole belt of ammunition in the general direction of the enemy. This provoked a mortar bombardment for which he did not stay.
Jason Gurney, British International Brigade fighter.
FOR PFEIFFER, Hemingway’s affair with Martha Gellhorn was far more serious and threatening than his dalliance with Jane Mason, and it eventually broke up her marriage, although unlike Hadley Richardson, Pfeiffer fought hard to keep her husband. After Gellhorn met Hemingway in Sloppy Joe’s and later accompanied him home for supper (where guests had been waiting several hours for him to show up), she remained on the island when her mother and her brother returned home.
In a manner reminiscent of Pfeiffer’s own tactic to snare Hemingway away from his first wife, she was invited to stay with the Hemingways at their Whitehead Street home and did so for two weeks.
When she returned to the mainland in early January, Hemingway followed her to New York, although their relationship was ostensibly — and perhaps then still was — that of two writer-journalists who had bonded because both were determined to get to Spain to cover the civil war.
In New York he was hired by the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), which served more than 60 publications nationwide, to report on the war for them. NANA agreed to pay him handsomely, much to the later irritation of his fellow hacks in Spain when they found out: $500 for a cabled report ($9,171 in 2021) and double that — $1,000 ($18,342) — for a, presumably longer, report sent by mail.
While in New York, Hemingway, John Dos Passos, the playwright Lillian Hellman and his friend Archibald MacLeish formed the company Contemporary Historians to fund and produce a documentary about the civil war Joris Ivens, a young Dutch communist filmmaker, wanted to make. After a quick trip back to Key West (where Pfeiffer again tried to talk him out of going to Spain, as much for his safety as knowing he would be together with Gellhorn), he was then off for Spain, via New York and Paris, and arrived in mid-March 1937 for the first of four visits.
Gellhorn was delayed by trouble gaining the credentials necessary to get into Spain and did not arrive until a few weeks later. Still primarily a novelist and short story writer, she did not yet have much of a journalistic track record and landing a contract proved impossible.
Finally, she persuaded Colliers magazine to ‘sponsor’ her and sign the papers necessary to obtain the visa she needed. Soon, however, she picked up paid work, filing colour pieces to publications back in the US (and went on to make her name as a war correspondent rather than as a novelist).
In a manner reminiscent of Pfeiffer’s own tactic to snare Hemingway away from his first wife, she was invited to stay with the Hemingways at their Whitehead Street home and did so for two weeks.
When she returned to the mainland in early January, Hemingway followed her to New York, although their relationship was ostensibly — and perhaps then still was — that of two writer-journalists who had bonded because both were determined to get to Spain to cover the civil war.
In New York he was hired by the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), which served more than 60 publications nationwide, to report on the war for them. NANA agreed to pay him handsomely, much to the later irritation of his fellow hacks in Spain when they found out: $500 for a cabled report ($9,171 in 2021) and double that — $1,000 ($18,342) — for a, presumably longer, report sent by mail.
While in New York, Hemingway, John Dos Passos, the playwright Lillian Hellman and his friend Archibald MacLeish formed the company Contemporary Historians to fund and produce a documentary about the civil war Joris Ivens, a young Dutch communist filmmaker, wanted to make. After a quick trip back to Key West (where Pfeiffer again tried to talk him out of going to Spain, as much for his safety as knowing he would be together with Gellhorn), he was then off for Spain, via New York and Paris, and arrived in mid-March 1937 for the first of four visits.
Gellhorn was delayed by trouble gaining the credentials necessary to get into Spain and did not arrive until a few weeks later. Still primarily a novelist and short story writer, she did not yet have much of a journalistic track record and landing a contract proved impossible.
Finally, she persuaded Colliers magazine to ‘sponsor’ her and sign the papers necessary to obtain the visa she needed. Soon, however, she picked up paid work, filing colour pieces to publications back in the US (and went on to make her name as a war correspondent rather than as a novelist).
Once in Madrid, she joined Hemingway at the Hotel Florida, where many of the reporters covering the war stayed, even though it was under constant bombardment from the Nationalist rebels — the front line was less than a mile away and it was often hit by shells intended for the nearby telephone exchange building.
