For Whom the Bell Tolls

Hemingway's Writing Style:-

A great deal has been written about Hemingway's distinctive style. In fact, the two great stylists of twentieth-century American literature are William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, and the styles of the two writers are so vastly different that there can be no comparison. For example, their styles have become so famous and so individually unique that yearly contests award prizes to people who write the best parodies of their styles. The parodies of Hemingway's writing style are perhaps the more fun to read because of Hemingway's ultimate simplicity and because he so often used the same style and the same themes in much of his work.

From the beginning of his writing career in the 1920s, Hemingway's writing style occasioned a great deal of comment and controversy. Basically, a typical Hemingway novel or short story is written in simple, direct, unadorned prose. Possibly, the style developed because of his early journalistic training. The reality, however, is this: Before Hemingway began publishing his short stories and sketches, American writers affected British mannerisms. Adjectives piled on top of one another; adverbs tripped over each other. Colons clogged the flow of even short paragraphs, and the plethora of semicolons often caused readers to throw up their hands in exasperation. And then came Hemingway.

An excellent example of Hemingway's style is found in "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place." In this story, there is no maudlin sentimentality; the plot is simple, yet highly complex and difficult. Focusing on an old man and two waiters, Hemingway says as little as possible. He lets the characters speak, and, from them, we discover the inner loneliness of two of the men and the callous prejudices of the other. When Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1954, his writing style was singled out as one of his foremost achievements. The committee recognized his "forceful and style-making mastery of the art of modern narration."

Hemingway has often been described as a master of dialogue; in story after story, novel after novel, readers and critics have remarked, "This is the way that these characters would really talk." Yet, a close examination of his dialogue reveals that this is rarely the way people really speak. The effect is accomplished, rather, by calculated emphasis and repetition that makes us remember what has been said.

Perhaps some of the best of Hemingway's much-celebrated use of dialogue occurs in "Hills Like White Elephants." When the story opens, two characters  a man and a woman are sitting at a table. We finally learn that the girl's nickname is "Jig." Eventually, we learn that they are in the cafe of a train station in Spain. But Hemingway tells us nothing about them or about their past or about their future. There is no description of them. We don't know their ages. We know virtually nothing about them. The only information that we have about them is what we learn from their dialogue; thus this story must be read very carefully.

This spare, carefully honed and polished writing style of Hemingway was by no means spontaneous. When he worked as a journalist, he learned to report facts crisply and succinctly. He was also an obsessive revisionist. It is reported that he wrote and rewrote all, or portions, of The Old Man and the Sea more than two hundred times before he was ready to release it for publication.

Hemingway took great pains with his work; he revised tirelessly. "A writer's style," he said, "should be direct and personal, his imagery rich and earthy, and his words simple and vigorous." Hemingway more than fulfilled his own requirements for good writing. His words are simple and vigorous, burnished and uniquely brilliant.

FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS :-

For Whom The Bell Tolls is the novel that was supposed to win Ernest Hemingway his first Pulitzer Prize in 1941. However, like Sinclair Lewis before him, Hemingway was denied the prize by the President of Columbia University. As the story goes, the 1941 Novel Jury recommended several books for the Pulitzer Prize including, but not primarily, For Whom The Bell Tolls, but the Pulitzer Advisory Board overrode their other recommendations in favor of the critic’s choice, For Whom The Bell Tolls. Before the Board could complete the vote they were blocked by one man: the President of Columbia University, Nicholas Butler Murray. He was ex-officio Chairman of the Pulitzer also Advisory Board and he objected to the ‘lascivious’ content in the novel (Sound familiar? Nicholas Butler Murray also blocked the Pulitzer Prize from being bestowed upon Sinclair Lewis in 1921 for his novel Main Street. Instead the 1921 prize was awarded to Edith Wharton for The Age of Innocence).

Why did no one on the Pulitzer Advisory Board stand up to Nicholas Butler Murray? His story is worth mentioning as he was a fascinating American figure. Nicholas Butler Murray was viewed as something of an autocratic ruler at Columbia University, often wantonly dismissing staff and faculty, prohibiting entry for Jewish students, in a word – he ruled Columbia with an iron first, and yet he was also a respected American statesman. He was the former running mate of William Howard Taft in 1912. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931 along with Jane Addams, for his efforts as President of the Carnegie Endowment For International for Peace. He helped to negotiate peace in Europe using his elite relationships with leaders like Kaiser Wilhelm II. Nicholas Butler Murray was also a popular cultural figure. Each year The New York Times printed his annual Christmas Greeting to the nation. He is recognized today as the longest serving President of Columbia University (43 years), a tenure which first began in the role of Interim President in 1901 before he was officially elected to the position of President, serving from 1902-1945. So when Nicholas Butler Murray stood in the doorway of the Pulitzer proceedings, refusing to move while shouting “I hope you will reconsider before you ask the university to be associated with an award for a work of this nature!” -no one dared to stand against him. The full details of the confrontation were later brought to light in 1962 by Arthur Krock, a Pulitzer Board member and New York Times journalist. As a consequence of the fight, no novel was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1941.

