For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Magic Mountain: Hemingway’s Debt to Thomas Mann

Hemingway brought a great deal of material to the writing of For Whom the Bell Tolls. Linda Wagner says there was “really too much material at hand.”¹ That idea is supported by the story’s hero, too.² Yet Hemingway was able to form this great mass of material into a complex story—not one based on his own experience; he says he “made it up”—with a wide variety of characters, and using a number of formal and stylistic devices. As Wagner suggests, this was technically a great leap forward for Hemingway. She credits this to a kind of bringing together of techniques (and themes) he had tried out from To Have and Have Not through his Spanish Civil War short stories and play.

We can extend her discussion by pointing out that Hemingway used literary “sources” other than his own previous work in writing this novel. Some of these other sources seem to be T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Don Quixote, Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” and knightly romances.³ And considering the hero’s river name and the novel’s echoes of a vegetation god whose fate is attached to the book’s “seasons,” a god who dies sacrificially to bring fertility to the waste land, Weston’s From Ritual to Romance should probably be added to this list. Another to add, one even more important than Lawrence’s book, is Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. There are a great many similarities between The Magic Mountain and For Whom the Bell Tolls, in terms of themes, techniques, characters, and even story shape. There are so many, in fact, that it is easy to believe that Hemingway found in Mann’s big book something of a model for turning his own abundant material into a complex and integrated novel—his first attempt at a lengthy novel of inclusion rather than a lyric novel of omission. Before turning to the many similarities between these two twentieth-century epics (which at first glance seem so dissimilar), let us first consider in chronological order Hemingway’s references to Mann, and his interest in Mann.

In a 1925 letter to Fitzgerald Hemingway praised highly Mann’s family novel, Buddenbrooks,⁴ and thereafter it had a permanent place on all of his suggested reading lists. In fact, it may have had some influence on For Whom the Bell Tolls. Hemingway’s Spanish epic is in one sense a family novel. The dynamics of Pablo’s “family” of guerrillas is comparable to those of Jordan’s boyhood family, so in a sense he is reliving (complete with oedipal conflict in the cave) what Freud called the “family romance.”⁵ And of course Jordan remembers at length his strong grandfather, his weak father, and his mother, and anguishes over his father’s suicide—an act that seems an important cause of his own deep inclination toward death—and his struggle against that inclination. (As we shall see, Hans is also secretly inclined toward death because of his family history.) Buddenbrooks concerns the fated, seemingly “genetic” decline of a conservative upper-middle-class family. Hemingway, with an artistic mother and conservative father (constant types in Mann’s fiction) —though a sensitive, nervous, and finally suicidal father—may have suspected, by the time he came to write Jordan’s story, a similar decline in his own family. Jordan meditates on the decline in his family, and once in distinctly genetic terms (FBT, pp. 338—39). Hans of The Magic Mountain is somewhat like Hanno Buddenbrooks; he is not an artist, but at the Berghof he has learned (like Hanno) to love the sensual and meditative life—which Mann associates with a deep wish for the release of death—rather than the active life of his commercial forebears. Suicide (his father’s and his own) was often on Hemingway’s mind while writing Jordan’s story. In a letter to his first wife he mentioned “taking the easy way out” as his father had done—but it would be a “bad example” to the children; and to the Russian critic Ivan Rashkin he wrote that “living is much more difficult and complicated than dying,”’ which might serve as a motto for his novel, and for The Magic Mountain, too.⁶

Mann’s “Disorder and Early Sorrow” was among Hemingway’s favorite short stories—and it was among the proposed titles for A Farewell to Arms.⁷ The Magic Mountain appeared in English in 1927, and soon thereafter Hemingway borrowed it from Sylvia Beach’s library; he had this same edition (see Note 22 below) in his libraries at Key West and in Cuba.⁸ Mann won the Nobel Prize in 1929, and in a 1930 letter to Guy Hickok Hemingway said he was “damned glad” about it.⁹ “ ‘Who is your Thomas Mann?’” the German Kandisky asks in Green Hills of Africa. “ ‘We do not have great writers,’ ” Hemingway answers, apparently meaning writers great throughout their career rather than one-great-book writers. Later in the book he refers to Buddenbrooks, suggesting that scenes from this novel are well-etched in memory.¹⁰ In the Lillian Ross interview (written just after he had completed Across the River and into the Trees), Hemingway jokingly remarks that he is not Thomas Mann, and so one should get another opinion on Fitzgerald.¹¹ As Carlos Baker implies, it is likely that Mann’s “Death in Venice” had some influence on Hemingway’s Across the River and into the Trees.¹² All of this seems to suggest that Mann was in a sense on Hemingway’s mind throughout most of his career. It seems fair to say that he thought Mann and Joyce the two great writers of the twentieth century, though he expressed certain reservations about Joyce.