Franklin (left) was born in Brooklyn, New York, as Sydney Frumpkin, the son of a nasty NYPD cop who beat him badly as a child. Franklin was gay — and according to at least one biographer a paedophile — but was attached to and admired by Hemingway, who might or might not have known about his sexual orientation. Jeffrey Meyers says Franklin became jealous of Gellhorn the closer she got to Hemingway. He was not very political aware.
Despite his apparent sincerity in wanting to fight fascism, Hemingway seems to have regarded the war as something of a spectator sport. In July 1936 after rebel army garrisons rose up against the Republican government and fighting broke out between Franco’s Nationalist forces and Spanish Loyalists, he was determined to go to Spain, but was delayed by having to finish his novel To Have And Have Not.
The Fifth Column had been published by Scribner’s the autumn of 1938 in a volume entitled The Fifth Column And The First Forty-Nine Stories. Consisting of the play and the first 49 stories Hemingway had written, it included four new and more recent short stories first published in Esquire and Cosmopolitan.
Though it is unclear when Hemingway and Gellhorn began their sexual relationship, it had certainly started by the time they were holed up in the Hotel Florida. Although Gellhorn had her own room — and once during a bombardment and to her fury was locked in there by Hemingway ‘for her safety’ — they shared his bed.
John Dos Passos had intended to help Joris Ivens with filming The Spanish Earth in practical ways — carrying equipment, scouting locations and generally assisting — but when he heard his friend Jose Robles had disappeared and decided to find out why, he stood down and suggested Hemingway should take over those duties.
. . .
There can be no doubt that Hemingway often put himself in real danger in Spain, while helping with the filming of and reporting on some of the battles. He seemed to thrive on danger and was regarded as ‘brave’, but he did not fight in the civil war as he often claimed.
Bizarrely, in later life Pfeiffer insisted that Hemingway had, in fact, been a soldier, commanding a Loyalist battalion, but had to do so secretly and that his journalism was just a necessary ‘cover’. That claim could only have come from her husband and was just one of the growing list of tall stories Hemingway was telling. (He also claimed to have taken part in the mass execution in a basement of more than 100 Falangists. No evidence of that has ever come to light.)
Biographers agree that being in dangerous situations seemed to bring out the best in Hemingway: his mood improved and he became less irascible, he got on better with people, was good and amusing company, and liberally shared the food, wine and whisky his friend the Jewish matador Sydney Franklin always managed to scare up in Madrid where all were in short supply.
After he agreed to travel to Spain with Hemingway — he had lived and worked in Mexico and spoke Spanish — he disingenuously asked him ‘whose side are we on, Ernie?’
There have been suggestions that Hemingway’s story The Mother Of A Queen was an attack on Franklin, but this is unlikely.
That story was published in the collection Winner Take Nothing in 1933, but a year earlier in Death In The Afternoon, Hemingway had written a glowing description of Franklin’s abilities as a matador. He might well have known about Franklin’s homosexuality but it did not affect the friendship he felt for him.
Yet Hemingway was not universally popular. Apart from the generous fees the NANA were paying him, his fellow journalists also envied the perks his fame and high-profile brought him: courtesy of the Loyalist government, he was allowed the use of a car and a driver, and was given an allowance of gasoline, which was also in short supply.
Despite his apparent sincerity in wanting to fight fascism, Hemingway seems to have regarded the war as something of a spectator sport. In July 1936 after rebel army garrisons rose up against the Republican government and fighting broke out between Franco’s Nationalist forces and Spanish Loyalists, he was determined to go to Spain, but was delayed by having to finish his novel To Have And Have Not.
