Hemingway, Love, and War (with David Wyatt)

What can Ernest Hemingway teach us today about the morality of war, the eternal and transient nature of love, and how to write a masterpiece? Listen as author and teacher David Wyatt talks with EconTalk's Russ Roberts about Hemingway's epic For Whom the Bell Tolls. Topics include Hemingway's role in the wars of the 20th century, the book's context and themes, and its lasting influence on American literature and writing about war.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to EconTalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links to other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is [email protected]. We'd love to hear from you. Today is July 28, 2025, and my guest is Professor of English and author David Wyatt of the University of Maryland. He teaches and writes about 20th century American literature,

• 0:47Speaker 00

  including Ernest Hemingway. Our topic for today is Hemingway's novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls. David, welcome to Econ Talk.

• 0:55Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me, Russ. Happy to be here.

• 0:59Speaker 00

  I want to let listeners know that there will be some spoilers, so if you want to enjoy the book without those, please read it before you listen to this episode. Now, the novel's set in the Spanish Civil War, which isn't even 100 years old, but is probably forgotten by many. Give us a thumbnail sketch of the war. What was it about? And what was Hemingway's involvement?

• 1:22Speaker 01

  You can see the Spanish Civil War as a run-up to World War II, a proxy war in which various countries took sides in the initial fight between fascism and democracy. It took place in Spain from 1936 to 1939, and it was a war that was perhaps timed at that point in history because Spain had never had its French Revolution. In France, it was a class war as well. The military, the aristocracy, the church, the bankers on one side, and a whole array of...

• 2:03Speaker 01

  A different class of persons on the other. France kept fighting this war, you might say, for the next 150 years. Spain never had such an outbreak. And so, in some sense, the pressures that were released in France and in Germany and Italy in the 19th century came to a head in Spain in the 30s because of the growing gap, you might say, between the haves and the have-nots. In the 30s, mid-30s, the Popular Front was elected to run the country. It was called the Republic. And this movement was an attempt to redistribute land, money, power,

• 2:46Speaker 01

  and it was resisted by the powers that be. When the Front came in, they began an attack on the clergy and the churches. And there was some killing of priests. At this point, the right, the forces on the right, decided to take arms. And under Francisco Franco, they began a rebellion against the elected government called the Republic. So on the one hand, you had Franco and his fascists. On the other hand, you had this newly-elected republic. So it was a war between, you might say, the old guard and the new. And into this war came support from Germany and Italy for Franco and the fascists.

• 3:31Speaker 01

  And the Soviet Union supports the republic. So it's a proxy war in that sense. And what happens is that the support from the fascists is much more effective than it is from the Soviet Union. There's also an American contingent, about 300 or 3,000 American soldiers, volunteers, formed the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. And Robert Jordan, the protagonist from The Boltoes, is a kind of member of that brigade. These Americans fought for the republic. When I say that this fascist support was more effective, you see this in the novel When the Planes Come and Bomb El Sordo.

• 4:16Speaker 01

  These are planes, German and Italian planes, probably mostly German planes. So that Franco and his fascists were much more well-equipped than the other side. Hemingway loved Spain. And he had been going there since the early 1920s, probably his favorite country in Europe. When the war breaks out, he decides he wants to cover it. He's a war correspondent. He was a correspondent in the Franco-Turkish War, the Spanish Civil War, World War II. He went to the wars. So he spends four visits in Spain. Gets there in 37, about, what, half a year or so, nine months after the war begins.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  He sets up headquarters in Madrid. And there he falls in love with Martha Gelhorn, another war correspondent. And this is when their affair begins and will eventually lead to his divorce from Pauline Pfeiffer and his marriage with Martha. So he goes to the war. He goes to the front. He's often in action. He's not carrying a gun, but he's very close to the front lines in many cases. He befriends the great photographer, Robert Capo, the war photographer. And he says at one point, "We were never happier than when we thought the Republic had a chance to win." Of course, the Republic lost. Franco wins. And for the next 30 years, Spain exists under a kind of right-wing oppression, which eventually

• 5:45Speaker 01

  is lifted in the 1970s.

• 5:47Speaker 00

  So the other thing I just want to add about the Spanish Civil War. First, many intellectuals got involved typically on the side of the Republic and the communists. George Orwell famously broke with communism after seeing how what happened in the Spanish Civil War. Lost a lot of friends. We did an episode with Christopher Hitchens on that a long, long time ago, which we'll link to. But the other thing I want to add is that, so the war goes 36 to 39. It ends with Franco ascendant as dictator. Opposition holds till 1975. Hemingway was clearly on the side of the Republic against the fascists.

• 6:32Speaker 00

  Robert Jordan, the protagonist, is clearly on the side. He's fighting for the Republic against the fascists. And...

• 6:40Speaker 00

  The book is banned in Spain until 1968, which is really amazing. And then the other thing I just want to add is this was a very brutal conflict. I read, I suppose it's accurate, 200,000 people died. There was bombing of civilians, which was, as you suggested, another prelude to the tragedy of World War II's bombing of civilians in London and Japan and Germany. It's a brutal, brutal thing. Guernica Picasso's painting is an example of that.

• 7:24Speaker 00

  When does Hemingway, so the work goes 36 to 39. When does Hemingway write this book? And when does it come out? And how is it received?

• 7:34Speaker 01

  He begins writing it in late 38, early 39. And he spends about nine or 10 months writing it. It's published in 1940. It's very well received. And a movie with Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman is made fairly quickly thereafter. Many of Hemingway's books were made into films. So you might say it's percolating inside of him during the four visits he makes to Spain. And he finally decides to sit down and write what became his longest novel.