The Magic Mountain is of course vast and complex. Again, it appears that to some extent it provided a model for Hemingway in writing For Whom the Bell Tolls; that is, in Mann’s book Hemingway found themes (accelerated time and education, the inclination toward death) and techniques (the leitmotiv, development by repetition and intensification more than by story, a combining of the realistic and the dreamlike) that were not entirely new to him. He also found characters with whom he sympathized. I think he found a story shape and a number of incidents, too, all of which helped to guide him in shaping and giving expression to his own great mass of material.

Both For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Magic Mountain are novels of education, which take place (shortly before the outbreak of world war) atop a kind of magic mountain. In this “heightening atmosphere”—and it is so because of the nearness of passionate love and the nearness of death (which the hero seems half in love with)—the passive and often prone hero, in a highly sensitized state of mind and emotions, undergoes a miraculously speeded-up education, flying through the “years.”¹³ The relativity of time, a theme in both books, becomes a matter of narrative time (as we shall see later in this essay). The educations of the passive heroes, Robert Jordan and Hans Castorp, are achieved by experiencing new and startling events, memory, and meditation, and perhaps more than anything else, through their student-auditor relationships with various “lecturers,” dominant personalities who represent various attitudes toward life.¹⁴ After completing his education—in a sense, after many “years” have passed by for the hero—each young man descends his mountain and dies on the field of battle.¹⁵ Hans dies to bring about a better world, and (unconsciously, at least) does so willingly. The same can be said of Jordan. They both find on their mountaintop a reason to live, a serious purpose in life; and that purpose is to die—sacrificially, hence justifiably—for a noble cause. So each of these novels of “accelerated” education atop a magic mountain has basically the same story shape: a bell-shaped curve, a trip up a mountain, and then (after many “years”) a descent to a place of death.

Both novels are abundantly detailed and realistic; yet at the same time they have an interior, subjective quality (memory, meditation, many “estranged” states of mind), and even a mystical dimension: for example, gypsy fortune-telling in one, seances in the other. In each book we also find implied knightly romance and fairy-tale dimensions. Both novels make use of the microcosm technique—which is new in Hemingway’s work—and as mentioned, both aspire toward a musical structure. Many commentators have noticed the musical structure of Mann’s novel.¹⁶ Hemingway’s usual repetition (of scenes, images, action, dialogue) with variation operates on a grand scale in his novel: “every damn word and action in this book depends on every other word and action,” he said; protesting against cuts of some of the more gruesome scenes, he said it would be like taking “the bass viol or the oboe out of my orchestra” because it makes an ugly sound “when played alone.”¹⁷

Again, a family theme is important in each book. The hero becomes part of a “family” atop his magic mountain. More important, he must overcome past family influences, which have instilled in him an accentuated consciousness of death, and even a kind of hidden love of easeful death. When Hans was a child his mother, then his father, and finally his beloved grandfather died.¹⁸ Jordan struggles to overcome the suicide of his father.

Thus the conflict seems essentially the same for each of our relatively passive heroes: a conflict between a high-minded duty to life and mankind and a secret, unconscious wish for death. It is a conflict between Duty and Goodness and the desire for the release of dissolving death.¹⁹

Perhaps the simplest and clearest way to observe the surprising number of similarities between these two novels is to follow the general outline of action and situation in Hemingway’s book and see how often it coincides with Mann’s book.

For Whom the Bell Tolls begins with Jordan, accompanied by Anselmo, pausing on his climb up the mountain. Soon the steep climb continues, then he meets Pablo and gets the first hint that things may not go as planned. They continue the climb, proceeding to the cave, where Jordan has a meal and begins to meet other characters, whom the novel will soon imply are his “family’ Here we discover that he is replacing a dead man, Kashkin. Pilar reads his future in his hand; more hints of coming disaster will follow. That night Jordan sleeps in his sleeping bag out under the cold alpine stars with Maria. In the morning he goes on a long walk with Pilar and Maria, and meets another major character, El Sordo.

