Hemingway, Malraux and Spain: For Whom the Bell Tolls and L'espoir

Ben Stoltzfus

This essay blends historical facts, political attitudes, biographical events, and aesthetic preoccupations. It organizes and focuses information from a variety of sources, especially the 1992 issue of the North Dakota Quarterly entitled Malraux, Hemingway, and Embattled Spain, into a narrative sequence that highlights the personal rivalry between Ernest Hemingway and Andr Malraux. It also analyzes the artistic differences between the two novelists as they are manifest in two works that emerged from the Spanish Civil War: For Whom the Bell Tolls and L'espoir. Hemingway's novel, with occasional metafictional digressions, is written in the classic realist tradition, and it describes one event, the blowing of a bridge in the Guadarama Mountains of central Spain, whereas Malraux's novel transcends conventional narrative form in order to communicate the simultaneity of the Spanish conflict on all military fronts. His novel is decentered in ways that anticipate postmodern attitudes, and this dispersal of narrative perspective contrasts markedly with Hemingway's unitary vision of an event that, for him, revolves around one main character, Robert Jordan, in contrast with some six or seven characters for Malraux, all of whom are more or less equal. Hemingway describes individuals in action, whereas Malraux's most memorable episodes involve groups, collective action, and fraternal endeavor. The unanimism of L'espoir is not to be found in the isolated events and circumscribed interactions of the characters in For Whom the Bell Tolls. The biographical information is not new, but my organization of it is, and it helps to explain the animus between the two writers. Although essays have been written comparing For Whom the Bell Tolls and L'espoir, none combines the historical, political, biographical, and aesthetic categories [End Page 179] using individual and unanimist molds, or frames the differences in the context of classic realism and postmodernism. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in July 1936, Andr Malraux was purposefully engaged in Spain less than a week after the rebel uprising of July 17. He organized a foreign volunteer air force for the Loyalists, assumed its command in battle, collected French bombers for the Espaa Squadron, and personally flew sixty-five missions. Jules Segnaire, who was with Malraux in the Espaa Squadron, says: I was with him over Teruel when we had flak all around us. Malraux risked his life as much as any of the comrades. But his role was obviously more important, first because he had to command the squadron, and secondly because he had to supply it. If there were planes, it was thanks to him. 1 Meanwhile, Ernest Hemingway was writing To Have and Have Not and slugging it out with Wallace Stevens in Key West. 2 By November, when Malraux's squadron had been put out of action by Franco's superior air power, Malraux traveled to the

United States to raise funds for the Republican cause. 3 In the course of his visit he met Hemingway and gave him a list of people to see in Spain. 4 Hemingway arrived in March 1937, along with fellow journalist Martha Gellhorn and co-worker Joris Ivens with whom he would collaborate on a fund-raising film for the Republic. Meanwhile, Malraux had returned to France in early 1937, and went back to Spain again in July. Hemingway, unlike Malraux, had missed the decisive first eight months of the war on which Malraux's novel L'espoir is based. When Malraux returned to France for its publication in 1937, Hemingway, perhaps envious, accused him of pulling out of the war too soon, "of pussyfooting off to resume his career of opportunist, high-wire artist, and political charlatan . . . while the Spanish Republic bled to death from its wounds." 5 Despite their emerging antipathy, Malraux and Hemingway were much alike. In their lives and works they projected a total artistic construct, what Bickford Sylvester calls "an orchestrated amalgamation of fictional texts and fictionalized authorial persona," and they manipulated the public into identifying their novels with their lives. 6 They were also cat lovers, middle class, short on formal education, and had fathers who had committed suicide. They were both going through marital break-up in Spain and were starting over with new partners. They mistrusted intellectuals [End Page 180] and they adored T. E. Lawrence, the quintessential man of action who was also a writer (Garrick 14-15). The protagonists of L'espoir and For Whom the Bell Tolls, like their authors, opposed fascism in general while also engaged in the specific struggle against Franco. Hemingway had once admired La condition humaine, stating that it was the best book he had read in a decade, and Malraux had said that A Farewell to Arms was the best love novel to have been written since Stendhal. Malraux also admired Hemingway for being a warrior-writer, particularly the action passages in For Whom the Bell Tolls where his descriptions and style were "the language of action." 7 After the war in Spain, and by the end of World War II, the exploits of both writers loomed larger than life. Indeed, they were both credited with "liberating Paris," however exaggerated that claim may have been. Their rivalry surfaced again when they met at the Ritz and Malraux announced that he had commanded two thousand men compared with Hemingway's ten or twelve. 8 Earlier, Hemingway had referred derogatorily to Malraux's novels as "masterpisses" even as Malraux criticized the love story in For Whom the Bell Tolls as "the intrusion of fiction on reality" (Lewis 67). After the war, both men went their separate ways, Hemingway to Cuba and Ketchum, Idaho, where he died in 1961. Malraux remained in Paris, eventually to become Charles de Gaulle's minister of culture. He died in 1976. In November 1996, Malraux was reinterred in the Pantheon, on the Left Bank in Paris, where he now rests in the company of other great Frenchmen, such as JeanJacques Rousseau and Victor Hugo. This honor serves to reinforce the striking contrast between France and America and the way the two countries treat their artists. France respects its intellectuals whereas America neglects them. In fact, artists in America tend not to be intellectuals. There is the mystique of the innocent creative genius. Hemingway, for one, shunned egg heads, preferring the friendship of soldiers, hunters, ranchers, and fishermen. Commenting on this phenomenon, Malraux stated that "to my mind, the essential characteristic of contemporary American writing is

