Ernest Hemingway's affinity for Spain is well-known. He was attracted by the Spanish character, and as proposed in a recent article, was perhaps influenced by the work of Pío Baroja. Whatever Hemingway may owe to the generation of 98 novelist, a comparison of him with the outstanding novelist of the succeeding generation, Camilo José Cela, intensifies what is perceived as Hemingway's Spanish Weltanschauung. Hemingway, unlike Baroja, depicts a confrontation with life in all of its dimensions and what Cleanth Brooks calls: "the struggle of man to be a human being in a world which increasingly seeks to reduce him to a mechanism, a mere thing." Cela's work presents a similar vigorous approach to life and concern with human dignity. Robert Kirsner writing on Viaje a la Alcarria observes that: "Here man does not surrender himself completely to external circumstances. He is not reduced to being a pawn of a material machination of 'cause and effect'."

Hemingway the writer so strongly reflects the vitality of his own life's involvements that the life of Hemingway the battle-scarred man of action has become something of a legend. In Cela too the living of life and knowing it through the senses is essential. Like Hemingway he has written poetry, been a soldier, a newspaperman, a novelist and a bull fighter. He and Hemingway have both been virile protagonists in the life they have so accurately observed, and so they are often protagonists in the literature they have created. Cela's accounts of his foot travels through the Spanish countryside in which he writes of what he has seen, smelled, heard, felt and done bear a resemblance to Hemingway's The Green Hills of Africa. A number of passages from The Sun Also Rises present the same feeling, as Hemingway in the identity of Jake Barnes travels, eats and sleeps in northern Spain. Here as in Cela's books of regional travel he is explicit as to the price of rooms and meals, the countryside and the customs. Neither Hemingway nor Cela, however, is intellectually or stylistically limited in these works to a terse account of the place and its people. There is attention to the subtleties of mood and atmosphere and often a lyric reflection on the nature of things.

Las cosas están siempre mejor un poco revueltas, un poco en desorden; el frío orden administrativo de los museos, de los ficheros, de la estadística y de los cementerios, es un orden inhumano, un orden antinatural; es, en definitiva, un desorden. El orden es el de la naturaleza, que todavía no ha dado dos ároboles o dos montes o dos caballos iguales. Haber sacado de Pastrana los tapices para traerlos a la capital ha sido, además, un error: es mucho más grato encontrarse las cosas como por casualidad, que ir a buscarlas ya a tiro hecho y sin posible riesgo de fraude.

Hemingway reflects a similar distaste for the changes wrought by a progressive society.

A continent ages quickly once we come. The natives live in harmony with it. But the foreigner destroys, cuts down the trees, drains the water, so that the water supply is altered and in a short time the soil, once the sod is turned under, is cropped out and, next, it starts to blow away as it has blown away in every old country and as I had seen it start to blow in Canada. The earth gets tired of being exploited. A country wears out quickly unless man puts back in it all his residue and that of all his beasts. When he quits using beasts and uses machines, the earth defeats him quickly. The machine can't reproduce, nor does it fertilize the soil, and it eats what he cannot raise. A country was made to be as we found it. We are the intruders and after we are dead we may have ruined it but it will still be there and we don't know what the next changes are.

Along with the feeling of the presence of Hemingway as protagonist, in many of his works there is an interesting collection of primitive types. The characters satirized in The Torrents of Spring are particularly like the motley group who patronize Cela's Café de artistas. In these works Cela and Hemingway satirize the trite and false in writing as well as the oddities of human nature. Characters who people the bars, cafes, locker rooms, sick beds, camps and road sides of Cela and Hemingway tales tend to be pathetic in the crowded emptiness that is their lives. They are characterized in a variety of dialects, brogues, mixtures of languages and simple inarticulateness. A use of language which has greatly interested Hemingway critics is that of For Whom the Bell Tolls in which the Spanish mentality is portrayed through English which seems to be a direct translation from the Spanish.

"… Perhaps it came from talking that foolishness about Valencia. And that failure of a man who has gone to look at his horses. I wounded him much with the story. Kill him, yes. Curse him, yes. But wound him, no."

"How came you to be with him?"