Mann’s book opens with Hans Castorp on a train climbing a steep mountain. At the train station he meets his cousin, the soldier Joachim, and together they take a carriage up to the sanatorium. In Joachim, standing in “Military position, heels together,” at the station—along with the uniformed concierge (there for Hans’s luggage), a former soldier who limps because his “knee-pan has been removed”—we begin to get the military motif that runs throughout the novel like a constant minor melody.²⁰

(Perhaps it is only a coincidence, but it is interesting to note that one of Jordan’s educators in Madrid is a German officer named Hans; two pages after the introduction of Hans, we learn that, while fighting in the Sierras, Jordan and others “held out in the Sanitarium firing from the windows” [FBT, pp. 234–36].)

At the sanatorium, a family-like place as it will turn out, Hans discovers that his room had been made free two days before, when its former occupant died. He too is replacing a dead person. This is one of the early omens that his stay will be more than three weeks, and may end in death. Later, Hans will view his hand under an X-ray machine and will be shocked at the sudden recognition of his own mortality. Pilar’s reading death in the hand of Robert Jordan is a similar incident.

After being settled in his room, Hans is taken by his cousin to the dining hall, where we begin to get to know some of the novel’s other characters. During his first night Hans lies out on the balcony of his room in a sleeping robe under the alpine stars. Before sleeping he enjoys the best thing in his life, his beloved Maria (his cigar), to whom (or which) he is “wed.” (The beloved of the soldier Joachim, the blond Marjusa, is another “Maria,” as he points out to Hans—which may suggest that Hans and Joachim are in a sense psychological doubles, as are the fearful Kashkin and the idealistic Lt. Berrendo, both blonds, of the blond Robert Jordan.) As the novel progresses we often find Hans out on his balcony at night, wrapped in his heavy sleeping robe, going over the “whole mass of his life,” remembering, meditating—all part of his education—alone with his Maria.

Chapter 2 is a flashback to Castorp’s former life (much of this flashback concerns his grandfather; Jordan’s memories of his grandfa¬ther come late in his story), from childhood up to the time he decides to visit Joachim at the Berghof for three weeks. (Early in Jordan’s story we get a flashback to his meeting with Golz and his reasons for going to the mountain cave of the guerrillas.) The next day Hans, like Jordan on his first full day, goes for a long walk (with his cousin) and meets Settembrini, who will emerge as a major figure in the novel.

That evening in the dining hall Hans first becomes aware of Clavdia Chauchat—“upon whom illness had conferred such a degree of freedom”—the “sensual and passive” blond whom he will soon love passionately. (And of course past events have conferred upon Jordan’s “passive” Maria an unwonted freedom.) Clavdia Chauchat is a kind of free-spirited gypsy—she is more than once associated with the Spanish gypsy girl Carmen, who loves and loses a soldier. Chauchat means “hot cat.” Jordan refers to Maria as a cat, a furry animal, and most often as “rabbit.”

So, in outline form, the novels begin with many similarities (though Mann’s flashback to his young hero’s former life is much longer than Hemingway’s), so many that we may suspect that Mann’s book gave Hemingway a formal beginning: the heroes climb a steep mountainside and near the top they meet someone (Pablo, Joachim), then continue their climb to the “family setting” place where they will stay. We discover that each is replacing a person who had recently died; later there are other bad omens. Then they have a meal and meet other important characters. Their first night (and throughout their stories) they enjoy their Maria, meditate, and sleep out under the stars in their sleeping bags. The next day they go for a long walk and meet other important story characters. Both books continue similarly: with flashbacks to earlier stages of the hero’s education; the student-auditor hero being lectured to by others; intense, shocking experiences; then, his education-life completed, the hero descends the mountain to meet death.

There are other similarities at the beginning; each book opens realistically and then tends to move into a kind of interior, subjective condition. Also, each book begins in “real” time and later moves into a subjective narrative time.

When they stop along the way to El Sordo’s hideout on the first full day, Pilar tells Jordan and Maria the horrible story of the murder of the Fascist villagers. (There are only a few brief shocking tales in Mann’s book: for example, the story of the crucifixion and burning of Naphta’s father, the story of the dying child visited by the priest, remarks about corpses brought down from a sanatorium higher up in the mountains on sleds.) Clearly Pilar’s story is intended to seem dreamlike: it is a major step in Jordan’s education toward a philosophy of love, and it has certain similarities with the most important step in the education of Hans, his dream in the snowstorm.

