User:KWatson/sandbox: Difference between revisions

Hemingway and Mailer were deeply in love with language, and not just English, as we see in the former’s ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'', which exudes his fondness for Spanish. Mailer studied German assiduously as preparation for writing ''The Castle in the Forest'', and he also worked with Russian in connection with his trips to the Soviet Union, as is evident in ''Harlot’s Ghost'',

''Oswald’s Tale'', and ''Castle in the Forest''. Their stylistic innovations, well celebrated in Hemingway but not yet fully recognized in Mailer, are no doubt related to this love of language that they shared. Further, neither writer hesitated to tackle the burning issues of the day, in and out of their fiction.

It should be stressed that Watson is writing about Hemingway’s journalism and not his fiction. Naturally, one has to ask whether in ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'' Hemingway continues to portray the Spanish Civil War in the same fashion as Watson describes. I believe that in the novel Hemingway’s treatment of the Reds does indeed include a measure of admiration, but it also contains a much fuller depiction of them and their conduct of the war that includes both direct and indirect condemnation of certain communist actors and their acts. Let me quickly say that in ''For Whom the Bell Tolls,'' despite an open sympathy for the Loyalist-Red cause, Hemingway complicates the actual conduct of the war by both sides, as well as the associated moral

questions, to a degree that renders any pat conclusions about these matters more than problematic.

The tendency throughout ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'', as we see in the case of the town just mentioned, that Robert A. Martin has identified as Ronda in Malaga Province is for each of the sides to match or exceed each other in the commission of atrocities. For instance, the beheading of Sordo and his men that the fascist Lt. Burrendo orders is followed shortly by Pablo’s execution of several men he has recruited to help with the blowing up of the bridge. When reflecting on Pilar’s story, Robert Jordan admits to himself

that he always knew that the side he was fighting for behaved as she described and that however much he hates this “that damned woman made me see it

The case of Robert Jordan is special for a number of reasons, primarily of course because he is an American who is taking orders from a Soviet general, but also because he is a fascinating combination of stubborn commitment to what he sees as his duty and his far ranging and sensitive introspection and contemplation. In the early passages of the novel Jordan might be easily mistaken for a hero straight out of Soviet Socialist Realism—not just because he agrees to the highly questionable orders of Soviet General Golz, but because his virtues are so strong, and his motives are so pure. Over the course of the novel, however, Robert Jordan grows ever richer, more complex and

elusive as a character. In this sense, ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'' is a concentrated case of a ''Bildungsroman'' that covers not an extended period of maturation but only about seventy hours, the last hours of Jordan’s life. In the end, Jordan, for all of his attachment to the Republican cause, tells himself that he is “not a red Marxist” and not to “kid yourself with too many dialectics". It is here that he undergoes the revelation that his love for Maria is the most important thing in his life and that such love is indeed the most important part of life. I would claim also (allowing for the fact that there were indeed genuine American communists such as Jorvis Ivens) that Jordan’s “non-party” commitment to the Red/Republican cause is characteristically American in his lack of interest in the specifics of its ideology.

more” and allows himself to bask in the false glow of what might have

are all too good and too true to the cause to be true.

Lest anyone think I am about to attempt a deconstruction of ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'', let me say that whatever its minor faults may be I find the novel to be a work of real genius. (I will let specialists in American literature continue their battle over its rank among Hemingway’s and America’s great novels.) In addition to this multi-leveled novel’s masterfully constructed plot and its superb development of a whole range of disparate characters, several of whom are imbued with the kinds of mythic qualities Robert E. Gajdusek attributes to them (–), I find that Hemingway’s use of Spanish is both innovative and effective. Although he translates many of the Spanish passages, he lets others stand in the original, trusting the reader who does not know the language to deduce the meaning from the context. Furthermore, Hemingway’s use of Spanish phraseology in English, as in “the woman of Pablo,” and “What passes with thee?” and “thou askest” creates a kind of linguistic estrangement, a kind of “Inglespañol” that effectively conveys the Spanish speaking milieu of the novel as well as the point of view of the Spanish speaking hero Robert Jordan, who is a Spanish instructor at the University Montana in Missoula.

