![]() ![]() The story opens and closes with Robert Jordan lying flat on the pine-needle floor of a Spanish forest. 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. 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. 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.īut there, I think, the resemblance ends. Though the heroine, Maria, reminds one rather less of Catherine Barkley, the two women have much in common. Like Henry, he is anti-heroically heroic, anti-romantically romantic, very male, passionate, an artist of action, Mercutio modernized. ![]() The hero, Robert Jordan, a young American Loyalist sympathizer, recalls to mind Frederic Henry. ![]() It’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. ![]()
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