Pilar’s dreamlike story of ritual murder, concluding with a drunken slaughter in a church, suggests to Jordan the brutality underlying the ideals of the Republican cause, and the dark forces that reside in man in general. Hans Castorp’s dream of a happy island people turns into a drunken, ritualistic slaughter of a child outside a church. His dream in the snowstorm suggests to him the brutality and madness beneath the surface of civilization, the dark forces that reside in mankind—the underside of Settembrini’s humanist gospel of reason and good works (not unlike Jordan’s gospel of Duty)—and leads to his life-affirming “conversion.” But as suggested earlier, Hans’s conversion does not eradicate his essential sympathy with death; indeed, his conversion seems to give him a high-minded reason for going to meet death on the battlefield. Jordan’s three-day conversion is not so dissimilar.
Before reaching El Sordo’s, Jordan thinks that Maria is like a dream of the film star Garbo come alive. Castorp’s past dreams of Pribislav Hippe come true in the person of Clavdia. Maria and Clavdia are both old, recurring dreams come miraculously alive.

At the meeting with El Sordo Jordan realizes that the guerrillas, who have seen no action in three months, are out of touch with the war; they are withdrawn from time, motion, the change that has been going on in the war below. They lie in a hermetic (one of Mann’s words) atmosphere, “dying of boredom” one of the guerrillas says, though they “eat very well” (meals are a major time killer at the Berghof). Until they saw the morning planes, they had not realized the changes going on in the war. Now they must get involved, and the logic of the story (and the war itself) implies that they will soon die. They are among the soon-to-die, the virtually moribund, living on a hermetic, removed mountaintop. Also, there is a suggestion of sickness among the guerrillas. They are sick (or rotten) from a lack of action, Pilar says. Pablo is “sick” (FBT, p. 32) with longing for Maria and—though he once killed more than the “bubonic plague” (FBT, p. 26)—perhaps he is sick with a fear of death, too. After her experience in the barbershop, Maria (who is, like Catherine Barkley, a little “mad” when she first meets her lover) may be infertile. (But the entire country is sick, ravaged, infertile, and a little mad.) One of the gypsies calls the cave an insane asylum, and Anselmo calls it a palace of fear.²¹

Mann’s book features the same basic situation. Disease is of course a constant metaphor in the novel. At the Berghof we find a “family” of the moribund (even the doctors are sick), an “international bridge” (Mann’s words) in the “service of the cure,” young people mostly, who have come from all over the world to take up the “predominantly horizontal,” temporarily and for many permanently in the local graveyard. They are stagnating and bored—rather than rabbit stew, it is “soup everlasting”—with nothing to do but find ways to make time pass. They live in an estranged, hermetic atmosphere, cut off from the flow of time and events on the flatland. Thus they do not realize war is coming, but when it does, it will touch them, too.

After leaving El Sordo’s, Jordan and Maria make love in the mountain meadow, and feel the earth move. The implication (here and elsewhere) is that he loves Maria more than he could love anyone in a normal situation, because of the constant proximity of death. In Mann’s book we are told that Hans Castorp experiences a depth of passion and love for Clavdia that would never have been possible on the flatland, because of the nearness of death and the estranged mountaintop setting.

After this Jordan meditates on the relativity of time (completing a seventy-year life in seventy hours), as he will again on his final night. There are two long excursuses on the relativity of time in Mann’s book. 

Before Jordan, Maria, and Pilar reach the cave, it begins to snow. It had been hot the previous day and now, in late May, comes a snowstorm, which Jordan can hardly believe. In Mann’s book the snowstorm comes in August, which Hans finds equally shocking. In both novels the unseasonable snowstorm is a metaphor for the relativity of time (for example, there are three “seasons” in Hemingway’s book, summer, winter, and thawing spring in three days) and for the confusion of the normal sense of time. Also, it is another factor among many in each book contributing to the estrangement of atmosphere of these magic mountaintop locales, these places beyond the “line” of the “real” world. 

