by
George Packer
Guernica by Pablo Picasso
There was a moment, in April of 1937, when the Lost Generation of nineteen-twenties Paris reunited in Madrid. The occasion was the Spanish Civil War, already in its ninth month, but the regular shelling of the Hotel Florida and other privations of the Fascist siege didn’t prevent Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Josephine Herbst, and Hemingway’s latest distraction from the thought of suicide, Martha Gellhorn, from living well. Though the Hotel Florida wasn’t the Café des Amateurs, Hemingway managed to procure, thanks in part to impeccable connections with the Spanish government and the Russian general staff, the best food and brandy in the city. Every morning, the other guests woke up to the smell of eggs, bacon, and coffee being prepared by a Hemingway flunky in Room 108, courtesy of the Communist International. The moveable feast had crashed the Red decade.
Hemingway was an unlikely recruit to the Spanish cause. He had long since made his separate peace with the war of his youth and focussed his talent on the terse eloquence of the nobly wounded, the faithfully adrift, the stoically defeated; the Hemingway antihero, withdrawn from all causes, became a type of such popular influence that a whole crop of movies, novels, and actual lives grew laconic in imitation. But, in the nineteen-thirties, the literary infatuation with Communism returned to American prose the kind of lofty, romantic language that Hemingway had condemned at the end of “A Farewell to Arms”: “There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.” For Hemingway, the nineteen-thirties had nothing to do with coal strikes and the Scottsboro trial, and everything to do with bullfighting, marlin fishing, big-game hunting, and staving off the decline of his literary powers. By 1936, a decade past being very poor and very happy, he had become his own chief imitator—an international celebrity without a published novel in seven years and with a bad one (“To Have and Have Not”) in manuscript. He had grown bored with his second marriage, to the wealthy, adoring, and shallow Pauline—ruthlessly portrayed in one of his last great stories, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” as the desperately cheerful wife of a writer dying of gangrene and soul rot on an East African game reserve. With an animal instinct of impending doom, Hemingway, at the age of thirty-seven, sought out two familiar escape routes: violence and sex.
In February of 1936, Spanish voters elected by a narrow plurality a center-left coalition government of Anarchists, Socialists, Communists, and Republicans. It was the third democratic election in five years in a country that had not yet shed its feudal and clerical past. Some factions in the elected government had revolutionary goals, with those on the far left calling for “democracy of a new type,” meaning a prelude to the dictatorship of the proletariat; after five months of chaos, two of the Spanish institutions that had long exercised repressive power under the old monarchy—the military and the Church—were ready to overthrow the Republic. The civil war began on July 17th, when General Francisco Franco launched a rebellion from Spanish Morocco that quickly cut Spain in half. The Western democracies imposed an arms embargo on both sides, but Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy began giving troops and matériel to Franco’s rebels almost immediately, even as the Soviet Union advised and armed the Republic.
In late September, Hemingway wrote his editor at Scribners, Maxwell Perkins, “I hate to have missed the Spanish thing worse than anything in the world but have to have this book finished first.” The civil war, which most people assumed would last a few months, accommodated Hemingway’s writing schedule; it would go on for another two and a half years. He finished a draft of “To Have and Have Not” and immediately contracted to write a series of newspaper dispatches from the Madrid front. In short order, he also fell in love with Gellhorn, a beautiful and well-connected younger journalist who sailed into his marooned life on Key West just before she was scheduled to depart for Spain herself, on assignment for Collier’s. In Madrid, he offered literary advice and patronage; she educated him in Popular Front propaganda while accommodating him sexually to the extent, according to one biographer, of undergoing a widening procedure known as vaginoplasty.