• 8:08Speaker 00

  Yeah. For those of you who haven't read, this is fiction, obviously, but those of you who have not read Hemingway's wartime correspondence, I recommend it. There's a collection of that from his writing on World War II that is really quite extraordinary. And clearly, he was up close to many wartime battles and situations. Now, I mentioned that Orwell soured on communism after his experience in Spain. Hemingway, my understanding is he was criticized both by the left and the right for this book. The left felt it wasn't pro-republic enough. The right obviously didn't like it.

• 8:53Speaker 00

  I mentioned it was banned in Spain. Did he ever comment or write after the war beyond this publication of this book and reflect back on the Spanish Civil War?

• 9:05Speaker 01

  You know, I'm not sure I can answer that question fully. I don't recall any such comment. I would say this about your point, which is that in this novel, clearly Robert Jordan has taken a side. He's very passionate about support of the republic, but in Hemingway's treatment of the enemy, of the other, particularly Lieutenant Berendow, who ends up riding into the sights of Robert's rifle on the last page of the book, he gives that character, who is an enemy figure, an inner life, a kind of dignity, and a kind of respect, so

• 9:43Speaker 01

  that, in a strange way, this book avoids a kind of ideological side-taking. It shows a lot of the flaws in the strategy of being promoted by his own side. At one point, Robert tries to call off the entire blowing of the bridge. So he's quite honest about the deficiencies, you might say, in the side that Robert is supporting. And it's a novel, so it's not a ideological tract, and in that sense, he wants to give even the other side the dignity of at least having an inner life. Not that he ever agreed with the ultimate

• 10:27Speaker 01

  values or the triumph of the fascists, but as a novelist, it was important to him to not turn the enemy into cardboard figures. Hemingway, in this novel, I think, masters what I'd call the art of empathy, of feeling for and with almost every character that he presents. And it's part of the reason why I love the book so much, is that it seems to me a much more full-hearted, generous, and affirmative book than anything he had previously written.

• 11:08Speaker 00

  It's a fantastic observation that they're not cardboard figures. More than that, the characters on Robert Jordan's side, we don't hear much...

• 11:23Speaker 00

  Almost nothing directly from the characters on the other side, the fascists. We do get their inner world a little bit, but from the Robert Jordan side, there's an immense amount of discomfort at killing, even though they're their enemy, because a lot of times they're seeing the faces of the men that they're killing. They understand that they do feel they're doing something they think they should be doing, and they respect that. And in varying amounts, and part of the power of the book is how differently different characters cope with that moral challenge, in varying amounts, they have guilt, shame,

• 12:07Speaker 00

  a feeling of a lost humanity in their execution of the job of wartime killing. And it's, I think, extraordinary. And you're right, they're all, even the most flawed characters, of which Pablo is probably the most despicable, gets his day in court in the reader's mind and has a few redeeming moments, even though he's probably the least likable of the group.

• 12:37Speaker 01

  Two responses. One about the point about killing. Early on, Anselmo, the old man, he says, "I'm an old man who will live until I die," and eventually is killed near the end. Anselmo raises the issue of killing, and he says, he asks a question early on of Robert, "Who forgives?" Who forgives? Anselmo says, "Since we no longer have God," a pretty astonishing thing for a Spanish, not peasant exactly, but working man to say. And the novel takes up the whole issue of forgiveness, or what I would call self-forgiveness. That is, how do you live with the things you have done?

• 13:23Speaker 01

  That you, for which you might need to seek forgiveness, killing among them. But there are lots of other sins, if you will, that Robert and others contemplate in their own lives. Pablo, as you mentioned, Pablo is the great figure of change. I think this novel is about whether or not people can change, or grow, or learn. It's a novel of education, and that's one of the words Robert applies to himself. He says, "I was learning very fast at near the end." Pablo gets three chances, not just two, he gets three chances. Times he betrays the band, he finally comes back, and when he finally comes back, he comes back with the detonators and with some more men, so he helps out a bit at the end.

• 14:07Speaker 01

  And he fights well at the end, although he loses all of his men. So through Pablo, I think Hemingway is exploring the whole issue of change. And in Pablo's case, he doesn't change, he vacillates. Change for Hemingway is when you you turn against the self you have been, and you learn, you're educated, to live differently. And this is what Robert undergoes in this book. And he undergoes it because, unlike any other character in the earlier novels, he is given a past. Hemingway gives him memory.

• 14:38Speaker 00

  I just want to say one strange thing about the pace, then I want to ask you something else. But, you know, there's a weird tension in that time moves extremely slowly in this book. We're waiting, everybody's waiting, we're waiting for this mission to reach its conclusion. And in a way, that's what the whole book is. And we'll talk about why it's so much more than that. But on the surface, it's just a bunch of people waiting around to do something they think they have to do, they know it's dangerous, they think it's important, it's not easy, and they and they get it done.

• 15:17Speaker 00

  So you can feel the clock kind of just ticking, ticking, ticking. And at the same time, time is speeding up tremendously. And as you you gave one example, you talk about his feeling that he's learning very quickly. And I think that's a, you know, we think of life's lessons.

• 15:42Speaker 00

  I feel I'm a little bit wiser perhaps than I was 50 years ago when I first read this book. This is my second read. But as you get older, you start thinking, yeah, I understand some things I didn't understand before. And Robert Jordan's a young man, and he gets those lessons. And at the same time, he has this whirlwind romance with Maria that he expects is might only last three days. He gets three and a half ish days. And we'll come back and talk about that. But but this just on this issue of time, there's this weird

• 16:20Speaker 00

  rubbing your stomach and patting your head going on where time is is incredibly slow. And when is this going to happen? And and this mission to get the dispatch to General Golds is just like interminable. And they're waiting. And at the same time, he's hurtling towards the end of the book, and many, many things are happening at a at an accelerated pace. I hadn't realized that until we talked. I think that's a that's an extraordinary achievement to have those two things going on at the same time.