that it is the only literature whose creators are not intellectuals." 9 And he wondered how American literature could intellectualize itself without losing its direct approach. It was precisely this direct approach that French writers and critics such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Claude-Edmonde Magny had admired.10 Although, in his fiction, Malraux prefers men of action to intellectuals, he himself was an intimidating interlocutor. Stephen Spender, Andr Gide, A. J. Ayer, Franois Mauriac, among others, attest Malraux's [End Page 181] brilliance and dynamism as a conversationalist (Garrick 12). That an intellectual's intellectual such as Gide could feel humbled by Malraux's verbal pyrotechnics suggests that Hemingway would also take offense. Personal idiosyncracies aside, Hemingway should have approved of the tendency of Malraux's characters to devalue the intellect. Moreno, in L'espoir, has learned that neither thoughts nor deep truths exist when shells begin to fall. 11 Unamuno, Spain's great philosopher, is criticized for thinking and not acting. One of the characters in Les noyers de l'Altenburg says that "intellectuals are like women . . . soldiers make them dream" (Brombert 65). Malraux even dismisses Sartre as a man who has never fought. In L'espoir Malraux has taken the scholar out of the study and given him an active role in the midst of war. The aviator Scali was a professor of Art History in Italy and the author of the most important study on Piero della Francesca. Garcia, perhaps Spain's foremost ethnologist, heads the Loyalists' military intelligence. Lopez, the sculptor, and Shade, the journalist, discuss the values of contemporary art. Magnin, like Malraux, organized and leads one of the air squadrons. The way he takes off his glasses betrays the gesture of the intellectual (Brombert 68). And Guernico, the leader of Madrid's ambulance corps, is one of Spain's well-known Catholic writers. There is a great concentration of intellectuals in action. In For Whom the Bell Tolls Hemingway has also cast Robert Jordan as an intellectual and a man of action. Erik Nakjavani points out that Jordan is an academic, a scholar, and a courageous militant. He has taught Spanish at the University of Montana in Missoula and he has written a book on Spain. He "carries his considerable knowledge to Spain in order to defend that country and the political ideal which it embodies in the form of Spanish Republicanism." 12 Both Hemingway's and Malraux's characters are in Spain fighting against the regressive forces of the Church and the feudal landlord class as represented by the "nationalist" military machine. As E. San Juan, Jr. points out, Spain in the 1930s typifies a Third World competitive market of alienated labor. All of the opposing forces were "overdetermined by the global conflict between fascist Germany and Italy, on the one hand, and the anti-fascist camp of the Soviet Union and the International volunteers, on the other." 13 Hemingway's Jordan and Malraux's many characters were all fighting with the popular forces of peasants, workers, and elements of the petty bourgeoisie. And both novels were written in order to elucidate, defend, and justify that particular political position. Although neither Hemingway nor Malraux were members of the Party, the communists were the most disciplined group on the Republican side, and the Soviets, who [End Page 182] were organizing the International Brigades and forwarding arms and ammunition to the Madrid government, were seen as best able to mould the various Loyalist groups into a unified force that could achieve victory. 14 Also, intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s were attracted to communism because they saw it as a vast destructive operation, a political adjunct to the literary movements of Dada

