Candide by Voltaire

Source of book: I own this. 

This is one of those books that I probably should have read years ago. We read about it in high school, but I don’t think we read any excerpts. (Probably too racy for a Fundie curriculum...those crazy French authors!) I also didn’t own a copy until recently. I picked up a lovely hardback Easton Press edition at a recent library sale, which gave me the chance to read it. 

First published in 1759, Candide caused controversy and scandal from the outset. Although it was widely known that Voltaire wrote it, he used a pseudonym for plausible deniability. His publishers weren’t so lucky, and were hounded and prosecuted and bankrupted for their pains. Ah, the good old days, when government censorship was inescapable. (Actually, Candide was indeed Banned In Boston in 1929.) As is often the case with censorship, this only increased the book’s popularity, and it became one of the most widely read and translated works of its era. 

Candide was influenced by Jonathan Swift’s earlier work, Gulliver’s Travels, as well as other picaresque novels, travelogues, and coming-of-age stories of the time. The title character (whose name is a bit of a pun, like the other characters) grows up in relative luxury, raised by a nobleman, and taught by Dr. Pangloss, who subscribes to Leibniz’ philosophy that we live in the best of all possible worlds. When Candide tries some kissing on the baron’s daughter, he is evicted, and begins a series of tragic and ludicrous adventures, becoming more and more disillusioned. 

The story itself is highly unrealistic, shockingly bloody (although few actually end up dying like we think they have), and deliciously satirical. Voltaire takes on pretty much every institution of his time, but also a lot of beliefs - and the problem of evil. Religion, of course, is thoroughly skewered, which is one reason it was banned. But also, governments, the military, philosophers, and society get solid digs throughout. Hypocrisy isn’t hard to find, of course. 

Regular readers of English Victorian literature like myself tend to find French writers a bit...racy. The thing of it is that they assume a certain degree of female promiscuity as normal, and don’t have the obsession with virginity that English and American writers seem to. This book plays sex for laughs and horror. The main female character, Cunegonde, is raped in the second chapter, is kept as a mistress by both a Jew and a priest at the same time (shocking enough at the time), becomes the mistress of a Governor in South America, then a sex slave to a pirate, and finally ends up as the nagging wife of Candide. But at least she becomes a good cook. (It is hard to explain how funny that line is without the context.) 

The book is both very much of its time, yet with timeless satire. I can’t say all of it has aged well - the bit about the women taking monkeys as lovers feels like a racist jab at indigenous peoples, for example. But much more feels contemporary. After all, Voltaire points out the tendency of powerful men to rape and abuse women, or at least use and discard them. Greed and jealousy haven’t gone away either, nor has ludicrous class chauvinism. Human nature is still human nature. 

Speaking of that, Candide is forced into the Bulgarian military, but chickens out and hides during the brutal battle. Voltaire’s description of the aftereffects of the battle are unfortunately spot on:

He clambered over heaps of dead and dying men and reach a neighboring village, which was in ashes; it was an Abare village, which the Bulgarians had burned in accordance with international law. Here, old men dazed with blows watched the dying agonies of their murdered wives who clutched their children to their bleeding breasts; there, disemboweled girls who had been made to satisfy the natural appetites of heroes gasped their last sighs; others, half-burned, begged to be put to death. Brains were scattered on the ground among dismembered arms and legs.

As he flees this horror, he comes across a village that belongs to the other side, and the same thing was done by them. At this point, he is still clinging to the “this is the best of all possible worlds” philosophy, but it is getting harder. 

Soon afterward, Candide is reunited with Pangloss, who relates the sad fates of the baron and his household. (Although it turns out they aren’t all dead…) Pangloss looks like hell, and confesses that when Candide caught him “giving a lesson in experimental physics” to the maid, he caught syphilis. 