John Dos Passos was travelling to Spain as well. He was Hemingway’s friend from their days in Paris, and he had met his wife through him. Hemingway, near the end of his life, portrayed Dos Passos in the nasty last pages of “A Moveable Feast” as a treacherous little “pilot fish” who had led Pauline and her rich friends into Hemingway’s youthful domestic bliss in the twenties and lured him into breaking up his first marriage. But Hemingway’s friendship with Dos Passos was already strained by the publication, in 1936, of “The Big Money,” the third novel of Dos Passos’s “U.S.A.” trilogy, to general acclaim and a Time cover story the week that fighting began in Spain. For a brief moment, Dos Passos was as big as the big man of American letters. It’s hard now to remember that, several generations ago, the trio of great novelists born around the turn of the century—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner—was a quartet, with the fourth chair occupied by Dos Passos. “U.S.A.,” which tells an alternative, submerged history of the first three decades of the American century, has become one of the great neglected achievements of literary modernism, with its nervy, jarring formal juxtapositions—newspaper headlines, popular songs, autobiographical fragments, short biographies of the famous—punctuating deceptively flat sagas of ordinary fictional types on the margins of great events, driven by the blind force of history across blighted human landscapes.
Dos Passos was, to the core, a political writer, whose radical vision was crystallized the night of Sacco and Vanzetti’s electrocution, in 1927. “America our nation has been beaten by strangers who have turned our language inside out who have taken the clean words our fathers spoke and made them slimy and foul . . . all right we are two nations,” he declaimed in a prose poem about the incident near the end of “The Big Money.” Though Dos Passos’s characters had some resemblance to the downtrodden figures of the proletarian novel of the thirties, his technical brio belonged to the defiant, avant-garde twenties, when radicalism had more to do with art than with politics. Dos Passos never managed or even tried to depict a fully realized inner life, and his experimentalism, his technique of narrating characters externally in the vernacular of their own voices, prevented him from achieving the tragic effects of Dreiser’s clumsier, more earthbound realism, though the picture of American dreaming is just as dark. “You yourself seem to enjoy life more than most people and are by way of being a brilliant talker; but you tend to make your characters talk clichés, and they always get a bad egg for breakfast,” Edmund Wilson—who was also made by the twenties but took a keen interest in the revolutionary movements of the thirties—observed in a letter to him. “I sometimes think you consider this a duty of some kind.” A writer whose single greatest burst of prose describes the burial of the Unknown Soldier after the First World War, culminating in the words “Woodrow Wilson brought a bouquet of poppies,” will always have a tenuous hold on popularity.
Dos Passos went to Spain in order to work on a documentary about the war, “The Spanish Earth,” to be shot by a brilliant young Dutch filmmaker named Joris Ivens, under the auspices of a group of New York writers led by Archibald MacLeish. The project’s purpose was to galvanize American support for the beleaguered Spanish government and to encourage President Roosevelt to lift the arms embargo. Dos Passos, already growing disenchanted with the American left, was encumbered with all the luggage of his embattled political ideals. There was a lot he didn’t know about what he had signed on for: Ivens was a hireling of the Comintern; the whole undertaking was a piece of propaganda controlled by Moscow; and Dos Passos himself, always an independent radical, was officially out of favor with the Communist Party, having been denounced at the 1934 Soviet Writers Congress, where the Party line on art turned from modernism to socialist realism. Moscow meant to use Dos Passos to lure the biggest fish of all to lend his name to the film. Hemingway, indifferent to left-wing politics until he met Martha Gellhorn, was happy to oblige.
What happened between Hemingway and Dos Passos in Spain is the subject of Stephen Koch’s new book, “The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the Murder of José Robles” (Counterpoint; $24.95). Koch’s story illustrates, among other things, the danger of writers plunging into politics and war, and it offers an unlovely portrait of the engagé artist as useful idiot. Its small drama leads directly to all the big questions about the nature of the Spanish Civil War which have recently generated controversy among historians. The Spaniard of Koch’s subtitle was Dos Passos’s close friend from youthful wanderings in Spain. José Robles was a left-wing aristocrat, a political exile and a professor at Johns Hopkins during the rule of the Spanish monarchy, who was vacationing in Spain at the time of Franco’s rebellion. But Robles maintained enough independence of mind to raise an alarm among pro-Communist Spanish authorities and the Soviet intelligence agents who, by early 1937, were bringing the government increasingly under Stalin’s control. Dos Passos was counting on Robles to serve as his main Spanish contact on the film; but by the time the two American novelists reached Madrid, separately, Robles had disappeared. It was Hemingway who learned first—from the Greenwich Village journalist Josephine Herbst, herself on a tour of the war zone very likely sponsored by the Comintern—that Robles had been arrested and shot as a Fascist spy. To this day, the manner and motive of Robles’s death remain a mystery; he was almost certainly a victim of the Stalinist purges that began around the same time in Spain.
