Robert Jordan and the Spanish country: learning to live in it "truly and well."(protagonist in Ernest Hemingway's novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls)

Martin, Robert A.

ONE THING THAT CAN be said about For Whom the Bell Tolls, probably without much argument, is that in those few short days preparing for and carrying out the mission, most of the characters have the opportunity to see some kind of truth or relation unfold before them. They are in highly unusual circumstances, and in such situations people very often become acutely aware of what is important to them and why. But Hemingway, because he is Hemingway, turns it up a notch, especially for Robert Jordan. Jordan is unlike any of the other characters in the book, both in his philosophy and by the things he does perhaps less consciously--the gestures and motions--and finally by the absolutely unique way Hemingway places Jordan into his surroundings.

As Tony Tanner has noted, with Hemingway in mind, "to find any truth a man must be alone, alone with his senses and the seen world" (30). This is an easy thing to say knowing about Hemingway's love for the outdoors; but it is also difficult to generalize in this manner without thinking of the way Hemingway has handled Robert Jordan. Through abundant, actually pervasive and detailed descriptions of nature, especially of the pine trees, Hemingway suggests that man is not merely an interloper or casual observer of nature, but rather, he is an integral part of the wild, an active participant. He must, therefore, if he is to grow and mature, be not only a participant in nature, but also a pupil of it as well.

It all starts, of course, with Hemingway. He once told some friends in Chicago in the early 1920s that before his own creative processes could begin to make any sense or progress, he had to"see it, feel it, smell it, hear it" (Fenton 103). Hemingway invented, of course; he was proud of that. But he really could not be satisfied that he was on the right track with his writing until he could satisfy these four senses. This method is echoed in Death in the Afternoon when Hemingway says "let those who want to save the world if you can get to see it clear and as a whole. Then any part you make will represent the whole if it's made truly" (278). These, then, are the two elements against which Robert Jordan must be measured--seeing the world clear and as a whole, and seeing it "truly."

Tanner has described Robert Jordan as "earth-bound, earth-committed" (26). This is a precise way of describing both Robert Jordan and how Hemingway merged Jordan and his surroundings into one. From page one of the novel the reader cannot mistake the intimacy between Jordan and the hills and forest where the mission is being prepared. Indeed, the very first line of the book tells us that Jordan "lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees" (FWTBT1). There is no such thing as reading Hemingway too carefully. It cannot be done, and this opening sequence of flowing images sets the mood and the tempo for all that follows. Our first image of Robert Jordan is predictive--he is lying on "the pine needled floor of the forest." At this point, Jordan is not particularly aware of the pine trees or the wind, or even of the grass. He is in the midst of all of them, but he is, more or less, an intruder. He is looking at the bridge and mentally preparing his plan of action. And the forest around him is, at this point, merely where he happens to be at the time, and where the action will take place later. Steadily, though, as the novel progresses, Jordan will be exposed to, and will become more and more aware of the forest--especially the pine trees.

Hemingway's descriptions of the wilderness for the first three-quarters of the novel are, mostly, incidental--to Robert Jordan, at least. The complete awareness of his surroundings has not yet taken place for Jordan, and will not, until much later. But a prelude to Jordan's realizations about the pines and the forest and all of nature occurs when El Sordo prepares to meet his death. "Living," thinks El Sordo, "was a field of grain blowing in the wind on the side of a hill. Living was a hawk in the sky. Living was an earthen jar of water in the dust ... living was a horse between your legs ... and the far side of the valley and the hills beyond" (312). And we can be fairly sure that El Sordo does not think quite so eloquently or expansively every day of his life. For Jordan and El Sordo, however, an appreciation and wonder about the earth begins to occur very quickly when they realize that life might suddenly end. El Sordo's thoughts are not merely a reflection on how beautiful things are. They are of a deeper mystery and wonder, like Huck Finn's fascination with the minute aspects of life as he travels down the Mississippi River with Jim.