“My dear Candide! You remember Paquette, the maid-servant of our august Baroness; in her arms I enjoyed the delights of Paradise which have produced the tortures of Hell by which you see I am devoured; she was infected and perhaps is dead. Paquette received this present from a most learned monk, who had it from the source; for he received it from an old countess, who had it from a cavalry captain, who owed it to a marchioness, who derived it from a page, who had received it from a Jesuit, who, when a novice, had it in direct line from one of the companions of Christopher Columbus.” 

Voltaire is actually correct about this: it is generally agreed that Columbus’ crew brought syphilis back from the New World with them. But notice how many unspoken truths Voltaire puts in this one statement. Pangloss taking advantage of his position to seduce a maid, who had previously slept with a monk, who also did it with a countess. The randy countess did it with both clergy and military; the soldier was irresistible to multiple rich women, one of whom also had the hots for young boys. (A page would be from ages 7-14, typically.) That boy was infected after being raped by a priest, who got it by a chain back to Columbus. That’s a lot of morally and/or socially unacceptable relationships that were widely known to exist, but were not always talked about in public. 

Despite all this, Pangloss continues to cling to his philosophy. 

“It was all indispensable, and private misfortunes make the public good, so that the more private misfortunes there are, the more everything is well.” 

If you think this sounds a bit like Social Darwinism (which would come into vogue a century later), you are right. 

Candide is, through improbably circumstances, reunited with Cunegonde, only to find that she is dependent on selling her body to the Jewish merchant and the Inquisitor on alternating days. They both show up, and, jealous of finding Cunegonde in the presence of another man, try to kill Candide, who kills them instead in self defense. Cunegonde marvels that Candide, who is both mild mannered and incompetent with a sword, manages this. 

“My dear young lady,” replied Candide, “when a man is in love, jealous, and has been flogged by the Inquisition, he is beside himself.” 

That’s a laugh out loud line, and wouldn’t be entirely out of place in The Princess Bride. 

One of the watercolor illustrations from my Easton Press edition of the book, by Sylvain Sauvage.

There is a decent amount of gratuitous boobage, but what do you expect from a French artist?

The party flees to South America, where they end up in Paraguay. Candide’s servant, Cacambo (the most rational person in this crazy book), spent time there, and explains how things are. 

“Their government is a most admirable thing. The kingdom is already more than three hundred leagues in diameter and is divided into thirty provinces. Los Padres have everything and the people have nothing; ‘tis the masterpiece of reason and justice. For my part, I know nothing so divine as Los Padres who here make war on the Kings of Spain and Portugal and in Europe act as their confessors; who here kill Spaniards and at Madrid send them to Heaven; all this delights me…” 

Eventually, Candide meets another philosopher, Martin, who is the opposite of Pangloss. Martin is cynical and pessimistic about everything, which makes him as mockable as Pangloss. Here are a couple of exchanges:

“But to what end was this world formed?” said Candide.

“To infuriate us,” replied Martin.

I am reminded of the famous line from The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy…

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory mentioned, which states that this has already happened.

Later in the conversation, the naive Candide asks another question:

“Do you think,” said Candide, “that men have always massacred each other, as they do today? Have they always been liars, cheats, traitors, brigands, weak, flighty, cowardly, envious, gluttonous, drunken, grasping, and vicious, bloody, backbiting, debauched, fanatical, hypocritical and silly?”

“Do you think,” said Martin, “that sparrow-hawks have always eaten the pigeons they came across?”

“Yes, of course,” said Candide.

“Well,” said Martin, “if sparrow-hawks have always possessed the same nature, why should you expect men to change theirs?”

Near the end, Candide and Martin are the guests of Pococurante, a rich epicurean who is a critic of everything. Martin is just cynical, but Pococurante finds his “excellent taste” prevents him from enjoying nearly everything. After dismissing the classics of the time as mostly rubbish, Pococurante gives away his game:

“Fools admire everything in a celebrated author. I only read to please myself, and I only like what suits me.” 