and surrealism. It was a time of political violence and defeat: the defeat of the Comintern in China, of the Loyalists in Spain, and of France as a nation in 1940. 15 However, Malraux's anti-fascist commitment, as expressed in L'espoir, is neither Stalinist nor counterrevolutionary. His defense of democratic values is accompanied by an ongoing critique of communism and Stalinist ideology (Thornberry 229). Gatan Picon and Armand Hoog concur, stating that the Malraux of the 1930s was not a marxist any more than the Malraux of 1948 was a fascist. 16 In For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway chips away at the idea of the Communist Party as an organized effort to promote solidarity among the masses and he rejects communism as a philosophy. 17 Although Jordan respects the Communist Party, works under its orders, and admires some of its leaders, he portrays the majority of them as "maniacs, phonies, fakes, murderers, and propaganda-make-ups." 18 Both novels critique communism while admiring the heroism of the men who fought under the Party's leaders. L'espoir culminates in the battle of Guadalajara (March 1937), the most important victory won by the Republican forces during the war, whereas For Whom the Bell Tolls describes an operation of support in a localized abortive offensive. The courage, heroism, and sacrifice of the protagonists of L'espoir are meaningful because they adumbrate the final triumph over fascism, whereas Jordan's failed effort, from beginning to end, is a struggle against overwhelming odds (Schmigalle 77-78). In both novels, history is the stage on which the heroes are defined, and the Civil War is the backdrop against which they test themselves. But the novels are very different in sweep and in structure. L'espoir is a fictionalized chronicle of the first months of the war. There are many characters and the events are described alternately in Barcelona, Madrid, Toledo, and Guadalajara. Malraux is telling the story of the men who fought the war, but he is also describing the events as they occurred. He uses changing perspectives from one city to another, highlighting the points of view of the ground forces, the aviators, and the main characters in order to provide different and, at times, simultaneous perspectives from which the events are narrated. There is a triple movement to the action of the novel: first, the initial euphoria of the "lyric illusion"; second, the leaders strive to harness the energy in order [End Page 183] to give the disorganized factions greater power and cohesion; and third, the Loyalists succumb to the superior military power of Franco's forces. Malraux alternates scenes of war with philosophical and political conversations. Altogether, there are fifteen major dialogs, each one separated from the other by scenes of action. Each conversation shuffles the participants in order to focus on a different topic. Magnin is the commander of the International Air Force. Garcia is an ethnologist turned intelligence chief. Hernandez is an idealistic captain at the siege of the Alcazar and the fall of Toledo. Scali is an Italian art historian who becomes a bombardier. Ximns is a devout Spanish Catholic Loyalist, and Manuel is perhaps the closest thing to a central character. As a result, the reader views events "through one great, multifaceted compound eye that absorbs all possible angles of vision" (Wilkinson 80). In contrast to the panoramic landscapes of L'espoir, with its descriptions of crowds, fraternal virility, and group solidarity, For Whom the Bell Tolls is a fictional account of one episode describing the Spanish Republican guerrilla warfare in May 1937, in the Sierra Guadarama in Spain, in the province of Segovia. Jordan is sent on a secret mission behind enemy lines where he preaches communist ideology to Pablo's band.

He persuades them to help him blow a bridge over a mountain gorge where he will die defending the Republican cause. Despite this fundamental difference in narrative approach, the lines between tyranny and change are clearly drawn. Both authors describe the people's challenge to the State and the Church as well as the bone-breaking poverty that serving the wealthy land owners has reduced them to. In L'espoir, Ximns believes the Church has forced the Spanish people into a sort of mindless childhood. The peasants accuse the Church of supporting the nobility and repressing the masses, and of preaching the virtues of poverty and submission while supporting the Fascists who are killing them. 19 And Jordan, who is on the side of the people, believes that he is fighting "for all the poor in the world, against all tyranny." 20 There is also the protagonists' sense of commitment to something that transcends them--freedom, justice, dignity, an idealized Spain--ideals that regulate their actions in life and define their essences in death. Nonetheless, these two novels are very different in tone and concept-differences that, to some degree, also explain the antagonisms of the two authors. Malraux spurns conventional narrative techniques that emphasize plot, linear chronology, and character development in favor of a different aesthetic. Although he believes that the novelist should create a coherent world, he does not believe in creating characters. 21 "Great artists [End Page 184] are not transcribers of the scheme of things, they are its rivals." 22 Malraux devalues the French tradition of psychological analysis that runs from La Princesse de Clves to A la recherche du temps perdu and, in doing so, he also moves beyond Hemingway's "objective style," the directness that the French admired so much. Hemingway's influence on world writing has been remarkable: short sentences, dialog, the iceberg technique, and the fourth and fifth dimensions that connote so much more than meets the eye or ear. Except for works such as Green Hills of Africa and A Moveable Feast, in which life and art overlap, he still believes in the illusion of fiction. Malraux makes no such distinction and, because his writing is more transgressive, he is, in many ways, postmodern. Fiction, autobiography, and art criticism are all cast in the same mold. "When I try to express what the Spanish Revolution revealed to me, I write L'espoir; when I try to express what art and its current metamorphosis have revealed to me, I write Les voix du silence." 23 These events and insights belong to the same domain. As Picon points out, there is a symbiotic relationship between the images of art and the images of life (15). In his writing, Malraux has suppressed the trappings of the conventional novel and replaced them with shifting images that radically alter the artistic process. Instead of a love story between Jordan and Maria, or the psychological conflict between Jordan and Pablo, or the suspense between success and failure in blowing the bridge, Malraux, as R. M. Albrs puts it, registers "lightning flashes of awareness and anguish." 24 Malraux is less interested in telling a story, as Hemingway is, than in presenting moments of crisis when men become aware of destiny, when they become aware of their human condition as tragedy. 25 This insight into "man's fate" is what Malraux calls "consciousness." In one of the many dialogs that punctuate L'espoir, Scali asks Garcia what the best thing is in life that a person can do. Garcia's answer: "To transform into consciousness as vast an experience as possible" (E 282), and the novel ends with the statement that "an anemic Spain was at last becoming conscious of herself" (E 360). The struggle of the Loyalists will not have been in vain and in due course the defeat of fascism will have vindicated their effort and their belief that the enemy of man should not be other men

