The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Ernest Hemingway · a novel in forty-three chapters, under an epigraph from Donne · Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, October 1940 · scored on Hemingway’s English, its rendered Spanish counted as part of the work; read from knowledge, no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Historical novel of a single action, compressed to seventy hours and opened to retrospect; a war novel of commitment and its disillusion, told through one consciousness and the voices around it
Mythos
A sacrifice: a stranger comes to a mountain, is given a woman, a family and a death, and lays down his life at a bridge to hold the pass for others; the sibyl, the fallen hero who returns, the old man of conscience; courage inherited from a grandfather and failed by a father
Phase
About three days and three nights in the last days of May 1937, before a Republican offensive toward Segovia, with the past gathered into them: a town’s day of killing, a hotel where the war is managed, a father and a grandfather
Presentation
Fiction; forty-three numbered chapters in a close third person centred on Robert Jordan, with chapters and passages given to Anselmo, Pilar, El Sordo and his men, Andrés, Karkov and Lieutenant Berrendo; first and last sentences on the same forest floor
Register
An English made to sound like Spanish, with “thee” and “thou” for the familiar and “obscenity” where an oath would stand; long run-on sentences beside short declaratives; a high share of dialogue
Scale
One bridge, one band in a cave, one hill, one road through the lines; the Republic, the Comintern and the fascist officers; behind Jordan, the American Civil War
Governing Proposition
Robert Jordan, an American fighting for the Spanish Republic, comes to a guerrilla band in the mountains northwest of Madrid with an order to blow a bridge at the hour a Republican offensive begins, and in about three days and three nights he is given a woman, a family and a death. The wager of the novel is that seventy hours, told at nearly real time and opened to memory, can hold a whole life and a whole war: that a just cause is fought with the same cruelty as the unjust one, by people who know it, and that a man may serve it wholly while seeing through it, because no death is private.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest.” The novel begins on the ground, in the pines of the Sierra de Guadarrama northwest of Madrid, in the last days of May 1937. Robert Jordan, an American fighting for the Republic, has come to the mountains with an order from General Golz: to blow a bridge at the hour a Republican offensive toward Segovia begins. For the work he needs a guerrilla band that lives in a cave in the hills, and he comes to them as a stranger. The book will have him reckon his life in hours, roughly seventy of them.
The band is the world of the book. Anselmo, the old man of conscience, who will not make killing easy. Pablo, the fallen hero, who will betray the band and return to it. Pilar, who reads Jordan’s palm on the first day and smells death on him. The gypsy, the wine, the arguments over Pablo. And María, raped and shorn, who is given to Jordan and given back her life. The book keeps the reader inside their speech, as a guest in it, the way Jordan is.
That speech is an English made to sound like Spanish. The familiar second person comes through as “thee” and “thou”; “Qué va” and “Inglés” run through the talk; and the word “obscenity” stands where a Spanish oath would. It is the book’s riskiest choice. It fails in places, chiefly in the love talk, where “thee” becomes a mannerism and “obscenity” reads as coy, and it has been parodied since. It succeeds where the band speaks and where Pilar tells, and there it does what no plain English could: it holds the reader at the edge of another language for the length of a long novel.
Movement II
Pilar tells Jordan how the war began in Pablo’s town. It is a long telling, from the dawn in the square to the last man at the cliff. The Republicans of the town formed two lines of men with flails, and the fascists were made to walk between them and were beaten, and thrown from the cliff. At first the killing was done as a duty; as the day went on and the wine went round, it turned into a drunken festival. The run-on sentences carry the rhythm of the mob, and Pilar tells it without palliation.
This is the moral ground the bridge stands on. The book was written by a supporter of the Republic, and it sets a Republican atrocity at its centre, told by a Republican. The cruelty of the just cause is not hidden or excused; it is the condition under which Jordan serves. The disclosure of the novel can be stated, and the tale states it first: a just cause is fought with the same cruelty as the unjust one, by people who know it.
Pilar is the book’s sibyl and its earth-mother. She describes to Jordan the smell of death, and the description unnerves him. Anselmo, beside her, keeps the other side of the ledger: he refuses to make killing easy, and his lapsed prayer returns to him. Between them the book weighs the ethics of killing from the ground up, and it puts Jordan’s own record among them. The tale is not an anthology piece detached from the novel; it is what makes the bridge cost what it costs.