<blockqoute>There is no other one but one now, one, going now, rising now, sailing now, leaving now, wheeling now, soaring now, away now, all the way now, all of all the way now, one and one is one, is one, is one, is one ...is one in goodness, is one to cherish, is one now on earth with elbows against the cut and slept-on branches of the pine tree with the smell of the pine boughs and the night; to earth conclusively now, and with the morning of the day to come. ( )</blockquote>

I find this passage doubly noteworthy because its rhythmic, flowing, repetitive intonations are so unlike the straight-forward, gruff and blunt style Hemingway often employs. Here Hemingway also evokes the bond between nature and the characters, especially Robert Jordan, that he develops throughout the novel.

Here, then, is my segue to Norman Mailer, who also uses Communism and Fascism as measures of each other. In 1984 Mailer made his first trip to Russia and the Soviet Union. This brief visit helped lay the groundwork for a much longer one in which he researched material and interviewed many

Soviet citizens in pursuit of material for Oswald’s Tale. I should add here that Mailer had a built in, so to speak, predisposition to visit Russia, since as J.

We can say former Reds now not just because there is no longer a Soviet Union, but also because in Russia the word itself has long since lost the edge it possessed in the early years of the establishment of the Soviet state. Of course, the word remains in such terms as the Red Army, but there it is in a vestigial role, not the provocative one it once had. Similarly, by the time Mailer began visiting the Soviet Union the energy of the 1930s, its frenzied “socialist building" had flowed over the dams of all those hydroelectric plants, flown up through the stacks of all the steel mills, and become frozen in the gray cement of the resulting Soviet concrete colossus. During Harry

Hubbard’s visits to Moscow in Harlot’s Ghost, Oswald’s strange stay in the USSR chronicled in Oswald’s Tale, and Mailer’s own visit just mentioned, the overall impression one gets is that of hum-drum routine. The human energy that was voluntarily and forcibly put into the building of the new state’s infrastructure was long since spent. I say forcibly because prisoners of the Gulag were used as laborers on many major and minor projects, including the building of the Moscow Metro, the extensive system of waterways linking Moscow with Leningrad-Petersburg, and the Belomor (White Sea) Canal. The romance associated with the Soviet intervention in Spain, amplified by cultural visits such as the one made by a Basque soccer team in 1937, was also long gone. Even if in the mid 1980s the Soviet Union was still a police state, Stalin’s terror of the 1930s was over as well, and dissidents were, as Mailer wrote in 1984 “ostracized . . . but no longer pulled out of their beds at three in the morning”( ).By the mid 1980s, a Soviet version of the middle class had long since formed (at least in the cities) that provided its citizens a stable and predictable way of life. When Hubbard visits the Metropol

Throughout Harlot’s Ghost Mailer describes how the CIA and the KGB engaged in competition with each other in both Latin America, especially Uruguay, and in Berlin. (Mailer also describes the CIA’s and Hubbard’s activities in “Red” Cuba that led to the Bay of Pigs fiasco.) Even with the understanding that over all of this hung the possibility of some overzealous fool on either side making a fatal blunder that could have led to a nuclear exchange, I hope that we have now reached a time when we can look

back and say, as I believe Mailer shows us, that all of the hugger-mugger, derring-do, tunnel digging, and various forms of cat and mouse the CIA and KGB engaged in were just so much silliness. We do so of course in the full recognition that much of this nonsense still goes on in the post-Soviet present.

And the same may be said of Hemingway, who largely on account of his time at the Hotel Gaylord in Madrid, where he met with a number of Soviet participants in the Spanish Civil War on the Republican side, was exceptionally well informed about what was going on in the Soviet Union of the late 1930s. He knew about the purges, especially of the Red Army’s officer corps, including that of Tukachevsky. He also knew buzz words and phrases, such as “liquidated” and “enemy of the people,” and he knew about political

was clearly well read in Chekhov and he also read authors of the Soviet period. As Clarence Brown points out, Hemingway’s praise of Andrei Platonov to Soviet journalists helped spur the Soviets to resume publication of this writer of exceptional and original talent. It was during the 1960s that Hemingway experienced a surge of popularity among Russian readers. Indeed, I remember vividly a young man I met in Kiev in 1969 who had literally read all of Hemingway that was available in Russian translation at that time and who knew by heart the plots of many of his stories and novels. There is not space here adequately to describe what voracious readers of fiction Russians are except to say that they—from professional intellectuals to professional bus drivers—often know well not just the “classics” of their own literature but those of world literature, including of course Hemingway. Furthermore, some of the Russian writers who are often associated with a loose grouping from the 1960s called “Young Prose,” for example Yury Kazakov, show the unmistakable hand of Hemingway in their manner of writing. So

we see that the relations between Hemingway and Russian writers form a two-way street.