but whatever diminishes him or them. This conclusion reminds us of John Donne's epigraph to For Whom the Bell Tolls, except that Hemingway's novel is so different from Malraux's. It expresses similar values and pursues similar goals, but on a fictional plane that bears little resemblance to the Frenchman's work. For Whom the Bell Tolls is a classic realist text, that is, it follows the conventions of realism in which plot, characters, and place govern the [End Page 185] writing and the reader's involvement. All of the characters, even the secondary ones, are fully developed through dialog, description, flashback, and inner monologue. Jordan, the main character, is a flesh-and-blood entity, someone the reader can relate to, shake his hand if necessary, and wish him luck when blowing the bridge. This is the function of realism in writing. We see it at work not only in Jordan but also in the other characters, as Hemingway portrays the identities of Pilar, Pablo, Maria, and Anselmo-the family of guerrilla fighters that circumstance and necessity have brought together. Hemingway's characters, his descriptions of places and events, and his use of plot to move the action toward climax clearly serve a dual function. The individuals come alive but they also embody essential characteristics of the Spanish people. Pilar, though not a virgin anymore, is named after the Virgin of Pilar. In many evocative passages she describes the mob execution of the fascists in Pablo's village and her life with Finito, the bullfighter, before she meets Pablo. She provides essential background information about life in Spain. Her narratives help to situate specific events and the Spanish value system. Pablo, like Pilar, is a gypsy, and he is the fading leader of a guerrilla band that operates in the mountains. In Pablo, Hemingway gives us a complex and nuanced character, weakened by age, events, and wine, a foil for Pilar's strength and pride. His deviousness is as defined as Anselmo's loyalty and Maria's love. Each character embodies one or more traits of a collective psyche. Although each one is portrayed as an individual, together, they form a collective portrait. Maria, shaved and raped by the Falangists, is the symbol of a country that is being raped by Franco. By falling in love with her, Jordan loves the beauty, honesty, and devotion of the land for which he gives his life. We understand why he is willing to die for Spain and why, at the end, after blowing the bridge, despite the pain of his broken leg and the threat of torture by his captors, he does not commit suicide (thereby highlighting the cowardice of his father's suicide), but engages the enemy in a rearguard action that will ensure the safe passage of Maria and his adoptive family. Jordan is an American who understands the idiosyncracies of the Spanish people and who, therefore, because he also speaks the language, can become a member of Pilar's family. He is also a part of Iberia and he has heard the tolling of the peninsular bells. However, despite the symbolism of John Donne's epigraph and the symbolism of character (Maria is also the name of the Virgin Mother, and Jordan is the name of a river in the Holy Land where T. E. Lawrence blew up trains) and place, For [End Page 186] Whom the Bell Tolls is a work that is personal, intense, and highly focused. The tragic love story between Robert and Maria--two people ground up in the machinery of the Civil War--involves the reader in a profound way. Although Hemingway gives us a lot of information about other places and events, the action