On his second morning, Jordan wakes to shoot the rider on the big gray horse. And as he lies in wait with Agustin for the coming of more horsemen, Agustin says that for him “ ‘there is no stronger feeling’ ” in life than the lust to kill. A possible source (there is no way of knowing for certain, of course) of this comment is Naphta, the militaristic little “Spanish Jesuit,” as Mann calls him, who says that in killing man gratifies “ ‘his heart’s deepest wish.’ ” Naphta, the proto-Fascist, the instinct worshiper, says that what the world needs now is a good dose of terror. 

The age demanding terror is something we find in the Yeatsian motif buried in Hemingway’s book: the rough beast, newly born, that is slouching toward Madrid, eventually, and the birth of Fascism, in Spain, and finally world revolution. As Naphta warns the humanist Settem- brini, not all revolutions end in democracy. The next revolution may be worldwide, and end in the iron rule of totalitarianism. 

By his final night, Jordan has gone through many “years” of experience and education. “ ‘I have learned much from thee,’ ” he says to Maria, as he has learned much from Pilar, Pablo, and the others (FBT, p. 380). When he wakes from his dream in the snowstorm, Hans thinks “I have learned much from ‘those up here.’ ”²² 

On this final night, Jordan also thinks: “I have learned much about life in these four days; more, I think, than in all the other time” (FBT, p. 380; italics added). Castorp says to Settembrini that his stay in the mountains “ ‘has given me more food for thought in these ten months than . . . in all the years before’ ” down on the flatland (MM, p. 376; italics added).

Jordan’s final night meditations on time and learning begin with him looking at his watch: “But as he watched the minute hand he found he could almost check its motion with his concentration”—an evocative image that may have come from Mann’s book. Toward the story’s end, after becoming conscious again of “real” time and preparatory to descending the mountain, Hans looks at his pocket watch, and “watching the second-hand, essayed to hold time by the tail, to cling to and prolong the passing moments”—as Jordan is obviously trying to do on this final night.

After blowing up the bridge the next morning, Jordan is wounded and laid against a tree. Then we get the scene of his “family” gathered about what is very much like his deathbed; and we must emphasize again that they are a disguised version of his boyhood family, and he is the son. This “deathbed” scene, with Pablo, Maria, and Pilar hovering over the wounded “son,” Maria and Pilar crying, is in its essentials similar to the most moving scene in Mann’s book: the death of the good soldier Joachim, with his crying mother and cousin Hans standing at his bedside (MM, pp. 534–39).

Previous to this, but still toward the end of his life, Joachim had come up with some uncharacteristically advanced insights, which indicated a “certain heightening of his nature” (MM, p. 542). The alchemistical heightening begins much earlier for Hans, of course, and this heightening process in both young men causes them to speed through the years, as it does Robert Jordan.

In the deathbed scene of Joachim we encounter the novel’s most evocative image of the acceleration of time and the completion of a lifetime in a few days, which of course is what we have in Hemingway’s book. Joachim has grown the beginnings of a beard in the final few days, “the beard of a soldier in the field” (Robert Jordan too has the few days’ beginning of a beard).

But because of this beard Joachim had suddenly grown from a stripling to a ripe man—though perhaps not because of it alone. He was living fast, his life whirred away like the mechanism of a watch; he passed at a gallop through stages not granted him to reach; and in the last four-and-twenty hours became a grey old man. (MM, p. 537)

The pathetic and soldierly death of the “knight” Joachim would probably have appealed to Hemingway, who more than once considered entitling a novel A New Slain Knight. Also, the impressive image of the accelerating clock seems especially pertinent to Hemingway’s book, where accelerating time, and the hero’s watch, are so basic. Jordan gallops through the “years” because he quickly learns so much, new and intense experiences following one another rapidly. Early in the book he thinks:

I suppose it is possible to live as full a life in seventy hours as in seventy years; granted that your life has been full up to the time that the seventy hours start and that you have reached a certain age. (FBT, p. 166)

Time is subjective and relative; and he seems to see things in terms of differential calculus (something an engineer would know about). His thoughts suggest that he will learn not at a steady pace but at an accelerating rate as the novel progresses —so by the story’s conclusion he can say: “I was learning fast there at the end.”

Jordan wonders at the end “if you keep on learning or if there is only a certain amount each man can understand.” By story’s end he has learned his certain amount—that which he had been “programmed” to learn in a seventy-year life—thus (like Joachim) he in a sense becomes a gray old man.

