For Whom the Book Palls: An Irishman’s Diary about re-reading Hemingway

When I first read Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls as an impressionable teenager, I loved every line of it. I more than loved it, I lived it, at least in imagination.

For several days, I was Robert Jordan, the American dynamiter behind enemy lines during the Spanish Civil War, embarked on a doomed mission to blow up a bridge, while taking time out to have a mind-blowing love affair with a partisan beauty named Maria.

But it’s true what they say, you should never go back, even to favourite novels.

I picked it up again recently, prompted by the war’s 80th anniversary. And, 300 pages in, I’m still waiting for the magic. I don’t know if it’s me or the book. All I know is that one of us has aged badly.

It’s still perfectly readable, with a bit of work. It’s just that some of the things that fascinated me at the time, so that I could still remember exact phrases 30-odd years later, have lost their power.

Absinthe

Take Hemingway’s descriptions of absinthe, for example. He is one of many writers and artists to have mythologised this formerly notorious drink.

By the time I first learned about it through him, it had the added allure of being banned in most countries. But in more recent years, it has been widely unbanned again, in EU-regulated form. The aura of danger it once had is gone.

Then there's sex. This wasn't exactly banned in Ireland at the time I first read For Whom the Bell Tolls. But around where I lived, at least, you would have had a better chance finding absinthe.

Via the same book, Hemingway introduced me to the concept where, during intercourse of an especially intense kind, the earth might move. In fact he introduced the world to this notion, albeit while crediting it to Spanish gypsy belief – which also held that it happens only three times in a person’s life.

Earth moving

Until the book was published in 1940, most people had never heard the question, rendered even more mysterious by his idiomatic use of second-person singular, to suggest Spanish: “Did the earth move for thee?” This very quickly became a comic cliché, but not before condemning several generations to feelings of inadequacy about their sex lives.

I myself was still optimistic when one morning, a few years afterwards, and by now living in a Rathgar bedsit, I really did feel the earth move.

Unfortunately, I was alone at the time. As the radio news reported later, the cause had been an actual earthquake (measured at 5.4) off the coast of Wales.

Such disappointments aside, in the intervening years the book has also found ways to become actively annoying. I don’t remember noticing the first time, maybe because it was the same paragraph where Robert and Maria experienced simultaneous earth tremors.

But Hemingway must also be the only literary novelist to turn the word “small” into an adverb, ie “smally”.

Smally

Even now, my laptop refuses to write this, attempting to change it to “smelly”. Is it possible that’s what Hemingway meant too? Well, since his sentence refers to Maria’s lips, “that moved smally and by themselves”, I hope not. Bad as it is, “smally” is the lesser of two evils. But it’s still a literary war crime.

And then there’s Maria, in general. How do you solve a problem like her? She has been through a rough time at the hands of the Falangists, we know, so we have to make allowances.

She seemed vaguely interesting when I first encountered her in Hemingway’s pages, whereas since then, her supposed beauty notwithstanding, she appears to have become a passive, one-dimensional, and entirely boring person.

It’s not that Hemingway couldn’t write women, he does a very good job with the book’s other female protagonist, Pilar. And God knows he had done sufficient research.

I think it was F Scott Fitzgerald who advanced the theory that, for every major novel, Hemingway also needed a new wife.

According to this scheme, his third great book, For Whom the Bell Tolls, must have been inspired by Martha Gellhorn, who indeed travelled with him in Spain and would become Mrs Hemingway III in 1940.

But Gellhorn was a renowned journalist in her own right and by all accounts, the least submissive of Hemingway’s women.

So the wonder is, if she was a big influence on the book, how she ever let him away with creating such a pallid female love interest.