As Jordan and his companions become more engaged in the mission and in one another, the imagery of the pine trees increases, as does Jordan's awareness and feeling for them. His lovemaking with Maria in the forest is both a turning point structurally and the approximate point where the tempo increases. An example of the abundance of references to pines is helpful in demonstrating just how overwhelming they become:

and the three of them sat down under a pine tree (54)

he smelled the pines and he heard the stream ... he lay there behind the

pine tree, with the submachine gun across his left forearm (434)

he circled the hillside through the pines and ... dropped down to

where Agustin lay in the clump of scrub pines (450)

Robert Jordan ran up the hill through the pines (454)

They could see ... the sun coming down on them through the pine

branches (456)

He caressed the [horse] once ... and held him steady as they dropped

down fast and sliding through the pines (458)

Robert Jordan looked around, saw what he wanted finally, and reached

up and broke a dead limb from a pine tree (460)

He looked at the pines and he tried not to think at all (468)

This is illustrative but by no means complete. What it does illustrate is the way in which Hemingway's references to the pines increase dramatically once the mission gets under way. When all of the planning and waiting give way to the action that Jordan knows may very well kill him, the pines are mentioned almost constantly, sometimes several times in a single page or even in a single paragraph.

What significance, then, can be given to the pines? Obviously, Hemingway could have used many different things to unify the book, but he quite likely chose pines for several reasons. First and foremost, pine trees are quite literally the type of tree that most abundantly graces that part of Spain. It was something that was there and Hemingway used it as he saw it--the way it was. Second, Hemingway needed something of nature, some organic part that could speak, in concrete Hemingway terms, of the majesty, strength, and endurance of nature. Pines are one of the most ancient classes of tree. It would not have made much sense for Hemingway to have used a poplar tree, which also grows in Spain, but which has a lifespan of sometimes less than thirty Years. With the pines Hemingway found a way to communicate to Robert Jordan the permanence of nature, the theme that says "the earth abides forever." Jordan is witness not only to the sight of pines, but to the feel of them when he touches the sap, and also to their poignant smell.

Jeffrey Meyers has commented on the way in which Hemingway ties the book together and, although Meyers does not specifically mention the pines, he is clearly referring to them when he says that "the taut structure perfectly enhances the meaning. The words of the last sentence repeat those of the first one ... and ... link with each other to complete the circular unity of the book" (337). Indeed, the first and last sentences of the book do have Robert Jordan lying prone against the pine needles of the forest. But Hemingway did not arrive at this structure easily. He had originally thought of putting in an epilogue, but in the end, wisely, did not. "It really stops," Hemingway wrote in a letter to Maxwell Perkins, "where Jordan is feeling his heart beating against the pine needle floor of the forest ... every damned word and action in this book depends on every other ... he's laying there on the pine needles at the start and that is where he is at the end" (SL 514). Carlos Baker was wise enough to agree with Hemingway when he commented that "this was all ... that the novel required" (351).(1) There is that simplicity to it. Regardless of the extensive .flashbacks and telling of war horrors and exploits by the characters, there is an ultimately simple thread running from beginning to end and this thread is nature. It is difficult to disagree with Emily Watts' assertion that "the land is the only element of consistency in Hemingway's universe" (45). Watts concludes that Hemingway was seemingly working toward a "single art" (xii); that is, a way of writing that manages to capture for the reader all of the subtleties and beauty of a symphony, a painting, or a sculpture.

Hemingway's love of art is well-known, especially his preference for Cezanne, and he quite possibly at some point saw his writing as Cezanne saw painting. "To paint" said Cezanne, "is not to make a servile copy of the objective, but to grasp the harmony between a number of relations" (qtd. in Dorival 101). Grasping the harmony between a number of relations was what Hemingway had been after all along, but it rather suddenly all came together in For Whom the Bell Tolls. He was trying to achieve a universal sense of harmony between nature and people who come into close contact with nature. Hemingway shows us that this harmony can be a most difficult struggle of perception. To realize one's affinity with nature, and to realize truly the importance of it, requires going far beyond a mere sense of being amused or pleased by, for example, a clear, cloudless day. Erik Nakjavani has noted that for Hemingway, it is to "see `simple things' as the primitive man might have seen them at the dawn of human existence on earth, simply and with the awe implicit in any act of genuine discovery" (4).