Movement III
Snow falls in May, and it betrays the tracks. El Sordo, an old man who leads another band, makes his stand on a bare hilltop, with his dead horses for a breastwork. The boy Joaquín says the Hail Mary as the planes come. When the hill falls, the heads are taken afterwards. Jordan is not there. The book tells the stand without him, and so shows first, in others, the death he will die.
The telling is cut with total control. The point of view moves from the hilltop to the officers below, and then to Lieutenant Berrendo, who prays for his dead friend. The fascist side has its own prayers and its own grief, and the book gives them passages of their own. The sacred enters the novel here at its plainest: a boy’s prayer under the bombs, and an enemy officer’s prayer for a friend, set inside the same action.
At the cave the band’s comedy, the wine and the gypsy’s laziness and the arguments, is the life the order puts in pawn; Sordo’s death is the bill. One law runs through the whole book, obligation to the others kept in the full knowledge of death, and here its cost is paid in full for the first time.
Movement IV
Andrés is sent through the lines with a message for General Golz that could stop the attack and save the band. The book cuts away to his night journey, through the Republican lines toward Golz’s headquarters, and the form carries the irony. The message that could save the band moves slower than the attack.
What stops it is the war’s own management. The Comintern’s commissar, André Marty, under his own name, holds the message out of suspicion while the attack he could stop goes forward. Behind him is Gaylord’s, the hotel where the war is run by people who will not die in it, and Karkov with his cynicism. The law of the book breaks here against bureaucracy. The Marty chapter turns satire into caricature more than the book needs, but its charge is the book’s: the war is managed against its dying.
Pablo betrays the band, the exploder is stolen, and grenades must do its work. Then Pablo returns, and he kills the men he recruited, for their horses. Jordan and María have had their nights, and the famous night when the earth moves. The love story is the book’s sanctuary, and it obeys a softer law than the rest; María stays closer to an emblem than a person. But the book has given Jordan the thing he comes to believe: that a whole life can be lived in three days.
Movement V
The bridge has its few minutes. The wiring, the grenades, the timing to the bombing: the action is exact in its mechanics, and the bridge goes. Then Jordan’s leg is broken. He does not decide to be a sacrifice: the order and the broken leg decide, and he consents. He stays behind a tree, to hold the pass for the others.
There he waits. He holds off the pain, and the wish to use the pistol, so as to wait for the officer. His father killed himself with the Civil War pistol that Jordan once dropped into a lake; his grandfather fought in that war. Courage inherited and courage failed meet in the last pages, and the book does not settle whether this is a sacrifice or a chosen death that the father’s example shadows. Jordan’s reckoning is his own: “The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.”
The last sentence returns to the first: “He could feel his heart beating against the pine needle floor of the forest.” The book is a circle of seventy hours closed on the same ground. Above it stands Donne’s epigraph, the meditation from which the title comes: “any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde”, and so “never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.” The novel’s thesis is that no death is private. Eighty-six years of readers have gone back to it, and they still quarrel over its politics, its Spain and its love story.