I know a few people like that. Nothing against reading for fun - hey, I do it all the time! But to go through life unchallenged, only dabbling in what you already know and like, seems a tragedy. 

After all these crazy adventures, Pangloss, Candide, Martin, Cunegonde, and a few others they have picked up on the way, settle down on a bit of land in a sort of commune, and find some bit of contentment, if not exactly happiness. Martin urges everyone to work without arguing as that is the only way life will be endurable. Pangloss, despite admitting that he didn’t actually believe his own optimism, keeps on preaching it, claiming that all the horrors of the past were necessary for their current situation. Candide, finally older and wiser, ends the book by saying:

“‘Tis well said,” replied Candide, “but we must cultivate our gardens.” 

Candide is unlike any other book I have read, I must say. While clearly in the 18th Century style, it’s short episodes and rapid-fire plot contrast with the more wordy and rambling style of Swift and others. The book is short, but covers a bewildering amount of ground. All the wit and satire happens in such a rapid-fire manner that you can’t just whip through it - you have to stop and savor it. In a way, I was reminded of Mark Twain, who also used unexpected twists, improbable events, and razor-sharp satire throughout his work. 

***

Update: I got busy and completely forgot that I needed to add music to this! 

Back in the day, when I was a rookie violinist with the BSO, we had these summer pops concerts outdoors in the heat. We got a full rehearsal and a quick run-through before the concert, and that was it. We played 1812 Overture at the end with fireworks and stuff. 

Anyway, because literally everyone besides my brother and me had played the stuff a gazillion times, we got handed our music before the first rehearsal (we had a shot at 1812 because our teacher gave us parts to work on), and had to sight read Bernstein's Candide Overture. 

Total flop sweat time. 

We managed to make it through without playing in the rests, at least. Now, it doesn't seem as terrifying as it did back then, but I still remember that feeling of panic. Welcome to the big league, kid...

The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

Source of book: I own this.

One of the gaps in my reading experience has been the “era of pessimism,” for lack of a better term. I read a lot of the Victorians and earlier, and some of the books of the 20th Century, but not nearly as much as I should have. I think there were two reasons for this. First, my parents, who introduced me to authors like Dickens, Twain, and Hawthorne at a very young age (think single digits) weren’t all that familiar with more modern books - perhaps a result of the schooling they received? I mean, there were some - my mom encouraged me to read The Octopus. But for the most part, we read older books together. The other factor was that my literature curriculum was A Beka, which, while in a few cases quite subversive for a Fundie publication, tended to give the 20th Century - that godless era - a rather short shrift.

So, over the last few years, I have tried to read a wider variety of books and catch up on some of the most important ones I missed. To that end, I read my first Edith Wharton novel: The House of Mirth.

The title comes from Ecclesiastes: “The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.”

Wharton was born about a decade before the Gilded Age, into a wealthy New York socialite family - like the characters in this book. As such, she wrote from first-hand knowledge of that society. She also was insulated from charges that this book was sour grapes, that she was from a lower class just jealous of the wealthy. Her own background allowed her to write piercing satire from her own experiences and take her shots against her own tribe, so to speak.

Lily Dale is an impoverished but well born beauty who has been raised since birth for one task: to marry money. At the opening of the book, however, she is at the elderly age of 29, and so far hasn’t succeeded. In part this is because she wishes to marry for love. As she discovers, though, the ultra-wealthy guys tend to be...not very nice people. This much remains true. Excesses of money and power do not tend to build good character, and trust fund babies (like, say Il Toupee) grow up to be entitled assholes.

Lily makes a number of missteps that lead to her crashing out of society, and eventually coming to a tragic end. The first is at the beginning, when she visits her friend Laurence Selden, a respectable but not wealthy lawyer. (He is kind of at the fringe of the top society because of his birth, and he lives a comfortable, but not ostentatious life - but he still earns his living working, which keeps him out of the upper echelons.) She is seen leaving by Mr. Rosedale, a Jewish banker trying to rise in society.

