This Day in Literary History (Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls” Published)

October 21, 1940—In For Whom the Bell Tolls, published on this date by Scribners, Ernest Hemingway did more than just write a bestselling book and further burnish the Byronic image that had made him a celebrity. He also made the most successful effort, in the last three decades of his life, to solidify his standing as a serious literary artist.

The future Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winner had achieved standing among literary critics in the 1920s with a quartet of works still taught in college and university English courses: two short-story collections, In Our Time (1925) and Men Without Women (1927), and two novels, The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929). But the 1930s were a more problematic decade.

Like younger friend John O’Hara, Hemingway was probably most adept in short fiction, but his aspirations—and the serious money—lay with the novel. Winner Take Nothing (1933) showed that he was a master of the miniature narrative, but he longed to do other things, with results not always happy. Death in the Afternoon (1932) and Green Hills of Africa (1935), ostensibly about, respectively, bullfighting and big-game hunting, turned out to be, as his later acolyte Norman Mailer would later term one of his own works, “Advertisements for Myself.”

And then there was To Have and Have Not. If you want to know what kind of reception that received, recall the legend that director Howard Hawks bet the author that he could make a decent film out of his worst book. (Audiences in effect voted with Hawks by making the resulting movie with Humphrey Bogart and sultry newcomer Lauren Bacall a roaring box-office success.)

The public and most critics, however, decided that For Whom the Bell Tolls was a return to form for the former darling of the Lost Generation. The novel about the Spanish Civil War was, simultaneously, Hemingway’s most ambitious project and his biggest bid for commercial success. (In considering the latter, recall that Hemingway’s hero, Robert Jordan, was written with good friend Gary Cooper in mind. Probably no novel was so self-consciously crafted for a particular actor until Michael Crichton summoned the face and mannerisms of Sean Connery as he fleshed out the character of “John Connor”--an Anglicization of the Scot’s name--in Rising Sun.)

The adjective most often associated with For Whom the Bell Tolls is “Tolstoyan”—pretty much what you’d expect about a sprawling realistic novel with love and war as its major themes. But the man who identified an equally strong influence was Hemingway's onetime mentor and current frenemy, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Though writing a gracious letter to his old expatriate compadre after receiving an inscribed copy of the novel (“I envy you like hell and there's no irony in this"), Fitzgerald gave greater vent to his feelings privately in his notebook: “It is so to speak Ernest’s ‘Tale of Two Cities’ though the comparison isn’t apt. I mean it is a thoroughly superficial book which has all the profundity of ‘Rebecca.’”

What a takedown—in two sentences, three memorable books, each made (or about to be made) into memorable films, dismissed. There certainly was an element of envy here: from his youth, Fitzgerald had harbored far more intense interest in theater and film than Hemingway, yet here was the man he had formerly championed now having Paramount Studios wiggle $150,000 for the rights to adapt the book, while Fitzgerald had been diverting his waning energies from fiction by laboring in the nation’s great Dream Factory these last few years. (Until, of course, dismissal from his studio job gave him enough time to begin writing The Last Tycoon.)

For all his palpable resentment over the success of a former friend who had mercilessly dissed him in the short story "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," Fitzgerald was onto something: For Whom the Bell Tolls contained much of the same sentimentality that suffused A Tale of Two Cities, but also the sweeping narrative drive and colorful detail that the theater-obsessed Charles Dickens could pack into his Victorian novel. Both Dickens and Hemingway wrote of heroes so self-sacrificing that they bordered on suicidal. (Indeed, as he awaits death, Robert Jordan recalls how his father committed suicide—a situation all too similar to the fate of Hemingway’s father Clarence.)

It turns out that in the last Presidential election, both major-party candidates cited For Whom the Bell Tolls as major influences. It's easy to see why the soldier--stoic in the face of possible death--would have appealed to ex-POW John McCain. But Barack Obama, too, found inspiration in the book, according to an NPR story from 2008. The successful candidate would have found the lesson taught by his mother--"You must live so you make a difference in the world"--reinforced by Jordan, another academic who left his job teaching to bring justice to an uncertain and dangerous world.

Hemingway's star was at its brightest around the time of publication of this book: financial success had come his way, critics were hailing his return to form, he was marrying the glamorous foreign correspondent Martha Gellhorn, and the public was recalling his own involvement on the Loyalist side in the Spanish Civil War. But things were never really so good again.

It wasn't merely that the union with Gellhorn failed, or that his fourth wife, Mary Welsh, would turn out to be more nurse than mate. But from here on, mounting physical and mental woes would sap his energy. He was able to complete only two more works over the next two decades: Across the River and Into the Trees, a disaster, and The Old Man and the Sea, which, though better, still never approached the force of his earlier work.

The alcoholism that, he believed, undid Fitzgerald took longer, but now it began to plague Hemingway. Additionally, the depression that plagued his father began to affect him more. (Gellhorn had correctly predicted, toward the end of their marriage, that he would kill himself.) He could start projects now, but no longer had the focus to bring them to successful conclusions--one reason why so much of his work ended up being published posthumously (A Movable Feast, Islands in the Stream, Garden of Eden, True at First Light).