Hemingway’s literature about the Spanish civil war, like most other historical fiction, provides us with a record of the time. However, it is less significant as a record than as meditation on the problems of war writing and expatriate involvement. By historical standards, the war was short, but it was by far one of the most complex wars and at times, complex to the point of contradictory. Most people understand the war as the Republicans versus the Nationalists, but it was actually much more complicated than that. Each side had several subgroups and those subgroups all had goals that differed entirely. Nonetheless, Hemingway saw the complexity in more than just the belligerents. As an expatriate, he often wondered and wrote extensively about his role in the war. He knew he was representing (and occasionally fighting in) a war that was not his own, but he still felt like he had a deeper connection with Spain than the average foreigner; he had traveled there several times before, enjoyed bullfights, eaten with the locals, and even talked with the locals in their own language. He was an outsider and an insider at the same time.
He fought in the trenches and wrote about them from afar. As a writer, he wasn’t trying to tell us what the war was about; he was trying to tell us that war cannot be represented by one story, or even a thousand. Writers, including and especially writers of war, cannot present the world as it is. No matter who his protagonist is, Hemingway’s stories will always be from the perspective of Hemingway. The realist movement tried to present a picture of the world as it is. The modernist movement, as Professor Joseph Entin puts it, points out the piece of glass and frame in front that same picture. This is what makes Hemingway a modernist; he presents his stories not as ‘scenes from the Spanish Civil War,’ but rather as examples of the complexities and contradictions that plague a county divided and the writers who try to comprehend those divisions and the conflicts around them. As examiners of the Spanish Civil War today, our present-day understanding of the events is skewed by our knowledge of what came after. We now primarily associate the fascists with the horrible atrocities committed during World War II, but at the time of the Spanish Civil War, those events had not happened yet.
The Nationalists, while backed and allied with Fascist Germany and Italy, were not fascists themselves. While they were comprised of various political groups, the Nationalists were mainly comprised of wealthy landowners and clergy members. As Paul Preston points out in his book, We Saw Spain Die, the Nationalists owned “the land, the banks and industry, as well as the principal newspapers and radio stations” (3). They were wealthy and intended to stay that way. The Republican side, on the other hand, was mostly comprised of farmers and industrial workers. When they won the election on February 16th, 1934, it was “a narrow victory [that]…shattered right-wing hopes of being able to impose legally an authoritarian, corporative state” (Preston 4). Then, after the coup of July 1936 overthrew the Republican government, The Civil War officially began. Almost three years of atrocities and bloodshed would terrorize the country, resulting in over 500,000 deaths, not including those who died from starvation, malnutrition, or war-induced disease (‘Spanish Civil War’).
When this many people die, it is common for people to look for a reason or someone to blame. So who is to blame for the Spanish Civil War? Many people view the war as a clear dichotomy of good versus evil: the poor Republicans only wanted a chance at economic freedom and a separation of church and state, but then the evil Nationalists overthrew their government and started killing them because they wanted to keep all the land and money to themselves. While there is some truth to this narrative, it leaves a lot of important points out. For example, in September 1936, John Langdon-Davies of the News Chronicle wrote, “Today most English people have been convinced that the government supporters are not only ‘reds’ but ghouls; that the reason why they have not defeated the fascists is that they spend their time raping nuns and watching them dance naked” (Langdon-Davies 97). While this claim cannot be confirmed nor denied, it still speaks to the public opinion of the Republicans at the time. Langdon-Davies sympathized with the Republicans, but unlike Hemingway during the war, he didn’t deny Republican violence. In his book, Behind the Spanish Barricades, Langdon-Davies addresses and instance when Republicans shot thirteen fascist sympathizers in Ripoll, but also condemns “those who had brought to Spain the most horrible atrocity of all, civil war” (121).
While Langdon-Davies was one of the more neutral correspondents, he blames the atrocities that occurred during the war on the rebels because they incited the war with their coup. The Republicans’ violence resulted from understanding that “a victory for the rebels [meant] their re-imposition on the remnant left alive” (Langdon-Davies vii-viii). But who is to say that the coup is the exact cause of the war? From the rebel perspective, the election of 1934 could also be cited as the cause of the war because it prompted the rebels to plan the coup. In September 1935, Hemingway published an article in Esquire Magazine titled ‘Notes on the Next War,’ in which he predicts and discourages the United States’ involvement in any future wars. He claims that it will happen ‘Not this August, nor…next August, nor next September,’ but that war is coming soon (‘Notes’ 19). He argues that no man or group of men who is exempt from war should be able to declare it. He then briefly outlines the movements of countries like Italy, France, and Germany that possibly indicate the impending war and proposes that ‘The only way to combat the murder that is war is to show the dirty combinations that make it and the criminals and swine that hope for it and the idiotic way they run it when they get it’ (156).
