Heroism and Anxiety

For Whom the Bell Tolls wasn't quite what I expected. My expectations had been mainly formed by people calling Hemingway a misogynist and chauvinist, an exponent of rugged manliness, toughness, emotional and sexual and political bluntness. I suppose I could see all of those things (especially the misogyny).

But For Whom the Bell Tolls is a book about uncertainty. It is no less neurotic than a good teen anxt book: I nominate Martin Amis' The Rachel Papers. The point of For Whom the Bell Tolls is how it goes inside heroism, inside determination and finds there doubt and anxiety and struggle. I said it was about uncertainty but I could also say it is about hope, in the sense that hope is the problem or mystery that is asked and not solved.

Hope in this book is dangerously double-edged, something to fight against and then occassionally to surrender to, but only momentarily, and then to pick one's pack up and resume fighting. Hope is a woman in this book. Hope is uncatchable and unreliable and indispensable and strange and wonderful, and no matter how many times you say to yourself that it's not to be trusted, you'll die for it anyway.

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Then there was the smell of heather crushed and the roughness of the bent stalks under her head and the sun bright on her closed eyes and all his life he would remember the curve of her throat with her head pushed back into the heather roots and her lips that moved smally and by themselves and the fluttering of the lashes on the eyes tight closed against the sun and against everything, and for her everything was red, orange, and gold-red from the sun on the closed eyes, and it all was that color, all of it, the filling, the possessing, the having, all of that color, all in a blindness of that color. For him it was a dark passage which led to nowhere, then to nowhere, then again to nowhere, always and forever to nowhere, heavy on the elbows in the earth to nowhere, dark, never any end to nowhere, hung on all time always to unknowing nowhere, this time and again for always and to nowhere, now not to be borne once again always and to nowhere, now beyond all bearing up, up, up into nowhere, suddenly, scaldingly, holdingly all nowhere gone and time absolutely still and they were both there, time having stopped and he felt the earth move out and away from under them.