Describing his frustration in a letter his Scribner’s editor in September, he confessed he was worried the fighting would be over before he reached Spain, adding
I hate to have missed this Spanish thing worse than anything in the world . . .Two months later when he realised the war would not after all soon be over, he again wrote to Perkins
I’ve got to get to Spain. But there’s no great hurry. They’ll be fighting for a long time and it’s cold as hell around Madrid now!One man who was less than impressed with Hemingway and his gung-ho attitude was the international brigade fighter in the British Battalion, Jason Gurney. In Crusade In Spain, his memoir of his time fighting for the Loyalists, Gurney describes meeting Hemingway when he visited the front and said he was
full of hearty and bogus bonhomie. He sat himself down behind the bullet-proof shield of a machine-gun and loosed off a whole belt of ammunition in the general direction of the enemy. This provoked a mortar bombardment for which he did not stay.Biographers also note that despite believing he was political astute, Hemingway was rather naïve about the Loyalists and the ruthless control Stalin and the Soviets had over them. Kenneth Lynn sums it up well
If [Hemingway] was fatally susceptible to the temper of the times, it was mainly because of his lack of political sophistication. Only at rare moments in his life had he taken an interest in politics, yet he proposed to make his way through the Spanish labyrinth. The results were foreordained. Although he presented himself to the readers as an unfoolable ‘Papa’, he in fact was easily fooled and the Communists were well-served by him until the outcome of the war as in no doubt.
The Loyalist government itself was also rather naïve: at one point, Stalin persuaded them to hand over all their gold for ‘safe-keeping’ in Russia. They did, it was shipped off to the Soviet Union and never seen again.
The Loyalists consisted of a bewildering number of disparate groups. They included anarchists, Marxists, other Comintern communists, Trotskyists and syndicalists, and they were always falling out and feuding with each other.
Also supporting the Loyalists were Spanish democrats, who simply wanted to protect their new republic. Finally, the Loyalists were joined by idealistic foreigners, who believed the neutrality espoused by the governments of the US, Britain and France was not an option. These young men, not just from all over Europe but as far off as the US, South Africa and Australia, wanted to fight the growing fascism in Europe.
Of the Soviet-controlled Loyalists and the fascist Nationalists (backed by Germany’s Adolf Hitler and Italy’s Benito Mussolini) they considered the communists the lesser of two evils. Most important for them was that, with their own governments opting for neutrality, Stalin was the only force confronting fascism.
Those foreigners fighting for the Loyalists who did not want to ally themselves with Stalin and the Comintern (such as George Orwell) aligned with POUM, a Marxist and Trotskyist grouping. It didn’t help the Loyalist cause that supporters of the Stalinist Comintern and POUM often fought each other.
Despite their idealism and honourable intentions, the Loyalists were often something of a disorganised rabble. Many of the volunteers who enlisted in the International Brigades had too little or no military training and often appalling commanders.
Despite their idealism and honourable intentions, the Loyalists were often something of a disorganised rabble. Many of the volunteers who enlisted in the International Brigades had too little or no military training and often appalling commanders.
In his memoir, Jason Gurney is less than complimentary about the several leaders he served under. A very few were gifted soldiers, he said, but others simply had no idea what they were supposed to be doing and how to go about doing it.
He describes André Marty (right), the chief political commissar of the International Brigades who welcomed the foreign recruits when they arrived in Barcelona, as ‘sinister and a ludicrous figure’ who
always spoke in an hysterical roar, he suspected everyone of treason, or worse, listened to advice from nobody, ordered executions on little or no pretext — in short he was a real menace.Hemingway was also unimpressed by the ‘murderous’ Marty, one of the many real-life civil war participants included in his novel For Whom The Bell Tolls, and portrays him as condoning the horrors committed by the communist Loyalists.
Yet Hemingway himself often turned a blind eye to these horrors and, unlike John Dos Passos, also tacitly condoned what was going on. He almost certainly knew of the Loyalist purges and will also have heard reports of the Stalinist show trials and summary executions in Russia; but he chose to disregard them and work with the Stalinists because he felt they gave the disorganised Loyalists much-needed structure, ‘discipline’ and useful cohesion.
Hemingway seems to have been something of a dupe and was played by Mikhail Koltsov, publicly Pravda’s correspondent in Spain covering the civil war, but privately an NKVD agent and thought to have been reporting directly to Stalin.
Koltsov, who became Karkov in For Whom The Bell Tolls, worked on Hemingway’s vanity as seeing himself as ‘a man who had the inside gen’ and fed him all kinds of stories about ‘fascist collaborators’ which Hemingway believed and repeated. Koltsov’s aim was simply to ensure disharmony and distrust 
among the groups making up the Loyalists so that the Soviets could control them better.