In 1918, Hemingway signed up to be an ambulance driver in Italy during World War I. In June, he was injured by Austrian mortar fire. Despite his injury, he carried a wounded Italian soldier to safety, only to be hit again by machine gun fire, resulting in the Italian government granting him the Silver Medal of Valor (‘Hemingway on War and Its Aftermath’ Putnam). Though his experiences in Italy could have been much worse, Hemingway came home with an intense disdain for war and the people who cause it. Therefore, in 1935, when he saw what he believed to be political movement in Spain and Italy that pointed to another world war, he wrote and published ‘Notes on the Next War’ to caution Americans away from any involvement. He claims, ”We were fools to be sucked in once on a European war and we should never be sucked in again’ (‘Notes’ 156). However, this all changed just over a year later in July 1936, when the Nationalists in Spain staged a coup against the Second Spanish Republic, inciting a civil war. If this had occurred in any other country, Hemingway would have arguably stayed true to his anti-war beliefs, but Hemingway loved Spain and the Spanish people. Inspired by the several trips he took there during his lifetime, he wrote short stories, fiction, essays, and a non-fiction book all based in Spain. He had his favorite bars and was referred to by the locals as ‘Ernesto,’ often because they had trouble pronouncing his last name.
As Adam Hochschild points out in his book, Spain in Our Hearts, “Hemingway had an almost proprietary love for Spain. A trip there had been the basis for The Sun Also Rises, the novel that first made the world notice him, and he had returned often, seeing Spanish friends and gathering material for Death in the Afternoon” (142). As the war went on, Hemingway began to abandon his previously held anti-war beliefs. Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union all signed a non-intervention pact, but both Hitler and Mussolini sent aid to the Nationalists almost immediately after the war began. Alternatively, The United States, which unofficially agreed to the non-intervention pact, and France refused to send any aid to the Republicans. His own country’s refusal to protect a young democracy in need enraged Hemingway enough to force him to abandon his non-involvement stance and encourage American intervention. He understood the threat that fascism posed and knew that it would grow and conquer unless it was stopped on the battlefields of Spain.
A year later, he joined the North American Newspaper Alliance as a correspondent and traveled to Spain to join ‘La Causa.’ Hochschild also argues, “For Hemingway Spain offered a chance to recapture not only the experience of war, but another part of his youth” (143), but Hemingway’s motivations were much more complicated than that. While nostalgia might have played a small part in his decision, he ultimately decided to go to Spain to protect a country he loved and to leave his mark on the effort to stop the spread of fascism. Shortly after the war started, he sent a letter to his good friend and editor, Maxwell Perkins, saying, ‘I hate to have missed this Spanish thing worse than anything in the world’ (Selected Letters 454), feeling guilty for not being more involved. In his article, Anton Nilsson argues that Hemingway’s motivation for joining the fight in Spain was because he ’could not accept that foreign powers were threatening the liberty of the people of his beloved Spain’ (83). Eventually, Hemingway decided to act, hesitant to become an active member in yet another war, but also determined to protect the people, country, and ideologies he held so dear. Despite his popularity among career critics and modern readers alike, it is well known that not all of Hemingway’s writing turns to gold. His first and only full-length play, The Fifth Column, is a prime example of this. Even Hemingway eventually saw the play’s deficiency when production was stalled in early 1939 and he wrote in a letter to his mother-in-law, Mary Pfeiffer, that he wished he ‘had never heard of a play but had written a novel instead’ (SL 476).
However, it is one of the first pieces Hemingway wrote about the Spanish Civil War and is crucial to our understanding of the way his perspectives changed as the war progressed. The Fifth Column follows the activities of counter-espionage agent Philip Rawlings, a Communist agent full of alcohol and machismo, posing undercover as a war correspondent. Operating out of the Florida hotel, the same hotel in which Hemingway often stayed, they track down ‘fifth column’ members. The term comes from the Siege of Madrid in 1936, when Nationalist General Emilio Mola told a journalist that when his four columns of troops approached Madrid, a ‘fifth column’ of supporters from inside the city would help destroy the Republican Government from within. Also with him in the hotel are Dorothy Bridges and Robert Preston, who think Philip is a ‘playboy’ (22) and a brawler, but Dorothy, a blonde caricature of Hemingway’s then mistress and fellow correspondent, Martha Gellhorn, falls for him and dreams of a happy future with him after the war.
Philip eventually captures a fifth column member and acquires a confession through torture, which leads to the discovery of three hundred more fifth columnists. The violence starts to eat away at Philip, and he questions the importance of his work before ultimately deciding to break with Dorothy and to continue his mission. Critics of the play aren’t sure why Hemingway decided to write the story in this format. Some argue that he was pressured to compete with his contemporaries, like John Dos Passos and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who had written plays around that time, while others argue that he was inspired by the screenings of The Spanish Earth, during which he gave speeches, and wanted to recreate the immediacy in which an audience experiences a medium such as theatre (Raeburn 6-7).