Next, she chickens out of marrying Percy Gryce, a wealthy mama’s boy who is at least not a jerk, even if he is insipid.

In debt because of the social expectation that she play at bridge for money, she cannot sustain her lifestyle, and turns to her friend’s husband, a stock speculator, for assistance. She fails to realize that he isn’t just investing her money, he is adding to it with the expectation that his generosity will be...rewarded. And not in a way Lily wishes to.

From there, it is misstep after misstep, and not of the necessarily blameworthy variety. She is “sacrificed” by a friend who wishes to deflect blame for her own affair. She is unjustly accused of trying to get young heir married to her social inferior. (The males who were really involved get off scot free, of course.)

I can’t decide how much of The House of Mirth is intended to skewer upper class society, and how much of it is intended to critique women like Lily, who expect to have wealth and love just because they are well-born and beautiful. Probably both. Wharton also takes on the sexual double standard, where men are free to play without consequence, while women pay the social price. Unless they have money and a scapegoat.

Reading this book left me with ambiguous feelings about it. On the one hand, Wharton is a skilled and witty writer. There are many devastating lines, and her descriptions and psychological explorations are memorable. On the other, her casual anti-semitism is really grating. Rosedale is mostly a stereotype common to the age, and even the little bit of humanity he is briefly allowed is then immediately counteracted by his avarice. In a book with nuanced and conflicted and complicated characters, that one should be “unacceptably Jewish” and assumed to be beyond the pale for a woman of good breeding to consider is disappointing. And while you could blame Wharton‘s time in history, it seems less of a valid excuse when you consider that George Eliot wrote a far better book with Jewish characters, Daniel Deronda, a full 30 years prior.

Another irritating factor for me was that it was hard to find a character to actually like. I guess the closest is Selden, who seems at least normal and decent. But he - quite rightly - realizes that Lily would never be happy with his financial station. So I was hoping he wouldn’t get caught in her snare. Except that he is about the only good thing in her life, and you hate to see her lose that. And Lily herself is the sort of woman that I most hate to deal with in divorce court - aware of their beauty and wearing a gigantic sense of entitlement. I spent more of the book looking on in horror at the unfolding tragedy, but having a hard time sympathizing with anyone. To quote Mercutio: “A plague on both your houses!”

There are some great lines along the way, at least. One comes in the opening scene, where Lily Dale expresses her jealousy of Selden’s modest flat (with a library, though, so I approve.)

“How delicious to have a place like this all to one’s self! What a miserable thing it is to be a woman.”

Seldon points out that his cousin gets along fine by herself. But she has no ambitions of marrying, so Lily sees female independence as giving up the dream of marrying money.

I also loved this description of another character, Mrs. Dorset.

She was smaller and thinner than Lily Bart, with a restless pliability of pose, as if she could have been crumpled up and run through a ring, like the sinuous draperies she affected. Her small pale face seemed the mere setting of a pair of dark exaggerated eyes, of which the visionary gaze contrasted curiously with her self-assertive tone and gestures; so that, as one of her friends observed, she was like a disembodied spirit who took up a great deal of room.

There is also a good scene where Lily is still on the fence about Percy Gryce.

She had been bored all afternoon by Percy Gryce -- the mere thought seemed to waken an echo of his droning voice -- but she could not ignore him on the morrow, she must follow up her success, must submit to more boredom, must be ready with fresh compliances and adaptabilities, and all on the bare chance that he might ultimately decide to do her the honour of boring her for life.

This is, of course, the dilemma for Lily. Which is more important? To marry for the vast wealth she craves? Or settle for less but avoid the boredom? Lest we forget, this is only the dilemma because Lily is well-born and beautiful - if she were ordinary, she would be forced to take what she could get.