Hemingway, who was well-acquainted with Joan Miro, had perhaps finally arrived at the point where the mature artist realizes, as Miro said, that "The earth does not only inspire, it also corrects, it supplies energy and stimulates movement, but it dictates direction and imposes order as well" (qtd. in Dupin 82). This is what Hemingway subtly conveys as he steadily enfolds Robert Jordan into the forest of the Spanish hills. Jordan, of course, is much closer to nature than the others to begin with, and so we should guess that he has, by the end, the best chance to become a part of it. At one point mid-way through the book Fernando tells Jordan, "You have a curious idea to sleep in the open, Don Roberto" (259). Fernando here clearly does not understand that Jordan's senses are already more finely tuned than those of most people, and that he is well along the way to a sense of an ultimate integration with nature. He has become more highly sensitized to his surroundings. Tanner is correct in stating that in Jordan's case "it is the danger of the mission and the love of Maria that sensitize him, prompting his senses to an almost awed alertness and efficient clarity" (23), which he calls Jordan's "raw hyper-lucidity" (22).

When the group leaves for the blowing of the bridge, Hemingway manages to bring nature to Jordan like a magnet; and in doing so, very carefully splices in the devices of the battle, the guns that must be there, between Jordan and nature, making them also seem to be an almost inextricable part of Jordan's experience. It is not enough for Jordan to merely pass through or sit under the pines, he must feel them and the rest of the forest much more completely:

Robert Jordan placing his feet ... feeling the dead pine needles under

his rope-soled shoes, bumping a tree root with one foot and putting a

hand forward and feeling the cold metal jut of the automatic rifle ...

his shoes sliding and grooving the forest floor, putting his left hand out

again and touching the rough bark of a tree trunk, then as he braced

himself his hand feeling a smooth place, the base of the palm of his

hand coming away sticky from the resinous sap.... (407)

This sensory perception cannot be over-emphasized. As Jordan's imminent confrontation in the battle draws closer, he instinctively immerses every one of his senses into the forest. He can feel, smell, see, and hear all of it. And here Hemingway smoothly merges the rapid succession of sensory encounters and the thoughts Jordan has about them as the battle approaches: "Robert Jordan lay behind the trunk of a pine tree on the slope of the hill ... watched it become daylight ... feeling it gray within him, as though he were a part of the slow lightening that comes before the rising of the sun ... the pine trunks below him were hard and clear now ... [and] he felt the give of the brown, dropped pine needles under his elbows" (431).

Jordan is at the point of totally immersing himself into the intimate workings of nature, feeling part of something as existentially detached as the sun rising ninety-two million miles away:

He lay there ... a squirrel chittered from a pine tree below him and

Robert Jordan watched the squirrel come down the tree trunk, stopping

on his way down to turn his head and look toward where the man

was watching. He saw the squirrel's eyes, small and bright and watched

his tail jerk in excitement ... on the tree trunk he looked back at Robert

Jordan ... Robert Jordan looked down through the pines ... he would

like to have the squirrel with him in his pocket. He would like to have

had anything he could touch. He rubbed his elbows against the pine

needles. (433)

At this moment, Jordan is trying very hard to become one with his surroundings. He realizes that he must savor all of it--the squirrel, the dirt, the sun, the clouds, and the pines--just as he has been able to savor his time with Maria. Jordan thinks that he would like to breathe very slowly and "slow up the time again and feel it" (431).

Where Hemingway excels as an artist, and the climax of For Whom the Bell Tolls is the finely-tuned example, is in creating a scene as precisely as it can be done without distortion. As early as 1923, in the poem "Riparto D'Assalto," he had described a group of soldiers going off to die with phrases like "bristly faces, dirty hides" and (this should sound familiar)"splintered pines" (TSTP 55). Nature is always there, and it is Hemingway's way of putting men into forests and fields that will also be there forever, and giving them the opportunity to test themselves against fate and bad luck. The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway wrote to Perkins in 1926, had characters who were perhaps tragic, but "the point of the book to me was that the earth abideth forever" (SL 229). For it is only after the bridge is blown and Robert Jordan's leg is broken, that he achieves the ultimate realization. It is not something he can speak; it is something that through his experiences in nature, he has come to accept, understand, and even welcome. He knows he will die, but he will do it fighting and with his body once more pressed as tightly as possible against the "pine needled floor of the forest." The final page speaks for itself as perhaps no other epiphany in twentieth-century literature has done so well.