Being Stalin’s man didn’t much help Koltsov (left), however: at the end of 1937 he was recalled to Moscow and arrested for criticising the Russian purges and show trials, and shot just over two years later. Having an affair with the wife of his then NKVD boss didn’t help. She too was shot.
Hemingway’s links to the Soviets didn’t end there: after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a former KGB officer, Alexander Vassiliev, was going through old NKVD files and discovered that in 1941 when Hemingway was just about to start a tour of China with Martha Gellhorn, he agreed to supply the Soviets with information. He was thus — though de facto just nominally — ‘a KGB agent’ and given the codename ‘Argo’. He supplied very little information, if any, to the KGB and nothing of value.
Hemingway’s facility speaking Spanish is as questionable as his political astuteness. Some accounts, unsurprisingly including Hemingway’s own, insist he eventually came to speak the language fluently. Others report that his command of Spanish — and for that matter French and Italian — was always flawed, notably grammatically.
Hemingway’s links to the Soviets didn’t end there: after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a former KGB officer, Alexander Vassiliev, was going through old NKVD files and discovered that in 1941 when Hemingway was just about to start a tour of China with Martha Gellhorn, he agreed to supply the Soviets with information. He was thus — though de facto just nominally — ‘a KGB agent’ and given the codename ‘Argo’. He supplied very little information, if any, to the KGB and nothing of value.
Hemingway’s facility speaking Spanish is as questionable as his political astuteness. Some accounts, unsurprisingly including Hemingway’s own, insist he eventually came to speak the language fluently. Others report that his command of Spanish — and for that matter French and Italian — was always flawed, notably grammatically.
Arturo Barea, who ran the Loyalist press bureau based in the telephone exchange near the Hotel Florida where reporters had to have their stories cleared before they could be filed, recalls that he and other Spaniards were often amused by the infelicities and malapropisms of which Hemingway was guilty when he spoke Spanish. Later, in the 1950s when he visited Spain and had been living in Cuba for almost two decades, Spaniards were equally amused by the thick Cuban accent he had acquired.
Like much in Hemingway’s life the outlines of what was and was not the case are rather blurred.
While in Madrid living with Gellhorn at the Hotel Florida, Hemingway wrote his only play, The Fifth Column. Like much of Hemingway’s work, it was quasi-autobiographical, although any such suggestion annoyed him and he always insisted it wasn’t true.
. . .
The play’s central character — that is, Hemingway’s alter ego — was a cynical, hard-drinking, hard-living American and self-confessed ‘third-rate’ journalist in Madrid ostensibly reporting on the Spanish Civil War as a cover for his work as a secret agent. The rather dumb blonde American who is in love with him and with whom he has an affair was a barely disguised Martha Gellhorn. By all accounts Hemingway’s portrayal of her was said to be remarkably true to life, except that Gellhorn was certainly not stupid.
After each sojourn in Spain Hemingway returned to Key West and his wife and sons, but to an increasingly fraught atmosphere. Pfeiffer, under no illusions at all, was desperate to save her marriage. After his first visit to Spain, he didn’t stay at home long and was soon off to Bimini, part of the Bahamas and 50 miles east of Miami, which he had discovered a few years earlier when he was told there was excellent fishing.
After each sojourn in Spain Hemingway returned to Key West and his wife and sons, but to an increasingly fraught atmosphere. Pfeiffer, under no illusions at all, was desperate to save her marriage. After his first visit to Spain, he didn’t stay at home long and was soon off to Bimini, part of the Bahamas and 50 miles east of Miami, which he had discovered a few years earlier when he was told there was excellent fishing.
There he finished and corrected the gallery proofs of To Have And Have Not, but this work was interrupted by a trip to New York to make a speech at a writers’ conference and to complete narration of The Spanish Earth. Before undertaking his second trip to Spain to cover the civil war, he also visited the White House to attend a private viewing of the film for President Roosevelt and his wife Eleanor (who was a friend of Gellhorn’s), and went to Hollywood, with Pfeiffer, to raise money for the Loyalists.