It isn’t until we have the stage set pretty well that we get to hear of Lily’s upbringing. Of her mother who was good at spending and raised her daughter to be the same. Of her father who did what was expected - bring home the money - until he didn’t, and at that point, he might as well be dead. Wharton sneaks this poisonous line in:

She [Lily] had not been deceived by Mrs. Bart’s words: she knew at once that they were ruined. In the dark hours which followed, that awful fact overshadowed even her father’s slow and difficult dying. To his wife, he no longer counted: he had become extinct when he ceased to fulfil his purpose, and she sat at his side with the provisional air of a traveller who waits for a belated train to start.

I have seen too many of this kind of woman in my divorce practice. Sure, they aren’t in the upper crust of society, but the idea that the function of a man and the measure of his manhood is money very much persists. It is the same dynamic: woman leverages her beauty and “purity” into a marriage to a man with sufficient income. Life happens, and his income decreases, and she dumps his butt and slanders him to everyone as lacking manhood (aka money).

Here is another cutting line, from Lily’s analysis of Mr. Gryce’s nature.

He had the kind of character in which prudence is a vice, and good advice the most dangerous nourishment. But Lily had known the species before: she was aware that such a guarded nature must find one huge outlet of egoism, and she determined to be to him what his Americana had hitherto been: the one possession in which he took sufficient pride to spend money on it. She knew that this generosity to self is one of the forms of meanness, and she resolved so to identify herself with her husband’s vanity that to gratify her wishes would be to him the most exquisite form of self-indulgence.

That’s just so good. Wharton does indeed capture that dynamic - the man who loves to spend on his wife as he would on another hobby that gratifies him. To see her dressed finely (or, in the modern case, to see her driving an Land Rover) gratifies his ego, and is that “exquisite form of self-indulgence.”

Later in the book, Lily has found herself in the uncomfortable position of accompanying a wealthy friend and her husband on a European trip - and the expectation is that she will keep the husband occupied so he doesn’t notice his wife having an affair with a much younger man. But things fall apart (and Lily is eventually blamed for it.) I like this line in the middle of a longer contemplation of the situation.

All her concern had hitherto been for young Silverton, not only because, in such affairs, the woman’s instinct is to side with the man, but because his case made a peculiar appeal to her sympathies. He was so desperately in earnest, poor youth, and his earnestness was of so different a quality from Bertha’s, though hers too was desperate enough. The difference was that Bertha was in earnest only about herself, while he was in earnest about her. But now, at the actual crisis, this difference seemed to throw the weight of destitution on Bertha’s side, since at least he had her to suffer for, and she had only herself.

Wharton’s wit is definitely the best part of the book. I wonder if she was as rapier-sharp in person as well.

After the crisis, Bertha blames Lily, and tells tales about her. Lily’s poorer and do-gooder friend asks why Lily can’t just tell the truth about it all and clear her name.

“The whole truth?” Miss Bart laughed. “What is truth? Where a woman is concerned, it’s the story that’s easiest to believe. In this case it’s a great deal easier to believe Bertha Dorset’s story than mine, because she has a big house and an opera box, and it’s convenient to be on good terms with her.”

Lily is right, alas. We see this play out every day, where those with money and power are able to control the narrative. (Although the Me Too movement is pushing back - a welcome development.) In fact, I can point to my wife’s experience as a teen as an example of this. It was more convenient to believe she was a Jezebel gunning for the young men than to challenge those with power in the group.

There is one final observation I want to look at. As Lily falls further in social status, it becomes clear that her specific skill set isn’t well adapted to changing circumstances.

Having been accustomed to take herself at the popular valuation, as a person of energy and resource, naturally fitted to dominate any situation in which she found herself, she vaguely imagined that such gifts would be of value to seekers after social guidance; but there was unfortunately no specific head under which the art of saying and doing the right thing could be offered in the market, and even Mrs. Fisher’s resourcefulness failed before the difficulty of discovering a workable vein in the vague wealth of Lily’s graces.