centers on the remote mountain canyon, the cave, the road, and the bridge. This is where things happen. Blowing the bridge severs the link between the left and right banks of the river, both physically and politically. It is a symbolic act that exposes the chasm between the opposing sides. It is the visual dramatization of events that have been moving inexorably toward the novel's climax. The river that flows beneath the broken and twisted supports and girders represents also both space-time and cosmic indifference to the tragic circumstances that have been staged on both sides of the divide. Hemingway's characters all fit into a narrative aesthetic that is primarily referential. However, I do not mean to imply that, for all its realism, For Whom the Bell Tolls is devoid of self-reflexive elements, the two most memorable ones being Pilar's account of the killing of the fascists, the flashback to the corrida, and her description of life with the matador Finito. These accounts are narratives within the main narrative and they have their specular value, that is, they complicate any simplistic view of the novel as pure classic realism. In a self-conscious nod to his writerly genius, Hemingway/Jordan says that Pilar is a better story-teller than Quevedo, even as Jordan wishes he could write well enough to tell the story of the killing of the fascists, if only he could get it down the way she told it. But since Jordan has not written it, and Pilar can't, and we know that Hemingway has, it is Hemingway himself who is telling the reader, in not too oblique a way, that he is better than Quevedo (FWBT 134). Furthermore, I don't believe that Hemingway wants to undermine the realism of the novel. He may want the reader to acknowledge his superior writing abilities, but these are highlighted, not to devalue the larger narrative, but to enhance it. Jordan's determination to blow the bridge is never in doubt and Hemingway, unlike postmodern writers, particularly the metafictionists, does not cast doubt on the veracity of events. If he fabulates, it is not to call attention to language, the way Robert Coover does in Spanking the Maid or Raymond Federman in Double or Nothing, but to contribute to the suspense of the story. Nor does Malraux foreground language per se. The differences between him and Hemingway reside primarily in the way they describe collective action. In For Whom the Bell Tolls Pilar's description of the drunken mob that is killing the fascists is a negative portrayal of group behavior and it [End Page 187] is very different from Malraux's positive descriptions of groups. Hemingway's portrayal of the peasants is not Malraux's idealized portrait of them in L'espoir, as for instance, when after the airplane crash, the rescue party brings the dead aviators down the mountain. The fraternal voices of the Spanish peasants meld with the rhythms of death and renewal on the mountain in order to oppose the dehumanizing and destructive forces of the war. For Malraux, a person's commitment to the cause is as imperious as the rocks and as ephemeral as the decaying apples around the trunk of the tree. Decay may symbolize death but the tree symbolizes life. There is a fraternal consciousness that raises its collective voice above the forces that debase man (E 34142). By man, Malraux means all men and women who work toward a common goal, hence his animation of crowds, streets, barracks, and churches. Only the concerted endeavor of all human beings can counteract the absurd, alienation, and aloneness.

The closest Hemingway comes to Malraux's vision of solidarity in action is when he compares the discipline of resistance in the Sierras to taking part in a crusade, when the participants fight with a true sense of comradeship. Hemingway compares the combatants' feelings to religious faith and the beatitudes of artistic experience (FWBT 235). Typical, perhaps, and in sharp contrast, is his portrayal of Gordo's solitary stand on the hill, an isolation that contrasts with Malraux's description of people, places, and equipment, all of which are group oriented. By comparison, Malraux's characters are flattened out, as in modern painting, where depth and perspective are abolished. According to R. M. Albrs, "Malraux has suppressed the immobile setting favored in the traditional art of story and novel, replacing it by confused, vibrant, shifting images." 26 In contrast to For Whom the Bell Tolls, L'espoir evolves over a period of months, not days, it is not set in one place, except perhaps for Spain in general, and it has no love story to sustain it. It does not fit the mold of classic realism. Malraux is less interested in the subtleties of human interaction, the way Hemingway is, than by the chance to use fiction as a means of exploring and highlighting ideas. His purpose in writing the book was to help the reader empathize with the Republican cause, in short, to give as broad an experience as possible by describing the multifaceted nature of the war that was being fought simultaneously on many fronts. Malraux's most lyrical passages center not on one man or one unit but on descriptions of fighting that are panoramic and that involve crowd action: street encounters, tank battles, airplane sorties. It's not the psychology of the individual that interests Malraux as much as the ideology of the group. The novel dramatizes fraternal endeavor and collective [End Page 188] movement in line with unanimist premises that were laid down by Jules Romains, a twentieth-century predecessor, who wrote a 27-volume novel entitled Hommes de bonne volont. According to Romains, a unanimist writer can tap into the psychology of the crowd in a street, a square, or a theater and, in doing so, write the poetics of the group. Emile Durkheim and Gustave Le Bon had already done this in their nineteenth-century sociological studies, 27 and it was Romains and Georges Chennevire who, from 1903 on, particularly throughout the Fauves and Cubist periods of French art, strove to imbue their writing with the consciousness of group behavior. According to them, a crowd had a life and dynamic rhythm of its own. These two writers emphasized the positive force elicited by collective beings and they strove to direct this energy through their essays, poetry, fiction, and mass gatherings, such as Chennevire's Ftes du Peuple. 28 Romains' Vie unanime, Knock, and Puissances de Paris evoke the consciousness of groups, and he poeticizes the agglomerations and noises of people, streets, cities, trains, ports, barracks, stores, and churches. 29 Andr Cuisenier and others have described the theory of unanimism in great detail, 30 and this literary movement has clearly left its imprint on Malraux. In L'espoir, its influence is discernible in his descriptions of street scenes, ground and air battles, and the vocabulary of hope within the fraternal endeavor of the combatants. Instead of individuals, he depicts a crowd thrashing about with an exhausted and dejected sense of rage (E 194). In his description of the insurrectionists' attack on the fascist barracks, he animates a battering ram which then functions as a synecdoche of crowd action. The battering ram does not see the flag of surrender and, in its zeal, breaks down the door that the fascists have just opened (E 36, my emphasis). In like manner