In mid-August 1937, Hemingway and Gellhorn headed back to Spain — though for appearances sake they travelled separately. It was while he was in New York waiting to board the liner to take him to France the following day, that Hemingway had his silly ‘fight’ with Max Eastman (right) in Max Perkins’s Scribner’s office when he unexpectedly dropped in on Perkins and found Eastman already present.
Eastman’s review of Death In The Afternoon a few years earlier, entitled Bull In The Afternoon, had enraged Hemingway. The review began by conceding
There are gorgeous pages in Ernest Hemingway’s book about bullfights — big humor and reckless straight talk of what things are, genuinely heavy ferocity against prattle of what they are not. Hemingway is a full-sized man hewing his way with flying strokes of the poet’s broad axe which I greatly admire.But very soon Eastman developed his theme, declaring that there was also
an unconscionable quantity of bull — to put it as decorously as possible — poured and plastered all over what he writes about bullfights. By bull I mean juvenile romantic gushing and sentimentalizing of simple facts.He ridiculed Hemingway’s suggestion that bullfighting was ‘art’ and ‘tragedy’ and compared his literary style to
wearing false hair on the chest.Hemingway, always sensitive on the subject of his masculinity, had taken this to imply he was less than manly. So meeting Eastman, he pulled open his shirt to reveal a chest full of hair and persuaded Eastman to bare his, comparatively hairless, chest. It was all very light-hearted until that point, but Hemingway’s mood suddenly changed.
Spotting the book in which Eastman’s review had appeared on Perkins’s desk, he picked it up and slapped it in Eastman’s face. Accounts of how the subsequent and very brief ‘fight’ then developed vary, with both sides claiming victory.
Eastman claimed he threw Hemingway over Perkins’s desk and stood him in the corner on his head. Hemingway claimed he could have punched Eastman much harder, but held back because Eastman might have fallen out of the office window into Fifth Avenue. As it was Eastman landed on the window seat.
Perkins’s private account, in a letter to Scott Fitzgerald, is probably closest to the truth: concerned that Hemingway, a younger, then fitter and stronger man, might harm Eastman, he rushed around from behind his desk to try to separate the two. He found Eastman sitting on Hemingway’s chest and Hemingway grinning broadly, his temper outburst over and his mood again light-hearted. The story made the New York Times three times, but publicly Scribner’s would only confirm that ‘the affair had taken place’ adding only that
this is a personal matter between the two gentlemen in question.
. . .
From Paris, Hemingway and Gellhorn carried on to Madrid and arrived by mid-September. To Have And Have Not was published a month later and in December Pfeiffer, pining for Hemingway and without warning him, crossed the Atlantic for Paris and was reunited with him just after Christmas. She and Hemingway were back in Key West by the end of January but relations between them, though polite, were cold. The marriage was ending, though at a slow pace.
Just six weeks later he was off back to Spain, and was again joined Gellhorn. By the end of May he was back in New York and carried on to Key West. In August he spent four weeks with Pfeiffer in Wyoming, before he returned to Paris to spend September and October with Gellhorn, then they returned to Spain where the Loyalist were slowly losing to the Nationalist. By the beginning of December he was back in Key West, but after Christmas returned to New York to rejoin Gellhorn.
In mid-February 1939, he took off from Key West for Havana where he started writing For Whom The Bell Tolls, completing the first two chapters in a month. Back at home in Whitehead Street in Key West, the superficial harmony with Pfeiffer now gave way to continual rowing and anger.
Finally, he sailed his boat, Pilar, to Havana where he was joined by Martha. They initially stayed at the Hotel Ambos Mundi, but moved to the Hotel Sevilla, although Hemingway still had his mail forwarded to the Ambos Mundi to keep up the fiction that that was where he was living. Bar the divorce proceedings 20 months later, Hemingway’s marriage to Pfeiffer was over.
. . .
Martha, who did not just like, but demanded cleanliness and order, soon got fed up living hand-to-mouth in the hotel with a very untidy and distressingly unhygienic Hemingway, and found and rented a rundown and overgrown farm, Finca Vigia, 15 miles from the centre of Havana. Hemingway joined her, and over the next few months and years she slowly brought the Finca Vigia back to life.