However, I’m inclined to agree with John Raeburn, who proposes that he wrote it as a play for its unique exposure. The play was intended for Broadway stages, which were routinely filled with powerful, intellectual, and wealthy individuals. Raeburn argues that ‘the stage presented a tempting opportunity to propagandize this elite and an extraordinarily visible forum for publicizing the Loyalist cause’ (8). Many critics agree that The Fifth Column, as Scott D. Yarbrough puts it, ’is a banal work of propaganda and one of the worst things Hemingway ever wrote’ (163). While its slow pacing and underdeveloped characters don’t help, the main fault of the play lies with its moral center. Rawlings, a thinly-veiled Hemingway stand-in, is meant to be a hero, breaking up the fifth column, but instead becomes, as Carlos Bakers points out, ‘…a projection of Ernest himself, based on his imagination of how it might feel to be an actual insider…’ (Life, 321).
Charles Molesworth claims that the play’s ‘hero,’ Philip Rawlings, ‘…fails to mediate the pressure as he becomes numbed by his role as executioner of Fascist spies. He taunts himself and his spoiled American mistress with dreams of a sensual paradise free from all conflict and fear, and when he deliberately bursts the bubble of this dream he has no mission or discipline to replace it’ (86-87). In 1939, Lionel Trilling implied that the play appears to advocate the notion that ‘oppression by the right people brings liberty’ (59) and Raeburn claims there is a ‘Machiavellian indifference to [the] moral dimensions [of political questions]’ (15). Stanley Payne even wrote that it ‘was a grotesque romance of the Republican terror, in which the propagandist… was a swaggering American who specialized in political liquidation… [perhaps] the ugliest American in all world literature.’ Each of these critics makes different accusations towards the moral center of the play, but they all seem to agree that the play glorifies radical political activity. However, the possibility of the critic’s political leanings should be considered here when assessing these criticisms. Would they be more or less harsh if Rawlings was on the Nationalist side?
To what extent is radical political action necessary in a war? Some critics, like William Braasch Watson, attribute the play’s propagandistic stance to communist manipulation, specifically by Joris Ivens, Hemingway’s friend and collaborator on the documentary, The Spanish Earth. Alternatively, other critics like Stephen Cooper argue that Hemingway was aware of the dangers of Stalinism and only tolerated them because of the order and discipline they brought to the disorganized, divided Republican forces (92). I, however, maintain that The Fifth Colum takes such a political stance because of Hemingway’s own ignorance. He was ignorant of the dangerous nature of the Soviet Union’s involvement, the extent of the Soviet Union’s involvement, and the way in which a war like the Spanish Civil War is fought. Although the Soviet Union’s involvement was necessary to stop an immediate defeat of the Republican forces, it’s role in the war eventually grew into a force that overshadowed the original purpose of the war (Graham 40).
Despite their superior organizational and tactical skills, the Soviet Union solidified already existing divides within the Republican government with its political and social agendas. Ignorance can even be found on a superficial level of the play in its minor characters. Almost all the Spanish characters are presented for seemingly general comedic effect: the hotel maid who wards Dorothy of Philip’s ‘badness,’ the drunk electrician who babbles political slogans, and the hotel manager who constantly asks for food. Luckily, as Hemingway continues his time in Spain, he starts to further understand the dynamics of the war, as proved by his later literature.
On August 19th, 1935, one year before the start of the Spanish Civil War, Hemingway wrote to Ivan Kashkin, “A true work of art endures forever; no matter what its politics” (Baker, SL 419). Before the war, Hemingway was not a particularly political person or author. In the same letter to Kashkin, Hemingway also wrote, “the state I care nothing for…I believe in the absolute minimum of government…A writer is like a gypsy. He owes no allegiance to any government” (Baker, SL 19). However, after only a few months in Spain, his writing became almost exclusively political. Although his novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls is his most well-known work about the war, Hemingway also wrote four short stories inspired by his time in Spain. The first is called “The Denunciation,” which takes place at Chicote’s, a bar in Madrid. The narrator explains that you did not talk politics [in Chicote’s]…There were cafes where you went for politics and nothing else but you didn’t talk politics at Chicote’s” (89).
In his book, Allen Josephs points out the irony of this detail because during the Spanish Civil War, politics were “virtually the only subject anyone [talked] about” (Josephs 35). Although the narrator is an American named Henry Emmunds, the story primarily revolves around an old, unnamed waiter and his moral dilemma when he spots an old customer in the bar who now fights for the Fascists. While the old customer, Luis Delgado, is “in a loyalist uniform, talking to three young loyalist flyers,” (Four Stories, Hemingway 97) Emmunds says that he “[knows] he is not” (93) on the loyalist side. The waiter struggles with whether or not to denounce him and asks for Emmunds’ advice. Emmunds responds with, “I would never denounce him myself…But I am a foreigner and it is your war and your problem” (97) and gives him the number of the secret police. After much back and forth, the waiter finally decides to make the call and Emmunds decides to leave because “There is going to be some trouble” (97). As he leaves, a Seguridad car pulls up and men with sub-machine guns come out.