• 16:54Speaker 01

  Well, that's a brilliant description of the two tensions at work. On the one hand, it's a book about the proper timing of an explosion, the blowing of the bridge. And that's going to be the climax. On the other hand, it's 470 pages. It's only 70 hours.

• 17:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:13Speaker 01

  Of time are covered. So it's a very long book about a very short time. Hemingway's earlier novels have been fairly short books or modestly modest in length, about months or even years. So here, he takes up the challenge of how to fill the time, which is for him an important step, because Frederick Henry had talked about killing time.

• 17:37Speaker 01

  I just want to be with Catherine the rest of the time. I was happy to kill. Jake Barnes in Silence of the Rises can't really enter time. He's been cut off from it, literally. So this is a book which immerses us in the moment, in very quotidian moments of eating stewed rabbit and mushrooms, of drinking absinthe, but especially the time in the book. There's the present, of course, the very intense present and the waiting you talk about. But there's also these recursions into memory, into the personal past, into dreams, into stories, the great story that Pilar tells about the taking of the town, chapter 10. So in all kinds of ways Hemingway has to find a strategy that will allow him to fill the time rather than to kill it.

• 18:23Speaker 01

  And for me, the most important examples of that are chapters 30 and 31 where Jordan remembers his father and his mother and his grandmother. And then the next chapter with Maria, their last night together, where she tells him her personal story. People are given a story. And we therefore learn what it is that they need to learn based upon what they have come out of.

• 18:50Speaker 00

  And maybe that's the answer to my next question, which was, even though not much happens, the pace never flags. It's a page turner. You read it with great anticipation. And how does Hemingway do that? Well, one way I guess he does it is with the flashbacks and the memories, which sort of slow down the pace of anticipation. Any other thoughts on that, on the pacing?

• 19:16Speaker 01

  Well, I think, I think he wanted two things. He wanted the sense of apprehension you're talking about, of expectant waiting. And he also wanted to show.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  How life goes moment by moment, the quotidian, the everyday, the banal, the cooking, the looking, the savoring, and the lovemaking, of course. Time is always made for love in Hemingway, although it rarely goes as well between two people as it does between these two. It's kind of a magical thing, this love affair. It happens very suddenly. They fall in love without any prelude. They're quickly in bed, and you believe in this because you understand this is a heightened experience, given the apprehension, the pressure which they're up against. And so, people have complained about the love affair.

• 20:15Speaker 01

  They've complained about the characterization of Maria, who's quite young. But my sense is, this is a romance. Hemingway was a great partisan of romance, which is to say, of a heightened reality to which many of us may in our lives aspire but rarely reach. And he's giving us, therefore, an image of what might be possible for them and maybe for us.

• 20:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, I love this idea that you can live 70 years and 70 hours. And he's constantly, Robert Jordan is constantly wondering, he doesn't know what his fate will be. He's trying to convince himself that that's enough, that time is inherently ambiguous and elastic, and an extraordinary 70 hours could be, quote, "enough." It's an interesting way to live.

• 21:17Speaker 01

  Well, he talks very explicitly about time. He talks about the difference between duration and intensity. And you could argue that duration has been...

• 21:30Speaker 01

  And the problem for his characters here to four, especially for Jake and for Frederick, intensity is what Frederick experiences in almost every moment. And so it's a model of how to penetrate duration and to live a full life. And of course, he needed, Hemingway needed the pressure of war very often, most of his novels deal with it, to kind of create that back pressure, which heightens the intensity and the importance of the love. At one point, he says, "I wish there was more time." And we do too. But the great thing is, he's already, he Hemingway's already given us that, that this book has so much more time in it, in

• 22:13Speaker 01

  the sense of incident, memory, dreams, all the rest that make us such a rich experience.

• 22:21Speaker 00

  Now, there's two very powerful flashbacks, or stories retold. One highlights what's fabulous about those two flashbacks. One highlights the cruelty of the Republicans, and one highlights the cruelty of the fascists. I think they're both told by women, which is interesting. Women are often the victims of war. It's an incredibly effective way to let him comment on the inhumanity of human beings to each other, especially during wartime.

• 23:03Speaker 01

  Well, yes, Pilar tells the first story, and Maria tells the second. Chapter 10, Pilar, gives this beautiful rendition of how the Republicans and Pablo's band took the town. And then they marched the fascists out, people they deemed to be fascists, between two lines of men withholding flails. They beat them, and then they throw them off the clip. And this is an example of where Hemingway allows the other, the enemy, if you will, the fascists in this case, to become humanized. Each one has a story. Some behave badly, some behave well. But Don Guillermo...

• 23:46Speaker 01

  Is a fascist, as Peelark says, because of the religion of his wife. And he honors that, so he takes that side. When he is marched out between the two lines, his wife yells out something like, "I go with thee, I want to go with thee." And he turns with tears in his eyes and gestures toward her, and then he's mocked by the men with the flails. And at this point, your sympathy is clearly with him. This is a man who, because of his loyalty to his wife, has perhaps chosen the less sympathetic side. And we sympathize with the two of them as she witnesses him going to his death. And the terrible thing about this whole incident is that it seems like a victory, but the chapter ends with the line about,

• 24:31Speaker 01

  "And the next week or the next day, the fascists came and retook the town." So much for that victory. And Pablo Lenglet feels true regret about what he did. So that's an example of Hemingway complicating side-taking. If I might, I just would turn to Maria's example. When Maria tells Robert about her rape and the hair cutting that she endured when the fascists took her town. And there again, they kill her parents. And this is an amazing echo. When Maria's wife, sorry, mother sees her husband being dragged out and about to be shot, she yells out to him

• 25:16Speaker 01

  in the same way that Don Guillermo's wife had yelled out to him. So there's a parallel being drawn. And suddenly, the differences between these two sides collapse in this moment, you might say, of filial or of marital loyalty. We'll get back, I hope, to Maria's story, because I think it's a very important part of the book. But you're right, these are both stories told by women.