Act III · The Twelve
The spine is as tight as any in the American novel: one bridge, one order, one attack, three days. Pablo’s treachery, Sordo’s horses, the snow in May that betrays the tracks, the planes over the pass and Andrés’s message all tighten on the same hour. The told episodes earn their place. Pilar’s tale is the moral ground the bridge stands on; Sordo’s hill is the death Jordan will die, shown first to others. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is the middle. The love scenes repeat their own vocabulary, Jordan’s monologues on the Party, his father and what he will write afterwards circle back, and the banter at the cave runs past its point. Perhaps a tenth to an eighth could go without the knowledge changing.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: a just cause is fought with the same cruelty as the unjust one, by people who know it, and a man may serve it wholly while seeing through it. Pilar tells, without palliation, how the Republicans of Pablo’s town beat the fascists between lines of men with flails and threw them from the cliff, and how the killing turned from a duty into a drunken festival; a writer who supported the Republic sets that at the book’s centre. Beside it stand the Comintern’s commissar, André Marty under his own name, obstructing Andrés out of suspicion, Karkov’s cynicism and Anselmo’s refusal to make killing easy. Donne gives the second disclosure: no death is private. Held below the top because the love story idealises where the rest of the book sees, and Jordan’s reckonings are sometimes stated rather than earned.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The heights are real and recur, and most are dreadful. Pilar’s tale is built in one long telling from the dawn in the square to the last man at the cliff. On Sordo’s hill the old man fights from a bare hilltop behind dead horses, the boy Joaquín says the Hail Mary as the planes come, and the heads are taken afterwards. Pilar describes the smell of death and unnerves Jordan. The bridge has its few minutes, and the close has Jordan, his leg broken, holding off pain and the wish to end it so as to wait for the officer. The warm height, the night when the earth moves, is famous and divides readers: the scene leans on its idiom. Held below the top for that lapse and for the level stretches of talk at the cave.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Myth built more than evoked. The structure is a sacrifice: a stranger comes to a mountain, is given a woman, a family and a death, and lays down his life at a bridge to hold the pass for others, all within the span of a short Passion. The archetype is load-bearing because the action carries it: Jordan does not decide to be a sacrifice; the broken leg and the order decide, and he consents. Around him the figures are built from the ground: Pilar the sibyl and earth-mother, who reads his palm on the first day; Pablo the fallen hero who betrays and returns; Anselmo the old man of conscience; María, raped and shorn and given back her life. Held below the top because María is closer to an emblem than a person, which thins half of the myth.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The inheritance is the war novel with a love story, Tolstoy above all (Hemingway’s admiration for War and Peace is on record), and Hemingway’s own manner, by then the most imitated style in English. The swerve has two parts. Against his own method: a long, interior, discursive novel, with sentences running a page, in place of the iceberg, and a hero who thinks at length. Against his own side: a supporter of the Republic puts a Republican atrocity at the book’s centre and names a living Comintern leader as a paranoid obstructor, at a moment when the left wanted the war told cleanly. The invented English for Spanish is a real wager, and much mocked. Held below the gate because the novel form itself is a proven path, and the larger departure in Hemingway’s work was made in the 1920s.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Change the form and the book loses what it knows. The compression of a life into seventy hours is the argument: Jordan comes to think that a whole life can be lived in three days, and the form makes it so, setting the near present at nearly real time and opening it to retrospect, Gaylord’s, the father, the grandfather, Pilar’s town, so that the past is gathered into the hours before the bridge. The two sentences on the pine-needle floor close the circle. The rendered Spanish is form as knowledge: the reader is kept inside the band’s speech as a guest, the way Jordan is. The Andrés chapters make the form carry the irony: the message that could save the band moves slower than the attack. Held below the top because the middle could stand in a different order and the love chapters are a container more than an instrument.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The evidence is eighty-six years of return, and the readings multiply: a novel of political commitment and of its disillusion; a study of suicide and inherited courage, read with new weight after the author’s death in 1961; a Spanish book in English, read and resented by Spanish readers for its Spain; a book on the ethics of killing; a love story read as fantasy, with María as its weakest figure or as its most damaged survivor. Questions stay open. Does Pablo’s return redeem him, or only finish his betrayal, since he kills the men he recruited for their horses? Is Jordan’s last stand a sacrifice, or a chosen death that his father’s example shadows? Is the book’s Spain seen or projected? Held below the top because the prose yields less on return than Hemingway’s short fiction, and part of the yield is the quarrel over its politics.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The field is the American novel of the twentieth century and, through its subject, the literature of the Spanish Civil War in every language. The intrinsic force is an extension, not a reorganisation: the book took the clipped manner of the 1920s and showed it could carry a long novel of history, politics and a single consciousness, and it gave the war of the 1930s its central novel in English, with Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia the nearest rival in prose. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Sam Wood’s film of 1943 with Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman, a long line of later war novels with a guerrilla or partisan hero, and Donne’s phrase returned to the language. The film is reach, not force. Force and reach together meet the bar and no more; the book does not reorganise possibility as the early stories did.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Survival is demonstrated over eighty-six years, and weighed as eighty-six years. The text survives whole as published, in print without break since 1940. Presence has been continuous and wide: read, widely translated, filmed and taught, and the book through which most readers of English meet the Spanish war. Three charges hold it at the foot of its band. Its rendered Spanish has dated faster than the plain English of the early books and is a common object of parody; the reception of the love story has cooled; and the widest presence belongs to books read by nearly every reader of the language, which this one is not. Fame lends nothing here: the figure rests on unbroken print, translation and reading over more than eight decades.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Judged on Hemingway’s English, with the invented idiom part of the making. The command at its best is as great as anything in his work. Pilar’s tale is one of the great sustained narratives in American prose, its long run-on sentences carrying the mob’s rhythm. Sordo’s hill is cut with total control, the point of view moving from the hilltop to the officers below and to Berrendo after. The bridge is exact in its mechanics: the wiring, the stolen exploder replaced by grenades, the timing to the bombing. The landscape is rendered without a wasted word. Charged: the idiom can become a mannerism, “thee” in the love talk above all; “obscenity” for oaths reads as coy; the love dialogue falls flat for long stretches; Jordan’s interior voice slackens into self-address. The making is load-bearing in the set pieces and not everywhere.