After the anger and upset in Key West with Pfeiffer, ironically, Hemingway’s romance with Gellhorn did not, in fact, go too well. It had thrived amid the drama and excitement of the Spanish civil war and in the context of an illicit affair, but it already began to come under strain in the supposed bliss and domesticity of the Finca Vigia.
One bone of contention was that Gellhorn, like his mother, was a strong and independent woman who stood up for herself. Hemingway preferred compliant women, such as his first two wives, who put him at the centre of everything, especially their lives. He was also possessive, and at the time friends who knew them both wondered why Gellhorn put up with such behaviour.
She also quickly became bored with the domesticity and routine, and missed her life as a working journalist. She was, though, still smitten with Hemingway as her letters to him at the time demonstrate, although she was as much smitten, some biographers claim, with being associated with ‘a great writer’ as the man himself.
By her own admission, the sexual side of their marriage — which was never great, although early in their affair she had boasted to friends about Hemingway’s performance in bed — was not important to her. It seems there was some physical aspect to her body which made intercourse in some way difficult, although this seems finally to have been remedied by a visit to her physician.
At first the strains on their relationship were not great, but comparatively soon she needed to be up and away and working as a journalist again. She wanted a little independence — and not least money she had earned for herself and was not fulfilled simply running Hemingway’s household. He did not take well to that, and over time he became ever more fed-up with her attitude and, once she had taken off on assignment, her absences. For the present, though, those incipient strains were ignored.
. . .
The Fifth Column was finally premiered on Broadway in March 6, 1940, by Lee Strasberg, but his production was not of the work Hemingway had written. Strasberg staged a left-of-centre anti-fascist piece based on Hemingway’s play but more or less written by the Hollywood screenwriter Benjamin Glazer, who had been hired as what today is called a script doctor. It was not a success and ran for just 87 performances, closing on May 18.
The New York Mint Theater Company claims its own production of The Fifth Column 68 years later, in March 1968 and the work’s first revival, was the world premiere of the play Hemingway had actually written; but it, too, ran for less than ten weeks.
In its review of the 2008 production the New York Times was less than complimentary — the play, it commented, was ‘more a literary curiosity’ which, it complained, was ‘full of repetitions, extraneous scenes and lazy devices’. A review in New York’s Theater Mania is even less kind: the piece, it said, had a central conundrum, ‘a lack of mounting tension constructed from the series of vignettes that Hemingway thought constituted a play’. It concluded
When Hemingway was being lionized as America’s foremost writer, it was often the clipped dialogue that won him praise. So when Max says, ‘The bed is good,’ he’s speaking pure Hemingway. The same can’t be said of the play, though. As Papa might have penned: ‘It is not good.’A review of a second revival of the play, in 2016 in London, by Britain’s Guardian had some praise for the production, but described the play itself as ‘a rambling affair’ and a ‘minor work by a major writer’.
The Fifth Column had been published by Scribner’s the autumn of 1938 in a volume entitled The Fifth Column And The First Forty-Nine Stories. Consisting of the play and the first 49 stories Hemingway had written, it included four new and more recent short stories first published in Esquire and Cosmopolitan.
But it still wasn’t what Scribner’s wanted, so Max Perkins and the house were delighted that Hemingway’s experiences in Spain were finally to help him to produce the novel they had been pressing him for. He began writing For Whom The Bell Tolls it in February 1939 in Havana, carried on in Key West and then on his hunting and fishing trips to the Rockies with Gellhorn (though now he visited Idaho with her and later Mary Welsh, his fourth wife, instead Wyoming).
The new novel was a very welcome comeback for Hemingway. The career which had slowly been drifting nowhere for the past ten years was suddenly and quite spectacularly back on track, and contemporary critics were wildly enthusiastic about Hemingway’s latest production. A New York Times review described it as
Notable dissent from the majority view came from Arturo Barea (left) who had known Hemingway in Spain.
. . .