Wharton puts it particularly well, but the problem is simple enough: Lily hasn’t learned how to “do” anything productive. She has learned how to perform a role in a particular society. She knows how to look pretty, dress well, say witty stuff, and make people of a similar social class enjoy her company. But, failing to leverage these skills into becoming a rich man’s wife, she has nothing else really to offer. And when she is forced to actually earn a living, she is worse off than the average working-class girl.

Inherited tendencies had combined with early training to make her the highly specialized product she was: an organism as helpless out of its narrow range as the sea-anemone torn from the rock.

I have had this discussion with a number of people of the white Evangelical persuasion - typically parents of children or teens - about whether it is wise to train female children with the goal that they will be stay-at-home moms. For the cult in which my wife was raised, this was the only acceptable choice - and she was ostracised because she went to college to learn a skill.

But really, isn’t this very much like Lily Bart? Sure, the social stratum is lower - the white middle class - but the idea is the same. A woman is to be trained to perform a particular social role. “But what about caring for children and keeping a home?” I hear all the time. Sorry, I do not consider caring for children and doing housework to be a particularly unusual skill. I believe it is a basic life skill that all people - men included - should have. Kind of like knowing how to bathe and dress one’s self. Like Lily’s ability to charm, they aren’t that marketable in a pinch. And, given how many “stay-at-home moms” I know and have known who send their kids to school and have a housekeeper come in and clean, I am thinking the essence of the role isn’t actually the kids and house: it is fulfilling a particular social role in a particular social stratum. And if you fall out of that stratum for whatever reason, it’s a hard landing without other skills to fall back on.

In the end, Lily’s desire to marry for love isn’t a bad one. But combined with her insistence that it come with money, and her lack of a plan B, mean that she has zero margin for error - or even bad luck. Anything less than the “perfect” man coming along means she will fail. In contrast, Wharton portrays the working-class women, who grow up expecting to work, and hoping for a marriage to a decent if poor man. And so, if love doesn’t come, they can work, and if it does, they work to provide for the family. There is the resilience of lower expectations and greater diversity and suitability of their skill sets.

So, I guess in the end, I did rather enjoy this book. The wit and perceptive portrayal of the issues won me over, despite the lack of likeable characters.

For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

Source of book: I own this.

"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee."

~John Donne (Meditation XVII)

***

It has been a while since I read any Hemingway. And when I did, I read short stories. Believe it or not, I have never read one of his full length novels. I suppose one reason for this is that, while I like his writing, his unrelenting pessimism is difficult in large doses for me. I’m not talking about the ending of a book - not all books have to end happily. I love tragedy well enough. But Hemingway reminds me of, say, King Lear or Othello in that the bleakness is pretty unrelenting. Or like Chekhov, but without the humor.

This is not to say in any way that Hemingway is a bad writer. To the contrary, his bleakness is very well written and convincing, which is why it is difficult for me. Hemingway has a modern, spare, realistic style of writing that paints clear and detailed pictures without wasting words. He lets you in on the psychology of his characters as well as anyone, and does it by showing, not telling. His streams of consciousness are astoundingly close to real life for an introvert like me, which is why (in this particular book), the most traumatic parts were the inner dialogue of Robert Jordan’s head. I would be doing the exact same thing, and it was spooky.

I also don’t want to create the impression that I disliked For Whom the Bell Tolls. It is an excellent book, with a compelling, carefully paced and plotted story, and characters you care about. I liked the book, but it took me a while, because after 30-40 pages, I had to walk away and read something else. (With a brutal concert schedule and a 500 page book, that means slow reading…)

So, about the book itself. For Whom the Bell Tolls is set during the Spanish Civil War, in the 1930s. Hemingway wrote the book in 1939-40, and based it in part on his own experiences as a correspondent during the war.

