The 40s: The Story of a Decade (79 page)

A NOTE BY JOAN ACOCELLA

T
he Second World War was a catastrophe for most of the people in the East and the West, including
The New Yorker’
s book critics. Hence the leading characteristics of this collection of reviews from the 1940s. Nine essays culled from ten years do not an average make. The editors have of course pulled up the most interesting pieces. The table of contents reads like a short list of mid-century masters: Edmund Wilson on Jean-Paul Sartre, Lionel Trilling on George Orwell, Orwell on Graham Greene, W. H. Auden on T. S. Eliot—a wide gamut. Nevertheless, most of the reviews share one striking trait: an unashamed quest for objective truth. Modernism, with its claim that perception is relative to the perceiver, had been around for nearly a half century, but the writers of the forties, looking out over the wreckage of Dresden and Hiroshima, decided that the events leading up to this were not relative to the perceiver. Trilling, in his review of
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, speaks of Orwell’s “old-fashioned faith that the truth can be got at, that we can, if we actually want to, see the object as it really is.” The same might be said of most of the writers in this group.

They want seriousness. Not one of them fails to discuss politics, or something close. They fear ideologies, and not just those that underlay the war. They also inspect the belief systems, seemingly benign, that rose up out of the rubble. Wilson, always Johnny-on-the-spot, voices his mixed feelings about Existentialism, the new French philosophy. Other critics mull over the religious orthodoxy embraced by many intellectuals of the pre- and postwar period. Orwell, in his review of Greene’s
Heart of the Matter
, casts a cold eye on the author’s adopted Roman Catholicism, and on what he saw as the new Catholics’ habit of exalting vice as
well as virtue, at least in their co-religionists: “This cult of the sanctified sinner seems to me to be frivolous, and underneath it there probably lies a weakening of belief, for when people really believed in Hell, they were not so fond of striking graceful attitudes on its brink.” On the other side, Louise Bogan thinks that neo-Catholicism may have exacerbated Robert Lowell’s tortured introspection, and thereby unsettled his mind.

Communism, of course, comes under discussion. After Stalin’s show trials, some writers frankly denounce the Soviet Union. (It is certainly the foremost model for the dystopia in which
Nineteen Eighty-Four
is set.) Others still embrace a diluted Communism—for example, that of the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War, as portrayed by Hemingway in
For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Clifton Fadiman, in his review of that book, quotes the hero’s farewell to his young mistress as he goes off to blow up a bridge, and die: “I love thee as I love all that we have fought for. I love thee as I love liberty and dignity and the rights of all men to work and not be hungry.” Today’s readers may find this rather gassy, but I think that they will still grant the man’s convictions some honor. The point is not which program for living the reviewers recommended or condemned, but that they regarded such endorsements as part of their job. Even in the one frankly comic essay in this collection, Wilson’s “Why Do People Read Detective Stories?,” the basic complaint is that detective fiction has no moral content. Reading such novels, Wilson says, “I finally felt that I was unpacking large crates by swallowing the excelsior in order to find at the bottom a few bent and rusty nails.”

These critics feared the loss of their world: their allegiances, the books they lived by, the emotions born of those books. In
Notes Towards the Definition of Culture
, T. S. Eliot, by then a declared Tory, voiced his worry that the dominant culture of the West was going to be tossed out by arrivistes. Auden, in his review of that book, has some fun imagining the howls of rage that such views, coming from the most honored poet and critic of the period, were going to provoke. They did. But it is worth noting that Eliot, and also Auden, were taking on the gravest questions of their time. Their difference from other critics of the period was only that they tried to figure out, and say, what the problem was. Before the Second World War book criticism in
The New Yorker
was, in general, a casual business. Reviews tended to be short—relaxed, genial, as if the critic were sitting down and lighting a pipe and recording his thoughts in an hour or two after dinner. In the forties, because of the war—and
also, I believe, because of the example of Edmund Wilson, who arrived at the magazine as a weekly book reviewer in 1944 and stayed for about twenty-five years, raising the bar—the treatment of books became more searching. In a 1946 review of Robert Lowell’s second collection of poems,
Lord Weary’s Castle
, Louise Bogan says that Lowell “may be the first of that postwar generation which will write in dead earnest.” This was a prescient judgment. Lowell was indeed one of the first representatives of the new seriousness, but he was also the most personal and hair-tearing. Soon after him, as people became used to postwar blues, we get comedy, and not just in Wilson’s piece on detective stories (he also has a sterling essay on horror stories) but also in the glints of wit between the lines of Orwell’s view of the apocalyptic Greene, and Auden’s view of Eliot’s Toryism. Still, they were all writing in dead earnest.