The new novel was a very welcome comeback for Hemingway. The career which had slowly been drifting nowhere for the past ten years was suddenly and quite spectacularly back on track, and contemporary critics were wildly enthusiastic about Hemingway’s latest production. A New York Times review described it as
a tremendous piece of work. It is the most moving document to date on the Spanish Civil War, and the first major novel of the Second World War. As a story, it is superb, packed with the matter of picaresque romance: blood, lust, adventure, vulgarity, comedy, tragedy.Other reviewers also unpacked their superlatives. Time magazine (which, with Life magazine, became a stalwart champion of Hemingway for the next 20 years as his fame and celebrity grew and made him good copy) wrote that after the work published in the 1930s
Even his admirers wondered where he was going to find another experience big enough to make him write another A Farewell To Arms. If ever he did, they thought, he would produce another great book. They misunderstood Hemingway’s apparent obsession with killing, forgot that the dominant experience of this age is violent death. In 1936 Hemingway found the great experience — the Spanish Civil War. This week he published the great novel — For Whom The Bell Tolls . . . [it] is 1) a great Hemingway love story; 2) a tense story of adventure in war; 3) a grave and somber tragedy of Spanish peasants fighting for their lives. But above all it is about death . . . For Whom The Bell Tolls, unlike other novels of the Spanish Civil War, is told not in terms of the heroics and dubious politics of the International Brigade, but of a simple human struggle of the Spanish people.And Time warned that
Leftists may claim the book, but they will not like realistic descriptions of the cynical G.P.U. agents . . . However he may fancy himself as a leftist sympathizer, as great and sensitive artist Ernest Hemingway is well over of the Red rash. The bell in this book tolls for all mankind.In a piece marking the novel’s publication 50 years on biographer Michael Reynolds writes:
Dorothy Parker wrote that it was ‘beyond all comparison, Ernest Hemingway’s finest book’. The Nation thought the book set ‘a new standard for Hemingway in characterization, dialogue, suspense and compassion’. Clifton Fadiman in The New Yorker said it ‘touches a deeper level than any sounded in the author’s other books. It expresses and releases the adult Hemingway’. Saturday Review of Literature called it ‘the finest and richest novel which Mr. Hemingway has written . . . and it is probably one of the finest and richest novels of the last decade’. Edmund Wilson loved the novel: ‘Hemingway the artist is with us again; and it is like having an old friend back’.And Reynolds notes that
Amidst such effusive praise, only John Chamberlain, of the major reviewers, had the reserve to question whether this was Hemingway’s best novel or not. We would not know, he said, ‘until the passions of the present epoch have subsided’.
As an active Loyalist he had escaped Nationalist vengeance by a whisker. When all seemed lost, he decided to surrender and be shot rather than face being lynched by a Nationalist mob.
But the Nationalist interrogator he faced turned out to be an old school friend who immediately declared surrendering was nonsense, found him a set of clothes and quietly set him free.
Barea finally found sanctuary in a British consulate who managed to spirit him away on a boat via Mallorca.
Barea declared that Hemingway thought he knew Spain and the mentality of the people, but he did not. They would never behave in the way he described and would never so brutally slaughter the Nationalist as Hemingway portrayed.
Pertinently for the ‘love story of the novel’, no self-respecting middle-class girl would jump into bed with a man on the very first night after meeting him. The mass rape of Maria was also too far-fetched: no Spaniard would care to have sex — even in rape — with a woman ‘still moist’ from a previous encounter.
. . .
For Whom The Bell Tolls was given an initial print run of 210,000 copies — an astonishing 200,000 more than To Have And Have Not, which might suggest Perkins and Scribner’s had a great deal more faith in Hemingway’s latest novel than they had had in To Have And Have Not — and the film rights were immediately snapped up by Paramount for $110,000.
Within six months the new novel had sold just short of half a million copies, thanks to its choice by the Book-Of-The-Month Club which spurred even greater public interest. This was an irony given the scorn Hemingway had earlier in his career expressed for novels chosen by the Book-Of-The-Month Club and those authors who benefited from the boost in sales.
Yet for almost ten year until he published Across The River And Into The Trees in 1950 that was it for Hemingway, Scribner’s and Perkins. With the publication of For Whom The Bells Tolls and a new wife, a second nominal stage of Hemingway’s life was concluded.
He had finished writing and revising the novel in July 1940, and it was published on October 21, two weeks before his divorce from Pfeiffer. He married Gellhorn two week later.