"How is one with any one? In the first days of the movement and before too, he was something. Something serious. But now he is finished. The plug has been drawn and the wine has all run out of the skin."

In La Catira Cela uses a dialect of Venezuela to characterize the people and their affinity to the land which holds and isolates them. "… Mía, mocho Clorindo, vale, pie a los santos que to baya a sali con bien. Un marrón te he e da pa toa la gente, vale. Yo no me muevo e el hato…."

A look at Hemingway and Cela, each within his national context, reminds us of their respective roles as postwar novelist and the consternation caused by their first novels, The Sun Also Rises first published in 1926 and La familia de Pascual Duarte in 1942. After the First World War, Americans were shocked to see themselves as part of a lost generation given to endless drinking and promiscuity. In Spain the aftermath of the revolution carried the same psychological devastation, alienation and dissolution of traditional values; and Cela horrified his countrymen with their presentation in his tremendistic novel. Pascual is a victim of circumstance, a primitive who can express his hostilities only through his violent acts, and so the final horror of his story lies in the truth of the words that begin it: "Yo, señor, no soy malo…." As Pascual in his simplicity describes the circumstances leading up to his first bloody act, he tells how he turned back again to sit on his favorite rock because it looked so lonely at his leaving. The fixed look of his faithful dog seems to challenge Pascual for his softness, and so the man reacts with violence as spontaneously as he did out of pity.

Un temblor recorrió todo mi cuerpo; parecía como una corriente que forzaba por salirme por los brazos. El pitillo se me había apagado; la escopeta, de un solo caño, se dejaba acariciar, lentamente, entre mis piernas. La perra seguía mirándome fija, como si no me hubiera visto nunca, como si fuese a culparme de algo de un momento a otro, y su mirada me calentaba la sangre de las venas de tal manera que se veía llegar el momento en que tuviese que entregarme; hacía calor, un calor espantoso, y mis ojos se entornaban dominados por el mirar, como un clavo, a del animal…

Cogí la escopeta y disparé: volví a cargar y volví a disparar. La perra tenía una sangre oscura y pegajosa que se extendía poco a poco por la tierra.

Generally Hemingway protagonists represent more civilization and complexity, but under the skin they are driven by the same urges which are eventually but often less spontaneously fulfilled. When Agustín explains to Robert Jordan the impelling desire he had to kill the Fascist cavalrymen as they rode by within easy firing range, he characterizes his passion as being akin to the sexual drive.

"… And when I saw those four there and thought that we must kill them I was like a mare in the corral waiting for the stallion…. The necessity was on me as it is on a mare in heat. You cannot know what it is if you have not felt it."

"You sweated enough," Robert Jordan said. "I thought it was fear."

"Fear, yes," Agustín said. "Fear and the other. And in this life there is no stronger thing than the other."

Agustín likens his instinctive desire to kill to the mating instinct of an animal, and Pascual describes his visceral reactions which also strongly suggest the description of sexual impulses: "un temblor," "todo mi cuerpo," "se dejaba acariciar," "me calentaba la sangre," "tuviese que entregarme." Jordan's intellectuality and civilization remove his impulses from the superficial level of immediacy and cause him to abhor their manifestations in Agustín, but out of his own honesty he finds them to exist within himself and to have an outlet acceptable within the social order.

Yes, Robert Jordan thought. We do it coldly but they do not, nor ever have. It is their extra sacrament. Their old one that they had before the new religion came from the far end of the Mediterranean, the one they have never abandoned but only suppressed and hidden to bring it out again in wars and inquisitions…. Stop making dubious literature about the Berbers and the old Iberians and admit that you have liked to kill as all who are soldiers by choice have enjoyed it at some time whether they lie about it or not.