Back at the hotel, Emmunds makes a call to the number he gave to the waiter and talks to a man named Pepe and asks him to tell Delgado before he is killed that is was him to denounced him because he “did not wish him to be disillusioned or bitter about the waiters [at Chicote’s] before he died” (100). In his book of essays, Kenneth Johnston discusses the non-intervention pact that was signed by several countries at the beginning of the war and explains that while the United States never officially joined the committee, they held a policy of “‘moral aloofness,’ enunciated by the American Secretary of State, Cordell Hull [and was] widely supported by both the American public and Congress” (218). Johnston makes the argument that “‘The Denunciation’ is a story of self-denunciation, for it is sharply critical of the narrator for his failure, his refusal, to assume the responsibilities which come with commitment” (218). Hemingway is using the aloofness of Emmunds to criticize America and subsequently every other country that refused to get involved in the Spanish Civil War.
Emmunds claims to be “Absolutely and always” with the cause but refuses to make the call himself. The narrator even appears to be somewhat admiring on Delgado, a man who is politically his enemy. He calls him an “utter bloody fool” (91), but he also says that he “would have given plenty not to have seen him in there” (96). Emmunds also recollects a time before the war when they were gambling together and Delgado ended up losing a large sum of money, but still honored it. He is clearly facing a moral dilemma along with the waiter, but Emmunds lacks the courage to act on his decision and instead cops out of making the call because it is not his war. Instead he passes the responsibility onto another, just like the Americans. In ‘The Butterfly and the Tank,’ another one of Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War stories, a man named Edwin Henry, whose initials are not coincidental, walks into Chicote’s, the same bar ’The Denunciation’ takes place. It is the ‘second winter of shelling in the siege of Madrid and everything was short including tobacco and people’s tempers’ (101).
The bar is crowded, so Henry sits at a table with some people he doesn’t know, including a woman who is ‘pretty terrible looking’ and a man who ‘looked as though he ought to be wearing an old school tie’ (101-2). A seemingly drunk man then enters the bar with a flit gun filled with cologne and starts spraying a waiter. Henry notes that the man seems unconcerned that it is the second year of the war, that the city is under siege, or that ‘he was one of only four men in civilian clothes in the place’ (103). Three men in uniform get up and push the man outside. He comes back in, face bloodied and shirt torn, and aims the flit gun at the crowd again. Then, a shot goes off, everyone ducks under the tables, and the man with the flit gun falls to the ground. The police arrive and try to figure out who shot the man. While their investigation is going on, Henry talks to the manager and he says, ‘How rare it is. His gaiety comes in contact with the seriousness of the war like a butterfly… like a butterfly and a tank’ and suggests to Henry that make that the title if he ever writes it down (108-9). The terrible looking woman overhears this and tells Henry that he ‘could not write it because it would be prejudicial to the cause of the Spanish Republic’ (106).
Eventually, the curfew gets closer and the police are forced to let everyone leave. Finally, the dead man’s wife arrives and cries, ‘Pedro, who has don’t this to thee. Pedro,’ and Henry thinks the last lines of the story: ’the police would never be able to tell her that even if they had the name of the man who pulled the trigger’ (109). Just like his other stories, critics tend to argue about what Hemingway’s intended to say about the war with this piece. Kenneth Johnston thinks the butterfly and tank metaphors apply ‘not only to the dead civilian in the story, but also the narrator-writer’ (184), suggesting that both the Henry, Hemingway, and the flit man were the butterflies when exposed to this incident. Granted the flit man payed a higher price, but Henry and Hemingway were truly exposed to the brutality to the brutality of the war by such a seemingly small incident. In the context of the greater war, this is an insignificant event, but in the context of the flit man’s life, it means everything. Martin Light, however, focuses on the narrator caught between the politics of writing or not writing a story.
This struggle is also seen in For Whom the Bell Tolls when Robert Jordan discusses writing his ‘true’ book and struggles with whether to include certain Republican atrocities. This is certainly an underlying issue in the story, but certainly not the primary one. Alternatively, Julian Smith thinks the story revolves around the flit gun man and sees him as a twisted Christ-figure. While I somewhat agree with the Christ-figure concept, even though he can’t fully be considered a martyr, the story is certainly told from Henry’s point of view and it is his actions who drive the story forward. Finally, Allen Josephs argues that this and his other stories resemble Hemingway’s journalistic dispatches, which I completely disagree with because Hemingway’s dispatches were decidedly pro-republican, whereas his stories are pro-republican but tend to toe the line a bit more. The last line of this story, ‘the police would never be able to tell her that even if they had the name of the man who pulled the trigger’ (109), is most insightful when it comes to discussing the main point of this story.