• 25:42Speaker 00

  Talk about Hemingway's interest in Grace Under Pressure. It's a theme that runs throughout the book. It runs really throughout Hemingway's life. And you talked about that a lot of his books take place during wartime. A lot of his life took place around danger. He...

• 26:02Speaker 00

  So war correspondent where war two as we just mentioned, he I think drove an ambulance in where war one, is that correct? Do I have that right?

• 26:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:10Speaker 00

  He he's close to the conflict in the Spanish Civil War as a correspondent. He likes bullfights and I I think he ran with the bulls and when he was younger. So he's very interested in grace under pressure, handling difficult situations with aplomb. One of the characters says, "Help me, oh Lord, tomorrow to comport myself as a man should in his final hours." And it's very sad, actually, that line. It's a very, it's a credible line, it's a beautiful

• 26:54Speaker 00

  line. But we real, reading the book, it's hard not to remember that Hemingway's final hours were, he took his own life. Robert Jordan's father kills himself in For Whom the Bell Tolls, in the memory scene that you talk about, where he reminisces about his youth and his father and grandfather. Hemingway's father took his life, Hemingway takes his life, his own life. I mean, you could argue, he didn't, he wanted to make sure he could comport himself well as a man should in his final hours, and that was his way of doing it, given his situation. But talk about grace under pressure.

• 27:34Speaker 01

  Well, it's a phrase that Hemingway deployed. I don't think he used it in one of his novels. I think it might have been in in Dark, in Death in the Afternoon, the bullfighting book. I'm not sure where the phrase, I can't locate where it rolls, but it's become a real shibboleth in Hemingway's studies. I I both admire the ambition behind the phrase, but I also am aware that

• 28:02Speaker 01

  His characters often fail to achieve it, and he's interested in showing them failing at it. For instance, Francis Macumber runs from the lion in The Short Happy Life of Francis Macumber, and then is given a second chance to stand firm when the buffalo charges. That's a story about change. And acquiring grace because you've been publicly shamed. So there's often a failure to meet the standard that then allows a character to try again. Hemingway's, or rather, Jordan's father, you mentioned, is a good example of the case. He shoots himself,

• 28:46Speaker 01

  and the gun is given to Robert Jordan, who rides up to this lake in Montana and tries to drop it into the lake. But as he holds the gun in front of himself before he drops it, he sees himself holding the gun, and that image is mirrored so that he's looking at himself as if he were trying to shoot himself. This is a rehearsal. This is a chance for the young Robert to rehearse for the moment in which he will have to contemplate taking his own life as well, which comes near the end when he's been wounded. He's in so much pain, he's not sure he can stand it. "Should I do that business my father did or not?" he asks himself. And he really seriously contemplates it. He understands he may be driven to it by pain.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  This is, it's not graceless, but it's awkward. It's embarrassing. He finally manages to compose himself. The pain somehow lessens. And earlier on, he talks about being embarrassed by his father, and being embarrassed by the farewell at the train where his father weeps. So the father is a male figure who constantly falls short of this norm. And yet, Robert finds himself forgiving him and also sees himself being tempted to imitate him. But finally, not so much through grace of his own, but simple bodily grace of the pain,

• 30:13Speaker 01

  retiring is allowed to remain alive until the end. And that's important. Robert does not die in this book. We know he's going to die. We almost know from the beginning because very early on, I think it's Pablo, one of the characters in the cave says, "If you are wounded in this thing of the bridge, would you be willing to be left behind?" Let's utterly forecast what's gonna happen. So we're told, virtually told right away, what's gonna happen. And we're back to this issue of waiting. We have to live with this apprehension for the entire book. So we know this. And Hemingway loves to predict his endings at the very start, and then we have to live with that pressure.

• 30:54Speaker 00

  Yeah. Sorry for the spoilers for those of you who haven't read the book yet, but it is foreshadowed in all kinds of ways. Pilar reads his poem. There's a really wonderful, extraordinary discourse between Hemingway, between Robert Jordan and Pilar about mysticism.

• 31:15Speaker 00

  She believes in it. Robert Jordan, presumably speaking on Hemingway's behalf, does not.

• 31:23Speaker 00

  He does get an unfortunate data point in favor of her view. But he also does a pretty good job giving her argument its due and in a respectful way. I want to talk about the narrative voice in the book for a minute. So Hemingway is writing this in the late 30s. And by the way, I don't know if it's correct, I saw this on ChatGPT, that the gap between when he submitted the manuscript and when the book came out was like three months. I thought, well, those are the days. It's really quite a, they kind of moved that along quickly. I know they had incentive to do so. It was, you know, the Spanish Civil War was front and center in people's minds then, but it was kind of extraordinary. But he's writing

• 32:08Speaker 00

  this in the late 30s. So he's, he's writing this after Ulysses by Joyce. He's writing it after The Sound and the Fury and Faulkner's work. He's writing it after Virginia Woolf. And he is famous.

• 32:23Speaker 00

  Stylistically for short clipped sentences. And yet, reading this after 50 years from the first time I read it, I was shocked at how much stream of consciousness there is, something closer to the style of a Faulkner or a Joyce, not the same level of intensity, of course. But what it does in my reading, and I want your take, I saw that in the Kindle version, by the way, gives you the first few pages of the original manuscript, which is written in first person. And he crosses out the I and he puts he. So he writes the book in third person, and yet, you feel like it's in first person.