Malraux animates the barracks that are vibrating with cries, explosions, and smoke, like a sonorous convent (E 35, my emphasis). In yet another unanimist image he compares the city to a living body that is being drained of its life blood by the people leaving it (E 176). Madrid, illuminated and disguised by the props and costumes of the revolution, is described as one immense nocturnal studio (E 38). Elsewhere, lights give the bombing of a city a muted existence, but when the lights are extinguished, the life of the city is even more intense (E 159). In another bombing scene Malraux compares the city to a blind man crying out in self defense (E 198, my emphasis). Castille sleeps with one eye open (E 211), and Madrid, not the individuals in it, is invested with enormous powers to resist the enemy (E 224). Moreover, the hope that gives the novel its resonance stems from the discipline and fraternity of men engaged in a common cause (E 197). This awareness of [End Page 189] themselves in groups and in cities, as Malraux portrays it, evolves slowly into the optimism with which the novel ends. If, at last, Spain is becoming conscious of itself, it is because the efforts of each enclave coalesce into resisting Franco's machine, the war that is tearing the country apart. All these descriptions belong to the panoramic simultaneity that makes L'espoir so different from For Whom the Bell Tolls. Whereas Hemingway strives to give each one of his characters specific and different personality traits, Malraux is working toward a definition of history, political action, and group behavior. Although, as we have seen, Malraux develops many characters, none is as clearly delineated and memorable as Hemingway's. Indeed, the most memorable characters in L'espoir are not individuals, but the people, the refugees, the combatants, the airplane crews, the bombed cities, and ultimately Spain itself. Unanimists believe that a nation, like any entity, can become a "god." For that reason, there is hope for a divided country whenever it becomes conscious of itself and its collective purpose. In 1937, Spain was shattered, and Franco eventually won the Civil War, and it is ironic that during this same period Hitler was able to give Germany a Nazi identity--one that would set the stage for World War II--a calamity adumbrated by the war in Spain. Picon phrases it aptly when he states that the story of Malraux is in essence the encounter between Malraux and history. Indeed, Malraux's fictions, like A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls emerge from the bloody and tumultuous history of the twentieth century which Friedrich Nietzsche prophetically defined as "the classical era of war." Malraux, who liked to quote Napoleon's dictum that "tragedy is now Politics," drew on the defining myth of the twentieth century in order to write Man's Fate and Man's Hope, in a context of tragedy (Malraux par lui-mme 19). According to Germaine Bre, history is the stage on which Malraux's heroes are defined. The author's purpose is to create a myth of redemption more eloquent than the silence of the cosmos. 31 Malrucian heroes then define themselves through fraternal action in combat by opposing dictators such as Franco or through an art that exalts the human in opposition to cosmic indifference. Malraux's perception that life is both tragic and absurd leads him toward political commitment on the one hand and, on the other, to conclude that only art can survive death. The masterpieces of the past-Malraux calls them "the voices of silence"--speak not only of human greatness, but they also manifest the continuity of conscious engagement.

Malraux's art foregrounds humanity's inherent greatness as it strives to unveil its sense of destiny. In this connection the artist is greater than [End Page 190] the revolutionary because he or she is not bound by the straightjacket of expediency. While the artist, like the revolutionary, is mortal, the artist's work transcends finitude. Art may not be eternal but it is the supreme expression of a culture that "ever since man has confronted the Cosmos alone, aspires to inherit the nobility of the world." 34 Although in L'espoir Manuel implies that fraternal revolutionary action is as strong as art (E 360), and Moreno says that when the bombs begin to fall and people die the masterpieces of the world seem inconsequential, revolutions are, nonetheless, by their very nature ephemeral and also deadly, whereas art not only endows mankind with the mantle of true nobility, it also escapes from the vicissitudes of time. Hemingway, like Malraux, writes of the Republicans' sense of brotherhood under fire and of their dedication and, like Malraux, he juxtaposes political commitment and art. For Jordan, the feeling of fraternal endeavor is as authentic as listening to Bach, or standing in the cathedral of Chartres, or looking at Mantegna, el Greco, or Brueghel (FWBT 235). In opposition to fascism's destructive image of humanity--one that privileges certain men and women at the expense of minorities and the oppressed--both Hemingway and Malraux committed themselves early on to oppose totalitarianism." 32 It is also ironic that these two great writers who were engaged in the struggle against fascism preferred to duke it out rather than acknowledge their similarities. Jordan, Magnin, Scali, Hernandez, Garcia, Jimenez, and Manuel, like their progenitors, are of the same cloth. Because Hemingway's lone hero resembles Malraux's many warriors, it's time, once again, to sound the bell: "No man is an Iland . . . every man is a piece of the Continent." 33 In conclusion, despite Hemingway's and Malraux's commitment to the Republican cause, their novels are very different in form and style. Whereas Hemingway strives to give each one of his characters a specific personality, Malraux is working toward a definition of history and political action. Despite blowing the bridge over the gorge, the ending of Hemingway's novel is tragic because Jordan and Maria are separated and we know that he will die while guarding the retreat of his gypsy friends. Malraux's ending is hopeful because Spain, despite the agony of the war, is developing a consciousness of itself. This consciousness belongs to Malraux's generic optimism and faith in the efficacy of group endeavor and fraternal action, and it contrasts with the overriding pessimism of Hemingway's novels in which winners are always losers. Hemingway's heroes and heroines may save their dignity, but they either die, lose the person they love, or end up impotent. Their tragedies, although they function as a metaphor for the human condition, are solitary endings, like [End Page 191] Jordan's rearguard action, whereas Malraux's tragedies are potential victories because they are fueled by a collective spirit that transcends the individual. Despite Donne's epigraph, For Whom the Bell Tolls does not describe the Spanish Civil War the way L'espoir does. Their differences are manifest in the way each author develops action in battle and in the way each one portrays the characters involved. Both Hemingway and Malraux have a tragic view of the world--men and women die and only works of art survive the corrosive effects of time. However, the exploration and characterization of this tragedy is, for Hemingway, a lonely