Dos Passos, concerned for his friend’s wife and children, made the rounds of Spanish officials, only to encounter an unctuous series of bureaucratic lies and brushoffs—now that they had Hemingway, they didn’t even need to be polite to Dos Passos. Still, Dos Passos’s response to his friend’s disappearance reflected his sense that progressive politics without human decency is a sham. Hemingway, in a thinly disguised magazine article about the episode published in a short-lived Esquire spinoff called Ken, described these scruples as “the good hearted naiveté of a typical American liberal attitude.” Bookish, balding, tall and ungainly, sunny in temperament, too trusting of others’ good will: Dos Passos was the sort of man who aroused Hemingway’s sadistic appetite. “White as the under half of an unsold flounder at 11 o’clock in the morning just before the fish market shuts” was one of Hemingway’s fictionalized descriptions of his old friend. Hemingway seems to have needed to destroy a friendship or a marriage every few years just to keep functioning. In Madrid he did both.
He and Gellhorn received Dos Passos coldly when he arrived empty-handed at their well-provisioned suite; they were embarrassed by all the questions he was asking around town. “If it’s your professor bloke’s disappearance, think nothing of it,” Hemingway sneers, in Stephen Koch’s retelling. “People disappear every day.” This was war, and there was a way to behave during a war, and Dos Passos was failing the code. “Dos was not good in war, Hem claimed, because he was not a hunter,” Koch writes, paraphrasing Herbst’s own observations in her book “Spanish Journal.” “He didn’t know how to take care of himself in the wild. That’s what made him show up with no food. Dos had no balls; Dos had no understanding of war.” At one key moment in “The Breaking Point,” Dos Passos tells Hemingway, “The question I keep putting to myself is what’s the use of fighting a war for civil liberties, if you destroy civil liberties in the process?” Hemingway shoots back, “Civil liberties, shit. Are you with us or are you against us?”
Hemingway never embraced the ideological dogma of the Communists, though he admired their hardboiled stance, and he regarded the revolutionary fervor of the Anarchists as a joke. If chance had placed him in the Fascist sector, he would have been attracted to the steely nerve of Franco’s lieutenants. The reasons for Hemingway’s partisanship were entirely personal and literary. The imperative to hold the purity of his line through the maximum of exposure, which in 1931 made him an aficionado of bullfighting and in 1934 a crack shot in Kenya, in 1937 turned Hemingway into a willing tool of Stalin’s secret police. It was a rough brand of radical chic that also created a new type: the war correspondent as habitué of a particularly exclusive night club, who knows how and how not to act under shelling, where to get the best whiskey, what tone to use when drinking with killers. He’s drawn to violence and power for their own sake; war and the politics of war simply provide the stage for his own display of sang-froid. The influence of this type helped to mar the work of successive generations of war writers up to our own.
The falseness of Hemingway’s period in Spain can be felt in the novel that he eventually got out of the civil war. “For Whom the Bell Tolls” was a wild success with the American left and with Hollywood (as was the film “The Spanish Earth,” a masterly piece of cinematic propaganda narrated by Hemingway, who also toured with it around the country; Dos Passos was entirely cut out). Hemingway’s hero Robert Jordan, an American volunteer in the International Brigade, carries himself through revolution and war with all the stylized, self-conscious poise of a lonely matador in the ring. The Spanish critic Arturo Barea, himself a target of the secret police, wrote after the novel’s publication, in 1940, “I find myself awkwardly alone in the conviction that, as a novel about Spaniards and their war, it is unreal and, in the last analysis, deeply untruthful.”
As for Dos Passos, Spain seems to have killed something in him. He had gone there to see what he had given up on seeing in America—workers and peasants struggling to create a more just society—not to drink anis with Russian commissars in range of enemy artillery. The betrayals he experienced in Spain, personal and political, were so devastating that he could not bring himself to write an account of what happened to his murdered friend José Robles and his former friend Ernest Hemingway. (Hemingway, meanwhile, was spreading the news back home, in person and in print, that Dos Passos was a coward and a traitor to la causa.) But, in 1938, when Dos Passos was still trying to sort out the meaning of Robles’s death, he published a novel (lambasted by fellow-travelling critics such as Malcolm Cowley) about a disillusioned young radical who goes to fight in Spain and dies there. No one today has heard of “Adventures of a Young Man,” while “For Whom the Bell Tolls” is still taught in high schools. Hemingway’s romantic fable is in almost every way more compelling. But Dos Passos, in his dispirited and unblinking realism, was the one to convey what it meant to be alive in the nineteen-thirties.