• 33:06Speaker 00

  And one of the reasons you do is that for more than one character, mainly Robert Jordan, but for others as well, you get into their head and you get their stream of consciousness in longer sentences than you normally associate with Hemingway.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  Well, that's a key point. My argument in my book about Hemingway is that the early style, which is the style for which most people remember him, is something that changes. And by the mid 30s, with the two non-fictional books, Green Hills of Africa and Death in the Afternoon, he's already shifting away from that clipped style of omission and of short sentences to a much more meditative, reflective, recursive style, which finally culminates in this book. What this book is about is thinking. There's not much thinking that goes on in the earlier books in the sense of willful going into the mind. Robert, or rather Frederick and Jake Barnes, each only have one memory in entirety of

• 34:06Speaker 01

  their novels, memory of home. And it sort of befalls them, but ordinarily, they try not to think because there's too much that they're haunted by and they don't want to allow themselves to go there. Robert is given an immense freedom to think. He even talks to himself, he talks to himself in the second person, in the third person. He's fully allowed in inner life. Hemingway calls this, he calls thinking "mental conversation." And he uses that phrase at the end of Big Brother River, which is the last story in our time. In a passage which he eventually cut, a passage at the end of the last story in which

• 34:47Speaker 01

  Nick is walking back from fishing, and he begins to think, and he's a writer, it turns out, and he thinks about Cezanne and wanting to write the way Cezanne painted the country, and he has all kinds of fantasies about his future writing career. Hemmerich cut that all out. He says, "This story does not need mental conversation." Robert gets mental conversation, and that's the difference. We get to go inside of a person and watch how a mind works.

• 35:16Speaker 00

  So I want to give an example of his style that I just think is, it was my favorite example probably in the book. It's about, the passage I'm going to read is, it's about death and life. We'll come back and we'll talk just about death in a minute, but this passage is memorable because of the way he talks about life. And what he's going to say in this passage is, you know, life's pretty great. But he manages to say this in such an extraordinary way. So he says, "If one must die," he thought, and clearly one must, "I can die, but I hate it. Dying was nothing, and he had no picture of it

• 35:56Speaker 00

  nor fear of it in his mind, but living was a field of grain blowing in the wind on the side of a hill. Living was a hawk in the sky. Living was an earthen jar of water in the dust of the threshing, with the grain flailed out and the chaff blowing. Living was a horse between your legs and a carbine under one leg, and a hill and a valley and a stream with trees along it, and the far side of the valley and the hills beyond."

• 36:33Speaker 01

  Well, I am so glad you chose that because I was thinking of reading it myself today. That's El Sordo, that's El Sordo thinking about the fact that he's gonna be bombed to death. And he too is given this extraordinary passage, and look at those sentences, they each begin with the gerund living, living thing. That's the repetition for which Hemingway is so famous. But in this case, it's not a sense of being trapped in a sort of capturing pattern. It's a celebration of the Spanish earth. And this is a book not about, it's certainly a book in which people die,

• 37:16Speaker 01

  but it is really a book about how to live. That's what Hemingway is finally coming to be able to show us. And there's so many instances in which there's a kind of sense of fullness of experience, even though it's shadowed by what we know is coming, because it's been announced from the beginning.

• 37:39Speaker 01

  We are given more time.

• 37:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, what's amazing, a couple of things I didn't remember until you just mentioned it. I forgot this is El Sordo. So El Sordo is not a particularly romantic character, and yet he is given this meditation on life. It's not a statement, in a way, those things are not life. What do you mean, the hills beyond? And what do you mean, the earth and jar? It's an incredibly poetic passage that is, what I would say, a perfect example of show, don't tell. And it allows us to imagine a down-to-earth character like Sordo

• 38:26Speaker 00

  having a soul with a richness that could express itself this way, right? Living was a hawk in the sky. No, it's not. So what is he saying? And he's saying that our experience of the earth really is a vivid part of being alive. It's an unbelievable passage. It's pure poetry.

• 38:50Speaker 01

  Well, Hemingway loved landscape and writes about it as powerfully as anybody who ever lived. And to situate yourself in a place and to take it in visually, orally, its taste, its smells. He's a great poetic sensation, P. Hemingway. And he loves food and drink. There are many wonderful meals concocted in this book.

• 39:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's true.

• 39:21Speaker 01

  And so, you know, it's given to someone like El Sordo, who, as you say, is not a major character, but he's a compelling one because he is up on the top of the hill, taking his stand. It's Barindo and his men will eventually come and overrun the hill, and the plains have done their work for them. And yet, he's given, this is an example of what I mean by the generosity toward characters. He's given this, as you call it, a very poetic meditation.

• 39:53Speaker 00

  It's amazing. I forgot about how good the food is. It's, they're eating a bunch of very primitive food and drink, but, and there's some very nice conversations or descriptions of alcohol and the passage on absence where he's, do you have that?

• 40:19Speaker 01

  Here it is, page 51.

• 40:21Speaker 00

  Go ahead.

• 40:22Speaker 01

  Robert Jordan pushed the cup toward him. It was a milky yellow now with the water, and he hoped the gypsy would not take more than a swallow. There was very little of it left. And he calls it a warming idea, changing liquid alchemy. And then he...

• 40:44Speaker 01

  I guess this is not where he remembers Paris.

• 40:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:46Speaker 01

  But he does. Yeah, you go on and he remembers Paris, yeah. The chestnut trees and all the rest.

• 40:51Speaker 00

  Where's that?

• 40:52Speaker 01

  So.

• 40:52Speaker 00

  Read that part.

• 40:54Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 40:56Speaker 01

  There was very little of it left, and one cup of it took the place of the evening papers, of all the old evenings in cafes, of all chestnut trees that would be in bloom now in this month, of the great slow horses of the outer boulevards, of bookshops, of kiosks, and of galleries, of the parc monsieur, of the staid buffalo, and of the butch chauvin, of the guarantee trust company, and the île de la Cité, the Foyos Old Hotel, and of being able to read and relax in the evening, semicolon, of all the things he had enjoyed and forgotten, and that came back to him when he tasted that opaque, bitter, tongue-numbing, brain-warming, stomach-warming, idea-changing, liquid alchemy.

• 41:41Speaker 01

  Now, that's an example of that kind of sentence you were talking about.