experience, whereas for Malraux it is fraternal. Malraux's individuals triumph in solidarity and the reassurance it can provide. I suspect Hemingway and Malraux understood their differences. Their artistic temperaments, in addition to their professional rivalry, probably tainted a relationship that could have been more harmonious. In any case, Hemingway always eventually distanced himself, even from friends such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Dos Passos, among others. Hemingway was not only more aggressive than Malraux in vilifying his rivals, he also structured his fiction and his characters in ways that reflect a fundamental sense of alienation. In contrast, Malraux's initial sense of alienation in novels such as La voie royale (The Royal Way), altered radically, in order to impose the stamp and potential victory of man over nature, as in La condition humaine and L'espoir. Like Hemingway, Malraux describes the opposition between an indifferent universe and the realm of human experience. But unlike Hemingway, he frames these categories differently and the message of L'espoir is a message of hope. It reflects an inviolate faith in what men and women can accomplish, politically and artistically. University of California, Riverside

Notes
1. As quoted by Jean Lacouture in Andr Malraux, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random, 1975) 242-43. 2. John Garrick, "Two Bulls Locked Horn in Horn in Fight: The Rivalry of Hemingway and Malraux in Spain," North Dakota Quarterly 60 (1992): 9. 3. David Wilkinson, Malraux: An Essay in Political Criticism (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1967) 6-7. 4. Axel Madsen, Malraux: A Biography (New York: Morrow, 1976) 195. 5. Garrick 9-10. See Martine de Courcel who says that by late 1936, the Spanish Civil War had ceased to be an affair for amateurs. The Russian air force had taken over the Republican command and General Smuskievich imposed upon Malraux and his team the heavy hand of Soviet bureaucracy (43). Malraux: Life and Work (New York: Harcourt, 1976). See also William Braasch Watson who says that the Loyalist cause was defeated on March 31, 1939, one month after Hemingway began writing For Whom the Bell Tolls. "Hemingway's Attacks on the Soviets and the Communists in For Whom the Bell Tolls," North Dakota Quarterly 60 (1992): 115. 6. Bickford Sylvester, "The Writer as l'homme engag: Persona as Literary Device in Hemingway and Malraux," North Dakota Quarterly 60 (1992): 19. 7. Robert W. Lewis, "Hemingway, Malraux and the Warrior-Writer," North Dakota Quarterly 60 (1992): 66. 8. Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (New York: Scribner, 1969) 532.

9. As quoted by Henri Peyre in French Novelists of Today (New York: Oxford UP, 1967) 218. 10. See Jean-Paul Sartre, "American Novelists in French Eyes," The Atlantic Monthly 178 (1946): 114-18, and Claude-Edmonde Magny, L'ge du roman amricain (Paris: Seuil, 1948), particularly Chapter II, "La technique objective dans le roman amricain," 44-61. 11. See Victor Brombert, "Malraux: Passion and Intellect," Yale French Studies 18 (1957): 63-76. 12. Erik Nakjavani, "Knowledge as Power: Robert Jordan as an Intellectual Hero," The Hemingway Review 7 (1988): 135-36. 13. E. San Juan, Jr., "Ideological Form, Symbolic Exchange, Textual Production: A Symptomatic Reading of For Whom the Bell Tolls," North Dakota Quarterly 60 (1992): 121. 14. Robert S. Thornberry, "Ideology and the Pragmatic Narrative: L'Espoir Revisited," North Dakota Quarterly 60 (1992): 226. 15. Germaine Bre and Margaret Guiton, "Return to Man: Andr Malraux--Maker of Myths," in The French Novel: From Gide to Camus (New York: Harcourt, 1962) 18182. 16. Gatan Picon, Malraux par lui-mme (Paris: Seuil, 1955) 91. See also Armand Hoog, "Malraux, Mllberg and Frobenius," Yale French Studies 18 (1957): 89. See also an address given by Malraux at the International Association of Writers for the Defense of Culture, in London, June, 1936. Reprinted as "Three Speeches: Our Cultural Heritage," Yale French Studies 18 (1957): 27-38. "I have always been impressed by the inability of the fascist arts to represent anything except the clash of man against man. . . . fascist civilization tends, in its last stage, to the total militarization of the nation. And fascist art, where it exists, tends to the estheticization of war. Now the enemy of the soldier is another soldier, is a man. Whereas, from liberalism all the way to communism, man's adversary is not man, but the earth. It is in the conflict with the earth, in the exaltation of man's victory over things, that there has developed one of the West's strongest traditions, from Robinson Crusoe to the Soviet film" (36). Trans. Kenneth Douglas. 17. Robert E. Fleming, "Communism vs. Community in For Whom the Bell Tolls," North Dakota Quarterly 60 (1992): 146. 18. Gunther Schmigalle, "Seven Ambiguities in Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls," North Dakota Quarterly 60 (1992): 73. 19. Andr Malraux, L'espoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1937) 130-31. Henceforth E in the text. 20. Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls (New York: Scribner, 1987) 236. Henceforth FWBT in the text.

