Errata and Furthermores

Corrections and updates to Reading Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, including noteworthy sources that regrettably did not find their way into the book. Updated 9 February 2024.

See also Picturing Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Chapter One

3:3+ The young man . . . with sun-streaked fair hair: For discussions of the guerillas Hemingway might have met and drawn from for Jordan’s work, see Edward Gazur, Alexander Orlov (2002), pp. 130-131; Peter Wyden, The Passionate War (1983), p. 222; and Aleksander Szurek, The Shattered Dream (1989), pp. 144-148. These and related sources are discussed in Amanda Vaill, Hotel Florida (2014), pp. 245-247 and Vernon, Hemingway’s Second War (2011), pp. 169-170. G.H. Muller’s discussion in Hemingway and the Spanish Civil War (2019) recaps these other histories (pp.135-137).

chapter six

66:14+ I am an anti-fascist: This entry’s discussion of how anti-fascist was often understood to mean communist uses as an example the International Brigade records of Paul Wendorf. Wendorf’s letters from Spain to his wife were made available online in 2023 here (having been published in Spain; thanks to Nancy Phillips for making it happen). Paul and Leona married immediately before he traveled to Spain in February 1937; he was killed on 18 August 1938 in the Sierra Pandols.”The world is still gloomy but there is a little light,” he wrote in his last letter (8 Aug. 1938). The entry’s information that “Seventy-two percent of American volunteers to Spain belonged to either the Communist Party or the Young Communist League” comes from the demographic data published by Chris Brooks in The Volunteer (26 Sept. 2017).

Chapter Eleven

135:38+ who censored his thinking?: The passage continues with Jordan’s insistence that “nobody owned his mind” and that “afterwards” he would have “plenty of material” for making sense of it all, an insistence many readers have understood as Hemingway’s personal defense of his own wartime promotion of the Republic. The idea of processing the truth “afterwards,” perhaps through writing, matches the language and spirit of his short story “Under the Ridge” (CSS 469), published in October 1939 (he drafted the present chapter in late June 1939 [Appendix A]). As much as possible, Reading Hemingway’s FWBT concentrates on the literary text as literary text—it is not a biographical project. For an excellent study of Hemingway’s politics throughout the 1930s, and their fictional reflection in the novel, see Milton Cohen’s The Pull of Politics (2018), chapters 3 and 7. Chapter 7 was initially published as “Robert Jordan's (and Ernest Hemingway's) "True Book": Myths and Moral Quandaries in For Whom the Bell Tolls” in The Hemingway Review vol.36, no, 2, Spring 2017, pp. 42-64 (both book and article are available through Project Muse).

137:16+ Garbo still: “The Swedish actor Ingrid Bergman played Maria in the 1943 film adaptation of the novel—so a Swedish actor plays the Spanish beloved whom her lover’s fantasies conflate with a Swedish actor….The person Paramount first named to play Maria, the actor and ballerina Vera Zorina (Haver 13), born Eva Brigitta Hartwig, had a German father and a Norwegian mother.” And an Austria-Swiss actor, Maria Schell, played Maria in the 12 & 19 March 1959 Playhouse 90 teleplay adaptation, alongside Jason Robards, Jr. as Jordan. A.E. Hotchner wrote the teleplay. According to his memoir-biography Papa Hemingway, Hotchner traveled to Spain with Hemingway, and saw the novel’s setting, only a few years earlier, in 1956 (Da Capo Press, 2005, p. 182).

Chapter Thirteen

170:25+ shoot the other and himself, or herself: Hemingway will rewrite Maria’s request for a suicide pact with Jordan as Catherine Bourne’s request to her husband David in the so-called Provisional Ending of The Garden of Eden. “Sure,” Jordan says (171:8); “Sure,” David says. Jordan’s “promise” directly answers Maria’s question of whether he would shoot her, whereas David’s sure answers Catherine’s question of whether he would “do it with” her (Eby, Reading Hemingway’s GOE, p. 335).

Chapter Sixteen

203:16 our ex-Lord himself: It should perhaps go without saying that Maria’s shorn hair would have a hard time of drying Jordan’s feet, per the Biblical allusion. This is possibly the reason Jordan smiles at Pilar’s quip. Maybe he smiles, though, because he catches the death prediction in Pilar’s Biblical reference.

Chapter Thirty-One

342:20+ any oversupply of that for tomorrow: Jordan’s allusion to Onan references non-coital ejaculation. Theologically, God might have killed Onan not just for wasting his semen but for “violating his levirate obligation” to procreate with his brother’s widow—so Onan’s sister-in-law—and thereby be her redeemer. Pilar’s observation that Jordan and Maria could be “brother and sister by the look” (67:12), while intending blood relations, suggests the redeemer role (through sex) that Jordan assumes toward Maria. Pilar, Maria’s mother-figure who makes the sibling comparison, couches that role as practically an obligation to take Maria away with him after the bridge and set her up with him in Madrid. Hemingway surely did not intend such an involved allusion! Nevertheless, the levirate idea circles the novel’s complex of kinship, race, identity, attraction, and duty.

351:14 herded us away and up the hill: Carl Eby notes that, in The Garden of Eden manuscript, “Marita wonders if her new haircut makes her look like Renée Jeanne Falconetti about to be burned at the stake in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 silent film masterpiece, La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc”, and that the film’s scene resembles this one of Maria’s treatment in their violence (Reading Hemingway’s GOE, p. 312). It’s fair to wonder if Hemingway also had Falconetti-as-Joan in mind regarding Maria, especially given the religious dimension of the Spanish Civil War and possibly of this scene (in which her rapists refer to their actions as making her into a “Bride of the Red Christ” (352:11).

Chapter Thirty-Nine

392:26+ conversion on the road to Tarsus: Paintings traditionally depict St. Paul as having fallen from his horse when struck with his vision. See for example Caravaggio’s Conversion on the Way to Damascus (1601) at the church of Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome. If Hemingway intended to reference that tradition, he would seem to have Jordan indirectly anticipate his own fate. Other paintings turn Paul’s companions into an army, such as Bruegel’s Conversion of Paul (1567), in which Paul falls from his horse surrounded by his army on a piney mountain pass.