Joachim approaches death in full consciousness and “in harmony with himself.” The point is made that he dies for honor’s sake. “ ‘Field of honor, you know,’ ” the Hofrat says. “ ‘Honor was the death of him’ ” (MM, p. 538). Jordan gets himself “completely integrated” as he prepares for death; and he too dies for the sake of duty and honor.

Saying good-bye to Maria, Jordan experiences a sense of deja vu. He had not felt this young since the time as a boy in Montana when he had said good-bye to his father at the train station, and his father, after a few high-minded remarks, had kissed him and wept. Going off to the war, Hans is accompanied to the train station by Settembrini, a father figure he has now outgrown. At the station Settembrini kisses him on both cheeks, which takes Hans “no little aback,” then, after a high-minded little speech, weeps, as the train pulls away.

When Jordan, now wounded, makes his second departure from Maria, he tells her essentially that where she goes he will go, too. In Mann’s book Valentine’s song from Gounod’s Faust—“the soldierly prayer of the hero departing for the field of honor”—has a great deal of meaning for Hans: “If God should summon me away / Thee I would watch and guard alway / O Marguerite!” Hans Castorp will soon be departing for the battlefield and death, and the “thee” he fantasizes looking down on protectingly after he dies is apparently Clavdia.

Jordan’s final piece of learning comes near the story’s end. “There’s no one thing that’s true. It’s all true”: the things of life and the things of death . This is what Hans learns during the snowstorm, when he realizes that he must balance the claims of life and those of death. And he can, for man is the “lord of counter-positions” (MM, p. 496). But of course neither hero attains this balance. For both of them the lure of death is stronger than the claims of life.

Each novel ends in much the same way: with the camera pulling back, distancing itself from the hero, who is on the field of battle about to perish.

Other important similarities between these two books are the knightly romance and fairy-tale dimensions, and also the relativity of time, a matter not only of theme but of narrative time, too.

Hans Castorp is a kind of Perceval questing for knowledge, while his cousin, Lt. Joachim Ziemssen, is an honorable and duty-loving knight, a “purely formal” man, of a more soldierly type. Robert Jordan—in a sense, a combination of the meditative, death-inclined Hans and the soldier Joachim—is a knightlike figure who has traveled to a distant land to fight for a Cause just and true; not only does he fight against the great beast that is laying waste the land, but he is on a quest for knowledge, too (he plans to write a book someday). And like Joachim, he is an honorable, dutiful soldier-knight. It has been pointed out before that Hans Castorp finds an echo in the German knight Tannhauser (of Wagner’s opera), who went to a magic mountain and there gained love and knowledge, and afterward attempted to expiate his sins.²³ Robert Jordan and his trip to a magic mountain suggest something similar, though it is probably his father’s great sin that he feels he must eradicate.

Mann’s novel implies a fairy tale of a young man who wanders into the precincts of a magical mountain setting and there undergoes a miraculous education; or, to use Mann’s simile, Hans falls into a kind of seven-year sleep, has strange dreams, and finally awakens with new knowledge. It has been suggested that Hans’s waking near the story’s end from his long sleep and dream (like the Seven-Year Sleeper of German legend) is comparable to the Rip Van Winkle story.²⁴ We find a hint of the same story in Hemingway’s book. When Jordan arrives at the cave he is given wine; later one of the gypsies (Rafael, the “time waster’’) goes off with Jordan’s “marvelous chronometer,” and by this point in the story, time has become subjective and accelerated.

But Hemingway’s book has other implied fairy-tale dimensions. Our young hero is led by a strange old man up a mountain to a place of mysticism and omens, and gypsies living in forests and caves, a magic mountain atmosphere, in which he undergoes a miraculously speeded- up education, flying through the “years.” In a cave in the mountains he finds a precious, transforming gold —the golden-haired Maria, who was found “in the rocks” by the gypsies—a witchlike mother figure and seven “dwarfs” (Pablo and his men number seven); or else, Jordan and Maria are two middle-class orphans who have fled to the woods. There they find peasant mother and father figures, and receive an education in the gypsies’ mysterious and (for Jordan) true brotherhood.

Mann’s magic mountain concept naturally calls for allusions to the world of romance and fairy tale. So if Hemingway took from him, as he seems to have done, the idea of using a strange, transforming mountaintop setting for his novel of accelerated education, then we need not be surprised to see the outlines of romance and fairy tale in the novel. But Hemingway’s biggest debt to Mann’s novel may be in the application of the concept of the relativity of time to narrative time; that is, in the use of various kinds of time, especially the fairy-tale-like idea of speeding through the “years.”