The police will never be able to tell Pedro’s wife who killed him because it wasn’t just the man who pulled the trigger. A whole network of circumstances contributed to his death: the Republican disunity, the Nationalist brutality, the tension and fear that comes with war, heightened paranoia, and the war itself. As Martin Light touches on in his article, “Who, after all, is responsible for [Pedro’s] death? A force larger than the behavior of any individual has killed Pedro. It is Pedro himself, it is the war, it is everyone” (36). In ’Night Before Battle,’ Hemingway once again presents the reader with a thinly-veiled representation on himself as the protagonist. The story starts by following Henry and his film crew as they record battles during the War- something Hemingway also did with John Dos Passos and Joris Ivens while making their propagandistic documentary, ‘The Spanish Earth.’ Henry then goes to Chicote’s to meet his friend Al, who commands a tank division. Al complains of his group’s unpreparedness for the fight, which is supposed to take place the next day, and implies his own death is coming soon.
Henry takes Al back to his hotel room to take a bath, but Henry’s hotel room is crowded with people who are using it to have a party. Al takes a bath anyway and even stays to gamble a while. Henry and his other friends go out to dinner at a poor restaurant called Gran Via, run by an anarchist syndicate. Al arrives later. When the group returns to the hotel, they meet Baldy Johnson, a fighter pilot, who describes his latest daring escape. Eventually, everyone leaves Henry’s room except for the film crew and Al. As Al leaves he asks Henry to send a letter home to him family for him. Henry tells him that he will be able to mail it himself, but Al insists. Finally, Henry insists on seeing Al tomorrow at Chicote’s. Al hesitates to make the promise, but then finally agrees and walks back to the base. In this story, like the several others written during this period, Hemingway makes a version of himself the main character. In the ‘Butterfly and the Tank,’ the protagonist is a writer, and in this story, the protagonist is a filmmaker, both positions Hemingway held while in Spain. In his article, Michael Maiwald claims that Hemingway likened his protagonists to himself because he was trying to ‘capitalize on his insider status within Republican Spain’ (176).
However, that in an unfair critique; Hemingway, like many writers, was in the literary camp of ‘write what you know.’ He often wrote of bullfights and fishing and writing, all things he was well-versed in. Of course, he was hoping to make money off the story, just as any writer does, but he wasn’t exploiting his status within the Republic in the process. He was simply writing from the perspective of which he was seeing the war. Maiwald also claims that, ‘For Henry, the act of filming created emotional distance and conceptual abstraction’ and that he ‘ignores the real outcomes of the battles he films’ (181). Henry is an outsider, just like Hemingway; he comes from the United States, is likely a volunteer, and is solely there to document the war. Alternatively, Al is a Spanish solider in the Republican army. It is his country, his war, and his duty to fight. Henry sees the war in a different way; for example, he notes that the ‘tanks looked like small mud-colored beetles bustling in the trees and spitting tiny flashes and the men behind them were toy men who lay flat, then crouched and ran, and then dropped to run again, or stay where they lay, spotting the hillside as the tanks moved on’ (111).
Here, he sees the tanks and the soldiers as if they were miniaturized through the lens of a camera. This is the expatriate conundrum that Hemingway is trying to capture. By presenting Henry, the American observer, and Al, the Spanish soldier, next to each other, he calls into question the role of the expatriate during wartime. As an expatriate himself, Hemingway likely wondered about his own role in the war. How involved should I get? Am I actually helping or just getting in the way? However, Henry does ultimately help Al in an unexpected way. Because of his distance from the war, Henry is able to distract Al from his potentially deadly day ahead. If Henry was another Spanish solider, he wouldn’t be able to bring Al’s spirits up because he would be too busy bringing up his own. When Al tells him his suspicions that he is going to die in battle the next day, Henry invites him back to the hotel to take a bath. He distracts him with gambling, wine, food, and women. Then at the end of the night, as Al is leaving and asks him to mail the letter home, Henry tells him that he ‘won’t have to send it’ (138).
Henry may be detached from the real horrors of the war, but he is at least able to help his friend for the night. Hemingway’s last short story from this period, ‘Under the Ridge,’ focuses on similar themes as his previous stories. Although the narrator is unnamed, it is believed that he is Henry, the narrator from ‘Night Before Battle,’ since they are both Americans on a film crew. After a not-so-successful battle, Henry rests with some soldiers hiding in the caves. One of the soldiers, only referred to as ’The Extremaduran,’ describes his hatred of foreigners. He hates the English, French, and Moors because they ’sacked and pillaged’ his town (144). He hates North Americans because his father was killed in Cuba. But most of all, he hates Russians because they are ‘representatives of tyranny’ and specifically, because of an incident involving one of his soldiers (145). He tells the story of Paco, a young frightened soldier, who shot his own hand to avoid going to battle and ends up losing that hand. His Russian superiors then publicaly execute him as an example to deter anyone else who might think about doing the same. Despite the Extremaduran’s hostility, the narrator says that he ‘understand[s] [his] hatred’ (150).
