BOOKSHELF

MOST of our literary critics seem to agree that "For Whom the Bell Tolls" is Ernest Heminway's greatest book, greater even than "A farewell to Arms." In harrowing days like these we live in, it is interesting to see just what kind of book it is that can catch men's attention, and light up for an instant the shadows that lie behind the day-by-day kaleidoscope of draft numbers, campaign speeches, and invasions.

The hero of the book, a young American named Robert Jordan who is fighting for the Spanish Loyalists, is an agonizing study in schizophrenia. He is working at a job--blowing up a bridge behind the Fascist lines with the help of a guerrilla band--which he knows will result in his death and probably that of some of his helpers. Constantly he berates, wheedles, consoles and prods--himself. Under the inhuman, cracking pressure of events, his personality is more and more dangerously split, and is healed at the final page only by the certainty of his death and separation from his beloved, the Spanish girl Maria. Unfortunately, last-minute recoveries like Robert Jordan's are pretty well confined to books, while his discase afflicts, to some degree, everyone who reads a newspaper.

Schizophrenia is an occupational sickness of civilized men in wartime. Here is a relentless, rending case history of it, really a case history of every free mind that is aware of the present retrogression of Europe. Essentially, Robert Jordan is a psychological week, and his story is only more poignant because on the surface he is a normal, healthy, and super-courageous young man. He loves, as only a Heminway hero can, at both extremes of romance and grossness. He organizes, he leads, he inspires the little group of Spanish peasants who are helping him. But to keep his precarious sanity, he has to resort to one mental prop after another. He mulls over the memory of his grandfather, a crusty, brave old Civil War Cavalryman. He forces himself to concentrate on the unlikely chance of a long, happy life with Maria after the Revolution is won. Everlastingly he talks to himself, standing aside and sizing himself up. But he finds out, as all his fellow-sufferers must, that this is a symptom of his discase, and not a cure. It only makes the ailment worse, for this is a kind of mental sickness that feeds upon itself.

"For Whom the Bell Tolls" is, incidentally, a thrilling story--Gary Cooper will fit well into the role of Robert Jordan. The dialogue is surprisingly effective, translated almost literally, as it is, from the Spanish. The picture of war-wracked Spain has an authentic air--there are heroes, villains, and likewise bunglers on both sides. Several brilliant "set pieces" dot the pages of the book: an unbearably bloody and terrifying description of the start of the Revolution in a small village, a nauseous discourse on the "smell of death," and three exciting love episodes. But it is the spiritually tortured character of Robert Jordan that makes this a book peculiarly meant for this world of today.