There are three “times” in Mann’s book: realistic time, a hermetic out-of-timeness, and a speeding through the “years” (content time); these last two, of course, are subjective times. The Magic Mountain begins in realistic or clock time. The hero’s first full day (Chapter 3) is presented in almost minute-by-minute fashion. But after this, things change. After a few months, time becomes hermetic; it seems to move not at all—the monotonous daily round (month after month, year after year) of soup everlasting. But on another subjective level, the years fly past for the hero, so that he becomes an “old man” in seven brief years. The years, many “years,” pass so quickly because of their content. And so the hero, in his alchemistically heightened state, experiences and learns what it would normally take a lifetime to learn.

These three narrative times occur in Hemingway’s novel—and only in this one, of all his novels. We noticed that the guerrillas live a hermetic existence, cut off from time’s passage. But when Jordan comes to the mountains—with his watch and his directions to blow up the bridge at a precise time—he in a sense brings real time with him. The planes of the first morning emphasize the point. So the novel begins in real, clock time; and the early descriptions and events are realistic enough, compared with later events.

But at some point we begin to encounter, along with the regular beat of clock time, subjective time: perhaps when the gypsy “time waster” goes off with the hero’s watch, or, as some critics suggest, when Jordan and Maria make love in the meadow and time seems to stop for them. Then the story moves into a kind of mythic time, or an eternal-now (essentially comparable to Mann’s hermetic time).

But as the novel progresses the reader is caught up in another kind of subjective time. Time as the hero experiences it—subjective narrative time—speeds up, and does so at what seems to be a mathematically accelerating rate. It speeds up in the sense that the hero experiences an increasingly rapid succession of new, intense, shocking events; time speeds up in the sense that Jordan goes through many “years” of experience and—in his “alchemistically” heightened state of mind and emotions—education. This fairy-tale-like (or perhaps we should say, dreamlike: dreams are a major motif in both novels²⁵) acceleration of time and education—this application of the concept of the relativity of time to narrative time, subjective narrative time—is new in Hemingway’s fiction, and likely it came from Mann’s book.

Herman Weigand—who says that Hans Castorp “matures at a supernaturally rapid rate”—maintains that time in The Magic Mountain moves at a “progressively faster rate,” finally approaching “a state of pure, motionless duration”; time undergoes a “progressive foreshortening.”²⁶ Precisely the same descriptive terms are used in the two most influential critical discussions of the time dimension of For Whom the Bell Tolls.²⁷

So both young heroes climb to the top of what turns out to be a magic mountain, and there they undergo an accelerated education. Their education is stimulated by passionate love, the nearness of death, and their own deep inclination toward the peace of death—the “ultimate ridding of the ego,” in Jordan’s ambiguous words—as well as a rapid series of intense learning experiences. Jordan is in an “over-sensitized” state of mind and emotions (FBT, p. 381); the “actual adventures” of Hans consist of an “alchemical ‘keying up,’ ” Mann says. In this enhanced environment and highly sensitized state of mind and emotions, they learn in a student-auditor format, as well. Then, having rushed through the “years” toward death, they finally descend their mountain to the place where they will at last meet death. The lure of death is stronger than the claims of duty and life. And in both books the relativity of time is not only a theme for meditation, but also a matter of subjective narrative time.

The Magic Mountain provides a metaphor for a sick Europe on the eve of world war, and it implies a cultural death-wish. For Whom the Bell Tolls in a sense updates the metaphor, and it too implies a cultural death-wish, suggested not only by our idealistic hero’s subterranean inclination for the sweet release of death, but also by the buried allusions to Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” that is, to his myth of the end of a historical cycle—with Leda in the barber shop and the rough beast of Fascism, seen across the gorge, slouching toward Madrid—a historical cycle that can no more be stopped than the beginning of an offensive, once its inertia has been overcome. There is nothing our Christ-like hero can do about it.²⁸ The similarities between these two encyclopedic, twentieth-century epics seem too many and profound to be a matter of coincidence.

William Adair, For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Magic Mountain: Hemingway's Debt to Thomas Mann. - Twentieth Century Literature (Duke University Press), Winter, 1989, Vol. 35, No. 4 (Winter, 1989), pp. 429-444