The narrator then heads back to Madrid, hoping to write about the incidents after the war is over. This is the fourth time in his short stories about the war that Heminway has inserted himself as the protagonist. The narrator is part of a film crew, a writer, and most significantly, a foreigner. While the past stories have commented on expatriate involvement in the war in one way or another, this one pushes the controversial theme to the foreground. In all of the previous stories, the conversation has come from the foreigner’s perspective, primarily because that is the only side Hemingway can personally offer. However, this is the first time we hear from the Spanish perspective. While there are other soldiers in the story who disagree with his hatred of foreigners, the Extremaduran’s point of view is the most present. ‘The Denunciation,’ ‘The Butterfly and the Tank,’ and ‘Night Before Battle’ have all asked the question, ‘to what extent should expatriates get involved in this war?’ ‘Under the Ridge’ seems to answer it. While the story is only representing one soldier’s specific opinion, the narrator comes to accept and almost agree with it.
Therefore, if the narrator is meant to be a representation of Hemingway, does he also agree with this sentiment? In his article, Michael Maiwald notes that in ‘Under the Ridge’: Hemingway has not turned his story over to another narrator, whose searing narrative of injustice offers a truth about the war from the perspective of and in the voice of the Spanish people… linked to the soil and untainted by cosmopolitan influences – as the unnamed man proudly informed our narrator, there are no foreigners in [his home town] – the Extremaduran destabilizes the narrator’s own authority within the story (187). This is the first time in Hemingway’s short stories that he discusses the concept of Spanish regionalism. However, it is important to note the correlation between this story, which he started writing at the very end of the war, and his final dispatch written for NANA, which also discusses ‘the regionalism of the Spaniard’ (91). In his last dispatch, dated May 10, 1938, he writes, ‘the one unaccountable factor foreigners never figure when analyzing the Spanish campaign… is the regionalism of the Spaniard…once one sector is isolated from another, instead of being panicked they seem relieved at not being bothered by the necessity of contact with another region’ (91).
Because this realization came at the end of the war, around the time he was writing ‘Under the Ridge,’ we can conclude that this was a concept he had been thinking about. He then left Spain soon after, not to return until 1950. Perhaps he left because he knew the war was as good as lost. Or perhaps he left because he had the same realization as his nameless narrator. Widely regarded as the most influential novel about the Spanish Civil War, Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, follows Robert Jordan, an American explosives expert in the International Brigades, on his mission to explode a Fascist-controlled bridge with a team of guerrilleros, or guerilla fighters. Jordan receives his orders from Goltz, a Russian general, who is using the bridge explosion as part of a larger Republican offensive. An old man named Anselmo escorts him to the guerilla camp, which is located in a cave in the mountains near Segovia. There he meets Pablo, the often drunk, hotheaded leader of the guerrilleros and Pilar, a half-gypsy who is actually in charge. There is also Maria, who is seeking shelter in the camp after the Fascists raped her and murdered her family. Soon after Robert Jordan arrives, Maria and him fall in love. While Pablo thinks that blowing the bridge is a dangerous idea, the rest of the group agrees to accompany Jordan in his mission. However, after a cavalryman stumbles upon the cave and a nearby group of guerrilleros is killed, Robert Jordan begins to suspect that the fascists are expecting them. He decides to sends a member of the group with a message to General Goltz to stop the attack. However, he doesn’t make it in time because he is stalled by Andre Marty, a politican who suspects him of being a fascist spy.
Robert Jordan and the group proceed with their orders and blow the bridge, however, several of the guerrilleros are killed, including Anselmo. As the rest are making their escape, a bullet hits Robert Jordan’s horse and it lands on his leg, breaking it. He knows he’ll have to be left behind, so he says his farewell to Maria and takes aim at the fascists descending upon him. From 1936 to 1939, Ernest Hemingway was notoriously outspoken about the Spanish Civil War. He spoke about it often, both publically and privately, but what he spoke about changed several times throughout the course of the three years. In September of 1936, just two months after the start of the war, Hemingway wrote to his editor at Scribner, Max Perkins, “When finish [To Have and Have Not] hope to go to Spain if all not over there…I hate to have missed this Spanish thing worse than anything in the world” (Baker, SL 454-455). Later that year in November, Hemingway received a letter from John Wheeler, general manager of the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), asking him to cover the war.
