Was Hemingway the Hero Of for WHOM the Bell tolls?
A cryptic note places him behind enemy lines in Spain’s civil war Giles Tremlett
On Feb. 27, 1937, ernest Hemingway embarked on the SS Paris from New york, headed into a war zone. “For a long time me and my conscience both have known I have to go to Spain,” he wrote before leaving. Hemingway saw the ongoing fighting in his most cherished country as nothing less than a “dress rehearsal for the inevitable european war.”
What the novelist did not suspect was that, while in Spain, he would end up leading a behind-the-lines mission targeting General Franco’s Nationalist forces — an episode that does not appear in any biography and of which even his most devoted readers remain unaware. Nor could he know the experience would inspire his next great novel.
For Hemingway, the trip was serious. At 37, he had hit a crisis: his second marriage was failing and, more catastrophically, his popularity among readers was waning and his writing was drying up. He hadn’t published a novel in seven years, since A Farewell to Arms.
Nominally, he was going to Spain to practise his original trade as a journalist, but really he was after inspiration. He found it. In October 1940, after four long spells there, he published For Whom the bell Tolls, about the fortunes of an American guerrilla fighter called robert Jordan. In just a few months, the novel sold half a million copies.
Jordan’s character is based on the volunteers of the International brigades — a remarkable army of 35,000 volunteers from 80 countries, who formed an anti-fascist force in Spain that was compared to the crusades and the Tower of babel.
but was Hemingway himself the model for Jordan? “He fought now in this war because it had started in a country that he loved,” the author wrote. “And he believed in the republic and that if it were destroyed life would be unbearable.”
He knew guerrilla warfare provoked a constant inner battle against the “fear and apprehension” of being caught and shot. What’s more, in a brief note in the archive of poet and former International brigades member edwin rolfe at the university of Illinois, Hemingway reveals that he personally carried out a frightening, behind-the-lines mission.
The note, published in 2012 in The Antioch review by historian Peter carroll but otherwise unknown to the world (and not in
Mary V. dearborn’s 2017 biography), sees Hemingway at his most coarse and cryptic. Written to rolfe in 1940, just as he was finishing For Whom the bell Tolls, it reads: “O.K. Once I had to go to a town (I) will not name to check personally (knew many people there) on effect of something that happened from the air and its true effect. Also on possibility of rising there… And to carry dough… Was scare(d) pissless all the time, really scared… there is an indignity in that kind of finish that scares long in advance.”
There are no clues as to where Hemingway went. either way, his mission ended in failure.
Hemingway loved to place himself at the centre of everything, and often exaggerated. but was he a fantasist? I have been unable to find any reference to this mission in the International brigades archive in Moscow, but guerrilla operations are generally not recorded.
In any event, Hemingway’s dedication to the cause was unquestionable. “I think it was the only time of his life when he was not the most important thing. He really cared about the republic and about that war,” wrote his girlfriend, Martha Gellhorn, who became one of the world’s first great female war correspondents. “I believe I never would have gotten hooked otherwise.”
His love of the foreign volunteers was genuine, too, even if he spent more time drinking whiskey with them at the Hotel Florida in Madrid than on the front. “For him we had the scent of death, like the bullfighters,” wrote German commissar Gustav regler. “And because of this he was invigorated in our company.”
Milton Wolff, commander of the Abraham Lincoln battalion, called Hemingway a “tourist” and a “prick,” who “wants very much to be a martyr.” On an unannounced visit to the british battalion, Hemingway was told to “piss off” by the commander.
The more radical brigades veterans were furious that in For Whom the bell Tolls communists, who accounted for half of the volunteers, were portrayed as ruthless killers, but Hemingway never stopped praising the men and women who fought fascism while their governments pursued non-intervention.
Gellhorn recalled him weeping after the International brigades were disbanded in 1938.
The republic lost the war in 1939, ushering in Franco’s 36-year dictatorship. emboldened by his unpunished trampling of the Spanish non-intervention pact, Adolf Hitler attacked Poland six months later. To Hemingway and the brigades it was proof they had been right — fascism had to be fought with weapons.