Money and Marriage: Hemingway's Self-Censorship in For Whom the Bell Tolls

For most of his career as a professional writer, Ernest Hemingway fought a war against what he called "genteel writing." An examination of his career from the 1925 publication of In Our Time to the 1938 publication of The Fifth Column and the First Forty-nine Stories reveals that Hemingway enjoyed with every book he published greater freedom in his use of words generally considered to be obscene by his publisher and others. This greater freedom of expression did not extend to Hemingway's biggest commercial success, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Hemingway wrote the novel without using any of the obscene words he had fought to include in his previous works. In writing the novel, he gave in to commercial pressures, writing the novel in the way that he did to increase the chances of serializing it or of selling it to a book club. Quite directly, For Whom the Bell Tolls was shaped stylistically by Hemingway's divorce from Pauline Pfeiffer and desire to marry Martha Gellhorn. The novel provided Hemingway with financial independence and the money to maintain the lifestyle he had grown used to in the 1930s, but which he would have lost with the loss of the Pfeiffer family fortune.