Hemingway accepted, despite disapproval from Max Perkins and his wife at the time, Pauline (Baker, A Life Story 296). He also teamed up with fellow writer, John Dos Passos and Dutch Communist, Joris Ivens to make a documentary (later to be titled The Spanish Earth) about the Spanish Civil War, meant to impart the plight of the Spanish people. However, Dos Passos and Hemingway had been friendly competitors for years and it comes as no surprise that they disagreed on what the focus of the film should be. Dos Passos wanted to “stress the predicament of the common people” whereas Hemingway was “far more interested in the military aspects” (Baker, A Life Story 300). At this time, Hemingway was decidedly an isolationist and wanted America to have nothing to do with the war. Although he loved Spain and cared for the Spanish people, he didn’t want a repeat of World War I. In an article for Esquire Magazine in 1935, he wrote, “We were fools to be sucked in once on a European war and we should never be sucked in again” (Notes on the Next War). Because of his anti-war stance, he decided before he left for Spain that he was going to use his contract with NANA to be an anti-war correspondent and try to keep America out it. In a February, 1937 letter to his family, he wrote, “The Reds may be as bad as they say but they are the people of the country versus the absentee landlords, the moors, the Italians, and the Germans…
This is the dress rehearsal for the inevitable European war and I would like to try to write anti-war war correspondence that would help to keep us out of it when it comes” (Baker, SL 458). When Hemingway went to Spain to cover the war and to film The Spanish Earth, he knew what he wanted to communicate to the rest of the world, especially the Americans. However, when he got to Spain, something changed. Throughout his time in Spain, Hemingway wrote thirty-one news dispatches for NANA, eighteen magazine articles for Ken magazine and other publications, five short stories, and his first and only play, The Fifth Column. However, the tone of these works is drastically different compared to the tone of his works and letters from before the war. William Watson, editor of ‘Hemingway’s Civil War Dispatches,” notes in his evaluation that Hemingway was not a “professional newspaperman” and that “Jack Wheeler…did not hire Hemingway primarily because of his newspaper background. He hired him because Hemingway was a celebrity and a name that could sell NANA’s syndicated services” (Watson 7).
Because Hemingway was not a professional, he was more susceptible to input his own personal bias into his news correspondence and other works. For example, his dispatch written on March 26th, 1937 analyzes the Battle of Brihuega, in which Italian and Nationalist forces attempted to circle Madrid but were defeated by the Republicans. Hemingway writes that the battle “will take its place in military history with the other decisive battles of the world” (Watson 22). Nevertheless, according to Watson, Mikhail Koltsov, a fellow correspondent, “thought he was exaggerating the significance of this government victory” (Watson 21). While it’s possible that Hemingway was exaggerating to give NANA an interesting story, it’s more likely that he was trying to sway the public to believe that the Republic had a significant chance of winning the war. Hemingway was not only guilty of exaggerating the victories of the Republic, but also of “denying that any terror existed [in the Republican government], denying that most of the generals of Loyalist divisions were either Russian or Russian-trained; repeating Soviet accusations against anarchist and anti-Stalinist groups; and never mentioning atrocities committed by pro-Loyalists, while emphasizing fascist shelling and bombing of civilians” (Cohen, 43-44). Through the lens of Hemingway’s writing, the Republicans could do no wrong.
By the time Hemingway started writing For Whom the Bell Tolls in February of 1939, Franco’s forces had already taken Barcelona. Madrid would fall six weeks later, officially ending the war. Hemingway had a reputation for defending the Republic and downplaying their unpleasant truths during the war, but now that the war was over, he had a different objective for his writing. He wanted to do what his own character, Robert Jordan, couldn’t; he wanted to write a “true book” (FWBT 163). In 1952, Hemingway wrote to his friend Bernard Berenson, “I tried to [“give a true account”] when I wrote [For Whom the Bell Tolls]. But I did not start on the book until after the Republic had lost the war and it was over because I would not write anything in the war which could hurt the Republic which I believed in and tried to serve as well as I could” (Baker, SL 789). During the war, he knew he had to exaggerate and leave out certain things about the Republic to make the public empathize with them. It is unclear how Hemingway thought having the public on the side of the Republicans would help them, but he was making a conscious decision to sway public opinion. Given his celebrity status, he didn’t want to say anything that would hurt their cause. However, now that the war was over and lost, he felt the need to tell the truth about the war, and he decided to use For Whom the Bell Tolls to do just that.