That year, the Novel Jury welcomed a newcomer: Dorothy Canfield Fisher, an impressive woman who replaced Robert M. Lovett from the previous year. Dorothy Canfield Fisher is perhaps best known for bringing the Montessori School system to the United States, but she also achieved other important milestones. She was praised by Eleanor Roosevelt as one of the most influential women in America. Alongside Fisher, two veteran Novel Jurists also reprised their roles in 1941: Jefferson B. Fletcher (Literature Professor at Columbia University), and Joseph W. Krutch (Literature Professor at Columbia University and naturalist writer). They considered several other novels aside from For Whom The Bell Tolls including The Trees by Joseph Conrad, The Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Native Son by Richard Wright, and Oliver Wiswell by Kenneth Roberts. The Jury apparently reluctantly favored The Trees by Joseph Conrad before the Pulitzer Board unilaterally selected For Whom The Bell Tolls and Nicholas Butler Murray blocked its nomination.

Of course, despite being robbed the first time, Hemingway later won the coveted Pulitzer Prize in 1959 for The Old Man And The Sea (feel free to read my reflections on The Old Man and the Sea here).

For Whom The Bell Tolls is as tense a novel as it is tender. It is the story of love and war -a soldier’s duty contrasted with a lover’s embrace. The book takes us covertly behind enemy lines during the destructive Spanish Civil War of the 1930s (a war which lasted from 1936-1939). The book spans approximately four days, and within that narrow timeframe a lifetime occurs: we gain a profound and complex glimpse into the nature of heroism and cowardice among ordinary people. Amidst the chaos of war and the looming specter of death, For Whom The Bell Tolls also pulls back the curtain on a budding romance between an American soldier and an innocent Spanish girl.

Lionel Trilling's 1937 statement sounds a ring of truth today: “More than any writer of our time he has been under glass, watched, checked up on, predicted, suspected, warned” (62). By the time The Sun Also Rises (TSAR) was published in 1926, the seeds of the Hemingway legend were firmly planted, and the accompanying stream of criticism with its penchant for entanglement in E. H.'s life had begun. Edmund Wilson described the situation in 1927: “The reputation of Ernest Hemingway has, in a very short time, assumed such proportions that it has already become fashionable to disparage him” (Shores 339).

From that time and into the present, a great deal of criticism on E. H.'s works has focused on linking his personal life to his fiction and his characters to living people. Nadine DeVost says that “by 1952, when the film version of ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ appeared, Hemingway's life and the plots of his stories and novels had become thoroughly interchangeable in the public's mind …” (39). Of course, E. H. added fuel to these fires. Yet, we want to remember that although some incidents in Hemingway's life and individuals that he knew may have served as a basis for his fiction, such insights are not necessary for an enjoyment or understanding of his fiction.1 Michael Reynolds says, “After he wrote The Sun Also Rises, most of his readers and more than one biographer assumed that all of his fiction was thinly veiled biography, which it almost never was” (Paris Years 61). Also, as Peter Hays, Robert Lewis (Hemingway in Italy), Reynolds (Hemingway's First War), and others have discovered, most of the time E. H. conducted research before he wrote. It is unfortunate when guesses detract from an objective reading or analysis of his works. To Have and Have Not (THHN) particularly has suffered from conjectures and to such an extent that until recently the novel's text and its clues have not received the attention that they deserve.

As if biographical confusion were not enough, Trilling believed that derogatory criticism had a negative effect on E. H. and blamed it “for the illegitimate emergence of Hemingway the ‘man’”—meaning that E. H. attempted to respond in his works to demands put upon him by critics (62). Trilling is not the only one who believed this; as a matter of fact, this tendency—also prevalent in THHN criticism—serves as a good example of how in some respects Hemingway criticism has changed little over the years. Thirty-three years after Trilling wrote the above, Arthur Waldhorn wrote that “the confusion of sounds from within and without damaged Hemingway's artistic inner ear and contributed to the intellectual imbalance of To Have and Have Not” (153). Jeffrey Meyers wrote thirteen years later than THHN “was a half-hearted attempt to meet the contemporary demand for political awareness …” (Biography 292, emphasis added). Seven years later, Michael M. Boardman stated, “The effect of such continuous scrutiny, especially on a man of such strong aesthetic convictions, was a defensive stance toward his reader” (165, emphasis added). Again, while opinions regarding critical influence on Hemingway's writings may hold interest for some, such speculations offer no insight into his works. Instead—like biographical guesses—they obscure his artistic skill, or relegate it to second in importance. Also, while E. H. was irritated by misguided criticism, it is difficult to prove that much of it ever went so far as to influence his published work. It may, however, have influenced his first drafts, which seem to have served as release valves; it was not uncommon for him to use his own name and those of acquaintances in early drafts. Yet, I have difficulty imagining that he would have allowed anyone or anything to interrupt his search for truth in writing.