While I had a very vague sense of the history involved, my true introduction to the Spanish Civil War was six years ago, when I read The Cypresses Believe in God, Jose Maria Gironella’s outstanding novel set on the brink of the war. Back in 2012, the book was terrifying enough. After the election of a man who is for all intents and purposes Fascist, and whose rhetoric and manipulation of the dominant religion looks much like the Falange, it seems urgently relevant. Our own society, like that of Spain in the 1930s, distrusts each other, distrusts institutions, and the Right wing seems all too eager to start a slaughter of those outside their tribe.

So, it would be too much, perhaps, to expect a book about that bloody, senseless, fratricidal, and damaging war to be anything other than unrelentingly pessimistic.

Robert Jordan is a youngish American fighting with the International Brigades, on behalf of the Republic forces. Jordan is originally from Montana, but has been teaching Spanish before he was recruited as a dynamiter. The war itself is in some ways a preview of the alliances of World War Two. On the side of the Republic are the English and Americans. But also the Russians and the Communist parties in Spain. And the Anarchists. On the other side, led by Franco, are the various right wing and Fascist parties, the Catholic Church - and the Fascist parties of Italy and Germany.

[Something to keep in mind here is that Hitler and Nazism were outliers as far as Fascist regimes went. Franco and Il Duce were more typical.]

The book opens with Jordan being led by Anselmo, an old guerrilla, to a band of rebels fighting behind Fascist lines. They are led by Pablo, who is getting increasingly erratic and unreliable as the war grinds on. Or perhaps, in reality, they are led by Pilar, Pablo’s wife - and hands down the best character in the book. She is badass. As badass as they come. And psychologically interesting as well.

Jordan’s job is to blow up a bridge right before an attack launched by Republican forces. This being Hemingway, we know it will end badly in some way or another. I won’t spoil the plot from there.

Particularly interesting in the book was the interplay of Pablo and Pilar, each of which have back stories which are gradually revealed as the book progresses. Pablo has had a pretty good career in the war blowing up trains, and causing general havoc. Pilar had quite a wild youth before settling down with Pablo. Both of them hate Fascists both because of the longstanding oppression of the lower classes (to which they belong) by the powerful landowners, and because of the slaughter of civilians in their home village by Falangists. One of the most haunting scenes in the book is when Pilar tells of the revenge taken against the Falangists - the men are run off of a cliff one at a time. It is pretty brutal.

Of course, the Falangists are every bit as bad when they get the upper hand. Maria, a young woman who becomes Jordan’s lover, watched her parents get slaughtered, and is brutally gang raped, leading to her near death and near insanity before Pilar rescues her. Gironella too tells of the way that people in Spain brutally turned on each other in an orgy of violence and hate.

There were some interesting lines in the book. Hemingway explores the uncomfortable reality of bigotry - which is a problem for both sides in the conflict. But particularly for the Right, which despises both the common man the inteligenta. I found particularly interesting Jordan’s observation about how fundamentalist religion feeds bigotry and hate:

"To be bigoted you have to be absolutely sure that you are right and nothing makes that surety and righteousness like continence. Continence is the foe of heresy."

The first part is pretty obvious. An absolute sense of surety that one is right is indeed the calling card of both fundamentalism and bigotry of all kinds. But the second part is one that I believe is true as well. I do not think it is an accident that American Fundamentalists/Evangelicals (pretty indistinguishable these days, alas) are obsessed with sex. In my experience, believing oneself to be free of sexual impurity serves as a way to look down on everyone else. It feeds bigotry by making a person feel righteous, even as he or she does shocking evil to his or her fellow humans.

Hemingway also uses an interesting exchange between Jordan and Primitivo, a young guerrilla to make a rather apropos point about the United States - even more relevant in our present time. They are discussing the differences between society in Spain and the United States - and the relevant political questions. Why, for example, did the US maintain a republic without confiscating large estates?

Robert Jordan, wiping out the stew bowl with bread, explained how the income tax and inheritance tax worked. 'But the big estates remain. Also, there are taxes on the land,' he said.