Koch, who is also the author of “Double Lives,” a study of the Comintern’s exploitation of intellectuals in the thirties, as well as two novels, has structured his book as a series of vividly rendered scenes connected by intelligent commentary, with the extensive dialogue largely drawn from the many pieces and books—some fictional—that his main characters devoted to Spain. In the trade-off between the pleasurable and the verifiable, though, Koch has a bias toward the former, and not all of the dramatic specificity of “The Breaking Point” can be sustained by its sources. (The rude welcome given by Hemingway and Gellhorn to Dos Passos on his arrival at the Hotel Florida is drawn entirely from a scene in “Century’s Ebb,” a novel written by Dos Passos almost forty years later, at the end of his life.) Without these liberties, of course, the book would be far less readable. But some flourishes aren’t necessary: when Koch tries to amplify a tale that requires none with his own one-sentence-paragraph interjections (“Hadn’t noticed him?”), he puts his thumb on the scales. We already know where the author’s sympathies lie.
What are we now to think about the Spanish Civil War? Though Koch focusses on the theme of friendship and betrayal, the larger historical question hovers over all the action of “The Breaking Point.” Spain was where the twentieth century’s great lie, the totalitarian lie, flowered. And yet for decades the Popular Front line that the war was a simple black-and-white struggle between democracy and fascism remained one of the century’s most stubborn myths. In 1984, when I was in my early twenties, I saw a documentary, narrated by Studs Terkel, called “The Good Fight,” a direct descendant of “The Spanish Earth”; and the heroic testimony of those aging survivors of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, sitting on neatly made cots in narrow furnished rooms, overwhelmed me. I knew that most of them were Communists, under Party discipline, and I knew (having read “Homage to Catalonia” earlier that year) that Moscow-backed agents had engineered the violent betrayal of the independent worker movement in Barcelona in May of 1937, just after Dos Passos left the country. Somehow none of this mattered in the face of a struggle in which neutrality seemed impossible. The whole point of Spain to several generations of left-wing intellectuals was the need for people ordinarily disposed toward equivocation to take sides. Auden, who contributed a statement to a pamphlet on Spain called “Authors Take Sides,” expressed the reluctant longing in “Spain,” the poem that he wrote just before the street fighting broke out in Barcelona, and later repudiated: “What’s your proposal? To build the Just City? I will, / I agree. Or is it the suicide pact, the romantic / Death? Very well, I accept, for / I am your choice, your decision: yes, I am Spain.”
Since the fall of the Soviet Union and the opening of state archives in Moscow, scholarship has considerably darkened the view of the Communist role in Republican Spain. Moscow’s subversion of the Spanish government, especially after May, 1937, when the pro-Communist Juan Negrín became Prime Minister, turns out to have been more extensive than most of the Republic’s defenders ever knew, and more Machiavellian. The historian Stanley G. Payne’s “The Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union, and Communism,” published last year, portrays a Spanish government that was in no serious sense democratic: though elected by a small plurality, it was composed largely of revolutionary parties that showed no willingness to allow the right wing a political future in Spain, and it was extremely brutal in its treatment of clerics, landowners, and suspected Fascists. In other words, Payne suggests, the elected Spanish government was probably headed toward Soviet-style totalitarianism before Franco ever launched his rebellion. Nor, according to recent scholarship, was the Republic forced to turn to the dubious embrace of the Soviet Union only after the Western democracies imposed their embargo; Stalin was among the Spanish government’s first arms suppliers of choice. Such discoveries have been enough to persuade some writers on Spain that the right side won.