He was completely integrated now and he took a good long look at

everything. Then he looked up at the sky. There were big white clouds

in it. He touched the palm of his hand against the pine needles where

he lay and touched the bark of the pine trunk that he lay behind. Then

he rested as easily as he could with his two elbows in the pine needles

and the muzzle of the submachine gun resting against the trunk of the

pine tree ... he could feel his heart beating against the pine needle floor

of the forest. (471)

This is the final crescendo of intimacy between Robert Jordan and the forest, conveying the sense that it should be taking place at an altar, like a communion. Words are nothing anymore, and all that Jordan needs to finish his life right is to lie against the pine floor of the forest and wait. A death in the arms of nature is not something that Hemingway would have been opposed to by any means. When Fraulein Glaser once said to Hemingway that a good death would be having one's heart stop while skiing "straight down in pulver Schnee," Hemingway remarked how "very romantic" (Baker 167). And although Robert Jordan is leaving a place he believes is well "worth fighting for" (467), it is no accident that Hemingway has allowed Jordan to take in as much as he has. Certain things to Hemingway were worth large sacrifices, even a simple, unspoiled river in 1937 near Madrid, which he saw as a river worth fighting for" (White 276).

One can See how Hemingway could easily have used as his alternate title for the novel, "The Undiscovered Country."(2) There is in all places some undiscovered part of the whole; in all countries, cities, woods, and rivers there are parts that are waiting to be known. And inside every man and woman there is an undiscovered country also. It is Hemingway's great talent that he can introduce the two, nature and mankind, in such a way that the reader is able to decipher something about himself. "I really believe" said Cezanne, "that the painter learns to think through nature, he learns to see" (qtd. in Dorival 103).

So it is for Robert Jordan. Even as he lies waiting for death with his heart beating against the pine needles of the forest floor, he has learned to love, to live, and, even in death, "to see it, feel it, smell it, hear it" Hemingway's development of Robert Jordan in nature and nature in Robert Jordan has--as an early reviewer noted in 1940--certainly "struck universal chords and ... struck them vibrantly" (Adams 1).

NOTES

(1.) Two related items on the pine tree imagery in Hemingway's life and work: Thomas Gould of North Carolina State University, who has made an intensive examination of the For Whom the Bell Tolls manuscript, has informed me that in the original draft Hemingway had used only "trees" to suggest the Spanish landscape. In a subsequent revision, however, he changed all the "trees" to "pine trees" throughout the manuscript. Michael Reynolds has also informed me that Mary Hemingway had two pine trees planted at the head of Hemingway's grave in the Ketchum, Idaho cemetery. When the first two pine trees died, she ordered two more to be planted and paid a local resident to water them daily to ensure their survival The trees today are alive and well, according to Reynolds The symbolism of the pine trees seems apparent in relation to For Whom the Bell Tolls.

(2.) One of the twenty-six titles Hemingway considered before settling on For Whom the Bell Tolls, "The Undiscovered Country" is taken from Hamlet's "to be or not to be" soliloquy on death:

But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscovered country, from whose bourn

No traveller returns, puzzles the will.... (Hamlet 3.1.78-80)

WORKS CITED

Adams, J. Donald. "The New Novel by Hemingway." New York Times Book Review. Rev. of For Whom the Bell Tolls, 20 Oct. 1940: 1.

Baker, Carlos. Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story. New York: Scribner's, 1969.

Dorival, Bernard. Cezanne. Trans. from the French by H.H. Thackwaite. New York: Continental Book Center, 1948.

Dupin, Jacques. Miro. Trans. from the French by Norbert Guterman. New York: Abrams, 1962.

Fenton, Charles. The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway: The Early Years. New York: Random House, 1954.

Hemingway, Ernest. By-Line: Ernest Hemingway. Ed. William White. New York: Scribner's, 1967.

--. Death in the Afternoon. New York: Scribner's, 1932.

--. For Whom the Bell Tolls. New York: Scribner's, 1940.

--. Selected Letters, 1917-1961. Ed. Carlos Baker. New York: Scribner's, 1981.

--. Three Stories & Ten Poems Paris: Contact, 1923.

Mellow, James R. Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992.

Meyers, Jeffrey. Hemingway: A Biography. New York: Harper and Row, 1985.

Nakjavani, Erik. "The Aesthetics of the Visible and the Invisible." The Hemingway Review 5.2 (Spring 1986): 2-11.

Tanner, Tony. "Ernest Hemingway's Unhurried Sensations." The Hemingway Review 1.2 (Spring 1982): 20-38.

Watts, Emily. Ernest Hemingway and the Arts. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1971.

ROBERT A. MARTIN Michigan State University