One author I've returned to recently is Earnest Hemingway - he makes for good reading on deployment. His work is entrancing and yet simple to read, and it takes me out of the day-to-day routine. I read The Sun Also Rises on my way across the Pacific, and found it metaphorically compelling. The whole "lost generation" idea of modernity was like the protagonist of that book, castrated by cynicism and unwilling to make the extra leap of faith required to find hope in a broken world (the literal cause of castration and cynicism being the first World War, and the broken world the depressed aftermath of the same). Of course, Hemingway himself provides plenty of reason to hope in the book, from the undoubtedly real love between the protagonist and Lady Brett, to the deep satisfying beauty of rural Spain, and finally in the "beautiful Spanish children" he mentions at the end of the book. Surely there are lots of reasons to be cynical even now (when our world starts to more closely resemble that of post-war Europe), but applying hope and faith to the problems allows one to stand against them in optimism, which is one big part of being a man. A modern example of this, perhaps, is when two young people get married. Finding another to love is an act of Providence--it is a grace and something to nurture and probably has helped keep many out of cynicism and unhappiness, which seem sadly prevalent in first-world societies today.
The book I read after The Sun also Rises was the children's classic The Secret Garden, wherein a neglected and pettish little girl is suddenly orphaned in India and sent to live with a crippled and bitter uncle, whose own son is both her own age and also neglected and pettish, even though he is spoiled on account of the fact he might be crippled like his father. I won't spoil the book for you, but suffice it to say that both the girl and the boy seize upon a world of nourishment and growth, which turns out to be the legacy of her aunt and his mother, and alter for the better. Thus, while I deeply sympathize with The Sun Also Rises, I find that The Secret Garden offers a more robust view of life--a view that Hemingway is not blind to, even if he can't quite make the leap to make it his own.
Now I am re-reading For Whom the Bell Tolls. I think it is Hemingway's masterpiece, a rich tale about adversity and love and the power of ideas. The protagonist, Robert Jordan, is fighting in the Spanish Civil War for the Republicans (sponsored by and ideologically similar to the Soviet Union), and the book opens with him going to a band of guerrillas behind Fascist lines to blow a strategic bridge in support of a forthcoming Republican offensive. Along the way he meets Maria, a victim of the war (and of numerous atrocities including rape) who is hiding with the guerrilla band. They fall in love immediately and sincerely, an event which combined with Roberto's (as they called him in Spain) natural appreciation for the Spanish countryside and Spaniards causes him to spend much of the course of the next few days re-thinking his priorities.
Prior to meeting Maria, Roberto was an ideological communist, intimate with the Soviet "political advisers" who really ran the Republic and quite cynical about it all. He was ready to die for that cause, but not passionately--as a materialist, he drew tepid pleasure from the pleasures of life and suffered through it's adversities, but saw no real reason to wish to continue living. After Maria, he begins to realize that there are transcendent goods in life: most immediately, a future with Maria; in an ancillary way, that the world is a beautiful place (something that resonates with me, for I too have wandered the rugged hills of Spain) and there is something to admire in the officially condemned but quite present and fervent religion of the Spaniards. There is a transition that takes place in the book: at first, Hemingway describes the countryside in his customary entrancing, wonderful way, with Roberto as a mere part of the whole scene; later Hemingway similarly describes the countryside through Roberto's own thoughts. Also, there is a part where Roberto kills a Navarrese cavalryman fighting for the Fascist side, noticing later that his victim was a Carlist (a soldier who fought not specifically for Fascism but rather for Catholicism against the atheist Republic) and feeling sorry for the man and his family. Roberto thinks to himself, "There is no people you love more than the Navarrese" (recalling his time spent in Spain before the outbreak of the civil war) and later admits to himself "Hell! you're no Marxist. You believe in liberte, equalite, fraternite! You believe in Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness." I won't spoil the ending if you haven't read the book, but I bring it up to illustrate what I think is a struggle going on in Hemingway's relation of the story between the cynical and seductive intellectual ideology of Communism on one hand, and hope and faith on the other.
Was Hemingway himself raised Catholic? I don't know, but after reading a scene in The Sun Also Rises where his protagonist kneels in the Cathedral of Pamplona and prays forgiveness for being "such a rotten Catholic," I suspect so. Certainly he betrays in both the books I've cited a deep regard and almost reverence for the devotion of the simple people of rural Spain. Though there is certainly an element of condescension in his treatment of them (after all, his protagonists are all lettered, affluent men like him), he echoes a Romantic and sometimes desperate envy of "the simple life" that runs throughout this modern, marginalizing, and hedonistic society we have constructed. It is, after all, in the simple life where fairy tales are born and where notions like "forever" and "contentment" are allowed to grow. If Hemingway says he was Communist, I don't dispute that and in fact despise it--I'm just pointing out that even a dedicated intellectual liberal like Hemingway evidently was not immune to the kind of joy that proceeds from grace: the grace of falling in love, the grace of joy in something so simple as a beautiful spring day, the grace of loving those who one suffers with. I doubt it is an accident that Catholicism casts such a long shadow across his oeuvre.