Score: 8.6 / 10
One law governs the whole: obligation to the others, kept in the full knowledge of death, and the cost of keeping it. Take the two most distant elements, the comic squabbling at the cave over the wine and the gypsy’s laziness, and Sordo’s men dying on the hill. They obey the same law: the band’s comedy is the life the order puts in pawn, and Sordo’s death is the bill. The law reaches Gaylord’s and Karkov, where the war is managed by people who will not die in it, and Andrés’s journey, where it breaks against bureaucracy; it reaches the father and grandfather, as a test of courage passed on. Held at this figure because the love story obeys a softer law, a sanctuary the book allows no one else, and the Marty chapter turns satire into caricature more than the law needs.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Many orders, held through one action and one consciousness. War: the guerrilla, the offensive, the planes, the cavalry patrol. The state and politics: the Republic, the Comintern, the anarchists, the fascist officers. The village: Pilar’s town and its killings, the bullfighters, the peasant memory of the band. The sacred: Anselmo’s lapsed and returning prayer, Joaquín’s Hail Mary, Berrendo’s prayer for his dead friend. The family: Jordan’s father and grandfather, and the band as a family. Love and the body. The natural order: the mountain, the snow, the horses. History: the American Civil War behind Jordan, Spain’s war in front. They are integrated, for everything comes to the bridge. Held below the top because three days and one place limit the reach: labour and ordinary life enter only as memory, and Spain beyond the mountain is seen chiefly from the hotel.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.0, then The Unconcealment and The Sublime at 8.8. Eighty-six years of unbroken print, translation and reading, with the text whole; a disclosure that holds, a Republican atrocity told by a Republican at the centre of a book on the Republic’s side; and heights that are real and recur, Pilar’s tale, Sordo’s hill, the bridge and Jordan behind the tree.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.0: a spine as tight as any in the American novel, but a middle in which the love scenes, Jordan’s monologues and the banter at the cave repeat, so that perhaps a tenth to an eighth could go. Next above it, The Swerve at 8.3: a double departure, from Hemingway’s own method and from his own side, inside the proven form of the war novel with a love story. Then The Bottomless Well at 8.4: readings that multiply and questions that stay open, from a prose that yields less on return than the short fiction.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.0 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.6, The Made at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.0, The Unconcealment at 8.8 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, and Pressure on Tradition meets it exactly at 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.3 falls two tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 8.0, against 7.5), and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.6. Four of the five summit conditions are met; the summit is withheld on the Epochal Gate, and the aggregate, at 8.6, stands below it as well.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, published by Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, in October 1940, dedicated to Martha Gellhorn; scored as the novel as published in 1940, in forty-three numbered chapters, under its epigraph from John Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624), Meditation XVII. The book is in copyright and no text of it was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Hemingway’s English, which is the original; the English made to sound like the Spanish its people speak is part of the work and is scored as such. Events are paraphrased, and English is quoted only where its words are certain: the first sentence, the last sentence and Jordan’s sentence on the world; the epigraph is given in substance and in its commonly printed spelling, without its italics. Sam Wood’s film of 1943 is not part of the work. The length in words, the share of dialogue, the length of the sentences and the chapter in which each episode falls are beyond this reading, and are neither credited nor charged. Facts that could not be verified, among them the book’s first sales, the history of its prizes and the attacks made on it at publication, are not given. Citations are by episode, placed by their position in the action.