21. As quoted by Picon in Malraux par lui-mme, 38. See Brombert, 63-76. See also Henri Peyre, "Andr Malraux," French Novelists of Today (New York: Oxford UP, 1967) 210-43. 22. As quoted by Geoffrey H. Hartman in "The Taming of History," Yale French Studies 18 (1957): 128. See Malraux par lui-mme, as quoted by Picon: "In my eyes, the modern novel is a privileged means for expressing what is tragic in man, and not an elucidation of the individual" (66). 23. As quoted by Picon in Malraux par lui-mme, 15. My translation. 24. R. M. Albrs, trans. Kevin Neilson, "Andr Malraux and the 'Abridged Abyss,'" Yale French Studies 18 (1957): 53. 25. Malraux's novels contain few women. The miltary conflicts and political struggles that his works describe are peopled almost exclusively by men. Man's Fate, the English title of his most famous novel, and the men in it, as in Man's Hope (the English title of L'espoir), struggle against oppression and death, and they confront their destiny together, but they do so without women. Also, it is important to remember that in the context of the 1930s, and in accordance with Webster's first definition, the word "man" denotes a human being, whether male or female. 26. Albrs 48. Because Malraux's endeavor is to lay bare the meaning of metaphysical destiny, "his achievement as a novelist need not conform to the literary and humanist norms of the well-ordered narrative, although he expresses his intentions via a story and an adventure quite concretely situated in a particular historical reality. Even as he 'relates' a moment in the life of one of his characters, Malraux does not feel it as a 'humanist' novelist would, for the action presented is not viewed in its restricted human context, but is made to vibrate with the meaning it possesses when confronting eternity" (47). 27. See Emile Durkheim, Les rgles de la mthode sociologique (Paris: Flix Alcan, 1927) and Gustave Le Bon, Psychologie des foules (Paris: PUF, 1939). 28. See Ben Stoltzfus, "Georges Chennevire and Les Ftes du Peuple," Comparative Literature 28 (1976): 343-62. 29. La vie unanime (Paris: Mercure de France, 1913); Knock (Paris: Gallimard, 1924); Puissances de Paris (Paris: Gallimard, 1919). 30. See Jules Romains et l'unanimisme (Paris: Flammarion, 1935) and L'art de Jules Romains (Paris: Flammarion, 1948). See also Ben Stoltzfus, Georges Chennevire et l'unanimisme (Paris: Minard, 1965). 31. Twentieth-Century French Literature, trans. Louise Guiney (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983) 256. 32. See Bickford Sylvester, "The Writer as l'homme engag," North Dakota Quarterly (1992): 32-33. "While both writers were fascinated by romantic mysticism and by epiphanies climaxing violent action, Malraux found an outlet for his romantic zeal in

political communion with others (as Days of Wrath especially attests). Conversely, the American romantic individualist, Hemingway, rejected not only collectivism, but for the most part politics in any form. Malraux believed that man--social man--and especially the artist, could inspire other men and women to improve their lot. Despite Malraux's pragmatism, and even skepticism, he was a reformer; he believed that the inspiring artist could move mankind to at least marginal collective progress." 33. In 1954, Gallimard reported that 130,000 copies of L'espoir had been sold since its publication in 1937, compared with 200,000 copies of the French translation of For Whom the Bell Tolls. The French critics believed that in this novel Hemingway had achieved the highest expression of his maturity as an artist. See Thelma M. Smith and Ward L. Miner, Transatlantic Migration: The Contemporary American Novel in France (Durham: Duke UP, 1955) 109. Despite the favorable reaction of the French press, Albert Camus asserted that For Whom the Bell Tolls was the book of a child compared with L'espoir (49).