Pascual Duarte, Agustín and Robert Jordan share the same primordial drives which are asserted in varying degrees. Of the three, Pascual is the most primitive and the most sensitive. It is when his tender feelings are bruised against the callousness of the human beings with whom he comes into contact that he is moved to commit a series of crimes which culminate in the murder of his own mother. Here the primitive urges that exist in man are not evil in themselves but become so when complicated and distorted by man's society. Pascual Duarte's situation was a product of the social order which had created it but which remained indifferent. The comfortable houses in his town seemed to be so far removed from his own as to be part of another world. Only his priest recognized Pascual to be "una rosa en un estercolero" but could not transplant him to more favorable terrain. Pascual in his dumb state of despair would not have been capable of articulating the words of Harry Morgan: "No matter how, a man alone ain't got no bloody chance." In To Have and Have Not Hemingway sees the individual as a victim of the social order but does not lose faith in his significance and dignity. Harry Morgan's violent acts arising out of his economic necessity carry him along on an irrevocable tide as do Pascual's. Morgan acted with awareness rather than out of passion, but like Pascual he was presented with no alternative. In the case of Agustín and Robert Jordan they too finally are only victims of a social product which is the war.

Although Hemingway found war to create a dramatic and real situation removed from the hypocrisy of a materialistic society, he abhorred it for its mass brutalization and destruction. A soldier's act of cowardice or bravery might be of utmost importance in defining his character, but war itself is never glorious or even expedient. National goals and ideals are lost; and out of the suffering, survival alone has significance. Hemingway's major war novels, A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls point up the futility as well as the abject cruelty and ugliness of the war scene. Frederic Henry finds the war to be so purposeless and intolerable that he deserts, and Robert Jordan dies for a cause which no longer seems to exist. Many of the short stories among Hemingway's first collection, In Our Time, are adaptations of the articles that he did at the front, and in their careful selection of detail they reflect the horror that the young man felt at his early contacts with war. Seeing what the Greeks did to their pack animals must have created an indelible image in his mind since there are later references to the same incident.

The Greeks were nice chaps too. When they evacuated they had all their baggage animals they couldn't take off with them so they just broke their forelegs and dumped them into the shallow water. All those mules with their forelegs broken pushed over into the shallow water. It was all a pleasant business. My word yes a most pleasant business.

The only comment on the scene is the ironical use of the word "pleasant." Typical of Hemingway is the apparent simplicity and objectivity with which he presents this stark scene of outrageous cruelty. Cela is a master of the same technique with which he arouses feelings of disgust and anger in his reader while he stands aloof as an objective narrator.

En la calle de Torrijos, un perro agoniza en el alcorque de un árbol. Lo atropelló un taxi por mitad de la barriga. Tiene los ojos suplicantes y la lengua fuera. Unos niños le hostigan con el pie …

Unos basureros se acercan al grupo del can moribundo, cogen al perro de las patas de atrás y lo tiran dentro del carrito. El animal da un profundo, un desalentado aullido de dolor, cuando va por el aire.

A product of Cela's reaction to war itself is El solitario which grimly and sardonically paints the hideousness of the soldier's life with death. He writes: "La muerte causa menos dolor que la espera de la muerte." In another passage he speaks of the loss of privacy and hence the loss of identity imposed by army life. "La guerra no es buen paisaje para la soledad. En la guerra, la soledad tiene demasiados atónitos espectadores. No quiero vivir, pero si quiero morir a solas: como he nacido. No hay causa noble fuera de la soledad del hombre y, en la batalla, la soledad del hombre se atropella por la mera presencia de los demás." Hemingway's Colonel expresses the same attitude toward a regimented life that denies a man his solitude: "… you go off to be alone, and think or not think, and pick a good piece of cover and there are two riflemen there already, or some boy asleep. There's no more privacy in the army than in a professional shit-house." In La colmena the aftermath of war is a mass struggle for existence that continues to rob human beings of their individuality. The undignified existence of the hungry and sickly café goers is like the swarming together of insects where there is an incessant stinging and buzzing but no exchange of affection or concern for one another. Nati wistfully remembers the innocent kisses she exchanged with Martin and how things were before their society had warped their lives: "… creí que las cosas eran así, como fueron entre tú y yo, y después vi que no, que no eran así … que eran de otra manera mucho peor…." It is here in the crowded life of the city that Cela sees man at his worst, victimized and dehumanized by life in the postwar society of Madrid.