• 41:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:43Speaker 01

  It's almost run-on sentence, because the mind keeps associating and recalling and re-experiencing this catalogue of memory. The style, therefore, has to capture that motion of mind.

• 41:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, and that's as, uh, that's as close as he's gonna get to the madeleines of Proust. You know, the ability of food or drink to evoke memory.

• 42:11Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm, exactly. Memory is so important in this book, because it's been a fugitive commodity for most of him anyways, characters, male characters, and to be given the privilege and the, and the, the power of recall.

• 42:30Speaker 01

  The, the reason that Robert and Maria can have their last night, and he can open himself up to her story, which is very painful for him, he says, "Don't tell it, don't tell it." He doesn't want to listen. "Nay, I must tell it." And she makes him listen, and he finally surrenders. The reason he can listen to her memories, which are mostly painful, is because in the prior chapter, he has... Had his reckoning in memory with his father. He has been embarrassed, once again, by all that went on between them, by how his father ended his life, and yet he's also forgiven him. So by having Robert go into that, you might say unresolved past, which he, at least in

• 43:14Speaker 01

  imagination, now resolves, he can then turn to the woman he loves and allow her to bring up her memories. And then facing those... Part of what Hemingway's getting at is that in a mature love, the male character has to face the fact that the woman has a prior history. In this case, a sexual history, a terrible assault and a trauma that she carries with her, and he, if he's going to really love her, has to be willing to listen, to take that in, and to not be derailed by the fact that she's had a prior life.

• 43:58Speaker 00

  Yeah. I want to shift gears and talk about what is kind of a strange interlude in the book, and I'm curious what you make of it. Robert tries to get a message to General Golds. So he sends...

• 44:17Speaker 01

  Andres.

• 44:18Speaker 00

  Andres, on what is kind of a tragicomic, madcap, bizarro mission. And it does serve, in a way, it serves to heighten the tension, because it delays the inevitable moment when we have to see what happens to the bridge. But it also kind of, it's almost a digression. It's comic. There are numerous moments of comedy in this cross-country journey. It almost doesn't fit, and you could argue it could have been cut. Why do you think he kept it?

• 45:03Speaker 00

  And what was he trying to do there with that story?

• 45:08Speaker 01

  It's a really good question. I was looking over those four chapters. There are four interpolated chapters that follow Andres as he tries to get through the lines, to bring the message that Robert wants to send to his superiors.

• 45:23Speaker 01

  Use the word digression and that's exactly what it is. Hemingway is learning the art of digression, which is another way to extend the time. The last day, the sort of beginning of the assault on the bridge and all that happened subsequently, fills seventy pages, the last seventy pages of this book are given to this fairly brief interval. How to heighten the tension, as you suggest, well, you interpolate for these four digressive chapters, which, through which we have to wait to get back to what it is we really are, at this point, most caring about. And I think it's, it's again, giving everybody more time.

• 46:08Speaker 01

  And you could argue all the memories, all the great meals, the story that Pilar tells about the taking of the town, these are all digressions in a sense, from the linear momentum of the assault on the bridge. This, the actual action of the story, could be reduced to a short story. Yeah. So the, the rest of the book is this filling out of Robert's experience, both his immediate, his past experience, and his future expectations, because the night with Maria, they talk about, "We'll go to Madrid, we'll cut your hair, you'll look like Garbo." And it's a complete making-believe, that's the phrase that Hemingway uses. They're both making-believe, because at some level, they both expect

• 46:53Speaker 01

  what's gonna happen. And, and yet, they have, they're given this beautiful interval. Hemingway describes it as a complete embracing of what would not be. And this is about believing in a fiction. And Hemingway is coming to understand the value of this, he's always known it. But the ultimate fiction that these characters live out and believe in is romantic love.

• 47:20Speaker 01

  The other one, I suppose, is, um, shall we say, um, historical change, you know, trying to fight a war to change a country for the better. And so he's, he's highlighting for us how any of us who are involved in love relationship have pitched into a fiction, a thing we only make true by continuing to believe in it. It's something we make up. It's not a given. It's a, it's, it's, it's made and, and they make love in the very brief time they have. And it, it's real, it's true insofar as they believe in it.

• 47:58Speaker 00

  Yeah. And it's a, you know, besides the events that are going to frustrate that imagined future, they're a weird mismatch. He's an English teacher from Western United States and she's an uneducated teenager, perhaps, maybe. She's clearly much younger than he is. Um, and we believe in it anyway also. There's something really quite beautiful about it. It's not, um, I, I know he got criticized some for that bromance being a little, as you suggested earlier, maybe a little implausible, but it, it didn't feel implausible to me. It was really quite, quite beautiful.

• 48:42Speaker 00

  The other thing I felt about the interlude of the delivering of the message was, you know, here we have, I thought this was incredibly effective, not so much in the moment. When, when I was reading it, I'm thinking, come on, come on, come on, let's get to it. Okay, then I, you just, you just know it's not going to go well. Uh, it, it doesn't, uh, it's, it's not going to end, uh, it's not going to end well. It's like, let's get through it. I want to find out what happens. But, but, you know, when I reflect back on that digression. It really is, it's quite extraordinary because Robert Jordan is on the ground,

• 49:22Speaker 00

  literally, through a good chunk of the book. He's, he is in the trench, in the trenches, as we say about soldiers. He's, he's got the pine needles around him and he's, he's immersed in it. And he's so immersed in it that it's, it's an extraordinary meditative experience that we experience alongside him as he prepares for what he knows will be the decision-making, the emotional challenges and threats to his ability to complete his mission. And then we've got the generals, the people in the, in the headquarters, who are woefully either

• 50:03Speaker 00

  corrupt, essentially, as Marty is, effectively, corrupt, or, you know, it's, you know, Goltz, who we have all this hope for, says basically, "Well, it's probably not going to work, but maybe it will." And it's to contrast his, I don't know what you would call it, ambivalence or uncertainty about, casualness even, about this moment in the war, with Jordan's and his team, who are living this with this unimaginable intensity. So that does give it an incredible power that I don't think I appreciated when I was reading it, and I only get it now.