In military and political terms, the civil war didn’t resemble the coming world war; from the start, it was an internal struggle between revolutionary and counter-revolutionary forces. But many revisionists have replaced one set of simplifications with another. The failure of the democracies to defend the Spanish Republic convinced Hitler and Mussolini that Fascist takeovers elsewhere in Europe would go unchecked; Soviet interference was inevitable given the weakness of the Republic and the maneuverings of Germany and Italy. If it was acceptable for Winston Churchill, now the darling of the anti-appeasement lobby in Washington, to enter into an alliance with Stalin (“If Hitler invaded hell,” Churchill explained, “I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons”), it’s difficult to see why the same calculation, when made by Spaniards in 1936 in circumstances at least as desperate as Britain’s in 1941, should disqualify the entire struggle. When Heinrich Himmler visited Spain in 1940, the year after Franco’s protracted victory, he was shocked by the brutality of the Falangist repression. Whether or not democracy was on one side, fascism was clearly on the other.
Intellectuals can hardly keep away from politics any more than other citizens, and probably less, especially in decades like the nineteen-thirties (or this one, for that matter). But, because they typically bring to it an unstable mix of abstraction and narcissism, their judgments tend to be absolute, when nothing in politics ever is. This is why a writer as devoted to the visible, concrete world as Hemingway could nonetheless stumble so badly during his time in Spain: he lacked a sense of politics. The writer forever in search of one true sentence ended up accepting a whole raft of lies. Dos Passos, for his part, lacked the inner toughness to recover from the blow his idealism was dealt by José Robles’s murder and Hemingway’s betrayal. Dos Passos, of course, never wrote another book that came anywhere near the brilliance of “U.S.A.” At the same time, as if his literary flame required the fuel of radical politics to keep burning, after Spain he began a rightward drift, which by the 1964 election had become so extreme that Edmund Wilson wrote him, “I feel obliged to tell you that your article about the San Francisco convention sounded like a teenager squealing over the Beatles. What on earth has happened to you? How can you take Goldwater seriously?” (Even during his Goldwater phase, though, Dos Passos never repudiated his belief in the Spanish Republican cause.) When war, politics, and writers mix, the results are seldom inspiring.
Toward the end of “The Breaking Point,” Dos Passos, reeling from these revelations and on his way out of the country, walks into a Barcelona hotel lobby and is accosted by a lanky, battered-looking Englishman who is on leave after months at the front and has been waiting to meet him. “Things I’ve heard lead me to believe that you are one of the few who understand what’s going on,” George Orwell tells John Dos Passos. His appearance in the story amounts to a cameo, but, because he was better cut out for Spain and politics than either Hemingway or Dos Passos, Orwell kept his bearings, neither turning the war into a stage for his own psychodrama nor wilting under the pressure of ambiguous reality. Almost seventy years after its publication, his “Homage to Catalonia” holds up against all the recent revelations and controversies about the Spanish Civil War. Orwell was always able to sustain two ideas about it: one of betrayal, the other of hope. His encounter with reality in Spain was steady enough that these didn’t have to cancel each other out. “What I saw in Spain did not make me cynical,” he wrote to a friend just after returning to England, “but it does make me think that the future is pretty grim.” Summing up the war several years after it ended, Orwell still hadn’t followed Dos Passos to the right. “In essence it was a class war,” he wrote. “That was the real issue; all else was froth on its surface.”
Because we live in the age after the age of class war, when no idea has taken the place of socialism to carry the human aspiration for equality, the historiographical debate over the nature of the Spanish Civil War has a blind spot when it comes to the human heart of the matter. The files of the Soviet secret police have exploded forever the fiction of good versus evil in Spain. But in the early scenes of “Homage to Catalonia,” and in the photographs of Robert Capa from Barcelona and Madrid, and in Arturo Barea’s memoir, one keeps encountering a certain expression on the human face. Octavio Paz, who, though he fought in Spain, was not a writer given to illusion, described it years later in “The Labyrinth of Solitude”: “In those faces—obtuse and obstinate, gross and brutal, like those the great Spanish painters, without the least touch of complacency and with an almost flesh-and-blood realism, have left us—there was something like a desperate hopefulness, something very concrete and at the same time universal. Since then I have never seen the same expression on any face. . . . The memory will never leave me. Anyone who has looked Hope in the face will never forget it. He will search for it everywhere he goes.”