Conversely in the peaceful countryside, away from the swarming city, Cela finds beauty and dignity in life. His numerous narrations of his travels through the Spanish provinces reflect his love of the land and the people who live close to it. "Parece que no pero, en el campo, sentado al borde de un camino, se ve más claro que en la ciudad eso de que en el mundo, Dios ordena las cosas con bastante sentido." When Cela assumes the role of vagabundo, he expresses his feelings about the city. "Al vagabundo no le gustan las ciudades ni hace buenas migas con los ciudadanos." As Hemingway recounts his African travels, he reflects the same attitude. "I had loved country all my life; the country was always better than the people. I could only care about people a very few at a time." Over and over again Hemingway expresses his love for the natural world and the solitude he finds there. In hunting there is an escape from the world of people and an opportunity to find satisfaction in "killing cleanly." "Having killed … you feel a little quiet inside." The peace and quiet that Nick Adams found at the trout stream was one of its greatest attractions and was what took him back to it in his mind when as a young soldier he was afraid to sleep at night because his soul might leave his body as it had when he was hit. When Nick and Bill went out to the cabin during The Big Three Day Blow, Bill asked Nick: "Wouldn't it be hell to be in town?" In Cross Country Snow George is struck by the thought that: "Maybe we'll never go skiing again…." Nick responds that they must because: "It isn't worth-while if you can't." Later, however. Hemingway found that hunting good snow wasn't worth-while because: "You saw too many people, ski-ing now."

Nuevas andanzas y desventuras de Lazarillo de Tormes carries the same antisocial yet basically humanist attitudes as Cela's travel books. Paul Ilie observes that: "Al viajar, Cela cumple un acto social. Sus excursiones son prolongadas fugas del estado de sociabilidad al que el hombre se ve condenado … El viaje a la ventura apunta a una vida más primitiva que la del intelectual." Cela's Lazarillo suffers only abject cruelty at the hands of human beings until he leaves the towns and villages and finds the hermit, El penitente Felipe, who spends his time stargazing. His first question to Lazarillo is: "—¿Amas la Naturaleza y sus encantos?—Sí, señor; las dos cosas." Lazarillo found a happy life with el penitente while the natural world determined the rhythm of their lives. "Pasaron los días y las noches sobre nosotros; amaneciö el Señor mañana a mañana encima de nuestras cabezas, ora risueño y soleado, ora un tanto Iluvioso y como Ilorador…." From his other masters Lazarillo received nothing but beatings, but looking back on those days he accepts them as an inevitable part of the order of things in the world. "Al andar de los años, cuando llegué a tener criado, hice lo mismo, y no creo que tampoco a éste le haya parecido mal; de momento a nadie gusta que le peguen un revés en el pescuezo o un punterazo en el trasero, pero a la larga, si uno es criado, acaba 'por reconocer que para eso está, y se aguanta." The social order is unjust and perpetuates itself and its acceptance. In a more complex way the Colonel of Across the River and Into the Trees detested his own unkindness to his driver, Jackson, but accepted it since he too in earlier days had experienced similar treatment. The Colonel is an innately sensitive person who is responsive to Renata's beauty and the beauty of the countryside, yet he must struggle against the corrupting ugliness of war and army life that have made him rough. "He sure is a mean son of a bitch. Jackson thought, and he can be so God-damn nice."

Both Hemingway and Cela project a frightful awareness of life being handed out in limited quantities and an urgent need to eat, drink and enjoy all that there is to be enjoyed as long as it is physically possible to do so. The Hemingway protagonist lives with a threat of imminent death from the war, a faulty heart, the forces of nature or the establishment, all of which at least give him some kind of a fighting chance which the aging process and its culmination do not. Hemingway, nevertheless, could not accept the "Life is real: life is earnest, and the grave is not its goal" philosophy which he attributes to "someone with English blood."

And where did they bury him? and what became of the reality and the earnestness? The people of Castille have great common sense. They could not produce a poet who would write a line like that. They know death is the unescapable reality, the one thing any man may be sure of; the only security; that it transcends all modern comforts and that with it you do not need a bathtub in every American home, nor, when you have it, do you need the radio. They think a great deal about death and when they have a religion they have one which believes that life is much shorter than death.