• 50:49Speaker 01

  Well, I think Orwell is very good, too, on the whole kind of chaotic nature of this resistance, the shifting alliances, the strange cooperations, that it's a civil war, and it attracts all kinds of hangers-on, as well as competent supporters. So I think that the larger strategy of the war, even the kind of principles...

• 51:17Speaker 01

  Ames were so often compromised, as they are in all wars. But this one in particular was a very ugly, destructive civil war, which of course ended in thirty years of fascist repression. Hemingway couldn't go back to Spain for almost fifteen, twenty years. He goes back finally in the late 50s to write a book about bullfighting. But he was denied, you might say, the ability, denied himself the ability to return to his most beloved country because he was so heartbroken about what had happened.

• 51:50Speaker 00

  I want to read a quote about death, which is always, it kind of hovers over this book, alongside life. And although these two quotes illustrate that, the first is, everyone has, he's talking about death, everyone has to do this, one day or another. You know, there's a certain recognition of the inevitability. And then shortly after that sentence, he says, the character says, I think it's Robert Jordan, "I hate to leave it, is all. I hate to leave it very much, and I hope I have done some good in it." And then just after that, "The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for, and

• 52:34Speaker 00

  I hate very much to leave it." I thought that was a credo, maybe certainly for Robert Jordan, but probably for Hemingway too.

• 52:44Speaker 01

  He continues, "And you've had, you've had a lot of luck," he told himself, "to have had such a good life." And later on in that same paragraph, he talks about, "There's no one thing that's true. It's all true." Which is for him, a major thing to say, for Hemingway and for Robert both, because it's a movement away from a kind of credo or a rigid code to accepting.

• 53:17Speaker 01

  I suppose all kinds of experiences and points of view. What you just read us reminds us of how much time we spend inside of Robert's head. He's been injured now and he's thinking back on his life. And it's a beautiful and prolonged meditation. At one point, he says, "I hope I've done some good in it. I've tried to with what talent I had." And then he corrects it and he italicizes the next sentence. "Have," you mean, "all right, have." He brings it into the present tense. Whatever we had, we have. And he has it to the end. He accepts it all. He forgives what he can forgive. And he affirms how good it was.

• 54:02Speaker 01

  That word "good" is one of Hemingway's favorite words. He's often seeking, his characters are seeking for the good place. Phrase occurs in this book too. And so he's able to say farewell. And my favorite saying in the book is, "I go with thee." When he says to, "I go, you must go, you must go. I'm wounded, you must go, I go with thee." And she says, "No, no, I say, no, I go with thee." What he means is, it's a literal statement. He said, "I want to be accurate." It's literally true. If she leaves and she survives, he goes with her, "thee." And the "thee," of course, reflects the head quote from John Donne. "Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee." So he's the "thee" in the book rather than "you."

• 54:47Speaker 01

  Hemingway uses "thee," the form of "thee," is a kind of echo of Donne. But it's a beautiful thing to say to somebody because it's true. People go with other people who survive them and remember and love them. And that's what Hemingway's affirming, is that kind of immortality.

• 55:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's beautiful.

• 55:06Speaker 00

  Amazing. Is, you said this is your, I think you may have said this before we started typing, I remember. But you said this is your favorite novel of Hemingway's. Is it your favorite American novel?

• 55:20Speaker 01

  I would.

• 55:20Speaker 00

  What would else would be in the running if it's not? Or if it's close?

• 55:24Speaker 01

  Oh, well, Sound and the Fury, Beloved, The Grapes of Wrath.

• 55:32Speaker 01

  American pastor Philip Roth. I guess, you know, if you had to sort of reel off five titles. Great Gatsby.

• 55:42Speaker 01

  So yeah, those are books that I teach and love and

• 55:48Speaker 01

  there are many, many others, but but those those come to mind pretty easily.

• 55:56Speaker 00

  It's I forget the name of the book. I don't know where I read it, but I have a collection of Hemingway's

• 56:05Speaker 00

  nonfiction writing that includes the war correspondence I mentioned, but it also includes this extraordinary day he spends out on the water with a young aspiring writer who somehow manages to get Hemingway to take him along and and to ask dumb questions. It could be a fictional character that he made up for this purpose to let Hemingway opine on the art of writing. And he says he says two things in there I've never forgotten, even though it's been 50 years or so since I read him. I told David, I told you before we started taping that I read almost everything Hemingway wrote when I was when I was young.

• 56:45Speaker 00

  But and loved loved the short stories, but not so much the novels. And it's fun to come back and read the novels now. To read this one, which I loved the second time more than I did the first time. Maybe it's because I'm older and a little closer to death as a result of reading it at my age. But in that essay with the aspiring writer, the story he tells, there's two things I've never forgotten. One is write when you stop writing when you know what's going to happen next, because it'll help you get started the next day. And that's advice I've taken to heart. It's very hard to follow, but it's fantastic advice. But the second thing he says in there, which is hilarious, and your list reminds me.

• 57:30Speaker 00

  He says to this kid, you have to read other writers because you have to know who you have to beat. Meaning who's writing do you have to surpass? And of course, he was friends with Fitzgerald. And you could argue he surpassed Fitzgerald, but I wonder if he was happy with his career. I think about the following, and I want you to comment on it. He wins the Nobel Prize in 1954.

• 58:06Speaker 00

  When he's, he was born in 1900, I think. So he's roughly 50.

• 58:11Speaker 01

  1899.