'But surely the big proprietors and the rich will make a revolution against such taxes. Such taxes appear to me to be revolutionary. They will revolt against the government when they see that they are threatened, exactly as the fascists have done here,' Primitivo said.

'It is possible.'

'Then you will have to fight in your country as we fight here.'

'Yes, we will have to fight.'

'But are there not many fascists in your country?'

'There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the time comes.'

Dang. Let’s see, we have had a long (and largely successful) campaign by the ultra rich in our country to largely eliminate the estate tax, and drastically lower income taxes on the wealthy. And we have had literal Nazis marching in our streets. Hmm. Maybe Hemingway was on to something there.

Also: “There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the time comes.” YES. And some of us have indeed discovered who the Fascist sympathizers in our life are too - the ones still rooting for Trump as he works to ethnically cleanse our country, dismantle our public institutions, and enrich himself and his cronies. We can see who many of you are, unfortunately.

Death is a major theme of For Whom the Bell Tolls - as the title might hint. Jordan knows his time is coming. Whether sooner, or later, death will get him. In a great scene where Jordan recalls some of the Russians he worked with, he tells of an event where Karkov ends up with some dead Russians on his hands. He can’t just leave them, because the Russians are not officially involved in the war, and he doesn’t need an international incident. So the bodies are carefully disfigured in away as to look like they were killed in a fire. That way, they are just bodies.

No one could tell from the bodies of these wounded men he would leave in beds at the Palace, that they were Russians. Nothing proved a naked dead man was a Russian. Your nationality and your politics did not show when you were dead.

That last line is outstanding. Ultimately, the nuances of our politics won’t really matter when we are corpses. (Although, if you take Christ literally, our destiny after that hinges on how we cared for others - or not.)

One more example of good writing is worth quoting.

Now that his rage was gone he was excited by this storm as he was always by all storms. In a blizzard, a gale, a sudden squall, a tropical storm, or a summer thunder shower in the mountains there was an excitement that came to him from no other thing. It was like the excitement of battle except that it was clean.

One final observation. Because of when the book was written, Hemingway had to steer clear of obscenity laws. This was thirty years before Miller v. California, which overruled prior precedent and established a new standard. As of 1940, the standard applied was essentially a Victorian one: material was obscene if it tended to “deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences.” Even as late as 1957, the court was still using a “average person, applying contemporary community standards” test for obscenity. It wasn’t until Miller that our current standard was adopted. In order to ban material as obscene, the court must find (in addition to the other requirements) “Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” If written today, For Whom the Bell Tolls would undoubtedly look different.

The most obvious difference is that Hemingway scrupulously avoids actual swear words, while making it blindingly obvious that his characters are swearing. In most cases, he just substitutes “obscenity” for whatever word he means. This is particularly amusing in cases where he uses a standard Spanish swearing formula, as in the common, “I obscenity in the milk of your ancestors!” That cracks me up every time. But, Hemingway simultaneously wrote the story the way he wanted to while thumbing his nose at the censors, who would find nothing literally offensive in the book, while pretty much every reader ever could fill in the appropriate cuss word without difficulty.

The other interesting way the book carefully skirts the censors is in its sex scenes. Yes, you could write an actual sex scene in 1940. You could mention breasts, and buttocks. But not genitals. Not directly. And you couldn’t say that they had an orgasm. Just that “the earth moved,” which has become a cultural cliche. (It was original when Hemingway used it...not so much now.) In some cases, I find the lack of graphic language to enhance the sexiness of a scene. In this case, it was more amusing because of Hemingway’s dated assumptions about gender, and the way his language is now overused. But I certainly have read worse writing about sex.

For Whom the Bell Tolls is a worthy read, both for its characters and its strong writing. It isn’t the most pleasant book, but it is a good reminder of the human cost of war - and the human cost of Tribalism, which is behind the vast majority of wars big and small.

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You don’t think I could leave out Metallica’s take on the phrase, do you? It is definitely in harmony with the themes of Hemingway’s novel.