Even before he went to Spain, he knew that the war was complicated. In February of 1937, he wrote to his friend Harry Sylvester, “The Spanish war is a bad war… and nobody is right” (Baker, SL 456). So when he wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls, he made sure to highlight that complexity. The most obvious example of Hemingway’s change of narrative is Pilar’s recollection of the massacre of the fascist and pro-fascist members of Pablo’s hometown at the start of the war. She describes how Pablo shot four Fascist officers point blank and then watches as a mob beats the pro-fascists, the wealthy landowners, and the priest before throwing them off a cliff. For this segment, Hemingway allots about thirty-two pages of the novel to this graphic story. As Cohen notes in his article, “neither Maria’s recollection of her family’s execution by the fascists, nor her account of her own gang-rape by the Moors, nor Joaquin’s brief narrative of how the fascists murdered his family- nor all three combined- come anywhere close to the length of Pilar’s narrative” (53). As a man who was famous for his short, concise sentences, it is clearly no accident that Hemingway spent so many pages on this story. He intentionally emphasizes this story because he wants to make it clear that there is no good or evil in this war, or in any. After hearing the story, Robert Jordan promises to himself to “try to write it and if he had luck and could remember it perhaps he could get it down as she told it” (134).
He vows to write Pilar’s story down, as Hemingway has done in his own novel, further supporting the argument that Robert Jordan is a projection of Hemingway and that they are both understanding of the moral complexities of the war. Hemingway uses Robert Jordan to express his own moral ambiguities when it comes to the war. One of the most prevalent moral questions that Robert Jordan (and consequently Ernest Hemingway) faces is killing in wartime. In a conversation with Karkov, a Russian correspondent, Robert Jordan says, “I don’t mind…[the assassinations]…I do not like them but I do not mind them any more…My mind is in suspension until we win the war” (245). However, later in the novel, we find out in an inner monologue that Robert Jordan has assassinated people himself: “how many do you suppose you have killed? I don’t know because I won’t keep track… how many were real fascists? Two that I am sure of. Because I had to shoot them when we took them prisoners…And did you mind that? No. Nor did you like it? No. I decided never to do it again.” (304).
In his article, Cohen points out the ethical contradiction here “between morally disapproving of an act enough to avoid it in the future and not ‘minding’ it” as long as someone else pulls the trigger (49). This borderline hypocritical conundrum once again calls into question the presence of the good versus evil binary that Hemingway was representing in his earlier correspondence and fiction. Finally, the last misrepresentation that Hemingway seeks to correct in For Whom the Bell Tolls is that of the Russian communist presence in Spain. While Robert Jordan is not a communist, he certainly has no problem taking orders from them. Early in the novel, Jordan explains his trust of the Russian leadership: He was under Communist discipline for the duration of the war. Here in Spain the Communists offered the best discipline and the soundest and sanest for the prosecution of the war. He accepted their discipline for the duration of the war because, in the conduct of the war, they were the only party whose program and whose discipline he could respect. (163) However, the “discipline” he’s referring to is actually more of a repression of the various leftist groups like the CNT/ FAI (the ararcho-syndicalists), the POUM (the anti-Stalin communists), and the UGT (the Workers’ General Union).
The Communists dismantled their militias and even started murdering members of the groups that didn’t agree with them. In the novel, Hemingway even makes a specific reference to Andres Nin, one of the founders of the POUM. Nin was arrested during the war on the orders of Alexandr Orlov, a general in the NKVD, and later disappeared. Karkov, in his conversation with Robert Jordan, says that he “[has] sent a cable describing the wickedness of that infamous organization of Trotskyite murderers and their fascist machinations all beneath contempt but, between us, it is not very serious, the P. O. U. M. Nin was their only man. We had him but he escaped from our hands… “[he is] In Paris. We say he is in Paris” (247). Here Karkov is suggesting that Nin escaped the NKVD and is now living in Paris, although it is obviously far more likely that his disappearance is a result of his murder at the hand of the NKVD. Hemingway’s drastic change of tone, while truthful to Hemingway’s experiences, provoked the criticism of several of his colleagues, critics, and leftist political figures, all who felt that he was tarnishing the memory of the Republican cause.
One person in particular, however, was particularly offended and took his opinion to the popular leftist magazine, New Masses. Alvah Bessie’s “Hemingway’s ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’” severely criticizes the novel, calling it “a cosmopolitan love story against the background of the Spanish Civil War” that “[slanders] the Spanish people [and] the Soviet Union” (Bessie 29). Bessie, who also wrote a novel set during the Spanish Civil War, was not the only one who criticized For Whom the Bell Tolls on the basis of defaming the memory of the Republic and the Spanish people. The complexity of the Spanish Civil War forced Ernest Hemingway to face a series of moral dilemmas that changed the writer’s perspective on the war. He went from an apolitical isolationist to an unfaltering Republican supporter to a dispeller of myths. While For Whom the Bell Tolls was wildly successful, Hemingway got his fair share of criticism that claimed he betrayed the Republic. Some contemporary critics think he was right to tell his truth, while others thought he should have continued on with his original narrative to protect the reputation of the Republic. Regardless, Hemingway set out to write his and Robert Jordan’s “true book,” and that he did.