A stark passage from El solitario asserts the horror of "the unescapable reality." "La vida es una brevisima tregua que hay que gozar de espaldas a los cementerios y sus puntuales gusanos devoradores de la carne que aun hubiera servido para dar felicidad a la carne." This biological aspect of death is frequently asserted. One of the patients of Pabellón de reposo objects to burial because to her it seems to be removal from the natural world.

El recuerdo del 14 metido en una caja pintada de negro, con metro y medio o dos metros de tierra encima, me sobrecoge.

A los muertos no se les debiera enterrar: es cruel. Se les debiera dejar en los húmedos y verdes prados, a la orilla de los alegres riachuelos, recubiertos con un tul o con una gasa para que las mariposas no les molestasen. Sería, sin duda, más humano.

The Colonel finds on the other hand a certain satisfaction in identifying the final processes of death and burial with a return to life.

For a long time he had been thinking about all the fine places he would like to be buried and what parts of the earth he would like to be a part of. The stinking, putrefying part doesn't last very long, really, he thought, and anyway you are just a sort of mulch, and even, the bones will be some use finally. I'd like to be buried way out at the edge of the grounds, but in sight of the old graceful house and the tall, great trees. I don't think it would be much of a nuisance to them. I could be a part of the ground where the children play in the evenings, and in the mornings, maybe, they would still be training jumping horses and their hoofs would make the thudding on the turf, and trout would rise in the pool when there was a hatch of fly.

Man's death is a counterpart of life to be understood in terms of life. Pascual Duarte and Agustín in their desire to give death respond as to the mating urge. When Robert Jodan and María make love they describe it as dying, and Pascual Duarte's first sexual experience is on the fresh grave of his brother Mario.

There is another form of death removed from that of the body that is antithetical to the love and awareness of life that is Hemingway's and Cela's. Characteristic of the mass existence that repels them is its unawareness and insensibility, its lack of commitment to living. "Vamos sintiéndonos vivir—en medio de un mundo que se siente, inexorablemente, morir—…." "You just get dead like most people are most of the time." Nevertheless, the individual who asserts his humanity is finally as insignificant as those who comprise the unconsciousness of the social order.

… and when, on the sea, you are alone with it and know that this Gulf Stream you are living with, knowing, learning about, and loving, has moved, as it moves, since before man, and that it has gone by the shoreline of that long, beautiful, unhappy island since before Columbus sighted it and that the things you find out about it, and those that have always lived in it are permanent and of value because that stream will flow, as it has flowed, after the Indians, after the Spaniards, after the British, after the Americans and after all the Cubans and all the systems of governments, the richness, the poverty, the martyrdom, the sacrifice and the venality and the cruelty are all gone …

Ultimately man must recognize his insignificance in a world that takes no notice of his arrival or his departure. This is the realization with which Pipía Sánchez is left after seeing the bodies of her son and two husbands given back to the land. "La tierra quea, negra … La tierra quea siempre … Manque los cielos Iloren, durante días y dias, y los ríos se agolpen … Manque los alzamientos ardan, güeno, y mueran abrasaos los hombres … Manque las mujeres se tornaran jorras, negra…."

Cela and Hemingway each presented his country at a crucial moment with a new authenticity of expression and an awareness of the disparity between tradition and grim reality. When the values of their respective societies seemed to be in a state of disintegration, they affirmed the significance of the individual and his relationship to life itself. Their writings reflect a view of collective forms of civilized life as chaotic and degrading, in essence uncivilized, and a reverence for the "all abiding land" and things and people in their natural state. To find these Cela had only to set out for the provinces of Spain. Hemingway's destination was the same, but for him it was distant and exotic. He found Spain to be a country attractive for its primitivism and its freedom from the materialism that for him characterized the American way of life. Neither Cela nor Hemingway has written out of a social commitment but rather out of a commitment to life. They assert the reality of man's body and its passions as a component of his humanity which gives him the capacity to live briefly but completely. They share the view that to identify with the established order is to allow it to determine the shape of life and thus to accept a lifeless existence. Human relationships are meaningful at the personal level but are distorted by society so that finally in the worlds of Cela and Hemingway it is necessary to accept the notion that living like dying is an essentially lonely business.