Hemingway, the American Left, and the Soviet Union: Some Forgotten Episodes
Journal article by Cary Nelson; The Hemingway Review, Vol. 14, 1994
Journal Article Excerpt
Hemingway, the American left, and the Soviet Union: some forgotten episodes by Cary Nelson RECENT BIOGRAPHICAL scholarship--notably Kenneth S. Lynn's Hemingway (1987) and James R. Mellow's Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences (1992) --suggests that a consensus may be forming about the political judgments that coalesced in For Whom the Bell Tolls and that presumably carried Hemingway through the next two decades of his life. Briefly, the argument as Mellow puts it is that Hemingway by the end of 1938 experienced "growing disillusionment" with the cause of the Spanish Republic. His 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls as a result became, according to Mellow, "among other things, Hemingway's study of cowards and traitors and brave men in battle, as well as his apologia for supporting the Loyalists in the Spanish civil war" (517). "In both the marriage [to Martha Gellhorn] and the romance with left-wing politics," Lynn writes in a similar argument, "Hemingway would discover himself to have been sadly deceived" (442); "he said farewell to the Comintern in For Whom the Bell Tolls" (452). Putting in his own rhetoric the lesson he would have us believe Hemingway learned, Lynn writes that "the anti-Fascist propaganda being generated by the Comintern's cleverest liars, Willi Muenzenberg and Otto Katz (both later liquidated on Stalin's orders) was a rhetorical cover for the imperialistic designs of a system no less ruthless than Hitler's and infinitely more so than the repressive regime that Franco would establish" (444).(1) One exception to this pattern is Jeffrey Meyers' Hemingway: A Biography (1985), which sees For Whom the Bell Tolls as flowing from Hemingway's Loyalist sympathies rather than marking their end point. But Meyers too picks up the theme of disenchantment, arguing that Hemingway "abandoned interest in politics after his side lost the war in Spain" (325). If these conclusions hold, they will clearly shape not only our view of Hemingway's politics and the cultural work he may have hoped For Whom the Bell Tolls would do but also our view of the popular front politics of the 1930s and what they teach us for the present. In mellow's consistent (and rather monolithic) references to "the Communist side" in the Spanish Civil War and in Lynn's more fully articulated political views there is an effort to recruit contemporary readers to what both biographers consider common-sense political wisdom about modern history and the legacy of the Left in its heyday. One may well, for example, contest Lynn's wisdom, Stalin having murdered rather more of his fellow humans than Franco, but Franco's postwar summary executions being quite notable for a smaller country. One might remind Lynn that the Holocaust for many of us grants Hitler a special status when ruthlessness is being gauged. But this is not the place to carry on that argument. The question here is about Hemingway's attitude toward the Spanish Civil War and toward the international Left in the 1930s and 1940s. On those two related issues I believe Lynn and Mellow are wrong and that there is growing new evidence to prove them so. The recently released recording of Hemingway's "On the American Dead in Spain" reveals one piece of notable evidence.(2) The original 1939 New Masses elegy is not, as Mellow would have it, only a tribute to those international volunteers who died in Spain. It is also a concise and principled attack on Fascism. In fact, when Hemingway recorded the piece eight years later (in 1947), he made two brief additions to the eighth paragraph that reaffirm his 1938 beliefs about Fascism and establish his current antagonism toward the Franco regime. It is perhaps most appropriate to consider these two new passages not as additions to the original essay but rather as unplanned asides introduced as Hemingway was making the recording. Here is the eighth paragraph of "On the American Dead in Spain" with the new 1947 passages in italics: The fascists may spread over the land, blasting their way with weight of metal brought from other countries. They may advance aided by traitors and by cowards. All these things happened. They may destroy cities and villages and try to hold the people in slavery. This they are trying to do now. But you cannot hold any people in slavery.These eleven words are not earth-shaking. Historically, they are less important than the simple fact that Hemingway reaffirmed the essay by recording it for public presentation in 1947 and did so for the consistently Left-wing Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. But they do ... |
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