CLIFTON FADIMAN

OCTOBER 26, 1940 (ON
FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS
)

I
t’s not inaccurate to say that Hemingway’s
For Whom the Bell Tolls
is
A Farewell to Arms
with the background, instead, the Spanish Civil War. The hero, Robert Jordan, a young American Loyalist sympathizer, recalls to mind Frederic Henry. Like Henry, he is anti-heroically heroic, anti-romantically romantic, very male, passionate, an artist of action, Mercutio modernized. Though the heroine, Maria, reminds one rather less of Catherine Barkley, the two women have much in common. Also, in both books the mounting interplay of death and sex is a major theme, the body’s intense aliveness as it senses its own destruction.

But there, I think, the resemblance ends. For this book is not merely an advance on
A Farewell to Arms.
It touches a deeper level than any sounded in the author’s other books. It expresses and releases the adult
Hemingway, whose voice was first heard in the groping
To Have and Have Not.
It is by a better man, a man in whom works the principle of growth, so rare among American writers.

The story opens and closes with Robert Jordan lying flat on the pine-needle floor of a Spanish forest. When we first meet him he is very much alive and planning the details of his job, which is to join forces with a band of Spanish guerrillas and with their aid blow up an important bridge at the precise instant that will most help the Loyalist advance on Segovia. When we last see him he has fulfilled his mission and is facing certain death. Between the opening and closing pass three days and three nights. Between the opening and closing pass a lifetime for Robert and Maria and something very much like a lifetime for the reader. “I suppose,” thinks Robert, “it is possible to live as full a life in seventy hours as in seventy years.” The full life lived by Robert and Maria spills over into your own mind as you read, so the three days and three nights are added to your life, and you are larger and more of a person on
this page
than you were on
this page
. That is one test of a first-rate work of fiction.

For Whom the Bell Tolls
is about serious people engaged in serious actions. The word “serious” (a favorite among Spaniards) occurs again and again. The thoughts of Robert, even at his most sardonic, are serious thoughts. “There are necessary orders that are no fault of yours and there is a bridge and that bridge can be the point on which the future of the human race can turn. As it can turn on everything that happens in this war.” It is a stern and grave reflection, sterner, graver than anything in
A Farewell to Arms.
The title itself is part of a grave reflection, from the sermons of John Donne. That we may see on what a new and different level of emotion Hemingway now works, I quote the sentence from which the title is taken: “No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am
involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.”

This utterance (I suppose it is one of the greatest sentences in English) is about death and says yes to life. That men confer value on life by feeling deeply each other’s mortality is the underlying theme of the novel. Here is something other than Hemingway’s old romantic absorption in death, though growing out of it. Remember that
For Whom the Bell Tolls
is an anti-Fascist novel. “Any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde.” All of what the dictator most profoundly and religiously disbelieves is in that sentence. Hemingway is no fool. He portrays many of the Loyalists as cowards, brutes, and politicians—as they undoubtedly were. He portrays some of the Fascists as men of twisted nobility—as they undoubtedly were. But he knows that the war, at its deepest level (the first battle of the war now on your front pages), is a war between those who deny life and those who affirm it. And if it is not yet such a war, it must become so, or it will, no matter who wins, have been fought in vain. I take that to be the central feeling of
For Whom the Bell Tolls
, and that is why the book is more than a thrilling novel about love and death and battle and a finer work than
A Farewell to Arms.

It is interesting to watch in this new book a certain process of etherealization. Just as the Wagnerian death fascination of
Death in the Afternoon
changes here into something purer, so the small-boy Spartanism and the parade of masculinity which weakened the earlier books are transformed into something less gross, something—Hemingway would despise the word—spiritual. And yet this is by far the most sensual of all his books, the most truly passionate. This process of purification extends even to minor matters. In the other books, for example, drinking is described as a pleasure, as a springboard for wit, as a help to love, as fun, as madness. There is much drinking in
For Whom the Bell Tolls
, and none of it is solemn, but it becomes at times a serious thing. Liquor, drunk by these Spanish guerrillas before a battle, is a noble and necessary pleasure. Drinking has dignity.