• 58:12Speaker 00

  Okay, so he's 50, hasn't turned 54 yet, maybe 55 yet, when he wins the Nobel Prize? So he wins the Nobel Prize, and then in 1961, seven years later, he kills himself in Ketchum, Idaho with a shotgun.

• 58:30Speaker 00

  Nothing he does, nothing he does between 54 and 61 is very well received, and certainly posthumously is not well received. And I wonder, we're not gonna, I'm not gonna speculate on his personal psychology, I'm sure it's, it's complicated, but I wonder how much despair he endured, how much bitterness he endured at the end of his life when he did not feel he was beating the competition. He wasn't writing at the peak of his powers.

• 59:08Speaker 00

  Or do you disagree?

• 59:09Speaker 01

  The whole posthum, I disagree in the sense that I would say that the posthumous career, I've written a bit about this, is much richer than people realize. And if you take A Moveable Feast, which is published in 1964, Mary puts it together, his fourth wife, it's probably the most beloved book he ever wrote.

• 59:26Speaker 00

  Love that book.

• 59:27Speaker 01

  His memoir. Well, this is a posthumous book. Then in 1970, we get Islands in the Stream, which is a much underrated, again, war novel, set in Bimini in Cuba. Then we get in 1986, The Garden of Eden, a very controversial book, but it changed Hemingway's studies because of all the gender bending in that book, all the role playing and switching of, of gender behavior. It reoriented the field and allowed people to begin to see in Hemingway, kind of looking back through the lens of The Garden of Eden, that he was not championing some kind of

• 1:00:03Speaker 01

  Masculine code, but much more interested in vulnerability and what I call the pathos of gender, the fact that we're each assigned something called a gender at birth, which can feel very limiting as a identity. So, and there are more books than I've even enumerated that were being written and worked on in those last years. So, he was actually quite productive, but what he couldn't do was finish. And so what had to happen was that other people, editors, had to finish for him. And there are more books by Hemingway published after he died than while he was alive, especially if you now include The Letters Project, this beautiful project, Cambridge University Press is doing of his collected letters, which

• 1:00:47Speaker 01

  are, it's an astonishingly rich undertaking. I think there's six or seven volumes, there probably will be thirteen or fourteen or more by the time we're finished.

• 1:00:57Speaker 00

  Well, I'm a huge fan of A Mobile Face. I recommend it also. You want to recommend two or three short stories that somebody who's never read them might start with and that you particularly enjoy?

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  Well, I just pulled a book off the shelf at the house I'm renting called This Is My Best, where in the 40s, maybe the 50s, writers pick one story or poem to have featured in this volume. Hemingway picked this short Happy Life of Francis McComber, which is a very long short story and is my, his greatest short story in this, again, the generosity toward a character who's given a second chance. I love Now I Lay Me, which is a Nick Adams story about a wounded veteran who lies in bed, listening to the silkworms chew the leaves, and engages in a process of remembering back, which is the beginning of this project

• 1:01:53Speaker 01

  of allowing memory to intrude. And of course, what he remembers are his mother and his father. And then, I guess, Hills Like White Elephants, which is a story in which a young couple, not married, are at a train station in Spain, and they're discussing something he wants her to do. It's never named, but it's an argument that...

• 1:02:24Speaker 01

  Builds intention and it's pretty clear that has something to do with an unwanted pregnancy.

• 1:02:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:02:32Speaker 01

  And that story gives, shows Hemingway again, this issue of side-taking, siding with both parties, but especially entering into the, trying to enter into the subjectivity of the female character with sympathy and understanding.

• 1:02:49Speaker 00

  And I would just add, the story, "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," just because I love that title and it, and it captures something about being a writer and frequenter of cafes, bars, and it's a lovely line.

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  It is.

• 1:03:08Speaker 00

  How has his reputation risen and fallen since his death?

• 1:03:16Speaker 01

  Well, it's been, I think, a bit of a roller coaster ride. I, I think it, it fell off due to all kinds of forces and fashions. All I can say, I think it's recovered a considerable amount of standing because of the, the deeper attention given to the posthumous work and the Letters Project and the various biographies that have continued to be generated. When I teach Hemingway, my students fall in love with him, and especially my, my female

• 1:03:58Speaker 01

  students, they see a tenderness and a vulnerability that has been occluded by the myth of the Hemingway Code, which I think is a complete misconstrual of what he's really up to. And so, if you give people a chance to be exposed to the full breadth of the career, they have the experience you've had in rereading from the Maltz Holes, they discover.

• 1:04:22Speaker 01

  A man of deep feeling, of human compassion, and of careful attention to the things that make up what we call living a life. Living, to use El Sordo's word, living. That's what he, that's his gift, is to make us feel that we're in it, that we're living it as we're reading it.

• 1:04:48Speaker 00

  Do you think he'll be read in 100 years? And if one of his book remains, will it be this one?

• 1:04:54Speaker 01

  I'm not sure it'll be this one. He will be read. I just read a biography of Tim O'Brien, the author of The Things They Carried, who is probably, that story, The Things They Carried, is the most anthologized, reprinted story, I think, written in the 20th century. Of course, it's a Vietnam War story. But O'Brien acknowledges more than once his death to Hemingway. So writers survive because they are refigured by other writers. And Hemingway keeps being refigured as new talent arises, reads him, and is inspired by him. I have no fear for his survival as a major figure.

• 1:05:36Speaker 01

  And I just think it's a matter of surrendering to the reading experience, and you'll be carried away.

• 1:05:42Speaker 00

  My guest today has been David Wyatt. We've been talking about Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. David, thanks for being part of Econ Talk.

• 1:05:52Speaker 01

  My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

• 1:05:55Speaker 00

  This is Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. For more Econ Talk, go to EconTalk.org, where you can also comment on today's podcast and find links and readings related to today's conversation. The sound engineer for Econ Talk is Rich Goyette. I'm your host, Russ Roberts. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday.