Project Mailer - User contributions [en]

User talk:Grlucas

2025-04-20T18:11:00Z

MerAtticus: /* Hemingway */ new section

{{Talk header}}
[[/Archive 202504/]]

== Final edits ==
Hello, my article is complete: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Ernest_and_Norman_(Exit_Music)|Ernest and Norman (Exit Music)]]
:{{Reply to|Flowersbloom}} great, thank you. I made some corrections. Please be sure to sign your talk page posts. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Good evening, Dr. Lucas. Below is the link to my edited article:
https://projectmailer.net/pm/User:ASpeed/sandbox
:{{Reply to|ASpeed}} great. Let me know when it’s finished and posted, and I’l have a look. It appears as if you still have a bit of work to do. Please be sure to sign your talk page posts. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Good evening, @[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]. I have completed most of my Remediation Articles, but I still show issues for the one named, "[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman,_Papa,_and_the_Autoerotic_Construction_of_Woman|Norman, Papa, and the Autoerotic Construction of Woman]].

Based on the latest updates, [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Battles_for_Regard,_Writerly_and_Otherwise|Battles for Regard, Writerly and Otherwise]] looks good with exception of including a '''category'''.
:{{Reply to|ALedezma}} this one is good. I made some corrections before removing the banner, mostly in your sources. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

May you let me know if there is anything I can do on my end to resolve the issues with the first [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman,_Papa,_and_the_Autoerotic_Construction_of_Woman|article]]?

[[User:ALedezma|ALedezma]] ([[User talk:ALedezma|talk]]) 21:47, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|ALedezma}} looking very good, but some sources missing page numbers. Please see to those. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

:::Thank you @[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] . I will review those and respond when complete. [[User:ALedezma|ALedezma]] ([[User talk:ALedezma|talk]]) 22:47, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
::::@[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]. Thank you for your feedback. A review of article additions was made for source pages. [[User:ALedezma|ALedezma]] ([[User talk:ALedezma|talk]]) 20:22, 11 April 2025 (EDT)
:::::{{Reply to| ALedezma}} ok, looking good. I made some corrections. There's one final thing to do: no footnotes should appear in the notes section; use {{tl|harvtxt}} instead; I did one to show you how to use the template. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:39, 12 April 2025 (EDT)
::::::@[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] Changes were done to footnote sources. Thank you! [[User:ALedezma|ALedezma]] ([[User talk:ALedezma|talk]]) 19:59, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas I finished my remediation article https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer%27s_The_Fight:_Hemingway,_Bullfighting,_and_the_Lovely_Metaphysics_of_Boxing&action=edit [[User:TWietstruk|TWietstruk]] ([[User talk:TWietstruk|talk]]) 19:44, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| TWietstruk}} good work so far, but there is more to do: placement of footnotes (eliminate spaces around them and punctuation always goes ''before'' the footnote.); proofread for typos; fix all red errors at the bottom (most of these are from errors in sourcing); works cited entries should be bulleted list and eliminate space between entries. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:05, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Final edit and no errors with some help from @NRMMGA5108, @JKilchenmann. Please mark me as complete. On to help someone else with the things I've learned
https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer%27s_The_Fight:_Hemingway,_Bullfighting,_and_the_Lovely_Metaphysics_of_Boxing&action=edit [[User:TWietstruk|TWietstruk]] ([[User talk:TWietstruk|talk]]) 17:52, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas I have finished my assigned remediation article: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Jive-Ass_Aficionado:_Why_Are_We_in_Vietnam%3F_and_Hemingway%27s_Moral_Code#cite_note-FOOTNOTEHemingway2003-24
Username ADear.
:{{Reply to|ADear}} thank you. I have marked this as complete. Please be sure you sign your talk page posts correctly. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:05, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I have finished remediating my assigned article. Please review it at your earliest convenience. The link is here: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Norman_Mailer's_Mythmaking_in_An_American_Dream_and_“The_White_Negro”|Norman Mailer's Mythmaking in An American Dream and “The White Negro”]]—[[User:Erhernandez|Erhernandez]] ([[User talk:Erhernandez|talk]]) 08:52, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Erhernandez}} well done! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. I removed your banner after making a few corrections. Please have a look over it and move on to the next thing. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:06, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I transferred and edited my article. Can you look at it and remove the banner? Here's the link: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Authorship_and_Alienation_in_Death_in_the_Afternoon_and_Advertisements_for_Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself]] ( [[User:APKnight25|APKnight25]] ([[User talk:APKnight25|talk]]) 13:02, 28 March 2025 (EDT) )
:{{Reply to| APKnight25}} looking good! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. Next, eliminate all "fang" quotes in the article and add “real quotation marks.” Your sources should be a bulleted list. And there should be no space before a citation. You’re almost finished! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:21, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of "Reinventing the Wheel" Mailer Article for Review ==

Dr. Lucas,

My [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Reinventing_a_New_Wheel:_The_Films_of_Norman_Mailer|article]] is ready for review.

Thank you!
[[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 15:29, 29 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|TPoole}} great! Could you include a link to it? Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:07, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
::OK, I [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer|found it]]. Looking really good. Great work. There are some citation issues that need to be seen to. The two red categories at the bottom should not be there; they will go away when the citations errors are corrected. Eliminate any quotation mark "fangs" in the text and replace them with “real quotation marks.” Let me know if you need help. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:14, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:::@Grlucas, what are the citation issues? Which ones need correcting? [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 17:31, 31 March 2025 (EDT)
::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} When you click your citations, they should jump to the works cited entry they correspond to. Several of yours do not, indicated by the red “Harv and Sfn no-target errors” at the bottom. You also have a "CS1 maint: Unrecognized language" error that will likely be cleared up when you fix the citation issues. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:55, 1 April 2025 (EDT)
:::::@Grlucas, I have tried correcting the sfn codes in my citations. I was able to get the 2 web citations to link correctly. But for some reason, I cannot get the Mailer 1967 film Wild 90 citation to link to the reference list. Please advise. [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 20:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
::::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} OK, all fixed and published. Thanks. Please move on to another remediation. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:46, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of: "Contradictory Syntheses: Norman Mailer’s Left Conservatism and the Problematic of 'Totalitarianism'" ==

Dr. Lucas

I finished the remediation of the following article:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Contradictory_Syntheses:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Left_Conservatism_and_the_Problematic_of_%E2%80%9CTotalitarianism%E2%80%9D

It is ready for your review. Thank you.
[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 19:04, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} looks great. I made some tweaks to the references and some throughout, like changing ' and " to real apostrophes and quotation marks. A bit more clean-up, but you might want to check over it again. I removed the under-construction banner. Well one. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 21:32, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Final Edit ==

Thank you for your comments on my remediation of
"[[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself.]]"

I've eliminated the "fang quotes" and changed them to “real quotation marks.” This was a very fascinating tip that taught me something new. It's something I've never noticed before but now always will.

I also put my sources in a bulleted list and removed the space before the citations. I think I'm all set now.
:{{Reply to|APKnight25}} great work! Please help other editors to complete the volume. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:34, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Firearms in the Works of Hemingway and Mailer'' ==

[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]

Hi Dr. Lucas,

I believe I have done everything for the Remediation of my article. Please let me know if there is anything else I need to do.

I will also link the article below:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Firearms_in_the_Works_of_Hemingway_and_Mailer

Thank you,
Caitlin Vinson
:{{Reply to|CVinson}} great work so far. Your references must use templates, please. Blockquotes must also be done correctly. No spaces or line breaks before or after the {{tl|pg}} template. Footnote placement is also off (punctuation goes before the footnote; no spaces before or after the footnote). I will add the abstract and url. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:30, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Hi Dr. Lucas, I believe there have been some updates made to the project. I believe I have also updated the works cited section to show correct templates. Please let me know if there is anything further that I need to do. Thank you, Caitlin.
::{{reply to| CVinson}} please sign your talk page posts correctly. Thanks. You still need to do some work on the sources. Use the <code>|author-mask=1</code> in your template for repeated author names. Also, you must eliminate the red “Harv and Sfn no-target errors” message at the bottom. No spaces or returns before or after the {{tl|pg}} call, as I already mentioned above. No parenthetical citations should be left, either; those should all be remediated to footnotes. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:50, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:::{{Reply to|Grlucas}} I have updated the sources and updated the in-text citations. I am still having trouble with the "Harv and Sfn no-target errors." I have not been successful in fixing this error and have tried multiple ways to fix it. —[[User:CVinson|CVinson]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 8:18, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

::::{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Hi Dr. Lucas, I see that I still have a red X for my remediation assignment. Is there something else I am still missing? —[[User:CVinson|CVinson]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:35, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:::::{{reply to| CVinson}} sorry, I'm just getting back to it. There are quite a few punctuation errors. Some left out and others appear after the {{tl|sfn}}. I'm trying to correct those I see, but you should have a look, too. Page is designated as <code>p=</code> in {{tl|sfn}}, not <code>pg=</code>; and a span of pages needs <code>pp=</code>. Again, I have tried to correct these. I removed the banner, but please have another look through. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:01, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Norman Mailer Today'' ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished up my remediation article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Norman Mailer Today|Norman Mailer Today]], and it is ready for review. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you! —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 18:20, 3 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Kamyers}} Great work! Please help your fellow editors finish the volume, or pick something to work on in [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010|Volume 4]]. Thanks, and well done. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:00, 4 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of “The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s ‘Hills Like White Elephants’” ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished my remediation of Jennifer Yirinec's article: [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”|The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.”]] Thank you for your assistance with the article. It is ready for its final review! [[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 10:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} a stellar job. Well done. I removed the banner, so you can move on to another article. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:12, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

== Tribute Remediations ==
Dr. Lucas, I have begun work on the tributes for volume 5. [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Grace Notes|Grace Notes]] by Stephen Borkowski is ready for its final review.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 12:58, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} Well done! Banner removed, url added. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:18, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

==Oohh Normie Final Edits==
Hi Dr. Lucas, I have finished my article: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/"Oohh_Normie_—_You're_Sooo_Hemingway":_Mailer_Memories_and_Encounters|Oohh Normie, You're Sooo Hemingway]]. Please let me know if there is anything I need to fix. [[User:Tbara4554|Tbara4554]] ([[User talk:Tbara4554|talk]]) 20:01, 5 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|Tbara4554}} thank you. I made some corrections and removed the banner. You might want to have another look over it. Please move on to something else. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:53, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== Harlot's Ghost, Bildungsroman, Masculinity and Hemingway ==

Dr. Lucas,

The following article is ready for your review. Thanks.

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Harlot%27s_Ghost,_Bildungsroman,_Masculinity_and_Hemingway

[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 21:22, 5 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} excellent. Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:39, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== I am done with this ==

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Situating_Hemingway:_Mailer,_Style,_Ethics
:Received. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:29, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== Final Review PM Article ==

Hi Dr. Lucas, [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Hemingway_to_Mailer_—_A_Delayed_Response_to_The_Deer_Park|here]] is my remediated article, ready for review![[User:Hobbitonya|Hobbitonya]] ([[User talk:Hobbitonya|talk]]) 12:21, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Hobbitonya}} great work. I have removed the banner, so you are good to move on to something else. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:20, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Project ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have finished my remedidation project and I am ready for it to be reviewed. '''Article link''': [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe#Works_Cited|Piling On: Norman Mailer's Utilization of Marilyn Monroe]

Thanks,

[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 13:04, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} good work so far. Please remove wikilinks. Change ' and " to typographical apostrophes and quotation marks. And all red errors at the bottom of the page need to be taken care of. These are likely all from coding errors in your sources. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:24, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have removed the wikilinks, changed to the correct typographic style and updated my sources.
'''Article link''': [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe#Works_Cited|Piling On: Norman Mailer's Utilization of Marilyn Monroe] Thanks, [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 21:55, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

[I forgot to fill out the summary box. I am adding my summary]
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} you're getting there! It looks great. You must eliminate all the red errors at the bottom. These appear when there are errors in your citations. Let me know if you need help. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:15, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

@{{reply to|Grlucas}} I have tried everything I can think of and I still have harv and sfn no-target errors and harv and sfn multiple-target errors and cs1 uses editors parameter. Do I not include the editor? [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 16:03, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

{{reply to|Grlucas}} I have managed to get rid of two of the red target errors. I am still working on finding the harv sfn multiple target error. Thanks, [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 20:37, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

{{reply to|Grlucas}} I have tried everything i can think of to remove the last red error flag. I had to turn it in. I don't know that else I can do in this situation. I was given citation that did not follow any of the given formats. [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 21:45, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} all parenthetical citations must be remediated to {{tl|sfn}}; none of yours are. Get these done, then we can worry about the errors. (Some notes on sources: any generic <code><nowiki>{{citation}}</nowiki></code> will not be correct. I see you have a book review by Marshall that has no source (I tried to find the original and cannot; this is a weird citation; I'll continue to look for it). There's also one that looks like a film that should use the [[w:Template:Cite AV media|<code>Cite AV media</code> template]].) Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:16, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Submission ==

Hello!
Here's my remediated article; [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/The_Devil's_Party:_Reading_and_Wreaking_Vengeance_in_The_Castle_in_the_Forest|The Devil's Party: Reading and Wreaking Vengeance in ''The Castle in the Forest'']].
Thanks! Please let me know if there's anything I can review or correct.
[[User:Maggiemrogers|Maggiemrogers]] ([[User talk:Maggiemrogers|talk]]) 13:23, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Maggiemrogers}} nice work! Banner removed, so please move on to something else in the volume. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:39, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Vol. 4: Rumors of Grace article remediated ==

I believe I have completed remediation of ''[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Rumors_of_Grace:_God-Language_in_Hemingway_and_Mailer|Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer]]'', vol. 4. I was having last-minute trouble with sfn errors for sources without authors, but Justin Kilchenmann helped me out, so I think they are fixed.
:{{Reply to|Sherrilledwards}} You have done a remarkable job—a real Herculean effort! Footnotes should not go in any notes. See those I changed; the others should be changed in the same way. I have done some, but the others have to be fixed, I'm afraid. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:20, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to|Grlucas}}I believe I have completed these fixes, so the article is again ready for review. [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 15:49, 12 April 2025 (EDT)
:::{{Reply to| Sherrilledwards}} truly exceptional work—a model remediation! Marked as complete. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:30, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of "Inside Norman Mailer ==

Hi Dr. Lucas - I have finished remediating the article, [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Inside Norman Mailer|Inside Norman Mailer]]. Please let me know if I need to make any adjustments. Thank you! [[User:Chelsey.brantley|Chelsey.brantley]] ([[User talk:Chelsey.brantley|talk]]) 18:09, 7 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Chelsey.brantley}} good work! Please help with another article from volume 4. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:36, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed: Norman Mailer: Playboy Magazine ==

I hope I am doing this is right. I have finished remediating my article about Norman Mailer and its in my designated sandbox [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Norman_Mailer:_Playboy_Magazine_Heavyweight here.]
If there are any last minute edits, let me know. I got the last of the errors removed yesterday. And I believe we are on the same page with leaving the in-line citations for ''Playboy'' to be as is, since the author didn't put them down in the works cited. [[User:NrmMGA5108|NrmMGA5108]] ([[User talk:NrmMGA5108|talk]]) 20:14, 7 April 2025 (EDT)Nina Mizner
:{{Reply to|NrmMGA5108}} looking good! So, the parenthetical citations still in the article, I'm assuming, are there because of those missing sources? Please check your page numbers; some seem to be off. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:04, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to|Grlucas}} I found the page number error and its corrected, and yes all the parenthetical citations should be referencing issues of the ''playboy'' magazine, which were not listed in the works cited. --[[User:NrmMGA5108|NrmMGA5108]] ([[User talk:NrmMGA5108|talk]]) 20:54, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| NrmMGA5108}} it looks great. I removed the banner! Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:29, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed Remediation From Here to Eternity and The Naked and The Dead: Premier to Eternity? ==

Greeting Dr. Lucas,

I have made the adjustment that you mentioned.

I also made additional edits to my short footnotes and noticed that my citations did not link to my references - which has been fixed.

I have tested all of my citations, and they all work.

Here is my article by Alexander Hicks, ''From Here to Eternity and The Naked and The Dead: Premier to Eternity?''

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/From_Here_to_Eternity_and_The_Naked_and_the_Dead:_Premiere_to_Eternity%3F

Have a great day.
:{{Reply to| THarrell}} Please always sign your talk page posts. Several “quoted items” in the article appear as ‘quoted items’; these must be corrected, please. No spaces or returns should surround {{tl|pg}} calls. Multiple page numbers should look like this <code><nowiki>{{sfn|Moretti|1996|pp=11-14}}</nowiki></code>; note the double <code>pp</code>. There seem to be many typos. I corrected some for you, but you must see to the rest. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:16, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Greetings,

Are these the only additional corrections that need to be made? This is different from what you mentioned before.

I just want to be sure that I have hit everything.

Also can you verify what other typos you are seeing, I have ran through this twice.

If something is spelt a certain way, for example "Soljer", I have left it that way. Since it is mentioned like that in the article.
—[[User:THarrell|THarrell]] ([[User talk:THarrell|talk]]) 06:49, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Greetings,

I have gone through and fixed all of the short footnotes.

I have gone line by line with a ruler to look at any typos, and fixed the words that I found that had a dash in them/needed to be lowercased.

I have also fixed the quotations.

—[[User:THarrell|THarrell]] ([[User talk:THarrell|talk]]) 12:31, 9 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| THarrell}} much better. Periods go inside quotations marks; I think I fixed these, but please check. Also, there are no spaces before footnotes; again, I did a find/replace, but you should check. Also, check that all titles of novels are italicized (if it's italicized in the PDF, then it has to be italicized in the remediation, including abbreviations, like ''Naked''); I fixed a couple. Also, no extra spaces; there should only be a single blank space between paragraphs. There are quite a few little details that needed (need?) fixing. I removed the banner, but please check my work. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 12:41, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon” ==

Greetings Dr. Lucus,

My article is ready for your review. Thank you.

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Mailer%E2%80%99s_%E2%80%9CFootnote_to_Death_in_the_Afternoon%E2%80%9D)
:{{Reply to| KForeman}} it's coming along. Please ''always'' sign your talk page posts. Right up top, there are errors. Please use the real {{tl|pg}}, like all the other articles. Citations need to be fixed. All parenthetical citations must be converted. You still have quite a bit of work to do. All red sections need to be seen to and corrected. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:20, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
@Grlucs, per your suggestions, I've made the corrections. Please review. I look forward to your feedback. Thank you.
:{{Reply to| KForeman}} looking better. All parenthetical page numbers should be removed and added to the {{tl|sfn}}. Check your page numbers in {{tl|pg}}. Footnotes should have no spaces around them; periods and commas go ''inside'' quotation marks and before the footnotes. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:28, 19 April 2025 (EDT)

=Remediation of "Cluster Seeds and the Mailer Legacy"=
Hello, Dr. Lucas. I have completed the remediation of [https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Cluster_Seeds_and_the_Mailer_Legacy&oldid=18200| my article], and it is ready for your review. Thank you!—[[User:ADavis|ADavis]] ([[User talk:ADavis|talk]]) 11:32, 8 April 2025 (EDT)@ADavis
:{{Reply to| ADavis}} got it. I think I check it yesterday and removed the banner then. Please move on to another piece. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediating Article: Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing Volume 4. ==

Hello Dr. Lucas,

I have completed remediating my article. Here is the link [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing|The Mailer Review: Volume 4: Mailer, Hemingway, Boxing (2010)]] [[User:JBrown|JBrown]] ([[User talk:JBrown|talk]]) 13:01, 8 April 2025 (EDT)JBrown
:{{Reply to|JBrown}} a good start, but all parenthetical citations need to be footnotes. Also, check your headers. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Norris Church Mailer'' ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished up remediating the article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norris Church Mailer|Norris Church Mailer]], and it is ready for review. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you! —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 13:42, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|Kamyers}} awesome work! Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Final Edits Completed and Ready for Review ==

Dr. Lucas, I have completed my assigned remediation article: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Looking_at_the_Past:_Nostalgia_as_Technique_in_The_Naked_and_the_Dead_and_For_Whom_the_Bell_Tolls|Looking at the Past: Nostalgia as Technique in The Naked and the Dead and For Whom the Bell Tolls]]. Please review at your convenience. I enjoyed working on this assignment. I look forward to your suggestions and feedback. All the best, Danielle (DBond007)
:{{Reply to| DBond007}} ok, good work. Please remove all the external links. Links to Wikipedia are not necessary, but if used, they need to be done correctly. There should be no spaces before {{tl|sfn}}. May sure all your ' and " are actually typographical apostrophes and quotation marks. Remove any superfluous spaces and line breaks; these mess up the formatting. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Thank you. I will get started on these revisions immediately. Thanks for the feedback and your time. :)[[User:DBond007|DBond007]] ([[User talk:DBond007|talk]]) 11:30, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| Grlucas}} I have completed all the requested revisions and ready for review round 2. Thank you again![[User:DBond007|DBond007]] ([[User talk:DBond007|talk]]) 12:10, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:::{{Reply to|DBond007}} looking better! There are still items to be seen to, like titles on novels and magazines need to appear like they do in the original: if it's italicized in the PDF, it must be italicized on the web. I added the epigram for you and corrected that pesky citation. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:41, 12 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| Grlucas}}I have completed edits. I went through and took out quotes around The Time Machine, except for one instance that the author uses them. All my other titles seem to correspond to the original article. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you for the epigram and the pesky citation correction. Best, [[User:DBond007|DBond007]] ([[User talk:DBond007|talk]]) 15:25, 17 April 2025 (EDT)
:::{{Reply to|DBond007}} received, and good work. I had to clean up the sources a bit, so you might want to have a look. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:42, 18 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| Grlucas}}I went back and reviewed some of the other articles marked complete to compare and look for remaining revisions. I made one change on Works Cited and also added the page numbers to correspond to the pdf. Let's try this again. Again, I *believe I am finished with this article. Best,[[User:DBond007|DBond007]] ([[User talk:DBond007|talk]]) 10:36, 18 April 2025 (EDT)

Hopefully this works!. I'm not sure how to reply to other threads, but I was scrolling through the PDF and noticed the publisher is Iowa Pres? Just curious if it's supposed to be Iowa Press? [[User:Wverna|Wverna]] ([[User talk:Wverna|talk]]) 22:33, 18 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Wverna}} I'm not sure what you're talking about. Perhaps if you included a link to the article? See [[w:Help:Talk pages|Talk page guidelines]] if you don't know how to use them. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:33, 19 April 2025 (EDT)
Just kidding, I responded to the wrong "Bell Tolls' article. I was referring to this one: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Tolls_of_War:_Mailerian_Sub-Texts_in_For_Whom_the_Bell_Tolls sorry about that! [[User:Wverna|Wverna]] ([[User talk:Wverna|talk]]) 17:49, 19 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed the remediation assignment ==

Good evening Dr. Lucas,

I hope I am doing this right. Here is the link for my completed Remediation articles: [http://The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Encounters_with_Mailer Encounters with Mailer].

&

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Effects_of_Trauma_on_the_Narrative_Structures_of_Across_the_River_and_Into_the_Trees_and_The_Naked_and_the_Dead

I look forward to reading your feedback.

All the best,

Patrick Riley
:{{Reply to|Priley1984}} thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:40, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Project Submission: An Expected Encounter in an Unexpected Place ==

Link:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer:_An_Expected_Encounter_in_an_Unexpected_Place

Winnie Verna
:{{Reply to|Wverna}} received, thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:51, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== E.Mosley ==

Good evening, @Grlucas. I have completed my Remediation Articles[[https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/On_Reading_Mailer_Too_Young]]. The article I had was " On Reading Mailer Too Young Volume 4, 2010
:{{Reply to| Essence903m}} thank you. I had to fix and clean-up quite a bit. Your saves also do not include summaries. When you move on to your next article, please be more careful and follow the instructions. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:12, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Kynndra Watson ==

Good Evening, @grlucas. i have completed my Remediation articles: Volume 5: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Making_Masculinity_and_Unmaking_Jewishness:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Voice_in_Wild_90_and_Beyond_the_Law and Volume 4: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Mailer,_Hemingway,_and_the_%E2%80%9CReds%E2%80%9D.

Thank you.
:{{Reply to| KWatson}} thank you, and this is a good start, but there are still many items that need to be cleaned up, like footnote indications (They go after punctuation), citation errors (all the red errors at the bottom need to be seen to), extra spaces and ALL CAPS need to be removed. Please see other completed articles for models. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:18, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/What Would Be the Fun of That?|"What Would Be the Fun of That?"]] by Peter Alson.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:33, 9 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} awesome! Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:21, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== “Remembering Norris Church” Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Remembering Norris Church|“Remembering Norris Church”]] by John Bowers.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 16:17, 9 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} and again, excellent! Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:22, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== “The Norris I Knew” Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/The Norris I Knew|“The Norris I Knew”]] by Christopher Busa.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:04, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} rockin’! 👍🏼 —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:24, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== "Norris Mailer" Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Norris Mailer|"Norris Mailer"]] by Nancy Collins.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:35, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} thanks again. You’re tearing it up. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:32, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== "Rise Above It" Tribute Remediation ==

Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Rise Above It|"Rise Above It"]] by David Ebershoff—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 11:12, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} excellent. Many thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:15, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed Additional Articles ==

Hello, Dr. Lucas. I have remediated [https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Tributes_to_Norris_Church_Mailer/A_View_Through_the_Prism&oldid=18744|"A View Through the Prism"], [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Tributes_to_Norris_Church_Mailer/Lip_Liner|"Lip Liner"], and [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/The_Living_Room_Show#|"The Living Room Show"] in Volume 5. They are ready for your review. Thank you!—[[User:ADavis|ADavis]] ([[User talk:ADavis|talk]]) 12:31, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|ADavis}} great work. Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:26, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Submission notification sent 29 March ==

@grlucas

Dr. Lucas - I sent a Talk Page notification that I had completed the page I remediated on 29 March. The table indicates I haven't done anything yet. I sent it from the Talk Page from the article site. I don't see a response from that notification, but I had received one from you earlier in the process.
I don't understand what happened.

[[User:LogansPop22|LogansPop22]] ([[User talk:LogansPop22|talk]]) 14:54, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|LogansPop22}} sorry if I missed that. [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Hemingway and Women at the Front: Blowing Bridges in The Fifth Column, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Other Works|this article]], right? It's looking great, though all the parenthetical citations must be converted to footnotes using {{tl|sfn}} and some of the author names in your notes should use {{tl|harvtxt}}. I added the "citations" section for you. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:39, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Making Masculinity and Unmaking Jewishness: Norman Mailer’s Voice in Wild 90 and Beyond the Law ==

@Grlucas, I have made some additional edits to this [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Making_Masculinity_and_Unmaking_Jewishness:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Voice_in_Wild_90_and_Beyond_the_Law article] in Volume 5 by correcting most of the citations. There are 2 that still do not work, but I think that is because the sources are incomplete.

[[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 21:16, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| TPoole}} Looking really good, and this is a complicated one. A couple of things: no spaces or line breaks before or after {{tl|pg}}; I removed the spaces before {{tl|sfn}}, but you might want to check them; there are some typos, like missing spaces before some parentheses; no footnotes should appear in the notes section: use {{tl|harvtxt}} instead. And all the red errors at the bottom need to be cleared up. Great work so far! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:00, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Red Error-Gone ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}I have deleted all the sfn's and the red error is gone. I don't know why I didn't think about this days ago.

[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe|Gladstein-Monroe]]

[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 23:07, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|MerAtticus}} getting closer. A few things: you should use <code>|author-mask=1</code> for repeated author names in your works cited; all parenthetical citations need to be replaced with footnotes using {{tl|sfn}}; must punctuation in your sources need to be removed as the templates do that for you; and you need to use {{tl|harvtxt}} for citations in your endnotes. Also, letters and films have their own templates. I did a couple of these for you as examples. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:14, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== "Remembering Norris" Tribute Remediation ==

Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Remembering Norris|"Remembering Norris"]] by Margo Howard.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:20, 12 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} excellent! Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:35, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

== Norman Mailer: From Orgone Accumulator to Cancer Protection for Schizophrenics ==

Dr. Lucas,

The following article is ready for your review:
https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer:_From_Orgone_Accumulator_to_Cancer_Protection_for_Schizophrenics

I was unable to find the correct format for the first works cited entry under Mailer. It is a reprint of a magazine article. Thank you. [[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 16:28, 12 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} you are a master remediator! Thank you for going above and beyond. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:44, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

==Tolls of War: Mailerian Sub-Texts in For Whom the Bell Tolls, Trust & Sparring with Norman==
Dr. Lucas, these were some of the smaller ones, so I went ahead and knocked them out. They are ready for review: [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Sparring with Norman|Sparring with Norman]], [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Trust|Trust]], and [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tolls of War: Mailerian Sub-Texts in For Whom the Bell Tolls|Tolls of War: Mailerian Sub-Texts in For Whom the Bell Tolls]]. —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 10:27, 13 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Kamyers}} all excellent—above and beyond! Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:56, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing'' ==

Hi everyone,
I am currently helping with the article, [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Death,_Art,_and_the_Disturbing:_Hemingway_and_Mailer_and_the_Art_of_Writing Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing]. It still has a good bit to go, if anyone wants to help out.
—[[User:CVinson|CVinson]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 5:17 PM, 13 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|CVinson}} thanks! I added the author info. I'm not sure many will see your request; you might want to post it on the forum. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 14:56, 14 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Thank you for adding the author information and I have posted the request in the forum. Thank you! —[[User:CVinson|CVinson]] ([[User talk:CVinson|talk]]) 6:53 PM, 14 April 2025 (EDT)

== Mimi and Mercer ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have corrected the Mimi Gladstein [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Piling On: Norman Mailer’s Utilization of Marilyn Monroe]] and removed all the red errors. I also have finishe the Erin Mercer article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Automatons and the Atomic Abyss: The Naked and the Dead]], except the ''The Naked and the Dead'' in the display title. An error occured.
[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 19:26, 13 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} good work. There should be no footnotes in the endnotes, please. Since this is the only thing to correct, I have removed the banner, but please let me know when you made that final correction. Thanks! (I will respond about your second article shortly.) —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 14:59, 14 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} your second article looks good. Could you use the [[w:Template:Cite interview|Template:Cite interview]] for interviews. I did one for you. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 16:33, 14 April 2025 (EDT)

== Through the Lens of the Beatniks Remediation ==

Hello, Dr. Lucas! I've completed the remediation of [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Through_the_Lens_of_the_Beatniks:_Norman_Mailer_and_Modern_American_Man’s_Quest_for_Self-Realization#CITEREFNaked1992|Through the Lens of the Beatniks]]. I wasn't able to get the letter citations exactly how I thought they should be. If there's anything I'm missing, please let me know! Thanks! [[User:Maggiemrogers|Maggiemrogers]] ([[User talk:Maggiemrogers|talk]]) 10:09, 14 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Maggiemrogers}} got it! It looks great. I made some format changes, but you did a great job! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 15:58, 14 April 2025 (EDT)

== Finish Mimi ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}

I have made the final edit to Mimi and removed the footnotes from the endnotes. [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe]] [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 15:50, 14 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} you removed all the citations. Only '''footnotes''' need to be removed, but citations need to stay. I did the first note for you (now erased, but you can see it in the history) so you could see how it was done. You can also see [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer|this one]]. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 16:52, 14 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed? All You Need is Glove ==

Hi Dr. Lucas, I believe the book review, [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/All_You_Need_is_Glove|All You Need is Glove]] is done and ready for review! [[User:Hobbitonya|Hobbitonya]] ([[User talk:Hobbitonya|talk]]) 19:10, 14 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Hobbitonya}} awesome work! Banner removed, and many thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:08, 16 April 2025 (EDT)

== Harv and Sfn no-target ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I changed the citations in the article to interview and I tried a few things to get rid of the Harv and Sfn no-target with little luck. [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Automatons_and_the_Atomic_Abyss:_The_Naked_and_the_Dead]]
[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 21:04, 14 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} this was because your interviews had no dates. Most are from Lennon's book, published in 1988. I added the dates to the citations, but the sfn footnotes need to be fixed to correspond with those. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:24, 16 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} OK, between your fixes and my little tweaks, this one is finished! Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:50, 17 April 2025 (EDT)

== Erros fixed ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have fixed all citation errors in both articles and added the harvtxt. Atomic Abyss still has the Pages using duplicate arguments in template calls error.
[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Automatons_and_the_Atomic_Abyss:_The_Naked_and_the_Dead]]
:{{Reply to|MerAtticus}} see above. These still need fixing. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:35, 16 April 2025 (EDT)

[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe]]
:{{Reply to|MerAtticus}} this one looks great! Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:35, 16 April 2025 (EDT)

[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 08:23, 15 April 2025 (EDT)

== completed: Advertisements for Others ==

Thanks to some classmates helping with the finishing touches, my second article should be ready. [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Advertisements_for_Others:_The_Blurbs_of_Norman_Mailer|Advertisements for Others.]]
--[[User:NrmMGA5108|NrmMGA5108]] ([[User talk:NrmMGA5108|talk]]) 19:24, 17 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to| NrmMGA5108}} received, and thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:15, 18 April 2025 (EDT)

== Two Poems Vol 4 Ready? ==

Hi Dr. Lucas! I think these two poems are ready for review: [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/The Boxer in the Park|The Boxer in the Park]] and Norman Mailer and [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer_and_Ernest_Hemingway_Do_Not_Box_in_Heaven|Ernest Hemingway Do Not Box in Heaven]]. The second on says the display title is wrong, but again, I don't know what I am missing there. Thank you![[User:Hobbitonya|Hobbitonya]] ([[User talk:Hobbitonya|talk]]) 09:05, 18 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Hobbitonya}} excellent! Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:56, 18 April 2025 (EDT)

== A Dialogue Essay on Mailer and Hemingway ==

Hey,

I see that [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/A Dialogue Essay on Mailer and Hemingway|A Dialogue Essay on Mailer and Hemingway]] is missing text. Can you email me a copy or link it as a reply, so I can remediate this article. [[User:APKnight25|APKnight25]] ([[User talk:APKnight25|talk]]) 09:44, 18 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| APKnight25}} you may download both volumes’ PDFs on the [https://forum.grlucas.net/t/project-mailer-assignments-remediation-project/88/3?u=grlucas forum]. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:40, 18 April 2025 (EDT)

== Almost complete ==

@grlucas
I've made a ton of progress.
The only thing I have left is going through all of the links to do away with harvtxt and sfn target error and an error for extra text in the author section. I fixed the error about using an "en" dash between years.
I'll still be working on it until tomorrow night, but please take a look: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Hemingway_and_Women_at_the_Front:_Blowing_Bridges_in_The_Fifth_Column,_For_Whom_the_Bell_Tolls,_and_Other_Works

== Articles complete ==

@grlucas
I have also made a lot of progress with my articles and luckily received a last minute assit from a few of my class mates. I beleive both volumes to be complete: Vol 4: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Mailer,_Hemingway,_and_the_%E2%80%9CReds%E2%80%9D (Which I believe has already been submitted) and Volume 5: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Making_Masculinity_and_Unmaking_Jewishness:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Voice_in_Wild_90_and_Beyond_the_Law (I just received the final error correction from a fellow student.

I also started working on this Vol 4 article once I got back into the system: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Style,_Politics,_and_Hemingway%27s_Spanish_Civil_War_Dispatches in my sandbox https://projectmailer.net/pm/User:KWatson/sandbox but another user has already completed it.

Please review my articles and advise what else is needed from me. Thank you [[User:KWatson|KWatson]] ([[User talk:KWatson|talk]]) 15:37, 19 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| KWatson}} OK, I already checked the [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer, Hemingway, and the “Reds”|Peppard article]]. For [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Making Masculinity and Unmaking Jewishness: Norman Mailer’s Voice in Wild 90 and Beyond the Law|the Cohen]], the notes are still not quite right. Citations must be logically inserted. Instead of <blockquote>Mary V. Dearborn writes that Mailer picked up Yiddish at home from his parents, “enough so that many years later, in Germany, he was able to ask for directions in this language and be understood.” {{harvtxt|Dearborn|1999|p=14}}</blockquote> it should be <blockquote>Mary V. {{harvtxt|Dearborn|1999|p=14}} writes that Mailer picked up Yiddish at home from his parents, “enough so that many years later, in Germany, he was able to ask for directions in this language and be understood.” </blockquote> See the difference? Please be meticulous on these. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:57, 20 April 2025 (EDT)

== Additional edits ==

Hello! I reformatted all in text citations, did some editing, and added page numbers to [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing|Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing]]- could you please take a look at the updated page and see if there's anything additional that it needs?

I was also wondering: on this page, I had also recieved confirmation from you that my [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/The American Civil War in The Naked and the Dead and Across the River and Into the Trees|originally assigned article]] was complete, and the banner could be removed. However, it is still showing as an X on the page, and I am unable to find the comment from you! Could you please clarify if anything needs to be fixed? Thanks so much!
[[User:KaraCroissant|KaraCroissant]] ([[User talk:KaraCroissant|talk]]) 16:25, 19 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| KaraCroissant}} good! I was making quite a few corrections on “[[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing|Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing]],” but I stopped, figuring you might want to finish it. Put footnotes directly after the quotations, not all at the end of sentences. No spaces or line breaks before or after {{tl|pg}}. Use <code>|author-mask=1</code> with repeated author names in works cited entries, titles of books must be italicized like they are in the original text, etc. Thanks. After a few fixes, I removed the banner for the [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/The American Civil War in The Naked and the Dead and Across the River and Into the Trees|Meredith article]]. Well done. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:20, 20 April 2025 (EDT)

== Civil War..Dispatched. ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}

I believe the Hemingway's Spanish Civil War is complete except the harvtext were not working. [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Style,_Politics,_and_Hemingway's_Spanish_Civil_War_Dispatches]]
[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 17:37, 19 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} I made many small corrections. Please view them in the history and continue in the same way. This one just needs a bit more attention. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:33, 20 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation, Vol. 4 & 5 ==

For your review,

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norris_Church_Mailer:_An_Artist_from_Arkansas

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Imagining_Evil:_The_Sardonic_Narrator_of_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Last_Novel (Wasn't sure whether or not to add the dinkus)

[[User:Wverna|Wverna]] ([[User talk:Wverna|talk]]) 11:15, 20 April 2025 (EDT)

== Hemingway ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}} I revised early this morning and I have gone back through it this afternoon. Hopefully it looks okay. Any ciations in the notes at this point is beyond my understanding of the topic. [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Style,_Politics,_and_Hemingway's_Spanish_Civil_War_Dispatches]]

[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 14:11, 20 April 2025 (EDT)

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches

2025-04-20T18:06:04Z

MerAtticus: minor corrections

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
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{{byline|last=Vernon |first=Alex |abstract=The Spanish Civil War began in July 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally-restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy. By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr04ver |note=Adapted and printed with permission from ''Hemingway’s Second War: Bearing Witness to the Spanish Civil War.'' Iowa City: U of Iowa Press, 2011.}}
{{dc|dc=T|he Spanish Civil War began on}} 17-18 July, 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy, to collaborate with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens on the pro-Republican documentary ''The Spanish Earth'', and to pursue his fledgling love affair with Martha Gellhorn.

By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches for NANA.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=4}}{{efn|Quotations from the NANA dispatches follow the Diplomatic Text established by William Braasch’s “Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches.” I prefer NANA’s titles rather than {{harvtxt|Watson|1988}}’s. For my disagreements with some of Watson’s datings, see my comments on specific dispatches in ''Hemingway’s Second War''.}} The secondary sources habitually judge them inferior journalism. Carlos Baker in the first Hemingway biography, for example, complains that the dialogue was “so heavily stamped with personal mannerisms as to be of doubtful authenticity.” Baker sees a “curious monotony in his stories of battles and bombardments,” a gratuitous use of graphic imagery “to shock his readers,” and “a note of triumphant boastfulness” in reporting proximity to danger. He also faults Hemingway for “often hint[ing] he was alone when in fact he was usually with Martha Gellhorn, Matthews, and Delmer.” Hemingway lacked Dos Passos’ “eye for telling details” and the “meticulous exactitude and inclusiveness that characterized the best work of Herbert Matthews and Sefton Delmer.”{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}

Philip Knightley’s ''The First Casualty'', the standard history of war correspondence, paraphrases Baker but with a trouncing final judgment:{{pg|427|428}}Hemingway’s “performance as a war correspondent was abysmally bad.” But Knightley goes beyond “technical” dissatisfaction to moral condemnation. Not just “unjustifiably optimistic”—an excusable offense—Hemingway’s reporting was “unforgivable” in its “total failure to report the Communist persecution, imprisonment, and summary execution of ‘untrustworthy elements’ on the Republican side, when he knew this was happening and when disclosing it might well have prevented further horrors like this.”{{sfn|Knightley|2004|pp=231–32}}{{efn|In my view, {{harvtxt|Knightley|2004}} does not sufficiently acknowledge his paraphrasing of {{harvtxt|Baker|1969}}.}}

Such criticisms in the final analysis might bear out. As Scott Donaldson writes, Hemingway advanced the Republican cause in his dispatches by eliciting “the deepest possible feelings of horror and of sympathy for the victims” of the Madrid bombardment; his “undue optimism” often “ignored Loyalist defeats and exaggerated the importance of its victories”; and “he repeatedly called attention to the participation of Italians and Germans on Franco’s side.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=426}} It also served as a recruitment tool—Milton Wolff, for example, acknowledged the strong influence Hemingway’s dispatches had on his decision to volunteer. Nevertheless, I think it a worthwhile exercise to attend a little more studiously to Hemingway’s dispatches, their context, and their artistry. I don’t necessarily intend to reverse the general opinion of the correspondence, only to achieve a better and more sympathetic understanding.

Herbert Matthews’ reporting for the ''New York Times'' will serve as a convenient comparison for two reasons. First, because both Baker and Knightley use Matthews’ journalism as the standard of excellence to pass judgment on Hemingway’s; and second, because the two worked practically side-by-side, seeing and reporting on many of the same events. In fact so closely did they work together that NANA sometimes complained that the ''Times'' was not buying Hemingway’s pieces because they resembled Matthews,’ and at one point Matthews’ own editors at the Times suspected him of plagiarizing Hemingway.{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|pp=411, 420}} A note from Matthews’ assigned editor Raymond McCaw provides, in two columns, seven quite similar passages from Hemingway’s Aragon front dispatches of September 13 and 14 with Matthews’ of September 14, with a penciled note at the bottom: “a deadly parallel if you ask me.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937c}} Edwin James, the managing editor and McCaw’s boss, eventually agreed with Matthews’ defense: “It is quite apparent that you did not file any duplicate of the Hemingway story, or vice versa. As I understand it, the similarity arose from the fact that you{{pg|428|429}}both went to see the same show and saw it at the same time [sic], under the same conditions.”{{sfn|James|1937b}}

Matthews’ dispatches ring of Republican bias as much if not more than anything Hemingway ever filed. The ''Times'' received many letters to the editor complaining about Matthews’ undisguised politics, which also gave serious concern to some of his editors. His description of the Republican May 1937 infighting in Barcelona is a striking example of how his news veered into propaganda and shows just how much he passed along the government’s version of events. The government’s “BLOODLESS TRIUMPH FOUGHT WITH RECOGNIZEDWEAPONS OF DEMOCRACY” turned out to be blatantly false, as the government and the “COMMUNISTS [WHO] DISTINGUISHED THEMSELVES” resorted to violent suppression. His blaming the uprising on the anarchist CNT working as Franco operatives parrots the government’s and the communist party’s public position, even though both charges—that the anarchists precipitated the events and that they were under Nationalist direction—were also false. His dispatch’s optimistic close also equivocates the political reality: “NEW GOVERNMENT HAS TAKEN POWER WHICH APPEARS TOVE CONFIDENCE VAST MAJORITY SPANIARDS IN LOYALIST TERRITORY AND TIS HOPED WILL GAIN EQUAL CONFIDENCE ABROAD STOP VIOLENCE AND REVOLUTION BEEN REPUDIATED AND NEWAND FAR HOPEFULLER PERIOD SEEMS BEGINNING.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937a}}The ''Times'', knowing full well the one-sided coverage of a correspondent writing from one side of the conflict, had a reporter on both sides: Matthews with the Republicans, and William Carney with the Nationalists. They got their facts right (or wrong) as often as the other, their editors concluded;{{sfn|James|1937a}} and they inspired about the same number of letters of complaint.{{sfn|James|1939}}

Furthermore, Matthews’ dispatches received a great deal of substantive editorial revisions. One of Matthews’ Teruel reports had to be cut for length, as McCaw informed James: “This bird sent 2844 words on the same facts which Hemingway covered much better in less than half that number. I wonder if Matthews thinks the paper is thriving, and that cable tolls do not matter a damn. Of course, it had to be cut for space anyway.” McCaw most likely refers here to Matthews’ dispatch corresponding to Hemingway’s “The Attack on Teruel,” though Matthews’ account of the fall of Teruel is also much longer (and more long-winded) than Hemingway’s, and just as personal in terms of describing the dangers{{pg|429|430}} he faced. Indeed its length allows him to share even more of the action he endured.{{sfn|McCaw|1937b}}

Raymond McCaw held a general professional disagreement with Matthews perhaps tainted with over zealousness. Whether a personal or political motive informed that disagreement can’t be determined from the evidence I’ve seen. It is also clear that McCaw’s charges bear some validity—that any responsible editor could have easily and reasonably taken issue where McCaw did. One of the more interesting examples concerns Matthews’ piece on Guadalajara. Because he only saw evidence on Franco’s side of Italian forces, he only reported on Italians. But the ''Times'' editors heard from other sources that German soldiers also participated in the March offensive. They thought it prudent, from this confusion, to change (nine times) “Italian” to “Rebel,” “the foe,” or “Insurgent.” When Matthews saw the published piece he wrote a strenuous objection. In some instances the editors changed paraphrased quotations from his sources. One large paragraph omitted by the editors stressed the first-hand nature of the information, and Matthews underlines the key words: “All day, at every place we stopped and no matter whom we talked to or what we saw, there was only one label—Italian. The dead bodies, the prisoners, the material of every kind, the men who had occupied Brihuega and then fled were Italian and nothing but Italian.” Here and elsewhere in his original story, Matthews emphasizes the “personal knowledge” of its information.{{sfn|Matthews|1937a}}{{efn|James supported McCaw on these changes, though later acknowledged that altering quoted sources was perhaps unwarranted (29 April 1937; Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3).}} Yet Matthews did not report on the foreigners fighting for the Republic—it was in fact the Italian Garibali Battalion that routed Franco’s Italians. We might surmise government censorship behind this silence, though Matthews would not cable news of “CENSORSHIP STRICTER” and “BAN ON MENTIONING INTERNATIONALS INCLUDING AMERICANS INSTITUTED TODAY” until July.{{sfn|Matthews|1937b}} Perhaps he cautiously self-censored, or politically self-censored for the same reasons the government would eventually ban mention. Still, his stridency about the omission of foreigners on one side is striking given his knowledge of their contribution to the other side. For this reason too, and his omission of other nationalities on the insurgent side, it seemed only fair to his editor “to stand on the statement that the majority of the Rebels were Italians and let it go at that.”{{sfn|James|1937c}} A reasonable decision.

Throughout his correspondence to his editors and his several books,{{pg|430|431}}Matthews maintained a passionate defense of his eyewitness journalistic standard, a position those close to him understood. “Matthews never believed anything he had not seen with his own eyes,” Joris Ivens wrote. “He never saw his job as reporter as one that permitted him to sit in his hotel and read the handouts of the War Ministry.” {{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=112}} Sidney Franklin recalls that some writers wrote their pieces before arriving in Madrid, and came only for the “legitimacy” of the Madrid dateline.{{sfn|Franklin|1952|p=232}}And Matthews hated, on principle, having his name attached to an article that violated the integrity of his witness. The only way to achieve objectivity, for Matthews, was to acknowledge one’s subjective perspective. Writing to his publisher, Matthews argued that “the full documentary value” of his coverage was lost when the editors altered his submissions for “the apparent necessity of giving more or less equal space to both sides.”{{sfn|Matthews|1939}}

As with Matthews, so too Hemingway. Indeed the commitment to subjectivity
fit quite well with Hemingway’s modernist aesthetics. If Hemingway
focused the dispatches on his perspective—on his own experience dodging
artillery—more than Matthews and more than most, he did so at least partially
to fulfill expectations. NANA approached him, after all, for his name
and personality as much as whatever he would write. Before he even left the
states it pitched him to potential publications, sending out a promotional release with text to be used alongside his forthcoming dispatches and suggesting
they include a photograph: “Mr. Hemingway’s assignment is to get both from the bombed towns and bombed trenches the human story of the war, not just an account of the game being played by general staffs with pins
and a map.”{{sfn|NANA|1937}} NANA also released each individual dispatch with a one-sentence “precede” about the “famous” or “noted” author. Ernest Hemingway was not writing as Herbert Mathews, ace reporter; Hemingway was writing as Ernest Hemingway, famous author of novels and stories well known to be drawn from his own experiences.

That he understood this to be his assignment is further evidenced by a
cable Matthews sent to his ''Times'' editors on April 9, 1937, concerning the
Loyalist attack: “WORKED CONJOINTL WITH HEMINGWAY TODAY HE SENDING EYEWITNESS DESCRIPTION WHILE EYE SENT GENERAL STRATEGY.”{{sfn|Matthews|1937a}}When a year later the ''Times'' asked NANA to ensure Hemingway’s reports differed from Matthews, NANA complied by asking Hemingway “to emphasize color rather than straight reporting” not necessarily out of dissatisfaction with Hemingway’s reportage as Baker contends,{{efn|{{harvtxt|Baker|1969}}’s notes date the ''Times'' request to NANA as 8 Apr. 1938, and NANA’s to Hemingway as 15
Apr. 1938 (Princeton University, Firestone Library: Box 18, Folder 8 “1938”), the date of “The Bombing of Tortosa” dispatch.}} but to increase{{pg|431|432}}the chance of selling to the ''Times'' and indeed to ensure the spirit of NANA’s original arrangement with Hemingway. {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}Far from dissatisfied, NANA wrote Hemingway at the end of August 1938 a letter of agreement for his coverage of “a general European war” should it break out, “written in your colorful style” (Hemingway was in Paris, on his way to Spain for the last time during the war).{{sfn|Wheeler|1938}}When Edmund Wilson criticized the selected dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'', Hemingway wrote him that “I was paid to write what are called ‘eye witness’ accounts . . .what is called, or was asked for as ‘color stuff.’ Most of such stuff is faked. Mine was not. It was straight reporting and the personal stuff was what had been asked for by the editors. “Wilson’s estimation was also based upon ''Fact’s'' inclusion of the “The Old Man at the Bridge” story from ''Ken'', “not a news dispatch” at all.{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a}}Speaking at Carnegie Hall before the showing of a rough cut of ''The Spanish Earth'', shortly after his first trip to Spain and so very much in the context of his wartime work, Hemingway defined the writer’s problem as “project[ing] [what is true] in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2002|p=193}}

Personal, anecdotal journalism had been Hemingway’s signature style from his earliest days filing reports, in the early 1920s from Paris, when his editor at the ''Toronto Star Weekly'' “encouraged [. . .] what Hemingway did best: write about himself in the act of being a reporter.”{{sfn|Reynolds|1989|p=45}}How could he expect that NANA would expect anything else, if indeed NANA did expect anything else? In the Spanish Civil War he at least maintained his eyewitness posture; in World War II, however, he couldn’t keep himself out. His first piece, about D-Day, begins, “No one remembers the date of the Battle of Shiloh. But the day ''we took'' Fox Green beach was the sixth of June, and the wind was blowing hard out of the northwest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1967|p=340}}His venue too—''Collier’s'' magazine—and the fact that he had not written anything in three years further contributed to the story-like nature of the WWII stories, in which he figured as a protagonist—not to mention the stories and involvement he couldn’t write about, armed and running around France more of a free agent than his guerilla-hero Robert Jordan ever was (though he began to transform these experiences into fiction in several unpublished stories). In wartime China in 1943, filing articles for Ralph Ingersoll’s short-lived ''PM'' New York afternoon daily, Hemingway did not even care to be called a news reporter.{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=99}}

It should be mentioned that Hemingway and Matthews enjoyed a great{{pg|432|433}}friendship and working relationship. Hemingway usually brought Matthews, who did not have a car, on his excursions. When Matthews left Madrid for a break in mid April 1937, he had already ensured Hemingway would provide coverage to the ''Times'' through NANA. For one thing, Hemingway did not have to worry about Matthews as a rival for the history books. He could endorse his friends’ book, ''Two Wars and More to Come'', and praise him as “the ablest and the bravest war correspondent writing today “who “when the fakers are all dead [. . .] will be read in the schools” (Advertisement 21) because Matthews posed no threat to Hemingway’s own chances to be read in the schools. The only brief Hemingway ever expressed he really reserved for Matthews’ editors, for not wanting his Teruel street-fighting story and for cutting references to himself in Matthews’ Teruel dispatches so that it appeared only Matthews had been there.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=462}}

As for Hemingway’s neglecting to name everyone with him for every story, the ''Times'' cutting of his name suggests that such exactitude was hardly a priority. A paper had no incentive for announcing the fact that a competitor’s
correspondent stood beside its own to see and report the same
events. NANA changed at least one vague Hemingway “we,” which admits
to the presence of others, to “this correspondent”
—we can hardly fault Hemingway for working in the spirit of his
employer’s standards.{{sfn|NANA|1938}}{{efn|“we” in typescript and radiogram (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 1 and Folder 25).}} Do readers care that Matthews, Delmer, Gellhorn,
and others were there? The story’s effect and the limited word count also
weighed against such roll calls. One editor chose not to clutter the dispatch
on the great retreat across the Ebro with all the names of the American International Brigade volunteers Hemingway encountered, an omission of
Content more far serious than that of omitted correspondent names.{{efn| Radiogram insert dateline 4 April 1938 (HRC: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 25).}} Hemingway
often gave the names of the reporters with him, such as at Teruel;
nor was he the only reporter to sometimes neglect to do so. Martha Gellhorn,
for example, used a vague “we” and singled herself out as the primary
participant in some of her stories.

By using first-person reportage Hemingway—and Matthews and Gellhorn And most of the group covering the war—were operating solidly within
convention. William Stott, in ''Documentary Expression and Thirties America'',
calls this first-person ''participant observer'' technique “the most common sort
of documentary reportage in the thirties” that worked “by vicarious persuasion:
the writer partook of the events he reported and bared his feelings
and attitudes to influence the reader’s own.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=178-9}}{{efn|He specifically includes Hemingway et al (180). {{harvtxt|Stott|1986}}}} Stott also observes {{pg|433|434}}another technique to enable documentary reportage to “talk to us, and convince us that we, our deepest interests, are engaged,” in the use of the second person: “Thirties documentaries constantly address ‘you,’ the ‘you’ who is we the audience, and exhorts, wheedles, begs us to identify, pity, participate.” His examples include Dorothy Parker’s Spanish Civil War writing, and Hemingway’s 1935 “First-Hand Report on the Florida Hurricane.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=27-8}} A number of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches employ the second-person as a way of bringing the reader along for the ride.

Hemingway’s dispatches used personal pronouns more artfully than is generally recognized. “A New Kind of War,” which William Braasch Watson notes as having been “[w]ritten with more care and imagination” than its predecessors, begins in second person: “The window of the hotel is open and, as you lie in bed, you hear the firing in the front line seventeen blocks away.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=29}} He takes “you” outside, to see the damage and the dead from the bombing. “Someone makes a joke about missing teeth and someone else says not to make that joke. And everyone has the feeling that characterizes war. It wasn’t me, see? It wasn’t me.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} The tension between the first person and second-person pronouns—the movement toward identification with “you” and the insistence that “it wasn’t me”—continues in the next line. Here the reader is at once still in the narrator’s shoes, but strangely distanced from the narrator through biographical tidbit and, at the same time, asked to see himself in the enemy: “The Italian dead up on the Guadalajara weren’t you although Italian dead, because of where you had spent your boyhood, always seemed, still, like Our Dead.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} It is worth quoting at length the dispatch’s transition to first person:
<blockquote>
After the shell that lit on the sidewalk in front of the hotel you got a beautiful double corner room on that side, twice the size of the one you’d had, for less than a dollar. It wasn’t me they killed. See? No. Not me. It wasn’t me anymore.

Then in a hospital given by the American Friends of Spanish Democracy located out behind the Morata front along the road
to Valencia they said, “Raven wants to see you.”

“Do I know him?”

“I don’t think so,” they said. “But he wants to see you.”

“Where is he?”

“Upstairs.”{{pg|434|435}}In the room upstairs they are giving a blood transfusion to a man with a very gray face who lay on a cot with his arm out looking away from the gurgling bottle and moaning in a very impersonal way. He moaned mechanically and at regular intervals and it did not seem to be him that made the sound. His lips did not move.

“Where’s Raven?” I asked.

“I’m here,” said Raven.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=31}}</blockquote>
The piece simply could not have sustained the second-person for the remaining five pages. More significantly, for this deeply personal exchange between the writer and the faceless, eyeless soldier, Hemingway could not hide in the rhetorical device of the second-person. In the process, he effects a reversal of the usual pronoun game; instead of identifying with the all embracing “you,” we leave that trick behind and become fully attached to
the narratorial “I” as ourselves, as we might not have been had the article
begun in the first person. And even as the narrator identifies himself by name
for the only time in any of the dispatches—“Hemingway,” and later
“Ernest”—as decidedly not ourselves. We do not say, ''It isn’t me''. The historian
Hugh Thomas notes “the refreshing candour” of Hemingway’s naming
himself “in the world of the International Brigades, where no one’s name
seemed to be truthfully given.”{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=591}}{{efn|For Watson, the dispatch “seems, in fact, on the verge of becoming a story.”{{harvtxt|Watson|1988|p=29}}}}

A year later Hemingway’s “Tortosa Calmly Awaits Assault” resists admitting
the city’s imminent fall. Yet it does so anyway, by subtly alluding to the
wartime rhetoric of sacrificed blood irrigating the earth and rejuvenating
Spain. Such rhetoric was common during the war, appearing in speeches,
print, and poetry. Many of the poems in Cary Nelson’s anthology ''The Wound
and the Dream: Sixty Years of American Poems about the Civil War'' join in the
Spanish and international chorus’s general connection between Republican
soldiers and the land, and the particular singing of their dead nourishing
the land. We find such language in La Pasionaria’s farewell address to the International Brigades, her epilogue to ''The Book of the XV Brigade'', and Hemingway’s famous eulogy “On the American Dead in Spain”: “For our dead are
a part of the earth of Spain now and the earth of Spain can never die. Each
winter it will seem to die and each spring it will come alive again. Our dead
will live with it forever.”{{sfn|Nelson|1994|p=3}}{{efn| Reprinted in {{harvtxt|Bruccoli|2006|p=76}} and {{harvtxt|Nelson|1994}} ''Remembering'' 37 (the drafts at the JFK are titled “The Dead at Jarama”). In addition to the poems in Nelson’s anthology, see the excerpt from Boris Todrin’s “Spanish Sowing” in {{harvtxt|Guttmann|1962|pp=179-180}}.}} The Tortosa dispatch implies the deaths of{{pg|435|436}}many Republican soldiers in its final paragraph’s description of the newborn onions:
<blockquote>The artillery was picking up a little now. Two came in at a fairly useful place and as the smoke blew away ahead and settled through the trees, you picked an armful of spring onions from a field beside the trail that led to the Tortosa road. They were the first onions of the spring and peeling one I found they were plump white and not too strong. The Ebro Delta has a fine rich land, and where the onions grow, tomorrow will be a battle.
{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=84}}</blockquote>

The echo is quiet, and perhaps unconscious, but there nevertheless. The opening boastfulness of “American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents”
should be taken somewhat ironically. The dispatch begins by announcing
that for “two days we have been doing the most dangerous thing
you can do in this war. That is keep close behind an unstabilized line where
the enemy are attacking with mechanized forces.” Then, a few pages later,
we learn about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade survivors of the spring 1938
Nationalist offensive that took Bob Merriman and eventually reached the
Mediterranean Sea. Reading about these survivors creeping through enemy
camps, stepping on a sleeping German soldier’s hand, sprinting “across an
open field toward the Ebro bank and being sniped at by artillery controlled
by an observation plane overhead” and then “the desperate swimming of
the Ebro” naked, we are asked to place the correspondent’s plight in due perspective.{{sfn|Watson|1988|pp=71-2}} This story certainly escapes the charge of a monotonous
battle and bombing scene; its switch from apparently boastful to
awe-struck witness feels almost deliberately self-conscious. Other choice selfironic
moments come in the dispatches of that pre-Teruel quiet fall of 1938.
The one titled “Hemingway, Covering War, Tells of Brush with Death” has little
to report from Madrid other than the new aftershave brand he is trying.
In “Loyalists’ Drive Seen Progressing as Planned,” he writes that “Shells are
all much the same and if they don’t hit you there is no story and if they do
you won’t have to write it.” {{sfn|Watson|1988|p=58}}

Hemingway’s dispatches are sometimes monotonous because his war was
Usually monotonous—as wars are most of the time. It should also be kept in
mind that scholars reviewing Hemingway’s NANA dispatches one after{{pg|436|437}}another do not relive the original reading experience. Hemingway wrote dispatches sporadically, papers did not run all of his dispatches, papers edited and cut them, and readers read at least a couple of papers’ worth of other articles in between. He told Edmund Wilson as much in defending himself against Wilson’s critique of the selected (and heavily edited and cut) dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'' without his consent: “If you are being paid to be shot at and write about it you are supposed to mention the shooting. [. . .] But I do not go in for re-printing journalism.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a}}

If we can in this way better understand his style, and at least explain it if
not excuse it, we similarly ought to try to contextualize—and perhaps
excuse—the moral problem. The two issues here are the specific condemnation
of Hemingway’s silence about Republican atrocities and the general
question of biased reporting (the latter of which has already partially been
addressed).

Hemingway knew, as Donaldson writes, that mentioning the atrocities
“would arouse anticommunist sentiments back in the States and effectively
undermine any possibility of American intervention.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=394}} It is also doubtful
that reporting them would have stopped them. But reporting Republican
atrocities from Spain was not possible for the simple reason that all dispatches
went through a government censor. Matthews cabled his editors
from Paris in May 1937 to tell them that “censorship does not permit us to
say when the ‘telefonica’ is hit. So whenever you see reference in my
despatches [sic] to ‘an important building in the center of the city’ or words
to that effect, the cable desk can know that it is the telefonica.” {{sfn|Matthews|1937c}} As already noted, by July he would cable “CENSORSHIP
STRICTER” as the ban on mentioning internationals went into effect. {{sfn|Matthews|1937d}}{{sfn|Matthews|1937e}} Cowles’ memoir confirms the
aggressive censorship, observing that it limited journalists to exactly the kind of material Hemingway wrote about:
<blockquote>There were frequent attempts to “beat the censor” by employing American slang expressions, but this came to an end when a Canadian girl joined the staff. The International Brigades were not allowed to be publicized; no reference could be made to Russian armaments, and buildings and streets which suffered
bombardments could not be identified.</blockquote>{{pg|437|438}}<blockquote>It was only in the realm of the human interest story that the journalists had a free hand. They could describe bombardments to their heart’s content.{{sfn|Cowles|1941|p=20}}</blockquote>
Hemingway and everyone else—to reserve incrimination for Hemingway is hardly just. No correspondent covering Republican Spain reported suspicious imprisonments and disappearances by government agents.

Hemingway, through Joris Ivens and ''The Spanish Earth'' project, had better
access to officials than most. Had he been able somehow to report such
activity, he would have lost that access and would probably have been kicked
out of the country. His fame would have likely prevented his own officially
sponsored disappearance, though he still worried, especially as so many of
such crimes on the Republican side occurred from free agents. When Jasper
Wood printed the anarchist F.A.I. banner in the limited edition book version
of ''The Spanish Earth'', Hemingway expressed his anxieties bluntly in a letter
to Jasper on August 20, 1938. It is hardly “petulant,” he scolded, “not to wish
to be shot.”{{sfn|Davison|1988|p=128}} Hostility in the Republic against the anarchists
ran high; after the Barcelona May Day conflict, the government’s foreign
minister told U.S. Ambassador Claude Bowers that “anarchist revolt
throughout Catalonia and not only expected but welcomed as an opportunity
to liquidate the anarchists who have been hostile from the beginning.”
{{sfn|United States|1954|p=292}}{{efn| The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State, 5 May 1937.}}

It is possible that Hemingway’s dispatch stating that “not one friend [. . .]
has been executed or is missing” was his clever means of reporting
the rumors and indeed the general fact while evading the censors, as in this very dispatch he acknowledged the presence of a censor after a bombardment.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=34}}
Matthews, on the other hand, never found a way to mention the
censors or admit even the possibility of people gone missing in the Republic.
Peter Moreira has observed that in a 1943 dispatch Hemingway related a remark by a British officer about the Chinese Nationalist government’s being
“hopeless on the offensive” because censorship “prevented American reporters
From actually saying that the Nationalists wouldn’t attack, surmising that by telling this anecdote Hemingway could sneak such a judgment into
his reports.”{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=77}} In Spain, censors aside, the eyewitness standard and his
own safety and continuing ability to report the war, and, yes, his passionate
support of the government contributed to his decision. He could have written
about government abuses from the states, but then could not return to{{pg|438|439}}cover the war and support the cause—a justification other journalists, those who did not return after the spring of 1937, did not enjoy. In his mind too, knowing what he heard of fascist atrocities, any reportage against the government lessening its chances of victory through killing hopes of increased international aid would have led to more deaths at Franco’s hands that the much smaller number inspired by fifth column paranoia.{{efn|''Hemingway’s Second War'' discusses in greater depth Hemingway’s politics and his falling out
with John Dos Passos over the execution of José Robles.}}

The accusation that Hemingway did not write about Republican atrocities
because he was saving it for his fiction I find baseless.{{sfn|Knightley|2004|p=232}}{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=402}}{{efn|Hemingway’s casual comment to colleagues calling dibs on Pepe Quintanilla, the executioner of
Madrid, is not sufficient evidence.}}Carolyn Moorehead, in her biography of Martha Gellhorn, describes
the climate for the Madrid correspondents that first spring: “And so,
day by day, the correspondents walked a thin and nervous line between truth,
evasions, and propaganda, telling one another that though it was not all right
if things were made up and presented as true, it was acceptable to describe
what you wanted, provided it was true and provided your readers were aware
of your position.”{{sfn|Moorehead|2003|p=125}} My own sense is that they did not walk the line quite
so nervously; their passionate commitment, and their principles of position
disclosure and the eyewitness standard, made that walk relatively easy.

The problem of ''committed journalism'', even sixty years later, has not been
resolved—as anyone paying attention to the media and world affairs well
knows. One person’s truth is another person’s propaganda. Certainly, as
Knightley notes, reporting from “the heart” affects one’s judgment.{{sfn|Knightley|2004|pp=234-5}}
Yet to attempt “balance,” per the edits to Matthews’ Guadalajara piece, betrays
one’s believed truth. Furthermore, the kind of reporting done by the
correspondents with the Republic—committed, one-sided, optimistic,
heroic, human interest work by embedded writers—would be practiced
widely and without reserve during World War II. Such narrative journalism,
with roots in Louise May Alcott’s “Hospital Sketches” series published in the
''Boston Commonwealth'', and more immediately in 1930s social documentary
writing whose “essence” is “not information”, anticipated postwar
new journalism’s adoption of novelistic narrative technique for nonfiction
which culminated with such wartime books as Norman Mailer’s ''Armies of
the Night'' and Michael Herr’s ''Dispatches''.{{sfn|Stott|1986|p=11}} Some of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches
fall in this line of development.

Today we might categorize such writing under the awkward umbrella
term ''creative nonfiction''. That term certainly fits the mixed bag of nonfiction
narratives and commentaries Hemingway published during the war in
Ken magazine. These pieces are essays, not journalism, several of which{{pg|439|440}}directly appeal for support for the Republic, and most of which really deal with the approaching world war. ''Ken'' wanted “precisely the kind of opinion articles he could not write for NANA.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=433}} His article, “The Cardinal Picks a Winner,” shows a photo of a row of dead children from Barcelona and another one with Nationalist officers saluting and Catholic officials with raised hands, apparently making the fascist salute as well. He ends ironically: “So I ''don’t believe'' the people shown in the photo can really be making it. I would rather prefer to think that the photograph was faked.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=436}} When Hemingway argues in “A Program for U.S. Realism” that the United States should stay out of the next war except to stuff its pockets through arms sales, one has to wonder, given his call and the democratic nations’ failure to save Spain, if we are to sniff sarcasm here.

The language of the dispatches, with their corrective intent against
Franco’s propaganda, does risk propagandizing. Hemingway’s optimism and
anti-fascism certainly colored his correspondence work. His criticism of the
anarchist and POUM militia for their inactivity on the Aragon front, for example,
sounds a lot like the Spanish Communist Party’s.{{efn|It at least sounds almost exactly like Dolores Ibarruri in her memoir. To the anarchists’ complaint
that they had no arms, she retorts “that they had more arms than did many other fronts. . . .
What they didn’t have and what they were constantly demanding were airplanes and tanks .And
they didn’t have them because the Republic government didn’t have them either, except for those
it received as aid from the Soviet Union.”{{harvtxt|Ibarruri|1966|pp=283-4}} Yet the various Catalonia militia were not
as well equipped with small arms as the more regular Popular Army units, and because of the
terrain tanks and planes were in fact necessary.}}
But unlike
Matthews, Hemingway limited his reports within the Republic to military
matters. Hemingway may have generally condemned the anarchists in his
nonfiction, considering their activity as hampering the war effort, but he
never repeated the accusation of their collaboration with the rebels, as
Matthews had done. And when Hemingway commented on the Bareclona
crisis, he referred only to the government—not the communists, as
Matthews had done.{{efn|{{harvtxt|Hemingway|1937}}’s comments in “Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win” NANA staff
correspondent dispatch. Though arguably he was propagandizing by hiding the communist influence—
to mention the communists to an American audience would not gain sympathy for the
cause.}}Nor did he write articles asserting the limited role of
the communists in the government, or explaining Spanish anarchism, also
as Matthews had done.{{efn|An article on the communists’ limited role appeared in late November 1937, as discussed in a
missive from The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State on 2
Dec. 1937. Matthews’ “Anarchism: Spain’s Enigma” appeared in the ''New York Times'' 22 Aug. 1937:6, 14.}}

During one of Hemingway’s stateside breaks between trips to Spain, his
children asked if he was a “tool” of Stalin, an accusation tossed by a schoolmate
who, presumably parroting his or her parents, probably understood
the term no better than Hemingway’s children. {{sfn|Hemingway|1938b}}
Hemingway believed in the Republic’s potential, but he was never a dupe of
the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) or Comintern. As did many others, he
accepted PCE’s presence in the government for its discipline and organization
toward winning the war, and he understood the material necessity for
Comintern’s support. It should also be noted, as historians Hugh Thomas
and Helen Graham have reminded us, that the communism associated with
the Republic wasn’t particularly communist anyway.{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=628}}{{sfn|Graham|2002|p=184}} {{pg|440|441}}

Hemingway declined to follow Joris Ivens’ suggestion that he write a
dispatch on the significant role of the political commissars in the Republican
military, even though that would have meant
featuring his brave new friend Gustav Regler.{{sfn|Ivens|1969}} Hemingway also, in a letter
justifying his work to Jack Wheeler at NANA, wrote about choosing not to
send a dispatch he had written because it might strike readers as propaganda
“no matter how true.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1938b}}

Hemingway went to Spain to see the war himself and to support the Republic
through his ambulance fund. The paychecks from NANA and the
fundraising from ''The Spanish Earth'' helped. Whatever propagandistic streak
colors the dispatches pales in comparison to the documentary. The filmmaker,
Joris Ivens, was well established in European communist circles. The
documentary genre then and now has occupied a slippery position between
the extremes of impossible-to-achieve empirical nonfiction and of the outright
fictionalized. Evaluations of Hemingway’s journalism are informed by
knowledge of ''The Spanish Earth'' and the ''Ken'' essays to the detriment of the
journalism. And the very nature of the slippery documentary genre may enable
the film to escape opprobrium. It wasn’t reportage; it was altogether
something else. But for that matter, Hemingway’s dispatches weren’t purely
reportage either, and if not ''altogether'' something else, still something else,
and should be reckoned with accordingly.

== Notes ==
{{notelist|20em}}

==Citations==
{{Reflist|15em}}

==Works Cited==
{{refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker
|first=Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Bruccoli |first=Matthew |date=2006 |title=Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame |url= |location=Columbia |publisher=U of South Caronia P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Cowles |first=Virginia |date=1941 |title=Looking for Trouble |url= |location=New York
|publisher=Harper & Brothers |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Davison |first=Richard Allan |title=The Publication of Hemingway’s The Spanish Earth: An Untold Story |url= |journal=Hemingway Review
|volume=7.2 |issue= |date=1988
|pages=122-130 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson
|first=Scott |date=2009 |title=Fitzgerald & Hemingway: Works and Days |url= |location=New York |publisher=Columbia UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Franklin |first=Sidney |date=1952 |title=Bullfighter from Brooklyn |url= |location=New York |publisher=Prentice-Hall |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Graham |first=Helen |date=2002 |title=The Spanish Republic at War 1936-1939 |url= |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Guttmann |first=Allen |date=1962 |title=The Wound in the Heart: American and the Spanish Civil War |url= |location=New York |publisher=Free Press of Glencoe |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1967 |title=By-Line: Ernest Hemingway |url= |location=New York |publisher=Scibner |pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Trogdon
|editor-first=Robert W.
|author-mask=1
|title=Fascism is a Lie
|url=
|journal=Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference |volume==
|issue=
|date=2002
|pages=193-6
|location=New York
|publisher=Carroll & Graf
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 May 1937
|chapter=Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=nd
|chapter=The Home Front
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938a
|chapter=Letter to Edmund Wilson
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=2 June 1938b
|chapter=Letter to Jack Wheeler
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=14 Feb 1939
|chapter=On the American Dead in Spain
|title=TS. New Masses
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Baker
|editor-first=Carlos
|author-mask=1
|date=2003
|chapter=The Hadely Mowrer
|title=Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Scribner
|pages=462-3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ibarruri
|first=Dolores
|date=1966
|title=They Shall Not Pass: The Autobiography of La Pasionaria
|url=
|location=United States
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|date=1969
|title=The Camera and I
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|author-mask=1
|date=26 Apr 1937
|chapter=Letter to Ernest Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|date=20 Nov 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Bertrand Weaver
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=12 Oct 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=25 Apr 1939
|chapter=Letter to M.B. Tenney
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Apr 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Knightley
|first=Phillip
|date=2004
|title=The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq
|url=
|location=Baltimore
|publisher=John Hopkins
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=
|date=9 Apr 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=TS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=11 Apr 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=8 May 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=6 July 1937d
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=July 1937e
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=22 March 1939
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 9
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=
|date=20 May 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=20 Dec 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 5
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Sep 1937c
|chapter=Note to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moorehead
|first=Caroline
|date=2003
|title=Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Henry Holt
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moreira
|first=Peter
|date=2006
|title=Hemingway on the China Front: His WWII Spy Mission with Martha Gellhorn
|url=
|location=Washington D.C.
|publisher=Potomac Books
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|date=5 Feb 1937
|chapter=Promotion Box: Hemingway, For Immediate Release
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|author-mask=1
|date=4 Apr 1938
|chapter=Promotion Box: American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|editor-last=Nelson
|editor-first=Card
|date=1994
|title=Remembering Spain: Hemingway’s Civil War Eulogy and the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
|url=
|location=Urbana
|publisher=U of Illinois
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Reynolds
|first=Michael
|date=1989
|title=Hemingway: The Paris Years
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Norton
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Stott
|first=William
|date=1986
|title=Documentary Expression and Thirties America
|url=
|location=Chicago
|publisher=U of Chicago P
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Thomas
|first=Hugh
|date=2001
|title=The Spanish Civil War, Rev. ed.
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Modern Library
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine
|last=''Two Wars and More to Come''
|first=
|date=24 Jan 1938
|title=Best Sellers of the Week Here and Elsewhere
|type=Advertisement
|url=
|magazine=New York Times
|pages=
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=United States
|first=
|title=Dept. of State
|url=
|journal= Foreign Relations of the Untied States, 1937 |volume=1
|issue=General
|date=1954
|pages=
|location=Washington
|publisher=GPO
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Watson
|first=William Braasch
|title=Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches
|url=
|journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=7.2
|issue=
|date=1988
|pages=4-121
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Wheeler
|first=John H.
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938
|chapter=Letter to Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection, Box 3 Folder 14
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}

{{refend}}
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches

2025-04-20T17:59:52Z

MerAtticus: unnecessary p's

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{{byline|last=Vernon |first=Alex |abstract=The Spanish Civil War began in July 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally-restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy. By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr04ver |note=Adapted and printed with permission from ''Hemingway’s Second War: Bearing Witness to the Spanish Civil War.'' Iowa City: U of Iowa Press, 2011.}}
{{dc|dc=T|he Spanish Civil War began on}} 17-18 July, 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy, to collaborate with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens on the pro-Republican documentary ''The Spanish Earth'', and to pursue his fledgling love affair with Martha Gellhorn.

By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches for NANA.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=4}}{{efn|Quotations from the NANA dispatches follow the Diplomatic Text established by William Braasch’s “Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches.” I prefer NANA’s titles rather than {{harvtxt|Watson|1988}}’s. For my disagreements with some of Watson’s datings, see my comments on specific dispatches in ''Hemingway’s Second War''.}} The secondary sources habitually judge them inferior journalism. Carlos Baker in the first Hemingway biography, for example, complains that the dialogue was “so heavily stamped with personal mannerisms as to be of doubtful authenticity.” Baker sees a “curious monotony in his stories of battles and bombardments,” a gratuitous use of graphic imagery “to shock his readers,” and “a note of triumphant boastfulness” in reporting proximity to danger. He also faults Hemingway for “often hint[ing] he was alone when in fact he was usually with Martha Gellhorn, Matthews, and Delmer.” Hemingway lacked Dos Passos’ “eye for telling details” and the “meticulous exactitude and inclusiveness that characterized the best work of Herbert Matthews and Sefton Delmer.”{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}

Philip Knightley’s ''The First Casualty'', the standard history of war correspondence, paraphrases Baker but with a trouncing final judgment:{{pg|427|428}}Hemingway’s “performance as a war correspondent was abysmally bad.” But Knightley goes beyond “technical” dissatisfaction to moral condemnation. Not just “unjustifiably optimistic”—an excusable offense—Hemingway’s reporting was “unforgivable” in its “total failure to report the Communist persecution, imprisonment, and summary execution of ‘untrustworthy elements’ on the Republican side, when he knew this was happening and when disclosing it might well have prevented further horrors like this.”{{sfn|Knightley|2004|pp=231–32}}{{efn|In my view, {{harvtxt|Knightley|2004}} does not sufficiently acknowledge his paraphrasing of {{harvtxt|Baker|1969}}.}}

Such criticisms in the final analysis might bear out. As Scott Donaldson writes, Hemingway advanced the Republican cause in his dispatches by eliciting “the deepest possible feelings of horror and of sympathy for the victims” of the Madrid bombardment; his “undue optimism” often “ignored Loyalist defeats and exaggerated the importance of its victories”; and “he repeatedly called attention to the participation of Italians and Germans on Franco’s side.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=426}} It also served as a recruitment tool—Milton Wolff, for example, acknowledged the strong influence Hemingway’s dispatches had on his decision to volunteer. Nevertheless, I think it a worthwhile exercise to attend a little more studiously to Hemingway’s dispatches, their context, and their artistry. I don’t necessarily intend to reverse the general opinion of the correspondence, only to achieve a better and more sympathetic understanding.

Herbert Matthews’ reporting for the ''New York Times'' will serve as a convenient comparison for two reasons. First, because both Baker and Knightley use Matthews’ journalism as the standard of excellence to pass judgment on Hemingway’s; and second, because the two worked practically side-by-side, seeing and reporting on many of the same events. In fact so closely did they work together that NANA sometimes complained that the ''Times'' was not buying Hemingway’s pieces because they resembled Matthews,’ and at one point Matthews’ own editors at the Times suspected him of plagiarizing Hemingway.{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|pp=411, 420}} A note from Matthews’ assigned editor Raymond McCaw provides, in two columns, seven quite similar passages from Hemingway’s Aragon front dispatches of September 13 and 14 with Matthews’ of September 14, with a penciled note at the bottom: “a deadly parallel if you ask me.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937c}} Edwin James, the managing editor and McCaw’s boss, eventually agreed with Matthews’ defense: “It is quite apparent that you did not file any duplicate of the Hemingway story, or vice versa. As I understand it, the similarity arose from the fact that you{{pg|428|429}}both went to see the same show and saw it at the same time [sic], under the same conditions.”{{sfn|James|1937b}}

Matthews’ dispatches ring of Republican bias as much if not more than anything Hemingway ever filed. The ''Times'' received many letters to the editor complaining about Matthews’ undisguised politics, which also gave serious concern to some of his editors. His description of the Republican May 1937 infighting in Barcelona is a striking example of how his news veered into propaganda and shows just how much he passed along the government’s version of events. The government’s “BLOODLESS TRIUMPH FOUGHT WITH RECOGNIZEDWEAPONS OF DEMOCRACY” turned out to be blatantly false, as the government and the “COMMUNISTS [WHO] DISTINGUISHED THEMSELVES” resorted to violent suppression. His blaming the uprising on the anarchist CNT working as Franco operatives parrots the government’s and the communist party’s public position, even though both charges—that the anarchists precipitated the events and that they were under Nationalist direction—were also false. His dispatch’s optimistic close also equivocates the political reality: “NEW GOVERNMENT HAS TAKEN POWER WHICH APPEARS TOVE CONFIDENCE VAST MAJORITY SPANIARDS IN LOYALIST TERRITORY AND TIS HOPED WILL GAIN EQUAL CONFIDENCE ABROAD STOP VIOLENCE AND REVOLUTION BEEN REPUDIATED AND NEWAND FAR HOPEFULLER PERIOD SEEMS BEGINNING.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937a|p=}}The ''Times'', knowing full well the one-sided coverage of a correspondent writing from one side of the conflict, had a reporter on both sides: Matthews with the Republicans, and William Carney with the Nationalists. They got their facts right (or wrong) as often as the other, their editors concluded;{{sfn|James|1937a}} and they inspired about the same number of letters of complaint.{{sfn|James|1939}}

Furthermore, Matthews’ dispatches received a great deal of substantive editorial revisions. One of Matthews’ Teruel reports had to be cut for length, as McCaw informed James: “This bird sent 2844 words on the same facts which Hemingway covered much better in less than half that number. I wonder if Matthews thinks the paper is thriving, and that cable tolls do not matter a damn. Of course, it had to be cut for space anyway.” McCaw most likely refers here to Matthews’ dispatch corresponding to Hemingway’s “The Attack on Teruel,” though Matthews’ account of the fall of Teruel is also much longer (and more long-winded) than Hemingway’s, and just as personal in terms of describing the dangers{{pg|429|430}} he faced. Indeed its length allows him to share even more of the action he endured.{{sfn|McCaw|1937b}}

Raymond McCaw held a general professional disagreement with Matthews perhaps tainted with over zealousness. Whether a personal or political motive informed that disagreement can’t be determined from the evidence I’ve seen. It is also clear that McCaw’s charges bear some validity—that any responsible editor could have easily and reasonably taken issue where McCaw did. One of the more interesting examples concerns Matthews’ piece on Guadalajara. Because he only saw evidence on Franco’s side of Italian forces, he only reported on Italians. But the ''Times'' editors heard from other sources that German soldiers also participated in the March offensive. They thought it prudent, from this confusion, to change (nine times) “Italian” to “Rebel,” “the foe,” or “Insurgent.” When Matthews saw the published piece he wrote a strenuous objection. In some instances the editors changed paraphrased quotations from his sources. One large paragraph omitted by the editors stressed the first-hand nature of the information, and Matthews underlines the key words: “All day, at every place we stopped and no matter whom we talked to or what we saw, there was only one label—Italian. The dead bodies, the prisoners, the material of every kind, the men who had occupied Brihuega and then fled were Italian and nothing but Italian.” Here and elsewhere in his original story, Matthews emphasizes the “personal knowledge” of its information.{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}{{efn|James supported McCaw on these changes, though later acknowledged that altering quoted sources was perhaps unwarranted (29 April 1937; Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3).}} Yet Matthews did not report on the foreigners fighting for the Republic—it was in fact the Italian Garibali Battalion that routed Franco’s Italians. We might surmise government censorship behind this silence, though Matthews would not cable news of “CENSORSHIP STRICTER” and “BAN ON MENTIONING INTERNATIONALS INCLUDING AMERICANS INSTITUTED TODAY” until July.{{sfn|Matthews|1937b}} Perhaps he cautiously self-censored, or politically self-censored for the same reasons the government would eventually ban mention. Still, his stridency about the omission of foreigners on one side is striking given his knowledge of their contribution to the other side. For this reason too, and his omission of other nationalities on the insurgent side, it seemed only fair to his editor “to stand on the statement that the majority of the Rebels were Italians and let it go at that.”{{sfn|James|1937c|p=}} A reasonable decision.

Throughout his correspondence to his editors and his several books,{{pg|430|431}}Matthews maintained a passionate defense of his eyewitness journalistic standard, a position those close to him understood. “Matthews never believed anything he had not seen with his own eyes,” Joris Ivens wrote. “He never saw his job as reporter as one that permitted him to sit in his hotel and read the handouts of the War Ministry.” {{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=112}} Sidney Franklin recalls that some writers wrote their pieces before arriving in Madrid, and came only for the “legitimacy” of the Madrid dateline.{{sfn|Franklin|1952|p=232}}And Matthews hated, on principle, having his name attached to an article that violated the integrity of his witness. The only way to achieve objectivity, for Matthews, was to acknowledge one’s subjective perspective. Writing to his publisher, Matthews argued that “the full documentary value” of his coverage was lost when the editors altered his submissions for “the apparent necessity of giving more or less equal space to both sides.”{{sfn|Matthews|1939}}

As with Matthews, so too Hemingway. Indeed the commitment to subjectivity
fit quite well with Hemingway’s modernist aesthetics. If Hemingway
focused the dispatches on his perspective—on his own experience dodging
artillery—more than Matthews and more than most, he did so at least partially
to fulfill expectations. NANA approached him, after all, for his name
and personality as much as whatever he would write. Before he even left the
states it pitched him to potential publications, sending out a promotional release with text to be used alongside his forthcoming dispatches and suggesting
they include a photograph: “Mr. Hemingway’s assignment is to get both from the bombed towns and bombed trenches the human story of the war, not just an account of the game being played by general staffs with pins
and a map.”{{sfn|NANA|1937}} NANA also released each individual dispatch with a one-sentence “precede” about the “famous” or “noted” author. Ernest Hemingway was not writing as Herbert Mathews, ace reporter; Hemingway was writing as Ernest Hemingway, famous author of novels and stories well known to be drawn from his own experiences.

That he understood this to be his assignment is further evidenced by a
cable Matthews sent to his ''Times'' editors on April 9, 1937, concerning the
Loyalist attack: “WORKED CONJOINTL WITH HEMINGWAY TODAY HE SENDING EYEWITNESS DESCRIPTION WHILE EYE SENT GENERAL STRATEGY.”{{sfn|Matthews|1937a}}When a year later the ''Times'' asked NANA to ensure Hemingway’s reports differed from Matthews, NANA complied by asking Hemingway “to emphasize color rather than straight reporting” not necessarily out of dissatisfaction with Hemingway’s reportage as Baker contends,{{efn|{{harvtxt|Baker|1969}}’s notes date the ''Times'' request to NANA as 8 Apr. 1938, and NANA’s to Hemingway as 15
Apr. 1938 (Princeton University, Firestone Library: Box 18, Folder 8 “1938”), the date of “The Bombing of Tortosa” dispatch.}} but to increase{{pg|431|432}}the chance of selling to the ''Times'' and indeed to ensure the spirit of NANA’s original arrangement with Hemingway. {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}Far from dissatisfied, NANA wrote Hemingway at the end of August 1938 a letter of agreement for his coverage of “a general European war” should it break out, “written in your colorful style” (Hemingway was in Paris, on his way to Spain for the last time during the war).{{sfn|Wheeler|1938}}When Edmund Wilson criticized the selected dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'', Hemingway wrote him that “I was paid to write what are called ‘eye witness’ accounts . . .what is called, or was asked for as ‘color stuff.’ Most of such stuff is faked. Mine was not. It was straight reporting and the personal stuff was what had been asked for by the editors. “Wilson’s estimation was also based upon ''Fact’s'' inclusion of the “The Old Man at the Bridge” story from ''Ken'', “not a news dispatch” at all.{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a}}Speaking at Carnegie Hall before the showing of a rough cut of ''The Spanish Earth'', shortly after his first trip to Spain and so very much in the context of his wartime work, Hemingway defined the writer’s problem as “project[ing] [what is true] in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2002|p=193}}

Personal, anecdotal journalism had been Hemingway’s signature style from his earliest days filing reports, in the early 1920s from Paris, when his editor at the ''Toronto Star Weekly'' “encouraged [. . .] what Hemingway did best: write about himself in the act of being a reporter.”{{sfn|Reynolds|1989|p=45}}How could he expect that NANA would expect anything else, if indeed NANA did expect anything else? In the Spanish Civil War he at least maintained his eyewitness posture; in World War II, however, he couldn’t keep himself out. His first piece, about D-Day, begins, “No one remembers the date of the Battle of Shiloh. But the day ''we took'' Fox Green beach was the sixth of June, and the wind was blowing hard out of the northwest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1967|p=340}}His venue too—''Collier’s'' magazine—and the fact that he had not written anything in three years further contributed to the story-like nature of the WWII stories, in which he figured as a protagonist—not to mention the stories and involvement he couldn’t write about, armed and running around France more of a free agent than his guerilla-hero Robert Jordan ever was (though he began to transform these experiences into fiction in several unpublished stories). In wartime China in 1943, filing articles for Ralph Ingersoll’s short-lived ''PM'' New York afternoon daily, Hemingway did not even care to be called a news reporter.{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=99}}

It should be mentioned that Hemingway and Matthews enjoyed a great{{pg|432|433}}friendship and working relationship. Hemingway usually brought Matthews, who did not have a car, on his excursions. When Matthews left Madrid for a break in mid April 1937, he had already ensured Hemingway would provide coverage to the ''Times'' through NANA. For one thing, Hemingway did not have to worry about Matthews as a rival for the history books. He could endorse his friends’ book, ''Two Wars and More to Come'', and praise him as “the ablest and the bravest war correspondent writing today “who “when the fakers are all dead [. . .] will be read in the schools” (Advertisement 21) because Matthews posed no threat to Hemingway’s own chances to be read in the schools. The only brief Hemingway ever expressed he really reserved for Matthews’ editors, for not wanting his Teruel street-fighting story and for cutting references to himself in Matthews’ Teruel dispatches so that it appeared only Matthews had been there.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=462}}

As for Hemingway’s neglecting to name everyone with him for every story, the ''Times'' cutting of his name suggests that such exactitude was hardly a priority. A paper had no incentive for announcing the fact that a competitor’s
correspondent stood beside its own to see and report the same
events. NANA changed at least one vague Hemingway “we,” which admits
to the presence of others, to “this correspondent”
—we can hardly fault Hemingway for working in the spirit of his
employer’s standards.{{sfn|NANA|1938}}{{efn|“we” in typescript and radiogram (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 1 and Folder 25).}} Do readers care that Matthews, Delmer, Gellhorn,
and others were there? The story’s effect and the limited word count also
weighed against such roll calls. One editor chose not to clutter the dispatch
on the great retreat across the Ebro with all the names of the American International Brigade volunteers Hemingway encountered, an omission of
Content more far serious than that of omitted correspondent names.{{efn| Radiogram insert dateline 4 April 1938 (HRC: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 25).}} Hemingway
often gave the names of the reporters with him, such as at Teruel;
nor was he the only reporter to sometimes neglect to do so. Martha Gellhorn,
for example, used a vague “we” and singled herself out as the primary
participant in some of her stories.

By using first-person reportage Hemingway—and Matthews and Gellhorn And most of the group covering the war—were operating solidly within
convention. William Stott, in ''Documentary Expression and Thirties America'',
calls this first-person ''participant observer'' technique “the most common sort
of documentary reportage in the thirties” that worked “by vicarious persuasion:
the writer partook of the events he reported and bared his feelings
and attitudes to influence the reader’s own.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=178-9}}{{efn|He specifically includes Hemingway et al (180). {{harvtxt|Stott|1986}}}} Stott also observes {{pg|433|434}}another technique to enable documentary reportage to “talk to us, and convince us that we, our deepest interests, are engaged,” in the use of the second person: “Thirties documentaries constantly address ‘you,’ the ‘you’ who is we the audience, and exhorts, wheedles, begs us to identify, pity, participate.” His examples include Dorothy Parker’s Spanish Civil War writing, and Hemingway’s 1935 “First-Hand Report on the Florida Hurricane.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=27-8}} A number of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches employ the second-person as a way of bringing the reader along for the ride.

Hemingway’s dispatches used personal pronouns more artfully than is generally recognized. “A New Kind of War,” which William Braasch Watson notes as having been “[w]ritten with more care and imagination” than its predecessors, begins in second person: “The window of the hotel is open and, as you lie in bed, you hear the firing in the front line seventeen blocks away.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=29}} He takes “you” outside, to see the damage and the dead from the bombing. “Someone makes a joke about missing teeth and someone else says not to make that joke. And everyone has the feeling that characterizes war. It wasn’t me, see? It wasn’t me.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} The tension between the first person and second-person pronouns—the movement toward identification with “you” and the insistence that “it wasn’t me”—continues in the next line. Here the reader is at once still in the narrator’s shoes, but strangely distanced from the narrator through biographical tidbit and, at the same time, asked to see himself in the enemy: “The Italian dead up on the Guadalajara weren’t you although Italian dead, because of where you had spent your boyhood, always seemed, still, like Our Dead.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} It is worth quoting at length the dispatch’s transition to first person:
<blockquote>
After the shell that lit on the sidewalk in front of the hotel you got a beautiful double corner room on that side, twice the size of the one you’d had, for less than a dollar. It wasn’t me they killed. See? No. Not me. It wasn’t me anymore.

Then in a hospital given by the American Friends of Spanish Democracy located out behind the Morata front along the road
to Valencia they said, “Raven wants to see you.”

“Do I know him?”

“I don’t think so,” they said. “But he wants to see you.”

“Where is he?”

“Upstairs.”{{pg|434|435}}In the room upstairs they are giving a blood transfusion to a man with a very gray face who lay on a cot with his arm out looking away from the gurgling bottle and moaning in a very impersonal way. He moaned mechanically and at regular intervals and it did not seem to be him that made the sound. His lips did not move.

“Where’s Raven?” I asked.

“I’m here,” said Raven.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=31}}</blockquote>
The piece simply could not have sustained the second-person for the remaining five pages. More significantly, for this deeply personal exchange between the writer and the faceless, eyeless soldier, Hemingway could not hide in the rhetorical device of the second-person. In the process, he effects a reversal of the usual pronoun game; instead of identifying with the all embracing “you,” we leave that trick behind and become fully attached to
the narratorial “I” as ourselves, as we might not have been had the article
begun in the first person. And even as the narrator identifies himself by name
for the only time in any of the dispatches—“Hemingway,” and later
“Ernest”—as decidedly not ourselves. We do not say, ''It isn’t me''. The historian
Hugh Thomas notes “the refreshing candour” of Hemingway’s naming
himself “in the world of the International Brigades, where no one’s name
seemed to be truthfully given.”{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=591}}{{efn|For Watson, the dispatch “seems, in fact, on the verge of becoming a story.”{{harvtxt|Watson|1988|p=29}}}}

A year later Hemingway’s “Tortosa Calmly Awaits Assault” resists admitting
the city’s imminent fall. Yet it does so anyway, by subtly alluding to the
wartime rhetoric of sacrificed blood irrigating the earth and rejuvenating
Spain. Such rhetoric was common during the war, appearing in speeches,
print, and poetry. Many of the poems in Cary Nelson’s anthology ''The Wound
and the Dream: Sixty Years of American Poems about the Civil War'' join in the
Spanish and international chorus’s general connection between Republican
soldiers and the land, and the particular singing of their dead nourishing
the land. We find such language in La Pasionaria’s farewell address to the International Brigades, her epilogue to ''The Book of the XV Brigade'', and Hemingway’s famous eulogy “On the American Dead in Spain”: “For our dead are
a part of the earth of Spain now and the earth of Spain can never die. Each
winter it will seem to die and each spring it will come alive again. Our dead
will live with it forever.”{{sfn|Nelson|1994|p=3}}{{efn| Reprinted in {{harvtxt|Bruccoli|2006|p=76}} and {{harvtxt|Nelson|1994}} ''Remembering'' 37 (the drafts at the JFK are titled “The Dead at Jarama”). In addition to the poems in Nelson’s anthology, see the excerpt from Boris Todrin’s “Spanish Sowing” in {{harvtxt|Guttmann|1962|pp=179-180}}.}} The Tortosa dispatch implies the deaths of{{pg|435|436}}many Republican soldiers in its final paragraph’s description of the newborn onions:
<blockquote>The artillery was picking up a little now. Two came in at a fairly useful place and as the smoke blew away ahead and settled through the trees, you picked an armful of spring onions from a field beside the trail that led to the Tortosa road. They were the first onions of the spring and peeling one I found they were plump white and not too strong. The Ebro Delta has a fine rich land, and where the onions grow, tomorrow will be a battle.
{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=84}}</blockquote>

The echo is quiet, and perhaps unconscious, but there nevertheless. The opening boastfulness of “American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents”
should be taken somewhat ironically. The dispatch begins by announcing
that for “two days we have been doing the most dangerous thing
you can do in this war. That is keep close behind an unstabilized line where
the enemy are attacking with mechanized forces.” Then, a few pages later,
we learn about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade survivors of the spring 1938
Nationalist offensive that took Bob Merriman and eventually reached the
Mediterranean Sea. Reading about these survivors creeping through enemy
camps, stepping on a sleeping German soldier’s hand, sprinting “across an
open field toward the Ebro bank and being sniped at by artillery controlled
by an observation plane overhead” and then “the desperate swimming of
the Ebro” naked, we are asked to place the correspondent’s plight in due perspective.{{sfn|Watson|1988|pp=71-2}} This story certainly escapes the charge of a monotonous
battle and bombing scene; its switch from apparently boastful to
awe-struck witness feels almost deliberately self-conscious. Other choice selfironic
moments come in the dispatches of that pre-Teruel quiet fall of 1938.
The one titled “Hemingway, Covering War, Tells of Brush with Death” has little
to report from Madrid other than the new aftershave brand he is trying.
In “Loyalists’ Drive Seen Progressing as Planned,” he writes that “Shells are
all much the same and if they don’t hit you there is no story and if they do
you won’t have to write it.” {{sfn|Watson|1988|p=58}}

Hemingway’s dispatches are sometimes monotonous because his war was
Usually monotonous—as wars are most of the time. It should also be kept in
mind that scholars reviewing Hemingway’s NANA dispatches one after{{pg|436|437}}another do not relive the original reading experience. Hemingway wrote dispatches sporadically, papers did not run all of his dispatches, papers edited and cut them, and readers read at least a couple of papers’ worth of other articles in between. He told Edmund Wilson as much in defending himself against Wilson’s critique of the selected (and heavily edited and cut) dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'' without his consent: “If you are being paid to be shot at and write about it you are supposed to mention the shooting. [. . .] But I do not go in for re-printing journalism.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a}}

If we can in this way better understand his style, and at least explain it if
not excuse it, we similarly ought to try to contextualize—and perhaps
excuse—the moral problem. The two issues here are the specific condemnation
of Hemingway’s silence about Republican atrocities and the general
question of biased reporting (the latter of which has already partially been
addressed).

Hemingway knew, as Donaldson writes, that mentioning the atrocities
“would arouse anticommunist sentiments back in the States and effectively
undermine any possibility of American intervention.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=394}} It is also doubtful
that reporting them would have stopped them. But reporting Republican
atrocities from Spain was not possible for the simple reason that all dispatches
went through a government censor. Matthews cabled his editors
from Paris in May 1937 to tell them that “censorship does not permit us to
say when the ‘telefonica’ is hit. So whenever you see reference in my
despatches [sic] to ‘an important building in the center of the city’ or words
to that effect, the cable desk can know that it is the telefonica.” {{sfn|Matthews|1937c}} As already noted, by July he would cable “CENSORSHIP
STRICTER” as the ban on mentioning internationals went into effect. {{sfn|Matthews|1937d}}{{sfn|Matthews|1937e}} Cowles’ memoir confirms the
aggressive censorship, observing that it limited journalists to exactly the kind of material Hemingway wrote about:
<blockquote>There were frequent attempts to “beat the censor” by employing American slang expressions, but this came to an end when a Canadian girl joined the staff. The International Brigades were not allowed to be publicized; no reference could be made to Russian armaments, and buildings and streets which suffered
bombardments could not be identified.</blockquote>{{pg|437|438}}<blockquote>It was only in the realm of the human interest story that the journalists had a free hand. They could describe bombardments to their heart’s content.{{sfn|Cowles|1941|p=20}}</blockquote>
Hemingway and everyone else—to reserve incrimination for Hemingway is hardly just. No correspondent covering Republican Spain reported suspicious imprisonments and disappearances by government agents.

Hemingway, through Joris Ivens and ''The Spanish Earth'' project, had better
access to officials than most. Had he been able somehow to report such
activity, he would have lost that access and would probably have been kicked
out of the country. His fame would have likely prevented his own officially
sponsored disappearance, though he still worried, especially as so many of
such crimes on the Republican side occurred from free agents. When Jasper
Wood printed the anarchist F.A.I. banner in the limited edition book version
of ''The Spanish Earth'', Hemingway expressed his anxieties bluntly in a letter
to Jasper on August 20, 1938. It is hardly “petulant,” he scolded, “not to wish
to be shot.”{{sfn|Davison|1988|p=128}} Hostility in the Republic against the anarchists
ran high; after the Barcelona May Day conflict, the government’s foreign
minister told U.S. Ambassador Claude Bowers that “anarchist revolt
throughout Catalonia and not only expected but welcomed as an opportunity
to liquidate the anarchists who have been hostile from the beginning.”
{{sfn|NA|1954|p=292}}{{efn| The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State, 5 May 1937.}}

It is possible that Hemingway’s dispatch stating that “not one friend [. . .]
has been executed or is missing” was his clever means of reporting
the rumors and indeed the general fact while evading the censors, as in this very dispatch he acknowledged the presence of a censor after a bombardment.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=34}}
Matthews, on the other hand, never found a way to mention the
censors or admit even the possibility of people gone missing in the Republic.
Peter Moreira has observed that in a 1943 dispatch Hemingway related a remark by a British officer about the Chinese Nationalist government’s being
“hopeless on the offensive” because censorship “prevented American reporters
From actually saying that the Nationalists wouldn’t attack, surmising that by telling this anecdote Hemingway could sneak such a judgment into
his reports.”{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=77}} In Spain, censors aside, the eyewitness standard and his
own safety and continuing ability to report the war, and, yes, his passionate
support of the government contributed to his decision. He could have written
about government abuses from the states, but then could not return to{{pg|438|439}}cover the war and support the cause—a justification other journalists, those who did not return after the spring of 1937, did not enjoy. In his mind too, knowing what he heard of fascist atrocities, any reportage against the government lessening its chances of victory through killing hopes of increased international aid would have led to more deaths at Franco’s hands that the much smaller number inspired by fifth column paranoia.{{efn|''Hemingway’s Second War'' discusses in greater depth Hemingway’s politics and his falling out
with John Dos Passos over the execution of José Robles.}}

The accusation that Hemingway did not write about Republican atrocities
because he was saving it for his fiction I find baseless.{{sfn|Knightley|2004|p=232}}{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=402}}{{efn|Hemingway’s casual comment to colleagues calling dibs on Pepe Quintanilla, the executioner of
Madrid, is not sufficient evidence.}}Carolyn Moorehead, in her biography of Martha Gellhorn, describes
the climate for the Madrid correspondents that first spring: “And so,
day by day, the correspondents walked a thin and nervous line between truth,
evasions, and propaganda, telling one another that though it was not all right
if things were made up and presented as true, it was acceptable to describe
what you wanted, provided it was true and provided your readers were aware
of your position.”{{sfn|Moorehead|2003|p=125}} My own sense is that they did not walk the line quite
so nervously; their passionate commitment, and their principles of position
disclosure and the eyewitness standard, made that walk relatively easy.

The problem of ''committed journalism'', even sixty years later, has not been
resolved—as anyone paying attention to the media and world affairs well
knows. One person’s truth is another person’s propaganda. Certainly, as
Knightley notes, reporting from “the heart” affects one’s judgment.{{sfn|Knightley|2004|pp=234-5}}
Yet to attempt “balance,” per the edits to Matthews’ Guadalajara piece, betrays
one’s believed truth. Furthermore, the kind of reporting done by the
correspondents with the Republic—committed, one-sided, optimistic,
heroic, human interest work by embedded writers—would be practiced
widely and without reserve during World War II. Such narrative journalism,
with roots in Louise May Alcott’s “Hospital Sketches” series published in the
''Boston Commonwealth'', and more immediately in 1930s social documentary
writing whose “essence” is “not information”, anticipated postwar
new journalism’s adoption of novelistic narrative technique for nonfiction
which culminated with such wartime books as Norman Mailer’s ''Armies of
the Night'' and Michael Herr’s ''Dispatches''.{{sfn|Stott|1986|p=11}} Some of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches
fall in this line of development.

Today we might categorize such writing under the awkward umbrella
term ''creative nonfiction''. That term certainly fits the mixed bag of nonfiction
narratives and commentaries Hemingway published during the war in
Ken magazine. These pieces are essays, not journalism, several of which{{pg|439|440}}directly appeal for support for the Republic, and most of which really deal with the approaching world war. ''Ken'' wanted “precisely the kind of opinion articles he could not write for NANA.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=433}} His article, “The Cardinal Picks a Winner,” shows a photo of a row of dead children from Barcelona and another one with Nationalist officers saluting and Catholic officials with raised hands, apparently making the fascist salute as well. He ends ironically: “So I ''don’t believe'' the people shown in the photo can really be making it. I would rather prefer to think that the photograph was faked.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=436}} When Hemingway argues in “A Program for U.S. Realism” that the United States should stay out of the next war except to stuff its pockets through arms sales, one has to wonder, given his call and the democratic nations’ failure to save Spain, if we are to sniff sarcasm here.

The language of the dispatches, with their corrective intent against
Franco’s propaganda, does risk propagandizing. Hemingway’s optimism and
anti-fascism certainly colored his correspondence work. His criticism of the
anarchist and POUM militia for their inactivity on the Aragon front, for example,
sounds a lot like the Spanish Communist Party’s.{{efn|It at least sounds almost exactly like Dolores Ibarruri in her memoir. To the anarchists’ complaint
that they had no arms, she retorts “that they had more arms than did many other fronts. . . .
What they didn’t have and what they were constantly demanding were airplanes and tanks .And
they didn’t have them because the Republic government didn’t have them either, except for those
it received as aid from the Soviet Union.”{{harvtxt|Ibarruri|1966|pp=283-4}} Yet the various Catalonia militia were not
as well equipped with small arms as the more regular Popular Army units, and because of the
terrain tanks and planes were in fact necessary.}}
But unlike
Matthews, Hemingway limited his reports within the Republic to military
matters. Hemingway may have generally condemned the anarchists in his
nonfiction, considering their activity as hampering the war effort, but he
never repeated the accusation of their collaboration with the rebels, as
Matthews had done. And when Hemingway commented on the Bareclona
crisis, he referred only to the government—not the communists, as
Matthews had done.{{efn|{{harvtxt|Hemingway|1937}}’s comments in “Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win” NANA staff
correspondent dispatch. Though arguably he was propagandizing by hiding the communist influence—
to mention the communists to an American audience would not gain sympathy for the
cause.}}Nor did he write articles asserting the limited role of
the communists in the government, or explaining Spanish anarchism, also
as Matthews had done.{{efn|An article on the communists’ limited role appeared in late November 1937, as discussed in a
missive from The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State on 2
Dec. 1937. Matthews’ “Anarchism: Spain’s Enigma” appeared in the ''New York Times'' 22 Aug. 1937:6, 14.}}

During one of Hemingway’s stateside breaks between trips to Spain, his
children asked if he was a “tool” of Stalin, an accusation tossed by a schoolmate
who, presumably parroting his or her parents, probably understood
the term no better than Hemingway’s children. {{sfn|Hemingway|1938b}}
Hemingway believed in the Republic’s potential, but he was never a dupe of
the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) or Comintern. As did many others, he
accepted PCE’s presence in the government for its discipline and organization
toward winning the war, and he understood the material necessity for
Comintern’s support. It should also be noted, as historians Hugh Thomas
and Helen Graham have reminded us, that the communism associated with
the Republic wasn’t particularly communist anyway.{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=628}}{{sfn|Graham|2002|p=184}} {{pg|440|441}}

Hemingway declined to follow Joris Ivens’ suggestion that he write a
dispatch on the significant role of the political commissars in the Republican
military, even though that would have meant
featuring his brave new friend Gustav Regler.{{sfn|Ivens|1969}} Hemingway also, in a letter
justifying his work to Jack Wheeler at NANA, wrote about choosing not to
send a dispatch he had written because it might strike readers as propaganda
“no matter how true.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1938b}}

Hemingway went to Spain to see the war himself and to support the Republic
through his ambulance fund. The paychecks from NANA and the
fundraising from ''The Spanish Earth'' helped. Whatever propagandistic streak
colors the dispatches pales in comparison to the documentary. The filmmaker,
Joris Ivens, was well established in European communist circles. The
documentary genre then and now has occupied a slippery position between
the extremes of impossible-to-achieve empirical nonfiction and of the outright
fictionalized. Evaluations of Hemingway’s journalism are informed by
knowledge of ''The Spanish Earth'' and the ''Ken'' essays to the detriment of the
journalism. And the very nature of the slippery documentary genre may enable
the film to escape opprobrium. It wasn’t reportage; it was altogether
something else. But for that matter, Hemingway’s dispatches weren’t purely
reportage either, and if not ''altogether'' something else, still something else,
and should be reckoned with accordingly.

== Notes ==
{{notelist|20em}}

==Citations==
{{Reflist|15em}}

==Works Cited==
{{refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker
|first=Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Bruccoli |first=Matthew |date=2006 |title=Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame |url= |location=Columbia |publisher=U of South Caronia P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Cowles |first=Virginia |date=1941 |title=Looking for Trouble |url= |location=New York
|publisher=Harper & Brothers |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Davison |first=Richard Allan |title=The Publication of Hemingway’s The Spanish Earth: An Untold Story |url= |journal=Hemingway Review
|volume=7.2 |issue= |date=1988
|pages=122-130 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson
|first=Scott |date=2009 |title=Fitzgerald & Hemingway: Works and Days |url= |location=New York |publisher=Columbia UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Franklin |first=Sidney |date=1952 |title=Bullfighter from Brooklyn |url= |location=New York |publisher=Prentice-Hall |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Graham |first=Helen |date=2002 |title=The Spanish Republic at War 1936-1939 |url= |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Guttmann |first=Allen |date=1962 |title=The Wound in the Heart: American and the Spanish Civil War |url= |location=New York |publisher=Free Press of Glencoe |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1967 |title=By-Line: Ernest Hemingway |url= |location=New York |publisher=Scibner |pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Trogdon
|editor-first=Robert W.
|author-mask=1
|title=Fascism is a Lie
|url=
|journal=Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference |volume==
|issue=
|date=2002
|pages=193-6
|location=New York
|publisher=Carroll & Graf
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 May 1937
|chapter=Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=nd
|chapter=The Home Front
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938a
|chapter=Letter to Edmund Wilson
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=2 June 1938b
|chapter=Letter to Jack Wheeler
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=14 Feb 1939
|chapter=On the American Dead in Spain
|title=TS. New Masses
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Baker
|editor-first=Carlos
|author-mask=1
|date=2003
|chapter=The Hadely Mowrer
|title=Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Scribner
|pages=462-3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ibarruri
|first=Dolores
|date=1966
|title=They Shall Not Pass: The Autobiography of La Pasionaria
|url=
|location=United States
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|date=1969
|title=The Camera and I
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|author-mask=1
|date=26 Apr 1937
|chapter=Letter to Ernest Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|date=20 Nov 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Bertrand Weaver
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=12 Oct 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=25 Apr 1939
|chapter=Letter to M.B. Tenney
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Apr 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Knightley
|first=Phillip
|date=2004
|title=The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq
|url=
|location=Baltimore
|publisher=John Hopkins
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=
|date=9 Apr 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=TS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=11 Apr 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=8 May 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=6 July 1937d
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=July 1937e
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=22 March 1939
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 9
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=
|date=20 May 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=20 Dec 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 5
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Sep 1937c
|chapter=Note to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moorehead
|first=Caroline
|date=2003
|title=Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Henry Holt
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moreira
|first=Peter
|date=2006
|title=Hemingway on the China Front: His WWII Spy Mission with Martha Gellhorn
|url=
|location=Washington D.C.
|publisher=Potomac Books
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|date=5 Feb 1937
|chapter=Promotion Box: Hemingway, For Immediate Release
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|author-mask=1
|date=4 Apr 1938
|chapter=Promotion Box: American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|editor-last=Nelson
|editor-first=Card
|date=1994
|title=Remembering Spain: Hemingway’s Civil War Eulogy and the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
|url=
|location=Urbana
|publisher=U of Illinois
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Reynolds
|first=Michael
|date=1989
|title=Hemingway: The Paris Years
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Norton
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Stott
|first=William
|date=1986
|title=Documentary Expression and Thirties America
|url=
|location=Chicago
|publisher=U of Chicago P
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Thomas
|first=Hugh
|date=2001
|title=The Spanish Civil War, Rev. ed.
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Modern Library
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine
|last=''Two Wars and More to Come''
|first=
|date=24 Jan 1938
|title=Best Sellers of the Week Here and Elsewhere
|type=Advertisement
|url=
|magazine=New York Times
|pages=
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=NA
|first=
|title=United States. Dept. of State
|url=
|journal= Foreign Relations of the Untied States, 1937 |volume=1
|issue=General
|date=1954
|pages=
|location=Washington
|publisher=GPO
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Watson
|first=William Braasch
|title=Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches
|url=
|journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=7.2
|issue=
|date=1988
|pages=4-121
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Wheeler
|first=John H.
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938
|chapter=Letter to Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection, Box 3 Folder 14
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}

{{refend}}
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches

2025-04-20T17:53:48Z

MerAtticus: typo erase

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 

{{byline|last=Vernon |first=Alex |abstract=The Spanish Civil War began in July 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally-restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy. By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr04ver |note=Adapted and printed with permission from ''Hemingway’s Second War: Bearing Witness to the Spanish Civil War.'' Iowa City: U of Iowa Press, 2011.}}
{{dc|dc=T|he Spanish Civil War began on}} 17-18 July, 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy, to collaborate with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens on the pro-Republican documentary ''The Spanish Earth'', and to pursue his fledgling love affair with Martha Gellhorn.

By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches for NANA.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=4}}{{efn|Quotations from the NANA dispatches follow the Diplomatic Text established by William Braasch’s “Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches.” I prefer NANA’s titles rather than {{harvtxt|Watson|1988}}’s. For my disagreements with some of Watson’s datings, see my comments on specific dispatches in ''Hemingway’s Second War''.}} The secondary sources habitually judge them inferior journalism. Carlos Baker in the first Hemingway biography, for example, complains that the dialogue was “so heavily stamped with personal mannerisms as to be of doubtful authenticity.” Baker sees a “curious monotony in his stories of battles and bombardments,” a gratuitous use of graphic imagery “to shock his readers,” and “a note of triumphant boastfulness” in reporting proximity to danger. He also faults Hemingway for “often hint[ing] he was alone when in fact he was usually with Martha Gellhorn, Matthews, and Delmer.” Hemingway lacked Dos Passos’ “eye for telling details” and the “meticulous exactitude and inclusiveness that characterized the best work of Herbert Matthews and Sefton Delmer.”{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}

Philip Knightley’s ''The First Casualty'', the standard history of war correspondence, paraphrases Baker but with a trouncing final judgment:{{pg|427|428}}Hemingway’s “performance as a war correspondent was abysmally bad.” But Knightley goes beyond “technical” dissatisfaction to moral condemnation. Not just “unjustifiably optimistic”—an excusable offense—Hemingway’s reporting was “unforgivable” in its “total failure to report the Communist persecution, imprisonment, and summary execution of ‘untrustworthy elements’ on the Republican side, when he knew this was happening and when disclosing it might well have prevented further horrors like this.”{{sfn|Knightley|2004|pp=231–32}}{{efn|In my view, {{harvtxt|Knightley|2004}} does not sufficiently acknowledge his paraphrasing of {{harvtxt|Baker|1969}}.}}

Such criticisms in the final analysis might bear out. As Scott Donaldson writes, Hemingway advanced the Republican cause in his dispatches by eliciting “the deepest possible feelings of horror and of sympathy for the victims” of the Madrid bombardment; his “undue optimism” often “ignored Loyalist defeats and exaggerated the importance of its victories”; and “he repeatedly called attention to the participation of Italians and Germans on Franco’s side.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=426}} It also served as a recruitment tool—Milton Wolff, for example, acknowledged the strong influence Hemingway’s dispatches had on his decision to volunteer. Nevertheless, I think it a worthwhile exercise to attend a little more studiously to Hemingway’s dispatches, their context, and their artistry. I don’t necessarily intend to reverse the general opinion of the correspondence, only to achieve a better and more sympathetic understanding.

Herbert Matthews’ reporting for the ''New York Times'' will serve as a convenient comparison for two reasons. First, because both Baker and Knightley use Matthews’ journalism as the standard of excellence to pass judgment on Hemingway’s; and second, because the two worked practically side-by-side, seeing and reporting on many of the same events. In fact so closely did they work together that NANA sometimes complained that the ''Times'' was not buying Hemingway’s pieces because they resembled Matthews,’ and at one point Matthews’ own editors at the Times suspected him of plagiarizing Hemingway.{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|pp=411, 420}} A note from Matthews’ assigned editor Raymond McCaw provides, in two columns, seven quite similar passages from Hemingway’s Aragon front dispatches of September 13 and 14 with Matthews’ of September 14, with a penciled note at the bottom: “a deadly parallel if you ask me.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937c}} Edwin James, the managing editor and McCaw’s boss, eventually agreed with Matthews’ defense: “It is quite apparent that you did not file any duplicate of the Hemingway story, or vice versa. As I understand it, the similarity arose from the fact that you{{pg|428|429}}both went to see the same show and saw it at the same time [sic], under the same conditions.”{{sfn|James|1937b}}

Matthews’ dispatches ring of Republican bias as much if not more than anything Hemingway ever filed. The ''Times'' received many letters to the editor complaining about Matthews’ undisguised politics, which also gave serious concern to some of his editors. His description of the Republican May 1937 infighting in Barcelona is a striking example of how his news veered into propaganda and shows just how much he passed along the government’s version of events. The government’s “BLOODLESS TRIUMPH FOUGHT WITH RECOGNIZEDWEAPONS OF DEMOCRACY” turned out to be blatantly false, as the government and the “COMMUNISTS [WHO] DISTINGUISHED THEMSELVES” resorted to violent suppression. His blaming the uprising on the anarchist CNT working as Franco operatives parrots the government’s and the communist party’s public position, even though both charges—that the anarchists precipitated the events and that they were under Nationalist direction—were also false. His dispatch’s optimistic close also equivocates the political reality: “NEW GOVERNMENT HAS TAKEN POWER WHICH APPEARS TOVE CONFIDENCE VAST MAJORITY SPANIARDS IN LOYALIST TERRITORY AND TIS HOPED WILL GAIN EQUAL CONFIDENCE ABROAD STOP VIOLENCE AND REVOLUTION BEEN REPUDIATED AND NEWAND FAR HOPEFULLER PERIOD SEEMS BEGINNING.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937a|p=}}The ''Times'', knowing full well the one-sided coverage of a correspondent writing from one side of the conflict, had a reporter on both sides: Matthews with the Republicans, and William Carney with the Nationalists. They got their facts right (or wrong) as often as the other, their editors concluded;{{sfn|James|1937a}} and they inspired about the same number of letters of complaint.{{sfn|James|1939}}

Furthermore, Matthews’ dispatches received a great deal of substantive editorial revisions. One of Matthews’ Teruel reports had to be cut for length, as McCaw informed James: “This bird sent 2844 words on the same facts which Hemingway covered much better in less than half that number. I wonder if Matthews thinks the paper is thriving, and that cable tolls do not matter a damn. Of course, it had to be cut for space anyway.” McCaw most likely refers here to Matthews’ dispatch corresponding to Hemingway’s “The Attack on Teruel,” though Matthews’ account of the fall of Teruel is also much longer (and more long-winded) than Hemingway’s, and just as personal in terms of describing the dangers{{pg|429|430}} he faced. Indeed its length allows him to share even more of the action he endured.{{sfn|McCaw|1937b}}

Raymond McCaw held a general professional disagreement with Matthews perhaps tainted with over zealousness. Whether a personal or political motive informed that disagreement can’t be determined from the evidence I’ve seen. It is also clear that McCaw’s charges bear some validity—that any responsible editor could have easily and reasonably taken issue where McCaw did. One of the more interesting examples concerns Matthews’ piece on Guadalajara. Because he only saw evidence on Franco’s side of Italian forces, he only reported on Italians. But the ''Times'' editors heard from other sources that German soldiers also participated in the March offensive. They thought it prudent, from this confusion, to change (nine times) “Italian” to “Rebel,” “the foe,” or “Insurgent.” When Matthews saw the published piece he wrote a strenuous objection. In some instances the editors changed paraphrased quotations from his sources. One large paragraph omitted by the editors stressed the first-hand nature of the information, and Matthews underlines the key words: “All day, at every place we stopped and no matter whom we talked to or what we saw, there was only one label—Italian. The dead bodies, the prisoners, the material of every kind, the men who had occupied Brihuega and then fled were Italian and nothing but Italian.” Here and elsewhere in his original story, Matthews emphasizes the “personal knowledge” of its information.{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}{{efn|James supported McCaw on these changes, though later acknowledged that altering quoted sources was perhaps unwarranted (29 April 1937; Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3).}} Yet Matthews did not report on the foreigners fighting for the Republic—it was in fact the Italian Garibali Battalion that routed Franco’s Italians. We might surmise government censorship behind this silence, though Matthews would not cable news of “CENSORSHIP STRICTER” and “BAN ON MENTIONING INTERNATIONALS INCLUDING AMERICANS INSTITUTED TODAY” until July.{{sfn|Matthews|1937b}} Perhaps he cautiously self-censored, or politically self-censored for the same reasons the government would eventually ban mention. Still, his stridency about the omission of foreigners on one side is striking given his knowledge of their contribution to the other side. For this reason too, and his omission of other nationalities on the insurgent side, it seemed only fair to his editor “to stand on the statement that the majority of the Rebels were Italians and let it go at that.”{{sfn|James|1937c|p=}} A reasonable decision.

Throughout his correspondence to his editors and his several books,{{pg|430|431}}Matthews maintained a passionate defense of his eyewitness journalistic standard, a position those close to him understood. “Matthews never believed anything he had not seen with his own eyes,” Joris Ivens wrote. “He never saw his job as reporter as one that permitted him to sit in his hotel and read the handouts of the War Ministry.” {{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=112}} Sidney Franklin recalls that some writers wrote their pieces before arriving in Madrid, and came only for the “legitimacy” of the Madrid dateline.{{sfn|Franklin|1952|p=232}}And Matthews hated, on principle, having his name attached to an article that violated the integrity of his witness. The only way to achieve objectivity, for Matthews, was to acknowledge one’s subjective perspective. Writing to his publisher, Matthews argued that “the full documentary value” of his coverage was lost when the editors altered his submissions for “the apparent necessity of giving more or less equal space to both sides.”{{sfn|Matthews|1939|p=}}

As with Matthews, so too Hemingway. Indeed the commitment to subjectivity
fit quite well with Hemingway’s modernist aesthetics. If Hemingway
focused the dispatches on his perspective—on his own experience dodging
artillery—more than Matthews and more than most, he did so at least partially
to fulfill expectations. NANA approached him, after all, for his name
and personality as much as whatever he would write. Before he even left the
states it pitched him to potential publications, sending out a promotional release with text to be used alongside his forthcoming dispatches and suggesting
they include a photograph: “Mr. Hemingway’s assignment is to get both from the bombed towns and bombed trenches the human story of the war, not just an account of the game being played by general staffs with pins
and a map.”{{sfn|NANA|1937|p=}} NANA also released each individual dispatch with a one-sentence “precede” about the “famous” or “noted” author. Ernest Hemingway was not writing as Herbert Mathews, ace reporter; Hemingway was writing as Ernest Hemingway, famous author of novels and stories well known to be drawn from his own experiences.

That he understood this to be his assignment is further evidenced by a
cable Matthews sent to his ''Times'' editors on April 9, 1937, concerning the
Loyalist attack: “WORKED CONJOINTL WITH HEMINGWAY TODAY HE SENDING EYEWITNESS DESCRIPTION WHILE EYE SENT GENERAL STRATEGY.”{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}When a year later the ''Times'' asked NANA to ensure Hemingway’s reports differed from Matthews, NANA complied by asking Hemingway “to emphasize color rather than straight reporting” not necessarily out of dissatisfaction with Hemingway’s reportage as Baker contends,{{efn|{{harvtxt|Baker|1969|p=}}’s notes date the ''Times'' request to NANA as 8 Apr. 1938, and NANA’s to Hemingway as 15
Apr. 1938 (Princeton University, Firestone Library: Box 18, Folder 8 “1938”), the date of “The Bombing of Tortosa” dispatch.}} but to increase{{pg|431|432}}the chance of selling to the ''Times'' and indeed to ensure the spirit of NANA’s original arrangement with Hemingway. {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}Far from dissatisfied, NANA wrote Hemingway at the end of August 1938 a letter of agreement for his coverage of “a general European war” should it break out, “written in your colorful style” (Hemingway was in Paris, on his way to Spain for the last time during the war).{{sfn|Wheeler|1938|p=}}When Edmund Wilson criticized the selected dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'', Hemingway wrote him that “I was paid to write what are called ‘eye witness’ accounts . . .what is called, or was asked for as ‘color stuff.’ Most of such stuff is faked. Mine was not. It was straight reporting and the personal stuff was what had been asked for by the editors. “Wilson’s estimation was also based upon ''Fact’s'' inclusion of the “The Old Man at the Bridge” story from ''Ken'', “not a news dispatch” at all.{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}Speaking at Carnegie Hall before the showing of a rough cut of ''The Spanish Earth'', shortly after his first trip to Spain and so very much in the context of his wartime work, Hemingway defined the writer’s problem as “project[ing] [what is true] in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2002|p=193}}

Personal, anecdotal journalism had been Hemingway’s signature style from his earliest days filing reports, in the early 1920s from Paris, when his editor at the ''Toronto Star Weekly'' “encouraged [. . .] what Hemingway did best: write about himself in the act of being a reporter.”{{sfn|Reynolds|1989|p=45}}How could he expect that NANA would expect anything else, if indeed NANA did expect anything else? In the Spanish Civil War he at least maintained his eyewitness posture; in World War II, however, he couldn’t keep himself out. His first piece, about D-Day, begins, “No one remembers the date of the Battle of Shiloh. But the day ''we took'' Fox Green beach was the sixth of June, and the wind was blowing hard out of the northwest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1967|p=340}}His venue too—''Collier’s'' magazine—and the fact that he had not written anything in three years further contributed to the story-like nature of the WWII stories, in which he figured as a protagonist—not to mention the stories and involvement he couldn’t write about, armed and running around France more of a free agent than his guerilla-hero Robert Jordan ever was (though he began to transform these experiences into fiction in several unpublished stories). In wartime China in 1943, filing articles for Ralph Ingersoll’s short-lived ''PM'' New York afternoon daily, Hemingway did not even care to be called a news reporter.{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=99}}

It should be mentioned that Hemingway and Matthews enjoyed a great{{pg|432|433}}friendship and working relationship. Hemingway usually brought Matthews, who did not have a car, on his excursions. When Matthews left Madrid for a break in mid April 1937, he had already ensured Hemingway would provide coverage to the ''Times'' through NANA. For one thing, Hemingway did not have to worry about Matthews as a rival for the history books. He could endorse his friends’ book, ''Two Wars and More to Come'', and praise him as “the ablest and the bravest war correspondent writing today “who “when the fakers are all dead [. . .] will be read in the schools” (Advertisement 21) because Matthews posed no threat to Hemingway’s own chances to be read in the schools. The only brief Hemingway ever expressed he really reserved for Matthews’ editors, for not wanting his Teruel street-fighting story and for cutting references to himself in Matthews’ Teruel dispatches so that it appeared only Matthews had been there.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=462}}

As for Hemingway’s neglecting to name everyone with him for every story, the ''Times'' cutting of his name suggests that such exactitude was hardly a priority. A paper had no incentive for announcing the fact that a competitor’s
correspondent stood beside its own to see and report the same
events. NANA changed at least one vague Hemingway “we,” which admits
to the presence of others, to “this correspondent”
—we can hardly fault Hemingway for working in the spirit of his
employer’s standards.{{sfn|NANA|1938|p=}}{{efn|“we” in typescript and radiogram (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 1 and Folder 25).}} Do readers care that Matthews, Delmer, Gellhorn,
and others were there? The story’s effect and the limited word count also
weighed against such roll calls. One editor chose not to clutter the dispatch
on the great retreat across the Ebro with all the names of the American International Brigade volunteers Hemingway encountered, an omission of
Content more far serious than that of omitted correspondent names.{{efn| Radiogram insert dateline 4 April 1938 (HRC: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 25).}} Hemingway
often gave the names of the reporters with him, such as at Teruel;
nor was he the only reporter to sometimes neglect to do so. Martha Gellhorn,
for example, used a vague “we” and singled herself out as the primary
participant in some of her stories.

By using first-person reportage Hemingway—and Matthews and Gellhorn And most of the group covering the war—were operating solidly within
convention. William Stott, in ''Documentary Expression and Thirties America'',
calls this first-person ''participant observer'' technique “the most common sort
of documentary reportage in the thirties” that worked “by vicarious persuasion:
the writer partook of the events he reported and bared his feelings
and attitudes to influence the reader’s own.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=178-9}}{{efn|He specifically includes Hemingway et al (180). {{harvtxt|Stott|1986|p=}}}} Stott also observes {{pg|433|434}}another technique to enable documentary reportage to “talk to us, and convince us that we, our deepest interests, are engaged,” in the use of the second person: “Thirties documentaries constantly address ‘you,’ the ‘you’ who is we the audience, and exhorts, wheedles, begs us to identify, pity, participate.” His examples include Dorothy Parker’s Spanish Civil War writing, and Hemingway’s 1935 “First-Hand Report on the Florida Hurricane.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=27-8}} A number of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches employ the second-person as a way of bringing the reader along for the ride.

Hemingway’s dispatches used personal pronouns more artfully than is generally recognized. “A New Kind of War,” which William Braasch Watson notes as having been “[w]ritten with more care and imagination” than its predecessors, begins in second person: “The window of the hotel is open and, as you lie in bed, you hear the firing in the front line seventeen blocks away.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=29}} He takes “you” outside, to see the damage and the dead from the bombing. “Someone makes a joke about missing teeth and someone else says not to make that joke. And everyone has the feeling that characterizes war. It wasn’t me, see? It wasn’t me.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} The tension between the first person and second-person pronouns—the movement toward identification with “you” and the insistence that “it wasn’t me”—continues in the next line. Here the reader is at once still in the narrator’s shoes, but strangely distanced from the narrator through biographical tidbit and, at the same time, asked to see himself in the enemy: “The Italian dead up on the Guadalajara weren’t you although Italian dead, because of where you had spent your boyhood, always seemed, still, like Our Dead.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} It is worth quoting at length the dispatch’s transition to first person:
<blockquote>
After the shell that lit on the sidewalk in front of the hotel you got a beautiful double corner room on that side, twice the size of the one you’d had, for less than a dollar. It wasn’t me they killed. See? No. Not me. It wasn’t me anymore.

Then in a hospital given by the American Friends of Spanish Democracy located out behind the Morata front along the road
to Valencia they said, “Raven wants to see you.”

“Do I know him?”

“I don’t think so,” they said. “But he wants to see you.”

“Where is he?”

“Upstairs.”{{pg|434|435}}In the room upstairs they are giving a blood transfusion to a man with a very gray face who lay on a cot with his arm out looking away from the gurgling bottle and moaning in a very impersonal way. He moaned mechanically and at regular intervals and it did not seem to be him that made the sound. His lips did not move.

“Where’s Raven?” I asked.

“I’m here,” said Raven.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=31}}</blockquote>
The piece simply could not have sustained the second-person for the remaining five pages. More significantly, for this deeply personal exchange between the writer and the faceless, eyeless soldier, Hemingway could not hide in the rhetorical device of the second-person. In the process, he effects a reversal of the usual pronoun game; instead of identifying with the all embracing “you,” we leave that trick behind and become fully attached to
the narratorial “I” as ourselves, as we might not have been had the article
begun in the first person. And even as the narrator identifies himself by name
for the only time in any of the dispatches—“Hemingway,” and later
“Ernest”—as decidedly not ourselves. We do not say, ''It isn’t me''. The historian
Hugh Thomas notes “the refreshing candour” of Hemingway’s naming
himself “in the world of the International Brigades, where no one’s name
seemed to be truthfully given.”{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=591}}{{efn|For Watson, the dispatch “seems, in fact, on the verge of becoming a story.”{{harvtxt|Watson|1988|p=29}}}}

A year later Hemingway’s “Tortosa Calmly Awaits Assault” resists admitting
the city’s imminent fall. Yet it does so anyway, by subtly alluding to the
wartime rhetoric of sacrificed blood irrigating the earth and rejuvenating
Spain. Such rhetoric was common during the war, appearing in speeches,
print, and poetry. Many of the poems in Cary Nelson’s anthology ''The Wound
and the Dream: Sixty Years of American Poems about the Civil War'' join in the
Spanish and international chorus’s general connection between Republican
soldiers and the land, and the particular singing of their dead nourishing
the land. We find such language in La Pasionaria’s farewell address to the International Brigades, her epilogue to ''The Book of the XV Brigade'', and Hemingway’s famous eulogy “On the American Dead in Spain”: “For our dead are
a part of the earth of Spain now and the earth of Spain can never die. Each
winter it will seem to die and each spring it will come alive again. Our dead
will live with it forever.”{{sfn|Nelson|1994|p=3}}{{efn| Reprinted in {{harvtxt|Bruccoli|2006|p=76}} and {{harvtxt|Nelson|1994|p=}} ''Remembering'' 37 (the drafts at the JFK are titled “The Dead at Jarama”). In addition to the poems in Nelson’s anthology, see the excerpt from Boris Todrin’s “Spanish Sowing” in {{harvtxt|Guttmann|1962|pp=179-180}}.}} The Tortosa dispatch implies the deaths of{{pg|435|436}}many Republican soldiers in its final paragraph’s description of the newborn onions:
<blockquote>The artillery was picking up a little now. Two came in at a fairly useful place and as the smoke blew away ahead and settled through the trees, you picked an armful of spring onions from a field beside the trail that led to the Tortosa road. They were the first onions of the spring and peeling one I found they were plump white and not too strong. The Ebro Delta has a fine rich land, and where the onions grow, tomorrow will be a battle.
{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=84}}</blockquote>

The echo is quiet, and perhaps unconscious, but there nevertheless. The opening boastfulness of “American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents”
should be taken somewhat ironically. The dispatch begins by announcing
that for “two days we have been doing the most dangerous thing
you can do in this war. That is keep close behind an unstabilized line where
the enemy are attacking with mechanized forces.” Then, a few pages later,
we learn about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade survivors of the spring 1938
Nationalist offensive that took Bob Merriman and eventually reached the
Mediterranean Sea. Reading about these survivors creeping through enemy
camps, stepping on a sleeping German soldier’s hand, sprinting “across an
open field toward the Ebro bank and being sniped at by artillery controlled
by an observation plane overhead” and then “the desperate swimming of
the Ebro” naked, we are asked to place the correspondent’s plight in due perspective.{{sfn|Watson|1988|pp=71-2}} This story certainly escapes the charge of a monotonous
battle and bombing scene; its switch from apparently boastful to
awe-struck witness feels almost deliberately self-conscious. Other choice selfironic
moments come in the dispatches of that pre-Teruel quiet fall of 1938.
The one titled “Hemingway, Covering War, Tells of Brush with Death” has little
to report from Madrid other than the new aftershave brand he is trying.
In “Loyalists’ Drive Seen Progressing as Planned,” he writes that “Shells are
all much the same and if they don’t hit you there is no story and if they do
you won’t have to write it.” {{sfn|Watson|1988|p=58}}

Hemingway’s dispatches are sometimes monotonous because his war was
Usually monotonous—as wars are most of the time. It should also be kept in
mind that scholars reviewing Hemingway’s NANA dispatches one after{{pg|436|437}}another do not relive the original reading experience. Hemingway wrote dispatches sporadically, papers did not run all of his dispatches, papers edited and cut them, and readers read at least a couple of papers’ worth of other articles in between. He told Edmund Wilson as much in defending himself against Wilson’s critique of the selected (and heavily edited and cut) dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'' without his consent: “If you are being paid to be shot at and write about it you are supposed to mention the shooting. [. . .] But I do not go in for re-printing journalism.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}

If we can in this way better understand his style, and at least explain it if
not excuse it, we similarly ought to try to contextualize—and perhaps
excuse—the moral problem. The two issues here are the specific condemnation
of Hemingway’s silence about Republican atrocities and the general
question of biased reporting (the latter of which has already partially been
addressed).

Hemingway knew, as Donaldson writes, that mentioning the atrocities
“would arouse anticommunist sentiments back in the States and effectively
undermine any possibility of American intervention.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=394}} It is also doubtful
that reporting them would have stopped them. But reporting Republican
atrocities from Spain was not possible for the simple reason that all dispatches
went through a government censor. Matthews cabled his editors
from Paris in May 1937 to tell them that “censorship does not permit us to
say when the ‘telefonica’ is hit. So whenever you see reference in my
despatches [sic] to ‘an important building in the center of the city’ or words
to that effect, the cable desk can know that it is the telefonica.” {{sfn|Matthews|1937c|p=}} As already noted, by July he would cable “CENSORSHIP
STRICTER” as the ban on mentioning internationals went into effect. {{sfn|Matthews|1937d|p=}}{{sfn|Matthews|1937e|p=}} Cowles’ memoir confirms the
aggressive censorship, observing that it limited journalists to exactly the kind of material Hemingway wrote about:
<blockquote>There were frequent attempts to “beat the censor” by employing American slang expressions, but this came to an end when a Canadian girl joined the staff. The International Brigades were not allowed to be publicized; no reference could be made to Russian armaments, and buildings and streets which suffered
bombardments could not be identified.</blockquote>{{pg|437|438}}<blockquote>It was only in the realm of the human interest story that the journalists had a free hand. They could describe bombardments to their heart’s content.{{sfn|Cowles|1941|p=20}}</blockquote>
Hemingway and everyone else—to reserve incrimination for Hemingway is hardly just. No correspondent covering Republican Spain reported suspicious imprisonments and disappearances by government agents.

Hemingway, through Joris Ivens and ''The Spanish Earth'' project, had better
access to officials than most. Had he been able somehow to report such
activity, he would have lost that access and would probably have been kicked
out of the country. His fame would have likely prevented his own officially
sponsored disappearance, though he still worried, especially as so many of
such crimes on the Republican side occurred from free agents. When Jasper
Wood printed the anarchist F.A.I. banner in the limited edition book version
of ''The Spanish Earth'', Hemingway expressed his anxieties bluntly in a letter
to Jasper on August 20, 1938. It is hardly “petulant,” he scolded, “not to wish
to be shot.”{{sfn|Davison|1988|p=128}} Hostility in the Republic against the anarchists
ran high; after the Barcelona May Day conflict, the government’s foreign
minister told U.S. Ambassador Claude Bowers that “anarchist revolt
throughout Catalonia and not only expected but welcomed as an opportunity
to liquidate the anarchists who have been hostile from the beginning.”
{{sfn|NA|1954|p=292}}{{efn| The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State, 5 May 1937.}}

It is possible that Hemingway’s dispatch stating that “not one friend [. . .]
has been executed or is missing” was his clever means of reporting
the rumors and indeed the general fact while evading the censors, as in this very dispatch he acknowledged the presence of a censor after a bombardment.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=34}}
Matthews, on the other hand, never found a way to mention the
censors or admit even the possibility of people gone missing in the Republic.
Peter Moreira has observed that in a 1943 dispatch Hemingway related a remark by a British officer about the Chinese Nationalist government’s being
“hopeless on the offensive” because censorship “prevented American reporters
From actually saying that the Nationalists wouldn’t attack, surmising that by telling this anecdote Hemingway could sneak such a judgment into
his reports.”{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=77}} In Spain, censors aside, the eyewitness standard and his
own safety and continuing ability to report the war, and, yes, his passionate
support of the government contributed to his decision. He could have written
about government abuses from the states, but then could not return to{{pg|438|439}}cover the war and support the cause—a justification other journalists, those who did not return after the spring of 1937, did not enjoy. In his mind too, knowing what he heard of fascist atrocities, any reportage against the government lessening its chances of victory through killing hopes of increased international aid would have led to more deaths at Franco’s hands that the much smaller number inspired by fifth column paranoia.{{efn|''Hemingway’s Second War'' discusses in greater depth Hemingway’s politics and his falling out
with John Dos Passos over the execution of José Robles.}}

The accusation that Hemingway did not write about Republican atrocities
because he was saving it for his fiction I find baseless.{{sfn|Knightley|2004|p=232}}{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=402}}{{efn|Hemingway’s casual comment to colleagues calling dibs on Pepe Quintanilla, the executioner of
Madrid, is not sufficient evidence.}}Carolyn Moorehead, in her biography of Martha Gellhorn, describes
the climate for the Madrid correspondents that first spring: “And so,
day by day, the correspondents walked a thin and nervous line between truth,
evasions, and propaganda, telling one another that though it was not all right
if things were made up and presented as true, it was acceptable to describe
what you wanted, provided it was true and provided your readers were aware
of your position.”{{sfn|Moorehead|2003|p=125}} My own sense is that they did not walk the line quite
so nervously; their passionate commitment, and their principles of position
disclosure and the eyewitness standard, made that walk relatively easy.

The problem of ''committed journalism'', even sixty years later, has not been
resolved—as anyone paying attention to the media and world affairs well
knows. One person’s truth is another person’s propaganda. Certainly, as
Knightley notes, reporting from “the heart” affects one’s judgment.{{sfn|Knightley|2004|pp=234-5}}
Yet to attempt “balance,” per the edits to Matthews’ Guadalajara piece, betrays
one’s believed truth. Furthermore, the kind of reporting done by the
correspondents with the Republic—committed, one-sided, optimistic,
heroic, human interest work by embedded writers—would be practiced
widely and without reserve during World War II. Such narrative journalism,
with roots in Louise May Alcott’s “Hospital Sketches” series published in the
''Boston Commonwealth'', and more immediately in 1930s social documentary
writing whose “essence” is “not information”, anticipated postwar
new journalism’s adoption of novelistic narrative technique for nonfiction
which culminated with such wartime books as Norman Mailer’s ''Armies of
the Night'' and Michael Herr’s ''Dispatches''.{{sfn|Stott|1986|p=11}} Some of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches
fall in this line of development.

Today we might categorize such writing under the awkward umbrella
term ''creative nonfiction''. That term certainly fits the mixed bag of nonfiction
narratives and commentaries Hemingway published during the war in
Ken magazine. These pieces are essays, not journalism, several of which{{pg|439|440}}directly appeal for support for the Republic, and most of which really deal with the approaching world war. ''Ken'' wanted “precisely the kind of opinion articles he could not write for NANA.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=433}} His article, “The Cardinal Picks a Winner,” shows a photo of a row of dead children from Barcelona and another one with Nationalist officers saluting and Catholic officials with raised hands, apparently making the fascist salute as well. He ends ironically: “So I ''don’t believe'' the people shown in the photo can really be making it. I would rather prefer to think that the photograph was faked.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=436}} When Hemingway argues in “A Program for U.S. Realism” that the United States should stay out of the next war except to stuff its pockets through arms sales, one has to wonder, given his call and the democratic nations’ failure to save Spain, if we are to sniff sarcasm here.

The language of the dispatches, with their corrective intent against
Franco’s propaganda, does risk propagandizing. Hemingway’s optimism and
anti-fascism certainly colored his correspondence work. His criticism of the
anarchist and POUM militia for their inactivity on the Aragon front, for example,
sounds a lot like the Spanish Communist Party’s.{{efn|It at least sounds almost exactly like Dolores Ibarruri in her memoir. To the anarchists’ complaint
that they had no arms, she retorts “that they had more arms than did many other fronts. . . .
What they didn’t have and what they were constantly demanding were airplanes and tanks .And
they didn’t have them because the Republic government didn’t have them either, except for those
it received as aid from the Soviet Union.”{{harvtxt|Ibarruri|1966|pp=283-4}} Yet the various Catalonia militia were not
as well equipped with small arms as the more regular Popular Army units, and because of the
terrain tanks and planes were in fact necessary.}}
But unlike
Matthews, Hemingway limited his reports within the Republic to military
matters. Hemingway may have generally condemned the anarchists in his
nonfiction, considering their activity as hampering the war effort, but he
never repeated the accusation of their collaboration with the rebels, as
Matthews had done. And when Hemingway commented on the Bareclona
crisis, he referred only to the government—not the communists, as
Matthews had done.{{efn|{{harvtxt|Hemingway|1937|p=}}’s comments in “Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win” NANA staff
correspondent dispatch. Though arguably he was propagandizing by hiding the communist influence—
to mention the communists to an American audience would not gain sympathy for the
cause.}}Nor did he write articles asserting the limited role of
the communists in the government, or explaining Spanish anarchism, also
as Matthews had done.{{efn|An article on the communists’ limited role appeared in late November 1937, as discussed in a
missive from The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State on 2
Dec. 1937. Matthews’ “Anarchism: Spain’s Enigma” appeared in the ''New York Times'' 22 Aug. 1937:6, 14.}}

During one of Hemingway’s stateside breaks between trips to Spain, his
children asked if he was a “tool” of Stalin, an accusation tossed by a schoolmate
who, presumably parroting his or her parents, probably understood
the term no better than Hemingway’s children. {{sfn|Hemingway|1938b|p=}}
Hemingway believed in the Republic’s potential, but he was never a dupe of
the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) or Comintern. As did many others, he
accepted PCE’s presence in the government for its discipline and organization
toward winning the war, and he understood the material necessity for
Comintern’s support. It should also be noted, as historians Hugh Thomas
and Helen Graham have reminded us, that the communism associated with
the Republic wasn’t particularly communist anyway.{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=628}}{{sfn|Graham|2002|p=184}} {{pg|440|441}}

Hemingway declined to follow Joris Ivens’ suggestion that he write a
dispatch on the significant role of the political commissars in the Republican
military, even though that would have meant
featuring his brave new friend Gustav Regler.{{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=}} Hemingway also, in a letter
justifying his work to Jack Wheeler at NANA, wrote about choosing not to
send a dispatch he had written because it might strike readers as propaganda
“no matter how true.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1938b|p=}}

Hemingway went to Spain to see the war himself and to support the Republic
through his ambulance fund. The paychecks from NANA and the
fundraising from ''The Spanish Earth'' helped. Whatever propagandistic streak
colors the dispatches pales in comparison to the documentary. The filmmaker,
Joris Ivens, was well established in European communist circles. The
documentary genre then and now has occupied a slippery position between
the extremes of impossible-to-achieve empirical nonfiction and of the outright
fictionalized. Evaluations of Hemingway’s journalism are informed by
knowledge of ''The Spanish Earth'' and the ''Ken'' essays to the detriment of the
journalism. And the very nature of the slippery documentary genre may enable
the film to escape opprobrium. It wasn’t reportage; it was altogether
something else. But for that matter, Hemingway’s dispatches weren’t purely
reportage either, and if not ''altogether'' something else, still something else,
and should be reckoned with accordingly.

== Notes ==
{{notelist|20em}}

==Citations==
{{Reflist|15em}}

==Works Cited==
{{refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker
|first=Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Bruccoli |first=Matthew |date=2006 |title=Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame |url= |location=Columbia |publisher=U of South Caronia P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Cowles |first=Virginia |date=1941 |title=Looking for Trouble |url= |location=New York
|publisher=Harper & Brothers |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Davison |first=Richard Allan |title=The Publication of Hemingway’s The Spanish Earth: An Untold Story |url= |journal=Hemingway Review
|volume=7.2 |issue= |date=1988
|pages=122-130 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson
|first=Scott |date=2009 |title=Fitzgerald & Hemingway: Works and Days |url= |location=New York |publisher=Columbia UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Franklin |first=Sidney |date=1952 |title=Bullfighter from Brooklyn |url= |location=New York |publisher=Prentice-Hall |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Graham |first=Helen |date=2002 |title=The Spanish Republic at War 1936-1939 |url= |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Guttmann |first=Allen |date=1962 |title=The Wound in the Heart: American and the Spanish Civil War |url= |location=New York |publisher=Free Press of Glencoe |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1967 |title=By-Line: Ernest Hemingway |url= |location=New York |publisher=Scibner |pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Trogdon
|editor-first=Robert W.
|author-mask=1
|title=Fascism is a Lie
|url=
|journal=Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference |volume==
|issue=
|date=2002
|pages=193-6
|location=New York
|publisher=Carroll & Graf
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 May 1937
|chapter=Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=nd
|chapter=The Home Front
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938a
|chapter=Letter to Edmund Wilson
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=2 June 1938b
|chapter=Letter to Jack Wheeler
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=14 Feb 1939
|chapter=On the American Dead in Spain
|title=TS. New Masses
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Baker
|editor-first=Carlos
|author-mask=1
|date=2003
|chapter=The Hadely Mowrer
|title=Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Scribner
|pages=462-3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ibarruri
|first=Dolores
|date=1966
|title=They Shall Not Pass: The Autobiography of La Pasionaria
|url=
|location=United States
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|date=1969
|title=The Camera and I
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|author-mask=1
|date=26 Apr 1937
|chapter=Letter to Ernest Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|date=20 Nov 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Bertrand Weaver
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=12 Oct 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=25 Apr 1939
|chapter=Letter to M.B. Tenney
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Apr 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Knightley
|first=Phillip
|date=2004
|title=The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq
|url=
|location=Baltimore
|publisher=John Hopkins
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=
|date=9 Apr 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=TS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=11 Apr 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=8 May 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=6 July 1937d
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=July 1937e
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=22 March 1939
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 9
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=
|date=20 May 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=20 Dec 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 5
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Sep 1937c
|chapter=Note to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moorehead
|first=Caroline
|date=2003
|title=Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Henry Holt
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moreira
|first=Peter
|date=2006
|title=Hemingway on the China Front: His WWII Spy Mission with Martha Gellhorn
|url=
|location=Washington D.C.
|publisher=Potomac Books
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|date=5 Feb 1937
|chapter=Promotion Box: Hemingway, For Immediate Release
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|author-mask=1
|date=4 Apr 1938
|chapter=Promotion Box: American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|editor-last=Nelson
|editor-first=Card
|date=1994
|title=Remembering Spain: Hemingway’s Civil War Eulogy and the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
|url=
|location=Urbana
|publisher=U of Illinois
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Reynolds
|first=Michael
|date=1989
|title=Hemingway: The Paris Years
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Norton
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Stott
|first=William
|date=1986
|title=Documentary Expression and Thirties America
|url=
|location=Chicago
|publisher=U of Chicago P
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Thomas
|first=Hugh
|date=2001
|title=The Spanish Civil War, Rev. ed.
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Modern Library
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine
|last=''Two Wars and More to Come''
|first=
|date=24 Jan 1938
|title=Best Sellers of the Week Here and Elsewhere
|type=Advertisement
|url=
|magazine=New York Times
|pages=
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=NA
|first=
|title=United States. Dept. of State
|url=
|journal= Foreign Relations of the Untied States, 1937 |volume=1
|issue=General
|date=1954
|pages=
|location=Washington
|publisher=GPO
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Watson
|first=William Braasch
|title=Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches
|url=
|journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=7.2
|issue=
|date=1988
|pages=4-121
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Wheeler
|first=John H.
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938
|chapter=Letter to Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection, Box 3 Folder 14
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}

{{refend}}
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches

2025-04-20T17:52:15Z

MerAtticus: harvtxt

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 

{{byline|last=Vernon |first=Alex |abstract=The Spanish Civil War began in July 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally-restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy. By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr04ver |note=Adapted and printed with permission from ''Hemingway’s Second War: Bearing Witness to the Spanish Civil War.'' Iowa City: U of Iowa Press, 2011.}}
{{dc|dc=T|he Spanish Civil War began on}} 17-18 July, 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy, to collaborate with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens on the pro-Republican documentary ''The Spanish Earth'', and to pursue his fledgling love affair with Martha Gellhorn.

By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches for NANA.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=4}}{{efn|Quotations from the NANA dispatches follow the Diplomatic Text established by William Braasch’s “Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches.” I prefer NANA’s titles rather than {{harvtxt|Watson|1988}}’s. For my disagreements with some of Watson’s datings, see my comments on specific dispatches in ''Hemingway’s Second War''.}} The secondary sources habitually judge them inferior journalism. Carlos Baker in the first Hemingway biography, for example, complains that the dialogue was “so heavily stamped with personal mannerisms as to be of doubtful authenticity.” Baker sees a “curious monotony in his stories of battles and bombardments,” a gratuitous use of graphic imagery “to shock his readers,” and “a note of triumphant boastfulness” in reporting proximity to danger. He also faults Hemingway for “often hint[ing] he was alone when in fact he was usually with Martha Gellhorn, Matthews, and Delmer.” Hemingway lacked Dos Passos’ “eye for telling details” and the “meticulous exactitude and inclusiveness that characterized the best work of Herbert Matthews and Sefton Delmer.”{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}

Philip Knightley’s ''The First Casualty'', the standard history of war correspondence, paraphrases Baker but with a trouncing final judgment:{{pg|427|428}}Hemingway’s “performance as a war correspondent was abysmally bad.” But Knightley goes beyond “technical” dissatisfaction to moral condemnation. Not just “unjustifiably optimistic”—an excusable offense—Hemingway’s reporting was “unforgivable” in its “total failure to report the Communist persecution, imprisonment, and summary execution of ‘untrustworthy elements’ on the Republican side, when he knew this was happening and when disclosing it might well have prevented further horrors like this.”{{sfn|Knightley|2004|pp=231–32}}{{efn|In my view, {{harvtxt|Knightley|2004}} does not sufficiently acknowledge his paraphrasing of {{harvtxt|Baker|1969}}.}}

Such criticisms in the final analysis might bear out. As Scott Donaldson writes, Hemingway advanced the Republican cause in his dispatches by eliciting “the deepest possible feelings of horror and of sympathy for the victims” of the Madrid bombardment; his “undue optimism” often “ignored Loyalist defeats and exaggerated the importance of its victories”; and “he repeatedly called attention to the participation of Italians and Germans on Franco’s side.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=426}} It also served as a recruitment tool—Milton Wolff, for example, acknowledged the strong influence Hemingway’s dispatches had on his decision to volunteer. Nevertheless, I think it a worthwhile exercise to attend a little more studiously to Hemingway’s dispatches, their context, and their artistry. I don’t necessarily intend to reverse the general opinion of the correspondence, only to achieve a better and more sympathetic understanding.

Herbert Matthews’ reporting for the ''New York Times'' will serve as a convenient comparison for two reasons. First, because both Baker and Knightley use Matthews’ journalism as the standard of excellence to pass judgment on Hemingway’s; and second, because the two worked practically side-by-side, seeing and reporting on many of the same events. In fact so closely did they work together that NANA sometimes complained that the ''Times'' was not buying Hemingway’s pieces because they resembled Matthews,’ and at one point Matthews’ own editors at the Times suspected him of plagiarizing Hemingway.{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|pp=411, 420}} A note from Matthews’ assigned editor Raymond McCaw provides, in two columns, seven quite similar passages from Hemingway’s Aragon front dispatches of September 13 and 14 with Matthews’ of September 14, with a penciled note at the bottom: “a deadly parallel if you ask me.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937c}} Edwin James, the managing editor and McCaw’s boss, eventually agreed with Matthews’ defense: “It is quite apparent that you did not file any duplicate of the Hemingway story, or vice versa. As I understand it, the similarity arose from the fact that you{{pg|428|429}}both went to see the same show and saw it at the same time [sic], under the same conditions.”{{sfn|James|1937b}}

Matthews’ dispatches ring of Republican bias as much if not more than anything Hemingway ever filed. The ''Times'' received many letters to the editor complaining about Matthews’ undisguised politics, which also gave serious concern to some of his editors. His description of the Republican May 1937 infighting in Barcelona is a striking example of how his news veered into propaganda and shows just how much he passed along the government’s version of events. The government’s “BLOODLESS TRIUMPH FOUGHT WITH RECOGNIZEDWEAPONS OF DEMOCRACY” turned out to be blatantly false, as the government and the “COMMUNISTS [WHO] DISTINGUISHED THEMSELVES” resorted to violent suppression. His blaming the uprising on the anarchist CNT working as Franco operatives parrots the government’s and the communist party’s public position, even though both charges—that the anarchists precipitated the events and that they were under Nationalist direction—were also false. His dispatch’s optimistic close also equivocates the political reality: “NEW GOVERNMENT HAS TAKEN POWER WHICH APPEARS TOVE CONFIDENCE VAST MAJORITY SPANIARDS IN LOYALIST TERRITORY AND TIS HOPED WILL GAIN EQUAL CONFIDENCE ABROAD STOP VIOLENCE AND REVOLUTION BEEN REPUDIATED AND NEWAND FAR HOPEFULLER PERIOD SEEMS BEGINNING.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937a|p=}}The ''Times'', knowing full well the one-sided coverage of a correspondent writing from one side of the conflict, had a reporter on both sides: Matthews with the Republicans, and William Carney with the Nationalists. They got their facts right (or wrong) as often as the other, their editors concluded;{{sfn|James|1937a}} and they inspired about the same number of letters of complaint.{{sfn|James|1939}}

Furthermore, Matthews’ dispatches received a great deal of substantive editorial revisions. One of Matthews’ Teruel reports had to be cut for length, as McCaw informed James: “This bird sent 2844 words on the same facts which Hemingway covered much better in less than half that number. I wonder if Matthews thinks the paper is thriving, and that cable tolls do not matter a damn. Of course, it had to be cut for space anyway.” McCaw most likely refers here to Matthews’ dispatch corresponding to Hemingway’s “The Attack on Teruel,” though Matthews’ account of the fall of Teruel is also much longer (and more long-winded) than Hemingway’s, and just as personal in terms of describing the dangers{{pg|429|430}} he faced. Indeed its length allows him to share even more of the action he endured.{{sfn|McCaw|1937b}}

Raymond McCaw held a general professional disagreement with Matthews perhaps tainted with over zealousness. Whether a personal or political motive informed that disagreement can’t be determined from the evidence I’ve seen. It is also clear that McCaw’s charges bear some validity—that any responsible editor could have easily and reasonably taken issue where McCaw did. One of the more interesting examples concerns Matthews’ piece on Guadalajara. Because he only saw evidence on Franco’s side of Italian forces, he only reported on Italians. But the ''Times'' editors heard from other sources that German soldiers also participated in the March offensive. They thought it prudent, from this confusion, to change (nine times) “Italian” to “Rebel,” “the foe,” or “Insurgent.” When Matthews saw the published piece he wrote a strenuous objection. In some instances the editors changed paraphrased quotations from his sources. One large paragraph omitted by the editors stressed the first-hand nature of the information, and Matthews underlines the key words: “All day, at every place we stopped and no matter whom we talked to or what we saw, there was only one label—Italian. The dead bodies, the prisoners, the material of every kind, the men who had occupied Brihuega and then fled were Italian and nothing but Italian.” Here and elsewhere in his original story, Matthews emphasizes the “personal knowledge” of its information.{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}{{efn|James supported McCaw on these changes, though later acknowledged that altering quoted sources was perhaps unwarranted (29 April 1937; Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3).}} Yet Matthews did not report on the foreigners fighting for the Republic—it was in fact the Italian Garibali Battalion that routed Franco’s Italians. We might surmise government censorship behind this silence, though Matthews would not cable news of “CENSORSHIP STRICTER” and “BAN ON MENTIONING INTERNATIONALS INCLUDING AMERICANS INSTITUTED TODAY” until July.{{sfn|Matthews|1937b}} Perhaps he cautiously self-censored, or politically self-censored for the same reasons the government would eventually ban mention. Still, his stridency about the omission of foreigners on one side is striking given his knowledge of their contribution to the other side. For this reason too, and his omission of other nationalities on the insurgent side, it seemed only fair to his editor “to stand on the statement that the majority of the Rebels were Italians and let it go at that.”{{sfn|James|1937c|p=}} A reasonable decision.

Throughout his correspondence to his editors and his several books,{{pg|430|431}}Matthews maintained a passionate defense of his eyewitness journalistic standard, a position those close to him understood. “Matthews never believed anything he had not seen with his own eyes,” Joris Ivens wrote. “He never saw his job as reporter as one that permitted him to sit in his hotel and read the handouts of the War Ministry.” {{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=112}} Sidney Franklin recalls that some writers wrote their pieces before arriving in Madrid, and came only for the “legitimacy” of the Madrid dateline.{{sfn|Franklin|1952|p=232}}And Matthews hated, on principle, having his name attached to an article that violated the integrity of his witness. The only way to achieve objectivity, for Matthews, was to acknowledge one’s subjective perspective. Writing to his publisher, Matthews argued that “the full documentary value” of his coverage was lost when the editors altered his submissions for “the apparent necessity of giving more or less equal space to both sides.”{{sfn|Matthews|1939|p=}}

As with Matthews, so too Hemingway. Indeed the commitment to subjectivity
fit quite well with Hemingway’s modernist aesthetics. If Hemingway
focused the dispatches on his perspective—on his own experience dodging
artillery—more than Matthews and more than most, he did so at least partially
to fulfill expectations. NANA approached him, after all, for his name
and personality as much as whatever he would write. Before he even left the
states it pitched him to potential publications, sending out a promotional release with text to be used alongside his forthcoming dispatches and suggesting
they include a photograph: “Mr. Hemingway’s assignment is to get both from the bombed towns and bombed trenches the human story of the war, not just an account of the game being played by general staffs with pins
and a map.”{{sfn|NANA|1937|p=}} NANA also released each individual dispatch with a one-sentence “precede” about the “famous” or “noted” author. Ernest Hemingway was not writing as Herbert Mathews, ace reporter; Hemingway was writing as Ernest Hemingway, famous author of novels and stories well known to be drawn from his own experiences.

That he understood this to be his assignment is further evidenced by a
cable Matthews sent to his ''Times'' editors on April 9, 1937, concerning the
Loyalist attack: “WORKED CONJOINTL WITH HEMINGWAY TODAY HE SENDING EYEWITNESS DESCRIPTION WHILE EYE SENT GENERAL STRATEGY.”{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}When a year later the ''Times'' asked NANA to ensure Hemingway’s reports differed from Matthews, NANA complied by asking Hemingway “to emphasize color rather than straight reporting” not necessarily out of dissatisfaction with Hemingway’s reportage as Baker contends,{{efn|{{harvtxt|Baker|1969|p=}}’s notes date the ''Times'' request to NANA as 8 Apr. 1938, and NANA’s to Hemingway as 15
Apr. 1938 (Princeton University, Firestone Library: Box 18, Folder 8 “1938”), the date of “The Bombing of Tortosa” dispatch.}} but to increase{{pg|431|432}}the chance of selling to the ''Times'' and indeed to ensure the spirit of NANA’s original arrangement with Hemingway. {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}Far from dissatisfied, NANA wrote Hemingway at the end of August 1938 a letter of agreement for his coverage of “a general European war” should it break out, “written in your colorful style” (Hemingway was in Paris, on his way to Spain for the last time during the war).{{sfn|Wheeler|1938|p=}}When Edmund Wilson criticized the selected dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'', Hemingway wrote him that “I was paid to write what are called ‘eye witness’ accounts . . .what is called, or was asked for as ‘color stuff.’ Most of such stuff is faked. Mine was not. It was straight reporting and the personal stuff was what had been asked for by the editors. “Wilson’s estimation was also based upon ''Fact’s'' inclusion of the “The Old Man at the Bridge” story from ''Ken'', “not a news dispatch” at all.{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}Speaking at Carnegie Hall before the showing of a rough cut of ''The Spanish Earth'', shortly after his first trip to Spain and so very much in the context of his wartime work, Hemingway defined the writer’s problem as “project[ing] [what is true] in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2002|p=193}}

Personal, anecdotal journalism had been Hemingway’s signature style from his earliest days filing reports, in the early 1920s from Paris, when his editor at the ''Toronto Star Weekly'' “encouraged [. . .] what Hemingway did best: write about himself in the act of being a reporter.”{{sfn|Reynolds|1989|p=45}}How could he expect that NANA would expect anything else, if indeed NANA did expect anything else? In the Spanish Civil War he at least maintained his eyewitness posture; in World War II, however, he couldn’t keep himself out. His first piece, about D-Day, begins, “No one remembers the date of the Battle of Shiloh. But the day ''we took'' Fox Green beach was the sixth of June, and the wind was blowing hard out of the northwest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1967|p=340}}His venue too—''Collier’s'' magazine—and the fact that he had not written anything in three years further contributed to the story-like nature of the WWII stories, in which he figured as a protagonist—not to mention the stories and involvement he couldn’t write about, armed and running around France more of a free agent than his guerilla-hero Robert Jordan ever was (though he began to transform these experiences into fiction in several unpublished stories). In wartime China in 1943, filing articles for Ralph Ingersoll’s short-lived ''PM'' New York afternoon daily, Hemingway did not even care to be called a news reporter.{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=99}}

It should be mentioned that Hemingway and Matthews enjoyed a great{{pg|432|433}}friendship and working relationship. Hemingway usually brought Matthews, who did not have a car, on his excursions. When Matthews left Madrid for a break in mid April 1937, he had already ensured Hemingway would provide coverage to the ''Times'' through NANA. For one thing, Hemingway did not have to worry about Matthews as a rival for the history books. He could endorse his friends’ book, ''Two Wars and More to Come'', and praise him as “the ablest and the bravest war correspondent writing today “who “when the fakers are all dead [. . .] will be read in the schools” (Advertisement 21) because Matthews posed no threat to Hemingway’s own chances to be read in the schools. The only brief Hemingway ever expressed he really reserved for Matthews’ editors, for not wanting his Teruel street-fighting story and for cutting references to himself in Matthews’ Teruel dispatches so that it appeared only Matthews had been there.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=462}}

As for Hemingway’s neglecting to name everyone with him for every story, the ''Times'' cutting of his name suggests that such exactitude was hardly a priority. A paper had no incentive for announcing the fact that a competitor’s
correspondent stood beside its own to see and report the same
events. NANA changed at least one vague Hemingway “we,” which admits
to the presence of others, to “this correspondent”
—we can hardly fault Hemingway for working in the spirit of his
employer’s standards.{{sfn|NANA|1938|p=}}{{efn|“we” in typescript and radiogram (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 1 and Folder 25).}} Do readers care that Matthews, Delmer, Gellhorn,
and others were there? The story’s effect and the limited word count also
weighed against such roll calls. One editor chose not to clutter the dispatch
on the great retreat across the Ebro with all the names of the American International Brigade volunteers Hemingway encountered, an omission of
Content more far serious than that of omitted correspondent names.{{efn| Radiogram insert dateline 4 April 1938 (HRC: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 25).}} Hemingway
often gave the names of the reporters with him, such as at Teruel;
nor was he the only reporter to sometimes neglect to do so. Martha Gellhorn,
for example, used a vague “we” and singled herself out as the primary
participant in some of her stories.

By using first-person reportage Hemingway—and Matthews and Gellhorn And most of the group covering the war—were operating solidly within
convention. William Stott, in ''Documentary Expression and Thirties America'',
calls this first-person ''participant observer'' technique “the most common sort
of documentary reportage in the thirties” that worked “by vicarious persuasion:
the writer partook of the events he reported and bared his feelings
and attitudes to influence the reader’s own.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=178-9}}{{efn|He specifically includes Hemingway et al (180). {{harvtxt|Stott|1986|p=}}}} Stott also observes {{pg|433|434}}another technique to enable documentary reportage to “talk to us, and convince us that we, our deepest interests, are engaged,” in the use of the second person: “Thirties documentaries constantly address ‘you,’ the ‘you’ who is we the audience, and exhorts, wheedles, begs us to identify, pity, participate.” His examples include Dorothy Parker’s Spanish Civil War writing, and Hemingway’s 1935 “First-Hand Report on the Florida Hurricane.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=27-8}} A number of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches employ the second-person as a way of bringing the reader along for the ride.

Hemingway’s dispatches used personal pronouns more artfully than is generally recognized. “A New Kind of War,” which William Braasch Watson notes as having been “[w]ritten with more care and imagination” than its predecessors, begins in second person: “The window of the hotel is open and, as you lie in bed, you hear the firing in the front line seventeen blocks away.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=29}} He takes “you” outside, to see the damage and the dead from the bombing. “Someone makes a joke about missing teeth and someone else says not to make that joke. And everyone has the feeling that characterizes war. It wasn’t me, see? It wasn’t me.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} The tension between the first person and second-person pronouns—the movement toward identification with “you” and the insistence that “it wasn’t me”—continues in the next line. Here the reader is at once still in the narrator’s shoes, but strangely distanced from the narrator through biographical tidbit and, at the same time, asked to see himself in the enemy: “The Italian dead up on the Guadalajara weren’t you although Italian dead, because of where you had spent your boyhood, always seemed, still, like Our Dead.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} It is worth quoting at length the dispatch’s transition to first person:
<blockquote>
After the shell that lit on the sidewalk in front of the hotel you got a beautiful double corner room on that side, twice the size of the one you’d had, for less than a dollar. It wasn’t me they killed. See? No. Not me. It wasn’t me anymore.

Then in a hospital given by the American Friends of Spanish Democracy located out behind the Morata front along the road
to Valencia they said, “Raven wants to see you.”

“Do I know him?”

“I don’t think so,” they said. “But he wants to see you.”

“Where is he?”

“Upstairs.”{{pg|434|435}}In the room upstairs they are giving a blood transfusion to a man with a very gray face who lay on a cot with his arm out looking away from the gurgling bottle and moaning in a very impersonal way. He moaned mechanically and at regular intervals and it did not seem to be him that made the sound. His lips did not move.

“Where’s Raven?” I asked.

“I’m here,” said Raven.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=31}}</blockquote>
The piece simply could not have sustained the second-person for the remaining five pages. More significantly, for this deeply personal exchange between the writer and the faceless, eyeless soldier, Hemingway could not hide in the rhetorical device of the second-person. In the process, he effects a reversal of the usual pronoun game; instead of identifying with the all embracing “you,” we leave that trick behind and become fully attached to
the narratorial “I” as ourselves, as we might not have been had the article
begun in the first person. And even as the narrator identifies himself by name
for the only time in any of the dispatches—“Hemingway,” and later
“Ernest”—as decidedly not ourselves. We do not say, ''It isn’t me''. The historian
Hugh Thomas notes “the refreshing candour” of Hemingway’s naming
himself “in the world of the International Brigades, where no one’s name
seemed to be truthfully given.”{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=591}}{{efn|For Watson, the dispatch “seems, in fact, on the verge of becoming a story.”{{harvtxt|Watson|1988|p=29}}}}

A year later Hemingway’s “Tortosa Calmly Awaits Assault” resists admitting
the city’s imminent fall. Yet it does so anyway, by subtly alluding to the
wartime rhetoric of sacrificed blood irrigating the earth and rejuvenating
Spain. Such rhetoric was common during the war, appearing in speeches,
print, and poetry. Many of the poems in Cary Nelson’s anthology ''The Wound
and the Dream: Sixty Years of American Poems about the Civil War'' join in the
Spanish and international chorus’s general connection between Republican
soldiers and the land, and the particular singing of their dead nourishing
the land. We find such language in La Pasionaria’s farewell address to the International Brigades, her epilogue to ''The Book of the XV Brigade'', and Hemingway’s famous eulogy “On the American Dead in Spain”: “For our dead are
a part of the earth of Spain now and the earth of Spain can never die. Each
winter it will seem to die and each spring it will come alive again. Our dead
will live with it forever.”{{sfn|Nelson|1994|p=3}}{{efn| Reprinted in {{harvtxt|Bruccoli|2006|p=76}} and {{harvtxt|Nelson|1994|p=}} ''Remembering'' 37 (the drafts at the JFK are titled “The Dead at Jarama”). In addition to the poems in Nelson’s anthology, see the excerpt from Boris Todrin’s “Spanish Sowing” in {{harvtxt|Guttmann|1962|pp=179-180}}.}} The Tortosa dispatch implies the deaths of{{pg|435|436}}many Republican soldiers in its final paragraph’s description of the newborn onions:
<blockquote>The artillery was picking up a little now. Two came in at a fairly useful place and as the smoke blew away ahead and settled through the trees, you picked an armful of spring onions from a field beside the trail that led to the Tortosa road. They were the first onions of the spring and peeling one I found they were plump white and not too strong. The Ebro Delta has a fine rich land, and where the onions grow, tomorrow will be a battle.
{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=84}}</blockquote>

The echo is quiet, and perhaps unconscious, but there nevertheless. The opening boastfulness of “American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents”
should be taken somewhat ironically. The dispatch begins by announcing
that for “two days we have been doing the most dangerous thing
you can do in this war. That is keep close behind an unstabilized line where
the enemy are attacking with mechanized forces.” Then, a few pages later,
we learn about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade survivors of the spring 1938
Nationalist offensive that took Bob Merriman and eventually reached the
Mediterranean Sea. Reading about these survivors creeping through enemy
camps, stepping on a sleeping German soldier’s hand, sprinting “across an
open field toward the Ebro bank and being sniped at by artillery controlled
by an observation plane overhead” and then “the desperate swimming of
the Ebro” naked, we are asked to place the correspondent’s plight in due perspective.{{sfn|Watson|1988|pp=71-2}} This story certainly escapes the charge of a monotonous
battle and bombing scene; its switch from apparently boastful to
awe-struck witness feels almost deliberately self-conscious. Other choice selfironic
moments come in the dispatches of that pre-Teruel quiet fall of 1938.
The one titled “Hemingway, Covering War, Tells of Brush with Death” has little
to report from Madrid other than the new aftershave brand he is trying.
In “Loyalists’ Drive Seen Progressing as Planned,” he writes that “Shells are
all much the same and if they don’t hit you there is no story and if they do
you won’t have to write it.” {{sfn|Watson|1988|p=58}}

Hemingway’s dispatches are sometimes monotonous because his war was
Usually monotonous—as wars are most of the time. It should also be kept in
mind that scholars reviewing Hemingway’s NANA dispatches one after{{pg|436|437}}another do not relive the original reading experience. Hemingway wrote dispatches sporadically, papers did not run all of his dispatches, papers edited and cut them, and readers read at least a couple of papers’ worth of other articles in between. He told Edmund Wilson as much in defending himself against Wilson’s critique of the selected (and heavily edited and cut) dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'' without his consent: “If you are being paid to be shot at and write about it you are supposed to mention the shooting. [. . .] But I do not go in for re-printing journalism.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}

If we can in this way better understand his style, and at least explain it if
not excuse it, we similarly ought to try to contextualize—and perhaps
excuse—the moral problem. The two issues here are the specific condemnation
of Hemingway’s silence about Republican atrocities and the general
question of biased reporting (the latter of which has already partially been
addressed).

Hemingway knew, as Donaldson writes, that mentioning the atrocities
“would arouse anticommunist sentiments back in the States and effectively
undermine any possibility of American intervention.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=394}} It is also doubtful
that reporting them would have stopped them. But reporting Republican
atrocities from Spain was not possible for the simple reason that all dispatches
went through a government censor. Matthews cabled his editors
from Paris in May 1937 to tell them that “censorship does not permit us to
say when the ‘telefonica’ is hit. So whenever you see reference in my
despatches [sic] to ‘an important building in the center of the city’ or words
to that effect, the cable desk can know that it is the telefonica.” {{sfn|Matthews|1937c|p=}} As already noted, by July he would cable “CENSORSHIP
STRICTER” as the ban on mentioning internationals went into effect. {{sfn|Matthews|1937d|p=}}{{sfn|Matthews|1937e|p=}} Cowles’ memoir confirms the
aggressive censorship, observing that it limited journalists to exactly the kind of material Hemingway wrote about:
<blockquote>There were frequent attempts to “beat the censor” by employing American slang expressions, but this came to an end when a Canadian girl joined the staff. The International Brigades were not allowed to be publicized; no reference could be made to Russian armaments, and buildings and streets which suffered
bombardments could not be identified.</blockquote>{{pg|437|438}}<blockquote>It was only in the realm of the human interest story that the journalists had a free hand. They could describe bombardments to their heart’s content.{{sfn|Cowles|1941|p=20}}</blockquote>
Hemingway and everyone else—to reserve incrimination for Hemingway is hardly just. No correspondent covering Republican Spain reported suspicious imprisonments and disappearances by government agents.

Hemingway, through Joris Ivens and ''The Spanish Earth'' project, had better
access to officials than most. Had he been able somehow to report such
activity, he would have lost that access and would probably have been kicked
out of the country. His fame would have likely prevented his own officially
sponsored disappearance, though he still worried, especially as so many of
such crimes on the Republican side occurred from free agents. When Jasper
Wood printed the anarchist F.A.I. banner in the limited edition book version
of ''The Spanish Earth'', Hemingway expressed his anxieties bluntly in a letter
to Jasper on August 20, 1938. It is hardly “petulant,” he scolded, “not to wish
to be shot.”{{sfn|Davison|1988|p=128}} Hostility in the Republic against the anarchists
ran high; after the Barcelona May Day conflict, the government’s foreign
minister told U.S. Ambassador Claude Bowers that “anarchist revolt
throughout Catalonia and not only expected but welcomed as an opportunity
to liquidate the anarchists who have been hostile from the beginning.”
{{sfn|NA|1954|p=292}}{{efn| The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State, 5 May 1937.}}

It is possible that Hemingway’s dispatch stating that “not one friend [. . .]
has been executed or is missing” was his clever means of reporting
the rumors and indeed the general fact while evading the censors, as in this very dispatch he acknowledged the presence of a censor after a bombardment.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=34}}
Matthews, on the other hand, never found a way to mention the
censors or admit even the possibility of people gone missing in the Republic.
Peter Moreira has observed that in a 1943 dispatch Hemingway related a remark by a British officer about the Chinese Nationalist government’s being
“hopeless on the offensive” because censorship “prevented American reporters
From actually saying that the Nationalists wouldn’t attack, surmising that by telling this anecdote Hemingway could sneak such a judgment into
his reports.”{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=77}} In Spain, censors aside, the eyewitness standard and his
own safety and continuing ability to report the war, and, yes, his passionate
support of the government contributed to his decision. He could have written
about government abuses from the states, but then could not return to{{pg|438|439}}cover the war and support the cause—a justification other journalists, those who did not return after the spring of 1937, did not enjoy. In his mind too, knowing what he heard of fascist atrocities, any reportage against the government lessening its chances of victory through killing hopes of increased international aid would have led to more deaths at Franco’s hands that the much smaller number inspired by fifth column paranoia.{{efn|''Hemingway’s Second War'' discusses in greater depth Hemingway’s politics and his falling out
with John Dos Passos over the execution of José Robles.}}

The accusation that Hemingway did not write about Republican atrocities
because he was saving it for his fiction I find baseless.{{sfn|Knightley|2004|p=232}}{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=402}}{{efn|Hemingway’s casual comment to colleagues calling dibs on Pepe Quintanilla, the executioner of
Madrid, is not sufficient evidence.}}Carolyn Moorehead, in her biography of Martha Gellhorn, describes
the climate for the Madrid correspondents that first spring: “And so,
day by day, the correspondents walked a thin and nervous line between truth,
evasions, and propaganda, telling one another that though it was not all right
if things were made up and presented as true, it was acceptable to describe
what you wanted, provided it was true and provided your readers were aware
of your position.”{{sfn|Moorehead|2003|p=125}} My own sense is that they did not walk the line quite
so nervously; their passionate commitment, and their principles of position
disclosure and the eyewitness standard, made that walk relatively easy.

The problem of ''committed journalism'', even sixty years later, has not been
resolved—as anyone paying attention to the media and world affairs well
knows. One person’s truth is another person’s propaganda. Certainly, as
Knightley notes, reporting from “the heart” affects one’s judgment.{{sfn|Knightley|2004|pp=234-5}}
Yet to attempt “balance,” per the edits to Matthews’ Guadalajara piece, betrays
one’s believed truth. Furthermore, the kind of reporting done by the
correspondents with the Republic—committed, one-sided, optimistic,
heroic, human interest work by embedded writers—would be practiced
widely and without reserve during World War II. Such narrative journalism,
with roots in Louise May Alcott’s “Hospital Sketches” series published in the
''Boston Commonwealth'', and more immediately in 1930s social documentary
writing whose “essence” is “not information”, anticipated postwar
new journalism’s adoption of novelistic narrative technique for nonfiction
which culminated with such wartime books as Norman Mailer’s ''Armies of
the Night'' and Michael Herr’s ''Dispatches''.{{sfn|Stott|1986|p=11}} Some of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches
fall in this line of development.

Today we might categorize such writing under the awkward umbrella
term ''creative nonfiction''. That term certainly fits the mixed bag of nonfiction
narratives and commentaries Hemingway published during the war in
Ken magazine. These pieces are essays, not journalism, several of which{{pg|439|440}}directly appeal for support for the Republic, and most of which really deal with the approaching world war. ''Ken'' wanted “precisely the kind of opinion articles he could not write for NANA.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=433}} His article, “The Cardinal Picks a Winner,” shows a photo of a row of dead children from Barcelona and another one with Nationalist officers saluting and Catholic officials with raised hands, apparently making the fascist salute as well. He ends ironically: “So I ''don’t believe'' the people shown in the photo can really be making it. I would rather prefer to think that the photograph was faked.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=436}} When Hemingway argues in “A Program for U.S. Realism” that the United States should stay out of the next war except to stuff its pockets through arms sales, one has to wonder, given his call and the democratic nations’ failure to save Spain, if we are to sniff sarcasm here.

The language of the dispatches, with their corrective intent against
Franco’s propaganda, does risk propagandizing. Hemingway’s optimism and
anti-fascism certainly colored his correspondence work. His criticism of the
anarchist and POUM militia for their inactivity on the Aragon front, for example,
sounds a lot like the Spanish Communist Party’s.{{efn|It at least sounds almost exactly like Dolores Ibarruri in her memoir. To the anarchists’ complaint
that they had no arms, she retorts “that they had more arms than did many other fronts. . . .
What they didn’t have and what they were constantly demanding were airplanes and tanks .And
they didn’t have them because the Republic government didn’t have them either, except for those
it received as aid from the Soviet Union.”{{harvtxt|Ibarruri|1966|pp=283-4}} Yet the various Catalonia militia were not
as well equipped with small arms as the more regular Popular Army units, and because of the
terrain tanks and planes were in fact necessary.}}
But unlike
Matthews, Hemingway limited his reports within the Republic to military
matters. Hemingway may have generally condemned the anarchists in his
nonfiction, considering their activity as hampering the war effort, but he
never repeated the accusation of their collaboration with the rebels, as
Matthews had done. And when Hemingway commented on the Bareclona
crisis, he referred only to the government—not the communists, as
Matthews had done.{{efn|{{harvtxt|Hemingway|1937|p=}}’s comments in “Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win” NANA staff
correspondent dispatch. Though arguably he was propagandizing by hiding the communist influence—
to mention the communists to an American audience would not gain sympathy for the
cause.}}Nor did he write articles asserting the limited role of
the communists in the government, or explaining Spanish anarchism, also
as Matthews had done.{{efn|An article on the communists’ limited role appeared in late November 1937, as discussed in a
missive from The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State on 2
Dec. 1937. Matthews’ “Anarchism: Spain’s Enigma” appeared in the ''New York Times'' 22 Aug. 1937:6, 14.}}

During one of Hemingway’s stateside breaks between trips to Spain, his
children asked if he was a “tool” of Stalin, an accusation tossed by a schoolmate
who, presumably parroting his or her parents, probably understood
the term no better than Hemingway’s children. {{sfn|Hemingway|1938b|p=}}
Hemingway believed in the Republic’s potential, but he was never a dupe of
the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) or Comintern. As did many others, he
accepted PCE’s presence in the government for its discipline and organization
toward winning the war, and he understood the material necessity for
Comintern’s support. It should also be noted, as historians Hugh Thomas
and Helen Graham have reminded us, that the communism associated with
the Republic wasn’t particularly communist anyway.{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=628}}{{sfn|Graham|2002|p=184}} {{pg|440|441}}

Hemingway declined to follow Joris Ivens’ suggestion that he write a
dispatch on the significant role of the political commissars in the Republican
military, even though that would have meant
featuring his brave new friend Gustav Regler.{{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=}} Hemingway also, in a letter
justifying his work to Jack Wheeler at NANA, wrote about choosing not to
send a dispatch he had written because it might strike readers as propaganda
“no matter how true” (Letter to Jack Wheeler).{{sfn|Hemingway|1938b|p=}}

Hemingway went to Spain to see the war himself and to support the Republic
through his ambulance fund. The paychecks from NANA and the
fundraising from ''The Spanish Earth'' helped. Whatever propagandistic streak
colors the dispatches pales in comparison to the documentary. The filmmaker,
Joris Ivens, was well established in European communist circles. The
documentary genre then and now has occupied a slippery position between
the extremes of impossible-to-achieve empirical nonfiction and of the outright
fictionalized. Evaluations of Hemingway’s journalism are informed by
knowledge of ''The Spanish Earth'' and the ''Ken'' essays to the detriment of the
journalism. And the very nature of the slippery documentary genre may enable
the film to escape opprobrium. It wasn’t reportage; it was altogether
something else. But for that matter, Hemingway’s dispatches weren’t purely
reportage either, and if not ''altogether'' something else, still something else,
and should be reckoned with accordingly.

== Notes ==
{{notelist|20em}}

==Citations==
{{Reflist|15em}}

==Works Cited==
{{refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker
|first=Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Bruccoli |first=Matthew |date=2006 |title=Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame |url= |location=Columbia |publisher=U of South Caronia P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Cowles |first=Virginia |date=1941 |title=Looking for Trouble |url= |location=New York
|publisher=Harper & Brothers |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Davison |first=Richard Allan |title=The Publication of Hemingway’s The Spanish Earth: An Untold Story |url= |journal=Hemingway Review
|volume=7.2 |issue= |date=1988
|pages=122-130 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson
|first=Scott |date=2009 |title=Fitzgerald & Hemingway: Works and Days |url= |location=New York |publisher=Columbia UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Franklin |first=Sidney |date=1952 |title=Bullfighter from Brooklyn |url= |location=New York |publisher=Prentice-Hall |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Graham |first=Helen |date=2002 |title=The Spanish Republic at War 1936-1939 |url= |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Guttmann |first=Allen |date=1962 |title=The Wound in the Heart: American and the Spanish Civil War |url= |location=New York |publisher=Free Press of Glencoe |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1967 |title=By-Line: Ernest Hemingway |url= |location=New York |publisher=Scibner |pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Trogdon
|editor-first=Robert W.
|author-mask=1
|title=Fascism is a Lie
|url=
|journal=Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference |volume==
|issue=
|date=2002
|pages=193-6
|location=New York
|publisher=Carroll & Graf
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 May 1937
|chapter=Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=nd
|chapter=The Home Front
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938a
|chapter=Letter to Edmund Wilson
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=2 June 1938b
|chapter=Letter to Jack Wheeler
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=14 Feb 1939
|chapter=On the American Dead in Spain
|title=TS. New Masses
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Baker
|editor-first=Carlos
|author-mask=1
|date=2003
|chapter=The Hadely Mowrer
|title=Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Scribner
|pages=462-3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ibarruri
|first=Dolores
|date=1966
|title=They Shall Not Pass: The Autobiography of La Pasionaria
|url=
|location=United States
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|date=1969
|title=The Camera and I
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|author-mask=1
|date=26 Apr 1937
|chapter=Letter to Ernest Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|date=20 Nov 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Bertrand Weaver
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=12 Oct 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=25 Apr 1939
|chapter=Letter to M.B. Tenney
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Apr 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Knightley
|first=Phillip
|date=2004
|title=The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq
|url=
|location=Baltimore
|publisher=John Hopkins
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=
|date=9 Apr 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=TS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=11 Apr 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=8 May 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=6 July 1937d
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=July 1937e
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=22 March 1939
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 9
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=
|date=20 May 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=20 Dec 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 5
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Sep 1937c
|chapter=Note to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moorehead
|first=Caroline
|date=2003
|title=Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Henry Holt
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moreira
|first=Peter
|date=2006
|title=Hemingway on the China Front: His WWII Spy Mission with Martha Gellhorn
|url=
|location=Washington D.C.
|publisher=Potomac Books
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|date=5 Feb 1937
|chapter=Promotion Box: Hemingway, For Immediate Release
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|author-mask=1
|date=4 Apr 1938
|chapter=Promotion Box: American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|editor-last=Nelson
|editor-first=Card
|date=1994
|title=Remembering Spain: Hemingway’s Civil War Eulogy and the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
|url=
|location=Urbana
|publisher=U of Illinois
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Reynolds
|first=Michael
|date=1989
|title=Hemingway: The Paris Years
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Norton
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Stott
|first=William
|date=1986
|title=Documentary Expression and Thirties America
|url=
|location=Chicago
|publisher=U of Chicago P
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Thomas
|first=Hugh
|date=2001
|title=The Spanish Civil War, Rev. ed.
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Modern Library
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine
|last=''Two Wars and More to Come''
|first=
|date=24 Jan 1938
|title=Best Sellers of the Week Here and Elsewhere
|type=Advertisement
|url=
|magazine=New York Times
|pages=
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=NA
|first=
|title=United States. Dept. of State
|url=
|journal= Foreign Relations of the Untied States, 1937 |volume=1
|issue=General
|date=1954
|pages=
|location=Washington
|publisher=GPO
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Watson
|first=William Braasch
|title=Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches
|url=
|journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=7.2
|issue=
|date=1988
|pages=4-121
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Wheeler
|first=John H.
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938
|chapter=Letter to Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection, Box 3 Folder 14
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}

{{refend}}
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches

2025-04-20T17:39:49Z

MerAtticus: citation correction

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 

{{byline|last=Vernon |first=Alex |abstract=The Spanish Civil War began in July 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally-restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy. By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr04ver |note=Adapted and printed with permission from ''Hemingway’s Second War: Bearing Witness to the Spanish Civil War.'' Iowa City: U of Iowa Press, 2011.}}
{{dc|dc=T|he Spanish Civil War began on}} 17-18 July, 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy, to collaborate with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens on the pro-Republican documentary ''The Spanish Earth'', and to pursue his fledgling love affair with Martha Gellhorn.

By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches for NANA.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=4}}{{efn|Quotations from the NANA dispatches follow the Diplomatic Text established by William Braasch’s “Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches.” I prefer NANA’s titles rather than {{harvtxt|Watson|1988}}’s. For my disagreements with some of Watson’s datings, see my comments on specific dispatches in ''Hemingway’s Second War''.}} The secondary sources habitually judge them inferior journalism. Carlos Baker in the first Hemingway biography, for example, complains that the dialogue was “so heavily stamped with personal mannerisms as to be of doubtful authenticity.” Baker sees a “curious monotony in his stories of battles and bombardments,” a gratuitous use of graphic imagery “to shock his readers,” and “a note of triumphant boastfulness” in reporting proximity to danger. He also faults Hemingway for “often hint[ing] he was alone when in fact he was usually with Martha Gellhorn, Matthews, and Delmer.” Hemingway lacked Dos Passos’ “eye for telling details” and the “meticulous exactitude and inclusiveness that characterized the best work of Herbert Matthews and Sefton Delmer.”{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}

Philip Knightley’s ''The First Casualty'', the standard history of war correspondence, paraphrases Baker but with a trouncing final judgment:{{pg|427|428}}Hemingway’s “performance as a war correspondent was abysmally bad.” But Knightley goes beyond “technical” dissatisfaction to moral condemnation. Not just “unjustifiably optimistic”—an excusable offense—Hemingway’s reporting was “unforgivable” in its “total failure to report the Communist persecution, imprisonment, and summary execution of ‘untrustworthy elements’ on the Republican side, when he knew this was happening and when disclosing it might well have prevented further horrors like this.”{{sfn|Knightley|2004|pp=231–32}}{{efn|In my view, {{harvtxt|Knightley|2004}} does not sufficiently acknowledge his paraphrasing of {{harvtxt|Baker|1969}}.}}

Such criticisms in the final analysis might bear out. As Scott Donaldson writes, Hemingway advanced the Republican cause in his dispatches by eliciting “the deepest possible feelings of horror and of sympathy for the victims” of the Madrid bombardment; his “undue optimism” often “ignored Loyalist defeats and exaggerated the importance of its victories”; and “he repeatedly called attention to the participation of Italians and Germans on Franco’s side.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=426}} It also served as a recruitment tool—Milton Wolff, for example, acknowledged the strong influence Hemingway’s dispatches had on his decision to volunteer. Nevertheless, I think it a worthwhile exercise to attend a little more studiously to Hemingway’s dispatches, their context, and their artistry. I don’t necessarily intend to reverse the general opinion of the correspondence, only to achieve a better and more sympathetic understanding.

Herbert Matthews’ reporting for the ''New York Times'' will serve as a convenient comparison for two reasons. First, because both Baker and Knightley use Matthews’ journalism as the standard of excellence to pass judgment on Hemingway’s; and second, because the two worked practically side-by-side, seeing and reporting on many of the same events. In fact so closely did they work together that NANA sometimes complained that the ''Times'' was not buying Hemingway’s pieces because they resembled Matthews,’ and at one point Matthews’ own editors at the Times suspected him of plagiarizing Hemingway.{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|pp=411, 420}} A note from Matthews’ assigned editor Raymond McCaw provides, in two columns, seven quite similar passages from Hemingway’s Aragon front dispatches of September 13 and 14 with Matthews’ of September 14, with a penciled note at the bottom: “a deadly parallel if you ask me.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937c}} Edwin James, the managing editor and McCaw’s boss, eventually agreed with Matthews’ defense: “It is quite apparent that you did not file any duplicate of the Hemingway story, or vice versa. As I understand it, the similarity arose from the fact that you{{pg|428|429}}both went to see the same show and saw it at the same time [sic], under the same conditions.”{{sfn|James|1937b}}

Matthews’ dispatches ring of Republican bias as much if not more than anything Hemingway ever filed. The ''Times'' received many letters to the editor complaining about Matthews’ undisguised politics, which also gave serious concern to some of his editors. His description of the Republican May 1937 infighting in Barcelona is a striking example of how his news veered into propaganda and shows just how much he passed along the government’s version of events. The government’s “BLOODLESS TRIUMPH FOUGHT WITH RECOGNIZEDWEAPONS OF DEMOCRACY” turned out to be blatantly false, as the government and the “COMMUNISTS [WHO] DISTINGUISHED THEMSELVES” resorted to violent suppression. His blaming the uprising on the anarchist CNT working as Franco operatives parrots the government’s and the communist party’s public position, even though both charges—that the anarchists precipitated the events and that they were under Nationalist direction—were also false. His dispatch’s optimistic close also equivocates the political reality: “NEW GOVERNMENT HAS TAKEN POWER WHICH APPEARS TOVE CONFIDENCE VAST MAJORITY SPANIARDS IN LOYALIST TERRITORY AND TIS HOPED WILL GAIN EQUAL CONFIDENCE ABROAD STOP VIOLENCE AND REVOLUTION BEEN REPUDIATED AND NEWAND FAR HOPEFULLER PERIOD SEEMS BEGINNING.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937a|p=}}The ''Times'', knowing full well the one-sided coverage of a correspondent writing from one side of the conflict, had a reporter on both sides: Matthews with the Republicans, and William Carney with the Nationalists. They got their facts right (or wrong) as often as the other, their editors concluded;{{sfn|James|1937a}} and they inspired about the same number of letters of complaint.{{sfn|James|1939}}

Furthermore, Matthews’ dispatches received a great deal of substantive editorial revisions. One of Matthews’ Teruel reports had to be cut for length, as McCaw informed James: “This bird sent 2844 words on the same facts which Hemingway covered much better in less than half that number. I wonder if Matthews thinks the paper is thriving, and that cable tolls do not matter a damn. Of course, it had to be cut for space anyway.” McCaw most likely refers here to Matthews’ dispatch corresponding to Hemingway’s “The Attack on Teruel,” though Matthews’ account of the fall of Teruel is also much longer (and more long-winded) than Hemingway’s, and just as personal in terms of describing the dangers{{pg|429|430}} he faced. Indeed its length allows him to share even more of the action he endured.{{sfn|McCaw|1937b}}

Raymond McCaw held a general professional disagreement with Matthews perhaps tainted with over zealousness. Whether a personal or political motive informed that disagreement can’t be determined from the evidence I’ve seen. It is also clear that McCaw’s charges bear some validity—that any responsible editor could have easily and reasonably taken issue where McCaw did. One of the more interesting examples concerns Matthews’ piece on Guadalajara. Because he only saw evidence on Franco’s side of Italian forces, he only reported on Italians. But the ''Times'' editors heard from other sources that German soldiers also participated in the March offensive. They thought it prudent, from this confusion, to change (nine times) “Italian” to “Rebel,” “the foe,” or “Insurgent.” When Matthews saw the published piece he wrote a strenuous objection. In some instances the editors changed paraphrased quotations from his sources. One large paragraph omitted by the editors stressed the first-hand nature of the information, and Matthews underlines the key words: “All day, at every place we stopped and no matter whom we talked to or what we saw, there was only one label—Italian. The dead bodies, the prisoners, the material of every kind, the men who had occupied Brihuega and then fled were Italian and nothing but Italian.” Here and elsewhere in his original story, Matthews emphasizes the “personal knowledge” of its information.{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}{{efn|James supported McCaw on these changes, though later acknowledged that altering quoted sources was perhaps unwarranted (29 April 1937; Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3).}} Yet Matthews did not report on the foreigners fighting for the Republic—it was in fact the Italian Garibali Battalion that routed Franco’s Italians. We might surmise government censorship behind this silence, though Matthews would not cable news of “CENSORSHIP STRICTER” and “BAN ON MENTIONING INTERNATIONALS INCLUDING AMERICANS INSTITUTED TODAY” until July.{{sfn|Matthews|1937b}} Perhaps he cautiously self-censored, or politically self-censored for the same reasons the government would eventually ban mention. Still, his stridency about the omission of foreigners on one side is striking given his knowledge of their contribution to the other side. For this reason too, and his omission of other nationalities on the insurgent side, it seemed only fair to his editor “to stand on the statement that the majority of the Rebels were Italians and let it go at that.”{{sfn|James|1937c|p=}} A reasonable decision.

Throughout his correspondence to his editors and his several books,{{pg|430|431}}Matthews maintained a passionate defense of his eyewitness journalistic standard, a position those close to him understood. “Matthews never believed anything he had not seen with his own eyes,” Joris Ivens wrote. “He never saw his job as reporter as one that permitted him to sit in his hotel and read the handouts of the War Ministry.” {{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=112}} Sidney Franklin recalls that some writers wrote their pieces before arriving in Madrid, and came only for the “legitimacy” of the Madrid dateline.{{sfn|Franklin|1952|p=232}}And Matthews hated, on principle, having his name attached to an article that violated the integrity of his witness. The only way to achieve objectivity, for Matthews, was to acknowledge one’s subjective perspective. Writing to his publisher, Matthews argued that “the full documentary value” of his coverage was lost when the editors altered his submissions for “the apparent necessity of giving more or less equal space to both sides.”{{sfn|Matthews|1939|p=}}

As with Matthews, so too Hemingway. Indeed the commitment to subjectivity
fit quite well with Hemingway’s modernist aesthetics. If Hemingway
focused the dispatches on his perspective—on his own experience dodging
artillery—more than Matthews and more than most, he did so at least partially
to fulfill expectations. NANA approached him, after all, for his name
and personality as much as whatever he would write. Before he even left the
states it pitched him to potential publications, sending out a promotional release with text to be used alongside his forthcoming dispatches and suggesting
they include a photograph: “Mr. Hemingway’s assignment is to get both from the bombed towns and bombed trenches the human story of the war, not just an account of the game being played by general staffs with pins
and a map.”{{sfn|NANA|1937|p=}} NANA also released each individual dispatch with a one-sentence “precede” about the “famous” or “noted” author. Ernest Hemingway was not writing as Herbert Mathews, ace reporter; Hemingway was writing as Ernest Hemingway, famous author of novels and stories well known to be drawn from his own experiences.

That he understood this to be his assignment is further evidenced by a
cable Matthews sent to his ''Times'' editors on April 9, 1937, concerning the
Loyalist attack: “WORKED CONJOINTL WITH HEMINGWAY TODAY HE SENDING EYEWITNESS DESCRIPTION WHILE EYE SENT GENERAL STRATEGY.”{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}When a year later the ''Times'' asked NANA to ensure Hemingway’s reports differed from Matthews, NANA complied by asking Hemingway “to emphasize color rather than straight reporting” not necessarily out of dissatisfaction with Hemingway’s reportage as Baker contends,{{efn|{{harvtxt|Baker|1969|p=}}’s notes date the ''Times'' request to NANA as 8 Apr. 1938, and NANA’s to Hemingway as 15
Apr. 1938 (Princeton University, Firestone Library: Box 18, Folder 8 “1938”), the date of “The Bombing of Tortosa” dispatch.}} but to increase{{pg|431|432}}the chance of selling to the ''Times'' and indeed to ensure the spirit of NANA’s original arrangement with Hemingway. {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}Far from dissatisfied, NANA wrote Hemingway at the end of August 1938 a letter of agreement for his coverage of “a general European war” should it break out, “written in your colorful style” (Hemingway was in Paris, on his way to Spain for the last time during the war).{{sfn|Wheeler|1938|p=}}When Edmund Wilson criticized the selected dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'', Hemingway wrote him that “I was paid to write what are called ‘eye witness’ accounts . . .what is called, or was asked for as ‘color stuff.’ Most of such stuff is faked. Mine was not. It was straight reporting and the personal stuff was what had been asked for by the editors. “Wilson’s estimation was also based upon ''Fact’s'' inclusion of the “The Old Man at the Bridge” story from ''Ken'', “not a news dispatch” at all.{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}Speaking at Carnegie Hall before the showing of a rough cut of ''The Spanish Earth'', shortly after his first trip to Spain and so very much in the context of his wartime work, Hemingway defined the writer’s problem as “project[ing] [what is true] in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2002|p=193}}

Personal, anecdotal journalism had been Hemingway’s signature style from his earliest days filing reports, in the early 1920s from Paris, when his editor at the ''Toronto Star Weekly'' “encouraged [. . .] what Hemingway did best: write about himself in the act of being a reporter.”{{sfn|Reynolds|1989|p=45}}How could he expect that NANA would expect anything else, if indeed NANA did expect anything else? In the Spanish Civil War he at least maintained his eyewitness posture; in World War II, however, he couldn’t keep himself out. His first piece, about D-Day, begins, “No one remembers the date of the Battle of Shiloh. But the day ''we took'' Fox Green beach was the sixth of June, and the wind was blowing hard out of the northwest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1967|p=340}}His venue too—''Collier’s'' magazine—and the fact that he had not written anything in three years further contributed to the story-like nature of the WWII stories, in which he figured as a protagonist—not to mention the stories and involvement he couldn’t write about, armed and running around France more of a free agent than his guerilla-hero Robert Jordan ever was (though he began to transform these experiences into fiction in several unpublished stories). In wartime China in 1943, filing articles for Ralph Ingersoll’s short-lived ''PM'' New York afternoon daily, Hemingway did not even care to be called a news reporter.{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=99}}

It should be mentioned that Hemingway and Matthews enjoyed a great{{pg|432|433}}friendship and working relationship. Hemingway usually brought Matthews, who did not have a car, on his excursions. When Matthews left Madrid for a break in mid April 1937, he had already ensured Hemingway would provide coverage to the ''Times'' through NANA. For one thing, Hemingway did not have to worry about Matthews as a rival for the history books. He could endorse his friends’ book, ''Two Wars and More to Come'', and praise him as “the ablest and the bravest war correspondent writing today “who “when the fakers are all dead [. . .] will be read in the schools” (Advertisement 21) because Matthews posed no threat to Hemingway’s own chances to be read in the schools. The only brief Hemingway ever expressed he really reserved for Matthews’ editors, for not wanting his Teruel street-fighting story and for cutting references to himself in Matthews’ Teruel dispatches so that it appeared only Matthews had been there.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=462}}

As for Hemingway’s neglecting to name everyone with him for every story, the ''Times'' cutting of his name suggests that such exactitude was hardly a priority. A paper had no incentive for announcing the fact that a competitor’s
correspondent stood beside its own to see and report the same
events. NANA changed at least one vague Hemingway “we,” which admits
to the presence of others, to “this correspondent”
—we can hardly fault Hemingway for working in the spirit of his
employer’s standards.{{sfn|NANA|1938|p=}}{{efn|“we” in typescript and radiogram (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 1 and Folder 25).}} Do readers care that Matthews, Delmer, Gellhorn,
and others were there? The story’s effect and the limited word count also
weighed against such roll calls. One editor chose not to clutter the dispatch
on the great retreat across the Ebro with all the names of the American International Brigade volunteers Hemingway encountered, an omission of
Content more far serious than that of omitted correspondent names.{{efn| Radiogram insert dateline 4 April 1938 (HRC: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 25).}} Hemingway
often gave the names of the reporters with him, such as at Teruel;
nor was he the only reporter to sometimes neglect to do so. Martha Gellhorn,
for example, used a vague “we” and singled herself out as the primary
participant in some of her stories.

By using first-person reportage Hemingway—and Matthews and Gellhorn And most of the group covering the war—were operating solidly within
convention. William Stott, in ''Documentary Expression and Thirties America'',
calls this first-person ''participant observer'' technique “the most common sort
of documentary reportage in the thirties” that worked “by vicarious persuasion:
the writer partook of the events he reported and bared his feelings
and attitudes to influence the reader’s own.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=178-9}}{{efn|He specifically includes Hemingway et al (180). {{harvtxt|Stott|1986|p=}}}} Stott also observes {{pg|433|434}}another technique to enable documentary reportage to “talk to us, and convince us that we, our deepest interests, are engaged,” in the use of the second person: “Thirties documentaries constantly address ‘you,’ the ‘you’ who is we the audience, and exhorts, wheedles, begs us to identify, pity, participate.” His examples include Dorothy Parker’s Spanish Civil War writing, and Hemingway’s 1935 “First-Hand Report on the Florida Hurricane.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=27-8}} A number of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches employ the second-person as a way of bringing the reader along for the ride.

Hemingway’s dispatches used personal pronouns more artfully than is generally recognized. “A New Kind of War,” which William Braasch Watson notes as having been “[w]ritten with more care and imagination” than its predecessors, begins in second person: “The window of the hotel is open and, as you lie in bed, you hear the firing in the front line seventeen blocks away.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=29}} He takes “you” outside, to see the damage and the dead from the bombing. “Someone makes a joke about missing teeth and someone else says not to make that joke. And everyone has the feeling that characterizes war. It wasn’t me, see? It wasn’t me.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} The tension between the first person and second-person pronouns—the movement toward identification with “you” and the insistence that “it wasn’t me”—continues in the next line. Here the reader is at once still in the narrator’s shoes, but strangely distanced from the narrator through biographical tidbit and, at the same time, asked to see himself in the enemy: “The Italian dead up on the Guadalajara weren’t you although Italian dead, because of where you had spent your boyhood, always seemed, still, like Our Dead.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} It is worth quoting at length the dispatch’s transition to first person:
<blockquote>
After the shell that lit on the sidewalk in front of the hotel you got a beautiful double corner room on that side, twice the size of the one you’d had, for less than a dollar. It wasn’t me they killed. See? No. Not me. It wasn’t me anymore.

Then in a hospital given by the American Friends of Spanish Democracy located out behind the Morata front along the road
to Valencia they said, “Raven wants to see you.”

“Do I know him?”

“I don’t think so,” they said. “But he wants to see you.”

“Where is he?”

“Upstairs.”{{pg|434|435}}In the room upstairs they are giving a blood transfusion to a man with a very gray face who lay on a cot with his arm out looking away from the gurgling bottle and moaning in a very impersonal way. He moaned mechanically and at regular intervals and it did not seem to be him that made the sound. His lips did not move.

“Where’s Raven?” I asked.

“I’m here,” said Raven.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=31}}</blockquote>
The piece simply could not have sustained the second-person for the remaining five pages. More significantly, for this deeply personal exchange between the writer and the faceless, eyeless soldier, Hemingway could not hide in the rhetorical device of the second-person. In the process, he effects a reversal of the usual pronoun game; instead of identifying with the all embracing “you,” we leave that trick behind and become fully attached to
the narratorial “I” as ourselves, as we might not have been had the article
begun in the first person. And even as the narrator identifies himself by name
for the only time in any of the dispatches—“Hemingway,” and later
“Ernest”—as decidedly not ourselves. We do not say, ''It isn’t me''. The historian
Hugh Thomas notes “the refreshing candour” of Hemingway’s naming
himself “in the world of the International Brigades, where no one’s name
seemed to be truthfully given.”{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=591}}{{efn|For Watson, the dispatch “seems, in fact, on the verge of becoming a story.”{{harvtxt|Watson|1988|p=29}}}}

A year later Hemingway’s “Tortosa Calmly Awaits Assault” resists admitting
the city’s imminent fall. Yet it does so anyway, by subtly alluding to the
wartime rhetoric of sacrificed blood irrigating the earth and rejuvenating
Spain. Such rhetoric was common during the war, appearing in speeches,
print, and poetry. Many of the poems in Cary Nelson’s anthology ''The Wound
and the Dream: Sixty Years of American Poems about the Civil War'' join in the
Spanish and international chorus’s general connection between Republican
soldiers and the land, and the particular singing of their dead nourishing
the land. We find such language in La Pasionaria’s farewell address to the International Brigades, her epilogue to ''The Book of the XV Brigade'', and Hemingway’s famous eulogy “On the American Dead in Spain”: “For our dead are
a part of the earth of Spain now and the earth of Spain can never die. Each
winter it will seem to die and each spring it will come alive again. Our dead
will live with it forever.”{{sfn|Nelson|1994|p=3}}{{efn| Reprinted in {{harvtxt|Bruccoli|2006|p=76}} and {{harvtxt|Nelson|1994|p=37}} (the drafts at the JFK are titled “The Dead at Jarama”). In addition to the poems in Nelson’s anthology, see the excerpt from Boris Todrin’s “Spanish Sowing” in {{harvtxt|Guttmann|1969|pp=179-180}}.}} The Tortosa dispatch implies the deaths of{{pg|435|436}}many Republican soldiers in its final paragraph’s description of the newborn onions:
<blockquote>The artillery was picking up a little now. Two came in at a fairly useful place and as the smoke blew away ahead and settled through the trees, you picked an armful of spring onions from a field beside the trail that led to the Tortosa road. They were the first onions of the spring and peeling one I found they were plump white and not too strong. The Ebro Delta has a fine rich land, and where the onions grow, tomorrow will be a battle.
{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=84}}</blockquote>

The echo is quiet, and perhaps unconscious, but there nevertheless. The opening boastfulness of “American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents”
should be taken somewhat ironically. The dispatch begins by announcing
that for “two days we have been doing the most dangerous thing
you can do in this war. That is keep close behind an unstabilized line where
the enemy are attacking with mechanized forces.” Then, a few pages later,
we learn about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade survivors of the spring 1938
Nationalist offensive that took Bob Merriman and eventually reached the
Mediterranean Sea. Reading about these survivors creeping through enemy
camps, stepping on a sleeping German soldier’s hand, sprinting “across an
open field toward the Ebro bank and being sniped at by artillery controlled
by an observation plane overhead” and then “the desperate swimming of
the Ebro” naked, we are asked to place the correspondent’s plight in due perspective.{{sfn|Watson|1988|pp=71-2}} This story certainly escapes the charge of a monotonous
battle and bombing scene; its switch from apparently boastful to
awe-struck witness feels almost deliberately self-conscious. Other choice selfironic
moments come in the dispatches of that pre-Teruel quiet fall of 1938.
The one titled “Hemingway, Covering War, Tells of Brush with Death” has little
to report from Madrid other than the new aftershave brand he is trying.
In “Loyalists’ Drive Seen Progressing as Planned,” he writes that “Shells are
all much the same and if they don’t hit you there is no story and if they do
you won’t have to write it.” {{sfn|Watson|1988|p=58}}

Hemingway’s dispatches are sometimes monotonous because his war was
Usually monotonous—as wars are most of the time. It should also be kept in
mind that scholars reviewing Hemingway’s NANA dispatches one after{{pg|436|437}}another do not relive the original reading experience. Hemingway wrote dispatches sporadically, papers did not run all of his dispatches, papers edited and cut them, and readers read at least a couple of papers’ worth of other articles in between. He told Edmund Wilson as much in defending himself against Wilson’s critique of the selected (and heavily edited and cut) dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'' without his consent: “If you are being paid to be shot at and write about it you are supposed to mention the shooting. [. . .] But I do not go in for re-printing journalism.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}

If we can in this way better understand his style, and at least explain it if
not excuse it, we similarly ought to try to contextualize—and perhaps
excuse—the moral problem. The two issues here are the specific condemnation
of Hemingway’s silence about Republican atrocities and the general
question of biased reporting (the latter of which has already partially been
addressed).

Hemingway knew, as Donaldson writes, that mentioning the atrocities
“would arouse anticommunist sentiments back in the States and effectively
undermine any possibility of American intervention.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=394}} It is also doubtful
that reporting them would have stopped them. But reporting Republican
atrocities from Spain was not possible for the simple reason that all dispatches
went through a government censor. Matthews cabled his editors
from Paris in May 1937 to tell them that “censorship does not permit us to
say when the ‘telefonica’ is hit. So whenever you see reference in my
despatches [sic] to ‘an important building in the center of the city’ or words
to that effect, the cable desk can know that it is the telefonica.” {{sfn|Matthews|1937c|p=}} As already noted, by July he would cable “CENSORSHIP
STRICTER” as the ban on mentioning internationals went into effect. {{sfn|Matthews|1937d|p=}}{{sfn|Matthews|1937e|p=}} Cowles’ memoir confirms the
aggressive censorship, observing that it limited journalists to exactly the kind of material Hemingway wrote about:
<blockquote>There were frequent attempts to “beat the censor” by employing American slang expressions, but this came to an end when a Canadian girl joined the staff. The International Brigades were not allowed to be publicized; no reference could be made to Russian armaments, and buildings and streets which suffered
bombardments could not be identified.</blockquote>{{pg|437|438}}<blockquote>It was only in the realm of the human interest story that the journalists had a free hand. They could describe bombardments to their heart’s content.{{sfn|Cowles|1941|p=20}}</blockquote>
Hemingway and everyone else—to reserve incrimination for Hemingway is hardly just. No correspondent covering Republican Spain reported suspicious imprisonments and disappearances by government agents.

Hemingway, through Joris Ivens and ''The Spanish Earth'' project, had better
access to officials than most. Had he been able somehow to report such
activity, he would have lost that access and would probably have been kicked
out of the country. His fame would have likely prevented his own officially
sponsored disappearance, though he still worried, especially as so many of
such crimes on the Republican side occurred from free agents. When Jasper
Wood printed the anarchist F.A.I. banner in the limited edition book version
of ''The Spanish Earth'', Hemingway expressed his anxieties bluntly in a letter
to Jasper on August 20, 1938. It is hardly “petulant,” he scolded, “not to wish
to be shot.”{{sfn|Davison|1988|p=128}} Hostility in the Republic against the anarchists
ran high; after the Barcelona May Day conflict, the government’s foreign
minister told U.S. Ambassador Claude Bowers that “anarchist revolt
throughout Catalonia and not only expected but welcomed as an opportunity
to liquidate the anarchists who have been hostile from the beginning.”
{{sfn|NA|1954|p=292}}{{efn| The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State, 5 May 1937.}}

It is possible that Hemingway’s dispatch stating that “not one friend [. . .]
has been executed or is missing” was his clever means of reporting
the rumors and indeed the general fact while evading the censors, as in this very dispatch he acknowledged the presence of a censor after a bombardment.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=34}}
Matthews, on the other hand, never found a way to mention the
censors or admit even the possibility of people gone missing in the Republic.
Peter Moreira has observed that in a 1943 dispatch Hemingway related a remark by a British officer about the Chinese Nationalist government’s being
“hopeless on the offensive” because censorship “prevented American reporters
From actually saying that the Nationalists wouldn’t attack, surmising that by telling this anecdote Hemingway could sneak such a judgment into
his reports.”{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=77}} In Spain, censors aside, the eyewitness standard and his
own safety and continuing ability to report the war, and, yes, his passionate
support of the government contributed to his decision. He could have written
about government abuses from the states, but then could not return to{{pg|438|439}}cover the war and support the cause—a justification other journalists, those who did not return after the spring of 1937, did not enjoy. In his mind too, knowing what he heard of fascist atrocities, any reportage against the government lessening its chances of victory through killing hopes of increased international aid would have led to more deaths at Franco’s hands that the much smaller number inspired by fifth column paranoia.{{efn|''Hemingway’s Second War'' discusses in greater depth Hemingway’s politics and his falling out
with John Dos Passos over the execution of José Robles.}}

The accusation that Hemingway did not write about Republican atrocities
because he was saving it for his fiction I find baseless.{{sfn|Knightley|2004|p=232}}{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=402}}{{efn|Hemingway’s casual comment to colleagues calling dibs on Pepe Quintanilla, the executioner of
Madrid, is not sufficient evidence.}}Carolyn Moorehead, in her biography of Martha Gellhorn, describes
the climate for the Madrid correspondents that first spring: “And so,
day by day, the correspondents walked a thin and nervous line between truth,
evasions, and propaganda, telling one another that though it was not all right
if things were made up and presented as true, it was acceptable to describe
what you wanted, provided it was true and provided your readers were aware
of your position.”{{sfn|Moorehead|2003|p=125}} My own sense is that they did not walk the line quite
so nervously; their passionate commitment, and their principles of position
disclosure and the eyewitness standard, made that walk relatively easy.

The problem of ''committed journalism'', even sixty years later, has not been
resolved—as anyone paying attention to the media and world affairs well
knows. One person’s truth is another person’s propaganda. Certainly, as
Knightley notes, reporting from “the heart” affects one’s judgment.{{sfn|Knightley|2004|pp=234-5}}
Yet to attempt “balance,” per the edits to Matthews’ Guadalajara piece, betrays
one’s believed truth. Furthermore, the kind of reporting done by the
correspondents with the Republic—committed, one-sided, optimistic,
heroic, human interest work by embedded writers—would be practiced
widely and without reserve during World War II. Such narrative journalism,
with roots in Louise May Alcott’s “Hospital Sketches” series published in the
''Boston Commonwealth'', and more immediately in 1930s social documentary
writing whose “essence” is “not information”, anticipated postwar
new journalism’s adoption of novelistic narrative technique for nonfiction
which culminated with such wartime books as Norman Mailer’s ''Armies of
the Night'' and Michael Herr’s ''Dispatches''.{{sfn|Stott|1986|p=11}} Some of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches
fall in this line of development.

Today we might categorize such writing under the awkward umbrella
term ''creative nonfiction''. That term certainly fits the mixed bag of nonfiction
narratives and commentaries Hemingway published during the war in
Ken magazine. These pieces are essays, not journalism, several of which{{pg|439|440}}directly appeal for support for the Republic, and most of which really deal with the approaching world war. ''Ken'' wanted “precisely the kind of opinion articles he could not write for NANA.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=433}} His article, “The Cardinal Picks a Winner,” shows a photo of a row of dead children from Barcelona and another one with Nationalist officers saluting and Catholic officials with raised hands, apparently making the fascist salute as well. He ends ironically: “So I ''don’t believe'' the people shown in the photo can really be making it. I would rather prefer to think that the photograph was faked.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=436}} When Hemingway argues in “A Program for U.S. Realism” that the United States should stay out of the next war except to stuff its pockets through arms sales, one has to wonder, given his call and the democratic nations’ failure to save Spain, if we are to sniff sarcasm here.

The language of the dispatches, with their corrective intent against
Franco’s propaganda, does risk propagandizing. Hemingway’s optimism and
anti-fascism certainly colored his correspondence work. His criticism of the
anarchist and POUM militia for their inactivity on the Aragon front, for example,
sounds a lot like the Spanish Communist Party’s.{{efn|It at least sounds almost exactly like Dolores Ibarruri in her memoir. To the anarchists’ complaint
that they had no arms, she retorts “that they had more arms than did many other fronts. . . .
What they didn’t have and what they were constantly demanding were airplanes and tanks .And
they didn’t have them because the Republic government didn’t have them either, except for those
it received as aid from the Soviet Union.” {{harvtxt|Ibarruri|1966|pp=238-284}} Yet the various Catalonia militia were not
as well equipped with small arms as the more regular Popular Army units, and because of the
terrain tanks and planes were in fact necessary.}}
But unlike
Matthews, Hemingway limited his reports within the Republic to military
matters. Hemingway may have generally condemned the anarchists in his
nonfiction, considering their activity as hampering the war effort, but he
never repeated the accusation of their collaboration with the rebels, as
Matthews had done. And when Hemingway commented on the Bareclona
crisis, he referred only to the government—not the communists, as
Matthews had done.{{efn|{{harvtxt|Hemingway|1937|p=}}’s comments in “Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win” NANA staff
correspondent dispatch. Though arguably he was propagandizing by hiding the communist influence—
to mention the communists to an American audience would not gain sympathy for the
cause.}}Nor did he write articles asserting the limited role of
the communists in the government, or explaining Spanish anarchism, also
as Matthews had done.{{efn|An article on the communists’ limited role appeared in late November 1937, as discussed in a
missive from The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State on 2
Dec. 1937. {{harvtxt|NA|1954|p=461}} Matthews’ “Anarchism: Spain’s Enigma” appeared in the ''New York Times'' 22 Aug. 1937:6, 14.}}

During one of Hemingway’s stateside breaks between trips to Spain, his
children asked if he was a “tool” of Stalin, an accusation tossed by a schoolmate
who, presumably parroting his or her parents, probably understood
the term no better than Hemingway’s children. {{sfn|Hemingway|1938b|p=}}
Hemingway believed in the Republic’s potential, but he was never a dupe of
the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) or Comintern. As did many others, he
accepted PCE’s presence in the government for its discipline and organization
toward winning the war, and he understood the material necessity for
Comintern’s support. It should also be noted, as historians Hugh Thomas
and Helen Graham have reminded us, that the communism associated with
the Republic wasn’t particularly communist anyway.{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=628}}{{sfn|Graham|2002|p=184}} {{pg|440|441}}

Hemingway declined to follow Joris Ivens’ suggestion that he write a
dispatch on the significant role of the political commissars in the Republican
military, even though that would have meant
featuring his brave new friend Gustav Regler.{{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=}} Hemingway also, in a letter
justifying his work to Jack Wheeler at NANA, wrote about choosing not to
send a dispatch he had written because it might strike readers as propaganda
“no matter how true” (Letter to Jack Wheeler).{{sfn|Hemingway|1938b|p=}}

Hemingway went to Spain to see the war himself and to support the Republic
through his ambulance fund. The paychecks from NANA and the
fundraising from ''The Spanish Earth'' helped. Whatever propagandistic streak
colors the dispatches pales in comparison to the documentary. The filmmaker,
Joris Ivens, was well established in European communist circles. The
documentary genre then and now has occupied a slippery position between
the extremes of impossible-to-achieve empirical nonfiction and of the outright
fictionalized. Evaluations of Hemingway’s journalism are informed by
knowledge of ''The Spanish Earth'' and the ''Ken'' essays to the detriment of the
journalism. And the very nature of the slippery documentary genre may enable
the film to escape opprobrium. It wasn’t reportage; it was altogether
something else. But for that matter, Hemingway’s dispatches weren’t purely
reportage either, and if not ''altogether'' something else, still something else,
and should be reckoned with accordingly.

== Notes ==
{{notelist|20em}}

==Citations==
{{Reflist|15em}}

==Works Cited==
{{refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker
|first=Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Bruccoli |first=Matthew |date=2006 |title=Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame |url= |location=Columbia |publisher=U of South Caronia P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Cowles |first=Virginia |date=1941 |title=Looking for Trouble |url= |location=New York
|publisher=Harper & Brothers |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Davison |first=Richard Allan |title=The Publication of Hemingway’s The Spanish Earth: An Untold Story |url= |journal=Hemingway Review
|volume=7.2 |issue= |date=1988
|pages=122-130 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson
|first=Scott |date=2009 |title=Fitzgerald & Hemingway: Works and Days |url= |location=New York |publisher=Columbia UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Franklin |first=Sidney |date=1952 |title=Bullfighter from Brooklyn |url= |location=New York |publisher=Prentice-Hall |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Graham |first=Helen |date=2002 |title=The Spanish Republic at War 1936-1939 |url= |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Guttmann |first=Allen |date=1962 |title=The Wound in the Heart: American and the Spanish Civil War |url= |location=New York |publisher=Free Press of Glencoe |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1967 |title=By-Line: Ernest Hemingway |url= |location=New York |publisher=Scibner |pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Trogdon
|editor-first=Robert W.
|author-mask=1
|title=Fascism is a Lie
|url=
|journal=Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference |volume==
|issue=
|date=2002
|pages=193-6
|location=New York
|publisher=Carroll & Graf
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 May 1937
|chapter=Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=nd
|chapter=The Home Front
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938a
|chapter=Letter to Edmund Wilson
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=2 June 1938b
|chapter=Letter to Jack Wheeler
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=14 Feb 1939
|chapter=On the American Dead in Spain
|title=TS. New Masses
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Baker
|editor-first=Carlos
|author-mask=1
|date=2003
|chapter=The Hadely Mowrer
|title=Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Scribner
|pages=462-3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ibarruri
|first=Dolores
|date=1966
|title=They Shall Not Pass: The Autobiography of La Pasionaria
|url=
|location=United States
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|date=1969
|title=The Camera and I
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|author-mask=1
|date=26 Apr 1937
|chapter=Letter to Ernest Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|date=20 Nov 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Bertrand Weaver
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=12 Oct 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=25 Apr 1939
|chapter=Letter to M.B. Tenney
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Apr 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Knightley
|first=Phillip
|date=2004
|title=The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq
|url=
|location=Baltimore
|publisher=John Hopkins
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=
|date=9 Apr 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=TS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=11 Apr 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=8 May 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=6 July 1937d
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=July 1937e
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=22 March 1939
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 9
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=
|date=20 May 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=20 Dec 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 5
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Sep 1937c
|chapter=Note to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moorehead
|first=Caroline
|date=2003
|title=Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Henry Holt
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moreira
|first=Peter
|date=2006
|title=Hemingway on the China Front: His WWII Spy Mission with Martha Gellhorn
|url=
|location=Washington D.C.
|publisher=Potomac Books
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|date=5 Feb 1937
|chapter=Promotion Box: Hemingway, For Immediate Release
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|author-mask=1
|date=4 Apr 1938
|chapter=Promotion Box: American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|editor-last=Nelson
|editor-first=Card
|date=1994
|title=Remembering Spain: Hemingway’s Civil War Eulogy and the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
|url=
|location=Urbana
|publisher=U of Illinois
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Reynolds
|first=Michael
|date=1989
|title=Hemingway: The Paris Years
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Norton
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Stott
|first=William
|date=1986
|title=Documentary Expression and Thirties America
|url=
|location=Chicago
|publisher=U of Chicago P
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Thomas
|first=Hugh
|date=2001
|title=The Spanish Civil War, Rev. ed.
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Modern Library
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine
|last=''Two Wars and More to Come''
|first=
|date=24 Jan 1938
|title=Best Sellers of the Week Here and Elsewhere
|type=Advertisement
|url=
|magazine=New York Times
|pages=
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=NA
|first=
|title=United States. Dept. of State
|url=
|journal= Foreign Relations of the Untied States, 1937 |volume=1
|issue=General
|date=1954
|pages=
|location=Washington
|publisher=GPO
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Watson
|first=William Braasch
|title=Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches
|url=
|journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=7.2
|issue=
|date=1988
|pages=4-121
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Wheeler
|first=John H.
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938
|chapter=Letter to Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection, Box 3 Folder 14
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}

{{refend}}
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches

2025-04-20T14:26:50Z

MerAtticus: note O harvtext

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{{byline|last=Vernon |first=Alex |abstract=The Spanish Civil War began in July 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally-restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy. By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches.}}

{{dc|dc=T|HE SPANISH CIVIL WAR BEGAN ON}} 17-18 JULY, 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy, to collaborate with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens on the pro-Republican documentary ''The Spanish Earth'', and to pursue his fledgling love affair with Martha Gellhorn.{{efn|Adapted and printed with permission from ''Hemingway’s Second War: Bearing Witness to the Spanish Civil War.'' Iowa City: U of Iowa Press, 2011.}}
By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches for NANA.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=4}}{{efn|Quotations from the NANA dispatches follow the Diplomatic Text established by William Braasch’s “Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches.” I prefer NANA’s titles rather than Watson’s. For my disagreements with some of Watson’s datings, see my comments on specific dispatches in ''Hemingway’s Second War'' {{harvtxt|Watson|1988|p=}}.}}The secondary sources habitually judge them inferior journalism. Carlos Baker in the first Hemingway biography, for example, complains that the dialogue was “so heavily stamped with personal mannerisms as to be of doubtful authenticity.” Baker sees a “curious monotony in his stories of battles and bombardments,” a gratuitous use of graphic imagery “to shock his readers,” and “a note of triumphant boastfulness” in reporting proximity to danger. He also faults Hemingway for “often hint[ing] he was alone when in fact he was usually with Martha Gellhorn, Matthews, and Delmer.” Hemingway lacked Dos Passos’ “eye for telling details” and the “meticulous exactitude and inclusiveness that characterized the best work of Herbert Matthews and Sefton Delmer.”{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}

Philip Knightley’s ''The First Casualty'', the standard history of war correspondence, paraphrases Baker but with a trouncing final judgment:{{pg|427|428}}Hemingway’s “performance as a war correspondent was abysmally bad.” But Knightley goes beyond “technical” dissatisfaction to moral condemnation. Not just “unjustifiably optimistic”—an excusable offense—Hemingway’s reporting was “unforgivable” in its “total failure to report the Communist persecution, imprisonment, and summary execution of ‘untrustworthy elements’ on the Republican side, when he knew this was happening and when disclosing it might well have prevented further horrors like this.”
{{sfn|Knightley|2004 |pp=231–32}}{{efn|In my view, Knightley does not sufficiently acknowledge his paraphrasing of Baker.}}

Such criticisms in the final analysis might bear out. As Scott Donaldson writes, Hemingway advanced the Republican cause in his dispatches by eliciting “the deepest possible feelings of horror and of sympathy for the victims” of the Madrid bombardment; his “undue optimism” often “ignored Loyalist defeats and exaggerated the importance of its victories”; and “he repeatedly called attention to the participation of Italians and Germans on Franco’s side.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=426}} It also served as a recruitment tool—Milton Wolff, for example, acknowledged the strong influence Hemingway’s dispatches had on his decision to volunteer. Nevertheless, I think it a worthwhile exercise to attend a little more studiously to Hemingway’s dispatches, their context, and their artistry. I don’t necessarily intend to reverse the general opinion of the correspondence, only to achieve a better and more sympathetic understanding.

Herbert Matthews’ reporting for the ''New York Times'' will serve as a convenient comparison for two reasons. First, because both Baker and Knightley use Matthews’ journalism as the standard of excellence to pass judgment on Hemingway’s; and second, because the two worked practically side-by-side, seeing and reporting on many of the same events. In fact so closely did they work together that NANA sometimes complained that the ''Times'' was not buying Hemingway’s pieces because they resembled Matthews,’ and at one point Matthews’ own editors at the Times suspected him of plagiarizing Hemingway.{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|pp=411, 420}} A note from Matthews’ assigned editor Raymond McCaw provides, in two columns, seven quite similar passages from Hemingway’s Aragon front dispatches of September 13 and 14 with Matthews’ of September 14, with a penciled note at the bottom: “a deadly parallel if you ask me.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937c|p=}} Edwin James, the managing editor and McCaw’s boss, eventually agreed with Matthews’ defense: “It is quite apparent that you did not file any duplicate of the Hemingway story, or vice versa. As I understand it, the similarity arose from the fact that you{{pg|428|429}}both went to see the same show and saw it at the same time [sic], under the same conditions.”{{sfn|James|1937b|p=}}

Matthews’ dispatches ring of Republican bias as much if not more than anything Hemingway ever filed. The ''Times'' received many letters to the editor complaining about Matthews’ undisguised politics, which also gave serious concern to some of his editors. His description of the Republican May 1937 infighting in Barcelona is a striking example of how his news veered into propaganda and shows just how much he passed along the government’s version of events. The government’s “BLOODLESS TRIUMPH FOUGHT WITH RECOGNIZEDWEAPONS OF DEMOCRACY” turned out to be blatantly false, as the government and the “COMMUNISTS [WHO] DISTINGUISHED THEMSELVES” resorted to violent suppression. His blaming the uprising on the anarchist CNT working as Franco operatives parrots the government’s and the communist party’s public position, even though both charges—that the anarchists precipitated the events and that they were under Nationalist direction—were also false. His dispatch’s optimistic close also equivocates the political reality: “NEW GOVERNMENT HAS TAKEN POWER WHICH APPEARS TOVE CONFIDENCE VAST MAJORITY SPANIARDS IN LOYALIST TERRITORY AND TIS HOPED WILL GAIN EQUAL CONFIDENCE ABROAD STOP VIOLENCE AND REVOLUTION BEEN REPUDIATED AND NEWAND FAR HOPEFULLER PERIOD SEEMS BEGINNING.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937a|p=}}The ''Times'', knowing full well the one-sided coverage of a correspondent writing from one side of the conflict, had a reporter on both sides: Matthews with the Republicans, and William Carney with the Nationalists. They got their facts right (or wrong) as often as the other, their editors concluded; and they inspired about the same number of letters of complaint.{{sfn|James|1937a|p=}}{{sfn|James|1939|p=}}

Furthermore, Matthews’ dispatches received a great deal of substantive editorial revisions. One of Matthews’ Teruel reports had to be cut for length, as McCaw informed James: “This bird sent 2844 words on the same facts which Hemingway covered much better in less than half that number. I wonder if Matthews thinks the paper is thriving, and that cable tolls do not matter a damn. Of course, it had to be cut for space anyway.” McCaw most likely refers here to Matthews’ dispatch corresponding to Hemingway’s “The Attack on Teruel,” though Matthews’ account of the fall of Teruel is also much longer (and more long-winded) than Hemingway’s, and just as personal in terms of describing the dangers{{pg|429|430}} he faced. Indeed its length allows him to share even more of the action he endured.{{sfn|McCaw|1937b|p=}}

Raymond McCaw held a general professional disagreement with Matthews perhaps tainted with over zealousness. Whether a personal or political motive informed that disagreement can’t be determined from the evidence I’ve seen. It is also clear that McCaw’s charges bear some validity—that any responsible editor could have easily and reasonably taken issue where McCaw did. One of the more interesting examples concerns Matthews’ piece on Guadalajara. Because he only saw evidence on Franco’s side of Italian forces, he only reported on Italians. But the ''Times'' editors heard from other sources that German soldiers also participated in the March offensive. They thought it prudent, from this confusion, to change (nine times) “Italian” to “Rebel,” “the foe,” or “Insurgent.” When Matthews saw the published piece he wrote a strenuous objection. In some instances the editors changed paraphrased quotations from his sources. One large paragraph omitted by the editors stressed the first-hand nature of the information, and Matthews underlines the key words: “All day, at every place we stopped and no matter whom we talked to or what we saw, there was only one label—Italian. The dead bodies, the prisoners, the material of every kind, the men who had occupied Brihuega and then fled were Italian and nothing but Italian.” Here and elsewhere in his original story, Matthews emphasizes the “personal knowledge” of its information.{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}{{efn|James supported McCaw on these changes, though later acknowledged that altering quoted sources was perhaps unwarranted(29 April 1937; Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3).}}Yet Matthews did not report on the foreigners fighting for the Republic—it was in fact the Italian Garibali Battalion that routed Franco’s Italians. We might surmise government censorship behind this silence, though Matthews would not cable news of “CENSORSHIP STRICTER” and “BAN ON MENTIONING INTERNATIONALS INCLUDING AMERICANS INSTITUTED TODAY” until July.{{sfn|Matthews|1937b|p=}}Perhaps he cautiously self-censored, or politically self-censored for the same reasons the government would eventually ban mention. Still, his stridency about the omission of foreigners on one side is striking given his knowledge of their contribution to the other side. For this reason too, and his omission of other nationalities on the insurgent side, it seemed only fair to his editor “to stand on the statement that the majority of the Rebels were Italians and let it go at that.”{{sfn|James|1937c|p=}} A reasonable decision.

Throughout his correspondence to his editors and his several books,{{pg|430|431}}Matthews maintained a passionate defense of his eyewitness journalistic standard, a position those close to him understood. “Matthews never believed anything he had not seen with his own eyes,” Joris Ivens wrote. “He never saw his job as reporter as one that permitted him to sit in his hotel and read the handouts of the War Ministry.” {{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=112}} Sidney Franklin recalls that some writers wrote their pieces before arriving in Madrid, and came only for the “legitimacy” of the Madrid dateline.{{sfn|Franklin|1952|p=232}}And Matthews hated, on principle, having his name attached to an article that violated the integrity of his witness. The only way to achieve objectivity, for Matthews, was to acknowledge one’s subjective perspective. Writing to his publisher, Matthews argued that “the full documentary value” of his coverage was lost when the editors altered his submissions for “the apparent necessity of giving more or less equal space to both sides.”{{sfn|Matthews|1939|p=}}

As with Matthews, so too Hemingway. Indeed the commitment to subjectivity
fit quite well with Hemingway’s modernist aesthetics. If Hemingway
focused the dispatches on his perspective—on his own experience dodging
artillery—more than Matthews and more than most, he did so at least partially
to fulfill expectations. NANA approached him, after all, for his name
and personality as much as whatever he would write. Before he even left the
states it pitched him to potential publications, sending out a promotional release with text to be used alongside his forthcoming dispatches and suggesting
they include a photograph: “Mr. Hemingway’s assignment is to get both from the bombed towns and bombed trenches the human story of the war, not just an account of the game being played by general staffs with pins
and a map.”{{sfn|NANA|1937|p=}} NANA also released each individual dispatch with a one-sentence “precede” about the “famous” or “noted” author. Ernest Hemingway was not writing as Herbert Mathews, ace reporter; Hemingway was writing as Ernest Hemingway, famous author of novels and stories well known to be drawn from his own experiences.

That he understood this to be his assignment is further evidenced by a
cable Matthews sent to his ''Times'' editors on April 9, 1937, concerning the
Loyalist attack: “WORKED CONJOINTL WITH HEMINGWAY TODAY HE SENDING EYEWITNESS DESCRIPTION WHILE EYE SENT GENERAL STRATEGY.”{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}When a year later the ''Times'' asked NANA to ensure Hemingway’s reports differed from Matthews, NANA complied by asking Hemingway “to emphasize color rather than straight reporting” not necessarily out of dissatisfaction with Hemingway’s reportage as Baker contends,{{efn|{{harvtxt|Baker|1969|p=}}’s notes date the ''Times'' request to NANA as 8 Apr. 1938, and NANA’s to Hemingway as 15
Apr. 1938 (Princeton University, Firestone Library: Box 18, Folder 8 “1938”), the date of “The Bombing of Tortosa” dispatch.}} but to increase{{pg|431|432}}the chance of selling to the ''Times'' and indeed to ensure the spirit of NANA’s original arrangement with Hemingway. {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}Far from dissatisfied, NANA wrote Hemingway at the end of August 1938 a letter of agreement for his coverage of “a general European war” should it break out, “written in your colorful style” (Hemingway was in Paris, on his way to Spain for the last time during the war).{{sfn|Wheeler|1938|p=}}When Edmund Wilson criticized the selected dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'', Hemingway wrote him that “I was paid to write what are called ‘eye witness’ accounts . . .what is called, or was asked for as ‘color stuff.’ Most of such stuff is faked. Mine was not. It was straight reporting and the personal stuff was what had been asked for by the editors. “Wilson’s estimation was also based upon ''Fact’s'' inclusion of the “The Old Man at the Bridge” story from ''Ken'', “not a news dispatch” at all.{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}Speaking at Carnegie Hall before the showing of a rough cut of ''The Spanish Earth'', shortly after his first trip to Spain and so very much in the context of his wartime work, Hemingway defined the writer’s problem as “project[ing] [what is true] in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2002|p=193}}

Personal, anecdotal journalism had been Hemingway’s signature style from his earliest days filing reports, in the early 1920s from Paris, when his editor at the ''Toronto Star Weekly'' “encouraged [. . .] what Hemingway did best: write about himself in the act of being a reporter.”{{sfn|Reynolds|1989|p=45}}How could he expect that NANA would expect anything else, if indeed NANA did expect anything else? In the Spanish Civil War he at least maintained his eyewitness posture; in World War II, however, he couldn’t keep himself out. His first piece, about D-Day, begins, “No one remembers the date of the Battle of Shiloh. But the day ''we took'' Fox Green beach was the sixth of June, and the wind was blowing hard out of the northwest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1967|p=340}}His venue too—''Collier’s'' magazine—and the fact that he had not written anything in three years further contributed to the story-like nature of the WWII stories, in which he figured as a protagonist—not to mention the stories and involvement he couldn’t write about, armed and running around France more of a free agent than his guerilla-hero Robert Jordan ever was (though he began to transform these experiences into fiction in several unpublished stories). In wartime China in 1943, filing articles for Ralph Ingersoll’s short-lived ''PM'' New York afternoon daily, Hemingway did not even care to be called a news reporter.{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=99}}

It should be mentioned that Hemingway and Matthews enjoyed a great{{pg|432|433}}friendship and working relationship. Hemingway usually brought Matthews, who did not have a car, on his excursions. When Matthews left Madrid for a break in mid April 1937, he had already ensured Hemingway would provide coverage to the ''Times'' through NANA. For one thing, Hemingway did not have to worry about Matthews as a rival for the history books. He could endorse his friends’ book, ''Two Wars and More to Come'', and praise him as “the ablest and the bravest war correspondent writing today “who “when the fakers are all dead [. . .] will be read in the schools” (Advertisement 21) because Matthews posed no threat to Hemingway’s own chances to be read in the schools. The only brief Hemingway ever expressed he really reserved for Matthews’ editors, for not wanting his Teruel street-fighting story and for cutting references to himself in Matthews’ Teruel dispatches so that it appeared only Matthews had been there.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=462}}

As for Hemingway’s neglecting to name everyone with him for every story, the ''Times'' cutting of his name suggests that such exactitude was hardly a priority. A paper had no incentive for announcing the fact that a competitor’s
correspondent stood beside its own to see and report the same
events. NANA changed at least one vague Hemingway “we,” which admits
to the presence of others, to “this correspondent”
—we can hardly fault Hemingway for working in the spirit of his
employer’s standards.{{sfn|NANA|1938|p=}}{{efn|“we” in typescript and radiogram (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 1 and Folder 25).}} Do readers care that Matthews, Delmer, Gellhorn,
and others were there? The story’s effect and the limited word count also
weighed against such roll calls. One editor chose not to clutter the dispatch
on the great retreat across the Ebro with all the names of the American International Brigade volunteers Hemingway encountered, an omission of
Content more far serious than that of omitted correspondent names.{{efn| Radiogram insert dateline 4 April 1938 (HRC: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 25).}} Hemingway
often gave the names of the reporters with him, such as at Teruel;
nor was he the only reporter to sometimes neglect to do so. Martha Gellhorn,
for example, used a vague “we” and singled herself out as the primary
participant in some of her stories.

By using first-person reportage Hemingway—and Matthews and Gellhorn And most of the group covering the war—were operating solidly within
convention. William Stott, in ''Documentary Expression and Thirties America'',
calls this first-person ''participant observer'' technique “the most common sort
of documentary reportage in the thirties” that worked “by vicarious persuasion:
the writer partook of the events he reported and bared his feelings
and attitudes to influence the reader’s own.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=178-9}}{{efn|He specifically includes Hemingway et al (180). {{harvtxt|Stott|1986|p=}}}} Stott also observes {{pg|433|434}}another technique to enable documentary reportage to “talk to us, and convince us that we, our deepest interests, are engaged,” in the use of the second person: “Thirties documentaries constantly address ‘you,’ the ‘you’ who is we the audience, and exhorts, wheedles, begs us to identify, pity, participate.” His examples include Dorothy Parker’s Spanish Civil War writing, and Hemingway’s 1935 “First-Hand Report on the Florida Hurricane.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=27-8}} A number of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches employ the second-person as a way of bringing the reader along for the ride.

Hemingway’s dispatches used personal pronouns more artfully than is generally recognized. “A New Kind of War,” which William Braasch Watson notes as having been “[w]ritten with more care and imagination” than its predecessors, begins in second person: “The window of the hotel is open and, as you lie in bed, you hear the firing in the front line seventeen blocks away.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=29}} He takes “you” outside, to see the damage and the dead from the bombing. “Someone makes a joke about missing teeth and someone else says not to make that joke. And everyone has the feeling that characterizes war. It wasn’t me, see? It wasn’t me.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} The tension between the first person and second-person pronouns—the movement toward identification with “you” and the insistence that “it wasn’t me”—continues in the next line. Here the reader is at once still in the narrator’s shoes, but strangely distanced from the narrator through biographical tidbit and, at the same time, asked to see himself in the enemy: “The Italian dead up on the Guadalajara weren’t you although Italian dead, because of where you had spent your boyhood, always seemed, still, like Our Dead.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} It is worth quoting at length the dispatch’s transition to first person:
<blockquote>
After the shell that lit on the sidewalk in front of the hotel you got a beautiful double corner room on that side, twice the size of the one you’d had, for less than a dollar. It wasn’t me they killed. See? No. Not me. It wasn’t me anymore.

Then in a hospital given by the American Friends of Spanish Democracy located out behind the Morata front along the road
to Valencia they said, “Raven wants to see you.”

“Do I know him?”

“I don’t think so,” they said. “But he wants to see you.”

“Where is he?”

“Upstairs.”{{pg|434|435}}In the room upstairs they are giving a blood transfusion to a man with a very gray face who lay on a cot with his arm out looking away from the gurgling bottle and moaning in a very impersonal way. He moaned mechanically and at regular intervals and it did not seem to be him that made the sound. His lips did not move.

“Where’s Raven?” I asked.

“I’m here,” said Raven.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=31}}</blockquote>
The piece simply could not have sustained the second-person for the remaining five pages. More significantly, for this deeply personal exchange between the writer and the faceless, eyeless soldier, Hemingway could not hide in the rhetorical device of the second-person. In the process, he effects a reversal of the usual pronoun game; instead of identifying with the all embracing “you,” we leave that trick behind and become fully attached to
the narratorial “I” as ourselves, as we might not have been had the article
begun in the first person. And even as the narrator identifies himself by name
for the only time in any of the dispatches—“Hemingway,” and later
“Ernest”—as decidedly not ourselves. We do not say, ''It isn’t me''. The historian
Hugh Thomas notes “the refreshing candour” of Hemingway’s naming
himself “in the world of the International Brigades, where no one’s name
seemed to be truthfully given.”{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=591}}{{efn|For Watson, the dispatch “seems, in fact, on the verge of becoming a story.”{{harvtxt|Watson|1988|p=29}}}}

A year later Hemingway’s “Tortosa Calmly Awaits Assault” resists admitting
the city’s imminent fall. Yet it does so anyway, by subtly alluding to the
wartime rhetoric of sacrificed blood irrigating the earth and rejuvenating
Spain. Such rhetoric was common during the war, appearing in speeches,
print, and poetry. Many of the poems in Cary Nelson’s anthology ''The Wound
and the Dream: Sixty Years of American Poems about the Civil War'' join in the
Spanish and international chorus’s general connection between Republican
soldiers and the land, and the particular singing of their dead nourishing
the land. We find such language in La Pasionaria’s farewell address to the International Brigades, her epilogue to ''The Book of the XV Brigade'', and Hemingway’s famous eulogy “On the American Dead in Spain”: “For our dead are
a part of the earth of Spain now and the earth of Spain can never die. Each
winter it will seem to die and each spring it will come alive again. Our dead
will live with it forever.”{{sfn|Nelson|1994|p=3}}{{efn| Reprinted in {{harvtxt|Bruccoli|2006|p=76}} and {{harvtxt|Nelson|1994|p=37}} (the drafts at the JFK are titled “The Dead at Jarama”). In addition to the poems in Nelson’s anthology, see the excerpt from Boris Todrin’s “Spanish Sowing” in {{harvtxt|Guttmann|1969|pp=179-180}}.}} The Tortosa dispatch implies the deaths of{{pg|435|436}}many Republican soldiers in its final paragraph’s description of the newborn onions:
<blockquote>The artillery was picking up a little now. Two came in at a fairly useful place and as the smoke blew away ahead and settled through the trees, you picked an armful of spring onions from a field beside the trail that led to the Tortosa road. They were the first onions of the spring and peeling one I found they were plump white and not too strong. The Ebro Delta has a fine rich land, and where the onions grow, tomorrow will be a battle.
{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=84}}</blockquote>

The echo is quiet, and perhaps unconscious, but there nevertheless. The opening boastfulness of “American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents”
should be taken somewhat ironically. The dispatch begins by announcing
that for “two days we have been doing the most dangerous thing
you can do in this war. That is keep close behind an unstabilized line where
the enemy are attacking with mechanized forces.” Then, a few pages later,
we learn about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade survivors of the spring 1938
Nationalist offensive that took Bob Merriman and eventually reached the
Mediterranean Sea. Reading about these survivors creeping through enemy
camps, stepping on a sleeping German soldier’s hand, sprinting “across an
open field toward the Ebro bank and being sniped at by artillery controlled
by an observation plane overhead” and then “the desperate swimming of
the Ebro” naked, we are asked to place the correspondent’s plight in due perspective.{{sfn|Watson|1988|pp=71-2}} This story certainly escapes the charge of a monotonous
battle and bombing scene; its switch from apparently boastful to
awe-struck witness feels almost deliberately self-conscious. Other choice selfironic
moments come in the dispatches of that pre-Teruel quiet fall of 1938.
The one titled “Hemingway, Covering War, Tells of Brush with Death” has little
to report from Madrid other than the new aftershave brand he is trying.
In “Loyalists’ Drive Seen Progressing as Planned,” he writes that “Shells are
all much the same and if they don’t hit you there is no story and if they do
you won’t have to write it.” {{sfn|Watson|1988|p=58}}

Hemingway’s dispatches are sometimes monotonous because his war was
Usually monotonous—as wars are most of the time. It should also be kept in
mind that scholars reviewing Hemingway’s NANA dispatches one after{{pg|436|437}}another do not relive the original reading experience. Hemingway wrote dispatches sporadically, papers did not run all of his dispatches, papers edited and cut them, and readers read at least a couple of papers’ worth of other articles in between. He told Edmund Wilson as much in defending himself against Wilson’s critique of the selected (and heavily edited and cut) dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'' without his consent: “If you are being paid to be shot at and write about it you are supposed to mention the shooting. [. . .] But I do not go in for re-printing journalism.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}

If we can in this way better understand his style, and at least explain it if
not excuse it, we similarly ought to try to contextualize—and perhaps
excuse—the moral problem. The two issues here are the specific condemnation
of Hemingway’s silence about Republican atrocities and the general
question of biased reporting (the latter of which has already partially been
addressed).

Hemingway knew, as Donaldson writes, that mentioning the atrocities
“would arouse anticommunist sentiments back in the States and effectively
undermine any possibility of American intervention.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=394}} It is also doubtful
that reporting them would have stopped them. But reporting Republican
atrocities from Spain was not possible for the simple reason that all dispatches
went through a government censor. Matthews cabled his editors
from Paris in May 1937 to tell them that “censorship does not permit us to
say when the ‘telefonica’ is hit. So whenever you see reference in my
despatches [sic] to ‘an important building in the center of the city’ or words
to that effect, the cable desk can know that it is the telefonica.” {{sfn|Matthews|1937c|p=}} As already noted, by July he would cable “CENSORSHIP
STRICTER” as the ban on mentioning internationals went into effect. {{sfn|Matthews|1937d|p=}}{{sfn|Matthews|1937e|p=}} Cowles’ memoir confirms the
aggressive censorship, observing that it limited journalists to exactly the kind of material Hemingway wrote about:
<blockquote>There were frequent attempts to “beat the censor” by employing American slang expressions, but this came to an end when a Canadian girl joined the staff. The International Brigades were not allowed to be publicized; no reference could be made to Russian armaments, and buildings and streets which suffered
bombardments could not be identified.</blockquote>{{pg|437|438}}<blockquote>It was only in the realm of the human interest story that the journalists had a free hand. They could describe bombardments to their heart’s content.{{sfn|Cowles|1941|p=20}}</blockquote>
Hemingway and everyone else—to reserve incrimination for Hemingway is hardly just. No correspondent covering Republican Spain reported suspicious imprisonments and disappearances by government agents.

Hemingway, through Joris Ivens and ''The Spanish Earth'' project, had better
access to officials than most. Had he been able somehow to report such
activity, he would have lost that access and would probably have been kicked
out of the country. His fame would have likely prevented his own officially
sponsored disappearance, though he still worried, especially as so many of
such crimes on the Republican side occurred from free agents. When Jasper
Wood printed the anarchist F.A.I. banner in the limited edition book version
of ''The Spanish Earth'', Hemingway expressed his anxieties bluntly in a letter
to Jasper on August 20, 1938. It is hardly “petulant,” he scolded, “not to wish
to be shot.”{{sfn|Davison|1988|p=128}} Hostility in the Republic against the anarchists
ran high; after the Barcelona May Day conflict, the government’s foreign
minister told U.S. Ambassador Claude Bowers that “anarchist revolt
throughout Catalonia and not only expected but welcomed as an opportunity
to liquidate the anarchists who have been hostile from the beginning.”
{{sfn|NA|1954|p=292}}{{efn| The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State, 5 May 1937.}}

It is possible that Hemingway’s dispatch stating that “not one friend [. . .]
has been executed or is missing” was his clever means of reporting
the rumors and indeed the general fact while evading the censors, as in this very dispatch he acknowledged the presence of a censor after a bombardment.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=34}}
Matthews, on the other hand, never found a way to mention the
censors or admit even the possibility of people gone missing in the Republic.
Peter Moreira has observed that in a 1943 dispatch Hemingway related a remark by a British officer about the Chinese Nationalist government’s being
“hopeless on the offensive” because censorship “prevented American reporters
From actually saying that the Nationalists wouldn’t attack, surmising that by telling this anecdote Hemingway could sneak such a judgment into
his reports.”{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=77}} In Spain, censors aside, the eyewitness standard and his
own safety and continuing ability to report the war, and, yes, his passionate
support of the government contributed to his decision. He could have written
about government abuses from the states, but then could not return to{{pg|438|439}}cover the war and support the cause—a justification other journalists, those who did not return after the spring of 1937, did not enjoy. In his mind too, knowing what he heard of fascist atrocities, any reportage against the government lessening its chances of victory through killing hopes of increased international aid would have led to more deaths at Franco’s hands that the much smaller number inspired by fifth column paranoia.{{efn|''Hemingway’s Second War'' discusses in greater depth Hemingway’s politics and his falling out
with John Dos Passos over the execution of José Robles.}}

The accusation that Hemingway did not write about Republican atrocities
because he was saving it for his fiction I find baseless.{{sfn|Knightley|2004|p=232}}{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=402}}{{efn|Hemingway’s casual comment to colleagues calling dibs on Pepe Quintanilla, the executioner of
Madrid, is not sufficient evidence.}}Carolyn Moorehead, in her biography of Martha Gellhorn, describes
the climate for the Madrid correspondents that first spring: “And so,
day by day, the correspondents walked a thin and nervous line between truth,
evasions, and propaganda, telling one another that though it was not all right
if things were made up and presented as true, it was acceptable to describe
what you wanted, provided it was true and provided your readers were aware
of your position.”{{sfn|Moorehead|2003|p=125}} My own sense is that they did not walk the line quite
so nervously; their passionate commitment, and their principles of position
disclosure and the eyewitness standard, made that walk relatively easy.

The problem of ''committed journalism'', even sixty years later, has not been
resolved—as anyone paying attention to the media and world affairs well
knows. One person’s truth is another person’s propaganda. Certainly, as
Knightley notes, reporting from “the heart” affects one’s judgment.{{sfn|Knightley|2004|pp=234-5}}
Yet to attempt “balance,” per the edits to Matthews’ Guadalajara piece, betrays
one’s believed truth. Furthermore, the kind of reporting done by the
correspondents with the Republic—committed, one-sided, optimistic,
heroic, human interest work by embedded writers—would be practiced
widely and without reserve during World War II. Such narrative journalism,
with roots in Louise May Alcott’s “Hospital Sketches” series published in the
''Boston Commonwealth'', and more immediately in 1930s social documentary
writing whose “essence” is “not information”, anticipated postwar
new journalism’s adoption of novelistic narrative technique for nonfiction
which culminated with such wartime books as Norman Mailer’s ''Armies of
the Night'' and Michael Herr’s ''Dispatches''.{{sfn|Stott|1986|p=11}} Some of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches
fall in this line of development.

Today we might categorize such writing under the awkward umbrella
term ''creative nonfiction''. That term certainly fits the mixed bag of nonfiction
narratives and commentaries Hemingway published during the war in
Ken magazine. These pieces are essays, not journalism, several of which{{pg|439|440}}directly appeal for support for the Republic, and most of which really deal with the approaching world war. ''Ken'' wanted “precisely the kind of opinion articles he could not write for NANA.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=433}} His article, “The Cardinal Picks a Winner,” shows a photo of a row of dead children from Barcelona and another one with Nationalist officers saluting and Catholic officials with raised hands, apparently making the fascist salute as well. He ends ironically: “So I ''don’t believe'' the people shown in the photo can really be making it. I would rather prefer to think that the photograph was faked.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=436}} When Hemingway argues in “A Program for U.S. Realism” that the United States should stay out of the next war except to stuff its pockets through arms sales, one has to wonder, given his call and the democratic nations’ failure to save Spain, if we are to sniff sarcasm here.

The language of the dispatches, with their corrective intent against
Franco’s propaganda, does risk propagandizing. Hemingway’s optimism and
anti-fascism certainly colored his correspondence work. His criticism of the
anarchist and POUM militia for their inactivity on the Aragon front, for example,
sounds a lot like the Spanish Communist Party’s.{{efn|It at least sounds almost exactly like Dolores Ibarruri in her memoir. To the anarchists’ complaint
that they had no arms, she retorts “that they had more arms than did many other fronts. . . .
What they didn’t have and what they were constantly demanding were airplanes and tanks .And
they didn’t have them because the Republic government didn’t have them either, except for those
it received as aid from the Soviet Union.” {{harvtxt|Ibarruri|1966|pp=238-284}} Yet the various Catalonia militia were not
as well equipped with small arms as the more regular Popular Army units, and because of the
terrain tanks and planes were in fact necessary.}}
But unlike
Matthews, Hemingway limited his reports within the Republic to military
matters. Hemingway may have generally condemned the anarchists in his
nonfiction, considering their activity as hampering the war effort, but he
never repeated the accusation of their collaboration with the rebels, as
Matthews had done. And when Hemingway commented on the Bareclona
crisis, he referred only to the government—not the communists, as
Matthews had done.{{efn|{{harvtxt|Hemingway|1937|p=}}’s comments in “Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win” NANA staff
correspondent dispatch. Though arguably he was propagandizing by hiding the communist influence—
to mention the communists to an American audience would not gain sympathy for the
cause.}}Nor did he write articles asserting the limited role of
the communists in the government, or explaining Spanish anarchism, also
as Matthews had done.{{efn|An article on the communists’ limited role appeared in late November 1937, as discussed in a
missive from The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State on 2
Dec. 1937. {{harvtxt|NA|1954|p=461}} Matthews’ “Anarchism: Spain’s Enigma” appeared in the ''New York Times'' 22 Aug. 1937:6, 14.}}

During one of Hemingway’s stateside breaks between trips to Spain, his
children asked if he was a “tool” of Stalin, an accusation tossed by a schoolmate
who, presumably parroting his or her parents, probably understood
the term no better than Hemingway’s children. {{sfn|Hemingway|nd|p=}}
Hemingway believed in the Republic’s potential, but he was never a dupe of
the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) or Comintern. As did many others, he
accepted PCE’s presence in the government for its discipline and organization
toward winning the war, and he understood the material necessity for
Comintern’s support. It should also be noted, as historians Hugh Thomas
and Helen Graham have reminded us, that the communism associated with
the Republic wasn’t particularly communist anyway.{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=628}}{{sfn|Graham|2002|p=184}} {{pg|440|441}}

Hemingway declined to follow Joris Ivens’ suggestion that he write a
dispatch on the significant role of the political commissars in the Republican
military, even though that would have meant
featuring his brave new friend Gustav Regler.{{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=}} Hemingway also, in a letter
justifying his work to Jack Wheeler at NANA, wrote about choosing not to
send a dispatch he had written because it might strike readers as propaganda
“no matter how true” (Letter to Jack Wheeler).{{sfn|Hemingway|1938b|p=}}

Hemingway went to Spain to see the war himself and to support the Republic
through his ambulance fund. The paychecks from NANA and the
fundraising from ''The Spanish Earth'' helped. Whatever propagandistic streak
colors the dispatches pales in comparison to the documentary. The filmmaker,
Joris Ivens, was well established in European communist circles. The
documentary genre then and now has occupied a slippery position between
the extremes of impossible-to-achieve empirical nonfiction and of the outright
fictionalized. Evaluations of Hemingway’s journalism are informed by
knowledge of ''The Spanish Earth'' and the ''Ken'' essays to the detriment of the
journalism. And the very nature of the slippery documentary genre may enable
the film to escape opprobrium. It wasn’t reportage; it was altogether
something else. But for that matter, Hemingway’s dispatches weren’t purely
reportage either, and if not ''altogether'' something else, still something else,
and should be reckoned with accordingly.

== Notes ==
{{notelist|20em}}

==Citations==
{{Reflist|15em}}

==Works Cited==
{{refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker
|first=Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Bruccoli |first=Matthew |date=2006 |title=Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame |url= |location=Columbia |publisher=U of South Caronia P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Cowles |first=Virginia |date=1941 |title=Looking for Trouble |url= |location=New York
|publisher=Harper & Brothers |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Davison |first=Richard Allan |title=The Publication of Hemingway’s The Spanish Earth: An Untold Story |url= |journal=Hemingway Review
|volume=7.2 |issue= |date=1988
|pages=122-130 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson
|first=Scott |date=2009 |title=Fitzgerald & Hemingway: Works and Days |url= |location=New York |publisher=Columbia UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Franklin |first=Sidney |date=1952 |title=Bullfighter from Brooklyn |url= |location=New York |publisher=Prentice-Hall |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Graham |first=Helen |date=2002 |title=The Spanish Republic at War 1936-1939 |url= |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Guttmann |first=Allen |date=1962 |title=The Wound in the Heart: American and the Spanish Civil War |url= |location=New York |publisher=Free Press of Glencoe |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1967 |title=By-Line: Ernest Hemingway |url= |location=New York |publisher=Scibner |pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Trogdon
|editor-first=Robert W.
|author-mask=1
|title=Fascism is a Lie
|url=
|journal=Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference |volume==
|issue=
|date=2002
|pages=193-6
|location=New York
|publisher=Carroll & Graf
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 May 1937
|chapter=Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=nd
|chapter=The Home Front
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938a
|chapter=Letter to Edmund Wilson
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=2 June 1938b
|chapter=Letter to Jack Wheeler
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=14 Feb 1939
|chapter=On the American Dead in Spain
|title=TS. New Masses
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Baker
|editor-first=Carlos
|author-mask=1
|date=2003
|chapter=The Hadely Mowrer
|title=Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Scribner
|pages=462-3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ibarruri
|first=Dolores
|date=1966
|title=They Shall Not Pass: The Autobiography of La Pasionaria
|url=
|location=United States
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|date=1969
|title=The Camera and I
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|author-mask=1
|date=26 Apr 1937
|chapter=Letter to Ernest Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|date=20 Nov 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Bertrand Weaver
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=12 Oct 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=25 Apr 1939
|chapter=Letter to M.B. Tenney
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Apr 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Knightley
|first=Phillip
|date=2004
|title=The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq
|url=
|location=Baltimore
|publisher=John Hopkins
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=
|date=9 Apr 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=TS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=11 Apr 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=8 May 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=6 July 1937d
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=July 1937e
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=22 March 1939
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 9
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=
|date=20 May 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=20 Dec 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 5
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Sep 1937c
|chapter=Note to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moorehead
|first=Caroline
|date=2003
|title=Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Henry Holt
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moreira
|first=Peter
|date=2006
|title=Hemingway on the China Front: His WWII Spy Mission with Martha Gellhorn
|url=
|location=Washington D.C.
|publisher=Potomac Books
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|date=5 Feb 1937
|chapter=Promotion Box: Hemingway, For Immediate Release
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|author-mask=1
|date=4 Apr 1938
|chapter=Promotion Box: American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|editor-last=Nelson
|editor-first=Card
|date=1994
|title=Remembering Spain: Hemingway’s Civil War Eulogy and the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
|url=
|location=Urbana
|publisher=U of Illinois
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Reynolds
|first=Michael
|date=1989
|title=Hemingway: The Paris Years
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Norton
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Stott
|first=William
|date=1986
|title=Documentary Expression and Thirties America
|url=
|location=Chicago
|publisher=U of Chicago P
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Thomas
|first=Hugh
|date=2001
|title=The Spanish Civil War, Rev. ed.
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Modern Library
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine
|last=''Two Wars and More to Come''
|first=
|date=24 Jan 1938
|title=Best Sellers of the Week Here and Elsewhere
|type=Advertisement
|url=
|magazine=New York Times
|pages=
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=NA
|first=
|title=United States. Dept. of State
|url=
|journal= Foreign Relations of the Untied States, 1937 |volume=1
|issue=General
|date=1954
|pages=
|location=Washington
|publisher=GPO
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Watson
|first=William Braasch
|title=Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches
|url=
|journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=7.2
|issue=
|date=1988
|pages=4-121
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Wheeler
|first=John H.
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938
|chapter=Letter to Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection, Box 3 Folder 14
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}

{{refend}}
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches

2025-04-20T14:25:08Z

MerAtticus: note P harvtext and italic typo fix

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{{byline|last=Vernon |first=Alex |abstract=The Spanish Civil War began in July 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally-restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy. By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches.}}

{{dc|dc=T|HE SPANISH CIVIL WAR BEGAN ON}} 17-18 JULY, 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy, to collaborate with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens on the pro-Republican documentary ''The Spanish Earth'', and to pursue his fledgling love affair with Martha Gellhorn.{{efn|Adapted and printed with permission from ''Hemingway’s Second War: Bearing Witness to the Spanish Civil War.'' Iowa City: U of Iowa Press, 2011.}}
By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches for NANA.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=4}}{{efn|Quotations from the NANA dispatches follow the Diplomatic Text established by William Braasch’s “Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches.” I prefer NANA’s titles rather than Watson’s. For my disagreements with some of Watson’s datings, see my comments on specific dispatches in ''Hemingway’s Second War'' {{harvtxt|Watson|1988|p=}}.}}The secondary sources habitually judge them inferior journalism. Carlos Baker in the first Hemingway biography, for example, complains that the dialogue was “so heavily stamped with personal mannerisms as to be of doubtful authenticity.” Baker sees a “curious monotony in his stories of battles and bombardments,” a gratuitous use of graphic imagery “to shock his readers,” and “a note of triumphant boastfulness” in reporting proximity to danger. He also faults Hemingway for “often hint[ing] he was alone when in fact he was usually with Martha Gellhorn, Matthews, and Delmer.” Hemingway lacked Dos Passos’ “eye for telling details” and the “meticulous exactitude and inclusiveness that characterized the best work of Herbert Matthews and Sefton Delmer.”{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}

Philip Knightley’s ''The First Casualty'', the standard history of war correspondence, paraphrases Baker but with a trouncing final judgment:{{pg|427|428}}Hemingway’s “performance as a war correspondent was abysmally bad.” But Knightley goes beyond “technical” dissatisfaction to moral condemnation. Not just “unjustifiably optimistic”—an excusable offense—Hemingway’s reporting was “unforgivable” in its “total failure to report the Communist persecution, imprisonment, and summary execution of ‘untrustworthy elements’ on the Republican side, when he knew this was happening and when disclosing it might well have prevented further horrors like this.”
{{sfn|Knightley|2004 |pp=231–32}}{{efn|In my view, Knightley does not sufficiently acknowledge his paraphrasing of Baker.}}

Such criticisms in the final analysis might bear out. As Scott Donaldson writes, Hemingway advanced the Republican cause in his dispatches by eliciting “the deepest possible feelings of horror and of sympathy for the victims” of the Madrid bombardment; his “undue optimism” often “ignored Loyalist defeats and exaggerated the importance of its victories”; and “he repeatedly called attention to the participation of Italians and Germans on Franco’s side.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=426}} It also served as a recruitment tool—Milton Wolff, for example, acknowledged the strong influence Hemingway’s dispatches had on his decision to volunteer. Nevertheless, I think it a worthwhile exercise to attend a little more studiously to Hemingway’s dispatches, their context, and their artistry. I don’t necessarily intend to reverse the general opinion of the correspondence, only to achieve a better and more sympathetic understanding.

Herbert Matthews’ reporting for the ''New York Times'' will serve as a convenient comparison for two reasons. First, because both Baker and Knightley use Matthews’ journalism as the standard of excellence to pass judgment on Hemingway’s; and second, because the two worked practically side-by-side, seeing and reporting on many of the same events. In fact so closely did they work together that NANA sometimes complained that the ''Times'' was not buying Hemingway’s pieces because they resembled Matthews,’ and at one point Matthews’ own editors at the Times suspected him of plagiarizing Hemingway.{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|pp=411, 420}} A note from Matthews’ assigned editor Raymond McCaw provides, in two columns, seven quite similar passages from Hemingway’s Aragon front dispatches of September 13 and 14 with Matthews’ of September 14, with a penciled note at the bottom: “a deadly parallel if you ask me.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937c|p=}} Edwin James, the managing editor and McCaw’s boss, eventually agreed with Matthews’ defense: “It is quite apparent that you did not file any duplicate of the Hemingway story, or vice versa. As I understand it, the similarity arose from the fact that you{{pg|428|429}}both went to see the same show and saw it at the same time [sic], under the same conditions.”{{sfn|James|1937b|p=}}

Matthews’ dispatches ring of Republican bias as much if not more than anything Hemingway ever filed. The ''Times'' received many letters to the editor complaining about Matthews’ undisguised politics, which also gave serious concern to some of his editors. His description of the Republican May 1937 infighting in Barcelona is a striking example of how his news veered into propaganda and shows just how much he passed along the government’s version of events. The government’s “BLOODLESS TRIUMPH FOUGHT WITH RECOGNIZEDWEAPONS OF DEMOCRACY” turned out to be blatantly false, as the government and the “COMMUNISTS [WHO] DISTINGUISHED THEMSELVES” resorted to violent suppression. His blaming the uprising on the anarchist CNT working as Franco operatives parrots the government’s and the communist party’s public position, even though both charges—that the anarchists precipitated the events and that they were under Nationalist direction—were also false. His dispatch’s optimistic close also equivocates the political reality: “NEW GOVERNMENT HAS TAKEN POWER WHICH APPEARS TOVE CONFIDENCE VAST MAJORITY SPANIARDS IN LOYALIST TERRITORY AND TIS HOPED WILL GAIN EQUAL CONFIDENCE ABROAD STOP VIOLENCE AND REVOLUTION BEEN REPUDIATED AND NEWAND FAR HOPEFULLER PERIOD SEEMS BEGINNING.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937a|p=}}The ''Times'', knowing full well the one-sided coverage of a correspondent writing from one side of the conflict, had a reporter on both sides: Matthews with the Republicans, and William Carney with the Nationalists. They got their facts right (or wrong) as often as the other, their editors concluded; and they inspired about the same number of letters of complaint.{{sfn|James|1937a|p=}}{{sfn|James|1939|p=}}

Furthermore, Matthews’ dispatches received a great deal of substantive editorial revisions. One of Matthews’ Teruel reports had to be cut for length, as McCaw informed James: “This bird sent 2844 words on the same facts which Hemingway covered much better in less than half that number. I wonder if Matthews thinks the paper is thriving, and that cable tolls do not matter a damn. Of course, it had to be cut for space anyway.” McCaw most likely refers here to Matthews’ dispatch corresponding to Hemingway’s “The Attack on Teruel,” though Matthews’ account of the fall of Teruel is also much longer (and more long-winded) than Hemingway’s, and just as personal in terms of describing the dangers{{pg|429|430}} he faced. Indeed its length allows him to share even more of the action he endured.{{sfn|McCaw|1937b|p=}}

Raymond McCaw held a general professional disagreement with Matthews perhaps tainted with over zealousness. Whether a personal or political motive informed that disagreement can’t be determined from the evidence I’ve seen. It is also clear that McCaw’s charges bear some validity—that any responsible editor could have easily and reasonably taken issue where McCaw did. One of the more interesting examples concerns Matthews’ piece on Guadalajara. Because he only saw evidence on Franco’s side of Italian forces, he only reported on Italians. But the ''Times'' editors heard from other sources that German soldiers also participated in the March offensive. They thought it prudent, from this confusion, to change (nine times) “Italian” to “Rebel,” “the foe,” or “Insurgent.” When Matthews saw the published piece he wrote a strenuous objection. In some instances the editors changed paraphrased quotations from his sources. One large paragraph omitted by the editors stressed the first-hand nature of the information, and Matthews underlines the key words: “All day, at every place we stopped and no matter whom we talked to or what we saw, there was only one label—Italian. The dead bodies, the prisoners, the material of every kind, the men who had occupied Brihuega and then fled were Italian and nothing but Italian.” Here and elsewhere in his original story, Matthews emphasizes the “personal knowledge” of its information.{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}{{efn|James supported McCaw on these changes, though later acknowledged that altering quoted sources was perhaps unwarranted(29 April 1937; Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3).}}Yet Matthews did not report on the foreigners fighting for the Republic—it was in fact the Italian Garibali Battalion that routed Franco’s Italians. We might surmise government censorship behind this silence, though Matthews would not cable news of “CENSORSHIP STRICTER” and “BAN ON MENTIONING INTERNATIONALS INCLUDING AMERICANS INSTITUTED TODAY” until July.{{sfn|Matthews|1937b|p=}}Perhaps he cautiously self-censored, or politically self-censored for the same reasons the government would eventually ban mention. Still, his stridency about the omission of foreigners on one side is striking given his knowledge of their contribution to the other side. For this reason too, and his omission of other nationalities on the insurgent side, it seemed only fair to his editor “to stand on the statement that the majority of the Rebels were Italians and let it go at that.”{{sfn|James|1937c|p=}} A reasonable decision.

Throughout his correspondence to his editors and his several books,{{pg|430|431}}Matthews maintained a passionate defense of his eyewitness journalistic standard, a position those close to him understood. “Matthews never believed anything he had not seen with his own eyes,” Joris Ivens wrote. “He never saw his job as reporter as one that permitted him to sit in his hotel and read the handouts of the War Ministry.” {{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=112}} Sidney Franklin recalls that some writers wrote their pieces before arriving in Madrid, and came only for the “legitimacy” of the Madrid dateline.{{sfn|Franklin|1952|p=232}}And Matthews hated, on principle, having his name attached to an article that violated the integrity of his witness. The only way to achieve objectivity, for Matthews, was to acknowledge one’s subjective perspective. Writing to his publisher, Matthews argued that “the full documentary value” of his coverage was lost when the editors altered his submissions for “the apparent necessity of giving more or less equal space to both sides.”{{sfn|Matthews|1939|p=}}

As with Matthews, so too Hemingway. Indeed the commitment to subjectivity
fit quite well with Hemingway’s modernist aesthetics. If Hemingway
focused the dispatches on his perspective—on his own experience dodging
artillery—more than Matthews and more than most, he did so at least partially
to fulfill expectations. NANA approached him, after all, for his name
and personality as much as whatever he would write. Before he even left the
states it pitched him to potential publications, sending out a promotional release with text to be used alongside his forthcoming dispatches and suggesting
they include a photograph: “Mr. Hemingway’s assignment is to get both from the bombed towns and bombed trenches the human story of the war, not just an account of the game being played by general staffs with pins
and a map.”{{sfn|NANA|1937|p=}} NANA also released each individual dispatch with a one-sentence “precede” about the “famous” or “noted” author. Ernest Hemingway was not writing as Herbert Mathews, ace reporter; Hemingway was writing as Ernest Hemingway, famous author of novels and stories well known to be drawn from his own experiences.

That he understood this to be his assignment is further evidenced by a
cable Matthews sent to his ''Times'' editors on April 9, 1937, concerning the
Loyalist attack: “WORKED CONJOINTL WITH HEMINGWAY TODAY HE SENDING EYEWITNESS DESCRIPTION WHILE EYE SENT GENERAL STRATEGY.”{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}When a year later the ''Times'' asked NANA to ensure Hemingway’s reports differed from Matthews, NANA complied by asking Hemingway “to emphasize color rather than straight reporting” not necessarily out of dissatisfaction with Hemingway’s reportage as Baker contends,{{efn|{{harvtxt|Baker|1969|p=}}’s notes date the ''Times'' request to NANA as 8 Apr. 1938, and NANA’s to Hemingway as 15
Apr. 1938 (Princeton University, Firestone Library: Box 18, Folder 8 “1938”), the date of “The Bombing of Tortosa” dispatch.}} but to increase{{pg|431|432}}the chance of selling to the ''Times'' and indeed to ensure the spirit of NANA’s original arrangement with Hemingway. {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}Far from dissatisfied, NANA wrote Hemingway at the end of August 1938 a letter of agreement for his coverage of “a general European war” should it break out, “written in your colorful style” (Hemingway was in Paris, on his way to Spain for the last time during the war).{{sfn|Wheeler|1938|p=}}When Edmund Wilson criticized the selected dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'', Hemingway wrote him that “I was paid to write what are called ‘eye witness’ accounts . . .what is called, or was asked for as ‘color stuff.’ Most of such stuff is faked. Mine was not. It was straight reporting and the personal stuff was what had been asked for by the editors. “Wilson’s estimation was also based upon ''Fact’s'' inclusion of the “The Old Man at the Bridge” story from ''Ken'', “not a news dispatch” at all.{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}Speaking at Carnegie Hall before the showing of a rough cut of ''The Spanish Earth'', shortly after his first trip to Spain and so very much in the context of his wartime work, Hemingway defined the writer’s problem as “project[ing] [what is true] in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2002|p=193}}

Personal, anecdotal journalism had been Hemingway’s signature style from his earliest days filing reports, in the early 1920s from Paris, when his editor at the ''Toronto Star Weekly'' “encouraged [. . .] what Hemingway did best: write about himself in the act of being a reporter.”{{sfn|Reynolds|1989|p=45}}How could he expect that NANA would expect anything else, if indeed NANA did expect anything else? In the Spanish Civil War he at least maintained his eyewitness posture; in World War II, however, he couldn’t keep himself out. His first piece, about D-Day, begins, “No one remembers the date of the Battle of Shiloh. But the day ''we took'' Fox Green beach was the sixth of June, and the wind was blowing hard out of the northwest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1967|p=340}}His venue too—''Collier’s'' magazine—and the fact that he had not written anything in three years further contributed to the story-like nature of the WWII stories, in which he figured as a protagonist—not to mention the stories and involvement he couldn’t write about, armed and running around France more of a free agent than his guerilla-hero Robert Jordan ever was (though he began to transform these experiences into fiction in several unpublished stories). In wartime China in 1943, filing articles for Ralph Ingersoll’s short-lived ''PM'' New York afternoon daily, Hemingway did not even care to be called a news reporter.{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=99}}

It should be mentioned that Hemingway and Matthews enjoyed a great{{pg|432|433}}friendship and working relationship. Hemingway usually brought Matthews, who did not have a car, on his excursions. When Matthews left Madrid for a break in mid April 1937, he had already ensured Hemingway would provide coverage to the ''Times'' through NANA. For one thing, Hemingway did not have to worry about Matthews as a rival for the history books. He could endorse his friends’ book, ''Two Wars and More to Come'', and praise him as “the ablest and the bravest war correspondent writing today “who “when the fakers are all dead [. . .] will be read in the schools” (Advertisement 21) because Matthews posed no threat to Hemingway’s own chances to be read in the schools. The only brief Hemingway ever expressed he really reserved for Matthews’ editors, for not wanting his Teruel street-fighting story and for cutting references to himself in Matthews’ Teruel dispatches so that it appeared only Matthews had been there.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=462}}

As for Hemingway’s neglecting to name everyone with him for every story, the ''Times'' cutting of his name suggests that such exactitude was hardly a priority. A paper had no incentive for announcing the fact that a competitor’s
correspondent stood beside its own to see and report the same
events. NANA changed at least one vague Hemingway “we,” which admits
to the presence of others, to “this correspondent”
—we can hardly fault Hemingway for working in the spirit of his
employer’s standards.{{sfn|NANA|1938|p=}}{{efn|“we” in typescript and radiogram (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 1 and Folder 25).}} Do readers care that Matthews, Delmer, Gellhorn,
and others were there? The story’s effect and the limited word count also
weighed against such roll calls. One editor chose not to clutter the dispatch
on the great retreat across the Ebro with all the names of the American International Brigade volunteers Hemingway encountered, an omission of
Content more far serious than that of omitted correspondent names.{{efn| Radiogram insert dateline 4 April 1938 (HRC: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 25).}} Hemingway
often gave the names of the reporters with him, such as at Teruel;
nor was he the only reporter to sometimes neglect to do so. Martha Gellhorn,
for example, used a vague “we” and singled herself out as the primary
participant in some of her stories.

By using first-person reportage Hemingway—and Matthews and Gellhorn And most of the group covering the war—were operating solidly within
convention. William Stott, in ''Documentary Expression and Thirties America'',
calls this first-person ''participant observer'' technique “the most common sort
of documentary reportage in the thirties” that worked “by vicarious persuasion:
the writer partook of the events he reported and bared his feelings
and attitudes to influence the reader’s own.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=178-9}}{{efn|He specifically includes Hemingway et al (180). {{harvtxt|Stott|1986|p=}}}} Stott also observes {{pg|433|434}}another technique to enable documentary reportage to “talk to us, and convince us that we, our deepest interests, are engaged,” in the use of the second person: “Thirties documentaries constantly address ‘you,’ the ‘you’ who is we the audience, and exhorts, wheedles, begs us to identify, pity, participate.” His examples include Dorothy Parker’s Spanish Civil War writing, and Hemingway’s 1935 “First-Hand Report on the Florida Hurricane.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=27-8}} A number of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches employ the second-person as a way of bringing the reader along for the ride.

Hemingway’s dispatches used personal pronouns more artfully than is generally recognized. “A New Kind of War,” which William Braasch Watson notes as having been “[w]ritten with more care and imagination” than its predecessors, begins in second person: “The window of the hotel is open and, as you lie in bed, you hear the firing in the front line seventeen blocks away.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=29}} He takes “you” outside, to see the damage and the dead from the bombing. “Someone makes a joke about missing teeth and someone else says not to make that joke. And everyone has the feeling that characterizes war. It wasn’t me, see? It wasn’t me.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} The tension between the first person and second-person pronouns—the movement toward identification with “you” and the insistence that “it wasn’t me”—continues in the next line. Here the reader is at once still in the narrator’s shoes, but strangely distanced from the narrator through biographical tidbit and, at the same time, asked to see himself in the enemy: “The Italian dead up on the Guadalajara weren’t you although Italian dead, because of where you had spent your boyhood, always seemed, still, like Our Dead.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} It is worth quoting at length the dispatch’s transition to first person:
<blockquote>
After the shell that lit on the sidewalk in front of the hotel you got a beautiful double corner room on that side, twice the size of the one you’d had, for less than a dollar. It wasn’t me they killed. See? No. Not me. It wasn’t me anymore.

Then in a hospital given by the American Friends of Spanish Democracy located out behind the Morata front along the road
to Valencia they said, “Raven wants to see you.”

“Do I know him?”

“I don’t think so,” they said. “But he wants to see you.”

“Where is he?”

“Upstairs.”{{pg|434|435}}In the room upstairs they are giving a blood transfusion to a man with a very gray face who lay on a cot with his arm out looking away from the gurgling bottle and moaning in a very impersonal way. He moaned mechanically and at regular intervals and it did not seem to be him that made the sound. His lips did not move.

“Where’s Raven?” I asked.

“I’m here,” said Raven.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=31}}</blockquote>
The piece simply could not have sustained the second-person for the remaining five pages. More significantly, for this deeply personal exchange between the writer and the faceless, eyeless soldier, Hemingway could not hide in the rhetorical device of the second-person. In the process, he effects a reversal of the usual pronoun game; instead of identifying with the all embracing “you,” we leave that trick behind and become fully attached to
the narratorial “I” as ourselves, as we might not have been had the article
begun in the first person. And even as the narrator identifies himself by name
for the only time in any of the dispatches—“Hemingway,” and later
“Ernest”—as decidedly not ourselves. We do not say, ''It isn’t me''. The historian
Hugh Thomas notes “the refreshing candour” of Hemingway’s naming
himself “in the world of the International Brigades, where no one’s name
seemed to be truthfully given.”{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=591}}{{efn|For Watson, the dispatch “seems, in fact, on the verge of becoming a story.”{{harvtxt|Watson|1988|p=29}}}}

A year later Hemingway’s “Tortosa Calmly Awaits Assault” resists admitting
the city’s imminent fall. Yet it does so anyway, by subtly alluding to the
wartime rhetoric of sacrificed blood irrigating the earth and rejuvenating
Spain. Such rhetoric was common during the war, appearing in speeches,
print, and poetry. Many of the poems in Cary Nelson’s anthology ''The Wound
and the Dream: Sixty Years of American Poems about the Civil War'' join in the
Spanish and international chorus’s general connection between Republican
soldiers and the land, and the particular singing of their dead nourishing
the land. We find such language in La Pasionaria’s farewell address to the International Brigades, her epilogue to ''The Book of the XV Brigade'', and Hemingway’s famous eulogy “On the American Dead in Spain”: “For our dead are
a part of the earth of Spain now and the earth of Spain can never die. Each
winter it will seem to die and each spring it will come alive again. Our dead
will live with it forever.”{{sfn|Nelson|1994|p=3}}{{efn| Reprinted in {{harvtxt|Bruccoli|2006|p=76}} and {{harvtxt|Nelson|1994|p=37}} (the drafts at the JFK are titled “The Dead at Jarama”). In addition to the poems in Nelson’s anthology, see the excerpt from Boris Todrin’s “Spanish Sowing” in {{harvtxt|Guttmann|1969|pp=179-180}}.}} The Tortosa dispatch implies the deaths of{{pg|435|436}}many Republican soldiers in its final paragraph’s description of the newborn onions:
<blockquote>The artillery was picking up a little now. Two came in at a fairly useful place and as the smoke blew away ahead and settled through the trees, you picked an armful of spring onions from a field beside the trail that led to the Tortosa road. They were the first onions of the spring and peeling one I found they were plump white and not too strong. The Ebro Delta has a fine rich land, and where the onions grow, tomorrow will be a battle.
{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=84}}</blockquote>

The echo is quiet, and perhaps unconscious, but there nevertheless. The opening boastfulness of “American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents”
should be taken somewhat ironically. The dispatch begins by announcing
that for “two days we have been doing the most dangerous thing
you can do in this war. That is keep close behind an unstabilized line where
the enemy are attacking with mechanized forces.” Then, a few pages later,
we learn about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade survivors of the spring 1938
Nationalist offensive that took Bob Merriman and eventually reached the
Mediterranean Sea. Reading about these survivors creeping through enemy
camps, stepping on a sleeping German soldier’s hand, sprinting “across an
open field toward the Ebro bank and being sniped at by artillery controlled
by an observation plane overhead” and then “the desperate swimming of
the Ebro” naked, we are asked to place the correspondent’s plight in due perspective.{{sfn|Watson|1988|pp=71-2}} This story certainly escapes the charge of a monotonous
battle and bombing scene; its switch from apparently boastful to
awe-struck witness feels almost deliberately self-conscious. Other choice selfironic
moments come in the dispatches of that pre-Teruel quiet fall of 1938.
The one titled “Hemingway, Covering War, Tells of Brush with Death” has little
to report from Madrid other than the new aftershave brand he is trying.
In “Loyalists’ Drive Seen Progressing as Planned,” he writes that “Shells are
all much the same and if they don’t hit you there is no story and if they do
you won’t have to write it.” {{sfn|Watson|1988|p=58}}

Hemingway’s dispatches are sometimes monotonous because his war was
Usually monotonous—as wars are most of the time. It should also be kept in
mind that scholars reviewing Hemingway’s NANA dispatches one after{{pg|436|437}}another do not relive the original reading experience. Hemingway wrote dispatches sporadically, papers did not run all of his dispatches, papers edited and cut them, and readers read at least a couple of papers’ worth of other articles in between. He told Edmund Wilson as much in defending himself against Wilson’s critique of the selected (and heavily edited and cut) dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'' without his consent: “If you are being paid to be shot at and write about it you are supposed to mention the shooting. [. . .] But I do not go in for re-printing journalism.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}

If we can in this way better understand his style, and at least explain it if
not excuse it, we similarly ought to try to contextualize—and perhaps
excuse—the moral problem. The two issues here are the specific condemnation
of Hemingway’s silence about Republican atrocities and the general
question of biased reporting (the latter of which has already partially been
addressed).

Hemingway knew, as Donaldson writes, that mentioning the atrocities
“would arouse anticommunist sentiments back in the States and effectively
undermine any possibility of American intervention.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=394}} It is also doubtful
that reporting them would have stopped them. But reporting Republican
atrocities from Spain was not possible for the simple reason that all dispatches
went through a government censor. Matthews cabled his editors
from Paris in May 1937 to tell them that “censorship does not permit us to
say when the ‘telefonica’ is hit. So whenever you see reference in my
despatches [sic] to ‘an important building in the center of the city’ or words
to that effect, the cable desk can know that it is the telefonica.” {{sfn|Matthews|1937c|p=}} As already noted, by July he would cable “CENSORSHIP
STRICTER” as the ban on mentioning internationals went into effect. {{sfn|Matthews|1937d|p=}}{{sfn|Matthews|1937e|p=}} Cowles’ memoir confirms the
aggressive censorship, observing that it limited journalists to exactly the kind of material Hemingway wrote about:
<blockquote>There were frequent attempts to “beat the censor” by employing American slang expressions, but this came to an end when a Canadian girl joined the staff. The International Brigades were not allowed to be publicized; no reference could be made to Russian armaments, and buildings and streets which suffered
bombardments could not be identified.</blockquote>{{pg|437|438}}<blockquote>It was only in the realm of the human interest story that the journalists had a free hand. They could describe bombardments to their heart’s content.{{sfn|Cowles|1941|p=20}}</blockquote>
Hemingway and everyone else—to reserve incrimination for Hemingway is hardly just. No correspondent covering Republican Spain reported suspicious imprisonments and disappearances by government agents.

Hemingway, through Joris Ivens and ''The Spanish Earth'' project, had better
access to officials than most. Had he been able somehow to report such
activity, he would have lost that access and would probably have been kicked
out of the country. His fame would have likely prevented his own officially
sponsored disappearance, though he still worried, especially as so many of
such crimes on the Republican side occurred from free agents. When Jasper
Wood printed the anarchist F.A.I. banner in the limited edition book version
of ''The Spanish Earth'', Hemingway expressed his anxieties bluntly in a letter
to Jasper on August 20, 1938. It is hardly “petulant,” he scolded, “not to wish
to be shot.”{{sfn|Davison|1988|p=128}} Hostility in the Republic against the anarchists
ran high; after the Barcelona May Day conflict, the government’s foreign
minister told U.S. Ambassador Claude Bowers that “anarchist revolt
throughout Catalonia and not only expected but welcomed as an opportunity
to liquidate the anarchists who have been hostile from the beginning.”
{{sfn|NA|1954|p=292}}{{efn| The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State, 5 May 1937.}}

It is possible that Hemingway’s dispatch stating that “not one friend [. . .]
has been executed or is missing” was his clever means of reporting
the rumors and indeed the general fact while evading the censors, as in this very dispatch he acknowledged the presence of a censor after a bombardment.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=34}}
Matthews, on the other hand, never found a way to mention the
censors or admit even the possibility of people gone missing in the Republic.
Peter Moreira has observed that in a 1943 dispatch Hemingway related a remark by a British officer about the Chinese Nationalist government’s being
“hopeless on the offensive” because censorship “prevented American reporters
From actually saying that the Nationalists wouldn’t attack, surmising that by telling this anecdote Hemingway could sneak such a judgment into
his reports.”{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=77}} In Spain, censors aside, the eyewitness standard and his
own safety and continuing ability to report the war, and, yes, his passionate
support of the government contributed to his decision. He could have written
about government abuses from the states, but then could not return to{{pg|438|439}}cover the war and support the cause—a justification other journalists, those who did not return after the spring of 1937, did not enjoy. In his mind too, knowing what he heard of fascist atrocities, any reportage against the government lessening its chances of victory through killing hopes of increased international aid would have led to more deaths at Franco’s hands that the much smaller number inspired by fifth column paranoia.{{efn|''Hemingway’s Second War'' discusses in greater depth Hemingway’s politics and his falling out
with John Dos Passos over the execution of José Robles.}}

The accusation that Hemingway did not write about Republican atrocities
because he was saving it for his fiction I find baseless.{{sfn|Knightley|2004|p=232}}{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=402}}{{efn|Hemingway’s casual comment to colleagues calling dibs on Pepe Quintanilla, the executioner of
Madrid, is not sufficient evidence.}}Carolyn Moorehead, in her biography of Martha Gellhorn, describes
the climate for the Madrid correspondents that first spring: “And so,
day by day, the correspondents walked a thin and nervous line between truth,
evasions, and propaganda, telling one another that though it was not all right
if things were made up and presented as true, it was acceptable to describe
what you wanted, provided it was true and provided your readers were aware
of your position.”{{sfn|Moorehead|2003|p=125}} My own sense is that they did not walk the line quite
so nervously; their passionate commitment, and their principles of position
disclosure and the eyewitness standard, made that walk relatively easy.

The problem of ''committed journalism'', even sixty years later, has not been
resolved—as anyone paying attention to the media and world affairs well
knows. One person’s truth is another person’s propaganda. Certainly, as
Knightley notes, reporting from “the heart” affects one’s judgment.{{sfn|Knightley|2004|pp=234-5}}
Yet to attempt “balance,” per the edits to Matthews’ Guadalajara piece, betrays
one’s believed truth. Furthermore, the kind of reporting done by the
correspondents with the Republic—committed, one-sided, optimistic,
heroic, human interest work by embedded writers—would be practiced
widely and without reserve during World War II. Such narrative journalism,
with roots in Louise May Alcott’s “Hospital Sketches” series published in the
''Boston Commonwealth'', and more immediately in 1930s social documentary
writing whose “essence” is “not information”, anticipated postwar
new journalism’s adoption of novelistic narrative technique for nonfiction
which culminated with such wartime books as Norman Mailer’s ''Armies of
the Night'' and Michael Herr’s ''Dispatches''.{{sfn|Stott|1986|p=11}} Some of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches
fall in this line of development.

Today we might categorize such writing under the awkward umbrella
term ''creative nonfiction''. That term certainly fits the mixed bag of nonfiction
narratives and commentaries Hemingway published during the war in
Ken magazine. These pieces are essays, not journalism, several of which{{pg|439|440}}directly appeal for support for the Republic, and most of which really deal with the approaching world war. ''Ken'' wanted “precisely the kind of opinion articles he could not write for NANA.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=433}} His article, “The Cardinal Picks a Winner,” shows a photo of a row of dead children from Barcelona and another one with Nationalist officers saluting and Catholic officials with raised hands, apparently making the fascist salute as well. He ends ironically: “So I ''don’t believe'' the people shown in the photo can really be making it. I would rather prefer to think that the photograph was faked.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=436}} When Hemingway argues in “A Program for U.S. Realism” that the United States should stay out of the next war except to stuff its pockets through arms sales, one has to wonder, given his call and the democratic nations’ failure to save Spain, if we are to sniff sarcasm here.

The language of the dispatches, with their corrective intent against
Franco’s propaganda, does risk propagandizing. Hemingway’s optimism and
anti-fascism certainly colored his correspondence work. His criticism of the
anarchist and POUM militia for their inactivity on the Aragon front, for example,
sounds a lot like the Spanish Communist Party’s.{{efn|It at least sounds almost exactly like Dolores Ibarruri in her memoir. To the anarchists’ complaint
that they had no arms, she retorts “that they had more arms than did many other fronts. . . .
What they didn’t have and what they were constantly demanding were airplanes and tanks .And
they didn’t have them because the Republic government didn’t have them either, except for those
it received as aid from the Soviet Union.” {{harvtxt|Ibarruri|1966|pp=238-284}} Yet the various Catalonia militia were not
as well equipped with small arms as the more regular Popular Army units, and because of the
terrain tanks and planes were in fact necessary.}}
But unlike
Matthews, Hemingway limited his reports within the Republic to military
matters. Hemingway may have generally condemned the anarchists in his
nonfiction, considering their activity as hampering the war effort, but he
never repeated the accusation of their collaboration with the rebels, as
Matthews had done. And when Hemingway commented on the Bareclona
crisis, he referred only to the government—not the communists, as
Matthews had done.{{efn|Hemingway’s comments in “Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win” NANA staff
correspondent dispatch. Though arguably he was propagandizing by hiding the communist influence—
to mention the communists to an American audience would not gain sympathy for the
cause.}}Nor did he write articles asserting the limited role of
the communists in the government, or explaining Spanish anarchism, also
as Matthews had done.{{efn|An article on the communists’ limited role appeared in late November 1937, as discussed in a
missive from The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State on 2
Dec. 1937. {{harvtxt|NA|1954|p=461}} Matthews’ “Anarchism: Spain’s Enigma” appeared in the ''New York Times'' 22 Aug. 1937:6, 14.}}

During one of Hemingway’s stateside breaks between trips to Spain, his
children asked if he was a “tool” of Stalin, an accusation tossed by a schoolmate
who, presumably parroting his or her parents, probably understood
the term no better than Hemingway’s children. {{sfn|Hemingway|nd|p=}}
Hemingway believed in the Republic’s potential, but he was never a dupe of
the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) or Comintern. As did many others, he
accepted PCE’s presence in the government for its discipline and organization
toward winning the war, and he understood the material necessity for
Comintern’s support. It should also be noted, as historians Hugh Thomas
and Helen Graham have reminded us, that the communism associated with
the Republic wasn’t particularly communist anyway.{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=628}}{{sfn|Graham|2002|p=184}} {{pg|440|441}}

Hemingway declined to follow Joris Ivens’ suggestion that he write a
dispatch on the significant role of the political commissars in the Republican
military, even though that would have meant
featuring his brave new friend Gustav Regler.{{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=}} Hemingway also, in a letter
justifying his work to Jack Wheeler at NANA, wrote about choosing not to
send a dispatch he had written because it might strike readers as propaganda
“no matter how true” (Letter to Jack Wheeler).{{sfn|Hemingway|1938b|p=}}

Hemingway went to Spain to see the war himself and to support the Republic
through his ambulance fund. The paychecks from NANA and the
fundraising from ''The Spanish Earth'' helped. Whatever propagandistic streak
colors the dispatches pales in comparison to the documentary. The filmmaker,
Joris Ivens, was well established in European communist circles. The
documentary genre then and now has occupied a slippery position between
the extremes of impossible-to-achieve empirical nonfiction and of the outright
fictionalized. Evaluations of Hemingway’s journalism are informed by
knowledge of ''The Spanish Earth'' and the ''Ken'' essays to the detriment of the
journalism. And the very nature of the slippery documentary genre may enable
the film to escape opprobrium. It wasn’t reportage; it was altogether
something else. But for that matter, Hemingway’s dispatches weren’t purely
reportage either, and if not ''altogether'' something else, still something else,
and should be reckoned with accordingly.

== Notes ==
{{notelist|20em}}

==Citations==
{{Reflist|15em}}

==Works Cited==
{{refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker
|first=Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Bruccoli |first=Matthew |date=2006 |title=Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame |url= |location=Columbia |publisher=U of South Caronia P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Cowles |first=Virginia |date=1941 |title=Looking for Trouble |url= |location=New York
|publisher=Harper & Brothers |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Davison |first=Richard Allan |title=The Publication of Hemingway’s The Spanish Earth: An Untold Story |url= |journal=Hemingway Review
|volume=7.2 |issue= |date=1988
|pages=122-130 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson
|first=Scott |date=2009 |title=Fitzgerald & Hemingway: Works and Days |url= |location=New York |publisher=Columbia UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Franklin |first=Sidney |date=1952 |title=Bullfighter from Brooklyn |url= |location=New York |publisher=Prentice-Hall |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Graham |first=Helen |date=2002 |title=The Spanish Republic at War 1936-1939 |url= |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Guttmann |first=Allen |date=1962 |title=The Wound in the Heart: American and the Spanish Civil War |url= |location=New York |publisher=Free Press of Glencoe |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1967 |title=By-Line: Ernest Hemingway |url= |location=New York |publisher=Scibner |pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Trogdon
|editor-first=Robert W.
|author-mask=1
|title=Fascism is a Lie
|url=
|journal=Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference |volume==
|issue=
|date=2002
|pages=193-6
|location=New York
|publisher=Carroll & Graf
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 May 1937
|chapter=Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=nd
|chapter=The Home Front
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938a
|chapter=Letter to Edmund Wilson
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=2 June 1938b
|chapter=Letter to Jack Wheeler
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=14 Feb 1939
|chapter=On the American Dead in Spain
|title=TS. New Masses
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Baker
|editor-first=Carlos
|author-mask=1
|date=2003
|chapter=The Hadely Mowrer
|title=Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Scribner
|pages=462-3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ibarruri
|first=Dolores
|date=1966
|title=They Shall Not Pass: The Autobiography of La Pasionaria
|url=
|location=United States
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|date=1969
|title=The Camera and I
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|author-mask=1
|date=26 Apr 1937
|chapter=Letter to Ernest Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|date=20 Nov 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Bertrand Weaver
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=12 Oct 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=25 Apr 1939
|chapter=Letter to M.B. Tenney
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Apr 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Knightley
|first=Phillip
|date=2004
|title=The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq
|url=
|location=Baltimore
|publisher=John Hopkins
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=
|date=9 Apr 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=TS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=11 Apr 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=8 May 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=6 July 1937d
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=July 1937e
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=22 March 1939
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 9
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=
|date=20 May 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=20 Dec 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 5
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Sep 1937c
|chapter=Note to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moorehead
|first=Caroline
|date=2003
|title=Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Henry Holt
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moreira
|first=Peter
|date=2006
|title=Hemingway on the China Front: His WWII Spy Mission with Martha Gellhorn
|url=
|location=Washington D.C.
|publisher=Potomac Books
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|date=5 Feb 1937
|chapter=Promotion Box: Hemingway, For Immediate Release
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|author-mask=1
|date=4 Apr 1938
|chapter=Promotion Box: American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|editor-last=Nelson
|editor-first=Card
|date=1994
|title=Remembering Spain: Hemingway’s Civil War Eulogy and the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
|url=
|location=Urbana
|publisher=U of Illinois
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Reynolds
|first=Michael
|date=1989
|title=Hemingway: The Paris Years
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Norton
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Stott
|first=William
|date=1986
|title=Documentary Expression and Thirties America
|url=
|location=Chicago
|publisher=U of Chicago P
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Thomas
|first=Hugh
|date=2001
|title=The Spanish Civil War, Rev. ed.
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Modern Library
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine
|last=''Two Wars and More to Come''
|first=
|date=24 Jan 1938
|title=Best Sellers of the Week Here and Elsewhere
|type=Advertisement
|url=
|magazine=New York Times
|pages=
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=NA
|first=
|title=United States. Dept. of State
|url=
|journal= Foreign Relations of the Untied States, 1937 |volume=1
|issue=General
|date=1954
|pages=
|location=Washington
|publisher=GPO
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Watson
|first=William Braasch
|title=Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches
|url=
|journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=7.2
|issue=
|date=1988
|pages=4-121
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Wheeler
|first=John H.
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938
|chapter=Letter to Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection, Box 3 Folder 14
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}

{{refend}}
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches

2025-04-20T14:20:17Z

MerAtticus: harvtext n

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
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{{byline|last=Vernon |first=Alex |abstract=The Spanish Civil War began in July 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally-restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy. By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches.}}

{{dc|dc=T|HE SPANISH CIVIL WAR BEGAN ON}} 17-18 JULY, 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy, to collaborate with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens on the pro-Republican documentary ''The Spanish Earth'', and to pursue his fledgling love affair with Martha Gellhorn.{{efn|Adapted and printed with permission from ''Hemingway’s Second War: Bearing Witness to the Spanish Civil War.'' Iowa City: U of Iowa Press, 2011.}}
By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches for NANA.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=4}}{{efn|Quotations from the NANA dispatches follow the Diplomatic Text established by William Braasch’s “Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches.” I prefer NANA’s titles rather than Watson’s. For my disagreements with some of Watson’s datings, see my comments on specific dispatches in ''Hemingway’s Second War'' {{harvtxt|Watson|1988|p=}}.}}The secondary sources habitually judge them inferior journalism. Carlos Baker in the first Hemingway biography, for example, complains that the dialogue was “so heavily stamped with personal mannerisms as to be of doubtful authenticity.” Baker sees a “curious monotony in his stories of battles and bombardments,” a gratuitous use of graphic imagery “to shock his readers,” and “a note of triumphant boastfulness” in reporting proximity to danger. He also faults Hemingway for “often hint[ing] he was alone when in fact he was usually with Martha Gellhorn, Matthews, and Delmer.” Hemingway lacked Dos Passos’ “eye for telling details” and the “meticulous exactitude and inclusiveness that characterized the best work of Herbert Matthews and Sefton Delmer.”{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}

Philip Knightley’s ''The First Casualty'', the standard history of war correspondence, paraphrases Baker but with a trouncing final judgment:{{pg|427|428}}Hemingway’s “performance as a war correspondent was abysmally bad.” But Knightley goes beyond “technical” dissatisfaction to moral condemnation. Not just “unjustifiably optimistic”—an excusable offense—Hemingway’s reporting was “unforgivable” in its “total failure to report the Communist persecution, imprisonment, and summary execution of ‘untrustworthy elements’ on the Republican side, when he knew this was happening and when disclosing it might well have prevented further horrors like this.”
{{sfn|Knightley|2004 |pp=231–32}}{{efn|In my view, Knightley does not sufficiently acknowledge his paraphrasing of Baker.}}

Such criticisms in the final analysis might bear out. As Scott Donaldson writes, Hemingway advanced the Republican cause in his dispatches by eliciting “the deepest possible feelings of horror and of sympathy for the victims” of the Madrid bombardment; his “undue optimism” often “ignored Loyalist defeats and exaggerated the importance of its victories”; and “he repeatedly called attention to the participation of Italians and Germans on Franco’s side.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=426}} It also served as a recruitment tool—Milton Wolff, for example, acknowledged the strong influence Hemingway’s dispatches had on his decision to volunteer. Nevertheless, I think it a worthwhile exercise to attend a little more studiously to Hemingway’s dispatches, their context, and their artistry. I don’t necessarily intend to reverse the general opinion of the correspondence, only to achieve a better and more sympathetic understanding.

Herbert Matthews’ reporting for the ''New York Times'' will serve as a convenient comparison for two reasons. First, because both Baker and Knightley use Matthews’ journalism as the standard of excellence to pass judgment on Hemingway’s; and second, because the two worked practically side-by-side, seeing and reporting on many of the same events. In fact so closely did they work together that NANA sometimes complained that the ''Times'' was not buying Hemingway’s pieces because they resembled Matthews,’ and at one point Matthews’ own editors at the Times suspected him of plagiarizing Hemingway.{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|pp=411, 420}} A note from Matthews’ assigned editor Raymond McCaw provides, in two columns, seven quite similar passages from Hemingway’s Aragon front dispatches of September 13 and 14 with Matthews’ of September 14, with a penciled note at the bottom: “a deadly parallel if you ask me.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937c|p=}} Edwin James, the managing editor and McCaw’s boss, eventually agreed with Matthews’ defense: “It is quite apparent that you did not file any duplicate of the Hemingway story, or vice versa. As I understand it, the similarity arose from the fact that you{{pg|428|429}}both went to see the same show and saw it at the same time [sic], under the same conditions.”{{sfn|James|1937b|p=}}

Matthews’ dispatches ring of Republican bias as much if not more than anything Hemingway ever filed. The ''Times'' received many letters to the editor complaining about Matthews’ undisguised politics, which also gave serious concern to some of his editors. His description of the Republican May 1937 infighting in Barcelona is a striking example of how his news veered into propaganda and shows just how much he passed along the government’s version of events. The government’s “BLOODLESS TRIUMPH FOUGHT WITH RECOGNIZEDWEAPONS OF DEMOCRACY” turned out to be blatantly false, as the government and the “COMMUNISTS [WHO] DISTINGUISHED THEMSELVES” resorted to violent suppression. His blaming the uprising on the anarchist CNT working as Franco operatives parrots the government’s and the communist party’s public position, even though both charges—that the anarchists precipitated the events and that they were under Nationalist direction—were also false. His dispatch’s optimistic close also equivocates the political reality: “NEW GOVERNMENT HAS TAKEN POWER WHICH APPEARS TOVE CONFIDENCE VAST MAJORITY SPANIARDS IN LOYALIST TERRITORY AND TIS HOPED WILL GAIN EQUAL CONFIDENCE ABROAD STOP VIOLENCE AND REVOLUTION BEEN REPUDIATED AND NEWAND FAR HOPEFULLER PERIOD SEEMS BEGINNING.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937a|p=}}The ''Times'', knowing full well the one-sided coverage of a correspondent writing from one side of the conflict, had a reporter on both sides: Matthews with the Republicans, and William Carney with the Nationalists. They got their facts right (or wrong) as often as the other, their editors concluded; and they inspired about the same number of letters of complaint.{{sfn|James|1937a|p=}}{{sfn|James|1939|p=}}

Furthermore, Matthews’ dispatches received a great deal of substantive editorial revisions. One of Matthews’ Teruel reports had to be cut for length, as McCaw informed James: “This bird sent 2844 words on the same facts which Hemingway covered much better in less than half that number. I wonder if Matthews thinks the paper is thriving, and that cable tolls do not matter a damn. Of course, it had to be cut for space anyway.” McCaw most likely refers here to Matthews’ dispatch corresponding to Hemingway’s “The Attack on Teruel,” though Matthews’ account of the fall of Teruel is also much longer (and more long-winded) than Hemingway’s, and just as personal in terms of describing the dangers{{pg|429|430}} he faced. Indeed its length allows him to share even more of the action he endured.{{sfn|McCaw|1937b|p=}}

Raymond McCaw held a general professional disagreement with Matthews perhaps tainted with over zealousness. Whether a personal or political motive informed that disagreement can’t be determined from the evidence I’ve seen. It is also clear that McCaw’s charges bear some validity—that any responsible editor could have easily and reasonably taken issue where McCaw did. One of the more interesting examples concerns Matthews’ piece on Guadalajara. Because he only saw evidence on Franco’s side of Italian forces, he only reported on Italians. But the ''Times'' editors heard from other sources that German soldiers also participated in the March offensive. They thought it prudent, from this confusion, to change (nine times) “Italian” to “Rebel,” “the foe,” or “Insurgent.” When Matthews saw the published piece he wrote a strenuous objection. In some instances the editors changed paraphrased quotations from his sources. One large paragraph omitted by the editors stressed the first-hand nature of the information, and Matthews underlines the key words: “All day, at every place we stopped and no matter whom we talked to or what we saw, there was only one label—Italian. The dead bodies, the prisoners, the material of every kind, the men who had occupied Brihuega and then fled were Italian and nothing but Italian.” Here and elsewhere in his original story, Matthews emphasizes the “personal knowledge” of its information.{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}{{efn|James supported McCaw on these changes, though later acknowledged that altering quoted sources was perhaps unwarranted(29 April 1937; Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3).}}Yet Matthews did not report on the foreigners fighting for the Republic—it was in fact the Italian Garibali Battalion that routed Franco’s Italians. We might surmise government censorship behind this silence, though Matthews would not cable news of “CENSORSHIP STRICTER” and “BAN ON MENTIONING INTERNATIONALS INCLUDING AMERICANS INSTITUTED TODAY” until July.{{sfn|Matthews|1937b|p=}}Perhaps he cautiously self-censored, or politically self-censored for the same reasons the government would eventually ban mention. Still, his stridency about the omission of foreigners on one side is striking given his knowledge of their contribution to the other side. For this reason too, and his omission of other nationalities on the insurgent side, it seemed only fair to his editor “to stand on the statement that the majority of the Rebels were Italians and let it go at that.”{{sfn|James|1937c|p=}} A reasonable decision.

Throughout his correspondence to his editors and his several books,{{pg|430|431}}Matthews maintained a passionate defense of his eyewitness journalistic standard, a position those close to him understood. “Matthews never believed anything he had not seen with his own eyes,” Joris Ivens wrote. “He never saw his job as reporter as one that permitted him to sit in his hotel and read the handouts of the War Ministry.” {{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=112}} Sidney Franklin recalls that some writers wrote their pieces before arriving in Madrid, and came only for the “legitimacy” of the Madrid dateline.{{sfn|Franklin|1952|p=232}}And Matthews hated, on principle, having his name attached to an article that violated the integrity of his witness. The only way to achieve objectivity, for Matthews, was to acknowledge one’s subjective perspective. Writing to his publisher, Matthews argued that “the full documentary value” of his coverage was lost when the editors altered his submissions for “the apparent necessity of giving more or less equal space to both sides.”{{sfn|Matthews|1939|p=}}

As with Matthews, so too Hemingway. Indeed the commitment to subjectivity
fit quite well with Hemingway’s modernist aesthetics. If Hemingway
focused the dispatches on his perspective—on his own experience dodging
artillery—more than Matthews and more than most, he did so at least partially
to fulfill expectations. NANA approached him, after all, for his name
and personality as much as whatever he would write. Before he even left the
states it pitched him to potential publications, sending out a promotional release with text to be used alongside his forthcoming dispatches and suggesting
they include a photograph: “Mr. Hemingway’s assignment is to get both from the bombed towns and bombed trenches the human story of the war, not just an account of the game being played by general staffs with pins
and a map.”{{sfn|NANA|1937|p=}} NANA also released each individual dispatch with a one-sentence “precede” about the “famous” or “noted” author. Ernest Hemingway was not writing as Herbert Mathews, ace reporter; Hemingway was writing as Ernest Hemingway, famous author of novels and stories well known to be drawn from his own experiences.

That he understood this to be his assignment is further evidenced by a
cable Matthews sent to his ''Times'' editors on April 9, 1937, concerning the
Loyalist attack: “WORKED CONJOINTL WITH HEMINGWAY TODAY HE SENDING EYEWITNESS DESCRIPTION WHILE EYE SENT GENERAL STRATEGY.”{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}When a year later the ''Times'' asked NANA to ensure Hemingway’s reports differed from Matthews, NANA complied by asking Hemingway “to emphasize color rather than straight reporting” not necessarily out of dissatisfaction with Hemingway’s reportage as Baker contends,{{efn|{{harvtxt|Baker|1969|p=}}’s notes date the ''Times'' request to NANA as 8 Apr. 1938, and NANA’s to Hemingway as 15
Apr. 1938 (Princeton University, Firestone Library: Box 18, Folder 8 “1938”), the date of “The Bombing of Tortosa” dispatch.}} but to increase{{pg|431|432}}the chance of selling to the ''Times'' and indeed to ensure the spirit of NANA’s original arrangement with Hemingway. {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}Far from dissatisfied, NANA wrote Hemingway at the end of August 1938 a letter of agreement for his coverage of “a general European war” should it break out, “written in your colorful style” (Hemingway was in Paris, on his way to Spain for the last time during the war).{{sfn|Wheeler|1938|p=}}When Edmund Wilson criticized the selected dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'', Hemingway wrote him that “I was paid to write what are called ‘eye witness’ accounts . . .what is called, or was asked for as ‘color stuff.’ Most of such stuff is faked. Mine was not. It was straight reporting and the personal stuff was what had been asked for by the editors. “Wilson’s estimation was also based upon ''Fact’s'' inclusion of the “The Old Man at the Bridge” story from ''Ken'', “not a news dispatch” at all.{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}Speaking at Carnegie Hall before the showing of a rough cut of ''The Spanish Earth'', shortly after his first trip to Spain and so very much in the context of his wartime work, Hemingway defined the writer’s problem as “project[ing] [what is true] in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2002|p=193}}

Personal, anecdotal journalism had been Hemingway’s signature style from his earliest days filing reports, in the early 1920s from Paris, when his editor at the ''Toronto Star Weekly'' “encouraged [. . .] what Hemingway did best: write about himself in the act of being a reporter.”{{sfn|Reynolds|1989|p=45}}How could he expect that NANA would expect anything else, if indeed NANA did expect anything else? In the Spanish Civil War he at least maintained his eyewitness posture; in World War II, however, he couldn’t keep himself out. His first piece, about D-Day, begins, “No one remembers the date of the Battle of Shiloh. But the day ''we took'' Fox Green beach was the sixth of June, and the wind was blowing hard out of the northwest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1967|p=340}}His venue too—''Collier’s'' magazine—and the fact that he had not written anything in three years further contributed to the story-like nature of the WWII stories, in which he figured as a protagonist—not to mention the stories and involvement he couldn’t write about, armed and running around France more of a free agent than his guerilla-hero Robert Jordan ever was (though he began to transform these experiences into fiction in several unpublished stories). In wartime China in 1943, filing articles for Ralph Ingersoll’s short-lived ''PM'' New York afternoon daily, Hemingway did not even care to be called a news reporter.{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=99}}

It should be mentioned that Hemingway and Matthews enjoyed a great{{pg|432|433}}friendship and working relationship. Hemingway usually brought Matthews, who did not have a car, on his excursions. When Matthews left Madrid for a break in mid April 1937, he had already ensured Hemingway would provide coverage to the ''Times'' through NANA. For one thing, Hemingway did not have to worry about Matthews as a rival for the history books. He could endorse his friends’ book, ''Two Wars and More to Come'', and praise him as “the ablest and the bravest war correspondent writing today “who “when the fakers are all dead [. . .] will be read in the schools” (Advertisement 21) because Matthews posed no threat to Hemingway’s own chances to be read in the schools. The only brief Hemingway ever expressed he really reserved for Matthews’ editors, for not wanting his Teruel street-fighting story and for cutting references to himself in Matthews’ Teruel dispatches so that it appeared only Matthews had been there.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=462}}

As for Hemingway’s neglecting to name everyone with him for every story, the ''Times'' cutting of his name suggests that such exactitude was hardly a priority. A paper had no incentive for announcing the fact that a competitor’s
correspondent stood beside its own to see and report the same
events. NANA changed at least one vague Hemingway “we,” which admits
to the presence of others, to “this correspondent”
—we can hardly fault Hemingway for working in the spirit of his
employer’s standards.{{sfn|NANA|1938|p=}}{{efn|“we” in typescript and radiogram (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 1 and Folder 25).}} Do readers care that Matthews, Delmer, Gellhorn,
and others were there? The story’s effect and the limited word count also
weighed against such roll calls. One editor chose not to clutter the dispatch
on the great retreat across the Ebro with all the names of the American International Brigade volunteers Hemingway encountered, an omission of
Content more far serious than that of omitted correspondent names.{{efn| Radiogram insert dateline 4 April 1938 (HRC: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 25).}} Hemingway
often gave the names of the reporters with him, such as at Teruel;
nor was he the only reporter to sometimes neglect to do so. Martha Gellhorn,
for example, used a vague “we” and singled herself out as the primary
participant in some of her stories.

By using first-person reportage Hemingway—and Matthews and Gellhorn And most of the group covering the war—were operating solidly within
convention. William Stott, in ''Documentary Expression and Thirties America'',
calls this first-person ''participant observer'' technique “the most common sort
of documentary reportage in the thirties” that worked “by vicarious persuasion:
the writer partook of the events he reported and bared his feelings
and attitudes to influence the reader’s own.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=178-9}}{{efn|He specifically includes Hemingway et al (180). {{harvtxt|Stott|1986|p=}}}} Stott also observes {{pg|433|434}}another technique to enable documentary reportage to “talk to us, and convince us that we, our deepest interests, are engaged,” in the use of the second person: “Thirties documentaries constantly address ‘you,’ the ‘you’ who is we the audience, and exhorts, wheedles, begs us to identify, pity, participate.” His examples include Dorothy Parker’s Spanish Civil War writing, and Hemingway’s 1935 “First-Hand Report on the Florida Hurricane.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=27-8}} A number of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches employ the second-person as a way of bringing the reader along for the ride.

Hemingway’s dispatches used personal pronouns more artfully than is generally recognized. “A New Kind of War,” which William Braasch Watson notes as having been “[w]ritten with more care and imagination” than its predecessors, begins in second person: “The window of the hotel is open and, as you lie in bed, you hear the firing in the front line seventeen blocks away.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=29}} He takes “you” outside, to see the damage and the dead from the bombing. “Someone makes a joke about missing teeth and someone else says not to make that joke. And everyone has the feeling that characterizes war. It wasn’t me, see? It wasn’t me.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} The tension between the first person and second-person pronouns—the movement toward identification with “you” and the insistence that “it wasn’t me”—continues in the next line. Here the reader is at once still in the narrator’s shoes, but strangely distanced from the narrator through biographical tidbit and, at the same time, asked to see himself in the enemy: “The Italian dead up on the Guadalajara weren’t you although Italian dead, because of where you had spent your boyhood, always seemed, still, like Our Dead.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} It is worth quoting at length the dispatch’s transition to first person:
<blockquote>
After the shell that lit on the sidewalk in front of the hotel you got a beautiful double corner room on that side, twice the size of the one you’d had, for less than a dollar. It wasn’t me they killed. See? No. Not me. It wasn’t me anymore.

Then in a hospital given by the American Friends of Spanish Democracy located out behind the Morata front along the road
to Valencia they said, “Raven wants to see you.”

“Do I know him?”

“I don’t think so,” they said. “But he wants to see you.”

“Where is he?”

“Upstairs.”{{pg|434|435}}In the room upstairs they are giving a blood transfusion to a man with a very gray face who lay on a cot with his arm out looking away from the gurgling bottle and moaning in a very impersonal way. He moaned mechanically and at regular intervals and it did not seem to be him that made the sound. His lips did not move.

“Where’s Raven?” I asked.

“I’m here,” said Raven.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=31}}</blockquote>
The piece simply could not have sustained the second-person for the remaining five pages. More significantly, for this deeply personal exchange between the writer and the faceless, eyeless soldier, Hemingway could not hide in the rhetorical device of the second-person. In the process, he effects a reversal of the usual pronoun game; instead of identifying with the all embracing “you,” we leave that trick behind and become fully attached to
the narratorial “I” as ourselves, as we might not have been had the article
begun in the first person. And even as the narrator identifies himself by name
for the only time in any of the dispatches—“Hemingway,” and later
“Ernest”—as decidedly not ourselves. We do not say, ''It isn’t me''. The historian
Hugh Thomas notes “the refreshing candour” of Hemingway’s naming
himself “in the world of the International Brigades, where no one’s name
seemed to be truthfully given.”{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=591}}{{efn|For Watson, the dispatch “seems, in fact, on the verge of becoming a story.”{{harvtxt|Watson|1988|p=29}}}}

A year later Hemingway’s “Tortosa Calmly Awaits Assault” resists admitting
the city’s imminent fall. Yet it does so anyway, by subtly alluding to the
wartime rhetoric of sacrificed blood irrigating the earth and rejuvenating
Spain. Such rhetoric was common during the war, appearing in speeches,
print, and poetry. Many of the poems in Cary Nelson’s anthology ''The Wound
and the Dream: Sixty Years of American Poems about the Civil War'' join in the
Spanish and international chorus’s general connection between Republican
soldiers and the land, and the particular singing of their dead nourishing
the land. We find such language in La Pasionaria’s farewell address to the International Brigades, her epilogue to ''The Book of the XV Brigade'', and Hemingway’s famous eulogy “On the American Dead in Spain”: “For our dead are
a part of the earth of Spain now and the earth of Spain can never die. Each
winter it will seem to die and each spring it will come alive again. Our dead
will live with it forever.”{{sfn|Nelson|1994|p=3}}{{efn| Reprinted in {{harvtxt|Bruccoli|2006|p=76}} and {{harvtxt|Nelson|1994|p=37}} (the drafts at the JFK are titled “The Dead at Jarama”). In addition to the poems in Nelson’s anthology, see the excerpt from Boris Todrin’s “Spanish Sowing” in {{harvtxt|Guttmann|1969|pp=179-180}}.}} The Tortosa dispatch implies the deaths of{{pg|435|436}}many Republican soldiers in its final paragraph’s description of the newborn onions:
<blockquote>The artillery was picking up a little now. Two came in at a fairly useful place and as the smoke blew away ahead and settled through the trees, you picked an armful of spring onions from a field beside the trail that led to the Tortosa road. They were the first onions of the spring and peeling one I found they were plump white and not too strong. The Ebro Delta has a fine rich land, and where the onions grow, tomorrow will be a battle.
{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=84}}</blockquote>

The echo is quiet, and perhaps unconscious, but there nevertheless. The opening boastfulness of “American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents”
should be taken somewhat ironically. The dispatch begins by announcing
that for “two days we have been doing the most dangerous thing
you can do in this war. That is keep close behind an unstabilized line where
the enemy are attacking with mechanized forces.” Then, a few pages later,
we learn about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade survivors of the spring 1938
Nationalist offensive that took Bob Merriman and eventually reached the
Mediterranean Sea. Reading about these survivors creeping through enemy
camps, stepping on a sleeping German soldier’s hand, sprinting “across an
open field toward the Ebro bank and being sniped at by artillery controlled
by an observation plane overhead” and then “the desperate swimming of
the Ebro” naked, we are asked to place the correspondent’s plight in due perspective.{{sfn|Watson|1988|pp=71-2}} This story certainly escapes the charge of a monotonous
battle and bombing scene; its switch from apparently boastful to
awe-struck witness feels almost deliberately self-conscious. Other choice selfironic
moments come in the dispatches of that pre-Teruel quiet fall of 1938.
The one titled “Hemingway, Covering War, Tells of Brush with Death” has little
to report from Madrid other than the new aftershave brand he is trying.
In “Loyalists’ Drive Seen Progressing as Planned,” he writes that “Shells are
all much the same and if they don’t hit you there is no story and if they do
you won’t have to write it.” {{sfn|Watson|1988|p=58}}

Hemingway’s dispatches are sometimes monotonous because his war was
Usually monotonous—as wars are most of the time. It should also be kept in
mind that scholars reviewing Hemingway’s NANA dispatches one after{{pg|436|437}}another do not relive the original reading experience. Hemingway wrote dispatches sporadically, papers did not run all of his dispatches, papers edited and cut them, and readers read at least a couple of papers’ worth of other articles in between. He told Edmund Wilson as much in defending himself against Wilson’s critique of the selected (and heavily edited and cut) dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'' without his consent: “If you are being paid to be shot at and write about it you are supposed to mention the shooting. [. . .] But I do not go in for re-printing journalism.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}

If we can in this way better understand his style, and at least explain it if
not excuse it, we similarly ought to try to contextualize—and perhaps
excuse—the moral problem. The two issues here are the specific condemnation
of Hemingway’s silence about Republican atrocities and the general
question of biased reporting (the latter of which has already partially been
addressed).

Hemingway knew, as Donaldson writes, that mentioning the atrocities
“would arouse anticommunist sentiments back in the States and effectively
undermine any possibility of American intervention.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=394}} It is also doubtful
that reporting them would have stopped them. But reporting Republican
atrocities from Spain was not possible for the simple reason that all dispatches
went through a government censor. Matthews cabled his editors
from Paris in May 1937 to tell them that “censorship does not permit us to
say when the ‘telefonica’ is hit. So whenever you see reference in my
despatches [sic] to ‘an important building in the center of the city’ or words
to that effect, the cable desk can know that it is the telefonica.” {{sfn|Matthews|1937c|p=}} As already noted, by July he would cable “CENSORSHIP
STRICTER” as the ban on mentioning internationals went into effect. {{sfn|Matthews|1937d|p=}}{{sfn|Matthews|1937e|p=}} Cowles’ memoir confirms the
aggressive censorship, observing that it limited journalists to exactly the kind of material Hemingway wrote about:
<blockquote>There were frequent attempts to “beat the censor” by employing American slang expressions, but this came to an end when a Canadian girl joined the staff. The International Brigades were not allowed to be publicized; no reference could be made to Russian armaments, and buildings and streets which suffered
bombardments could not be identified.</blockquote>{{pg|437|438}}<blockquote>It was only in the realm of the human interest story that the journalists had a free hand. They could describe bombardments to their heart’s content.{{sfn|Cowles|1941|p=20}}</blockquote>
Hemingway and everyone else—to reserve incrimination for Hemingway is hardly just. No correspondent covering Republican Spain reported suspicious imprisonments and disappearances by government agents.

Hemingway, through Joris Ivens and ''The Spanish Earth'' project, had better
access to officials than most. Had he been able somehow to report such
activity, he would have lost that access and would probably have been kicked
out of the country. His fame would have likely prevented his own officially
sponsored disappearance, though he still worried, especially as so many of
such crimes on the Republican side occurred from free agents. When Jasper
Wood printed the anarchist F.A.I. banner in the limited edition book version
of ''The Spanish Earth'', Hemingway expressed his anxieties bluntly in a letter
to Jasper on August 20, 1938. It is hardly “petulant,” he scolded, “not to wish
to be shot.”{{sfn|Davison|1988|p=128}} Hostility in the Republic against the anarchists
ran high; after the Barcelona May Day conflict, the government’s foreign
minister told U.S. Ambassador Claude Bowers that “anarchist revolt
throughout Catalonia and not only expected but welcomed as an opportunity
to liquidate the anarchists who have been hostile from the beginning.”
{{sfn|NA|1954|p=292}}{{efn| The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State, 5 May 1937.}}

It is possible that Hemingway’s dispatch stating that “not one friend [. . .]
has been executed or is missing” was his clever means of reporting
the rumors and indeed the general fact while evading the censors, as in this very dispatch he acknowledged the presence of a censor after a bombardment.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=34}}
Matthews, on the other hand, never found a way to mention the
censors or admit even the possibility of people gone missing in the Republic.
Peter Moreira has observed that in a 1943 dispatch Hemingway related a remark by a British officer about the Chinese Nationalist government’s being
“hopeless on the offensive” because censorship “prevented American reporters
From actually saying that the Nationalists wouldn’t attack, surmising that by telling this anecdote Hemingway could sneak such a judgment into
his reports.”{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=77}} In Spain, censors aside, the eyewitness standard and his
own safety and continuing ability to report the war, and, yes, his passionate
support of the government contributed to his decision. He could have written
about government abuses from the states, but then could not return to{{pg|438|439}}cover the war and support the cause—a justification other journalists, those who did not return after the spring of 1937, did not enjoy. In his mind too, knowing what he heard of fascist atrocities, any reportage against the government lessening its chances of victory through killing hopes of increased international aid would have led to more deaths at Franco’s hands that the much smaller number inspired by fifth column paranoia.{{efn|''Hemingway’s Second War'' discusses in greater depth Hemingway’s politics and his falling out
with John Dos Passos over the execution of José Robles.}}

The accusation that Hemingway did not write about Republican atrocities
because he was saving it for his fiction I find baseless.{{sfn|Knightley|2004|p=232}}{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=402}}{{efn|Hemingway’s casual comment to colleagues calling dibs on Pepe Quintanilla, the executioner of
Madrid, is not sufficient evidence.}}Carolyn Moorehead, in her biography of Martha Gellhorn, describes
the climate for the Madrid correspondents that first spring: “And so,
day by day, the correspondents walked a thin and nervous line between truth,
evasions, and propaganda, telling one another that though it was not all right
if things were made up and presented as true, it was acceptable to describe
what you wanted, provided it was true and provided your readers were aware
of your position.”{{sfn|Moorehead|2003|p=125}} My own sense is that they did not walk the line quite
so nervously; their passionate commitment, and their principles of position
disclosure and the eyewitness standard, made that walk relatively easy.

The problem of ''committed journalism'', even sixty years later, has not been
resolved—as anyone paying attention to the media and world affairs well
knows. One person’s truth is another person’s propaganda. Certainly, as
Knightley notes, reporting from “the heart” affects one’s judgment.{{sfn|Knightley|2004|pp=234-5}}
Yet to attempt “balance,” per the edits to Matthews’ Guadalajara piece, betrays
one’s believed truth. Furthermore, the kind of reporting done by the
correspondents with the Republic—committed, one-sided, optimistic,
heroic, human interest work by embedded writers—would be practiced
widely and without reserve during World War II. Such narrative journalism,
with roots in Louise May Alcott’s “Hospital Sketches” series published in the
''Boston Commonwealth'', and more immediately in 1930s social documentary
writing whose “essence” is “not information”, anticipated postwar
new journalism’s adoption of novelistic narrative technique for nonfiction
which culminated with such wartime books as Norman Mailer’s ''Armies of
the Night'' and Michael Herr’s ''Dispatches''.{{sfn|Stott|1986|p=11}} Some of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches
fall in this line of development.

Today we might categorize such writing under the awkward umbrella
term ''creative nonfiction''. That term certainly fits the mixed bag of nonfiction
narratives and commentaries Hemingway published during the war in
Ken magazine. These pieces are essays, not journalism, several of which{{pg|439|440}}directly appeal for support for the Republic, and most of which really deal with the approaching world war. ''Ken'' wanted “precisely the kind of opinion articles he could not write for NANA.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=433}} His article, “The Cardinal Picks a Winner,” shows a photo of a row of dead children from Barcelona and another one with Nationalist officers saluting and Catholic officials with raised hands, apparently making the fascist salute as well. He ends ironically: “So I ''don’t believe'' the people shown in the photo can really be making it. I would rather prefer to think that the photograph was faked.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=436}} When Hemingway argues in “A Program for U.S. Realism” that the United States should stay out of the next war except to stuff its pockets through arms sales, one has to wonder, given his call and the democratic nations’ failure to save Spain, if we are to sniff sarcasm here.

The language of the dispatches, with their corrective intent against
Franco’s propaganda, does risk propagandizing. Hemingway’s optimism and
anti-fascism certainly colored his correspondence work. His criticism of the
anarchist and POUM militia for their inactivity on the Aragon front, for example,
sounds a lot like the Spanish Communist Party’s.{{efn|It at least sounds almost exactly like Dolores Ibarruri in her memoir. To the anarchists’ complaint
that they had no arms, she retorts “that they had more arms than did many other fronts. . . .
What they didn’t have and what they were constantly demanding were airplanes and tanks .And
they didn’t have them because the Republic government didn’t have them either, except for those
it received as aid from the Soviet Union.” {{harvtxt|Ibarruri|1966|pp=238-284}} Yet the various Catalonia militia were not
as well equipped with small arms as the more regular Popular Army units, and because of the
terrain tanks and planes were in fact necessary.}}
But unlike
Matthews, Hemingway limited his reports within the Republic to military
matters. Hemingway may have generally condemned the anarchists in his
nonfiction, considering their activity as hampering the war effort, but he
never repeated the accusation of their collaboration with the rebels, as
Matthews had done. And when Hemingway commented on the Bareclona
crisis, he referred only to the government—not the communists, as
Matthews had done.{{efn|Hemingway’s comments in “Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win” NANA staff
correspondent dispatch. Though arguably he was propagandizing by hiding the communist influence—
to mention the communists to an American audience would not gain sympathy for the
cause.}}Nor did he write articles asserting the limited role of
the communists in the government, or explaining Spanish anarchism, also
as Matthews had done.{{efn|An article on the communists’ limited role appeared in late November 1937, as discussed in a
missive from The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State on 2
Dec. 1937 (United States 461). Matthews’ “Anarchism: Spain’s Enigma” appeared in the New York
Times 22 Aug. 1937: 6, 14.}}

During one of Hemingway’s stateside breaks between trips to Spain, his
children asked if he was a “tool” of Stalin, an accusation tossed by a schoolmate
who, presumably parroting his or her parents, probably understood
the term no better than Hemingway’s children. {{sfn|Hemingway|nd|p=}}
Hemingway believed in the Republic’s potential, but he was never a dupe of
the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) or Comintern. As did many others, he
accepted PCE’s presence in the government for its discipline and organization
toward winning the war, and he understood the material necessity for
Comintern’s support. It should also be noted, as historians Hugh Thomas
and Helen Graham have reminded us, that the communism associated with
the Republic wasn’t particularly communist anyway.{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=628}}{{sfn|Graham|2002|p=184}} {{pg|440|441}}

Hemingway declined to follow Joris Ivens’ suggestion that he write a
dispatch on the significant role of the political commissars in the Republican
military, even though that would have meant
featuring his brave new friend Gustav Regler.{{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=}} Hemingway also, in a letter
justifying his work to Jack Wheeler at NANA, wrote about choosing not to
send a dispatch he had written because it might strike readers as propaganda
“no matter how true” (Letter to Jack Wheeler).{{sfn|Hemingway|1938b|p=}}

Hemingway went to Spain to see the war himself and to support the Republic
through his ambulance fund. The paychecks from NANA and the
fundraising from ''The Spanish Earth'' helped. Whatever propagandistic streak
colors the dispatches pales in comparison to the documentary. The filmmaker,
Joris Ivens, was well established in European communist circles. The
documentary genre then and now has occupied a slippery position between
the extremes of impossible-to-achieve empirical nonfiction and of the outright
fictionalized. Evaluations of Hemingway’s journalism are informed by
knowledge of ''The Spanish Earth'' and the ''Ken'' essays to the detriment of the
journalism. And the very nature of the slippery documentary genre may enable
the film to escape opprobrium. It wasn’t reportage; it was altogether
something else. But for that matter, Hemingway’s dispatches weren’t purely
reportage either, and if not ''altogether'' something else, still something else,
and should be reckoned with accordingly.

== Notes ==
{{notelist|20em}}

==Citations==
{{Reflist|15em}}

==Works Cited==
{{refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker
|first=Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Bruccoli |first=Matthew |date=2006 |title=Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame |url= |location=Columbia |publisher=U of South Caronia P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Cowles |first=Virginia |date=1941 |title=Looking for Trouble |url= |location=New York
|publisher=Harper & Brothers |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Davison |first=Richard Allan |title=The Publication of Hemingway’s The Spanish Earth: An Untold Story |url= |journal=Hemingway Review
|volume=7.2 |issue= |date=1988
|pages=122-130 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson
|first=Scott |date=2009 |title=Fitzgerald & Hemingway: Works and Days |url= |location=New York |publisher=Columbia UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Franklin |first=Sidney |date=1952 |title=Bullfighter from Brooklyn |url= |location=New York |publisher=Prentice-Hall |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Graham |first=Helen |date=2002 |title=The Spanish Republic at War 1936-1939 |url= |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Guttmann |first=Allen |date=1962 |title=The Wound in the Heart: American and the Spanish Civil War |url= |location=New York |publisher=Free Press of Glencoe |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1967 |title=By-Line: Ernest Hemingway |url= |location=New York |publisher=Scibner |pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Trogdon
|editor-first=Robert W.
|author-mask=1
|title=Fascism is a Lie
|url=
|journal=Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference |volume==
|issue=
|date=2002
|pages=193-6
|location=New York
|publisher=Carroll & Graf
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 May 1937
|chapter=Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=nd
|chapter=The Home Front
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938a
|chapter=Letter to Edmund Wilson
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=2 June 1938b
|chapter=Letter to Jack Wheeler
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=14 Feb 1939
|chapter=On the American Dead in Spain
|title=TS. New Masses
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Baker
|editor-first=Carlos
|author-mask=1
|date=2003
|chapter=The Hadely Mowrer
|title=Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Scribner
|pages=462-3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ibarruri
|first=Dolores
|date=1966
|title=They Shall Not Pass: The Autobiography of La Pasionaria
|url=
|location=United States
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|date=1969
|title=The Camera and I
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|author-mask=1
|date=26 Apr 1937
|chapter=Letter to Ernest Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|date=20 Nov 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Bertrand Weaver
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=12 Oct 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=25 Apr 1939
|chapter=Letter to M.B. Tenney
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Apr 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Knightley
|first=Phillip
|date=2004
|title=The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq
|url=
|location=Baltimore
|publisher=John Hopkins
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=
|date=9 Apr 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=TS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=11 Apr 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=8 May 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=6 July 1937d
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=July 1937e
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=22 March 1939
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 9
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=
|date=20 May 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=20 Dec 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 5
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Sep 1937c
|chapter=Note to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moorehead
|first=Caroline
|date=2003
|title=Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Henry Holt
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moreira
|first=Peter
|date=2006
|title=Hemingway on the China Front: His WWII Spy Mission with Martha Gellhorn
|url=
|location=Washington D.C.
|publisher=Potomac Books
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|date=5 Feb 1937
|chapter=Promotion Box: Hemingway, For Immediate Release
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|author-mask=1
|date=4 Apr 1938
|chapter=Promotion Box: American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|editor-last=Nelson
|editor-first=Card
|date=1994
|title=Remembering Spain: Hemingway’s Civil War Eulogy and the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
|url=
|location=Urbana
|publisher=U of Illinois
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Reynolds
|first=Michael
|date=1989
|title=Hemingway: The Paris Years
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Norton
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Stott
|first=William
|date=1986
|title=Documentary Expression and Thirties America
|url=
|location=Chicago
|publisher=U of Chicago P
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Thomas
|first=Hugh
|date=2001
|title=The Spanish Civil War, Rev. ed.
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Modern Library
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine
|last=''Two Wars and More to Come''
|first=
|date=24 Jan 1938
|title=Best Sellers of the Week Here and Elsewhere
|type=Advertisement
|url=
|magazine=New York Times
|pages=
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=NA
|first=
|title=United States. Dept. of State
|url=
|journal= Foreign Relations of the Untied States, 1937 |volume=1
|issue=General
|date=1954
|pages=
|location=Washington
|publisher=GPO
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Watson
|first=William Braasch
|title=Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches
|url=
|journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=7.2
|issue=
|date=1988
|pages=4-121
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Wheeler
|first=John H.
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938
|chapter=Letter to Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection, Box 3 Folder 14
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}

{{refend}}
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches

2025-04-20T14:16:13Z

MerAtticus: inline citation erase

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
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{{byline|last=Vernon |first=Alex |abstract=The Spanish Civil War began in July 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally-restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy. By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches.}}

{{dc|dc=T|HE SPANISH CIVIL WAR BEGAN ON}} 17-18 JULY, 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy, to collaborate with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens on the pro-Republican documentary ''The Spanish Earth'', and to pursue his fledgling love affair with Martha Gellhorn.{{efn|Adapted and printed with permission from ''Hemingway’s Second War: Bearing Witness to the Spanish Civil War.'' Iowa City: U of Iowa Press, 2011.}}
By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches for NANA.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=4}}{{efn|Quotations from the NANA dispatches follow the Diplomatic Text established by William Braasch’s “Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches.” I prefer NANA’s titles rather than Watson’s. For my disagreements with some of Watson’s datings, see my comments on specific dispatches in ''Hemingway’s Second War'' {{harvtxt|Watson|1988|p=}}.}}The secondary sources habitually judge them inferior journalism. Carlos Baker in the first Hemingway biography, for example, complains that the dialogue was “so heavily stamped with personal mannerisms as to be of doubtful authenticity.” Baker sees a “curious monotony in his stories of battles and bombardments,” a gratuitous use of graphic imagery “to shock his readers,” and “a note of triumphant boastfulness” in reporting proximity to danger. He also faults Hemingway for “often hint[ing] he was alone when in fact he was usually with Martha Gellhorn, Matthews, and Delmer.” Hemingway lacked Dos Passos’ “eye for telling details” and the “meticulous exactitude and inclusiveness that characterized the best work of Herbert Matthews and Sefton Delmer.”{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}

Philip Knightley’s ''The First Casualty'', the standard history of war correspondence, paraphrases Baker but with a trouncing final judgment:{{pg|427|428}}Hemingway’s “performance as a war correspondent was abysmally bad.” But Knightley goes beyond “technical” dissatisfaction to moral condemnation. Not just “unjustifiably optimistic”—an excusable offense—Hemingway’s reporting was “unforgivable” in its “total failure to report the Communist persecution, imprisonment, and summary execution of ‘untrustworthy elements’ on the Republican side, when he knew this was happening and when disclosing it might well have prevented further horrors like this.”
{{sfn|Knightley|2004 |pp=231–32}}{{efn|In my view, Knightley does not sufficiently acknowledge his paraphrasing of Baker.}}

Such criticisms in the final analysis might bear out. As Scott Donaldson writes, Hemingway advanced the Republican cause in his dispatches by eliciting “the deepest possible feelings of horror and of sympathy for the victims” of the Madrid bombardment; his “undue optimism” often “ignored Loyalist defeats and exaggerated the importance of its victories”; and “he repeatedly called attention to the participation of Italians and Germans on Franco’s side.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=426}} It also served as a recruitment tool—Milton Wolff, for example, acknowledged the strong influence Hemingway’s dispatches had on his decision to volunteer. Nevertheless, I think it a worthwhile exercise to attend a little more studiously to Hemingway’s dispatches, their context, and their artistry. I don’t necessarily intend to reverse the general opinion of the correspondence, only to achieve a better and more sympathetic understanding.

Herbert Matthews’ reporting for the ''New York Times'' will serve as a convenient comparison for two reasons. First, because both Baker and Knightley use Matthews’ journalism as the standard of excellence to pass judgment on Hemingway’s; and second, because the two worked practically side-by-side, seeing and reporting on many of the same events. In fact so closely did they work together that NANA sometimes complained that the ''Times'' was not buying Hemingway’s pieces because they resembled Matthews,’ and at one point Matthews’ own editors at the Times suspected him of plagiarizing Hemingway.{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|pp=411, 420}} A note from Matthews’ assigned editor Raymond McCaw provides, in two columns, seven quite similar passages from Hemingway’s Aragon front dispatches of September 13 and 14 with Matthews’ of September 14, with a penciled note at the bottom: “a deadly parallel if you ask me.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937c|p=}} Edwin James, the managing editor and McCaw’s boss, eventually agreed with Matthews’ defense: “It is quite apparent that you did not file any duplicate of the Hemingway story, or vice versa. As I understand it, the similarity arose from the fact that you{{pg|428|429}}both went to see the same show and saw it at the same time [sic], under the same conditions.”{{sfn|James|1937b|p=}}

Matthews’ dispatches ring of Republican bias as much if not more than anything Hemingway ever filed. The ''Times'' received many letters to the editor complaining about Matthews’ undisguised politics, which also gave serious concern to some of his editors. His description of the Republican May 1937 infighting in Barcelona is a striking example of how his news veered into propaganda and shows just how much he passed along the government’s version of events. The government’s “BLOODLESS TRIUMPH FOUGHT WITH RECOGNIZEDWEAPONS OF DEMOCRACY” turned out to be blatantly false, as the government and the “COMMUNISTS [WHO] DISTINGUISHED THEMSELVES” resorted to violent suppression. His blaming the uprising on the anarchist CNT working as Franco operatives parrots the government’s and the communist party’s public position, even though both charges—that the anarchists precipitated the events and that they were under Nationalist direction—were also false. His dispatch’s optimistic close also equivocates the political reality: “NEW GOVERNMENT HAS TAKEN POWER WHICH APPEARS TOVE CONFIDENCE VAST MAJORITY SPANIARDS IN LOYALIST TERRITORY AND TIS HOPED WILL GAIN EQUAL CONFIDENCE ABROAD STOP VIOLENCE AND REVOLUTION BEEN REPUDIATED AND NEWAND FAR HOPEFULLER PERIOD SEEMS BEGINNING.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937a|p=}}The ''Times'', knowing full well the one-sided coverage of a correspondent writing from one side of the conflict, had a reporter on both sides: Matthews with the Republicans, and William Carney with the Nationalists. They got their facts right (or wrong) as often as the other, their editors concluded; and they inspired about the same number of letters of complaint.{{sfn|James|1937a|p=}}{{sfn|James|1939|p=}}

Furthermore, Matthews’ dispatches received a great deal of substantive editorial revisions. One of Matthews’ Teruel reports had to be cut for length, as McCaw informed James: “This bird sent 2844 words on the same facts which Hemingway covered much better in less than half that number. I wonder if Matthews thinks the paper is thriving, and that cable tolls do not matter a damn. Of course, it had to be cut for space anyway.” McCaw most likely refers here to Matthews’ dispatch corresponding to Hemingway’s “The Attack on Teruel,” though Matthews’ account of the fall of Teruel is also much longer (and more long-winded) than Hemingway’s, and just as personal in terms of describing the dangers{{pg|429|430}} he faced. Indeed its length allows him to share even more of the action he endured.{{sfn|McCaw|1937b|p=}}

Raymond McCaw held a general professional disagreement with Matthews perhaps tainted with over zealousness. Whether a personal or political motive informed that disagreement can’t be determined from the evidence I’ve seen. It is also clear that McCaw’s charges bear some validity—that any responsible editor could have easily and reasonably taken issue where McCaw did. One of the more interesting examples concerns Matthews’ piece on Guadalajara. Because he only saw evidence on Franco’s side of Italian forces, he only reported on Italians. But the ''Times'' editors heard from other sources that German soldiers also participated in the March offensive. They thought it prudent, from this confusion, to change (nine times) “Italian” to “Rebel,” “the foe,” or “Insurgent.” When Matthews saw the published piece he wrote a strenuous objection. In some instances the editors changed paraphrased quotations from his sources. One large paragraph omitted by the editors stressed the first-hand nature of the information, and Matthews underlines the key words: “All day, at every place we stopped and no matter whom we talked to or what we saw, there was only one label—Italian. The dead bodies, the prisoners, the material of every kind, the men who had occupied Brihuega and then fled were Italian and nothing but Italian.” Here and elsewhere in his original story, Matthews emphasizes the “personal knowledge” of its information.{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}{{efn|James supported McCaw on these changes, though later acknowledged that altering quoted sources was perhaps unwarranted(29 April 1937; Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3).}}Yet Matthews did not report on the foreigners fighting for the Republic—it was in fact the Italian Garibali Battalion that routed Franco’s Italians. We might surmise government censorship behind this silence, though Matthews would not cable news of “CENSORSHIP STRICTER” and “BAN ON MENTIONING INTERNATIONALS INCLUDING AMERICANS INSTITUTED TODAY” until July.{{sfn|Matthews|1937b|p=}}Perhaps he cautiously self-censored, or politically self-censored for the same reasons the government would eventually ban mention. Still, his stridency about the omission of foreigners on one side is striking given his knowledge of their contribution to the other side. For this reason too, and his omission of other nationalities on the insurgent side, it seemed only fair to his editor “to stand on the statement that the majority of the Rebels were Italians and let it go at that.”{{sfn|James|1937c|p=}} A reasonable decision.

Throughout his correspondence to his editors and his several books,{{pg|430|431}}Matthews maintained a passionate defense of his eyewitness journalistic standard, a position those close to him understood. “Matthews never believed anything he had not seen with his own eyes,” Joris Ivens wrote. “He never saw his job as reporter as one that permitted him to sit in his hotel and read the handouts of the War Ministry.” {{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=112}} Sidney Franklin recalls that some writers wrote their pieces before arriving in Madrid, and came only for the “legitimacy” of the Madrid dateline.{{sfn|Franklin|1952|p=232}}And Matthews hated, on principle, having his name attached to an article that violated the integrity of his witness. The only way to achieve objectivity, for Matthews, was to acknowledge one’s subjective perspective. Writing to his publisher, Matthews argued that “the full documentary value” of his coverage was lost when the editors altered his submissions for “the apparent necessity of giving more or less equal space to both sides.”{{sfn|Matthews|1939|p=}}

As with Matthews, so too Hemingway. Indeed the commitment to subjectivity
fit quite well with Hemingway’s modernist aesthetics. If Hemingway
focused the dispatches on his perspective—on his own experience dodging
artillery—more than Matthews and more than most, he did so at least partially
to fulfill expectations. NANA approached him, after all, for his name
and personality as much as whatever he would write. Before he even left the
states it pitched him to potential publications, sending out a promotional release with text to be used alongside his forthcoming dispatches and suggesting
they include a photograph: “Mr. Hemingway’s assignment is to get both from the bombed towns and bombed trenches the human story of the war, not just an account of the game being played by general staffs with pins
and a map.”{{sfn|NANA|1937|p=}} NANA also released each individual dispatch with a one-sentence “precede” about the “famous” or “noted” author. Ernest Hemingway was not writing as Herbert Mathews, ace reporter; Hemingway was writing as Ernest Hemingway, famous author of novels and stories well known to be drawn from his own experiences.

That he understood this to be his assignment is further evidenced by a
cable Matthews sent to his ''Times'' editors on April 9, 1937, concerning the
Loyalist attack: “WORKED CONJOINTL WITH HEMINGWAY TODAY HE SENDING EYEWITNESS DESCRIPTION WHILE EYE SENT GENERAL STRATEGY.”{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}When a year later the ''Times'' asked NANA to ensure Hemingway’s reports differed from Matthews, NANA complied by asking Hemingway “to emphasize color rather than straight reporting” not necessarily out of dissatisfaction with Hemingway’s reportage as Baker contends,{{efn|{{harvtxt|Baker|1969|p=}}’s notes date the ''Times'' request to NANA as 8 Apr. 1938, and NANA’s to Hemingway as 15
Apr. 1938 (Princeton University, Firestone Library: Box 18, Folder 8 “1938”), the date of “The Bombing of Tortosa” dispatch.}} but to increase{{pg|431|432}}the chance of selling to the ''Times'' and indeed to ensure the spirit of NANA’s original arrangement with Hemingway. {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}Far from dissatisfied, NANA wrote Hemingway at the end of August 1938 a letter of agreement for his coverage of “a general European war” should it break out, “written in your colorful style” (Hemingway was in Paris, on his way to Spain for the last time during the war).{{sfn|Wheeler|1938|p=}}When Edmund Wilson criticized the selected dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'', Hemingway wrote him that “I was paid to write what are called ‘eye witness’ accounts . . .what is called, or was asked for as ‘color stuff.’ Most of such stuff is faked. Mine was not. It was straight reporting and the personal stuff was what had been asked for by the editors. “Wilson’s estimation was also based upon ''Fact’s'' inclusion of the “The Old Man at the Bridge” story from ''Ken'', “not a news dispatch” at all.{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}Speaking at Carnegie Hall before the showing of a rough cut of ''The Spanish Earth'', shortly after his first trip to Spain and so very much in the context of his wartime work, Hemingway defined the writer’s problem as “project[ing] [what is true] in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2002|p=193}}

Personal, anecdotal journalism had been Hemingway’s signature style from his earliest days filing reports, in the early 1920s from Paris, when his editor at the ''Toronto Star Weekly'' “encouraged [. . .] what Hemingway did best: write about himself in the act of being a reporter.”{{sfn|Reynolds|1989|p=45}}How could he expect that NANA would expect anything else, if indeed NANA did expect anything else? In the Spanish Civil War he at least maintained his eyewitness posture; in World War II, however, he couldn’t keep himself out. His first piece, about D-Day, begins, “No one remembers the date of the Battle of Shiloh. But the day ''we took'' Fox Green beach was the sixth of June, and the wind was blowing hard out of the northwest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1967|p=340}}His venue too—''Collier’s'' magazine—and the fact that he had not written anything in three years further contributed to the story-like nature of the WWII stories, in which he figured as a protagonist—not to mention the stories and involvement he couldn’t write about, armed and running around France more of a free agent than his guerilla-hero Robert Jordan ever was (though he began to transform these experiences into fiction in several unpublished stories). In wartime China in 1943, filing articles for Ralph Ingersoll’s short-lived ''PM'' New York afternoon daily, Hemingway did not even care to be called a news reporter.{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=99}}

It should be mentioned that Hemingway and Matthews enjoyed a great{{pg|432|433}}friendship and working relationship. Hemingway usually brought Matthews, who did not have a car, on his excursions. When Matthews left Madrid for a break in mid April 1937, he had already ensured Hemingway would provide coverage to the ''Times'' through NANA. For one thing, Hemingway did not have to worry about Matthews as a rival for the history books. He could endorse his friends’ book, ''Two Wars and More to Come'', and praise him as “the ablest and the bravest war correspondent writing today “who “when the fakers are all dead [. . .] will be read in the schools” (Advertisement 21) because Matthews posed no threat to Hemingway’s own chances to be read in the schools. The only brief Hemingway ever expressed he really reserved for Matthews’ editors, for not wanting his Teruel street-fighting story and for cutting references to himself in Matthews’ Teruel dispatches so that it appeared only Matthews had been there.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=462}}

As for Hemingway’s neglecting to name everyone with him for every story, the ''Times'' cutting of his name suggests that such exactitude was hardly a priority. A paper had no incentive for announcing the fact that a competitor’s
correspondent stood beside its own to see and report the same
events. NANA changed at least one vague Hemingway “we,” which admits
to the presence of others, to “this correspondent”
—we can hardly fault Hemingway for working in the spirit of his
employer’s standards.{{sfn|NANA|1938|p=}}{{efn|“we” in typescript and radiogram (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 1 and Folder 25).}} Do readers care that Matthews, Delmer, Gellhorn,
and others were there? The story’s effect and the limited word count also
weighed against such roll calls. One editor chose not to clutter the dispatch
on the great retreat across the Ebro with all the names of the American International Brigade volunteers Hemingway encountered, an omission of
Content more far serious than that of omitted correspondent names.{{efn| Radiogram insert dateline 4 April 1938 (HRC: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 25).}} Hemingway
often gave the names of the reporters with him, such as at Teruel;
nor was he the only reporter to sometimes neglect to do so. Martha Gellhorn,
for example, used a vague “we” and singled herself out as the primary
participant in some of her stories.

By using first-person reportage Hemingway—and Matthews and Gellhorn And most of the group covering the war—were operating solidly within
convention. William Stott, in ''Documentary Expression and Thirties America'',
calls this first-person ''participant observer'' technique “the most common sort
of documentary reportage in the thirties” that worked “by vicarious persuasion:
the writer partook of the events he reported and bared his feelings
and attitudes to influence the reader’s own.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=178-9}}{{efn|He specifically includes Hemingway et al (180). {{harvtxt|Stott|1986|p=}}}} Stott also observes {{pg|433|434}}another technique to enable documentary reportage to “talk to us, and convince us that we, our deepest interests, are engaged,” in the use of the second person: “Thirties documentaries constantly address ‘you,’ the ‘you’ who is we the audience, and exhorts, wheedles, begs us to identify, pity, participate.” His examples include Dorothy Parker’s Spanish Civil War writing, and Hemingway’s 1935 “First-Hand Report on the Florida Hurricane.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=27-8}} A number of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches employ the second-person as a way of bringing the reader along for the ride.

Hemingway’s dispatches used personal pronouns more artfully than is generally recognized. “A New Kind of War,” which William Braasch Watson notes as having been “[w]ritten with more care and imagination” than its predecessors, begins in second person: “The window of the hotel is open and, as you lie in bed, you hear the firing in the front line seventeen blocks away.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=29}} He takes “you” outside, to see the damage and the dead from the bombing. “Someone makes a joke about missing teeth and someone else says not to make that joke. And everyone has the feeling that characterizes war. It wasn’t me, see? It wasn’t me.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} The tension between the first person and second-person pronouns—the movement toward identification with “you” and the insistence that “it wasn’t me”—continues in the next line. Here the reader is at once still in the narrator’s shoes, but strangely distanced from the narrator through biographical tidbit and, at the same time, asked to see himself in the enemy: “The Italian dead up on the Guadalajara weren’t you although Italian dead, because of where you had spent your boyhood, always seemed, still, like Our Dead.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} It is worth quoting at length the dispatch’s transition to first person:
<blockquote>
After the shell that lit on the sidewalk in front of the hotel you got a beautiful double corner room on that side, twice the size of the one you’d had, for less than a dollar. It wasn’t me they killed. See? No. Not me. It wasn’t me anymore.

Then in a hospital given by the American Friends of Spanish Democracy located out behind the Morata front along the road
to Valencia they said, “Raven wants to see you.”

“Do I know him?”

“I don’t think so,” they said. “But he wants to see you.”

“Where is he?”

“Upstairs.”{{pg|434|435}}In the room upstairs they are giving a blood transfusion to a man with a very gray face who lay on a cot with his arm out looking away from the gurgling bottle and moaning in a very impersonal way. He moaned mechanically and at regular intervals and it did not seem to be him that made the sound. His lips did not move.

“Where’s Raven?” I asked.

“I’m here,” said Raven.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=31}}</blockquote>
The piece simply could not have sustained the second-person for the remaining five pages. More significantly, for this deeply personal exchange between the writer and the faceless, eyeless soldier, Hemingway could not hide in the rhetorical device of the second-person. In the process, he effects a reversal of the usual pronoun game; instead of identifying with the all embracing “you,” we leave that trick behind and become fully attached to
the narratorial “I” as ourselves, as we might not have been had the article
begun in the first person. And even as the narrator identifies himself by name
for the only time in any of the dispatches—“Hemingway,” and later
“Ernest”—as decidedly not ourselves. We do not say, ''It isn’t me''. The historian
Hugh Thomas notes “the refreshing candour” of Hemingway’s naming
himself “in the world of the International Brigades, where no one’s name
seemed to be truthfully given.”{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=591}}{{efn|For Watson, the dispatch “seems, in fact, on the verge of becoming a story.”{{harvtxt|Watson|1988|p=29}}}}

A year later Hemingway’s “Tortosa Calmly Awaits Assault” resists admitting
the city’s imminent fall. Yet it does so anyway, by subtly alluding to the
wartime rhetoric of sacrificed blood irrigating the earth and rejuvenating
Spain. Such rhetoric was common during the war, appearing in speeches,
print, and poetry. Many of the poems in Cary Nelson’s anthology ''The Wound
and the Dream: Sixty Years of American Poems about the Civil War'' join in the
Spanish and international chorus’s general connection between Republican
soldiers and the land, and the particular singing of their dead nourishing
the land. We find such language in La Pasionaria’s farewell address to the International Brigades, her epilogue to ''The Book of the XV Brigade'', and Hemingway’s famous eulogy “On the American Dead in Spain”: “For our dead are
a part of the earth of Spain now and the earth of Spain can never die. Each
winter it will seem to die and each spring it will come alive again. Our dead
will live with it forever.”{{sfn|Nelson|1994|p=3}}{{efn| Reprinted in {{harvtxt|Bruccoli|2006|p=76}} and {{harvtxt|Nelson|1994|p=37}} (the drafts at the JFK are titled “The Dead at Jarama”). In addition to the poems in Nelson’s anthology, see the excerpt from Boris Todrin’s “Spanish Sowing” in {{harvtxt|Guttmann|1969|pp=179-180}}.}} The Tortosa dispatch implies the deaths of{{pg|435|436}}many Republican soldiers in its final paragraph’s description of the newborn onions:
<blockquote>The artillery was picking up a little now. Two came in at a fairly useful place and as the smoke blew away ahead and settled through the trees, you picked an armful of spring onions from a field beside the trail that led to the Tortosa road. They were the first onions of the spring and peeling one I found they were plump white and not too strong. The Ebro Delta has a fine rich land, and where the onions grow, tomorrow will be a battle.
{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=84}}</blockquote>

The echo is quiet, and perhaps unconscious, but there nevertheless. The opening boastfulness of “American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents”
should be taken somewhat ironically. The dispatch begins by announcing
that for “two days we have been doing the most dangerous thing
you can do in this war. That is keep close behind an unstabilized line where
the enemy are attacking with mechanized forces.” Then, a few pages later,
we learn about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade survivors of the spring 1938
Nationalist offensive that took Bob Merriman and eventually reached the
Mediterranean Sea. Reading about these survivors creeping through enemy
camps, stepping on a sleeping German soldier’s hand, sprinting “across an
open field toward the Ebro bank and being sniped at by artillery controlled
by an observation plane overhead” and then “the desperate swimming of
the Ebro” naked, we are asked to place the correspondent’s plight in due perspective.{{sfn|Watson|1988|pp=71-2}} This story certainly escapes the charge of a monotonous
battle and bombing scene; its switch from apparently boastful to
awe-struck witness feels almost deliberately self-conscious. Other choice selfironic
moments come in the dispatches of that pre-Teruel quiet fall of 1938.
The one titled “Hemingway, Covering War, Tells of Brush with Death” has little
to report from Madrid other than the new aftershave brand he is trying.
In “Loyalists’ Drive Seen Progressing as Planned,” he writes that “Shells are
all much the same and if they don’t hit you there is no story and if they do
you won’t have to write it.” {{sfn|Watson|1988|p=58}}

Hemingway’s dispatches are sometimes monotonous because his war was
Usually monotonous—as wars are most of the time. It should also be kept in
mind that scholars reviewing Hemingway’s NANA dispatches one after{{pg|436|437}}another do not relive the original reading experience. Hemingway wrote dispatches sporadically, papers did not run all of his dispatches, papers edited and cut them, and readers read at least a couple of papers’ worth of other articles in between. He told Edmund Wilson as much in defending himself against Wilson’s critique of the selected (and heavily edited and cut) dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'' without his consent: “If you are being paid to be shot at and write about it you are supposed to mention the shooting. [. . .] But I do not go in for re-printing journalism.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}

If we can in this way better understand his style, and at least explain it if
not excuse it, we similarly ought to try to contextualize—and perhaps
excuse—the moral problem. The two issues here are the specific condemnation
of Hemingway’s silence about Republican atrocities and the general
question of biased reporting (the latter of which has already partially been
addressed).

Hemingway knew, as Donaldson writes, that mentioning the atrocities
“would arouse anticommunist sentiments back in the States and effectively
undermine any possibility of American intervention.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=394}} It is also doubtful
that reporting them would have stopped them. But reporting Republican
atrocities from Spain was not possible for the simple reason that all dispatches
went through a government censor. Matthews cabled his editors
from Paris in May 1937 to tell them that “censorship does not permit us to
say when the ‘telefonica’ is hit. So whenever you see reference in my
despatches [sic] to ‘an important building in the center of the city’ or words
to that effect, the cable desk can know that it is the telefonica.” {{sfn|Matthews|1937c|p=}} As already noted, by July he would cable “CENSORSHIP
STRICTER” as the ban on mentioning internationals went into effect. {{sfn|Matthews|1937d|p=}}{{sfn|Matthews|1937e|p=}} Cowles’ memoir confirms the
aggressive censorship, observing that it limited journalists to exactly the kind of material Hemingway wrote about:
<blockquote>There were frequent attempts to “beat the censor” by employing American slang expressions, but this came to an end when a Canadian girl joined the staff. The International Brigades were not allowed to be publicized; no reference could be made to Russian armaments, and buildings and streets which suffered
bombardments could not be identified.</blockquote>{{pg|437|438}}<blockquote>It was only in the realm of the human interest story that the journalists had a free hand. They could describe bombardments to their heart’s content.{{sfn|Cowles|1941|p=20}}</blockquote>
Hemingway and everyone else—to reserve incrimination for Hemingway is hardly just. No correspondent covering Republican Spain reported suspicious imprisonments and disappearances by government agents.

Hemingway, through Joris Ivens and ''The Spanish Earth'' project, had better
access to officials than most. Had he been able somehow to report such
activity, he would have lost that access and would probably have been kicked
out of the country. His fame would have likely prevented his own officially
sponsored disappearance, though he still worried, especially as so many of
such crimes on the Republican side occurred from free agents. When Jasper
Wood printed the anarchist F.A.I. banner in the limited edition book version
of ''The Spanish Earth'', Hemingway expressed his anxieties bluntly in a letter
to Jasper on August 20, 1938. It is hardly “petulant,” he scolded, “not to wish
to be shot.”{{sfn|Davison|1988|p=128}} Hostility in the Republic against the anarchists
ran high; after the Barcelona May Day conflict, the government’s foreign
minister told U.S. Ambassador Claude Bowers that “anarchist revolt
throughout Catalonia and not only expected but welcomed as an opportunity
to liquidate the anarchists who have been hostile from the beginning.”
{{sfn|NA|1954|p=292}}{{efn| The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State, 5 May 1937.}}

It is possible that Hemingway’s dispatch stating that “not one friend [. . .]
has been executed or is missing” was his clever means of reporting
the rumors and indeed the general fact while evading the censors, as in this very dispatch he acknowledged the presence of a censor after a bombardment.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=34}}
Matthews, on the other hand, never found a way to mention the
censors or admit even the possibility of people gone missing in the Republic.
Peter Moreira has observed that in a 1943 dispatch Hemingway related a remark by a British officer about the Chinese Nationalist government’s being
“hopeless on the offensive” because censorship “prevented American reporters
From actually saying that the Nationalists wouldn’t attack, surmising that by telling this anecdote Hemingway could sneak such a judgment into
his reports.”{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=77}} In Spain, censors aside, the eyewitness standard and his
own safety and continuing ability to report the war, and, yes, his passionate
support of the government contributed to his decision. He could have written
about government abuses from the states, but then could not return to{{pg|438|439}}cover the war and support the cause—a justification other journalists, those who did not return after the spring of 1937, did not enjoy. In his mind too, knowing what he heard of fascist atrocities, any reportage against the government lessening its chances of victory through killing hopes of increased international aid would have led to more deaths at Franco’s hands that the much smaller number inspired by fifth column paranoia.{{efn|''Hemingway’s Second War'' discusses in greater depth Hemingway’s politics and his falling out
with John Dos Passos over the execution of José Robles.}}

The accusation that Hemingway did not write about Republican atrocities
because he was saving it for his fiction I find baseless.{{sfn|Knightley|2004|p=232}}{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=402}}{{efn|Hemingway’s casual comment to colleagues calling dibs on Pepe Quintanilla, the executioner of
Madrid, is not sufficient evidence.}}Carolyn Moorehead, in her biography of Martha Gellhorn, describes
the climate for the Madrid correspondents that first spring: “And so,
day by day, the correspondents walked a thin and nervous line between truth,
evasions, and propaganda, telling one another that though it was not all right
if things were made up and presented as true, it was acceptable to describe
what you wanted, provided it was true and provided your readers were aware
of your position.”{{sfn|Moorehead|2003|p=125}} My own sense is that they did not walk the line quite
so nervously; their passionate commitment, and their principles of position
disclosure and the eyewitness standard, made that walk relatively easy.

The problem of ''committed journalism'', even sixty years later, has not been
resolved—as anyone paying attention to the media and world affairs well
knows. One person’s truth is another person’s propaganda. Certainly, as
Knightley notes, reporting from “the heart” affects one’s judgment.{{sfn|Knightley|2004|pp=234-5}}
Yet to attempt “balance,” per the edits to Matthews’ Guadalajara piece, betrays
one’s believed truth. Furthermore, the kind of reporting done by the
correspondents with the Republic—committed, one-sided, optimistic,
heroic, human interest work by embedded writers—would be practiced
widely and without reserve during World War II. Such narrative journalism,
with roots in Louise May Alcott’s “Hospital Sketches” series published in the
''Boston Commonwealth'', and more immediately in 1930s social documentary
writing whose “essence” is “not information”, anticipated postwar
new journalism’s adoption of novelistic narrative technique for nonfiction
which culminated with such wartime books as Norman Mailer’s ''Armies of
the Night'' and Michael Herr’s ''Dispatches''.{{sfn|Stott|1986|p=11}} Some of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches
fall in this line of development.

Today we might categorize such writing under the awkward umbrella
term ''creative nonfiction''. That term certainly fits the mixed bag of nonfiction
narratives and commentaries Hemingway published during the war in
Ken magazine. These pieces are essays, not journalism, several of which{{pg|439|440}}directly appeal for support for the Republic, and most of which really deal with the approaching world war. ''Ken'' wanted “precisely the kind of opinion articles he could not write for NANA.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=433}} His article, “The Cardinal Picks a Winner,” shows a photo of a row of dead children from Barcelona and another one with Nationalist officers saluting and Catholic officials with raised hands, apparently making the fascist salute as well. He ends ironically: “So I ''don’t believe'' the people shown in the photo can really be making it. I would rather prefer to think that the photograph was faked.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=436}} When Hemingway argues in “A Program for U.S. Realism” that the United States should stay out of the next war except to stuff its pockets through arms sales, one has to wonder, given his call and the democratic nations’ failure to save Spain, if we are to sniff sarcasm here.

The language of the dispatches, with their corrective intent against
Franco’s propaganda, does risk propagandizing. Hemingway’s optimism and
anti-fascism certainly colored his correspondence work. His criticism of the
anarchist and POUM militia for their inactivity on the Aragon front, for example,
sounds a lot like the Spanish Communist Party’s.{{efn|It at least sounds almost exactly like Dolores Ibarruri in her memoir. To the anarchists’ complaint
that they had no arms, she retorts “that they had more arms than did many other fronts. . . .
What they didn’t have and what they were constantly demanding were airplanes and tanks .And
they didn’t have them because the Republic government didn’t have them either, except for those
it received as aid from the Soviet Union” (238–284). Yet the various Catalonia militia were not
as well equipped with small arms as the more regular Popular Army units, and because of the
terrain tanks and planes were in fact necessary.}}
But unlike
Matthews, Hemingway limited his reports within the Republic to military
matters. Hemingway may have generally condemned the anarchists in his
nonfiction, considering their activity as hampering the war effort, but he
never repeated the accusation of their collaboration with the rebels, as
Matthews had done. And when Hemingway commented on the Bareclona
crisis, he referred only to the government—not the communists, as
Matthews had done.{{efn|Hemingway’s comments in “Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win” NANA staff
correspondent dispatch. Though arguably he was propagandizing by hiding the communist influence—
to mention the communists to an American audience would not gain sympathy for the
cause.}}Nor did he write articles asserting the limited role of
the communists in the government, or explaining Spanish anarchism, also
as Matthews had done.{{efn|An article on the communists’ limited role appeared in late November 1937, as discussed in a
missive from The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State on 2
Dec. 1937 (United States 461). Matthews’ “Anarchism: Spain’s Enigma” appeared in the New York
Times 22 Aug. 1937: 6, 14.}}

During one of Hemingway’s stateside breaks between trips to Spain, his
children asked if he was a “tool” of Stalin, an accusation tossed by a schoolmate
who, presumably parroting his or her parents, probably understood
the term no better than Hemingway’s children. {{sfn|Hemingway|nd|p=}}
Hemingway believed in the Republic’s potential, but he was never a dupe of
the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) or Comintern. As did many others, he
accepted PCE’s presence in the government for its discipline and organization
toward winning the war, and he understood the material necessity for
Comintern’s support. It should also be noted, as historians Hugh Thomas
and Helen Graham have reminded us, that the communism associated with
the Republic wasn’t particularly communist anyway.{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=628}}{{sfn|Graham|2002|p=184}} {{pg|440|441}}

Hemingway declined to follow Joris Ivens’ suggestion that he write a
dispatch on the significant role of the political commissars in the Republican
military, even though that would have meant
featuring his brave new friend Gustav Regler.{{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=}} Hemingway also, in a letter
justifying his work to Jack Wheeler at NANA, wrote about choosing not to
send a dispatch he had written because it might strike readers as propaganda
“no matter how true” (Letter to Jack Wheeler).{{sfn|Hemingway|1938b|p=}}

Hemingway went to Spain to see the war himself and to support the Republic
through his ambulance fund. The paychecks from NANA and the
fundraising from ''The Spanish Earth'' helped. Whatever propagandistic streak
colors the dispatches pales in comparison to the documentary. The filmmaker,
Joris Ivens, was well established in European communist circles. The
documentary genre then and now has occupied a slippery position between
the extremes of impossible-to-achieve empirical nonfiction and of the outright
fictionalized. Evaluations of Hemingway’s journalism are informed by
knowledge of ''The Spanish Earth'' and the ''Ken'' essays to the detriment of the
journalism. And the very nature of the slippery documentary genre may enable
the film to escape opprobrium. It wasn’t reportage; it was altogether
something else. But for that matter, Hemingway’s dispatches weren’t purely
reportage either, and if not ''altogether'' something else, still something else,
and should be reckoned with accordingly.

== Notes ==
{{notelist|20em}}

==Citations==
{{Reflist|15em}}

==Works Cited==
{{refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker
|first=Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Bruccoli |first=Matthew |date=2006 |title=Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame |url= |location=Columbia |publisher=U of South Caronia P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Cowles |first=Virginia |date=1941 |title=Looking for Trouble |url= |location=New York
|publisher=Harper & Brothers |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Davison |first=Richard Allan |title=The Publication of Hemingway’s The Spanish Earth: An Untold Story |url= |journal=Hemingway Review
|volume=7.2 |issue= |date=1988
|pages=122-130 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson
|first=Scott |date=2009 |title=Fitzgerald & Hemingway: Works and Days |url= |location=New York |publisher=Columbia UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Franklin |first=Sidney |date=1952 |title=Bullfighter from Brooklyn |url= |location=New York |publisher=Prentice-Hall |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Graham |first=Helen |date=2002 |title=The Spanish Republic at War 1936-1939 |url= |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Guttmann |first=Allen |date=1962 |title=The Wound in the Heart: American and the Spanish Civil War |url= |location=New York |publisher=Free Press of Glencoe |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1967 |title=By-Line: Ernest Hemingway |url= |location=New York |publisher=Scibner |pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Trogdon
|editor-first=Robert W.
|author-mask=1
|title=Fascism is a Lie
|url=
|journal=Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference |volume==
|issue=
|date=2002
|pages=193-6
|location=New York
|publisher=Carroll & Graf
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 May 1937
|chapter=Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=nd
|chapter=The Home Front
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938a
|chapter=Letter to Edmund Wilson
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=2 June 1938b
|chapter=Letter to Jack Wheeler
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=14 Feb 1939
|chapter=On the American Dead in Spain
|title=TS. New Masses
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Baker
|editor-first=Carlos
|author-mask=1
|date=2003
|chapter=The Hadely Mowrer
|title=Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Scribner
|pages=462-3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ibarruri
|first=Dolores
|date=1966
|title=They Shall Not Pass: The Autobiography of La Pasionaria
|url=
|location=United States
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|date=1969
|title=The Camera and I
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|author-mask=1
|date=26 Apr 1937
|chapter=Letter to Ernest Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|date=20 Nov 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Bertrand Weaver
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=12 Oct 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=25 Apr 1939
|chapter=Letter to M.B. Tenney
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Apr 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Knightley
|first=Phillip
|date=2004
|title=The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq
|url=
|location=Baltimore
|publisher=John Hopkins
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=
|date=9 Apr 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=TS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=11 Apr 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=8 May 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=6 July 1937d
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=July 1937e
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=22 March 1939
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 9
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=
|date=20 May 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=20 Dec 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 5
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Sep 1937c
|chapter=Note to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moorehead
|first=Caroline
|date=2003
|title=Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Henry Holt
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moreira
|first=Peter
|date=2006
|title=Hemingway on the China Front: His WWII Spy Mission with Martha Gellhorn
|url=
|location=Washington D.C.
|publisher=Potomac Books
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|date=5 Feb 1937
|chapter=Promotion Box: Hemingway, For Immediate Release
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|author-mask=1
|date=4 Apr 1938
|chapter=Promotion Box: American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|editor-last=Nelson
|editor-first=Card
|date=1994
|title=Remembering Spain: Hemingway’s Civil War Eulogy and the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
|url=
|location=Urbana
|publisher=U of Illinois
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Reynolds
|first=Michael
|date=1989
|title=Hemingway: The Paris Years
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Norton
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Stott
|first=William
|date=1986
|title=Documentary Expression and Thirties America
|url=
|location=Chicago
|publisher=U of Chicago P
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Thomas
|first=Hugh
|date=2001
|title=The Spanish Civil War, Rev. ed.
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Modern Library
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine
|last=''Two Wars and More to Come''
|first=
|date=24 Jan 1938
|title=Best Sellers of the Week Here and Elsewhere
|type=Advertisement
|url=
|magazine=New York Times
|pages=
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=NA
|first=
|title=United States. Dept. of State
|url=
|journal= Foreign Relations of the Untied States, 1937 |volume=1
|issue=General
|date=1954
|pages=
|location=Washington
|publisher=GPO
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Watson
|first=William Braasch
|title=Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches
|url=
|journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=7.2
|issue=
|date=1988
|pages=4-121
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Wheeler
|first=John H.
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938
|chapter=Letter to Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection, Box 3 Folder 14
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}

{{refend}}
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches

2025-04-20T14:12:39Z

MerAtticus: harvtext H

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 

{{byline|last=Vernon |first=Alex |abstract=The Spanish Civil War began in July 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally-restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy. By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches.}}

{{dc|dc=T|HE SPANISH CIVIL WAR BEGAN ON}} 17-18 JULY, 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy, to collaborate with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens on the pro-Republican documentary ''The Spanish Earth'', and to pursue his fledgling love affair with Martha Gellhorn.{{efn|Adapted and printed with permission from ''Hemingway’s Second War: Bearing Witness to the Spanish Civil War.'' Iowa City: U of Iowa Press, 2011.}}
By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches for NANA.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=4}}{{efn|Quotations from the NANA dispatches follow the Diplomatic Text established by William Braasch’s “Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches.” I prefer NANA’s titles rather than Watson’s. For my disagreements with some of Watson’s datings, see my comments on specific dispatches in ''Hemingway’s Second War'' {{harvtxt|Watson|1988|p=}}.}}The secondary sources habitually judge them inferior journalism. Carlos Baker in the first Hemingway biography, for example, complains that the dialogue was “so heavily stamped with personal mannerisms as to be of doubtful authenticity.” Baker sees a “curious monotony in his stories of battles and bombardments,” a gratuitous use of graphic imagery “to shock his readers,” and “a note of triumphant boastfulness” in reporting proximity to danger. He also faults Hemingway for “often hint[ing] he was alone when in fact he was usually with Martha Gellhorn, Matthews, and Delmer.” Hemingway lacked Dos Passos’ “eye for telling details” and the “meticulous exactitude and inclusiveness that characterized the best work of Herbert Matthews and Sefton Delmer.”{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}

Philip Knightley’s ''The First Casualty'', the standard history of war correspondence, paraphrases Baker but with a trouncing final judgment:{{pg|427|428}}Hemingway’s “performance as a war correspondent was abysmally bad.” But Knightley goes beyond “technical” dissatisfaction to moral condemnation. Not just “unjustifiably optimistic”—an excusable offense—Hemingway’s reporting was “unforgivable” in its “total failure to report the Communist persecution, imprisonment, and summary execution of ‘untrustworthy elements’ on the Republican side, when he knew this was happening and when disclosing it might well have prevented further horrors like this.”
{{sfn|Knightley|2004 |pp=231–32}}{{efn|In my view, Knightley does not sufficiently acknowledge his paraphrasing of Baker.}}

Such criticisms in the final analysis might bear out. As Scott Donaldson writes, Hemingway advanced the Republican cause in his dispatches by eliciting “the deepest possible feelings of horror and of sympathy for the victims” of the Madrid bombardment; his “undue optimism” often “ignored Loyalist defeats and exaggerated the importance of its victories”; and “he repeatedly called attention to the participation of Italians and Germans on Franco’s side.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=426}} It also served as a recruitment tool—Milton Wolff, for example, acknowledged the strong influence Hemingway’s dispatches had on his decision to volunteer. Nevertheless, I think it a worthwhile exercise to attend a little more studiously to Hemingway’s dispatches, their context, and their artistry. I don’t necessarily intend to reverse the general opinion of the correspondence, only to achieve a better and more sympathetic understanding.

Herbert Matthews’ reporting for the ''New York Times'' will serve as a convenient comparison for two reasons. First, because both Baker and Knightley use Matthews’ journalism as the standard of excellence to pass judgment on Hemingway’s; and second, because the two worked practically side-by-side, seeing and reporting on many of the same events. In fact so closely did they work together that NANA sometimes complained that the ''Times'' was not buying Hemingway’s pieces because they resembled Matthews,’ and at one point Matthews’ own editors at the Times suspected him of plagiarizing Hemingway.{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|pp=411, 420}} A note from Matthews’ assigned editor Raymond McCaw provides, in two columns, seven quite similar passages from Hemingway’s Aragon front dispatches of September 13 and 14 with Matthews’ of September 14, with a penciled note at the bottom: “a deadly parallel if you ask me.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937c|p=}} Edwin James, the managing editor and McCaw’s boss, eventually agreed with Matthews’ defense: “It is quite apparent that you did not file any duplicate of the Hemingway story, or vice versa. As I understand it, the similarity arose from the fact that you{{pg|428|429}}both went to see the same show and saw it at the same time [sic], under the same conditions.”{{sfn|James|1937b|p=}}

Matthews’ dispatches ring of Republican bias as much if not more than anything Hemingway ever filed. The ''Times'' received many letters to the editor complaining about Matthews’ undisguised politics, which also gave serious concern to some of his editors. His description of the Republican May 1937 infighting in Barcelona is a striking example of how his news veered into propaganda and shows just how much he passed along the government’s version of events. The government’s “BLOODLESS TRIUMPH FOUGHT WITH RECOGNIZEDWEAPONS OF DEMOCRACY” turned out to be blatantly false, as the government and the “COMMUNISTS [WHO] DISTINGUISHED THEMSELVES” resorted to violent suppression. His blaming the uprising on the anarchist CNT working as Franco operatives parrots the government’s and the communist party’s public position, even though both charges—that the anarchists precipitated the events and that they were under Nationalist direction—were also false. His dispatch’s optimistic close also equivocates the political reality: “NEW GOVERNMENT HAS TAKEN POWER WHICH APPEARS TOVE CONFIDENCE VAST MAJORITY SPANIARDS IN LOYALIST TERRITORY AND TIS HOPED WILL GAIN EQUAL CONFIDENCE ABROAD STOP VIOLENCE AND REVOLUTION BEEN REPUDIATED AND NEWAND FAR HOPEFULLER PERIOD SEEMS BEGINNING.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937a|p=}}The ''Times'', knowing full well the one-sided coverage of a correspondent writing from one side of the conflict, had a reporter on both sides: Matthews with the Republicans, and William Carney with the Nationalists. They got their facts right (or wrong) as often as the other, their editors concluded; and they inspired about the same number of letters of complaint.{{sfn|James|1937a|p=}}{{sfn|James|1939|p=}}

Furthermore, Matthews’ dispatches received a great deal of substantive editorial revisions. One of Matthews’ Teruel reports had to be cut for length, as McCaw informed James: “This bird sent 2844 words on the same facts which Hemingway covered much better in less than half that number. I wonder if Matthews thinks the paper is thriving, and that cable tolls do not matter a damn. Of course, it had to be cut for space anyway.” McCaw most likely refers here to Matthews’ dispatch corresponding to Hemingway’s “The Attack on Teruel,” though Matthews’ account of the fall of Teruel is also much longer (and more long-winded) than Hemingway’s, and just as personal in terms of describing the dangers{{pg|429|430}} he faced. Indeed its length allows him to share even more of the action he endured.{{sfn|McCaw|1937b|p=}}

Raymond McCaw held a general professional disagreement with Matthews perhaps tainted with over zealousness. Whether a personal or political motive informed that disagreement can’t be determined from the evidence I’ve seen. It is also clear that McCaw’s charges bear some validity—that any responsible editor could have easily and reasonably taken issue where McCaw did. One of the more interesting examples concerns Matthews’ piece on Guadalajara. Because he only saw evidence on Franco’s side of Italian forces, he only reported on Italians. But the ''Times'' editors heard from other sources that German soldiers also participated in the March offensive. They thought it prudent, from this confusion, to change (nine times) “Italian” to “Rebel,” “the foe,” or “Insurgent.” When Matthews saw the published piece he wrote a strenuous objection. In some instances the editors changed paraphrased quotations from his sources. One large paragraph omitted by the editors stressed the first-hand nature of the information, and Matthews underlines the key words: “All day, at every place we stopped and no matter whom we talked to or what we saw, there was only one label—Italian. The dead bodies, the prisoners, the material of every kind, the men who had occupied Brihuega and then fled were Italian and nothing but Italian.” Here and elsewhere in his original story, Matthews emphasizes the “personal knowledge” of its information.{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}{{efn|James supported McCaw on these changes, though later acknowledged that altering quoted sources was perhaps unwarranted(29 April 1937; Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3).}}Yet Matthews did not report on the foreigners fighting for the Republic—it was in fact the Italian Garibali Battalion that routed Franco’s Italians. We might surmise government censorship behind this silence, though Matthews would not cable news of “CENSORSHIP STRICTER” and “BAN ON MENTIONING INTERNATIONALS INCLUDING AMERICANS INSTITUTED TODAY” until July.{{sfn|Matthews|1937b|p=}}Perhaps he cautiously self-censored, or politically self-censored for the same reasons the government would eventually ban mention. Still, his stridency about the omission of foreigners on one side is striking given his knowledge of their contribution to the other side. For this reason too, and his omission of other nationalities on the insurgent side, it seemed only fair to his editor “to stand on the statement that the majority of the Rebels were Italians and let it go at that.”{{sfn|James|1937c|p=}} A reasonable decision.

Throughout his correspondence to his editors and his several books,{{pg|430|431}}Matthews maintained a passionate defense of his eyewitness journalistic standard, a position those close to him understood. “Matthews never believed anything he had not seen with his own eyes,” Joris Ivens wrote. “He never saw his job as reporter as one that permitted him to sit in his hotel and read the handouts of the War Ministry.” {{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=112}} Sidney Franklin recalls that some writers wrote their pieces before arriving in Madrid, and came only for the “legitimacy” of the Madrid dateline.{{sfn|Franklin|1952|p=232}}And Matthews hated, on principle, having his name attached to an article that violated the integrity of his witness. The only way to achieve objectivity, for Matthews, was to acknowledge one’s subjective perspective. Writing to his publisher, Matthews argued that “the full documentary value” of his coverage was lost when the editors altered his submissions for “the apparent necessity of giving more or less equal space to both sides.”{{sfn|Matthews|1939|p=}}

As with Matthews, so too Hemingway. Indeed the commitment to subjectivity
fit quite well with Hemingway’s modernist aesthetics. If Hemingway
focused the dispatches on his perspective—on his own experience dodging
artillery—more than Matthews and more than most, he did so at least partially
to fulfill expectations. NANA approached him, after all, for his name
and personality as much as whatever he would write. Before he even left the
states it pitched him to potential publications, sending out a promotional release with text to be used alongside his forthcoming dispatches and suggesting
they include a photograph: “Mr. Hemingway’s assignment is to get both from the bombed towns and bombed trenches the human story of the war, not just an account of the game being played by general staffs with pins
and a map.”{{sfn|NANA|1937|p=}} NANA also released each individual dispatch with a one-sentence “precede” about the “famous” or “noted” author. Ernest Hemingway was not writing as Herbert Mathews, ace reporter; Hemingway was writing as Ernest Hemingway, famous author of novels and stories well known to be drawn from his own experiences.

That he understood this to be his assignment is further evidenced by a
cable Matthews sent to his ''Times'' editors on April 9, 1937, concerning the
Loyalist attack: “WORKED CONJOINTL WITH HEMINGWAY TODAY HE SENDING EYEWITNESS DESCRIPTION WHILE EYE SENT GENERAL STRATEGY.”{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}When a year later the ''Times'' asked NANA to ensure Hemingway’s reports differed from Matthews, NANA complied by asking Hemingway “to emphasize color rather than straight reporting” not necessarily out of dissatisfaction with Hemingway’s reportage as Baker contends,{{efn|{{harvtxt|Baker|1969|p=}}’s notes date the ''Times'' request to NANA as 8 Apr. 1938, and NANA’s to Hemingway as 15
Apr. 1938 (Princeton University, Firestone Library: Box 18, Folder 8 “1938”), the date of “The Bombing of Tortosa” dispatch.}} but to increase{{pg|431|432}}the chance of selling to the ''Times'' and indeed to ensure the spirit of NANA’s original arrangement with Hemingway. {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}Far from dissatisfied, NANA wrote Hemingway at the end of August 1938 a letter of agreement for his coverage of “a general European war” should it break out, “written in your colorful style” (Hemingway was in Paris, on his way to Spain for the last time during the war).{{sfn|Wheeler|1938|p=}}When Edmund Wilson criticized the selected dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'', Hemingway wrote him that “I was paid to write what are called ‘eye witness’ accounts . . .what is called, or was asked for as ‘color stuff.’ Most of such stuff is faked. Mine was not. It was straight reporting and the personal stuff was what had been asked for by the editors. “Wilson’s estimation was also based upon ''Fact’s'' inclusion of the “The Old Man at the Bridge” story from ''Ken'', “not a news dispatch” at all.{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}Speaking at Carnegie Hall before the showing of a rough cut of ''The Spanish Earth'', shortly after his first trip to Spain and so very much in the context of his wartime work, Hemingway defined the writer’s problem as “project[ing] [what is true] in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2002|p=193}}

Personal, anecdotal journalism had been Hemingway’s signature style from his earliest days filing reports, in the early 1920s from Paris, when his editor at the ''Toronto Star Weekly'' “encouraged [. . .] what Hemingway did best: write about himself in the act of being a reporter.”{{sfn|Reynolds|1989|p=45}}How could he expect that NANA would expect anything else, if indeed NANA did expect anything else? In the Spanish Civil War he at least maintained his eyewitness posture; in World War II, however, he couldn’t keep himself out. His first piece, about D-Day, begins, “No one remembers the date of the Battle of Shiloh. But the day ''we took'' Fox Green beach was the sixth of June, and the wind was blowing hard out of the northwest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1967|p=340}}His venue too—''Collier’s'' magazine—and the fact that he had not written anything in three years further contributed to the story-like nature of the WWII stories, in which he figured as a protagonist—not to mention the stories and involvement he couldn’t write about, armed and running around France more of a free agent than his guerilla-hero Robert Jordan ever was (though he began to transform these experiences into fiction in several unpublished stories). In wartime China in 1943, filing articles for Ralph Ingersoll’s short-lived ''PM'' New York afternoon daily, Hemingway did not even care to be called a news reporter.{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=99}}

It should be mentioned that Hemingway and Matthews enjoyed a great{{pg|432|433}}friendship and working relationship. Hemingway usually brought Matthews, who did not have a car, on his excursions. When Matthews left Madrid for a break in mid April 1937, he had already ensured Hemingway would provide coverage to the ''Times'' through NANA. For one thing, Hemingway did not have to worry about Matthews as a rival for the history books. He could endorse his friends’ book, ''Two Wars and More to Come'', and praise him as “the ablest and the bravest war correspondent writing today “who “when the fakers are all dead [. . .] will be read in the schools” (Advertisement 21) because Matthews posed no threat to Hemingway’s own chances to be read in the schools. The only brief Hemingway ever expressed he really reserved for Matthews’ editors, for not wanting his Teruel street-fighting story and for cutting references to himself in Matthews’ Teruel dispatches so that it appeared only Matthews had been there.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=462}}

As for Hemingway’s neglecting to name everyone with him for every story, the ''Times'' cutting of his name suggests that such exactitude was hardly a priority. A paper had no incentive for announcing the fact that a competitor’s
correspondent stood beside its own to see and report the same
events. NANA changed at least one vague Hemingway “we,” which admits
to the presence of others, to “this correspondent”
—we can hardly fault Hemingway for working in the spirit of his
employer’s standards.{{sfn|NANA|1938|p=}}{{efn|“we” in typescript and radiogram (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 1 and Folder 25).}} Do readers care that Matthews, Delmer, Gellhorn,
and others were there? The story’s effect and the limited word count also
weighed against such roll calls. One editor chose not to clutter the dispatch
on the great retreat across the Ebro with all the names of the American International Brigade volunteers Hemingway encountered, an omission of
Content more far serious than that of omitted correspondent names.{{efn| Radiogram insert dateline 4 April 1938 (HRC: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 25).}} Hemingway
often gave the names of the reporters with him, such as at Teruel;
nor was he the only reporter to sometimes neglect to do so. Martha Gellhorn,
for example, used a vague “we” and singled herself out as the primary
participant in some of her stories.

By using first-person reportage Hemingway—and Matthews and Gellhorn And most of the group covering the war—were operating solidly within
convention. William Stott, in ''Documentary Expression and Thirties America'',
calls this first-person ''participant observer'' technique “the most common sort
of documentary reportage in the thirties” that worked “by vicarious persuasion:
the writer partook of the events he reported and bared his feelings
and attitudes to influence the reader’s own.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=178-9}}{{efn|He specifically includes Hemingway et al (180). {{harvtxt|Stott|1986|p=}}}} Stott also observes {{pg|433|434}}another technique to enable documentary reportage to “talk to us, and convince us that we, our deepest interests, are engaged,” in the use of the second person: “Thirties documentaries constantly address ‘you,’ the ‘you’ who is we the audience, and exhorts, wheedles, begs us to identify, pity, participate.” His examples include Dorothy Parker’s Spanish Civil War writing, and Hemingway’s 1935 “First-Hand Report on the Florida Hurricane.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=27-8}} A number of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches employ the second-person as a way of bringing the reader along for the ride.

Hemingway’s dispatches used personal pronouns more artfully than is generally recognized. “A New Kind of War,” which William Braasch Watson notes as having been “[w]ritten with more care and imagination” than its predecessors, begins in second person: “The window of the hotel is open and, as you lie in bed, you hear the firing in the front line seventeen blocks away.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=29}} He takes “you” outside, to see the damage and the dead from the bombing. “Someone makes a joke about missing teeth and someone else says not to make that joke. And everyone has the feeling that characterizes war. It wasn’t me, see? It wasn’t me.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} The tension between the first person and second-person pronouns—the movement toward identification with “you” and the insistence that “it wasn’t me”—continues in the next line. Here the reader is at once still in the narrator’s shoes, but strangely distanced from the narrator through biographical tidbit and, at the same time, asked to see himself in the enemy: “The Italian dead up on the Guadalajara weren’t you although Italian dead, because of where you had spent your boyhood, always seemed, still, like Our Dead.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} It is worth quoting at length the dispatch’s transition to first person:
<blockquote>
After the shell that lit on the sidewalk in front of the hotel you got a beautiful double corner room on that side, twice the size of the one you’d had, for less than a dollar. It wasn’t me they killed. See? No. Not me. It wasn’t me anymore.

Then in a hospital given by the American Friends of Spanish Democracy located out behind the Morata front along the road
to Valencia they said, “Raven wants to see you.”

“Do I know him?”

“I don’t think so,” they said. “But he wants to see you.”

“Where is he?”

“Upstairs.”{{pg|434|435}}In the room upstairs they are giving a blood transfusion to a man with a very gray face who lay on a cot with his arm out looking away from the gurgling bottle and moaning in a very impersonal way. He moaned mechanically and at regular intervals and it did not seem to be him that made the sound. His lips did not move.

“Where’s Raven?” I asked.

“I’m here,” said Raven.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=31}}</blockquote>
The piece simply could not have sustained the second-person for the remaining five pages. More significantly, for this deeply personal exchange between the writer and the faceless, eyeless soldier, Hemingway could not hide in the rhetorical device of the second-person. In the process, he effects a reversal of the usual pronoun game; instead of identifying with the all embracing “you,” we leave that trick behind and become fully attached to
the narratorial “I” as ourselves, as we might not have been had the article
begun in the first person. And even as the narrator identifies himself by name
for the only time in any of the dispatches—“Hemingway,” and later
“Ernest”—as decidedly not ourselves. We do not say, ''It isn’t me''. The historian
Hugh Thomas notes “the refreshing candour” of Hemingway’s naming
himself “in the world of the International Brigades, where no one’s name
seemed to be truthfully given.”{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=591}}{{efn|For Watson, the dispatch “seems, in fact, on the verge of becoming a story.”{{harvtxt|Watson|1988|p=29}}}}

A year later Hemingway’s “Tortosa Calmly Awaits Assault” resists admitting
the city’s imminent fall. Yet it does so anyway, by subtly alluding to the
wartime rhetoric of sacrificed blood irrigating the earth and rejuvenating
Spain. Such rhetoric was common during the war, appearing in speeches,
print, and poetry. Many of the poems in Cary Nelson’s anthology ''The Wound
and the Dream: Sixty Years of American Poems about the Civil War'' join in the
Spanish and international chorus’s general connection between Republican
soldiers and the land, and the particular singing of their dead nourishing
the land. We find such language in La Pasionaria’s farewell address to the International Brigades, her epilogue to ''The Book of the XV Brigade'', and Hemingway’s famous eulogy “On the American Dead in Spain”: “For our dead are
a part of the earth of Spain now and the earth of Spain can never die. Each
winter it will seem to die and each spring it will come alive again. Our dead
will live with it forever.”{{sfn|Nelson|1994|p=3}}{{efn| Reprinted in {{harvtxt|Bruccoli|2006|p=76}} and {{harvtxt|Nelson|1994|p=37}} (the drafts at the JFK are titled “The Dead at Jarama”). In addition to the poems in Nelson’s anthology, see the excerpt from Boris Todrin’s “Spanish Sowing” in {{harvtxt|Guttmann|1969|pp=179-180}}.}} The Tortosa dispatch implies the deaths of{{pg|435|436}}many Republican soldiers in its final paragraph’s description of the newborn onions:
<blockquote>The artillery was picking up a little now. Two came in at a fairly useful place and as the smoke blew away ahead and settled through the trees, you picked an armful of spring onions from a field beside the trail that led to the Tortosa road. They were the first onions of the spring and peeling one I found they were plump white and not too strong. The Ebro Delta has a fine rich land, and where the onions grow, tomorrow will be a battle.
{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=84}}</blockquote>

The echo is quiet, and perhaps unconscious, but there nevertheless. The opening boastfulness of “American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents”
should be taken somewhat ironically. The dispatch begins by announcing
that for “two days we have been doing the most dangerous thing
you can do in this war. That is keep close behind an unstabilized line where
the enemy are attacking with mechanized forces.” Then, a few pages later,
we learn about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade survivors of the spring 1938
Nationalist offensive that took Bob Merriman and eventually reached the
Mediterranean Sea. Reading about these survivors creeping through enemy
camps, stepping on a sleeping German soldier’s hand, sprinting “across an
open field toward the Ebro bank and being sniped at by artillery controlled
by an observation plane overhead” and then “the desperate swimming of
the Ebro” naked, we are asked to place the correspondent’s plight in due perspective.{{sfn|Watson|1988|pp=71-2}} This story certainly escapes the charge of a monotonous
battle and bombing scene; its switch from apparently boastful to
awe-struck witness feels almost deliberately self-conscious. Other choice selfironic
moments come in the dispatches of that pre-Teruel quiet fall of 1938.
The one titled “Hemingway, Covering War, Tells of Brush with Death” has little
to report from Madrid other than the new aftershave brand he is trying.
In “Loyalists’ Drive Seen Progressing as Planned,” he writes that “Shells are
all much the same and if they don’t hit you there is no story and if they do
you won’t have to write it.” {{sfn|Watson|1988|p=58}}

Hemingway’s dispatches are sometimes monotonous because his war was
Usually monotonous—as wars are most of the time. It should also be kept in
mind that scholars reviewing Hemingway’s NANA dispatches one after{{pg|436|437}}another do not relive the original reading experience. Hemingway wrote dispatches sporadically, papers did not run all of his dispatches, papers edited and cut them, and readers read at least a couple of papers’ worth of other articles in between. He told Edmund Wilson as much in defending himself against Wilson’s critique of the selected (and heavily edited and cut) dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'' without his consent: “If you are being paid to be shot at and write about it you are supposed to mention the shooting. [. . .] But I do not go in for re-printing journalism.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}

If we can in this way better understand his style, and at least explain it if
not excuse it, we similarly ought to try to contextualize—and perhaps
excuse—the moral problem. The two issues here are the specific condemnation
of Hemingway’s silence about Republican atrocities and the general
question of biased reporting (the latter of which has already partially been
addressed).

Hemingway knew, as Donaldson writes, that mentioning the atrocities
“would arouse anticommunist sentiments back in the States and effectively
undermine any possibility of American intervention.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=394}} It is also doubtful
that reporting them would have stopped them. But reporting Republican
atrocities from Spain was not possible for the simple reason that all dispatches
went through a government censor. Matthews cabled his editors
from Paris in May 1937 to tell them that “censorship does not permit us to
say when the ‘telefonica’ is hit. So whenever you see reference in my
despatches [sic] to ‘an important building in the center of the city’ or words
to that effect, the cable desk can know that it is the telefonica.” {{sfn|Matthews|1937c|p=}} As already noted, by July he would cable “CENSORSHIP
STRICTER” as the ban on mentioning internationals went into effect. {{sfn|Matthews|1937d|p=}}{{sfn|Matthews|1937e|p=}} Cowles’ memoir confirms the
aggressive censorship, observing that it limited journalists to exactly the kind of material Hemingway wrote about:
<blockquote>There were frequent attempts to “beat the censor” by employing American slang expressions, but this came to an end when a Canadian girl joined the staff. The International Brigades were not allowed to be publicized; no reference could be made to Russian armaments, and buildings and streets which suffered
bombardments could not be identified.</blockquote>{{pg|437|438}}<blockquote>It was only in the realm of the human interest story that the journalists had a free hand. They could describe bombardments to their heart’s content.{{sfn|Cowles|1941|p=20}}</blockquote>
Hemingway and everyone else—to reserve incrimination for Hemingway is hardly just. No correspondent covering Republican Spain reported suspicious imprisonments and disappearances by government agents.

Hemingway, through Joris Ivens and ''The Spanish Earth'' project, had better
access to officials than most. Had he been able somehow to report such
activity, he would have lost that access and would probably have been kicked
out of the country. His fame would have likely prevented his own officially
sponsored disappearance, though he still worried, especially as so many of
such crimes on the Republican side occurred from free agents. When Jasper
Wood printed the anarchist F.A.I. banner in the limited edition book version
of ''The Spanish Earth'', Hemingway expressed his anxieties bluntly in a letter
to Jasper on August 20, 1938. It is hardly “petulant,” he scolded, “not to wish
to be shot.”{{sfn|Davison|1988|p=128}} Hostility in the Republic against the anarchists
ran high; after the Barcelona May Day conflict, the government’s foreign
minister told U.S. Ambassador Claude Bowers that “anarchist revolt
throughout Catalonia and not only expected but welcomed as an opportunity
to liquidate the anarchists who have been hostile from the beginning.”
{{sfn|NA|1954|p=292}}{{efn| The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State, 5 May 1937.}}

It is possible that Hemingway’s dispatch stating that “not one friend [. . .]
has been executed or is missing” was his clever means of reporting
the rumors and indeed the general fact while evading the censors, as in this very dispatch he acknowledged the presence of a censor after a bombardment.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=34}}
Matthews, on the other hand, never found a way to mention the
censors or admit even the possibility of people gone missing in the Republic.
Peter Moreira has observed that in a 1943 dispatch Hemingway related a remark by a British officer about the Chinese Nationalist government’s being
“hopeless on the offensive” because censorship “prevented American reporters
From actually saying that the Nationalists wouldn’t attack, surmising that by telling this anecdote Hemingway could sneak such a judgment into
his reports.”{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=77}} In Spain, censors aside, the eyewitness standard and his
own safety and continuing ability to report the war, and, yes, his passionate
support of the government contributed to his decision. He could have written
about government abuses from the states, but then could not return to{{pg|438|439}}cover the war and support the cause—a justification other journalists, those who did not return after the spring of 1937, did not enjoy. In his mind too, knowing what he heard of fascist atrocities, any reportage against the government lessening its chances of victory through killing hopes of increased international aid would have led to more deaths at Franco’s hands that the much smaller number inspired by fifth column paranoia.{{efn|''Hemingway’s Second War'' discusses in greater depth Hemingway’s politics and his falling out
with John Dos Passos over the execution of José Robles}}.

The accusation that Hemingway did not write about Republican atrocities
because he was saving it for his fiction I find baseless (Knightley 232;
Baker 402).{{sfn|Knightley|2004|p=232}}{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=402}}{{efn|Hemingway’s casual comment to colleagues calling dibs on Pepe Quintanilla, the executioner of
Madrid, is not sufficient evidence.}}Carolyn Moorehead, in her biography of Martha Gellhorn, describes
the climate for the Madrid correspondents that first spring: “And so,
day by day, the correspondents walked a thin and nervous line between truth,
evasions, and propaganda, telling one another that though it was not all right
if things were made up and presented as true, it was acceptable to describe
what you wanted, provided it was true and provided your readers were aware
of your position.”{{sfn|Moorehead|2003|p=125}} My own sense is that they did not walk the line quite
so nervously; their passionate commitment, and their principles of position
disclosure and the eyewitness standard, made that walk relatively easy.

The problem of ''committed journalism'', even sixty years later, has not been
resolved—as anyone paying attention to the media and world affairs well
knows. One person’s truth is another person’s propaganda. Certainly, as
Knightley notes, reporting from “the heart” affects one’s judgment.{{sfn|Knightley|2004|pp=234-5}}
Yet to attempt “balance,” per the edits to Matthews’ Guadalajara piece, betrays
one’s believed truth. Furthermore, the kind of reporting done by the
correspondents with the Republic—committed, one-sided, optimistic,
heroic, human interest work by embedded writers—would be practiced
widely and without reserve during World War II. Such narrative journalism,
with roots in Louise May Alcott’s “Hospital Sketches” series published in the
''Boston Commonwealth'', and more immediately in 1930s social documentary
writing whose “essence” is “not information”, anticipated postwar
new journalism’s adoption of novelistic narrative technique for nonfiction
which culminated with such wartime books as Norman Mailer’s ''Armies of
the Night'' and Michael Herr’s ''Dispatches''.{{sfn|Stott|1986|p=11}} Some of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches
fall in this line of development.

Today we might categorize such writing under the awkward umbrella
term ''creative nonfiction''. That term certainly fits the mixed bag of nonfiction
narratives and commentaries Hemingway published during the war in
Ken magazine. These pieces are essays, not journalism, several of which{{pg|439|440}}directly appeal for support for the Republic, and most of which really deal with the approaching world war. ''Ken'' wanted “precisely the kind of opinion articles he could not write for NANA.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=433}} His article, “The Cardinal Picks a Winner,” shows a photo of a row of dead children from Barcelona and another one with Nationalist officers saluting and Catholic officials with raised hands, apparently making the fascist salute as well. He ends ironically: “So I ''don’t believe'' the people shown in the photo can really be making it. I would rather prefer to think that the photograph was faked.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=436}} When Hemingway argues in “A Program for U.S. Realism” that the United States should stay out of the next war except to stuff its pockets through arms sales, one has to wonder, given his call and the democratic nations’ failure to save Spain, if we are to sniff sarcasm here.

The language of the dispatches, with their corrective intent against
Franco’s propaganda, does risk propagandizing. Hemingway’s optimism and
anti-fascism certainly colored his correspondence work. His criticism of the
anarchist and POUM militia for their inactivity on the Aragon front, for example,
sounds a lot like the Spanish Communist Party’s.{{efn|It at least sounds almost exactly like Dolores Ibarruri in her memoir. To the anarchists’ complaint
that they had no arms, she retorts “that they had more arms than did many other fronts. . . .
What they didn’t have and what they were constantly demanding were airplanes and tanks .And
they didn’t have them because the Republic government didn’t have them either, except for those
it received as aid from the Soviet Union” (238–284). Yet the various Catalonia militia were not
as well equipped with small arms as the more regular Popular Army units, and because of the
terrain tanks and planes were in fact necessary.}}
But unlike
Matthews, Hemingway limited his reports within the Republic to military
matters. Hemingway may have generally condemned the anarchists in his
nonfiction, considering their activity as hampering the war effort, but he
never repeated the accusation of their collaboration with the rebels, as
Matthews had done. And when Hemingway commented on the Bareclona
crisis, he referred only to the government—not the communists, as
Matthews had done.{{efn|Hemingway’s comments in “Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win” NANA staff
correspondent dispatch. Though arguably he was propagandizing by hiding the communist influence—
to mention the communists to an American audience would not gain sympathy for the
cause.}}Nor did he write articles asserting the limited role of
the communists in the government, or explaining Spanish anarchism, also
as Matthews had done.{{efn|An article on the communists’ limited role appeared in late November 1937, as discussed in a
missive from The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State on 2
Dec. 1937 (United States 461). Matthews’ “Anarchism: Spain’s Enigma” appeared in the New York
Times 22 Aug. 1937: 6, 14.}}

During one of Hemingway’s stateside breaks between trips to Spain, his
children asked if he was a “tool” of Stalin, an accusation tossed by a schoolmate
who, presumably parroting his or her parents, probably understood
the term no better than Hemingway’s children. {{sfn|Hemingway|nd|p=}}
Hemingway believed in the Republic’s potential, but he was never a dupe of
the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) or Comintern. As did many others, he
accepted PCE’s presence in the government for its discipline and organization
toward winning the war, and he understood the material necessity for
Comintern’s support. It should also be noted, as historians Hugh Thomas
and Helen Graham have reminded us, that the communism associated with
the Republic wasn’t particularly communist anyway.{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=628}}{{sfn|Graham|2002|p=184}} {{pg|440|441}}

Hemingway declined to follow Joris Ivens’ suggestion that he write a
dispatch on the significant role of the political commissars in the Republican
military, even though that would have meant
featuring his brave new friend Gustav Regler.{{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=}} Hemingway also, in a letter
justifying his work to Jack Wheeler at NANA, wrote about choosing not to
send a dispatch he had written because it might strike readers as propaganda
“no matter how true” (Letter to Jack Wheeler).{{sfn|Hemingway|1938b|p=}}

Hemingway went to Spain to see the war himself and to support the Republic
through his ambulance fund. The paychecks from NANA and the
fundraising from ''The Spanish Earth'' helped. Whatever propagandistic streak
colors the dispatches pales in comparison to the documentary. The filmmaker,
Joris Ivens, was well established in European communist circles. The
documentary genre then and now has occupied a slippery position between
the extremes of impossible-to-achieve empirical nonfiction and of the outright
fictionalized. Evaluations of Hemingway’s journalism are informed by
knowledge of ''The Spanish Earth'' and the ''Ken'' essays to the detriment of the
journalism. And the very nature of the slippery documentary genre may enable
the film to escape opprobrium. It wasn’t reportage; it was altogether
something else. But for that matter, Hemingway’s dispatches weren’t purely
reportage either, and if not ''altogether'' something else, still something else,
and should be reckoned with accordingly.

== Notes ==
{{notelist|20em}}

==Citations==
{{Reflist|15em}}

==Works Cited==
{{refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker
|first=Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Bruccoli |first=Matthew |date=2006 |title=Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame |url= |location=Columbia |publisher=U of South Caronia P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Cowles |first=Virginia |date=1941 |title=Looking for Trouble |url= |location=New York
|publisher=Harper & Brothers |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Davison |first=Richard Allan |title=The Publication of Hemingway’s The Spanish Earth: An Untold Story |url= |journal=Hemingway Review
|volume=7.2 |issue= |date=1988
|pages=122-130 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson
|first=Scott |date=2009 |title=Fitzgerald & Hemingway: Works and Days |url= |location=New York |publisher=Columbia UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Franklin |first=Sidney |date=1952 |title=Bullfighter from Brooklyn |url= |location=New York |publisher=Prentice-Hall |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Graham |first=Helen |date=2002 |title=The Spanish Republic at War 1936-1939 |url= |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Guttmann |first=Allen |date=1962 |title=The Wound in the Heart: American and the Spanish Civil War |url= |location=New York |publisher=Free Press of Glencoe |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1967 |title=By-Line: Ernest Hemingway |url= |location=New York |publisher=Scibner |pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Trogdon
|editor-first=Robert W.
|author-mask=1
|title=Fascism is a Lie
|url=
|journal=Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference |volume==
|issue=
|date=2002
|pages=193-6
|location=New York
|publisher=Carroll & Graf
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 May 1937
|chapter=Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=nd
|chapter=The Home Front
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938a
|chapter=Letter to Edmund Wilson
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=2 June 1938b
|chapter=Letter to Jack Wheeler
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=14 Feb 1939
|chapter=On the American Dead in Spain
|title=TS. New Masses
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Baker
|editor-first=Carlos
|author-mask=1
|date=2003
|chapter=The Hadely Mowrer
|title=Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Scribner
|pages=462-3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ibarruri
|first=Dolores
|date=1966
|title=They Shall Not Pass: The Autobiography of La Pasionaria
|url=
|location=United States
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|date=1969
|title=The Camera and I
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|author-mask=1
|date=26 Apr 1937
|chapter=Letter to Ernest Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|date=20 Nov 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Bertrand Weaver
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=12 Oct 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=25 Apr 1939
|chapter=Letter to M.B. Tenney
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Apr 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Knightley
|first=Phillip
|date=2004
|title=The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq
|url=
|location=Baltimore
|publisher=John Hopkins
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=
|date=9 Apr 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=TS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=11 Apr 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=8 May 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=6 July 1937d
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=July 1937e
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=22 March 1939
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 9
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=
|date=20 May 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=20 Dec 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 5
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Sep 1937c
|chapter=Note to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moorehead
|first=Caroline
|date=2003
|title=Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Henry Holt
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moreira
|first=Peter
|date=2006
|title=Hemingway on the China Front: His WWII Spy Mission with Martha Gellhorn
|url=
|location=Washington D.C.
|publisher=Potomac Books
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|date=5 Feb 1937
|chapter=Promotion Box: Hemingway, For Immediate Release
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|author-mask=1
|date=4 Apr 1938
|chapter=Promotion Box: American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|editor-last=Nelson
|editor-first=Card
|date=1994
|title=Remembering Spain: Hemingway’s Civil War Eulogy and the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
|url=
|location=Urbana
|publisher=U of Illinois
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Reynolds
|first=Michael
|date=1989
|title=Hemingway: The Paris Years
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Norton
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Stott
|first=William
|date=1986
|title=Documentary Expression and Thirties America
|url=
|location=Chicago
|publisher=U of Chicago P
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Thomas
|first=Hugh
|date=2001
|title=The Spanish Civil War, Rev. ed.
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Modern Library
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine
|last=''Two Wars and More to Come''
|first=
|date=24 Jan 1938
|title=Best Sellers of the Week Here and Elsewhere
|type=Advertisement
|url=
|magazine=New York Times
|pages=
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=NA
|first=
|title=United States. Dept. of State
|url=
|journal= Foreign Relations of the Untied States, 1937 |volume=1
|issue=General
|date=1954
|pages=
|location=Washington
|publisher=GPO
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Watson
|first=William Braasch
|title=Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches
|url=
|journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=7.2
|issue=
|date=1988
|pages=4-121
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Wheeler
|first=John H.
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938
|chapter=Letter to Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection, Box 3 Folder 14
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}

{{refend}}
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches

2025-04-20T14:10:24Z

MerAtticus: harvtxt J

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 

{{byline|last=Vernon |first=Alex |abstract=The Spanish Civil War began in July 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally-restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy. By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches.}}

{{dc|dc=T|HE SPANISH CIVIL WAR BEGAN ON}} 17-18 JULY, 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy, to collaborate with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens on the pro-Republican documentary ''The Spanish Earth'', and to pursue his fledgling love affair with Martha Gellhorn.{{efn|Adapted and printed with permission from ''Hemingway’s Second War: Bearing Witness to the Spanish Civil War.'' Iowa City: U of Iowa Press, 2011.}}
By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches for NANA.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=4}}{{efn|Quotations from the NANA dispatches follow the Diplomatic Text established by William Braasch’s “Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches.” I prefer NANA’s titles rather than Watson’s. For my disagreements with some of Watson’s datings, see my comments on specific dispatches in ''Hemingway’s Second War'' {{harvtxt|Watson|1988|p=}}.}}The secondary sources habitually judge them inferior journalism. Carlos Baker in the first Hemingway biography, for example, complains that the dialogue was “so heavily stamped with personal mannerisms as to be of doubtful authenticity.” Baker sees a “curious monotony in his stories of battles and bombardments,” a gratuitous use of graphic imagery “to shock his readers,” and “a note of triumphant boastfulness” in reporting proximity to danger. He also faults Hemingway for “often hint[ing] he was alone when in fact he was usually with Martha Gellhorn, Matthews, and Delmer.” Hemingway lacked Dos Passos’ “eye for telling details” and the “meticulous exactitude and inclusiveness that characterized the best work of Herbert Matthews and Sefton Delmer.”{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}

Philip Knightley’s ''The First Casualty'', the standard history of war correspondence, paraphrases Baker but with a trouncing final judgment:{{pg|427|428}}Hemingway’s “performance as a war correspondent was abysmally bad.” But Knightley goes beyond “technical” dissatisfaction to moral condemnation. Not just “unjustifiably optimistic”—an excusable offense—Hemingway’s reporting was “unforgivable” in its “total failure to report the Communist persecution, imprisonment, and summary execution of ‘untrustworthy elements’ on the Republican side, when he knew this was happening and when disclosing it might well have prevented further horrors like this.”
{{sfn|Knightley|2004 |pp=231–32}}{{efn|In my view, Knightley does not sufficiently acknowledge his paraphrasing of Baker.}}

Such criticisms in the final analysis might bear out. As Scott Donaldson writes, Hemingway advanced the Republican cause in his dispatches by eliciting “the deepest possible feelings of horror and of sympathy for the victims” of the Madrid bombardment; his “undue optimism” often “ignored Loyalist defeats and exaggerated the importance of its victories”; and “he repeatedly called attention to the participation of Italians and Germans on Franco’s side.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=426}} It also served as a recruitment tool—Milton Wolff, for example, acknowledged the strong influence Hemingway’s dispatches had on his decision to volunteer. Nevertheless, I think it a worthwhile exercise to attend a little more studiously to Hemingway’s dispatches, their context, and their artistry. I don’t necessarily intend to reverse the general opinion of the correspondence, only to achieve a better and more sympathetic understanding.

Herbert Matthews’ reporting for the ''New York Times'' will serve as a convenient comparison for two reasons. First, because both Baker and Knightley use Matthews’ journalism as the standard of excellence to pass judgment on Hemingway’s; and second, because the two worked practically side-by-side, seeing and reporting on many of the same events. In fact so closely did they work together that NANA sometimes complained that the ''Times'' was not buying Hemingway’s pieces because they resembled Matthews,’ and at one point Matthews’ own editors at the Times suspected him of plagiarizing Hemingway.{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|pp=411, 420}} A note from Matthews’ assigned editor Raymond McCaw provides, in two columns, seven quite similar passages from Hemingway’s Aragon front dispatches of September 13 and 14 with Matthews’ of September 14, with a penciled note at the bottom: “a deadly parallel if you ask me.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937c|p=}} Edwin James, the managing editor and McCaw’s boss, eventually agreed with Matthews’ defense: “It is quite apparent that you did not file any duplicate of the Hemingway story, or vice versa. As I understand it, the similarity arose from the fact that you{{pg|428|429}}both went to see the same show and saw it at the same time [sic], under the same conditions.”{{sfn|James|1937b|p=}}

Matthews’ dispatches ring of Republican bias as much if not more than anything Hemingway ever filed. The ''Times'' received many letters to the editor complaining about Matthews’ undisguised politics, which also gave serious concern to some of his editors. His description of the Republican May 1937 infighting in Barcelona is a striking example of how his news veered into propaganda and shows just how much he passed along the government’s version of events. The government’s “BLOODLESS TRIUMPH FOUGHT WITH RECOGNIZEDWEAPONS OF DEMOCRACY” turned out to be blatantly false, as the government and the “COMMUNISTS [WHO] DISTINGUISHED THEMSELVES” resorted to violent suppression. His blaming the uprising on the anarchist CNT working as Franco operatives parrots the government’s and the communist party’s public position, even though both charges—that the anarchists precipitated the events and that they were under Nationalist direction—were also false. His dispatch’s optimistic close also equivocates the political reality: “NEW GOVERNMENT HAS TAKEN POWER WHICH APPEARS TOVE CONFIDENCE VAST MAJORITY SPANIARDS IN LOYALIST TERRITORY AND TIS HOPED WILL GAIN EQUAL CONFIDENCE ABROAD STOP VIOLENCE AND REVOLUTION BEEN REPUDIATED AND NEWAND FAR HOPEFULLER PERIOD SEEMS BEGINNING.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937a|p=}}The ''Times'', knowing full well the one-sided coverage of a correspondent writing from one side of the conflict, had a reporter on both sides: Matthews with the Republicans, and William Carney with the Nationalists. They got their facts right (or wrong) as often as the other, their editors concluded; and they inspired about the same number of letters of complaint.{{sfn|James|1937a|p=}}{{sfn|James|1939|p=}}

Furthermore, Matthews’ dispatches received a great deal of substantive editorial revisions. One of Matthews’ Teruel reports had to be cut for length, as McCaw informed James: “This bird sent 2844 words on the same facts which Hemingway covered much better in less than half that number. I wonder if Matthews thinks the paper is thriving, and that cable tolls do not matter a damn. Of course, it had to be cut for space anyway.” McCaw most likely refers here to Matthews’ dispatch corresponding to Hemingway’s “The Attack on Teruel,” though Matthews’ account of the fall of Teruel is also much longer (and more long-winded) than Hemingway’s, and just as personal in terms of describing the dangers{{pg|429|430}} he faced. Indeed its length allows him to share even more of the action he endured.{{sfn|McCaw|1937b|p=}}

Raymond McCaw held a general professional disagreement with Matthews perhaps tainted with over zealousness. Whether a personal or political motive informed that disagreement can’t be determined from the evidence I’ve seen. It is also clear that McCaw’s charges bear some validity—that any responsible editor could have easily and reasonably taken issue where McCaw did. One of the more interesting examples concerns Matthews’ piece on Guadalajara. Because he only saw evidence on Franco’s side of Italian forces, he only reported on Italians. But the ''Times'' editors heard from other sources that German soldiers also participated in the March offensive. They thought it prudent, from this confusion, to change (nine times) “Italian” to “Rebel,” “the foe,” or “Insurgent.” When Matthews saw the published piece he wrote a strenuous objection. In some instances the editors changed paraphrased quotations from his sources. One large paragraph omitted by the editors stressed the first-hand nature of the information, and Matthews underlines the key words: “All day, at every place we stopped and no matter whom we talked to or what we saw, there was only one label—Italian. The dead bodies, the prisoners, the material of every kind, the men who had occupied Brihuega and then fled were Italian and nothing but Italian.” Here and elsewhere in his original story, Matthews emphasizes the “personal knowledge” of its information.{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}{{efn|James supported McCaw on these changes, though later acknowledged that altering quoted sources was perhaps unwarranted(29 April 1937; Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3).}}Yet Matthews did not report on the foreigners fighting for the Republic—it was in fact the Italian Garibali Battalion that routed Franco’s Italians. We might surmise government censorship behind this silence, though Matthews would not cable news of “CENSORSHIP STRICTER” and “BAN ON MENTIONING INTERNATIONALS INCLUDING AMERICANS INSTITUTED TODAY” until July.{{sfn|Matthews|1937b|p=}}Perhaps he cautiously self-censored, or politically self-censored for the same reasons the government would eventually ban mention. Still, his stridency about the omission of foreigners on one side is striking given his knowledge of their contribution to the other side. For this reason too, and his omission of other nationalities on the insurgent side, it seemed only fair to his editor “to stand on the statement that the majority of the Rebels were Italians and let it go at that.”{{sfn|James|1937c|p=}} A reasonable decision.

Throughout his correspondence to his editors and his several books,{{pg|430|431}}Matthews maintained a passionate defense of his eyewitness journalistic standard, a position those close to him understood. “Matthews never believed anything he had not seen with his own eyes,” Joris Ivens wrote. “He never saw his job as reporter as one that permitted him to sit in his hotel and read the handouts of the War Ministry.” {{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=112}} Sidney Franklin recalls that some writers wrote their pieces before arriving in Madrid, and came only for the “legitimacy” of the Madrid dateline.{{sfn|Franklin|1952|p=232}}And Matthews hated, on principle, having his name attached to an article that violated the integrity of his witness. The only way to achieve objectivity, for Matthews, was to acknowledge one’s subjective perspective. Writing to his publisher, Matthews argued that “the full documentary value” of his coverage was lost when the editors altered his submissions for “the apparent necessity of giving more or less equal space to both sides.”{{sfn|Matthews|1939|p=}}

As with Matthews, so too Hemingway. Indeed the commitment to subjectivity
fit quite well with Hemingway’s modernist aesthetics. If Hemingway
focused the dispatches on his perspective—on his own experience dodging
artillery—more than Matthews and more than most, he did so at least partially
to fulfill expectations. NANA approached him, after all, for his name
and personality as much as whatever he would write. Before he even left the
states it pitched him to potential publications, sending out a promotional release with text to be used alongside his forthcoming dispatches and suggesting
they include a photograph: “Mr. Hemingway’s assignment is to get both from the bombed towns and bombed trenches the human story of the war, not just an account of the game being played by general staffs with pins
and a map.”{{sfn|NANA|1937|p=}} NANA also released each individual dispatch with a one-sentence “precede” about the “famous” or “noted” author. Ernest Hemingway was not writing as Herbert Mathews, ace reporter; Hemingway was writing as Ernest Hemingway, famous author of novels and stories well known to be drawn from his own experiences.

That he understood this to be his assignment is further evidenced by a
cable Matthews sent to his ''Times'' editors on April 9, 1937, concerning the
Loyalist attack: “WORKED CONJOINTL WITH HEMINGWAY TODAY HE SENDING EYEWITNESS DESCRIPTION WHILE EYE SENT GENERAL STRATEGY.”{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}When a year later the ''Times'' asked NANA to ensure Hemingway’s reports differed from Matthews, NANA complied by asking Hemingway “to emphasize color rather than straight reporting” not necessarily out of dissatisfaction with Hemingway’s reportage as Baker contends,{{efn|{{harvtxt|Baker|1969|p=}}’s notes date the ''Times'' request to NANA as 8 Apr. 1938, and NANA’s to Hemingway as 15
Apr. 1938 (Princeton University, Firestone Library: Box 18, Folder 8 “1938”), the date of “The Bombing of Tortosa” dispatch.}} but to increase{{pg|431|432}}the chance of selling to the ''Times'' and indeed to ensure the spirit of NANA’s original arrangement with Hemingway. {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}Far from dissatisfied, NANA wrote Hemingway at the end of August 1938 a letter of agreement for his coverage of “a general European war” should it break out, “written in your colorful style” (Hemingway was in Paris, on his way to Spain for the last time during the war).{{sfn|Wheeler|1938|p=}}When Edmund Wilson criticized the selected dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'', Hemingway wrote him that “I was paid to write what are called ‘eye witness’ accounts . . .what is called, or was asked for as ‘color stuff.’ Most of such stuff is faked. Mine was not. It was straight reporting and the personal stuff was what had been asked for by the editors. “Wilson’s estimation was also based upon ''Fact’s'' inclusion of the “The Old Man at the Bridge” story from ''Ken'', “not a news dispatch” at all.{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}Speaking at Carnegie Hall before the showing of a rough cut of ''The Spanish Earth'', shortly after his first trip to Spain and so very much in the context of his wartime work, Hemingway defined the writer’s problem as “project[ing] [what is true] in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2002|p=193}}

Personal, anecdotal journalism had been Hemingway’s signature style from his earliest days filing reports, in the early 1920s from Paris, when his editor at the ''Toronto Star Weekly'' “encouraged [. . .] what Hemingway did best: write about himself in the act of being a reporter.”{{sfn|Reynolds|1989|p=45}}How could he expect that NANA would expect anything else, if indeed NANA did expect anything else? In the Spanish Civil War he at least maintained his eyewitness posture; in World War II, however, he couldn’t keep himself out. His first piece, about D-Day, begins, “No one remembers the date of the Battle of Shiloh. But the day ''we took'' Fox Green beach was the sixth of June, and the wind was blowing hard out of the northwest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1967|p=340}}His venue too—''Collier’s'' magazine—and the fact that he had not written anything in three years further contributed to the story-like nature of the WWII stories, in which he figured as a protagonist—not to mention the stories and involvement he couldn’t write about, armed and running around France more of a free agent than his guerilla-hero Robert Jordan ever was (though he began to transform these experiences into fiction in several unpublished stories). In wartime China in 1943, filing articles for Ralph Ingersoll’s short-lived ''PM'' New York afternoon daily, Hemingway did not even care to be called a news reporter.{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=99}}

It should be mentioned that Hemingway and Matthews enjoyed a great{{pg|432|433}}friendship and working relationship. Hemingway usually brought Matthews, who did not have a car, on his excursions. When Matthews left Madrid for a break in mid April 1937, he had already ensured Hemingway would provide coverage to the ''Times'' through NANA. For one thing, Hemingway did not have to worry about Matthews as a rival for the history books. He could endorse his friends’ book, ''Two Wars and More to Come'', and praise him as “the ablest and the bravest war correspondent writing today “who “when the fakers are all dead [. . .] will be read in the schools” (Advertisement 21) because Matthews posed no threat to Hemingway’s own chances to be read in the schools. The only brief Hemingway ever expressed he really reserved for Matthews’ editors, for not wanting his Teruel street-fighting story and for cutting references to himself in Matthews’ Teruel dispatches so that it appeared only Matthews had been there.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=462}}

As for Hemingway’s neglecting to name everyone with him for every story, the ''Times'' cutting of his name suggests that such exactitude was hardly a priority. A paper had no incentive for announcing the fact that a competitor’s
correspondent stood beside its own to see and report the same
events. NANA changed at least one vague Hemingway “we,” which admits
to the presence of others, to “this correspondent”
—we can hardly fault Hemingway for working in the spirit of his
employer’s standards.{{sfn|NANA|1938|p=}}{{efn|“we” in typescript and radiogram (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 1 and Folder 25).}} Do readers care that Matthews, Delmer, Gellhorn,
and others were there? The story’s effect and the limited word count also
weighed against such roll calls. One editor chose not to clutter the dispatch
on the great retreat across the Ebro with all the names of the American International Brigade volunteers Hemingway encountered, an omission of
Content more far serious than that of omitted correspondent names.{{efn| Radiogram insert dateline 4 April 1938 (HRC: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 25).}} Hemingway
often gave the names of the reporters with him, such as at Teruel;
nor was he the only reporter to sometimes neglect to do so. Martha Gellhorn,
for example, used a vague “we” and singled herself out as the primary
participant in some of her stories.

By using first-person reportage Hemingway—and Matthews and Gellhorn And most of the group covering the war—were operating solidly within
convention. William Stott, in ''Documentary Expression and Thirties America'',
calls this first-person ''participant observer'' technique “the most common sort
of documentary reportage in the thirties” that worked “by vicarious persuasion:
the writer partook of the events he reported and bared his feelings
and attitudes to influence the reader’s own.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=178-9}}{{efn|He specifically includes Hemingway et al (180).}} Stott also observes {{pg|433|434}}another technique to enable documentary reportage to “talk to us, and convince us that we, our deepest interests, are engaged,” in the use of the second person: “Thirties documentaries constantly address ‘you,’ the ‘you’ who is we the audience, and exhorts, wheedles, begs us to identify, pity, participate.” His examples include Dorothy Parker’s Spanish Civil War writing, and Hemingway’s 1935 “First-Hand Report on the Florida Hurricane.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=27-8}} A number of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches employ the second-person as a way of bringing the reader along for the ride.

Hemingway’s dispatches used personal pronouns more artfully than is generally recognized. “A New Kind of War,” which William Braasch Watson notes as having been “[w]ritten with more care and imagination” than its predecessors, begins in second person: “The window of the hotel is open and, as you lie in bed, you hear the firing in the front line seventeen blocks away.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=29}} He takes “you” outside, to see the damage and the dead from the bombing. “Someone makes a joke about missing teeth and someone else says not to make that joke. And everyone has the feeling that characterizes war. It wasn’t me, see? It wasn’t me.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} The tension between the first person and second-person pronouns—the movement toward identification with “you” and the insistence that “it wasn’t me”—continues in the next line. Here the reader is at once still in the narrator’s shoes, but strangely distanced from the narrator through biographical tidbit and, at the same time, asked to see himself in the enemy: “The Italian dead up on the Guadalajara weren’t you although Italian dead, because of where you had spent your boyhood, always seemed, still, like Our Dead.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} It is worth quoting at length the dispatch’s transition to first person:
<blockquote>
After the shell that lit on the sidewalk in front of the hotel you got a beautiful double corner room on that side, twice the size of the one you’d had, for less than a dollar. It wasn’t me they killed. See? No. Not me. It wasn’t me anymore.

Then in a hospital given by the American Friends of Spanish Democracy located out behind the Morata front along the road
to Valencia they said, “Raven wants to see you.”

“Do I know him?”

“I don’t think so,” they said. “But he wants to see you.”

“Where is he?”

“Upstairs.”{{pg|434|435}}In the room upstairs they are giving a blood transfusion to a man with a very gray face who lay on a cot with his arm out looking away from the gurgling bottle and moaning in a very impersonal way. He moaned mechanically and at regular intervals and it did not seem to be him that made the sound. His lips did not move.

“Where’s Raven?” I asked.

“I’m here,” said Raven.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=31}}</blockquote>
The piece simply could not have sustained the second-person for the remaining five pages. More significantly, for this deeply personal exchange between the writer and the faceless, eyeless soldier, Hemingway could not hide in the rhetorical device of the second-person. In the process, he effects a reversal of the usual pronoun game; instead of identifying with the all embracing “you,” we leave that trick behind and become fully attached to
the narratorial “I” as ourselves, as we might not have been had the article
begun in the first person. And even as the narrator identifies himself by name
for the only time in any of the dispatches—“Hemingway,” and later
“Ernest”—as decidedly not ourselves. We do not say, ''It isn’t me''. The historian
Hugh Thomas notes “the refreshing candour” of Hemingway’s naming
himself “in the world of the International Brigades, where no one’s name
seemed to be truthfully given.”{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=591}}{{efn|For Watson, the dispatch “seems, in fact, on the verge of becoming a story.”{{harvtxt|Watson|1988|p=29}}}}

A year later Hemingway’s “Tortosa Calmly Awaits Assault” resists admitting
the city’s imminent fall. Yet it does so anyway, by subtly alluding to the
wartime rhetoric of sacrificed blood irrigating the earth and rejuvenating
Spain. Such rhetoric was common during the war, appearing in speeches,
print, and poetry. Many of the poems in Cary Nelson’s anthology ''The Wound
and the Dream: Sixty Years of American Poems about the Civil War'' join in the
Spanish and international chorus’s general connection between Republican
soldiers and the land, and the particular singing of their dead nourishing
the land. We find such language in La Pasionaria’s farewell address to the International Brigades, her epilogue to ''The Book of the XV Brigade'', and Hemingway’s famous eulogy “On the American Dead in Spain”: “For our dead are
a part of the earth of Spain now and the earth of Spain can never die. Each
winter it will seem to die and each spring it will come alive again. Our dead
will live with it forever.”{{sfn|Nelson|1994|p=3}}{{efn| Reprinted in {{harvtxt|Bruccoli|2006|p=76}} and {{harvtxt|Nelson|1994|p=37}} (the drafts at the JFK are titled “The Dead at Jarama”). In addition to the poems in Nelson’s anthology, see the excerpt from Boris Todrin’s “Spanish Sowing” in {{harvtxt|Guttmann|1969|pp=179-180}}.}} The Tortosa dispatch implies the deaths of{{pg|435|436}}many Republican soldiers in its final paragraph’s description of the newborn onions:
<blockquote>The artillery was picking up a little now. Two came in at a fairly useful place and as the smoke blew away ahead and settled through the trees, you picked an armful of spring onions from a field beside the trail that led to the Tortosa road. They were the first onions of the spring and peeling one I found they were plump white and not too strong. The Ebro Delta has a fine rich land, and where the onions grow, tomorrow will be a battle.
{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=84}}</blockquote>

The echo is quiet, and perhaps unconscious, but there nevertheless. The opening boastfulness of “American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents”
should be taken somewhat ironically. The dispatch begins by announcing
that for “two days we have been doing the most dangerous thing
you can do in this war. That is keep close behind an unstabilized line where
the enemy are attacking with mechanized forces.” Then, a few pages later,
we learn about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade survivors of the spring 1938
Nationalist offensive that took Bob Merriman and eventually reached the
Mediterranean Sea. Reading about these survivors creeping through enemy
camps, stepping on a sleeping German soldier’s hand, sprinting “across an
open field toward the Ebro bank and being sniped at by artillery controlled
by an observation plane overhead” and then “the desperate swimming of
the Ebro” naked, we are asked to place the correspondent’s plight in due perspective.{{sfn|Watson|1988|pp=71-2}} This story certainly escapes the charge of a monotonous
battle and bombing scene; its switch from apparently boastful to
awe-struck witness feels almost deliberately self-conscious. Other choice selfironic
moments come in the dispatches of that pre-Teruel quiet fall of 1938.
The one titled “Hemingway, Covering War, Tells of Brush with Death” has little
to report from Madrid other than the new aftershave brand he is trying.
In “Loyalists’ Drive Seen Progressing as Planned,” he writes that “Shells are
all much the same and if they don’t hit you there is no story and if they do
you won’t have to write it.” {{sfn|Watson|1988|p=58}}

Hemingway’s dispatches are sometimes monotonous because his war was
Usually monotonous—as wars are most of the time. It should also be kept in
mind that scholars reviewing Hemingway’s NANA dispatches one after{{pg|436|437}}another do not relive the original reading experience. Hemingway wrote dispatches sporadically, papers did not run all of his dispatches, papers edited and cut them, and readers read at least a couple of papers’ worth of other articles in between. He told Edmund Wilson as much in defending himself against Wilson’s critique of the selected (and heavily edited and cut) dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'' without his consent: “If you are being paid to be shot at and write about it you are supposed to mention the shooting. [. . .] But I do not go in for re-printing journalism.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}

If we can in this way better understand his style, and at least explain it if
not excuse it, we similarly ought to try to contextualize—and perhaps
excuse—the moral problem. The two issues here are the specific condemnation
of Hemingway’s silence about Republican atrocities and the general
question of biased reporting (the latter of which has already partially been
addressed).

Hemingway knew, as Donaldson writes, that mentioning the atrocities
“would arouse anticommunist sentiments back in the States and effectively
undermine any possibility of American intervention.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=394}} It is also doubtful
that reporting them would have stopped them. But reporting Republican
atrocities from Spain was not possible for the simple reason that all dispatches
went through a government censor. Matthews cabled his editors
from Paris in May 1937 to tell them that “censorship does not permit us to
say when the ‘telefonica’ is hit. So whenever you see reference in my
despatches [sic] to ‘an important building in the center of the city’ or words
to that effect, the cable desk can know that it is the telefonica.” {{sfn|Matthews|1937c|p=}} As already noted, by July he would cable “CENSORSHIP
STRICTER” as the ban on mentioning internationals went into effect. {{sfn|Matthews|1937d|p=}}{{sfn|Matthews|1937e|p=}} Cowles’ memoir confirms the
aggressive censorship, observing that it limited journalists to exactly the kind of material Hemingway wrote about:
<blockquote>There were frequent attempts to “beat the censor” by employing American slang expressions, but this came to an end when a Canadian girl joined the staff. The International Brigades were not allowed to be publicized; no reference could be made to Russian armaments, and buildings and streets which suffered
bombardments could not be identified.</blockquote>{{pg|437|438}}<blockquote>It was only in the realm of the human interest story that the journalists had a free hand. They could describe bombardments to their heart’s content.{{sfn|Cowles|1941|p=20}}</blockquote>
Hemingway and everyone else—to reserve incrimination for Hemingway is hardly just. No correspondent covering Republican Spain reported suspicious imprisonments and disappearances by government agents.

Hemingway, through Joris Ivens and ''The Spanish Earth'' project, had better
access to officials than most. Had he been able somehow to report such
activity, he would have lost that access and would probably have been kicked
out of the country. His fame would have likely prevented his own officially
sponsored disappearance, though he still worried, especially as so many of
such crimes on the Republican side occurred from free agents. When Jasper
Wood printed the anarchist F.A.I. banner in the limited edition book version
of ''The Spanish Earth'', Hemingway expressed his anxieties bluntly in a letter
to Jasper on August 20, 1938. It is hardly “petulant,” he scolded, “not to wish
to be shot.”{{sfn|Davison|1988|p=128}} Hostility in the Republic against the anarchists
ran high; after the Barcelona May Day conflict, the government’s foreign
minister told U.S. Ambassador Claude Bowers that “anarchist revolt
throughout Catalonia and not only expected but welcomed as an opportunity
to liquidate the anarchists who have been hostile from the beginning.”
{{sfn|NA|1954|p=292}}{{efn| The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State, 5 May 1937.}}

It is possible that Hemingway’s dispatch stating that “not one friend [. . .]
has been executed or is missing” was his clever means of reporting
the rumors and indeed the general fact while evading the censors, as in this very dispatch he acknowledged the presence of a censor after a bombardment.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=34}}
Matthews, on the other hand, never found a way to mention the
censors or admit even the possibility of people gone missing in the Republic.
Peter Moreira has observed that in a 1943 dispatch Hemingway related a remark by a British officer about the Chinese Nationalist government’s being
“hopeless on the offensive” because censorship “prevented American reporters
From actually saying that the Nationalists wouldn’t attack, surmising that by telling this anecdote Hemingway could sneak such a judgment into
his reports.”{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=77}} In Spain, censors aside, the eyewitness standard and his
own safety and continuing ability to report the war, and, yes, his passionate
support of the government contributed to his decision. He could have written
about government abuses from the states, but then could not return to{{pg|438|439}}cover the war and support the cause—a justification other journalists, those who did not return after the spring of 1937, did not enjoy. In his mind too, knowing what he heard of fascist atrocities, any reportage against the government lessening its chances of victory through killing hopes of increased international aid would have led to more deaths at Franco’s hands that the much smaller number inspired by fifth column paranoia.{{efn|''Hemingway’s Second War'' discusses in greater depth Hemingway’s politics and his falling out
with John Dos Passos over the execution of José Robles}}.

The accusation that Hemingway did not write about Republican atrocities
because he was saving it for his fiction I find baseless (Knightley 232;
Baker 402).{{sfn|Knightley|2004|p=232}}{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=402}}{{efn|Hemingway’s casual comment to colleagues calling dibs on Pepe Quintanilla, the executioner of
Madrid, is not sufficient evidence.}}Carolyn Moorehead, in her biography of Martha Gellhorn, describes
the climate for the Madrid correspondents that first spring: “And so,
day by day, the correspondents walked a thin and nervous line between truth,
evasions, and propaganda, telling one another that though it was not all right
if things were made up and presented as true, it was acceptable to describe
what you wanted, provided it was true and provided your readers were aware
of your position.”{{sfn|Moorehead|2003|p=125}} My own sense is that they did not walk the line quite
so nervously; their passionate commitment, and their principles of position
disclosure and the eyewitness standard, made that walk relatively easy.

The problem of ''committed journalism'', even sixty years later, has not been
resolved—as anyone paying attention to the media and world affairs well
knows. One person’s truth is another person’s propaganda. Certainly, as
Knightley notes, reporting from “the heart” affects one’s judgment.{{sfn|Knightley|2004|pp=234-5}}
Yet to attempt “balance,” per the edits to Matthews’ Guadalajara piece, betrays
one’s believed truth. Furthermore, the kind of reporting done by the
correspondents with the Republic—committed, one-sided, optimistic,
heroic, human interest work by embedded writers—would be practiced
widely and without reserve during World War II. Such narrative journalism,
with roots in Louise May Alcott’s “Hospital Sketches” series published in the
''Boston Commonwealth'', and more immediately in 1930s social documentary
writing whose “essence” is “not information”, anticipated postwar
new journalism’s adoption of novelistic narrative technique for nonfiction
which culminated with such wartime books as Norman Mailer’s ''Armies of
the Night'' and Michael Herr’s ''Dispatches''.{{sfn|Stott|1986|p=11}} Some of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches
fall in this line of development.

Today we might categorize such writing under the awkward umbrella
term ''creative nonfiction''. That term certainly fits the mixed bag of nonfiction
narratives and commentaries Hemingway published during the war in
Ken magazine. These pieces are essays, not journalism, several of which{{pg|439|440}}directly appeal for support for the Republic, and most of which really deal with the approaching world war. ''Ken'' wanted “precisely the kind of opinion articles he could not write for NANA.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=433}} His article, “The Cardinal Picks a Winner,” shows a photo of a row of dead children from Barcelona and another one with Nationalist officers saluting and Catholic officials with raised hands, apparently making the fascist salute as well. He ends ironically: “So I ''don’t believe'' the people shown in the photo can really be making it. I would rather prefer to think that the photograph was faked.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=436}} When Hemingway argues in “A Program for U.S. Realism” that the United States should stay out of the next war except to stuff its pockets through arms sales, one has to wonder, given his call and the democratic nations’ failure to save Spain, if we are to sniff sarcasm here.

The language of the dispatches, with their corrective intent against
Franco’s propaganda, does risk propagandizing. Hemingway’s optimism and
anti-fascism certainly colored his correspondence work. His criticism of the
anarchist and POUM militia for their inactivity on the Aragon front, for example,
sounds a lot like the Spanish Communist Party’s.{{efn|It at least sounds almost exactly like Dolores Ibarruri in her memoir. To the anarchists’ complaint
that they had no arms, she retorts “that they had more arms than did many other fronts. . . .
What they didn’t have and what they were constantly demanding were airplanes and tanks .And
they didn’t have them because the Republic government didn’t have them either, except for those
it received as aid from the Soviet Union” (238–284). Yet the various Catalonia militia were not
as well equipped with small arms as the more regular Popular Army units, and because of the
terrain tanks and planes were in fact necessary.}}
But unlike
Matthews, Hemingway limited his reports within the Republic to military
matters. Hemingway may have generally condemned the anarchists in his
nonfiction, considering their activity as hampering the war effort, but he
never repeated the accusation of their collaboration with the rebels, as
Matthews had done. And when Hemingway commented on the Bareclona
crisis, he referred only to the government—not the communists, as
Matthews had done.{{efn|Hemingway’s comments in “Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win” NANA staff
correspondent dispatch. Though arguably he was propagandizing by hiding the communist influence—
to mention the communists to an American audience would not gain sympathy for the
cause.}}Nor did he write articles asserting the limited role of
the communists in the government, or explaining Spanish anarchism, also
as Matthews had done.{{efn|An article on the communists’ limited role appeared in late November 1937, as discussed in a
missive from The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State on 2
Dec. 1937 (United States 461). Matthews’ “Anarchism: Spain’s Enigma” appeared in the New York
Times 22 Aug. 1937: 6, 14.}}

During one of Hemingway’s stateside breaks between trips to Spain, his
children asked if he was a “tool” of Stalin, an accusation tossed by a schoolmate
who, presumably parroting his or her parents, probably understood
the term no better than Hemingway’s children. {{sfn|Hemingway|nd|p=}}
Hemingway believed in the Republic’s potential, but he was never a dupe of
the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) or Comintern. As did many others, he
accepted PCE’s presence in the government for its discipline and organization
toward winning the war, and he understood the material necessity for
Comintern’s support. It should also be noted, as historians Hugh Thomas
and Helen Graham have reminded us, that the communism associated with
the Republic wasn’t particularly communist anyway.{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=628}}{{sfn|Graham|2002|p=184}} {{pg|440|441}}

Hemingway declined to follow Joris Ivens’ suggestion that he write a
dispatch on the significant role of the political commissars in the Republican
military, even though that would have meant
featuring his brave new friend Gustav Regler.{{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=}} Hemingway also, in a letter
justifying his work to Jack Wheeler at NANA, wrote about choosing not to
send a dispatch he had written because it might strike readers as propaganda
“no matter how true” (Letter to Jack Wheeler).{{sfn|Hemingway|1938b|p=}}

Hemingway went to Spain to see the war himself and to support the Republic
through his ambulance fund. The paychecks from NANA and the
fundraising from ''The Spanish Earth'' helped. Whatever propagandistic streak
colors the dispatches pales in comparison to the documentary. The filmmaker,
Joris Ivens, was well established in European communist circles. The
documentary genre then and now has occupied a slippery position between
the extremes of impossible-to-achieve empirical nonfiction and of the outright
fictionalized. Evaluations of Hemingway’s journalism are informed by
knowledge of ''The Spanish Earth'' and the ''Ken'' essays to the detriment of the
journalism. And the very nature of the slippery documentary genre may enable
the film to escape opprobrium. It wasn’t reportage; it was altogether
something else. But for that matter, Hemingway’s dispatches weren’t purely
reportage either, and if not ''altogether'' something else, still something else,
and should be reckoned with accordingly.

== Notes ==
{{notelist|20em}}

==Citations==
{{Reflist|15em}}

==Works Cited==
{{refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker
|first=Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Bruccoli |first=Matthew |date=2006 |title=Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame |url= |location=Columbia |publisher=U of South Caronia P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Cowles |first=Virginia |date=1941 |title=Looking for Trouble |url= |location=New York
|publisher=Harper & Brothers |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Davison |first=Richard Allan |title=The Publication of Hemingway’s The Spanish Earth: An Untold Story |url= |journal=Hemingway Review
|volume=7.2 |issue= |date=1988
|pages=122-130 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson
|first=Scott |date=2009 |title=Fitzgerald & Hemingway: Works and Days |url= |location=New York |publisher=Columbia UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Franklin |first=Sidney |date=1952 |title=Bullfighter from Brooklyn |url= |location=New York |publisher=Prentice-Hall |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Graham |first=Helen |date=2002 |title=The Spanish Republic at War 1936-1939 |url= |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Guttmann |first=Allen |date=1962 |title=The Wound in the Heart: American and the Spanish Civil War |url= |location=New York |publisher=Free Press of Glencoe |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1967 |title=By-Line: Ernest Hemingway |url= |location=New York |publisher=Scibner |pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Trogdon
|editor-first=Robert W.
|author-mask=1
|title=Fascism is a Lie
|url=
|journal=Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference |volume==
|issue=
|date=2002
|pages=193-6
|location=New York
|publisher=Carroll & Graf
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 May 1937
|chapter=Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=nd
|chapter=The Home Front
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938a
|chapter=Letter to Edmund Wilson
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=2 June 1938b
|chapter=Letter to Jack Wheeler
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=14 Feb 1939
|chapter=On the American Dead in Spain
|title=TS. New Masses
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Baker
|editor-first=Carlos
|author-mask=1
|date=2003
|chapter=The Hadely Mowrer
|title=Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Scribner
|pages=462-3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ibarruri
|first=Dolores
|date=1966
|title=They Shall Not Pass: The Autobiography of La Pasionaria
|url=
|location=United States
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|date=1969
|title=The Camera and I
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|author-mask=1
|date=26 Apr 1937
|chapter=Letter to Ernest Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|date=20 Nov 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Bertrand Weaver
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=12 Oct 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=25 Apr 1939
|chapter=Letter to M.B. Tenney
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Apr 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Knightley
|first=Phillip
|date=2004
|title=The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq
|url=
|location=Baltimore
|publisher=John Hopkins
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=
|date=9 Apr 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=TS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=11 Apr 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=8 May 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=6 July 1937d
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=July 1937e
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=22 March 1939
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 9
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=
|date=20 May 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=20 Dec 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 5
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Sep 1937c
|chapter=Note to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moorehead
|first=Caroline
|date=2003
|title=Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Henry Holt
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moreira
|first=Peter
|date=2006
|title=Hemingway on the China Front: His WWII Spy Mission with Martha Gellhorn
|url=
|location=Washington D.C.
|publisher=Potomac Books
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|date=5 Feb 1937
|chapter=Promotion Box: Hemingway, For Immediate Release
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|author-mask=1
|date=4 Apr 1938
|chapter=Promotion Box: American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|editor-last=Nelson
|editor-first=Card
|date=1994
|title=Remembering Spain: Hemingway’s Civil War Eulogy and the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
|url=
|location=Urbana
|publisher=U of Illinois
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Reynolds
|first=Michael
|date=1989
|title=Hemingway: The Paris Years
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Norton
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Stott
|first=William
|date=1986
|title=Documentary Expression and Thirties America
|url=
|location=Chicago
|publisher=U of Chicago P
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Thomas
|first=Hugh
|date=2001
|title=The Spanish Civil War, Rev. ed.
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Modern Library
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine
|last=''Two Wars and More to Come''
|first=
|date=24 Jan 1938
|title=Best Sellers of the Week Here and Elsewhere
|type=Advertisement
|url=
|magazine=New York Times
|pages=
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=NA
|first=
|title=United States. Dept. of State
|url=
|journal= Foreign Relations of the Untied States, 1937 |volume=1
|issue=General
|date=1954
|pages=
|location=Washington
|publisher=GPO
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Watson
|first=William Braasch
|title=Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches
|url=
|journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=7.2
|issue=
|date=1988
|pages=4-121
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Wheeler
|first=John H.
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938
|chapter=Letter to Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection, Box 3 Folder 14
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}

{{refend}}
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches

2025-04-20T14:05:26Z

MerAtticus: Htx note e

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{{byline|last=Vernon |first=Alex |abstract=The Spanish Civil War began in July 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally-restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy. By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches.}}

{{dc|dc=T|HE SPANISH CIVIL WAR BEGAN ON}} 17-18 JULY, 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy, to collaborate with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens on the pro-Republican documentary ''The Spanish Earth'', and to pursue his fledgling love affair with Martha Gellhorn.{{efn|Adapted and printed with permission from ''Hemingway’s Second War: Bearing Witness to the Spanish Civil War.'' Iowa City: U of Iowa Press, 2011.}}
By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches for NANA.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=4}}{{efn|Quotations from the NANA dispatches follow the Diplomatic Text established by William Braasch’s “Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches.” I prefer NANA’s titles rather than Watson’s. For my disagreements with some of Watson’s datings, see my comments on specific dispatches in ''Hemingway’s Second War'' {{harvtxt|Watson|1988|p=}}.}}The secondary sources habitually judge them inferior journalism. Carlos Baker in the first Hemingway biography, for example, complains that the dialogue was “so heavily stamped with personal mannerisms as to be of doubtful authenticity.” Baker sees a “curious monotony in his stories of battles and bombardments,” a gratuitous use of graphic imagery “to shock his readers,” and “a note of triumphant boastfulness” in reporting proximity to danger. He also faults Hemingway for “often hint[ing] he was alone when in fact he was usually with Martha Gellhorn, Matthews, and Delmer.” Hemingway lacked Dos Passos’ “eye for telling details” and the “meticulous exactitude and inclusiveness that characterized the best work of Herbert Matthews and Sefton Delmer.”{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}

Philip Knightley’s ''The First Casualty'', the standard history of war correspondence, paraphrases Baker but with a trouncing final judgment:{{pg|427|428}}Hemingway’s “performance as a war correspondent was abysmally bad.” But Knightley goes beyond “technical” dissatisfaction to moral condemnation. Not just “unjustifiably optimistic”—an excusable offense—Hemingway’s reporting was “unforgivable” in its “total failure to report the Communist persecution, imprisonment, and summary execution of ‘untrustworthy elements’ on the Republican side, when he knew this was happening and when disclosing it might well have prevented further horrors like this.”
{{sfn|Knightley|2004 |pp=231–32}}{{efn|In my view, Knightley does not sufficiently acknowledge his paraphrasing of Baker.}}

Such criticisms in the final analysis might bear out. As Scott Donaldson writes, Hemingway advanced the Republican cause in his dispatches by eliciting “the deepest possible feelings of horror and of sympathy for the victims” of the Madrid bombardment; his “undue optimism” often “ignored Loyalist defeats and exaggerated the importance of its victories”; and “he repeatedly called attention to the participation of Italians and Germans on Franco’s side.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=426}} It also served as a recruitment tool—Milton Wolff, for example, acknowledged the strong influence Hemingway’s dispatches had on his decision to volunteer. Nevertheless, I think it a worthwhile exercise to attend a little more studiously to Hemingway’s dispatches, their context, and their artistry. I don’t necessarily intend to reverse the general opinion of the correspondence, only to achieve a better and more sympathetic understanding.

Herbert Matthews’ reporting for the ''New York Times'' will serve as a convenient comparison for two reasons. First, because both Baker and Knightley use Matthews’ journalism as the standard of excellence to pass judgment on Hemingway’s; and second, because the two worked practically side-by-side, seeing and reporting on many of the same events. In fact so closely did they work together that NANA sometimes complained that the ''Times'' was not buying Hemingway’s pieces because they resembled Matthews,’ and at one point Matthews’ own editors at the Times suspected him of plagiarizing Hemingway.{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|pp=411, 420}} A note from Matthews’ assigned editor Raymond McCaw provides, in two columns, seven quite similar passages from Hemingway’s Aragon front dispatches of September 13 and 14 with Matthews’ of September 14, with a penciled note at the bottom: “a deadly parallel if you ask me.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937c|p=}} Edwin James, the managing editor and McCaw’s boss, eventually agreed with Matthews’ defense: “It is quite apparent that you did not file any duplicate of the Hemingway story, or vice versa. As I understand it, the similarity arose from the fact that you{{pg|428|429}}both went to see the same show and saw it at the same time [sic], under the same conditions.”{{sfn|James|1937b|p=}}

Matthews’ dispatches ring of Republican bias as much if not more than anything Hemingway ever filed. The ''Times'' received many letters to the editor complaining about Matthews’ undisguised politics, which also gave serious concern to some of his editors. His description of the Republican May 1937 infighting in Barcelona is a striking example of how his news veered into propaganda and shows just how much he passed along the government’s version of events. The government’s “BLOODLESS TRIUMPH FOUGHT WITH RECOGNIZEDWEAPONS OF DEMOCRACY” turned out to be blatantly false, as the government and the “COMMUNISTS [WHO] DISTINGUISHED THEMSELVES” resorted to violent suppression. His blaming the uprising on the anarchist CNT working as Franco operatives parrots the government’s and the communist party’s public position, even though both charges—that the anarchists precipitated the events and that they were under Nationalist direction—were also false. His dispatch’s optimistic close also equivocates the political reality: “NEW GOVERNMENT HAS TAKEN POWER WHICH APPEARS TOVE CONFIDENCE VAST MAJORITY SPANIARDS IN LOYALIST TERRITORY AND TIS HOPED WILL GAIN EQUAL CONFIDENCE ABROAD STOP VIOLENCE AND REVOLUTION BEEN REPUDIATED AND NEWAND FAR HOPEFULLER PERIOD SEEMS BEGINNING.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937a|p=}}The ''Times'', knowing full well the one-sided coverage of a correspondent writing from one side of the conflict, had a reporter on both sides: Matthews with the Republicans, and William Carney with the Nationalists. They got their facts right (or wrong) as often as the other, their editors concluded; and they inspired about the same number of letters of complaint.{{sfn|James|1937a|p=}}{{sfn|James|1939|p=}}

Furthermore, Matthews’ dispatches received a great deal of substantive editorial revisions. One of Matthews’ Teruel reports had to be cut for length, as McCaw informed James: “This bird sent 2844 words on the same facts which Hemingway covered much better in less than half that number. I wonder if Matthews thinks the paper is thriving, and that cable tolls do not matter a damn. Of course, it had to be cut for space anyway.” McCaw most likely refers here to Matthews’ dispatch corresponding to Hemingway’s “The Attack on Teruel,” though Matthews’ account of the fall of Teruel is also much longer (and more long-winded) than Hemingway’s, and just as personal in terms of describing the dangers{{pg|429|430}} he faced. Indeed its length allows him to share even more of the action he endured.{{sfn|McCaw|1937b|p=}}

Raymond McCaw held a general professional disagreement with Matthews perhaps tainted with over zealousness. Whether a personal or political motive informed that disagreement can’t be determined from the evidence I’ve seen. It is also clear that McCaw’s charges bear some validity—that any responsible editor could have easily and reasonably taken issue where McCaw did. One of the more interesting examples concerns Matthews’ piece on Guadalajara. Because he only saw evidence on Franco’s side of Italian forces, he only reported on Italians. But the ''Times'' editors heard from other sources that German soldiers also participated in the March offensive. They thought it prudent, from this confusion, to change (nine times) “Italian” to “Rebel,” “the foe,” or “Insurgent.” When Matthews saw the published piece he wrote a strenuous objection. In some instances the editors changed paraphrased quotations from his sources. One large paragraph omitted by the editors stressed the first-hand nature of the information, and Matthews underlines the key words: “All day, at every place we stopped and no matter whom we talked to or what we saw, there was only one label—Italian. The dead bodies, the prisoners, the material of every kind, the men who had occupied Brihuega and then fled were Italian and nothing but Italian.” Here and elsewhere in his original story, Matthews emphasizes the “personal knowledge” of its information.{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}{{efn|James supported McCaw on these changes, though later acknowledged that altering quoted sources was perhaps unwarranted(29 April 1937; Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3).}}Yet Matthews did not report on the foreigners fighting for the Republic—it was in fact the Italian Garibali Battalion that routed Franco’s Italians. We might surmise government censorship behind this silence, though Matthews would not cable news of “CENSORSHIP STRICTER” and “BAN ON MENTIONING INTERNATIONALS INCLUDING AMERICANS INSTITUTED TODAY” until July.{{sfn|Matthews|1937b|p=}}Perhaps he cautiously self-censored, or politically self-censored for the same reasons the government would eventually ban mention. Still, his stridency about the omission of foreigners on one side is striking given his knowledge of their contribution to the other side. For this reason too, and his omission of other nationalities on the insurgent side, it seemed only fair to his editor “to stand on the statement that the majority of the Rebels were Italians and let it go at that.”{{sfn|James|1937c|p=}} A reasonable decision.

Throughout his correspondence to his editors and his several books,{{pg|430|431}}Matthews maintained a passionate defense of his eyewitness journalistic standard, a position those close to him understood. “Matthews never believed anything he had not seen with his own eyes,” Joris Ivens wrote. “He never saw his job as reporter as one that permitted him to sit in his hotel and read the handouts of the War Ministry.” {{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=112}} Sidney Franklin recalls that some writers wrote their pieces before arriving in Madrid, and came only for the “legitimacy” of the Madrid dateline.{{sfn|Franklin|1952|p=232}}And Matthews hated, on principle, having his name attached to an article that violated the integrity of his witness. The only way to achieve objectivity, for Matthews, was to acknowledge one’s subjective perspective. Writing to his publisher, Matthews argued that “the full documentary value” of his coverage was lost when the editors altered his submissions for “the apparent necessity of giving more or less equal space to both sides.”{{sfn|Matthews|1939|p=}}

As with Matthews, so too Hemingway. Indeed the commitment to subjectivity
fit quite well with Hemingway’s modernist aesthetics. If Hemingway
focused the dispatches on his perspective—on his own experience dodging
artillery—more than Matthews and more than most, he did so at least partially
to fulfill expectations. NANA approached him, after all, for his name
and personality as much as whatever he would write. Before he even left the
states it pitched him to potential publications, sending out a promotional release with text to be used alongside his forthcoming dispatches and suggesting
they include a photograph: “Mr. Hemingway’s assignment is to get both from the bombed towns and bombed trenches the human story of the war, not just an account of the game being played by general staffs with pins
and a map.”{{sfn|NANA|1937|p=}} NANA also released each individual dispatch with a one-sentence “precede” about the “famous” or “noted” author. Ernest Hemingway was not writing as Herbert Mathews, ace reporter; Hemingway was writing as Ernest Hemingway, famous author of novels and stories well known to be drawn from his own experiences.

That he understood this to be his assignment is further evidenced by a
cable Matthews sent to his ''Times'' editors on April 9, 1937, concerning the
Loyalist attack: “WORKED CONJOINTL WITH HEMINGWAY TODAY HE SENDING EYEWITNESS DESCRIPTION WHILE EYE SENT GENERAL STRATEGY.”{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}When a year later the ''Times'' asked NANA to ensure Hemingway’s reports differed from Matthews, NANA complied by asking Hemingway “to emphasize color rather than straight reporting” not necessarily out of dissatisfaction with Hemingway’s reportage as Baker contends,{{efn|{{harvtxt|Baker|1969|p=}}’s notes date the ''Times'' request to NANA as 8 Apr. 1938, and NANA’s to Hemingway as 15
Apr. 1938 (Princeton University, Firestone Library: Box 18, Folder 8 “1938”), the date of “The Bombing of Tortosa” dispatch.}} but to increase{{pg|431|432}}the chance of selling to the ''Times'' and indeed to ensure the spirit of NANA’s original arrangement with Hemingway. {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}Far from dissatisfied, NANA wrote Hemingway at the end of August 1938 a letter of agreement for his coverage of “a general European war” should it break out, “written in your colorful style” (Hemingway was in Paris, on his way to Spain for the last time during the war).{{sfn|Wheeler|1938|p=}}When Edmund Wilson criticized the selected dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'', Hemingway wrote him that “I was paid to write what are called ‘eye witness’ accounts . . .what is called, or was asked for as ‘color stuff.’ Most of such stuff is faked. Mine was not. It was straight reporting and the personal stuff was what had been asked for by the editors. “Wilson’s estimation was also based upon ''Fact’s'' inclusion of the “The Old Man at the Bridge” story from ''Ken'', “not a news dispatch” at all.{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}Speaking at Carnegie Hall before the showing of a rough cut of ''The Spanish Earth'', shortly after his first trip to Spain and so very much in the context of his wartime work, Hemingway defined the writer’s problem as “project[ing] [what is true] in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2002|p=193}}

Personal, anecdotal journalism had been Hemingway’s signature style from his earliest days filing reports, in the early 1920s from Paris, when his editor at the ''Toronto Star Weekly'' “encouraged [. . .] what Hemingway did best: write about himself in the act of being a reporter.”{{sfn|Reynolds|1989|p=45}}How could he expect that NANA would expect anything else, if indeed NANA did expect anything else? In the Spanish Civil War he at least maintained his eyewitness posture; in World War II, however, he couldn’t keep himself out. His first piece, about D-Day, begins, “No one remembers the date of the Battle of Shiloh. But the day ''we took'' Fox Green beach was the sixth of June, and the wind was blowing hard out of the northwest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1967|p=340}}His venue too—''Collier’s'' magazine—and the fact that he had not written anything in three years further contributed to the story-like nature of the WWII stories, in which he figured as a protagonist—not to mention the stories and involvement he couldn’t write about, armed and running around France more of a free agent than his guerilla-hero Robert Jordan ever was (though he began to transform these experiences into fiction in several unpublished stories). In wartime China in 1943, filing articles for Ralph Ingersoll’s short-lived ''PM'' New York afternoon daily, Hemingway did not even care to be called a news reporter.{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=99}}

It should be mentioned that Hemingway and Matthews enjoyed a great{{pg|432|433}}friendship and working relationship. Hemingway usually brought Matthews, who did not have a car, on his excursions. When Matthews left Madrid for a break in mid April 1937, he had already ensured Hemingway would provide coverage to the ''Times'' through NANA. For one thing, Hemingway did not have to worry about Matthews as a rival for the history books. He could endorse his friends’ book, ''Two Wars and More to Come'', and praise him as “the ablest and the bravest war correspondent writing today “who “when the fakers are all dead [. . .] will be read in the schools” (Advertisement 21) because Matthews posed no threat to Hemingway’s own chances to be read in the schools. The only brief Hemingway ever expressed he really reserved for Matthews’ editors, for not wanting his Teruel street-fighting story and for cutting references to himself in Matthews’ Teruel dispatches so that it appeared only Matthews had been there.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=462}}

As for Hemingway’s neglecting to name everyone with him for every story, the ''Times'' cutting of his name suggests that such exactitude was hardly a priority. A paper had no incentive for announcing the fact that a competitor’s
correspondent stood beside its own to see and report the same
events. NANA changed at least one vague Hemingway “we,” which admits
to the presence of others, to “this correspondent”
—we can hardly fault Hemingway for working in the spirit of his
employer’s standards.{{sfn|NANA|1938|p=}}{{efn|“we” in typescript and radiogram (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 1 and Folder 25).}} Do readers care that Matthews, Delmer, Gellhorn,
and others were there? The story’s effect and the limited word count also
weighed against such roll calls. One editor chose not to clutter the dispatch
on the great retreat across the Ebro with all the names of the American International Brigade volunteers Hemingway encountered, an omission of
Content more far serious than that of omitted correspondent names.{{efn| Radiogram insert dateline 4 April 1938 (HRC: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 25).}} Hemingway
often gave the names of the reporters with him, such as at Teruel;
nor was he the only reporter to sometimes neglect to do so. Martha Gellhorn,
for example, used a vague “we” and singled herself out as the primary
participant in some of her stories.

By using first-person reportage Hemingway—and Matthews and Gellhorn And most of the group covering the war—were operating solidly within
convention. William Stott, in ''Documentary Expression and Thirties America'',
calls this first-person ''participant observer'' technique “the most common sort
of documentary reportage in the thirties” that worked “by vicarious persuasion:
the writer partook of the events he reported and bared his feelings
and attitudes to influence the reader’s own.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=178-9}}{{efn|He specifically includes Hemingway et al (180).}} Stott also observes {{pg|433|434}}another technique to enable documentary reportage to “talk to us, and convince us that we, our deepest interests, are engaged,” in the use of the second person: “Thirties documentaries constantly address ‘you,’ the ‘you’ who is we the audience, and exhorts, wheedles, begs us to identify, pity, participate.” His examples include Dorothy Parker’s Spanish Civil War writing, and Hemingway’s 1935 “First-Hand Report on the Florida Hurricane.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=27-8}} A number of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches employ the second-person as a way of bringing the reader along for the ride.

Hemingway’s dispatches used personal pronouns more artfully than is generally recognized. “A New Kind of War,” which William Braasch Watson notes as having been “[w]ritten with more care and imagination” than its predecessors, begins in second person: “The window of the hotel is open and, as you lie in bed, you hear the firing in the front line seventeen blocks away.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=29}} He takes “you” outside, to see the damage and the dead from the bombing. “Someone makes a joke about missing teeth and someone else says not to make that joke. And everyone has the feeling that characterizes war. It wasn’t me, see? It wasn’t me.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} The tension between the first person and second-person pronouns—the movement toward identification with “you” and the insistence that “it wasn’t me”—continues in the next line. Here the reader is at once still in the narrator’s shoes, but strangely distanced from the narrator through biographical tidbit and, at the same time, asked to see himself in the enemy: “The Italian dead up on the Guadalajara weren’t you although Italian dead, because of where you had spent your boyhood, always seemed, still, like Our Dead.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} It is worth quoting at length the dispatch’s transition to first person:
<blockquote>
After the shell that lit on the sidewalk in front of the hotel you got a beautiful double corner room on that side, twice the size of the one you’d had, for less than a dollar. It wasn’t me they killed. See? No. Not me. It wasn’t me anymore.

Then in a hospital given by the American Friends of Spanish Democracy located out behind the Morata front along the road
to Valencia they said, “Raven wants to see you.”

“Do I know him?”

“I don’t think so,” they said. “But he wants to see you.”

“Where is he?”

“Upstairs.”{{pg|434|435}}In the room upstairs they are giving a blood transfusion to a man with a very gray face who lay on a cot with his arm out looking away from the gurgling bottle and moaning in a very impersonal way. He moaned mechanically and at regular intervals and it did not seem to be him that made the sound. His lips did not move.

“Where’s Raven?” I asked.

“I’m here,” said Raven.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=31}}</blockquote>
The piece simply could not have sustained the second-person for the remaining five pages. More significantly, for this deeply personal exchange between the writer and the faceless, eyeless soldier, Hemingway could not hide in the rhetorical device of the second-person. In the process, he effects a reversal of the usual pronoun game; instead of identifying with the all embracing “you,” we leave that trick behind and become fully attached to
the narratorial “I” as ourselves, as we might not have been had the article
begun in the first person. And even as the narrator identifies himself by name
for the only time in any of the dispatches—“Hemingway,” and later
“Ernest”—as decidedly not ourselves. We do not say, ''It isn’t me''. The historian
Hugh Thomas notes “the refreshing candour” of Hemingway’s naming
himself “in the world of the International Brigades, where no one’s name
seemed to be truthfully given.”{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=591}}{{efn|For Watson, the dispatch “seems, in fact, on the verge of becoming a story.”{{harvtxt|Watson|1988|p=29}}}}

A year later Hemingway’s “Tortosa Calmly Awaits Assault” resists admitting
the city’s imminent fall. Yet it does so anyway, by subtly alluding to the
wartime rhetoric of sacrificed blood irrigating the earth and rejuvenating
Spain. Such rhetoric was common during the war, appearing in speeches,
print, and poetry. Many of the poems in Cary Nelson’s anthology ''The Wound
and the Dream: Sixty Years of American Poems about the Civil War'' join in the
Spanish and international chorus’s general connection between Republican
soldiers and the land, and the particular singing of their dead nourishing
the land. We find such language in La Pasionaria’s farewell address to the International Brigades, her epilogue to ''The Book of the XV Brigade'', and Hemingway’s famous eulogy “On the American Dead in Spain”: “For our dead are
a part of the earth of Spain now and the earth of Spain can never die. Each
winter it will seem to die and each spring it will come alive again. Our dead
will live with it forever.”{{sfn|Nelson|1994|p=3}}{{efn| Reprinted in Bruccoli 76 and Nelson, Remembering 37 (the drafts at the JFK are titled “The Dead at Jarama”). In addition to the poems in Nelson’s anthology, see the excerpt from Boris Todrin’s “Spanish Sowing” in Guttmann (Wounded 179–180).}} The Tortosa dispatch implies the deaths of{{pg|435|436}}many Republican soldiers in its final paragraph’s description of the newborn onions:
<blockquote>The artillery was picking up a little now. Two came in at a fairly useful place and as the smoke blew away ahead and settled through the trees, you picked an armful of spring onions from a field beside the trail that led to the Tortosa road. They were the first onions of the spring and peeling one I found they were plump white and not too strong. The Ebro Delta has a fine rich land, and where the onions grow, tomorrow will be a battle.
{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=84}}</blockquote>

The echo is quiet, and perhaps unconscious, but there nevertheless. The opening boastfulness of “American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents”
should be taken somewhat ironically. The dispatch begins by announcing
that for “two days we have been doing the most dangerous thing
you can do in this war. That is keep close behind an unstabilized line where
the enemy are attacking with mechanized forces.” Then, a few pages later,
we learn about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade survivors of the spring 1938
Nationalist offensive that took Bob Merriman and eventually reached the
Mediterranean Sea. Reading about these survivors creeping through enemy
camps, stepping on a sleeping German soldier’s hand, sprinting “across an
open field toward the Ebro bank and being sniped at by artillery controlled
by an observation plane overhead” and then “the desperate swimming of
the Ebro” naked, we are asked to place the correspondent’s plight in due perspective.{{sfn|Watson|1988|pp=71-2}} This story certainly escapes the charge of a monotonous
battle and bombing scene; its switch from apparently boastful to
awe-struck witness feels almost deliberately self-conscious. Other choice selfironic
moments come in the dispatches of that pre-Teruel quiet fall of 1938.
The one titled “Hemingway, Covering War, Tells of Brush with Death” has little
to report from Madrid other than the new aftershave brand he is trying.
In “Loyalists’ Drive Seen Progressing as Planned,” he writes that “Shells are
all much the same and if they don’t hit you there is no story and if they do
you won’t have to write it.” {{sfn|Watson|1988|p=58}}

Hemingway’s dispatches are sometimes monotonous because his war was
Usually monotonous—as wars are most of the time. It should also be kept in
mind that scholars reviewing Hemingway’s NANA dispatches one after{{pg|436|437}}another do not relive the original reading experience. Hemingway wrote dispatches sporadically, papers did not run all of his dispatches, papers edited and cut them, and readers read at least a couple of papers’ worth of other articles in between. He told Edmund Wilson as much in defending himself against Wilson’s critique of the selected (and heavily edited and cut) dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'' without his consent: “If you are being paid to be shot at and write about it you are supposed to mention the shooting. [. . .] But I do not go in for re-printing journalism.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}

If we can in this way better understand his style, and at least explain it if
not excuse it, we similarly ought to try to contextualize—and perhaps
excuse—the moral problem. The two issues here are the specific condemnation
of Hemingway’s silence about Republican atrocities and the general
question of biased reporting (the latter of which has already partially been
addressed).

Hemingway knew, as Donaldson writes, that mentioning the atrocities
“would arouse anticommunist sentiments back in the States and effectively
undermine any possibility of American intervention.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=394}} It is also doubtful
that reporting them would have stopped them. But reporting Republican
atrocities from Spain was not possible for the simple reason that all dispatches
went through a government censor. Matthews cabled his editors
from Paris in May 1937 to tell them that “censorship does not permit us to
say when the ‘telefonica’ is hit. So whenever you see reference in my
despatches [sic] to ‘an important building in the center of the city’ or words
to that effect, the cable desk can know that it is the telefonica.” {{sfn|Matthews|1937c|p=}} As already noted, by July he would cable “CENSORSHIP
STRICTER” as the ban on mentioning internationals went into effect. {{sfn|Matthews|1937d|p=}}{{sfn|Matthews|1937e|p=}} Cowles’ memoir confirms the
aggressive censorship, observing that it limited journalists to exactly the kind of material Hemingway wrote about:
<blockquote>There were frequent attempts to “beat the censor” by employing American slang expressions, but this came to an end when a Canadian girl joined the staff. The International Brigades were not allowed to be publicized; no reference could be made to Russian armaments, and buildings and streets which suffered
bombardments could not be identified.</blockquote>{{pg|437|438}}<blockquote>It was only in the realm of the human interest story that the journalists had a free hand. They could describe bombardments to their heart’s content.{{sfn|Cowles|1941|p=20}}</blockquote>
Hemingway and everyone else—to reserve incrimination for Hemingway is hardly just. No correspondent covering Republican Spain reported suspicious imprisonments and disappearances by government agents.

Hemingway, through Joris Ivens and ''The Spanish Earth'' project, had better
access to officials than most. Had he been able somehow to report such
activity, he would have lost that access and would probably have been kicked
out of the country. His fame would have likely prevented his own officially
sponsored disappearance, though he still worried, especially as so many of
such crimes on the Republican side occurred from free agents. When Jasper
Wood printed the anarchist F.A.I. banner in the limited edition book version
of ''The Spanish Earth'', Hemingway expressed his anxieties bluntly in a letter
to Jasper on August 20, 1938. It is hardly “petulant,” he scolded, “not to wish
to be shot.”{{sfn|Davison|1988|p=128}} Hostility in the Republic against the anarchists
ran high; after the Barcelona May Day conflict, the government’s foreign
minister told U.S. Ambassador Claude Bowers that “anarchist revolt
throughout Catalonia and not only expected but welcomed as an opportunity
to liquidate the anarchists who have been hostile from the beginning.”
{{sfn|NA|1954|p=292}}{{efn| The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State, 5 May 1937.}}

It is possible that Hemingway’s dispatch stating that “not one friend [. . .]
has been executed or is missing” was his clever means of reporting
the rumors and indeed the general fact while evading the censors, as in this very dispatch he acknowledged the presence of a censor after a bombardment.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=34}}
Matthews, on the other hand, never found a way to mention the
censors or admit even the possibility of people gone missing in the Republic.
Peter Moreira has observed that in a 1943 dispatch Hemingway related a remark by a British officer about the Chinese Nationalist government’s being
“hopeless on the offensive” because censorship “prevented American reporters
From actually saying that the Nationalists wouldn’t attack, surmising that by telling this anecdote Hemingway could sneak such a judgment into
his reports.”{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=77}} In Spain, censors aside, the eyewitness standard and his
own safety and continuing ability to report the war, and, yes, his passionate
support of the government contributed to his decision. He could have written
about government abuses from the states, but then could not return to{{pg|438|439}}cover the war and support the cause—a justification other journalists, those who did not return after the spring of 1937, did not enjoy. In his mind too, knowing what he heard of fascist atrocities, any reportage against the government lessening its chances of victory through killing hopes of increased international aid would have led to more deaths at Franco’s hands that the much smaller number inspired by fifth column paranoia.{{efn|''Hemingway’s Second War'' discusses in greater depth Hemingway’s politics and his falling out
with John Dos Passos over the execution of José Robles}}.

The accusation that Hemingway did not write about Republican atrocities
because he was saving it for his fiction I find baseless (Knightley 232;
Baker 402).{{sfn|Knightley|2004|p=232}}{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=402}}{{efn|Hemingway’s casual comment to colleagues calling dibs on Pepe Quintanilla, the executioner of
Madrid, is not sufficient evidence.}}Carolyn Moorehead, in her biography of Martha Gellhorn, describes
the climate for the Madrid correspondents that first spring: “And so,
day by day, the correspondents walked a thin and nervous line between truth,
evasions, and propaganda, telling one another that though it was not all right
if things were made up and presented as true, it was acceptable to describe
what you wanted, provided it was true and provided your readers were aware
of your position.”{{sfn|Moorehead|2003|p=125}} My own sense is that they did not walk the line quite
so nervously; their passionate commitment, and their principles of position
disclosure and the eyewitness standard, made that walk relatively easy.

The problem of ''committed journalism'', even sixty years later, has not been
resolved—as anyone paying attention to the media and world affairs well
knows. One person’s truth is another person’s propaganda. Certainly, as
Knightley notes, reporting from “the heart” affects one’s judgment.{{sfn|Knightley|2004|pp=234-5}}
Yet to attempt “balance,” per the edits to Matthews’ Guadalajara piece, betrays
one’s believed truth. Furthermore, the kind of reporting done by the
correspondents with the Republic—committed, one-sided, optimistic,
heroic, human interest work by embedded writers—would be practiced
widely and without reserve during World War II. Such narrative journalism,
with roots in Louise May Alcott’s “Hospital Sketches” series published in the
''Boston Commonwealth'', and more immediately in 1930s social documentary
writing whose “essence” is “not information”, anticipated postwar
new journalism’s adoption of novelistic narrative technique for nonfiction
which culminated with such wartime books as Norman Mailer’s ''Armies of
the Night'' and Michael Herr’s ''Dispatches''.{{sfn|Stott|1986|p=11}} Some of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches
fall in this line of development.

Today we might categorize such writing under the awkward umbrella
term ''creative nonfiction''. That term certainly fits the mixed bag of nonfiction
narratives and commentaries Hemingway published during the war in
Ken magazine. These pieces are essays, not journalism, several of which{{pg|439|440}}directly appeal for support for the Republic, and most of which really deal with the approaching world war. ''Ken'' wanted “precisely the kind of opinion articles he could not write for NANA.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=433}} His article, “The Cardinal Picks a Winner,” shows a photo of a row of dead children from Barcelona and another one with Nationalist officers saluting and Catholic officials with raised hands, apparently making the fascist salute as well. He ends ironically: “So I ''don’t believe'' the people shown in the photo can really be making it. I would rather prefer to think that the photograph was faked.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=436}} When Hemingway argues in “A Program for U.S. Realism” that the United States should stay out of the next war except to stuff its pockets through arms sales, one has to wonder, given his call and the democratic nations’ failure to save Spain, if we are to sniff sarcasm here.

The language of the dispatches, with their corrective intent against
Franco’s propaganda, does risk propagandizing. Hemingway’s optimism and
anti-fascism certainly colored his correspondence work. His criticism of the
anarchist and POUM militia for their inactivity on the Aragon front, for example,
sounds a lot like the Spanish Communist Party’s.{{efn|It at least sounds almost exactly like Dolores Ibarruri in her memoir. To the anarchists’ complaint
that they had no arms, she retorts “that they had more arms than did many other fronts. . . .
What they didn’t have and what they were constantly demanding were airplanes and tanks .And
they didn’t have them because the Republic government didn’t have them either, except for those
it received as aid from the Soviet Union” (238–284). Yet the various Catalonia militia were not
as well equipped with small arms as the more regular Popular Army units, and because of the
terrain tanks and planes were in fact necessary.}}
But unlike
Matthews, Hemingway limited his reports within the Republic to military
matters. Hemingway may have generally condemned the anarchists in his
nonfiction, considering their activity as hampering the war effort, but he
never repeated the accusation of their collaboration with the rebels, as
Matthews had done. And when Hemingway commented on the Bareclona
crisis, he referred only to the government—not the communists, as
Matthews had done.{{efn|Hemingway’s comments in “Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win” NANA staff
correspondent dispatch. Though arguably he was propagandizing by hiding the communist influence—
to mention the communists to an American audience would not gain sympathy for the
cause.}}Nor did he write articles asserting the limited role of
the communists in the government, or explaining Spanish anarchism, also
as Matthews had done.{{efn|An article on the communists’ limited role appeared in late November 1937, as discussed in a
missive from The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State on 2
Dec. 1937 (United States 461). Matthews’ “Anarchism: Spain’s Enigma” appeared in the New York
Times 22 Aug. 1937: 6, 14.}}

During one of Hemingway’s stateside breaks between trips to Spain, his
children asked if he was a “tool” of Stalin, an accusation tossed by a schoolmate
who, presumably parroting his or her parents, probably understood
the term no better than Hemingway’s children. {{sfn|Hemingway|nd|p=}}
Hemingway believed in the Republic’s potential, but he was never a dupe of
the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) or Comintern. As did many others, he
accepted PCE’s presence in the government for its discipline and organization
toward winning the war, and he understood the material necessity for
Comintern’s support. It should also be noted, as historians Hugh Thomas
and Helen Graham have reminded us, that the communism associated with
the Republic wasn’t particularly communist anyway.{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=628}}{{sfn|Graham|2002|p=184}} {{pg|440|441}}

Hemingway declined to follow Joris Ivens’ suggestion that he write a
dispatch on the significant role of the political commissars in the Republican
military, even though that would have meant
featuring his brave new friend Gustav Regler.{{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=}} Hemingway also, in a letter
justifying his work to Jack Wheeler at NANA, wrote about choosing not to
send a dispatch he had written because it might strike readers as propaganda
“no matter how true” (Letter to Jack Wheeler).{{sfn|Hemingway|1938b|p=}}

Hemingway went to Spain to see the war himself and to support the Republic
through his ambulance fund. The paychecks from NANA and the
fundraising from ''The Spanish Earth'' helped. Whatever propagandistic streak
colors the dispatches pales in comparison to the documentary. The filmmaker,
Joris Ivens, was well established in European communist circles. The
documentary genre then and now has occupied a slippery position between
the extremes of impossible-to-achieve empirical nonfiction and of the outright
fictionalized. Evaluations of Hemingway’s journalism are informed by
knowledge of ''The Spanish Earth'' and the ''Ken'' essays to the detriment of the
journalism. And the very nature of the slippery documentary genre may enable
the film to escape opprobrium. It wasn’t reportage; it was altogether
something else. But for that matter, Hemingway’s dispatches weren’t purely
reportage either, and if not ''altogether'' something else, still something else,
and should be reckoned with accordingly.

== Notes ==
{{notelist|20em}}

==Citations==
{{Reflist|15em}}

==Works Cited==
{{refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker
|first=Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Bruccoli |first=Matthew |date=2006 |title=Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame |url= |location=Columbia |publisher=U of South Caronia P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Cowles |first=Virginia |date=1941 |title=Looking for Trouble |url= |location=New York
|publisher=Harper & Brothers |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Davison |first=Richard Allan |title=The Publication of Hemingway’s The Spanish Earth: An Untold Story |url= |journal=Hemingway Review
|volume=7.2 |issue= |date=1988
|pages=122-130 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson
|first=Scott |date=2009 |title=Fitzgerald & Hemingway: Works and Days |url= |location=New York |publisher=Columbia UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Franklin |first=Sidney |date=1952 |title=Bullfighter from Brooklyn |url= |location=New York |publisher=Prentice-Hall |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Graham |first=Helen |date=2002 |title=The Spanish Republic at War 1936-1939 |url= |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Guttmann |first=Allen |date=1962 |title=The Wound in the Heart: American and the Spanish Civil War |url= |location=New York |publisher=Free Press of Glencoe |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1967 |title=By-Line: Ernest Hemingway |url= |location=New York |publisher=Scibner |pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Trogdon
|editor-first=Robert W.
|author-mask=1
|title=Fascism is a Lie
|url=
|journal=Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference |volume==
|issue=
|date=2002
|pages=193-6
|location=New York
|publisher=Carroll & Graf
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 May 1937
|chapter=Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=nd
|chapter=The Home Front
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938a
|chapter=Letter to Edmund Wilson
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=2 June 1938b
|chapter=Letter to Jack Wheeler
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=14 Feb 1939
|chapter=On the American Dead in Spain
|title=TS. New Masses
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Baker
|editor-first=Carlos
|author-mask=1
|date=2003
|chapter=The Hadely Mowrer
|title=Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Scribner
|pages=462-3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ibarruri
|first=Dolores
|date=1966
|title=They Shall Not Pass: The Autobiography of La Pasionaria
|url=
|location=United States
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|date=1969
|title=The Camera and I
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|author-mask=1
|date=26 Apr 1937
|chapter=Letter to Ernest Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|date=20 Nov 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Bertrand Weaver
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=12 Oct 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=25 Apr 1939
|chapter=Letter to M.B. Tenney
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Apr 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Knightley
|first=Phillip
|date=2004
|title=The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq
|url=
|location=Baltimore
|publisher=John Hopkins
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=
|date=9 Apr 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=TS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=11 Apr 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=8 May 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=6 July 1937d
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=July 1937e
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=22 March 1939
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 9
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=
|date=20 May 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=20 Dec 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 5
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Sep 1937c
|chapter=Note to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moorehead
|first=Caroline
|date=2003
|title=Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Henry Holt
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moreira
|first=Peter
|date=2006
|title=Hemingway on the China Front: His WWII Spy Mission with Martha Gellhorn
|url=
|location=Washington D.C.
|publisher=Potomac Books
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|date=5 Feb 1937
|chapter=Promotion Box: Hemingway, For Immediate Release
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|author-mask=1
|date=4 Apr 1938
|chapter=Promotion Box: American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|editor-last=Nelson
|editor-first=Card
|date=1994
|title=Remembering Spain: Hemingway’s Civil War Eulogy and the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
|url=
|location=Urbana
|publisher=U of Illinois
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Reynolds
|first=Michael
|date=1989
|title=Hemingway: The Paris Years
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Norton
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Stott
|first=William
|date=1986
|title=Documentary Expression and Thirties America
|url=
|location=Chicago
|publisher=U of Chicago P
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Thomas
|first=Hugh
|date=2001
|title=The Spanish Civil War, Rev. ed.
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Modern Library
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine
|last=''Two Wars and More to Come''
|first=
|date=24 Jan 1938
|title=Best Sellers of the Week Here and Elsewhere
|type=Advertisement
|url=
|magazine=New York Times
|pages=
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=NA
|first=
|title=United States. Dept. of State
|url=
|journal= Foreign Relations of the Untied States, 1937 |volume=1
|issue=General
|date=1954
|pages=
|location=Washington
|publisher=GPO
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Watson
|first=William Braasch
|title=Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches
|url=
|journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=7.2
|issue=
|date=1988
|pages=4-121
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Wheeler
|first=John H.
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938
|chapter=Letter to Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection, Box 3 Folder 14
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}

{{refend}}
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches

2025-04-20T13:58:26Z

MerAtticus: harvtext note b

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{{byline|last=Vernon |first=Alex |abstract=The Spanish Civil War began in July 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally-restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy. By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches.}}

{{dc|dc=T|HE SPANISH CIVIL WAR BEGAN ON}} 17-18 JULY, 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy, to collaborate with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens on the pro-Republican documentary ''The Spanish Earth'', and to pursue his fledgling love affair with Martha Gellhorn.{{efn|Adapted and printed with permission from ''Hemingway’s Second War: Bearing Witness to the Spanish Civil War.'' Iowa City: U of Iowa Press, 2011.}}
By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches for NANA.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=4}}{{efn|Quotations from the NANA dispatches follow the Diplomatic Text established by William Braasch’s “Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches.” I prefer NANA’s titles rather than Watson’s. For my disagreements with some of Watson’s datings, see my comments on specific dispatches in ''Hemingway’s Second War'' {{harvtxt|Watson|1988|p=}}.}}The secondary sources habitually judge them inferior journalism. Carlos Baker in the first Hemingway biography, for example, complains that the dialogue was “so heavily stamped with personal mannerisms as to be of doubtful authenticity.” Baker sees a “curious monotony in his stories of battles and bombardments,” a gratuitous use of graphic imagery “to shock his readers,” and “a note of triumphant boastfulness” in reporting proximity to danger. He also faults Hemingway for “often hint[ing] he was alone when in fact he was usually with Martha Gellhorn, Matthews, and Delmer.” Hemingway lacked Dos Passos’ “eye for telling details” and the “meticulous exactitude and inclusiveness that characterized the best work of Herbert Matthews and Sefton Delmer.”{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}

Philip Knightley’s ''The First Casualty'', the standard history of war correspondence, paraphrases Baker but with a trouncing final judgment:{{pg|427|428}}Hemingway’s “performance as a war correspondent was abysmally bad.” But Knightley goes beyond “technical” dissatisfaction to moral condemnation. Not just “unjustifiably optimistic”—an excusable offense—Hemingway’s reporting was “unforgivable” in its “total failure to report the Communist persecution, imprisonment, and summary execution of ‘untrustworthy elements’ on the Republican side, when he knew this was happening and when disclosing it might well have prevented further horrors like this.”
{{sfn|Knightley|2004 |pp=231–32}}{{efn|In my view, Knightley does not sufficiently acknowledge his paraphrasing of Baker.}}

Such criticisms in the final analysis might bear out. As Scott Donaldson writes, Hemingway advanced the Republican cause in his dispatches by eliciting “the deepest possible feelings of horror and of sympathy for the victims” of the Madrid bombardment; his “undue optimism” often “ignored Loyalist defeats and exaggerated the importance of its victories”; and “he repeatedly called attention to the participation of Italians and Germans on Franco’s side.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=426}} It also served as a recruitment tool—Milton Wolff, for example, acknowledged the strong influence Hemingway’s dispatches had on his decision to volunteer. Nevertheless, I think it a worthwhile exercise to attend a little more studiously to Hemingway’s dispatches, their context, and their artistry. I don’t necessarily intend to reverse the general opinion of the correspondence, only to achieve a better and more sympathetic understanding.

Herbert Matthews’ reporting for the ''New York Times'' will serve as a convenient comparison for two reasons. First, because both Baker and Knightley use Matthews’ journalism as the standard of excellence to pass judgment on Hemingway’s; and second, because the two worked practically side-by-side, seeing and reporting on many of the same events. In fact so closely did they work together that NANA sometimes complained that the ''Times'' was not buying Hemingway’s pieces because they resembled Matthews,’ and at one point Matthews’ own editors at the Times suspected him of plagiarizing Hemingway.{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|pp=411, 420}} A note from Matthews’ assigned editor Raymond McCaw provides, in two columns, seven quite similar passages from Hemingway’s Aragon front dispatches of September 13 and 14 with Matthews’ of September 14, with a penciled note at the bottom: “a deadly parallel if you ask me.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937c|p=}} Edwin James, the managing editor and McCaw’s boss, eventually agreed with Matthews’ defense: “It is quite apparent that you did not file any duplicate of the Hemingway story, or vice versa. As I understand it, the similarity arose from the fact that you{{pg|428|429}}both went to see the same show and saw it at the same time [sic], under the same conditions.”{{sfn|James|1937b|p=}}

Matthews’ dispatches ring of Republican bias as much if not more than anything Hemingway ever filed. The ''Times'' received many letters to the editor complaining about Matthews’ undisguised politics, which also gave serious concern to some of his editors. His description of the Republican May 1937 infighting in Barcelona is a striking example of how his news veered into propaganda and shows just how much he passed along the government’s version of events. The government’s “BLOODLESS TRIUMPH FOUGHT WITH RECOGNIZEDWEAPONS OF DEMOCRACY” turned out to be blatantly false, as the government and the “COMMUNISTS [WHO] DISTINGUISHED THEMSELVES” resorted to violent suppression. His blaming the uprising on the anarchist CNT working as Franco operatives parrots the government’s and the communist party’s public position, even though both charges—that the anarchists precipitated the events and that they were under Nationalist direction—were also false. His dispatch’s optimistic close also equivocates the political reality: “NEW GOVERNMENT HAS TAKEN POWER WHICH APPEARS TOVE CONFIDENCE VAST MAJORITY SPANIARDS IN LOYALIST TERRITORY AND TIS HOPED WILL GAIN EQUAL CONFIDENCE ABROAD STOP VIOLENCE AND REVOLUTION BEEN REPUDIATED AND NEWAND FAR HOPEFULLER PERIOD SEEMS BEGINNING.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937a|p=}}The ''Times'', knowing full well the one-sided coverage of a correspondent writing from one side of the conflict, had a reporter on both sides: Matthews with the Republicans, and William Carney with the Nationalists. They got their facts right (or wrong) as often as the other, their editors concluded; and they inspired about the same number of letters of complaint.{{sfn|James|1937a|p=}}{{sfn|James|1939|p=}}

Furthermore, Matthews’ dispatches received a great deal of substantive editorial revisions. One of Matthews’ Teruel reports had to be cut for length, as McCaw informed James: “This bird sent 2844 words on the same facts which Hemingway covered much better in less than half that number. I wonder if Matthews thinks the paper is thriving, and that cable tolls do not matter a damn. Of course, it had to be cut for space anyway.” McCaw most likely refers here to Matthews’ dispatch corresponding to Hemingway’s “The Attack on Teruel,” though Matthews’ account of the fall of Teruel is also much longer (and more long-winded) than Hemingway’s, and just as personal in terms of describing the dangers{{pg|429|430}} he faced. Indeed its length allows him to share even more of the action he endured.{{sfn|McCaw|1937b|p=}}

Raymond McCaw held a general professional disagreement with Matthews perhaps tainted with over zealousness. Whether a personal or political motive informed that disagreement can’t be determined from the evidence I’ve seen. It is also clear that McCaw’s charges bear some validity—that any responsible editor could have easily and reasonably taken issue where McCaw did. One of the more interesting examples concerns Matthews’ piece on Guadalajara. Because he only saw evidence on Franco’s side of Italian forces, he only reported on Italians. But the ''Times'' editors heard from other sources that German soldiers also participated in the March offensive. They thought it prudent, from this confusion, to change (nine times) “Italian” to “Rebel,” “the foe,” or “Insurgent.” When Matthews saw the published piece he wrote a strenuous objection. In some instances the editors changed paraphrased quotations from his sources. One large paragraph omitted by the editors stressed the first-hand nature of the information, and Matthews underlines the key words: “All day, at every place we stopped and no matter whom we talked to or what we saw, there was only one label—Italian. The dead bodies, the prisoners, the material of every kind, the men who had occupied Brihuega and then fled were Italian and nothing but Italian.” Here and elsewhere in his original story, Matthews emphasizes the “personal knowledge” of its information.{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}{{efn|James supported McCaw on these changes, though later acknowledged that altering quoted sources was perhaps unwarranted(29 April 1937; Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3).}}Yet Matthews did not report on the foreigners fighting for the Republic—it was in fact the Italian Garibali Battalion that routed Franco’s Italians. We might surmise government censorship behind this silence, though Matthews would not cable news of “CENSORSHIP STRICTER” and “BAN ON MENTIONING INTERNATIONALS INCLUDING AMERICANS INSTITUTED TODAY” until July.{{sfn|Matthews|1937b|p=}}Perhaps he cautiously self-censored, or politically self-censored for the same reasons the government would eventually ban mention. Still, his stridency about the omission of foreigners on one side is striking given his knowledge of their contribution to the other side. For this reason too, and his omission of other nationalities on the insurgent side, it seemed only fair to his editor “to stand on the statement that the majority of the Rebels were Italians and let it go at that.”{{sfn|James|1937c|p=}} A reasonable decision.

Throughout his correspondence to his editors and his several books,{{pg|430|431}}Matthews maintained a passionate defense of his eyewitness journalistic standard, a position those close to him understood. “Matthews never believed anything he had not seen with his own eyes,” Joris Ivens wrote. “He never saw his job as reporter as one that permitted him to sit in his hotel and read the handouts of the War Ministry.” {{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=112}} Sidney Franklin recalls that some writers wrote their pieces before arriving in Madrid, and came only for the “legitimacy” of the Madrid dateline.{{sfn|Franklin|1952|p=232}}And Matthews hated, on principle, having his name attached to an article that violated the integrity of his witness. The only way to achieve objectivity, for Matthews, was to acknowledge one’s subjective perspective. Writing to his publisher, Matthews argued that “the full documentary value” of his coverage was lost when the editors altered his submissions for “the apparent necessity of giving more or less equal space to both sides.”{{sfn|Matthews|1939|p=}}

As with Matthews, so too Hemingway. Indeed the commitment to subjectivity
fit quite well with Hemingway’s modernist aesthetics. If Hemingway
focused the dispatches on his perspective—on his own experience dodging
artillery—more than Matthews and more than most, he did so at least partially
to fulfill expectations. NANA approached him, after all, for his name
and personality as much as whatever he would write. Before he even left the
states it pitched him to potential publications, sending out a promotional release with text to be used alongside his forthcoming dispatches and suggesting
they include a photograph: “Mr. Hemingway’s assignment is to get both from the bombed towns and bombed trenches the human story of the war, not just an account of the game being played by general staffs with pins
and a map.”{{sfn|NANA|1937|p=}} NANA also released each individual dispatch with a one-sentence “precede” about the “famous” or “noted” author. Ernest Hemingway was not writing as Herbert Mathews, ace reporter; Hemingway was writing as Ernest Hemingway, famous author of novels and stories well known to be drawn from his own experiences.

That he understood this to be his assignment is further evidenced by a
cable Matthews sent to his ''Times'' editors on April 9, 1937, concerning the
Loyalist attack: “WORKED CONJOINTL WITH HEMINGWAY TODAY HE SENDING EYEWITNESS DESCRIPTION WHILE EYE SENT GENERAL STRATEGY.”{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}When a year later the ''Times'' asked NANA to ensure Hemingway’s reports differed from Matthews, NANA complied by asking Hemingway “to emphasize color rather than straight reporting” not necessarily out of dissatisfaction with Hemingway’s reportage as Baker contends,{{efn|Baker’s notes date the ''Times'' request to NANA as 8 Apr. 1938, and NANA’s to Hemingway as 15
Apr. 1938 (Princeton University, Firestone Library: Box 18, Folder 8 “1938”), the date of “The Bombing of Tortosa” dispatch.}} but to increase{{pg|431|432}}the chance of selling to the ''Times'' and indeed to ensure the spirit of NANA’s original arrangement with Hemingway. {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}Far from dissatisfied, NANA wrote Hemingway at the end of August 1938 a letter of agreement for his coverage of “a general European war” should it break out, “written in your colorful style” (Hemingway was in Paris, on his way to Spain for the last time during the war).{{sfn|Wheeler|1938|p=}}When Edmund Wilson criticized the selected dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'', Hemingway wrote him that “I was paid to write what are called ‘eye witness’ accounts . . .what is called, or was asked for as ‘color stuff.’ Most of such stuff is faked. Mine was not. It was straight reporting and the personal stuff was what had been asked for by the editors. “Wilson’s estimation was also based upon ''Fact’s'' inclusion of the “The Old Man at the Bridge” story from ''Ken'', “not a news dispatch” at all.{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}Speaking at Carnegie Hall before the showing of a rough cut of ''The Spanish Earth'', shortly after his first trip to Spain and so very much in the context of his wartime work, Hemingway defined the writer’s problem as “project[ing] [what is true] in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2002|p=193}}

Personal, anecdotal journalism had been Hemingway’s signature style from his earliest days filing reports, in the early 1920s from Paris, when his editor at the ''Toronto Star Weekly'' “encouraged [. . .] what Hemingway did best: write about himself in the act of being a reporter.”{{sfn|Reynolds|1989|p=45}}How could he expect that NANA would expect anything else, if indeed NANA did expect anything else? In the Spanish Civil War he at least maintained his eyewitness posture; in World War II, however, he couldn’t keep himself out. His first piece, about D-Day, begins, “No one remembers the date of the Battle of Shiloh. But the day ''we took'' Fox Green beach was the sixth of June, and the wind was blowing hard out of the northwest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1967|p=340}}His venue too—''Collier’s'' magazine—and the fact that he had not written anything in three years further contributed to the story-like nature of the WWII stories, in which he figured as a protagonist—not to mention the stories and involvement he couldn’t write about, armed and running around France more of a free agent than his guerilla-hero Robert Jordan ever was (though he began to transform these experiences into fiction in several unpublished stories). In wartime China in 1943, filing articles for Ralph Ingersoll’s short-lived ''PM'' New York afternoon daily, Hemingway did not even care to be called a news reporter.{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=99}}

It should be mentioned that Hemingway and Matthews enjoyed a great{{pg|432|433}}friendship and working relationship. Hemingway usually brought Matthews, who did not have a car, on his excursions. When Matthews left Madrid for a break in mid April 1937, he had already ensured Hemingway would provide coverage to the ''Times'' through NANA. For one thing, Hemingway did not have to worry about Matthews as a rival for the history books. He could endorse his friends’ book, ''Two Wars and More to Come'', and praise him as “the ablest and the bravest war correspondent writing today “who “when the fakers are all dead [. . .] will be read in the schools” (Advertisement 21) because Matthews posed no threat to Hemingway’s own chances to be read in the schools. The only brief Hemingway ever expressed he really reserved for Matthews’ editors, for not wanting his Teruel street-fighting story and for cutting references to himself in Matthews’ Teruel dispatches so that it appeared only Matthews had been there.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=462}}

As for Hemingway’s neglecting to name everyone with him for every story, the ''Times'' cutting of his name suggests that such exactitude was hardly a priority. A paper had no incentive for announcing the fact that a competitor’s
correspondent stood beside its own to see and report the same
events. NANA changed at least one vague Hemingway “we,” which admits
to the presence of others, to “this correspondent”
—we can hardly fault Hemingway for working in the spirit of his
employer’s standards.{{sfn|NANA|1938|p=}}{{efn|“we” in typescript and radiogram (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 1 and Folder 25).}} Do readers care that Matthews, Delmer, Gellhorn,
and others were there? The story’s effect and the limited word count also
weighed against such roll calls. One editor chose not to clutter the dispatch
on the great retreat across the Ebro with all the names of the American International Brigade volunteers Hemingway encountered, an omission of
Content more far serious than that of omitted correspondent names.{{efn| Radiogram insert dateline 4 April 1938 (HRC: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 25).}} Hemingway
often gave the names of the reporters with him, such as at Teruel;
nor was he the only reporter to sometimes neglect to do so. Martha Gellhorn,
for example, used a vague “we” and singled herself out as the primary
participant in some of her stories.

By using first-person reportage Hemingway—and Matthews and Gellhorn And most of the group covering the war—were operating solidly within
convention. William Stott, in ''Documentary Expression and Thirties America'',
calls this first-person ''participant observer'' technique “the most common sort
of documentary reportage in the thirties” that worked “by vicarious persuasion:
the writer partook of the events he reported and bared his feelings
and attitudes to influence the reader’s own.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=178-9}}{{efn|He specifically includes Hemingway et al (180).}} Stott also observes {{pg|433|434}}another technique to enable documentary reportage to “talk to us, and convince us that we, our deepest interests, are engaged,” in the use of the second person: “Thirties documentaries constantly address ‘you,’ the ‘you’ who is we the audience, and exhorts, wheedles, begs us to identify, pity, participate.” His examples include Dorothy Parker’s Spanish Civil War writing, and Hemingway’s 1935 “First-Hand Report on the Florida Hurricane.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=27-8}} A number of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches employ the second-person as a way of bringing the reader along for the ride.

Hemingway’s dispatches used personal pronouns more artfully than is generally recognized. “A New Kind of War,” which William Braasch Watson notes as having been “[w]ritten with more care and imagination” than its predecessors, begins in second person: “The window of the hotel is open and, as you lie in bed, you hear the firing in the front line seventeen blocks away.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=29}} He takes “you” outside, to see the damage and the dead from the bombing. “Someone makes a joke about missing teeth and someone else says not to make that joke. And everyone has the feeling that characterizes war. It wasn’t me, see? It wasn’t me.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} The tension between the first person and second-person pronouns—the movement toward identification with “you” and the insistence that “it wasn’t me”—continues in the next line. Here the reader is at once still in the narrator’s shoes, but strangely distanced from the narrator through biographical tidbit and, at the same time, asked to see himself in the enemy: “The Italian dead up on the Guadalajara weren’t you although Italian dead, because of where you had spent your boyhood, always seemed, still, like Our Dead.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} It is worth quoting at length the dispatch’s transition to first person:
<blockquote>
After the shell that lit on the sidewalk in front of the hotel you got a beautiful double corner room on that side, twice the size of the one you’d had, for less than a dollar. It wasn’t me they killed. See? No. Not me. It wasn’t me anymore.

Then in a hospital given by the American Friends of Spanish Democracy located out behind the Morata front along the road
to Valencia they said, “Raven wants to see you.”

“Do I know him?”

“I don’t think so,” they said. “But he wants to see you.”

“Where is he?”

“Upstairs.”{{pg|434|435}}In the room upstairs they are giving a blood transfusion to a man with a very gray face who lay on a cot with his arm out looking away from the gurgling bottle and moaning in a very impersonal way. He moaned mechanically and at regular intervals and it did not seem to be him that made the sound. His lips did not move.

“Where’s Raven?” I asked.

“I’m here,” said Raven.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=31}}</blockquote>
The piece simply could not have sustained the second-person for the remaining five pages. More significantly, for this deeply personal exchange between the writer and the faceless, eyeless soldier, Hemingway could not hide in the rhetorical device of the second-person. In the process, he effects a reversal of the usual pronoun game; instead of identifying with the all embracing “you,” we leave that trick behind and become fully attached to
the narratorial “I” as ourselves, as we might not have been had the article
begun in the first person. And even as the narrator identifies himself by name
for the only time in any of the dispatches—“Hemingway,” and later
“Ernest”—as decidedly not ourselves. We do not say, ''It isn’t me''. The historian
Hugh Thomas notes “the refreshing candour” of Hemingway’s naming
himself “in the world of the International Brigades, where no one’s name
seemed to be truthfully given.”{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=591}}{{efn|For Watson, the dispatch “seems, in fact, on the verge of becoming a story.”{{harvtxt|Watson|1988|p=29}}}}

A year later Hemingway’s “Tortosa Calmly Awaits Assault” resists admitting
the city’s imminent fall. Yet it does so anyway, by subtly alluding to the
wartime rhetoric of sacrificed blood irrigating the earth and rejuvenating
Spain. Such rhetoric was common during the war, appearing in speeches,
print, and poetry. Many of the poems in Cary Nelson’s anthology ''The Wound
and the Dream: Sixty Years of American Poems about the Civil War'' join in the
Spanish and international chorus’s general connection between Republican
soldiers and the land, and the particular singing of their dead nourishing
the land. We find such language in La Pasionaria’s farewell address to the International Brigades, her epilogue to ''The Book of the XV Brigade'', and Hemingway’s famous eulogy “On the American Dead in Spain”: “For our dead are
a part of the earth of Spain now and the earth of Spain can never die. Each
winter it will seem to die and each spring it will come alive again. Our dead
will live with it forever.”{{sfn|Nelson|1994|p=3}}{{efn| Reprinted in Bruccoli 76 and Nelson, Remembering 37 (the drafts at the JFK are titled “The Dead at Jarama”). In addition to the poems in Nelson’s anthology, see the excerpt from Boris Todrin’s “Spanish Sowing” in Guttmann (Wounded 179–180).}} The Tortosa dispatch implies the deaths of{{pg|435|436}}many Republican soldiers in its final paragraph’s description of the newborn onions:
<blockquote>The artillery was picking up a little now. Two came in at a fairly useful place and as the smoke blew away ahead and settled through the trees, you picked an armful of spring onions from a field beside the trail that led to the Tortosa road. They were the first onions of the spring and peeling one I found they were plump white and not too strong. The Ebro Delta has a fine rich land, and where the onions grow, tomorrow will be a battle.
{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=84}}</blockquote>

The echo is quiet, and perhaps unconscious, but there nevertheless. The opening boastfulness of “American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents”
should be taken somewhat ironically. The dispatch begins by announcing
that for “two days we have been doing the most dangerous thing
you can do in this war. That is keep close behind an unstabilized line where
the enemy are attacking with mechanized forces.” Then, a few pages later,
we learn about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade survivors of the spring 1938
Nationalist offensive that took Bob Merriman and eventually reached the
Mediterranean Sea. Reading about these survivors creeping through enemy
camps, stepping on a sleeping German soldier’s hand, sprinting “across an
open field toward the Ebro bank and being sniped at by artillery controlled
by an observation plane overhead” and then “the desperate swimming of
the Ebro” naked, we are asked to place the correspondent’s plight in due perspective.{{sfn|Watson|1988|pp=71-2}} This story certainly escapes the charge of a monotonous
battle and bombing scene; its switch from apparently boastful to
awe-struck witness feels almost deliberately self-conscious. Other choice selfironic
moments come in the dispatches of that pre-Teruel quiet fall of 1938.
The one titled “Hemingway, Covering War, Tells of Brush with Death” has little
to report from Madrid other than the new aftershave brand he is trying.
In “Loyalists’ Drive Seen Progressing as Planned,” he writes that “Shells are
all much the same and if they don’t hit you there is no story and if they do
you won’t have to write it.” {{sfn|Watson|1988|p=58}}

Hemingway’s dispatches are sometimes monotonous because his war was
Usually monotonous—as wars are most of the time. It should also be kept in
mind that scholars reviewing Hemingway’s NANA dispatches one after{{pg|436|437}}another do not relive the original reading experience. Hemingway wrote dispatches sporadically, papers did not run all of his dispatches, papers edited and cut them, and readers read at least a couple of papers’ worth of other articles in between. He told Edmund Wilson as much in defending himself against Wilson’s critique of the selected (and heavily edited and cut) dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'' without his consent: “If you are being paid to be shot at and write about it you are supposed to mention the shooting. [. . .] But I do not go in for re-printing journalism.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}

If we can in this way better understand his style, and at least explain it if
not excuse it, we similarly ought to try to contextualize—and perhaps
excuse—the moral problem. The two issues here are the specific condemnation
of Hemingway’s silence about Republican atrocities and the general
question of biased reporting (the latter of which has already partially been
addressed).

Hemingway knew, as Donaldson writes, that mentioning the atrocities
“would arouse anticommunist sentiments back in the States and effectively
undermine any possibility of American intervention.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=394}} It is also doubtful
that reporting them would have stopped them. But reporting Republican
atrocities from Spain was not possible for the simple reason that all dispatches
went through a government censor. Matthews cabled his editors
from Paris in May 1937 to tell them that “censorship does not permit us to
say when the ‘telefonica’ is hit. So whenever you see reference in my
despatches [sic] to ‘an important building in the center of the city’ or words
to that effect, the cable desk can know that it is the telefonica.” {{sfn|Matthews|1937c|p=}} As already noted, by July he would cable “CENSORSHIP
STRICTER” as the ban on mentioning internationals went into effect. {{sfn|Matthews|1937d|p=}}{{sfn|Matthews|1937e|p=}} Cowles’ memoir confirms the
aggressive censorship, observing that it limited journalists to exactly the kind of material Hemingway wrote about:
<blockquote>There were frequent attempts to “beat the censor” by employing American slang expressions, but this came to an end when a Canadian girl joined the staff. The International Brigades were not allowed to be publicized; no reference could be made to Russian armaments, and buildings and streets which suffered
bombardments could not be identified.</blockquote>{{pg|437|438}}<blockquote>It was only in the realm of the human interest story that the journalists had a free hand. They could describe bombardments to their heart’s content.{{sfn|Cowles|1941|p=20}}</blockquote>
Hemingway and everyone else—to reserve incrimination for Hemingway is hardly just. No correspondent covering Republican Spain reported suspicious imprisonments and disappearances by government agents.

Hemingway, through Joris Ivens and ''The Spanish Earth'' project, had better
access to officials than most. Had he been able somehow to report such
activity, he would have lost that access and would probably have been kicked
out of the country. His fame would have likely prevented his own officially
sponsored disappearance, though he still worried, especially as so many of
such crimes on the Republican side occurred from free agents. When Jasper
Wood printed the anarchist F.A.I. banner in the limited edition book version
of ''The Spanish Earth'', Hemingway expressed his anxieties bluntly in a letter
to Jasper on August 20, 1938. It is hardly “petulant,” he scolded, “not to wish
to be shot.”{{sfn|Davison|1988|p=128}} Hostility in the Republic against the anarchists
ran high; after the Barcelona May Day conflict, the government’s foreign
minister told U.S. Ambassador Claude Bowers that “anarchist revolt
throughout Catalonia and not only expected but welcomed as an opportunity
to liquidate the anarchists who have been hostile from the beginning.”
{{sfn|NA|1954|p=292}}{{efn| The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State, 5 May 1937.}}

It is possible that Hemingway’s dispatch stating that “not one friend [. . .]
has been executed or is missing” was his clever means of reporting
the rumors and indeed the general fact while evading the censors, as in this very dispatch he acknowledged the presence of a censor after a bombardment.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=34}}
Matthews, on the other hand, never found a way to mention the
censors or admit even the possibility of people gone missing in the Republic.
Peter Moreira has observed that in a 1943 dispatch Hemingway related a remark by a British officer about the Chinese Nationalist government’s being
“hopeless on the offensive” because censorship “prevented American reporters
From actually saying that the Nationalists wouldn’t attack, surmising that by telling this anecdote Hemingway could sneak such a judgment into
his reports.”{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=77}} In Spain, censors aside, the eyewitness standard and his
own safety and continuing ability to report the war, and, yes, his passionate
support of the government contributed to his decision. He could have written
about government abuses from the states, but then could not return to{{pg|438|439}}cover the war and support the cause—a justification other journalists, those who did not return after the spring of 1937, did not enjoy. In his mind too, knowing what he heard of fascist atrocities, any reportage against the government lessening its chances of victory through killing hopes of increased international aid would have led to more deaths at Franco’s hands that the much smaller number inspired by fifth column paranoia.{{efn|''Hemingway’s Second War'' discusses in greater depth Hemingway’s politics and his falling out
with John Dos Passos over the execution of José Robles}}.

The accusation that Hemingway did not write about Republican atrocities
because he was saving it for his fiction I find baseless (Knightley 232;
Baker 402).{{sfn|Knightley|2004|p=232}}{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=402}}{{efn|Hemingway’s casual comment to colleagues calling dibs on Pepe Quintanilla, the executioner of
Madrid, is not sufficient evidence.}}Carolyn Moorehead, in her biography of Martha Gellhorn, describes
the climate for the Madrid correspondents that first spring: “And so,
day by day, the correspondents walked a thin and nervous line between truth,
evasions, and propaganda, telling one another that though it was not all right
if things were made up and presented as true, it was acceptable to describe
what you wanted, provided it was true and provided your readers were aware
of your position.”{{sfn|Moorehead|2003|p=125}} My own sense is that they did not walk the line quite
so nervously; their passionate commitment, and their principles of position
disclosure and the eyewitness standard, made that walk relatively easy.

The problem of ''committed journalism'', even sixty years later, has not been
resolved—as anyone paying attention to the media and world affairs well
knows. One person’s truth is another person’s propaganda. Certainly, as
Knightley notes, reporting from “the heart” affects one’s judgment.{{sfn|Knightley|2004|pp=234-5}}
Yet to attempt “balance,” per the edits to Matthews’ Guadalajara piece, betrays
one’s believed truth. Furthermore, the kind of reporting done by the
correspondents with the Republic—committed, one-sided, optimistic,
heroic, human interest work by embedded writers—would be practiced
widely and without reserve during World War II. Such narrative journalism,
with roots in Louise May Alcott’s “Hospital Sketches” series published in the
''Boston Commonwealth'', and more immediately in 1930s social documentary
writing whose “essence” is “not information”, anticipated postwar
new journalism’s adoption of novelistic narrative technique for nonfiction
which culminated with such wartime books as Norman Mailer’s ''Armies of
the Night'' and Michael Herr’s ''Dispatches''.{{sfn|Stott|1986|p=11}} Some of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches
fall in this line of development.

Today we might categorize such writing under the awkward umbrella
term ''creative nonfiction''. That term certainly fits the mixed bag of nonfiction
narratives and commentaries Hemingway published during the war in
Ken magazine. These pieces are essays, not journalism, several of which{{pg|439|440}}directly appeal for support for the Republic, and most of which really deal with the approaching world war. ''Ken'' wanted “precisely the kind of opinion articles he could not write for NANA.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=433}} His article, “The Cardinal Picks a Winner,” shows a photo of a row of dead children from Barcelona and another one with Nationalist officers saluting and Catholic officials with raised hands, apparently making the fascist salute as well. He ends ironically: “So I ''don’t believe'' the people shown in the photo can really be making it. I would rather prefer to think that the photograph was faked.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=436}} When Hemingway argues in “A Program for U.S. Realism” that the United States should stay out of the next war except to stuff its pockets through arms sales, one has to wonder, given his call and the democratic nations’ failure to save Spain, if we are to sniff sarcasm here.

The language of the dispatches, with their corrective intent against
Franco’s propaganda, does risk propagandizing. Hemingway’s optimism and
anti-fascism certainly colored his correspondence work. His criticism of the
anarchist and POUM militia for their inactivity on the Aragon front, for example,
sounds a lot like the Spanish Communist Party’s.{{efn|It at least sounds almost exactly like Dolores Ibarruri in her memoir. To the anarchists’ complaint
that they had no arms, she retorts “that they had more arms than did many other fronts. . . .
What they didn’t have and what they were constantly demanding were airplanes and tanks .And
they didn’t have them because the Republic government didn’t have them either, except for those
it received as aid from the Soviet Union” (238–284). Yet the various Catalonia militia were not
as well equipped with small arms as the more regular Popular Army units, and because of the
terrain tanks and planes were in fact necessary.}}
But unlike
Matthews, Hemingway limited his reports within the Republic to military
matters. Hemingway may have generally condemned the anarchists in his
nonfiction, considering their activity as hampering the war effort, but he
never repeated the accusation of their collaboration with the rebels, as
Matthews had done. And when Hemingway commented on the Bareclona
crisis, he referred only to the government—not the communists, as
Matthews had done.{{efn|Hemingway’s comments in “Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win” NANA staff
correspondent dispatch. Though arguably he was propagandizing by hiding the communist influence—
to mention the communists to an American audience would not gain sympathy for the
cause.}}Nor did he write articles asserting the limited role of
the communists in the government, or explaining Spanish anarchism, also
as Matthews had done.{{efn|An article on the communists’ limited role appeared in late November 1937, as discussed in a
missive from The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State on 2
Dec. 1937 (United States 461). Matthews’ “Anarchism: Spain’s Enigma” appeared in the New York
Times 22 Aug. 1937: 6, 14.}}

During one of Hemingway’s stateside breaks between trips to Spain, his
children asked if he was a “tool” of Stalin, an accusation tossed by a schoolmate
who, presumably parroting his or her parents, probably understood
the term no better than Hemingway’s children. {{sfn|Hemingway|nd|p=}}
Hemingway believed in the Republic’s potential, but he was never a dupe of
the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) or Comintern. As did many others, he
accepted PCE’s presence in the government for its discipline and organization
toward winning the war, and he understood the material necessity for
Comintern’s support. It should also be noted, as historians Hugh Thomas
and Helen Graham have reminded us, that the communism associated with
the Republic wasn’t particularly communist anyway.{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=628}}{{sfn|Graham|2002|p=184}} {{pg|440|441}}

Hemingway declined to follow Joris Ivens’ suggestion that he write a
dispatch on the significant role of the political commissars in the Republican
military, even though that would have meant
featuring his brave new friend Gustav Regler.{{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=}} Hemingway also, in a letter
justifying his work to Jack Wheeler at NANA, wrote about choosing not to
send a dispatch he had written because it might strike readers as propaganda
“no matter how true” (Letter to Jack Wheeler).{{sfn|Hemingway|1938b|p=}}

Hemingway went to Spain to see the war himself and to support the Republic
through his ambulance fund. The paychecks from NANA and the
fundraising from ''The Spanish Earth'' helped. Whatever propagandistic streak
colors the dispatches pales in comparison to the documentary. The filmmaker,
Joris Ivens, was well established in European communist circles. The
documentary genre then and now has occupied a slippery position between
the extremes of impossible-to-achieve empirical nonfiction and of the outright
fictionalized. Evaluations of Hemingway’s journalism are informed by
knowledge of ''The Spanish Earth'' and the ''Ken'' essays to the detriment of the
journalism. And the very nature of the slippery documentary genre may enable
the film to escape opprobrium. It wasn’t reportage; it was altogether
something else. But for that matter, Hemingway’s dispatches weren’t purely
reportage either, and if not ''altogether'' something else, still something else,
and should be reckoned with accordingly.

== Notes ==
{{notelist|20em}}

==Citations==
{{Reflist|15em}}

==Works Cited==
{{refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker
|first=Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Bruccoli |first=Matthew |date=2006 |title=Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame |url= |location=Columbia |publisher=U of South Caronia P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Cowles |first=Virginia |date=1941 |title=Looking for Trouble |url= |location=New York
|publisher=Harper & Brothers |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Davison |first=Richard Allan |title=The Publication of Hemingway’s The Spanish Earth: An Untold Story |url= |journal=Hemingway Review
|volume=7.2 |issue= |date=1988
|pages=122-130 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson
|first=Scott |date=2009 |title=Fitzgerald & Hemingway: Works and Days |url= |location=New York |publisher=Columbia UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Franklin |first=Sidney |date=1952 |title=Bullfighter from Brooklyn |url= |location=New York |publisher=Prentice-Hall |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Graham |first=Helen |date=2002 |title=The Spanish Republic at War 1936-1939 |url= |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Guttmann |first=Allen |date=1962 |title=The Wound in the Heart: American and the Spanish Civil War |url= |location=New York |publisher=Free Press of Glencoe |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1967 |title=By-Line: Ernest Hemingway |url= |location=New York |publisher=Scibner |pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Trogdon
|editor-first=Robert W.
|author-mask=1
|title=Fascism is a Lie
|url=
|journal=Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference |volume==
|issue=
|date=2002
|pages=193-6
|location=New York
|publisher=Carroll & Graf
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 May 1937
|chapter=Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=nd
|chapter=The Home Front
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938a
|chapter=Letter to Edmund Wilson
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=2 June 1938b
|chapter=Letter to Jack Wheeler
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=14 Feb 1939
|chapter=On the American Dead in Spain
|title=TS. New Masses
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Baker
|editor-first=Carlos
|author-mask=1
|date=2003
|chapter=The Hadely Mowrer
|title=Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Scribner
|pages=462-3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ibarruri
|first=Dolores
|date=1966
|title=They Shall Not Pass: The Autobiography of La Pasionaria
|url=
|location=United States
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|date=1969
|title=The Camera and I
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|author-mask=1
|date=26 Apr 1937
|chapter=Letter to Ernest Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|date=20 Nov 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Bertrand Weaver
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=12 Oct 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=25 Apr 1939
|chapter=Letter to M.B. Tenney
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Apr 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Knightley
|first=Phillip
|date=2004
|title=The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq
|url=
|location=Baltimore
|publisher=John Hopkins
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=
|date=9 Apr 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=TS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=11 Apr 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=8 May 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=6 July 1937d
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=July 1937e
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=22 March 1939
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 9
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=
|date=20 May 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=20 Dec 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 5
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Sep 1937c
|chapter=Note to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moorehead
|first=Caroline
|date=2003
|title=Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Henry Holt
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moreira
|first=Peter
|date=2006
|title=Hemingway on the China Front: His WWII Spy Mission with Martha Gellhorn
|url=
|location=Washington D.C.
|publisher=Potomac Books
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|date=5 Feb 1937
|chapter=Promotion Box: Hemingway, For Immediate Release
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|author-mask=1
|date=4 Apr 1938
|chapter=Promotion Box: American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|editor-last=Nelson
|editor-first=Card
|date=1994
|title=Remembering Spain: Hemingway’s Civil War Eulogy and the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
|url=
|location=Urbana
|publisher=U of Illinois
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Reynolds
|first=Michael
|date=1989
|title=Hemingway: The Paris Years
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Norton
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Stott
|first=William
|date=1986
|title=Documentary Expression and Thirties America
|url=
|location=Chicago
|publisher=U of Chicago P
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Thomas
|first=Hugh
|date=2001
|title=The Spanish Civil War, Rev. ed.
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Modern Library
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine
|last=''Two Wars and More to Come''
|first=
|date=24 Jan 1938
|title=Best Sellers of the Week Here and Elsewhere
|type=Advertisement
|url=
|magazine=New York Times
|pages=
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=NA
|first=
|title=United States. Dept. of State
|url=
|journal= Foreign Relations of the Untied States, 1937 |volume=1
|issue=General
|date=1954
|pages=
|location=Washington
|publisher=GPO
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Watson
|first=William Braasch
|title=Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches
|url=
|journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=7.2
|issue=
|date=1988
|pages=4-121
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Wheeler
|first=John H.
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938
|chapter=Letter to Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection, Box 3 Folder 14
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}

{{refend}}
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches

2025-04-20T13:53:20Z

MerAtticus: Harvtext working..correction

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
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{{byline|last=Vernon |first=Alex |abstract=The Spanish Civil War began in July 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally-restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy. By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches.}}

{{dc|dc=T|HE SPANISH CIVIL WAR BEGAN ON}} 17-18 JULY, 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy, to collaborate with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens on the pro-Republican documentary ''The Spanish Earth'', and to pursue his fledgling love affair with Martha Gellhorn.{{efn|Adapted and printed with permission from ''Hemingway’s Second War: Bearing Witness to the Spanish Civil War.'' Iowa City: U of Iowa Press, 2011.}}
By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches for NANA.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=4}}{{efn|Quotations from the NANA dispatches follow the Diplomatic Text established by William Braasch’s “Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches.” I prefer NANA’s titles rather than Watson’s. For my disagreements with some of Watson’s datings, see my comments on specific dispatches in ''Hemingway’s Second War.''}}The secondary sources habitually judge them inferior journalism. Carlos Baker in the first Hemingway biography, for example, complains that the dialogue was “so heavily stamped with personal mannerisms as to be of doubtful authenticity.” Baker sees a “curious monotony in his stories of battles and bombardments,” a gratuitous use of graphic imagery “to shock his readers,” and “a note of triumphant boastfulness” in reporting proximity to danger. He also faults Hemingway for “often hint[ing] he was alone when in fact he was usually with Martha Gellhorn, Matthews, and Delmer.” Hemingway lacked Dos Passos’ “eye for telling details” and the “meticulous exactitude and inclusiveness that characterized the best work of Herbert Matthews and Sefton Delmer.”{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}

Philip Knightley’s ''The First Casualty'', the standard history of war correspondence, paraphrases Baker but with a trouncing final judgment:{{pg|427|428}}Hemingway’s “performance as a war correspondent was abysmally bad.” But Knightley goes beyond “technical” dissatisfaction to moral condemnation. Not just “unjustifiably optimistic”—an excusable offense—Hemingway’s reporting was “unforgivable” in its “total failure to report the Communist persecution, imprisonment, and summary execution of ‘untrustworthy elements’ on the Republican side, when he knew this was happening and when disclosing it might well have prevented further horrors like this.”
{{sfn|Knightley|2004 |pp=231–32}}{{efn|In my view, Knightley does not sufficiently acknowledge his paraphrasing of Baker.}}

Such criticisms in the final analysis might bear out. As Scott Donaldson writes, Hemingway advanced the Republican cause in his dispatches by eliciting “the deepest possible feelings of horror and of sympathy for the victims” of the Madrid bombardment; his “undue optimism” often “ignored Loyalist defeats and exaggerated the importance of its victories”; and “he repeatedly called attention to the participation of Italians and Germans on Franco’s side.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=426}} It also served as a recruitment tool—Milton Wolff, for example, acknowledged the strong influence Hemingway’s dispatches had on his decision to volunteer. Nevertheless, I think it a worthwhile exercise to attend a little more studiously to Hemingway’s dispatches, their context, and their artistry. I don’t necessarily intend to reverse the general opinion of the correspondence, only to achieve a better and more sympathetic understanding.

Herbert Matthews’ reporting for the ''New York Times'' will serve as a convenient comparison for two reasons. First, because both Baker and Knightley use Matthews’ journalism as the standard of excellence to pass judgment on Hemingway’s; and second, because the two worked practically side-by-side, seeing and reporting on many of the same events. In fact so closely did they work together that NANA sometimes complained that the ''Times'' was not buying Hemingway’s pieces because they resembled Matthews,’ and at one point Matthews’ own editors at the Times suspected him of plagiarizing Hemingway.{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|pp=411, 420}} A note from Matthews’ assigned editor Raymond McCaw provides, in two columns, seven quite similar passages from Hemingway’s Aragon front dispatches of September 13 and 14 with Matthews’ of September 14, with a penciled note at the bottom: “a deadly parallel if you ask me.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937c|p=}} Edwin James, the managing editor and McCaw’s boss, eventually agreed with Matthews’ defense: “It is quite apparent that you did not file any duplicate of the Hemingway story, or vice versa. As I understand it, the similarity arose from the fact that you{{pg|428|429}}both went to see the same show and saw it at the same time [sic], under the same conditions.”{{sfn|James|1937b|p=}}

Matthews’ dispatches ring of Republican bias as much if not more than anything Hemingway ever filed. The ''Times'' received many letters to the editor complaining about Matthews’ undisguised politics, which also gave serious concern to some of his editors. His description of the Republican May 1937 infighting in Barcelona is a striking example of how his news veered into propaganda and shows just how much he passed along the government’s version of events. The government’s “BLOODLESS TRIUMPH FOUGHT WITH RECOGNIZEDWEAPONS OF DEMOCRACY” turned out to be blatantly false, as the government and the “COMMUNISTS [WHO] DISTINGUISHED THEMSELVES” resorted to violent suppression. His blaming the uprising on the anarchist CNT working as Franco operatives parrots the government’s and the communist party’s public position, even though both charges—that the anarchists precipitated the events and that they were under Nationalist direction—were also false. His dispatch’s optimistic close also equivocates the political reality: “NEW GOVERNMENT HAS TAKEN POWER WHICH APPEARS TOVE CONFIDENCE VAST MAJORITY SPANIARDS IN LOYALIST TERRITORY AND TIS HOPED WILL GAIN EQUAL CONFIDENCE ABROAD STOP VIOLENCE AND REVOLUTION BEEN REPUDIATED AND NEWAND FAR HOPEFULLER PERIOD SEEMS BEGINNING.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937a|p=}}The ''Times'', knowing full well the one-sided coverage of a correspondent writing from one side of the conflict, had a reporter on both sides: Matthews with the Republicans, and William Carney with the Nationalists. They got their facts right (or wrong) as often as the other, their editors concluded; and they inspired about the same number of letters of complaint.{{sfn|James|1937a|p=}}{{sfn|James|1939|p=}}

Furthermore, Matthews’ dispatches received a great deal of substantive editorial revisions. One of Matthews’ Teruel reports had to be cut for length, as McCaw informed James: “This bird sent 2844 words on the same facts which Hemingway covered much better in less than half that number. I wonder if Matthews thinks the paper is thriving, and that cable tolls do not matter a damn. Of course, it had to be cut for space anyway.” McCaw most likely refers here to Matthews’ dispatch corresponding to Hemingway’s “The Attack on Teruel,” though Matthews’ account of the fall of Teruel is also much longer (and more long-winded) than Hemingway’s, and just as personal in terms of describing the dangers{{pg|429|430}} he faced. Indeed its length allows him to share even more of the action he endured.{{sfn|McCaw|1937b|p=}}

Raymond McCaw held a general professional disagreement with Matthews perhaps tainted with over zealousness. Whether a personal or political motive informed that disagreement can’t be determined from the evidence I’ve seen. It is also clear that McCaw’s charges bear some validity—that any responsible editor could have easily and reasonably taken issue where McCaw did. One of the more interesting examples concerns Matthews’ piece on Guadalajara. Because he only saw evidence on Franco’s side of Italian forces, he only reported on Italians. But the ''Times'' editors heard from other sources that German soldiers also participated in the March offensive. They thought it prudent, from this confusion, to change (nine times) “Italian” to “Rebel,” “the foe,” or “Insurgent.” When Matthews saw the published piece he wrote a strenuous objection. In some instances the editors changed paraphrased quotations from his sources. One large paragraph omitted by the editors stressed the first-hand nature of the information, and Matthews underlines the key words: “All day, at every place we stopped and no matter whom we talked to or what we saw, there was only one label—Italian. The dead bodies, the prisoners, the material of every kind, the men who had occupied Brihuega and then fled were Italian and nothing but Italian.” Here and elsewhere in his original story, Matthews emphasizes the “personal knowledge” of its information.{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}{{efn|James supported McCaw on these changes, though later acknowledged that altering quoted sources was perhaps unwarranted(29 April 1937; Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3).}}Yet Matthews did not report on the foreigners fighting for the Republic—it was in fact the Italian Garibali Battalion that routed Franco’s Italians. We might surmise government censorship behind this silence, though Matthews would not cable news of “CENSORSHIP STRICTER” and “BAN ON MENTIONING INTERNATIONALS INCLUDING AMERICANS INSTITUTED TODAY” until July.{{sfn|Matthews|1937b|p=}}Perhaps he cautiously self-censored, or politically self-censored for the same reasons the government would eventually ban mention. Still, his stridency about the omission of foreigners on one side is striking given his knowledge of their contribution to the other side. For this reason too, and his omission of other nationalities on the insurgent side, it seemed only fair to his editor “to stand on the statement that the majority of the Rebels were Italians and let it go at that.”{{sfn|James|1937c|p=}} A reasonable decision.

Throughout his correspondence to his editors and his several books,{{pg|430|431}}Matthews maintained a passionate defense of his eyewitness journalistic standard, a position those close to him understood. “Matthews never believed anything he had not seen with his own eyes,” Joris Ivens wrote. “He never saw his job as reporter as one that permitted him to sit in his hotel and read the handouts of the War Ministry.” {{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=112}} Sidney Franklin recalls that some writers wrote their pieces before arriving in Madrid, and came only for the “legitimacy” of the Madrid dateline.{{sfn|Franklin|1952|p=232}}And Matthews hated, on principle, having his name attached to an article that violated the integrity of his witness. The only way to achieve objectivity, for Matthews, was to acknowledge one’s subjective perspective. Writing to his publisher, Matthews argued that “the full documentary value” of his coverage was lost when the editors altered his submissions for “the apparent necessity of giving more or less equal space to both sides.”{{sfn|Matthews|1939|p=}}

As with Matthews, so too Hemingway. Indeed the commitment to subjectivity
fit quite well with Hemingway’s modernist aesthetics. If Hemingway
focused the dispatches on his perspective—on his own experience dodging
artillery—more than Matthews and more than most, he did so at least partially
to fulfill expectations. NANA approached him, after all, for his name
and personality as much as whatever he would write. Before he even left the
states it pitched him to potential publications, sending out a promotional release with text to be used alongside his forthcoming dispatches and suggesting
they include a photograph: “Mr. Hemingway’s assignment is to get both from the bombed towns and bombed trenches the human story of the war, not just an account of the game being played by general staffs with pins
and a map.”{{sfn|NANA|1937|p=}} NANA also released each individual dispatch with a one-sentence “precede” about the “famous” or “noted” author. Ernest Hemingway was not writing as Herbert Mathews, ace reporter; Hemingway was writing as Ernest Hemingway, famous author of novels and stories well known to be drawn from his own experiences.

That he understood this to be his assignment is further evidenced by a
cable Matthews sent to his ''Times'' editors on April 9, 1937, concerning the
Loyalist attack: “WORKED CONJOINTL WITH HEMINGWAY TODAY HE SENDING EYEWITNESS DESCRIPTION WHILE EYE SENT GENERAL STRATEGY.”{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}When a year later the ''Times'' asked NANA to ensure Hemingway’s reports differed from Matthews, NANA complied by asking Hemingway “to emphasize color rather than straight reporting” not necessarily out of dissatisfaction with Hemingway’s reportage as Baker contends,{{efn|Baker’s notes date the ''Times'' request to NANA as 8 Apr. 1938, and NANA’s to Hemingway as 15
Apr. 1938 (Princeton University, Firestone Library: Box 18, Folder 8 “1938”), the date of “The Bombing of Tortosa” dispatch.}} but to increase{{pg|431|432}}the chance of selling to the ''Times'' and indeed to ensure the spirit of NANA’s original arrangement with Hemingway. {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}Far from dissatisfied, NANA wrote Hemingway at the end of August 1938 a letter of agreement for his coverage of “a general European war” should it break out, “written in your colorful style” (Hemingway was in Paris, on his way to Spain for the last time during the war).{{sfn|Wheeler|1938|p=}}When Edmund Wilson criticized the selected dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'', Hemingway wrote him that “I was paid to write what are called ‘eye witness’ accounts . . .what is called, or was asked for as ‘color stuff.’ Most of such stuff is faked. Mine was not. It was straight reporting and the personal stuff was what had been asked for by the editors. “Wilson’s estimation was also based upon ''Fact’s'' inclusion of the “The Old Man at the Bridge” story from ''Ken'', “not a news dispatch” at all.{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}Speaking at Carnegie Hall before the showing of a rough cut of ''The Spanish Earth'', shortly after his first trip to Spain and so very much in the context of his wartime work, Hemingway defined the writer’s problem as “project[ing] [what is true] in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2002|p=193}}

Personal, anecdotal journalism had been Hemingway’s signature style from his earliest days filing reports, in the early 1920s from Paris, when his editor at the ''Toronto Star Weekly'' “encouraged [. . .] what Hemingway did best: write about himself in the act of being a reporter.”{{sfn|Reynolds|1989|p=45}}How could he expect that NANA would expect anything else, if indeed NANA did expect anything else? In the Spanish Civil War he at least maintained his eyewitness posture; in World War II, however, he couldn’t keep himself out. His first piece, about D-Day, begins, “No one remembers the date of the Battle of Shiloh. But the day ''we took'' Fox Green beach was the sixth of June, and the wind was blowing hard out of the northwest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1967|p=340}}His venue too—''Collier’s'' magazine—and the fact that he had not written anything in three years further contributed to the story-like nature of the WWII stories, in which he figured as a protagonist—not to mention the stories and involvement he couldn’t write about, armed and running around France more of a free agent than his guerilla-hero Robert Jordan ever was (though he began to transform these experiences into fiction in several unpublished stories). In wartime China in 1943, filing articles for Ralph Ingersoll’s short-lived ''PM'' New York afternoon daily, Hemingway did not even care to be called a news reporter.{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=99}}

It should be mentioned that Hemingway and Matthews enjoyed a great{{pg|432|433}}friendship and working relationship. Hemingway usually brought Matthews, who did not have a car, on his excursions. When Matthews left Madrid for a break in mid April 1937, he had already ensured Hemingway would provide coverage to the ''Times'' through NANA. For one thing, Hemingway did not have to worry about Matthews as a rival for the history books. He could endorse his friends’ book, ''Two Wars and More to Come'', and praise him as “the ablest and the bravest war correspondent writing today “who “when the fakers are all dead [. . .] will be read in the schools” (Advertisement 21) because Matthews posed no threat to Hemingway’s own chances to be read in the schools. The only brief Hemingway ever expressed he really reserved for Matthews’ editors, for not wanting his Teruel street-fighting story and for cutting references to himself in Matthews’ Teruel dispatches so that it appeared only Matthews had been there.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=462}}

As for Hemingway’s neglecting to name everyone with him for every story, the ''Times'' cutting of his name suggests that such exactitude was hardly a priority. A paper had no incentive for announcing the fact that a competitor’s
correspondent stood beside its own to see and report the same
events. NANA changed at least one vague Hemingway “we,” which admits
to the presence of others, to “this correspondent”
—we can hardly fault Hemingway for working in the spirit of his
employer’s standards.{{sfn|NANA|1938|p=}}{{efn|“we” in typescript and radiogram (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 1 and Folder 25).}} Do readers care that Matthews, Delmer, Gellhorn,
and others were there? The story’s effect and the limited word count also
weighed against such roll calls. One editor chose not to clutter the dispatch
on the great retreat across the Ebro with all the names of the American International Brigade volunteers Hemingway encountered, an omission of
Content more far serious than that of omitted correspondent names.{{efn| Radiogram insert dateline 4 April 1938 (HRC: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 25).}} Hemingway
often gave the names of the reporters with him, such as at Teruel;
nor was he the only reporter to sometimes neglect to do so. Martha Gellhorn,
for example, used a vague “we” and singled herself out as the primary
participant in some of her stories.

By using first-person reportage Hemingway—and Matthews and Gellhorn And most of the group covering the war—were operating solidly within
convention. William Stott, in ''Documentary Expression and Thirties America'',
calls this first-person ''participant observer'' technique “the most common sort
of documentary reportage in the thirties” that worked “by vicarious persuasion:
the writer partook of the events he reported and bared his feelings
and attitudes to influence the reader’s own.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=178-9}}{{efn|He specifically includes Hemingway et al (180).}} Stott also observes {{pg|433|434}}another technique to enable documentary reportage to “talk to us, and convince us that we, our deepest interests, are engaged,” in the use of the second person: “Thirties documentaries constantly address ‘you,’ the ‘you’ who is we the audience, and exhorts, wheedles, begs us to identify, pity, participate.” His examples include Dorothy Parker’s Spanish Civil War writing, and Hemingway’s 1935 “First-Hand Report on the Florida Hurricane.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=27-8}} A number of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches employ the second-person as a way of bringing the reader along for the ride.

Hemingway’s dispatches used personal pronouns more artfully than is generally recognized. “A New Kind of War,” which William Braasch Watson notes as having been “[w]ritten with more care and imagination” than its predecessors, begins in second person: “The window of the hotel is open and, as you lie in bed, you hear the firing in the front line seventeen blocks away.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=29}} He takes “you” outside, to see the damage and the dead from the bombing. “Someone makes a joke about missing teeth and someone else says not to make that joke. And everyone has the feeling that characterizes war. It wasn’t me, see? It wasn’t me.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} The tension between the first person and second-person pronouns—the movement toward identification with “you” and the insistence that “it wasn’t me”—continues in the next line. Here the reader is at once still in the narrator’s shoes, but strangely distanced from the narrator through biographical tidbit and, at the same time, asked to see himself in the enemy: “The Italian dead up on the Guadalajara weren’t you although Italian dead, because of where you had spent your boyhood, always seemed, still, like Our Dead.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} It is worth quoting at length the dispatch’s transition to first person:
<blockquote>
After the shell that lit on the sidewalk in front of the hotel you got a beautiful double corner room on that side, twice the size of the one you’d had, for less than a dollar. It wasn’t me they killed. See? No. Not me. It wasn’t me anymore.

Then in a hospital given by the American Friends of Spanish Democracy located out behind the Morata front along the road
to Valencia they said, “Raven wants to see you.”

“Do I know him?”

“I don’t think so,” they said. “But he wants to see you.”

“Where is he?”

“Upstairs.”{{pg|434|435}}In the room upstairs they are giving a blood transfusion to a man with a very gray face who lay on a cot with his arm out looking away from the gurgling bottle and moaning in a very impersonal way. He moaned mechanically and at regular intervals and it did not seem to be him that made the sound. His lips did not move.

“Where’s Raven?” I asked.

“I’m here,” said Raven.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=31}}</blockquote>
The piece simply could not have sustained the second-person for the remaining five pages. More significantly, for this deeply personal exchange between the writer and the faceless, eyeless soldier, Hemingway could not hide in the rhetorical device of the second-person. In the process, he effects a reversal of the usual pronoun game; instead of identifying with the all embracing “you,” we leave that trick behind and become fully attached to
the narratorial “I” as ourselves, as we might not have been had the article
begun in the first person. And even as the narrator identifies himself by name
for the only time in any of the dispatches—“Hemingway,” and later
“Ernest”—as decidedly not ourselves. We do not say, ''It isn’t me''. The historian
Hugh Thomas notes “the refreshing candour” of Hemingway’s naming
himself “in the world of the International Brigades, where no one’s name
seemed to be truthfully given.”{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=591}}{{efn|For Watson, the dispatch “seems, in fact, on the verge of becoming a story.”{{harvtxt|Watson|1988|p=29}}}}

A year later Hemingway’s “Tortosa Calmly Awaits Assault” resists admitting
the city’s imminent fall. Yet it does so anyway, by subtly alluding to the
wartime rhetoric of sacrificed blood irrigating the earth and rejuvenating
Spain. Such rhetoric was common during the war, appearing in speeches,
print, and poetry. Many of the poems in Cary Nelson’s anthology ''The Wound
and the Dream: Sixty Years of American Poems about the Civil War'' join in the
Spanish and international chorus’s general connection between Republican
soldiers and the land, and the particular singing of their dead nourishing
the land. We find such language in La Pasionaria’s farewell address to the International Brigades, her epilogue to ''The Book of the XV Brigade'', and Hemingway’s famous eulogy “On the American Dead in Spain”: “For our dead are
a part of the earth of Spain now and the earth of Spain can never die. Each
winter it will seem to die and each spring it will come alive again. Our dead
will live with it forever.”{{sfn|Nelson|1994|p=3}}{{efn| Reprinted in Bruccoli 76 and Nelson, Remembering 37 (the drafts at the JFK are titled “The Dead at Jarama”). In addition to the poems in Nelson’s anthology, see the excerpt from Boris Todrin’s “Spanish Sowing” in Guttmann (Wounded 179–180).}} The Tortosa dispatch implies the deaths of{{pg|435|436}}many Republican soldiers in its final paragraph’s description of the newborn onions:
<blockquote>The artillery was picking up a little now. Two came in at a fairly useful place and as the smoke blew away ahead and settled through the trees, you picked an armful of spring onions from a field beside the trail that led to the Tortosa road. They were the first onions of the spring and peeling one I found they were plump white and not too strong. The Ebro Delta has a fine rich land, and where the onions grow, tomorrow will be a battle.
{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=84}}</blockquote>

The echo is quiet, and perhaps unconscious, but there nevertheless. The opening boastfulness of “American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents”
should be taken somewhat ironically. The dispatch begins by announcing
that for “two days we have been doing the most dangerous thing
you can do in this war. That is keep close behind an unstabilized line where
the enemy are attacking with mechanized forces.” Then, a few pages later,
we learn about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade survivors of the spring 1938
Nationalist offensive that took Bob Merriman and eventually reached the
Mediterranean Sea. Reading about these survivors creeping through enemy
camps, stepping on a sleeping German soldier’s hand, sprinting “across an
open field toward the Ebro bank and being sniped at by artillery controlled
by an observation plane overhead” and then “the desperate swimming of
the Ebro” naked, we are asked to place the correspondent’s plight in due perspective.{{sfn|Watson|1988|pp=71-2}} This story certainly escapes the charge of a monotonous
battle and bombing scene; its switch from apparently boastful to
awe-struck witness feels almost deliberately self-conscious. Other choice selfironic
moments come in the dispatches of that pre-Teruel quiet fall of 1938.
The one titled “Hemingway, Covering War, Tells of Brush with Death” has little
to report from Madrid other than the new aftershave brand he is trying.
In “Loyalists’ Drive Seen Progressing as Planned,” he writes that “Shells are
all much the same and if they don’t hit you there is no story and if they do
you won’t have to write it.” {{sfn|Watson|1988|p=58}}

Hemingway’s dispatches are sometimes monotonous because his war was
Usually monotonous—as wars are most of the time. It should also be kept in
mind that scholars reviewing Hemingway’s NANA dispatches one after{{pg|436|437}}another do not relive the original reading experience. Hemingway wrote dispatches sporadically, papers did not run all of his dispatches, papers edited and cut them, and readers read at least a couple of papers’ worth of other articles in between. He told Edmund Wilson as much in defending himself against Wilson’s critique of the selected (and heavily edited and cut) dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'' without his consent: “If you are being paid to be shot at and write about it you are supposed to mention the shooting. [. . .] But I do not go in for re-printing journalism.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}

If we can in this way better understand his style, and at least explain it if
not excuse it, we similarly ought to try to contextualize—and perhaps
excuse—the moral problem. The two issues here are the specific condemnation
of Hemingway’s silence about Republican atrocities and the general
question of biased reporting (the latter of which has already partially been
addressed).

Hemingway knew, as Donaldson writes, that mentioning the atrocities
“would arouse anticommunist sentiments back in the States and effectively
undermine any possibility of American intervention.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=394}} It is also doubtful
that reporting them would have stopped them. But reporting Republican
atrocities from Spain was not possible for the simple reason that all dispatches
went through a government censor. Matthews cabled his editors
from Paris in May 1937 to tell them that “censorship does not permit us to
say when the ‘telefonica’ is hit. So whenever you see reference in my
despatches [sic] to ‘an important building in the center of the city’ or words
to that effect, the cable desk can know that it is the telefonica.” {{sfn|Matthews|1937c|p=}} As already noted, by July he would cable “CENSORSHIP
STRICTER” as the ban on mentioning internationals went into effect. {{sfn|Matthews|1937d|p=}}{{sfn|Matthews|1937e|p=}} Cowles’ memoir confirms the
aggressive censorship, observing that it limited journalists to exactly the kind of material Hemingway wrote about:
<blockquote>There were frequent attempts to “beat the censor” by employing American slang expressions, but this came to an end when a Canadian girl joined the staff. The International Brigades were not allowed to be publicized; no reference could be made to Russian armaments, and buildings and streets which suffered
bombardments could not be identified.</blockquote>{{pg|437|438}}<blockquote>It was only in the realm of the human interest story that the journalists had a free hand. They could describe bombardments to their heart’s content.{{sfn|Cowles|1941|p=20}}</blockquote>
Hemingway and everyone else—to reserve incrimination for Hemingway is hardly just. No correspondent covering Republican Spain reported suspicious imprisonments and disappearances by government agents.

Hemingway, through Joris Ivens and ''The Spanish Earth'' project, had better
access to officials than most. Had he been able somehow to report such
activity, he would have lost that access and would probably have been kicked
out of the country. His fame would have likely prevented his own officially
sponsored disappearance, though he still worried, especially as so many of
such crimes on the Republican side occurred from free agents. When Jasper
Wood printed the anarchist F.A.I. banner in the limited edition book version
of ''The Spanish Earth'', Hemingway expressed his anxieties bluntly in a letter
to Jasper on August 20, 1938. It is hardly “petulant,” he scolded, “not to wish
to be shot.”{{sfn|Davison|1988|p=128}} Hostility in the Republic against the anarchists
ran high; after the Barcelona May Day conflict, the government’s foreign
minister told U.S. Ambassador Claude Bowers that “anarchist revolt
throughout Catalonia and not only expected but welcomed as an opportunity
to liquidate the anarchists who have been hostile from the beginning.”
{{sfn|NA|1954|p=292}}{{efn| The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State, 5 May 1937.}}

It is possible that Hemingway’s dispatch stating that “not one friend [. . .]
has been executed or is missing” was his clever means of reporting
the rumors and indeed the general fact while evading the censors, as in this very dispatch he acknowledged the presence of a censor after a bombardment.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=34}}
Matthews, on the other hand, never found a way to mention the
censors or admit even the possibility of people gone missing in the Republic.
Peter Moreira has observed that in a 1943 dispatch Hemingway related a remark by a British officer about the Chinese Nationalist government’s being
“hopeless on the offensive” because censorship “prevented American reporters
From actually saying that the Nationalists wouldn’t attack, surmising that by telling this anecdote Hemingway could sneak such a judgment into
his reports.”{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=77}} In Spain, censors aside, the eyewitness standard and his
own safety and continuing ability to report the war, and, yes, his passionate
support of the government contributed to his decision. He could have written
about government abuses from the states, but then could not return to{{pg|438|439}}cover the war and support the cause—a justification other journalists, those who did not return after the spring of 1937, did not enjoy. In his mind too, knowing what he heard of fascist atrocities, any reportage against the government lessening its chances of victory through killing hopes of increased international aid would have led to more deaths at Franco’s hands that the much smaller number inspired by fifth column paranoia.{{efn|''Hemingway’s Second War'' discusses in greater depth Hemingway’s politics and his falling out
with John Dos Passos over the execution of José Robles}}.

The accusation that Hemingway did not write about Republican atrocities
because he was saving it for his fiction I find baseless (Knightley 232;
Baker 402).{{sfn|Knightley|2004|p=232}}{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=402}}{{efn|Hemingway’s casual comment to colleagues calling dibs on Pepe Quintanilla, the executioner of
Madrid, is not sufficient evidence.}}Carolyn Moorehead, in her biography of Martha Gellhorn, describes
the climate for the Madrid correspondents that first spring: “And so,
day by day, the correspondents walked a thin and nervous line between truth,
evasions, and propaganda, telling one another that though it was not all right
if things were made up and presented as true, it was acceptable to describe
what you wanted, provided it was true and provided your readers were aware
of your position.”{{sfn|Moorehead|2003|p=125}} My own sense is that they did not walk the line quite
so nervously; their passionate commitment, and their principles of position
disclosure and the eyewitness standard, made that walk relatively easy.

The problem of ''committed journalism'', even sixty years later, has not been
resolved—as anyone paying attention to the media and world affairs well
knows. One person’s truth is another person’s propaganda. Certainly, as
Knightley notes, reporting from “the heart” affects one’s judgment.{{sfn|Knightley|2004|pp=234-5}}
Yet to attempt “balance,” per the edits to Matthews’ Guadalajara piece, betrays
one’s believed truth. Furthermore, the kind of reporting done by the
correspondents with the Republic—committed, one-sided, optimistic,
heroic, human interest work by embedded writers—would be practiced
widely and without reserve during World War II. Such narrative journalism,
with roots in Louise May Alcott’s “Hospital Sketches” series published in the
''Boston Commonwealth'', and more immediately in 1930s social documentary
writing whose “essence” is “not information”, anticipated postwar
new journalism’s adoption of novelistic narrative technique for nonfiction
which culminated with such wartime books as Norman Mailer’s ''Armies of
the Night'' and Michael Herr’s ''Dispatches''.{{sfn|Stott|1986|p=11}} Some of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches
fall in this line of development.

Today we might categorize such writing under the awkward umbrella
term ''creative nonfiction''. That term certainly fits the mixed bag of nonfiction
narratives and commentaries Hemingway published during the war in
Ken magazine. These pieces are essays, not journalism, several of which{{pg|439|440}}directly appeal for support for the Republic, and most of which really deal with the approaching world war. ''Ken'' wanted “precisely the kind of opinion articles he could not write for NANA.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=433}} His article, “The Cardinal Picks a Winner,” shows a photo of a row of dead children from Barcelona and another one with Nationalist officers saluting and Catholic officials with raised hands, apparently making the fascist salute as well. He ends ironically: “So I ''don’t believe'' the people shown in the photo can really be making it. I would rather prefer to think that the photograph was faked.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=436}} When Hemingway argues in “A Program for U.S. Realism” that the United States should stay out of the next war except to stuff its pockets through arms sales, one has to wonder, given his call and the democratic nations’ failure to save Spain, if we are to sniff sarcasm here.

The language of the dispatches, with their corrective intent against
Franco’s propaganda, does risk propagandizing. Hemingway’s optimism and
anti-fascism certainly colored his correspondence work. His criticism of the
anarchist and POUM militia for their inactivity on the Aragon front, for example,
sounds a lot like the Spanish Communist Party’s.{{efn|It at least sounds almost exactly like Dolores Ibarruri in her memoir. To the anarchists’ complaint
that they had no arms, she retorts “that they had more arms than did many other fronts. . . .
What they didn’t have and what they were constantly demanding were airplanes and tanks .And
they didn’t have them because the Republic government didn’t have them either, except for those
it received as aid from the Soviet Union” (238–284). Yet the various Catalonia militia were not
as well equipped with small arms as the more regular Popular Army units, and because of the
terrain tanks and planes were in fact necessary.}}
But unlike
Matthews, Hemingway limited his reports within the Republic to military
matters. Hemingway may have generally condemned the anarchists in his
nonfiction, considering their activity as hampering the war effort, but he
never repeated the accusation of their collaboration with the rebels, as
Matthews had done. And when Hemingway commented on the Bareclona
crisis, he referred only to the government—not the communists, as
Matthews had done.{{efn|Hemingway’s comments in “Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win” NANA staff
correspondent dispatch. Though arguably he was propagandizing by hiding the communist influence—
to mention the communists to an American audience would not gain sympathy for the
cause.}}Nor did he write articles asserting the limited role of
the communists in the government, or explaining Spanish anarchism, also
as Matthews had done.{{efn|An article on the communists’ limited role appeared in late November 1937, as discussed in a
missive from The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State on 2
Dec. 1937 (United States 461). Matthews’ “Anarchism: Spain’s Enigma” appeared in the New York
Times 22 Aug. 1937: 6, 14.}}

During one of Hemingway’s stateside breaks between trips to Spain, his
children asked if he was a “tool” of Stalin, an accusation tossed by a schoolmate
who, presumably parroting his or her parents, probably understood
the term no better than Hemingway’s children. {{sfn|Hemingway|nd|p=}}
Hemingway believed in the Republic’s potential, but he was never a dupe of
the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) or Comintern. As did many others, he
accepted PCE’s presence in the government for its discipline and organization
toward winning the war, and he understood the material necessity for
Comintern’s support. It should also be noted, as historians Hugh Thomas
and Helen Graham have reminded us, that the communism associated with
the Republic wasn’t particularly communist anyway.{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=628}}{{sfn|Graham|2002|p=184}} {{pg|440|441}}

Hemingway declined to follow Joris Ivens’ suggestion that he write a
dispatch on the significant role of the political commissars in the Republican
military, even though that would have meant
featuring his brave new friend Gustav Regler.{{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=}} Hemingway also, in a letter
justifying his work to Jack Wheeler at NANA, wrote about choosing not to
send a dispatch he had written because it might strike readers as propaganda
“no matter how true” (Letter to Jack Wheeler).{{sfn|Hemingway|1938b|p=}}

Hemingway went to Spain to see the war himself and to support the Republic
through his ambulance fund. The paychecks from NANA and the
fundraising from ''The Spanish Earth'' helped. Whatever propagandistic streak
colors the dispatches pales in comparison to the documentary. The filmmaker,
Joris Ivens, was well established in European communist circles. The
documentary genre then and now has occupied a slippery position between
the extremes of impossible-to-achieve empirical nonfiction and of the outright
fictionalized. Evaluations of Hemingway’s journalism are informed by
knowledge of ''The Spanish Earth'' and the ''Ken'' essays to the detriment of the
journalism. And the very nature of the slippery documentary genre may enable
the film to escape opprobrium. It wasn’t reportage; it was altogether
something else. But for that matter, Hemingway’s dispatches weren’t purely
reportage either, and if not ''altogether'' something else, still something else,
and should be reckoned with accordingly.

== Notes ==
{{notelist|20em}}

==Citations==
{{Reflist|15em}}

==Works Cited==
{{refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker
|first=Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Bruccoli |first=Matthew |date=2006 |title=Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame |url= |location=Columbia |publisher=U of South Caronia P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Cowles |first=Virginia |date=1941 |title=Looking for Trouble |url= |location=New York
|publisher=Harper & Brothers |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Davison |first=Richard Allan |title=The Publication of Hemingway’s The Spanish Earth: An Untold Story |url= |journal=Hemingway Review
|volume=7.2 |issue= |date=1988
|pages=122-130 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson
|first=Scott |date=2009 |title=Fitzgerald & Hemingway: Works and Days |url= |location=New York |publisher=Columbia UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Franklin |first=Sidney |date=1952 |title=Bullfighter from Brooklyn |url= |location=New York |publisher=Prentice-Hall |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Graham |first=Helen |date=2002 |title=The Spanish Republic at War 1936-1939 |url= |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Guttmann |first=Allen |date=1962 |title=The Wound in the Heart: American and the Spanish Civil War |url= |location=New York |publisher=Free Press of Glencoe |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1967 |title=By-Line: Ernest Hemingway |url= |location=New York |publisher=Scibner |pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Trogdon
|editor-first=Robert W.
|author-mask=1
|title=Fascism is a Lie
|url=
|journal=Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference |volume==
|issue=
|date=2002
|pages=193-6
|location=New York
|publisher=Carroll & Graf
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 May 1937
|chapter=Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=nd
|chapter=The Home Front
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938a
|chapter=Letter to Edmund Wilson
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=2 June 1938b
|chapter=Letter to Jack Wheeler
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=14 Feb 1939
|chapter=On the American Dead in Spain
|title=TS. New Masses
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Baker
|editor-first=Carlos
|author-mask=1
|date=2003
|chapter=The Hadely Mowrer
|title=Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Scribner
|pages=462-3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ibarruri
|first=Dolores
|date=1966
|title=They Shall Not Pass: The Autobiography of La Pasionaria
|url=
|location=United States
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|date=1969
|title=The Camera and I
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|author-mask=1
|date=26 Apr 1937
|chapter=Letter to Ernest Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|date=20 Nov 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Bertrand Weaver
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=12 Oct 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=25 Apr 1939
|chapter=Letter to M.B. Tenney
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Apr 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Knightley
|first=Phillip
|date=2004
|title=The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq
|url=
|location=Baltimore
|publisher=John Hopkins
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=
|date=9 Apr 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=TS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=11 Apr 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=8 May 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=6 July 1937d
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=July 1937e
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=22 March 1939
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 9
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=
|date=20 May 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=20 Dec 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 5
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Sep 1937c
|chapter=Note to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moorehead
|first=Caroline
|date=2003
|title=Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Henry Holt
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moreira
|first=Peter
|date=2006
|title=Hemingway on the China Front: His WWII Spy Mission with Martha Gellhorn
|url=
|location=Washington D.C.
|publisher=Potomac Books
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|date=5 Feb 1937
|chapter=Promotion Box: Hemingway, For Immediate Release
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|author-mask=1
|date=4 Apr 1938
|chapter=Promotion Box: American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|editor-last=Nelson
|editor-first=Card
|date=1994
|title=Remembering Spain: Hemingway’s Civil War Eulogy and the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
|url=
|location=Urbana
|publisher=U of Illinois
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Reynolds
|first=Michael
|date=1989
|title=Hemingway: The Paris Years
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Norton
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Stott
|first=William
|date=1986
|title=Documentary Expression and Thirties America
|url=
|location=Chicago
|publisher=U of Chicago P
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Thomas
|first=Hugh
|date=2001
|title=The Spanish Civil War, Rev. ed.
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Modern Library
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine
|last=''Two Wars and More to Come''
|first=
|date=24 Jan 1938
|title=Best Sellers of the Week Here and Elsewhere
|type=Advertisement
|url=
|magazine=New York Times
|pages=
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=NA
|first=
|title=United States. Dept. of State
|url=
|journal= Foreign Relations of the Untied States, 1937 |volume=1
|issue=General
|date=1954
|pages=
|location=Washington
|publisher=GPO
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Watson
|first=William Braasch
|title=Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches
|url=
|journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=7.2
|issue=
|date=1988
|pages=4-121
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Wheeler
|first=John H.
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938
|chapter=Letter to Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection, Box 3 Folder 14
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}

{{refend}}
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches

2025-04-20T13:48:15Z

MerAtticus: italics typo fix

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 

{{byline|last=Vernon |first=Alex |abstract=The Spanish Civil War began in July 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally-restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy. By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches.}}

{{dc|dc=T|HE SPANISH CIVIL WAR BEGAN ON}} 17-18 JULY, 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy, to collaborate with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens on the pro-Republican documentary ''The Spanish Earth'', and to pursue his fledgling love affair with Martha Gellhorn.{{efn|Adapted and printed with permission from ''Hemingway’s Second War: Bearing Witness to the Spanish Civil War.'' Iowa City: U of Iowa Press, 2011.}}
By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches for NANA.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=4}}{{efn|Quotations from the NANA dispatches follow the Diplomatic Text established by William Braasch’s “Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches.” I prefer NANA’s titles rather than Watson’s. For my disagreements with some of Watson’s datings, see my comments on specific dispatches in ''Hemingway’s Second War.''}}The secondary sources habitually judge them inferior journalism. Carlos Baker in the first Hemingway biography, for example, complains that the dialogue was “so heavily stamped with personal mannerisms as to be of doubtful authenticity.” Baker sees a “curious monotony in his stories of battles and bombardments,” a gratuitous use of graphic imagery “to shock his readers,” and “a note of triumphant boastfulness” in reporting proximity to danger. He also faults Hemingway for “often hint[ing] he was alone when in fact he was usually with Martha Gellhorn, Matthews, and Delmer.” Hemingway lacked Dos Passos’ “eye for telling details” and the “meticulous exactitude and inclusiveness that characterized the best work of Herbert Matthews and Sefton Delmer.”{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}

Philip Knightley’s ''The First Casualty'', the standard history of war correspondence, paraphrases Baker but with a trouncing final judgment:{{pg|427|428}}Hemingway’s “performance as a war correspondent was abysmally bad.” But Knightley goes beyond “technical” dissatisfaction to moral condemnation. Not just “unjustifiably optimistic”—an excusable offense—Hemingway’s reporting was “unforgivable” in its “total failure to report the Communist persecution, imprisonment, and summary execution of ‘untrustworthy elements’ on the Republican side, when he knew this was happening and when disclosing it might well have prevented further horrors like this.”
{{sfn|Knightley|2004 |pp=231–32}}{{efn|In my view, Knightley does not sufficiently acknowledge his paraphrasing of Baker.}}

Such criticisms in the final analysis might bear out. As Scott Donaldson writes, Hemingway advanced the Republican cause in his dispatches by eliciting “the deepest possible feelings of horror and of sympathy for the victims” of the Madrid bombardment; his “undue optimism” often “ignored Loyalist defeats and exaggerated the importance of its victories”; and “he repeatedly called attention to the participation of Italians and Germans on Franco’s side.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=426}} It also served as a recruitment tool—Milton Wolff, for example, acknowledged the strong influence Hemingway’s dispatches had on his decision to volunteer. Nevertheless, I think it a worthwhile exercise to attend a little more studiously to Hemingway’s dispatches, their context, and their artistry. I don’t necessarily intend to reverse the general opinion of the correspondence, only to achieve a better and more sympathetic understanding.

Herbert Matthews’ reporting for the ''New York Times'' will serve as a convenient comparison for two reasons. First, because both Baker and Knightley use Matthews’ journalism as the standard of excellence to pass judgment on Hemingway’s; and second, because the two worked practically side-by-side, seeing and reporting on many of the same events. In fact so closely did they work together that NANA sometimes complained that the ''Times'' was not buying Hemingway’s pieces because they resembled Matthews,’ and at one point Matthews’ own editors at the Times suspected him of plagiarizing Hemingway.{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|pp=411, 420}} A note from Matthews’ assigned editor Raymond McCaw provides, in two columns, seven quite similar passages from Hemingway’s Aragon front dispatches of September 13 and 14 with Matthews’ of September 14, with a penciled note at the bottom: “a deadly parallel if you ask me.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937c|p=}} Edwin James, the managing editor and McCaw’s boss, eventually agreed with Matthews’ defense: “It is quite apparent that you did not file any duplicate of the Hemingway story, or vice versa. As I understand it, the similarity arose from the fact that you{{pg|428|429}}both went to see the same show and saw it at the same time [sic], under the same conditions.”{{sfn|James|1937b|p=}}

Matthews’ dispatches ring of Republican bias as much if not more than anything Hemingway ever filed. The ''Times'' received many letters to the editor complaining about Matthews’ undisguised politics, which also gave serious concern to some of his editors. His description of the Republican May 1937 infighting in Barcelona is a striking example of how his news veered into propaganda and shows just how much he passed along the government’s version of events. The government’s “BLOODLESS TRIUMPH FOUGHT WITH RECOGNIZEDWEAPONS OF DEMOCRACY” turned out to be blatantly false, as the government and the “COMMUNISTS [WHO] DISTINGUISHED THEMSELVES” resorted to violent suppression. His blaming the uprising on the anarchist CNT working as Franco operatives parrots the government’s and the communist party’s public position, even though both charges—that the anarchists precipitated the events and that they were under Nationalist direction—were also false. His dispatch’s optimistic close also equivocates the political reality: “NEW GOVERNMENT HAS TAKEN POWER WHICH APPEARS TOVE CONFIDENCE VAST MAJORITY SPANIARDS IN LOYALIST TERRITORY AND TIS HOPED WILL GAIN EQUAL CONFIDENCE ABROAD STOP VIOLENCE AND REVOLUTION BEEN REPUDIATED AND NEWAND FAR HOPEFULLER PERIOD SEEMS BEGINNING.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937a|p=}}The ''Times'', knowing full well the one-sided coverage of a correspondent writing from one side of the conflict, had a reporter on both sides: Matthews with the Republicans, and William Carney with the Nationalists. They got their facts right (or wrong) as often as the other, their editors concluded; and they inspired about the same number of letters of complaint.{{sfn|James|1937a|p=}}{{sfn|James|1939|p=}}

Furthermore, Matthews’ dispatches received a great deal of substantive editorial revisions. One of Matthews’ Teruel reports had to be cut for length, as McCaw informed James: “This bird sent 2844 words on the same facts which Hemingway covered much better in less than half that number. I wonder if Matthews thinks the paper is thriving, and that cable tolls do not matter a damn. Of course, it had to be cut for space anyway.” McCaw most likely refers here to Matthews’ dispatch corresponding to Hemingway’s “The Attack on Teruel,” though Matthews’ account of the fall of Teruel is also much longer (and more long-winded) than Hemingway’s, and just as personal in terms of describing the dangers{{pg|429|430}} he faced. Indeed its length allows him to share even more of the action he endured.{{sfn|McCaw|1937b|p=}}

Raymond McCaw held a general professional disagreement with Matthews perhaps tainted with over zealousness. Whether a personal or political motive informed that disagreement can’t be determined from the evidence I’ve seen. It is also clear that McCaw’s charges bear some validity—that any responsible editor could have easily and reasonably taken issue where McCaw did. One of the more interesting examples concerns Matthews’ piece on Guadalajara. Because he only saw evidence on Franco’s side of Italian forces, he only reported on Italians. But the ''Times'' editors heard from other sources that German soldiers also participated in the March offensive. They thought it prudent, from this confusion, to change (nine times) “Italian” to “Rebel,” “the foe,” or “Insurgent.” When Matthews saw the published piece he wrote a strenuous objection. In some instances the editors changed paraphrased quotations from his sources. One large paragraph omitted by the editors stressed the first-hand nature of the information, and Matthews underlines the key words: “All day, at every place we stopped and no matter whom we talked to or what we saw, there was only one label—Italian. The dead bodies, the prisoners, the material of every kind, the men who had occupied Brihuega and then fled were Italian and nothing but Italian.” Here and elsewhere in his original story, Matthews emphasizes the “personal knowledge” of its information.{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}{{efn|James supported McCaw on these changes, though later acknowledged that altering quoted sources was perhaps unwarranted(29 April 1937; Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3).}}Yet Matthews did not report on the foreigners fighting for the Republic—it was in fact the Italian Garibali Battalion that routed Franco’s Italians. We might surmise government censorship behind this silence, though Matthews would not cable news of “CENSORSHIP STRICTER” and “BAN ON MENTIONING INTERNATIONALS INCLUDING AMERICANS INSTITUTED TODAY” until July.{{sfn|Matthews|1937b|p=}}Perhaps he cautiously self-censored, or politically self-censored for the same reasons the government would eventually ban mention. Still, his stridency about the omission of foreigners on one side is striking given his knowledge of their contribution to the other side. For this reason too, and his omission of other nationalities on the insurgent side, it seemed only fair to his editor “to stand on the statement that the majority of the Rebels were Italians and let it go at that.”{{sfn|James|1937c|p=}} A reasonable decision.

Throughout his correspondence to his editors and his several books,{{pg|430|431}}Matthews maintained a passionate defense of his eyewitness journalistic standard, a position those close to him understood. “Matthews never believed anything he had not seen with his own eyes,” Joris Ivens wrote. “He never saw his job as reporter as one that permitted him to sit in his hotel and read the handouts of the War Ministry.” {{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=112}} Sidney Franklin recalls that some writers wrote their pieces before arriving in Madrid, and came only for the “legitimacy” of the Madrid dateline.{{sfn|Franklin|1952|p=232}}And Matthews hated, on principle, having his name attached to an article that violated the integrity of his witness. The only way to achieve objectivity, for Matthews, was to acknowledge one’s subjective perspective. Writing to his publisher, Matthews argued that “the full documentary value” of his coverage was lost when the editors altered his submissions for “the apparent necessity of giving more or less equal space to both sides.”{{sfn|Matthews|1939|p=}}

As with Matthews, so too Hemingway. Indeed the commitment to subjectivity
fit quite well with Hemingway’s modernist aesthetics. If Hemingway
focused the dispatches on his perspective—on his own experience dodging
artillery—more than Matthews and more than most, he did so at least partially
to fulfill expectations. NANA approached him, after all, for his name
and personality as much as whatever he would write. Before he even left the
states it pitched him to potential publications, sending out a promotional release with text to be used alongside his forthcoming dispatches and suggesting
they include a photograph: “Mr. Hemingway’s assignment is to get both from the bombed towns and bombed trenches the human story of the war, not just an account of the game being played by general staffs with pins
and a map.”{{sfn|NANA|1937|p=}} NANA also released each individual dispatch with a one-sentence “precede” about the “famous” or “noted” author. Ernest Hemingway was not writing as Herbert Mathews, ace reporter; Hemingway was writing as Ernest Hemingway, famous author of novels and stories well known to be drawn from his own experiences.

That he understood this to be his assignment is further evidenced by a
cable Matthews sent to his ''Times'' editors on April 9, 1937, concerning the
Loyalist attack: “WORKED CONJOINTL WITH HEMINGWAY TODAY HE SENDING EYEWITNESS DESCRIPTION WHILE EYE SENT GENERAL STRATEGY.”{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}When a year later the ''Times'' asked NANA to ensure Hemingway’s reports differed from Matthews, NANA complied by asking Hemingway “to emphasize color rather than straight reporting” not necessarily out of dissatisfaction with Hemingway’s reportage as Baker contends,{{efn|Baker’s notes date the ''Times'' request to NANA as 8 Apr. 1938, and NANA’s to Hemingway as 15
Apr. 1938 (Princeton University, Firestone Library: Box 18, Folder 8 “1938”), the date of “The Bombing of Tortosa” dispatch.}} but to increase{{pg|431|432}}the chance of selling to the ''Times'' and indeed to ensure the spirit of NANA’s original arrangement with Hemingway. {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}Far from dissatisfied, NANA wrote Hemingway at the end of August 1938 a letter of agreement for his coverage of “a general European war” should it break out, “written in your colorful style” (Hemingway was in Paris, on his way to Spain for the last time during the war).{{sfn|Wheeler|1938|p=}}When Edmund Wilson criticized the selected dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'', Hemingway wrote him that “I was paid to write what are called ‘eye witness’ accounts . . .what is called, or was asked for as ‘color stuff.’ Most of such stuff is faked. Mine was not. It was straight reporting and the personal stuff was what had been asked for by the editors. “Wilson’s estimation was also based upon ''Fact’s'' inclusion of the “The Old Man at the Bridge” story from ''Ken'', “not a news dispatch” at all.{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}Speaking at Carnegie Hall before the showing of a rough cut of ''The Spanish Earth'', shortly after his first trip to Spain and so very much in the context of his wartime work, Hemingway defined the writer’s problem as “project[ing] [what is true] in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2002|p=193}}

Personal, anecdotal journalism had been Hemingway’s signature style from his earliest days filing reports, in the early 1920s from Paris, when his editor at the ''Toronto Star Weekly'' “encouraged [. . .] what Hemingway did best: write about himself in the act of being a reporter.”{{sfn|Reynolds|1989|p=45}}How could he expect that NANA would expect anything else, if indeed NANA did expect anything else? In the Spanish Civil War he at least maintained his eyewitness posture; in World War II, however, he couldn’t keep himself out. His first piece, about D-Day, begins, “No one remembers the date of the Battle of Shiloh. But the day ''we took'' Fox Green beach was the sixth of June, and the wind was blowing hard out of the northwest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1967|p=340}}His venue too—''Collier’s'' magazine—and the fact that he had not written anything in three years further contributed to the story-like nature of the WWII stories, in which he figured as a protagonist—not to mention the stories and involvement he couldn’t write about, armed and running around France more of a free agent than his guerilla-hero Robert Jordan ever was (though he began to transform these experiences into fiction in several unpublished stories). In wartime China in 1943, filing articles for Ralph Ingersoll’s short-lived ''PM'' New York afternoon daily, Hemingway did not even care to be called a news reporter.{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=99}}

It should be mentioned that Hemingway and Matthews enjoyed a great{{pg|432|433}}friendship and working relationship. Hemingway usually brought Matthews, who did not have a car, on his excursions. When Matthews left Madrid for a break in mid April 1937, he had already ensured Hemingway would provide coverage to the ''Times'' through NANA. For one thing, Hemingway did not have to worry about Matthews as a rival for the history books. He could endorse his friends’ book, ''Two Wars and More to Come'', and praise him as “the ablest and the bravest war correspondent writing today “who “when the fakers are all dead [. . .] will be read in the schools” (Advertisement 21) because Matthews posed no threat to Hemingway’s own chances to be read in the schools. The only brief Hemingway ever expressed he really reserved for Matthews’ editors, for not wanting his Teruel street-fighting story and for cutting references to himself in Matthews’ Teruel dispatches so that it appeared only Matthews had been there.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=462}}

As for Hemingway’s neglecting to name everyone with him for every story, the ''Times'' cutting of his name suggests that such exactitude was hardly a priority. A paper had no incentive for announcing the fact that a competitor’s
correspondent stood beside its own to see and report the same
events. NANA changed at least one vague Hemingway “we,” which admits
to the presence of others, to “this correspondent”
—we can hardly fault Hemingway for working in the spirit of his
employer’s standards.{{sfn|NANA|1938|p=}}{{efn|“we” in typescript and radiogram (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 1 and Folder 25).}} Do readers care that Matthews, Delmer, Gellhorn,
and others were there? The story’s effect and the limited word count also
weighed against such roll calls. One editor chose not to clutter the dispatch
on the great retreat across the Ebro with all the names of the American International Brigade volunteers Hemingway encountered, an omission of
Content more far serious than that of omitted correspondent names.{{efn| Radiogram insert dateline 4 April 1938 (HRC: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 25).}} Hemingway
often gave the names of the reporters with him, such as at Teruel;
nor was he the only reporter to sometimes neglect to do so. Martha Gellhorn,
for example, used a vague “we” and singled herself out as the primary
participant in some of her stories.

By using first-person reportage Hemingway—and Matthews and Gellhorn And most of the group covering the war—were operating solidly within
convention. William Stott, in ''Documentary Expression and Thirties America'',
calls this first-person ''participant observer'' technique “the most common sort
of documentary reportage in the thirties” that worked “by vicarious persuasion:
the writer partook of the events he reported and bared his feelings
and attitudes to influence the reader’s own.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=178-9}}{{efn|He specifically includes Hemingway et al (180).}} Stott also observes {{pg|433|434}}another technique to enable documentary reportage to “talk to us, and convince us that we, our deepest interests, are engaged,” in the use of the second person: “Thirties documentaries constantly address ‘you,’ the ‘you’ who is we the audience, and exhorts, wheedles, begs us to identify, pity, participate.” His examples include Dorothy Parker’s Spanish Civil War writing, and Hemingway’s 1935 “First-Hand Report on the Florida Hurricane.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=27-8}} A number of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches employ the second-person as a way of bringing the reader along for the ride.

Hemingway’s dispatches used personal pronouns more artfully than is generally recognized. “A New Kind of War,” which William Braasch Watson notes as having been “[w]ritten with more care and imagination” than its predecessors, begins in second person: “The window of the hotel is open and, as you lie in bed, you hear the firing in the front line seventeen blocks away.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=29}} He takes “you” outside, to see the damage and the dead from the bombing. “Someone makes a joke about missing teeth and someone else says not to make that joke. And everyone has the feeling that characterizes war. It wasn’t me, see? It wasn’t me.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} The tension between the first person and second-person pronouns—the movement toward identification with “you” and the insistence that “it wasn’t me”—continues in the next line. Here the reader is at once still in the narrator’s shoes, but strangely distanced from the narrator through biographical tidbit and, at the same time, asked to see himself in the enemy: “The Italian dead up on the Guadalajara weren’t you although Italian dead, because of where you had spent your boyhood, always seemed, still, like Our Dead.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} It is worth quoting at length the dispatch’s transition to first person:
<blockquote>
After the shell that lit on the sidewalk in front of the hotel you got a beautiful double corner room on that side, twice the size of the one you’d had, for less than a dollar. It wasn’t me they killed. See? No. Not me. It wasn’t me anymore.

Then in a hospital given by the American Friends of Spanish Democracy located out behind the Morata front along the road
to Valencia they said, “Raven wants to see you.”

“Do I know him?”

“I don’t think so,” they said. “But he wants to see you.”

“Where is he?”

“Upstairs.”{{pg|434|435}}In the room upstairs they are giving a blood transfusion to a man with a very gray face who lay on a cot with his arm out looking away from the gurgling bottle and moaning in a very impersonal way. He moaned mechanically and at regular intervals and it did not seem to be him that made the sound. His lips did not move.

“Where’s Raven?” I asked.

“I’m here,” said Raven.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=31}}</blockquote>
The piece simply could not have sustained the second-person for the remaining five pages. More significantly, for this deeply personal exchange between the writer and the faceless, eyeless soldier, Hemingway could not hide in the rhetorical device of the second-person. In the process, he effects a reversal of the usual pronoun game; instead of identifying with the all embracing “you,” we leave that trick behind and become fully attached to
the narratorial “I” as ourselves, as we might not have been had the article
begun in the first person. And even as the narrator identifies himself by name
for the only time in any of the dispatches—“Hemingway,” and later
“Ernest”—as decidedly not ourselves. We do not say, ''It isn’t me''. The historian
Hugh Thomas notes “the refreshing candour” of Hemingway’s naming
himself “in the world of the International Brigades, where no one’s name
seemed to be truthfully given.”{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=591}}{{efn|For Watson, the dispatch “seems, in fact, on the verge of becoming a story” (29).}}

A year later Hemingway’s “Tortosa Calmly Awaits Assault” resists admitting
the city’s imminent fall. Yet it does so anyway, by subtly alluding to the
wartime rhetoric of sacrificed blood irrigating the earth and rejuvenating
Spain. Such rhetoric was common during the war, appearing in speeches,
print, and poetry. Many of the poems in Cary Nelson’s anthology ''The Wound
and the Dream: Sixty Years of American Poems about the Civil War'' join in the
Spanish and international chorus’s general connection between Republican
soldiers and the land, and the particular singing of their dead nourishing
the land. We find such language in La Pasionaria’s farewell address to the International Brigades, her epilogue to ''The Book of the XV Brigade'', and Hemingway’s famous eulogy “On the American Dead in Spain”: “For our dead are
a part of the earth of Spain now and the earth of Spain can never die. Each
winter it will seem to die and each spring it will come alive again. Our dead
will live with it forever.”{{sfn|Nelson|1994|p=3}}{{efn| Reprinted in Bruccoli 76 and Nelson, Remembering 37 (the drafts at the JFK are titled “The Dead at Jarama”). In addition to the poems in Nelson’s anthology, see the excerpt from Boris Todrin’s “Spanish Sowing” in Guttmann (Wounded 179–180).}} The Tortosa dispatch implies the deaths of{{pg|435|436}}many Republican soldiers in its final paragraph’s description of the newborn onions:
<blockquote>The artillery was picking up a little now. Two came in at a fairly useful place and as the smoke blew away ahead and settled through the trees, you picked an armful of spring onions from a field beside the trail that led to the Tortosa road. They were the first onions of the spring and peeling one I found they were plump white and not too strong. The Ebro Delta has a fine rich land, and where the onions grow, tomorrow will be a battle.
{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=84}}</blockquote>

The echo is quiet, and perhaps unconscious, but there nevertheless. The opening boastfulness of “American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents”
should be taken somewhat ironically. The dispatch begins by announcing
that for “two days we have been doing the most dangerous thing
you can do in this war. That is keep close behind an unstabilized line where
the enemy are attacking with mechanized forces.” Then, a few pages later,
we learn about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade survivors of the spring 1938
Nationalist offensive that took Bob Merriman and eventually reached the
Mediterranean Sea. Reading about these survivors creeping through enemy
camps, stepping on a sleeping German soldier’s hand, sprinting “across an
open field toward the Ebro bank and being sniped at by artillery controlled
by an observation plane overhead” and then “the desperate swimming of
the Ebro” naked, we are asked to place the correspondent’s plight in due perspective.{{sfn|Watson|1988|pp=71-2}} This story certainly escapes the charge of a monotonous
battle and bombing scene; its switch from apparently boastful to
awe-struck witness feels almost deliberately self-conscious. Other choice selfironic
moments come in the dispatches of that pre-Teruel quiet fall of 1938.
The one titled “Hemingway, Covering War, Tells of Brush with Death” has little
to report from Madrid other than the new aftershave brand he is trying.
In “Loyalists’ Drive Seen Progressing as Planned,” he writes that “Shells are
all much the same and if they don’t hit you there is no story and if they do
you won’t have to write it.” {{sfn|Watson|1988|p=58}}

Hemingway’s dispatches are sometimes monotonous because his war was
Usually monotonous—as wars are most of the time. It should also be kept in
mind that scholars reviewing Hemingway’s NANA dispatches one after{{pg|436|437}}another do not relive the original reading experience. Hemingway wrote dispatches sporadically, papers did not run all of his dispatches, papers edited and cut them, and readers read at least a couple of papers’ worth of other articles in between. He told Edmund Wilson as much in defending himself against Wilson’s critique of the selected (and heavily edited and cut) dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'' without his consent: “If you are being paid to be shot at and write about it you are supposed to mention the shooting. [. . .] But I do not go in for re-printing journalism.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}

If we can in this way better understand his style, and at least explain it if
not excuse it, we similarly ought to try to contextualize—and perhaps
excuse—the moral problem. The two issues here are the specific condemnation
of Hemingway’s silence about Republican atrocities and the general
question of biased reporting (the latter of which has already partially been
addressed).

Hemingway knew, as Donaldson writes, that mentioning the atrocities
“would arouse anticommunist sentiments back in the States and effectively
undermine any possibility of American intervention.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=394}} It is also doubtful
that reporting them would have stopped them. But reporting Republican
atrocities from Spain was not possible for the simple reason that all dispatches
went through a government censor. Matthews cabled his editors
from Paris in May 1937 to tell them that “censorship does not permit us to
say when the ‘telefonica’ is hit. So whenever you see reference in my
despatches [sic] to ‘an important building in the center of the city’ or words
to that effect, the cable desk can know that it is the telefonica.” {{sfn|Matthews|1937c|p=}} As already noted, by July he would cable “CENSORSHIP
STRICTER” as the ban on mentioning internationals went into effect. {{sfn|Matthews|1937d|p=}}{{sfn|Matthews|1937e|p=}} Cowles’ memoir confirms the
aggressive censorship, observing that it limited journalists to exactly the kind of material Hemingway wrote about:
<blockquote>There were frequent attempts to “beat the censor” by employing American slang expressions, but this came to an end when a Canadian girl joined the staff. The International Brigades were not allowed to be publicized; no reference could be made to Russian armaments, and buildings and streets which suffered
bombardments could not be identified.</blockquote>{{pg|437|438}}<blockquote>It was only in the realm of the human interest story that the journalists had a free hand. They could describe bombardments to their heart’s content.{{sfn|Cowles|1941|p=20}}</blockquote>
Hemingway and everyone else—to reserve incrimination for Hemingway is hardly just. No correspondent covering Republican Spain reported suspicious imprisonments and disappearances by government agents.

Hemingway, through Joris Ivens and ''The Spanish Earth'' project, had better
access to officials than most. Had he been able somehow to report such
activity, he would have lost that access and would probably have been kicked
out of the country. His fame would have likely prevented his own officially
sponsored disappearance, though he still worried, especially as so many of
such crimes on the Republican side occurred from free agents. When Jasper
Wood printed the anarchist F.A.I. banner in the limited edition book version
of ''The Spanish Earth'', Hemingway expressed his anxieties bluntly in a letter
to Jasper on August 20, 1938. It is hardly “petulant,” he scolded, “not to wish
to be shot.”{{sfn|Davison|1988|p=128}} Hostility in the Republic against the anarchists
ran high; after the Barcelona May Day conflict, the government’s foreign
minister told U.S. Ambassador Claude Bowers that “anarchist revolt
throughout Catalonia and not only expected but welcomed as an opportunity
to liquidate the anarchists who have been hostile from the beginning.”
{{sfn|NA|1954|p=292}}{{efn| The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State, 5 May 1937.}}

It is possible that Hemingway’s dispatch stating that “not one friend [. . .]
has been executed or is missing” was his clever means of reporting
the rumors and indeed the general fact while evading the censors, as in this very dispatch he acknowledged the presence of a censor after a bombardment.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=34}}
Matthews, on the other hand, never found a way to mention the
censors or admit even the possibility of people gone missing in the Republic.
Peter Moreira has observed that in a 1943 dispatch Hemingway related a remark by a British officer about the Chinese Nationalist government’s being
“hopeless on the offensive” because censorship “prevented American reporters
From actually saying that the Nationalists wouldn’t attack, surmising that by telling this anecdote Hemingway could sneak such a judgment into
his reports.”{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=77}} In Spain, censors aside, the eyewitness standard and his
own safety and continuing ability to report the war, and, yes, his passionate
support of the government contributed to his decision. He could have written
about government abuses from the states, but then could not return to{{pg|438|439}}cover the war and support the cause—a justification other journalists, those who did not return after the spring of 1937, did not enjoy. In his mind too, knowing what he heard of fascist atrocities, any reportage against the government lessening its chances of victory through killing hopes of increased international aid would have led to more deaths at Franco’s hands that the much smaller number inspired by fifth column paranoia.{{efn|''Hemingway’s Second War'' discusses in greater depth Hemingway’s politics and his falling out
with John Dos Passos over the execution of José Robles}}.

The accusation that Hemingway did not write about Republican atrocities
because he was saving it for his fiction I find baseless (Knightley 232;
Baker 402).{{sfn|Knightley|2004|p=232}}{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=402}}{{efn|Hemingway’s casual comment to colleagues calling dibs on Pepe Quintanilla, the executioner of
Madrid, is not sufficient evidence.}}Carolyn Moorehead, in her biography of Martha Gellhorn, describes
the climate for the Madrid correspondents that first spring: “And so,
day by day, the correspondents walked a thin and nervous line between truth,
evasions, and propaganda, telling one another that though it was not all right
if things were made up and presented as true, it was acceptable to describe
what you wanted, provided it was true and provided your readers were aware
of your position.”{{sfn|Moorehead|2003|p=125}} My own sense is that they did not walk the line quite
so nervously; their passionate commitment, and their principles of position
disclosure and the eyewitness standard, made that walk relatively easy.

The problem of ''committed journalism'', even sixty years later, has not been
resolved—as anyone paying attention to the media and world affairs well
knows. One person’s truth is another person’s propaganda. Certainly, as
Knightley notes, reporting from “the heart” affects one’s judgment.{{sfn|Knightley|2004|pp=234-5}}
Yet to attempt “balance,” per the edits to Matthews’ Guadalajara piece, betrays
one’s believed truth. Furthermore, the kind of reporting done by the
correspondents with the Republic—committed, one-sided, optimistic,
heroic, human interest work by embedded writers—would be practiced
widely and without reserve during World War II. Such narrative journalism,
with roots in Louise May Alcott’s “Hospital Sketches” series published in the
''Boston Commonwealth'', and more immediately in 1930s social documentary
writing whose “essence” is “not information”, anticipated postwar
new journalism’s adoption of novelistic narrative technique for nonfiction
which culminated with such wartime books as Norman Mailer’s ''Armies of
the Night'' and Michael Herr’s ''Dispatches''.{{sfn|Stott|1986|p=11}} Some of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches
fall in this line of development.

Today we might categorize such writing under the awkward umbrella
term ''creative nonfiction''. That term certainly fits the mixed bag of nonfiction
narratives and commentaries Hemingway published during the war in
Ken magazine. These pieces are essays, not journalism, several of which{{pg|439|440}}directly appeal for support for the Republic, and most of which really deal with the approaching world war. ''Ken'' wanted “precisely the kind of opinion articles he could not write for NANA.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=433}} His article, “The Cardinal Picks a Winner,” shows a photo of a row of dead children from Barcelona and another one with Nationalist officers saluting and Catholic officials with raised hands, apparently making the fascist salute as well. He ends ironically: “So I ''don’t believe'' the people shown in the photo can really be making it. I would rather prefer to think that the photograph was faked.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=436}} When Hemingway argues in “A Program for U.S. Realism” that the United States should stay out of the next war except to stuff its pockets through arms sales, one has to wonder, given his call and the democratic nations’ failure to save Spain, if we are to sniff sarcasm here.

The language of the dispatches, with their corrective intent against
Franco’s propaganda, does risk propagandizing. Hemingway’s optimism and
anti-fascism certainly colored his correspondence work. His criticism of the
anarchist and POUM militia for their inactivity on the Aragon front, for example,
sounds a lot like the Spanish Communist Party’s.{{efn|It at least sounds almost exactly like Dolores Ibarruri in her memoir. To the anarchists’ complaint
that they had no arms, she retorts “that they had more arms than did many other fronts. . . .
What they didn’t have and what they were constantly demanding were airplanes and tanks .And
they didn’t have them because the Republic government didn’t have them either, except for those
it received as aid from the Soviet Union” (238–284). Yet the various Catalonia militia were not
as well equipped with small arms as the more regular Popular Army units, and because of the
terrain tanks and planes were in fact necessary.}}
But unlike
Matthews, Hemingway limited his reports within the Republic to military
matters. Hemingway may have generally condemned the anarchists in his
nonfiction, considering their activity as hampering the war effort, but he
never repeated the accusation of their collaboration with the rebels, as
Matthews had done. And when Hemingway commented on the Bareclona
crisis, he referred only to the government—not the communists, as
Matthews had done.{{efn|Hemingway’s comments in “Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win” NANA staff
correspondent dispatch. Though arguably he was propagandizing by hiding the communist influence—
to mention the communists to an American audience would not gain sympathy for the
cause.}}Nor did he write articles asserting the limited role of
the communists in the government, or explaining Spanish anarchism, also
as Matthews had done.{{efn|An article on the communists’ limited role appeared in late November 1937, as discussed in a
missive from The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State on 2
Dec. 1937 (United States 461). Matthews’ “Anarchism: Spain’s Enigma” appeared in the New York
Times 22 Aug. 1937: 6, 14.}}

During one of Hemingway’s stateside breaks between trips to Spain, his
children asked if he was a “tool” of Stalin, an accusation tossed by a schoolmate
who, presumably parroting his or her parents, probably understood
the term no better than Hemingway’s children. {{sfn|Hemingway|nd|p=}}
Hemingway believed in the Republic’s potential, but he was never a dupe of
the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) or Comintern. As did many others, he
accepted PCE’s presence in the government for its discipline and organization
toward winning the war, and he understood the material necessity for
Comintern’s support. It should also be noted, as historians Hugh Thomas
and Helen Graham have reminded us, that the communism associated with
the Republic wasn’t particularly communist anyway.{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=628}}{{sfn|Graham|2002|p=184}} {{pg|440|441}}

Hemingway declined to follow Joris Ivens’ suggestion that he write a
dispatch on the significant role of the political commissars in the Republican
military, even though that would have meant
featuring his brave new friend Gustav Regler.{{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=}} Hemingway also, in a letter
justifying his work to Jack Wheeler at NANA, wrote about choosing not to
send a dispatch he had written because it might strike readers as propaganda
“no matter how true” (Letter to Jack Wheeler).{{sfn|Hemingway|1938b|p=}}

Hemingway went to Spain to see the war himself and to support the Republic
through his ambulance fund. The paychecks from NANA and the
fundraising from ''The Spanish Earth'' helped. Whatever propagandistic streak
colors the dispatches pales in comparison to the documentary. The filmmaker,
Joris Ivens, was well established in European communist circles. The
documentary genre then and now has occupied a slippery position between
the extremes of impossible-to-achieve empirical nonfiction and of the outright
fictionalized. Evaluations of Hemingway’s journalism are informed by
knowledge of ''The Spanish Earth'' and the ''Ken'' essays to the detriment of the
journalism. And the very nature of the slippery documentary genre may enable
the film to escape opprobrium. It wasn’t reportage; it was altogether
something else. But for that matter, Hemingway’s dispatches weren’t purely
reportage either, and if not ''altogether'' something else, still something else,
and should be reckoned with accordingly.

== Notes ==
{{notelist|20em}}

==Citations==
{{Reflist|15em}}

==Works Cited==
{{refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker
|first=Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Bruccoli |first=Matthew |date=2006 |title=Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame |url= |location=Columbia |publisher=U of South Caronia P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Cowles |first=Virginia |date=1941 |title=Looking for Trouble |url= |location=New York
|publisher=Harper & Brothers |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Davison |first=Richard Allan |title=The Publication of Hemingway’s The Spanish Earth: An Untold Story |url= |journal=Hemingway Review
|volume=7.2 |issue= |date=1988
|pages=122-130 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson
|first=Scott |date=2009 |title=Fitzgerald & Hemingway: Works and Days |url= |location=New York |publisher=Columbia UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Franklin |first=Sidney |date=1952 |title=Bullfighter from Brooklyn |url= |location=New York |publisher=Prentice-Hall |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Graham |first=Helen |date=2002 |title=The Spanish Republic at War 1936-1939 |url= |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Guttmann |first=Allen |date=1962 |title=The Wound in the Heart: American and the Spanish Civil War |url= |location=New York |publisher=Free Press of Glencoe |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1967 |title=By-Line: Ernest Hemingway |url= |location=New York |publisher=Scibner |pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Trogdon
|editor-first=Robert W.
|author-mask=1
|title=Fascism is a Lie
|url=
|journal=Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference |volume==
|issue=
|date=2002
|pages=193-6
|location=New York
|publisher=Carroll & Graf
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 May 1937
|chapter=Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=nd
|chapter=The Home Front
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938a
|chapter=Letter to Edmund Wilson
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=2 June 1938b
|chapter=Letter to Jack Wheeler
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=14 Feb 1939
|chapter=On the American Dead in Spain
|title=TS. New Masses
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Baker
|editor-first=Carlos
|author-mask=1
|date=2003
|chapter=The Hadely Mowrer
|title=Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Scribner
|pages=462-3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ibarruri
|first=Dolores
|date=1966
|title=They Shall Not Pass: The Autobiography of La Pasionaria
|url=
|location=United States
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|date=1969
|title=The Camera and I
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|author-mask=1
|date=26 Apr 1937
|chapter=Letter to Ernest Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|date=20 Nov 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Bertrand Weaver
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=12 Oct 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=25 Apr 1939
|chapter=Letter to M.B. Tenney
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Apr 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Knightley
|first=Phillip
|date=2004
|title=The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq
|url=
|location=Baltimore
|publisher=John Hopkins
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=
|date=9 Apr 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=TS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=11 Apr 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=8 May 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=6 July 1937d
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=July 1937e
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=22 March 1939
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 9
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=
|date=20 May 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=20 Dec 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 5
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Sep 1937c
|chapter=Note to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moorehead
|first=Caroline
|date=2003
|title=Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Henry Holt
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moreira
|first=Peter
|date=2006
|title=Hemingway on the China Front: His WWII Spy Mission with Martha Gellhorn
|url=
|location=Washington D.C.
|publisher=Potomac Books
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|date=5 Feb 1937
|chapter=Promotion Box: Hemingway, For Immediate Release
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|author-mask=1
|date=4 Apr 1938
|chapter=Promotion Box: American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|editor-last=Nelson
|editor-first=Card
|date=1994
|title=Remembering Spain: Hemingway’s Civil War Eulogy and the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
|url=
|location=Urbana
|publisher=U of Illinois
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Reynolds
|first=Michael
|date=1989
|title=Hemingway: The Paris Years
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Norton
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Stott
|first=William
|date=1986
|title=Documentary Expression and Thirties America
|url=
|location=Chicago
|publisher=U of Chicago P
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Thomas
|first=Hugh
|date=2001
|title=The Spanish Civil War, Rev. ed.
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Modern Library
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine
|last=''Two Wars and More to Come''
|first=
|date=24 Jan 1938
|title=Best Sellers of the Week Here and Elsewhere
|type=Advertisement
|url=
|magazine=New York Times
|pages=
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=NA
|first=
|title=United States. Dept. of State
|url=
|journal= Foreign Relations of the Untied States, 1937 |volume=1
|issue=General
|date=1954
|pages=
|location=Washington
|publisher=GPO
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Watson
|first=William Braasch
|title=Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches
|url=
|journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=7.2
|issue=
|date=1988
|pages=4-121
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Wheeler
|first=John H.
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938
|chapter=Letter to Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection, Box 3 Folder 14
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}

{{refend}}
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches

2025-04-20T13:45:43Z

MerAtticus: added note one.

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 

{{byline|last=Vernon |first=Alex |abstract=The Spanish Civil War began in July 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally-restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy. By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches.}}

{{dc|dc=T|HE SPANISH CIVIL WAR BEGAN ON}} 17-18 JULY, 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy, to collaborate with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens on the pro-Republican documentary ''The Spanish Earth'', and to pursue his fledgling love affair with Martha Gellhorn.{{efn|Adapted and printed with permission from ''Hemingway’s Second War: Bearing Witness to the
Spanish Civil War.'' Iowa City: U of Iowa Press, 2011.}}
By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches for NANA.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=4}}{{efn|Quotations from the NANA dispatches follow the Diplomatic Text established by William Braasch’s “Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches.” I prefer NANA’s titles rather than Watson’s. For my disagreements with some of Watson’s datings, see my comments on specific dispatches in ''Hemingway’s Second War.''}}The secondary sources habitually judge them inferior journalism. Carlos Baker in the first Hemingway biography, for example, complains that the dialogue was “so heavily stamped with personal mannerisms as to be of doubtful authenticity.” Baker sees a “curious monotony in his stories of battles and bombardments,” a gratuitous use of graphic imagery “to shock his readers,” and “a note of triumphant boastfulness” in reporting proximity to danger. He also faults Hemingway for “often hint[ing] he was alone when in fact he was usually with Martha Gellhorn, Matthews, and Delmer.” Hemingway lacked Dos Passos’ “eye for telling details” and the “meticulous exactitude and inclusiveness that characterized the best work of Herbert Matthews and Sefton Delmer.”{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}

Philip Knightley’s ''The First Casualty'', the standard history of war correspondence, paraphrases Baker but with a trouncing final judgment:{{pg|427|428}}Hemingway’s “performance as a war correspondent was abysmally bad.” But Knightley goes beyond “technical” dissatisfaction to moral condemnation. Not just “unjustifiably optimistic”—an excusable offense—Hemingway’s reporting was “unforgivable” in its “total failure to report the Communist persecution, imprisonment, and summary execution of ‘untrustworthy elements’ on the Republican side, when he knew this was happening and when disclosing it might well have prevented further horrors like this.”
{{sfn|Knightley|2004 |pp=231–32}}{{efn|In my view, Knightley does not sufficiently acknowledge his paraphrasing of Baker.}}

Such criticisms in the final analysis might bear out. As Scott Donaldson writes, Hemingway advanced the Republican cause in his dispatches by eliciting “the deepest possible feelings of horror and of sympathy for the victims” of the Madrid bombardment; his “undue optimism” often “ignored Loyalist defeats and exaggerated the importance of its victories”; and “he repeatedly called attention to the participation of Italians and Germans on Franco’s side.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=426}} It also served as a recruitment tool—Milton Wolff, for example, acknowledged the strong influence Hemingway’s dispatches had on his decision to volunteer. Nevertheless, I think it a worthwhile exercise to attend a little more studiously to Hemingway’s dispatches, their context, and their artistry. I don’t necessarily intend to reverse the general opinion of the correspondence, only to achieve a better and more sympathetic understanding.

Herbert Matthews’ reporting for the ''New York Times'' will serve as a convenient comparison for two reasons. First, because both Baker and Knightley use Matthews’ journalism as the standard of excellence to pass judgment on Hemingway’s; and second, because the two worked practically side-by-side, seeing and reporting on many of the same events. In fact so closely did they work together that NANA sometimes complained that the ''Times'' was not buying Hemingway’s pieces because they resembled Matthews,’ and at one point Matthews’ own editors at the Times suspected him of plagiarizing Hemingway.{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|pp=411, 420}} A note from Matthews’ assigned editor Raymond McCaw provides, in two columns, seven quite similar passages from Hemingway’s Aragon front dispatches of September 13 and 14 with Matthews’ of September 14, with a penciled note at the bottom: “a deadly parallel if you ask me.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937c|p=}} Edwin James, the managing editor and McCaw’s boss, eventually agreed with Matthews’ defense: “It is quite apparent that you did not file any duplicate of the Hemingway story, or vice versa. As I understand it, the similarity arose from the fact that you{{pg|428|429}}both went to see the same show and saw it at the same time [sic], under the same conditions.”{{sfn|James|1937b|p=}}

Matthews’ dispatches ring of Republican bias as much if not more than anything Hemingway ever filed. The ''Times'' received many letters to the editor complaining about Matthews’ undisguised politics, which also gave serious concern to some of his editors. His description of the Republican May 1937 infighting in Barcelona is a striking example of how his news veered into propaganda and shows just how much he passed along the government’s version of events. The government’s “BLOODLESS TRIUMPH FOUGHT WITH RECOGNIZEDWEAPONS OF DEMOCRACY” turned out to be blatantly false, as the government and the “COMMUNISTS [WHO] DISTINGUISHED THEMSELVES” resorted to violent suppression. His blaming the uprising on the anarchist CNT working as Franco operatives parrots the government’s and the communist party’s public position, even though both charges—that the anarchists precipitated the events and that they were under Nationalist direction—were also false. His dispatch’s optimistic close also equivocates the political reality: “NEW GOVERNMENT HAS TAKEN POWER WHICH APPEARS TOVE CONFIDENCE VAST MAJORITY SPANIARDS IN LOYALIST TERRITORY AND TIS HOPED WILL GAIN EQUAL CONFIDENCE ABROAD STOP VIOLENCE AND REVOLUTION BEEN REPUDIATED AND NEWAND FAR HOPEFULLER PERIOD SEEMS BEGINNING.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937a|p=}}The ''Times'', knowing full well the one-sided coverage of a correspondent writing from one side of the conflict, had a reporter on both sides: Matthews with the Republicans, and William Carney with the Nationalists. They got their facts right (or wrong) as often as the other, their editors concluded; and they inspired about the same number of letters of complaint.{{sfn|James|1937a|p=}}{{sfn|James|1939|p=}}

Furthermore, Matthews’ dispatches received a great deal of substantive editorial revisions. One of Matthews’ Teruel reports had to be cut for length, as McCaw informed James: “This bird sent 2844 words on the same facts which Hemingway covered much better in less than half that number. I wonder if Matthews thinks the paper is thriving, and that cable tolls do not matter a damn. Of course, it had to be cut for space anyway.” McCaw most likely refers here to Matthews’ dispatch corresponding to Hemingway’s “The Attack on Teruel,” though Matthews’ account of the fall of Teruel is also much longer (and more long-winded) than Hemingway’s, and just as personal in terms of describing the dangers{{pg|429|430}} he faced. Indeed its length allows him to share even more of the action he endured.{{sfn|McCaw|1937b|p=}}

Raymond McCaw held a general professional disagreement with Matthews perhaps tainted with over zealousness. Whether a personal or political motive informed that disagreement can’t be determined from the evidence I’ve seen. It is also clear that McCaw’s charges bear some validity—that any responsible editor could have easily and reasonably taken issue where McCaw did. One of the more interesting examples concerns Matthews’ piece on Guadalajara. Because he only saw evidence on Franco’s side of Italian forces, he only reported on Italians. But the ''Times'' editors heard from other sources that German soldiers also participated in the March offensive. They thought it prudent, from this confusion, to change (nine times) “Italian” to “Rebel,” “the foe,” or “Insurgent.” When Matthews saw the published piece he wrote a strenuous objection. In some instances the editors changed paraphrased quotations from his sources. One large paragraph omitted by the editors stressed the first-hand nature of the information, and Matthews underlines the key words: “All day, at every place we stopped and no matter whom we talked to or what we saw, there was only one label—Italian. The dead bodies, the prisoners, the material of every kind, the men who had occupied Brihuega and then fled were Italian and nothing but Italian.” Here and elsewhere in his original story, Matthews emphasizes the “personal knowledge” of its information.{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}{{efn|James supported McCaw on these changes, though later acknowledged that altering quoted sources was perhaps unwarranted(29 April 1937; Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3).}}Yet Matthews did not report on the foreigners fighting for the Republic—it was in fact the Italian Garibali Battalion that routed Franco’s Italians. We might surmise government censorship behind this silence, though Matthews would not cable news of “CENSORSHIP STRICTER” and “BAN ON MENTIONING INTERNATIONALS INCLUDING AMERICANS INSTITUTED TODAY” until July.{{sfn|Matthews|1937b|p=}}Perhaps he cautiously self-censored, or politically self-censored for the same reasons the government would eventually ban mention. Still, his stridency about the omission of foreigners on one side is striking given his knowledge of their contribution to the other side. For this reason too, and his omission of other nationalities on the insurgent side, it seemed only fair to his editor “to stand on the statement that the majority of the Rebels were Italians and let it go at that.”{{sfn|James|1937c|p=}} A reasonable decision.

Throughout his correspondence to his editors and his several books,{{pg|430|431}}Matthews maintained a passionate defense of his eyewitness journalistic standard, a position those close to him understood. “Matthews never believed anything he had not seen with his own eyes,” Joris Ivens wrote. “He never saw his job as reporter as one that permitted him to sit in his hotel and read the handouts of the War Ministry.” {{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=112}} Sidney Franklin recalls that some writers wrote their pieces before arriving in Madrid, and came only for the “legitimacy” of the Madrid dateline.{{sfn|Franklin|1952|p=232}}And Matthews hated, on principle, having his name attached to an article that violated the integrity of his witness. The only way to achieve objectivity, for Matthews, was to acknowledge one’s subjective perspective. Writing to his publisher, Matthews argued that “the full documentary value” of his coverage was lost when the editors altered his submissions for “the apparent necessity of giving more or less equal space to both sides.”{{sfn|Matthews|1939|p=}}

As with Matthews, so too Hemingway. Indeed the commitment to subjectivity
fit quite well with Hemingway’s modernist aesthetics. If Hemingway
focused the dispatches on his perspective—on his own experience dodging
artillery—more than Matthews and more than most, he did so at least partially
to fulfill expectations. NANA approached him, after all, for his name
and personality as much as whatever he would write. Before he even left the
states it pitched him to potential publications, sending out a promotional release with text to be used alongside his forthcoming dispatches and suggesting
they include a photograph: “Mr. Hemingway’s assignment is to get both from the bombed towns and bombed trenches the human story of the war, not just an account of the game being played by general staffs with pins
and a map.”{{sfn|NANA|1937|p=}} NANA also released each individual dispatch with a one-sentence “precede” about the “famous” or “noted” author. Ernest Hemingway was not writing as Herbert Mathews, ace reporter; Hemingway was writing as Ernest Hemingway, famous author of novels and stories well known to be drawn from his own experiences.

That he understood this to be his assignment is further evidenced by a
cable Matthews sent to his ''Times'' editors on April 9, 1937, concerning the
Loyalist attack: “WORKED CONJOINTL WITH HEMINGWAY TODAY HE SENDING EYEWITNESS DESCRIPTION WHILE EYE SENT GENERAL STRATEGY.”{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}When a year later the ''Times'' asked NANA to ensure Hemingway’s reports differed from Matthews, NANA complied by asking Hemingway “to emphasize color rather than straight reporting” not necessarily out of dissatisfaction with Hemingway’s reportage as Baker contends,{{efn|Baker’s notes date the ''Times'' request to NANA as 8 Apr. 1938, and NANA’s to Hemingway as 15
Apr. 1938 (Princeton University, Firestone Library: Box 18, Folder 8 “1938”), the date of “The Bombing of Tortosa” dispatch.}} but to increase{{pg|431|432}}the chance of selling to the ''Times'' and indeed to ensure the spirit of NANA’s original arrangement with Hemingway. {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}Far from dissatisfied, NANA wrote Hemingway at the end of August 1938 a letter of agreement for his coverage of “a general European war” should it break out, “written in your colorful style” (Hemingway was in Paris, on his way to Spain for the last time during the war).{{sfn|Wheeler|1938|p=}}When Edmund Wilson criticized the selected dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'', Hemingway wrote him that “I was paid to write what are called ‘eye witness’ accounts . . .what is called, or was asked for as ‘color stuff.’ Most of such stuff is faked. Mine was not. It was straight reporting and the personal stuff was what had been asked for by the editors. “Wilson’s estimation was also based upon ''Fact’s'' inclusion of the “The Old Man at the Bridge” story from ''Ken'', “not a news dispatch” at all.{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}Speaking at Carnegie Hall before the showing of a rough cut of ''The Spanish Earth'', shortly after his first trip to Spain and so very much in the context of his wartime work, Hemingway defined the writer’s problem as “project[ing] [what is true] in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2002|p=193}}

Personal, anecdotal journalism had been Hemingway’s signature style from his earliest days filing reports, in the early 1920s from Paris, when his editor at the ''Toronto Star Weekly'' “encouraged [. . .] what Hemingway did best: write about himself in the act of being a reporter.”{{sfn|Reynolds|1989|p=45}}How could he expect that NANA would expect anything else, if indeed NANA did expect anything else? In the Spanish Civil War he at least maintained his eyewitness posture; in World War II, however, he couldn’t keep himself out. His first piece, about D-Day, begins, “No one remembers the date of the Battle of Shiloh. But the day ''we took'' Fox Green beach was the sixth of June, and the wind was blowing hard out of the northwest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1967|p=340}}His venue too—''Collier’s'' magazine—and the fact that he had not written anything in three years further contributed to the story-like nature of the WWII stories, in which he figured as a protagonist—not to mention the stories and involvement he couldn’t write about, armed and running around France more of a free agent than his guerilla-hero Robert Jordan ever was (though he began to transform these experiences into fiction in several unpublished stories). In wartime China in 1943, filing articles for Ralph Ingersoll’s short-lived ''PM'' New York afternoon daily, Hemingway did not even care to be called a news reporter.{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=99}}

It should be mentioned that Hemingway and Matthews enjoyed a great{{pg|432|433}}friendship and working relationship. Hemingway usually brought Matthews, who did not have a car, on his excursions. When Matthews left Madrid for a break in mid April 1937, he had already ensured Hemingway would provide coverage to the ''Times'' through NANA. For one thing, Hemingway did not have to worry about Matthews as a rival for the history books. He could endorse his friends’ book, ''Two Wars and More to Come'', and praise him as “the ablest and the bravest war correspondent writing today “who “when the fakers are all dead [. . .] will be read in the schools” (Advertisement 21) because Matthews posed no threat to Hemingway’s own chances to be read in the schools. The only brief Hemingway ever expressed he really reserved for Matthews’ editors, for not wanting his Teruel street-fighting story and for cutting references to himself in Matthews’ Teruel dispatches so that it appeared only Matthews had been there.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=462}}

As for Hemingway’s neglecting to name everyone with him for every story, the ''Times'' cutting of his name suggests that such exactitude was hardly a priority. A paper had no incentive for announcing the fact that a competitor’s
correspondent stood beside its own to see and report the same
events. NANA changed at least one vague Hemingway “we,” which admits
to the presence of others, to “this correspondent”
—we can hardly fault Hemingway for working in the spirit of his
employer’s standards.{{sfn|NANA|1938|p=}}{{efn|“we” in typescript and radiogram (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 1 and Folder 25).}} Do readers care that Matthews, Delmer, Gellhorn,
and others were there? The story’s effect and the limited word count also
weighed against such roll calls. One editor chose not to clutter the dispatch
on the great retreat across the Ebro with all the names of the American International Brigade volunteers Hemingway encountered, an omission of
Content more far serious than that of omitted correspondent names.{{efn| Radiogram insert dateline 4 April 1938 (HRC: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 25).}} Hemingway
often gave the names of the reporters with him, such as at Teruel;
nor was he the only reporter to sometimes neglect to do so. Martha Gellhorn,
for example, used a vague “we” and singled herself out as the primary
participant in some of her stories.

By using first-person reportage Hemingway—and Matthews and Gellhorn And most of the group covering the war—were operating solidly within
convention. William Stott, in ''Documentary Expression and Thirties America'',
calls this first-person ''participant observer'' technique “the most common sort
of documentary reportage in the thirties” that worked “by vicarious persuasion:
the writer partook of the events he reported and bared his feelings
and attitudes to influence the reader’s own.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=178-9}}{{efn|He specifically includes Hemingway et al (180).}} Stott also observes {{pg|433|434}}another technique to enable documentary reportage to “talk to us, and convince us that we, our deepest interests, are engaged,” in the use of the second person: “Thirties documentaries constantly address ‘you,’ the ‘you’ who is we the audience, and exhorts, wheedles, begs us to identify, pity, participate.” His examples include Dorothy Parker’s Spanish Civil War writing, and Hemingway’s 1935 “First-Hand Report on the Florida Hurricane.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=27-8}} A number of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches employ the second-person as a way of bringing the reader along for the ride.

Hemingway’s dispatches used personal pronouns more artfully than is generally recognized. “A New Kind of War,” which William Braasch Watson notes as having been “[w]ritten with more care and imagination” than its predecessors, begins in second person: “The window of the hotel is open and, as you lie in bed, you hear the firing in the front line seventeen blocks away.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=29}} He takes “you” outside, to see the damage and the dead from the bombing. “Someone makes a joke about missing teeth and someone else says not to make that joke. And everyone has the feeling that characterizes war. It wasn’t me, see? It wasn’t me.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} The tension between the first person and second-person pronouns—the movement toward identification with “you” and the insistence that “it wasn’t me”—continues in the next line. Here the reader is at once still in the narrator’s shoes, but strangely distanced from the narrator through biographical tidbit and, at the same time, asked to see himself in the enemy: “The Italian dead up on the Guadalajara weren’t you although Italian dead, because of where you had spent your boyhood, always seemed, still, like Our Dead.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} It is worth quoting at length the dispatch’s transition to first person:
<blockquote>
After the shell that lit on the sidewalk in front of the hotel you got a beautiful double corner room on that side, twice the size of the one you’d had, for less than a dollar. It wasn’t me they killed. See? No. Not me. It wasn’t me anymore.

Then in a hospital given by the American Friends of Spanish Democracy located out behind the Morata front along the road
to Valencia they said, “Raven wants to see you.”

“Do I know him?”

“I don’t think so,” they said. “But he wants to see you.”

“Where is he?”

“Upstairs.”{{pg|434|435}}In the room upstairs they are giving a blood transfusion to a man with a very gray face who lay on a cot with his arm out looking away from the gurgling bottle and moaning in a very impersonal way. He moaned mechanically and at regular intervals and it did not seem to be him that made the sound. His lips did not move.

“Where’s Raven?” I asked.

“I’m here,” said Raven.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=31}}</blockquote>
The piece simply could not have sustained the second-person for the remaining five pages. More significantly, for this deeply personal exchange between the writer and the faceless, eyeless soldier, Hemingway could not hide in the rhetorical device of the second-person. In the process, he effects a reversal of the usual pronoun game; instead of identifying with the all embracing “you,” we leave that trick behind and become fully attached to
the narratorial “I” as ourselves, as we might not have been had the article
begun in the first person. And even as the narrator identifies himself by name
for the only time in any of the dispatches—“Hemingway,” and later
“Ernest”—as decidedly not ourselves. We do not say, ''It isn’t me''. The historian
Hugh Thomas notes “the refreshing candour” of Hemingway’s naming
himself “in the world of the International Brigades, where no one’s name
seemed to be truthfully given.”{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=591}}{{efn|For Watson, the dispatch “seems, in fact, on the verge of becoming a story” (29).}}

A year later Hemingway’s “Tortosa Calmly Awaits Assault” resists admitting
the city’s imminent fall. Yet it does so anyway, by subtly alluding to the
wartime rhetoric of sacrificed blood irrigating the earth and rejuvenating
Spain. Such rhetoric was common during the war, appearing in speeches,
print, and poetry. Many of the poems in Cary Nelson’s anthology ''The Wound
and the Dream: Sixty Years of American Poems about the Civil War'' join in the
Spanish and international chorus’s general connection between Republican
soldiers and the land, and the particular singing of their dead nourishing
the land. We find such language in La Pasionaria’s farewell address to the International Brigades, her epilogue to ''The Book of the XV Brigade'', and Hemingway’s famous eulogy “On the American Dead in Spain”: “For our dead are
a part of the earth of Spain now and the earth of Spain can never die. Each
winter it will seem to die and each spring it will come alive again. Our dead
will live with it forever.”{{sfn|Nelson|1994|p=3}}{{efn| Reprinted in Bruccoli 76 and Nelson, Remembering 37 (the drafts at the JFK are titled “The Dead at Jarama”). In addition to the poems in Nelson’s anthology, see the excerpt from Boris Todrin’s “Spanish Sowing” in Guttmann (Wounded 179–180).}} The Tortosa dispatch implies the deaths of{{pg|435|436}}many Republican soldiers in its final paragraph’s description of the newborn onions:
<blockquote>The artillery was picking up a little now. Two came in at a fairly useful place and as the smoke blew away ahead and settled through the trees, you picked an armful of spring onions from a field beside the trail that led to the Tortosa road. They were the first onions of the spring and peeling one I found they were plump white and not too strong. The Ebro Delta has a fine rich land, and where the onions grow, tomorrow will be a battle.
{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=84}}</blockquote>

The echo is quiet, and perhaps unconscious, but there nevertheless. The opening boastfulness of “American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents”
should be taken somewhat ironically. The dispatch begins by announcing
that for “two days we have been doing the most dangerous thing
you can do in this war. That is keep close behind an unstabilized line where
the enemy are attacking with mechanized forces.” Then, a few pages later,
we learn about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade survivors of the spring 1938
Nationalist offensive that took Bob Merriman and eventually reached the
Mediterranean Sea. Reading about these survivors creeping through enemy
camps, stepping on a sleeping German soldier’s hand, sprinting “across an
open field toward the Ebro bank and being sniped at by artillery controlled
by an observation plane overhead” and then “the desperate swimming of
the Ebro” naked, we are asked to place the correspondent’s plight in due perspective.{{sfn|Watson|1988|pp=71-2}} This story certainly escapes the charge of a monotonous
battle and bombing scene; its switch from apparently boastful to
awe-struck witness feels almost deliberately self-conscious. Other choice selfironic
moments come in the dispatches of that pre-Teruel quiet fall of 1938.
The one titled “Hemingway, Covering War, Tells of Brush with Death” has little
to report from Madrid other than the new aftershave brand he is trying.
In “Loyalists’ Drive Seen Progressing as Planned,” he writes that “Shells are
all much the same and if they don’t hit you there is no story and if they do
you won’t have to write it.” {{sfn|Watson|1988|p=58}}

Hemingway’s dispatches are sometimes monotonous because his war was
Usually monotonous—as wars are most of the time. It should also be kept in
mind that scholars reviewing Hemingway’s NANA dispatches one after{{pg|436|437}}another do not relive the original reading experience. Hemingway wrote dispatches sporadically, papers did not run all of his dispatches, papers edited and cut them, and readers read at least a couple of papers’ worth of other articles in between. He told Edmund Wilson as much in defending himself against Wilson’s critique of the selected (and heavily edited and cut) dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'' without his consent: “If you are being paid to be shot at and write about it you are supposed to mention the shooting. [. . .] But I do not go in for re-printing journalism.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}

If we can in this way better understand his style, and at least explain it if
not excuse it, we similarly ought to try to contextualize—and perhaps
excuse—the moral problem. The two issues here are the specific condemnation
of Hemingway’s silence about Republican atrocities and the general
question of biased reporting (the latter of which has already partially been
addressed).

Hemingway knew, as Donaldson writes, that mentioning the atrocities
“would arouse anticommunist sentiments back in the States and effectively
undermine any possibility of American intervention.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=394}} It is also doubtful
that reporting them would have stopped them. But reporting Republican
atrocities from Spain was not possible for the simple reason that all dispatches
went through a government censor. Matthews cabled his editors
from Paris in May 1937 to tell them that “censorship does not permit us to
say when the ‘telefonica’ is hit. So whenever you see reference in my
despatches [sic] to ‘an important building in the center of the city’ or words
to that effect, the cable desk can know that it is the telefonica.” {{sfn|Matthews|1937c|p=}} As already noted, by July he would cable “CENSORSHIP
STRICTER” as the ban on mentioning internationals went into effect. {{sfn|Matthews|1937d|p=}}{{sfn|Matthews|1937e|p=}} Cowles’ memoir confirms the
aggressive censorship, observing that it limited journalists to exactly the kind of material Hemingway wrote about:
<blockquote>There were frequent attempts to “beat the censor” by employing American slang expressions, but this came to an end when a Canadian girl joined the staff. The International Brigades were not allowed to be publicized; no reference could be made to Russian armaments, and buildings and streets which suffered
bombardments could not be identified.</blockquote>{{pg|437|438}}<blockquote>It was only in the realm of the human interest story that the journalists had a free hand. They could describe bombardments to their heart’s content.{{sfn|Cowles|1941|p=20}}</blockquote>
Hemingway and everyone else—to reserve incrimination for Hemingway is hardly just. No correspondent covering Republican Spain reported suspicious imprisonments and disappearances by government agents.

Hemingway, through Joris Ivens and ''The Spanish Earth'' project, had better
access to officials than most. Had he been able somehow to report such
activity, he would have lost that access and would probably have been kicked
out of the country. His fame would have likely prevented his own officially
sponsored disappearance, though he still worried, especially as so many of
such crimes on the Republican side occurred from free agents. When Jasper
Wood printed the anarchist F.A.I. banner in the limited edition book version
of ''The Spanish Earth'', Hemingway expressed his anxieties bluntly in a letter
to Jasper on August 20, 1938. It is hardly “petulant,” he scolded, “not to wish
to be shot.”{{sfn|Davison|1988|p=128}} Hostility in the Republic against the anarchists
ran high; after the Barcelona May Day conflict, the government’s foreign
minister told U.S. Ambassador Claude Bowers that “anarchist revolt
throughout Catalonia and not only expected but welcomed as an opportunity
to liquidate the anarchists who have been hostile from the beginning.”
{{sfn|NA|1954|p=292}}{{efn| The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State, 5 May 1937.}}

It is possible that Hemingway’s dispatch stating that “not one friend [. . .]
has been executed or is missing” was his clever means of reporting
the rumors and indeed the general fact while evading the censors, as in this very dispatch he acknowledged the presence of a censor after a bombardment.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=34}}
Matthews, on the other hand, never found a way to mention the
censors or admit even the possibility of people gone missing in the Republic.
Peter Moreira has observed that in a 1943 dispatch Hemingway related a remark by a British officer about the Chinese Nationalist government’s being
“hopeless on the offensive” because censorship “prevented American reporters
From actually saying that the Nationalists wouldn’t attack, surmising that by telling this anecdote Hemingway could sneak such a judgment into
his reports.”{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=77}} In Spain, censors aside, the eyewitness standard and his
own safety and continuing ability to report the war, and, yes, his passionate
support of the government contributed to his decision. He could have written
about government abuses from the states, but then could not return to{{pg|438|439}}cover the war and support the cause—a justification other journalists, those who did not return after the spring of 1937, did not enjoy. In his mind too, knowing what he heard of fascist atrocities, any reportage against the government lessening its chances of victory through killing hopes of increased international aid would have led to more deaths at Franco’s hands that the much smaller number inspired by fifth column paranoia.{{efn|''Hemingway’s Second War'' discusses in greater depth Hemingway’s politics and his falling out
with John Dos Passos over the execution of José Robles}}.

The accusation that Hemingway did not write about Republican atrocities
because he was saving it for his fiction I find baseless (Knightley 232;
Baker 402).{{sfn|Knightley|2004|p=232}}{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=402}}{{efn|Hemingway’s casual comment to colleagues calling dibs on Pepe Quintanilla, the executioner of
Madrid, is not sufficient evidence.}}Carolyn Moorehead, in her biography of Martha Gellhorn, describes
the climate for the Madrid correspondents that first spring: “And so,
day by day, the correspondents walked a thin and nervous line between truth,
evasions, and propaganda, telling one another that though it was not all right
if things were made up and presented as true, it was acceptable to describe
what you wanted, provided it was true and provided your readers were aware
of your position.”{{sfn|Moorehead|2003|p=125}} My own sense is that they did not walk the line quite
so nervously; their passionate commitment, and their principles of position
disclosure and the eyewitness standard, made that walk relatively easy.

The problem of ''committed journalism'', even sixty years later, has not been
resolved—as anyone paying attention to the media and world affairs well
knows. One person’s truth is another person’s propaganda. Certainly, as
Knightley notes, reporting from “the heart” affects one’s judgment.{{sfn|Knightley|2004|pp=234-5}}
Yet to attempt “balance,” per the edits to Matthews’ Guadalajara piece, betrays
one’s believed truth. Furthermore, the kind of reporting done by the
correspondents with the Republic—committed, one-sided, optimistic,
heroic, human interest work by embedded writers—would be practiced
widely and without reserve during World War II. Such narrative journalism,
with roots in Louise May Alcott’s “Hospital Sketches” series published in the
''Boston Commonwealth'', and more immediately in 1930s social documentary
writing whose “essence” is “not information”, anticipated postwar
new journalism’s adoption of novelistic narrative technique for nonfiction
which culminated with such wartime books as Norman Mailer’s ''Armies of
the Night'' and Michael Herr’s ''Dispatches''.{{sfn|Stott|1986|p=11}} Some of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches
fall in this line of development.

Today we might categorize such writing under the awkward umbrella
term ''creative nonfiction''. That term certainly fits the mixed bag of nonfiction
narratives and commentaries Hemingway published during the war in
Ken magazine. These pieces are essays, not journalism, several of which{{pg|439|440}}directly appeal for support for the Republic, and most of which really deal with the approaching world war. ''Ken'' wanted “precisely the kind of opinion articles he could not write for NANA.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=433}} His article, “The Cardinal Picks a Winner,” shows a photo of a row of dead children from Barcelona and another one with Nationalist officers saluting and Catholic officials with raised hands, apparently making the fascist salute as well. He ends ironically: “So I ''don’t believe'' the people shown in the photo can really be making it. I would rather prefer to think that the photograph was faked.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=436}} When Hemingway argues in “A Program for U.S. Realism” that the United States should stay out of the next war except to stuff its pockets through arms sales, one has to wonder, given his call and the democratic nations’ failure to save Spain, if we are to sniff sarcasm here.

The language of the dispatches, with their corrective intent against
Franco’s propaganda, does risk propagandizing. Hemingway’s optimism and
anti-fascism certainly colored his correspondence work. His criticism of the
anarchist and POUM militia for their inactivity on the Aragon front, for example,
sounds a lot like the Spanish Communist Party’s.{{efn|It at least sounds almost exactly like Dolores Ibarruri in her memoir. To the anarchists’ complaint
that they had no arms, she retorts “that they had more arms than did many other fronts. . . .
What they didn’t have and what they were constantly demanding were airplanes and tanks .And
they didn’t have them because the Republic government didn’t have them either, except for those
it received as aid from the Soviet Union” (238–284). Yet the various Catalonia militia were not
as well equipped with small arms as the more regular Popular Army units, and because of the
terrain tanks and planes were in fact necessary.}}
But unlike
Matthews, Hemingway limited his reports within the Republic to military
matters. Hemingway may have generally condemned the anarchists in his
nonfiction, considering their activity as hampering the war effort, but he
never repeated the accusation of their collaboration with the rebels, as
Matthews had done. And when Hemingway commented on the Bareclona
crisis, he referred only to the government—not the communists, as
Matthews had done.{{efn|Hemingway’s comments in “Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win” NANA staff
correspondent dispatch. Though arguably he was propagandizing by hiding the communist influence—
to mention the communists to an American audience would not gain sympathy for the
cause.}}Nor did he write articles asserting the limited role of
the communists in the government, or explaining Spanish anarchism, also
as Matthews had done.{{efn|An article on the communists’ limited role appeared in late November 1937, as discussed in a
missive from The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State on 2
Dec. 1937 (United States 461). Matthews’ “Anarchism: Spain’s Enigma” appeared in the New York
Times 22 Aug. 1937: 6, 14.}}

During one of Hemingway’s stateside breaks between trips to Spain, his
children asked if he was a “tool” of Stalin, an accusation tossed by a schoolmate
who, presumably parroting his or her parents, probably understood
the term no better than Hemingway’s children. {{sfn|Hemingway|nd|p=}}
Hemingway believed in the Republic’s potential, but he was never a dupe of
the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) or Comintern. As did many others, he
accepted PCE’s presence in the government for its discipline and organization
toward winning the war, and he understood the material necessity for
Comintern’s support. It should also be noted, as historians Hugh Thomas
and Helen Graham have reminded us, that the communism associated with
the Republic wasn’t particularly communist anyway.{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=628}}{{sfn|Graham|2002|p=184}} {{pg|440|441}}

Hemingway declined to follow Joris Ivens’ suggestion that he write a
dispatch on the significant role of the political commissars in the Republican
military, even though that would have meant
featuring his brave new friend Gustav Regler.{{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=}} Hemingway also, in a letter
justifying his work to Jack Wheeler at NANA, wrote about choosing not to
send a dispatch he had written because it might strike readers as propaganda
“no matter how true” (Letter to Jack Wheeler).{{sfn|Hemingway|1938b|p=}}

Hemingway went to Spain to see the war himself and to support the Republic
through his ambulance fund. The paychecks from NANA and the
fundraising from ''The Spanish Earth'' helped. Whatever propagandistic streak
colors the dispatches pales in comparison to the documentary. The filmmaker,
Joris Ivens, was well established in European communist circles. The
documentary genre then and now has occupied a slippery position between
the extremes of impossible-to-achieve empirical nonfiction and of the outright
fictionalized. Evaluations of Hemingway’s journalism are informed by
knowledge of ''The Spanish Earth'' and the ''Ken'' essays to the detriment of the
journalism. And the very nature of the slippery documentary genre may enable
the film to escape opprobrium. It wasn’t reportage; it was altogether
something else. But for that matter, Hemingway’s dispatches weren’t purely
reportage either, and if not ''altogether'' something else, still something else,
and should be reckoned with accordingly.

== Notes ==
{{notelist|20em}}

==Citations==
{{Reflist|15em}}

==Works Cited==
{{refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker
|first=Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Bruccoli |first=Matthew |date=2006 |title=Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame |url= |location=Columbia |publisher=U of South Caronia P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Cowles |first=Virginia |date=1941 |title=Looking for Trouble |url= |location=New York
|publisher=Harper & Brothers |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Davison |first=Richard Allan |title=The Publication of Hemingway’s The Spanish Earth: An Untold Story |url= |journal=Hemingway Review
|volume=7.2 |issue= |date=1988
|pages=122-130 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson
|first=Scott |date=2009 |title=Fitzgerald & Hemingway: Works and Days |url= |location=New York |publisher=Columbia UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Franklin |first=Sidney |date=1952 |title=Bullfighter from Brooklyn |url= |location=New York |publisher=Prentice-Hall |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Graham |first=Helen |date=2002 |title=The Spanish Republic at War 1936-1939 |url= |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Guttmann |first=Allen |date=1962 |title=The Wound in the Heart: American and the Spanish Civil War |url= |location=New York |publisher=Free Press of Glencoe |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1967 |title=By-Line: Ernest Hemingway |url= |location=New York |publisher=Scibner |pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Trogdon
|editor-first=Robert W.
|author-mask=1
|title=Fascism is a Lie
|url=
|journal=Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference |volume==
|issue=
|date=2002
|pages=193-6
|location=New York
|publisher=Carroll & Graf
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 May 1937
|chapter=Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=nd
|chapter=The Home Front
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938a
|chapter=Letter to Edmund Wilson
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=2 June 1938b
|chapter=Letter to Jack Wheeler
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=14 Feb 1939
|chapter=On the American Dead in Spain
|title=TS. New Masses
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Baker
|editor-first=Carlos
|author-mask=1
|date=2003
|chapter=The Hadely Mowrer
|title=Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Scribner
|pages=462-3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ibarruri
|first=Dolores
|date=1966
|title=They Shall Not Pass: The Autobiography of La Pasionaria
|url=
|location=United States
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|date=1969
|title=The Camera and I
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|author-mask=1
|date=26 Apr 1937
|chapter=Letter to Ernest Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|date=20 Nov 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Bertrand Weaver
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=12 Oct 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=25 Apr 1939
|chapter=Letter to M.B. Tenney
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Apr 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Knightley
|first=Phillip
|date=2004
|title=The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq
|url=
|location=Baltimore
|publisher=John Hopkins
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=
|date=9 Apr 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=TS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=11 Apr 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=8 May 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=6 July 1937d
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=July 1937e
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=22 March 1939
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 9
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=
|date=20 May 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=20 Dec 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 5
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Sep 1937c
|chapter=Note to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moorehead
|first=Caroline
|date=2003
|title=Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Henry Holt
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moreira
|first=Peter
|date=2006
|title=Hemingway on the China Front: His WWII Spy Mission with Martha Gellhorn
|url=
|location=Washington D.C.
|publisher=Potomac Books
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|date=5 Feb 1937
|chapter=Promotion Box: Hemingway, For Immediate Release
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|author-mask=1
|date=4 Apr 1938
|chapter=Promotion Box: American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|editor-last=Nelson
|editor-first=Card
|date=1994
|title=Remembering Spain: Hemingway’s Civil War Eulogy and the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
|url=
|location=Urbana
|publisher=U of Illinois
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Reynolds
|first=Michael
|date=1989
|title=Hemingway: The Paris Years
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Norton
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Stott
|first=William
|date=1986
|title=Documentary Expression and Thirties America
|url=
|location=Chicago
|publisher=U of Chicago P
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Thomas
|first=Hugh
|date=2001
|title=The Spanish Civil War, Rev. ed.
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Modern Library
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine
|last=''Two Wars and More to Come''
|first=
|date=24 Jan 1938
|title=Best Sellers of the Week Here and Elsewhere
|type=Advertisement
|url=
|magazine=New York Times
|pages=
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=NA
|first=
|title=United States. Dept. of State
|url=
|journal= Foreign Relations of the Untied States, 1937 |volume=1
|issue=General
|date=1954
|pages=
|location=Washington
|publisher=GPO
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Watson
|first=William Braasch
|title=Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches
|url=
|journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=7.2
|issue=
|date=1988
|pages=4-121
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Wheeler
|first=John H.
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938
|chapter=Letter to Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection, Box 3 Folder 14
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}

{{refend}}
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches

2025-04-20T02:14:11Z

MerAtticus: spacing issue

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 

{{byline|last=Vernon |first=Alex |abstract=The Spanish Civil War began in July 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally-restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy. By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches.}}

{{dc|dc=T|HE SPANISH CIVIL WAR BEGAN ON}} 17-18 JULY, 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy, to collaborate with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens on the pro-Republican documentary ''The Spanish Earth'', and to pursue his fledgling love affair with Martha Gellhorn.

By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches for NANA.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=4}}{{efn|Quotations from the NANA dispatches follow the Diplomatic Text established by William Braasch’s “Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches.” I prefer NANA’s titles rather than Watson’s. For my disagreements with some of Watson’s datings, see my comments on specific dispatches in ''Hemingway’s Second War.''}}The secondary sources habitually judge them inferior journalism. Carlos Baker in the first Hemingway biography, for example, complains that the dialogue was “so heavily stamped with personal mannerisms as to be of doubtful authenticity.” Baker sees a “curious monotony in his stories of battles and bombardments,” a gratuitous use of graphic imagery “to shock his readers,” and “a note of triumphant boastfulness” in reporting proximity to danger. He also faults Hemingway for “often hint[ing] he was alone when in fact he was usually with Martha Gellhorn, Matthews, and Delmer.” Hemingway lacked Dos Passos’ “eye for telling details” and the “meticulous exactitude and inclusiveness that characterized the best work of Herbert Matthews and Sefton Delmer.”{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}

Philip Knightley’s ''The First Casualty'', the standard history of war correspondence, paraphrases Baker but with a trouncing final judgment:{{pg|427|428}}Hemingway’s “performance as a war correspondent was abysmally bad.” But Knightley goes beyond “technical” dissatisfaction to moral condemnation. Not just “unjustifiably optimistic”—an excusable offense—Hemingway’s reporting was “unforgivable” in its “total failure to report the Communist persecution, imprisonment, and summary execution of ‘untrustworthy elements’ on the Republican side, when he knew this was happening and when disclosing it might well have prevented further horrors like this.”
{{sfn|Knightley|2004 |pp=231–32}}{{efn|In my view, Knightley does not sufficiently acknowledge his paraphrasing of Baker.}}

Such criticisms in the final analysis might bear out. As Scott Donaldson writes, Hemingway advanced the Republican cause in his dispatches by eliciting “the deepest possible feelings of horror and of sympathy for the victims” of the Madrid bombardment; his “undue optimism” often “ignored Loyalist defeats and exaggerated the importance of its victories”; and “he repeatedly called attention to the participation of Italians and Germans on Franco’s side.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=426}} It also served as a recruitment tool—Milton Wolff, for example, acknowledged the strong influence Hemingway’s dispatches had on his decision to volunteer. Nevertheless, I think it a worthwhile exercise to attend a little more studiously to Hemingway’s dispatches, their context, and their artistry. I don’t necessarily intend to reverse the general opinion of the correspondence, only to achieve a better and more sympathetic understanding.

Herbert Matthews’ reporting for the ''New York Times'' will serve as a convenient comparison for two reasons. First, because both Baker and Knightley use Matthews’ journalism as the standard of excellence to pass judgment on Hemingway’s; and second, because the two worked practically side-by-side, seeing and reporting on many of the same events. In fact so closely did they work together that NANA sometimes complained that the ''Times'' was not buying Hemingway’s pieces because they resembled Matthews,’ and at one point Matthews’ own editors at the Times suspected him of plagiarizing Hemingway.{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|pp=411, 420}} A note from Matthews’ assigned editor Raymond McCaw provides, in two columns, seven quite similar passages from Hemingway’s Aragon front dispatches of September 13 and 14 with Matthews’ of September 14, with a penciled note at the bottom: “a deadly parallel if you ask me.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937c|p=}} Edwin James, the managing editor and McCaw’s boss, eventually agreed with Matthews’ defense: “It is quite apparent that you did not file any duplicate of the Hemingway story, or vice versa. As I understand it, the similarity arose from the fact that you{{pg|428|429}}both went to see the same show and saw it at the same time [sic], under the same conditions.”{{sfn|James|1937b|p=}}

Matthews’ dispatches ring of Republican bias as much if not more than anything Hemingway ever filed. The ''Times'' received many letters to the editor complaining about Matthews’ undisguised politics, which also gave serious concern to some of his editors. His description of the Republican May 1937 infighting in Barcelona is a striking example of how his news veered into propaganda and shows just how much he passed along the government’s version of events. The government’s “BLOODLESS TRIUMPH FOUGHT WITH RECOGNIZEDWEAPONS OF DEMOCRACY” turned out to be blatantly false, as the government and the “COMMUNISTS [WHO] DISTINGUISHED THEMSELVES” resorted to violent suppression. His blaming the uprising on the anarchist CNT working as Franco operatives parrots the government’s and the communist party’s public position, even though both charges—that the anarchists precipitated the events and that they were under Nationalist direction—were also false. His dispatch’s optimistic close also equivocates the political reality: “NEW GOVERNMENT HAS TAKEN POWER WHICH APPEARS TOVE CONFIDENCE VAST MAJORITY SPANIARDS IN LOYALIST TERRITORY AND TIS HOPED WILL GAIN EQUAL CONFIDENCE ABROAD STOP VIOLENCE AND REVOLUTION BEEN REPUDIATED AND NEWAND FAR HOPEFULLER PERIOD SEEMS BEGINNING.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937a|p=}}The ''Times'', knowing full well the one-sided coverage of a correspondent writing from one side of the conflict, had a reporter on both sides: Matthews with the Republicans, and William Carney with the Nationalists. They got their facts right (or wrong) as often as the other, their editors concluded; and they inspired about the same number of letters of complaint.{{sfn|James|1937a|p=}}{{sfn|James|1939|p=}}

Furthermore, Matthews’ dispatches received a great deal of substantive editorial revisions. One of Matthews’ Teruel reports had to be cut for length, as McCaw informed James: “This bird sent 2844 words on the same facts which Hemingway covered much better in less than half that number. I wonder if Matthews thinks the paper is thriving, and that cable tolls do not matter a damn. Of course, it had to be cut for space anyway.” McCaw most likely refers here to Matthews’ dispatch corresponding to Hemingway’s “The Attack on Teruel,” though Matthews’ account of the fall of Teruel is also much longer (and more long-winded) than Hemingway’s, and just as personal in terms of describing the dangers{{pg|429|430}} he faced. Indeed its length allows him to share even more of the action he endured.{{sfn|McCaw|1937b|p=}}

Raymond McCaw held a general professional disagreement with Matthews perhaps tainted with over zealousness. Whether a personal or political motive informed that disagreement can’t be determined from the evidence I’ve seen. It is also clear that McCaw’s charges bear some validity—that any responsible editor could have easily and reasonably taken issue where McCaw did. One of the more interesting examples concerns Matthews’ piece on Guadalajara. Because he only saw evidence on Franco’s side of Italian forces, he only reported on Italians. But the ''Times'' editors heard from other sources that German soldiers also participated in the March offensive. They thought it prudent, from this confusion, to change (nine times) “Italian” to “Rebel,” “the foe,” or “Insurgent.” When Matthews saw the published piece he wrote a strenuous objection. In some instances the editors changed paraphrased quotations from his sources. One large paragraph omitted by the editors stressed the first-hand nature of the information, and Matthews underlines the key words: “All day, at every place we stopped and no matter whom we talked to or what we saw, there was only one label—Italian. The dead bodies, the prisoners, the material of every kind, the men who had occupied Brihuega and then fled were Italian and nothing but Italian.” Here and elsewhere in his original story, Matthews emphasizes the “personal knowledge” of its information.{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}{{efn|James supported McCaw on these changes, though later acknowledged that altering quoted sources was perhaps unwarranted(29 April 1937; Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3).}}Yet Matthews did not report on the foreigners fighting for the Republic—it was in fact the Italian Garibali Battalion that routed Franco’s Italians. We might surmise government censorship behind this silence, though Matthews would not cable news of “CENSORSHIP STRICTER” and “BAN ON MENTIONING INTERNATIONALS INCLUDING AMERICANS INSTITUTED TODAY” until July.{{sfn|Matthews|1937b|p=}}Perhaps he cautiously self-censored, or politically self-censored for the same reasons the government would eventually ban mention. Still, his stridency about the omission of foreigners on one side is striking given his knowledge of their contribution to the other side. For this reason too, and his omission of other nationalities on the insurgent side, it seemed only fair to his editor “to stand on the statement that the majority of the Rebels were Italians and let it go at that.”{{sfn|James|1937c|p=}} A reasonable decision.

Throughout his correspondence to his editors and his several books,{{pg|430|431}}Matthews maintained a passionate defense of his eyewitness journalistic standard, a position those close to him understood. “Matthews never believed anything he had not seen with his own eyes,” Joris Ivens wrote. “He never saw his job as reporter as one that permitted him to sit in his hotel and read the handouts of the War Ministry.” {{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=112}} Sidney Franklin recalls that some writers wrote their pieces before arriving in Madrid, and came only for the “legitimacy” of the Madrid dateline.{{sfn|Franklin|1952|p=232}}And Matthews hated, on principle, having his name attached to an article that violated the integrity of his witness. The only way to achieve objectivity, for Matthews, was to acknowledge one’s subjective perspective. Writing to his publisher, Matthews argued that “the full documentary value” of his coverage was lost when the editors altered his submissions for “the apparent necessity of giving more or less equal space to both sides.”{{sfn|Matthews|1939|p=}}

As with Matthews, so too Hemingway. Indeed the commitment to subjectivity
fit quite well with Hemingway’s modernist aesthetics. If Hemingway
focused the dispatches on his perspective—on his own experience dodging
artillery—more than Matthews and more than most, he did so at least partially
to fulfill expectations. NANA approached him, after all, for his name
and personality as much as whatever he would write. Before he even left the
states it pitched him to potential publications, sending out a promotional release with text to be used alongside his forthcoming dispatches and suggesting
they include a photograph: “Mr. Hemingway’s assignment is to get both from the bombed towns and bombed trenches the human story of the war, not just an account of the game being played by general staffs with pins
and a map.”{{sfn|NANA|1937|p=}} NANA also released each individual dispatch with a one-sentence “precede” about the “famous” or “noted” author. Ernest Hemingway was not writing as Herbert Mathews, ace reporter; Hemingway was writing as Ernest Hemingway, famous author of novels and stories well known to be drawn from his own experiences.

That he understood this to be his assignment is further evidenced by a
cable Matthews sent to his ''Times'' editors on April 9, 1937, concerning the
Loyalist attack: “WORKED CONJOINTL WITH HEMINGWAY TODAY HE SENDING EYEWITNESS DESCRIPTION WHILE EYE SENT GENERAL STRATEGY.”{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}When a year later the ''Times'' asked NANA to ensure Hemingway’s reports differed from Matthews, NANA complied by asking Hemingway “to emphasize color rather than straight reporting” not necessarily out of dissatisfaction with Hemingway’s reportage as Baker contends,{{efn|Baker’s notes date the Times request to NANA as 8 Apr. 1938, and NANA’s to Hemingway as 15
Apr. 1938 (Princeton University, Firestone Library: Box 18, Folder 8 “1938”), the date of “The Bombing of Tortosa” dispatch.}} but to increase{{pg|431|432}}the chance of selling to the ''Times'' and indeed to ensure the spirit of NANA’s original arrangement with Hemingway. {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}Far from dissatisfied, NANA wrote Hemingway at the end of August 1938 a letter of agreement for his coverage of “a general European war” should it break out, “written in your colorful style” (Hemingway was in Paris, on his way to Spain for the last time during the war).{{sfn|Wheeler|1938|p=}}When Edmund Wilson criticized the selected dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'', Hemingway wrote him that “I was paid to write what are called ‘eye witness’ accounts . . .what is called, or was asked for as ‘color stuff.’ Most of such stuff is faked. Mine was not. It was straight reporting and the personal stuff was what had been asked for by the editors. “Wilson’s estimation was also based upon ''Fact’s'' inclusion of the “The Old Man at the Bridge” story from ''Ken'', “not a news dispatch” at all.{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}Speaking at Carnegie Hall before the showing of a rough cut of ''The Spanish Earth'', shortly after his first trip to Spain and so very much in the context of his wartime work, Hemingway defined the writer’s problem as “project[ing] [what is true] in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2002|p=193}}

Personal, anecdotal journalism had been Hemingway’s signature style from his earliest days filing reports, in the early 1920s from Paris, when his editor at the ''Toronto Star Weekly'' “encouraged [. . .] what Hemingway did best: write about himself in the act of being a reporter.”{{sfn|Reynolds|1989|p=45}}How could he expect that NANA would expect anything else, if indeed NANA did expect anything else? In the Spanish Civil War he at least maintained his eyewitness posture; in World War II, however, he couldn’t keep himself out. His first piece, about D-Day, begins, “No one remembers the date of the Battle of Shiloh. But the day ''we took'' Fox Green beach was the sixth of June, and the wind was blowing hard out of the northwest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1967|p=340}}His venue too—''Collier’s'' magazine—and the fact that he had not written anything in three years further contributed to the story-like nature of the WWII stories, in which he figured as a protagonist—not to mention the stories and involvement he couldn’t write about, armed and running around France more of a free agent than his guerilla-hero Robert Jordan ever was (though he began to transform these experiences into fiction in several unpublished stories). In wartime China in 1943, filing articles for Ralph Ingersoll’s short-lived ''PM'' New York afternoon daily, Hemingway did not even care to be called a news reporter.{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=99}}

It should be mentioned that Hemingway and Matthews enjoyed a great{{pg|432|433}}friendship and working relationship. Hemingway usually brought Matthews, who did not have a car, on his excursions. When Matthews left Madrid for a break in mid April 1937, he had already ensured Hemingway would provide coverage to the ''Times'' through NANA. For one thing, Hemingway did not have to worry about Matthews as a rival for the history books. He could endorse his friends’ book, ''Two Wars and More to Come'', and praise him as “the ablest and the bravest war correspondent writing today “who “when the fakers are all dead [. . .] will be read in the schools” (Advertisement 21) because Matthews posed no threat to Hemingway’s own chances to be read in the schools. The only brief Hemingway ever expressed he really reserved for Matthews’ editors, for not wanting his Teruel street-fighting story and for cutting references to himself in Matthews’ Teruel dispatches so that it appeared only Matthews had been there.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=462}}

As for Hemingway’s neglecting to name everyone with him for every story, the ''Times'' cutting of his name suggests that such exactitude was hardly a priority. A paper had no incentive for announcing the fact that a competitor’s
correspondent stood beside its own to see and report the same
events. NANA changed at least one vague Hemingway “we,” which admits
to the presence of others, to “this correspondent”
—we can hardly fault Hemingway for working in the spirit of his
employer’s standards.{{sfn|NANA|1938|p=}}{{efn|“we” in typescript and radiogram (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 1 and Folder 25).}} Do readers care that Matthews, Delmer, Gellhorn,
and others were there? The story’s effect and the limited word count also
weighed against such roll calls. One editor chose not to clutter the dispatch
on the great retreat across the Ebro with all the names of the American International Brigade volunteers Hemingway encountered, an omission of
Content more far serious than that of omitted correspondent names.{{efn| Radiogram insert dateline 4 April 1938 (HRC: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 25).}} Hemingway
often gave the names of the reporters with him, such as at Teruel;
nor was he the only reporter to sometimes neglect to do so. Martha Gellhorn,
for example, used a vague “we” and singled herself out as the primary
participant in some of her stories.

By using first-person reportage Hemingway—and Matthews and Gellhorn And most of the group covering the war—were operating solidly within
convention. William Stott, in ''Documentary Expression and Thirties America'',
calls this first-person ''participant observer'' technique “the most common sort
of documentary reportage in the thirties” that worked “by vicarious persuasion:
the writer partook of the events he reported and bared his feelings
and attitudes to influence the reader’s own.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=178-9}}{{efn|He specifically includes Hemingway et al (180).}} Stott also observes {{pg|433|434}}another technique to enable documentary reportage to “talk to us, and convince us that we, our deepest interests, are engaged,” in the use of the second person: “Thirties documentaries constantly address ‘you,’ the ‘you’ who is we the audience, and exhorts, wheedles, begs us to identify, pity, participate.” His examples include Dorothy Parker’s Spanish Civil War writing, and Hemingway’s 1935 “First-Hand Report on the Florida Hurricane.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=27-8}} A number of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches employ the second-person as a way of bringing the reader along for the ride.

Hemingway’s dispatches used personal pronouns more artfully than is generally recognized. “A New Kind of War,” which William Braasch Watson notes as having been “[w]ritten with more care and imagination” than its predecessors, begins in second person: “The window of the hotel is open and, as you lie in bed, you hear the firing in the front line seventeen blocks away.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=29}} He takes “you” outside, to see the damage and the dead from the bombing. “Someone makes a joke about missing teeth and someone else says not to make that joke. And everyone has the feeling that characterizes war. It wasn’t me, see? It wasn’t me.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} The tension between the first person and second-person pronouns—the movement toward identification with “you” and the insistence that “it wasn’t me”—continues in the next line. Here the reader is at once still in the narrator’s shoes, but strangely distanced from the narrator through biographical tidbit and, at the same time, asked to see himself in the enemy: “The Italian dead up on the Guadalajara weren’t you although Italian dead, because of where you had spent your boyhood, always seemed, still, like Our Dead.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} It is worth quoting at length the dispatch’s transition to first person:
<blockquote>
After the shell that lit on the sidewalk in front of the hotel you got a beautiful double corner room on that side, twice the size of the one you’d had, for less than a dollar. It wasn’t me they killed. See? No. Not me. It wasn’t me anymore.

Then in a hospital given by the American Friends of Spanish Democracy located out behind the Morata front along the road
to Valencia they said, “Raven wants to see you.”

“Do I know him?”

“I don’t think so,” they said. “But he wants to see you.”

“Where is he?”

“Upstairs.”{{pg|434|435}}In the room upstairs they are giving a blood transfusion to a man with a very gray face who lay on a cot with his arm out looking away from the gurgling bottle and moaning in a very impersonal way. He moaned mechanically and at regular intervals and it did not seem to be him that made the sound. His lips did not move.

“Where’s Raven?” I asked.

“I’m here,” said Raven.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=31}}</blockquote>
The piece simply could not have sustained the second-person for the remaining five pages. More significantly, for this deeply personal exchange between the writer and the faceless, eyeless soldier, Hemingway could not hide in the rhetorical device of the second-person. In the process, he effects a reversal of the usual pronoun game; instead of identifying with the all embracing “you,” we leave that trick behind and become fully attached to
the narratorial “I” as ourselves, as we might not have been had the article
begun in the first person. And even as the narrator identifies himself by name
for the only time in any of the dispatches—“Hemingway,” and later
“Ernest”—as decidedly not ourselves. We do not say, ''It isn’t me''. The historian
Hugh Thomas notes “the refreshing candour” of Hemingway’s naming
himself “in the world of the International Brigades, where no one’s name
seemed to be truthfully given.”{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=591}}{{efn|For Watson, the dispatch “seems, in fact, on the verge of becoming a story” (29).}}

A year later Hemingway’s “Tortosa Calmly Awaits Assault” resists admitting
the city’s imminent fall. Yet it does so anyway, by subtly alluding to the
wartime rhetoric of sacrificed blood irrigating the earth and rejuvenating
Spain. Such rhetoric was common during the war, appearing in speeches,
print, and poetry. Many of the poems in Cary Nelson’s anthology ''The Wound
and the Dream: Sixty Years of American Poems about the Civil War'' join in the
Spanish and international chorus’s general connection between Republican
soldiers and the land, and the particular singing of their dead nourishing
the land. We find such language in La Pasionaria’s farewell address to the International Brigades, her epilogue to ''The Book of the XV Brigade'', and Hemingway’s famous eulogy “On the American Dead in Spain”: “For our dead are
a part of the earth of Spain now and the earth of Spain can never die. Each
winter it will seem to die and each spring it will come alive again. Our dead
will live with it forever.”{{sfn|Nelson|1994|p=3}}{{efn| Reprinted in Bruccoli 76 and Nelson, Remembering 37 (the drafts at the JFK are titled “The Dead at Jarama”). In addition to the poems in Nelson’s anthology, see the excerpt from Boris Todrin’s “Spanish Sowing” in Guttmann (Wounded 179–180).}} The Tortosa dispatch implies the deaths of{{pg|435|436}}many Republican soldiers in its final paragraph’s description of the newborn onions:
<blockquote>The artillery was picking up a little now. Two came in at a fairly useful place and as the smoke blew away ahead and settled through the trees, you picked an armful of spring onions from a field beside the trail that led to the Tortosa road. They were the first onions of the spring and peeling one I found they were plump white and not too strong. The Ebro Delta has a fine rich land, and where the onions grow, tomorrow will be a battle.
{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=84}}</blockquote>

The echo is quiet, and perhaps unconscious, but there nevertheless. The opening boastfulness of “American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents”
should be taken somewhat ironically. The dispatch begins by announcing
that for “two days we have been doing the most dangerous thing
you can do in this war. That is keep close behind an unstabilized line where
the enemy are attacking with mechanized forces.” Then, a few pages later,
we learn about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade survivors of the spring 1938
Nationalist offensive that took Bob Merriman and eventually reached the
Mediterranean Sea. Reading about these survivors creeping through enemy
camps, stepping on a sleeping German soldier’s hand, sprinting “across an
open field toward the Ebro bank and being sniped at by artillery controlled
by an observation plane overhead” and then “the desperate swimming of
the Ebro” naked, we are asked to place the correspondent’s plight in due perspective.{{sfn|Watson|1988|pp=71-2}} This story certainly escapes the charge of a monotonous
battle and bombing scene; its switch from apparently boastful to
awe-struck witness feels almost deliberately self-conscious. Other choice selfironic
moments come in the dispatches of that pre-Teruel quiet fall of 1938.
The one titled “Hemingway, Covering War, Tells of Brush with Death” has little
to report from Madrid other than the new aftershave brand he is trying.
In “Loyalists’ Drive Seen Progressing as Planned,” he writes that “Shells are
all much the same and if they don’t hit you there is no story and if they do
you won’t have to write it.” {{sfn|Watson|1988|p=58}}

Hemingway’s dispatches are sometimes monotonous because his war was
Usually monotonous—as wars are most of the time. It should also be kept in
mind that scholars reviewing Hemingway’s NANA dispatches one after{{pg|436|437}}another do not relive the original reading experience. Hemingway wrote dispatches sporadically, papers did not run all of his dispatches, papers edited and cut them, and readers read at least a couple of papers’ worth of other articles in between. He told Edmund Wilson as much in defending himself against Wilson’s critique of the selected (and heavily edited and cut) dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'' without his consent: “If you are being paid to be shot at and write about it you are supposed to mention the shooting. [. . .] But I do not go in for re-printing journalism.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}

If we can in this way better understand his style, and at least explain it if
not excuse it, we similarly ought to try to contextualize—and perhaps
excuse—the moral problem. The two issues here are the specific condemnation
of Hemingway’s silence about Republican atrocities and the general
question of biased reporting (the latter of which has already partially been
addressed).

Hemingway knew, as Donaldson writes, that mentioning the atrocities
“would arouse anticommunist sentiments back in the States and effectively
undermine any possibility of American intervention.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=394}} It is also doubtful
that reporting them would have stopped them. But reporting Republican
atrocities from Spain was not possible for the simple reason that all dispatches
went through a government censor. Matthews cabled his editors
from Paris in May 1937 to tell them that “censorship does not permit us to
say when the ‘telefonica’ is hit. So whenever you see reference in my
despatches [sic] to ‘an important building in the center of the city’ or words
to that effect, the cable desk can know that it is the telefonica.” {{sfn|Matthews|1937c|p=}} As already noted, by July he would cable “CENSORSHIP
STRICTER” as the ban on mentioning internationals went into effect. {{sfn|Matthews|1937d|p=}}{{sfn|Matthews|1937e|p=}} Cowles’ memoir confirms the
aggressive censorship, observing that it limited journalists to exactly the kind of material Hemingway wrote about:
<blockquote>There were frequent attempts to “beat the censor” by employing American slang expressions, but this came to an end when a Canadian girl joined the staff. The International Brigades were not allowed to be publicized; no reference could be made to Russian armaments, and buildings and streets which suffered
bombardments could not be identified.</blockquote>{{pg|437|438}}<blockquote>It was only in the realm of the human interest story that the journalists had a free hand. They could describe bombardments to their heart’s content.{{sfn|Cowles|1941|p=20}}</blockquote>
Hemingway and everyone else—to reserve incrimination for Hemingway is hardly just. No correspondent covering Republican Spain reported suspicious imprisonments and disappearances by government agents.

Hemingway, through Joris Ivens and ''The Spanish Earth'' project, had better
access to officials than most. Had he been able somehow to report such
activity, he would have lost that access and would probably have been kicked
out of the country. His fame would have likely prevented his own officially
sponsored disappearance, though he still worried, especially as so many of
such crimes on the Republican side occurred from free agents. When Jasper
Wood printed the anarchist F.A.I. banner in the limited edition book version
of ''The Spanish Earth'', Hemingway expressed his anxieties bluntly in a letter
to Jasper on August 20, 1938. It is hardly “petulant,” he scolded, “not to wish
to be shot.”{{sfn|Davison|1988|p=128}} Hostility in the Republic against the anarchists
ran high; after the Barcelona May Day conflict, the government’s foreign
minister told U.S. Ambassador Claude Bowers that “anarchist revolt
throughout Catalonia and not only expected but welcomed as an opportunity
to liquidate the anarchists who have been hostile from the beginning.”
{{sfn|NA|1954|p=292}}{{efn| The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State, 5 May 1937.}}

It is possible that Hemingway’s dispatch stating that “not one friend [. . .]
has been executed or is missing” was his clever means of reporting
the rumors and indeed the general fact while evading the censors, as in this very dispatch he acknowledged the presence of a censor after a bombardment.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=34}}
Matthews, on the other hand, never found a way to mention the
censors or admit even the possibility of people gone missing in the Republic.
Peter Moreira has observed that in a 1943 dispatch Hemingway related a remark by a British officer about the Chinese Nationalist government’s being
“hopeless on the offensive” because censorship “prevented American reporters
From actually saying that the Nationalists wouldn’t attack, surmising that by telling this anecdote Hemingway could sneak such a judgment into
his reports.”{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=77}} In Spain, censors aside, the eyewitness standard and his
own safety and continuing ability to report the war, and, yes, his passionate
support of the government contributed to his decision. He could have written
about government abuses from the states, but then could not return to{{pg|438|439}}cover the war and support the cause—a justification other journalists, those who did not return after the spring of 1937, did not enjoy. In his mind too, knowing what he heard of fascist atrocities, any reportage against the government lessening its chances of victory through killing hopes of increased international aid would have led to more deaths at Franco’s hands that the much smaller number inspired by fifth column paranoia.{{efn|''Hemingway’s Second War'' discusses in greater depth Hemingway’s politics and his falling out
with John Dos Passos over the execution of José Robles}}.

The accusation that Hemingway did not write about Republican atrocities
because he was saving it for his fiction I find baseless (Knightley 232;
Baker 402).{{sfn|Knightley|2004|p=232}}{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=402}}{{efn|Hemingway’s casual comment to colleagues calling dibs on Pepe Quintanilla, the executioner of
Madrid, is not sufficient evidence.}}Carolyn Moorehead, in her biography of Martha Gellhorn, describes
the climate for the Madrid correspondents that first spring: “And so,
day by day, the correspondents walked a thin and nervous line between truth,
evasions, and propaganda, telling one another that though it was not all right
if things were made up and presented as true, it was acceptable to describe
what you wanted, provided it was true and provided your readers were aware
of your position.”{{sfn|Moorehead|2003|p=125}} My own sense is that they did not walk the line quite
so nervously; their passionate commitment, and their principles of position
disclosure and the eyewitness standard, made that walk relatively easy.

The problem of ''committed journalism'', even sixty years later, has not been
resolved—as anyone paying attention to the media and world affairs well
knows. One person’s truth is another person’s propaganda. Certainly, as
Knightley notes, reporting from “the heart” affects one’s judgment.{{sfn|Knightley|2004|pp=234-5}}
Yet to attempt “balance,” per the edits to Matthews’ Guadalajara piece, betrays
one’s believed truth. Furthermore, the kind of reporting done by the
correspondents with the Republic—committed, one-sided, optimistic,
heroic, human interest work by embedded writers—would be practiced
widely and without reserve during World War II. Such narrative journalism,
with roots in Louise May Alcott’s “Hospital Sketches” series published in the
''Boston Commonwealth'', and more immediately in 1930s social documentary
writing whose “essence” is “not information”, anticipated postwar
new journalism’s adoption of novelistic narrative technique for nonfiction
which culminated with such wartime books as Norman Mailer’s ''Armies of
the Night'' and Michael Herr’s ''Dispatches''.{{sfn|Stott|1986|p=11}} Some of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches
fall in this line of development.

Today we might categorize such writing under the awkward umbrella
term ''creative nonfiction''. That term certainly fits the mixed bag of nonfiction
narratives and commentaries Hemingway published during the war in
Ken magazine. These pieces are essays, not journalism, several of which{{pg|439|440}}directly appeal for support for the Republic, and most of which really deal with the approaching world war. ''Ken'' wanted “precisely the kind of opinion articles he could not write for NANA.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=433}} His article, “The Cardinal Picks a Winner,” shows a photo of a row of dead children from Barcelona and another one with Nationalist officers saluting and Catholic officials with raised hands, apparently making the fascist salute as well. He ends ironically: “So I ''don’t believe'' the people shown in the photo can really be making it. I would rather prefer to think that the photograph was faked.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=436}} When Hemingway argues in “A Program for U.S. Realism” that the United States should stay out of the next war except to stuff its pockets through arms sales, one has to wonder, given his call and the democratic nations’ failure to save Spain, if we are to sniff sarcasm here.

The language of the dispatches, with their corrective intent against
Franco’s propaganda, does risk propagandizing. Hemingway’s optimism and
anti-fascism certainly colored his correspondence work. His criticism of the
anarchist and POUM militia for their inactivity on the Aragon front, for example,
sounds a lot like the Spanish Communist Party’s.{{efn|It at least sounds almost exactly like Dolores Ibarruri in her memoir. To the anarchists’ complaint
that they had no arms, she retorts “that they had more arms than did many other fronts. . . .
What they didn’t have and what they were constantly demanding were airplanes and tanks .And
they didn’t have them because the Republic government didn’t have them either, except for those
it received as aid from the Soviet Union” (238–284). Yet the various Catalonia militia were not
as well equipped with small arms as the more regular Popular Army units, and because of the
terrain tanks and planes were in fact necessary.}}
But unlike
Matthews, Hemingway limited his reports within the Republic to military
matters. Hemingway may have generally condemned the anarchists in his
nonfiction, considering their activity as hampering the war effort, but he
never repeated the accusation of their collaboration with the rebels, as
Matthews had done. And when Hemingway commented on the Bareclona
crisis, he referred only to the government—not the communists, as
Matthews had done.{{efn|Hemingway’s comments in “Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win” NANA staff
correspondent dispatch. Though arguably he was propagandizing by hiding the communist influence—
to mention the communists to an American audience would not gain sympathy for the
cause.}}Nor did he write articles asserting the limited role of
the communists in the government, or explaining Spanish anarchism, also
as Matthews had done.{{efn|An article on the communists’ limited role appeared in late November 1937, as discussed in a
missive from The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State on 2
Dec. 1937 (United States 461). Matthews’ “Anarchism: Spain’s Enigma” appeared in the New York
Times 22 Aug. 1937: 6, 14.}}

During one of Hemingway’s stateside breaks between trips to Spain, his
children asked if he was a “tool” of Stalin, an accusation tossed by a schoolmate
who, presumably parroting his or her parents, probably understood
the term no better than Hemingway’s children. {{sfn|Hemingway|nd|p=}}
Hemingway believed in the Republic’s potential, but he was never a dupe of
the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) or Comintern. As did many others, he
accepted PCE’s presence in the government for its discipline and organization
toward winning the war, and he understood the material necessity for
Comintern’s support. It should also be noted, as historians Hugh Thomas
and Helen Graham have reminded us, that the communism associated with
the Republic wasn’t particularly communist anyway.{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=628}}{{sfn|Graham|2002|p=184}} {{pg|440|441}}

Hemingway declined to follow Joris Ivens’ suggestion that he write a
dispatch on the significant role of the political commissars in the Republican
military, even though that would have meant
featuring his brave new friend Gustav Regler.{{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=}} Hemingway also, in a letter
justifying his work to Jack Wheeler at NANA, wrote about choosing not to
send a dispatch he had written because it might strike readers as propaganda
“no matter how true” (Letter to Jack Wheeler).{{sfn|Hemingway|1938b|p=}}

Hemingway went to Spain to see the war himself and to support the Republic
through his ambulance fund. The paychecks from NANA and the
fundraising from ''The Spanish Earth'' helped. Whatever propagandistic streak
colors the dispatches pales in comparison to the documentary. The filmmaker,
Joris Ivens, was well established in European communist circles. The
documentary genre then and now has occupied a slippery position between
the extremes of impossible-to-achieve empirical nonfiction and of the outright
fictionalized. Evaluations of Hemingway’s journalism are informed by
knowledge of ''The Spanish Earth'' and the ''Ken'' essays to the detriment of the
journalism. And the very nature of the slippery documentary genre may enable
the film to escape opprobrium. It wasn’t reportage; it was altogether
something else. But for that matter, Hemingway’s dispatches weren’t purely
reportage either, and if not ''altogether'' something else, still something else,
and should be reckoned with accordingly.

== Notes ==
{{notelist|20em}}

==Citations==
{{Reflist|15em}}

==Works Cited==
{{refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker
|first=Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Bruccoli |first=Matthew |date=2006 |title=Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame |url= |location=Columbia |publisher=U of South Caronia P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Cowles |first=Virginia |date=1941 |title=Looking for Trouble |url= |location=New York
|publisher=Harper & Brothers |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Davison |first=Richard Allan |title=The Publication of Hemingway’s The Spanish Earth: An Untold Story |url= |journal=Hemingway Review
|volume=7.2 |issue= |date=1988
|pages=122-130 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson
|first=Scott |date=2009 |title=Fitzgerald & Hemingway: Works and Days |url= |location=New York |publisher=Columbia UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Franklin |first=Sidney |date=1952 |title=Bullfighter from Brooklyn |url= |location=New York |publisher=Prentice-Hall |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Graham |first=Helen |date=2002 |title=The Spanish Republic at War 1936-1939 |url= |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Guttmann |first=Allen |date=1962 |title=The Wound in the Heart: American and the Spanish Civil War |url= |location=New York |publisher=Free Press of Glencoe |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1967 |title=By-Line: Ernest Hemingway |url= |location=New York |publisher=Scibner |pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Trogdon
|editor-first=Robert W.
|author-mask=1
|title=Fascism is a Lie
|url=
|journal=Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference |volume==
|issue=
|date=2002
|pages=193-6
|location=New York
|publisher=Carroll & Graf
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 May 1937
|chapter=Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=nd
|chapter=The Home Front
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938a
|chapter=Letter to Edmund Wilson
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=2 June 1938b
|chapter=Letter to Jack Wheeler
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=14 Feb 1939
|chapter=On the American Dead in Spain
|title=TS. New Masses
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Baker
|editor-first=Carlos
|author-mask=1
|date=2003
|chapter=The Hadely Mowrer
|title=Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Scribner
|pages=462-3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ibarruri
|first=Dolores
|date=1966
|title=They Shall Not Pass: The Autobiography of La Pasionaria
|url=
|location=United States
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|date=1969
|title=The Camera and I
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|author-mask=1
|date=26 Apr 1937
|chapter=Letter to Ernest Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|date=20 Nov 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Bertrand Weaver
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=12 Oct 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=25 Apr 1939
|chapter=Letter to M.B. Tenney
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Apr 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Knightley
|first=Phillip
|date=2004
|title=The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq
|url=
|location=Baltimore
|publisher=John Hopkins
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=
|date=9 Apr 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=TS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=11 Apr 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=8 May 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=6 July 1937d
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=July 1937e
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=22 March 1939
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 9
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=
|date=20 May 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=20 Dec 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 5
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Sep 1937c
|chapter=Note to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moorehead
|first=Caroline
|date=2003
|title=Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Henry Holt
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moreira
|first=Peter
|date=2006
|title=Hemingway on the China Front: His WWII Spy Mission with Martha Gellhorn
|url=
|location=Washington D.C.
|publisher=Potomac Books
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|date=5 Feb 1937
|chapter=Promotion Box: Hemingway, For Immediate Release
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|author-mask=1
|date=4 Apr 1938
|chapter=Promotion Box: American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|editor-last=Nelson
|editor-first=Card
|date=1994
|title=Remembering Spain: Hemingway’s Civil War Eulogy and the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
|url=
|location=Urbana
|publisher=U of Illinois
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Reynolds
|first=Michael
|date=1989
|title=Hemingway: The Paris Years
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Norton
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Stott
|first=William
|date=1986
|title=Documentary Expression and Thirties America
|url=
|location=Chicago
|publisher=U of Chicago P
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Thomas
|first=Hugh
|date=2001
|title=The Spanish Civil War, Rev. ed.
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Modern Library
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine
|last=''Two Wars and More to Come''
|first=
|date=24 Jan 1938
|title=Best Sellers of the Week Here and Elsewhere
|type=Advertisement
|url=
|magazine=New York Times
|pages=
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=NA
|first=
|title=United States. Dept. of State
|url=
|journal= Foreign Relations of the Untied States, 1937 |volume=1
|issue=General
|date=1954
|pages=
|location=Washington
|publisher=GPO
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Watson
|first=William Braasch
|title=Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches
|url=
|journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=7.2
|issue=
|date=1988
|pages=4-121
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Wheeler
|first=John H.
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938
|chapter=Letter to Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection, Box 3 Folder 14
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}

{{refend}}
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches

2025-04-20T02:10:39Z

MerAtticus: spacing issue

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{{byline|last=Vernon |first=Alex |abstract=The Spanish Civil War began in July 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally-restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy. By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches.}}

{{dc|dc=T|HE SPANISH CIVIL WAR BEGAN ON}} 17-18 JULY, 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy, to collaborate with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens on the pro-Republican documentary ''The Spanish Earth'', and to pursue his fledgling love affair with Martha Gellhorn.

By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches for NANA.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=4}}{{efn|Quotations from the NANA dispatches follow the Diplomatic Text established by William Braasch’s “Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches.” I prefer NANA’s titles rather than Watson’s. For my disagreements with some of Watson’s datings, see my comments on specific dispatches in ''Hemingway’s Second War.''}}The secondary sources habitually judge them inferior journalism. Carlos Baker in the first Hemingway biography, for example, complains that the dialogue was “so heavily stamped with personal mannerisms as to be of doubtful authenticity.” Baker sees a “curious monotony in his stories of battles and bombardments,” a gratuitous use of graphic imagery “to shock his readers,” and “a note of triumphant boastfulness” in reporting proximity to danger. He also faults Hemingway for “often hint[ing] he was alone when in fact he was usually with Martha Gellhorn, Matthews, and Delmer.” Hemingway lacked Dos Passos’ “eye for telling details” and the “meticulous exactitude and inclusiveness that characterized the best work of Herbert Matthews and Sefton Delmer.”{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}

Philip Knightley’s ''The First Casualty'', the standard history of war correspondence, paraphrases Baker but with a trouncing final judgment:{{pg|427|428}}Hemingway’s “performance as a war correspondent was abysmally bad.” But Knightley goes beyond “technical” dissatisfaction to moral condemnation. Not just “unjustifiably optimistic”—an excusable offense—Hemingway’s reporting was “unforgivable” in its “total failure to report the Communist persecution, imprisonment, and summary execution of ‘untrustworthy elements’ on the Republican side, when he knew this was happening and when disclosing it might well have prevented further horrors like this.”
{{sfn|Knightley|2004 |pp=231–32}}{{efn|In my view, Knightley does not sufficiently acknowledge his paraphrasing of Baker.}}

Such criticisms in the final analysis might bear out. As Scott Donaldson writes, Hemingway advanced the Republican cause in his dispatches by eliciting “the deepest possible feelings of horror and of sympathy for the victims” of the Madrid bombardment; his “undue optimism” often “ignored Loyalist defeats and exaggerated the importance of its victories”; and “he repeatedly called attention to the participation of Italians and Germans on Franco’s side.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=426}} It also served as a recruitment tool—Milton Wolff, for example, acknowledged the strong influence Hemingway’s dispatches had on his decision to volunteer. Nevertheless, I think it a worthwhile exercise to attend a little more studiously to Hemingway’s dispatches, their context, and their artistry. I don’t necessarily intend to reverse the general opinion of the correspondence, only to achieve a better and more sympathetic understanding.

Herbert Matthews’ reporting for the ''New York Times'' will serve as a convenient comparison for two reasons. First, because both Baker and Knightley use Matthews’ journalism as the standard of excellence to pass judgment on Hemingway’s; and second, because the two worked practically side-by-side, seeing and reporting on many of the same events. In fact so closely did they work together that NANA sometimes complained that the ''Times'' was not buying Hemingway’s pieces because they resembled Matthews,’ and at one point Matthews’ own editors at the Times suspected him of plagiarizing Hemingway.{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|pp=411, 420}} A note from Matthews’ assigned editor Raymond McCaw provides, in two columns, seven quite similar passages from Hemingway’s Aragon front dispatches of September 13 and 14 with Matthews’ of September 14, with a penciled note at the bottom: “a deadly parallel if you ask me.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937c|p=}} Edwin James, the managing editor and McCaw’s boss, eventually agreed with Matthews’ defense: “It is quite apparent that you did not file any duplicate of the Hemingway story, or vice versa. As I understand it, the similarity arose from the fact that you{{pg|428|429}}both went to see the same show and saw it at the same time [sic], under the same conditions.”{{sfn|James|1937b|p=}}

Matthews’ dispatches ring of Republican bias as much if not more than anything Hemingway ever filed. The ''Times'' received many letters to the editor complaining about Matthews’ undisguised politics, which also gave serious concern to some of his editors. His description of the Republican May 1937 infighting in Barcelona is a striking example of how his news veered into propaganda and shows just how much he passed along the government’s version of events. The government’s “BLOODLESS TRIUMPH FOUGHT WITH RECOGNIZEDWEAPONS OF DEMOCRACY” turned out to be blatantly false, as the government and the “COMMUNISTS [WHO] DISTINGUISHED THEMSELVES” resorted to violent suppression. His blaming the uprising on the anarchist CNT working as Franco operatives parrots the government’s and the communist party’s public position, even though both charges—that the anarchists precipitated the events and that they were under Nationalist direction—were also false. His dispatch’s optimistic close also equivocates the political reality: “NEW GOVERNMENT HAS TAKEN POWER WHICH APPEARS TOVE CONFIDENCE VAST MAJORITY SPANIARDS IN LOYALIST TERRITORY AND TIS HOPED WILL GAIN EQUAL CONFIDENCE ABROAD STOP VIOLENCE AND REVOLUTION BEEN REPUDIATED AND NEWAND FAR HOPEFULLER PERIOD SEEMS BEGINNING.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937a|p=}}The ''Times'', knowing full well the one-sided coverage of a correspondent writing from one side of the conflict, had a reporter on both sides: Matthews with the Republicans, and William Carney with the Nationalists. They got their facts right (or wrong) as often as the other, their editors concluded; and they inspired about the same number of letters of complaint.{{sfn|James|1937a|p=}}{{sfn|James|1939|p=}}

Furthermore, Matthews’ dispatches received a great deal of substantive editorial revisions. One of Matthews’ Teruel reports had to be cut for length, as McCaw informed James: “This bird sent 2844 words on the same facts which Hemingway covered much better in less than half that number. I wonder if Matthews thinks the paper is thriving, and that cable tolls do not matter a damn. Of course, it had to be cut for space anyway.” McCaw most likely refers here to Matthews’ dispatch corresponding to Hemingway’s “The Attack on Teruel,” though Matthews’ account of the fall of Teruel is also much longer (and more long-winded) than Hemingway’s, and just as personal in terms of describing the dangers{{pg|429|430}} he faced. Indeed its length allows him to share even more of the action he endured.{{sfn|McCaw|1937b|p=}}

Raymond McCaw held a general professional disagreement with Matthews perhaps tainted with over zealousness. Whether a personal or political motive informed that disagreement can’t be determined from the evidence I’ve seen. It is also clear that McCaw’s charges bear some validity—that any responsible editor could have easily and reasonably taken issue where McCaw did. One of the more interesting examples concerns Matthews’ piece on Guadalajara. Because he only saw evidence on Franco’s side of Italian forces, he only reported on Italians. But the ''Times'' editors heard from other sources that German soldiers also participated in the March offensive. They thought it prudent, from this confusion, to change (nine times) “Italian” to “Rebel,” “the foe,” or “Insurgent.” When Matthews saw the published piece he wrote a strenuous objection. In some instances the editors changed paraphrased quotations from his sources. One large paragraph omitted by the editors stressed the first-hand nature of the information, and Matthews underlines the key words: “All day, at every place we stopped and no matter whom we talked to or what we saw, there was only one label—Italian. The dead bodies, the prisoners, the material of every kind, the men who had occupied Brihuega and then fled were Italian and nothing but Italian.” Here and elsewhere in his original story, Matthews emphasizes the “personal knowledge” of its information.{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}{{efn|James supported McCaw on these changes, though later acknowledged that altering quoted sources was perhaps unwarranted(29 April 1937; Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3).}}Yet Matthews did not report on the foreigners fighting for the Republic—it was in fact the Italian Garibali Battalion that routed Franco’s Italians. We might surmise government censorship behind this silence, though Matthews would not cable news of “CENSORSHIP STRICTER” and “BAN ON MENTIONING INTERNATIONALS INCLUDING AMERICANS INSTITUTED TODAY” until July.{{sfn|Matthews|1937b|p=}}Perhaps he cautiously self-censored, or politically self-censored for the same reasons the government would eventually ban mention. Still, his stridency about the omission of foreigners on one side is striking given his knowledge of their contribution to the other side. For this reason too, and his omission of other nationalities on the insurgent side, it seemed only fair to his editor “to stand on the statement that the majority of the Rebels were Italians and let it go at that.”{{sfn|James|1937c|p=}} A reasonable decision.

Throughout his correspondence to his editors and his several books,{{pg|430|431}}Matthews maintained a passionate defense of his eyewitness journalistic standard, a position those close to him understood. “Matthews never believed anything he had not seen with his own eyes,” Joris Ivens wrote. “He never saw his job as reporter as one that permitted him to sit in his hotel and read the handouts of the War Ministry.” {{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=112}} Sidney Franklin recalls that some writers wrote their pieces before arriving in Madrid, and came only for the “legitimacy” of the Madrid dateline.{{sfn|Franklin|1952|p=232}}And Matthews hated, on principle, having his name attached to an article that violated the integrity of his witness. The only way to achieve objectivity, for Matthews, was to acknowledge one’s subjective perspective. Writing to his publisher, Matthews argued that “the full documentary value” of his coverage was lost when the editors altered his submissions for “the apparent necessity of giving more or less equal space to both sides.”{{sfn|Matthews|1939|p=}}

As with Matthews, so too Hemingway. Indeed the commitment to subjectivity
fit quite well with Hemingway’s modernist aesthetics. If Hemingway
focused the dispatches on his perspective—on his own experience dodging
artillery—more than Matthews and more than most, he did so at least partially
to fulfill expectations. NANA approached him, after all, for his name
and personality as much as whatever he would write. Before he even left the
states it pitched him to potential publications, sending out a promotional release with text to be used alongside his forthcoming dispatches and suggesting
they include a photograph: “Mr. Hemingway’s assignment is to get both from the bombed towns and bombed trenches the human story of the war, not just an account of the game being played by general staffs with pins
and a map.”{{sfn|NANA|1937|p=}} NANA also released each individual dispatch with a one-sentence “precede” about the “famous” or “noted” author. Ernest Hemingway was not writing as Herbert Mathews, ace reporter; Hemingway was writing as Ernest Hemingway, famous author of novels and stories well known to be drawn from his own experiences.

That he understood this to be his assignment is further evidenced by a
cable Matthews sent to his ''Times'' editors on April 9, 1937, concerning the
Loyalist attack: “WORKED CONJOINTL WITH HEMINGWAY TODAY HE SENDING EYEWITNESS DESCRIPTION WHILE EYE SENT GENERAL STRATEGY.”{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}When a year later the ''Times'' asked NANA to ensure Hemingway’s reports differed from Matthews, NANA complied by asking Hemingway “to emphasize color rather than straight reporting” not necessarily out of dissatisfaction with Hemingway’s reportage as Baker contends,{{efn|Baker’s notes date the Times request to NANA as 8 Apr. 1938, and NANA’s to Hemingway as 15
Apr. 1938 (Princeton University, Firestone Library: Box 18, Folder 8 “1938”), the date of “The Bombing of Tortosa” dispatch.}} but to increase{{pg|431|432}}the chance of selling to the ''Times'' and indeed to ensure the spirit of NANA’s original arrangement with Hemingway. {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}Far from dissatisfied, NANA wrote Hemingway at the end of August 1938 a letter of agreement for his coverage of “a general European war” should it break out, “written in your colorful style” (Hemingway was in Paris, on his way to Spain for the last time during the war).{{sfn|Wheeler|1938|p=}}When Edmund Wilson criticized the selected dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'', Hemingway wrote him that “I was paid to write what are called ‘eye witness’ accounts . . .what is called, or was asked for as ‘color stuff.’ Most of such stuff is faked. Mine was not. It was straight reporting and the personal stuff was what had been asked for by the editors. “Wilson’s estimation was also based upon ''Fact’s'' inclusion of the “The Old Man at the Bridge” story from ''Ken'', “not a news dispatch” at all.{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}Speaking at Carnegie Hall before the showing of a rough cut of ''The Spanish Earth'', shortly after his first trip to Spain and so very much in the context of his wartime work, Hemingway defined the writer’s problem as “project[ing] [what is true] in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2002|p=193}}

Personal, anecdotal journalism had been Hemingway’s signature style from his earliest days filing reports, in the early 1920s from Paris, when his editor at the ''Toronto Star Weekly'' “encouraged [. . .] what Hemingway did best: write about himself in the act of being a reporter.”{{sfn|Reynolds|1989|p=45}}How could he expect that NANA would expect anything else, if indeed NANA did expect anything else? In the Spanish Civil War he at least maintained his eyewitness posture; in World War II, however, he couldn’t keep himself out. His first piece, about D-Day, begins, “No one remembers the date of the Battle of Shiloh. But the day ''we took'' Fox Green beach was the sixth of June, and the wind was blowing hard out of the northwest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1967|p=340}}His venue too—''Collier’s'' magazine—and the fact that he had not written anything in three years further contributed to the story-like nature of the WWII stories, in which he figured as a protagonist—not to mention the stories and involvement he couldn’t write about, armed and running around France more of a free agent than his guerilla-hero Robert Jordan ever was (though he began to transform these experiences into fiction in several unpublished stories). In wartime China in 1943, filing articles for Ralph Ingersoll’s short-lived ''PM'' New York afternoon daily, Hemingway did not even care to be called a news reporter.{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=99}}

It should be mentioned that Hemingway and Matthews enjoyed a great{{pg|432|433}}friendship and working relationship. Hemingway usually brought Matthews, who did not have a car, on his excursions. When Matthews left Madrid for a break in mid April 1937, he had already ensured Hemingway would provide coverage to the ''Times'' through NANA. For one thing, Hemingway did not have to worry about Matthews as a rival for the history books. He could endorse his friends’ book, ''Two Wars and More to Come'', and praise him as “the ablest and the bravest war correspondent writing today “who “when the fakers are all dead [. . .] will be read in the schools” (Advertisement 21) because Matthews posed no threat to Hemingway’s own chances to be read in the schools. The only brief Hemingway ever expressed he really reserved for Matthews’ editors, for not wanting his Teruel street-fighting story and for cutting references to himself in Matthews’ Teruel dispatches so that it appeared only Matthews had been there.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=462}}

As for Hemingway’s neglecting to name everyone with him for every story, the ''Times'' cutting of his name suggests that such exactitude was hardly a priority. A paper had no incentive for announcing the fact that a competitor’s
correspondent stood beside its own to see and report the same
events. NANA changed at least one vague Hemingway “we,” which admits
to the presence of others, to “this correspondent”
—we can hardly fault Hemingway for working in the spirit of his
employer’s standards.{{sfn|NANA|1938|p=}}{{efn|“we” in typescript and radiogram (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 1 and Folder 25).}} Do readers care that Matthews, Delmer, Gellhorn,
and others were there? The story’s effect and the limited word count also
weighed against such roll calls. One editor chose not to clutter the dispatch
on the great retreat across the Ebro with all the names of the American International Brigade volunteers Hemingway encountered, an omission of
Content more far serious than that of omitted correspondent names.{{efn| Radiogram insert dateline 4 April 1938 (HRC: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 25).}} Hemingway
often gave the names of the reporters with him, such as at Teruel;
nor was he the only reporter to sometimes neglect to do so. Martha Gellhorn,
for example, used a vague “we” and singled herself out as the primary
participant in some of her stories.

By using first-person reportage Hemingway—and Matthews and Gellhorn And most of the group covering the war—were operating solidly within
convention. William Stott, in ''Documentary Expression and Thirties America'',
calls this first-person ''participant observer'' technique “the most common sort
of documentary reportage in the thirties” that worked “by vicarious persuasion:
the writer partook of the events he reported and bared his feelings
and attitudes to influence the reader’s own.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=178-9}}{{efn|He specifically includes Hemingway et al (180).}} Stott also observes {{pg|433|434}}another technique to enable documentary reportage to “talk to us, and convince us that we, our deepest interests, are engaged,” in the use of the second person: “Thirties documentaries constantly address ‘you,’ the ‘you’ who is we the audience, and exhorts, wheedles, begs us to identify, pity, participate.” His examples include Dorothy Parker’s Spanish Civil War writing, and Hemingway’s 1935 “First-Hand Report on the Florida Hurricane.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=27-8}} A number of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches employ the second-person as a way of bringing the reader along for the ride.

Hemingway’s dispatches used personal pronouns more artfully than is generally recognized. “A New Kind of War,” which William Braasch Watson notes as having been “[w]ritten with more care and imagination” than its predecessors, begins in second person: “The window of the hotel is open and, as you lie in bed, you hear the firing in the front line seventeen blocks away.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=29}} He takes “you” outside, to see the damage and the dead from the bombing. “Someone makes a joke about missing teeth and someone else says not to make that joke. And everyone has the feeling that characterizes war. It wasn’t me, see? It wasn’t me.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} The tension between the first person and second-person pronouns—the movement toward identification with “you” and the insistence that “it wasn’t me”—continues in the next line. Here the reader is at once still in the narrator’s shoes, but strangely distanced from the narrator through biographical tidbit and, at the same time, asked to see himself in the enemy: “The Italian dead up on the Guadalajara weren’t you although Italian dead, because of where you had spent your boyhood, always seemed, still, like Our Dead.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} It is worth quoting at length the dispatch’s transition to first person:
<blockquote>
After the shell that lit on the sidewalk in front of the hotel you got a beautiful double corner room on that side, twice the size of the one you’d had, for less than a dollar. It wasn’t me they killed. See? No. Not me. It wasn’t me anymore.

Then in a hospital given by the American Friends of Spanish Democracy located out behind the Morata front along the road
to Valencia they said, “Raven wants to see you.”

“Do I know him?”

“I don’t think so,” they said. “But he wants to see you.”

“Where is he?”

“Upstairs.”{{pg|434|435}}In the room upstairs they are giving a blood transfusion to a man with a very gray face who lay on a cot with his arm out looking away from the gurgling bottle and moaning in a very impersonal way. He moaned mechanically and at regular intervals and it did not seem to be him that made the sound. His lips did not move.

“Where’s Raven?” I asked.

“I’m here,” said Raven.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=31}}</blockquote>
The piece simply could not have sustained the second-person for the remaining five pages. More significantly, for this deeply personal exchange between the writer and the faceless, eyeless soldier, Hemingway could not hide in the rhetorical device of the second-person. In the process, he effects a reversal of the usual pronoun game; instead of identifying with the all embracing “you,” we leave that trick behind and become fully attached to
the narratorial “I” as ourselves, as we might not have been had the article
begun in the first person. And even as the narrator identifies himself by name
for the only time in any of the dispatches—“Hemingway,” and later
“Ernest”—as decidedly not ourselves. We do not say, ''It isn’t me''. The historian
Hugh Thomas notes “the refreshing candour” of Hemingway’s naming
himself “in the world of the International Brigades, where no one’s name
seemed to be truthfully given.”{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=591}}{{efn|For Watson, the dispatch “seems, in fact, on the verge of becoming a story” (29).}}

A year later Hemingway’s “Tortosa Calmly Awaits Assault” resists admitting
the city’s imminent fall. Yet it does so anyway, by subtly alluding to the
wartime rhetoric of sacrificed blood irrigating the earth and rejuvenating
Spain. Such rhetoric was common during the war, appearing in speeches,
print, and poetry. Many of the poems in Cary Nelson’s anthology ''The Wound
and the Dream: Sixty Years of American Poems about the Civil War'' join in the
Spanish and international chorus’s general connection between Republican
soldiers and the land, and the particular singing of their dead nourishing
the land. We find such language in La Pasionaria’s farewell address to the International Brigades, her epilogue to ''The Book of the XV Brigade'', and Hemingway’s famous eulogy “On the American Dead in Spain”: “For our dead are
a part of the earth of Spain now and the earth of Spain can never die. Each
winter it will seem to die and each spring it will come alive again. Our dead
will live with it forever.”{{sfn|Nelson|1994|p=3}}{{efn| Reprinted in Bruccoli 76 and Nelson, Remembering 37 (the drafts at the JFK are titled “The Dead at Jarama”). In addition to the poems in Nelson’s anthology, see the excerpt from Boris Todrin’s “Spanish Sowing” in Guttmann (Wounded 179–180).}} The Tortosa dispatch implies the deaths of{{pg|435|436}}many Republican soldiers in its final paragraph’s description of the newborn onions:
<blockquote>The artillery was picking up a little now. Two came in at a fairly useful place and as the smoke blew away ahead and settled through the trees, you picked an armful of spring onions from a field beside the trail that led to the Tortosa road. They were the first onions of the spring and peeling one I found they were plump white and not too strong. The Ebro Delta has a fine rich land, and where the onions grow, tomorrow will be a battle.
{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=84}}</blockquote>

The echo is quiet, and perhaps unconscious, but there nevertheless. The opening boastfulness of “American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents”
should be taken somewhat ironically. The dispatch begins by announcing
that for “two days we have been doing the most dangerous thing
you can do in this war. That is keep close behind an unstabilized line where
the enemy are attacking with mechanized forces.” Then, a few pages later,
we learn about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade survivors of the spring 1938
Nationalist offensive that took Bob Merriman and eventually reached the
Mediterranean Sea. Reading about these survivors creeping through enemy
camps, stepping on a sleeping German soldier’s hand, sprinting “across an
open field toward the Ebro bank and being sniped at by artillery controlled
by an observation plane overhead” and then “the desperate swimming of
the Ebro” naked, we are asked to place the correspondent’s plight in due perspective.{{sfn|Watson|1988|pp=71-2}} This story certainly escapes the charge of a monotonous
battle and bombing scene; its switch from apparently boastful to
awe-struck witness feels almost deliberately self-conscious. Other choice selfironic
moments come in the dispatches of that pre-Teruel quiet fall of 1938.
The one titled “Hemingway, Covering War, Tells of Brush with Death” has little
to report from Madrid other than the new aftershave brand he is trying.
In “Loyalists’ Drive Seen Progressing as Planned,” he writes that “Shells are
all much the same and if they don’t hit you there is no story and if they do
you won’t have to write it.” {{sfn|Watson|1988|p=58}}

Hemingway’s dispatches are sometimes monotonous because his war was
Usually monotonous—as wars are most of the time. It should also be kept in
mind that scholars reviewing Hemingway’s NANA dispatches one after{{pg|436|437}}another do not relive the original reading experience. Hemingway wrote dispatches sporadically, papers did not run all of his dispatches, papers edited and cut them, and readers read at least a couple of papers’ worth of other articles in between. He told Edmund Wilson as much in defending himself against Wilson’s critique of the selected (and heavily edited and cut) dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'' without his consent: “If you are being paid to be shot at and write about it you are supposed to mention the shooting. [. . .] But I do not go in for re-printing journalism.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}

If we can in this way better understand his style, and at least explain it if
not excuse it, we similarly ought to try to contextualize—and perhaps
excuse—the moral problem. The two issues here are the specific condemnation
of Hemingway’s silence about Republican atrocities and the general
question of biased reporting (the latter of which has already partially been
addressed).

Hemingway knew, as Donaldson writes, that mentioning the atrocities
“would arouse anticommunist sentiments back in the States and effectively
undermine any possibility of American intervention.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=394}} It is also doubtful
that reporting them would have stopped them. But reporting Republican
atrocities from Spain was not possible for the simple reason that all dispatches
went through a government censor. Matthews cabled his editors
from Paris in May 1937 to tell them that “censorship does not permit us to
say when the ‘telefonica’ is hit. So whenever you see reference in my
despatches [sic] to ‘an important building in the center of the city’ or words
to that effect, the cable desk can know that it is the telefonica.” {{sfn|Matthews|1937c|p=}} As already noted, by July he would cable “CENSORSHIP
STRICTER” as the ban on mentioning internationals went into effect. {{sfn|Matthews|1937d|p=}}{{sfn|Matthews|1937e|p=}} Cowles’ memoir confirms the
aggressive censorship, observing that it limited journalists to exactly the kind of material Hemingway wrote about:
<blockquote>There were frequent attempts to “beat the censor” by employing American slang expressions, but this came to an end when a Canadian girl joined the staff. The International Brigades were not allowed to be publicized; no reference could be made to Russian armaments, and buildings and streets which suffered
bombardments could not be identified.</blockquote>{{pg|437|438}}<blockquote>It was only in the realm of the human interest story that the journalists had a free hand. They could describe bombardments to their heart’s content.{{sfn|Cowles|1941|p=20}}</blockquote>
Hemingway and everyone else—to reserve incrimination for Hemingway is hardly just. No correspondent covering Republican Spain reported suspicious imprisonments and disappearances by government agents.

Hemingway, through Joris Ivens and ''The Spanish Earth'' project, had better
access to officials than most. Had he been able somehow to report such
activity, he would have lost that access and would probably have been kicked
out of the country. His fame would have likely prevented his own officially
sponsored disappearance, though he still worried, especially as so many of
such crimes on the Republican side occurred from free agents. When Jasper
Wood printed the anarchist F.A.I. banner in the limited edition book version
of ''The Spanish Earth'', Hemingway expressed his anxieties bluntly in a letter
to Jasper on August 20, 1938. It is hardly “petulant,” he scolded, “not to wish
to be shot.”{{sfn|Davison|1988|p=128}} Hostility in the Republic against the anarchists
ran high; after the Barcelona May Day conflict, the government’s foreign
minister told U.S. Ambassador Claude Bowers that “anarchist revolt
throughout Catalonia and not only expected but welcomed as an opportunity
to liquidate the anarchists who have been hostile from the beginning.”
{{sfn|NA|1954|p=292}}{{efn| The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State, 5 May 1937.}}

It is possible that Hemingway’s dispatch stating that “not one friend [. . .]
has been executed or is missing” was his clever means of reporting
the rumors and indeed the general fact while evading the censors, as in this very dispatch he acknowledged the presence of a censor after a bombardment.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=34}}
Matthews, on the other hand, never found a way to mention the
censors or admit even the possibility of people gone missing in the Republic.
Peter Moreira has observed that in a 1943 dispatch Hemingway related a remark by a British officer about the Chinese Nationalist government’s being
“hopeless on the offensive” because censorship “prevented American reporters
From actually saying that the Nationalists wouldn’t attack, surmising that by telling this anecdote Hemingway could sneak such a judgment into
his reports.”{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=77}} In Spain, censors aside, the eyewitness standard and his
own safety and continuing ability to report the war, and, yes, his passionate
support of the government contributed to his decision. He could have written
about government abuses from the states, but then could not return to{{pg|438|439}}cover the war and support the cause—a justification other journalists, those who did not return after the spring of 1937, did not enjoy. In his mind too, knowing what he heard of fascist atrocities, any reportage against the government lessening its chances of victory through killing hopes of increased international aid would have led to more deaths at Franco’s hands that the much smaller number inspired by fifth column paranoia.{{efn|''Hemingway’s Second War'' discusses in greater depth Hemingway’s politics and his falling out
with John Dos Passos over the execution of José Robles}}.

The accusation that Hemingway did not write about Republican atrocities
because he was saving it for his fiction I find baseless (Knightley 232;
Baker 402).{{sfn|Knightley|2004|p=232}}{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=402}}{{efn|Hemingway’s casual comment to colleagues calling dibs on Pepe Quintanilla, the executioner of
Madrid, is not sufficient evidence.}}Carolyn Moorehead, in her biography of Martha Gellhorn, describes
the climate for the Madrid correspondents that first spring: “And so,
day by day, the correspondents walked a thin and nervous line between truth,
evasions, and propaganda, telling one another that though it was not all right
if things were made up and presented as true, it was acceptable to describe
what you wanted, provided it was true and provided your readers were aware
of your position.”{{sfn|Moorehead|2003|p=125}} My own sense is that they did not walk the line quite
so nervously; their passionate commitment, and their principles of position
disclosure and the eyewitness standard, made that walk relatively easy.

The problem of ''committed journalism'', even sixty years later, has not been
resolved—as anyone paying attention to the media and world affairs well
knows. One person’s truth is another person’s propaganda. Certainly, as
Knightley notes, reporting from “the heart” affects one’s judgment.{{sfn|Knightley|2004|pp=234-5}}
Yet to attempt “balance,” per the edits to Matthews’ Guadalajara piece, betrays
one’s believed truth. Furthermore, the kind of reporting done by the
correspondents with the Republic—committed, one-sided, optimistic,
heroic, human interest work by embedded writers—would be practiced
widely and without reserve during World War II. Such narrative journalism,
with roots in Louise May Alcott’s “Hospital Sketches” series published in the
''Boston Commonwealth'', and more immediately in 1930s social documentary
writing whose “essence” is “not information”, anticipated postwar
new journalism’s adoption of novelistic narrative technique for nonfiction
which culminated with such wartime books as Norman Mailer’s ''Armies of
the Night'' and Michael Herr’s ''Dispatches''.{{sfn|Stott|1986|p=11}} Some of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches
fall in this line of development.

Today we might categorize such writing under the awkward umbrella
term ''creative nonfiction''. That term certainly fits the mixed bag of nonfiction
narratives and commentaries Hemingway published during the war in
Ken magazine. These pieces are essays, not journalism, several of which{{pg|439|440}}directly appeal for support for the Republic, and most of which really deal
with the approaching world war. ''Ken'' wanted “precisely the kind of opinion
articles he could not write for NANA.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=433}} His article, “The
Cardinal Picks a Winner,” shows a photo of a row of dead children from
Barcelona and another one with Nationalist officers saluting and Catholic officials
with raised hands, apparently making the fascist salute as well. He
ends ironically: “So I ''don’t believe'' the people shown in the photo can really
be making it. I would rather prefer to think that the photograph was faked.”
{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=436}} When Hemingway argues in “A Program for U.S. Realism” that the
United States should stay out of the next war except to stuff its pockets
through arms sales, one has to wonder, given his call and the democratic nations’
failure to save Spain, if we are to sniff sarcasm here.

The language of the dispatches, with their corrective intent against
Franco’s propaganda, does risk propagandizing. Hemingway’s optimism and
anti-fascism certainly colored his correspondence work. His criticism of the
anarchist and POUM militia for their inactivity on the Aragon front, for example,
sounds a lot like the Spanish Communist Party’s.{{efn|It at least sounds almost exactly like Dolores Ibarruri in her memoir. To the anarchists’ complaint
that they had no arms, she retorts “that they had more arms than did many other fronts. . . .
What they didn’t have and what they were constantly demanding were airplanes and tanks .And
they didn’t have them because the Republic government didn’t have them either, except for those
it received as aid from the Soviet Union” (238–284). Yet the various Catalonia militia were not
as well equipped with small arms as the more regular Popular Army units, and because of the
terrain tanks and planes were in fact necessary.}}
But unlike
Matthews, Hemingway limited his reports within the Republic to military
matters. Hemingway may have generally condemned the anarchists in his
nonfiction, considering their activity as hampering the war effort, but he
never repeated the accusation of their collaboration with the rebels, as
Matthews had done. And when Hemingway commented on the Bareclona
crisis, he referred only to the government—not the communists, as
Matthews had done.{{efn|Hemingway’s comments in “Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win” NANA staff
correspondent dispatch. Though arguably he was propagandizing by hiding the communist influence—
to mention the communists to an American audience would not gain sympathy for the
cause.}}Nor did he write articles asserting the limited role of
the communists in the government, or explaining Spanish anarchism, also
as Matthews had done.{{efn|An article on the communists’ limited role appeared in late November 1937, as discussed in a
missive from The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State on 2
Dec. 1937 (United States 461). Matthews’ “Anarchism: Spain’s Enigma” appeared in the New York
Times 22 Aug. 1937: 6, 14.}}

During one of Hemingway’s stateside breaks between trips to Spain, his
children asked if he was a “tool” of Stalin, an accusation tossed by a schoolmate
who, presumably parroting his or her parents, probably understood
the term no better than Hemingway’s children. {{sfn|Hemingway|nd|p=}}
Hemingway believed in the Republic’s potential, but he was never a dupe of
the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) or Comintern. As did many others, he
accepted PCE’s presence in the government for its discipline and organization
toward winning the war, and he understood the material necessity for
Comintern’s support. It should also be noted, as historians Hugh Thomas
and Helen Graham have reminded us, that the communism associated with
the Republic wasn’t particularly communist anyway.{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=628}}{{sfn|Graham|2002|p=184}} {{pg|440|441}}

Hemingway declined to follow Joris Ivens’ suggestion that he write a
dispatch on the significant role of the political commissars in the Republican
military, even though that would have meant
featuring his brave new friend Gustav Regler.{{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=}} Hemingway also, in a letter
justifying his work to Jack Wheeler at NANA, wrote about choosing not to
send a dispatch he had written because it might strike readers as propaganda
“no matter how true” (Letter to Jack Wheeler).{{sfn|Hemingway|1938b|p=}}

Hemingway went to Spain to see the war himself and to support the Republic
through his ambulance fund. The paychecks from NANA and the
fundraising from ''The Spanish Earth'' helped. Whatever propagandistic streak
colors the dispatches pales in comparison to the documentary. The filmmaker,
Joris Ivens, was well established in European communist circles. The
documentary genre then and now has occupied a slippery position between
the extremes of impossible-to-achieve empirical nonfiction and of the outright
fictionalized. Evaluations of Hemingway’s journalism are informed by
knowledge of ''The Spanish Earth'' and the ''Ken'' essays to the detriment of the
journalism. And the very nature of the slippery documentary genre may enable
the film to escape opprobrium. It wasn’t reportage; it was altogether
something else. But for that matter, Hemingway’s dispatches weren’t purely
reportage either, and if not ''altogether'' something else, still something else,
and should be reckoned with accordingly.

== Notes ==
{{notelist|20em}}

==Citations==
{{Reflist|15em}}

==Works Cited==
{{refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker
|first=Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Bruccoli |first=Matthew |date=2006 |title=Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame |url= |location=Columbia |publisher=U of South Caronia P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Cowles |first=Virginia |date=1941 |title=Looking for Trouble |url= |location=New York
|publisher=Harper & Brothers |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Davison |first=Richard Allan |title=The Publication of Hemingway’s The Spanish Earth: An Untold Story |url= |journal=Hemingway Review
|volume=7.2 |issue= |date=1988
|pages=122-130 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson
|first=Scott |date=2009 |title=Fitzgerald & Hemingway: Works and Days |url= |location=New York |publisher=Columbia UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Franklin |first=Sidney |date=1952 |title=Bullfighter from Brooklyn |url= |location=New York |publisher=Prentice-Hall |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Graham |first=Helen |date=2002 |title=The Spanish Republic at War 1936-1939 |url= |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Guttmann |first=Allen |date=1962 |title=The Wound in the Heart: American and the Spanish Civil War |url= |location=New York |publisher=Free Press of Glencoe |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1967 |title=By-Line: Ernest Hemingway |url= |location=New York |publisher=Scibner |pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Trogdon
|editor-first=Robert W.
|author-mask=1
|title=Fascism is a Lie
|url=
|journal=Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference |volume==
|issue=
|date=2002
|pages=193-6
|location=New York
|publisher=Carroll & Graf
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 May 1937
|chapter=Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=nd
|chapter=The Home Front
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938a
|chapter=Letter to Edmund Wilson
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=2 June 1938b
|chapter=Letter to Jack Wheeler
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=14 Feb 1939
|chapter=On the American Dead in Spain
|title=TS. New Masses
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Baker
|editor-first=Carlos
|author-mask=1
|date=2003
|chapter=The Hadely Mowrer
|title=Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Scribner
|pages=462-3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ibarruri
|first=Dolores
|date=1966
|title=They Shall Not Pass: The Autobiography of La Pasionaria
|url=
|location=United States
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|date=1969
|title=The Camera and I
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|author-mask=1
|date=26 Apr 1937
|chapter=Letter to Ernest Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|date=20 Nov 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Bertrand Weaver
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=12 Oct 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=25 Apr 1939
|chapter=Letter to M.B. Tenney
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Apr 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Knightley
|first=Phillip
|date=2004
|title=The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq
|url=
|location=Baltimore
|publisher=John Hopkins
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=
|date=9 Apr 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=TS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=11 Apr 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=8 May 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=6 July 1937d
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=July 1937e
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=22 March 1939
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 9
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=
|date=20 May 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=20 Dec 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 5
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Sep 1937c
|chapter=Note to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moorehead
|first=Caroline
|date=2003
|title=Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Henry Holt
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moreira
|first=Peter
|date=2006
|title=Hemingway on the China Front: His WWII Spy Mission with Martha Gellhorn
|url=
|location=Washington D.C.
|publisher=Potomac Books
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|date=5 Feb 1937
|chapter=Promotion Box: Hemingway, For Immediate Release
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|author-mask=1
|date=4 Apr 1938
|chapter=Promotion Box: American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|editor-last=Nelson
|editor-first=Card
|date=1994
|title=Remembering Spain: Hemingway’s Civil War Eulogy and the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
|url=
|location=Urbana
|publisher=U of Illinois
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Reynolds
|first=Michael
|date=1989
|title=Hemingway: The Paris Years
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Norton
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Stott
|first=William
|date=1986
|title=Documentary Expression and Thirties America
|url=
|location=Chicago
|publisher=U of Chicago P
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Thomas
|first=Hugh
|date=2001
|title=The Spanish Civil War, Rev. ed.
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Modern Library
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine
|last=''Two Wars and More to Come''
|first=
|date=24 Jan 1938
|title=Best Sellers of the Week Here and Elsewhere
|type=Advertisement
|url=
|magazine=New York Times
|pages=
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=NA
|first=
|title=United States. Dept. of State
|url=
|journal= Foreign Relations of the Untied States, 1937 |volume=1
|issue=General
|date=1954
|pages=
|location=Washington
|publisher=GPO
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Watson
|first=William Braasch
|title=Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches
|url=
|journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=7.2
|issue=
|date=1988
|pages=4-121
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Wheeler
|first=John H.
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938
|chapter=Letter to Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection, Box 3 Folder 14
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}

{{refend}}
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches

2025-04-20T02:09:17Z

MerAtticus: spacing issue

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{{byline|last=Vernon |first=Alex |abstract=The Spanish Civil War began in July 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally-restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy. By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches.}}

{{dc|dc=T|HE SPANISH CIVIL WAR BEGAN ON}} 17-18 JULY, 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy, to collaborate with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens on the pro-Republican documentary ''The Spanish Earth'', and to pursue his fledgling love affair with Martha Gellhorn.

By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches for NANA.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=4}}{{efn|Quotations from the NANA dispatches follow the Diplomatic Text established by William Braasch’s “Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches.” I prefer NANA’s titles rather than Watson’s. For my disagreements with some of Watson’s datings, see my comments on specific dispatches in ''Hemingway’s Second War.''}}The secondary sources habitually judge them inferior journalism. Carlos Baker in the first Hemingway biography, for example, complains that the dialogue was “so heavily stamped with personal mannerisms as to be of doubtful authenticity.” Baker sees a “curious monotony in his stories of battles and bombardments,” a gratuitous use of graphic imagery “to shock his readers,” and “a note of triumphant boastfulness” in reporting proximity to danger. He also faults Hemingway for “often hint[ing] he was alone when in fact he was usually with Martha Gellhorn, Matthews, and Delmer.” Hemingway lacked Dos Passos’ “eye for telling details” and the “meticulous exactitude and inclusiveness that characterized the best work of Herbert Matthews and Sefton Delmer.”{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}

Philip Knightley’s ''The First Casualty'', the standard history of war correspondence, paraphrases Baker but with a trouncing final judgment:{{pg|427|428}}Hemingway’s “performance as a war correspondent was abysmally bad.” But Knightley goes beyond “technical” dissatisfaction to moral condemnation. Not just “unjustifiably optimistic”—an excusable offense—Hemingway’s reporting was “unforgivable” in its “total failure to report the Communist persecution, imprisonment, and summary execution of ‘untrustworthy elements’ on the Republican side, when he knew this was happening and when disclosing it might well have prevented further horrors like this.”
{{sfn|Knightley|2004 |pp=231–32}}{{efn|In my view, Knightley does not sufficiently acknowledge his paraphrasing of Baker.}}

Such criticisms in the final analysis might bear out. As Scott Donaldson writes, Hemingway advanced the Republican cause in his dispatches by eliciting “the deepest possible feelings of horror and of sympathy for the victims” of the Madrid bombardment; his “undue optimism” often “ignored Loyalist defeats and exaggerated the importance of its victories”; and “he repeatedly called attention to the participation of Italians and Germans on Franco’s side.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=426}} It also served as a recruitment tool—Milton Wolff, for example, acknowledged the strong influence Hemingway’s dispatches had on his decision to volunteer. Nevertheless, I think it a worthwhile exercise to attend a little more studiously to Hemingway’s dispatches, their context, and their artistry. I don’t necessarily intend to reverse the general opinion of the correspondence, only to achieve a better and more sympathetic understanding.

Herbert Matthews’ reporting for the ''New York Times'' will serve as a convenient comparison for two reasons. First, because both Baker and Knightley use Matthews’ journalism as the standard of excellence to pass judgment on Hemingway’s; and second, because the two worked practically side-by-side, seeing and reporting on many of the same events. In fact so closely did they work together that NANA sometimes complained that the ''Times'' was not buying Hemingway’s pieces because they resembled Matthews,’ and at one point Matthews’ own editors at the Times suspected him of plagiarizing Hemingway.{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|pp=411, 420}} A note from Matthews’ assigned editor Raymond McCaw provides, in two columns, seven quite similar passages from Hemingway’s Aragon front dispatches of September 13 and 14 with Matthews’ of September 14, with a penciled note at the bottom: “a deadly parallel if you ask me.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937c|p=}} Edwin James, the managing editor and McCaw’s boss, eventually agreed with Matthews’ defense: “It is quite apparent that you did not file any duplicate of the Hemingway story, or vice versa. As I understand it, the similarity arose from the fact that you{{pg|428|429}}both went to see the same show and saw it at the same time [sic], under the same conditions.”{{sfn|James|1937b|p=}}

Matthews’ dispatches ring of Republican bias as much if not more than anything Hemingway ever filed. The ''Times'' received many letters to the editor complaining about Matthews’ undisguised politics, which also gave serious concern to some of his editors. His description of the Republican May 1937 infighting in Barcelona is a striking example of how his news veered into propaganda and shows just how much he passed along the government’s version of events. The government’s “BLOODLESS TRIUMPH FOUGHT WITH RECOGNIZEDWEAPONS OF DEMOCRACY” turned out to be blatantly false, as the government and the “COMMUNISTS [WHO] DISTINGUISHED THEMSELVES” resorted to violent suppression. His blaming the uprising on the anarchist CNT working as Franco operatives parrots the government’s and the communist party’s public position, even though both charges—that the anarchists precipitated the events and that they were under Nationalist direction—were also false. His dispatch’s optimistic close also equivocates the political reality: “NEW GOVERNMENT HAS TAKEN POWER WHICH APPEARS TOVE CONFIDENCE VAST MAJORITY SPANIARDS IN LOYALIST TERRITORY AND TIS HOPED WILL GAIN EQUAL CONFIDENCE ABROAD STOP VIOLENCE AND REVOLUTION BEEN REPUDIATED AND NEWAND FAR HOPEFULLER PERIOD SEEMS BEGINNING.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937a|p=}}The ''Times'', knowing full well the one-sided coverage of a correspondent writing from one side of the conflict, had a reporter on both sides: Matthews with the Republicans, and William Carney with the Nationalists. They got their facts right (or wrong) as often as the other, their editors concluded; and they inspired about the same number of letters of complaint.{{sfn|James|1937a|p=}}{{sfn|James|1939|p=}}

Furthermore, Matthews’ dispatches received a great deal of substantive editorial revisions. One of Matthews’ Teruel reports had to be cut for length, as McCaw informed James: “This bird sent 2844 words on the same facts which Hemingway covered much better in less than half that number. I wonder if Matthews thinks the paper is thriving, and that cable tolls do not matter a damn. Of course, it had to be cut for space anyway.” McCaw most likely refers here to Matthews’ dispatch corresponding to Hemingway’s “The Attack on Teruel,” though Matthews’ account of the fall of Teruel is also much longer (and more long-winded) than Hemingway’s, and just as personal in terms of describing the dangers{{pg|429|430}} he faced. Indeed its length allows him to share even more of the action he endured.{{sfn|McCaw|1937b|p=}}

Raymond McCaw held a general professional disagreement with Matthews perhaps tainted with over zealousness. Whether a personal or political motive informed that disagreement can’t be determined from the evidence I’ve seen. It is also clear that McCaw’s charges bear some validity—that any responsible editor could have easily and reasonably taken issue where McCaw did. One of the more interesting examples concerns Matthews’ piece on Guadalajara. Because he only saw evidence on Franco’s side of Italian forces, he only reported on Italians. But the ''Times'' editors heard from other sources that German soldiers also participated in the March offensive. They thought it prudent, from this confusion, to change (nine times) “Italian” to “Rebel,” “the foe,” or “Insurgent.” When Matthews saw the published piece he wrote a strenuous objection. In some instances the editors changed paraphrased quotations from his sources. One large paragraph omitted by the editors stressed the first-hand nature of the information, and Matthews underlines the key words: “All day, at every place we stopped and no matter whom we talked to or what we saw, there was only one label—Italian. The dead bodies, the prisoners, the material of every kind, the men who had occupied Brihuega and then fled were Italian and nothing but Italian.” Here and elsewhere in his original story, Matthews emphasizes the “personal knowledge” of its information.{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}{{efn|James supported McCaw on these changes, though later acknowledged that altering quoted sources was perhaps unwarranted(29 April 1937; Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3).}}Yet Matthews did not report on the foreigners fighting for the Republic—it was in fact the Italian Garibali Battalion that routed Franco’s Italians. We might surmise government censorship behind this silence, though Matthews would not cable news of “CENSORSHIP STRICTER” and “BAN ON MENTIONING INTERNATIONALS INCLUDING AMERICANS INSTITUTED TODAY” until July.{{sfn|Matthews|1937b|p=}}Perhaps he cautiously self-censored, or politically self-censored for the same reasons the government would eventually ban mention. Still, his stridency about the omission of foreigners on one side is striking given his knowledge of their contribution to the other side. For this reason too, and his omission of other nationalities on the insurgent side, it seemed only fair to his editor “to stand on the statement that the majority of the Rebels were Italians and let it go at that.”{{sfn|James|1937c|p=}} A reasonable decision.

Throughout his correspondence to his editors and his several books,{{pg|430|431}}Matthews maintained a passionate defense of his eyewitness journalistic standard, a position those close to him understood. “Matthews never believed anything he had not seen with his own eyes,” Joris Ivens wrote. “He never saw his job as reporter as one that permitted him to sit in his hotel and read the handouts of the War Ministry.” {{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=112}} Sidney Franklin recalls that some writers wrote their pieces before arriving in Madrid, and came only for the “legitimacy” of the Madrid dateline.{{sfn|Franklin|1952|p=232}}And Matthews hated, on principle, having his name attached to an article that violated the integrity of his witness. The only way to achieve objectivity, for Matthews, was to acknowledge one’s subjective perspective. Writing to his publisher, Matthews argued that “the full documentary value” of his coverage was lost when the editors altered his submissions for “the apparent necessity of giving more or less equal space to both sides.”{{sfn|Matthews|1939|p=}}

As with Matthews, so too Hemingway. Indeed the commitment to subjectivity
fit quite well with Hemingway’s modernist aesthetics. If Hemingway
focused the dispatches on his perspective—on his own experience dodging
artillery—more than Matthews and more than most, he did so at least partially
to fulfill expectations. NANA approached him, after all, for his name
and personality as much as whatever he would write. Before he even left the
states it pitched him to potential publications, sending out a promotional release with text to be used alongside his forthcoming dispatches and suggesting
they include a photograph: “Mr. Hemingway’s assignment is to get both from the bombed towns and bombed trenches the human story of the war, not just an account of the game being played by general staffs with pins
and a map.”{{sfn|NANA|1937|p=}} NANA also released each individual dispatch with a one-sentence “precede” about the “famous” or “noted” author. Ernest Hemingway was not writing as Herbert Mathews, ace reporter; Hemingway was writing as Ernest Hemingway, famous author of novels and stories well known to be drawn from his own experiences.

That he understood this to be his assignment is further evidenced by a
cable Matthews sent to his ''Times'' editors on April 9, 1937, concerning the
Loyalist attack: “WORKED CONJOINTL WITH HEMINGWAY TODAY HE SENDING EYEWITNESS DESCRIPTION WHILE EYE SENT GENERAL STRATEGY.”{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}When a year later the ''Times'' asked NANA to ensure Hemingway’s reports differed from Matthews, NANA complied by asking Hemingway “to emphasize color rather than straight reporting” not necessarily out of dissatisfaction with Hemingway’s reportage as Baker contends,{{efn|Baker’s notes date the Times request to NANA as 8 Apr. 1938, and NANA’s to Hemingway as 15
Apr. 1938 (Princeton University, Firestone Library: Box 18, Folder 8 “1938”), the date of “The Bombing of Tortosa” dispatch.}} but to increase{{pg|431|432}}the chance of selling to the ''Times'' and indeed to ensure the spirit of NANA’s original arrangement with Hemingway. {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}Far from dissatisfied, NANA wrote Hemingway at the end of August 1938 a letter of agreement for his coverage of “a general European war” should it break out, “written in your colorful style” (Hemingway was in Paris, on his way to Spain for the last time during the war).{{sfn|Wheeler|1938|p=}}When Edmund Wilson criticized the selected dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'', Hemingway wrote him that “I was paid to write what are called ‘eye witness’ accounts . . .what is called, or was asked for as ‘color stuff.’ Most of such stuff is faked. Mine was not. It was straight reporting and the personal stuff was what had been asked for by the editors. “Wilson’s estimation was also based upon ''Fact’s'' inclusion of the “The Old Man at the Bridge” story from ''Ken'', “not a news dispatch” at all.{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}Speaking at Carnegie Hall before the showing of a rough cut of ''The Spanish Earth'', shortly after his first trip to Spain and so very much in the context of his wartime work, Hemingway defined the writer’s problem as “project[ing] [what is true] in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2002|p=193}}

Personal, anecdotal journalism had been Hemingway’s signature style from his earliest days filing reports, in the early 1920s from Paris, when his editor at the ''Toronto Star Weekly'' “encouraged [. . .] what Hemingway did best: write about himself in the act of being a reporter.”{{sfn|Reynolds|1989|p=45}}How could he expect that NANA would expect anything else, if indeed NANA did expect anything else? In the Spanish Civil War he at least maintained his eyewitness posture; in World War II, however, he couldn’t keep himself out. His first piece, about D-Day, begins, “No one remembers the date of the Battle of Shiloh. But the day ''we took'' Fox Green beach was the sixth of June, and the wind was blowing hard out of the northwest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1967|p=340}}His venue too—''Collier’s'' magazine—and the fact that he had not written anything in three years further contributed to the story-like nature of the WWII stories, in which he figured as a protagonist—not to mention the stories and involvement he couldn’t write about, armed and running around France more of a free agent than his guerilla-hero Robert Jordan ever was (though he began to transform these experiences into fiction in several unpublished stories). In wartime China in 1943, filing articles for Ralph Ingersoll’s short-lived ''PM'' New York afternoon daily, Hemingway did not even care to be called a news reporter.{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=99}}

It should be mentioned that Hemingway and Matthews enjoyed a great{{pg|432|433}}friendship and working relationship. Hemingway usually brought Matthews, who did not have a car, on his excursions. When Matthews left Madrid for a break in mid April 1937, he had already ensured Hemingway would provide coverage to the ''Times'' through NANA. For one thing, Hemingway did not have to worry about Matthews as a rival for the history books. He could endorse his friends’ book, ''Two Wars and More to Come'', and praise him as “the ablest and the bravest war correspondent writing today “who “when the fakers are all dead [. . .] will be read in the schools” (Advertisement 21) because Matthews posed no threat to Hemingway’s own chances to be read in the schools. The only brief Hemingway ever expressed he really reserved for Matthews’ editors, for not wanting his Teruel street-fighting story and for cutting references to himself in Matthews’ Teruel dispatches so that it appeared only Matthews had been there.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=462}}

As for Hemingway’s neglecting to name everyone with him for every story, the ''Times'' cutting of his name suggests that such exactitude was hardly a priority. A paper had no incentive for announcing the fact that a competitor’s
correspondent stood beside its own to see and report the same
events. NANA changed at least one vague Hemingway “we,” which admits
to the presence of others, to “this correspondent”
—we can hardly fault Hemingway for working in the spirit of his
employer’s standards.{{sfn|NANA|1938|p=}}{{efn|“we” in typescript and radiogram (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 1 and Folder 25).}} Do readers care that Matthews, Delmer, Gellhorn,
and others were there? The story’s effect and the limited word count also
weighed against such roll calls. One editor chose not to clutter the dispatch
on the great retreat across the Ebro with all the names of the American International Brigade volunteers Hemingway encountered, an omission of
Content more far serious than that of omitted correspondent names.{{efn| Radiogram insert dateline 4 April 1938 (HRC: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 25).}} Hemingway
often gave the names of the reporters with him, such as at Teruel;
nor was he the only reporter to sometimes neglect to do so. Martha Gellhorn,
for example, used a vague “we” and singled herself out as the primary
participant in some of her stories.

By using first-person reportage Hemingway—and Matthews and Gellhorn And most of the group covering the war—were operating solidly within
convention. William Stott, in ''Documentary Expression and Thirties America'',
calls this first-person ''participant observer'' technique “the most common sort
of documentary reportage in the thirties” that worked “by vicarious persuasion:
the writer partook of the events he reported and bared his feelings
and attitudes to influence the reader’s own.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=178-9}}{{efn|He specifically includes Hemingway et al (180).}} Stott also observes {{pg|433|434}}another technique to enable documentary reportage to “talk to us, and convince us that we, our deepest interests, are engaged,” in the use of the second person: “Thirties documentaries constantly address ‘you,’ the ‘you’ who is we the audience, and exhorts, wheedles, begs us to identify, pity, participate.” His examples include Dorothy Parker’s Spanish Civil War writing, and Hemingway’s 1935 “First-Hand Report on the Florida Hurricane.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=27-8}} A number of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches employ the second-person as a way of bringing the reader along for the ride.

Hemingway’s dispatches used personal pronouns more artfully than is generally recognized. “A New Kind of War,” which William Braasch Watson notes as having been “[w]ritten with more care and imagination” than its predecessors, begins in second person: “The window of the hotel is open and, as you lie in bed, you hear the firing in the front line seventeen blocks away.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=29}} He takes “you” outside, to see the damage and the dead from the bombing. “Someone makes a joke about missing teeth and someone else says not to make that joke. And everyone has the feeling that characterizes war. It wasn’t me, see? It wasn’t me.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} The tension between the first person and second-person pronouns—the movement toward identification with “you” and the insistence that “it wasn’t me”—continues in the next line. Here the reader is at once still in the narrator’s shoes, but strangely distanced from the narrator through biographical tidbit and, at the same time, asked to see himself in the enemy: “The Italian dead up on the Guadalajara weren’t you although Italian dead, because of where you had spent your boyhood, always seemed, still, like Our Dead.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} It is worth quoting at length the dispatch’s transition to first person:
<blockquote>
After the shell that lit on the sidewalk in front of the hotel you got a beautiful double corner room on that side, twice the size of the one you’d had, for less than a dollar. It wasn’t me they killed. See? No. Not me. It wasn’t me anymore.

Then in a hospital given by the American Friends of Spanish Democracy located out behind the Morata front along the road
to Valencia they said, “Raven wants to see you.”

“Do I know him?”

“I don’t think so,” they said. “But he wants to see you.”

“Where is he?”

“Upstairs.”{{pg|434|435}}In the room upstairs they are giving a blood transfusion to a man with a very gray face who lay on a cot with his arm out looking away from the gurgling bottle and moaning in a very impersonal way. He moaned mechanically and at regular intervals and it did not seem to be him that made the sound. His lips did not move.

“Where’s Raven?” I asked.

“I’m here,” said Raven.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=31}}</blockquote>The piece simply could not have sustained the second-person for the remaining
five pages. More significantly, for this deeply personal exchange between
the writer and the faceless, eyeless soldier, Hemingway could not hide
in the rhetorical device of the second-person. In the process, he effects a reversal
of the usual pronoun game; instead of identifying with the all embracing
“you,” we leave that trick behind and become fully attached to
the narratorial “I” as ourselves, as we might not have been had the article
begun in the first person. And even as the narrator identifies himself by name
for the only time in any of the dispatches—“Hemingway,” and later
“Ernest”—as decidedly not ourselves. We do not say, ''It isn’t me''. The historian
Hugh Thomas notes “the refreshing candour” of Hemingway’s naming
himself “in the world of the International Brigades, where no one’s name
seemed to be truthfully given.”{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=591}}{{efn|For Watson, the dispatch “seems, in fact, on the verge of becoming a story” (29).}}

A year later Hemingway’s “Tortosa Calmly Awaits Assault” resists admitting
the city’s imminent fall. Yet it does so anyway, by subtly alluding to the
wartime rhetoric of sacrificed blood irrigating the earth and rejuvenating
Spain. Such rhetoric was common during the war, appearing in speeches,
print, and poetry. Many of the poems in Cary Nelson’s anthology ''The Wound
and the Dream: Sixty Years of American Poems about the Civil War'' join in the
Spanish and international chorus’s general connection between Republican
soldiers and the land, and the particular singing of their dead nourishing
the land. We find such language in La Pasionaria’s farewell address to the International Brigades, her epilogue to ''The Book of the XV Brigade'', and Hemingway’s famous eulogy “On the American Dead in Spain”: “For our dead are
a part of the earth of Spain now and the earth of Spain can never die. Each
winter it will seem to die and each spring it will come alive again. Our dead
will live with it forever.”{{sfn|Nelson|1994|p=3}}{{efn| Reprinted in Bruccoli 76 and Nelson, Remembering 37 (the drafts at the JFK are titled “The Dead at Jarama”). In addition to the poems in Nelson’s anthology, see the excerpt from Boris Todrin’s “Spanish Sowing” in Guttmann (Wounded 179–180).}} The Tortosa dispatch implies the deaths of{{pg|435|436}}many Republican soldiers in its final paragraph’s description of the newborn onions:
<blockquote>The artillery was picking up a little now. Two came in at a fairly useful place and as the smoke blew away ahead and settled through the trees, you picked an armful of spring onions from a field beside the trail that led to the Tortosa road. They were the first onions of the spring and peeling one I found they were plump white and not too strong. The Ebro Delta has a fine rich land, and where the onions grow, tomorrow will be a battle.
{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=84}}</blockquote>

The echo is quiet, and perhaps unconscious, but there nevertheless. The opening boastfulness of “American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents”
should be taken somewhat ironically. The dispatch begins by announcing
that for “two days we have been doing the most dangerous thing
you can do in this war. That is keep close behind an unstabilized line where
the enemy are attacking with mechanized forces.” Then, a few pages later,
we learn about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade survivors of the spring 1938
Nationalist offensive that took Bob Merriman and eventually reached the
Mediterranean Sea. Reading about these survivors creeping through enemy
camps, stepping on a sleeping German soldier’s hand, sprinting “across an
open field toward the Ebro bank and being sniped at by artillery controlled
by an observation plane overhead” and then “the desperate swimming of
the Ebro” naked, we are asked to place the correspondent’s plight in due perspective.{{sfn|Watson|1988|pp=71-2}} This story certainly escapes the charge of a monotonous
battle and bombing scene; its switch from apparently boastful to
awe-struck witness feels almost deliberately self-conscious. Other choice selfironic
moments come in the dispatches of that pre-Teruel quiet fall of 1938.
The one titled “Hemingway, Covering War, Tells of Brush with Death” has little
to report from Madrid other than the new aftershave brand he is trying.
In “Loyalists’ Drive Seen Progressing as Planned,” he writes that “Shells are
all much the same and if they don’t hit you there is no story and if they do
you won’t have to write it.” {{sfn|Watson|1988|p=58}}

Hemingway’s dispatches are sometimes monotonous because his war was
Usually monotonous—as wars are most of the time. It should also be kept in
mind that scholars reviewing Hemingway’s NANA dispatches one after{{pg|436|437}}another do not relive the original reading experience. Hemingway wrote dispatches sporadically, papers did not run all of his dispatches, papers edited and cut them, and readers read at least a couple of papers’ worth of other articles in between. He told Edmund Wilson as much in defending himself against Wilson’s critique of the selected (and heavily edited and cut) dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'' without his consent: “If you are being paid to be shot at and write about it you are supposed to mention the shooting. [. . .] But I do not go in for re-printing journalism.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}

If we can in this way better understand his style, and at least explain it if
not excuse it, we similarly ought to try to contextualize—and perhaps
excuse—the moral problem. The two issues here are the specific condemnation
of Hemingway’s silence about Republican atrocities and the general
question of biased reporting (the latter of which has already partially been
addressed).

Hemingway knew, as Donaldson writes, that mentioning the atrocities
“would arouse anticommunist sentiments back in the States and effectively
undermine any possibility of American intervention.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=394}} It is also doubtful
that reporting them would have stopped them. But reporting Republican
atrocities from Spain was not possible for the simple reason that all dispatches
went through a government censor. Matthews cabled his editors
from Paris in May 1937 to tell them that “censorship does not permit us to
say when the ‘telefonica’ is hit. So whenever you see reference in my
despatches [sic] to ‘an important building in the center of the city’ or words
to that effect, the cable desk can know that it is the telefonica.” {{sfn|Matthews|1937c|p=}} As already noted, by July he would cable “CENSORSHIP
STRICTER” as the ban on mentioning internationals went into effect. {{sfn|Matthews|1937d|p=}}{{sfn|Matthews|1937e|p=}} Cowles’ memoir confirms the
aggressive censorship, observing that it limited journalists to exactly the kind of material Hemingway wrote about:
<blockquote>There were frequent attempts to “beat the censor” by employing American slang expressions, but this came to an end when a Canadian girl joined the staff. The International Brigades were not allowed to be publicized; no reference could be made to Russian armaments, and buildings and streets which suffered
bombardments could not be identified.</blockquote>{{pg|437|438}}<blockquote>It was only in the realm of the human interest story that the journalists had a free hand. They could describe bombardments to their heart’s content.{{sfn|Cowles|1941|p=20}}</blockquote>
Hemingway and everyone else—to reserve incrimination for Hemingway is hardly just. No correspondent covering Republican Spain reported suspicious imprisonments and disappearances by government agents.

Hemingway, through Joris Ivens and ''The Spanish Earth'' project, had better
access to officials than most. Had he been able somehow to report such
activity, he would have lost that access and would probably have been kicked
out of the country. His fame would have likely prevented his own officially
sponsored disappearance, though he still worried, especially as so many of
such crimes on the Republican side occurred from free agents. When Jasper
Wood printed the anarchist F.A.I. banner in the limited edition book version
of ''The Spanish Earth'', Hemingway expressed his anxieties bluntly in a letter
to Jasper on August 20, 1938. It is hardly “petulant,” he scolded, “not to wish
to be shot.”{{sfn|Davison|1988|p=128}} Hostility in the Republic against the anarchists
ran high; after the Barcelona May Day conflict, the government’s foreign
minister told U.S. Ambassador Claude Bowers that “anarchist revolt
throughout Catalonia and not only expected but welcomed as an opportunity
to liquidate the anarchists who have been hostile from the beginning.”
{{sfn|NA|1954|p=292}}{{efn| The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State, 5 May 1937.}}

It is possible that Hemingway’s dispatch stating that “not one friend [. . .]
has been executed or is missing” was his clever means of reporting
the rumors and indeed the general fact while evading the censors, as in this very dispatch he acknowledged the presence of a censor after a bombardment.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=34}}
Matthews, on the other hand, never found a way to mention the
censors or admit even the possibility of people gone missing in the Republic.
Peter Moreira has observed that in a 1943 dispatch Hemingway related a remark by a British officer about the Chinese Nationalist government’s being
“hopeless on the offensive” because censorship “prevented American reporters
From actually saying that the Nationalists wouldn’t attack, surmising that by telling this anecdote Hemingway could sneak such a judgment into
his reports.”{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=77}} In Spain, censors aside, the eyewitness standard and his
own safety and continuing ability to report the war, and, yes, his passionate
support of the government contributed to his decision. He could have written
about government abuses from the states, but then could not return to{{pg|438|439}}cover the war and support the cause—a justification other journalists, those who did not return after the spring of 1937, did not enjoy. In his mind too, knowing what he heard of fascist atrocities, any reportage against the government lessening its chances of victory through killing hopes of increased international aid would have led to more deaths at Franco’s hands that the much smaller number inspired by fifth column paranoia.{{efn|''Hemingway’s Second War'' discusses in greater depth Hemingway’s politics and his falling out
with John Dos Passos over the execution of José Robles}}.

The accusation that Hemingway did not write about Republican atrocities
because he was saving it for his fiction I find baseless (Knightley 232;
Baker 402).{{sfn|Knightley|2004|p=232}}{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=402}}{{efn|Hemingway’s casual comment to colleagues calling dibs on Pepe Quintanilla, the executioner of
Madrid, is not sufficient evidence.}}Carolyn Moorehead, in her biography of Martha Gellhorn, describes
the climate for the Madrid correspondents that first spring: “And so,
day by day, the correspondents walked a thin and nervous line between truth,
evasions, and propaganda, telling one another that though it was not all right
if things were made up and presented as true, it was acceptable to describe
what you wanted, provided it was true and provided your readers were aware
of your position.”{{sfn|Moorehead|2003|p=125}} My own sense is that they did not walk the line quite
so nervously; their passionate commitment, and their principles of position
disclosure and the eyewitness standard, made that walk relatively easy.

The problem of ''committed journalism'', even sixty years later, has not been
resolved—as anyone paying attention to the media and world affairs well
knows. One person’s truth is another person’s propaganda. Certainly, as
Knightley notes, reporting from “the heart” affects one’s judgment.{{sfn|Knightley|2004|pp=234-5}}
Yet to attempt “balance,” per the edits to Matthews’ Guadalajara piece, betrays
one’s believed truth. Furthermore, the kind of reporting done by the
correspondents with the Republic—committed, one-sided, optimistic,
heroic, human interest work by embedded writers—would be practiced
widely and without reserve during World War II. Such narrative journalism,
with roots in Louise May Alcott’s “Hospital Sketches” series published in the
''Boston Commonwealth'', and more immediately in 1930s social documentary
writing whose “essence” is “not information”, anticipated postwar
new journalism’s adoption of novelistic narrative technique for nonfiction
which culminated with such wartime books as Norman Mailer’s ''Armies of
the Night'' and Michael Herr’s ''Dispatches''.{{sfn|Stott|1986|p=11}} Some of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches
fall in this line of development.

Today we might categorize such writing under the awkward umbrella
term ''creative nonfiction''. That term certainly fits the mixed bag of nonfiction
narratives and commentaries Hemingway published during the war in
Ken magazine. These pieces are essays, not journalism, several of which{{pg|439|440}}directly appeal for support for the Republic, and most of which really deal
with the approaching world war. ''Ken'' wanted “precisely the kind of opinion
articles he could not write for NANA.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=433}} His article, “The
Cardinal Picks a Winner,” shows a photo of a row of dead children from
Barcelona and another one with Nationalist officers saluting and Catholic officials
with raised hands, apparently making the fascist salute as well. He
ends ironically: “So I ''don’t believe'' the people shown in the photo can really
be making it. I would rather prefer to think that the photograph was faked.”
{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=436}} When Hemingway argues in “A Program for U.S. Realism” that the
United States should stay out of the next war except to stuff its pockets
through arms sales, one has to wonder, given his call and the democratic nations’
failure to save Spain, if we are to sniff sarcasm here.

The language of the dispatches, with their corrective intent against
Franco’s propaganda, does risk propagandizing. Hemingway’s optimism and
anti-fascism certainly colored his correspondence work. His criticism of the
anarchist and POUM militia for their inactivity on the Aragon front, for example,
sounds a lot like the Spanish Communist Party’s.{{efn|It at least sounds almost exactly like Dolores Ibarruri in her memoir. To the anarchists’ complaint
that they had no arms, she retorts “that they had more arms than did many other fronts. . . .
What they didn’t have and what they were constantly demanding were airplanes and tanks .And
they didn’t have them because the Republic government didn’t have them either, except for those
it received as aid from the Soviet Union” (238–284). Yet the various Catalonia militia were not
as well equipped with small arms as the more regular Popular Army units, and because of the
terrain tanks and planes were in fact necessary.}}
But unlike
Matthews, Hemingway limited his reports within the Republic to military
matters. Hemingway may have generally condemned the anarchists in his
nonfiction, considering their activity as hampering the war effort, but he
never repeated the accusation of their collaboration with the rebels, as
Matthews had done. And when Hemingway commented on the Bareclona
crisis, he referred only to the government—not the communists, as
Matthews had done.{{efn|Hemingway’s comments in “Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win” NANA staff
correspondent dispatch. Though arguably he was propagandizing by hiding the communist influence—
to mention the communists to an American audience would not gain sympathy for the
cause.}}Nor did he write articles asserting the limited role of
the communists in the government, or explaining Spanish anarchism, also
as Matthews had done.{{efn|An article on the communists’ limited role appeared in late November 1937, as discussed in a
missive from The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State on 2
Dec. 1937 (United States 461). Matthews’ “Anarchism: Spain’s Enigma” appeared in the New York
Times 22 Aug. 1937: 6, 14.}}

During one of Hemingway’s stateside breaks between trips to Spain, his
children asked if he was a “tool” of Stalin, an accusation tossed by a schoolmate
who, presumably parroting his or her parents, probably understood
the term no better than Hemingway’s children. {{sfn|Hemingway|nd|p=}}
Hemingway believed in the Republic’s potential, but he was never a dupe of
the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) or Comintern. As did many others, he
accepted PCE’s presence in the government for its discipline and organization
toward winning the war, and he understood the material necessity for
Comintern’s support. It should also be noted, as historians Hugh Thomas
and Helen Graham have reminded us, that the communism associated with
the Republic wasn’t particularly communist anyway.{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=628}}{{sfn|Graham|2002|p=184}} {{pg|440|441}}

Hemingway declined to follow Joris Ivens’ suggestion that he write a
dispatch on the significant role of the political commissars in the Republican
military, even though that would have meant
featuring his brave new friend Gustav Regler.{{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=}} Hemingway also, in a letter
justifying his work to Jack Wheeler at NANA, wrote about choosing not to
send a dispatch he had written because it might strike readers as propaganda
“no matter how true” (Letter to Jack Wheeler).{{sfn|Hemingway|1938b|p=}}

Hemingway went to Spain to see the war himself and to support the Republic
through his ambulance fund. The paychecks from NANA and the
fundraising from ''The Spanish Earth'' helped. Whatever propagandistic streak
colors the dispatches pales in comparison to the documentary. The filmmaker,
Joris Ivens, was well established in European communist circles. The
documentary genre then and now has occupied a slippery position between
the extremes of impossible-to-achieve empirical nonfiction and of the outright
fictionalized. Evaluations of Hemingway’s journalism are informed by
knowledge of ''The Spanish Earth'' and the ''Ken'' essays to the detriment of the
journalism. And the very nature of the slippery documentary genre may enable
the film to escape opprobrium. It wasn’t reportage; it was altogether
something else. But for that matter, Hemingway’s dispatches weren’t purely
reportage either, and if not ''altogether'' something else, still something else,
and should be reckoned with accordingly.

== Notes ==
{{notelist|20em}}

==Citations==
{{Reflist|15em}}

==Works Cited==
{{refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker
|first=Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Bruccoli |first=Matthew |date=2006 |title=Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame |url= |location=Columbia |publisher=U of South Caronia P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Cowles |first=Virginia |date=1941 |title=Looking for Trouble |url= |location=New York
|publisher=Harper & Brothers |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Davison |first=Richard Allan |title=The Publication of Hemingway’s The Spanish Earth: An Untold Story |url= |journal=Hemingway Review
|volume=7.2 |issue= |date=1988
|pages=122-130 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson
|first=Scott |date=2009 |title=Fitzgerald & Hemingway: Works and Days |url= |location=New York |publisher=Columbia UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Franklin |first=Sidney |date=1952 |title=Bullfighter from Brooklyn |url= |location=New York |publisher=Prentice-Hall |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Graham |first=Helen |date=2002 |title=The Spanish Republic at War 1936-1939 |url= |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Guttmann |first=Allen |date=1962 |title=The Wound in the Heart: American and the Spanish Civil War |url= |location=New York |publisher=Free Press of Glencoe |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1967 |title=By-Line: Ernest Hemingway |url= |location=New York |publisher=Scibner |pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Trogdon
|editor-first=Robert W.
|author-mask=1
|title=Fascism is a Lie
|url=
|journal=Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference |volume==
|issue=
|date=2002
|pages=193-6
|location=New York
|publisher=Carroll & Graf
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 May 1937
|chapter=Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=nd
|chapter=The Home Front
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938a
|chapter=Letter to Edmund Wilson
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=2 June 1938b
|chapter=Letter to Jack Wheeler
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=14 Feb 1939
|chapter=On the American Dead in Spain
|title=TS. New Masses
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Baker
|editor-first=Carlos
|author-mask=1
|date=2003
|chapter=The Hadely Mowrer
|title=Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Scribner
|pages=462-3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ibarruri
|first=Dolores
|date=1966
|title=They Shall Not Pass: The Autobiography of La Pasionaria
|url=
|location=United States
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|date=1969
|title=The Camera and I
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|author-mask=1
|date=26 Apr 1937
|chapter=Letter to Ernest Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|date=20 Nov 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Bertrand Weaver
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=12 Oct 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=25 Apr 1939
|chapter=Letter to M.B. Tenney
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Apr 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Knightley
|first=Phillip
|date=2004
|title=The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq
|url=
|location=Baltimore
|publisher=John Hopkins
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=
|date=9 Apr 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=TS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=11 Apr 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=8 May 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=6 July 1937d
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=July 1937e
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=22 March 1939
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 9
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=
|date=20 May 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=20 Dec 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 5
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Sep 1937c
|chapter=Note to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moorehead
|first=Caroline
|date=2003
|title=Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Henry Holt
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moreira
|first=Peter
|date=2006
|title=Hemingway on the China Front: His WWII Spy Mission with Martha Gellhorn
|url=
|location=Washington D.C.
|publisher=Potomac Books
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|date=5 Feb 1937
|chapter=Promotion Box: Hemingway, For Immediate Release
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|author-mask=1
|date=4 Apr 1938
|chapter=Promotion Box: American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|editor-last=Nelson
|editor-first=Card
|date=1994
|title=Remembering Spain: Hemingway’s Civil War Eulogy and the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
|url=
|location=Urbana
|publisher=U of Illinois
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Reynolds
|first=Michael
|date=1989
|title=Hemingway: The Paris Years
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Norton
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Stott
|first=William
|date=1986
|title=Documentary Expression and Thirties America
|url=
|location=Chicago
|publisher=U of Chicago P
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Thomas
|first=Hugh
|date=2001
|title=The Spanish Civil War, Rev. ed.
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Modern Library
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine
|last=''Two Wars and More to Come''
|first=
|date=24 Jan 1938
|title=Best Sellers of the Week Here and Elsewhere
|type=Advertisement
|url=
|magazine=New York Times
|pages=
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=NA
|first=
|title=United States. Dept. of State
|url=
|journal= Foreign Relations of the Untied States, 1937 |volume=1
|issue=General
|date=1954
|pages=
|location=Washington
|publisher=GPO
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Watson
|first=William Braasch
|title=Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches
|url=
|journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=7.2
|issue=
|date=1988
|pages=4-121
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Wheeler
|first=John H.
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938
|chapter=Letter to Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection, Box 3 Folder 14
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}

{{refend}}
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches

2025-04-20T02:03:03Z

MerAtticus: typo

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 

{{byline|last=Vernon |first=Alex |abstract=The Spanish Civil War began in July 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally-restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy. By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches.}}

{{dc|dc=T|HE SPANISH CIVIL WAR BEGAN ON}} 17-18 JULY, 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy, to collaborate with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens on the pro-Republican documentary ''The Spanish Earth'', and to pursue his fledgling love affair with Martha Gellhorn.

By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches for NANA.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=4}}{{efn|Quotations from the NANA dispatches follow the Diplomatic Text established by William Braasch’s “Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches.” I prefer NANA’s titles rather than Watson’s. For my disagreements with some of Watson’s datings, see my comments on specific dispatches in ''Hemingway’s Second War.''}}The secondary sources habitually judge them inferior journalism. Carlos Baker in the first Hemingway biography, for example, complains that the dialogue was “so heavily stamped with personal mannerisms as to be of doubtful authenticity.” Baker sees a “curious monotony in his stories of battles and bombardments,” a gratuitous use of graphic imagery “to shock his readers,” and “a note of triumphant boastfulness” in reporting proximity to danger. He also faults Hemingway for “often hint[ing] he was alone when in fact he was usually with Martha Gellhorn, Matthews, and Delmer.” Hemingway lacked Dos Passos’ “eye for telling details” and the “meticulous exactitude and inclusiveness that characterized the best work of Herbert Matthews and Sefton Delmer.”{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}

Philip Knightley’s ''The First Casualty'', the standard history of war correspondence, paraphrases Baker but with a trouncing final judgment:{{pg|427|428}}Hemingway’s “performance as a war correspondent was abysmally bad.” But Knightley goes beyond “technical” dissatisfaction to moral condemnation. Not just “unjustifiably optimistic”—an excusable offense—Hemingway’s reporting was “unforgivable” in its “total failure to report the Communist persecution, imprisonment, and summary execution of ‘untrustworthy elements’ on the Republican side, when he knew this was happening and when disclosing it might well have prevented further horrors like this.”
{{sfn|Knightley|2004 |pp=231–32}}{{efn|In my view, Knightley does not sufficiently acknowledge his paraphrasing of Baker.}}

Such criticisms in the final analysis might bear out. As Scott Donaldson writes, Hemingway advanced the Republican cause in his dispatches by eliciting “the deepest possible feelings of horror and of sympathy for the victims” of the Madrid bombardment; his “undue optimism” often “ignored Loyalist defeats and exaggerated the importance of its victories”; and “he repeatedly called attention to the participation of Italians and Germans on Franco’s side.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=426}} It also served as a recruitment tool—Milton Wolff, for example, acknowledged the strong influence Hemingway’s dispatches had on his decision to volunteer. Nevertheless, I think it a worthwhile exercise to attend a little more studiously to Hemingway’s dispatches, their context, and their artistry. I don’t necessarily intend to reverse the general opinion of the correspondence, only to achieve a better and more sympathetic understanding.

Herbert Matthews’ reporting for the ''New York Times'' will serve as a convenient comparison for two reasons. First, because both Baker and Knightley use Matthews’ journalism as the standard of excellence to pass judgment on Hemingway’s; and second, because the two worked practically side-by-side, seeing and reporting on many of the same events. In fact so closely did they work together that NANA sometimes complained that the ''Times'' was not buying Hemingway’s pieces because they resembled Matthews,’ and at one point Matthews’ own editors at the Times suspected him of plagiarizing Hemingway.{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|pp=411, 420}} A note from Matthews’ assigned editor Raymond McCaw provides, in two columns, seven quite similar passages from Hemingway’s Aragon front dispatches of September 13 and 14 with Matthews’ of September 14, with a penciled note at the bottom: “a deadly parallel if you ask me.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937c|p=}} Edwin James, the managing editor and McCaw’s boss, eventually agreed with Matthews’ defense: “It is quite apparent that you did not file any duplicate of the Hemingway story, or vice versa. As I understand it, the similarity arose from the fact that you{{pg|428|429}}both went to see the same show and saw it at the same time [sic], under the same conditions.”{{sfn|James|1937b|p=}}

Matthews’ dispatches ring of Republican bias as much if not more than anything Hemingway ever filed. The ''Times'' received many letters to the editor complaining about Matthews’ undisguised politics, which also gave serious concern to some of his editors. His description of the Republican May 1937 infighting in Barcelona is a striking example of how his news veered into propaganda and shows just how much he passed along the government’s version of events. The government’s “BLOODLESS TRIUMPH FOUGHT WITH RECOGNIZEDWEAPONS OF DEMOCRACY” turned out to be blatantly false, as the government and the “COMMUNISTS [WHO] DISTINGUISHED THEMSELVES” resorted to violent suppression. His blaming the uprising on the anarchist CNT working as Franco operatives parrots the government’s and the communist party’s public position, even though both charges—that the anarchists precipitated the events and that they were under Nationalist direction—were also false. His dispatch’s optimistic close also equivocates the political reality: “NEW GOVERNMENT HAS TAKEN POWER WHICH APPEARS TOVE CONFIDENCE VAST MAJORITY SPANIARDS IN LOYALIST TERRITORY AND TIS HOPED WILL GAIN EQUAL CONFIDENCE ABROAD STOP VIOLENCE AND REVOLUTION BEEN REPUDIATED AND NEWAND FAR HOPEFULLER PERIOD SEEMS BEGINNING.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937a|p=}}The ''Times'', knowing full well the one-sided coverage of a correspondent writing from one side of the conflict, had a reporter on both sides: Matthews with the Republicans, and William Carney with the Nationalists. They got their facts right (or wrong) as often as the other, their editors concluded; and they inspired about the same number of letters of complaint.{{sfn|James|1937a|p=}}{{sfn|James|1939|p=}}

Furthermore, Matthews’ dispatches received a great deal of substantive editorial revisions. One of Matthews’ Teruel reports had to be cut for length, as McCaw informed James: “This bird sent 2844 words on the same facts which Hemingway covered much better in less than half that number. I wonder if Matthews thinks the paper is thriving, and that cable tolls do not matter a damn. Of course, it had to be cut for space anyway.” McCaw most likely refers here to Matthews’ dispatch corresponding to Hemingway’s “The Attack on Teruel,” though Matthews’ account of the fall of Teruel is also much longer (and more long-winded) than Hemingway’s, and just as personal in terms of describing the dangers{{pg|429|430}} he faced. Indeed its length allows him to share even more of the action he endured.{{sfn|McCaw|1937b|p=}}

Raymond McCaw held a general professional disagreement with Matthews perhaps tainted with over zealousness. Whether a personal or political motive informed that disagreement can’t be determined from the evidence I’ve seen. It is also clear that McCaw’s charges bear some validity—that any responsible editor could have easily and reasonably taken issue where McCaw did. One of the more interesting examples concerns Matthews’ piece on Guadalajara. Because he only saw evidence on Franco’s side of Italian forces, he only reported on Italians. But the ''Times'' editors heard from other sources that German soldiers also participated in the March offensive. They thought it prudent, from this confusion, to change (nine times) “Italian” to “Rebel,” “the foe,” or “Insurgent.” When Matthews saw the published piece he wrote a strenuous objection. In some instances the editors changed paraphrased quotations from his sources. One large paragraph omitted by the editors stressed the first-hand nature of the information, and Matthews underlines the key words: “All day, at every place we stopped and no matter whom we talked to or what we saw, there was only one label—Italian. The dead bodies, the prisoners, the material of every kind, the men who had occupied Brihuega and then fled were Italian and nothing but Italian.” Here and elsewhere in his original story, Matthews emphasizes the “personal knowledge” of its information.{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}{{efn|James supported McCaw on these changes, though later acknowledged that altering quoted sources was perhaps unwarranted(29 April 1937; Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3).}}Yet Matthews did not report on the foreigners fighting for the Republic—it was in fact the Italian Garibali Battalion that routed Franco’s Italians. We might surmise government censorship behind this silence, though Matthews would not cable news of “CENSORSHIP STRICTER” and “BAN ON MENTIONING INTERNATIONALS INCLUDING AMERICANS INSTITUTED TODAY” until July.{{sfn|Matthews|1937b|p=}}Perhaps he cautiously self-censored, or politically self-censored for the same reasons the government would eventually ban mention. Still, his stridency about the omission of foreigners on one side is striking given his knowledge of their contribution to the other side. For this reason too, and his omission of other nationalities on the insurgent side, it seemed only fair to his editor “to stand on the statement that the majority of the Rebels were Italians and let it go at that.”{{sfn|James|1937c|p=}} A reasonable decision.

Throughout his correspondence to his editors and his several books,{{pg|430|431}}Matthews maintained a passionate defense of his eyewitness journalistic standard, a position those close to him understood. “Matthews never believed anything he had not seen with his own eyes,” Joris Ivens wrote. “He never saw his job as reporter as one that permitted him to sit in his hotel and read the handouts of the War Ministry.” {{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=112}} Sidney Franklin recalls that some writers wrote their pieces before arriving in Madrid, and came only for the “legitimacy” of the Madrid dateline.{{sfn|Franklin|1952|p=232}}And Matthews hated, on principle, having his name attached to an article that violated the integrity of his witness. The only way to achieve objectivity, for Matthews, was to acknowledge one’s subjective perspective. Writing to his publisher, Matthews argued that “the full documentary value” of his coverage was lost when the editors altered his submissions for “the apparent necessity of giving more or less equal space to both sides.”{{sfn|Matthews|1939|p=}}

As with Matthews, so too Hemingway. Indeed the commitment to subjectivity
fit quite well with Hemingway’s modernist aesthetics. If Hemingway
focused the dispatches on his perspective—on his own experience dodging
artillery—more than Matthews and more than most, he did so at least partially
to fulfill expectations. NANA approached him, after all, for his name
and personality as much as whatever he would write. Before he even left the
states it pitched him to potential publications, sending out a promotional release with text to be used alongside his forthcoming dispatches and suggesting
they include a photograph: “Mr. Hemingway’s assignment is to get both from the bombed towns and bombed trenches the human story of the war, not just an account of the game being played by general staffs with pins
and a map.”{{sfn|NANA|1937|p=}} NANA also released each individual dispatch with a one-sentence “precede” about the “famous” or “noted” author. Ernest Hemingway was not writing as Herbert Mathews, ace reporter; Hemingway was writing as Ernest Hemingway, famous author of novels and stories well known to be drawn from his own experiences.

That he understood this to be his assignment is further evidenced by a
cable Matthews sent to his ''Times'' editors on April 9, 1937, concerning the
Loyalist attack: “WORKED CONJOINTL WITH HEMINGWAY TODAY HE SENDING EYEWITNESS DESCRIPTION WHILE EYE SENT GENERAL STRATEGY.”{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}When a year later the ''Times'' asked NANA to ensure Hemingway’s reports differed from Matthews, NANA complied by asking Hemingway “to emphasize color rather than straight reporting” not necessarily out of dissatisfaction with Hemingway’s reportage as Baker contends,{{efn|Baker’s notes date the Times request to NANA as 8 Apr. 1938, and NANA’s to Hemingway as 15
Apr. 1938 (Princeton University, Firestone Library: Box 18, Folder 8 “1938”), the date of “The Bombing of Tortosa” dispatch.}} but to increase{{pg|431|432}}the chance of selling to the ''Times'' and indeed to ensure the spirit of NANA’s original arrangement with Hemingway. {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}Far from dissatisfied, NANA wrote Hemingway at the end of August 1938 a letter of agreement for his coverage of “a general European war” should it break out, “written in your colorful style” (Hemingway was in Paris, on his way to Spain for the last time during the war).{{sfn|Wheeler|1938|p=}}When Edmund Wilson criticized the selected dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'', Hemingway wrote him that “I was paid to write what are called ‘eye witness’ accounts . . .what is called, or was asked for as ‘color stuff.’ Most of such stuff is faked. Mine was not. It was straight reporting and the personal stuff was what had been asked for by the editors. “Wilson’s estimation was also based upon ''Fact’s'' inclusion of the “The Old Man at the Bridge” story from ''Ken'', “not a news dispatch” at all.{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}Speaking at Carnegie Hall before the showing of a rough cut of ''The Spanish Earth'', shortly after his first trip to Spain and so very much in the context of his wartime work, Hemingway defined the writer’s problem as “project[ing] [what is true] in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2002|p=193}}

Personal, anecdotal journalism had been Hemingway’s signature style from his earliest days filing reports, in the early 1920s from Paris, when his editor at the ''Toronto Star Weekly'' “encouraged [. . .] what Hemingway did best: write about himself in the act of being a reporter.”{{sfn|Reynolds|1989|p=45}}How could he expect that NANA would expect anything else, if indeed NANA did expect anything else? In the Spanish Civil War he at least maintained his eyewitness posture; in World War II, however, he couldn’t keep himself out. His first piece, about D-Day, begins, “No one remembers the date of the Battle of Shiloh. But the day ''we took'' Fox Green beach was the sixth of June, and the wind was blowing hard out of the northwest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1967|p=340}}His venue too—''Collier’s'' magazine—and the fact that he had not written anything in three years further contributed to the story-like nature of the WWII stories, in which he figured as a protagonist—not to mention the stories and involvement he couldn’t write about, armed and running around France more of a free agent than his guerilla-hero Robert Jordan ever was (though he began to transform these experiences into fiction in several unpublished stories). In wartime China in 1943, filing articles for Ralph Ingersoll’s short-lived ''PM'' New York afternoon daily, Hemingway did not even care to be called a news reporter.{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=99}}

It should be mentioned that Hemingway and Matthews enjoyed a great{{pg|432|433}}friendship and working relationship. Hemingway usually brought Matthews, who did not have a car, on his excursions. When Matthews left Madrid for a break in mid April 1937, he had already ensured Hemingway would provide coverage to the ''Times'' through NANA. For one thing, Hemingway did not have to worry about Matthews as a rival for the history books. He could endorse his friends’ book, ''Two Wars and More to Come'', and praise him as “the ablest and the bravest war correspondent writing today “who “when the fakers are all dead [. . .] will be read in the schools” (Advertisement 21) because Matthews posed no threat to Hemingway’s own chances to be read in the schools. The only brief Hemingway ever expressed he really reserved for Matthews’ editors, for not wanting his Teruel street-fighting story and for cutting references to himself in Matthews’ Teruel dispatches so that it appeared only Matthews had been there.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=462}}

As for Hemingway’s neglecting to name everyone with him for every story, the ''Times'' cutting of his name suggests that such exactitude was hardly a priority. A paper had no incentive for announcing the fact that a competitor’s
correspondent stood beside its own to see and report the same
events. NANA changed at least one vague Hemingway “we,” which admits
to the presence of others, to “this correspondent”
—we can hardly fault Hemingway for working in the spirit of his
employer’s standards.{{sfn|NANA|1938|p=}}{{efn|“we” in typescript and radiogram (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 1 and Folder 25).}} Do readers care that Matthews, Delmer, Gellhorn,
and others were there? The story’s effect and the limited word count also
weighed against such roll calls. One editor chose not to clutter the dispatch
on the great retreat across the Ebro with all the names of the American International Brigade volunteers Hemingway encountered, an omission of
Content more far serious than that of omitted correspondent names.{{efn| Radiogram insert dateline 4 April 1938 (HRC: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 25).}} Hemingway
often gave the names of the reporters with him, such as at Teruel;
nor was he the only reporter to sometimes neglect to do so. Martha Gellhorn,
for example, used a vague “we” and singled herself out as the primary
participant in some of her stories.

By using first-person reportage Hemingway—and Matthews and Gellhorn And most of the group covering the war—were operating solidly within
convention. William Stott, in ''Documentary Expression and Thirties America'',
calls this first-person ''participant observer'' technique “the most common sort
of documentary reportage in the thirties” that worked “by vicarious persuasion:
the writer partook of the events he reported and bared his feelings
and attitudes to influence the reader’s own.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=178-9}}{{efn|He specifically includes Hemingway et al (180).}} Stott also observes {{pg|433|434}}another technique to enable documentary reportage to “talk to us, and convince us that we, our deepest interests, are engaged,” in the use of the second person: “Thirties documentaries constantly address ‘you,’ the ‘you’ who is we the audience, and exhorts, wheedles, begs us to identify, pity, participate.” His examples include Dorothy Parker’s Spanish Civil War writing, and Hemingway’s 1935 “First-Hand Report on the Florida Hurricane.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=27-8}} A number of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches employ the second-person as a way of bringing the reader along for the ride.

Hemingway’s dispatches used personal pronouns more artfully than is
generally recognized. “A New Kind of War,” which William Braasch Watson
notes as having been “[w]ritten with more care and imagination” than its
predecessors, begins in second person: “The window of the hotel is open
and, as you lie in bed, you hear the firing in the front line seventeen blocks
away.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=29}} He takes “you” outside, to see the damage and the dead from the bombing. “Someone makes a joke about missing teeth and someone else says not to make that joke. And everyone has the feeling that characterizes war. It wasn’t me, see? It wasn’t me.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} The tension between the first person and second-person pronouns—the movement toward identification with “you” and the insistence that “it wasn’t me”—continues in the next line. Here the reader is at once still in the narrator’s shoes, but strangely distanced from the narrator through biographical tidbit and, at the same time, asked
to see himself in the enemy: “The Italian dead up on the Guadalajara weren’t
you although Italian dead, because of where you had spent your boyhood,
always seemed, still, like Our Dead.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} It is worth quoting at length the dispatch’s transition to first person:<blockquote>
After the shell that lit on the sidewalk in front of the hotel you got a beautiful double corner room on that side, twice the size of the one you’d had, for less than a dollar. It wasn’t me they killed. See? No. Not me. It wasn’t me anymore.

Then in a hospital given by the American Friends of Spanish Democracy located out behind the Morata front along the road
to Valencia they said, “Raven wants to see you.”

“Do I know him?”

“I don’t think so,” they said. “But he wants to see you.”

“Where is he?”

“Upstairs.”{{pg|434|435}}In the room upstairs they are giving a blood transfusion to a man with a very gray face who lay on a cot with his arm out looking away from the gurgling bottle and moaning in a very impersonal way. He moaned mechanically and at regular intervals and it did not seem to be him that made the sound. His lips did not move.

“Where’s Raven?” I asked.

“I’m here,” said Raven.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=31}}</blockquote>The piece simply could not have sustained the second-person for the remaining
five pages. More significantly, for this deeply personal exchange between
the writer and the faceless, eyeless soldier, Hemingway could not hide
in the rhetorical device of the second-person. In the process, he effects a reversal
of the usual pronoun game; instead of identifying with the all embracing
“you,” we leave that trick behind and become fully attached to
the narratorial “I” as ourselves, as we might not have been had the article
begun in the first person. And even as the narrator identifies himself by name
for the only time in any of the dispatches—“Hemingway,” and later
“Ernest”—as decidedly not ourselves. We do not say, ''It isn’t me''. The historian
Hugh Thomas notes “the refreshing candour” of Hemingway’s naming
himself “in the world of the International Brigades, where no one’s name
seemed to be truthfully given.”{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=591}}{{efn|For Watson, the dispatch “seems, in fact, on the verge of becoming a story” (29).}}

A year later Hemingway’s “Tortosa Calmly Awaits Assault” resists admitting
the city’s imminent fall. Yet it does so anyway, by subtly alluding to the
wartime rhetoric of sacrificed blood irrigating the earth and rejuvenating
Spain. Such rhetoric was common during the war, appearing in speeches,
print, and poetry. Many of the poems in Cary Nelson’s anthology ''The Wound
and the Dream: Sixty Years of American Poems about the Civil War'' join in the
Spanish and international chorus’s general connection between Republican
soldiers and the land, and the particular singing of their dead nourishing
the land. We find such language in La Pasionaria’s farewell address to the International Brigades, her epilogue to ''The Book of the XV Brigade'', and Hemingway’s famous eulogy “On the American Dead in Spain”: “For our dead are
a part of the earth of Spain now and the earth of Spain can never die. Each
winter it will seem to die and each spring it will come alive again. Our dead
will live with it forever.”{{sfn|Nelson|1994|p=3}}{{efn| Reprinted in Bruccoli 76 and Nelson, Remembering 37 (the drafts at the JFK are titled “The Dead at Jarama”). In addition to the poems in Nelson’s anthology, see the excerpt from Boris Todrin’s “Spanish Sowing” in Guttmann (Wounded 179–180).}} The Tortosa dispatch implies the deaths of{{pg|435|436}}many Republican soldiers in its final paragraph’s description of the newborn onions:
<blockquote>The artillery was picking up a little now. Two came in at a fairly useful place and as the smoke blew away ahead and settled through the trees, you picked an armful of spring onions from a field beside the trail that led to the Tortosa road. They were the first onions of the spring and peeling one I found they were plump white and not too strong. The Ebro Delta has a fine rich land, and where the onions grow, tomorrow will be a battle.
{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=84}}</blockquote>

The echo is quiet, and perhaps unconscious, but there nevertheless. The opening boastfulness of “American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents”
should be taken somewhat ironically. The dispatch begins by announcing
that for “two days we have been doing the most dangerous thing
you can do in this war. That is keep close behind an unstabilized line where
the enemy are attacking with mechanized forces.” Then, a few pages later,
we learn about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade survivors of the spring 1938
Nationalist offensive that took Bob Merriman and eventually reached the
Mediterranean Sea. Reading about these survivors creeping through enemy
camps, stepping on a sleeping German soldier’s hand, sprinting “across an
open field toward the Ebro bank and being sniped at by artillery controlled
by an observation plane overhead” and then “the desperate swimming of
the Ebro” naked, we are asked to place the correspondent’s plight in due perspective.{{sfn|Watson|1988|pp=71-2}} This story certainly escapes the charge of a monotonous
battle and bombing scene; its switch from apparently boastful to
awe-struck witness feels almost deliberately self-conscious. Other choice selfironic
moments come in the dispatches of that pre-Teruel quiet fall of 1938.
The one titled “Hemingway, Covering War, Tells of Brush with Death” has little
to report from Madrid other than the new aftershave brand he is trying.
In “Loyalists’ Drive Seen Progressing as Planned,” he writes that “Shells are
all much the same and if they don’t hit you there is no story and if they do
you won’t have to write it.” {{sfn|Watson|1988|p=58}}

Hemingway’s dispatches are sometimes monotonous because his war was
Usually monotonous—as wars are most of the time. It should also be kept in
mind that scholars reviewing Hemingway’s NANA dispatches one after{{pg|436|437}}another do not relive the original reading experience. Hemingway wrote dispatches sporadically, papers did not run all of his dispatches, papers edited and cut them, and readers read at least a couple of papers’ worth of other articles in between. He told Edmund Wilson as much in defending himself against Wilson’s critique of the selected (and heavily edited and cut) dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'' without his consent: “If you are being paid to be shot at and write about it you are supposed to mention the shooting. [. . .] But I do not go in for re-printing journalism.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}

If we can in this way better understand his style, and at least explain it if
not excuse it, we similarly ought to try to contextualize—and perhaps
excuse—the moral problem. The two issues here are the specific condemnation
of Hemingway’s silence about Republican atrocities and the general
question of biased reporting (the latter of which has already partially been
addressed).

Hemingway knew, as Donaldson writes, that mentioning the atrocities
“would arouse anticommunist sentiments back in the States and effectively
undermine any possibility of American intervention.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=394}} It is also doubtful
that reporting them would have stopped them. But reporting Republican
atrocities from Spain was not possible for the simple reason that all dispatches
went through a government censor. Matthews cabled his editors
from Paris in May 1937 to tell them that “censorship does not permit us to
say when the ‘telefonica’ is hit. So whenever you see reference in my
despatches [sic] to ‘an important building in the center of the city’ or words
to that effect, the cable desk can know that it is the telefonica.” {{sfn|Matthews|1937c|p=}} As already noted, by July he would cable “CENSORSHIP
STRICTER” as the ban on mentioning internationals went into effect. {{sfn|Matthews|1937d|p=}}{{sfn|Matthews|1937e|p=}} Cowles’ memoir confirms the
aggressive censorship, observing that it limited journalists to exactly the kind of material Hemingway wrote about:
<blockquote>There were frequent attempts to “beat the censor” by employing American slang expressions, but this came to an end when a Canadian girl joined the staff. The International Brigades were not allowed to be publicized; no reference could be made to Russian armaments, and buildings and streets which suffered
bombardments could not be identified.</blockquote>{{pg|437|438}}<blockquote>It was only in the realm of the human interest story that the journalists had a free hand. They could describe bombardments to their heart’s content.{{sfn|Cowles|1941|p=20}}</blockquote>
Hemingway and everyone else—to reserve incrimination for Hemingway is hardly just. No correspondent covering Republican Spain reported suspicious imprisonments and disappearances by government agents.

Hemingway, through Joris Ivens and ''The Spanish Earth'' project, had better
access to officials than most. Had he been able somehow to report such
activity, he would have lost that access and would probably have been kicked
out of the country. His fame would have likely prevented his own officially
sponsored disappearance, though he still worried, especially as so many of
such crimes on the Republican side occurred from free agents. When Jasper
Wood printed the anarchist F.A.I. banner in the limited edition book version
of ''The Spanish Earth'', Hemingway expressed his anxieties bluntly in a letter
to Jasper on August 20, 1938. It is hardly “petulant,” he scolded, “not to wish
to be shot.”{{sfn|Davison|1988|p=128}} Hostility in the Republic against the anarchists
ran high; after the Barcelona May Day conflict, the government’s foreign
minister told U.S. Ambassador Claude Bowers that “anarchist revolt
throughout Catalonia and not only expected but welcomed as an opportunity
to liquidate the anarchists who have been hostile from the beginning.”
{{sfn|NA|1954|p=292}}{{efn| The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State, 5 May 1937.}}

It is possible that Hemingway’s dispatch stating that “not one friend [. . .]
has been executed or is missing” was his clever means of reporting
the rumors and indeed the general fact while evading the censors, as in this very dispatch he acknowledged the presence of a censor after a bombardment.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=34}}
Matthews, on the other hand, never found a way to mention the
censors or admit even the possibility of people gone missing in the Republic.
Peter Moreira has observed that in a 1943 dispatch Hemingway related a remark by a British officer about the Chinese Nationalist government’s being
“hopeless on the offensive” because censorship “prevented American reporters
From actually saying that the Nationalists wouldn’t attack, surmising that by telling this anecdote Hemingway could sneak such a judgment into
his reports.”{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=77}} In Spain, censors aside, the eyewitness standard and his
own safety and continuing ability to report the war, and, yes, his passionate
support of the government contributed to his decision. He could have written
about government abuses from the states, but then could not return to{{pg|438|439}}cover the war and support the cause—a justification other journalists, those who did not return after the spring of 1937, did not enjoy. In his mind too, knowing what he heard of fascist atrocities, any reportage against the government lessening its chances of victory through killing hopes of increased international aid would have led to more deaths at Franco’s hands that the much smaller number inspired by fifth column paranoia.{{efn|''Hemingway’s Second War'' discusses in greater depth Hemingway’s politics and his falling out
with John Dos Passos over the execution of José Robles}}.

The accusation that Hemingway did not write about Republican atrocities
because he was saving it for his fiction I find baseless (Knightley 232;
Baker 402).{{sfn|Knightley|2004|p=232}}{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=402}}{{efn|Hemingway’s casual comment to colleagues calling dibs on Pepe Quintanilla, the executioner of
Madrid, is not sufficient evidence.}}Carolyn Moorehead, in her biography of Martha Gellhorn, describes
the climate for the Madrid correspondents that first spring: “And so,
day by day, the correspondents walked a thin and nervous line between truth,
evasions, and propaganda, telling one another that though it was not all right
if things were made up and presented as true, it was acceptable to describe
what you wanted, provided it was true and provided your readers were aware
of your position.”{{sfn|Moorehead|2003|p=125}} My own sense is that they did not walk the line quite
so nervously; their passionate commitment, and their principles of position
disclosure and the eyewitness standard, made that walk relatively easy.

The problem of ''committed journalism'', even sixty years later, has not been
resolved—as anyone paying attention to the media and world affairs well
knows. One person’s truth is another person’s propaganda. Certainly, as
Knightley notes, reporting from “the heart” affects one’s judgment.{{sfn|Knightley|2004|pp=234-5}}
Yet to attempt “balance,” per the edits to Matthews’ Guadalajara piece, betrays
one’s believed truth. Furthermore, the kind of reporting done by the
correspondents with the Republic—committed, one-sided, optimistic,
heroic, human interest work by embedded writers—would be practiced
widely and without reserve during World War II. Such narrative journalism,
with roots in Louise May Alcott’s “Hospital Sketches” series published in the
''Boston Commonwealth'', and more immediately in 1930s social documentary
writing whose “essence” is “not information”, anticipated postwar
new journalism’s adoption of novelistic narrative technique for nonfiction
which culminated with such wartime books as Norman Mailer’s ''Armies of
the Night'' and Michael Herr’s ''Dispatches''.{{sfn|Stott|1986|p=11}} Some of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches
fall in this line of development.

Today we might categorize such writing under the awkward umbrella
term ''creative nonfiction''. That term certainly fits the mixed bag of nonfiction
narratives and commentaries Hemingway published during the war in
Ken magazine. These pieces are essays, not journalism, several of which{{pg|439|440}}directly appeal for support for the Republic, and most of which really deal
with the approaching world war. ''Ken'' wanted “precisely the kind of opinion
articles he could not write for NANA.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=433}} His article, “The
Cardinal Picks a Winner,” shows a photo of a row of dead children from
Barcelona and another one with Nationalist officers saluting and Catholic officials
with raised hands, apparently making the fascist salute as well. He
ends ironically: “So I ''don’t believe'' the people shown in the photo can really
be making it. I would rather prefer to think that the photograph was faked.”
{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=436}} When Hemingway argues in “A Program for U.S. Realism” that the
United States should stay out of the next war except to stuff its pockets
through arms sales, one has to wonder, given his call and the democratic nations’
failure to save Spain, if we are to sniff sarcasm here.

The language of the dispatches, with their corrective intent against
Franco’s propaganda, does risk propagandizing. Hemingway’s optimism and
anti-fascism certainly colored his correspondence work. His criticism of the
anarchist and POUM militia for their inactivity on the Aragon front, for example,
sounds a lot like the Spanish Communist Party’s.{{efn|It at least sounds almost exactly like Dolores Ibarruri in her memoir. To the anarchists’ complaint
that they had no arms, she retorts “that they had more arms than did many other fronts. . . .
What they didn’t have and what they were constantly demanding were airplanes and tanks .And
they didn’t have them because the Republic government didn’t have them either, except for those
it received as aid from the Soviet Union” (238–284). Yet the various Catalonia militia were not
as well equipped with small arms as the more regular Popular Army units, and because of the
terrain tanks and planes were in fact necessary.}}
But unlike
Matthews, Hemingway limited his reports within the Republic to military
matters. Hemingway may have generally condemned the anarchists in his
nonfiction, considering their activity as hampering the war effort, but he
never repeated the accusation of their collaboration with the rebels, as
Matthews had done. And when Hemingway commented on the Bareclona
crisis, he referred only to the government—not the communists, as
Matthews had done.{{efn|Hemingway’s comments in “Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win” NANA staff
correspondent dispatch. Though arguably he was propagandizing by hiding the communist influence—
to mention the communists to an American audience would not gain sympathy for the
cause.}}Nor did he write articles asserting the limited role of
the communists in the government, or explaining Spanish anarchism, also
as Matthews had done.{{efn|An article on the communists’ limited role appeared in late November 1937, as discussed in a
missive from The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State on 2
Dec. 1937 (United States 461). Matthews’ “Anarchism: Spain’s Enigma” appeared in the New York
Times 22 Aug. 1937: 6, 14.}}

During one of Hemingway’s stateside breaks between trips to Spain, his
children asked if he was a “tool” of Stalin, an accusation tossed by a schoolmate
who, presumably parroting his or her parents, probably understood
the term no better than Hemingway’s children. {{sfn|Hemingway|nd|p=}}
Hemingway believed in the Republic’s potential, but he was never a dupe of
the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) or Comintern. As did many others, he
accepted PCE’s presence in the government for its discipline and organization
toward winning the war, and he understood the material necessity for
Comintern’s support. It should also be noted, as historians Hugh Thomas
and Helen Graham have reminded us, that the communism associated with
the Republic wasn’t particularly communist anyway.{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=628}}{{sfn|Graham|2002|p=184}} {{pg|440|441}}

Hemingway declined to follow Joris Ivens’ suggestion that he write a
dispatch on the significant role of the political commissars in the Republican
military, even though that would have meant
featuring his brave new friend Gustav Regler.{{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=}} Hemingway also, in a letter
justifying his work to Jack Wheeler at NANA, wrote about choosing not to
send a dispatch he had written because it might strike readers as propaganda
“no matter how true” (Letter to Jack Wheeler).{{sfn|Hemingway|1938b|p=}}

Hemingway went to Spain to see the war himself and to support the Republic
through his ambulance fund. The paychecks from NANA and the
fundraising from ''The Spanish Earth'' helped. Whatever propagandistic streak
colors the dispatches pales in comparison to the documentary. The filmmaker,
Joris Ivens, was well established in European communist circles. The
documentary genre then and now has occupied a slippery position between
the extremes of impossible-to-achieve empirical nonfiction and of the outright
fictionalized. Evaluations of Hemingway’s journalism are informed by
knowledge of ''The Spanish Earth'' and the ''Ken'' essays to the detriment of the
journalism. And the very nature of the slippery documentary genre may enable
the film to escape opprobrium. It wasn’t reportage; it was altogether
something else. But for that matter, Hemingway’s dispatches weren’t purely
reportage either, and if not ''altogether'' something else, still something else,
and should be reckoned with accordingly.

== Notes ==
{{notelist|20em}}

==Citations==
{{Reflist|15em}}

==Works Cited==
{{refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker
|first=Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Bruccoli |first=Matthew |date=2006 |title=Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame |url= |location=Columbia |publisher=U of South Caronia P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Cowles |first=Virginia |date=1941 |title=Looking for Trouble |url= |location=New York
|publisher=Harper & Brothers |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Davison |first=Richard Allan |title=The Publication of Hemingway’s The Spanish Earth: An Untold Story |url= |journal=Hemingway Review
|volume=7.2 |issue= |date=1988
|pages=122-130 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson
|first=Scott |date=2009 |title=Fitzgerald & Hemingway: Works and Days |url= |location=New York |publisher=Columbia UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Franklin |first=Sidney |date=1952 |title=Bullfighter from Brooklyn |url= |location=New York |publisher=Prentice-Hall |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Graham |first=Helen |date=2002 |title=The Spanish Republic at War 1936-1939 |url= |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Guttmann |first=Allen |date=1962 |title=The Wound in the Heart: American and the Spanish Civil War |url= |location=New York |publisher=Free Press of Glencoe |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1967 |title=By-Line: Ernest Hemingway |url= |location=New York |publisher=Scibner |pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Trogdon
|editor-first=Robert W.
|author-mask=1
|title=Fascism is a Lie
|url=
|journal=Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference |volume==
|issue=
|date=2002
|pages=193-6
|location=New York
|publisher=Carroll & Graf
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 May 1937
|chapter=Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=nd
|chapter=The Home Front
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938a
|chapter=Letter to Edmund Wilson
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=2 June 1938b
|chapter=Letter to Jack Wheeler
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=14 Feb 1939
|chapter=On the American Dead in Spain
|title=TS. New Masses
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Baker
|editor-first=Carlos
|author-mask=1
|date=2003
|chapter=The Hadely Mowrer
|title=Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Scribner
|pages=462-3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ibarruri
|first=Dolores
|date=1966
|title=They Shall Not Pass: The Autobiography of La Pasionaria
|url=
|location=United States
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|date=1969
|title=The Camera and I
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|author-mask=1
|date=26 Apr 1937
|chapter=Letter to Ernest Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|date=20 Nov 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Bertrand Weaver
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=12 Oct 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=25 Apr 1939
|chapter=Letter to M.B. Tenney
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Apr 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Knightley
|first=Phillip
|date=2004
|title=The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq
|url=
|location=Baltimore
|publisher=John Hopkins
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=
|date=9 Apr 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=TS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=11 Apr 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=8 May 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=6 July 1937d
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=July 1937e
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=22 March 1939
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 9
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=
|date=20 May 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=20 Dec 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 5
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Sep 1937c
|chapter=Note to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moorehead
|first=Caroline
|date=2003
|title=Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Henry Holt
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moreira
|first=Peter
|date=2006
|title=Hemingway on the China Front: His WWII Spy Mission with Martha Gellhorn
|url=
|location=Washington D.C.
|publisher=Potomac Books
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|date=5 Feb 1937
|chapter=Promotion Box: Hemingway, For Immediate Release
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|author-mask=1
|date=4 Apr 1938
|chapter=Promotion Box: American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|editor-last=Nelson
|editor-first=Card
|date=1994
|title=Remembering Spain: Hemingway’s Civil War Eulogy and the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
|url=
|location=Urbana
|publisher=U of Illinois
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Reynolds
|first=Michael
|date=1989
|title=Hemingway: The Paris Years
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Norton
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Stott
|first=William
|date=1986
|title=Documentary Expression and Thirties America
|url=
|location=Chicago
|publisher=U of Chicago P
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Thomas
|first=Hugh
|date=2001
|title=The Spanish Civil War, Rev. ed.
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Modern Library
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine
|last=''Two Wars and More to Come''
|first=
|date=24 Jan 1938
|title=Best Sellers of the Week Here and Elsewhere
|type=Advertisement
|url=
|magazine=New York Times
|pages=
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=NA
|first=
|title=United States. Dept. of State
|url=
|journal= Foreign Relations of the Untied States, 1937 |volume=1
|issue=General
|date=1954
|pages=
|location=Washington
|publisher=GPO
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Watson
|first=William Braasch
|title=Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches
|url=
|journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=7.2
|issue=
|date=1988
|pages=4-121
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Wheeler
|first=John H.
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938
|chapter=Letter to Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection, Box 3 Folder 14
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}

{{refend}}
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches

2025-04-20T02:01:30Z

MerAtticus: typo

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 

{{byline|last=Vernon |first=Alex |abstract=The Spanish Civil War began in July 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally-restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy. By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches.}}

{{dc|dc=T|HE SPANISH CIVIL WAR BEGAN ON}} 17-18 JULY, 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy, to collaborate with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens on the pro-Republican documentary ''The Spanish Earth'', and to pursue his fledgling love affair with Martha Gellhorn.

By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches for NANA.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=4}}{{efn|Quotations from the NANA dispatches follow the Diplomatic Text established by William Braasch’s “Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches.” I prefer NANA’s titles rather than Watson’s. For my disagreements with some of Watson’s datings, see my comments on specific dispatches in ''Hemingway’s Second War.''}}The secondary sources habitually judge them inferior journalism. Carlos Baker in the first Hemingway biography, for example, complains that the dialogue was “so heavily stamped with personal mannerisms as to be of doubtful authenticity.” Baker sees a “curious monotony in his stories of battles and bombardments,” a gratuitous use of graphic imagery “to shock his readers,” and “a note of triumphant boastfulness” in reporting proximity to danger. He also faults Hemingway for “often hint[ing] he was alone when in fact he was usually with Martha Gellhorn, Matthews, and Delmer.” Hemingway lacked Dos Passos’ “eye for telling details” and the “meticulous exactitude and inclusiveness that characterized the best work of Herbert Matthews and Sefton Delmer.”{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}

Philip Knightley’s ''The First Casualty'', the standard history of war correspondence, paraphrases Baker but with a trouncing final judgment:{{pg|427|428}}Hemingway’s “performance as a war correspondent was abysmally bad.” But Knightley goes beyond “technical” dissatisfaction to moral condemnation. Not just “unjustifiably optimistic”—an excusable offense—Hemingway’s reporting was “unforgivable” in its “total failure to report the Communist persecution, imprisonment, and summary execution of ‘untrustworthy elements’ on the Republican side, when he knew this was happening and when disclosing it might well have prevented further horrors like this.”
{{sfn|Knightley|2004 |pp=231–32}}{{efn|In my view, Knightley does not sufficiently acknowledge his paraphrasing of Baker.}}

Such criticisms in the final analysis might bear out. As Scott Donaldson writes, Hemingway advanced the Republican cause in his dispatches by eliciting “the deepest possible feelings of horror and of sympathy for the victims” of the Madrid bombardment; his “undue optimism” often “ignored Loyalist defeats and exaggerated the importance of its victories”; and “he repeatedly called attention to the participation of Italians and Germans on Franco’s side.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=426}} It also served as a recruitment tool—Milton Wolff, for example, acknowledged the strong influence Hemingway’s dispatches had on his decision to volunteer. Nevertheless, I think it a worthwhile exercise to attend a little more studiously to Hemingway’s dispatches, their context, and their artistry. I don’t necessarily intend to reverse the general opinion of the correspondence, only to achieve a better and more sympathetic understanding.

Herbert Matthews’ reporting for the ''New York Times'' will serve as a convenient comparison for two reasons. First, because both Baker and Knightley use Matthews’ journalism as the standard of excellence to pass judgment on Hemingway’s; and second, because the two worked practically side-by-side, seeing and reporting on many of the same events. In fact so closely did they work together that NANA sometimes complained that the ''Times'' was not buying Hemingway’s pieces because they resembled Matthews,’ and at one point Matthews’ own editors at the Times suspected him of plagiarizing Hemingway.{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|pp=411, 420}} A note from Matthews’ assigned editor Raymond McCaw provides, in two columns, seven quite similar passages from Hemingway’s Aragon front dispatches of September 13 and 14 with Matthews’ of September 14, with a penciled note at the bottom: “a deadly parallel if you ask me.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937c|p=}} Edwin James, the managing editor and McCaw’s boss, eventually agreed with Matthews’ defense: “It is quite apparent that you did not file any duplicate of the Hemingway story, or vice versa. As I understand it, the similarity arose from the fact that you{{pg|428|429}}both went to see the same show and saw it at the same time [sic], under the same conditions.”{{sfn|James|1937b|p=}}

Matthews’ dispatches ring of Republican bias as much if not more than anything Hemingway ever filed. The ''Times'' received many letters to the editor complaining about Matthews’ undisguised politics, which also gave serious concern to some of his editors. His description of the Republican May 1937 infighting in Barcelona is a striking example of how his news veered into propaganda and shows just how much he passed along the government’s version of events. The government’s “BLOODLESS TRIUMPH FOUGHT WITH RECOGNIZEDWEAPONS OF DEMOCRACY” turned out to be blatantly false, as the government and the “COMMUNISTS [WHO] DISTINGUISHED THEMSELVES” resorted to violent suppression. His blaming the uprising on the anarchist CNT working as Franco operatives parrots the government’s and the communist party’s public position, even though both charges—that the anarchists precipitated the events and that they were under Nationalist direction—were also false. His dispatch’s optimistic close also equivocates the political reality: “NEW GOVERNMENT HAS TAKEN POWER WHICH APPEARS TOVE CONFIDENCE VAST MAJORITY SPANIARDS IN LOYALIST TERRITORY AND TIS HOPED WILL GAIN EQUAL CONFIDENCE ABROAD STOP VIOLENCE AND REVOLUTION BEEN REPUDIATED AND NEWAND FAR HOPEFULLER PERIOD SEEMS BEGINNING.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937a|p=}}The ''Times'', knowing full well the one-sided coverage of a correspondent writing from one side of the conflict, had a reporter on both sides: Matthews with the Republicans, and William Carney with the Nationalists. They got their facts right (or wrong) as often as the other, their editors concluded; and they inspired about the same number of letters of complaint.{{sfn|James|1937a|p=}}{{sfn|James|1939|p=}}

Furthermore, Matthews’ dispatches received a great deal of substantive editorial revisions. One of Matthews’ Teruel reports had to be cut for length, as McCaw informed James: “This bird sent 2844 words on the same facts which Hemingway covered much better in less than half that number. I wonder if Matthews thinks the paper is thriving, and that cable tolls do not matter a damn. Of course, it had to be cut for space anyway.” McCaw most likely refers here to Matthews’ dispatch corresponding to Hemingway’s “The Attack on Teruel,” though Matthews’ account of the fall of Teruel is also much longer (and more long-winded) than Hemingway’s, and just as personal in terms of describing the dangers{{pg|429|430}} he faced. Indeed its length allows him to share even more of the action he endured.{{sfn|McCaw|1937b|p=}}

Raymond McCaw held a general professional disagreement with Matthews perhaps tainted with over zealousness. Whether a personal or political motive informed that disagreement can’t be determined from the evidence I’ve seen. It is also clear that McCaw’s charges bear some validity—that any responsible editor could have easily and reasonably taken issue where McCaw did. One of the more interesting examples concerns Matthews’ piece on Guadalajara. Because he only saw evidence on Franco’s side of Italian forces, he only reported on Italians. But the ''Times'' editors heard from other sources that German soldiers also participated in the March offensive. They thought it prudent, from this confusion, to change (nine times) “Italian” to “Rebel,” “the foe,” or “Insurgent.” When Matthews saw the published piece he wrote a strenuous objection. In some instances the editors changed paraphrased quotations from his sources. One large paragraph omitted by the editors stressed the first-hand nature of the information, and Matthews underlines the key words: “All day, at every place we stopped and no matter whom we talked to or what we saw, there was only one label—Italian. The dead bodies, the prisoners, the material of every kind, the men who had occupied Brihuega and then fled were Italian and nothing but Italian.” Here and elsewhere in his original story, Matthews emphasizes the “personal knowledge” of its information.{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}{{efn|James supported McCaw on these changes, though later acknowledged that altering quoted sources was perhaps unwarranted(29 April 1937; Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3).}}Yet Matthews did not report on the foreigners fighting for the Republic—it was in fact the Italian Garibali Battalion that routed Franco’s Italians. We might surmise government censorship behind this silence, though Matthews would not cable news of “CENSORSHIP STRICTER” and “BAN ON MENTIONING INTERNATIONALS INCLUDING AMERICANS INSTITUTED TODAY” until July.{{sfn|Matthews|1937b|p=}}Perhaps he cautiously self-censored, or politically self-censored for the same reasons the government would eventually ban mention. Still, his stridency about the omission of foreigners on one side is striking given his knowledge of their contribution to the other side. For this reason too, and his omission of other nationalities on the insurgent side, it seemed only fair to his editor “to stand on the statement that the majority of the Rebels were Italians and let it go at that.”{{sfn|James|1937c|p=}} A reasonable decision.

Throughout his correspondence to his editors and his several books,{{pg|430|431}}Matthews maintained a passionate defense of his eyewitness journalistic standard, a position those close to him understood. “Matthews never believed anything he had not seen with his own eyes,” Joris Ivens wrote. “He never saw his job as reporter as one that permitted him to sit in his hotel and read the handouts of the War Ministry.” {{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=112}} Sidney Franklin recalls that some writers wrote their pieces before arriving in Madrid, and came only for the “legitimacy” of the Madrid dateline.{{sfn|Franklin|1952|p=232}}And Matthews hated, on principle, having his name attached to an article that violated the integrity of his witness. The only way to achieve objectivity, for Matthews, was to acknowledge one’s subjective perspective. Writing to his publisher, Matthews argued that “the full documentary value” of his coverage was lost when the editors altered his submissions for “the apparent necessity of giving more or less equal space to both sides.”{{sfn|Matthews|1939|p=}}

As with Matthews, so too Hemingway. Indeed the commitment to subjectivity
fit quite well with Hemingway’s modernist aesthetics. If Hemingway
focused the dispatches on his perspective—on his own experience dodging
artillery—more than Matthews and more than most, he did so at least partially
to fulfill expectations. NANA approached him, after all, for his name
and personality as much as whatever he would write. Before he even left the
states it pitched him to potential publications, sending out a promotional release with text to be used alongside his forthcoming dispatches and suggesting
they include a photograph: “Mr. Hemingway’s assignment is to get both from the bombed towns and bombed trenches the human story of the war, not just an account of the game being played by general staffs with pins
and a map.”{{sfn|NANA|1937|p=}}{{ NANA also released each individual dispatch with a one-sentence “precede” about the “famous” or “noted” author. Ernest Hemingway was not writing as Herbert Mathews, ace reporter; Hemingway was writing as Ernest Hemingway, famous author of novels and stories well known to be drawn from his own experiences.

That he understood this to be his assignment is further evidenced by a
cable Matthews sent to his ''Times'' editors on April 9, 1937, concerning the
Loyalist attack: “WORKED CONJOINTL WITH HEMINGWAY TODAY HE SENDING EYEWITNESS DESCRIPTION WHILE EYE SENT GENERAL STRATEGY.”{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}When a year later the ''Times'' asked NANA to ensure Hemingway’s reports differed from Matthews, NANA complied by asking Hemingway “to emphasize color rather than straight reporting” not necessarily out of dissatisfaction with Hemingway’s reportage as Baker contends,{{efn|Baker’s notes date the Times request to NANA as 8 Apr. 1938, and NANA’s to Hemingway as 15
Apr. 1938 (Princeton University, Firestone Library: Box 18, Folder 8 “1938”), the date of “The Bombing of Tortosa” dispatch.}} but to increase{{pg|431|432}}the chance of selling to the ''Times'' and indeed to ensure the spirit of NANA’s original arrangement with Hemingway. {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}Far from dissatisfied, NANA wrote Hemingway at the end of August 1938 a letter of agreement for his coverage of “a general European war” should it break out, “written in your colorful style” (Hemingway was in Paris, on his way to Spain for the last time during the war).{{sfn|Wheeler|1938|p=}}When Edmund Wilson criticized the selected dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'', Hemingway wrote him that “I was paid to write what are called ‘eye witness’ accounts . . .what is called, or was asked for as ‘color stuff.’ Most of such stuff is faked. Mine was not. It was straight reporting and the personal stuff was what had been asked for by the editors. “Wilson’s estimation was also based upon ''Fact’s'' inclusion of the “The Old Man at the Bridge” story from ''Ken'', “not a news dispatch” at all.{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}Speaking at Carnegie Hall before the showing of a rough cut of ''The Spanish Earth'', shortly after his first trip to Spain and so very much in the context of his wartime work, Hemingway defined the writer’s problem as “project[ing] [what is true] in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2002|p=193}}

Personal, anecdotal journalism had been Hemingway’s signature style from his earliest days filing reports, in the early 1920s from Paris, when his editor at the ''Toronto Star Weekly'' “encouraged [. . .] what Hemingway did best: write about himself in the act of being a reporter.”{{sfn|Reynolds|1989|p=45}}How could he expect that NANA would expect anything else, if indeed NANA did expect anything else? In the Spanish Civil War he at least maintained his eyewitness posture; in World War II, however, he couldn’t keep himself out. His first piece, about D-Day, begins, “No one remembers the date of the Battle of Shiloh. But the day ''we took'' Fox Green beach was the sixth of June, and the wind was blowing hard out of the northwest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1967|p=340}}His venue too—''Collier’s'' magazine—and the fact that he had not written anything in three years further contributed to the story-like nature of the WWII stories, in which he figured as a protagonist—not to mention the stories and involvement he couldn’t write about, armed and running around France more of a free agent than his guerilla-hero Robert Jordan ever was (though he began to transform these experiences into fiction in several unpublished stories). In wartime China in 1943, filing articles for Ralph Ingersoll’s short-lived ''PM'' New York afternoon daily, Hemingway did not even care to be called a news reporter.{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=99}}

It should be mentioned that Hemingway and Matthews enjoyed a great{{pg|432|433}}friendship and working relationship. Hemingway usually brought Matthews, who did not have a car, on his excursions. When Matthews left Madrid for a break in mid April 1937, he had already ensured Hemingway would provide coverage to the ''Times'' through NANA. For one thing, Hemingway did not have to worry about Matthews as a rival for the history books. He could endorse his friends’ book, ''Two Wars and More to Come'', and praise him as “the ablest and the bravest war correspondent writing today “who “when the fakers are all dead [. . .] will be read in the schools” (Advertisement 21) because Matthews posed no threat to Hemingway’s own chances to be read in the schools. The only brief Hemingway ever expressed he really reserved for Matthews’ editors, for not wanting his Teruel street-fighting story and for cutting references to himself in Matthews’ Teruel dispatches so that it appeared only Matthews had been there.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=462}}

As for Hemingway’s neglecting to name everyone with him for every story, the ''Times'' cutting of his name suggests that such exactitude was hardly a priority. A paper had no incentive for announcing the fact that a competitor’s
correspondent stood beside its own to see and report the same
events. NANA changed at least one vague Hemingway “we,” which admits
to the presence of others, to “this correspondent”
—we can hardly fault Hemingway for working in the spirit of his
employer’s standards.{{sfn|NANA|1938|p=}}{{efn|“we” in typescript and radiogram (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 1 and Folder 25).}} Do readers care that Matthews, Delmer, Gellhorn,
and others were there? The story’s effect and the limited word count also
weighed against such roll calls. One editor chose not to clutter the dispatch
on the great retreat across the Ebro with all the names of the American International Brigade volunteers Hemingway encountered, an omission of
Content more far serious than that of omitted correspondent names.{{efn| Radiogram insert dateline 4 April 1938 (HRC: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 25).}} Hemingway
often gave the names of the reporters with him, such as at Teruel;
nor was he the only reporter to sometimes neglect to do so. Martha Gellhorn,
for example, used a vague “we” and singled herself out as the primary
participant in some of her stories.

By using first-person reportage Hemingway—and Matthews and Gellhorn And most of the group covering the war—were operating solidly within
convention. William Stott, in ''Documentary Expression and Thirties America'',
calls this first-person ''participant observer'' technique “the most common sort
of documentary reportage in the thirties” that worked “by vicarious persuasion:
the writer partook of the events he reported and bared his feelings
and attitudes to influence the reader’s own.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=178-9}}{{efn|He specifically includes Hemingway et al (180).}} Stott also observes {{pg|433|434}}another technique to enable documentary reportage to “talk to us, and convince us that we, our deepest interests, are engaged,” in the use of the second person: “Thirties documentaries constantly address ‘you,’ the ‘you’ who is we the audience, and exhorts, wheedles, begs us to identify, pity, participate.” His examples include Dorothy Parker’s Spanish Civil War writing, and Hemingway’s 1935 “First-Hand Report on the Florida Hurricane.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=27-8}} A number of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches employ the second-person as a way of bringing the reader along for the ride.

Hemingway’s dispatches used personal pronouns more artfully than is
generally recognized. “A New Kind of War,” which William Braasch Watson
notes as having been “[w]ritten with more care and imagination” than its
predecessors, begins in second person: “The window of the hotel is open
and, as you lie in bed, you hear the firing in the front line seventeen blocks
away.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=29}} He takes “you” outside, to see the damage and the dead from the bombing. “Someone makes a joke about missing teeth and someone else says not to make that joke. And everyone has the feeling that characterizes war. It wasn’t me, see? It wasn’t me.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} The tension between the first person and second-person pronouns—the movement toward identification with “you” and the insistence that “it wasn’t me”—continues in the next line. Here the reader is at once still in the narrator’s shoes, but strangely distanced from the narrator through biographical tidbit and, at the same time, asked
to see himself in the enemy: “The Italian dead up on the Guadalajara weren’t
you although Italian dead, because of where you had spent your boyhood,
always seemed, still, like Our Dead.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} It is worth quoting at length the dispatch’s transition to first person:<blockquote>
After the shell that lit on the sidewalk in front of the hotel you got a beautiful double corner room on that side, twice the size of the one you’d had, for less than a dollar. It wasn’t me they killed. See? No. Not me. It wasn’t me anymore.

Then in a hospital given by the American Friends of Spanish Democracy located out behind the Morata front along the road
to Valencia they said, “Raven wants to see you.”

“Do I know him?”

“I don’t think so,” they said. “But he wants to see you.”

“Where is he?”

“Upstairs.”{{pg|434|435}}In the room upstairs they are giving a blood transfusion to a man with a very gray face who lay on a cot with his arm out looking away from the gurgling bottle and moaning in a very impersonal way. He moaned mechanically and at regular intervals and it did not seem to be him that made the sound. His lips did not move.

“Where’s Raven?” I asked.

“I’m here,” said Raven.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=31}}</blockquote>The piece simply could not have sustained the second-person for the remaining
five pages. More significantly, for this deeply personal exchange between
the writer and the faceless, eyeless soldier, Hemingway could not hide
in the rhetorical device of the second-person. In the process, he effects a reversal
of the usual pronoun game; instead of identifying with the all embracing
“you,” we leave that trick behind and become fully attached to
the narratorial “I” as ourselves, as we might not have been had the article
begun in the first person. And even as the narrator identifies himself by name
for the only time in any of the dispatches—“Hemingway,” and later
“Ernest”—as decidedly not ourselves. We do not say, ''It isn’t me''. The historian
Hugh Thomas notes “the refreshing candour” of Hemingway’s naming
himself “in the world of the International Brigades, where no one’s name
seemed to be truthfully given.”{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=591}}{{efn|For Watson, the dispatch “seems, in fact, on the verge of becoming a story” (29).}}

A year later Hemingway’s “Tortosa Calmly Awaits Assault” resists admitting
the city’s imminent fall. Yet it does so anyway, by subtly alluding to the
wartime rhetoric of sacrificed blood irrigating the earth and rejuvenating
Spain. Such rhetoric was common during the war, appearing in speeches,
print, and poetry. Many of the poems in Cary Nelson’s anthology ''The Wound
and the Dream: Sixty Years of American Poems about the Civil War'' join in the
Spanish and international chorus’s general connection between Republican
soldiers and the land, and the particular singing of their dead nourishing
the land. We find such language in La Pasionaria’s farewell address to the International Brigades, her epilogue to ''The Book of the XV Brigade'', and Hemingway’s famous eulogy “On the American Dead in Spain”: “For our dead are
a part of the earth of Spain now and the earth of Spain can never die. Each
winter it will seem to die and each spring it will come alive again. Our dead
will live with it forever.”{{sfn|Nelson|1994|p=3}}{{efn| Reprinted in Bruccoli 76 and Nelson, Remembering 37 (the drafts at the JFK are titled “The Dead at Jarama”). In addition to the poems in Nelson’s anthology, see the excerpt from Boris Todrin’s “Spanish Sowing” in Guttmann (Wounded 179–180).}} The Tortosa dispatch implies the deaths of{{pg|435|436}}many Republican soldiers in its final paragraph’s description of the newborn onions:
<blockquote>The artillery was picking up a little now. Two came in at a fairly useful place and as the smoke blew away ahead and settled through the trees, you picked an armful of spring onions from a field beside the trail that led to the Tortosa road. They were the first onions of the spring and peeling one I found they were plump white and not too strong. The Ebro Delta has a fine rich land, and where the onions grow, tomorrow will be a battle.
{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=84}}</blockquote>

The echo is quiet, and perhaps unconscious, but there nevertheless. The opening boastfulness of “American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents”
should be taken somewhat ironically. The dispatch begins by announcing
that for “two days we have been doing the most dangerous thing
you can do in this war. That is keep close behind an unstabilized line where
the enemy are attacking with mechanized forces.” Then, a few pages later,
we learn about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade survivors of the spring 1938
Nationalist offensive that took Bob Merriman and eventually reached the
Mediterranean Sea. Reading about these survivors creeping through enemy
camps, stepping on a sleeping German soldier’s hand, sprinting “across an
open field toward the Ebro bank and being sniped at by artillery controlled
by an observation plane overhead” and then “the desperate swimming of
the Ebro” naked, we are asked to place the correspondent’s plight in due perspective.{{sfn|Watson|1988|pp=71-2}} This story certainly escapes the charge of a monotonous
battle and bombing scene; its switch from apparently boastful to
awe-struck witness feels almost deliberately self-conscious. Other choice selfironic
moments come in the dispatches of that pre-Teruel quiet fall of 1938.
The one titled “Hemingway, Covering War, Tells of Brush with Death” has little
to report from Madrid other than the new aftershave brand he is trying.
In “Loyalists’ Drive Seen Progressing as Planned,” he writes that “Shells are
all much the same and if they don’t hit you there is no story and if they do
you won’t have to write it.” {{sfn|Watson|1988|p=58}}

Hemingway’s dispatches are sometimes monotonous because his war was
Usually monotonous—as wars are most of the time. It should also be kept in
mind that scholars reviewing Hemingway’s NANA dispatches one after{{pg|436|437}}another do not relive the original reading experience. Hemingway wrote dispatches sporadically, papers did not run all of his dispatches, papers edited and cut them, and readers read at least a couple of papers’ worth of other articles in between. He told Edmund Wilson as much in defending himself against Wilson’s critique of the selected (and heavily edited and cut) dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'' without his consent: “If you are being paid to be shot at and write about it you are supposed to mention the shooting. [. . .] But I do not go in for re-printing journalism.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}

If we can in this way better understand his style, and at least explain it if
not excuse it, we similarly ought to try to contextualize—and perhaps
excuse—the moral problem. The two issues here are the specific condemnation
of Hemingway’s silence about Republican atrocities and the general
question of biased reporting (the latter of which has already partially been
addressed).

Hemingway knew, as Donaldson writes, that mentioning the atrocities
“would arouse anticommunist sentiments back in the States and effectively
undermine any possibility of American intervention.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=394}} It is also doubtful
that reporting them would have stopped them. But reporting Republican
atrocities from Spain was not possible for the simple reason that all dispatches
went through a government censor. Matthews cabled his editors
from Paris in May 1937 to tell them that “censorship does not permit us to
say when the ‘telefonica’ is hit. So whenever you see reference in my
despatches [sic] to ‘an important building in the center of the city’ or words
to that effect, the cable desk can know that it is the telefonica.” {{sfn|Matthews|1937c|p=}} As already noted, by July he would cable “CENSORSHIP
STRICTER” as the ban on mentioning internationals went into effect. {{sfn|Matthews|1937d|p=}}{{sfn|Matthews|1937e|p=}} Cowles’ memoir confirms the
aggressive censorship, observing that it limited journalists to exactly the kind of material Hemingway wrote about:
<blockquote>There were frequent attempts to “beat the censor” by employing American slang expressions, but this came to an end when a Canadian girl joined the staff. The International Brigades were not allowed to be publicized; no reference could be made to Russian armaments, and buildings and streets which suffered
bombardments could not be identified.</blockquote>{{pg|437|438}}<blockquote>It was only in the realm of the human interest story that the journalists had a free hand. They could describe bombardments to their heart’s content.{{sfn|Cowles|1941|p=20}}</blockquote>
Hemingway and everyone else—to reserve incrimination for Hemingway is hardly just. No correspondent covering Republican Spain reported suspicious imprisonments and disappearances by government agents.

Hemingway, through Joris Ivens and ''The Spanish Earth'' project, had better
access to officials than most. Had he been able somehow to report such
activity, he would have lost that access and would probably have been kicked
out of the country. His fame would have likely prevented his own officially
sponsored disappearance, though he still worried, especially as so many of
such crimes on the Republican side occurred from free agents. When Jasper
Wood printed the anarchist F.A.I. banner in the limited edition book version
of ''The Spanish Earth'', Hemingway expressed his anxieties bluntly in a letter
to Jasper on August 20, 1938. It is hardly “petulant,” he scolded, “not to wish
to be shot.”{{sfn|Davison|1988|p=128}} Hostility in the Republic against the anarchists
ran high; after the Barcelona May Day conflict, the government’s foreign
minister told U.S. Ambassador Claude Bowers that “anarchist revolt
throughout Catalonia and not only expected but welcomed as an opportunity
to liquidate the anarchists who have been hostile from the beginning.”
{{sfn|NA|1954|p=292}}{{efn| The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State, 5 May 1937.}}

It is possible that Hemingway’s dispatch stating that “not one friend [. . .]
has been executed or is missing” was his clever means of reporting
the rumors and indeed the general fact while evading the censors, as in this very dispatch he acknowledged the presence of a censor after a bombardment.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=34}}
Matthews, on the other hand, never found a way to mention the
censors or admit even the possibility of people gone missing in the Republic.
Peter Moreira has observed that in a 1943 dispatch Hemingway related a remark by a British officer about the Chinese Nationalist government’s being
“hopeless on the offensive” because censorship “prevented American reporters
From actually saying that the Nationalists wouldn’t attack, surmising that by telling this anecdote Hemingway could sneak such a judgment into
his reports.”{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=77}} In Spain, censors aside, the eyewitness standard and his
own safety and continuing ability to report the war, and, yes, his passionate
support of the government contributed to his decision. He could have written
about government abuses from the states, but then could not return to{{pg|438|439}}cover the war and support the cause—a justification other journalists, those who did not return after the spring of 1937, did not enjoy. In his mind too, knowing what he heard of fascist atrocities, any reportage against the government lessening its chances of victory through killing hopes of increased international aid would have led to more deaths at Franco’s hands that the much smaller number inspired by fifth column paranoia.{{efn|''Hemingway’s Second War'' discusses in greater depth Hemingway’s politics and his falling out
with John Dos Passos over the execution of José Robles}}.

The accusation that Hemingway did not write about Republican atrocities
because he was saving it for his fiction I find baseless (Knightley 232;
Baker 402).{{sfn|Knightley|2004|p=232}}{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=402}}{{efn|Hemingway’s casual comment to colleagues calling dibs on Pepe Quintanilla, the executioner of
Madrid, is not sufficient evidence.}}Carolyn Moorehead, in her biography of Martha Gellhorn, describes
the climate for the Madrid correspondents that first spring: “And so,
day by day, the correspondents walked a thin and nervous line between truth,
evasions, and propaganda, telling one another that though it was not all right
if things were made up and presented as true, it was acceptable to describe
what you wanted, provided it was true and provided your readers were aware
of your position.”{{sfn|Moorehead|2003|p=125}} My own sense is that they did not walk the line quite
so nervously; their passionate commitment, and their principles of position
disclosure and the eyewitness standard, made that walk relatively easy.

The problem of ''committed journalism'', even sixty years later, has not been
resolved—as anyone paying attention to the media and world affairs well
knows. One person’s truth is another person’s propaganda. Certainly, as
Knightley notes, reporting from “the heart” affects one’s judgment.{{sfn|Knightley|2004|pp=234-5}}
Yet to attempt “balance,” per the edits to Matthews’ Guadalajara piece, betrays
one’s believed truth. Furthermore, the kind of reporting done by the
correspondents with the Republic—committed, one-sided, optimistic,
heroic, human interest work by embedded writers—would be practiced
widely and without reserve during World War II. Such narrative journalism,
with roots in Louise May Alcott’s “Hospital Sketches” series published in the
''Boston Commonwealth'', and more immediately in 1930s social documentary
writing whose “essence” is “not information”, anticipated postwar
new journalism’s adoption of novelistic narrative technique for nonfiction
which culminated with such wartime books as Norman Mailer’s ''Armies of
the Night'' and Michael Herr’s ''Dispatches''.{{sfn|Stott|1986|p=11}} Some of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches
fall in this line of development.

Today we might categorize such writing under the awkward umbrella
term ''creative nonfiction''. That term certainly fits the mixed bag of nonfiction
narratives and commentaries Hemingway published during the war in
Ken magazine. These pieces are essays, not journalism, several of which{{pg|439|440}}directly appeal for support for the Republic, and most of which really deal
with the approaching world war. ''Ken'' wanted “precisely the kind of opinion
articles he could not write for NANA.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=433}} His article, “The
Cardinal Picks a Winner,” shows a photo of a row of dead children from
Barcelona and another one with Nationalist officers saluting and Catholic officials
with raised hands, apparently making the fascist salute as well. He
ends ironically: “So I ''don’t believe'' the people shown in the photo can really
be making it. I would rather prefer to think that the photograph was faked.”
{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=436}} When Hemingway argues in “A Program for U.S. Realism” that the
United States should stay out of the next war except to stuff its pockets
through arms sales, one has to wonder, given his call and the democratic nations’
failure to save Spain, if we are to sniff sarcasm here.

The language of the dispatches, with their corrective intent against
Franco’s propaganda, does risk propagandizing. Hemingway’s optimism and
anti-fascism certainly colored his correspondence work. His criticism of the
anarchist and POUM militia for their inactivity on the Aragon front, for example,
sounds a lot like the Spanish Communist Party’s.{{efn|It at least sounds almost exactly like Dolores Ibarruri in her memoir. To the anarchists’ complaint
that they had no arms, she retorts “that they had more arms than did many other fronts. . . .
What they didn’t have and what they were constantly demanding were airplanes and tanks .And
they didn’t have them because the Republic government didn’t have them either, except for those
it received as aid from the Soviet Union” (238–284). Yet the various Catalonia militia were not
as well equipped with small arms as the more regular Popular Army units, and because of the
terrain tanks and planes were in fact necessary.}}
But unlike
Matthews, Hemingway limited his reports within the Republic to military
matters. Hemingway may have generally condemned the anarchists in his
nonfiction, considering their activity as hampering the war effort, but he
never repeated the accusation of their collaboration with the rebels, as
Matthews had done. And when Hemingway commented on the Bareclona
crisis, he referred only to the government—not the communists, as
Matthews had done.{{efn|Hemingway’s comments in “Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win” NANA staff
correspondent dispatch. Though arguably he was propagandizing by hiding the communist influence—
to mention the communists to an American audience would not gain sympathy for the
cause.}}Nor did he write articles asserting the limited role of
the communists in the government, or explaining Spanish anarchism, also
as Matthews had done.{{efn|An article on the communists’ limited role appeared in late November 1937, as discussed in a
missive from The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State on 2
Dec. 1937 (United States 461). Matthews’ “Anarchism: Spain’s Enigma” appeared in the New York
Times 22 Aug. 1937: 6, 14.}}

During one of Hemingway’s stateside breaks between trips to Spain, his
children asked if he was a “tool” of Stalin, an accusation tossed by a schoolmate
who, presumably parroting his or her parents, probably understood
the term no better than Hemingway’s children. {{sfn|Hemingway|nd|p=}}
Hemingway believed in the Republic’s potential, but he was never a dupe of
the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) or Comintern. As did many others, he
accepted PCE’s presence in the government for its discipline and organization
toward winning the war, and he understood the material necessity for
Comintern’s support. It should also be noted, as historians Hugh Thomas
and Helen Graham have reminded us, that the communism associated with
the Republic wasn’t particularly communist anyway.{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=628}}{{sfn|Graham|2002|p=184}} {{pg|440|441}}

Hemingway declined to follow Joris Ivens’ suggestion that he write a
dispatch on the significant role of the political commissars in the Republican
military, even though that would have meant
featuring his brave new friend Gustav Regler.{{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=}} Hemingway also, in a letter
justifying his work to Jack Wheeler at NANA, wrote about choosing not to
send a dispatch he had written because it might strike readers as propaganda
“no matter how true” (Letter to Jack Wheeler).{{sfn|Hemingway|1938b|p=}}

Hemingway went to Spain to see the war himself and to support the Republic
through his ambulance fund. The paychecks from NANA and the
fundraising from ''The Spanish Earth'' helped. Whatever propagandistic streak
colors the dispatches pales in comparison to the documentary. The filmmaker,
Joris Ivens, was well established in European communist circles. The
documentary genre then and now has occupied a slippery position between
the extremes of impossible-to-achieve empirical nonfiction and of the outright
fictionalized. Evaluations of Hemingway’s journalism are informed by
knowledge of ''The Spanish Earth'' and the ''Ken'' essays to the detriment of the
journalism. And the very nature of the slippery documentary genre may enable
the film to escape opprobrium. It wasn’t reportage; it was altogether
something else. But for that matter, Hemingway’s dispatches weren’t purely
reportage either, and if not ''altogether'' something else, still something else,
and should be reckoned with accordingly.

== Notes ==
{{notelist|20em}}

==Citations==
{{Reflist|15em}}

==Works Cited==
{{refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker
|first=Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Bruccoli |first=Matthew |date=2006 |title=Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame |url= |location=Columbia |publisher=U of South Caronia P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Cowles |first=Virginia |date=1941 |title=Looking for Trouble |url= |location=New York
|publisher=Harper & Brothers |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Davison |first=Richard Allan |title=The Publication of Hemingway’s The Spanish Earth: An Untold Story |url= |journal=Hemingway Review
|volume=7.2 |issue= |date=1988
|pages=122-130 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson
|first=Scott |date=2009 |title=Fitzgerald & Hemingway: Works and Days |url= |location=New York |publisher=Columbia UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Franklin |first=Sidney |date=1952 |title=Bullfighter from Brooklyn |url= |location=New York |publisher=Prentice-Hall |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Graham |first=Helen |date=2002 |title=The Spanish Republic at War 1936-1939 |url= |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Guttmann |first=Allen |date=1962 |title=The Wound in the Heart: American and the Spanish Civil War |url= |location=New York |publisher=Free Press of Glencoe |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1967 |title=By-Line: Ernest Hemingway |url= |location=New York |publisher=Scibner |pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Trogdon
|editor-first=Robert W.
|author-mask=1
|title=Fascism is a Lie
|url=
|journal=Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference |volume==
|issue=
|date=2002
|pages=193-6
|location=New York
|publisher=Carroll & Graf
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 May 1937
|chapter=Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=nd
|chapter=The Home Front
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938a
|chapter=Letter to Edmund Wilson
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=2 June 1938b
|chapter=Letter to Jack Wheeler
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=14 Feb 1939
|chapter=On the American Dead in Spain
|title=TS. New Masses
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Baker
|editor-first=Carlos
|author-mask=1
|date=2003
|chapter=The Hadely Mowrer
|title=Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Scribner
|pages=462-3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ibarruri
|first=Dolores
|date=1966
|title=They Shall Not Pass: The Autobiography of La Pasionaria
|url=
|location=United States
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|date=1969
|title=The Camera and I
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|author-mask=1
|date=26 Apr 1937
|chapter=Letter to Ernest Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|date=20 Nov 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Bertrand Weaver
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=12 Oct 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=25 Apr 1939
|chapter=Letter to M.B. Tenney
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Apr 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Knightley
|first=Phillip
|date=2004
|title=The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq
|url=
|location=Baltimore
|publisher=John Hopkins
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=
|date=9 Apr 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=TS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=11 Apr 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=8 May 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=6 July 1937d
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=July 1937e
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=22 March 1939
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 9
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=
|date=20 May 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=20 Dec 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 5
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Sep 1937c
|chapter=Note to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moorehead
|first=Caroline
|date=2003
|title=Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Henry Holt
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moreira
|first=Peter
|date=2006
|title=Hemingway on the China Front: His WWII Spy Mission with Martha Gellhorn
|url=
|location=Washington D.C.
|publisher=Potomac Books
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|date=5 Feb 1937
|chapter=Promotion Box: Hemingway, For Immediate Release
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|author-mask=1
|date=4 Apr 1938
|chapter=Promotion Box: American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|editor-last=Nelson
|editor-first=Card
|date=1994
|title=Remembering Spain: Hemingway’s Civil War Eulogy and the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
|url=
|location=Urbana
|publisher=U of Illinois
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Reynolds
|first=Michael
|date=1989
|title=Hemingway: The Paris Years
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Norton
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Stott
|first=William
|date=1986
|title=Documentary Expression and Thirties America
|url=
|location=Chicago
|publisher=U of Chicago P
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Thomas
|first=Hugh
|date=2001
|title=The Spanish Civil War, Rev. ed.
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Modern Library
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine
|last=''Two Wars and More to Come''
|first=
|date=24 Jan 1938
|title=Best Sellers of the Week Here and Elsewhere
|type=Advertisement
|url=
|magazine=New York Times
|pages=
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=NA
|first=
|title=United States. Dept. of State
|url=
|journal= Foreign Relations of the Untied States, 1937 |volume=1
|issue=General
|date=1954
|pages=
|location=Washington
|publisher=GPO
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Watson
|first=William Braasch
|title=Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches
|url=
|journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=7.2
|issue=
|date=1988
|pages=4-121
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Wheeler
|first=John H.
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938
|chapter=Letter to Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection, Box 3 Folder 14
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}

{{refend}}
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches

2025-04-20T01:59:54Z

MerAtticus: typo

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 

{{byline|last=Vernon |first=Alex |abstract=The Spanish Civil War began in July 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally-restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy. By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches.}}

{{dc|dc=T|HE SPANISH CIVIL WAR BEGAN ON}} 17-18 JULY, 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy, to collaborate with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens on the pro-Republican documentary ''The Spanish Earth'', and to pursue his fledgling love affair with Martha Gellhorn.

By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches for NANA.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=4}}{{efn|Quotations from the NANA dispatches follow the Diplomatic Text established by William Braasch’s “Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches.” I prefer NANA’s titles rather than Watson’s. For my disagreements with some of Watson’s datings, see my comments on specific dispatches in ''Hemingway’s Second War.''}}The secondary sources habitually judge them inferior journalism. Carlos Baker in the first Hemingway biography, for example, complains that the dialogue was “so heavily stamped with personal mannerisms as to be of doubtful authenticity.” Baker sees a “curious monotony in his stories of battles and bombardments,” a gratuitous use of graphic imagery “to shock his readers,” and “a note of triumphant boastfulness” in reporting proximity to danger. He also faults Hemingway for “often hint[ing] he was alone when in fact he was usually with Martha Gellhorn, Matthews, and Delmer.” Hemingway lacked Dos Passos’ “eye for telling details” and the “meticulous exactitude and inclusiveness that characterized the best work of Herbert Matthews and Sefton Delmer.”{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}

Philip Knightley’s ''The First Casualty'', the standard history of war correspondence, paraphrases Baker but with a trouncing final judgment:{{pg|427|428}}Hemingway’s “performance as a war correspondent was abysmally bad.” But Knightley goes beyond “technical” dissatisfaction to moral condemnation. Not just “unjustifiably optimistic”—an excusable offense—Hemingway’s reporting was “unforgivable” in its “total failure to report the Communist persecution, imprisonment, and summary execution of ‘untrustworthy elements’ on the Republican side, when he knew this was happening and when disclosing it might well have prevented further horrors like this.”
{{sfn|Knightley|2004 |pp=231–32}}{{efn|In my view, Knightley does not sufficiently acknowledge his paraphrasing of Baker.}}

Such criticisms in the final analysis might bear out. As Scott Donaldson writes, Hemingway advanced the Republican cause in his dispatches by eliciting “the deepest possible feelings of horror and of sympathy for the victims” of the Madrid bombardment; his “undue optimism” often “ignored Loyalist defeats and exaggerated the importance of its victories”; and “he repeatedly called attention to the participation of Italians and Germans on Franco’s side.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=426}} It also served as a recruitment tool—Milton Wolff, for example, acknowledged the strong influence Hemingway’s dispatches had on his decision to volunteer. Nevertheless, I think it a worthwhile exercise to attend a little more studiously to Hemingway’s dispatches, their context, and their artistry. I don’t necessarily intend to reverse the general opinion of the correspondence, only to achieve a better and more sympathetic understanding.

Herbert Matthews’ reporting for the ''New York Times'' will serve as a convenient comparison for two reasons. First, because both Baker and Knightley use Matthews’ journalism as the standard of excellence to pass judgment on Hemingway’s; and second, because the two worked practically side-by-side, seeing and reporting on many of the same events. In fact so closely did they work together that NANA sometimes complained that the ''Times'' was not buying Hemingway’s pieces because they resembled Matthews,’ and at one point Matthews’ own editors at the Times suspected him of plagiarizing Hemingway.{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|pp=411, 420}} A note from Matthews’ assigned editor Raymond McCaw provides, in two columns, seven quite similar passages from Hemingway’s Aragon front dispatches of September 13 and 14 with Matthews’ of September 14, with a penciled note at the bottom: “a deadly parallel if you ask me.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937c|p=}} Edwin James, the managing editor and McCaw’s boss, eventually agreed with Matthews’ defense: “It is quite apparent that you did not file any duplicate of the Hemingway story, or vice versa. As I understand it, the similarity arose from the fact that you{{pg|428|429}}both went to see the same show and saw it at the same time [sic], under the same conditions.”{{sfn|James|1937b|p=}}

Matthews’ dispatches ring of Republican bias as much if not more than anything Hemingway ever filed. The ''Times'' received many letters to the editor complaining about Matthews’ undisguised politics, which also gave serious concern to some of his editors. His description of the Republican May 1937 infighting in Barcelona is a striking example of how his news veered into propaganda and shows just how much he passed along the government’s version of events. The government’s “BLOODLESS TRIUMPH FOUGHT WITH RECOGNIZEDWEAPONS OF DEMOCRACY” turned out to be blatantly false, as the government and the “COMMUNISTS [WHO] DISTINGUISHED THEMSELVES” resorted to violent suppression. His blaming the uprising on the anarchist CNT working as Franco operatives parrots the government’s and the communist party’s public position, even though both charges—that the anarchists precipitated the events and that they were under Nationalist direction—were also false. His dispatch’s optimistic close also equivocates the political reality: “NEW GOVERNMENT HAS TAKEN POWER WHICH APPEARS TOVE CONFIDENCE VAST MAJORITY SPANIARDS IN LOYALIST TERRITORY AND TIS HOPED WILL GAIN EQUAL CONFIDENCE ABROAD STOP VIOLENCE AND REVOLUTION BEEN REPUDIATED AND NEWAND FAR HOPEFULLER PERIOD SEEMS BEGINNING.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937a|p=}}The ''Times'', knowing full well the one-sided coverage of a correspondent writing from one side of the conflict, had a reporter on both sides: Matthews with the Republicans, and William Carney with the Nationalists. They got their facts right (or wrong) as often as the other, their editors concluded; and they inspired about the same number of letters of complaint.{{sfn|James|1937a|p=}}{sfn|James|1939|p=}}

Furthermore, Matthews’ dispatches received a great deal of substantive editorial revisions. One of Matthews’ Teruel reports had to be cut for length, as McCaw informed James: “This bird sent 2844 words on the same facts which Hemingway covered much better in less than half that number. I wonder if Matthews thinks the paper is thriving, and that cable tolls do not matter a damn. Of course, it had to be cut for space anyway.” McCaw most likely refers here to Matthews’ dispatch corresponding to Hemingway’s “The Attack on Teruel,” though Matthews’ account of the fall of Teruel is also much longer (and more long-winded) than Hemingway’s, and just as personal in terms of describing the dangers{{pg|429|430}} he faced. Indeed its length allows him to share even more of the action he endured.{{sfn|McCaw|1937b|p=}}

Raymond McCaw held a general professional disagreement with Matthews perhaps tainted with over zealousness. Whether a personal or political motive informed that disagreement can’t be determined from the evidence I’ve seen. It is also clear that McCaw’s charges bear some validity—that any responsible editor could have easily and reasonably taken issue where McCaw did. One of the more interesting examples concerns Matthews’ piece on Guadalajara. Because he only saw evidence on Franco’s side of Italian forces, he only reported on Italians. But the ''Times'' editors heard from other sources that German soldiers also participated in the March offensive. They thought it prudent, from this confusion, to change (nine times) “Italian” to “Rebel,” “the foe,” or “Insurgent.” When Matthews saw the published piece he wrote a strenuous objection. In some instances the editors changed paraphrased quotations from his sources. One large paragraph omitted by the editors stressed the first-hand nature of the information, and Matthews underlines the key words: “All day, at every place we stopped and no matter whom we talked to or what we saw, there was only one label—Italian. The dead bodies, the prisoners, the material of every kind, the men who had occupied Brihuega and then fled were Italian and nothing but Italian.” Here and elsewhere in his original story, Matthews emphasizes the “personal knowledge” of its information.{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}{{efn|James supported McCaw on these changes, though later acknowledged that altering quoted sources was perhaps unwarranted(29 April 1937; Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3).}}Yet Matthews did not report on the foreigners fighting for the Republic—it was in fact the Italian Garibali Battalion that routed Franco’s Italians. We might surmise government censorship behind this silence, though Matthews would not cable news of “CENSORSHIP STRICTER” and “BAN ON MENTIONING INTERNATIONALS INCLUDING AMERICANS INSTITUTED TODAY” until July.{{sfn|Matthews|1937b|p=}}Perhaps he cautiously self-censored, or politically self-censored for the same reasons the government would eventually ban mention. Still, his stridency about the omission of foreigners on one side is striking given his knowledge of their contribution to the other side. For this reason too, and his omission of other nationalities on the insurgent side, it seemed only fair to his editor “to stand on the statement that the majority of the Rebels were Italians and let it go at that.”{{sfn|James|1937c|p=}} A reasonable decision.

Throughout his correspondence to his editors and his several books,{{pg|430|431}}Matthews maintained a passionate defense of his eyewitness journalistic standard, a position those close to him understood. “Matthews never believed anything he had not seen with his own eyes,” Joris Ivens wrote. “He never saw his job as reporter as one that permitted him to sit in his hotel and read the handouts of the War Ministry.” {{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=112}} Sidney Franklin recalls that some writers wrote their pieces before arriving in Madrid, and came only for the “legitimacy” of the Madrid dateline.{{sfn|Franklin|1952|p=232}}And Matthews hated, on principle, having his name attached to an article that violated the integrity of his witness. The only way to achieve objectivity, for Matthews, was to acknowledge one’s subjective perspective. Writing to his publisher, Matthews argued that “the full documentary value” of his coverage was lost when the editors altered his submissions for “the apparent necessity of giving more or less equal space to both sides.”{{sfn|Matthews|1939|p=}}

As with Matthews, so too Hemingway. Indeed the commitment to subjectivity
fit quite well with Hemingway’s modernist aesthetics. If Hemingway
focused the dispatches on his perspective—on his own experience dodging
artillery—more than Matthews and more than most, he did so at least partially
to fulfill expectations. NANA approached him, after all, for his name
and personality as much as whatever he would write. Before he even left the
states it pitched him to potential publications, sending out a promotional release with text to be used alongside his forthcoming dispatches and suggesting
they include a photograph: “Mr. Hemingway’s assignment is to get both from the bombed towns and bombed trenches the human story of the war, not just an account of the game being played by general staffs with pins
and a map.”{{sfn|NANA|1937|p=}}{{ NANA also released each individual dispatch with a one-sentence “precede” about the “famous” or “noted” author. Ernest Hemingway was not writing as Herbert Mathews, ace reporter; Hemingway was writing as Ernest Hemingway, famous author of novels and stories well known to be drawn from his own experiences.

That he understood this to be his assignment is further evidenced by a
cable Matthews sent to his ''Times'' editors on April 9, 1937, concerning the
Loyalist attack: “WORKED CONJOINTL WITH HEMINGWAY TODAY HE SENDING EYEWITNESS DESCRIPTION WHILE EYE SENT GENERAL STRATEGY.”{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}When a year later the ''Times'' asked NANA to ensure Hemingway’s reports differed from Matthews, NANA complied by asking Hemingway “to emphasize color rather than straight reporting” not necessarily out of dissatisfaction with Hemingway’s reportage as Baker contends,{{efn|Baker’s notes date the Times request to NANA as 8 Apr. 1938, and NANA’s to Hemingway as 15
Apr. 1938 (Princeton University, Firestone Library: Box 18, Folder 8 “1938”), the date of “The Bombing of Tortosa” dispatch.}} but to increase{{pg|431|432}}the chance of selling to the ''Times'' and indeed to ensure the spirit of NANA’s original arrangement with Hemingway. {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}Far from dissatisfied, NANA wrote Hemingway at the end of August 1938 a letter of agreement for his coverage of “a general European war” should it break out, “written in your colorful style” (Hemingway was in Paris, on his way to Spain for the last time during the war).{{sfn|Wheeler|1938|p=}}When Edmund Wilson criticized the selected dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'', Hemingway wrote him that “I was paid to write what are called ‘eye witness’ accounts . . .what is called, or was asked for as ‘color stuff.’ Most of such stuff is faked. Mine was not. It was straight reporting and the personal stuff was what had been asked for by the editors. “Wilson’s estimation was also based upon ''Fact’s'' inclusion of the “The Old Man at the Bridge” story from ''Ken'', “not a news dispatch” at all.{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}Speaking at Carnegie Hall before the showing of a rough cut of ''The Spanish Earth'', shortly after his first trip to Spain and so very much in the context of his wartime work, Hemingway defined the writer’s problem as “project[ing] [what is true] in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2002|p=193}}

Personal, anecdotal journalism had been Hemingway’s signature style from his earliest days filing reports, in the early 1920s from Paris, when his editor at the ''Toronto Star Weekly'' “encouraged [. . .] what Hemingway did best: write about himself in the act of being a reporter.”{{sfn|Reynolds|1989|p=45}}How could he expect that NANA would expect anything else, if indeed NANA did expect anything else? In the Spanish Civil War he at least maintained his eyewitness posture; in World War II, however, he couldn’t keep himself out. His first piece, about D-Day, begins, “No one remembers the date of the Battle of Shiloh. But the day ''we took'' Fox Green beach was the sixth of June, and the wind was blowing hard out of the northwest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1967|p=340}}His venue too—''Collier’s'' magazine—and the fact that he had not written anything in three years further contributed to the story-like nature of the WWII stories, in which he figured as a protagonist—not to mention the stories and involvement he couldn’t write about, armed and running around France more of a free agent than his guerilla-hero Robert Jordan ever was (though he began to transform these experiences into fiction in several unpublished stories). In wartime China in 1943, filing articles for Ralph Ingersoll’s short-lived ''PM'' New York afternoon daily, Hemingway did not even care to be called a news reporter.{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=99}}

It should be mentioned that Hemingway and Matthews enjoyed a great{{pg|432|433}}friendship and working relationship. Hemingway usually brought Matthews, who did not have a car, on his excursions. When Matthews left Madrid for a break in mid April 1937, he had already ensured Hemingway would provide coverage to the ''Times'' through NANA. For one thing, Hemingway did not have to worry about Matthews as a rival for the history books. He could endorse his friends’ book, ''Two Wars and More to Come'', and praise him as “the ablest and the bravest war correspondent writing today “who “when the fakers are all dead [. . .] will be read in the schools” (Advertisement 21) because Matthews posed no threat to Hemingway’s own chances to be read in the schools. The only brief Hemingway ever expressed he really reserved for Matthews’ editors, for not wanting his Teruel street-fighting story and for cutting references to himself in Matthews’ Teruel dispatches so that it appeared only Matthews had been there.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=462}}

As for Hemingway’s neglecting to name everyone with him for every story, the ''Times'' cutting of his name suggests that such exactitude was hardly a priority. A paper had no incentive for announcing the fact that a competitor’s
correspondent stood beside its own to see and report the same
events. NANA changed at least one vague Hemingway “we,” which admits
to the presence of others, to “this correspondent”
—we can hardly fault Hemingway for working in the spirit of his
employer’s standards.{{sfn|NANA|1938|p=}}{{efn|“we” in typescript and radiogram (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 1 and Folder 25).}} Do readers care that Matthews, Delmer, Gellhorn,
and others were there? The story’s effect and the limited word count also
weighed against such roll calls. One editor chose not to clutter the dispatch
on the great retreat across the Ebro with all the names of the American International Brigade volunteers Hemingway encountered, an omission of
Content more far serious than that of omitted correspondent names.{{efn| Radiogram insert dateline 4 April 1938 (HRC: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 25).}} Hemingway
often gave the names of the reporters with him, such as at Teruel;
nor was he the only reporter to sometimes neglect to do so. Martha Gellhorn,
for example, used a vague “we” and singled herself out as the primary
participant in some of her stories.

By using first-person reportage Hemingway—and Matthews and Gellhorn And most of the group covering the war—were operating solidly within
convention. William Stott, in ''Documentary Expression and Thirties America'',
calls this first-person ''participant observer'' technique “the most common sort
of documentary reportage in the thirties” that worked “by vicarious persuasion:
the writer partook of the events he reported and bared his feelings
and attitudes to influence the reader’s own.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=178-9}}{{efn|He specifically includes Hemingway et al (180).}} Stott also observes {{pg|433|434}}another technique to enable documentary reportage to “talk to us, and convince us that we, our deepest interests, are engaged,” in the use of the second person: “Thirties documentaries constantly address ‘you,’ the ‘you’ who is we the audience, and exhorts, wheedles, begs us to identify, pity, participate.” His examples include Dorothy Parker’s Spanish Civil War writing, and Hemingway’s 1935 “First-Hand Report on the Florida Hurricane.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=27-8}} A number of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches employ the second-person as a way of bringing the reader along for the ride.

Hemingway’s dispatches used personal pronouns more artfully than is
generally recognized. “A New Kind of War,” which William Braasch Watson
notes as having been “[w]ritten with more care and imagination” than its
predecessors, begins in second person: “The window of the hotel is open
and, as you lie in bed, you hear the firing in the front line seventeen blocks
away.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=29}} He takes “you” outside, to see the damage and the dead from the bombing. “Someone makes a joke about missing teeth and someone else says not to make that joke. And everyone has the feeling that characterizes war. It wasn’t me, see? It wasn’t me.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} The tension between the first person and second-person pronouns—the movement toward identification with “you” and the insistence that “it wasn’t me”—continues in the next line. Here the reader is at once still in the narrator’s shoes, but strangely distanced from the narrator through biographical tidbit and, at the same time, asked
to see himself in the enemy: “The Italian dead up on the Guadalajara weren’t
you although Italian dead, because of where you had spent your boyhood,
always seemed, still, like Our Dead.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} It is worth quoting at length the dispatch’s transition to first person:<blockquote>
After the shell that lit on the sidewalk in front of the hotel you got a beautiful double corner room on that side, twice the size of the one you’d had, for less than a dollar. It wasn’t me they killed. See? No. Not me. It wasn’t me anymore.

Then in a hospital given by the American Friends of Spanish Democracy located out behind the Morata front along the road
to Valencia they said, “Raven wants to see you.”

“Do I know him?”

“I don’t think so,” they said. “But he wants to see you.”

“Where is he?”

“Upstairs.”{{pg|434|435}}In the room upstairs they are giving a blood transfusion to a man with a very gray face who lay on a cot with his arm out looking away from the gurgling bottle and moaning in a very impersonal way. He moaned mechanically and at regular intervals and it did not seem to be him that made the sound. His lips did not move.

“Where’s Raven?” I asked.

“I’m here,” said Raven.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=31}}</blockquote>The piece simply could not have sustained the second-person for the remaining
five pages. More significantly, for this deeply personal exchange between
the writer and the faceless, eyeless soldier, Hemingway could not hide
in the rhetorical device of the second-person. In the process, he effects a reversal
of the usual pronoun game; instead of identifying with the all embracing
“you,” we leave that trick behind and become fully attached to
the narratorial “I” as ourselves, as we might not have been had the article
begun in the first person. And even as the narrator identifies himself by name
for the only time in any of the dispatches—“Hemingway,” and later
“Ernest”—as decidedly not ourselves. We do not say, ''It isn’t me''. The historian
Hugh Thomas notes “the refreshing candour” of Hemingway’s naming
himself “in the world of the International Brigades, where no one’s name
seemed to be truthfully given.”{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=591}}{{efn|For Watson, the dispatch “seems, in fact, on the verge of becoming a story” (29).}}

A year later Hemingway’s “Tortosa Calmly Awaits Assault” resists admitting
the city’s imminent fall. Yet it does so anyway, by subtly alluding to the
wartime rhetoric of sacrificed blood irrigating the earth and rejuvenating
Spain. Such rhetoric was common during the war, appearing in speeches,
print, and poetry. Many of the poems in Cary Nelson’s anthology ''The Wound
and the Dream: Sixty Years of American Poems about the Civil War'' join in the
Spanish and international chorus’s general connection between Republican
soldiers and the land, and the particular singing of their dead nourishing
the land. We find such language in La Pasionaria’s farewell address to the International Brigades, her epilogue to ''The Book of the XV Brigade'', and Hemingway’s famous eulogy “On the American Dead in Spain”: “For our dead are
a part of the earth of Spain now and the earth of Spain can never die. Each
winter it will seem to die and each spring it will come alive again. Our dead
will live with it forever.”{{sfn|Nelson|1994|p=3}}{{efn| Reprinted in Bruccoli 76 and Nelson, Remembering 37 (the drafts at the JFK are titled “The Dead at Jarama”). In addition to the poems in Nelson’s anthology, see the excerpt from Boris Todrin’s “Spanish Sowing” in Guttmann (Wounded 179–180).}} The Tortosa dispatch implies the deaths of{{pg|435|436}}many Republican soldiers in its final paragraph’s description of the newborn onions:
<blockquote>The artillery was picking up a little now. Two came in at a fairly useful place and as the smoke blew away ahead and settled through the trees, you picked an armful of spring onions from a field beside the trail that led to the Tortosa road. They were the first onions of the spring and peeling one I found they were plump white and not too strong. The Ebro Delta has a fine rich land, and where the onions grow, tomorrow will be a battle.
{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=84}}</blockquote>

The echo is quiet, and perhaps unconscious, but there nevertheless. The opening boastfulness of “American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents”
should be taken somewhat ironically. The dispatch begins by announcing
that for “two days we have been doing the most dangerous thing
you can do in this war. That is keep close behind an unstabilized line where
the enemy are attacking with mechanized forces.” Then, a few pages later,
we learn about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade survivors of the spring 1938
Nationalist offensive that took Bob Merriman and eventually reached the
Mediterranean Sea. Reading about these survivors creeping through enemy
camps, stepping on a sleeping German soldier’s hand, sprinting “across an
open field toward the Ebro bank and being sniped at by artillery controlled
by an observation plane overhead” and then “the desperate swimming of
the Ebro” naked, we are asked to place the correspondent’s plight in due perspective.{{sfn|Watson|1988|pp=71-2}} This story certainly escapes the charge of a monotonous
battle and bombing scene; its switch from apparently boastful to
awe-struck witness feels almost deliberately self-conscious. Other choice selfironic
moments come in the dispatches of that pre-Teruel quiet fall of 1938.
The one titled “Hemingway, Covering War, Tells of Brush with Death” has little
to report from Madrid other than the new aftershave brand he is trying.
In “Loyalists’ Drive Seen Progressing as Planned,” he writes that “Shells are
all much the same and if they don’t hit you there is no story and if they do
you won’t have to write it.” {{sfn|Watson|1988|p=58}}

Hemingway’s dispatches are sometimes monotonous because his war was
Usually monotonous—as wars are most of the time. It should also be kept in
mind that scholars reviewing Hemingway’s NANA dispatches one after{{pg|436|437}}another do not relive the original reading experience. Hemingway wrote dispatches sporadically, papers did not run all of his dispatches, papers edited and cut them, and readers read at least a couple of papers’ worth of other articles in between. He told Edmund Wilson as much in defending himself against Wilson’s critique of the selected (and heavily edited and cut) dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'' without his consent: “If you are being paid to be shot at and write about it you are supposed to mention the shooting. [. . .] But I do not go in for re-printing journalism.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}

If we can in this way better understand his style, and at least explain it if
not excuse it, we similarly ought to try to contextualize—and perhaps
excuse—the moral problem. The two issues here are the specific condemnation
of Hemingway’s silence about Republican atrocities and the general
question of biased reporting (the latter of which has already partially been
addressed).

Hemingway knew, as Donaldson writes, that mentioning the atrocities
“would arouse anticommunist sentiments back in the States and effectively
undermine any possibility of American intervention.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=394}} It is also doubtful
that reporting them would have stopped them. But reporting Republican
atrocities from Spain was not possible for the simple reason that all dispatches
went through a government censor. Matthews cabled his editors
from Paris in May 1937 to tell them that “censorship does not permit us to
say when the ‘telefonica’ is hit. So whenever you see reference in my
despatches [sic] to ‘an important building in the center of the city’ or words
to that effect, the cable desk can know that it is the telefonica.” {{sfn|Matthews|1937c|p=}} As already noted, by July he would cable “CENSORSHIP
STRICTER” as the ban on mentioning internationals went into effect. {{sfn|Matthews|1937d|p=}}{{sfn|Matthews|1937e|p=}} Cowles’ memoir confirms the
aggressive censorship, observing that it limited journalists to exactly the kind of material Hemingway wrote about:
<blockquote>There were frequent attempts to “beat the censor” by employing American slang expressions, but this came to an end when a Canadian girl joined the staff. The International Brigades were not allowed to be publicized; no reference could be made to Russian armaments, and buildings and streets which suffered
bombardments could not be identified.</blockquote>{{pg|437|438}}<blockquote>It was only in the realm of the human interest story that the journalists had a free hand. They could describe bombardments to their heart’s content.{{sfn|Cowles|1941|p=20}}</blockquote>
Hemingway and everyone else—to reserve incrimination for Hemingway is hardly just. No correspondent covering Republican Spain reported suspicious imprisonments and disappearances by government agents.

Hemingway, through Joris Ivens and ''The Spanish Earth'' project, had better
access to officials than most. Had he been able somehow to report such
activity, he would have lost that access and would probably have been kicked
out of the country. His fame would have likely prevented his own officially
sponsored disappearance, though he still worried, especially as so many of
such crimes on the Republican side occurred from free agents. When Jasper
Wood printed the anarchist F.A.I. banner in the limited edition book version
of ''The Spanish Earth'', Hemingway expressed his anxieties bluntly in a letter
to Jasper on August 20, 1938. It is hardly “petulant,” he scolded, “not to wish
to be shot.”{{sfn|Davison|1988|p=128}} Hostility in the Republic against the anarchists
ran high; after the Barcelona May Day conflict, the government’s foreign
minister told U.S. Ambassador Claude Bowers that “anarchist revolt
throughout Catalonia and not only expected but welcomed as an opportunity
to liquidate the anarchists who have been hostile from the beginning.”
{{sfn|NA|1954|p=292}}{{efn| The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State, 5 May 1937.}}

It is possible that Hemingway’s dispatch stating that “not one friend [. . .]
has been executed or is missing” was his clever means of reporting
the rumors and indeed the general fact while evading the censors, as in this very dispatch he acknowledged the presence of a censor after a bombardment.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=34}}
Matthews, on the other hand, never found a way to mention the
censors or admit even the possibility of people gone missing in the Republic.
Peter Moreira has observed that in a 1943 dispatch Hemingway related a remark by a British officer about the Chinese Nationalist government’s being
“hopeless on the offensive” because censorship “prevented American reporters
From actually saying that the Nationalists wouldn’t attack, surmising that by telling this anecdote Hemingway could sneak such a judgment into
his reports.”{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=77}} In Spain, censors aside, the eyewitness standard and his
own safety and continuing ability to report the war, and, yes, his passionate
support of the government contributed to his decision. He could have written
about government abuses from the states, but then could not return to{{pg|438|439}}cover the war and support the cause—a justification other journalists, those who did not return after the spring of 1937, did not enjoy. In his mind too, knowing what he heard of fascist atrocities, any reportage against the government lessening its chances of victory through killing hopes of increased international aid would have led to more deaths at Franco’s hands that the much smaller number inspired by fifth column paranoia.{{efn|''Hemingway’s Second War'' discusses in greater depth Hemingway’s politics and his falling out
with John Dos Passos over the execution of José Robles}}.

The accusation that Hemingway did not write about Republican atrocities
because he was saving it for his fiction I find baseless (Knightley 232;
Baker 402).{{sfn|Knightley|2004|p=232}}{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=402}}{{efn|Hemingway’s casual comment to colleagues calling dibs on Pepe Quintanilla, the executioner of
Madrid, is not sufficient evidence.}}Carolyn Moorehead, in her biography of Martha Gellhorn, describes
the climate for the Madrid correspondents that first spring: “And so,
day by day, the correspondents walked a thin and nervous line between truth,
evasions, and propaganda, telling one another that though it was not all right
if things were made up and presented as true, it was acceptable to describe
what you wanted, provided it was true and provided your readers were aware
of your position.”{{sfn|Moorehead|2003|p=125}} My own sense is that they did not walk the line quite
so nervously; their passionate commitment, and their principles of position
disclosure and the eyewitness standard, made that walk relatively easy.

The problem of ''committed journalism'', even sixty years later, has not been
resolved—as anyone paying attention to the media and world affairs well
knows. One person’s truth is another person’s propaganda. Certainly, as
Knightley notes, reporting from “the heart” affects one’s judgment.{{sfn|Knightley|2004|pp=234-5}}
Yet to attempt “balance,” per the edits to Matthews’ Guadalajara piece, betrays
one’s believed truth. Furthermore, the kind of reporting done by the
correspondents with the Republic—committed, one-sided, optimistic,
heroic, human interest work by embedded writers—would be practiced
widely and without reserve during World War II. Such narrative journalism,
with roots in Louise May Alcott’s “Hospital Sketches” series published in the
''Boston Commonwealth'', and more immediately in 1930s social documentary
writing whose “essence” is “not information”, anticipated postwar
new journalism’s adoption of novelistic narrative technique for nonfiction
which culminated with such wartime books as Norman Mailer’s ''Armies of
the Night'' and Michael Herr’s ''Dispatches''.{{sfn|Stott|1986|p=11}} Some of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches
fall in this line of development.

Today we might categorize such writing under the awkward umbrella
term ''creative nonfiction''. That term certainly fits the mixed bag of nonfiction
narratives and commentaries Hemingway published during the war in
Ken magazine. These pieces are essays, not journalism, several of which{{pg|439|440}}directly appeal for support for the Republic, and most of which really deal
with the approaching world war. ''Ken'' wanted “precisely the kind of opinion
articles he could not write for NANA.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=433}} His article, “The
Cardinal Picks a Winner,” shows a photo of a row of dead children from
Barcelona and another one with Nationalist officers saluting and Catholic officials
with raised hands, apparently making the fascist salute as well. He
ends ironically: “So I ''don’t believe'' the people shown in the photo can really
be making it. I would rather prefer to think that the photograph was faked.”
{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=436}} When Hemingway argues in “A Program for U.S. Realism” that the
United States should stay out of the next war except to stuff its pockets
through arms sales, one has to wonder, given his call and the democratic nations’
failure to save Spain, if we are to sniff sarcasm here.

The language of the dispatches, with their corrective intent against
Franco’s propaganda, does risk propagandizing. Hemingway’s optimism and
anti-fascism certainly colored his correspondence work. His criticism of the
anarchist and POUM militia for their inactivity on the Aragon front, for example,
sounds a lot like the Spanish Communist Party’s.{{efn|It at least sounds almost exactly like Dolores Ibarruri in her memoir. To the anarchists’ complaint
that they had no arms, she retorts “that they had more arms than did many other fronts. . . .
What they didn’t have and what they were constantly demanding were airplanes and tanks .And
they didn’t have them because the Republic government didn’t have them either, except for those
it received as aid from the Soviet Union” (238–284). Yet the various Catalonia militia were not
as well equipped with small arms as the more regular Popular Army units, and because of the
terrain tanks and planes were in fact necessary.}}
But unlike
Matthews, Hemingway limited his reports within the Republic to military
matters. Hemingway may have generally condemned the anarchists in his
nonfiction, considering their activity as hampering the war effort, but he
never repeated the accusation of their collaboration with the rebels, as
Matthews had done. And when Hemingway commented on the Bareclona
crisis, he referred only to the government—not the communists, as
Matthews had done.{{efn|Hemingway’s comments in “Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win” NANA staff
correspondent dispatch. Though arguably he was propagandizing by hiding the communist influence—
to mention the communists to an American audience would not gain sympathy for the
cause.}}Nor did he write articles asserting the limited role of
the communists in the government, or explaining Spanish anarchism, also
as Matthews had done.{{efn|An article on the communists’ limited role appeared in late November 1937, as discussed in a
missive from The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State on 2
Dec. 1937 (United States 461). Matthews’ “Anarchism: Spain’s Enigma” appeared in the New York
Times 22 Aug. 1937: 6, 14.}}

During one of Hemingway’s stateside breaks between trips to Spain, his
children asked if he was a “tool” of Stalin, an accusation tossed by a schoolmate
who, presumably parroting his or her parents, probably understood
the term no better than Hemingway’s children. {{sfn|Hemingway|nd|p=}}
Hemingway believed in the Republic’s potential, but he was never a dupe of
the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) or Comintern. As did many others, he
accepted PCE’s presence in the government for its discipline and organization
toward winning the war, and he understood the material necessity for
Comintern’s support. It should also be noted, as historians Hugh Thomas
and Helen Graham have reminded us, that the communism associated with
the Republic wasn’t particularly communist anyway.{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=628}}{{sfn|Graham|2002|p=184}} {{pg|440|441}}

Hemingway declined to follow Joris Ivens’ suggestion that he write a
dispatch on the significant role of the political commissars in the Republican
military, even though that would have meant
featuring his brave new friend Gustav Regler.{{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=}} Hemingway also, in a letter
justifying his work to Jack Wheeler at NANA, wrote about choosing not to
send a dispatch he had written because it might strike readers as propaganda
“no matter how true” (Letter to Jack Wheeler).{{sfn|Hemingway|1938b|p=}}

Hemingway went to Spain to see the war himself and to support the Republic
through his ambulance fund. The paychecks from NANA and the
fundraising from ''The Spanish Earth'' helped. Whatever propagandistic streak
colors the dispatches pales in comparison to the documentary. The filmmaker,
Joris Ivens, was well established in European communist circles. The
documentary genre then and now has occupied a slippery position between
the extremes of impossible-to-achieve empirical nonfiction and of the outright
fictionalized. Evaluations of Hemingway’s journalism are informed by
knowledge of ''The Spanish Earth'' and the ''Ken'' essays to the detriment of the
journalism. And the very nature of the slippery documentary genre may enable
the film to escape opprobrium. It wasn’t reportage; it was altogether
something else. But for that matter, Hemingway’s dispatches weren’t purely
reportage either, and if not ''altogether'' something else, still something else,
and should be reckoned with accordingly.

== Notes ==
{{notelist|20em}}

==Citations==
{{Reflist|15em}}

==Works Cited==
{{refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker
|first=Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Bruccoli |first=Matthew |date=2006 |title=Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame |url= |location=Columbia |publisher=U of South Caronia P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Cowles |first=Virginia |date=1941 |title=Looking for Trouble |url= |location=New York
|publisher=Harper & Brothers |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Davison |first=Richard Allan |title=The Publication of Hemingway’s The Spanish Earth: An Untold Story |url= |journal=Hemingway Review
|volume=7.2 |issue= |date=1988
|pages=122-130 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson
|first=Scott |date=2009 |title=Fitzgerald & Hemingway: Works and Days |url= |location=New York |publisher=Columbia UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Franklin |first=Sidney |date=1952 |title=Bullfighter from Brooklyn |url= |location=New York |publisher=Prentice-Hall |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Graham |first=Helen |date=2002 |title=The Spanish Republic at War 1936-1939 |url= |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Guttmann |first=Allen |date=1962 |title=The Wound in the Heart: American and the Spanish Civil War |url= |location=New York |publisher=Free Press of Glencoe |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1967 |title=By-Line: Ernest Hemingway |url= |location=New York |publisher=Scibner |pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Trogdon
|editor-first=Robert W.
|author-mask=1
|title=Fascism is a Lie
|url=
|journal=Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference |volume==
|issue=
|date=2002
|pages=193-6
|location=New York
|publisher=Carroll & Graf
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 May 1937
|chapter=Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=nd
|chapter=The Home Front
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938a
|chapter=Letter to Edmund Wilson
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=2 June 1938b
|chapter=Letter to Jack Wheeler
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=14 Feb 1939
|chapter=On the American Dead in Spain
|title=TS. New Masses
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Baker
|editor-first=Carlos
|author-mask=1
|date=2003
|chapter=The Hadely Mowrer
|title=Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Scribner
|pages=462-3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ibarruri
|first=Dolores
|date=1966
|title=They Shall Not Pass: The Autobiography of La Pasionaria
|url=
|location=United States
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|date=1969
|title=The Camera and I
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|author-mask=1
|date=26 Apr 1937
|chapter=Letter to Ernest Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|date=20 Nov 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Bertrand Weaver
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=12 Oct 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=25 Apr 1939
|chapter=Letter to M.B. Tenney
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Apr 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Knightley
|first=Phillip
|date=2004
|title=The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq
|url=
|location=Baltimore
|publisher=John Hopkins
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=
|date=9 Apr 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=TS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=11 Apr 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=8 May 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=6 July 1937d
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=July 1937e
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=22 March 1939
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 9
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=
|date=20 May 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=20 Dec 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 5
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Sep 1937c
|chapter=Note to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moorehead
|first=Caroline
|date=2003
|title=Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Henry Holt
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moreira
|first=Peter
|date=2006
|title=Hemingway on the China Front: His WWII Spy Mission with Martha Gellhorn
|url=
|location=Washington D.C.
|publisher=Potomac Books
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|date=5 Feb 1937
|chapter=Promotion Box: Hemingway, For Immediate Release
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|author-mask=1
|date=4 Apr 1938
|chapter=Promotion Box: American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|editor-last=Nelson
|editor-first=Card
|date=1994
|title=Remembering Spain: Hemingway’s Civil War Eulogy and the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
|url=
|location=Urbana
|publisher=U of Illinois
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Reynolds
|first=Michael
|date=1989
|title=Hemingway: The Paris Years
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Norton
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Stott
|first=William
|date=1986
|title=Documentary Expression and Thirties America
|url=
|location=Chicago
|publisher=U of Chicago P
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Thomas
|first=Hugh
|date=2001
|title=The Spanish Civil War, Rev. ed.
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Modern Library
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine
|last=''Two Wars and More to Come''
|first=
|date=24 Jan 1938
|title=Best Sellers of the Week Here and Elsewhere
|type=Advertisement
|url=
|magazine=New York Times
|pages=
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=NA
|first=
|title=United States. Dept. of State
|url=
|journal= Foreign Relations of the Untied States, 1937 |volume=1
|issue=General
|date=1954
|pages=
|location=Washington
|publisher=GPO
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Watson
|first=William Braasch
|title=Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches
|url=
|journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=7.2
|issue=
|date=1988
|pages=4-121
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Wheeler
|first=John H.
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938
|chapter=Letter to Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection, Box 3 Folder 14
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}

{{refend}}
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches

2025-04-19T21:40:19Z

MerAtticus: typo

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{{byline|last=Vernon |first=Alex |abstract=The Spanish Civil War began in July 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally-restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy. By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches.}}

{{dc|dc=T|HE SPANISH CIVIL WAR BEGAN ON}} 17-18 JULY, 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy, to collaborate with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens on the pro-Republican documentary ''The Spanish Earth'', and to pursue his fledgling love affair with Martha Gellhorn.

By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches for NANA.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=4}}{{efn|Quotations from the NANA dispatches follow the Diplomatic Text established by William Braasch’s “Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches.” I prefer NANA’s titles rather than Watson’s. For my disagreements with some of Watson’s datings, see my comments on specific dispatches in ''Hemingway’s Second War.''}}The secondary sources habitually judge them inferior journalism. Carlos Baker in the first Hemingway biography, for example, complains that the dialogue was “so heavily stamped with personal mannerisms as to be of doubtful authenticity.” Baker sees a “curious monotony in his stories of battles and bombardments,” a gratuitous use of graphic imagery “to shock his readers,” and “a note of triumphant boastfulness” in reporting proximity to danger. He also faults Hemingway for “often hint[ing] he was alone when in fact he was usually with Martha Gellhorn, Matthews, and Delmer.” Hemingway lacked Dos Passos’ “eye for telling details” and the “meticulous exactitude and inclusiveness that characterized the best work of Herbert Matthews and Sefton Delmer.”{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}

Philip Knightley’s ''The First Casualty'', the standard history of war correspondence, paraphrases Baker but with a trouncing final judgment:{{pg|427|428}}Hemingway’s “performance as a war correspondent was abysmally bad.” But Knightley goes beyond “technical” dissatisfaction to moral condemnation. Not just “unjustifiably optimistic”—an excusable offense—Hemingway’s reporting was “unforgivable” in its “total failure to report the Communist persecution, imprisonment, and summary execution of ‘untrustworthy elements’ on the Republican side, when he knew this was happening and when disclosing it might well have prevented further horrors like this.”
{{sfn|Knightley|2004 |pp=231–32}}{{efn|In my view, Knightley does not sufficiently acknowledge his paraphrasing of Baker.}}

Such criticisms in the final analysis might bear out. As Scott Donaldson writes, Hemingway advanced the Republican cause in his dispatches by eliciting “the deepest possible feelings of horror and of sympathy for the victims” of the Madrid bombardment; his “undue optimism” often “ignored Loyalist defeats and exaggerated the importance of its victories”; and “he repeatedly called attention to the participation of Italians and Germans on Franco’s side.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=426}} It also served as a recruitment tool—Milton Wolff, for example, acknowledged the strong influence Hemingway’s dispatches had on his decision to volunteer. Nevertheless, I think it a worthwhile exercise to attend a little more studiously to Hemingway’s dispatches, their context, and their artistry. I don’t necessarily intend to reverse the general opinion of the correspondence, only to achieve a better and more sympathetic understanding.

Herbert Matthews’ reporting for the ''New York Times'' will serve as a convenient comparison for two reasons. First, because both Baker and Knightley use Matthews’ journalism as the standard of excellence to pass judgment on Hemingway’s; and second, because the two worked practically side-by-side, seeing and reporting on many of the same events. In fact so closely did they work together that NANA sometimes complained that the ''Times'' was not buying Hemingway’s pieces because they resembled Matthews,’ and at one point Matthews’ own editors at the Times suspected him of plagiarizing Hemingway.{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|pp=411, 420}} A note from Matthews’ assigned editor Raymond McCaw provides, in two columns, seven quite similar passages from Hemingway’s Aragon front dispatches of September 13 and 14 with Matthews’ of September 14, with a penciled note at the bottom: “a deadly parallel if you ask me.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937c|p=}} Edwin James, the managing editor and McCaw’s boss, eventually agreed with Matthews’ defense: “It is quite apparent that you did not file any duplicate of the Hemingway story, or vice versa. As I understand it, the similarity arose from the fact that you{{pg|428|429}}both went to see the same show and saw it at the same time [sic], under the same conditions.”{{sfn|James|1937b|p=}}

Matthews’ dispatches ring of Republican bias as much if not more than anything Hemingway ever filed. The ''Times'' received many letters to the editor complaining about Matthews’ undisguised politics, which also gave serious concern to some of his editors. His description of the Republican May 1937 infighting in Barcelona is a striking example of how his news veered into propaganda and shows just how much he passed along the government’s version of events. The government’s “BLOODLESS TRIUMPH FOUGHT WITH RECOGNIZEDWEAPONS OF DEMOCRACY” turned out to be blatantly false, as the government and the “COMMUNISTS [WHO] DISTINGUISHED THEMSELVES” resorted to violent suppression. His blaming the uprising on the anarchist CNT working as Franco operatives parrots the government’s and the communist party’s public position, even though both charges—that the anarchists precipitated the events and that they were under Nationalist direction—were also false. His dispatch’s optimistic close also equivocates the political reality: “NEW GOVERNMENT HAS TAKEN POWER WHICH APPEARS TOVE CONFIDENCE VAST MAJORITY SPANIARDS IN LOYALIST TERRITORY AND TIS HOPED WILL GAIN EQUAL CONFIDENCE ABROAD STOP VIOLENCE AND REVOLUTION BEEN REPUDIATED AND NEWAND FAR HOPEFULLER PERIOD SEEMS BEGINNING.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937a|p=}}The ''Times'', knowing full well the one-sided coverage of a correspondent writing from one side of the conflict, had a reporter on both sides: Matthews with the Republicans, and William Carney with the Nationalists. They got their facts right (or wrong) as often as the other, their editors concluded; and they inspired about the same number of letters of complaint.{{sfn|James|1937a|p=}}{sfn|James|1939|p=}}

Furthermore, Matthews’ dispatches received a great deal of substantive editorial revisions. One of Matthews’ Teruel reports had to be cut for length, as McCaw informed James: “This bird sent 2844 words on the same facts which Hemingway covered much better in less than half that number. I wonder if Matthews thinks the paper is thriving, and that cable tolls do not matter a damn. Of course, it had to be cut for space anyway.” McCaw most likely refers here to Matthews’ dispatch corresponding to Hemingway’s “The Attack on Teruel,” though Matthews’ account of the fall of Teruel is also much longer (and more long-winded) than Hemingway’s, and just as personal in terms of describing the dangers{{pg|429|430}} he faced. Indeed its length allows him to share even more of the action he endured.{{sfn|McCaw|1937b|p=}}

Raymond McCaw held a general professional disagreement with Matthews perhaps tainted with over zealousness. Whether a personal or political motive informed that disagreement can’t be determined from the evidence I’ve seen. It is also clear that McCaw’s charges bear some validity—that any responsible editor could have easily and reasonably taken issue where McCaw did. One of the more interesting examples concerns Matthews’ piece on Guadalajara. Because he only saw evidence on Franco’s side of Italian forces, he only reported on Italians. But the ''Times'' editors heard from other sources that German soldiers also participated in the March offensive. They thought it prudent, from this confusion, to change (nine times) “Italian” to “Rebel,” “the foe,” or “Insurgent.” When Matthews saw the published piece he wrote a strenuous objection. In some instances the editors changed paraphrased quotations from his sources. One large paragraph omitted by the editors stressed the first-hand nature of the information, and Matthews underlines the key words: “All day, at every place we stopped and no matter whom we talked to or what we saw, there was only one label—Italian. The dead bodies, the prisoners, the material of every kind, the men who had occupied Brihuega and then fled were Italian and nothing but Italian.” Here and elsewhere in his original story, Matthews emphasizes the “personal knowledge” of its information.{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}{{efn|James supported McCaw on these changes, though later acknowledged that altering quoted sources was perhaps unwarranted(29 April 1937; Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3).}}Yet Matthews did not report on the foreigners fighting for the Republic—it was in fact the Italian Garibali Battalion that routed Franco’s Italians. We might surmise government censorship behind this silence, though Matthews would not cable news of “CENSORSHIP STRICTER” and “BAN ON MENTIONING INTERNATIONALS INCLUDING AMERICANS INSTITUTED TODAY” until July.{{sfn|Matthews|1937b|p=}}Perhaps he cautiously self-censored, or politically self-censored for the same reasons the government would eventually ban mention. Still, his stridency about the omission of foreigners on one side is striking given his knowledge of their contribution to the other side. For this reason too, and his omission of other nationalities on the insurgent side, it seemed only fair to his editor “to stand on the statement that the majority of the Rebels were Italians and let it go at that.”{{sfn|James|1937c|p=}} A reasonable decision.

Throughout his correspondence to his editors and his several books,{{pg|430|431}}Matthews maintained a passionate defense of his eyewitness journalistic standard, a position those close to him understood. “Matthews never believed anything he had not seen with his own eyes,” Joris Ivens wrote. “He never saw his job as reporter as one that permitted him to sit in his hotel and read the handouts of the War Ministry.” {{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=112}} Sidney Franklin recalls that some writers wrote their pieces before arriving in Madrid, and came only for the “legitimacy” of the Madrid dateline.{{sfn|Franklin|1952|p=232}}And Matthews hated, on principle, having his name attached to an article that violated the integrity of his witness. The only way to achieve objectivity, for Matthews, was to acknowledge one’s subjective perspective. Writing to his publisher, Matthews argued that “the full documentary value” of his coverage was lost when the editors altered his submissions for “the apparent necessity of giving more or less equal space to both sides.”{{sfn|Matthews|1939|p=}}

As with Matthews, so too Hemingway. Indeed the commitment to subjectivity
fit quite well with Hemingway’s modernist aesthetics. If Hemingway
focused the dispatches on his perspective—on his own experience dodging
artillery—more than Matthews and more than most, he did so at least partially
to fulfill expectations. NANA approached him, after all, for his name
and personality as much as whatever he would write. Before he even left the
states it pitched him to potential publications, sending out a promotional release with text to be used alongside his forthcoming dispatches and suggesting
they include a photograph: “Mr. Hemingway’s assignment is to get both from the bombed towns and bombed trenches the human story of the war, not just an account of the game being played by general staffs with pins
and a map.”{{sfn|NANA|1937|p=}}{{ NANA also released each individual dispatch with a one-sentence “precede” about the “famous” or “noted” author. Ernest Hemingway was not writing as Herbert Mathews, ace reporter; Hemingway was writing as Ernest Hemingway, famous author of novels and stories well known to be drawn from his own experiences.

That he understood this to be his assignment is further evidenced by a
cable Matthews sent to his ''Times'' editors on April 9, 1937, concerning the
Loyalist attack: “WORKED CONJOINTL WITH HEMINGWAY TODAY HE SENDING EYEWITNESS DESCRIPTION WHILE EYE SENT GENERAL STRATEGY.”{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}When a year later the ''Times'' asked NANA to ensure Hemingway’s reports differed from Matthews, NANA complied by asking Hemingway “to emphasize color rather than straight reporting” not necessarily out of dissatisfaction with Hemingway’s reportage as Baker contends,{{efn|Baker’s notes date the Times request to NANA as 8 Apr. 1938, and NANA’s to Hemingway as 15
Apr. 1938 (Princeton University, Firestone Library: Box 18, Folder 8 “1938”), the date of “The Bombing of Tortosa” dispatch.}} but to increase{{pg|431|432}}the chance of selling to the ''Times'' and indeed to ensure the spirit of NANA’s original arrangement with Hemingway. {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}Far from dissatisfied, NANA wrote Hemingway at the end of August 1938 a letter of agreement for his coverage of “a general European war” should it break out, “written in your colorful style” (Hemingway was in Paris, on his way to Spain for the last time during the war).{{sfn|Wheeler|1938|p=}}When Edmund Wilson criticized the selected dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'', Hemingway wrote him that “I was paid to write what are called ‘eye witness’ accounts . . .what is called, or was asked for as ‘color stuff.’ Most of such stuff is faked. Mine was not. It was straight reporting and the personal stuff was what had been asked for by the editors. “Wilson’s estimation was also based upon ''Fact’s'' inclusion of the “The Old Man at the Bridge” story from ''Ken'', “not a news dispatch” at all.{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}Speaking at Carnegie Hall before the showing of a rough cut of ''The Spanish Earth'', shortly after his first trip to Spain and so very much in the context of his wartime work, Hemingway defined the writer’s problem as “project[ing] [what is true] in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2002|p=193}}

Personal, anecdotal journalism had been Hemingway’s signature style from his earliest days filing reports, in the early 1920s from Paris, when his editor at the ''Toronto Star Weekly'' “encouraged [. . .] what Hemingway did best: write about himself in the act of being a reporter.”{{sfn|Reynolds|1989|p=45}}How could he expect that NANA would expect anything else, if indeed NANA did expect anything else? In the Spanish Civil War he at least maintained his eyewitness posture; in World War II, however, he couldn’t keep himself out. His first piece, about D-Day, begins, “No one remembers the date of the Battle of Shiloh. But the day ''we took'' Fox Green beach was the sixth of June, and the wind was blowing hard out of the northwest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1967|p=340}}His venue too—''Collier’s'' magazine—and the fact that he had not written anything in three years further contributed to the story-like nature of the WWII stories, in which he figured as a protagonist—not to mention the stories and involvement he couldn’t write about, armed and running around France more of a free agent than his guerilla-hero Robert Jordan ever was (though he began to transform these experiences into fiction in several unpublished stories). In wartime China in 1943, filing articles for Ralph Ingersoll’s short-lived ''PM'' New York afternoon daily, Hemingway did not even care to be called a news reporter.{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=99}}

It should be mentioned that Hemingway and Matthews enjoyed a great{{pg|432|433}}friendship and working relationship. Hemingway usually brought Matthews, who did not have a car, on his excursions. When Matthews left Madrid for a break in mid April 1937, he had already ensured Hemingway would provide coverage to the ''Times'' through NANA. For one thing, Hemingway did not have to worry about Matthews as a rival for the history books. He could endorse his friends’ book, ''Two Wars and More to Come'', and praise him as “the ablest and the bravest war correspondent writing today “who “when the fakers are all dead [. . .] will be read in the schools” (Advertisement 21) because Matthews posed no threat to Hemingway’s own chances to be read in the schools. The only brief Hemingway ever expressed he really reserved for Matthews’ editors, for not wanting his Teruel street-fighting story and for cutting references to himself in Matthews’ Teruel dispatches so that it appeared only Matthews had been there.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=462}}

As for Hemingway’s neglecting to name everyone with him for every story, the ''Times'' cutting of his name suggests that such exactitude was hardly a priority. A paper had no incentive for announcing the fact that a competitor’s
correspondent stood beside its own to see and report the same
events. NANA changed at least one vague Hemingway “we,” which admits
to the presence of others, to “this correspondent”
—we can hardly fault Hemingway for working in the spirit of his
employer’s standards.{{sfn|NANA|1938|p=}}{{efn|“we” in typescript and radiogram (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 1 and Folder 25).}} Do readers care that Matthews, Delmer, Gellhorn,
and others were there? The story’s effect and the limited word count also
weighed against such roll calls. One editor chose not to clutter the dispatch
on the great retreat across the Ebro with all the names of the American International Brigade volunteers Hemingway encountered, an omission of
Content more far serious than that of omitted correspondent names.{{efn| Radiogram insert dateline 4 April 1938 (HRC: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 25).}} Hemingway
often gave the names of the reporters with him, such as at Teruel;
nor was he the only reporter to sometimes neglect to do so. Martha Gellhorn,
for example, used a vague “we” and singled herself out as the primary
participant in some of her stories.

By using first-person reportage Hemingway—and Matthews and Gellhorn And most of the group covering the war—were operating solidly within
convention. William Stott, in ''Documentary Expression and Thirties America'',
calls this first-person ''participant observer'' technique “the most common sort
of documentary reportage in the thirties” that worked “by vicarious persuasion:
the writer partook of the events he reported and bared his feelings
and attitudes to influence the reader’s own.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=178-9}}{{efn|He specifically includes Hemingway et al (180).}} Stott also observes {{pg|433|434}}another technique to enable documentary reportage to “talk to us, and convince us that we, our deepest interests, are engaged,” in the use of the second person: “Thirties documentaries constantly address ‘you,’ the ‘you’ who is we the audience, and exhorts, wheedles, begs us to identify, pity, participate.” His examples include Dorothy Parker’s Spanish Civil War writing, and Hemingway’s 1935 “First-Hand Report on the Florida Hurricane.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=27-8}} A number of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches employ the second-person as a way of bringing the reader along for the ride.

Hemingway’s dispatches used personal pronouns more artfully than is
generally recognized. “A New Kind of War,” which William Braasch Watson
notes as having been “[w]ritten with more care and imagination” than its
predecessors, begins in second person: “The window of the hotel is open
and, as you lie in bed, you hear the firing in the front line seventeen blocks
away.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=29}} He takes “you” outside, to see the damage and the dead from the bombing. “Someone makes a joke about missing teeth and someone else says not to make that joke. And everyone has the feeling that characterizes war. It wasn’t me, see? It wasn’t me.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} The tension between the first person and second-person pronouns—the movement toward identification with “you” and the insistence that “it wasn’t me”—continues in the next line. Here the reader is at once still in the narrator’s shoes, but strangely distanced from the narrator through biographical tidbit and, at the same time, asked
to see himself in the enemy: “The Italian dead up on the Guadalajara weren’t
you although Italian dead, because of where you had spent your boyhood,
always seemed, still, like Our Dead.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} It is worth quoting at length the dispatch’s transition to first person:<blockquote>
After the shell that lit on the sidewalk in front of the hotel you got a beautiful double corner room on that side, twice the size of the one you’d had, for less than a dollar. It wasn’t me they killed. See? No. Not me. It wasn’t me anymore.

Then in a hospital given by the American Friends of Spanish Democracy located out behind the Morata front along the road
to Valencia they said, “Raven wants to see you.”

“Do I know him?”

“I don’t think so,” they said. “But he wants to see you.”

“Where is he?”

“Upstairs.”{{pg|434|435}}In the room upstairs they are giving a blood transfusion to a man with a very gray face who lay on a cot with his arm out looking away from the gurgling bottle and moaning in a very impersonal way. He moaned mechanically and at regular intervals and it did not seem to be him that made the sound. His lips did not move.

“Where’s Raven?” I asked.

“I’m here,” said Raven.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=31}}</blockquote>The piece simply could not have sustained the second-person for the remaining
five pages. More significantly, for this deeply personal exchange between
the writer and the faceless, eyeless soldier, Hemingway could not hide
in the rhetorical device of the second-person. In the process, he effects a reversal
of the usual pronoun game; instead of identifying with the all embracing
“you,” we leave that trick behind and become fully attached to
the narratorial “I” as ourselves, as we might not have been had the article
begun in the first person. And even as the narrator identifies himself by name
for the only time in any of the dispatches—“Hemingway,” and later
“Ernest”—as decidedly not ourselves. We do not say, ''It isn’t me''. The historian
Hugh Thomas notes “the refreshing candour” of Hemingway’s naming
himself “in the world of the International Brigades, where no one’s name
seemed to be truthfully given.”{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=591}}{{efn|For Watson, the dispatch “seems, in fact, on the verge of becoming a story” (29).}}

A year later Hemingway’s “Tortosa Calmly Awaits Assault” resists admitting
the city’s imminent fall. Yet it does so anyway, by subtly alluding to the
wartime rhetoric of sacrificed blood irrigating the earth and rejuvenating
Spain. Such rhetoric was common during the war, appearing in speeches,
print, and poetry. Many of the poems in Cary Nelson’s anthology ''The Wound
and the Dream: Sixty Years of American Poems about the Civil War'' join in the
Spanish and international chorus’s general connection between Republican
soldiers and the land, and the particular singing of their dead nourishing
the land. We find such language in La Pasionaria’s farewell address to the International Brigades, her epilogue to ''The Book of the XV Brigade'', and Hemingway’s famous eulogy “On the American Dead in Spain”: “For our dead are
a part of the earth of Spain now and the earth of Spain can never die. Each
winter it will seem to die and each spring it will come alive again. Our dead
will live with it forever.”{{sfn|Nelson|1994|p=3}}{{efn| Reprinted in Bruccoli 76 and Nelson, Remembering 37 (the drafts at the JFK are titled “The Dead at Jarama”). In addition to the poems in Nelson’s anthology, see the excerpt from Boris Todrin’s “Spanish Sowing” in Guttmann (Wounded 179–180).}} The Tortosa dispatch implies the deaths of{{pg|435|436}}many Republican soldiers in its final paragraph’s description of the newborn onions:
<blockquote>The artillery was picking up a little now. Two came in at a fairly useful place and as the smoke blew away ahead and settled through the trees, you picked an armful of spring onions from a field beside the trail that led to the Tortosa road. They were the first onions of the spring and peeling one I found they were plump white and not too strong. The Ebro Delta has a fine rich land, and where the onions grow, tomorrow will be a battle.
{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=84}}</blockquote>

The echo is quiet, and perhaps unconscious, but there nevertheless. The opening boastfulness of “American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents”
should be taken somewhat ironically. The dispatch begins by announcing
that for “two days we have been doing the most dangerous thing
you can do in this war. That is keep close behind an unstabilized line where
the enemy are attacking with mechanized forces.” Then, a few pages later,
we learn about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade survivors of the spring 1938
Nationalist offensive that took Bob Merriman and eventually reached the
Mediterranean Sea. Reading about these survivors creeping through enemy
camps, stepping on a sleeping German soldier’s hand, sprinting “across an
open field toward the Ebro bank and being sniped at by artillery controlled
by an observation plane overhead” and then “the desperate swimming of
the Ebro” naked, we are asked to place the correspondent’s plight in due perspective.{{sfn|Watson|1988|pp=71-2}} This story certainly escapes the charge of a monotonous
battle and bombing scene; its switch from apparently boastful to
awe-struck witness feels almost deliberately self-conscious. Other choice selfironic
moments come in the dispatches of that pre-Teruel quiet fall of 1938.
The one titled “Hemingway, Covering War, Tells of Brush with Death” has little
to report from Madrid other than the new aftershave brand he is trying.
In “Loyalists’ Drive Seen Progressing as Planned,” he writes that “Shells are
all much the same and if they don’t hit you there is no story and if they do
you won’t have to write it.” {{sfn|Watson|1988|p=58}}

Hemingway’s dispatches are sometimes monotonous because his war was
Usually monotonous—as wars are most of the time. It should also be kept in
mind that scholars reviewing Hemingway’s NANA dispatches one after{{pg|436|437}}another do not relive the original reading experience. Hemingway wrote dispatches sporadically, papers did not run all of his dispatches, papers edited and cut them, and readers read at least a couple of papers’ worth of other articles in between. He told Edmund Wilson as much in defending himself against Wilson’s critique of the selected (and heavily edited and cut) dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'' without his consent: “If you are being paid to be shot at and write about it you are supposed to mention the shooting. [. . .] But I do not go in for re-printing journalism.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}

If we can in this way better understand his style, and at least explain it if
not excuse it, we similarly ought to try to contextualize—and perhaps
excuse—the moral problem. The two issues here are the specific condemnation
of Hemingway’s silence about Republican atrocities and the general
question of biased reporting (the latter of which has already partially been
addressed).

Hemingway knew, as Donaldson writes, that mentioning the atrocities
“would arouse anticommunist sentiments back in the States and effectively
undermine any possibility of American intervention.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=394}} It is also doubtful
that reporting them would have stopped them. But reporting Republican
atrocities from Spain was not possible for the simple reason that all dispatches
went through a government censor. Matthews cabled his editors
from Paris in May 1937 to tell them that “censorship does not permit us to
say when the ‘telefonica’ is hit. So whenever you see reference in my
despatches [sic] to ‘an important building in the center of the city’ or words
to that effect, the cable desk can know that it is the telefonica.” {{sfn|Matthews|1937c|p=}} As already noted, by July he would cable “CENSORSHIP
STRICTER” as the ban on mentioning internationals went into effect. {{sfn|Matthews|1937d|p=}}{{sfn|Matthews|1937e|p=}} Cowles’ memoir confirms the
aggressive censorship, observing that it limited journalists to exactly the kind of material Hemingway wrote about:
<blockquote>There were frequent attempts to “beat the censor” by employing American slang expressions, but this came to an end when a Canadian girl joined the staff. The International Brigades were not allowed to be publicized; no reference could be made to Russian armaments, and buildings and streets which suffered
bombardments could not be identified.</blockquote>{{pg|437|438}}<blockquote>It was only in the realm of the human interest story that the journalists had a free hand. They could describe bombardments to their heart’s content.{{sfn|Cowles|1941|p=20}}</blockquote>
Hemingway and everyone else—to reserve incrimination for Hemingway is hardly just. No correspondent covering Republican Spain reported suspicious imprisonments and disappearances by government agents.

Hemingway, through Joris Ivens and ''The Spanish Earth'' project, had better
access to officials than most. Had he been able somehow to report such
activity, he would have lost that access and would probably have been kicked
out of the country. His fame would have likely prevented his own officially
sponsored disappearance, though he still worried, especially as so many of
such crimes on the Republican side occurred from free agents. When Jasper
Wood printed the anarchist F.A.I. banner in the limited edition book version
of ''The Spanish Earth'', Hemingway expressed his anxieties bluntly in a letter
to Jasper on August 20, 1938. It is hardly “petulant,” he scolded, “not to wish
to be shot.”{{sfn|Davison|1988|p=128}} Hostility in the Republic against the anarchists
ran high; after the Barcelona May Day conflict, the government’s foreign
minister told U.S. Ambassador Claude Bowers that “anarchist revolt
throughout Catalonia and not only expected but welcomed as an opportunity
to liquidate the anarchists who have been hostile from the beginning.”
{{sfn|NA|1954|p=292}}{{efn| The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State, 5 May 1937.}}

It is possible that Hemingway’s dispatch stating that “not one friend [. . .]
has been executed or is missing” was his clever means of reporting
the rumors and indeed the general fact while evading the censors, as in this very dispatch he acknowledged the presence of a censor after a bombardment.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=34}}
Matthews, on the other hand, never found a way to mention the
censors or admit even the possibility of people gone missing in the Republic.
Peter Moreira has observed that in a 1943 dispatch Hemingway related a remark by a British officer about the Chinese Nationalist government’s being
“hopeless on the offensive” because censorship “prevented American reporters
From actually saying that the Nationalists wouldn’t attack, surmising that by telling this anecdote Hemingway could sneak such a judgment into
his reports.”{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=77}} In Spain, censors aside, the eyewitness standard and his
own safety and continuing ability to report the war, and, yes, his passionate
support of the government contributed to his decision. He could have written
about government abuses from the states, but then could not return to{{pg|438|439}}cover the war and support the cause—a justification other journalists, those who did not return after the spring of 1937, did not enjoy. In his mind too, knowing what he heard of fascist atrocities, any reportage against the government lessening its chances of victory through killing hopes of increased international aid would have led to more deaths at Franco’s hands that the much smaller number inspired by fifth column paranoia.{{efn|''Hemingway’s Second War'' discusses in greater depth Hemingway’s politics and his falling out
with John Dos Passos over the execution of José Robles}}.

The accusation that Hemingway did not write about Republican atrocities
because he was saving it for his fiction I find baseless (Knightley 232;
Baker 402).{{sfn|Knightley|2004|p=232}}{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=402}}{{efn|Hemingway’s casual comment to colleagues calling dibs on Pepe Quintanilla, the executioner of
Madrid, is not sufficient evidence.}}Carolyn Moorehead, in her biography of Martha Gellhorn, describes
the climate for the Madrid correspondents that first spring: “And so,
day by day, the correspondents walked a thin and nervous line between truth,
evasions, and propaganda, telling one another that though it was not all right
if things were made up and presented as true, it was acceptable to describe
what you wanted, provided it was true and provided your readers were aware
of your position.”{{sfn|Moorehead|2003|p=125}} My own sense is that they did not walk the line quite
so nervously; their passionate commitment, and their principles of position
disclosure and the eyewitness standard, made that walk relatively easy.

The problem of ''committed journalism'', even sixty years later, has not been
resolved—as anyone paying attention to the media and world affairs well
knows. One person’s truth is another person’s propaganda. Certainly, as
Knightley notes, reporting from “the heart” affects one’s judgment.{{sfn|Knightley|2004|pp=234-5}}
Yet to attempt “balance,” per the edits to Matthews’ Guadalajara piece, betrays
one’s believed truth. Furthermore, the kind of reporting done by the
correspondents with the Republic—committed, one-sided, optimistic,
heroic, human interest work by embedded writers—would be practiced
widely and without reserve during World War II. Such narrative journalism,
with roots in Louise May Alcott’s “Hospital Sketches” series published in the
''Boston Commonwealth'', and more immediately in 1930s social documentary
writing whose “essence” is “not information”, anticipated postwar
new journalism’s adoption of novelistic narrative technique for nonfiction
which culminated with such wartime books as Norman Mailer’s ''Armies of
the Night'' and Michael Herr’s ''Dispatches''.{{sfn|Stott|1986|p=11}} Some of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches
fall in this line of development.

Today we might categorize such writing under the awkward umbrella
term ''creative nonfiction''. That term certainly fits the mixed bag of nonfiction
narratives and commentaries Hemingway published during the war in
Ken magazine. These pieces are essays, not journalism, several of which{{pg|439|440}}directly appeal for support for the Republic, and most of which really deal
with the approaching world war. ''Ken'' wanted “precisely the kind of opinion
articles he could not write for NANA.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=433}} His article, “The
Cardinal Picks a Winner,” shows a photo of a row of dead children from
Barcelona and another one with Nationalist officers saluting and Catholic officials
with raised hands, apparently making the fascist salute as well. He
ends ironically: “So I ''don’t believe'' the people shown in the photo can really
be making it. I would rather prefer to think that the photograph was faked.”
{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=436}} When Hemingway argues in “A Program for U.S. Realism” that the
United States should stay out of the next war except to stuff its pockets
through arms sales, one has to wonder, given his call and the democratic nations’
failure to save Spain, if we are to sniff sarcasm here.

The language of the dispatches, with their corrective intent against
Franco’s propaganda, does risk propagandizing. Hemingway’s optimism and
anti-fascism certainly colored his correspondence work. His criticism of the
anarchist and POUM militia for their inactivity on the Aragon front, for example,
sounds a lot like the Spanish Communist Party’s.{{efn|It at least sounds almost exactly like Dolores Ibarruri in her memoir. To the anarchists’ complaint
that they had no arms, she retorts “that they had more arms than did many other fronts. . . .
What they didn’t have and what they were constantly demanding were airplanes and tanks .And
they didn’t have them because the Republic government didn’t have them either, except for those
it received as aid from the Soviet Union” (238–284). Yet the various Catalonia militia were not
as well equipped with small arms as the more regular Popular Army units, and because of the
terrain tanks and planes were in fact necessary.}}
But unlike
Matthews, Hemingway limited his reports within the Republic to military
matters. Hemingway may have generally condemned the anarchists in his
nonfiction, considering their activity as hampering the war effort, but he
never repeated the accusation of their collaboration with the rebels, as
Matthews had done. And when Hemingway commented on the Bareclona
crisis, he referred only to the government—not the communists, as
Matthews had done.{{efn|Hemingway’s comments in “Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win” NANA staff
correspondent dispatch. Though arguably he was propagandizing by hiding the communist influence—
to mention the communists to an American audience would not gain sympathy for the
cause.}}Nor did he write articles asserting the limited role of
the communists in the government, or explaining Spanish anarchism, also
as Matthews had done.{{efn|An article on the communists’ limited role appeared in late November 1937, as discussed in a
missive from The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State on 2
Dec. 1937 (United States 461). Matthews’ “Anarchism: Spain’s Enigma” appeared in the New York
Times 22 Aug. 1937: 6, 14.}}

During one of Hemingway’s stateside breaks between trips to Spain, his
children asked if he was a “tool” of Stalin, an accusation tossed by a schoolmate
who, presumably parroting his or her parents, probably understood
the term no better than Hemingway’s children. {{sfn|Hemingway|nd|p=}}
Hemingway believed in the Republic’s potential, but he was never a dupe of
the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) or Comintern. As did many others, he
accepted PCE’s presence in the government for its discipline and organization
toward winning the war, and he understood the material necessity for
Comintern’s support. It should also be noted, as historians Hugh Thomas
and Helen Graham have reminded us, that the communism associated with
the Republic wasn’t particularly communist anyway.{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=628}}{{sfn|Graham|2002|p=184}} {{pg|440|441}}

Hemingway declined to follow Joris Ivens’ suggestion that he write a
dispatch on the significant role of the political commissars in the Republican
military, even though that would have meant
featuring his brave new friend Gustav Regler.{{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=}} Hemingway also, in a letter
justifying his work to Jack Wheeler at NANA, wrote about choosing not to
send a dispatch he had written because it might strike readers as propaganda
“no matter how true” (Letter to Jack Wheeler).{{sfn|Hemingway|1938b|p=}}

Hemingway went to Spain to see the war himself and to support the Republic
through his ambulance fund. The paychecks from NANA and the
fundraising from ''The Spanish Earth'' helped. Whatever propagandistic streak
colors the dispatches pales in comparison to the documentary. The filmmaker,
Joris Ivens, was well established in European communist circles. The
documentary genre then and now has occupied a slippery position between
the extremes of impossible-to-achieve empirical nonfiction and of the outright
fictionalized. Evaluations of Hemingway’s journalism are informed by
knowledge of ''The Spanish Earth'' and the ''Ken'' essays to the detriment of the
journalism. And the very nature of the slippery documentary genre may enable
the film to escape opprobrium. It wasn’t reportage; it was altogether
something else. But for that matter, Hemingway’s dispatches weren’t purely
reportage either, and if not ''altogether'' something else, still something else,
and should be reckoned with accordingly.

== Notes ==
{{notelist|20em}}

==Citations==
{{Reflist|15em}}

==Works Cited==
{{refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker
|first=Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Bruccoli |first=Matthew |date=2006 |title=Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame |url= |location=Columbia |publisher=U of South Caronia P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Cowles |first=Virginia |date=1941 |title=Looking for Trouble |url= |location=New York
|publisher=Harper & Brothers |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Davison |first=Richard Allan |title=The Publication of Hemingway’s The Spanish Earth: An Untold Story |url= |journal=Hemingway Review
|volume=7.2 |issue= |date=1988
|pages=122-130 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson
|first=Scott |date=2009 |title=Fitzgerald & Hemingway: Works and Days |url= |location=New York |publisher=Columbia UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Franklin |first=Sidney |date=1952 |title=Bullfighter from Brooklyn |url= |location=New York |publisher=Prentice-Hall |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Graham |first=Helen |date=2002 |title=The Spanish Republic at War 1936-1939 |url= |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Guttmann |first=Allen |date=1962 |title=The Wound in the Heart: American and the Spanish Civil War |url= |location=New York |publisher=Free Press of Glencoe |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1967 |title=By-Line: Ernest Hemingway |url= |location=New York |publisher=Scibner |pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Trogdon
|editor-first=Robert W.
|author-mask=1
|title=Fascism is a Lie
|url=
|journal=Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference |volume==
|issue=
|date=2002
|pages=193-6
|location=New York
|publisher=Carroll & Graf
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 May 1937
|chapter=Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=nd
|chapter=The Home Front
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938a
|chapter=Letter to Edmund Wilson
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=2 June 1938b
|chapter=Letter to Jack Wheeler
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=14 Feb 1939
|chapter=On the American Dead in Spain
|title=TS. New Masses
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Baker
|editor-first=Carlos
|author-mask=1
|date=2003
|chapter=The Hadely Mowrer
|title=Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Scribner
|pages=462-3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ibarruri
|first=Dolores
|date=1966
|title=They Shall Not Pass: The Autobiography of La Pasionaria
|url=
|location=United States
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|date=1969
|title=The Camera and I
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|author-mask=1
|date=26 Apr 1937
|chapter=Letter to Ernest Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|date=20 Nov 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Bertrand Weaver
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=12 Oct 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=25 Apr 1939
|chapter=Letter to M.B. Tenney
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Apr 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Knightley
|first=Phillip
|date=2004
|title=The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq
|url=
|location=Baltimore
|publisher=John Hopkins
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=
|date=9 Apr 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=TS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=11 Apr 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=8 May 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=6 July 1937d
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=July 1937e
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=22 March 1939
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 9
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=
|date=20 May 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=20 Dec 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 5
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Sep 1937c
|chapter=Note to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moorehead
|first=Caroline
|date=2003
|title=Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Henry Holt
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moreira
|first=Peter
|date=2006
|title=Hemingway on the China Front: His WWII Spy Mission with Martha Gellhorn
|url=
|location=Washington D.C.
|publisher=Potomac Books
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|date=5 Feb 1937
|chapter=Promotion Box: Hemingway, For Immediate Release
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|author-mask=1
|date=4 Apr 1938
|chapter=Promotion Box: American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|editor-last=Nelson
|editor-first=Card
|date=1994
|title=Remembering Spain: Hemingway’s Civil War Eulogy and the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
|url=
|location=Urbana
|publisher=U of Illinois
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Reynolds
|first=Michael
|date=1989
|title=Hemingway: The Paris Years
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Norton
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Stott
|first=William
|date=1986
|title=Documentary Expression and Thirties America
|url=
|location=Chicago
|publisher=U of Chicago P
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Thomas
|first=Hugh
|date=2001
|title=The Spanish Civil War, Rev. ed.
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Modern Library
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine
|last=''Two Wars and More to Come''
|first=
|date=24 Jan 1938
|title=Best Sellers of the Week Here and Elsewhere
|type=Advertisement
|url=
|magazine=New York Times
|pages=
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=NA
|first=
|title=United States. Dept. of State
|url=
|journal= Foreign Relations of the Untied States, 1937 |volume==1
|issue=General
|date=1954
|pages=
|location=Washington
|publisher=GPO
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Watson
|first=William Braasch
|title=Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches
|url=
|journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=7.2
|issue=
|date=1988
|pages=4-121
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Wheeler
|first=John H.
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938
|chapter=Letter to Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection, Box 3 Folder 14
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}

{{refend}}
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

User talk:Grlucas

2025-04-19T21:37:27Z

MerAtticus: /* Civil War..Dispatched. */ new section

{{Talk header}}
[[/Archive 202504/]]

== Final edits ==
Hello, my article is complete: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Ernest_and_Norman_(Exit_Music)|Ernest and Norman (Exit Music)]]
:{{Reply to|Flowersbloom}} great, thank you. I made some corrections. Please be sure to sign your talk page posts. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Good evening, Dr. Lucas. Below is the link to my edited article:
https://projectmailer.net/pm/User:ASpeed/sandbox
:{{Reply to|ASpeed}} great. Let me know when it’s finished and posted, and I’l have a look. It appears as if you still have a bit of work to do. Please be sure to sign your talk page posts. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Good evening, @[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]. I have completed most of my Remediation Articles, but I still show issues for the one named, "[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman,_Papa,_and_the_Autoerotic_Construction_of_Woman|Norman, Papa, and the Autoerotic Construction of Woman]].

Based on the latest updates, [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Battles_for_Regard,_Writerly_and_Otherwise|Battles for Regard, Writerly and Otherwise]] looks good with exception of including a '''category'''.
:{{Reply to|ALedezma}} this one is good. I made some corrections before removing the banner, mostly in your sources. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

May you let me know if there is anything I can do on my end to resolve the issues with the first [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman,_Papa,_and_the_Autoerotic_Construction_of_Woman|article]]?

[[User:ALedezma|ALedezma]] ([[User talk:ALedezma|talk]]) 21:47, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|ALedezma}} looking very good, but some sources missing page numbers. Please see to those. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

:::Thank you @[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] . I will review those and respond when complete. [[User:ALedezma|ALedezma]] ([[User talk:ALedezma|talk]]) 22:47, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
::::@[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]. Thank you for your feedback. A review of article additions was made for source pages. [[User:ALedezma|ALedezma]] ([[User talk:ALedezma|talk]]) 20:22, 11 April 2025 (EDT)
:::::{{Reply to| ALedezma}} ok, looking good. I made some corrections. There's one final thing to do: no footnotes should appear in the notes section; use {{tl|harvtxt}} instead; I did one to show you how to use the template. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:39, 12 April 2025 (EDT)
::::::@[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] Changes were done to footnote sources. Thank you! [[User:ALedezma|ALedezma]] ([[User talk:ALedezma|talk]]) 19:59, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas I finished my remediation article https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer%27s_The_Fight:_Hemingway,_Bullfighting,_and_the_Lovely_Metaphysics_of_Boxing&action=edit [[User:TWietstruk|TWietstruk]] ([[User talk:TWietstruk|talk]]) 19:44, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| TWietstruk}} good work so far, but there is more to do: placement of footnotes (eliminate spaces around them and punctuation always goes ''before'' the footnote.); proofread for typos; fix all red errors at the bottom (most of these are from errors in sourcing); works cited entries should be bulleted list and eliminate space between entries. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:05, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Final edit and no errors with some help from @NRMMGA5108, @JKilchenmann. Please mark me as complete. On to help someone else with the things I've learned
https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer%27s_The_Fight:_Hemingway,_Bullfighting,_and_the_Lovely_Metaphysics_of_Boxing&action=edit [[User:TWietstruk|TWietstruk]] ([[User talk:TWietstruk|talk]]) 17:52, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas I have finished my assigned remediation article: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Jive-Ass_Aficionado:_Why_Are_We_in_Vietnam%3F_and_Hemingway%27s_Moral_Code#cite_note-FOOTNOTEHemingway2003-24
Username ADear.
:{{Reply to|ADear}} thank you. I have marked this as complete. Please be sure you sign your talk page posts correctly. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:05, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I have finished remediating my assigned article. Please review it at your earliest convenience. The link is here: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Norman_Mailer's_Mythmaking_in_An_American_Dream_and_“The_White_Negro”|Norman Mailer's Mythmaking in An American Dream and “The White Negro”]]—[[User:Erhernandez|Erhernandez]] ([[User talk:Erhernandez|talk]]) 08:52, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Erhernandez}} well done! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. I removed your banner after making a few corrections. Please have a look over it and move on to the next thing. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:06, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I transferred and edited my article. Can you look at it and remove the banner? Here's the link: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Authorship_and_Alienation_in_Death_in_the_Afternoon_and_Advertisements_for_Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself]] ( [[User:APKnight25|APKnight25]] ([[User talk:APKnight25|talk]]) 13:02, 28 March 2025 (EDT) )
:{{Reply to| APKnight25}} looking good! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. Next, eliminate all "fang" quotes in the article and add “real quotation marks.” Your sources should be a bulleted list. And there should be no space before a citation. You’re almost finished! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:21, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of "Reinventing the Wheel" Mailer Article for Review ==

Dr. Lucas,

My [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Reinventing_a_New_Wheel:_The_Films_of_Norman_Mailer|article]] is ready for review.

Thank you!
[[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 15:29, 29 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|TPoole}} great! Could you include a link to it? Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:07, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
::OK, I [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer|found it]]. Looking really good. Great work. There are some citation issues that need to be seen to. The two red categories at the bottom should not be there; they will go away when the citations errors are corrected. Eliminate any quotation mark "fangs" in the text and replace them with “real quotation marks.” Let me know if you need help. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:14, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:::@Grlucas, what are the citation issues? Which ones need correcting? [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 17:31, 31 March 2025 (EDT)
::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} When you click your citations, they should jump to the works cited entry they correspond to. Several of yours do not, indicated by the red “Harv and Sfn no-target errors” at the bottom. You also have a "CS1 maint: Unrecognized language" error that will likely be cleared up when you fix the citation issues. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:55, 1 April 2025 (EDT)
:::::@Grlucas, I have tried correcting the sfn codes in my citations. I was able to get the 2 web citations to link correctly. But for some reason, I cannot get the Mailer 1967 film Wild 90 citation to link to the reference list. Please advise. [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 20:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
::::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} OK, all fixed and published. Thanks. Please move on to another remediation. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:46, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of: "Contradictory Syntheses: Norman Mailer’s Left Conservatism and the Problematic of 'Totalitarianism'" ==

Dr. Lucas

I finished the remediation of the following article:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Contradictory_Syntheses:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Left_Conservatism_and_the_Problematic_of_%E2%80%9CTotalitarianism%E2%80%9D

It is ready for your review. Thank you.
[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 19:04, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} looks great. I made some tweaks to the references and some throughout, like changing ' and " to real apostrophes and quotation marks. A bit more clean-up, but you might want to check over it again. I removed the under-construction banner. Well one. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 21:32, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Final Edit ==

Thank you for your comments on my remediation of
"[[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself.]]"

I've eliminated the "fang quotes" and changed them to “real quotation marks.” This was a very fascinating tip that taught me something new. It's something I've never noticed before but now always will.

I also put my sources in a bulleted list and removed the space before the citations. I think I'm all set now.
:{{Reply to|APKnight25}} great work! Please help other editors to complete the volume. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:34, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Firearms in the Works of Hemingway and Mailer'' ==

[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]

Hi Dr. Lucas,

I believe I have done everything for the Remediation of my article. Please let me know if there is anything else I need to do.

I will also link the article below:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Firearms_in_the_Works_of_Hemingway_and_Mailer

Thank you,
Caitlin Vinson
:{{Reply to|CVinson}} great work so far. Your references must use templates, please. Blockquotes must also be done correctly. No spaces or line breaks before or after the {{tl|pg}} template. Footnote placement is also off (punctuation goes before the footnote; no spaces before or after the footnote). I will add the abstract and url. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:30, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Hi Dr. Lucas, I believe there have been some updates made to the project. I believe I have also updated the works cited section to show correct templates. Please let me know if there is anything further that I need to do. Thank you, Caitlin.
::{{reply to| CVinson}} please sign your talk page posts correctly. Thanks. You still need to do some work on the sources. Use the <code>|author-mask=1</code> in your template for repeated author names. Also, you must eliminate the red “Harv and Sfn no-target errors” message at the bottom. No spaces or returns before or after the {{tl|pg}} call, as I already mentioned above. No parenthetical citations should be left, either; those should all be remediated to footnotes. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:50, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:::{{Reply to|Grlucas}} I have updated the sources and updated the in-text citations. I am still having trouble with the "Harv and Sfn no-target errors." I have not been successful in fixing this error and have tried multiple ways to fix it. —[[User:CVinson|CVinson]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 8:18, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

::::{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Hi Dr. Lucas, I see that I still have a red X for my remediation assignment. Is there something else I am still missing? —[[User:CVinson|CVinson]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:35, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:::::{{reply to| CVinson}} sorry, I'm just getting back to it. There are quite a few punctuation errors. Some left out and others appear after the {{tl|sfn}}. I'm trying to correct those I see, but you should have a look, too. Page is designated as <code>p=</code> in {{tl|sfn}}, not <code>pg=</code>; and a span of pages needs <code>pp=</code>. Again, I have tried to correct these. I removed the banner, but please have another look through. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:01, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Norman Mailer Today'' ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished up my remediation article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Norman Mailer Today|Norman Mailer Today]], and it is ready for review. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you! —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 18:20, 3 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Kamyers}} Great work! Please help your fellow editors finish the volume, or pick something to work on in [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010|Volume 4]]. Thanks, and well done. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:00, 4 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of “The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s ‘Hills Like White Elephants’” ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished my remediation of Jennifer Yirinec's article: [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”|The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.”]] Thank you for your assistance with the article. It is ready for its final review! [[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 10:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} a stellar job. Well done. I removed the banner, so you can move on to another article. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:12, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

== Tribute Remediations ==
Dr. Lucas, I have begun work on the tributes for volume 5. [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Grace Notes|Grace Notes]] by Stephen Borkowski is ready for its final review.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 12:58, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} Well done! Banner removed, url added. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:18, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

==Oohh Normie Final Edits==
Hi Dr. Lucas, I have finished my article: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/"Oohh_Normie_—_You're_Sooo_Hemingway":_Mailer_Memories_and_Encounters|Oohh Normie, You're Sooo Hemingway]]. Please let me know if there is anything I need to fix. [[User:Tbara4554|Tbara4554]] ([[User talk:Tbara4554|talk]]) 20:01, 5 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|Tbara4554}} thank you. I made some corrections and removed the banner. You might want to have another look over it. Please move on to something else. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:53, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== Harlot's Ghost, Bildungsroman, Masculinity and Hemingway ==

Dr. Lucas,

The following article is ready for your review. Thanks.

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Harlot%27s_Ghost,_Bildungsroman,_Masculinity_and_Hemingway

[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 21:22, 5 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} excellent. Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:39, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== I am done with this ==

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Situating_Hemingway:_Mailer,_Style,_Ethics
:Received. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:29, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== Final Review PM Article ==

Hi Dr. Lucas, [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Hemingway_to_Mailer_—_A_Delayed_Response_to_The_Deer_Park|here]] is my remediated article, ready for review![[User:Hobbitonya|Hobbitonya]] ([[User talk:Hobbitonya|talk]]) 12:21, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Hobbitonya}} great work. I have removed the banner, so you are good to move on to something else. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:20, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Project ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have finished my remedidation project and I am ready for it to be reviewed. '''Article link''': [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe#Works_Cited|Piling On: Norman Mailer's Utilization of Marilyn Monroe]

Thanks,

[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 13:04, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} good work so far. Please remove wikilinks. Change ' and " to typographical apostrophes and quotation marks. And all red errors at the bottom of the page need to be taken care of. These are likely all from coding errors in your sources. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:24, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have removed the wikilinks, changed to the correct typographic style and updated my sources.
'''Article link''': [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe#Works_Cited|Piling On: Norman Mailer's Utilization of Marilyn Monroe] Thanks, [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 21:55, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

[I forgot to fill out the summary box. I am adding my summary]
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} you're getting there! It looks great. You must eliminate all the red errors at the bottom. These appear when there are errors in your citations. Let me know if you need help. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:15, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

@{{reply to|Grlucas}} I have tried everything I can think of and I still have harv and sfn no-target errors and harv and sfn multiple-target errors and cs1 uses editors parameter. Do I not include the editor? [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 16:03, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

{{reply to|Grlucas}} I have managed to get rid of two of the red target errors. I am still working on finding the harv sfn multiple target error. Thanks, [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 20:37, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

{{reply to|Grlucas}} I have tried everything i can think of to remove the last red error flag. I had to turn it in. I don't know that else I can do in this situation. I was given citation that did not follow any of the given formats. [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 21:45, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} all parenthetical citations must be remediated to {{tl|sfn}}; none of yours are. Get these done, then we can worry about the errors. (Some notes on sources: any generic <code><nowiki>{{citation}}</nowiki></code> will not be correct. I see you have a book review by Marshall that has no source (I tried to find the original and cannot; this is a weird citation; I'll continue to look for it). There's also one that looks like a film that should use the [[w:Template:Cite AV media|<code>Cite AV media</code> template]].) Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:16, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Submission ==

Hello!
Here's my remediated article; [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/The_Devil's_Party:_Reading_and_Wreaking_Vengeance_in_The_Castle_in_the_Forest|The Devil's Party: Reading and Wreaking Vengeance in ''The Castle in the Forest'']].
Thanks! Please let me know if there's anything I can review or correct.
[[User:Maggiemrogers|Maggiemrogers]] ([[User talk:Maggiemrogers|talk]]) 13:23, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Maggiemrogers}} nice work! Banner removed, so please move on to something else in the volume. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:39, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Vol. 4: Rumors of Grace article remediated ==

I believe I have completed remediation of ''[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Rumors_of_Grace:_God-Language_in_Hemingway_and_Mailer|Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer]]'', vol. 4. I was having last-minute trouble with sfn errors for sources without authors, but Justin Kilchenmann helped me out, so I think they are fixed.
:{{Reply to|Sherrilledwards}} You have done a remarkable job—a real Herculean effort! Footnotes should not go in any notes. See those I changed; the others should be changed in the same way. I have done some, but the others have to be fixed, I'm afraid. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:20, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to|Grlucas}}I believe I have completed these fixes, so the article is again ready for review. [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 15:49, 12 April 2025 (EDT)
:::{{Reply to| Sherrilledwards}} truly exceptional work—a model remediation! Marked as complete. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:30, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of "Inside Norman Mailer ==

Hi Dr. Lucas - I have finished remediating the article, [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Inside Norman Mailer|Inside Norman Mailer]]. Please let me know if I need to make any adjustments. Thank you! [[User:Chelsey.brantley|Chelsey.brantley]] ([[User talk:Chelsey.brantley|talk]]) 18:09, 7 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Chelsey.brantley}} good work! Please help with another article from volume 4. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:36, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed: Norman Mailer: Playboy Magazine ==

I hope I am doing this is right. I have finished remediating my article about Norman Mailer and its in my designated sandbox [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Norman_Mailer:_Playboy_Magazine_Heavyweight here.]
If there are any last minute edits, let me know. I got the last of the errors removed yesterday. And I believe we are on the same page with leaving the in-line citations for ''Playboy'' to be as is, since the author didn't put them down in the works cited. [[User:NrmMGA5108|NrmMGA5108]] ([[User talk:NrmMGA5108|talk]]) 20:14, 7 April 2025 (EDT)Nina Mizner
:{{Reply to|NrmMGA5108}} looking good! So, the parenthetical citations still in the article, I'm assuming, are there because of those missing sources? Please check your page numbers; some seem to be off. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:04, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to|Grlucas}} I found the page number error and its corrected, and yes all the parenthetical citations should be referencing issues of the ''playboy'' magazine, which were not listed in the works cited. --[[User:NrmMGA5108|NrmMGA5108]] ([[User talk:NrmMGA5108|talk]]) 20:54, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| NrmMGA5108}} it looks great. I removed the banner! Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:29, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed Remediation From Here to Eternity and The Naked and The Dead: Premier to Eternity? ==

Greeting Dr. Lucas,

I have made the adjustment that you mentioned.

I also made additional edits to my short footnotes and noticed that my citations did not link to my references - which has been fixed.

I have tested all of my citations, and they all work.

Here is my article by Alexander Hicks, ''From Here to Eternity and The Naked and The Dead: Premier to Eternity?''

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/From_Here_to_Eternity_and_The_Naked_and_the_Dead:_Premiere_to_Eternity%3F

Have a great day.
:{{Reply to| THarrell}} Please always sign your talk page posts. Several “quoted items” in the article appear as ‘quoted items’; these must be corrected, please. No spaces or returns should surround {{tl|pg}} calls. Multiple page numbers should look like this <code><nowiki>{{sfn|Moretti|1996|pp=11-14}}</nowiki></code>; note the double <code>pp</code>. There seem to be many typos. I corrected some for you, but you must see to the rest. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:16, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Greetings,

Are these the only additional corrections that need to be made? This is different from what you mentioned before.

I just want to be sure that I have hit everything.

Also can you verify what other typos you are seeing, I have ran through this twice.

If something is spelt a certain way, for example "Soljer", I have left it that way. Since it is mentioned like that in the article.
—[[User:THarrell|THarrell]] ([[User talk:THarrell|talk]]) 06:49, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Greetings,

I have gone through and fixed all of the short footnotes.

I have gone line by line with a ruler to look at any typos, and fixed the words that I found that had a dash in them/needed to be lowercased.

I have also fixed the quotations.

—[[User:THarrell|THarrell]] ([[User talk:THarrell|talk]]) 12:31, 9 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| THarrell}} much better. Periods go inside quotations marks; I think I fixed these, but please check. Also, there are no spaces before footnotes; again, I did a find/replace, but you should check. Also, check that all titles of novels are italicized (if it's italicized in the PDF, then it has to be italicized in the remediation, including abbreviations, like ''Naked''); I fixed a couple. Also, no extra spaces; there should only be a single blank space between paragraphs. There are quite a few little details that needed (need?) fixing. I removed the banner, but please check my work. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 12:41, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon” ==

Greetings Dr. Lucus,

My article is ready for your review. Thank you.

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Mailer%E2%80%99s_%E2%80%9CFootnote_to_Death_in_the_Afternoon%E2%80%9D)
:{{Reply to| KForeman}} it's coming along. Please ''always'' sign your talk page posts. Right up top, there are errors. Please use the real {{tl|pg}}, like all the other articles. Citations need to be fixed. All parenthetical citations must be converted. You still have quite a bit of work to do. All red sections need to be seen to and corrected. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:20, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
@Grlucs, per your suggestions, I've made the corrections. Please review. I look forward to your feedback. Thank you.
:{{Reply to| KForeman}} looking better. All parenthetical page numbers should be removed and added to the {{tl|sfn}}. Check your page numbers in {{tl|pg}}. Footnotes should have no spaces around them; periods and commas go ''inside'' quotation marks and before the footnotes. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:28, 19 April 2025 (EDT)

=Remediation of "Cluster Seeds and the Mailer Legacy"=
Hello, Dr. Lucas. I have completed the remediation of [https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Cluster_Seeds_and_the_Mailer_Legacy&oldid=18200| my article], and it is ready for your review. Thank you!—[[User:ADavis|ADavis]] ([[User talk:ADavis|talk]]) 11:32, 8 April 2025 (EDT)@ADavis
:{{Reply to| ADavis}} got it. I think I check it yesterday and removed the banner then. Please move on to another piece. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediating Article: Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing Volume 4. ==

Hello Dr. Lucas,

I have completed remediating my article. Here is the link [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing|The Mailer Review: Volume 4: Mailer, Hemingway, Boxing (2010)]] [[User:JBrown|JBrown]] ([[User talk:JBrown|talk]]) 13:01, 8 April 2025 (EDT)JBrown
:{{Reply to|JBrown}} a good start, but all parenthetical citations need to be footnotes. Also, check your headers. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Norris Church Mailer'' ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished up remediating the article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norris Church Mailer|Norris Church Mailer]], and it is ready for review. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you! —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 13:42, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|Kamyers}} awesome work! Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Final Edits Completed and Ready for Review ==

Dr. Lucas, I have completed my assigned remediation article: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Looking_at_the_Past:_Nostalgia_as_Technique_in_The_Naked_and_the_Dead_and_For_Whom_the_Bell_Tolls|Looking at the Past: Nostalgia as Technique in The Naked and the Dead and For Whom the Bell Tolls]]. Please review at your convenience. I enjoyed working on this assignment. I look forward to your suggestions and feedback. All the best, Danielle (DBond007)
:{{Reply to| DBond007}} ok, good work. Please remove all the external links. Links to Wikipedia are not necessary, but if used, they need to be done correctly. There should be no spaces before {{tl|sfn}}. May sure all your ' and " are actually typographical apostrophes and quotation marks. Remove any superfluous spaces and line breaks; these mess up the formatting. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Thank you. I will get started on these revisions immediately. Thanks for the feedback and your time. :)[[User:DBond007|DBond007]] ([[User talk:DBond007|talk]]) 11:30, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| Grlucas}} I have completed all the requested revisions and ready for review round 2. Thank you again![[User:DBond007|DBond007]] ([[User talk:DBond007|talk]]) 12:10, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:::{{Reply to|DBond007}} looking better! There are still items to be seen to, like titles on novels and magazines need to appear like they do in the original: if it's italicized in the PDF, it must be italicized on the web. I added the epigram for you and corrected that pesky citation. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:41, 12 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| Grlucas}}I have completed edits. I went through and took out quotes around The Time Machine, except for one instance that the author uses them. All my other titles seem to correspond to the original article. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you for the epigram and the pesky citation correction. Best, [[User:DBond007|DBond007]] ([[User talk:DBond007|talk]]) 15:25, 17 April 2025 (EDT)
:::{{Reply to|DBond007}} received, and good work. I had to clean up the sources a bit, so you might want to have a look. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:42, 18 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| Grlucas}}I went back and reviewed some of the other articles marked complete to compare and look for remaining revisions. I made one change on Works Cited and also added the page numbers to correspond to the pdf. Let's try this again. Again, I *believe I am finished with this article. Best,[[User:DBond007|DBond007]] ([[User talk:DBond007|talk]]) 10:36, 18 April 2025 (EDT)

Hopefully this works!. I'm not sure how to reply to other threads, but I was scrolling through the PDF and noticed the publisher is Iowa Pres? Just curious if it's supposed to be Iowa Press? [[User:Wverna|Wverna]] ([[User talk:Wverna|talk]]) 22:33, 18 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Wverna}} I'm not sure what you're talking about. Perhaps if you included a link to the article? See [[w:Help:Talk pages|Talk page guidelines]] if you don't know how to use them. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:33, 19 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed the remediation assignment ==

Good evening Dr. Lucas,

I hope I am doing this right. Here is the link for my completed Remediation article: [http://The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Encounters_with_Mailer Encounters with Mailer].

I look forward to reading your feedback.

All the best,

Patrick Riley
:{{Reply to|Priley1984}} thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:40, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Project Submission: An Expected Encounter in an Unexpected Place ==

Link:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer:_An_Expected_Encounter_in_an_Unexpected_Place

Winnie Verna
:{{Reply to|Wverna}} received, thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:51, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== E.Mosley ==

Good evening, @Grlucas. I have completed my Remediation Articles[[https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/On_Reading_Mailer_Too_Young]]. The article I had was " On Reading Mailer Too Young Volume 4, 2010
:{{Reply to| Essence903m}} thank you. I had to fix and clean-up quite a bit. Your saves also do not include summaries. When you move on to your next article, please be more careful and follow the instructions. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:12, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Kynndra Watson ==

Good Evening, @grlucas. i have completed my Remediation articles: Volume 5: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Making_Masculinity_and_Unmaking_Jewishness:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Voice_in_Wild_90_and_Beyond_the_Law and Volume 4: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Mailer,_Hemingway,_and_the_%E2%80%9CReds%E2%80%9D.

Thank you.
:{{Reply to| KWatson}} thank you, and this is a good start, but there are still many items that need to be cleaned up, like footnote indications (They go after punctuation), citation errors (all the red errors at the bottom need to be seen to), extra spaces and ALL CAPS need to be removed. Please see other completed articles for models. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:18, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/What Would Be the Fun of That?|"What Would Be the Fun of That?"]] by Peter Alson.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:33, 9 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} awesome! Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:21, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== “Remembering Norris Church” Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Remembering Norris Church|“Remembering Norris Church”]] by John Bowers.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 16:17, 9 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} and again, excellent! Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:22, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== “The Norris I Knew” Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/The Norris I Knew|“The Norris I Knew”]] by Christopher Busa.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:04, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} rockin’! 👍🏼 —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:24, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== "Norris Mailer" Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Norris Mailer|"Norris Mailer"]] by Nancy Collins.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:35, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} thanks again. You’re tearing it up. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:32, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== "Rise Above It" Tribute Remediation ==

Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Rise Above It|"Rise Above It"]] by David Ebershoff—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 11:12, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} excellent. Many thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:15, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed Additional Articles ==

Hello, Dr. Lucas. I have remediated [https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Tributes_to_Norris_Church_Mailer/A_View_Through_the_Prism&oldid=18744|"A View Through the Prism"], [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Tributes_to_Norris_Church_Mailer/Lip_Liner|"Lip Liner"], and [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/The_Living_Room_Show#|"The Living Room Show"] in Volume 5. They are ready for your review. Thank you!—[[User:ADavis|ADavis]] ([[User talk:ADavis|talk]]) 12:31, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|ADavis}} great work. Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:26, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Submission notification sent 29 March ==

@grlucas

Dr. Lucas - I sent a Talk Page notification that I had completed the page I remediated on 29 March. The table indicates I haven't done anything yet. I sent it from the Talk Page from the article site. I don't see a response from that notification, but I had received one from you earlier in the process.
I don't understand what happened.

[[User:LogansPop22|LogansPop22]] ([[User talk:LogansPop22|talk]]) 14:54, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|LogansPop22}} sorry if I missed that. [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Hemingway and Women at the Front: Blowing Bridges in The Fifth Column, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Other Works|this article]], right? It's looking great, though all the parenthetical citations must be converted to footnotes using {{tl|sfn}} and some of the author names in your notes should use {{tl|harvtxt}}. I added the "citations" section for you. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:39, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Making Masculinity and Unmaking Jewishness: Norman Mailer’s Voice in Wild 90 and Beyond the Law ==

@Grlucas, I have made some additional edits to this [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Making_Masculinity_and_Unmaking_Jewishness:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Voice_in_Wild_90_and_Beyond_the_Law article] in Volume 5 by correcting most of the citations. There are 2 that still do not work, but I think that is because the sources are incomplete.

[[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 21:16, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| TPoole}} Looking really good, and this is a complicated one. A couple of things: no spaces or line breaks before or after {{tl|pg}}; I removed the spaces before {{tl|sfn}}, but you might want to check them; there are some typos, like missing spaces before some parentheses; no footnotes should appear in the notes section: use {{tl|harvtxt}} instead. And all the red errors at the bottom need to be cleared up. Great work so far! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:00, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Red Error-Gone ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}I have deleted all the sfn's and the red error is gone. I don't know why I didn't think about this days ago.

[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe|Gladstein-Monroe]]

[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 23:07, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|MerAtticus}} getting closer. A few things: you should use <code>|author-mask=1</code> for repeated author names in your works cited; all parenthetical citations need to be replaced with footnotes using {{tl|sfn}}; must punctuation in your sources need to be removed as the templates do that for you; and you need to use {{tl|harvtxt}} for citations in your endnotes. Also, letters and films have their own templates. I did a couple of these for you as examples. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:14, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== "Remembering Norris" Tribute Remediation ==

Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Remembering Norris|"Remembering Norris"]] by Margo Howard.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:20, 12 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} excellent! Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:35, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

== Norman Mailer: From Orgone Accumulator to Cancer Protection for Schizophrenics ==

Dr. Lucas,

The following article is ready for your review:
https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer:_From_Orgone_Accumulator_to_Cancer_Protection_for_Schizophrenics

I was unable to find the correct format for the first works cited entry under Mailer. It is a reprint of a magazine article. Thank you. [[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 16:28, 12 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} you are a master remediator! Thank you for going above and beyond. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:44, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

==Tolls of War: Mailerian Sub-Texts in For Whom the Bell Tolls, Trust & Sparring with Norman==
Dr. Lucas, these were some of the smaller ones, so I went ahead and knocked them out. They are ready for review: [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Sparring with Norman|Sparring with Norman]], [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Trust|Trust]], and [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tolls of War: Mailerian Sub-Texts in For Whom the Bell Tolls|Tolls of War: Mailerian Sub-Texts in For Whom the Bell Tolls]]. —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 10:27, 13 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Kamyers}} all excellent—above and beyond! Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:56, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing'' ==

Hi everyone,
I am currently helping with the article, [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Death,_Art,_and_the_Disturbing:_Hemingway_and_Mailer_and_the_Art_of_Writing Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing]. It still has a good bit to go, if anyone wants to help out.
—[[User:CVinson|CVinson]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 5:17 PM, 13 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|CVinson}} thanks! I added the author info. I'm not sure many will see your request; you might want to post it on the forum. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 14:56, 14 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Thank you for adding the author information and I have posted the request in the forum. Thank you! —[[User:CVinson|CVinson]] ([[User talk:CVinson|talk]]) 6:53 PM, 14 April 2025 (EDT)

== Mimi and Mercer ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have corrected the Mimi Gladstein [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Piling On: Norman Mailer’s Utilization of Marilyn Monroe]] and removed all the red errors. I also have finishe the Erin Mercer article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Automatons and the Atomic Abyss: The Naked and the Dead]], except the ''The Naked and the Dead'' in the display title. An error occured.
[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 19:26, 13 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} good work. There should be no footnotes in the endnotes, please. Since this is the only thing to correct, I have removed the banner, but please let me know when you made that final correction. Thanks! (I will respond about your second article shortly.) —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 14:59, 14 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} your second article looks good. Could you use the [[w:Template:Cite interview|Template:Cite interview]] for interviews. I did one for you. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 16:33, 14 April 2025 (EDT)

== Through the Lens of the Beatniks Remediation ==

Hello, Dr. Lucas! I've completed the remediation of [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Through_the_Lens_of_the_Beatniks:_Norman_Mailer_and_Modern_American_Man’s_Quest_for_Self-Realization#CITEREFNaked1992|Through the Lens of the Beatniks]]. I wasn't able to get the letter citations exactly how I thought they should be. If there's anything I'm missing, please let me know! Thanks! [[User:Maggiemrogers|Maggiemrogers]] ([[User talk:Maggiemrogers|talk]]) 10:09, 14 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Maggiemrogers}} got it! It looks great. I made some format changes, but you did a great job! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 15:58, 14 April 2025 (EDT)

== Finish Mimi ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}

I have made the final edit to Mimi and removed the footnotes from the endnotes. [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe]] [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 15:50, 14 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} you removed all the citations. Only '''footnotes''' need to be removed, but citations need to stay. I did the first note for you (now erased, but you can see it in the history) so you could see how it was done. You can also see [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer|this one]]. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 16:52, 14 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed? All You Need is Glove ==

Hi Dr. Lucas, I believe the book review, [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/All_You_Need_is_Glove|All You Need is Glove]] is done and ready for review! [[User:Hobbitonya|Hobbitonya]] ([[User talk:Hobbitonya|talk]]) 19:10, 14 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Hobbitonya}} awesome work! Banner removed, and many thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:08, 16 April 2025 (EDT)

== Harv and Sfn no-target ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I changed the citations in the article to interview and I tried a few things to get rid of the Harv and Sfn no-target with little luck. [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Automatons_and_the_Atomic_Abyss:_The_Naked_and_the_Dead]]
[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 21:04, 14 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} this was because your interviews had no dates. Most are from Lennon's book, published in 1988. I added the dates to the citations, but the sfn footnotes need to be fixed to correspond with those. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:24, 16 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} OK, between your fixes and my little tweaks, this one is finished! Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:50, 17 April 2025 (EDT)

== Erros fixed ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have fixed all citation errors in both articles and added the harvtxt. Atomic Abyss still has the Pages using duplicate arguments in template calls error.
[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Automatons_and_the_Atomic_Abyss:_The_Naked_and_the_Dead]]
:{{Reply to|MerAtticus}} see above. These still need fixing. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:35, 16 April 2025 (EDT)

[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe]]
:{{Reply to|MerAtticus}} this one looks great! Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:35, 16 April 2025 (EDT)

[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 08:23, 15 April 2025 (EDT)

== completed: Advertisements for Others ==

Thanks to some classmates helping with the finishing touches, my second article should be ready. [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Advertisements_for_Others:_The_Blurbs_of_Norman_Mailer|Advertisements for Others.]]
--[[User:NrmMGA5108|NrmMGA5108]] ([[User talk:NrmMGA5108|talk]]) 19:24, 17 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to| NrmMGA5108}} received, and thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:15, 18 April 2025 (EDT)

== Two Poems Vol 4 Ready? ==

Hi Dr. Lucas! I think these two poems are ready for review: [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/The Boxer in the Park|The Boxer in the Park]] and Norman Mailer and [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer_and_Ernest_Hemingway_Do_Not_Box_in_Heaven|Ernest Hemingway Do Not Box in Heaven]]. The second on says the display title is wrong, but again, I don't know what I am missing there. Thank you![[User:Hobbitonya|Hobbitonya]] ([[User talk:Hobbitonya|talk]]) 09:05, 18 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Hobbitonya}} excellent! Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:56, 18 April 2025 (EDT)

== A Dialogue Essay on Mailer and Hemingway ==

Hey,

I see that [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/A Dialogue Essay on Mailer and Hemingway|A Dialogue Essay on Mailer and Hemingway]] is missing text. Can you email me a copy or link it as a reply, so I can remediate this article. [[User:APKnight25|APKnight25]] ([[User talk:APKnight25|talk]]) 09:44, 18 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| APKnight25}} you may download both volumes’ PDFs on the [https://forum.grlucas.net/t/project-mailer-assignments-remediation-project/88/3?u=grlucas forum]. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:40, 18 April 2025 (EDT)

== Almost complete ==

@grlucas
I've made a ton of progress.
The only thing I have left is going through all of the links to do away with harvtxt and sfn target error and an error for extra text in the author section. I fixed the error about using an "en" dash between years.
I'll still be working on it until tomorrow night, but please take a look: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Hemingway_and_Women_at_the_Front:_Blowing_Bridges_in_The_Fifth_Column,_For_Whom_the_Bell_Tolls,_and_Other_Works

== Articles complete ==

@grlucas
I have also made a lot of progress with my articles and luckily received a last minute assit from a few of my class mates. I beleive both volumes to be complete: Vol 4: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Mailer,_Hemingway,_and_the_%E2%80%9CReds%E2%80%9D (Which I believe has already been submitted) and Volume 5: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Making_Masculinity_and_Unmaking_Jewishness:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Voice_in_Wild_90_and_Beyond_the_Law (I just received the final error correction from a fellow student.

I also started working on this Vol 4 article once I got back into the system: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Style,_Politics,_and_Hemingway%27s_Spanish_Civil_War_Dispatches in my sandbox https://projectmailer.net/pm/User:KWatson/sandbox but another user has already completed it.

Please review my articles and advise what else is needed from me. Thank you [[User:KWatson|KWatson]] ([[User talk:KWatson|talk]]) 15:37, 19 April 2025 (EDT)

== Additional edits ==

Hello! I reformatted all in text citations, did some editing, and added page numbers to [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing|Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing]]- could you please take a look at the updated page and see if there's anything additional that it needs?
[[User:KaraCroissant|KaraCroissant]] ([[User talk:KaraCroissant|talk]]) 16:25, 19 April 2025 (EDT)

== Civil War..Dispatched. ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}

I believe the Hemingway's Spanish Civil War is complete except the harvtext were not working. [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Style,_Politics,_and_Hemingway's_Spanish_Civil_War_Dispatches]]
[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 17:37, 19 April 2025 (EDT)

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches

2025-04-19T21:34:26Z

MerAtticus: default sort add

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{{byline|last=Vernon |first=Alex |abstract=The Spanish Civil War began in July 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally-restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy. By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches.}}

{{dc|dc=T|HE SPANISH CIVIL WAR BEGAN ON}} 17-18 JULY, 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy, to collaborate with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens on the pro-Republican documentary ''The Spanish Earth'', and to pursue his fledgling love affair with Martha Gellhorn.

By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches for NANA.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=4}}{{efn|Quotations from the NANA dispatches follow the Diplomatic Text established by William Braasch’s “Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches.” I prefer NANA’s titles rather than Watson’s. For my disagreements with some of Watson’s datings, see my comments on specific dispatches in ''Hemingway’s Second War.''}}The secondary sources habitually judge them inferior journalism. Carlos Baker in the first Hemingway biography, for example, complains that the dialogue was “so heavily stamped with personal mannerisms as to be of doubtful authenticity.” Baker sees a “curious monotony in his stories of battles and bombardments,” a gratuitous use of graphic imagery “to shock his readers,” and “a note of triumphant boastfulness” in reporting proximity to danger. He also faults Hemingway for “often hint[ing] he was alone when in fact he was usually with Martha Gellhorn, Matthews, and Delmer.” Hemingway lacked Dos Passos’ “eye for telling details” and the “meticulous exactitude and inclusiveness that characterized the best work of Herbert Matthews and Sefton Delmer.”{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}

Philip Knightley’s ''The First Casualty'', the standard history of war correspondence, paraphrases Baker but with a trouncing final judgment:{{pg|427|428}}Hemingway’s “performance as a war correspondent was abysmally bad.” But Knightley goes beyond “technical” dissatisfaction to moral condemnation. Not just “unjustifiably optimistic”—an excusable offense—Hemingway’s reporting was “unforgivable” in its “total failure to report the Communist persecution, imprisonment, and summary execution of ‘untrustworthy elements’ on the Republican side, when he knew this was happening and when disclosing it might well have prevented further horrors like this.”
{{sfn|Knightley|2004 |pp=231–32}}{{efn|In my view, Knightley does not sufficiently acknowledge his paraphrasing of Baker.}}

Such criticisms in the final analysis might bear out. As Scott Donaldson writes, Hemingway advanced the Republican cause in his dispatches by eliciting “the deepest possible feelings of horror and of sympathy for the victims” of the Madrid bombardment; his “undue optimism” often “ignored Loyalist defeats and exaggerated the importance of its victories”; and “he repeatedly called attention to the participation of Italians and Germans on Franco’s side.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=426}} It also served as a recruitment tool—Milton Wolff, for example, acknowledged the strong influence Hemingway’s dispatches had on his decision to volunteer. Nevertheless, I think it a worthwhile exercise to attend a little more studiously to Hemingway’s dispatches, their context, and their artistry. I don’t necessarily intend to reverse the general opinion of the correspondence, only to achieve a better and more sympathetic understanding.

Herbert Matthews’ reporting for the ''New York Times'' will serve as a convenient comparison for two reasons. First, because both Baker and Knightley use Matthews’ journalism as the standard of excellence to pass judgment on Hemingway’s; and second, because the two worked practically side-by-side, seeing and reporting on many of the same events. In fact so closely did they work together that NANA sometimes complained that the ''Times'' was not buying Hemingway’s pieces because they resembled Matthews,’ and at one point Matthews’ own editors at the Times suspected him of plagiarizing Hemingway.{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|pp=411, 420}} A note from Matthews’ assigned editor Raymond McCaw provides, in two columns, seven quite similar passages from Hemingway’s Aragon front dispatches of September 13 and 14 with Matthews’ of September 14, with a penciled note at the bottom: “a deadly parallel if you ask me.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937c|p=}} Edwin James, the managing editor and McCaw’s boss, eventually agreed with Matthews’ defense: “It is quite apparent that you did not file any duplicate of the Hemingway story, or vice versa. As I understand it, the similarity arose from the fact that you{{pg|428|429}}both went to see the same show and saw it at the same time [sic], under the same conditions.”{{sfn|James|1937b|p=}}

Matthews’ dispatches ring of Republican bias as much if not more than anything Hemingway ever filed. The ''Times'' received many letters to the editor complaining about Matthews’ undisguised politics, which also gave serious concern to some of his editors. His description of the Republican May 1937 infighting in Barcelona is a striking example of how his news veered into propaganda and shows just how much he passed along the government’s version of events. The government’s “BLOODLESS TRIUMPH FOUGHT WITH RECOGNIZEDWEAPONS OF DEMOCRACY” turned out to be blatantly false, as the government and the “COMMUNISTS [WHO] DISTINGUISHED THEMSELVES” resorted to violent suppression. His blaming the uprising on the anarchist CNT working as Franco operatives parrots the government’s and the communist party’s public position, even though both charges—that the anarchists precipitated the events and that they were under Nationalist direction—were also false. His dispatch’s optimistic close also equivocates the political reality: “NEW GOVERNMENT HAS TAKEN POWER WHICH APPEARS TOVE CONFIDENCE VAST MAJORITY SPANIARDS IN LOYALIST TERRITORY AND TIS HOPED WILL GAIN EQUAL CONFIDENCE ABROAD STOP VIOLENCE AND REVOLUTION BEEN REPUDIATED AND NEWAND FAR HOPEFULLER PERIOD SEEMS BEGINNING.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937a|p=}}The ''Times'', knowing full well the one-sided coverage of a correspondent writing from one side of the conflict, had a reporter on both sides: Matthews with the Republicans, and William Carney with the Nationalists. They got their facts right (or wrong) as often as the other, their editors concluded; and they inspired about the same number of letters of complaint.{{sfn|James|1937a|p=}}{sfn|James|1939|p=}}

Furthermore, Matthews’ dispatches received a great deal of substantive editorial revisions. One of Matthews’ Teruel reports had to be cut for length, as McCaw informed James: “This bird sent 2844 words on the same facts which Hemingway covered much better in less than half that number. I wonder if Matthews thinks the paper is thriving, and that cable tolls do not matter a damn. Of course, it had to be cut for space anyway.” McCaw most likely refers here to Matthews’ dispatch corresponding to Hemingway’s “The Attack on Teruel,” though Matthews’ account of the fall of Teruel is also much longer (and more long-winded) than Hemingway’s, and just as personal in terms of describing the dangers{{pg|429|430}} he faced. Indeed its length allows him to share even more of the action he endured.{{sfn|McCaw|1937b|p=}}

Raymond McCaw held a general professional disagreement with Matthews perhaps tainted with over zealousness. Whether a personal or political motive informed that disagreement can’t be determined from the evidence I’ve seen. It is also clear that McCaw’s charges bear some validity—that any responsible editor could have easily and reasonably taken issue where McCaw did. One of the more interesting examples concerns Matthews’ piece on Guadalajara. Because he only saw evidence on Franco’s side of Italian forces, he only reported on Italians. But the ''Times'' editors heard from other sources that German soldiers also participated in the March offensive. They thought it prudent, from this confusion, to change (nine times) “Italian” to “Rebel,” “the foe,” or “Insurgent.” When Matthews saw the published piece he wrote a strenuous objection. In some instances the editors changed paraphrased quotations from his sources. One large paragraph omitted by the editors stressed the first-hand nature of the information, and Matthews underlines the key words: “All day, at every place we stopped and no matter whom we talked to or what we saw, there was only one label—Italian. The dead bodies, the prisoners, the material of every kind, the men who had occupied Brihuega and then fled were Italian and nothing but Italian.” Here and elsewhere in his original story, Matthews emphasizes the “personal knowledge” of its information.{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}{{efn|James supported McCaw on these changes, though later acknowledged that altering quoted sources was perhaps unwarranted(29 April 1937; Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3).}}Yet Matthews did not report on the foreigners fighting for the Republic—it was in fact the Italian Garibali Battalion that routed Franco’s Italians. We might surmise government censorship behind this silence, though Matthews would not cable news of “CENSORSHIP STRICTER” and “BAN ON MENTIONING INTERNATIONALS INCLUDING AMERICANS INSTITUTED TODAY” until July.{{sfn|Matthews|1937b|p=}}Perhaps he cautiously self-censored, or politically self-censored for the same reasons the government would eventually ban mention. Still, his stridency about the omission of foreigners on one side is striking given his knowledge of their contribution to the other side. For this reason too, and his omission of other nationalities on the insurgent side, it seemed only fair to his editor “to stand on the statement that the majority of the Rebels were Italians and let it go at that.”{{sfn|James|1937c|p=}} A reasonable decision.

Throughout his correspondence to his editors and his several books,{{pg|430|431}}Matthews maintained a passionate defense of his eyewitness journalistic standard, a position those close to him understood. “Matthews never believed anything he had not seen with his own eyes,” Joris Ivens wrote. “He never saw his job as reporter as one that permitted him to sit in his hotel and read the handouts of the War Ministry.” {{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=112}} Sidney Franklin recalls that some writers wrote their pieces before arriving in Madrid, and came only for the “legitimacy” of the Madrid dateline.{{sfn|Franklin|1952|p=232}}And Matthews hated, on principle, having his name attached to an article that violated the integrity of his witness. The only way to achieve objectivity, for Matthews, was to acknowledge one’s subjective perspective. Writing to his publisher, Matthews argued that “the full documentary value” of his coverage was lost when the editors altered his submissions for “the apparent necessity of giving more or less equal space to both sides.”{{sfn|Matthews|1939|p=}}

As with Matthews, so too Hemingway. Indeed the commitment to subjectivity
fit quite well with Hemingway’s modernist aesthetics. If Hemingway
focused the dispatches on his perspective—on his own experience dodging
artillery—more than Matthews and more than most, he did so at least partially
to fulfill expectations. NANA approached him, after all, for his name
and personality as much as whatever he would write. Before he even left the
states it pitched him to potential publications, sending out a promotional release with text to be used alongside his forthcoming dispatches and suggesting
they include a photograph: “Mr. Hemingway’s assignment is to get both from the bombed towns and bombed trenches the human story of the war, not just an account of the game being played by general staffs with pins
and a map.”{{sfn|NANA|1937|p=}}{{ NANA also released each individual dispatch with a one-sentence “precede” about the “famous” or “noted” author. Ernest Hemingway was not writing as Herbert Mathews, ace reporter; Hemingway was writing as Ernest Hemingway, famous author of novels and stories well known to be drawn from his own experiences.

That he understood this to be his assignment is further evidenced by a
cable Matthews sent to his ''Times'' editors on April 9, 1937, concerning the
Loyalist attack: “WORKED CONJOINTL WITH HEMINGWAY TODAY HE SENDING EYEWITNESS DESCRIPTION WHILE EYE SENT GENERAL STRATEGY.”{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}When a year later the ''Times'' asked NANA to ensure Hemingway’s reports differed from Matthews, NANA complied by asking Hemingway “to emphasize color rather than straight reporting” not necessarily out of dissatisfaction with Hemingway’s reportage as Baker contends,{{efn|Baker’s notes date the Times request to NANA as 8 Apr. 1938, and NANA’s to Hemingway as 15
Apr. 1938 (Princeton University, Firestone Library: Box 18, Folder 8 “1938”), the date of “The Bombing of Tortosa” dispatch.}} but to increase{{pg|431|432}}the chance of selling to the ''Times'' and indeed to ensure the spirit of NANA’s original arrangement with Hemingway. {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}Far from dissatisfied, NANA wrote Hemingway at the end of August 1938 a letter of agreement for his coverage of “a general European war” should it break out, “written in your colorful style” (Hemingway was in Paris, on his way to Spain for the last time during the war).{{sfn|Wheeler|1938|p=}}When Edmund Wilson criticized the selected dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'', Hemingway wrote him that “I was paid to write what are called ‘eye witness’ accounts . . .what is called, or was asked for as ‘color stuff.’ Most of such stuff is faked. Mine was not. It was straight reporting and the personal stuff was what had been asked for by the editors. “Wilson’s estimation was also based upon ''Fact’s'' inclusion of the “The Old Man at the Bridge” story from ''Ken'', “not a news dispatch” at all.{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}Speaking at Carnegie Hall before the showing of a rough cut of ''The Spanish Earth'', shortly after his first trip to Spain and so very much in the context of his wartime work, Hemingway defined the writer’s problem as “project[ing] [what is true] in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2002|p=193}}

Personal, anecdotal journalism had been Hemingway’s signature style from his earliest days filing reports, in the early 1920s from Paris, when his editor at the ''Toronto Star Weekly'' “encouraged [. . .] what Hemingway did best: write about himself in the act of being a reporter.”{{sfn|Reynolds|1989|p=45}}How could he expect that NANA would expect anything else, if indeed NANA did expect anything else? In the Spanish Civil War he at least maintained his eyewitness posture; in World War II, however, he couldn’t keep himself out. His first piece, about D-Day, begins, “No one remembers the date of the Battle of Shiloh. But the day ''we took'' Fox Green beach was the sixth of June, and the wind was blowing hard out of the northwest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1967|p=340}}His venue too—''Collier’s'' magazine—and the fact that he had not written anything in three years further contributed to the story-like nature of the WWII stories, in which he figured as a protagonist—not to mention the stories and involvement he couldn’t write about, armed and running around France more of a free agent than his guerilla-hero Robert Jordan ever was (though he began to transform these experiences into fiction in several unpublished stories). In wartime China in 1943, filing articles for Ralph Ingersoll’s short-lived ''PM'' New York afternoon daily, Hemingway did not even care to be called a news reporter.{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=99}}

It should be mentioned that Hemingway and Matthews enjoyed a great{{pg|432|433}}friendship and working relationship. Hemingway usually brought Matthews, who did not have a car, on his excursions. When Matthews left Madrid for a break in mid April 1937, he had already ensured Hemingway would provide coverage to the ''Times'' through NANA. For one thing, Hemingway did not have to worry about Matthews as a rival for the history books. He could endorse his friends’ book, ''Two Wars and More to Come'', and praise him as “the ablest and the bravest war correspondent writing today “who “when the fakers are all dead [. . .] will be read in the schools” (Advertisement 21) because Matthews posed no threat to Hemingway’s own chances to be read in the schools. The only brief Hemingway ever expressed he really reserved for Matthews’ editors, for not wanting his Teruel street-fighting story and for cutting references to himself in Matthews’ Teruel dispatches so that it appeared only Matthews had been there.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=462}}

As for Hemingway’s neglecting to name everyone with him for every story, the ''Times'' cutting of his name suggests that such exactitude was hardly a priority. A paper had no incentive for announcing the fact that a competitor’s
correspondent stood beside its own to see and report the same
events. NANA changed at least one vague Hemingway “we,” which admits
to the presence of others, to “this correspondent”
—we can hardly fault Hemingway for working in the spirit of his
employer’s standards.{{sfn|NANA|1938|p=}}{{efn|“we” in typescript and radiogram (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 1 and Folder 25).}} Do readers care that Matthews, Delmer, Gellhorn,
and others were there? The story’s effect and the limited word count also
weighed against such roll calls. One editor chose not to clutter the dispatch
on the great retreat across the Ebro with all the names of the American International Brigade volunteers Hemingway encountered, an omission of
Content more far serious than that of omitted correspondent names.{{efn| Radiogram insert dateline 4 April 1938 (HRC: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 25).}} Hemingway
often gave the names of the reporters with him, such as at Teruel;
nor was he the only reporter to sometimes neglect to do so. Martha Gellhorn,
for example, used a vague “we” and singled herself out as the primary
participant in some of her stories.

By using first-person reportage Hemingway—and Matthews and Gellhorn And most of the group covering the war—were operating solidly within
convention. William Stott, in ''Documentary Expression and Thirties America'',
calls this first-person ''participant observer'' technique “the most common sort
of documentary reportage in the thirties” that worked “by vicarious persuasion:
the writer partook of the events he reported and bared his feelings
and attitudes to influence the reader’s own.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=178-9}}{{efn|He specifically includes Hemingway et al (180).}} Stott also observes {{pg|433|434}}another technique to enable documentary reportage to “talk to us, and convince us that we, our deepest interests, are engaged,” in the use of the second person: “Thirties documentaries constantly address ‘you,’ the ‘you’ who is we the audience, and exhorts, wheedles, begs us to identify, pity, participate.” His examples include Dorothy Parker’s Spanish Civil War writing, and Hemingway’s 1935 “First-Hand Report on the Florida Hurricane.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=27-8}} A number of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches employ the second-person as a way of bringing the reader along for the ride.

Hemingway’s dispatches used personal pronouns more artfully than is
generally recognized. “A New Kind of War,” which William Braasch Watson
notes as having been “[w]ritten with more care and imagination” than its
predecessors, begins in second person: “The window of the hotel is open
and, as you lie in bed, you hear the firing in the front line seventeen blocks
away.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=29}} He takes “you” outside, to see the damage and the dead from the bombing. “Someone makes a joke about missing teeth and someone else says not to make that joke. And everyone has the feeling that characterizes war. It wasn’t me, see? It wasn’t me.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} The tension between the first person and second-person pronouns—the movement toward identification with “you” and the insistence that “it wasn’t me”—continues in the next line. Here the reader is at once still in the narrator’s shoes, but strangely distanced from the narrator through biographical tidbit and, at the same time, asked
to see himself in the enemy: “The Italian dead up on the Guadalajara weren’t
you although Italian dead, because of where you had spent your boyhood,
always seemed, still, like Our Dead.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} It is worth quoting at length the dispatch’s transition to first person:<blockquote>
After the shell that lit on the sidewalk in front of the hotel you got a beautiful double corner room on that side, twice the size of the one you’d had, for less than a dollar. It wasn’t me they killed. See? No. Not me. It wasn’t me anymore.

Then in a hospital given by the American Friends of Spanish Democracy located out behind the Morata front along the road
to Valencia they said, “Raven wants to see you.”

“Do I know him?”

“I don’t think so,” they said. “But he wants to see you.”

“Where is he?”

“Upstairs.”{{pg|434|435}}In the room upstairs they are giving a blood transfusion to a man with a very gray face who lay on a cot with his arm out looking away from the gurgling bottle and moaning in a very impersonal way. He moaned mechanically and at regular intervals and it did not seem to be him that made the sound. His lips did not move.

“Where’s Raven?” I asked.

“I’m here,” said Raven.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=31}}</blockquote>The piece simply could not have sustained the second-person for the remaining
five pages. More significantly, for this deeply personal exchange between
the writer and the faceless, eyeless soldier, Hemingway could not hide
in the rhetorical device of the second-person. In the process, he effects a reversal
of the usual pronoun game; instead of identifying with the all embracing
“you,” we leave that trick behind and become fully attached to
the narratorial “I” as ourselves, as we might not have been had the article
begun in the first person. And even as the narrator identifies himself by name
for the only time in any of the dispatches—“Hemingway,” and later
“Ernest”—as decidedly not ourselves. We do not say, ''It isn’t me''. The historian
Hugh Thomas notes “the refreshing candour” of Hemingway’s naming
himself “in the world of the International Brigades, where no one’s name
seemed to be truthfully given.”{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=591}}{{efn|For Watson, the dispatch “seems, in fact, on the verge of becoming a story” (29).}}

A year later Hemingway’s “Tortosa Calmly Awaits Assault” resists admitting
the city’s imminent fall. Yet it does so anyway, by subtly alluding to the
wartime rhetoric of sacrificed blood irrigating the earth and rejuvenating
Spain. Such rhetoric was common during the war, appearing in speeches,
print, and poetry. Many of the poems in Cary Nelson’s anthology ''The Wound
and the Dream: Sixty Years of American Poems about the Civil War'' join in the
Spanish and international chorus’s general connection between Republican
soldiers and the land, and the particular singing of their dead nourishing
the land. We find such language in La Pasionaria’s farewell address to the International Brigades, her epilogue to ''The Book of the XV Brigade'', and Hemingway’s famous eulogy “On the American Dead in Spain”: “For our dead are
a part of the earth of Spain now and the earth of Spain can never die. Each
winter it will seem to die and each spring it will come alive again. Our dead
will live with it forever.”{{sfn|Nelson|1994|p=3}}{{efn| Reprinted in Bruccoli 76 and Nelson, Remembering 37 (the drafts at the JFK are titled “The Dead at Jarama”). In addition to the poems in Nelson’s anthology, see the excerpt from Boris Todrin’s “Spanish Sowing” in Guttmann (Wounded 179–180).}} The Tortosa dispatch implies the deaths of{{pg|435|436}}many Republican soldiers in its final paragraph’s description of the newborn onions:
<blockquote>The artillery was picking up a little now. Two came in at a fairly useful place and as the smoke blew away ahead and settled through the trees, you picked an armful of spring onions from a field beside the trail that led to the Tortosa road. They were the first onions of the spring and peeling one I found they were plump white and not too strong. The Ebro Delta has a fine rich land, and where the onions grow, tomorrow will be a battle.
{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=84}}</blockquote>

The echo is quiet, and perhaps unconscious, but there nevertheless. The opening boastfulness of “American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents”
should be taken somewhat ironically. The dispatch begins by announcing
that for “two days we have been doing the most dangerous thing
you can do in this war. That is keep close behind an unstabilized line where
the enemy are attacking with mechanized forces.” Then, a few pages later,
we learn about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade survivors of the spring 1938
Nationalist offensive that took Bob Merriman and eventually reached the
Mediterranean Sea. Reading about these survivors creeping through enemy
camps, stepping on a sleeping German soldier’s hand, sprinting “across an
open field toward the Ebro bank and being sniped at by artillery controlled
by an observation plane overhead” and then “the desperate swimming of
the Ebro” naked, we are asked to place the correspondent’s plight in due perspective.{{sfn|Watson|1988|pp=71-2}} This story certainly escapes the charge of a monotonous
battle and bombing scene; its switch from apparently boastful to
awe-struck witness feels almost deliberately self-conscious. Other choice selfironic
moments come in the dispatches of that pre-Teruel quiet fall of 1938.
The one titled “Hemingway, Covering War, Tells of Brush with Death” has little
to report from Madrid other than the new aftershave brand he is trying.
In “Loyalists’ Drive Seen Progressing as Planned,” he writes that “Shells are
all much the same and if they don’t hit you there is no story and if they do
you won’t have to write it.” {{sfn|Watson|1988|p=58}}

Hemingway’s dispatches are sometimes monotonous because his war was
Usually monotonous—as wars are most of the time. It should also be kept in
mind that scholars reviewing Hemingway’s NANA dispatches one after{{pg|436|437}}another do not relive the original reading experience. Hemingway wrote dispatches sporadically, papers did not run all of his dispatches, papers edited and cut them, and readers read at least a couple of papers’ worth of other articles in between. He told Edmund Wilson as much in defending himself against Wilson’s critique of the selected (and heavily edited and cut) dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'' without his consent: “If you are being paid to be shot at and write about it you are supposed to mention the shooting. [. . .] But I do not go in for re-printing journalism.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}

If we can in this way better understand his style, and at least explain it if
not excuse it, we similarly ought to try to contextualize—and perhaps
excuse—the moral problem. The two issues here are the specific condemnation
of Hemingway’s silence about Republican atrocities and the general
question of biased reporting (the latter of which has already partially been
addressed).

Hemingway knew, as Donaldson writes, that mentioning the atrocities
“would arouse anticommunist sentiments back in the States and effectively
undermine any possibility of American intervention.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=394}} It is also doubtful
that reporting them would have stopped them. But reporting Republican
atrocities from Spain was not possible for the simple reason that all dispatches
went through a government censor. Matthews cabled his editors
from Paris in May 1937 to tell them that “censorship does not permit us to
say when the ‘telefonica’ is hit. So whenever you see reference in my
despatches [sic] to ‘an important building in the center of the city’ or words
to that effect, the cable desk can know that it is the telefonica.” {{sfn|Matthews|1937c|p=}} As already noted, by July he would cable “CENSORSHIP
STRICTER” as the ban on mentioning internationals went into effect. {{sfn|Matthews|1937d|p=}}{{sfn|Matthews|1937e|p=}} Cowles’ memoir confirms the
aggressive censorship, observing that it limited journalists to exactly the kind of material Hemingway wrote about:
<blockquote>There were frequent attempts to “beat the censor” by employing American slang expressions, but this came to an end when a Canadian girl joined the staff. The International Brigades were not allowed to be publicized; no reference could be made to Russian armaments, and buildings and streets which suffered
bombardments could not be identified.</blockquote>{{pg|437|438}}<blockquote>It was only in the realm of the human interest story that the journalists had a free hand. They could describe bombardments to their heart’s content.{{sfn|Cowles|1941|p=20}}</blockquote>
Hemingway and everyone else—to reserve incrimination for Hemingway is hardly just. No correspondent covering Republican Spain reported suspicious imprisonments and disappearances by government agents.

Hemingway, through Joris Ivens and ''The Spanish Earth'' project, had better
access to officials than most. Had he been able somehow to report such
activity, he would have lost that access and would probably have been kicked
out of the country. His fame would have likely prevented his own officially
sponsored disappearance, though he still worried, especially as so many of
such crimes on the Republican side occurred from free agents. When Jasper
Wood printed the anarchist F.A.I. banner in the limited edition book version
of ''The Spanish Earth'', Hemingway expressed his anxieties bluntly in a letter
to Jasper on August 20, 1938. It is hardly “petulant,” he scolded, “not to wish
to be shot.”{{sfn|Davison|1988|p=128}} Hostility in the Republic against the anarchists
ran high; after the Barcelona May Day conflict, the government’s foreign
minister told U.S. Ambassador Claude Bowers that “anarchist revolt
throughout Catalonia and not only expected but welcomed as an opportunity
to liquidate the anarchists who have been hostile from the beginning.”
{{sfn|NA|1954|p=292}}{{efn| The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State, 5 May 1937.}}

It is possible that Hemingway’s dispatch stating that “not one friend [. . .]
has been executed or is missing” was his clever means of reporting
the rumors and indeed the general fact while evading the censors, as in this very dispatch he acknowledged the presence of a censor after a bombardment.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=34}}
Matthews, on the other hand, never found a way to mention the
censors or admit even the possibility of people gone missing in the Republic.
Peter Moreira has observed that in a 1943 dispatch Hemingway related a remark by a British officer about the Chinese Nationalist government’s being
“hopeless on the offensive” because censorship “prevented American reporters
From actually saying that the Nationalists wouldn’t attack, surmising that by telling this anecdote Hemingway could sneak such a judgment into
his reports.”{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=77}} In Spain, censors aside, the eyewitness standard and his
own safety and continuing ability to report the war, and, yes, his passionate
support of the government contributed to his decision. He could have written
about government abuses from the states, but then could not return to{{pg|438|439}}cover the war and support the cause—a justification other journalists, those who did not return after the spring of 1937, did not enjoy. In his mind too, knowing what he heard of fascist atrocities, any reportage against the government lessening its chances of victory through killing hopes of increased international aid would have led to more deaths at Franco’s hands that the much smaller number inspired by fifth column paranoia.{{efn|''Hemingway’s Second War'' discusses in greater depth Hemingway’s politics and his falling out
with John Dos Passos over the execution of José Robles}}.

The accusation that Hemingway did not write about Republican atrocities
because he was saving it for his fiction I find baseless (Knightley 232;
Baker 402).{{sfn|Knightley|2004|p=232}}{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=402}}{{efn|Hemingway’s casual comment to colleagues calling dibs on Pepe Quintanilla, the executioner of
Madrid, is not sufficient evidence.}}Carolyn Moorehead, in her biography of Martha Gellhorn, describes
the climate for the Madrid correspondents that first spring: “And so,
day by day, the correspondents walked a thin and nervous line between truth,
evasions, and propaganda, telling one another that though it was not all right
if things were made up and presented as true, it was acceptable to describe
what you wanted, provided it was true and provided your readers were aware
of your position.”{{sfn|Moorehead|2003|p=125}} My own sense is that they did not walk the line quite
so nervously; their passionate commitment, and their principles of position
disclosure and the eyewitness standard, made that walk relatively easy.

The problem of ''committed journalism'', even sixty years later, has not been
resolved—as anyone paying attention to the media and world affairs well
knows. One person’s truth is another person’s propaganda. Certainly, as
Knightley notes, reporting from “the heart” affects one’s judgment.{{sfn|Knightley|2004|pp=234-5}}
Yet to attempt “balance,” per the edits to Matthews’ Guadalajara piece, betrays
one’s believed truth. Furthermore, the kind of reporting done by the
correspondents with the Republic—committed, one-sided, optimistic,
heroic, human interest work by embedded writers—would be practiced
widely and without reserve during World War II. Such narrative journalism,
with roots in Louise May Alcott’s “Hospital Sketches” series published in the
''Boston Commonwealth'', and more immediately in 1930s social documentary
writing whose “essence” is “not information”, anticipated postwar
new journalism’s adoption of novelistic narrative technique for nonfiction
which culminated with such wartime books as Norman Mailer’s ''Armies of
the Night'' and Michael Herr’s ''Dispatches''.{{sfn|Stott|1986|p=11}} Some of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches
fall in this line of development.

Today we might categorize such writing under the awkward umbrella
term ''creative nonfiction''. That term certainly fits the mixed bag of nonfiction
narratives and commentaries Hemingway published during the war in
Ken magazine. These pieces are essays, not journalism, several of which{{pg|439|440}}directly appeal for support for the Republic, and most of which really deal
with the approaching world war. ''Ken'' wanted “precisely the kind of opinion
articles he could not write for NANA.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=433}} His article, “The
Cardinal Picks a Winner,” shows a photo of a row of dead children from
Barcelona and another one with Nationalist officers saluting and Catholic officials
with raised hands, apparently making the fascist salute as well. He
ends ironically: “So I ''don’t believe'' the people shown in the photo can really
be making it. I would rather prefer to think that the photograph was faked.”
{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=436}} When Hemingway argues in “A Program for U.S. Realism” that the
United States should stay out of the next war except to stuff its pockets
through arms sales, one has to wonder, given his call and the democratic nations’
failure to save Spain, if we are to sniff sarcasm here.

The language of the dispatches, with their corrective intent against
Franco’s propaganda, does risk propagandizing. Hemingway’s optimism and
anti-fascism certainly colored his correspondence work. His criticism of the
anarchist and POUM militia for their inactivity on the Aragon front, for example,
sounds a lot like the Spanish Communist Party’s.{{efn|It at least sounds almost exactly like Dolores Ibarruri in her memoir. To the anarchists’ complaint
that they had no arms, she retorts “that they had more arms than did many other fronts. . . .
What they didn’t have and what they were constantly demanding were airplanes and tanks .And
they didn’t have them because the Republic government didn’t have them either, except for those
it received as aid from the Soviet Union” (238–284). Yet the various Catalonia militia were not
as well equipped with small arms as the more regular Popular Army units, and because of the
terrain tanks and planes were in fact necessary.}}
But unlike
Matthews, Hemingway limited his reports within the Republic to military
matters. Hemingway may have generally condemned the anarchists in his
nonfiction, considering their activity as hampering the war effort, but he
never repeated the accusation of their collaboration with the rebels, as
Matthews had done. And when Hemingway commented on the Bareclona
crisis, he referred only to the government—not the communists, as
Matthews had done.{{efn|Hemingway’s comments in “Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win” NANA staff
correspondent dispatch. Though arguably he was propagandizing by hiding the communist influence—
to mention the communists to an American audience would not gain sympathy for the
cause.}}Nor did he write articles asserting the limited role of
the communists in the government, or explaining Spanish anarchism, also
as Matthews had done.{{efn|An article on the communists’ limited role appeared in late November 1937, as discussed in a
missive from The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State on 2
Dec. 1937 (United States 461). Matthews’ “Anarchism: Spain’s Enigma” appeared in the New York
Times 22 Aug. 1937: 6, 14.}}

During one of Hemingway’s stateside breaks between trips to Spain, his
children asked if he was a “tool” of Stalin, an accusation tossed by a schoolmate
who, presumably parroting his or her parents, probably understood
the term no better than Hemingway’s children. {{sfn|Hemingway|nd|p=}}
Hemingway believed in the Republic’s potential, but he was never a dupe of
the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) or Comintern. As did many others, he
accepted PCE’s presence in the government for its discipline and organization
toward winning the war, and he understood the material necessity for
Comintern’s support. It should also be noted, as historians Hugh Thomas
and Helen Graham have reminded us, that the communism associated with
the Republic wasn’t particularly communist anyway.{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=628}}{{sfn|Graham|2002|p=184}} {{pg|440|441}}

Hemingway declined to follow Joris Ivens’ suggestion that he write a
dispatch on the significant role of the political commissars in the Republican
military, even though that would have meant
featuring his brave new friend Gustav Regler.{{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=}} Hemingway also, in a letter
justifying his work to Jack Wheeler at NANA, wrote about choosing not to
send a dispatch he had written because it might strike readers as propaganda
“no matter how true” (Letter to Jack Wheeler).{{sfn|Hemingway|1938b|p=}}

Hemingway went to Spain to see the war himself and to support the Republic
through his ambulance fund. The paychecks from NANA and the
fundraising from ''The Spanish Earth'' helped. Whatever propagandistic streak
colors the dispatches pales in comparison to the documentary. The filmmaker,
Joris Ivens, was well established in European communist circles. The
documentary genre then and now has occupied a slippery position between
the extremes of impossible-to-achieve empirical nonfiction and of the outright
fictionalized. Evaluations of Hemingway’s journalism are informed by
knowledge of ''The Spanish Earth'' and the ''Ken'' essays to the detriment of the
journalism. And the very nature of the slippery documentary genre may enable
the film to escape opprobrium. It wasn’t reportage; it was altogether
something else. But for that matter, Hemingway’s dispatches weren’t purely
reportage either, and if not ''altogether'' something else, still something else,
and should be reckoned with accordingly.

== Notes ==
{{notelist|20em}}

==Citations==
{{Reflist|15em}}

==Works Cited==
{{refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker
|first=Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Bruccoli |first=Matthew |date=2006 |title=Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame |url= |location=Columbia |publisher=U of South Caronia P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Cowles |first=Virginia |date=1941 |title=Looking for Trouble |url= |location=New York
|publisher=Harper & Brothers |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Davison |first=Richard Allan |title=The Publication of Hemingway’s The Spanish Earth: An Untold Story |url= |journal=Hemingway Review
|volume=7.2 |issue= |date=1988
|pages=122-130 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson
|first=Scott |date=2009 |title=Fitzgerald & Hemingway: Works and Days |url= |location=New York |publisher=Columbia UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Franklin |first=Sidney |date=1952 |title=Bullfighter from Brooklyn |url= |location=New York |publisher=Prentice-Hall |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Graham |first=Helen |date=2002 |title=The Spanish Republic at War 1936-1939 |url= |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Guttmann |first=Allen |date=1962 |title=The Wound in the Heart: American and the Spanish Civil War |url= |location=New York |publisher=Free Press of Glencoe |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1967 |title=By-Line: Ernest Hemingway |url= |location=New York |publisher=Scibner |pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Trogdon
|editor-first=Robert W.
|author-mask=1
|title=Fascism is a Lie
|url=
|journal=Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference |volume==
|issue=
|date=2002
|pages=193-6
|location=New York
|publisher=Carroll & Graf
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 May 1937
|chapter=Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=nd
|chapter=The Home Front
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938a
|chapter=Letter to Edmund Wilson
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=2 June 1938b
|chapter=Letter to Jack Wheeler
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=14 Feb 1939
|chapter=On the American Dead in Spain
|title=TS. New Masses
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Baker
|editor-first=Carlos
|author-mask=1
|date=2003
|chapter=The Hadely Mowrer
|title=Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Scribner
|pages=462-3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ibarruri
|first=Dolores
|date=1966
|title=They Shall Not Pass: The Autobiography of La Pasionaria
|url=
|location=United States
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|date=1969
|title=The Camera and I
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|author-mask=1
|date=26 Apr 1937
|chapter=Letter to Ernest Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|date=20 Nov 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Bertrand Weaver
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=12 Oct 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=25 Apr 1939
|chapter=Letter to M.B. Tenney
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Apr 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Knightley
|first=Phillip
|date=2004
|title=The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq
|url=
|location=Baltimore
|publisher=John Hopkins
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=
|date=9 Apr 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=TS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=11 Apr 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=8 May 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=6 July 1937d
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=July 1937e
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=22 March 1939
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 9
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=
|date=20 May 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=20 Dec 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 5
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Sep 1937c
|chapter=Note to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moorehead
|first=Caroline
|date=2003
|title=Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Henry Holt
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moreira
|first=Peter
|date=2006
|title=Hemingway on the China Front: His WWII Spy Mission with Martha Gellhorn
|url=
|location=Washington D.C.
|publisher=Potomac Books
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|date=5 Feb 1937
|chapter=Promotion Box: Hemingway, For Immediate Release
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|author-mask=1
|date=4 Apr 1938
|chapter=Promotion Box: American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|editor-last=Nelson
|editor-first=Card
|date=1994
|title=Remembering Spain: Hemingway’s Civil War Eulogy and the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
|url=
|location=Urbana
|publisher=U of Illinois
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Reynolds
|first=Michael
|date=1989
|title=Hemingway: The Paris Years
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Norton
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Stott
|first=William
|date=1986
|title=Documentary Expression and Thirties America
|url=
|location=Chicago
|publisher=U of Chicago P
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Thomas
|first=Hugh
|date=2001
|title=The Spanish Civil War, Rev. ed.
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Modern Library
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine
|last=''Two Wars and More to Come''
|first=
|date=24 Jan 1938
|title=Best Sellers of the Week Here and Elsewhere
|type=Advertisement
|url=
|magazine=New York Times
|pages=
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=NA
|first=
|title=United States. Dept. of State
|url=
|journal= Foreign Relations of the Untied States, 1937 |volume==1
|issue=General
|date=1954
|pages=
|location=Washington
|publisher=GPO
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Watson
|first=William Braasch
|title=Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches
|url=
|journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=7.2
|issue=
|date=1988
|pages=4-121
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Wheeler
|first=John H.
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938
|chapter=Letter to Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection, Box 3 Folder 14
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}

{{refend}}
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches

2025-04-19T21:33:13Z

MerAtticus: formatting of citation sections

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{{byline|last=Vernon |first=Alex |abstract=The Spanish Civil War began in July 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally-restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy. By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches.}}

{{dc|dc=T|HE SPANISH CIVIL WAR BEGAN ON}} 17-18 JULY, 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy, to collaborate with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens on the pro-Republican documentary ''The Spanish Earth'', and to pursue his fledgling love affair with Martha Gellhorn.

By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches for NANA.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=4}}{{efn|Quotations from the NANA dispatches follow the Diplomatic Text established by William Braasch’s “Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches.” I prefer NANA’s titles rather than Watson’s. For my disagreements with some of Watson’s datings, see my comments on specific dispatches in ''Hemingway’s Second War.''}}The secondary sources habitually judge them inferior journalism. Carlos Baker in the first Hemingway biography, for example, complains that the dialogue was “so heavily stamped with personal mannerisms as to be of doubtful authenticity.” Baker sees a “curious monotony in his stories of battles and bombardments,” a gratuitous use of graphic imagery “to shock his readers,” and “a note of triumphant boastfulness” in reporting proximity to danger. He also faults Hemingway for “often hint[ing] he was alone when in fact he was usually with Martha Gellhorn, Matthews, and Delmer.” Hemingway lacked Dos Passos’ “eye for telling details” and the “meticulous exactitude and inclusiveness that characterized the best work of Herbert Matthews and Sefton Delmer.”{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}

Philip Knightley’s ''The First Casualty'', the standard history of war correspondence, paraphrases Baker but with a trouncing final judgment:{{pg|427|428}}Hemingway’s “performance as a war correspondent was abysmally bad.” But Knightley goes beyond “technical” dissatisfaction to moral condemnation. Not just “unjustifiably optimistic”—an excusable offense—Hemingway’s reporting was “unforgivable” in its “total failure to report the Communist persecution, imprisonment, and summary execution of ‘untrustworthy elements’ on the Republican side, when he knew this was happening and when disclosing it might well have prevented further horrors like this.”
{{sfn|Knightley|2004 |pp=231–32}}{{efn|In my view, Knightley does not sufficiently acknowledge his paraphrasing of Baker.}}

Such criticisms in the final analysis might bear out. As Scott Donaldson writes, Hemingway advanced the Republican cause in his dispatches by eliciting “the deepest possible feelings of horror and of sympathy for the victims” of the Madrid bombardment; his “undue optimism” often “ignored Loyalist defeats and exaggerated the importance of its victories”; and “he repeatedly called attention to the participation of Italians and Germans on Franco’s side.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=426}} It also served as a recruitment tool—Milton Wolff, for example, acknowledged the strong influence Hemingway’s dispatches had on his decision to volunteer. Nevertheless, I think it a worthwhile exercise to attend a little more studiously to Hemingway’s dispatches, their context, and their artistry. I don’t necessarily intend to reverse the general opinion of the correspondence, only to achieve a better and more sympathetic understanding.

Herbert Matthews’ reporting for the ''New York Times'' will serve as a convenient comparison for two reasons. First, because both Baker and Knightley use Matthews’ journalism as the standard of excellence to pass judgment on Hemingway’s; and second, because the two worked practically side-by-side, seeing and reporting on many of the same events. In fact so closely did they work together that NANA sometimes complained that the ''Times'' was not buying Hemingway’s pieces because they resembled Matthews,’ and at one point Matthews’ own editors at the Times suspected him of plagiarizing Hemingway.{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|pp=411, 420}} A note from Matthews’ assigned editor Raymond McCaw provides, in two columns, seven quite similar passages from Hemingway’s Aragon front dispatches of September 13 and 14 with Matthews’ of September 14, with a penciled note at the bottom: “a deadly parallel if you ask me.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937c|p=}} Edwin James, the managing editor and McCaw’s boss, eventually agreed with Matthews’ defense: “It is quite apparent that you did not file any duplicate of the Hemingway story, or vice versa. As I understand it, the similarity arose from the fact that you{{pg|428|429}}both went to see the same show and saw it at the same time [sic], under the same conditions.”{{sfn|James|1937b|p=}}

Matthews’ dispatches ring of Republican bias as much if not more than anything Hemingway ever filed. The ''Times'' received many letters to the editor complaining about Matthews’ undisguised politics, which also gave serious concern to some of his editors. His description of the Republican May 1937 infighting in Barcelona is a striking example of how his news veered into propaganda and shows just how much he passed along the government’s version of events. The government’s “BLOODLESS TRIUMPH FOUGHT WITH RECOGNIZEDWEAPONS OF DEMOCRACY” turned out to be blatantly false, as the government and the “COMMUNISTS [WHO] DISTINGUISHED THEMSELVES” resorted to violent suppression. His blaming the uprising on the anarchist CNT working as Franco operatives parrots the government’s and the communist party’s public position, even though both charges—that the anarchists precipitated the events and that they were under Nationalist direction—were also false. His dispatch’s optimistic close also equivocates the political reality: “NEW GOVERNMENT HAS TAKEN POWER WHICH APPEARS TOVE CONFIDENCE VAST MAJORITY SPANIARDS IN LOYALIST TERRITORY AND TIS HOPED WILL GAIN EQUAL CONFIDENCE ABROAD STOP VIOLENCE AND REVOLUTION BEEN REPUDIATED AND NEWAND FAR HOPEFULLER PERIOD SEEMS BEGINNING.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937a|p=}}The ''Times'', knowing full well the one-sided coverage of a correspondent writing from one side of the conflict, had a reporter on both sides: Matthews with the Republicans, and William Carney with the Nationalists. They got their facts right (or wrong) as often as the other, their editors concluded; and they inspired about the same number of letters of complaint.{{sfn|James|1937a|p=}}{sfn|James|1939|p=}}

Furthermore, Matthews’ dispatches received a great deal of substantive editorial revisions. One of Matthews’ Teruel reports had to be cut for length, as McCaw informed James: “This bird sent 2844 words on the same facts which Hemingway covered much better in less than half that number. I wonder if Matthews thinks the paper is thriving, and that cable tolls do not matter a damn. Of course, it had to be cut for space anyway.” McCaw most likely refers here to Matthews’ dispatch corresponding to Hemingway’s “The Attack on Teruel,” though Matthews’ account of the fall of Teruel is also much longer (and more long-winded) than Hemingway’s, and just as personal in terms of describing the dangers{{pg|429|430}} he faced. Indeed its length allows him to share even more of the action he endured.{{sfn|McCaw|1937b|p=}}

Raymond McCaw held a general professional disagreement with Matthews perhaps tainted with over zealousness. Whether a personal or political motive informed that disagreement can’t be determined from the evidence I’ve seen. It is also clear that McCaw’s charges bear some validity—that any responsible editor could have easily and reasonably taken issue where McCaw did. One of the more interesting examples concerns Matthews’ piece on Guadalajara. Because he only saw evidence on Franco’s side of Italian forces, he only reported on Italians. But the ''Times'' editors heard from other sources that German soldiers also participated in the March offensive. They thought it prudent, from this confusion, to change (nine times) “Italian” to “Rebel,” “the foe,” or “Insurgent.” When Matthews saw the published piece he wrote a strenuous objection. In some instances the editors changed paraphrased quotations from his sources. One large paragraph omitted by the editors stressed the first-hand nature of the information, and Matthews underlines the key words: “All day, at every place we stopped and no matter whom we talked to or what we saw, there was only one label—Italian. The dead bodies, the prisoners, the material of every kind, the men who had occupied Brihuega and then fled were Italian and nothing but Italian.” Here and elsewhere in his original story, Matthews emphasizes the “personal knowledge” of its information.{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}{{efn|James supported McCaw on these changes, though later acknowledged that altering quoted sources was perhaps unwarranted(29 April 1937; Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3).}}Yet Matthews did not report on the foreigners fighting for the Republic—it was in fact the Italian Garibali Battalion that routed Franco’s Italians. We might surmise government censorship behind this silence, though Matthews would not cable news of “CENSORSHIP STRICTER” and “BAN ON MENTIONING INTERNATIONALS INCLUDING AMERICANS INSTITUTED TODAY” until July.{{sfn|Matthews|1937b|p=}}Perhaps he cautiously self-censored, or politically self-censored for the same reasons the government would eventually ban mention. Still, his stridency about the omission of foreigners on one side is striking given his knowledge of their contribution to the other side. For this reason too, and his omission of other nationalities on the insurgent side, it seemed only fair to his editor “to stand on the statement that the majority of the Rebels were Italians and let it go at that.”{{sfn|James|1937c|p=}} A reasonable decision.

Throughout his correspondence to his editors and his several books,{{pg|430|431}}Matthews maintained a passionate defense of his eyewitness journalistic standard, a position those close to him understood. “Matthews never believed anything he had not seen with his own eyes,” Joris Ivens wrote. “He never saw his job as reporter as one that permitted him to sit in his hotel and read the handouts of the War Ministry.” {{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=112}} Sidney Franklin recalls that some writers wrote their pieces before arriving in Madrid, and came only for the “legitimacy” of the Madrid dateline.{{sfn|Franklin|1952|p=232}}And Matthews hated, on principle, having his name attached to an article that violated the integrity of his witness. The only way to achieve objectivity, for Matthews, was to acknowledge one’s subjective perspective. Writing to his publisher, Matthews argued that “the full documentary value” of his coverage was lost when the editors altered his submissions for “the apparent necessity of giving more or less equal space to both sides.”{{sfn|Matthews|1939|p=}}

As with Matthews, so too Hemingway. Indeed the commitment to subjectivity
fit quite well with Hemingway’s modernist aesthetics. If Hemingway
focused the dispatches on his perspective—on his own experience dodging
artillery—more than Matthews and more than most, he did so at least partially
to fulfill expectations. NANA approached him, after all, for his name
and personality as much as whatever he would write. Before he even left the
states it pitched him to potential publications, sending out a promotional release with text to be used alongside his forthcoming dispatches and suggesting
they include a photograph: “Mr. Hemingway’s assignment is to get both from the bombed towns and bombed trenches the human story of the war, not just an account of the game being played by general staffs with pins
and a map.”{{sfn|NANA|1937|p=}}{{ NANA also released each individual dispatch with a one-sentence “precede” about the “famous” or “noted” author. Ernest Hemingway was not writing as Herbert Mathews, ace reporter; Hemingway was writing as Ernest Hemingway, famous author of novels and stories well known to be drawn from his own experiences.

That he understood this to be his assignment is further evidenced by a
cable Matthews sent to his ''Times'' editors on April 9, 1937, concerning the
Loyalist attack: “WORKED CONJOINTL WITH HEMINGWAY TODAY HE SENDING EYEWITNESS DESCRIPTION WHILE EYE SENT GENERAL STRATEGY.”{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}When a year later the ''Times'' asked NANA to ensure Hemingway’s reports differed from Matthews, NANA complied by asking Hemingway “to emphasize color rather than straight reporting” not necessarily out of dissatisfaction with Hemingway’s reportage as Baker contends,{{efn|Baker’s notes date the Times request to NANA as 8 Apr. 1938, and NANA’s to Hemingway as 15
Apr. 1938 (Princeton University, Firestone Library: Box 18, Folder 8 “1938”), the date of “The Bombing of Tortosa” dispatch.}} but to increase{{pg|431|432}}the chance of selling to the ''Times'' and indeed to ensure the spirit of NANA’s original arrangement with Hemingway. {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}Far from dissatisfied, NANA wrote Hemingway at the end of August 1938 a letter of agreement for his coverage of “a general European war” should it break out, “written in your colorful style” (Hemingway was in Paris, on his way to Spain for the last time during the war).{{sfn|Wheeler|1938|p=}}When Edmund Wilson criticized the selected dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'', Hemingway wrote him that “I was paid to write what are called ‘eye witness’ accounts . . .what is called, or was asked for as ‘color stuff.’ Most of such stuff is faked. Mine was not. It was straight reporting and the personal stuff was what had been asked for by the editors. “Wilson’s estimation was also based upon ''Fact’s'' inclusion of the “The Old Man at the Bridge” story from ''Ken'', “not a news dispatch” at all.{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}Speaking at Carnegie Hall before the showing of a rough cut of ''The Spanish Earth'', shortly after his first trip to Spain and so very much in the context of his wartime work, Hemingway defined the writer’s problem as “project[ing] [what is true] in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2002|p=193}}

Personal, anecdotal journalism had been Hemingway’s signature style from his earliest days filing reports, in the early 1920s from Paris, when his editor at the ''Toronto Star Weekly'' “encouraged [. . .] what Hemingway did best: write about himself in the act of being a reporter.”{{sfn|Reynolds|1989|p=45}}How could he expect that NANA would expect anything else, if indeed NANA did expect anything else? In the Spanish Civil War he at least maintained his eyewitness posture; in World War II, however, he couldn’t keep himself out. His first piece, about D-Day, begins, “No one remembers the date of the Battle of Shiloh. But the day ''we took'' Fox Green beach was the sixth of June, and the wind was blowing hard out of the northwest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1967|p=340}}His venue too—''Collier’s'' magazine—and the fact that he had not written anything in three years further contributed to the story-like nature of the WWII stories, in which he figured as a protagonist—not to mention the stories and involvement he couldn’t write about, armed and running around France more of a free agent than his guerilla-hero Robert Jordan ever was (though he began to transform these experiences into fiction in several unpublished stories). In wartime China in 1943, filing articles for Ralph Ingersoll’s short-lived ''PM'' New York afternoon daily, Hemingway did not even care to be called a news reporter.{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=99}}

It should be mentioned that Hemingway and Matthews enjoyed a great{{pg|432|433}}friendship and working relationship. Hemingway usually brought Matthews, who did not have a car, on his excursions. When Matthews left Madrid for a break in mid April 1937, he had already ensured Hemingway would provide coverage to the ''Times'' through NANA. For one thing, Hemingway did not have to worry about Matthews as a rival for the history books. He could endorse his friends’ book, ''Two Wars and More to Come'', and praise him as “the ablest and the bravest war correspondent writing today “who “when the fakers are all dead [. . .] will be read in the schools” (Advertisement 21) because Matthews posed no threat to Hemingway’s own chances to be read in the schools. The only brief Hemingway ever expressed he really reserved for Matthews’ editors, for not wanting his Teruel street-fighting story and for cutting references to himself in Matthews’ Teruel dispatches so that it appeared only Matthews had been there.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=462}}

As for Hemingway’s neglecting to name everyone with him for every story, the ''Times'' cutting of his name suggests that such exactitude was hardly a priority. A paper had no incentive for announcing the fact that a competitor’s
correspondent stood beside its own to see and report the same
events. NANA changed at least one vague Hemingway “we,” which admits
to the presence of others, to “this correspondent”
—we can hardly fault Hemingway for working in the spirit of his
employer’s standards.{{sfn|NANA|1938|p=}}{{efn|“we” in typescript and radiogram (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 1 and Folder 25).}} Do readers care that Matthews, Delmer, Gellhorn,
and others were there? The story’s effect and the limited word count also
weighed against such roll calls. One editor chose not to clutter the dispatch
on the great retreat across the Ebro with all the names of the American International Brigade volunteers Hemingway encountered, an omission of
Content more far serious than that of omitted correspondent names.{{efn| Radiogram insert dateline 4 April 1938 (HRC: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 25).}} Hemingway
often gave the names of the reporters with him, such as at Teruel;
nor was he the only reporter to sometimes neglect to do so. Martha Gellhorn,
for example, used a vague “we” and singled herself out as the primary
participant in some of her stories.

By using first-person reportage Hemingway—and Matthews and Gellhorn And most of the group covering the war—were operating solidly within
convention. William Stott, in ''Documentary Expression and Thirties America'',
calls this first-person ''participant observer'' technique “the most common sort
of documentary reportage in the thirties” that worked “by vicarious persuasion:
the writer partook of the events he reported and bared his feelings
and attitudes to influence the reader’s own.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=178-9}}{{efn|He specifically includes Hemingway et al (180).}} Stott also observes {{pg|433|434}}another technique to enable documentary reportage to “talk to us, and convince us that we, our deepest interests, are engaged,” in the use of the second person: “Thirties documentaries constantly address ‘you,’ the ‘you’ who is we the audience, and exhorts, wheedles, begs us to identify, pity, participate.” His examples include Dorothy Parker’s Spanish Civil War writing, and Hemingway’s 1935 “First-Hand Report on the Florida Hurricane.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=27-8}} A number of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches employ the second-person as a way of bringing the reader along for the ride.

Hemingway’s dispatches used personal pronouns more artfully than is
generally recognized. “A New Kind of War,” which William Braasch Watson
notes as having been “[w]ritten with more care and imagination” than its
predecessors, begins in second person: “The window of the hotel is open
and, as you lie in bed, you hear the firing in the front line seventeen blocks
away.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=29}} He takes “you” outside, to see the damage and the dead from the bombing. “Someone makes a joke about missing teeth and someone else says not to make that joke. And everyone has the feeling that characterizes war. It wasn’t me, see? It wasn’t me.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} The tension between the first person and second-person pronouns—the movement toward identification with “you” and the insistence that “it wasn’t me”—continues in the next line. Here the reader is at once still in the narrator’s shoes, but strangely distanced from the narrator through biographical tidbit and, at the same time, asked
to see himself in the enemy: “The Italian dead up on the Guadalajara weren’t
you although Italian dead, because of where you had spent your boyhood,
always seemed, still, like Our Dead.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} It is worth quoting at length the dispatch’s transition to first person:<blockquote>
After the shell that lit on the sidewalk in front of the hotel you got a beautiful double corner room on that side, twice the size of the one you’d had, for less than a dollar. It wasn’t me they killed. See? No. Not me. It wasn’t me anymore.

Then in a hospital given by the American Friends of Spanish Democracy located out behind the Morata front along the road
to Valencia they said, “Raven wants to see you.”

“Do I know him?”

“I don’t think so,” they said. “But he wants to see you.”

“Where is he?”

“Upstairs.”{{pg|434|435}}In the room upstairs they are giving a blood transfusion to a man with a very gray face who lay on a cot with his arm out looking away from the gurgling bottle and moaning in a very impersonal way. He moaned mechanically and at regular intervals and it did not seem to be him that made the sound. His lips did not move.

“Where’s Raven?” I asked.

“I’m here,” said Raven.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=31}}</blockquote>The piece simply could not have sustained the second-person for the remaining
five pages. More significantly, for this deeply personal exchange between
the writer and the faceless, eyeless soldier, Hemingway could not hide
in the rhetorical device of the second-person. In the process, he effects a reversal
of the usual pronoun game; instead of identifying with the all embracing
“you,” we leave that trick behind and become fully attached to
the narratorial “I” as ourselves, as we might not have been had the article
begun in the first person. And even as the narrator identifies himself by name
for the only time in any of the dispatches—“Hemingway,” and later
“Ernest”—as decidedly not ourselves. We do not say, ''It isn’t me''. The historian
Hugh Thomas notes “the refreshing candour” of Hemingway’s naming
himself “in the world of the International Brigades, where no one’s name
seemed to be truthfully given.”{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=591}}{{efn|For Watson, the dispatch “seems, in fact, on the verge of becoming a story” (29).}}

A year later Hemingway’s “Tortosa Calmly Awaits Assault” resists admitting
the city’s imminent fall. Yet it does so anyway, by subtly alluding to the
wartime rhetoric of sacrificed blood irrigating the earth and rejuvenating
Spain. Such rhetoric was common during the war, appearing in speeches,
print, and poetry. Many of the poems in Cary Nelson’s anthology ''The Wound
and the Dream: Sixty Years of American Poems about the Civil War'' join in the
Spanish and international chorus’s general connection between Republican
soldiers and the land, and the particular singing of their dead nourishing
the land. We find such language in La Pasionaria’s farewell address to the International Brigades, her epilogue to ''The Book of the XV Brigade'', and Hemingway’s famous eulogy “On the American Dead in Spain”: “For our dead are
a part of the earth of Spain now and the earth of Spain can never die. Each
winter it will seem to die and each spring it will come alive again. Our dead
will live with it forever.”{{sfn|Nelson|1994|p=3}}{{efn| Reprinted in Bruccoli 76 and Nelson, Remembering 37 (the drafts at the JFK are titled “The Dead at Jarama”). In addition to the poems in Nelson’s anthology, see the excerpt from Boris Todrin’s “Spanish Sowing” in Guttmann (Wounded 179–180).}} The Tortosa dispatch implies the deaths of{{pg|435|436}}many Republican soldiers in its final paragraph’s description of the newborn onions:
<blockquote>The artillery was picking up a little now. Two came in at a fairly useful place and as the smoke blew away ahead and settled through the trees, you picked an armful of spring onions from a field beside the trail that led to the Tortosa road. They were the first onions of the spring and peeling one I found they were plump white and not too strong. The Ebro Delta has a fine rich land, and where the onions grow, tomorrow will be a battle.
{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=84}}</blockquote>

The echo is quiet, and perhaps unconscious, but there nevertheless. The opening boastfulness of “American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents”
should be taken somewhat ironically. The dispatch begins by announcing
that for “two days we have been doing the most dangerous thing
you can do in this war. That is keep close behind an unstabilized line where
the enemy are attacking with mechanized forces.” Then, a few pages later,
we learn about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade survivors of the spring 1938
Nationalist offensive that took Bob Merriman and eventually reached the
Mediterranean Sea. Reading about these survivors creeping through enemy
camps, stepping on a sleeping German soldier’s hand, sprinting “across an
open field toward the Ebro bank and being sniped at by artillery controlled
by an observation plane overhead” and then “the desperate swimming of
the Ebro” naked, we are asked to place the correspondent’s plight in due perspective.{{sfn|Watson|1988|pp=71-2}} This story certainly escapes the charge of a monotonous
battle and bombing scene; its switch from apparently boastful to
awe-struck witness feels almost deliberately self-conscious. Other choice selfironic
moments come in the dispatches of that pre-Teruel quiet fall of 1938.
The one titled “Hemingway, Covering War, Tells of Brush with Death” has little
to report from Madrid other than the new aftershave brand he is trying.
In “Loyalists’ Drive Seen Progressing as Planned,” he writes that “Shells are
all much the same and if they don’t hit you there is no story and if they do
you won’t have to write it.” {{sfn|Watson|1988|p=58}}

Hemingway’s dispatches are sometimes monotonous because his war was
Usually monotonous—as wars are most of the time. It should also be kept in
mind that scholars reviewing Hemingway’s NANA dispatches one after{{pg|436|437}}another do not relive the original reading experience. Hemingway wrote dispatches sporadically, papers did not run all of his dispatches, papers edited and cut them, and readers read at least a couple of papers’ worth of other articles in between. He told Edmund Wilson as much in defending himself against Wilson’s critique of the selected (and heavily edited and cut) dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'' without his consent: “If you are being paid to be shot at and write about it you are supposed to mention the shooting. [. . .] But I do not go in for re-printing journalism.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}

If we can in this way better understand his style, and at least explain it if
not excuse it, we similarly ought to try to contextualize—and perhaps
excuse—the moral problem. The two issues here are the specific condemnation
of Hemingway’s silence about Republican atrocities and the general
question of biased reporting (the latter of which has already partially been
addressed).

Hemingway knew, as Donaldson writes, that mentioning the atrocities
“would arouse anticommunist sentiments back in the States and effectively
undermine any possibility of American intervention.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=394}} It is also doubtful
that reporting them would have stopped them. But reporting Republican
atrocities from Spain was not possible for the simple reason that all dispatches
went through a government censor. Matthews cabled his editors
from Paris in May 1937 to tell them that “censorship does not permit us to
say when the ‘telefonica’ is hit. So whenever you see reference in my
despatches [sic] to ‘an important building in the center of the city’ or words
to that effect, the cable desk can know that it is the telefonica.” {{sfn|Matthews|1937c|p=}} As already noted, by July he would cable “CENSORSHIP
STRICTER” as the ban on mentioning internationals went into effect. {{sfn|Matthews|1937d|p=}}{{sfn|Matthews|1937e|p=}} Cowles’ memoir confirms the
aggressive censorship, observing that it limited journalists to exactly the kind of material Hemingway wrote about:
<blockquote>There were frequent attempts to “beat the censor” by employing American slang expressions, but this came to an end when a Canadian girl joined the staff. The International Brigades were not allowed to be publicized; no reference could be made to Russian armaments, and buildings and streets which suffered
bombardments could not be identified.</blockquote>{{pg|437|438}}<blockquote>It was only in the realm of the human interest story that the journalists had a free hand. They could describe bombardments to their heart’s content.{{sfn|Cowles|1941|p=20}}</blockquote>
Hemingway and everyone else—to reserve incrimination for Hemingway is hardly just. No correspondent covering Republican Spain reported suspicious imprisonments and disappearances by government agents.

Hemingway, through Joris Ivens and ''The Spanish Earth'' project, had better
access to officials than most. Had he been able somehow to report such
activity, he would have lost that access and would probably have been kicked
out of the country. His fame would have likely prevented his own officially
sponsored disappearance, though he still worried, especially as so many of
such crimes on the Republican side occurred from free agents. When Jasper
Wood printed the anarchist F.A.I. banner in the limited edition book version
of ''The Spanish Earth'', Hemingway expressed his anxieties bluntly in a letter
to Jasper on August 20, 1938. It is hardly “petulant,” he scolded, “not to wish
to be shot.”{{sfn|Davison|1988|p=128}} Hostility in the Republic against the anarchists
ran high; after the Barcelona May Day conflict, the government’s foreign
minister told U.S. Ambassador Claude Bowers that “anarchist revolt
throughout Catalonia and not only expected but welcomed as an opportunity
to liquidate the anarchists who have been hostile from the beginning.”
{{sfn|NA|1954|p=292}}{{efn| The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State, 5 May 1937.}}

It is possible that Hemingway’s dispatch stating that “not one friend [. . .]
has been executed or is missing” was his clever means of reporting
the rumors and indeed the general fact while evading the censors, as in this very dispatch he acknowledged the presence of a censor after a bombardment.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=34}}
Matthews, on the other hand, never found a way to mention the
censors or admit even the possibility of people gone missing in the Republic.
Peter Moreira has observed that in a 1943 dispatch Hemingway related a remark by a British officer about the Chinese Nationalist government’s being
“hopeless on the offensive” because censorship “prevented American reporters
From actually saying that the Nationalists wouldn’t attack, surmising that by telling this anecdote Hemingway could sneak such a judgment into
his reports.”{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=77}} In Spain, censors aside, the eyewitness standard and his
own safety and continuing ability to report the war, and, yes, his passionate
support of the government contributed to his decision. He could have written
about government abuses from the states, but then could not return to{{pg|438|439}}cover the war and support the cause—a justification other journalists, those who did not return after the spring of 1937, did not enjoy. In his mind too, knowing what he heard of fascist atrocities, any reportage against the government lessening its chances of victory through killing hopes of increased international aid would have led to more deaths at Franco’s hands that the much smaller number inspired by fifth column paranoia.{{efn|''Hemingway’s Second War'' discusses in greater depth Hemingway’s politics and his falling out
with John Dos Passos over the execution of José Robles}}.

The accusation that Hemingway did not write about Republican atrocities
because he was saving it for his fiction I find baseless (Knightley 232;
Baker 402).{{sfn|Knightley|2004|p=232}}{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=402}}{{efn|Hemingway’s casual comment to colleagues calling dibs on Pepe Quintanilla, the executioner of
Madrid, is not sufficient evidence.}}Carolyn Moorehead, in her biography of Martha Gellhorn, describes
the climate for the Madrid correspondents that first spring: “And so,
day by day, the correspondents walked a thin and nervous line between truth,
evasions, and propaganda, telling one another that though it was not all right
if things were made up and presented as true, it was acceptable to describe
what you wanted, provided it was true and provided your readers were aware
of your position.”{{sfn|Moorehead|2003|p=125}} My own sense is that they did not walk the line quite
so nervously; their passionate commitment, and their principles of position
disclosure and the eyewitness standard, made that walk relatively easy.

The problem of ''committed journalism'', even sixty years later, has not been
resolved—as anyone paying attention to the media and world affairs well
knows. One person’s truth is another person’s propaganda. Certainly, as
Knightley notes, reporting from “the heart” affects one’s judgment.{{sfn|Knightley|2004|pp=234-5}}
Yet to attempt “balance,” per the edits to Matthews’ Guadalajara piece, betrays
one’s believed truth. Furthermore, the kind of reporting done by the
correspondents with the Republic—committed, one-sided, optimistic,
heroic, human interest work by embedded writers—would be practiced
widely and without reserve during World War II. Such narrative journalism,
with roots in Louise May Alcott’s “Hospital Sketches” series published in the
''Boston Commonwealth'', and more immediately in 1930s social documentary
writing whose “essence” is “not information”, anticipated postwar
new journalism’s adoption of novelistic narrative technique for nonfiction
which culminated with such wartime books as Norman Mailer’s ''Armies of
the Night'' and Michael Herr’s ''Dispatches''.{{sfn|Stott|1986|p=11}} Some of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches
fall in this line of development.

Today we might categorize such writing under the awkward umbrella
term ''creative nonfiction''. That term certainly fits the mixed bag of nonfiction
narratives and commentaries Hemingway published during the war in
Ken magazine. These pieces are essays, not journalism, several of which{{pg|439|440}}directly appeal for support for the Republic, and most of which really deal
with the approaching world war. ''Ken'' wanted “precisely the kind of opinion
articles he could not write for NANA.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=433}} His article, “The
Cardinal Picks a Winner,” shows a photo of a row of dead children from
Barcelona and another one with Nationalist officers saluting and Catholic officials
with raised hands, apparently making the fascist salute as well. He
ends ironically: “So I ''don’t believe'' the people shown in the photo can really
be making it. I would rather prefer to think that the photograph was faked.”
{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=436}} When Hemingway argues in “A Program for U.S. Realism” that the
United States should stay out of the next war except to stuff its pockets
through arms sales, one has to wonder, given his call and the democratic nations’
failure to save Spain, if we are to sniff sarcasm here.

The language of the dispatches, with their corrective intent against
Franco’s propaganda, does risk propagandizing. Hemingway’s optimism and
anti-fascism certainly colored his correspondence work. His criticism of the
anarchist and POUM militia for their inactivity on the Aragon front, for example,
sounds a lot like the Spanish Communist Party’s.{{efn|It at least sounds almost exactly like Dolores Ibarruri in her memoir. To the anarchists’ complaint
that they had no arms, she retorts “that they had more arms than did many other fronts. . . .
What they didn’t have and what they were constantly demanding were airplanes and tanks .And
they didn’t have them because the Republic government didn’t have them either, except for those
it received as aid from the Soviet Union” (238–284). Yet the various Catalonia militia were not
as well equipped with small arms as the more regular Popular Army units, and because of the
terrain tanks and planes were in fact necessary.}}
But unlike
Matthews, Hemingway limited his reports within the Republic to military
matters. Hemingway may have generally condemned the anarchists in his
nonfiction, considering their activity as hampering the war effort, but he
never repeated the accusation of their collaboration with the rebels, as
Matthews had done. And when Hemingway commented on the Bareclona
crisis, he referred only to the government—not the communists, as
Matthews had done.{{efn|Hemingway’s comments in “Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win” NANA staff
correspondent dispatch. Though arguably he was propagandizing by hiding the communist influence—
to mention the communists to an American audience would not gain sympathy for the
cause.}}Nor did he write articles asserting the limited role of
the communists in the government, or explaining Spanish anarchism, also
as Matthews had done.{{efn|An article on the communists’ limited role appeared in late November 1937, as discussed in a
missive from The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State on 2
Dec. 1937 (United States 461). Matthews’ “Anarchism: Spain’s Enigma” appeared in the New York
Times 22 Aug. 1937: 6, 14.}}

During one of Hemingway’s stateside breaks between trips to Spain, his
children asked if he was a “tool” of Stalin, an accusation tossed by a schoolmate
who, presumably parroting his or her parents, probably understood
the term no better than Hemingway’s children. {{sfn|Hemingway|nd|p=}}
Hemingway believed in the Republic’s potential, but he was never a dupe of
the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) or Comintern. As did many others, he
accepted PCE’s presence in the government for its discipline and organization
toward winning the war, and he understood the material necessity for
Comintern’s support. It should also be noted, as historians Hugh Thomas
and Helen Graham have reminded us, that the communism associated with
the Republic wasn’t particularly communist anyway.{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=628}}{{sfn|Graham|2002|p=184}} {{pg|440|441}}

Hemingway declined to follow Joris Ivens’ suggestion that he write a
dispatch on the significant role of the political commissars in the Republican
military, even though that would have meant
featuring his brave new friend Gustav Regler.{{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=}} Hemingway also, in a letter
justifying his work to Jack Wheeler at NANA, wrote about choosing not to
send a dispatch he had written because it might strike readers as propaganda
“no matter how true” (Letter to Jack Wheeler).{{sfn|Hemingway|1938b|p=}}

Hemingway went to Spain to see the war himself and to support the Republic
through his ambulance fund. The paychecks from NANA and the
fundraising from ''The Spanish Earth'' helped. Whatever propagandistic streak
colors the dispatches pales in comparison to the documentary. The filmmaker,
Joris Ivens, was well established in European communist circles. The
documentary genre then and now has occupied a slippery position between
the extremes of impossible-to-achieve empirical nonfiction and of the outright
fictionalized. Evaluations of Hemingway’s journalism are informed by
knowledge of ''The Spanish Earth'' and the ''Ken'' essays to the detriment of the
journalism. And the very nature of the slippery documentary genre may enable
the film to escape opprobrium. It wasn’t reportage; it was altogether
something else. But for that matter, Hemingway’s dispatches weren’t purely
reportage either, and if not ''altogether'' something else, still something else,
and should be reckoned with accordingly.

== Notes ==
{{notelist|20em}}

==Citations==
{{Reflist|15em}}

==Works Cited==
{{refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker
|first=Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Bruccoli |first=Matthew |date=2006 |title=Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame |url= |location=Columbia |publisher=U of South Caronia P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Cowles |first=Virginia |date=1941 |title=Looking for Trouble |url= |location=New York
|publisher=Harper & Brothers |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Davison |first=Richard Allan |title=The Publication of Hemingway’s The Spanish Earth: An Untold Story |url= |journal=Hemingway Review
|volume=7.2 |issue= |date=1988
|pages=122-130 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson
|first=Scott |date=2009 |title=Fitzgerald & Hemingway: Works and Days |url= |location=New York |publisher=Columbia UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Franklin |first=Sidney |date=1952 |title=Bullfighter from Brooklyn |url= |location=New York |publisher=Prentice-Hall |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Graham |first=Helen |date=2002 |title=The Spanish Republic at War 1936-1939 |url= |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Guttmann |first=Allen |date=1962 |title=The Wound in the Heart: American and the Spanish Civil War |url= |location=New York |publisher=Free Press of Glencoe |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1967 |title=By-Line: Ernest Hemingway |url= |location=New York |publisher=Scibner |pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Trogdon
|editor-first=Robert W.
|author-mask=1
|title=Fascism is a Lie
|url=
|journal=Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference |volume==
|issue=
|date=2002
|pages=193-6
|location=New York
|publisher=Carroll & Graf
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 May 1937
|chapter=Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=nd
|chapter=The Home Front
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938a
|chapter=Letter to Edmund Wilson
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=2 June 1938b
|chapter=Letter to Jack Wheeler
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=14 Feb 1939
|chapter=On the American Dead in Spain
|title=TS. New Masses
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Baker
|editor-first=Carlos
|author-mask=1
|date=2003
|chapter=The Hadely Mowrer
|title=Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Scribner
|pages=462-3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ibarruri
|first=Dolores
|date=1966
|title=They Shall Not Pass: The Autobiography of La Pasionaria
|url=
|location=United States
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|date=1969
|title=The Camera and I
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|author-mask=1
|date=26 Apr 1937
|chapter=Letter to Ernest Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|date=20 Nov 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Bertrand Weaver
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=12 Oct 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=25 Apr 1939
|chapter=Letter to M.B. Tenney
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Apr 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Knightley
|first=Phillip
|date=2004
|title=The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq
|url=
|location=Baltimore
|publisher=John Hopkins
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=
|date=9 Apr 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=TS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=11 Apr 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=8 May 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=6 July 1937d
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=July 1937e
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=22 March 1939
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 9
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=
|date=20 May 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=20 Dec 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 5
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Sep 1937c
|chapter=Note to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moorehead
|first=Caroline
|date=2003
|title=Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Henry Holt
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moreira
|first=Peter
|date=2006
|title=Hemingway on the China Front: His WWII Spy Mission with Martha Gellhorn
|url=
|location=Washington D.C.
|publisher=Potomac Books
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|date=5 Feb 1937
|chapter=Promotion Box: Hemingway, For Immediate Release
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|author-mask=1
|date=4 Apr 1938
|chapter=Promotion Box: American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|editor-last=Nelson
|editor-first=Card
|date=1994
|title=Remembering Spain: Hemingway’s Civil War Eulogy and the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
|url=
|location=Urbana
|publisher=U of Illinois
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Reynolds
|first=Michael
|date=1989
|title=Hemingway: The Paris Years
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Norton
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Stott
|first=William
|date=1986
|title=Documentary Expression and Thirties America
|url=
|location=Chicago
|publisher=U of Chicago P
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Thomas
|first=Hugh
|date=2001
|title=The Spanish Civil War, Rev. ed.
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Modern Library
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine
|last=''Two Wars and More to Come''
|first=
|date=24 Jan 1938
|title=Best Sellers of the Week Here and Elsewhere
|type=Advertisement
|url=
|magazine=New York Times
|pages=
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=NA
|first=
|title=United States. Dept. of State
|url=
|journal= Foreign Relations of the Untied States, 1937 |volume==1
|issue=General
|date=1954
|pages=
|location=Washington
|publisher=GPO
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Watson
|first=William Braasch
|title=Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches
|url=
|journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=7.2
|issue=
|date=1988
|pages=4-121
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Wheeler
|first=John H.
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938
|chapter=Letter to Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection, Box 3 Folder 14
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}

{{refend}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches

2025-04-19T21:32:18Z

MerAtticus: edit to note 3

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
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{{byline|last=Vernon |first=Alex |abstract=The Spanish Civil War began in July 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally-restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy. By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches.}}

{{dc|dc=T|HE SPANISH CIVIL WAR BEGAN ON}} 17-18 JULY, 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy, to collaborate with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens on the pro-Republican documentary ''The Spanish Earth'', and to pursue his fledgling love affair with Martha Gellhorn.

By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches for NANA.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=4}}{{efn|Quotations from the NANA dispatches follow the Diplomatic Text established by William Braasch’s “Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches.” I prefer NANA’s titles rather than Watson’s. For my disagreements with some of Watson’s datings, see my comments on specific dispatches in ''Hemingway’s Second War.''}}The secondary sources habitually judge them inferior journalism. Carlos Baker in the first Hemingway biography, for example, complains that the dialogue was “so heavily stamped with personal mannerisms as to be of doubtful authenticity.” Baker sees a “curious monotony in his stories of battles and bombardments,” a gratuitous use of graphic imagery “to shock his readers,” and “a note of triumphant boastfulness” in reporting proximity to danger. He also faults Hemingway for “often hint[ing] he was alone when in fact he was usually with Martha Gellhorn, Matthews, and Delmer.” Hemingway lacked Dos Passos’ “eye for telling details” and the “meticulous exactitude and inclusiveness that characterized the best work of Herbert Matthews and Sefton Delmer.”{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}

Philip Knightley’s ''The First Casualty'', the standard history of war correspondence, paraphrases Baker but with a trouncing final judgment:{{pg|427|428}}Hemingway’s “performance as a war correspondent was abysmally bad.” But Knightley goes beyond “technical” dissatisfaction to moral condemnation. Not just “unjustifiably optimistic”—an excusable offense—Hemingway’s reporting was “unforgivable” in its “total failure to report the Communist persecution, imprisonment, and summary execution of ‘untrustworthy elements’ on the Republican side, when he knew this was happening and when disclosing it might well have prevented further horrors like this.”
{{sfn|Knightley|2004 |pp=231–32}}{{efn|In my view, Knightley does not sufficiently acknowledge his paraphrasing of Baker.}}

Such criticisms in the final analysis might bear out. As Scott Donaldson writes, Hemingway advanced the Republican cause in his dispatches by eliciting “the deepest possible feelings of horror and of sympathy for the victims” of the Madrid bombardment; his “undue optimism” often “ignored Loyalist defeats and exaggerated the importance of its victories”; and “he repeatedly called attention to the participation of Italians and Germans on Franco’s side.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=426}} It also served as a recruitment tool—Milton Wolff, for example, acknowledged the strong influence Hemingway’s dispatches had on his decision to volunteer. Nevertheless, I think it a worthwhile exercise to attend a little more studiously to Hemingway’s dispatches, their context, and their artistry. I don’t necessarily intend to reverse the general opinion of the correspondence, only to achieve a better and more sympathetic understanding.

Herbert Matthews’ reporting for the ''New York Times'' will serve as a convenient comparison for two reasons. First, because both Baker and Knightley use Matthews’ journalism as the standard of excellence to pass judgment on Hemingway’s; and second, because the two worked practically side-by-side, seeing and reporting on many of the same events. In fact so closely did they work together that NANA sometimes complained that the ''Times'' was not buying Hemingway’s pieces because they resembled Matthews,’ and at one point Matthews’ own editors at the Times suspected him of plagiarizing Hemingway.{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|pp=411, 420}} A note from Matthews’ assigned editor Raymond McCaw provides, in two columns, seven quite similar passages from Hemingway’s Aragon front dispatches of September 13 and 14 with Matthews’ of September 14, with a penciled note at the bottom: “a deadly parallel if you ask me.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937c|p=}} Edwin James, the managing editor and McCaw’s boss, eventually agreed with Matthews’ defense: “It is quite apparent that you did not file any duplicate of the Hemingway story, or vice versa. As I understand it, the similarity arose from the fact that you{{pg|428|429}}both went to see the same show and saw it at the same time [sic], under the same conditions.”{{sfn|James|1937b|p=}}

Matthews’ dispatches ring of Republican bias as much if not more than anything Hemingway ever filed. The ''Times'' received many letters to the editor complaining about Matthews’ undisguised politics, which also gave serious concern to some of his editors. His description of the Republican May 1937 infighting in Barcelona is a striking example of how his news veered into propaganda and shows just how much he passed along the government’s version of events. The government’s “BLOODLESS TRIUMPH FOUGHT WITH RECOGNIZEDWEAPONS OF DEMOCRACY” turned out to be blatantly false, as the government and the “COMMUNISTS [WHO] DISTINGUISHED THEMSELVES” resorted to violent suppression. His blaming the uprising on the anarchist CNT working as Franco operatives parrots the government’s and the communist party’s public position, even though both charges—that the anarchists precipitated the events and that they were under Nationalist direction—were also false. His dispatch’s optimistic close also equivocates the political reality: “NEW GOVERNMENT HAS TAKEN POWER WHICH APPEARS TOVE CONFIDENCE VAST MAJORITY SPANIARDS IN LOYALIST TERRITORY AND TIS HOPED WILL GAIN EQUAL CONFIDENCE ABROAD STOP VIOLENCE AND REVOLUTION BEEN REPUDIATED AND NEWAND FAR HOPEFULLER PERIOD SEEMS BEGINNING.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937a|p=}}The ''Times'', knowing full well the one-sided coverage of a correspondent writing from one side of the conflict, had a reporter on both sides: Matthews with the Republicans, and William Carney with the Nationalists. They got their facts right (or wrong) as often as the other, their editors concluded; and they inspired about the same number of letters of complaint.{{sfn|James|1937a|p=}}{sfn|James|1939|p=}}

Furthermore, Matthews’ dispatches received a great deal of substantive editorial revisions. One of Matthews’ Teruel reports had to be cut for length, as McCaw informed James: “This bird sent 2844 words on the same facts which Hemingway covered much better in less than half that number. I wonder if Matthews thinks the paper is thriving, and that cable tolls do not matter a damn. Of course, it had to be cut for space anyway.” McCaw most likely refers here to Matthews’ dispatch corresponding to Hemingway’s “The Attack on Teruel,” though Matthews’ account of the fall of Teruel is also much longer (and more long-winded) than Hemingway’s, and just as personal in terms of describing the dangers{{pg|429|430}} he faced. Indeed its length allows him to share even more of the action he endured.{{sfn|McCaw|1937b|p=}}

Raymond McCaw held a general professional disagreement with Matthews perhaps tainted with over zealousness. Whether a personal or political motive informed that disagreement can’t be determined from the evidence I’ve seen. It is also clear that McCaw’s charges bear some validity—that any responsible editor could have easily and reasonably taken issue where McCaw did. One of the more interesting examples concerns Matthews’ piece on Guadalajara. Because he only saw evidence on Franco’s side of Italian forces, he only reported on Italians. But the ''Times'' editors heard from other sources that German soldiers also participated in the March offensive. They thought it prudent, from this confusion, to change (nine times) “Italian” to “Rebel,” “the foe,” or “Insurgent.” When Matthews saw the published piece he wrote a strenuous objection. In some instances the editors changed paraphrased quotations from his sources. One large paragraph omitted by the editors stressed the first-hand nature of the information, and Matthews underlines the key words: “All day, at every place we stopped and no matter whom we talked to or what we saw, there was only one label—Italian. The dead bodies, the prisoners, the material of every kind, the men who had occupied Brihuega and then fled were Italian and nothing but Italian.” Here and elsewhere in his original story, Matthews emphasizes the “personal knowledge” of its information.{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}{{efn|James supported McCaw on these changes, though later acknowledged that altering quoted sources was perhaps unwarranted(29 April 1937; Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3).}}Yet Matthews did not report on the foreigners fighting for the Republic—it was in fact the Italian Garibali Battalion that routed Franco’s Italians. We might surmise government censorship behind this silence, though Matthews would not cable news of “CENSORSHIP STRICTER” and “BAN ON MENTIONING INTERNATIONALS INCLUDING AMERICANS INSTITUTED TODAY” until July.{{sfn|Matthews|1937b|p=}}Perhaps he cautiously self-censored, or politically self-censored for the same reasons the government would eventually ban mention. Still, his stridency about the omission of foreigners on one side is striking given his knowledge of their contribution to the other side. For this reason too, and his omission of other nationalities on the insurgent side, it seemed only fair to his editor “to stand on the statement that the majority of the Rebels were Italians and let it go at that.”{{sfn|James|1937c|p=}} A reasonable decision.

Throughout his correspondence to his editors and his several books,{{pg|430|431}}Matthews maintained a passionate defense of his eyewitness journalistic standard, a position those close to him understood. “Matthews never believed anything he had not seen with his own eyes,” Joris Ivens wrote. “He never saw his job as reporter as one that permitted him to sit in his hotel and read the handouts of the War Ministry.” {{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=112}} Sidney Franklin recalls that some writers wrote their pieces before arriving in Madrid, and came only for the “legitimacy” of the Madrid dateline.{{sfn|Franklin|1952|p=232}}And Matthews hated, on principle, having his name attached to an article that violated the integrity of his witness. The only way to achieve objectivity, for Matthews, was to acknowledge one’s subjective perspective. Writing to his publisher, Matthews argued that “the full documentary value” of his coverage was lost when the editors altered his submissions for “the apparent necessity of giving more or less equal space to both sides.”{{sfn|Matthews|1939|p=}}

As with Matthews, so too Hemingway. Indeed the commitment to subjectivity
fit quite well with Hemingway’s modernist aesthetics. If Hemingway
focused the dispatches on his perspective—on his own experience dodging
artillery—more than Matthews and more than most, he did so at least partially
to fulfill expectations. NANA approached him, after all, for his name
and personality as much as whatever he would write. Before he even left the
states it pitched him to potential publications, sending out a promotional release with text to be used alongside his forthcoming dispatches and suggesting
they include a photograph: “Mr. Hemingway’s assignment is to get both from the bombed towns and bombed trenches the human story of the war, not just an account of the game being played by general staffs with pins
and a map.”{{sfn|NANA|1937|p=}}{{ NANA also released each individual dispatch with a one-sentence “precede” about the “famous” or “noted” author. Ernest Hemingway was not writing as Herbert Mathews, ace reporter; Hemingway was writing as Ernest Hemingway, famous author of novels and stories well known to be drawn from his own experiences.

That he understood this to be his assignment is further evidenced by a
cable Matthews sent to his ''Times'' editors on April 9, 1937, concerning the
Loyalist attack: “WORKED CONJOINTL WITH HEMINGWAY TODAY HE SENDING EYEWITNESS DESCRIPTION WHILE EYE SENT GENERAL STRATEGY.”{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}When a year later the ''Times'' asked NANA to ensure Hemingway’s reports differed from Matthews, NANA complied by asking Hemingway “to emphasize color rather than straight reporting” not necessarily out of dissatisfaction with Hemingway’s reportage as Baker contends,{{efn|Baker’s notes date the Times request to NANA as 8 Apr. 1938, and NANA’s to Hemingway as 15
Apr. 1938 (Princeton University, Firestone Library: Box 18, Folder 8 “1938”), the date of “The Bombing of Tortosa” dispatch.}} but to increase{{pg|431|432}}the chance of selling to the ''Times'' and indeed to ensure the spirit of NANA’s original arrangement with Hemingway. {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}Far from dissatisfied, NANA wrote Hemingway at the end of August 1938 a letter of agreement for his coverage of “a general European war” should it break out, “written in your colorful style” (Hemingway was in Paris, on his way to Spain for the last time during the war).{{sfn|Wheeler|1938|p=}}When Edmund Wilson criticized the selected dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'', Hemingway wrote him that “I was paid to write what are called ‘eye witness’ accounts . . .what is called, or was asked for as ‘color stuff.’ Most of such stuff is faked. Mine was not. It was straight reporting and the personal stuff was what had been asked for by the editors. “Wilson’s estimation was also based upon ''Fact’s'' inclusion of the “The Old Man at the Bridge” story from ''Ken'', “not a news dispatch” at all.{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}Speaking at Carnegie Hall before the showing of a rough cut of ''The Spanish Earth'', shortly after his first trip to Spain and so very much in the context of his wartime work, Hemingway defined the writer’s problem as “project[ing] [what is true] in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2002|p=193}}

Personal, anecdotal journalism had been Hemingway’s signature style from his earliest days filing reports, in the early 1920s from Paris, when his editor at the ''Toronto Star Weekly'' “encouraged [. . .] what Hemingway did best: write about himself in the act of being a reporter.”{{sfn|Reynolds|1989|p=45}}How could he expect that NANA would expect anything else, if indeed NANA did expect anything else? In the Spanish Civil War he at least maintained his eyewitness posture; in World War II, however, he couldn’t keep himself out. His first piece, about D-Day, begins, “No one remembers the date of the Battle of Shiloh. But the day ''we took'' Fox Green beach was the sixth of June, and the wind was blowing hard out of the northwest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1967|p=340}}His venue too—''Collier’s'' magazine—and the fact that he had not written anything in three years further contributed to the story-like nature of the WWII stories, in which he figured as a protagonist—not to mention the stories and involvement he couldn’t write about, armed and running around France more of a free agent than his guerilla-hero Robert Jordan ever was (though he began to transform these experiences into fiction in several unpublished stories). In wartime China in 1943, filing articles for Ralph Ingersoll’s short-lived ''PM'' New York afternoon daily, Hemingway did not even care to be called a news reporter.{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=99}}

It should be mentioned that Hemingway and Matthews enjoyed a great{{pg|432|433}}friendship and working relationship. Hemingway usually brought Matthews, who did not have a car, on his excursions. When Matthews left Madrid for a break in mid April 1937, he had already ensured Hemingway would provide coverage to the ''Times'' through NANA. For one thing, Hemingway did not have to worry about Matthews as a rival for the history books. He could endorse his friends’ book, ''Two Wars and More to Come'', and praise him as “the ablest and the bravest war correspondent writing today “who “when the fakers are all dead [. . .] will be read in the schools” (Advertisement 21) because Matthews posed no threat to Hemingway’s own chances to be read in the schools. The only brief Hemingway ever expressed he really reserved for Matthews’ editors, for not wanting his Teruel street-fighting story and for cutting references to himself in Matthews’ Teruel dispatches so that it appeared only Matthews had been there.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=462}}

As for Hemingway’s neglecting to name everyone with him for every story, the ''Times'' cutting of his name suggests that such exactitude was hardly a priority. A paper had no incentive for announcing the fact that a competitor’s
correspondent stood beside its own to see and report the same
events. NANA changed at least one vague Hemingway “we,” which admits
to the presence of others, to “this correspondent”
—we can hardly fault Hemingway for working in the spirit of his
employer’s standards.{{sfn|NANA|1938|p=}}{{efn|“we” in typescript and radiogram (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 1 and Folder 25).}} Do readers care that Matthews, Delmer, Gellhorn,
and others were there? The story’s effect and the limited word count also
weighed against such roll calls. One editor chose not to clutter the dispatch
on the great retreat across the Ebro with all the names of the American International Brigade volunteers Hemingway encountered, an omission of
Content more far serious than that of omitted correspondent names.{{efn| Radiogram insert dateline 4 April 1938 (HRC: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 25).}} Hemingway
often gave the names of the reporters with him, such as at Teruel;
nor was he the only reporter to sometimes neglect to do so. Martha Gellhorn,
for example, used a vague “we” and singled herself out as the primary
participant in some of her stories.

By using first-person reportage Hemingway—and Matthews and Gellhorn And most of the group covering the war—were operating solidly within
convention. William Stott, in ''Documentary Expression and Thirties America'',
calls this first-person ''participant observer'' technique “the most common sort
of documentary reportage in the thirties” that worked “by vicarious persuasion:
the writer partook of the events he reported and bared his feelings
and attitudes to influence the reader’s own.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=178-9}}{{efn|He specifically includes Hemingway et al (180).}} Stott also observes {{pg|433|434}}another technique to enable documentary reportage to “talk to us, and convince us that we, our deepest interests, are engaged,” in the use of the second person: “Thirties documentaries constantly address ‘you,’ the ‘you’ who is we the audience, and exhorts, wheedles, begs us to identify, pity, participate.” His examples include Dorothy Parker’s Spanish Civil War writing, and Hemingway’s 1935 “First-Hand Report on the Florida Hurricane.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=27-8}} A number of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches employ the second-person as a way of bringing the reader along for the ride.

Hemingway’s dispatches used personal pronouns more artfully than is
generally recognized. “A New Kind of War,” which William Braasch Watson
notes as having been “[w]ritten with more care and imagination” than its
predecessors, begins in second person: “The window of the hotel is open
and, as you lie in bed, you hear the firing in the front line seventeen blocks
away.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=29}} He takes “you” outside, to see the damage and the dead from the bombing. “Someone makes a joke about missing teeth and someone else says not to make that joke. And everyone has the feeling that characterizes war. It wasn’t me, see? It wasn’t me.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} The tension between the first person and second-person pronouns—the movement toward identification with “you” and the insistence that “it wasn’t me”—continues in the next line. Here the reader is at once still in the narrator’s shoes, but strangely distanced from the narrator through biographical tidbit and, at the same time, asked
to see himself in the enemy: “The Italian dead up on the Guadalajara weren’t
you although Italian dead, because of where you had spent your boyhood,
always seemed, still, like Our Dead.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} It is worth quoting at length the dispatch’s transition to first person:<blockquote>
After the shell that lit on the sidewalk in front of the hotel you got a beautiful double corner room on that side, twice the size of the one you’d had, for less than a dollar. It wasn’t me they killed. See? No. Not me. It wasn’t me anymore.

Then in a hospital given by the American Friends of Spanish Democracy located out behind the Morata front along the road
to Valencia they said, “Raven wants to see you.”

“Do I know him?”

“I don’t think so,” they said. “But he wants to see you.”

“Where is he?”

“Upstairs.”{{pg|434|435}}In the room upstairs they are giving a blood transfusion to a man with a very gray face who lay on a cot with his arm out looking away from the gurgling bottle and moaning in a very impersonal way. He moaned mechanically and at regular intervals and it did not seem to be him that made the sound. His lips did not move.

“Where’s Raven?” I asked.

“I’m here,” said Raven.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=31}}</blockquote>The piece simply could not have sustained the second-person for the remaining
five pages. More significantly, for this deeply personal exchange between
the writer and the faceless, eyeless soldier, Hemingway could not hide
in the rhetorical device of the second-person. In the process, he effects a reversal
of the usual pronoun game; instead of identifying with the all embracing
“you,” we leave that trick behind and become fully attached to
the narratorial “I” as ourselves, as we might not have been had the article
begun in the first person. And even as the narrator identifies himself by name
for the only time in any of the dispatches—“Hemingway,” and later
“Ernest”—as decidedly not ourselves. We do not say, ''It isn’t me''. The historian
Hugh Thomas notes “the refreshing candour” of Hemingway’s naming
himself “in the world of the International Brigades, where no one’s name
seemed to be truthfully given.”{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=591}}{{efn|For Watson, the dispatch “seems, in fact, on the verge of becoming a story” (29).}}

A year later Hemingway’s “Tortosa Calmly Awaits Assault” resists admitting
the city’s imminent fall. Yet it does so anyway, by subtly alluding to the
wartime rhetoric of sacrificed blood irrigating the earth and rejuvenating
Spain. Such rhetoric was common during the war, appearing in speeches,
print, and poetry. Many of the poems in Cary Nelson’s anthology ''The Wound
and the Dream: Sixty Years of American Poems about the Civil War'' join in the
Spanish and international chorus’s general connection between Republican
soldiers and the land, and the particular singing of their dead nourishing
the land. We find such language in La Pasionaria’s farewell address to the International Brigades, her epilogue to ''The Book of the XV Brigade'', and Hemingway’s famous eulogy “On the American Dead in Spain”: “For our dead are
a part of the earth of Spain now and the earth of Spain can never die. Each
winter it will seem to die and each spring it will come alive again. Our dead
will live with it forever.”{{sfn|Nelson|1994|p=3}}{{efn| Reprinted in Bruccoli 76 and Nelson, Remembering 37 (the drafts at the JFK are titled “The Dead at Jarama”). In addition to the poems in Nelson’s anthology, see the excerpt from Boris Todrin’s “Spanish Sowing” in Guttmann (Wounded 179–180).}} The Tortosa dispatch implies the deaths of{{pg|435|436}}many Republican soldiers in its final paragraph’s description of the newborn onions:
<blockquote>The artillery was picking up a little now. Two came in at a fairly useful place and as the smoke blew away ahead and settled through the trees, you picked an armful of spring onions from a field beside the trail that led to the Tortosa road. They were the first onions of the spring and peeling one I found they were plump white and not too strong. The Ebro Delta has a fine rich land, and where the onions grow, tomorrow will be a battle.
{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=84}}</blockquote>

The echo is quiet, and perhaps unconscious, but there nevertheless. The opening boastfulness of “American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents”
should be taken somewhat ironically. The dispatch begins by announcing
that for “two days we have been doing the most dangerous thing
you can do in this war. That is keep close behind an unstabilized line where
the enemy are attacking with mechanized forces.” Then, a few pages later,
we learn about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade survivors of the spring 1938
Nationalist offensive that took Bob Merriman and eventually reached the
Mediterranean Sea. Reading about these survivors creeping through enemy
camps, stepping on a sleeping German soldier’s hand, sprinting “across an
open field toward the Ebro bank and being sniped at by artillery controlled
by an observation plane overhead” and then “the desperate swimming of
the Ebro” naked, we are asked to place the correspondent’s plight in due perspective.{{sfn|Watson|1988|pp=71-2}} This story certainly escapes the charge of a monotonous
battle and bombing scene; its switch from apparently boastful to
awe-struck witness feels almost deliberately self-conscious. Other choice selfironic
moments come in the dispatches of that pre-Teruel quiet fall of 1938.
The one titled “Hemingway, Covering War, Tells of Brush with Death” has little
to report from Madrid other than the new aftershave brand he is trying.
In “Loyalists’ Drive Seen Progressing as Planned,” he writes that “Shells are
all much the same and if they don’t hit you there is no story and if they do
you won’t have to write it.” {{sfn|Watson|1988|p=58}}

Hemingway’s dispatches are sometimes monotonous because his war was
Usually monotonous—as wars are most of the time. It should also be kept in
mind that scholars reviewing Hemingway’s NANA dispatches one after{{pg|436|437}}another do not relive the original reading experience. Hemingway wrote dispatches sporadically, papers did not run all of his dispatches, papers edited and cut them, and readers read at least a couple of papers’ worth of other articles in between. He told Edmund Wilson as much in defending himself against Wilson’s critique of the selected (and heavily edited and cut) dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'' without his consent: “If you are being paid to be shot at and write about it you are supposed to mention the shooting. [. . .] But I do not go in for re-printing journalism.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}

If we can in this way better understand his style, and at least explain it if
not excuse it, we similarly ought to try to contextualize—and perhaps
excuse—the moral problem. The two issues here are the specific condemnation
of Hemingway’s silence about Republican atrocities and the general
question of biased reporting (the latter of which has already partially been
addressed).

Hemingway knew, as Donaldson writes, that mentioning the atrocities
“would arouse anticommunist sentiments back in the States and effectively
undermine any possibility of American intervention.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=394}} It is also doubtful
that reporting them would have stopped them. But reporting Republican
atrocities from Spain was not possible for the simple reason that all dispatches
went through a government censor. Matthews cabled his editors
from Paris in May 1937 to tell them that “censorship does not permit us to
say when the ‘telefonica’ is hit. So whenever you see reference in my
despatches [sic] to ‘an important building in the center of the city’ or words
to that effect, the cable desk can know that it is the telefonica.” {{sfn|Matthews|1937c|p=}} As already noted, by July he would cable “CENSORSHIP
STRICTER” as the ban on mentioning internationals went into effect. {{sfn|Matthews|1937d|p=}}{{sfn|Matthews|1937e|p=}} Cowles’ memoir confirms the
aggressive censorship, observing that it limited journalists to exactly the kind of material Hemingway wrote about:
<blockquote>There were frequent attempts to “beat the censor” by employing American slang expressions, but this came to an end when a Canadian girl joined the staff. The International Brigades were not allowed to be publicized; no reference could be made to Russian armaments, and buildings and streets which suffered
bombardments could not be identified.</blockquote>{{pg|437|438}}<blockquote>It was only in the realm of the human interest story that the journalists had a free hand. They could describe bombardments to their heart’s content.{{sfn|Cowles|1941|p=20}}</blockquote>
Hemingway and everyone else—to reserve incrimination for Hemingway is hardly just. No correspondent covering Republican Spain reported suspicious imprisonments and disappearances by government agents.

Hemingway, through Joris Ivens and ''The Spanish Earth'' project, had better
access to officials than most. Had he been able somehow to report such
activity, he would have lost that access and would probably have been kicked
out of the country. His fame would have likely prevented his own officially
sponsored disappearance, though he still worried, especially as so many of
such crimes on the Republican side occurred from free agents. When Jasper
Wood printed the anarchist F.A.I. banner in the limited edition book version
of ''The Spanish Earth'', Hemingway expressed his anxieties bluntly in a letter
to Jasper on August 20, 1938. It is hardly “petulant,” he scolded, “not to wish
to be shot.”{{sfn|Davison|1988|p=128}} Hostility in the Republic against the anarchists
ran high; after the Barcelona May Day conflict, the government’s foreign
minister told U.S. Ambassador Claude Bowers that “anarchist revolt
throughout Catalonia and not only expected but welcomed as an opportunity
to liquidate the anarchists who have been hostile from the beginning.”
{{sfn|NA|1954|p=292}}{{efn| The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State, 5 May 1937.}}

It is possible that Hemingway’s dispatch stating that “not one friend [. . .]
has been executed or is missing” was his clever means of reporting
the rumors and indeed the general fact while evading the censors, as in this very dispatch he acknowledged the presence of a censor after a bombardment.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=34}}
Matthews, on the other hand, never found a way to mention the
censors or admit even the possibility of people gone missing in the Republic.
Peter Moreira has observed that in a 1943 dispatch Hemingway related a remark by a British officer about the Chinese Nationalist government’s being
“hopeless on the offensive” because censorship “prevented American reporters
From actually saying that the Nationalists wouldn’t attack, surmising that by telling this anecdote Hemingway could sneak such a judgment into
his reports.”{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=77}} In Spain, censors aside, the eyewitness standard and his
own safety and continuing ability to report the war, and, yes, his passionate
support of the government contributed to his decision. He could have written
about government abuses from the states, but then could not return to{{pg|438|439}}cover the war and support the cause—a justification other journalists, those who did not return after the spring of 1937, did not enjoy. In his mind too, knowing what he heard of fascist atrocities, any reportage against the government lessening its chances of victory through killing hopes of increased international aid would have led to more deaths at Franco’s hands that the much smaller number inspired by fifth column paranoia.{{efn|''Hemingway’s Second War'' discusses in greater depth Hemingway’s politics and his falling out
with John Dos Passos over the execution of José Robles}}.

The accusation that Hemingway did not write about Republican atrocities
because he was saving it for his fiction I find baseless (Knightley 232;
Baker 402).{{sfn|Knightley|2004|p=232}}{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=402}}{{efn|Hemingway’s casual comment to colleagues calling dibs on Pepe Quintanilla, the executioner of
Madrid, is not sufficient evidence.}}Carolyn Moorehead, in her biography of Martha Gellhorn, describes
the climate for the Madrid correspondents that first spring: “And so,
day by day, the correspondents walked a thin and nervous line between truth,
evasions, and propaganda, telling one another that though it was not all right
if things were made up and presented as true, it was acceptable to describe
what you wanted, provided it was true and provided your readers were aware
of your position.”{{sfn|Moorehead|2003|p=125}} My own sense is that they did not walk the line quite
so nervously; their passionate commitment, and their principles of position
disclosure and the eyewitness standard, made that walk relatively easy.

The problem of ''committed journalism'', even sixty years later, has not been
resolved—as anyone paying attention to the media and world affairs well
knows. One person’s truth is another person’s propaganda. Certainly, as
Knightley notes, reporting from “the heart” affects one’s judgment.{{sfn|Knightley|2004|pp=234-5}}
Yet to attempt “balance,” per the edits to Matthews’ Guadalajara piece, betrays
one’s believed truth. Furthermore, the kind of reporting done by the
correspondents with the Republic—committed, one-sided, optimistic,
heroic, human interest work by embedded writers—would be practiced
widely and without reserve during World War II. Such narrative journalism,
with roots in Louise May Alcott’s “Hospital Sketches” series published in the
''Boston Commonwealth'', and more immediately in 1930s social documentary
writing whose “essence” is “not information”, anticipated postwar
new journalism’s adoption of novelistic narrative technique for nonfiction
which culminated with such wartime books as Norman Mailer’s ''Armies of
the Night'' and Michael Herr’s ''Dispatches''.{{sfn|Stott|1986|p=11}} Some of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches
fall in this line of development.

Today we might categorize such writing under the awkward umbrella
term ''creative nonfiction''. That term certainly fits the mixed bag of nonfiction
narratives and commentaries Hemingway published during the war in
Ken magazine. These pieces are essays, not journalism, several of which{{pg|439|440}}directly appeal for support for the Republic, and most of which really deal
with the approaching world war. ''Ken'' wanted “precisely the kind of opinion
articles he could not write for NANA.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=433}} His article, “The
Cardinal Picks a Winner,” shows a photo of a row of dead children from
Barcelona and another one with Nationalist officers saluting and Catholic officials
with raised hands, apparently making the fascist salute as well. He
ends ironically: “So I ''don’t believe'' the people shown in the photo can really
be making it. I would rather prefer to think that the photograph was faked.”
{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=436}} When Hemingway argues in “A Program for U.S. Realism” that the
United States should stay out of the next war except to stuff its pockets
through arms sales, one has to wonder, given his call and the democratic nations’
failure to save Spain, if we are to sniff sarcasm here.

The language of the dispatches, with their corrective intent against
Franco’s propaganda, does risk propagandizing. Hemingway’s optimism and
anti-fascism certainly colored his correspondence work. His criticism of the
anarchist and POUM militia for their inactivity on the Aragon front, for example,
sounds a lot like the Spanish Communist Party’s.{{efn|It at least sounds almost exactly like Dolores Ibarruri in her memoir. To the anarchists’ complaint
that they had no arms, she retorts “that they had more arms than did many other fronts. . . .
What they didn’t have and what they were constantly demanding were airplanes and tanks .And
they didn’t have them because the Republic government didn’t have them either, except for those
it received as aid from the Soviet Union” (238–284). Yet the various Catalonia militia were not
as well equipped with small arms as the more regular Popular Army units, and because of the
terrain tanks and planes were in fact necessary.}}
But unlike
Matthews, Hemingway limited his reports within the Republic to military
matters. Hemingway may have generally condemned the anarchists in his
nonfiction, considering their activity as hampering the war effort, but he
never repeated the accusation of their collaboration with the rebels, as
Matthews had done. And when Hemingway commented on the Bareclona
crisis, he referred only to the government—not the communists, as
Matthews had done.{{efn|Hemingway’s comments in “Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win” NANA staff
correspondent dispatch. Though arguably he was propagandizing by hiding the communist influence—
to mention the communists to an American audience would not gain sympathy for the
cause.}}Nor did he write articles asserting the limited role of
the communists in the government, or explaining Spanish anarchism, also
as Matthews had done.{{efn|An article on the communists’ limited role appeared in late November 1937, as discussed in a
missive from The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State on 2
Dec. 1937 (United States 461). Matthews’ “Anarchism: Spain’s Enigma” appeared in the New York
Times 22 Aug. 1937: 6, 14.}}

During one of Hemingway’s stateside breaks between trips to Spain, his
children asked if he was a “tool” of Stalin, an accusation tossed by a schoolmate
who, presumably parroting his or her parents, probably understood
the term no better than Hemingway’s children. {{sfn|Hemingway|nd|p=}}
Hemingway believed in the Republic’s potential, but he was never a dupe of
the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) or Comintern. As did many others, he
accepted PCE’s presence in the government for its discipline and organization
toward winning the war, and he understood the material necessity for
Comintern’s support. It should also be noted, as historians Hugh Thomas
and Helen Graham have reminded us, that the communism associated with
the Republic wasn’t particularly communist anyway.{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=628}}{{sfn|Graham|2002|p=184}} {{pg|440|441}}

Hemingway declined to follow Joris Ivens’ suggestion that he write a
dispatch on the significant role of the political commissars in the Republican
military, even though that would have meant
featuring his brave new friend Gustav Regler.{{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=}} Hemingway also, in a letter
justifying his work to Jack Wheeler at NANA, wrote about choosing not to
send a dispatch he had written because it might strike readers as propaganda
“no matter how true” (Letter to Jack Wheeler).{{sfn|Hemingway|1938b|p=}}

Hemingway went to Spain to see the war himself and to support the Republic
through his ambulance fund. The paychecks from NANA and the
fundraising from ''The Spanish Earth'' helped. Whatever propagandistic streak
colors the dispatches pales in comparison to the documentary. The filmmaker,
Joris Ivens, was well established in European communist circles. The
documentary genre then and now has occupied a slippery position between
the extremes of impossible-to-achieve empirical nonfiction and of the outright
fictionalized. Evaluations of Hemingway’s journalism are informed by
knowledge of ''The Spanish Earth'' and the ''Ken'' essays to the detriment of the
journalism. And the very nature of the slippery documentary genre may enable
the film to escape opprobrium. It wasn’t reportage; it was altogether
something else. But for that matter, Hemingway’s dispatches weren’t purely
reportage either, and if not ''altogether'' something else, still something else,
and should be reckoned with accordingly.

=== Notes ===
{{notelist}}
===Citations===
{{reflist}}
===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker
|first=Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Bruccoli |first=Matthew |date=2006 |title=Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame |url= |location=Columbia |publisher=U of South Caronia P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Cowles |first=Virginia |date=1941 |title=Looking for Trouble |url= |location=New York
|publisher=Harper & Brothers |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Davison |first=Richard Allan |title=The Publication of Hemingway’s The Spanish Earth: An Untold Story |url= |journal=Hemingway Review
|volume=7.2 |issue= |date=1988
|pages=122-130 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson
|first=Scott |date=2009 |title=Fitzgerald & Hemingway: Works and Days |url= |location=New York |publisher=Columbia UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Franklin |first=Sidney |date=1952 |title=Bullfighter from Brooklyn |url= |location=New York |publisher=Prentice-Hall |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Graham |first=Helen |date=2002 |title=The Spanish Republic at War 1936-1939 |url= |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Guttmann |first=Allen |date=1962 |title=The Wound in the Heart: American and the Spanish Civil War |url= |location=New York |publisher=Free Press of Glencoe |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1967 |title=By-Line: Ernest Hemingway |url= |location=New York |publisher=Scibner |pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Trogdon
|editor-first=Robert W.
|author-mask=1
|title=Fascism is a Lie
|url=
|journal=Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference |volume==
|issue=
|date=2002
|pages=193-6
|location=New York
|publisher=Carroll & Graf
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 May 1937
|chapter=Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=nd
|chapter=The Home Front
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938a
|chapter=Letter to Edmund Wilson
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=2 June 1938b
|chapter=Letter to Jack Wheeler
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=14 Feb 1939
|chapter=On the American Dead in Spain
|title=TS. New Masses
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Baker
|editor-first=Carlos
|author-mask=1
|date=2003
|chapter=The Hadely Mowrer
|title=Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Scribner
|pages=462-3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ibarruri
|first=Dolores
|date=1966
|title=They Shall Not Pass: The Autobiography of La Pasionaria
|url=
|location=United States
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|date=1969
|title=The Camera and I
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|author-mask=1
|date=26 Apr 1937
|chapter=Letter to Ernest Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|date=20 Nov 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Bertrand Weaver
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=12 Oct 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=25 Apr 1939
|chapter=Letter to M.B. Tenney
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Apr 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Knightley
|first=Phillip
|date=2004
|title=The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq
|url=
|location=Baltimore
|publisher=John Hopkins
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=
|date=9 Apr 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=TS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=11 Apr 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=8 May 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=6 July 1937d
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=July 1937e
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=22 March 1939
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 9
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=
|date=20 May 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=20 Dec 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 5
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Sep 1937c
|chapter=Note to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moorehead
|first=Caroline
|date=2003
|title=Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Henry Holt
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moreira
|first=Peter
|date=2006
|title=Hemingway on the China Front: His WWII Spy Mission with Martha Gellhorn
|url=
|location=Washington D.C.
|publisher=Potomac Books
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|date=5 Feb 1937
|chapter=Promotion Box: Hemingway, For Immediate Release
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|author-mask=1
|date=4 Apr 1938
|chapter=Promotion Box: American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|editor-last=Nelson
|editor-first=Card
|date=1994
|title=Remembering Spain: Hemingway’s Civil War Eulogy and the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
|url=
|location=Urbana
|publisher=U of Illinois
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Reynolds
|first=Michael
|date=1989
|title=Hemingway: The Paris Years
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Norton
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Stott
|first=William
|date=1986
|title=Documentary Expression and Thirties America
|url=
|location=Chicago
|publisher=U of Chicago P
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Thomas
|first=Hugh
|date=2001
|title=The Spanish Civil War, Rev. ed.
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Modern Library
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine
|last=''Two Wars and More to Come''
|first=
|date=24 Jan 1938
|title=Best Sellers of the Week Here and Elsewhere
|type=Advertisement
|url=
|magazine=New York Times
|pages=
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=NA
|first=
|title=United States. Dept. of State
|url=
|journal= Foreign Relations of the Untied States, 1937 |volume==1
|issue=General
|date=1954
|pages=
|location=Washington
|publisher=GPO
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Watson
|first=William Braasch
|title=Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches
|url=
|journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=7.2
|issue=
|date=1988
|pages=4-121
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Wheeler
|first=John H.
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938
|chapter=Letter to Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection, Box 3 Folder 14
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}

{{refend}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches

2025-04-19T21:26:39Z

MerAtticus: added last few pages

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 

{{byline|last=Vernon |first=Alex |abstract=The Spanish Civil War began in July 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally-restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy. By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches.}}

{{dc|dc=T|HE SPANISH CIVIL WAR BEGAN ON}} 17-18 JULY, 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy, to collaborate with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens on the pro-Republican documentary ''The Spanish Earth'', and to pursue his fledgling love affair with Martha Gellhorn.

By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches for NANA.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=4}}{{efn|Quotations from the NANA dispatches follow the Diplomatic Text established by William Braasch Watson’s “Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches.” I prefer NANA’s titles rather than Watson’s. For my disagreements with some of Watson’s datings, see my comments on specific dispatches in ''Hemingway’s Second War.''}}The secondary sources habitually judge them inferior journalism. Carlos Baker in the first Hemingway biography, for example, complains that the dialogue was “so heavily stamped with personal mannerisms as to be of doubtful authenticity.” Baker sees a “curious monotony in his stories of battles and bombardments,” a gratuitous use of graphic imagery “to shock his readers,” and “a note of triumphant boastfulness” in reporting proximity to danger. He also faults Hemingway for “often hint[ing] he was alone when in fact he was usually with Martha Gellhorn, Matthews, and Delmer.” Hemingway lacked Dos Passos’ “eye for telling details” and the “meticulous exactitude and inclusiveness that characterized the best work of Herbert Matthews and Sefton Delmer.”{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}

Philip Knightley’s ''The First Casualty'', the standard history of war correspondence, paraphrases Baker but with a trouncing final judgment:{{pg|427|428}}Hemingway’s “performance as a war correspondent was abysmally bad.” But Knightley goes beyond “technical” dissatisfaction to moral condemnation. Not just “unjustifiably optimistic”—an excusable offense—Hemingway’s reporting was “unforgivable” in its “total failure to report the Communist persecution, imprisonment, and summary execution of ‘untrustworthy elements’ on the Republican side, when he knew this was happening and when disclosing it might well have prevented further horrors like this.”
{{sfn|Knightley|2004 |pp=231–32}}{{efn|In my view, Knightley does not sufficiently acknowledge his paraphrasing of Baker.}}

Such criticisms in the final analysis might bear out. As Scott Donaldson writes, Hemingway advanced the Republican cause in his dispatches by eliciting “the deepest possible feelings of horror and of sympathy for the victims” of the Madrid bombardment; his “undue optimism” often “ignored Loyalist defeats and exaggerated the importance of its victories”; and “he repeatedly called attention to the participation of Italians and Germans on Franco’s side.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=426}} It also served as a recruitment tool—Milton Wolff, for example, acknowledged the strong influence Hemingway’s dispatches had on his decision to volunteer. Nevertheless, I think it a worthwhile exercise to attend a little more studiously to Hemingway’s dispatches, their context, and their artistry. I don’t necessarily intend to reverse the general opinion of the correspondence, only to achieve a better and more sympathetic understanding.

Herbert Matthews’ reporting for the ''New York Times'' will serve as a convenient comparison for two reasons. First, because both Baker and Knightley use Matthews’ journalism as the standard of excellence to pass judgment on Hemingway’s; and second, because the two worked practically side-by-side, seeing and reporting on many of the same events. In fact so closely did they work together that NANA sometimes complained that the ''Times'' was not buying Hemingway’s pieces because they resembled Matthews,’ and at one point Matthews’ own editors at the Times suspected him of plagiarizing Hemingway.{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|pp=411, 420}} A note from Matthews’ assigned editor Raymond McCaw provides, in two columns, seven quite similar passages from Hemingway’s Aragon front dispatches of September 13 and 14 with Matthews’ of September 14, with a penciled note at the bottom: “a deadly parallel if you ask me.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937c|p=}} Edwin James, the managing editor and McCaw’s boss, eventually agreed with Matthews’ defense: “It is quite apparent that you did not file any duplicate of the Hemingway story, or vice versa. As I understand it, the similarity arose from the fact that you{{pg|428|429}}both went to see the same show and saw it at the same time [sic], under the same conditions.”{{sfn|James|1937b|p=}}

Matthews’ dispatches ring of Republican bias as much if not more than anything Hemingway ever filed. The ''Times'' received many letters to the editor complaining about Matthews’ undisguised politics, which also gave serious concern to some of his editors. His description of the Republican May 1937 infighting in Barcelona is a striking example of how his news veered into propaganda and shows just how much he passed along the government’s version of events. The government’s “BLOODLESS TRIUMPH FOUGHT WITH RECOGNIZEDWEAPONS OF DEMOCRACY” turned out to be blatantly false, as the government and the “COMMUNISTS [WHO] DISTINGUISHED THEMSELVES” resorted to violent suppression. His blaming the uprising on the anarchist CNT working as Franco operatives parrots the government’s and the communist party’s public position, even though both charges—that the anarchists precipitated the events and that they were under Nationalist direction—were also false. His dispatch’s optimistic close also equivocates the political reality: “NEW GOVERNMENT HAS TAKEN POWER WHICH APPEARS TOVE CONFIDENCE VAST MAJORITY SPANIARDS IN LOYALIST TERRITORY AND TIS HOPED WILL GAIN EQUAL CONFIDENCE ABROAD STOP VIOLENCE AND REVOLUTION BEEN REPUDIATED AND NEWAND FAR HOPEFULLER PERIOD SEEMS BEGINNING.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937a|p=}}The ''Times'', knowing full well the one-sided coverage of a correspondent writing from one side of the conflict, had a reporter on both sides: Matthews with the Republicans, and William Carney with the Nationalists. They got their facts right (or wrong) as often as the other, their editors concluded; and they inspired about the same number of letters of complaint.{{sfn|James|1937a|p=}}{sfn|James|1939|p=}}

Furthermore, Matthews’ dispatches received a great deal of substantive editorial revisions. One of Matthews’ Teruel reports had to be cut for length, as McCaw informed James: “This bird sent 2844 words on the same facts which Hemingway covered much better in less than half that number. I wonder if Matthews thinks the paper is thriving, and that cable tolls do not matter a damn. Of course, it had to be cut for space anyway.” McCaw most likely refers here to Matthews’ dispatch corresponding to Hemingway’s “The Attack on Teruel,” though Matthews’ account of the fall of Teruel is also much longer (and more long-winded) than Hemingway’s, and just as personal in terms of describing the dangers{{pg|429|430}} he faced. Indeed its length allows him to share even more of the action he endured.{{sfn|McCaw|1937b|p=}}

Raymond McCaw held a general professional disagreement with Matthews perhaps tainted with over zealousness. Whether a personal or political motive informed that disagreement can’t be determined from the evidence I’ve seen. It is also clear that McCaw’s charges bear some validity—that any responsible editor could have easily and reasonably taken issue where McCaw did. One of the more interesting examples concerns Matthews’ piece on Guadalajara. Because he only saw evidence on Franco’s side of Italian forces, he only reported on Italians. But the ''Times'' editors heard from other sources that German soldiers also participated in the March offensive. They thought it prudent, from this confusion, to change (nine times) “Italian” to “Rebel,” “the foe,” or “Insurgent.” When Matthews saw the published piece he wrote a strenuous objection. In some instances the editors changed paraphrased quotations from his sources. One large paragraph omitted by the editors stressed the first-hand nature of the information, and Matthews underlines the key words: “All day, at every place we stopped and no matter whom we talked to or what we saw, there was only one label—Italian. The dead bodies, the prisoners, the material of every kind, the men who had occupied Brihuega and then fled were Italian and nothing but Italian.” Here and elsewhere in his original story, Matthews emphasizes the “personal knowledge” of its information.{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}{{efn|James supported McCaw on these changes, though later acknowledged that altering quoted sources was perhaps unwarranted.{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}}}Yet Matthews did not report on the foreigners fighting for the Republic—it was in fact the Italian Garibali Battalion that routed Franco’s Italians. We might surmise government censorship behind this silence, though Matthews would not cable news of “CENSORSHIP STRICTER” and “BAN ON MENTIONING INTERNATIONALS INCLUDING AMERICANS INSTITUTED TODAY” until July.{{sfn|Matthews|1937b|p=}}Perhaps he cautiously self-censored, or politically self-censored for the same reasons the government would eventually ban mention. Still, his stridency about the omission of foreigners on one side is striking given his knowledge of their contribution to the other side. For this reason too, and his omission of other nationalities on the insurgent side, it seemed only fair to his editor “to stand on the statement that the majority of the Rebels were Italians and let it go at that.”{{sfn|James|1937c|p=}} A reasonable decision.

Throughout his correspondence to his editors and his several books,{{pg|430|431}}Matthews maintained a passionate defense of his eyewitness journalistic standard, a position those close to him understood. “Matthews never believed anything he had not seen with his own eyes,” Joris Ivens wrote. “He never saw his job as reporter as one that permitted him to sit in his hotel and read the handouts of the War Ministry.” {{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=112}} Sidney Franklin recalls that some writers wrote their pieces before arriving in Madrid, and came only for the “legitimacy” of the Madrid dateline.{{sfn|Franklin|1952|p=232}}And Matthews hated, on principle, having his name attached to an article that violated the integrity of his witness. The only way to achieve objectivity, for Matthews, was to acknowledge one’s subjective perspective. Writing to his publisher, Matthews argued that “the full documentary value” of his coverage was lost when the editors altered his submissions for “the apparent necessity of giving more or less equal space to both sides.”{{sfn|Matthews|1939|p=}}

As with Matthews, so too Hemingway. Indeed the commitment to subjectivity
fit quite well with Hemingway’s modernist aesthetics. If Hemingway
focused the dispatches on his perspective—on his own experience dodging
artillery—more than Matthews and more than most, he did so at least partially
to fulfill expectations. NANA approached him, after all, for his name
and personality as much as whatever he would write. Before he even left the
states it pitched him to potential publications, sending out a promotional release with text to be used alongside his forthcoming dispatches and suggesting
they include a photograph: “Mr. Hemingway’s assignment is to get both from the bombed towns and bombed trenches the human story of the war, not just an account of the game being played by general staffs with pins
and a map.”{{sfn|NANA|1937|p=}}{{ NANA also released each individual dispatch with a one-sentence “precede” about the “famous” or “noted” author. Ernest Hemingway was not writing as Herbert Mathews, ace reporter; Hemingway was writing as Ernest Hemingway, famous author of novels and stories well known to be drawn from his own experiences.

That he understood this to be his assignment is further evidenced by a
cable Matthews sent to his ''Times'' editors on April 9, 1937, concerning the
Loyalist attack: “WORKED CONJOINTL WITH HEMINGWAY TODAY HE SENDING EYEWITNESS DESCRIPTION WHILE EYE SENT GENERAL STRATEGY.”{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}When a year later the ''Times'' asked NANA to ensure Hemingway’s reports differed from Matthews, NANA complied by asking Hemingway “to emphasize color rather than straight reporting” not necessarily out of dissatisfaction with Hemingway’s reportage as Baker contends,{{efn|Baker’s notes date the Times request to NANA as 8 Apr. 1938, and NANA’s to Hemingway as 15
Apr. 1938 (Princeton University, Firestone Library: Box 18, Folder 8 “1938”), the date of “The Bombing of Tortosa” dispatch.}} but to increase{{pg|431|432}}the chance of selling to the ''Times'' and indeed to ensure the spirit of NANA’s original arrangement with Hemingway. {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}Far from dissatisfied, NANA wrote Hemingway at the end of August 1938 a letter of agreement for his coverage of “a general European war” should it break out, “written in your colorful style” (Hemingway was in Paris, on his way to Spain for the last time during the war).{{sfn|Wheeler|1938|p=}}When Edmund Wilson criticized the selected dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'', Hemingway wrote him that “I was paid to write what are called ‘eye witness’ accounts . . .what is called, or was asked for as ‘color stuff.’ Most of such stuff is faked. Mine was not. It was straight reporting and the personal stuff was what had been asked for by the editors. “Wilson’s estimation was also based upon ''Fact’s'' inclusion of the “The Old Man at the Bridge” story from ''Ken'', “not a news dispatch” at all.{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}Speaking at Carnegie Hall before the showing of a rough cut of ''The Spanish Earth'', shortly after his first trip to Spain and so very much in the context of his wartime work, Hemingway defined the writer’s problem as “project[ing] [what is true] in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2002|p=193}}

Personal, anecdotal journalism had been Hemingway’s signature style from his earliest days filing reports, in the early 1920s from Paris, when his editor at the ''Toronto Star Weekly'' “encouraged [. . .] what Hemingway did best: write about himself in the act of being a reporter.”{{sfn|Reynolds|1989|p=45}}How could he expect that NANA would expect anything else, if indeed NANA did expect anything else? In the Spanish Civil War he at least maintained his eyewitness posture; in World War II, however, he couldn’t keep himself out. His first piece, about D-Day, begins, “No one remembers the date of the Battle of Shiloh. But the day ''we took'' Fox Green beach was the sixth of June, and the wind was blowing hard out of the northwest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1967|p=340}}His venue too—''Collier’s'' magazine—and the fact that he had not written anything in three years further contributed to the story-like nature of the WWII stories, in which he figured as a protagonist—not to mention the stories and involvement he couldn’t write about, armed and running around France more of a free agent than his guerilla-hero Robert Jordan ever was (though he began to transform these experiences into fiction in several unpublished stories). In wartime China in 1943, filing articles for Ralph Ingersoll’s short-lived ''PM'' New York afternoon daily, Hemingway did not even care to be called a news reporter.{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=99}}

It should be mentioned that Hemingway and Matthews enjoyed a great{{pg|432|433}}friendship and working relationship. Hemingway usually brought Matthews, who did not have a car, on his excursions. When Matthews left Madrid for a break in mid April 1937, he had already ensured Hemingway would provide coverage to the ''Times'' through NANA. For one thing, Hemingway did not have to worry about Matthews as a rival for the history books. He could endorse his friends’ book, ''Two Wars and More to Come'', and praise him as “the ablest and the bravest war correspondent writing today “who “when the fakers are all dead [. . .] will be read in the schools” (Advertisement 21) because Matthews posed no threat to Hemingway’s own chances to be read in the schools. The only brief Hemingway ever expressed he really reserved for Matthews’ editors, for not wanting his Teruel street-fighting story and for cutting references to himself in Matthews’ Teruel dispatches so that it appeared only Matthews had been there.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=462}}

As for Hemingway’s neglecting to name everyone with him for every story, the ''Times'' cutting of his name suggests that such exactitude was hardly a priority. A paper had no incentive for announcing the fact that a competitor’s
correspondent stood beside its own to see and report the same
events. NANA changed at least one vague Hemingway “we,” which admits
to the presence of others, to “this correspondent”
—we can hardly fault Hemingway for working in the spirit of his
employer’s standards.{{sfn|NANA|1938|p=}}{{efn|“we” in typescript and radiogram (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 1 and Folder 25).}} Do readers care that Matthews, Delmer, Gellhorn,
and others were there? The story’s effect and the limited word count also
weighed against such roll calls. One editor chose not to clutter the dispatch
on the great retreat across the Ebro with all the names of the American International Brigade volunteers Hemingway encountered, an omission of
Content more far serious than that of omitted correspondent names.{{efn| Radiogram insert dateline 4 April 1938 (HRC: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 25).}} Hemingway
often gave the names of the reporters with him, such as at Teruel;
nor was he the only reporter to sometimes neglect to do so. Martha Gellhorn,
for example, used a vague “we” and singled herself out as the primary
participant in some of her stories.

By using first-person reportage Hemingway—and Matthews and Gellhorn And most of the group covering the war—were operating solidly within
convention. William Stott, in ''Documentary Expression and Thirties America'',
calls this first-person ''participant observer'' technique “the most common sort
of documentary reportage in the thirties” that worked “by vicarious persuasion:
the writer partook of the events he reported and bared his feelings
and attitudes to influence the reader’s own.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=178-9}}{{efn|He specifically includes Hemingway et al (180).}} Stott also observes {{pg|433|434}}another technique to enable documentary reportage to “talk to us, and convince us that we, our deepest interests, are engaged,” in the use of the second person: “Thirties documentaries constantly address ‘you,’ the ‘you’ who is we the audience, and exhorts, wheedles, begs us to identify, pity, participate.” His examples include Dorothy Parker’s Spanish Civil War writing, and Hemingway’s 1935 “First-Hand Report on the Florida Hurricane.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=27-8}} A number of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches employ the second-person as a way of bringing the reader along for the ride.

Hemingway’s dispatches used personal pronouns more artfully than is
generally recognized. “A New Kind of War,” which William Braasch Watson
notes as having been “[w]ritten with more care and imagination” than its
predecessors, begins in second person: “The window of the hotel is open
and, as you lie in bed, you hear the firing in the front line seventeen blocks
away.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=29}} He takes “you” outside, to see the damage and the dead from the bombing. “Someone makes a joke about missing teeth and someone else says not to make that joke. And everyone has the feeling that characterizes war. It wasn’t me, see? It wasn’t me.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} The tension between the first person and second-person pronouns—the movement toward identification with “you” and the insistence that “it wasn’t me”—continues in the next line. Here the reader is at once still in the narrator’s shoes, but strangely distanced from the narrator through biographical tidbit and, at the same time, asked
to see himself in the enemy: “The Italian dead up on the Guadalajara weren’t
you although Italian dead, because of where you had spent your boyhood,
always seemed, still, like Our Dead.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} It is worth quoting at length the dispatch’s transition to first person:<blockquote>
After the shell that lit on the sidewalk in front of the hotel you got a beautiful double corner room on that side, twice the size of the one you’d had, for less than a dollar. It wasn’t me they killed. See? No. Not me. It wasn’t me anymore.

Then in a hospital given by the American Friends of Spanish Democracy located out behind the Morata front along the road
to Valencia they said, “Raven wants to see you.”

“Do I know him?”

“I don’t think so,” they said. “But he wants to see you.”

“Where is he?”

“Upstairs.”{{pg|434|435}}In the room upstairs they are giving a blood transfusion to a man with a very gray face who lay on a cot with his arm out looking away from the gurgling bottle and moaning in a very impersonal way. He moaned mechanically and at regular intervals and it did not seem to be him that made the sound. His lips did not move.

“Where’s Raven?” I asked.

“I’m here,” said Raven.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=31}}</blockquote>The piece simply could not have sustained the second-person for the remaining
five pages. More significantly, for this deeply personal exchange between
the writer and the faceless, eyeless soldier, Hemingway could not hide
in the rhetorical device of the second-person. In the process, he effects a reversal
of the usual pronoun game; instead of identifying with the all embracing
“you,” we leave that trick behind and become fully attached to
the narratorial “I” as ourselves, as we might not have been had the article
begun in the first person. And even as the narrator identifies himself by name
for the only time in any of the dispatches—“Hemingway,” and later
“Ernest”—as decidedly not ourselves. We do not say, ''It isn’t me''. The historian
Hugh Thomas notes “the refreshing candour” of Hemingway’s naming
himself “in the world of the International Brigades, where no one’s name
seemed to be truthfully given.”{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=591}}{{efn|For Watson, the dispatch “seems, in fact, on the verge of becoming a story” (29).}}

A year later Hemingway’s “Tortosa Calmly Awaits Assault” resists admitting
the city’s imminent fall. Yet it does so anyway, by subtly alluding to the
wartime rhetoric of sacrificed blood irrigating the earth and rejuvenating
Spain. Such rhetoric was common during the war, appearing in speeches,
print, and poetry. Many of the poems in Cary Nelson’s anthology ''The Wound
and the Dream: Sixty Years of American Poems about the Civil War'' join in the
Spanish and international chorus’s general connection between Republican
soldiers and the land, and the particular singing of their dead nourishing
the land. We find such language in La Pasionaria’s farewell address to the International Brigades, her epilogue to ''The Book of the XV Brigade'', and Hemingway’s famous eulogy “On the American Dead in Spain”: “For our dead are
a part of the earth of Spain now and the earth of Spain can never die. Each
winter it will seem to die and each spring it will come alive again. Our dead
will live with it forever.”{{sfn|Nelson|1994|p=3}}{{efn| Reprinted in Bruccoli 76 and Nelson, Remembering 37 (the drafts at the JFK are titled “The Dead at Jarama”). In addition to the poems in Nelson’s anthology, see the excerpt from Boris Todrin’s “Spanish Sowing” in Guttmann (Wounded 179–180).}} The Tortosa dispatch implies the deaths of{{pg|435|436}}many Republican soldiers in its final paragraph’s description of the newborn onions:
<blockquote>The artillery was picking up a little now. Two came in at a fairly useful place and as the smoke blew away ahead and settled through the trees, you picked an armful of spring onions from a field beside the trail that led to the Tortosa road. They were the first onions of the spring and peeling one I found they were plump white and not too strong. The Ebro Delta has a fine rich land, and where the onions grow, tomorrow will be a battle.
{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=84}}</blockquote>

The echo is quiet, and perhaps unconscious, but there nevertheless. The opening boastfulness of “American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents”
should be taken somewhat ironically. The dispatch begins by announcing
that for “two days we have been doing the most dangerous thing
you can do in this war. That is keep close behind an unstabilized line where
the enemy are attacking with mechanized forces.” Then, a few pages later,
we learn about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade survivors of the spring 1938
Nationalist offensive that took Bob Merriman and eventually reached the
Mediterranean Sea. Reading about these survivors creeping through enemy
camps, stepping on a sleeping German soldier’s hand, sprinting “across an
open field toward the Ebro bank and being sniped at by artillery controlled
by an observation plane overhead” and then “the desperate swimming of
the Ebro” naked, we are asked to place the correspondent’s plight in due perspective.{{sfn|Watson|1988|pp=71-2}} This story certainly escapes the charge of a monotonous
battle and bombing scene; its switch from apparently boastful to
awe-struck witness feels almost deliberately self-conscious. Other choice selfironic
moments come in the dispatches of that pre-Teruel quiet fall of 1938.
The one titled “Hemingway, Covering War, Tells of Brush with Death” has little
to report from Madrid other than the new aftershave brand he is trying.
In “Loyalists’ Drive Seen Progressing as Planned,” he writes that “Shells are
all much the same and if they don’t hit you there is no story and if they do
you won’t have to write it.” {{sfn|Watson|1988|p=58}}

Hemingway’s dispatches are sometimes monotonous because his war was
Usually monotonous—as wars are most of the time. It should also be kept in
mind that scholars reviewing Hemingway’s NANA dispatches one after{{pg|436|437}}another do not relive the original reading experience. Hemingway wrote dispatches sporadically, papers did not run all of his dispatches, papers edited and cut them, and readers read at least a couple of papers’ worth of other articles in between. He told Edmund Wilson as much in defending himself against Wilson’s critique of the selected (and heavily edited and cut) dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'' without his consent: “If you are being paid to be shot at and write about it you are supposed to mention the shooting. [. . .] But I do not go in for re-printing journalism.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}

If we can in this way better understand his style, and at least explain it if
not excuse it, we similarly ought to try to contextualize—and perhaps
excuse—the moral problem. The two issues here are the specific condemnation
of Hemingway’s silence about Republican atrocities and the general
question of biased reporting (the latter of which has already partially been
addressed).

Hemingway knew, as Donaldson writes, that mentioning the atrocities
“would arouse anticommunist sentiments back in the States and effectively
undermine any possibility of American intervention.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=394}} It is also doubtful
that reporting them would have stopped them. But reporting Republican
atrocities from Spain was not possible for the simple reason that all dispatches
went through a government censor. Matthews cabled his editors
from Paris in May 1937 to tell them that “censorship does not permit us to
say when the ‘telefonica’ is hit. So whenever you see reference in my
despatches [sic] to ‘an important building in the center of the city’ or words
to that effect, the cable desk can know that it is the telefonica.” {{sfn|Matthews|1937c|p=}} As already noted, by July he would cable “CENSORSHIP
STRICTER” as the ban on mentioning internationals went into effect. {{sfn|Matthews|1937d|p=}}{{sfn|Matthews|1937e|p=}} Cowles’ memoir confirms the
aggressive censorship, observing that it limited journalists to exactly the kind of material Hemingway wrote about:
<blockquote>There were frequent attempts to “beat the censor” by employing American slang expressions, but this came to an end when a Canadian girl joined the staff. The International Brigades were not allowed to be publicized; no reference could be made to Russian armaments, and buildings and streets which suffered
bombardments could not be identified.</blockquote>{{pg|437|438}}<blockquote>It was only in the realm of the human interest story that the journalists had a free hand. They could describe bombardments to their heart’s content.{{sfn|Cowles|1941|p=20}}</blockquote>
Hemingway and everyone else—to reserve incrimination for Hemingway is hardly just. No correspondent covering Republican Spain reported suspicious imprisonments and disappearances by government agents.

Hemingway, through Joris Ivens and ''The Spanish Earth'' project, had better
access to officials than most. Had he been able somehow to report such
activity, he would have lost that access and would probably have been kicked
out of the country. His fame would have likely prevented his own officially
sponsored disappearance, though he still worried, especially as so many of
such crimes on the Republican side occurred from free agents. When Jasper
Wood printed the anarchist F.A.I. banner in the limited edition book version
of ''The Spanish Earth'', Hemingway expressed his anxieties bluntly in a letter
to Jasper on August 20, 1938. It is hardly “petulant,” he scolded, “not to wish
to be shot.”{{sfn|Davison|1988|p=128}} Hostility in the Republic against the anarchists
ran high; after the Barcelona May Day conflict, the government’s foreign
minister told U.S. Ambassador Claude Bowers that “anarchist revolt
throughout Catalonia and not only expected but welcomed as an opportunity
to liquidate the anarchists who have been hostile from the beginning.”
{{sfn|NA|1954|p=292}}{{efn| The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State, 5 May 1937.}}

It is possible that Hemingway’s dispatch stating that “not one friend [. . .]
has been executed or is missing” was his clever means of reporting
the rumors and indeed the general fact while evading the censors, as in this very dispatch he acknowledged the presence of a censor after a bombardment.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=34}}
Matthews, on the other hand, never found a way to mention the
censors or admit even the possibility of people gone missing in the Republic.
Peter Moreira has observed that in a 1943 dispatch Hemingway related a remark by a British officer about the Chinese Nationalist government’s being
“hopeless on the offensive” because censorship “prevented American reporters
From actually saying that the Nationalists wouldn’t attack, surmising that by telling this anecdote Hemingway could sneak such a judgment into
his reports.”{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=77}} In Spain, censors aside, the eyewitness standard and his
own safety and continuing ability to report the war, and, yes, his passionate
support of the government contributed to his decision. He could have written
about government abuses from the states, but then could not return to{{pg|438|439}}cover the war and support the cause—a justification other journalists, those who did not return after the spring of 1937, did not enjoy. In his mind too, knowing what he heard of fascist atrocities, any reportage against the government lessening its chances of victory through killing hopes of increased international aid would have led to more deaths at Franco’s hands that the much smaller number inspired by fifth column paranoia.{{efn|''Hemingway’s Second War'' discusses in greater depth Hemingway’s politics and his falling out
with John Dos Passos over the execution of José Robles}}.

The accusation that Hemingway did not write about Republican atrocities
because he was saving it for his fiction I find baseless (Knightley 232;
Baker 402).{{sfn|Knightley|2004|p=232}}{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=402}}{{efn|Hemingway’s casual comment to colleagues calling dibs on Pepe Quintanilla, the executioner of
Madrid, is not sufficient evidence.}}Carolyn Moorehead, in her biography of Martha Gellhorn, describes
the climate for the Madrid correspondents that first spring: “And so,
day by day, the correspondents walked a thin and nervous line between truth,
evasions, and propaganda, telling one another that though it was not all right
if things were made up and presented as true, it was acceptable to describe
what you wanted, provided it was true and provided your readers were aware
of your position.”{{sfn|Moorehead|2003|p=125}} My own sense is that they did not walk the line quite
so nervously; their passionate commitment, and their principles of position
disclosure and the eyewitness standard, made that walk relatively easy.

The problem of ''committed journalism'', even sixty years later, has not been
resolved—as anyone paying attention to the media and world affairs well
knows. One person’s truth is another person’s propaganda. Certainly, as
Knightley notes, reporting from “the heart” affects one’s judgment.{{sfn|Knightley|2004|pp=234-5}}
Yet to attempt “balance,” per the edits to Matthews’ Guadalajara piece, betrays
one’s believed truth. Furthermore, the kind of reporting done by the
correspondents with the Republic—committed, one-sided, optimistic,
heroic, human interest work by embedded writers—would be practiced
widely and without reserve during World War II. Such narrative journalism,
with roots in Louise May Alcott’s “Hospital Sketches” series published in the
''Boston Commonwealth'', and more immediately in 1930s social documentary
writing whose “essence” is “not information”, anticipated postwar
new journalism’s adoption of novelistic narrative technique for nonfiction
which culminated with such wartime books as Norman Mailer’s ''Armies of
the Night'' and Michael Herr’s ''Dispatches''.{{sfn|Stott|1986|p=11}} Some of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches
fall in this line of development.

Today we might categorize such writing under the awkward umbrella
term ''creative nonfiction''. That term certainly fits the mixed bag of nonfiction
narratives and commentaries Hemingway published during the war in
Ken magazine. These pieces are essays, not journalism, several of which{{pg|439|440}}directly appeal for support for the Republic, and most of which really deal
with the approaching world war. ''Ken'' wanted “precisely the kind of opinion
articles he could not write for NANA.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=433}} His article, “The
Cardinal Picks a Winner,” shows a photo of a row of dead children from
Barcelona and another one with Nationalist officers saluting and Catholic officials
with raised hands, apparently making the fascist salute as well. He
ends ironically: “So I ''don’t believe'' the people shown in the photo can really
be making it. I would rather prefer to think that the photograph was faked.”
{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=436}} When Hemingway argues in “A Program for U.S. Realism” that the
United States should stay out of the next war except to stuff its pockets
through arms sales, one has to wonder, given his call and the democratic nations’
failure to save Spain, if we are to sniff sarcasm here.

The language of the dispatches, with their corrective intent against
Franco’s propaganda, does risk propagandizing. Hemingway’s optimism and
anti-fascism certainly colored his correspondence work. His criticism of the
anarchist and POUM militia for their inactivity on the Aragon front, for example,
sounds a lot like the Spanish Communist Party’s.{{efn|It at least sounds almost exactly like Dolores Ibarruri in her memoir. To the anarchists’ complaint
that they had no arms, she retorts “that they had more arms than did many other fronts. . . .
What they didn’t have and what they were constantly demanding were airplanes and tanks .And
they didn’t have them because the Republic government didn’t have them either, except for those
it received as aid from the Soviet Union” (238–284). Yet the various Catalonia militia were not
as well equipped with small arms as the more regular Popular Army units, and because of the
terrain tanks and planes were in fact necessary.}}
But unlike
Matthews, Hemingway limited his reports within the Republic to military
matters. Hemingway may have generally condemned the anarchists in his
nonfiction, considering their activity as hampering the war effort, but he
never repeated the accusation of their collaboration with the rebels, as
Matthews had done. And when Hemingway commented on the Bareclona
crisis, he referred only to the government—not the communists, as
Matthews had done.{{efn|Hemingway’s comments in “Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win” NANA staff
correspondent dispatch. Though arguably he was propagandizing by hiding the communist influence—
to mention the communists to an American audience would not gain sympathy for the
cause.}}Nor did he write articles asserting the limited role of
the communists in the government, or explaining Spanish anarchism, also
as Matthews had done.{{efn|An article on the communists’ limited role appeared in late November 1937, as discussed in a
missive from The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State on 2
Dec. 1937 (United States 461). Matthews’ “Anarchism: Spain’s Enigma” appeared in the New York
Times 22 Aug. 1937: 6, 14.}}

During one of Hemingway’s stateside breaks between trips to Spain, his
children asked if he was a “tool” of Stalin, an accusation tossed by a schoolmate
who, presumably parroting his or her parents, probably understood
the term no better than Hemingway’s children. {{sfn|Hemingway|nd|p=}}
Hemingway believed in the Republic’s potential, but he was never a dupe of
the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) or Comintern. As did many others, he
accepted PCE’s presence in the government for its discipline and organization
toward winning the war, and he understood the material necessity for
Comintern’s support. It should also be noted, as historians Hugh Thomas
and Helen Graham have reminded us, that the communism associated with
the Republic wasn’t particularly communist anyway.{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=628}}{{sfn|Graham|2002|p=184}} {{pg|440|441}}

Hemingway declined to follow Joris Ivens’ suggestion that he write a
dispatch on the significant role of the political commissars in the Republican
military, even though that would have meant
featuring his brave new friend Gustav Regler.{{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=}} Hemingway also, in a letter
justifying his work to Jack Wheeler at NANA, wrote about choosing not to
send a dispatch he had written because it might strike readers as propaganda
“no matter how true” (Letter to Jack Wheeler).{{sfn|Hemingway|1938b|p=}}

Hemingway went to Spain to see the war himself and to support the Republic
through his ambulance fund. The paychecks from NANA and the
fundraising from ''The Spanish Earth'' helped. Whatever propagandistic streak
colors the dispatches pales in comparison to the documentary. The filmmaker,
Joris Ivens, was well established in European communist circles. The
documentary genre then and now has occupied a slippery position between
the extremes of impossible-to-achieve empirical nonfiction and of the outright
fictionalized. Evaluations of Hemingway’s journalism are informed by
knowledge of ''The Spanish Earth'' and the ''Ken'' essays to the detriment of the
journalism. And the very nature of the slippery documentary genre may enable
the film to escape opprobrium. It wasn’t reportage; it was altogether
something else. But for that matter, Hemingway’s dispatches weren’t purely
reportage either, and if not ''altogether'' something else, still something else,
and should be reckoned with accordingly.

=== Notes ===
{{notelist}}
===Citations===
{{reflist}}
===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker
|first=Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Bruccoli |first=Matthew |date=2006 |title=Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame |url= |location=Columbia |publisher=U of South Caronia P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Cowles |first=Virginia |date=1941 |title=Looking for Trouble |url= |location=New York
|publisher=Harper & Brothers |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Davison |first=Richard Allan |title=The Publication of Hemingway’s The Spanish Earth: An Untold Story |url= |journal=Hemingway Review
|volume=7.2 |issue= |date=1988
|pages=122-130 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson
|first=Scott |date=2009 |title=Fitzgerald & Hemingway: Works and Days |url= |location=New York |publisher=Columbia UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Franklin |first=Sidney |date=1952 |title=Bullfighter from Brooklyn |url= |location=New York |publisher=Prentice-Hall |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Graham |first=Helen |date=2002 |title=The Spanish Republic at War 1936-1939 |url= |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Guttmann |first=Allen |date=1962 |title=The Wound in the Heart: American and the Spanish Civil War |url= |location=New York |publisher=Free Press of Glencoe |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1967 |title=By-Line: Ernest Hemingway |url= |location=New York |publisher=Scibner |pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Trogdon
|editor-first=Robert W.
|author-mask=1
|title=Fascism is a Lie
|url=
|journal=Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference |volume==
|issue=
|date=2002
|pages=193-6
|location=New York
|publisher=Carroll & Graf
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 May 1937
|chapter=Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=nd
|chapter=The Home Front
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938a
|chapter=Letter to Edmund Wilson
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=2 June 1938b
|chapter=Letter to Jack Wheeler
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=14 Feb 1939
|chapter=On the American Dead in Spain
|title=TS. New Masses
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Baker
|editor-first=Carlos
|author-mask=1
|date=2003
|chapter=The Hadely Mowrer
|title=Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Scribner
|pages=462-3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ibarruri
|first=Dolores
|date=1966
|title=They Shall Not Pass: The Autobiography of La Pasionaria
|url=
|location=United States
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|date=1969
|title=The Camera and I
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|author-mask=1
|date=26 Apr 1937
|chapter=Letter to Ernest Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|date=20 Nov 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Bertrand Weaver
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=12 Oct 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=25 Apr 1939
|chapter=Letter to M.B. Tenney
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Apr 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Knightley
|first=Phillip
|date=2004
|title=The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq
|url=
|location=Baltimore
|publisher=John Hopkins
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=
|date=9 Apr 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=TS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=11 Apr 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=8 May 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=6 July 1937d
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=July 1937e
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=22 March 1939
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 9
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=
|date=20 May 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=20 Dec 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 5
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Sep 1937c
|chapter=Note to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moorehead
|first=Caroline
|date=2003
|title=Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Henry Holt
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moreira
|first=Peter
|date=2006
|title=Hemingway on the China Front: His WWII Spy Mission with Martha Gellhorn
|url=
|location=Washington D.C.
|publisher=Potomac Books
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|date=5 Feb 1937
|chapter=Promotion Box: Hemingway, For Immediate Release
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|author-mask=1
|date=4 Apr 1938
|chapter=Promotion Box: American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|editor-last=Nelson
|editor-first=Card
|date=1994
|title=Remembering Spain: Hemingway’s Civil War Eulogy and the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
|url=
|location=Urbana
|publisher=U of Illinois
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Reynolds
|first=Michael
|date=1989
|title=Hemingway: The Paris Years
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Norton
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Stott
|first=William
|date=1986
|title=Documentary Expression and Thirties America
|url=
|location=Chicago
|publisher=U of Chicago P
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Thomas
|first=Hugh
|date=2001
|title=The Spanish Civil War, Rev. ed.
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Modern Library
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine
|last=''Two Wars and More to Come''
|first=
|date=24 Jan 1938
|title=Best Sellers of the Week Here and Elsewhere
|type=Advertisement
|url=
|magazine=New York Times
|pages=
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=NA
|first=
|title=United States. Dept. of State
|url=
|journal= Foreign Relations of the Untied States, 1937 |volume==1
|issue=General
|date=1954
|pages=
|location=Washington
|publisher=GPO
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Watson
|first=William Braasch
|title=Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches
|url=
|journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=7.2
|issue=
|date=1988
|pages=4-121
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Wheeler
|first=John H.
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938
|chapter=Letter to Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection, Box 3 Folder 14
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}

{{refend}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches

2025-04-19T21:23:22Z

MerAtticus: added end of page 339

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
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{{byline|last=Vernon |first=Alex |abstract=The Spanish Civil War began in July 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally-restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy. By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches.}}

{{dc|dc=T|HE SPANISH CIVIL WAR BEGAN ON}} 17-18 JULY, 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy, to collaborate with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens on the pro-Republican documentary ''The Spanish Earth'', and to pursue his fledgling love affair with Martha Gellhorn.

By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches for NANA.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=4}}{{efn|Quotations from the NANA dispatches follow the Diplomatic Text established by William Braasch Watson’s “Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches.” I prefer NANA’s titles rather than Watson’s. For my disagreements with some of Watson’s datings, see my comments on specific dispatches in ''Hemingway’s Second War.''}}The secondary sources habitually judge them inferior journalism. Carlos Baker in the first Hemingway biography, for example, complains that the dialogue was “so heavily stamped with personal mannerisms as to be of doubtful authenticity.” Baker sees a “curious monotony in his stories of battles and bombardments,” a gratuitous use of graphic imagery “to shock his readers,” and “a note of triumphant boastfulness” in reporting proximity to danger. He also faults Hemingway for “often hint[ing] he was alone when in fact he was usually with Martha Gellhorn, Matthews, and Delmer.” Hemingway lacked Dos Passos’ “eye for telling details” and the “meticulous exactitude and inclusiveness that characterized the best work of Herbert Matthews and Sefton Delmer.”{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}

Philip Knightley’s ''The First Casualty'', the standard history of war correspondence, paraphrases Baker but with a trouncing final judgment:{{pg|427|428}}Hemingway’s “performance as a war correspondent was abysmally bad.” But Knightley goes beyond “technical” dissatisfaction to moral condemnation. Not just “unjustifiably optimistic”—an excusable offense—Hemingway’s reporting was “unforgivable” in its “total failure to report the Communist persecution, imprisonment, and summary execution of ‘untrustworthy elements’ on the Republican side, when he knew this was happening and when disclosing it might well have prevented further horrors like this.”
{{sfn|Knightley|2004 |pp=231–32}}{{efn|In my view, Knightley does not sufficiently acknowledge his paraphrasing of Baker.}}

Such criticisms in the final analysis might bear out. As Scott Donaldson writes, Hemingway advanced the Republican cause in his dispatches by eliciting “the deepest possible feelings of horror and of sympathy for the victims” of the Madrid bombardment; his “undue optimism” often “ignored Loyalist defeats and exaggerated the importance of its victories”; and “he repeatedly called attention to the participation of Italians and Germans on Franco’s side.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=426}} It also served as a recruitment tool—Milton Wolff, for example, acknowledged the strong influence Hemingway’s dispatches had on his decision to volunteer. Nevertheless, I think it a worthwhile exercise to attend a little more studiously to Hemingway’s dispatches, their context, and their artistry. I don’t necessarily intend to reverse the general opinion of the correspondence, only to achieve a better and more sympathetic understanding.

Herbert Matthews’ reporting for the ''New York Times'' will serve as a convenient comparison for two reasons. First, because both Baker and Knightley use Matthews’ journalism as the standard of excellence to pass judgment on Hemingway’s; and second, because the two worked practically side-by-side, seeing and reporting on many of the same events. In fact so closely did they work together that NANA sometimes complained that the ''Times'' was not buying Hemingway’s pieces because they resembled Matthews,’ and at one point Matthews’ own editors at the Times suspected him of plagiarizing Hemingway.{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|pp=411, 420}} A note from Matthews’ assigned editor Raymond McCaw provides, in two columns, seven quite similar passages from Hemingway’s Aragon front dispatches of September 13 and 14 with Matthews’ of September 14, with a penciled note at the bottom: “a deadly parallel if you ask me.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937c|p=}} Edwin James, the managing editor and McCaw’s boss, eventually agreed with Matthews’ defense: “It is quite apparent that you did not file any duplicate of the Hemingway story, or vice versa. As I understand it, the similarity arose from the fact that you{{pg|428|429}}both went to see the same show and saw it at the same time [sic], under the same conditions.”{{sfn|James|1937b|p=}}

Matthews’ dispatches ring of Republican bias as much if not more than anything Hemingway ever filed. The ''Times'' received many letters to the editor complaining about Matthews’ undisguised politics, which also gave serious concern to some of his editors. His description of the Republican May 1937 infighting in Barcelona is a striking example of how his news veered into propaganda and shows just how much he passed along the government’s version of events. The government’s “BLOODLESS TRIUMPH FOUGHT WITH RECOGNIZEDWEAPONS OF DEMOCRACY” turned out to be blatantly false, as the government and the “COMMUNISTS [WHO] DISTINGUISHED THEMSELVES” resorted to violent suppression. His blaming the uprising on the anarchist CNT working as Franco operatives parrots the government’s and the communist party’s public position, even though both charges—that the anarchists precipitated the events and that they were under Nationalist direction—were also false. His dispatch’s optimistic close also equivocates the political reality: “NEW GOVERNMENT HAS TAKEN POWER WHICH APPEARS TOVE CONFIDENCE VAST MAJORITY SPANIARDS IN LOYALIST TERRITORY AND TIS HOPED WILL GAIN EQUAL CONFIDENCE ABROAD STOP VIOLENCE AND REVOLUTION BEEN REPUDIATED AND NEWAND FAR HOPEFULLER PERIOD SEEMS BEGINNING.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937a|p=}}The ''Times'', knowing full well the one-sided coverage of a correspondent writing from one side of the conflict, had a reporter on both sides: Matthews with the Republicans, and William Carney with the Nationalists. They got their facts right (or wrong) as often as the other, their editors concluded; and they inspired about the same number of letters of complaint.{{sfn|James|1937a|p=}}{sfn|James|1939|p=}}

Furthermore, Matthews’ dispatches received a great deal of substantive editorial revisions. One of Matthews’ Teruel reports had to be cut for length, as McCaw informed James: “This bird sent 2844 words on the same facts which Hemingway covered much better in less than half that number. I wonder if Matthews thinks the paper is thriving, and that cable tolls do not matter a damn. Of course, it had to be cut for space anyway.” McCaw most likely refers here to Matthews’ dispatch corresponding to Hemingway’s “The Attack on Teruel,” though Matthews’ account of the fall of Teruel is also much longer (and more long-winded) than Hemingway’s, and just as personal in terms of describing the dangers{{pg|429|430}} he faced. Indeed its length allows him to share even more of the action he endured.{{sfn|McCaw|1937b|p=}}

Raymond McCaw held a general professional disagreement with Matthews perhaps tainted with over zealousness. Whether a personal or political motive informed that disagreement can’t be determined from the evidence I’ve seen. It is also clear that McCaw’s charges bear some validity—that any responsible editor could have easily and reasonably taken issue where McCaw did. One of the more interesting examples concerns Matthews’ piece on Guadalajara. Because he only saw evidence on Franco’s side of Italian forces, he only reported on Italians. But the ''Times'' editors heard from other sources that German soldiers also participated in the March offensive. They thought it prudent, from this confusion, to change (nine times) “Italian” to “Rebel,” “the foe,” or “Insurgent.” When Matthews saw the published piece he wrote a strenuous objection. In some instances the editors changed paraphrased quotations from his sources. One large paragraph omitted by the editors stressed the first-hand nature of the information, and Matthews underlines the key words: “All day, at every place we stopped and no matter whom we talked to or what we saw, there was only one label—Italian. The dead bodies, the prisoners, the material of every kind, the men who had occupied Brihuega and then fled were Italian and nothing but Italian.” Here and elsewhere in his original story, Matthews emphasizes the “personal knowledge” of its information.{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}{{efn|James supported McCaw on these changes, though later acknowledged that altering quoted sources was perhaps unwarranted.{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}}}Yet Matthews did not report on the foreigners fighting for the Republic—it was in fact the Italian Garibali Battalion that routed Franco’s Italians. We might surmise government censorship behind this silence, though Matthews would not cable news of “CENSORSHIP STRICTER” and “BAN ON MENTIONING INTERNATIONALS INCLUDING AMERICANS INSTITUTED TODAY” until July.{{sfn|Matthews|1937b|p=}}Perhaps he cautiously self-censored, or politically self-censored for the same reasons the government would eventually ban mention. Still, his stridency about the omission of foreigners on one side is striking given his knowledge of their contribution to the other side. For this reason too, and his omission of other nationalities on the insurgent side, it seemed only fair to his editor “to stand on the statement that the majority of the Rebels were Italians and let it go at that.”{{sfn|James|1937c|p=}} A reasonable decision.

Throughout his correspondence to his editors and his several books,{{pg|430|431}}Matthews maintained a passionate defense of his eyewitness journalistic standard, a position those close to him understood. “Matthews never believed anything he had not seen with his own eyes,” Joris Ivens wrote. “He never saw his job as reporter as one that permitted him to sit in his hotel and read the handouts of the War Ministry.” {{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=112}} Sidney Franklin recalls that some writers wrote their pieces before arriving in Madrid, and came only for the “legitimacy” of the Madrid dateline.{{sfn|Franklin|1952|p=232}}And Matthews hated, on principle, having his name attached to an article that violated the integrity of his witness. The only way to achieve objectivity, for Matthews, was to acknowledge one’s subjective perspective. Writing to his publisher, Matthews argued that “the full documentary value” of his coverage was lost when the editors altered his submissions for “the apparent necessity of giving more or less equal space to both sides.”{{sfn|Matthews|1939|p=}}

As with Matthews, so too Hemingway. Indeed the commitment to subjectivity
fit quite well with Hemingway’s modernist aesthetics. If Hemingway
focused the dispatches on his perspective—on his own experience dodging
artillery—more than Matthews and more than most, he did so at least partially
to fulfill expectations. NANA approached him, after all, for his name
and personality as much as whatever he would write. Before he even left the
states it pitched him to potential publications, sending out a promotional release with text to be used alongside his forthcoming dispatches and suggesting
they include a photograph: “Mr. Hemingway’s assignment is to get both from the bombed towns and bombed trenches the human story of the war, not just an account of the game being played by general staffs with pins
and a map.”{{sfn|NANA|1937|p=}}{{ NANA also released each individual dispatch with a one-sentence “precede” about the “famous” or “noted” author. Ernest Hemingway was not writing as Herbert Mathews, ace reporter; Hemingway was writing as Ernest Hemingway, famous author of novels and stories well known to be drawn from his own experiences.

That he understood this to be his assignment is further evidenced by a
cable Matthews sent to his ''Times'' editors on April 9, 1937, concerning the
Loyalist attack: “WORKED CONJOINTL WITH HEMINGWAY TODAY HE SENDING EYEWITNESS DESCRIPTION WHILE EYE SENT GENERAL STRATEGY.”{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}When a year later the ''Times'' asked NANA to ensure Hemingway’s reports differed from Matthews, NANA complied by asking Hemingway “to emphasize color rather than straight reporting” not necessarily out of dissatisfaction with Hemingway’s reportage as Baker contends,{{efn|Baker’s notes date the Times request to NANA as 8 Apr. 1938, and NANA’s to Hemingway as 15
Apr. 1938 (Princeton University, Firestone Library: Box 18, Folder 8 “1938”), the date of “The Bombing of Tortosa” dispatch.}} but to increase{{pg|431|432}}the chance of selling to the ''Times'' and indeed to ensure the spirit of NANA’s original arrangement with Hemingway. {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}Far from dissatisfied, NANA wrote Hemingway at the end of August 1938 a letter of agreement for his coverage of “a general European war” should it break out, “written in your colorful style” (Hemingway was in Paris, on his way to Spain for the last time during the war).{{sfn|Wheeler|1938|p=}}When Edmund Wilson criticized the selected dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'', Hemingway wrote him that “I was paid to write what are called ‘eye witness’ accounts . . .what is called, or was asked for as ‘color stuff.’ Most of such stuff is faked. Mine was not. It was straight reporting and the personal stuff was what had been asked for by the editors. “Wilson’s estimation was also based upon ''Fact’s'' inclusion of the “The Old Man at the Bridge” story from ''Ken'', “not a news dispatch” at all.{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}Speaking at Carnegie Hall before the showing of a rough cut of ''The Spanish Earth'', shortly after his first trip to Spain and so very much in the context of his wartime work, Hemingway defined the writer’s problem as “project[ing] [what is true] in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2002|p=193}}

Personal, anecdotal journalism had been Hemingway’s signature style from his earliest days filing reports, in the early 1920s from Paris, when his editor at the ''Toronto Star Weekly'' “encouraged [. . .] what Hemingway did best: write about himself in the act of being a reporter.”{{sfn|Reynolds|1989|p=45}}How could he expect that NANA would expect anything else, if indeed NANA did expect anything else? In the Spanish Civil War he at least maintained his eyewitness posture; in World War II, however, he couldn’t keep himself out. His first piece, about D-Day, begins, “No one remembers the date of the Battle of Shiloh. But the day ''we took'' Fox Green beach was the sixth of June, and the wind was blowing hard out of the northwest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1967|p=340}}His venue too—''Collier’s'' magazine—and the fact that he had not written anything in three years further contributed to the story-like nature of the WWII stories, in which he figured as a protagonist—not to mention the stories and involvement he couldn’t write about, armed and running around France more of a free agent than his guerilla-hero Robert Jordan ever was (though he began to transform these experiences into fiction in several unpublished stories). In wartime China in 1943, filing articles for Ralph Ingersoll’s short-lived ''PM'' New York afternoon daily, Hemingway did not even care to be called a news reporter.{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=99}}

It should be mentioned that Hemingway and Matthews enjoyed a great{{pg|432|433}}friendship and working relationship. Hemingway usually brought Matthews, who did not have a car, on his excursions. When Matthews left Madrid for a break in mid April 1937, he had already ensured Hemingway would provide coverage to the ''Times'' through NANA. For one thing, Hemingway did not have to worry about Matthews as a rival for the history books. He could endorse his friends’ book, ''Two Wars and More to Come'', and praise him as “the ablest and the bravest war correspondent writing today “who “when the fakers are all dead [. . .] will be read in the schools” (Advertisement 21) because Matthews posed no threat to Hemingway’s own chances to be read in the schools. The only brief Hemingway ever expressed he really reserved for Matthews’ editors, for not wanting his Teruel street-fighting story and for cutting references to himself in Matthews’ Teruel dispatches so that it appeared only Matthews had been there.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=462}}

As for Hemingway’s neglecting to name everyone with him for every story, the ''Times'' cutting of his name suggests that such exactitude was hardly a priority. A paper had no incentive for announcing the fact that a competitor’s
correspondent stood beside its own to see and report the same
events. NANA changed at least one vague Hemingway “we,” which admits
to the presence of others, to “this correspondent”
—we can hardly fault Hemingway for working in the spirit of his
employer’s standards.{{sfn|NANA|1938|p=}}{{efn|“we” in typescript and radiogram (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 1 and Folder 25).}} Do readers care that Matthews, Delmer, Gellhorn,
and others were there? The story’s effect and the limited word count also
weighed against such roll calls. One editor chose not to clutter the dispatch
on the great retreat across the Ebro with all the names of the American International Brigade volunteers Hemingway encountered, an omission of
Content more far serious than that of omitted correspondent names.{{efn| Radiogram insert dateline 4 April 1938 (HRC: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 25).}} Hemingway
often gave the names of the reporters with him, such as at Teruel;
nor was he the only reporter to sometimes neglect to do so. Martha Gellhorn,
for example, used a vague “we” and singled herself out as the primary
participant in some of her stories.

By using first-person reportage Hemingway—and Matthews and Gellhorn And most of the group covering the war—were operating solidly within
convention. William Stott, in ''Documentary Expression and Thirties America'',
calls this first-person ''participant observer'' technique “the most common sort
of documentary reportage in the thirties” that worked “by vicarious persuasion:
the writer partook of the events he reported and bared his feelings
and attitudes to influence the reader’s own.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=178-9}}{{efn|He specifically includes Hemingway et al (180).}} Stott also observes {{pg|433|434}}another technique to enable documentary reportage to “talk to us, and convince us that we, our deepest interests, are engaged,” in the use of the second person: “Thirties documentaries constantly address ‘you,’ the ‘you’ who is we the audience, and exhorts, wheedles, begs us to identify, pity, participate.” His examples include Dorothy Parker’s Spanish Civil War writing, and Hemingway’s 1935 “First-Hand Report on the Florida Hurricane.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=27-8}} A number of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches employ the second-person as a way of bringing the reader along for the ride.

Hemingway’s dispatches used personal pronouns more artfully than is
generally recognized. “A New Kind of War,” which William Braasch Watson
notes as having been “[w]ritten with more care and imagination” than its
predecessors, begins in second person: “The window of the hotel is open
and, as you lie in bed, you hear the firing in the front line seventeen blocks
away.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=29}} He takes “you” outside, to see the damage and the dead from the bombing. “Someone makes a joke about missing teeth and someone else says not to make that joke. And everyone has the feeling that characterizes war. It wasn’t me, see? It wasn’t me.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} The tension between the first person and second-person pronouns—the movement toward identification with “you” and the insistence that “it wasn’t me”—continues in the next line. Here the reader is at once still in the narrator’s shoes, but strangely distanced from the narrator through biographical tidbit and, at the same time, asked
to see himself in the enemy: “The Italian dead up on the Guadalajara weren’t
you although Italian dead, because of where you had spent your boyhood,
always seemed, still, like Our Dead.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} It is worth quoting at length the dispatch’s transition to first person:<blockquote>
After the shell that lit on the sidewalk in front of the hotel you got a beautiful double corner room on that side, twice the size of the one you’d had, for less than a dollar. It wasn’t me they killed. See? No. Not me. It wasn’t me anymore.

Then in a hospital given by the American Friends of Spanish Democracy located out behind the Morata front along the road
to Valencia they said, “Raven wants to see you.”

“Do I know him?”

“I don’t think so,” they said. “But he wants to see you.”

“Where is he?”

“Upstairs.”{{pg|434|435}}In the room upstairs they are giving a blood transfusion to a man with a very gray face who lay on a cot with his arm out looking away from the gurgling bottle and moaning in a very impersonal way. He moaned mechanically and at regular intervals and it did not seem to be him that made the sound. His lips did not move.

“Where’s Raven?” I asked.

“I’m here,” said Raven.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=31}}</blockquote>The piece simply could not have sustained the second-person for the remaining
five pages. More significantly, for this deeply personal exchange between
the writer and the faceless, eyeless soldier, Hemingway could not hide
in the rhetorical device of the second-person. In the process, he effects a reversal
of the usual pronoun game; instead of identifying with the all embracing
“you,” we leave that trick behind and become fully attached to
the narratorial “I” as ourselves, as we might not have been had the article
begun in the first person. And even as the narrator identifies himself by name
for the only time in any of the dispatches—“Hemingway,” and later
“Ernest”—as decidedly not ourselves. We do not say, ''It isn’t me''. The historian
Hugh Thomas notes “the refreshing candour” of Hemingway’s naming
himself “in the world of the International Brigades, where no one’s name
seemed to be truthfully given.”{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=591}}{{efn|For Watson, the dispatch “seems, in fact, on the verge of becoming a story” (29).}}

A year later Hemingway’s “Tortosa Calmly Awaits Assault” resists admitting
the city’s imminent fall. Yet it does so anyway, by subtly alluding to the
wartime rhetoric of sacrificed blood irrigating the earth and rejuvenating
Spain. Such rhetoric was common during the war, appearing in speeches,
print, and poetry. Many of the poems in Cary Nelson’s anthology ''The Wound
and the Dream: Sixty Years of American Poems about the Civil War'' join in the
Spanish and international chorus’s general connection between Republican
soldiers and the land, and the particular singing of their dead nourishing
the land. We find such language in La Pasionaria’s farewell address to the International Brigades, her epilogue to ''The Book of the XV Brigade'', and Hemingway’s famous eulogy “On the American Dead in Spain”: “For our dead are
a part of the earth of Spain now and the earth of Spain can never die. Each
winter it will seem to die and each spring it will come alive again. Our dead
will live with it forever.”{{sfn|Nelson|1994|p=3}}{{efn| Reprinted in Bruccoli 76 and Nelson, Remembering 37 (the drafts at the JFK are titled “The Dead at Jarama”). In addition to the poems in Nelson’s anthology, see the excerpt from Boris Todrin’s “Spanish Sowing” in Guttmann (Wounded 179–180).}} The Tortosa dispatch implies the deaths of{{pg|435|436}}many Republican soldiers in its final paragraph’s description of the newborn onions:
<blockquote>The artillery was picking up a little now. Two came in at a fairly useful place and as the smoke blew away ahead and settled through the trees, you picked an armful of spring onions from a field beside the trail that led to the Tortosa road. They were the first onions of the spring and peeling one I found they were plump white and not too strong. The Ebro Delta has a fine rich land, and where the onions grow, tomorrow will be a battle.
{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=84}}</blockquote>

The echo is quiet, and perhaps unconscious, but there nevertheless. The opening boastfulness of “American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents”
should be taken somewhat ironically. The dispatch begins by announcing
that for “two days we have been doing the most dangerous thing
you can do in this war. That is keep close behind an unstabilized line where
the enemy are attacking with mechanized forces.” Then, a few pages later,
we learn about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade survivors of the spring 1938
Nationalist offensive that took Bob Merriman and eventually reached the
Mediterranean Sea. Reading about these survivors creeping through enemy
camps, stepping on a sleeping German soldier’s hand, sprinting “across an
open field toward the Ebro bank and being sniped at by artillery controlled
by an observation plane overhead” and then “the desperate swimming of
the Ebro” naked, we are asked to place the correspondent’s plight in due perspective.{{sfn|Watson|1988|pp=71-2}} This story certainly escapes the charge of a monotonous
battle and bombing scene; its switch from apparently boastful to
awe-struck witness feels almost deliberately self-conscious. Other choice selfironic
moments come in the dispatches of that pre-Teruel quiet fall of 1938.
The one titled “Hemingway, Covering War, Tells of Brush with Death” has little
to report from Madrid other than the new aftershave brand he is trying.
In “Loyalists’ Drive Seen Progressing as Planned,” he writes that “Shells are
all much the same and if they don’t hit you there is no story and if they do
you won’t have to write it.” {{sfn|Watson|1988|p=58}}

Hemingway’s dispatches are sometimes monotonous because his war was
Usually monotonous—as wars are most of the time. It should also be kept in
mind that scholars reviewing Hemingway’s NANA dispatches one after{{pg|436|437}}another do not relive the original reading experience. Hemingway wrote dispatches sporadically, papers did not run all of his dispatches, papers edited and cut them, and readers read at least a couple of papers’ worth of other articles in between. He told Edmund Wilson as much in defending himself against Wilson’s critique of the selected (and heavily edited and cut) dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'' without his consent: “If you are being paid to be shot at and write about it you are supposed to mention the shooting. [. . .] But I do not go in for re-printing journalism.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}

If we can in this way better understand his style, and at least explain it if
not excuse it, we similarly ought to try to contextualize—and perhaps
excuse—the moral problem. The two issues here are the specific condemnation
of Hemingway’s silence about Republican atrocities and the general
question of biased reporting (the latter of which has already partially been
addressed).

Hemingway knew, as Donaldson writes, that mentioning the atrocities
“would arouse anticommunist sentiments back in the States and effectively
undermine any possibility of American intervention.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=394}} It is also doubtful
that reporting them would have stopped them. But reporting Republican
atrocities from Spain was not possible for the simple reason that all dispatches
went through a government censor. Matthews cabled his editors
from Paris in May 1937 to tell them that “censorship does not permit us to
say when the ‘telefonica’ is hit. So whenever you see reference in my
despatches [sic] to ‘an important building in the center of the city’ or words
to that effect, the cable desk can know that it is the telefonica.” {{sfn|Matthews|1937c|p=}} As already noted, by July he would cable “CENSORSHIP
STRICTER” as the ban on mentioning internationals went into effect. {{sfn|Matthews|1937d|p=}}{{sfn|Matthews|1937e|p=}} Cowles’ memoir confirms the
aggressive censorship, observing that it limited journalists to exactly the kind of material Hemingway wrote about:
<blockquote>There were frequent attempts to “beat the censor” by employing American slang expressions, but this came to an end when a Canadian girl joined the staff. The International Brigades were not allowed to be publicized; no reference could be made to Russian armaments, and buildings and streets which suffered
bombardments could not be identified.</blockquote>{{pg|437|438}}<blockquote>It was only in the realm of the human interest story that the journalists had a free hand. They could describe bombardments to their heart’s content.{{sfn|Cowles|1941|p=20}}</blockquote>
Hemingway and everyone else—to reserve incrimination for Hemingway is hardly just. No correspondent covering Republican Spain reported suspicious imprisonments and disappearances by government agents.

Hemingway, through Joris Ivens and ''The Spanish Earth'' project, had better
access to officials than most. Had he been able somehow to report such
activity, he would have lost that access and would probably have been kicked
out of the country. His fame would have likely prevented his own officially
sponsored disappearance, though he still worried, especially as so many of
such crimes on the Republican side occurred from free agents. When Jasper
Wood printed the anarchist F.A.I. banner in the limited edition book version
of ''The Spanish Earth'', Hemingway expressed his anxieties bluntly in a letter
to Jasper on August 20, 1938. It is hardly “petulant,” he scolded, “not to wish
to be shot.”{{sfn|Davison|1988|p=128}} Hostility in the Republic against the anarchists
ran high; after the Barcelona May Day conflict, the government’s foreign
minister told U.S. Ambassador Claude Bowers that “anarchist revolt
throughout Catalonia and not only expected but welcomed as an opportunity
to liquidate the anarchists who have been hostile from the beginning.”
{{sfn|NA|1954|p=292}}{{efn| The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State, 5 May 1937.}}

It is possible that Hemingway’s dispatch stating that “not one friend [. . .]
has been executed or is missing” was his clever means of reporting
the rumors and indeed the general fact while evading the censors, as in this very dispatch he acknowledged the presence of a censor after a bombardment.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=34}}
Matthews, on the other hand, never found a way to mention the
censors or admit even the possibility of people gone missing in the Republic.
Peter Moreira has observed that in a 1943 dispatch Hemingway related a remark by a British officer about the Chinese Nationalist government’s being
“hopeless on the offensive” because censorship “prevented American reporters
From actually saying that the Nationalists wouldn’t attack, surmising that by telling this anecdote Hemingway could sneak such a judgment into
his reports.”{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=77}} In Spain, censors aside, the eyewitness standard and his
own safety and continuing ability to report the war, and, yes, his passionate
support of the government contributed to his decision. He could have written
about government abuses from the states, but then could not return to{{pg|438|439}}cover the war and support the cause—a justification other journalists, those who did not return after the spring of 1937, did not enjoy. In his mind too, knowing what he heard of fascist atrocities, any reportage against the government lessening its chances of victory through killing hopes of increased international aid would have led to more deaths at Franco’s hands that the much smaller number inspired by fifth column paranoia.{{efn|''Hemingway’s Second War'' discusses in greater depth Hemingway’s politics and his falling out
with John Dos Passos over the execution of José Robles}}.

The accusation that Hemingway did not write about Republican atrocities
because he was saving it for his fiction I find baseless (Knightley 232;
Baker 402).{{sfn|Knightley|2004|p=232}}{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=402}}{{efn|Hemingway’s casual comment to colleagues calling dibs on Pepe Quintanilla, the executioner of
Madrid, is not sufficient evidence.}}Carolyn Moorehead, in her biography of Martha Gellhorn, describes
the climate for the Madrid correspondents that first spring: “And so,
day by day, the correspondents walked a thin and nervous line between truth,
evasions, and propaganda, telling one another that though it was not all right
if things were made up and presented as true, it was acceptable to describe
what you wanted, provided it was true and provided your readers were aware
of your position.”{{sfn|Moorehead|2003|p=125}} My own sense is that they did not walk the line quite
so nervously; their passionate commitment, and their principles of position
disclosure and the eyewitness standard, made that walk relatively easy.

The problem of ''committed journalism'', even sixty years later, has not been
resolved—as anyone paying attention to the media and world affairs well
knows. One person’s truth is another person’s propaganda. Certainly, as
Knightley notes, reporting from “the heart” affects one’s judgment.{{sfn|Knightley|2004|pp=234-5}}
Yet to attempt “balance,” per the edits to Matthews’ Guadalajara piece, betrays
one’s believed truth. Furthermore, the kind of reporting done by the
correspondents with the Republic—committed, one-sided, optimistic,
heroic, human interest work by embedded writers—would be practiced
widely and without reserve during World War II. Such narrative journalism,
with roots in Louise May Alcott’s “Hospital Sketches” series published in the
''Boston Commonwealth'', and more immediately in 1930s social documentary
writing whose “essence” is “not information”, anticipated postwar
new journalism’s adoption of novelistic narrative technique for nonfiction
which culminated with such wartime books as Norman Mailer’s ''Armies of
the Night'' and Michael Herr’s ''Dispatches''.{{sfn|Stott|1986|p=11}} Some of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches
fall in this line of development.

Today we might categorize such writing under the awkward umbrella
term ''creative nonfiction''. That term certainly fits the mixed bag of nonfiction
narratives and commentaries Hemingway published during the war in
Ken magazine. These pieces are essays, not journalism, several of which{{pg|439|440}}

=== Notes ===
{{notelist}}
===Citations===
{{reflist}}
===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker
|first=Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Bruccoli |first=Matthew |date=2006 |title=Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame |url= |location=Columbia |publisher=U of South Caronia P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Cowles |first=Virginia |date=1941 |title=Looking for Trouble |url= |location=New York
|publisher=Harper & Brothers |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Davison |first=Richard Allan |title=The Publication of Hemingway’s The Spanish Earth: An Untold Story |url= |journal=Hemingway Review
|volume=7.2 |issue= |date=1988
|pages=122-130 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson
|first=Scott |date=2009 |title=Fitzgerald & Hemingway: Works and Days |url= |location=New York |publisher=Columbia UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Franklin |first=Sidney |date=1952 |title=Bullfighter from Brooklyn |url= |location=New York |publisher=Prentice-Hall |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Graham |first=Helen |date=2002 |title=The Spanish Republic at War 1936-1939 |url= |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Guttmann |first=Allen |date=1962 |title=The Wound in the Heart: American and the Spanish Civil War |url= |location=New York |publisher=Free Press of Glencoe |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1967 |title=By-Line: Ernest Hemingway |url= |location=New York |publisher=Scibner |pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Trogdon
|editor-first=Robert W.
|author-mask=1
|title=Fascism is a Lie
|url=
|journal=Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference |volume==
|issue=
|date=2002
|pages=193-6
|location=New York
|publisher=Carroll & Graf
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 May 1937
|chapter=Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=nd
|chapter=The Home Front
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938a
|chapter=Letter to Edmund Wilson
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=2 June 1938b
|chapter=Letter to Jack Wheeler
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=14 Feb 1939
|chapter=On the American Dead in Spain
|title=TS. New Masses
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Baker
|editor-first=Carlos
|author-mask=1
|date=2003
|chapter=The Hadely Mowrer
|title=Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Scribner
|pages=462-3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ibarruri
|first=Dolores
|date=1966
|title=They Shall Not Pass: The Autobiography of La Pasionaria
|url=
|location=United States
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|date=1969
|title=The Camera and I
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|author-mask=1
|date=26 Apr 1937
|chapter=Letter to Ernest Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|date=20 Nov 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Bertrand Weaver
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=12 Oct 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=25 Apr 1939
|chapter=Letter to M.B. Tenney
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Apr 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Knightley
|first=Phillip
|date=2004
|title=The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq
|url=
|location=Baltimore
|publisher=John Hopkins
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=
|date=9 Apr 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=TS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=11 Apr 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=8 May 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=6 July 1937d
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=July 1937e
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=22 March 1939
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 9
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=
|date=20 May 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=20 Dec 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 5
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Sep 1937c
|chapter=Note to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moorehead
|first=Caroline
|date=2003
|title=Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Henry Holt
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moreira
|first=Peter
|date=2006
|title=Hemingway on the China Front: His WWII Spy Mission with Martha Gellhorn
|url=
|location=Washington D.C.
|publisher=Potomac Books
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|date=5 Feb 1937
|chapter=Promotion Box: Hemingway, For Immediate Release
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|author-mask=1
|date=4 Apr 1938
|chapter=Promotion Box: American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|editor-last=Nelson
|editor-first=Card
|date=1994
|title=Remembering Spain: Hemingway’s Civil War Eulogy and the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
|url=
|location=Urbana
|publisher=U of Illinois
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Reynolds
|first=Michael
|date=1989
|title=Hemingway: The Paris Years
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Norton
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Stott
|first=William
|date=1986
|title=Documentary Expression and Thirties America
|url=
|location=Chicago
|publisher=U of Chicago P
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Thomas
|first=Hugh
|date=2001
|title=The Spanish Civil War, Rev. ed.
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Modern Library
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine
|last=''Two Wars and More to Come''
|first=
|date=24 Jan 1938
|title=Best Sellers of the Week Here and Elsewhere
|type=Advertisement
|url=
|magazine=New York Times
|pages=
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=NA
|first=
|title=United States. Dept. of State
|url=
|journal= Foreign Relations of the Untied States, 1937 |volume==1
|issue=General
|date=1954
|pages=
|location=Washington
|publisher=GPO
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Watson
|first=William Braasch
|title=Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches
|url=
|journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=7.2
|issue=
|date=1988
|pages=4-121
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Wheeler
|first=John H.
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938
|chapter=Letter to Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection, Box 3 Folder 14
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}

{{refend}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches

2025-04-19T21:20:01Z

MerAtticus: added paragraphs

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{{byline|last=Vernon |first=Alex |abstract=The Spanish Civil War began in July 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally-restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy. By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches.}}

{{dc|dc=T|HE SPANISH CIVIL WAR BEGAN ON}} 17-18 JULY, 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy, to collaborate with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens on the pro-Republican documentary ''The Spanish Earth'', and to pursue his fledgling love affair with Martha Gellhorn.

By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches for NANA.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=4}}{{efn|Quotations from the NANA dispatches follow the Diplomatic Text established by William Braasch Watson’s “Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches.” I prefer NANA’s titles rather than Watson’s. For my disagreements with some of Watson’s datings, see my comments on specific dispatches in ''Hemingway’s Second War.''}}The secondary sources habitually judge them inferior journalism. Carlos Baker in the first Hemingway biography, for example, complains that the dialogue was “so heavily stamped with personal mannerisms as to be of doubtful authenticity.” Baker sees a “curious monotony in his stories of battles and bombardments,” a gratuitous use of graphic imagery “to shock his readers,” and “a note of triumphant boastfulness” in reporting proximity to danger. He also faults Hemingway for “often hint[ing] he was alone when in fact he was usually with Martha Gellhorn, Matthews, and Delmer.” Hemingway lacked Dos Passos’ “eye for telling details” and the “meticulous exactitude and inclusiveness that characterized the best work of Herbert Matthews and Sefton Delmer.”{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}

Philip Knightley’s ''The First Casualty'', the standard history of war correspondence, paraphrases Baker but with a trouncing final judgment:{{pg|427|428}}Hemingway’s “performance as a war correspondent was abysmally bad.” But Knightley goes beyond “technical” dissatisfaction to moral condemnation. Not just “unjustifiably optimistic”—an excusable offense—Hemingway’s reporting was “unforgivable” in its “total failure to report the Communist persecution, imprisonment, and summary execution of ‘untrustworthy elements’ on the Republican side, when he knew this was happening and when disclosing it might well have prevented further horrors like this.”
{{sfn|Knightley|2004 |pp=231–32}}{{efn|In my view, Knightley does not sufficiently acknowledge his paraphrasing of Baker.}}

Such criticisms in the final analysis might bear out. As Scott Donaldson writes, Hemingway advanced the Republican cause in his dispatches by eliciting “the deepest possible feelings of horror and of sympathy for the victims” of the Madrid bombardment; his “undue optimism” often “ignored Loyalist defeats and exaggerated the importance of its victories”; and “he repeatedly called attention to the participation of Italians and Germans on Franco’s side.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=426}} It also served as a recruitment tool—Milton Wolff, for example, acknowledged the strong influence Hemingway’s dispatches had on his decision to volunteer. Nevertheless, I think it a worthwhile exercise to attend a little more studiously to Hemingway’s dispatches, their context, and their artistry. I don’t necessarily intend to reverse the general opinion of the correspondence, only to achieve a better and more sympathetic understanding.

Herbert Matthews’ reporting for the ''New York Times'' will serve as a convenient comparison for two reasons. First, because both Baker and Knightley use Matthews’ journalism as the standard of excellence to pass judgment on Hemingway’s; and second, because the two worked practically side-by-side, seeing and reporting on many of the same events. In fact so closely did they work together that NANA sometimes complained that the ''Times'' was not buying Hemingway’s pieces because they resembled Matthews,’ and at one point Matthews’ own editors at the Times suspected him of plagiarizing Hemingway.{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|pp=411, 420}} A note from Matthews’ assigned editor Raymond McCaw provides, in two columns, seven quite similar passages from Hemingway’s Aragon front dispatches of September 13 and 14 with Matthews’ of September 14, with a penciled note at the bottom: “a deadly parallel if you ask me.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937c|p=}} Edwin James, the managing editor and McCaw’s boss, eventually agreed with Matthews’ defense: “It is quite apparent that you did not file any duplicate of the Hemingway story, or vice versa. As I understand it, the similarity arose from the fact that you{{pg|428|429}}both went to see the same show and saw it at the same time [sic], under the same conditions.”{{sfn|James|1937b|p=}}

Matthews’ dispatches ring of Republican bias as much if not more than anything Hemingway ever filed. The ''Times'' received many letters to the editor complaining about Matthews’ undisguised politics, which also gave serious concern to some of his editors. His description of the Republican May 1937 infighting in Barcelona is a striking example of how his news veered into propaganda and shows just how much he passed along the government’s version of events. The government’s “BLOODLESS TRIUMPH FOUGHT WITH RECOGNIZEDWEAPONS OF DEMOCRACY” turned out to be blatantly false, as the government and the “COMMUNISTS [WHO] DISTINGUISHED THEMSELVES” resorted to violent suppression. His blaming the uprising on the anarchist CNT working as Franco operatives parrots the government’s and the communist party’s public position, even though both charges—that the anarchists precipitated the events and that they were under Nationalist direction—were also false. His dispatch’s optimistic close also equivocates the political reality: “NEW GOVERNMENT HAS TAKEN POWER WHICH APPEARS TOVE CONFIDENCE VAST MAJORITY SPANIARDS IN LOYALIST TERRITORY AND TIS HOPED WILL GAIN EQUAL CONFIDENCE ABROAD STOP VIOLENCE AND REVOLUTION BEEN REPUDIATED AND NEWAND FAR HOPEFULLER PERIOD SEEMS BEGINNING.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937a|p=}}The ''Times'', knowing full well the one-sided coverage of a correspondent writing from one side of the conflict, had a reporter on both sides: Matthews with the Republicans, and William Carney with the Nationalists. They got their facts right (or wrong) as often as the other, their editors concluded; and they inspired about the same number of letters of complaint.{{sfn|James|1937a|p=}}{sfn|James|1939|p=}}

Furthermore, Matthews’ dispatches received a great deal of substantive editorial revisions. One of Matthews’ Teruel reports had to be cut for length, as McCaw informed James: “This bird sent 2844 words on the same facts which Hemingway covered much better in less than half that number. I wonder if Matthews thinks the paper is thriving, and that cable tolls do not matter a damn. Of course, it had to be cut for space anyway.” McCaw most likely refers here to Matthews’ dispatch corresponding to Hemingway’s “The Attack on Teruel,” though Matthews’ account of the fall of Teruel is also much longer (and more long-winded) than Hemingway’s, and just as personal in terms of describing the dangers{{pg|429|430}} he faced. Indeed its length allows him to share even more of the action he endured.{{sfn|McCaw|1937b|p=}}

Raymond McCaw held a general professional disagreement with Matthews perhaps tainted with over zealousness. Whether a personal or political motive informed that disagreement can’t be determined from the evidence I’ve seen. It is also clear that McCaw’s charges bear some validity—that any responsible editor could have easily and reasonably taken issue where McCaw did. One of the more interesting examples concerns Matthews’ piece on Guadalajara. Because he only saw evidence on Franco’s side of Italian forces, he only reported on Italians. But the ''Times'' editors heard from other sources that German soldiers also participated in the March offensive. They thought it prudent, from this confusion, to change (nine times) “Italian” to “Rebel,” “the foe,” or “Insurgent.” When Matthews saw the published piece he wrote a strenuous objection. In some instances the editors changed paraphrased quotations from his sources. One large paragraph omitted by the editors stressed the first-hand nature of the information, and Matthews underlines the key words: “All day, at every place we stopped and no matter whom we talked to or what we saw, there was only one label—Italian. The dead bodies, the prisoners, the material of every kind, the men who had occupied Brihuega and then fled were Italian and nothing but Italian.” Here and elsewhere in his original story, Matthews emphasizes the “personal knowledge” of its information.{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}{{efn|James supported McCaw on these changes, though later acknowledged that altering quoted sources was perhaps unwarranted.{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}}}Yet Matthews did not report on the foreigners fighting for the Republic—it was in fact the Italian Garibali Battalion that routed Franco’s Italians. We might surmise government censorship behind this silence, though Matthews would not cable news of “CENSORSHIP STRICTER” and “BAN ON MENTIONING INTERNATIONALS INCLUDING AMERICANS INSTITUTED TODAY” until July.{{sfn|Matthews|1937b|p=}}Perhaps he cautiously self-censored, or politically self-censored for the same reasons the government would eventually ban mention. Still, his stridency about the omission of foreigners on one side is striking given his knowledge of their contribution to the other side. For this reason too, and his omission of other nationalities on the insurgent side, it seemed only fair to his editor “to stand on the statement that the majority of the Rebels were Italians and let it go at that.”{{sfn|James|1937c|p=}} A reasonable decision.

Throughout his correspondence to his editors and his several books,{{pg|430|431}}Matthews maintained a passionate defense of his eyewitness journalistic standard, a position those close to him understood. “Matthews never believed anything he had not seen with his own eyes,” Joris Ivens wrote. “He never saw his job as reporter as one that permitted him to sit in his hotel and read the handouts of the War Ministry.” {{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=112}} Sidney Franklin recalls that some writers wrote their pieces before arriving in Madrid, and came only for the “legitimacy” of the Madrid dateline.{{sfn|Franklin|1952|p=232}}And Matthews hated, on principle, having his name attached to an article that violated the integrity of his witness. The only way to achieve objectivity, for Matthews, was to acknowledge one’s subjective perspective. Writing to his publisher, Matthews argued that “the full documentary value” of his coverage was lost when the editors altered his submissions for “the apparent necessity of giving more or less equal space to both sides.”{{sfn|Matthews|1939|p=}}

As with Matthews, so too Hemingway. Indeed the commitment to subjectivity
fit quite well with Hemingway’s modernist aesthetics. If Hemingway
focused the dispatches on his perspective—on his own experience dodging
artillery—more than Matthews and more than most, he did so at least partially
to fulfill expectations. NANA approached him, after all, for his name
and personality as much as whatever he would write. Before he even left the
states it pitched him to potential publications, sending out a promotional release with text to be used alongside his forthcoming dispatches and suggesting
they include a photograph: “Mr. Hemingway’s assignment is to get both from the bombed towns and bombed trenches the human story of the war, not just an account of the game being played by general staffs with pins
and a map.”{{sfn|NANA|1937|p=}}{{ NANA also released each individual dispatch with a one-sentence “precede” about the “famous” or “noted” author. Ernest Hemingway was not writing as Herbert Mathews, ace reporter; Hemingway was writing as Ernest Hemingway, famous author of novels and stories well known to be drawn from his own experiences.

That he understood this to be his assignment is further evidenced by a
cable Matthews sent to his ''Times'' editors on April 9, 1937, concerning the
Loyalist attack: “WORKED CONJOINTL WITH HEMINGWAY TODAY HE SENDING EYEWITNESS DESCRIPTION WHILE EYE SENT GENERAL STRATEGY.”{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}When a year later the ''Times'' asked NANA to ensure Hemingway’s reports differed from Matthews, NANA complied by asking Hemingway “to emphasize color rather than straight reporting” not necessarily out of dissatisfaction with Hemingway’s reportage as Baker contends,{{efn|Baker’s notes date the Times request to NANA as 8 Apr. 1938, and NANA’s to Hemingway as 15
Apr. 1938 (Princeton University, Firestone Library: Box 18, Folder 8 “1938”), the date of “The Bombing of Tortosa” dispatch.}} but to increase{{pg|431|432}}the chance of selling to the ''Times'' and indeed to ensure the spirit of NANA’s original arrangement with Hemingway. {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}Far from dissatisfied, NANA wrote Hemingway at the end of August 1938 a letter of agreement for his coverage of “a general European war” should it break out, “written in your colorful style” (Hemingway was in Paris, on his way to Spain for the last time during the war).{{sfn|Wheeler|1938|p=}}When Edmund Wilson criticized the selected dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'', Hemingway wrote him that “I was paid to write what are called ‘eye witness’ accounts . . .what is called, or was asked for as ‘color stuff.’ Most of such stuff is faked. Mine was not. It was straight reporting and the personal stuff was what had been asked for by the editors. “Wilson’s estimation was also based upon ''Fact’s'' inclusion of the “The Old Man at the Bridge” story from ''Ken'', “not a news dispatch” at all.{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}Speaking at Carnegie Hall before the showing of a rough cut of ''The Spanish Earth'', shortly after his first trip to Spain and so very much in the context of his wartime work, Hemingway defined the writer’s problem as “project[ing] [what is true] in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2002|p=193}}

Personal, anecdotal journalism had been Hemingway’s signature style from his earliest days filing reports, in the early 1920s from Paris, when his editor at the ''Toronto Star Weekly'' “encouraged [. . .] what Hemingway did best: write about himself in the act of being a reporter.”{{sfn|Reynolds|1989|p=45}}How could he expect that NANA would expect anything else, if indeed NANA did expect anything else? In the Spanish Civil War he at least maintained his eyewitness posture; in World War II, however, he couldn’t keep himself out. His first piece, about D-Day, begins, “No one remembers the date of the Battle of Shiloh. But the day ''we took'' Fox Green beach was the sixth of June, and the wind was blowing hard out of the northwest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1967|p=340}}His venue too—''Collier’s'' magazine—and the fact that he had not written anything in three years further contributed to the story-like nature of the WWII stories, in which he figured as a protagonist—not to mention the stories and involvement he couldn’t write about, armed and running around France more of a free agent than his guerilla-hero Robert Jordan ever was (though he began to transform these experiences into fiction in several unpublished stories). In wartime China in 1943, filing articles for Ralph Ingersoll’s short-lived ''PM'' New York afternoon daily, Hemingway did not even care to be called a news reporter.{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=99}}

It should be mentioned that Hemingway and Matthews enjoyed a great{{pg|432|433}}friendship and working relationship. Hemingway usually brought Matthews, who did not have a car, on his excursions. When Matthews left Madrid for a break in mid April 1937, he had already ensured Hemingway would provide coverage to the ''Times'' through NANA. For one thing, Hemingway did not have to worry about Matthews as a rival for the history books. He could endorse his friends’ book, ''Two Wars and More to Come'', and praise him as “the ablest and the bravest war correspondent writing today “who “when the fakers are all dead [. . .] will be read in the schools” (Advertisement 21) because Matthews posed no threat to Hemingway’s own chances to be read in the schools. The only brief Hemingway ever expressed he really reserved for Matthews’ editors, for not wanting his Teruel street-fighting story and for cutting references to himself in Matthews’ Teruel dispatches so that it appeared only Matthews had been there.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=462}}

As for Hemingway’s neglecting to name everyone with him for every story, the ''Times'' cutting of his name suggests that such exactitude was hardly a priority. A paper had no incentive for announcing the fact that a competitor’s
correspondent stood beside its own to see and report the same
events. NANA changed at least one vague Hemingway “we,” which admits
to the presence of others, to “this correspondent”
—we can hardly fault Hemingway for working in the spirit of his
employer’s standards.{{sfn|NANA|1938|p=}}{{efn|“we” in typescript and radiogram (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 1 and Folder 25).}} Do readers care that Matthews, Delmer, Gellhorn,
and others were there? The story’s effect and the limited word count also
weighed against such roll calls. One editor chose not to clutter the dispatch
on the great retreat across the Ebro with all the names of the American International Brigade volunteers Hemingway encountered, an omission of
Content more far serious than that of omitted correspondent names.{{efn| Radiogram insert dateline 4 April 1938 (HRC: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 25).}} Hemingway
often gave the names of the reporters with him, such as at Teruel;
nor was he the only reporter to sometimes neglect to do so. Martha Gellhorn,
for example, used a vague “we” and singled herself out as the primary
participant in some of her stories.

By using first-person reportage Hemingway—and Matthews and Gellhorn And most of the group covering the war—were operating solidly within
convention. William Stott, in ''Documentary Expression and Thirties America'',
calls this first-person ''participant observer'' technique “the most common sort
of documentary reportage in the thirties” that worked “by vicarious persuasion:
the writer partook of the events he reported and bared his feelings
and attitudes to influence the reader’s own.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=178-9}}{{efn|He specifically includes Hemingway et al (180).}} Stott also observes {{pg|433|434}}another technique to enable documentary reportage to “talk to us, and convince us that we, our deepest interests, are engaged,” in the use of the second person: “Thirties documentaries constantly address ‘you,’ the ‘you’ who is we the audience, and exhorts, wheedles, begs us to identify, pity, participate.” His examples include Dorothy Parker’s Spanish Civil War writing, and Hemingway’s 1935 “First-Hand Report on the Florida Hurricane.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=27-8}} A number of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches employ the second-person as a way of bringing the reader along for the ride.

Hemingway’s dispatches used personal pronouns more artfully than is
generally recognized. “A New Kind of War,” which William Braasch Watson
notes as having been “[w]ritten with more care and imagination” than its
predecessors, begins in second person: “The window of the hotel is open
and, as you lie in bed, you hear the firing in the front line seventeen blocks
away.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=29}} He takes “you” outside, to see the damage and the dead from the bombing. “Someone makes a joke about missing teeth and someone else says not to make that joke. And everyone has the feeling that characterizes war. It wasn’t me, see? It wasn’t me.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} The tension between the first person and second-person pronouns—the movement toward identification with “you” and the insistence that “it wasn’t me”—continues in the next line. Here the reader is at once still in the narrator’s shoes, but strangely distanced from the narrator through biographical tidbit and, at the same time, asked
to see himself in the enemy: “The Italian dead up on the Guadalajara weren’t
you although Italian dead, because of where you had spent your boyhood,
always seemed, still, like Our Dead.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} It is worth quoting at length the dispatch’s transition to first person:<blockquote>
After the shell that lit on the sidewalk in front of the hotel you got a beautiful double corner room on that side, twice the size of the one you’d had, for less than a dollar. It wasn’t me they killed. See? No. Not me. It wasn’t me anymore.

Then in a hospital given by the American Friends of Spanish Democracy located out behind the Morata front along the road
to Valencia they said, “Raven wants to see you.”

“Do I know him?”

“I don’t think so,” they said. “But he wants to see you.”

“Where is he?”

“Upstairs.”{{pg|434|435}}In the room upstairs they are giving a blood transfusion to a man with a very gray face who lay on a cot with his arm out looking away from the gurgling bottle and moaning in a very impersonal way. He moaned mechanically and at regular intervals and it did not seem to be him that made the sound. His lips did not move.

“Where’s Raven?” I asked.

“I’m here,” said Raven.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=31}}</blockquote>The piece simply could not have sustained the second-person for the remaining
five pages. More significantly, for this deeply personal exchange between
the writer and the faceless, eyeless soldier, Hemingway could not hide
in the rhetorical device of the second-person. In the process, he effects a reversal
of the usual pronoun game; instead of identifying with the all embracing
“you,” we leave that trick behind and become fully attached to
the narratorial “I” as ourselves, as we might not have been had the article
begun in the first person. And even as the narrator identifies himself by name
for the only time in any of the dispatches—“Hemingway,” and later
“Ernest”—as decidedly not ourselves. We do not say, ''It isn’t me''. The historian
Hugh Thomas notes “the refreshing candour” of Hemingway’s naming
himself “in the world of the International Brigades, where no one’s name
seemed to be truthfully given.”{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=591}}{{efn|For Watson, the dispatch “seems, in fact, on the verge of becoming a story” (29).}}

A year later Hemingway’s “Tortosa Calmly Awaits Assault” resists admitting
the city’s imminent fall. Yet it does so anyway, by subtly alluding to the
wartime rhetoric of sacrificed blood irrigating the earth and rejuvenating
Spain. Such rhetoric was common during the war, appearing in speeches,
print, and poetry. Many of the poems in Cary Nelson’s anthology ''The Wound
and the Dream: Sixty Years of American Poems about the Civil War'' join in the
Spanish and international chorus’s general connection between Republican
soldiers and the land, and the particular singing of their dead nourishing
the land. We find such language in La Pasionaria’s farewell address to the International Brigades, her epilogue to ''The Book of the XV Brigade'', and Hemingway’s famous eulogy “On the American Dead in Spain”: “For our dead are
a part of the earth of Spain now and the earth of Spain can never die. Each
winter it will seem to die and each spring it will come alive again. Our dead
will live with it forever.”{{sfn|Nelson|1994|p=3}}{{efn| Reprinted in Bruccoli 76 and Nelson, Remembering 37 (the drafts at the JFK are titled “The Dead at Jarama”). In addition to the poems in Nelson’s anthology, see the excerpt from Boris Todrin’s “Spanish Sowing” in Guttmann (Wounded 179–180).}} The Tortosa dispatch implies the deaths of{{pg|435|436}}many Republican soldiers in its final paragraph’s description of the newborn onions:
<blockquote>The artillery was picking up a little now. Two came in at a fairly useful place and as the smoke blew away ahead and settled through the trees, you picked an armful of spring onions from a field beside the trail that led to the Tortosa road. They were the first onions of the spring and peeling one I found they were plump white and not too strong. The Ebro Delta has a fine rich land, and where the onions grow, tomorrow will be a battle.
{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=84}}</blockquote>

The echo is quiet, and perhaps unconscious, but there nevertheless. The opening boastfulness of “American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents”
should be taken somewhat ironically. The dispatch begins by announcing
that for “two days we have been doing the most dangerous thing
you can do in this war. That is keep close behind an unstabilized line where
the enemy are attacking with mechanized forces.” Then, a few pages later,
we learn about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade survivors of the spring 1938
Nationalist offensive that took Bob Merriman and eventually reached the
Mediterranean Sea. Reading about these survivors creeping through enemy
camps, stepping on a sleeping German soldier’s hand, sprinting “across an
open field toward the Ebro bank and being sniped at by artillery controlled
by an observation plane overhead” and then “the desperate swimming of
the Ebro” naked, we are asked to place the correspondent’s plight in due perspective.{{sfn|Watson|1988|pp=71-2}} This story certainly escapes the charge of a monotonous
battle and bombing scene; its switch from apparently boastful to
awe-struck witness feels almost deliberately self-conscious. Other choice selfironic
moments come in the dispatches of that pre-Teruel quiet fall of 1938.
The one titled “Hemingway, Covering War, Tells of Brush with Death” has little
to report from Madrid other than the new aftershave brand he is trying.
In “Loyalists’ Drive Seen Progressing as Planned,” he writes that “Shells are
all much the same and if they don’t hit you there is no story and if they do
you won’t have to write it.” {{sfn|Watson|1988|p=58}}

Hemingway’s dispatches are sometimes monotonous because his war was
Usually monotonous—as wars are most of the time. It should also be kept in
mind that scholars reviewing Hemingway’s NANA dispatches one after{{pg|436|437}}another do not relive the original reading experience. Hemingway wrote dispatches sporadically, papers did not run all of his dispatches, papers edited and cut them, and readers read at least a couple of papers’ worth of other articles in between. He told Edmund Wilson as much in defending himself against Wilson’s critique of the selected (and heavily edited and cut) dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'' without his consent: “If you are being paid to be shot at and write about it you are supposed to mention the shooting. [. . .] But I do not go in for re-printing journalism.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}

If we can in this way better understand his style, and at least explain it if
not excuse it, we similarly ought to try to contextualize—and perhaps
excuse—the moral problem. The two issues here are the specific condemnation
of Hemingway’s silence about Republican atrocities and the general
question of biased reporting (the latter of which has already partially been
addressed).

Hemingway knew, as Donaldson writes, that mentioning the atrocities
“would arouse anticommunist sentiments back in the States and effectively
undermine any possibility of American intervention.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=394}} It is also doubtful
that reporting them would have stopped them. But reporting Republican
atrocities from Spain was not possible for the simple reason that all dispatches
went through a government censor. Matthews cabled his editors
from Paris in May 1937 to tell them that “censorship does not permit us to
say when the ‘telefonica’ is hit. So whenever you see reference in my
despatches [sic] to ‘an important building in the center of the city’ or words
to that effect, the cable desk can know that it is the telefonica.” {{sfn|Matthews|1937c|p=}} As already noted, by July he would cable “CENSORSHIP
STRICTER” as the ban on mentioning internationals went into effect. {{sfn|Matthews|1937d|p=}}{{sfn|Matthews|1937e|p=}} Cowles’ memoir confirms the
aggressive censorship, observing that it limited journalists to exactly the kind of material Hemingway wrote about:
<blockquote>There were frequent attempts to “beat the censor” by employing American slang expressions, but this came to an end when a Canadian girl joined the staff. The International Brigades were not allowed to be publicized; no reference could be made to Russian armaments, and buildings and streets which suffered
bombardments could not be identified.</blockquote>{{pg|437|438}}<blockquote>It was only in the realm of the human interest story that the journalists had a free hand. They could describe bombardments to their heart’s content.{{sfn|Cowles|1941|p=20}}</blockquote>
Hemingway and everyone else—to reserve incrimination for Hemingway is hardly just. No correspondent covering Republican Spain reported suspicious imprisonments and disappearances by government agents.

Hemingway, through Joris Ivens and ''The Spanish Earth'' project, had better
access to officials than most. Had he been able somehow to report such
activity, he would have lost that access and would probably have been kicked
out of the country. His fame would have likely prevented his own officially
sponsored disappearance, though he still worried, especially as so many of
such crimes on the Republican side occurred from free agents. When Jasper
Wood printed the anarchist F.A.I. banner in the limited edition book version
of ''The Spanish Earth'', Hemingway expressed his anxieties bluntly in a letter
to Jasper on August 20, 1938. It is hardly “petulant,” he scolded, “not to wish
to be shot.”{{sfn|Davison|1988|p=128}} Hostility in the Republic against the anarchists
ran high; after the Barcelona May Day conflict, the government’s foreign
minister told U.S. Ambassador Claude Bowers that “anarchist revolt
throughout Catalonia and not only expected but welcomed as an opportunity
to liquidate the anarchists who have been hostile from the beginning.”
{{sfn|NA|1954|p=292}}{{efn| The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State, 5 May 1937.}}

It is possible that Hemingway’s dispatch stating that “not one friend [. . .]
has been executed or is missing” was his clever means of reporting
the rumors and indeed the general fact while evading the censors, as in this very dispatch he acknowledged the presence of a censor after a bombardment.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=34}}
Matthews, on the other hand, never found a way to mention the
censors or admit even the possibility of people gone missing in the Republic.
Peter Moreira has observed that in a 1943 dispatch Hemingway related a remark by a British officer about the Chinese Nationalist government’s being
“hopeless on the offensive” because censorship “prevented American reporters
From actually saying that the Nationalists wouldn’t attack, surmising that by telling this anecdote Hemingway could sneak such a judgment into
his reports.”{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=77}} In Spain, censors aside, the eyewitness standard and his
own safety and continuing ability to report the war, and, yes, his passionate
support of the government contributed to his decision. He could have written
about government abuses from the states, but then could not return to{{pg|438|439}}cover the war and support the cause—a justification other journalists, those who did not return after the spring of 1937, did not enjoy. In his mind too, knowing what he heard of fascist atrocities, any reportage against the government lessening its chances of victory through killing hopes of increased international aid would have led to more deaths at Franco’s hands that the much smaller number inspired by fifth column paranoia.{{efn|''Hemingway’s Second War'' discusses in greater depth Hemingway’s politics and his falling out
with John Dos Passos over the execution of José Robles}}.

The accusation that Hemingway did not write about Republican atrocities
because he was saving it for his fiction I find baseless (Knightley 232;
Baker 402).{{sfn|Knightley|2004|p=232}}{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=402}}{{efn|Hemingway’s casual comment to colleagues calling dibs on Pepe Quintanilla, the executioner of
Madrid, is not sufficient evidence.}}Carolyn Moorehead, in her biography of Martha Gellhorn, describes
the climate for the Madrid correspondents that first spring: “And so,
day by day, the correspondents walked a thin and nervous line between truth,
evasions, and propaganda, telling one another that though it was not all right
if things were made up and presented as true, it was acceptable to describe
what you wanted, provided it was true and provided your readers were aware
of your position.”{{sfn|Moorehead|2003|p=125}} My own sense is that they did not walk the line quite
so nervously; their passionate commitment, and their principles of position
disclosure and the eyewitness standard, made that walk relatively easy.

The problem of ''committed journalism'', even sixty years later, has not been
resolved—as anyone paying attention to the media and world affairs well
knows. One person’s truth is another person’s propaganda. Certainly, as
Knightley notes, reporting from “the heart” affects one’s judgment.

=== Notes ===
{{notelist}}
===Citations===
{{reflist}}
===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker
|first=Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Bruccoli |first=Matthew |date=2006 |title=Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame |url= |location=Columbia |publisher=U of South Caronia P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Cowles |first=Virginia |date=1941 |title=Looking for Trouble |url= |location=New York
|publisher=Harper & Brothers |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Davison |first=Richard Allan |title=The Publication of Hemingway’s The Spanish Earth: An Untold Story |url= |journal=Hemingway Review
|volume=7.2 |issue= |date=1988
|pages=122-130 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson
|first=Scott |date=2009 |title=Fitzgerald & Hemingway: Works and Days |url= |location=New York |publisher=Columbia UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Franklin |first=Sidney |date=1952 |title=Bullfighter from Brooklyn |url= |location=New York |publisher=Prentice-Hall |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Graham |first=Helen |date=2002 |title=The Spanish Republic at War 1936-1939 |url= |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Guttmann |first=Allen |date=1962 |title=The Wound in the Heart: American and the Spanish Civil War |url= |location=New York |publisher=Free Press of Glencoe |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1967 |title=By-Line: Ernest Hemingway |url= |location=New York |publisher=Scibner |pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Trogdon
|editor-first=Robert W.
|author-mask=1
|title=Fascism is a Lie
|url=
|journal=Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference |volume==
|issue=
|date=2002
|pages=193-6
|location=New York
|publisher=Carroll & Graf
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 May 1937
|chapter=Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=nd
|chapter=The Home Front
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938a
|chapter=Letter to Edmund Wilson
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=2 June 1938b
|chapter=Letter to Jack Wheeler
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=14 Feb 1939
|chapter=On the American Dead in Spain
|title=TS. New Masses
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Baker
|editor-first=Carlos
|author-mask=1
|date=2003
|chapter=The Hadely Mowrer
|title=Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Scribner
|pages=462-3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ibarruri
|first=Dolores
|date=1966
|title=They Shall Not Pass: The Autobiography of La Pasionaria
|url=
|location=United States
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|date=1969
|title=The Camera and I
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|author-mask=1
|date=26 Apr 1937
|chapter=Letter to Ernest Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|date=20 Nov 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Bertrand Weaver
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=12 Oct 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=25 Apr 1939
|chapter=Letter to M.B. Tenney
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Apr 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Knightley
|first=Phillip
|date=2004
|title=The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq
|url=
|location=Baltimore
|publisher=John Hopkins
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=
|date=9 Apr 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=TS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=11 Apr 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=8 May 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=6 July 1937d
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=July 1937e
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=22 March 1939
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 9
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=
|date=20 May 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=20 Dec 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 5
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Sep 1937c
|chapter=Note to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moorehead
|first=Caroline
|date=2003
|title=Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Henry Holt
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moreira
|first=Peter
|date=2006
|title=Hemingway on the China Front: His WWII Spy Mission with Martha Gellhorn
|url=
|location=Washington D.C.
|publisher=Potomac Books
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|date=5 Feb 1937
|chapter=Promotion Box: Hemingway, For Immediate Release
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|author-mask=1
|date=4 Apr 1938
|chapter=Promotion Box: American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|editor-last=Nelson
|editor-first=Card
|date=1994
|title=Remembering Spain: Hemingway’s Civil War Eulogy and the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
|url=
|location=Urbana
|publisher=U of Illinois
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Reynolds
|first=Michael
|date=1989
|title=Hemingway: The Paris Years
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Norton
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Stott
|first=William
|date=1986
|title=Documentary Expression and Thirties America
|url=
|location=Chicago
|publisher=U of Chicago P
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Thomas
|first=Hugh
|date=2001
|title=The Spanish Civil War, Rev. ed.
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Modern Library
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine
|last=''Two Wars and More to Come''
|first=
|date=24 Jan 1938
|title=Best Sellers of the Week Here and Elsewhere
|type=Advertisement
|url=
|magazine=New York Times
|pages=
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=NA
|first=
|title=United States. Dept. of State
|url=
|journal= Foreign Relations of the Untied States, 1937 |volume==1
|issue=General
|date=1954
|pages=
|location=Washington
|publisher=GPO
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Watson
|first=William Braasch
|title=Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches
|url=
|journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=7.2
|issue=
|date=1988
|pages=4-121
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Wheeler
|first=John H.
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938
|chapter=Letter to Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection, Box 3 Folder 14
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}

{{refend}}

User:MerAtticus/sandbox

2025-04-19T21:15:06Z

MerAtticus: added pages

{{user sandbox|plain=yes}}
Abstract:The Spanish Civil War began in July 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally-restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a
deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy. By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches.

THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR BEGAN ON 17–18 JULY, 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally-restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy, to collaborate with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens on the pro-Republican documentary ''The Spanish Earth'', and to pursue his fledgling love affair with Martha Gellhorn.

By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches for NANA.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=4}}{{efn| Quotations from the NANA dispatches follow the Diplomatic Text established by William Braasch Watson’s “Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches.” I prefer NANA’s titles rather than Watson’s. For my disagreements with some of Watson’s datings, see my comments on specific dispatches in ''Hemingway’s Second War.''}} The secondary sources habitually judge them inferior journalism. Carlos Baker in the first Hemingway biography, for example, complains that the dialogue was “so heavily stamped with personal mannerisms as to be of doubtful authenticity.” Baker sees a “curious monotony in his stories of battles and bombardments,” a gratuitous use of graphic imagery “to shock his readers,” and “a note of triumphant boastfulness” in reporting proximity to danger. He also faults Hemingway for “often hint[ing] he was alone when in fact he was usually with Martha Gellhorn, Matthews, and Delmer.” Hemingway lacked Dos Passos’ “eye for telling details” and the “meticulous exactitude and inclusiveness that characterized the best work of Herbert Matthews and Sefton Delmer.”{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}

Philip Knightley’s ''The First Casualty'', the standard history of war correspondence, paraphrases Baker but with a trouncing final judgment:{{pg|427|428}}Hemingway’s “performance as a war correspondent was abysmally bad.” But Knightley goes beyond “technical” dissatisfaction to moral condemnation. Not just “unjustifiably optimistic”—an excusable offense—Hemingway’s reporting was “unforgivable” in its “total failure to report the Communist persecution, imprisonment, and summary execution of ‘untrustworthy elements’ on the Republican side, when he knew this was happening and when disclosing it might well have prevented further horrors like this.”
{{sfn|Knightley|2004 |pp=231–32}}{{efn|In my view, Knightley does not sufficiently acknowledge his paraphrasing of Baker.}}

Such criticisms in the final analysis might bear out. As Scott Donaldson writes, Hemingway advanced the Republican cause in his dispatches by eliciting “the deepest possible feelings of horror and of sympathy for the victims” of the Madrid bombardment; his “undue optimism” often “ignored Loyalist defeats and exaggerated the importance of its victories”; and “he repeatedly called attention to the participation of Italians and Germans on Franco’s side.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=426}} It also served as a recruitment tool—Milton Wolff, for example, acknowledged the strong influence Hemingway’s dispatches had on his decision to volunteer. Nevertheless, I think it a worthwhile exercise to attend a little more studiously to Hemingway’s dispatches, their context, and their artistry. I don’t necessarily intend to reverse the general opinion of the correspondence, only to achieve a better and more sympathetic understanding.

Herbert Matthews’ reporting for the New York Times will serve as a convenient comparison for two reasons. First, because both Baker and Knightley use Matthews’ journalism as the standard of excellence to pass judgment on Hemingway’s; and second, because the two worked practically side-by-side, seeing and reporting on many of the same events. In fact so closely did they work together that NANA sometimes complained that the Times was not buying Hemingway’s pieces because they resembled Matthews,’ and at one point Matthews’ own editors at the Times suspected him of plagiarizing Hemingway.{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|pp=411, 420}} A note from Matthews’ assigned editor Raymond McCaw provides, in two columns, seven quite similar passages from Hemingway’s Aragon front dispatches of September 13 and 14 with Matthews’ of September 14, with a penciled note at the bottom: “a deadly parallel if you ask me.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937|p=Note}} Edwin James, the managing editor and McCaw’s boss, eventually agreed with Matthews’ defense: “It is quite apparent that you did not file any duplicate of the Hemingway story, or vice versa. As I understand it, the similarity arose from the fact that you{{pg|428|429}}both went to see the same show and saw it at the same time [sic], under the same conditions.”{{sfn|James|1937|p=Herbert}}

Matthews’ dispatches ring of Republican bias as much if not more than anything Hemingway ever filed. The Times received many letters to the editor complaining about Matthews’ undisguised politics, which also gave serious concern to some of his editors. His description of the Republican May 1937 infighting in Barcelona is a striking example of how his news veered into propaganda and shows just how much he passed along the government’s version of events. The government’s “BLOODLESS TRIUMPH FOUGHT WITH RECOGNIZEDWEAPONS OF DEMOCRACY” turned out to be blatantly false, as the government and the “COMMUNISTS [WHO] DISTINGUISHED THEMSELVES” resorted to violent suppression. His blaming the uprising on the anarchist CNT working as Franco operatives parrots the government’s and the communist party’s public position, even though both charges—that the anarchists precipitated the events and that they were under Nationalist direction—were also false. His dispatch’s optimistic close also equivocates the political reality: “NEW GOVERNMENT HAS TAKEN POWER WHICH APPEARS TOVE CONFIDENCE VAST MAJORITY SPANIARDS IN LOYALIST TERRITORY AND TIS HOPED WILL GAIN EQUAL CONFIDENCE ABROAD STOP VIOLENCE AND REVOLUTION BEEN REPUDIATED AND NEWAND FAR HOPEFULLER PERIOD SEEMS BEGINNING.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937|p=May}}
The Times, knowing full well the one-sided coverage of a correspondent writing from one side of the conflict, had a reporter on both sides: Matthews with the Republicans, and William Carney with the Nationalists. They got their facts right (or wrong) as often as the other, their editors concluded; and they inspired about the same number of letters of complaint.{{sfn|James|1937|p=Bertrand}}{sfn|James|1939|p=Tenney}}

Furthermore, Matthews’ dispatches received a great deal of substantive editorial revisions. One of Matthews’ Teruel reports had to be cut for length, as McCaw informed James: “This bird sent 2844 words on the same facts which Hemingway covered much better in less than half that number. I wonder if Matthews thinks the paper is thriving, and that cable tolls do not matter a damn. Of course, it had to be cut for space anyway.” McCaw most likely refers here to Matthews’ dispatch corresponding to Hemingway’s “The Attack on Teruel,” though Matthews’ account of the fall of Teruel is also much longer (and more long-winded) than Hemingway’s, and just as personal in terms of describing the dangers{{pg|429|430}} he faced. Indeed its length allows him to share even more of the action he endured.{{sfn|McCaw|1937|p=December}}

Raymond McCaw held a general professional disagreement with Matthews perhaps tainted with over zealousness. Whether a personal or political motive informed that disagreement can’t be determined from the evidence I’ve seen. It is also clear that McCaw’s charges bear some validity—that any responsible editor could have easily and reasonably taken issue where McCaw did. One of the more interesting examples concerns Matthews’ piece on Guadalajara. Because he only saw evidence on Franco’s side of Italian forces, he only reported on Italians. But the Times editors heard from other sources that German soldiers also participated in the March offensive. They thought it prudent, from this confusion, to change (nine times) “Italian” to “Rebel,” “the foe,” or “Insurgent.” When Matthews saw the published piece he wrote a strenuous objection. In some instances the editors changed paraphrased quotations from his sources. One large paragraph omitted by the editors stressed the first-hand nature of the information, and Matthews underlines the key words: “All day, at every place we stopped and no matter whom we talked to or what we saw, there was only one label—Italian. The dead bodies, the prisoners, the material of every kind, the men who had occupied Brihuega and then fled were Italian and nothing but Italian.” Here and elsewhere in his original story, Matthews emphasizes the “personal knowledge” of its information.{{sfn|Matthews|1937|p=April}}{{efn|James supported McCaw on these changes, though later acknowledged that altering quoted sources was perhaps unwarranted.{{sfn|Matthews|1937|p=Herbert}}}} Yet Matthews did not report on the foreigners fighting for the Republic—it was in fact the Italian Garibali Battalion that routed Franco’s Italians. We might surmise government censorship behind this silence, though Matthews would not cable news of “CENSORSHIP STRICTER” and “BAN ON MENTIONING INTERNATIONALS INCLUDING AMERICANS INSTITUTED TODAY” until July.{{sfn|Matthews|1937|p=July}} Perhaps he cautiously self-censored, or politically self-censored for the same reasons the government would eventually ban mention. Still, his stridency about the omission of foreigners on one side is striking given his knowledge of their contribution to the other side. For this reason too, and his omission of other nationalities on the insurgent side, it seemed only fair to his editor “to stand on the statement that the majority of the Rebels were Italians and let it go at that.”{{sfn|James|1937|p=Sulzberger}} A reasonable decision.

Throughout his correspondence to his editors and his several books,{{pg|430|431}}Matthews maintained a passionate defense of his eyewitness journalistic standard, a position those close to him understood. “Matthews never believed anything he had not seen with his own eyes,” Joris Ivens wrote. “He never saw his job as reporter as one that permitted him to sit in his hotel and read the handouts of the War Ministry.” {{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=112 Sidney Franklin recalls that some writers wrote their pieces before arriving in Madrid, and came only for the “legitimacy” of the Madrid dateline.{{sfn|Franklin|1952|p=232}} And Matthews hated, on principle, having his name attached to an article that violated the integrity of his witness. The only way to achieve objectivity, for Matthews, was to acknowledge one’s subjective perspective. Writing to his publisher, Matthews argued that “the full documentary value” of his coverage was lost when the editors altered his submissions for “the apparent necessity of giving more or less equal space to both sides.”{{sfn|Matthews|1937|p=Sulzberger}}

As with Matthews, so too Hemingway. Indeed the commitment to subjectivity
fit quite well with Hemingway’s modernist aesthetics. If Hemingway
focused the dispatches on his perspective—on his own experience dodging
artillery—more than Matthews and more than most, he did so at least partially
to fulfill expectations. NANA approached him, after all, for his name
and personality as much as whatever he would write. Before he even left the
states it pitched him to potential publications, sending out a promotional release with text to be used alongside his forthcoming dispatches and suggesting
they include a photograph: “Mr. Hemingway’s assignment is to get both from the bombed towns and bombed trenches the human story of the war, not just an account of the game being played by general staffs with pins
and a map.”{{sfn|NANA|1937|p=Hemingway}}{{ NANA also released each individual dispatch with a one-sentence “precede” about the “famous” or “noted” author. Ernest Hemingway was not writing as Herbert Mathews, ace reporter; Hemingway was writing as Ernest Hemingway, famous author of novels and stories well known to be drawn from his own experiences.

That he understood this to be his assignment is further evidenced by a
cable Matthews sent to his Times editors on April 9, 1937, concerning the
Loyalist attack: “WORKED CONJOINTL WITH HEMINGWAY TODAY HE SENDING EYEWITNESS DESCRIPTION WHILE EYE SENT GENERAL STRATEGY.”{{sfn|Matthews|1937|p=April}} When a year later the Times asked NANA to ensure Hemingway’s reports differed from Matthews, NANA complied by asking Hemingway “to emphasize color rather than straight reporting” not necessarily out of dissatisfaction with Hemingway’s reportage as Baker contends,{{efn|Baker’s notes date the Times request to NANA as 8 Apr. 1938, and NANA’s to Hemingway as 15
Apr. 1938 (Princeton University, Firestone Library: Box 18, Folder 8 “1938”), the date of “The Bombing of Tortosa” dispatch.}} but to increase{{pg|431|432}}the chance of selling to the Times and indeed to ensure the spirit of NANA’s original arrangement with Hemingway. {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}Far from dissatisfied, NANA wrote Hemingway at the end of August 1938 a letter of agreement for his coverage of “a general European war” should it break out, “written in your colorful style” (Hemingway was in Paris, on his way to Spain for the last time during the war).{{sfn|Wheeler|1938|p=}} When Edmund Wilson criticized the selected dispatches reprinted in Fact, Hemingway wrote him that “I was paid to write what are called ‘eye witness’ accounts . . .what is called, or was asked for as ‘color stuff.’ Most of such stuff is faked. Mine was not. It was straight reporting and the personal stuff was what had been asked for by the editors. “Wilson’s estimation was also based upon Fact’s inclusion of the “The Old Man at the Bridge” story from Ken, “not a news dispatch” at all.{{sfn|Hemingway|1938|p=Edmund}} Speaking at Carnegie Hall before the showing of a rough cut of The Spanish Earth, shortly after his first trip to Spain and so very much in the context of his wartime work, Hemingway defined the writer’s problem as “project[ing] [what is true] in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2002|p=193}}

Personal, anecdotal journalism had been Hemingway’s signature style from his earliest days filing reports, in the early 1920s from Paris, when his editor at the Toronto Star Weekly “encouraged [. . .] what Hemingway did best: write about himself in the act of being a reporter.”{{sfn|Reynolds|1989|p=45}} How could he expect that NANA would expect anything else, if indeed NANA did expect anything else? In the Spanish Civil War he at least maintained his eyewitness posture; in World War II, however, he couldn’t keep himself out. His first piece, about D-Day, begins, “No one remembers the date of the Battle of Shiloh. But the day we took Fox Green beach was the sixth of June, and the wind was blowing hard out of the northwest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1967|p=340}} His venue too—Collier’s magazine—and the fact that he had not written anything in three years further contributed to the story-like nature of the WWII stories, in which he figured as a protagonist—not to mention the stories and involvement he couldn’t write about, armed and running around France more of a free agent than his guerilla-hero Robert Jordan ever was (though he began to transform these experiences into fiction in several unpublished stories). In wartime China in 1943, filing articles for Ralph Ingersoll’s short-lived PM New York afternoon daily, Hemingway did not even care to be called a news reporter.{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=99}}

It should be mentioned that Hemingway and Matthews enjoyed a great{{pg|432|433}friendship and working relationship. Hemingway usually brought Matthews, who did not have a car, on his excursions. When Matthews left Madrid for a break in mid April 1937, he had already ensured Hemingway would provide coverage to the Times through NANA. For one thing, Hemingway did not have to worry about Matthews as a rival for the history books. He could endorse his friends’ book, Two Wars and More to Come, and praise him as “the ablest and the bravest war correspondent writing today “who “when the fakers are all dead [. . .] will be read in the schools” (Advertisement 21) because Matthews posed no threat to Hemingway’s own chances to be read in the schools.{{sfn|?}} The only brief Hemingway ever expressed he really reserved for Matthews’ editors, for not wanting his Teruel street-fighting story and for cutting references to himself in Matthews’ Teruel dispatches so that it appeared only Matthews had been there.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=462}}

As for Hemingway’s neglecting to name everyone with him for every story, the Times cutting of his name suggests that such exactitude was hardly a priority. A paper had no incentive for announcing the fact that a competitor’s
correspondent stood beside its own to see and report the same
events. NANA changed at least one vague Hemingway “we,” which admits
to the presence of others, to “this correspondent”
—we can hardly fault Hemingway for working in the spirit of his
employer’s standards.{{sfn|NANA|1938|p=American Veterans}}{{efn|“we” in typescript and radiogram (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 1 and Folder 25).}} Do readers care that Matthews, Delmer, Gellhorn,
and others were there? The story’s effect and the limited word count also
weighed against such roll calls. One editor chose not to clutter the dispatch
on the great retreat across the Ebro with all the names of the American International Brigade volunteers Hemingway encountered, an omission of
Content more far serious than that of omitted correspondent names.{{efn| Radiogram insert dateline 4 April 1938 (HRC: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 25).}} Hemingway
often gave the names of the reporters with him, such as at Teruel;
nor was he the only reporter to sometimes neglect to do so. Martha Gellhorn,
for example, used a vague “we” and singled herself out as the primary
participant in some of her stories.

By using first-person reportage Hemingway—and Matthews and Gellhorn And most of the group covering the war—were operating solidly within
convention. William Stott, in Documentary Expression and Thirties America,
calls this first-person participant observer technique “the most common sort
of documentary reportage in the thirties” that worked “by vicarious persuasion:
the writer partook of the events he reported and bared his feelings
and attitudes to influence the reader’s own.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=178-9}}{{efn|He specifically includes Hemingway et al (180).}} Stott also observes {{pg|433|434}}another technique to enable documentary reportage to “talk to us, and convince us that we, our deepest interests, are engaged,” in the use of the second person: “Thirties documentaries constantly address ‘you,’ the ‘you’ who is we the audience, and exhorts, wheedles, begs us to identify, pity, participate.” His examples include Dorothy Parker’s Spanish Civil War writing, and Hemingway’s 1935 “First-Hand Report on the Florida Hurricane.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=27-8}} A number of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches employ the second-person as a way of bringing the reader along for the ride.

Hemingway’s dispatches used personal pronouns more artfully than is
generally recognized. “A New Kind of War,” which William Braasch Watson
notes as having been “[w]ritten with more care and imagination” than its
predecessors, begins in second person: “The window of the hotel is open
and, as you lie in bed, you hear the firing in the front line seventeen blocks
away.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=29}} He takes “you” outside, to see the damage and the dead from the bombing. “Someone makes a joke about missing teeth and someone else says not to make that joke. And everyone has the feeling that characterizes war. It wasn’t me, see? It wasn’t me.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} The tension between the first person and second-person pronouns—the movement toward identification with “you” and the insistence that “it wasn’t me”—continues in the next line. Here the reader is at once still in the narrator’s shoes, but strangely distanced from the narrator through biographical tidbit and, at the same time, asked
to see himself in the enemy: “The Italian dead up on the Guadalajara weren’t
you although Italian dead, because of where you had spent your boyhood,
always seemed, still, like Our Dead.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} It is worth quoting at length the dispatch’s transition to first person:

{{quote|After the shell that lit on the sidewalk in front of the hotel you got
a beautiful double corner room on that side, twice the size of the
one you’d had, for less than a dollar. It wasn’t me they killed. See?
No. Not me. It wasn’t me anymore.
Then in a hospital given by the American Friends of Spanish
Democracy located out behind the Morata front along the road
to Valencia they said, “Raven wants to see you.”
“Do I know him?”
“I don’t think so,” they said. “But he wants to see you.”
“Where is he?”
“Upstairs.”{{pg|434|435}}
In the room upstairs they are giving a blood transfusion to a
man with a very gray face who lay on a cot with his arm out looking
away from the gurgling bottle and moaning in a very impersonal
way. He moaned mechanically and at regular intervals and
it did not seem to be him that made the sound. His lips did not
move.
“Where’s Raven?” I asked.
“I’m here,” said Raven.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=31}} }}
The piece simply could not have sustained the second-person for the remaining
five pages. More significantly, for this deeply personal exchange between
the writer and the faceless, eyeless soldier, Hemingway could not hide
in the rhetorical device of the second-person. In the process, he effects a reversal
of the usual pronoun game; instead of identifying with the all embracing
“you,” we leave that trick behind and become fully attached to
the narratorial “I” as ourselves, as we might not have been had the article
begun in the first person. And even as the narrator identifies himself by name
for the only time in any of the dispatches—“Hemingway,” and later
“Ernest”—as decidedly not ourselves. We do not say, It isn’t me. The historian
Hugh Thomas notes “the refreshing candour” of Hemingway’s naming
himself “in the world of the International Brigades, where no one’s name
seemed to be truthfully given.”{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=591}}{{efn|For Watson, the dispatch “seems, in fact, on the verge of becoming a story” (29).}}

A year later Hemingway’s “Tortosa Calmly Awaits Assault” resists admitting
the city’s imminent fall. Yet it does so anyway, by subtly alluding to the
wartime rhetoric of sacrificed blood irrigating the earth and rejuvenating
Spain. Such rhetoric was common during the war, appearing in speeches,
print, and poetry. Many of the poems in Cary Nelson’s anthology The Wound
and the Dream: Sixty Years of American Poems about the Civil War join in the
Spanish and international chorus’s general connection between Republican
soldiers and the land, and the particular singing of their dead nourishing
the land. We find such language in La Pasionaria’s farewell address to the International Brigades, her epilogue to The Book of the XV Brigade, and Hemingway’s famous eulogy “On the American Dead in Spain”: “For our dead are
a part of the earth of Spain now and the earth of Spain can never die. Each
winter it will seem to die and each spring it will come alive again. Our dead
will live with it forever.”{{sfn|Nelson|1994|p=3}}{{efn| Reprinted in Bruccoli 76 and Nelson, Remembering 37 (the drafts at the JFK are titled “The Dead at Jarama”). In addition to the poems in Nelson’s anthology, see the excerpt from Boris Todrin’s “Spanish Sowing” in Guttmann (Wounded 179–180).}} The Tortosa dispatch implies the deaths of

cover the war and support the cause—a justification other journalists, those
who did not return after the spring of 1937, did not enjoy. In his mind too,
knowing what he heard of fascist atrocities, any reportage against the government
lessening its chances of victory through killing hopes of increased
international aid would have led to more deaths at Franco’s hands that the
much smaller number inspired by fifth column paranoia.12

The accusation that Hemingway did not write about Republican atrocities
because he was saving it for his fiction I find baseless (Knightley 232;
Baker 402).{{sfn|Knightley|2004|p=232}}{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=402}}{{efn|Hemingway’s casual comment to colleagues calling dibs on Pepe Quintanilla, the executioner of
Madrid, is not sufficient evidence.}}Carolyn Moorehead, in her biography of Martha Gellhorn, describes
the climate for the Madrid correspondents that first spring: “And so,
day by day, the correspondents walked a thin and nervous line between truth,
evasions, and propaganda, telling one another that though it was not all right
if things were made up and presented as true, it was acceptable to describe
what you wanted, provided it was true and provided your readers were aware
of your position.”{{sfn|Moorehead|2003|p=125}} My own sense is that they did not walk the line quite
so nervously; their passionate commitment, and their principles of position
disclosure and the eyewitness standard, made that walk relatively easy.

The problem of committed journalism, even sixty years later, has not been
resolved—as anyone paying attention to the media and world affairs well
knows. One person’s truth is another person’s propaganda. Certainly, as
Knightley notes, reporting from “the heart” affects one’s judgment.{{sfn|Knightley|2004|pp=234-5}}
Yet to attempt “balance,” per the edits to Matthews’ Guadalajara piece, betrays
one’s believed truth. Furthermore, the kind of reporting done by the
correspondents with the Republic—committed, one-sided, optimistic,
heroic, human interest work by embedded writers—would be practiced
widely and without reserve during World War II. Such narrative journalism,
with roots in Louise May Alcott’s “Hospital Sketches” series published in the
Boston Commonwealth, and more immediately in 1930s social documentary
writing whose “essence” is “not information”, anticipated postwar
new journalism’s adoption of novelistic narrative technique for nonfiction
which culminated with such wartime books as Norman Mailer’s Armies of
the Night and Michael Herr’s Dispatches.{{sfn|Stott|1986|p=11}} Some of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches
fall in this line of development.

Today we might categorize such writing under the awkward umbrella
term creative nonfiction. That term certainly fits the mixed bag of nonfiction
narratives and commentaries Hemingway published during the war in
Ken magazine. These pieces are essays, not journalism, several of which{{pg|439|440}}

directly appeal for support for the Republic, and most of which really deal
with the approaching world war. Ken wanted “precisely the kind of opinion
articles he could not write for NANA.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=433}} His article, “The
Cardinal Picks a Winner,” shows a photo of a row of dead children from
Barcelona and another one with Nationalist officers saluting and Catholic officials
with raised hands, apparently making the fascist salute as well. He
ends ironically: “So I don’t believe the people shown in the photo can really
be making it. I would rather prefer to think that the photograph was faked.”
{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=436}} When Hemingway argues in “A Program for U.S. Realism” that the
United States should stay out of the next war except to stuff its pockets
through arms sales, one has to wonder, given his call and the democratic nations’
failure to save Spain, if we are to sniff sarcasm here.

The language of the dispatches, with their corrective intent against
Franco’s propaganda, does risk propagandizing. Hemingway’s optimism and
anti-fascism certainly colored his correspondence work. His criticism of the
anarchist and POUM militia for their inactivity on the Aragon front, for example,
sounds a lot like the Spanish Communist Party’s.{{efn|It at least sounds almost exactly like Dolores Ibarruri in her memoir. To the anarchists’ complaint
that they had no arms, she retorts “that they had more arms than did many other fronts. . . .
What they didn’t have and what they were constantly demanding were airplanes and tanks .And
they didn’t have them because the Republic government didn’t have them either, except for those
it received as aid from the Soviet Union” (238–284). Yet the various Catalonia militia were not
as well equipped with small arms as the more regular Popular Army units, and because of the
terrain tanks and planes were in fact necessary.}}
But unlike
Matthews, Hemingway limited his reports within the Republic to military
matters. Hemingway may have generally condemned the anarchists in his
nonfiction, considering their activity as hampering the war effort, but he
never repeated the accusation of their collaboration with the rebels, as
Matthews had done. And when Hemingway commented on the Bareclona
crisis, he referred only to the government—not the communists, as
Matthews had done.{{efn|Hemingway’s comments in “Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win” NANA staff
correspondent dispatch. Though arguably he was propagandizing by hiding the communist influence—
to mention the communists to an American audience would not gain sympathy for the
cause.}}Nor did he write articles asserting the limited role of
the communists in the government, or explaining Spanish anarchism, also
as Matthews had done.{{efn|An article on the communists’ limited role appeared in late November 1937, as discussed in a
missive from The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State on 2
Dec. 1937 (United States 461). Matthews’ “Anarchism: Spain’s Enigma” appeared in the New York
Times 22 Aug. 1937: 6, 14.}}

During one of Hemingway’s stateside breaks between trips to Spain, his
children asked if he was a “tool” of Stalin, an accusation tossed by a schoolmate
who, presumably parroting his or her parents, probably understood
the term no better than Hemingway’s children. {{sfn|Hemingway|nd|p=}}
Hemingway believed in the Republic’s potential, but he was never a dupe of
the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) or Comintern. As did many others, he
accepted PCE’s presence in the government for its discipline and organization
toward winning the war, and he understood the material necessity for
Comintern’s support. It should also be noted, as historians Hugh Thomas
and Helen Graham have reminded us, that the communism associated with
the Republic wasn’t particularly communist anyway.{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=628}}{{sfn|Graham|2002|p=184}} {{pg|440|441}}

Hemingway declined to follow Joris Ivens’ suggestion that he write a
dispatch on the significant role of the political commissars in the Republican
military, even though that would have meant
featuring his brave new friend Gustav Regler.{{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=}} Hemingway also, in a letter
justifying his work to Jack Wheeler at NANA, wrote about choosing not to
send a dispatch he had written because it might strike readers as propaganda
“no matter how true” (Letter to Jack Wheeler).{{sfn|Hemingway|1938b|p=}}

Hemingway went to Spain to see the war himself and to support the Republic
through his ambulance fund. The paychecks from NANA and the
fundraising from The Spanish Earth helped. Whatever propagandistic streak
colors the dispatches pales in comparison to the documentary. The filmmaker,
Joris Ivens, was well established in European communist circles. The
documentary genre then and now has occupied a slippery position between
the extremes of impossible-to-achieve empirical nonfiction and of the outright
fictionalized. Evaluations of Hemingway’s journalism are informed by
knowledge of The Spanish Earth and the Ken essays to the detriment of the
journalism. And the very nature of the slippery documentary genre may enable
the film to escape opprobrium. It wasn’t reportage; it was altogether
something else. But for that matter, Hemingway’s dispatches weren’t purely
reportage either, and if not altogether something else, still something else,
and should be reckoned with accordingly.

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|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=12 Oct 1937
|chapter=Letter to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=25 Apr 1939
|chapter=Letter to M.B. Tenney
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Apr 1937
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Knightley
|first=Phillip
|date=2004
|title=The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq
|url=
|location=Baltimore
|publisher=John Hopkins
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=
|date=9 Apr 1937
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=TS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=11 Apr 1937
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=6 July 1937
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=July 1937
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=22 March 1939
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 9
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=
|date=20 May 1937
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=20 Dec 1937
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 5
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Sep 1937
|chapter=Note to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moorehead
|first=Caroline
|date=2003
|title=Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Henry Holt
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moreira
|first=Peter
|date=2006
|title=Hemingway on the China Front: His WWII Spy Mission with Martha Gellhorn
|url=
|location=Washington D.C.
|publisher=Potomac Books
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|date=5 Feb 1937
|chapter=Promotion Box: Hemingway, For Immediate Release
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|author-mask=1
|date=4 Apr 1938
|chapter=Promotion Box: American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|editor-last=Nelson
|editor-first=Card
|date=1994
|title=Remembering Spain: Hemingway’s Civil War Eulogy and the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
|url=
|location=Urbana
|publisher=U of Illinois
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Reynolds
|first=Michael
|date=1989
|title=Hemingway: The Paris Years
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Norton
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Stott
|first=William
|date=1986
|title=Documentary Expression and Thirties America
|url=
|location=Chicago
|publisher=U of Chicago P
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Thomas
|first=Hugh
|date=2001
|title=The Spanish Civil War, Rev. ed.
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Modern Library
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine
|last=''Two Wars and More to Come''
|first=
|date=24 Jan 1938
|title=Best Sellers of the Week Here and Elsewhere
|type=Advertisement
|url=
|magazine=New York Times
|pages=
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=
|first=
|title=United States. Dept. of State
|url=
|journal= Foreign Relations of the Untied States, 1937 |volume==1
|issue=General
|date=1954
|pages=
|location=Washington
|publisher=GPO
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Watson
|first=William Braasch
|title=Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches
|url=
|journal=The Hemingway Review |volume==7.2
|issue=
|date=1988
|pages=4-121
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Wheeler
|first=John H.
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938
|chapter=Letter to Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection, Box 3 Folder 14
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches

2025-04-19T20:52:00Z

MerAtticus: page number correction

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{{byline|last=Vernon |first=Alex |abstract=The Spanish Civil War began in July 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally-restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy. By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches.}}

{{dc|dc=T|HE SPANISH CIVIL WAR BEGAN ON}} 17-18 JULY, 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy, to collaborate with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens on the pro-Republican documentary ''The Spanish Earth'', and to pursue his fledgling love affair with Martha Gellhorn.

By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches for NANA.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=4}}{{efn|Quotations from the NANA dispatches follow the Diplomatic Text established by William Braasch Watson’s “Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches.” I prefer NANA’s titles rather than Watson’s. For my disagreements with some of Watson’s datings, see my comments on specific dispatches in ''Hemingway’s Second War.''}}The secondary sources habitually judge them inferior journalism. Carlos Baker in the first Hemingway biography, for example, complains that the dialogue was “so heavily stamped with personal mannerisms as to be of doubtful authenticity.” Baker sees a “curious monotony in his stories of battles and bombardments,” a gratuitous use of graphic imagery “to shock his readers,” and “a note of triumphant boastfulness” in reporting proximity to danger. He also faults Hemingway for “often hint[ing] he was alone when in fact he was usually with Martha Gellhorn, Matthews, and Delmer.” Hemingway lacked Dos Passos’ “eye for telling details” and the “meticulous exactitude and inclusiveness that characterized the best work of Herbert Matthews and Sefton Delmer.”{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}

Philip Knightley’s ''The First Casualty'', the standard history of war correspondence, paraphrases Baker but with a trouncing final judgment:{{pg|427|428}}Hemingway’s “performance as a war correspondent was abysmally bad.” But Knightley goes beyond “technical” dissatisfaction to moral condemnation. Not just “unjustifiably optimistic”—an excusable offense—Hemingway’s reporting was “unforgivable” in its “total failure to report the Communist persecution, imprisonment, and summary execution of ‘untrustworthy elements’ on the Republican side, when he knew this was happening and when disclosing it might well have prevented further horrors like this.”
{{sfn|Knightley|2004 |pp=231–32}}{{efn|In my view, Knightley does not sufficiently acknowledge his paraphrasing of Baker.}}

Such criticisms in the final analysis might bear out. As Scott Donaldson writes, Hemingway advanced the Republican cause in his dispatches by eliciting “the deepest possible feelings of horror and of sympathy for the victims” of the Madrid bombardment; his “undue optimism” often “ignored Loyalist defeats and exaggerated the importance of its victories”; and “he repeatedly called attention to the participation of Italians and Germans on Franco’s side.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=426}} It also served as a recruitment tool—Milton Wolff, for example, acknowledged the strong influence Hemingway’s dispatches had on his decision to volunteer. Nevertheless, I think it a worthwhile exercise to attend a little more studiously to Hemingway’s dispatches, their context, and their artistry. I don’t necessarily intend to reverse the general opinion of the correspondence, only to achieve a better and more sympathetic understanding.

Herbert Matthews’ reporting for the ''New York Times'' will serve as a convenient comparison for two reasons. First, because both Baker and Knightley use Matthews’ journalism as the standard of excellence to pass judgment on Hemingway’s; and second, because the two worked practically side-by-side, seeing and reporting on many of the same events. In fact so closely did they work together that NANA sometimes complained that the ''Times'' was not buying Hemingway’s pieces because they resembled Matthews,’ and at one point Matthews’ own editors at the Times suspected him of plagiarizing Hemingway.{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|pp=411, 420}} A note from Matthews’ assigned editor Raymond McCaw provides, in two columns, seven quite similar passages from Hemingway’s Aragon front dispatches of September 13 and 14 with Matthews’ of September 14, with a penciled note at the bottom: “a deadly parallel if you ask me.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937c|p=}} Edwin James, the managing editor and McCaw’s boss, eventually agreed with Matthews’ defense: “It is quite apparent that you did not file any duplicate of the Hemingway story, or vice versa. As I understand it, the similarity arose from the fact that you{{pg|428|429}}both went to see the same show and saw it at the same time [sic], under the same conditions.”{{sfn|James|1937b|p=}}

Matthews’ dispatches ring of Republican bias as much if not more than anything Hemingway ever filed. The ''Times'' received many letters to the editor complaining about Matthews’ undisguised politics, which also gave serious concern to some of his editors. His description of the Republican May 1937 infighting in Barcelona is a striking example of how his news veered into propaganda and shows just how much he passed along the government’s version of events. The government’s “BLOODLESS TRIUMPH FOUGHT WITH RECOGNIZEDWEAPONS OF DEMOCRACY” turned out to be blatantly false, as the government and the “COMMUNISTS [WHO] DISTINGUISHED THEMSELVES” resorted to violent suppression. His blaming the uprising on the anarchist CNT working as Franco operatives parrots the government’s and the communist party’s public position, even though both charges—that the anarchists precipitated the events and that they were under Nationalist direction—were also false. His dispatch’s optimistic close also equivocates the political reality: “NEW GOVERNMENT HAS TAKEN POWER WHICH APPEARS TOVE CONFIDENCE VAST MAJORITY SPANIARDS IN LOYALIST TERRITORY AND TIS HOPED WILL GAIN EQUAL CONFIDENCE ABROAD STOP VIOLENCE AND REVOLUTION BEEN REPUDIATED AND NEWAND FAR HOPEFULLER PERIOD SEEMS BEGINNING.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937a|p=}}The ''Times'', knowing full well the one-sided coverage of a correspondent writing from one side of the conflict, had a reporter on both sides: Matthews with the Republicans, and William Carney with the Nationalists. They got their facts right (or wrong) as often as the other, their editors concluded; and they inspired about the same number of letters of complaint.{{sfn|James|1937a|p=}}{sfn|James|1939|p=}}

Furthermore, Matthews’ dispatches received a great deal of substantive editorial revisions. One of Matthews’ Teruel reports had to be cut for length, as McCaw informed James: “This bird sent 2844 words on the same facts which Hemingway covered much better in less than half that number. I wonder if Matthews thinks the paper is thriving, and that cable tolls do not matter a damn. Of course, it had to be cut for space anyway.” McCaw most likely refers here to Matthews’ dispatch corresponding to Hemingway’s “The Attack on Teruel,” though Matthews’ account of the fall of Teruel is also much longer (and more long-winded) than Hemingway’s, and just as personal in terms of describing the dangers{{pg|429|430}} he faced. Indeed its length allows him to share even more of the action he endured.{{sfn|McCaw|1937b|p=}}

Raymond McCaw held a general professional disagreement with Matthews perhaps tainted with over zealousness. Whether a personal or political motive informed that disagreement can’t be determined from the evidence I’ve seen. It is also clear that McCaw’s charges bear some validity—that any responsible editor could have easily and reasonably taken issue where McCaw did. One of the more interesting examples concerns Matthews’ piece on Guadalajara. Because he only saw evidence on Franco’s side of Italian forces, he only reported on Italians. But the ''Times'' editors heard from other sources that German soldiers also participated in the March offensive. They thought it prudent, from this confusion, to change (nine times) “Italian” to “Rebel,” “the foe,” or “Insurgent.” When Matthews saw the published piece he wrote a strenuous objection. In some instances the editors changed paraphrased quotations from his sources. One large paragraph omitted by the editors stressed the first-hand nature of the information, and Matthews underlines the key words: “All day, at every place we stopped and no matter whom we talked to or what we saw, there was only one label—Italian. The dead bodies, the prisoners, the material of every kind, the men who had occupied Brihuega and then fled were Italian and nothing but Italian.” Here and elsewhere in his original story, Matthews emphasizes the “personal knowledge” of its information.{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}{{efn|James supported McCaw on these changes, though later acknowledged that altering quoted sources was perhaps unwarranted.{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}}}Yet Matthews did not report on the foreigners fighting for the Republic—it was in fact the Italian Garibali Battalion that routed Franco’s Italians. We might surmise government censorship behind this silence, though Matthews would not cable news of “CENSORSHIP STRICTER” and “BAN ON MENTIONING INTERNATIONALS INCLUDING AMERICANS INSTITUTED TODAY” until July.{{sfn|Matthews|1937b|p=}}Perhaps he cautiously self-censored, or politically self-censored for the same reasons the government would eventually ban mention. Still, his stridency about the omission of foreigners on one side is striking given his knowledge of their contribution to the other side. For this reason too, and his omission of other nationalities on the insurgent side, it seemed only fair to his editor “to stand on the statement that the majority of the Rebels were Italians and let it go at that.”{{sfn|James|1937c|p=}} A reasonable decision.

Throughout his correspondence to his editors and his several books,{{pg|430|431}}Matthews maintained a passionate defense of his eyewitness journalistic standard, a position those close to him understood. “Matthews never believed anything he had not seen with his own eyes,” Joris Ivens wrote. “He never saw his job as reporter as one that permitted him to sit in his hotel and read the handouts of the War Ministry.” {{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=112}} Sidney Franklin recalls that some writers wrote their pieces before arriving in Madrid, and came only for the “legitimacy” of the Madrid dateline.{{sfn|Franklin|1952|p=232}}And Matthews hated, on principle, having his name attached to an article that violated the integrity of his witness. The only way to achieve objectivity, for Matthews, was to acknowledge one’s subjective perspective. Writing to his publisher, Matthews argued that “the full documentary value” of his coverage was lost when the editors altered his submissions for “the apparent necessity of giving more or less equal space to both sides.”{{sfn|Matthews|1939|p=}}

As with Matthews, so too Hemingway. Indeed the commitment to subjectivity
fit quite well with Hemingway’s modernist aesthetics. If Hemingway
focused the dispatches on his perspective—on his own experience dodging
artillery—more than Matthews and more than most, he did so at least partially
to fulfill expectations. NANA approached him, after all, for his name
and personality as much as whatever he would write. Before he even left the
states it pitched him to potential publications, sending out a promotional release with text to be used alongside his forthcoming dispatches and suggesting
they include a photograph: “Mr. Hemingway’s assignment is to get both from the bombed towns and bombed trenches the human story of the war, not just an account of the game being played by general staffs with pins
and a map.”{{sfn|NANA|1937|p=}}{{ NANA also released each individual dispatch with a one-sentence “precede” about the “famous” or “noted” author. Ernest Hemingway was not writing as Herbert Mathews, ace reporter; Hemingway was writing as Ernest Hemingway, famous author of novels and stories well known to be drawn from his own experiences.

That he understood this to be his assignment is further evidenced by a
cable Matthews sent to his ''Times'' editors on April 9, 1937, concerning the
Loyalist attack: “WORKED CONJOINTL WITH HEMINGWAY TODAY HE SENDING EYEWITNESS DESCRIPTION WHILE EYE SENT GENERAL STRATEGY.”{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}When a year later the ''Times'' asked NANA to ensure Hemingway’s reports differed from Matthews, NANA complied by asking Hemingway “to emphasize color rather than straight reporting” not necessarily out of dissatisfaction with Hemingway’s reportage as Baker contends,{{efn|Baker’s notes date the Times request to NANA as 8 Apr. 1938, and NANA’s to Hemingway as 15
Apr. 1938 (Princeton University, Firestone Library: Box 18, Folder 8 “1938”), the date of “The Bombing of Tortosa” dispatch.}} but to increase{{pg|431|432}}the chance of selling to the ''Times'' and indeed to ensure the spirit of NANA’s original arrangement with Hemingway. {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}Far from dissatisfied, NANA wrote Hemingway at the end of August 1938 a letter of agreement for his coverage of “a general European war” should it break out, “written in your colorful style” (Hemingway was in Paris, on his way to Spain for the last time during the war).{{sfn|Wheeler|1938|p=}}When Edmund Wilson criticized the selected dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'', Hemingway wrote him that “I was paid to write what are called ‘eye witness’ accounts . . .what is called, or was asked for as ‘color stuff.’ Most of such stuff is faked. Mine was not. It was straight reporting and the personal stuff was what had been asked for by the editors. “Wilson’s estimation was also based upon ''Fact’s'' inclusion of the “The Old Man at the Bridge” story from ''Ken'', “not a news dispatch” at all.{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}Speaking at Carnegie Hall before the showing of a rough cut of ''The Spanish Earth'', shortly after his first trip to Spain and so very much in the context of his wartime work, Hemingway defined the writer’s problem as “project[ing] [what is true] in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2002|p=193}}

Personal, anecdotal journalism had been Hemingway’s signature style from his earliest days filing reports, in the early 1920s from Paris, when his editor at the ''Toronto Star Weekly'' “encouraged [. . .] what Hemingway did best: write about himself in the act of being a reporter.”{{sfn|Reynolds|1989|p=45}}How could he expect that NANA would expect anything else, if indeed NANA did expect anything else? In the Spanish Civil War he at least maintained his eyewitness posture; in World War II, however, he couldn’t keep himself out. His first piece, about D-Day, begins, “No one remembers the date of the Battle of Shiloh. But the day ''we took'' Fox Green beach was the sixth of June, and the wind was blowing hard out of the northwest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1967|p=340}}His venue too—''Collier’s'' magazine—and the fact that he had not written anything in three years further contributed to the story-like nature of the WWII stories, in which he figured as a protagonist—not to mention the stories and involvement he couldn’t write about, armed and running around France more of a free agent than his guerilla-hero Robert Jordan ever was (though he began to transform these experiences into fiction in several unpublished stories). In wartime China in 1943, filing articles for Ralph Ingersoll’s short-lived ''PM'' New York afternoon daily, Hemingway did not even care to be called a news reporter.{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=99}}

It should be mentioned that Hemingway and Matthews enjoyed a great{{pg|432|433}}friendship and working relationship. Hemingway usually brought Matthews, who did not have a car, on his excursions. When Matthews left Madrid for a break in mid April 1937, he had already ensured Hemingway would provide coverage to the ''Times'' through NANA. For one thing, Hemingway did not have to worry about Matthews as a rival for the history books. He could endorse his friends’ book, ''Two Wars and More to Come'', and praise him as “the ablest and the bravest war correspondent writing today “who “when the fakers are all dead [. . .] will be read in the schools” (Advertisement 21) because Matthews posed no threat to Hemingway’s own chances to be read in the schools. The only brief Hemingway ever expressed he really reserved for Matthews’ editors, for not wanting his Teruel street-fighting story and for cutting references to himself in Matthews’ Teruel dispatches so that it appeared only Matthews had been there.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=462}}

As for Hemingway’s neglecting to name everyone with him for every story, the ''Times'' cutting of his name suggests that such exactitude was hardly a priority. A paper had no incentive for announcing the fact that a competitor’s
correspondent stood beside its own to see and report the same
events. NANA changed at least one vague Hemingway “we,” which admits
to the presence of others, to “this correspondent”
—we can hardly fault Hemingway for working in the spirit of his
employer’s standards.{{sfn|NANA|1938|p=}}{{efn|“we” in typescript and radiogram (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 1 and Folder 25).}} Do readers care that Matthews, Delmer, Gellhorn,
and others were there? The story’s effect and the limited word count also
weighed against such roll calls. One editor chose not to clutter the dispatch
on the great retreat across the Ebro with all the names of the American International Brigade volunteers Hemingway encountered, an omission of
Content more far serious than that of omitted correspondent names.{{efn| Radiogram insert dateline 4 April 1938 (HRC: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 25).}} Hemingway
often gave the names of the reporters with him, such as at Teruel;
nor was he the only reporter to sometimes neglect to do so. Martha Gellhorn,
for example, used a vague “we” and singled herself out as the primary
participant in some of her stories.

By using first-person reportage Hemingway—and Matthews and Gellhorn And most of the group covering the war—were operating solidly within
convention. William Stott, in ''Documentary Expression and Thirties America'',
calls this first-person ''participant observer'' technique “the most common sort
of documentary reportage in the thirties” that worked “by vicarious persuasion:
the writer partook of the events he reported and bared his feelings
and attitudes to influence the reader’s own.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=178-9}}{{efn|He specifically includes Hemingway et al (180).}} Stott also observes {{pg|433|434}}another technique to enable documentary reportage to “talk to us, and convince us that we, our deepest interests, are engaged,” in the use of the second person: “Thirties documentaries constantly address ‘you,’ the ‘you’ who is we the audience, and exhorts, wheedles, begs us to identify, pity, participate.” His examples include Dorothy Parker’s Spanish Civil War writing, and Hemingway’s 1935 “First-Hand Report on the Florida Hurricane.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=27-8}} A number of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches employ the second-person as a way of bringing the reader along for the ride.

Hemingway’s dispatches used personal pronouns more artfully than is
generally recognized. “A New Kind of War,” which William Braasch Watson
notes as having been “[w]ritten with more care and imagination” than its
predecessors, begins in second person: “The window of the hotel is open
and, as you lie in bed, you hear the firing in the front line seventeen blocks
away.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=29}} He takes “you” outside, to see the damage and the dead from the bombing. “Someone makes a joke about missing teeth and someone else says not to make that joke. And everyone has the feeling that characterizes war. It wasn’t me, see? It wasn’t me.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} The tension between the first person and second-person pronouns—the movement toward identification with “you” and the insistence that “it wasn’t me”—continues in the next line. Here the reader is at once still in the narrator’s shoes, but strangely distanced from the narrator through biographical tidbit and, at the same time, asked
to see himself in the enemy: “The Italian dead up on the Guadalajara weren’t
you although Italian dead, because of where you had spent your boyhood,
always seemed, still, like Our Dead.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} It is worth quoting at length the dispatch’s transition to first person:<blockquote>
After the shell that lit on the sidewalk in front of the hotel you got a beautiful double corner room on that side, twice the size of the one you’d had, for less than a dollar. It wasn’t me they killed. See? No. Not me. It wasn’t me anymore.

Then in a hospital given by the American Friends of Spanish Democracy located out behind the Morata front along the road
to Valencia they said, “Raven wants to see you.”

“Do I know him?”

“I don’t think so,” they said. “But he wants to see you.”

“Where is he?”

“Upstairs.”{{pg|434|435}}In the room upstairs they are giving a blood transfusion to a man with a very gray face who lay on a cot with his arm out looking away from the gurgling bottle and moaning in a very impersonal way. He moaned mechanically and at regular intervals and it did not seem to be him that made the sound. His lips did not move.

“Where’s Raven?” I asked.

“I’m here,” said Raven.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=31}}</blockquote>The piece simply could not have sustained the second-person for the remaining
five pages. More significantly, for this deeply personal exchange between
the writer and the faceless, eyeless soldier, Hemingway could not hide
in the rhetorical device of the second-person. In the process, he effects a reversal
of the usual pronoun game; instead of identifying with the all embracing
“you,” we leave that trick behind and become fully attached to
the narratorial “I” as ourselves, as we might not have been had the article
begun in the first person. And even as the narrator identifies himself by name
for the only time in any of the dispatches—“Hemingway,” and later
“Ernest”—as decidedly not ourselves. We do not say, ''It isn’t me''. The historian
Hugh Thomas notes “the refreshing candour” of Hemingway’s naming
himself “in the world of the International Brigades, where no one’s name
seemed to be truthfully given.”{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=591}}{{efn|For Watson, the dispatch “seems, in fact, on the verge of becoming a story” (29).}}

A year later Hemingway’s “Tortosa Calmly Awaits Assault” resists admitting
the city’s imminent fall. Yet it does so anyway, by subtly alluding to the
wartime rhetoric of sacrificed blood irrigating the earth and rejuvenating
Spain. Such rhetoric was common during the war, appearing in speeches,
print, and poetry. Many of the poems in Cary Nelson’s anthology ''The Wound
and the Dream: Sixty Years of American Poems about the Civil War'' join in the
Spanish and international chorus’s general connection between Republican
soldiers and the land, and the particular singing of their dead nourishing
the land. We find such language in La Pasionaria’s farewell address to the International Brigades, her epilogue to ''The Book of the XV Brigade'', and Hemingway’s famous eulogy “On the American Dead in Spain”: “For our dead are
a part of the earth of Spain now and the earth of Spain can never die. Each
winter it will seem to die and each spring it will come alive again. Our dead
will live with it forever.”{{sfn|Nelson|1994|p=3}}{{efn| Reprinted in Bruccoli 76 and Nelson, Remembering 37 (the drafts at the JFK are titled “The Dead at Jarama”). In addition to the poems in Nelson’s anthology, see the excerpt from Boris Todrin’s “Spanish Sowing” in Guttmann (Wounded 179–180).}} The Tortosa dispatch implies the deaths of{{pg|435|436}}many Republican soldiers in its final paragraph’s description of the newborn onions:
<blockquote>The artillery was picking up a little now. Two came in at a fairly useful place and as the smoke blew away ahead and settled through the trees, you picked an armful of spring onions from a field beside the trail that led to the Tortosa road. They were the first onions of the spring and peeling one I found they were plump white and not too strong. The Ebro Delta has a fine rich land, and where the onions grow, tomorrow will be a battle.
{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=84}}</blockquote>

The echo is quiet, and perhaps unconscious, but there nevertheless. The opening boastfulness of “American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents”
should be taken somewhat ironically. The dispatch begins by announcing
that for “two days we have been doing the most dangerous thing
you can do in this war. That is keep close behind an unstabilized line where
the enemy are attacking with mechanized forces.” Then, a few pages later,
we learn about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade survivors of the spring 1938
Nationalist offensive that took Bob Merriman and eventually reached the
Mediterranean Sea. Reading about these survivors creeping through enemy
camps, stepping on a sleeping German soldier’s hand, sprinting “across an
open field toward the Ebro bank and being sniped at by artillery controlled
by an observation plane overhead” and then “the desperate swimming of
the Ebro” naked, we are asked to place the correspondent’s plight in due perspective.{{sfn|Watson|1988|pp=71-2}} This story certainly escapes the charge of a monotonous
battle and bombing scene; its switch from apparently boastful to
awe-struck witness feels almost deliberately self-conscious. Other choice selfironic
moments come in the dispatches of that pre-Teruel quiet fall of 1938.
The one titled “Hemingway, Covering War, Tells of Brush with Death” has little
to report from Madrid other than the new aftershave brand he is trying.
In “Loyalists’ Drive Seen Progressing as Planned,” he writes that “Shells are
all much the same and if they don’t hit you there is no story and if they do
you won’t have to write it.” {{sfn|Watson|1988|p=58}}

Hemingway’s dispatches are sometimes monotonous because his war was
Usually monotonous—as wars are most of the time. It should also be kept in
mind that scholars reviewing Hemingway’s NANA dispatches one after{{pg|436|437}}another do not relive the original reading experience. Hemingway wrote dispatches sporadically, papers did not run all of his dispatches, papers edited and cut them, and readers read at least a couple of papers’ worth of other articles in between. He told Edmund Wilson as much in defending himself against Wilson’s critique of the selected (and heavily edited and cut) dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'' without his consent: “If you are being paid to be shot at and write about it you are supposed to mention the shooting. [. . .] But I do not go in for re-printing journalism.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}

If we can in this way better understand his style, and at least explain it if
not excuse it, we similarly ought to try to contextualize—and perhaps
excuse—the moral problem. The two issues here are the specific condemnation
of Hemingway’s silence about Republican atrocities and the general
question of biased reporting (the latter of which has already partially been
addressed).

Hemingway knew, as Donaldson writes, that mentioning the atrocities
“would arouse anticommunist sentiments back in the States and effectively
undermine any possibility of American intervention.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=394}} It is also doubtful
that reporting them would have stopped them. But reporting Republican
atrocities from Spain was not possible for the simple reason that all dispatches
went through a government censor. Matthews cabled his editors
from Paris in May 1937 to tell them that “censorship does not permit us to
say when the ‘telefonica’ is hit. So whenever you see reference in my
despatches [sic] to ‘an important building in the center of the city’ or words
to that effect, the cable desk can know that it is the telefonica.” {{sfn|Matthews|1937c|p=}} As already noted, by July he would cable “CENSORSHIP
STRICTER” as the ban on mentioning internationals went into effect. {{sfn|Matthews|1937d|p=}}{{sfn|Matthews|1937e|p=}} Cowles’ memoir confirms the
aggressive censorship, observing that it limited journalists to exactly the kind of material Hemingway wrote about:
<blockquote>There were frequent attempts to “beat the censor” by employing American slang expressions, but this came to an end when a Canadian girl joined the staff. The International Brigades were not allowed to be publicized; no reference could be made to Russian armaments, and buildings and streets which suffered
bombardments could not be identified.</blockquote>{{pg|437|438}}<blockquote>It was only in the realm of the human interest story that the journalists had a free hand. They could describe bombardments to their heart’s content.{{sfn|Cowles|1941|p=20}}</blockquote>
Hemingway and everyone else—to reserve incrimination for Hemingway is hardly just. No correspondent covering Republican Spain reported suspicious imprisonments and disappearances by government agents.

Hemingway, through Joris Ivens and ''The Spanish Earth'' project, had better
access to officials than most. Had he been able somehow to report such
activity, he would have lost that access and would probably have been kicked
out of the country. His fame would have likely prevented his own officially
sponsored disappearance, though he still worried, especially as so many of
such crimes on the Republican side occurred from free agents. When Jasper
Wood printed the anarchist F.A.I. banner in the limited edition book version
of ''The Spanish Earth'', Hemingway expressed his anxieties bluntly in a letter
to Jasper on August 20, 1938. It is hardly “petulant,” he scolded, “not to wish
to be shot.”{{sfn|Davison|1988|p=128}} Hostility in the Republic against the anarchists
ran high; after the Barcelona May Day conflict, the government’s foreign
minister told U.S. Ambassador Claude Bowers that “anarchist revolt
throughout Catalonia and not only expected but welcomed as an opportunity
to liquidate the anarchists who have been hostile from the beginning.”
{{sfn|NA|1954|p=292}}{{efn| The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State, 5 May 1937.}}

It is possible that Hemingway’s dispatch stating that “not one friend [. . .]
has been executed or is missing” was his clever means of reporting
the rumors and indeed the general fact while evading the censors, as
in this very dispatch he acknowledged the presence of a censor after a bombardment.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=34}}
Matthews, on the other hand, never found a way to mention the
censors or admit even the possibility of people gone missing in the Republic.
Peter Moreira has observed that in a 1943 dispatch Hemingway related a
remark by a British officer about the Chinese Nationalist government’s being
“hopeless on the offensive” because censorship “prevented American reporters
From actually saying that the Nationalists wouldn’t attack, surmising
that by telling this anecdote Hemingway could sneak such a judgment into
his reports.”{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=77}} In Spain, censors aside, the eyewitness standard and his
own safety and continuing ability to report the war, and, yes, his passionate
support of the government contributed to his decision. He could have written
about government abuses from the states, but then could not return to{{pg|438|439}}

=== Notes ===
{{notelist}}
===Citations===
{{reflist}}
===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker
|first=Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Bruccoli |first=Matthew |date=2006 |title=Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame |url= |location=Columbia |publisher=U of South Caronia P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Cowles |first=Virginia |date=1941 |title=Looking for Trouble |url= |location=New York
|publisher=Harper & Brothers |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Davison |first=Richard Allan |title=The Publication of Hemingway’s The Spanish Earth: An Untold Story |url= |journal=Hemingway Review
|volume=7.2 |issue= |date=1988
|pages=122-130 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson
|first=Scott |date=2009 |title=Fitzgerald & Hemingway: Works and Days |url= |location=New York |publisher=Columbia UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Franklin |first=Sidney |date=1952 |title=Bullfighter from Brooklyn |url= |location=New York |publisher=Prentice-Hall |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Graham |first=Helen |date=2002 |title=The Spanish Republic at War 1936-1939 |url= |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Guttmann |first=Allen |date=1962 |title=The Wound in the Heart: American and the Spanish Civil War |url= |location=New York |publisher=Free Press of Glencoe |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1967 |title=By-Line: Ernest Hemingway |url= |location=New York |publisher=Scibner |pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Trogdon
|editor-first=Robert W.
|author-mask=1
|title=Fascism is a Lie
|url=
|journal=Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference |volume==
|issue=
|date=2002
|pages=193-6
|location=New York
|publisher=Carroll & Graf
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 May 1937
|chapter=Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=nd
|chapter=The Home Front
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938a
|chapter=Letter to Edmund Wilson
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=2 June 1938b
|chapter=Letter to Jack Wheeler
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=14 Feb 1939
|chapter=On the American Dead in Spain
|title=TS. New Masses
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Baker
|editor-first=Carlos
|author-mask=1
|date=2003
|chapter=The Hadely Mowrer
|title=Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Scribner
|pages=462-3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ibarruri
|first=Dolores
|date=1966
|title=They Shall Not Pass: The Autobiography of La Pasionaria
|url=
|location=United States
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|date=1969
|title=The Camera and I
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|author-mask=1
|date=26 Apr 1937
|chapter=Letter to Ernest Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|date=20 Nov 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Bertrand Weaver
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=12 Oct 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=25 Apr 1939
|chapter=Letter to M.B. Tenney
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Apr 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Knightley
|first=Phillip
|date=2004
|title=The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq
|url=
|location=Baltimore
|publisher=John Hopkins
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=
|date=9 Apr 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=TS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=11 Apr 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=8 May 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=6 July 1937d
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=July 1937e
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=22 March 1939
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 9
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=
|date=20 May 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=20 Dec 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 5
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Sep 1937c
|chapter=Note to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moorehead
|first=Caroline
|date=2003
|title=Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Henry Holt
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moreira
|first=Peter
|date=2006
|title=Hemingway on the China Front: His WWII Spy Mission with Martha Gellhorn
|url=
|location=Washington D.C.
|publisher=Potomac Books
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|date=5 Feb 1937
|chapter=Promotion Box: Hemingway, For Immediate Release
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|author-mask=1
|date=4 Apr 1938
|chapter=Promotion Box: American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|editor-last=Nelson
|editor-first=Card
|date=1994
|title=Remembering Spain: Hemingway’s Civil War Eulogy and the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
|url=
|location=Urbana
|publisher=U of Illinois
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Reynolds
|first=Michael
|date=1989
|title=Hemingway: The Paris Years
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Norton
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Stott
|first=William
|date=1986
|title=Documentary Expression and Thirties America
|url=
|location=Chicago
|publisher=U of Chicago P
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Thomas
|first=Hugh
|date=2001
|title=The Spanish Civil War, Rev. ed.
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Modern Library
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine
|last=''Two Wars and More to Come''
|first=
|date=24 Jan 1938
|title=Best Sellers of the Week Here and Elsewhere
|type=Advertisement
|url=
|magazine=New York Times
|pages=
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=NA
|first=
|title=United States. Dept. of State
|url=
|journal= Foreign Relations of the Untied States, 1937 |volume==1
|issue=General
|date=1954
|pages=
|location=Washington
|publisher=GPO
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Watson
|first=William Braasch
|title=Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches
|url=
|journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=7.2
|issue=
|date=1988
|pages=4-121
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Wheeler
|first=John H.
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938
|chapter=Letter to Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection, Box 3 Folder 14
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}

{{refend}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches

2025-04-19T19:08:02Z

MerAtticus: added page 438, fixed errors

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 

{{byline|last=Vernon |first=Alex |abstract=The Spanish Civil War began in July 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally-restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy. By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches.}}

{{dc|dc=T|HE SPANISH CIVIL WAR BEGAN ON}} 17-18 JULY, 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy, to collaborate with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens on the pro-Republican documentary ''The Spanish Earth'', and to pursue his fledgling love affair with Martha Gellhorn.

By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches for NANA.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=4}}{{efn|Quotations from the NANA dispatches follow the Diplomatic Text established by William Braasch Watson’s “Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches.” I prefer NANA’s titles rather than Watson’s. For my disagreements with some of Watson’s datings, see my comments on specific dispatches in ''Hemingway’s Second War.''}}The secondary sources habitually judge them inferior journalism. Carlos Baker in the first Hemingway biography, for example, complains that the dialogue was “so heavily stamped with personal mannerisms as to be of doubtful authenticity.” Baker sees a “curious monotony in his stories of battles and bombardments,” a gratuitous use of graphic imagery “to shock his readers,” and “a note of triumphant boastfulness” in reporting proximity to danger. He also faults Hemingway for “often hint[ing] he was alone when in fact he was usually with Martha Gellhorn, Matthews, and Delmer.” Hemingway lacked Dos Passos’ “eye for telling details” and the “meticulous exactitude and inclusiveness that characterized the best work of Herbert Matthews and Sefton Delmer.”{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}

Philip Knightley’s ''The First Casualty'', the standard history of war correspondence, paraphrases Baker but with a trouncing final judgment:{{pg|427|428}}Hemingway’s “performance as a war correspondent was abysmally bad.” But Knightley goes beyond “technical” dissatisfaction to moral condemnation. Not just “unjustifiably optimistic”—an excusable offense—Hemingway’s reporting was “unforgivable” in its “total failure to report the Communist persecution, imprisonment, and summary execution of ‘untrustworthy elements’ on the Republican side, when he knew this was happening and when disclosing it might well have prevented further horrors like this.”
{{sfn|Knightley|2004 |pp=231–32}}{{efn|In my view, Knightley does not sufficiently acknowledge his paraphrasing of Baker.}}

Such criticisms in the final analysis might bear out. As Scott Donaldson writes, Hemingway advanced the Republican cause in his dispatches by eliciting “the deepest possible feelings of horror and of sympathy for the victims” of the Madrid bombardment; his “undue optimism” often “ignored Loyalist defeats and exaggerated the importance of its victories”; and “he repeatedly called attention to the participation of Italians and Germans on Franco’s side.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=426}} It also served as a recruitment tool—Milton Wolff, for example, acknowledged the strong influence Hemingway’s dispatches had on his decision to volunteer. Nevertheless, I think it a worthwhile exercise to attend a little more studiously to Hemingway’s dispatches, their context, and their artistry. I don’t necessarily intend to reverse the general opinion of the correspondence, only to achieve a better and more sympathetic understanding.

Herbert Matthews’ reporting for the ''New York Times'' will serve as a convenient comparison for two reasons. First, because both Baker and Knightley use Matthews’ journalism as the standard of excellence to pass judgment on Hemingway’s; and second, because the two worked practically side-by-side, seeing and reporting on many of the same events. In fact so closely did they work together that NANA sometimes complained that the ''Times'' was not buying Hemingway’s pieces because they resembled Matthews,’ and at one point Matthews’ own editors at the Times suspected him of plagiarizing Hemingway.{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|pp=411, 420}} A note from Matthews’ assigned editor Raymond McCaw provides, in two columns, seven quite similar passages from Hemingway’s Aragon front dispatches of September 13 and 14 with Matthews’ of September 14, with a penciled note at the bottom: “a deadly parallel if you ask me.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937c|p=}} Edwin James, the managing editor and McCaw’s boss, eventually agreed with Matthews’ defense: “It is quite apparent that you did not file any duplicate of the Hemingway story, or vice versa. As I understand it, the similarity arose from the fact that you{{pg|428|429}}both went to see the same show and saw it at the same time [sic], under the same conditions.”{{sfn|James|1937b|p=}}

Matthews’ dispatches ring of Republican bias as much if not more than anything Hemingway ever filed. The ''Times'' received many letters to the editor complaining about Matthews’ undisguised politics, which also gave serious concern to some of his editors. His description of the Republican May 1937 infighting in Barcelona is a striking example of how his news veered into propaganda and shows just how much he passed along the government’s version of events. The government’s “BLOODLESS TRIUMPH FOUGHT WITH RECOGNIZEDWEAPONS OF DEMOCRACY” turned out to be blatantly false, as the government and the “COMMUNISTS [WHO] DISTINGUISHED THEMSELVES” resorted to violent suppression. His blaming the uprising on the anarchist CNT working as Franco operatives parrots the government’s and the communist party’s public position, even though both charges—that the anarchists precipitated the events and that they were under Nationalist direction—were also false. His dispatch’s optimistic close also equivocates the political reality: “NEW GOVERNMENT HAS TAKEN POWER WHICH APPEARS TOVE CONFIDENCE VAST MAJORITY SPANIARDS IN LOYALIST TERRITORY AND TIS HOPED WILL GAIN EQUAL CONFIDENCE ABROAD STOP VIOLENCE AND REVOLUTION BEEN REPUDIATED AND NEWAND FAR HOPEFULLER PERIOD SEEMS BEGINNING.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937a|p=}}The ''Times'', knowing full well the one-sided coverage of a correspondent writing from one side of the conflict, had a reporter on both sides: Matthews with the Republicans, and William Carney with the Nationalists. They got their facts right (or wrong) as often as the other, their editors concluded; and they inspired about the same number of letters of complaint.{{sfn|James|1937a|p=}}{sfn|James|1939|p=}}

Furthermore, Matthews’ dispatches received a great deal of substantive editorial revisions. One of Matthews’ Teruel reports had to be cut for length, as McCaw informed James: “This bird sent 2844 words on the same facts which Hemingway covered much better in less than half that number. I wonder if Matthews thinks the paper is thriving, and that cable tolls do not matter a damn. Of course, it had to be cut for space anyway.” McCaw most likely refers here to Matthews’ dispatch corresponding to Hemingway’s “The Attack on Teruel,” though Matthews’ account of the fall of Teruel is also much longer (and more long-winded) than Hemingway’s, and just as personal in terms of describing the dangers{{pg|429|430}} he faced. Indeed its length allows him to share even more of the action he endured.{{sfn|McCaw|1937b|p=}}

Raymond McCaw held a general professional disagreement with Matthews perhaps tainted with over zealousness. Whether a personal or political motive informed that disagreement can’t be determined from the evidence I’ve seen. It is also clear that McCaw’s charges bear some validity—that any responsible editor could have easily and reasonably taken issue where McCaw did. One of the more interesting examples concerns Matthews’ piece on Guadalajara. Because he only saw evidence on Franco’s side of Italian forces, he only reported on Italians. But the ''Times'' editors heard from other sources that German soldiers also participated in the March offensive. They thought it prudent, from this confusion, to change (nine times) “Italian” to “Rebel,” “the foe,” or “Insurgent.” When Matthews saw the published piece he wrote a strenuous objection. In some instances the editors changed paraphrased quotations from his sources. One large paragraph omitted by the editors stressed the first-hand nature of the information, and Matthews underlines the key words: “All day, at every place we stopped and no matter whom we talked to or what we saw, there was only one label—Italian. The dead bodies, the prisoners, the material of every kind, the men who had occupied Brihuega and then fled were Italian and nothing but Italian.” Here and elsewhere in his original story, Matthews emphasizes the “personal knowledge” of its information.{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}{{efn|James supported McCaw on these changes, though later acknowledged that altering quoted sources was perhaps unwarranted.{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}}}Yet Matthews did not report on the foreigners fighting for the Republic—it was in fact the Italian Garibali Battalion that routed Franco’s Italians. We might surmise government censorship behind this silence, though Matthews would not cable news of “CENSORSHIP STRICTER” and “BAN ON MENTIONING INTERNATIONALS INCLUDING AMERICANS INSTITUTED TODAY” until July.{{sfn|Matthews|1937b|p=}}Perhaps he cautiously self-censored, or politically self-censored for the same reasons the government would eventually ban mention. Still, his stridency about the omission of foreigners on one side is striking given his knowledge of their contribution to the other side. For this reason too, and his omission of other nationalities on the insurgent side, it seemed only fair to his editor “to stand on the statement that the majority of the Rebels were Italians and let it go at that.”{{sfn|James|1937c|p=}} A reasonable decision.

Throughout his correspondence to his editors and his several books,{{pg|430|431}}Matthews maintained a passionate defense of his eyewitness journalistic standard, a position those close to him understood. “Matthews never believed anything he had not seen with his own eyes,” Joris Ivens wrote. “He never saw his job as reporter as one that permitted him to sit in his hotel and read the handouts of the War Ministry.” {{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=112}} Sidney Franklin recalls that some writers wrote their pieces before arriving in Madrid, and came only for the “legitimacy” of the Madrid dateline.{{sfn|Franklin|1952|p=232}}And Matthews hated, on principle, having his name attached to an article that violated the integrity of his witness. The only way to achieve objectivity, for Matthews, was to acknowledge one’s subjective perspective. Writing to his publisher, Matthews argued that “the full documentary value” of his coverage was lost when the editors altered his submissions for “the apparent necessity of giving more or less equal space to both sides.”{{sfn|Matthews|1939|p=}}

As with Matthews, so too Hemingway. Indeed the commitment to subjectivity
fit quite well with Hemingway’s modernist aesthetics. If Hemingway
focused the dispatches on his perspective—on his own experience dodging
artillery—more than Matthews and more than most, he did so at least partially
to fulfill expectations. NANA approached him, after all, for his name
and personality as much as whatever he would write. Before he even left the
states it pitched him to potential publications, sending out a promotional release with text to be used alongside his forthcoming dispatches and suggesting
they include a photograph: “Mr. Hemingway’s assignment is to get both from the bombed towns and bombed trenches the human story of the war, not just an account of the game being played by general staffs with pins
and a map.”{{sfn|NANA|1937|p=}}{{ NANA also released each individual dispatch with a one-sentence “precede” about the “famous” or “noted” author. Ernest Hemingway was not writing as Herbert Mathews, ace reporter; Hemingway was writing as Ernest Hemingway, famous author of novels and stories well known to be drawn from his own experiences.

That he understood this to be his assignment is further evidenced by a
cable Matthews sent to his ''Times'' editors on April 9, 1937, concerning the
Loyalist attack: “WORKED CONJOINTL WITH HEMINGWAY TODAY HE SENDING EYEWITNESS DESCRIPTION WHILE EYE SENT GENERAL STRATEGY.”{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}When a year later the ''Times'' asked NANA to ensure Hemingway’s reports differed from Matthews, NANA complied by asking Hemingway “to emphasize color rather than straight reporting” not necessarily out of dissatisfaction with Hemingway’s reportage as Baker contends,{{efn|Baker’s notes date the Times request to NANA as 8 Apr. 1938, and NANA’s to Hemingway as 15
Apr. 1938 (Princeton University, Firestone Library: Box 18, Folder 8 “1938”), the date of “The Bombing of Tortosa” dispatch.}} but to increase{{pg|431|432}}the chance of selling to the ''Times'' and indeed to ensure the spirit of NANA’s original arrangement with Hemingway. {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}Far from dissatisfied, NANA wrote Hemingway at the end of August 1938 a letter of agreement for his coverage of “a general European war” should it break out, “written in your colorful style” (Hemingway was in Paris, on his way to Spain for the last time during the war).{{sfn|Wheeler|1938|p=}}When Edmund Wilson criticized the selected dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'', Hemingway wrote him that “I was paid to write what are called ‘eye witness’ accounts . . .what is called, or was asked for as ‘color stuff.’ Most of such stuff is faked. Mine was not. It was straight reporting and the personal stuff was what had been asked for by the editors. “Wilson’s estimation was also based upon ''Fact’s'' inclusion of the “The Old Man at the Bridge” story from ''Ken'', “not a news dispatch” at all.{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}Speaking at Carnegie Hall before the showing of a rough cut of ''The Spanish Earth'', shortly after his first trip to Spain and so very much in the context of his wartime work, Hemingway defined the writer’s problem as “project[ing] [what is true] in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2002|p=193}}

Personal, anecdotal journalism had been Hemingway’s signature style from his earliest days filing reports, in the early 1920s from Paris, when his editor at the ''Toronto Star Weekly'' “encouraged [. . .] what Hemingway did best: write about himself in the act of being a reporter.”{{sfn|Reynolds|1989|p=45}}How could he expect that NANA would expect anything else, if indeed NANA did expect anything else? In the Spanish Civil War he at least maintained his eyewitness posture; in World War II, however, he couldn’t keep himself out. His first piece, about D-Day, begins, “No one remembers the date of the Battle of Shiloh. But the day ''we took'' Fox Green beach was the sixth of June, and the wind was blowing hard out of the northwest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1967|p=340}}His venue too—''Collier’s'' magazine—and the fact that he had not written anything in three years further contributed to the story-like nature of the WWII stories, in which he figured as a protagonist—not to mention the stories and involvement he couldn’t write about, armed and running around France more of a free agent than his guerilla-hero Robert Jordan ever was (though he began to transform these experiences into fiction in several unpublished stories). In wartime China in 1943, filing articles for Ralph Ingersoll’s short-lived ''PM'' New York afternoon daily, Hemingway did not even care to be called a news reporter.{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=99}}

It should be mentioned that Hemingway and Matthews enjoyed a great{{pg|432|433}}friendship and working relationship. Hemingway usually brought Matthews, who did not have a car, on his excursions. When Matthews left Madrid for a break in mid April 1937, he had already ensured Hemingway would provide coverage to the ''Times'' through NANA. For one thing, Hemingway did not have to worry about Matthews as a rival for the history books. He could endorse his friends’ book, ''Two Wars and More to Come'', and praise him as “the ablest and the bravest war correspondent writing today “who “when the fakers are all dead [. . .] will be read in the schools” (Advertisement 21) because Matthews posed no threat to Hemingway’s own chances to be read in the schools. The only brief Hemingway ever expressed he really reserved for Matthews’ editors, for not wanting his Teruel street-fighting story and for cutting references to himself in Matthews’ Teruel dispatches so that it appeared only Matthews had been there.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=462}}

As for Hemingway’s neglecting to name everyone with him for every story, the ''Times'' cutting of his name suggests that such exactitude was hardly a priority. A paper had no incentive for announcing the fact that a competitor’s
correspondent stood beside its own to see and report the same
events. NANA changed at least one vague Hemingway “we,” which admits
to the presence of others, to “this correspondent”
—we can hardly fault Hemingway for working in the spirit of his
employer’s standards.{{sfn|NANA|1938|p=}}{{efn|“we” in typescript and radiogram (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 1 and Folder 25).}} Do readers care that Matthews, Delmer, Gellhorn,
and others were there? The story’s effect and the limited word count also
weighed against such roll calls. One editor chose not to clutter the dispatch
on the great retreat across the Ebro with all the names of the American International Brigade volunteers Hemingway encountered, an omission of
Content more far serious than that of omitted correspondent names.{{efn| Radiogram insert dateline 4 April 1938 (HRC: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 25).}} Hemingway
often gave the names of the reporters with him, such as at Teruel;
nor was he the only reporter to sometimes neglect to do so. Martha Gellhorn,
for example, used a vague “we” and singled herself out as the primary
participant in some of her stories.

By using first-person reportage Hemingway—and Matthews and Gellhorn And most of the group covering the war—were operating solidly within
convention. William Stott, in ''Documentary Expression and Thirties America'',
calls this first-person ''participant observer'' technique “the most common sort
of documentary reportage in the thirties” that worked “by vicarious persuasion:
the writer partook of the events he reported and bared his feelings
and attitudes to influence the reader’s own.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=178-9}}{{efn|He specifically includes Hemingway et al (180).}} Stott also observes {{pg|433|434}}another technique to enable documentary reportage to “talk to us, and convince us that we, our deepest interests, are engaged,” in the use of the second person: “Thirties documentaries constantly address ‘you,’ the ‘you’ who is we the audience, and exhorts, wheedles, begs us to identify, pity, participate.” His examples include Dorothy Parker’s Spanish Civil War writing, and Hemingway’s 1935 “First-Hand Report on the Florida Hurricane.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=27-8}} A number of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches employ the second-person as a way of bringing the reader along for the ride.

Hemingway’s dispatches used personal pronouns more artfully than is
generally recognized. “A New Kind of War,” which William Braasch Watson
notes as having been “[w]ritten with more care and imagination” than its
predecessors, begins in second person: “The window of the hotel is open
and, as you lie in bed, you hear the firing in the front line seventeen blocks
away.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=29}} He takes “you” outside, to see the damage and the dead from the bombing. “Someone makes a joke about missing teeth and someone else says not to make that joke. And everyone has the feeling that characterizes war. It wasn’t me, see? It wasn’t me.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} The tension between the first person and second-person pronouns—the movement toward identification with “you” and the insistence that “it wasn’t me”—continues in the next line. Here the reader is at once still in the narrator’s shoes, but strangely distanced from the narrator through biographical tidbit and, at the same time, asked
to see himself in the enemy: “The Italian dead up on the Guadalajara weren’t
you although Italian dead, because of where you had spent your boyhood,
always seemed, still, like Our Dead.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} It is worth quoting at length the dispatch’s transition to first person:<blockquote>
After the shell that lit on the sidewalk in front of the hotel you got a beautiful double corner room on that side, twice the size of the one you’d had, for less than a dollar. It wasn’t me they killed. See? No. Not me. It wasn’t me anymore.

Then in a hospital given by the American Friends of Spanish Democracy located out behind the Morata front along the road
to Valencia they said, “Raven wants to see you.”

“Do I know him?”

“I don’t think so,” they said. “But he wants to see you.”

“Where is he?”

“Upstairs.”{{pg|434|435}}In the room upstairs they are giving a blood transfusion to a man with a very gray face who lay on a cot with his arm out looking away from the gurgling bottle and moaning in a very impersonal way. He moaned mechanically and at regular intervals and it did not seem to be him that made the sound. His lips did not move.

“Where’s Raven?” I asked.

“I’m here,” said Raven.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=31}}</blockquote>The piece simply could not have sustained the second-person for the remaining
five pages. More significantly, for this deeply personal exchange between
the writer and the faceless, eyeless soldier, Hemingway could not hide
in the rhetorical device of the second-person. In the process, he effects a reversal
of the usual pronoun game; instead of identifying with the all embracing
“you,” we leave that trick behind and become fully attached to
the narratorial “I” as ourselves, as we might not have been had the article
begun in the first person. And even as the narrator identifies himself by name
for the only time in any of the dispatches—“Hemingway,” and later
“Ernest”—as decidedly not ourselves. We do not say, ''It isn’t me''. The historian
Hugh Thomas notes “the refreshing candour” of Hemingway’s naming
himself “in the world of the International Brigades, where no one’s name
seemed to be truthfully given.”{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=591}}{{efn|For Watson, the dispatch “seems, in fact, on the verge of becoming a story” (29).}}

A year later Hemingway’s “Tortosa Calmly Awaits Assault” resists admitting
the city’s imminent fall. Yet it does so anyway, by subtly alluding to the
wartime rhetoric of sacrificed blood irrigating the earth and rejuvenating
Spain. Such rhetoric was common during the war, appearing in speeches,
print, and poetry. Many of the poems in Cary Nelson’s anthology ''The Wound
and the Dream: Sixty Years of American Poems about the Civil War'' join in the
Spanish and international chorus’s general connection between Republican
soldiers and the land, and the particular singing of their dead nourishing
the land. We find such language in La Pasionaria’s farewell address to the International Brigades, her epilogue to ''The Book of the XV Brigade'', and Hemingway’s famous eulogy “On the American Dead in Spain”: “For our dead are
a part of the earth of Spain now and the earth of Spain can never die. Each
winter it will seem to die and each spring it will come alive again. Our dead
will live with it forever.”{{sfn|Nelson|1994|p=3}}{{efn| Reprinted in Bruccoli 76 and Nelson, Remembering 37 (the drafts at the JFK are titled “The Dead at Jarama”). In addition to the poems in Nelson’s anthology, see the excerpt from Boris Todrin’s “Spanish Sowing” in Guttmann (Wounded 179–180).}} The Tortosa dispatch implies the deaths of{{pg|435|436}}many Republican soldiers in its final paragraph’s description of the newborn onions:
<blockquote>The artillery was picking up a little now. Two came in at a fairly useful place and as the smoke blew away ahead and settled through the trees, you picked an armful of spring onions from a field beside the trail that led to the Tortosa road. They were the first onions of the spring and peeling one I found they were plump white and not too strong. The Ebro Delta has a fine rich land, and where the onions grow, tomorrow will be a battle.
{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=84}}</blockquote>

The echo is quiet, and perhaps unconscious, but there nevertheless. The opening boastfulness of “American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents”
should be taken somewhat ironically. The dispatch begins by announcing
that for “two days we have been doing the most dangerous thing
you can do in this war. That is keep close behind an unstabilized line where
the enemy are attacking with mechanized forces.” Then, a few pages later,
we learn about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade survivors of the spring 1938
Nationalist offensive that took Bob Merriman and eventually reached the
Mediterranean Sea. Reading about these survivors creeping through enemy
camps, stepping on a sleeping German soldier’s hand, sprinting “across an
open field toward the Ebro bank and being sniped at by artillery controlled
by an observation plane overhead” and then “the desperate swimming of
the Ebro” naked, we are asked to place the correspondent’s plight in due perspective.{{sfn|Watson|1988|pp=71-2}} This story certainly escapes the charge of a monotonous
battle and bombing scene; its switch from apparently boastful to
awe-struck witness feels almost deliberately self-conscious. Other choice selfironic
moments come in the dispatches of that pre-Teruel quiet fall of 1938.
The one titled “Hemingway, Covering War, Tells of Brush with Death” has little
to report from Madrid other than the new aftershave brand he is trying.
In “Loyalists’ Drive Seen Progressing as Planned,” he writes that “Shells are
all much the same and if they don’t hit you there is no story and if they do
you won’t have to write it.” {{sfn|Watson|1988|p=58}}

Hemingway’s dispatches are sometimes monotonous because his war was
Usually monotonous—as wars are most of the time. It should also be kept in
mind that scholars reviewing Hemingway’s NANA dispatches one after{{pg|436|437}}another do not relive the original reading experience. Hemingway wrote dispatches sporadically, papers did not run all of his dispatches, papers edited and cut them, and readers read at least a couple of papers’ worth of other articles in between. He told Edmund Wilson as much in defending himself against Wilson’s critique of the selected (and heavily edited and cut) dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'' without his consent: “If you are being paid to be shot at and write about it you are supposed to mention the shooting. [. . .] But I do not go in for re-printing journalism.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}

If we can in this way better understand his style, and at least explain it if
not excuse it, we similarly ought to try to contextualize—and perhaps
excuse—the moral problem. The two issues here are the specific condemnation
of Hemingway’s silence about Republican atrocities and the general
question of biased reporting (the latter of which has already partially been
addressed).

Hemingway knew, as Donaldson writes, that mentioning the atrocities
“would arouse anticommunist sentiments back in the States and effectively
undermine any possibility of American intervention.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=394}} It is also doubtful
that reporting them would have stopped them. But reporting Republican
atrocities from Spain was not possible for the simple reason that all dispatches
went through a government censor. Matthews cabled his editors
from Paris in May 1937 to tell them that “censorship does not permit us to
say when the ‘telefonica’ is hit. So whenever you see reference in my
despatches [sic] to ‘an important building in the center of the city’ or words
to that effect, the cable desk can know that it is the telefonica.” {{sfn|Matthews|1937c|p=}} As already noted, by July he would cable “CENSORSHIP
STRICTER” as the ban on mentioning internationals went into effect. {{sfn|Matthews|1937d|p=}}{{sfn|Matthews|1937e|p=}} Cowles’ memoir confirms the
aggressive censorship, observing that it limited journalists to exactly the kind of material Hemingway wrote about:
<blockquote>There were frequent attempts to “beat the censor” by employing American slang expressions, but this came to an end when a Canadian girl joined the staff. The International Brigades were not allowed to be publicized; no reference could be made to Russian armaments, and buildings and streets which suffered
bombardments could not be identified.</blockquote>{{pg|437|438}}<blockquote>It was only in the realm of the human interest story that the journalists had a free hand. They could describe bombardments to their heart’s content.{{sfn|Cowles|1941|p=20}}</blockquote>
Hemingway and everyone else—to reserve incrimination for Hemingway is hardly just. No correspondent covering Republican Spain reported suspicious imprisonments and disappearances by government agents.

Hemingway, through Joris Ivens and ''The Spanish Earth'' project, had better
access to officials than most. Had he been able somehow to report such
activity, he would have lost that access and would probably have been kicked
out of the country. His fame would have likely prevented his own officially
sponsored disappearance, though he still worried, especially as so many of
such crimes on the Republican side occurred from free agents. When Jasper
Wood printed the anarchist F.A.I. banner in the limited edition book version
of ''The Spanish Earth'', Hemingway expressed his anxieties bluntly in a letter
to Jasper on August 20, 1938. It is hardly “petulant,” he scolded, “not to wish
to be shot.”{{sfn|Davison|1988|p=128}} Hostility in the Republic against the anarchists
ran high; after the Barcelona May Day conflict, the government’s foreign
minister told U.S. Ambassador Claude Bowers that “anarchist revolt
throughout Catalonia and not only expected but welcomed as an opportunity
to liquidate the anarchists who have been hostile from the beginning.”
{{sfn|NA|1954|p=292}}{{efn| The Ambassador in Spain (Bowers), then in France, to the Secretary of State, 5 May 1937.}}

It is possible that Hemingway’s dispatch stating that “not one friend [. . .]
has been executed or is missing” was his clever means of reporting
the rumors and indeed the general fact while evading the censors, as
in this very dispatch he acknowledged the presence of a censor after a bombardment.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=34}}
Matthews, on the other hand, never found a way to mention the
censors or admit even the possibility of people gone missing in the Republic.
Peter Moreira has observed that in a 1943 dispatch Hemingway related a
remark by a British officer about the Chinese Nationalist government’s being
“hopeless on the offensive” because censorship “prevented American reporters
From actually saying that the Nationalists wouldn’t attack, surmising
that by telling this anecdote Hemingway could sneak such a judgment into
his reports.”{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=77}} In Spain, censors aside, the eyewitness standard and his
own safety and continuing ability to report the war, and, yes, his passionate
support of the government contributed to his decision. He could have written
about government abuses from the states, but then could not return to{{pg|448|439}}

=== Notes ===
{{notelist}}
===Citations===
{{reflist}}
===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker
|first=Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Bruccoli |first=Matthew |date=2006 |title=Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame |url= |location=Columbia |publisher=U of South Caronia P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Cowles |first=Virginia |date=1941 |title=Looking for Trouble |url= |location=New York
|publisher=Harper & Brothers |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Davison |first=Richard Allan |title=The Publication of Hemingway’s The Spanish Earth: An Untold Story |url= |journal=Hemingway Review
|volume=7.2 |issue= |date=1988
|pages=122-130 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson
|first=Scott |date=2009 |title=Fitzgerald & Hemingway: Works and Days |url= |location=New York |publisher=Columbia UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Franklin |first=Sidney |date=1952 |title=Bullfighter from Brooklyn |url= |location=New York |publisher=Prentice-Hall |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Graham |first=Helen |date=2002 |title=The Spanish Republic at War 1936-1939 |url= |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Guttmann |first=Allen |date=1962 |title=The Wound in the Heart: American and the Spanish Civil War |url= |location=New York |publisher=Free Press of Glencoe |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1967 |title=By-Line: Ernest Hemingway |url= |location=New York |publisher=Scibner |pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Trogdon
|editor-first=Robert W.
|author-mask=1
|title=Fascism is a Lie
|url=
|journal=Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference |volume==
|issue=
|date=2002
|pages=193-6
|location=New York
|publisher=Carroll & Graf
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 May 1937
|chapter=Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=nd
|chapter=The Home Front
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938a
|chapter=Letter to Edmund Wilson
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=2 June 1938b
|chapter=Letter to Jack Wheeler
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=14 Feb 1939
|chapter=On the American Dead in Spain
|title=TS. New Masses
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Baker
|editor-first=Carlos
|author-mask=1
|date=2003
|chapter=The Hadely Mowrer
|title=Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Scribner
|pages=462-3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ibarruri
|first=Dolores
|date=1966
|title=They Shall Not Pass: The Autobiography of La Pasionaria
|url=
|location=United States
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|date=1969
|title=The Camera and I
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|author-mask=1
|date=26 Apr 1937
|chapter=Letter to Ernest Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|date=20 Nov 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Bertrand Weaver
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=12 Oct 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=25 Apr 1939
|chapter=Letter to M.B. Tenney
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Apr 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Knightley
|first=Phillip
|date=2004
|title=The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq
|url=
|location=Baltimore
|publisher=John Hopkins
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=
|date=9 Apr 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=TS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=11 Apr 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=8 May 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=6 July 1937d
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=July 1937e
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=22 March 1939
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 9
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=
|date=20 May 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=20 Dec 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 5
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Sep 1937c
|chapter=Note to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moorehead
|first=Caroline
|date=2003
|title=Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Henry Holt
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moreira
|first=Peter
|date=2006
|title=Hemingway on the China Front: His WWII Spy Mission with Martha Gellhorn
|url=
|location=Washington D.C.
|publisher=Potomac Books
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|date=5 Feb 1937
|chapter=Promotion Box: Hemingway, For Immediate Release
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|author-mask=1
|date=4 Apr 1938
|chapter=Promotion Box: American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|editor-last=Nelson
|editor-first=Card
|date=1994
|title=Remembering Spain: Hemingway’s Civil War Eulogy and the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
|url=
|location=Urbana
|publisher=U of Illinois
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Reynolds
|first=Michael
|date=1989
|title=Hemingway: The Paris Years
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Norton
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Stott
|first=William
|date=1986
|title=Documentary Expression and Thirties America
|url=
|location=Chicago
|publisher=U of Chicago P
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Thomas
|first=Hugh
|date=2001
|title=The Spanish Civil War, Rev. ed.
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Modern Library
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine
|last=''Two Wars and More to Come''
|first=
|date=24 Jan 1938
|title=Best Sellers of the Week Here and Elsewhere
|type=Advertisement
|url=
|magazine=New York Times
|pages=
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=NA
|first=
|title=United States. Dept. of State
|url=
|journal= Foreign Relations of the Untied States, 1937 |volume==1
|issue=General
|date=1954
|pages=
|location=Washington
|publisher=GPO
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Watson
|first=William Braasch
|title=Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches
|url=
|journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=7.2
|issue=
|date=1988
|pages=4-121
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Wheeler
|first=John H.
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938
|chapter=Letter to Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection, Box 3 Folder 14
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}

{{refend}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches

2025-04-19T18:45:05Z

MerAtticus: added 437 fixed missing works cited

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{{byline|last=Vernon |first=Alex |abstract=The Spanish Civil War began in July 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally-restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy. By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches.}}

{{dc|dc=T|HE SPANISH CIVIL WAR BEGAN ON}} 17-18 JULY, 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy, to collaborate with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens on the pro-Republican documentary ''The Spanish Earth'', and to pursue his fledgling love affair with Martha Gellhorn.

By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches for NANA.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=4}}{{efn|Quotations from the NANA dispatches follow the Diplomatic Text established by William Braasch Watson’s “Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches.” I prefer NANA’s titles rather than Watson’s. For my disagreements with some of Watson’s datings, see my comments on specific dispatches in ''Hemingway’s Second War.''}}The secondary sources habitually judge them inferior journalism. Carlos Baker in the first Hemingway biography, for example, complains that the dialogue was “so heavily stamped with personal mannerisms as to be of doubtful authenticity.” Baker sees a “curious monotony in his stories of battles and bombardments,” a gratuitous use of graphic imagery “to shock his readers,” and “a note of triumphant boastfulness” in reporting proximity to danger. He also faults Hemingway for “often hint[ing] he was alone when in fact he was usually with Martha Gellhorn, Matthews, and Delmer.” Hemingway lacked Dos Passos’ “eye for telling details” and the “meticulous exactitude and inclusiveness that characterized the best work of Herbert Matthews and Sefton Delmer.”{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}

Philip Knightley’s ''The First Casualty'', the standard history of war correspondence, paraphrases Baker but with a trouncing final judgment:{{pg|427|428}}Hemingway’s “performance as a war correspondent was abysmally bad.” But Knightley goes beyond “technical” dissatisfaction to moral condemnation. Not just “unjustifiably optimistic”—an excusable offense—Hemingway’s reporting was “unforgivable” in its “total failure to report the Communist persecution, imprisonment, and summary execution of ‘untrustworthy elements’ on the Republican side, when he knew this was happening and when disclosing it might well have prevented further horrors like this.”
{{sfn|Knightley|2004 |pp=231–32}}{{efn|In my view, Knightley does not sufficiently acknowledge his paraphrasing of Baker.}}

Such criticisms in the final analysis might bear out. As Scott Donaldson writes, Hemingway advanced the Republican cause in his dispatches by eliciting “the deepest possible feelings of horror and of sympathy for the victims” of the Madrid bombardment; his “undue optimism” often “ignored Loyalist defeats and exaggerated the importance of its victories”; and “he repeatedly called attention to the participation of Italians and Germans on Franco’s side.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=426}} It also served as a recruitment tool—Milton Wolff, for example, acknowledged the strong influence Hemingway’s dispatches had on his decision to volunteer. Nevertheless, I think it a worthwhile exercise to attend a little more studiously to Hemingway’s dispatches, their context, and their artistry. I don’t necessarily intend to reverse the general opinion of the correspondence, only to achieve a better and more sympathetic understanding.

Herbert Matthews’ reporting for the ''New York Times'' will serve as a convenient comparison for two reasons. First, because both Baker and Knightley use Matthews’ journalism as the standard of excellence to pass judgment on Hemingway’s; and second, because the two worked practically side-by-side, seeing and reporting on many of the same events. In fact so closely did they work together that NANA sometimes complained that the ''Times'' was not buying Hemingway’s pieces because they resembled Matthews,’ and at one point Matthews’ own editors at the Times suspected him of plagiarizing Hemingway.{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|pp=411, 420}} A note from Matthews’ assigned editor Raymond McCaw provides, in two columns, seven quite similar passages from Hemingway’s Aragon front dispatches of September 13 and 14 with Matthews’ of September 14, with a penciled note at the bottom: “a deadly parallel if you ask me.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937c|p=}} Edwin James, the managing editor and McCaw’s boss, eventually agreed with Matthews’ defense: “It is quite apparent that you did not file any duplicate of the Hemingway story, or vice versa. As I understand it, the similarity arose from the fact that you{{pg|428|429}}both went to see the same show and saw it at the same time [sic], under the same conditions.”{{sfn|James|1937b|p=}}

Matthews’ dispatches ring of Republican bias as much if not more than anything Hemingway ever filed. The ''Times'' received many letters to the editor complaining about Matthews’ undisguised politics, which also gave serious concern to some of his editors. His description of the Republican May 1937 infighting in Barcelona is a striking example of how his news veered into propaganda and shows just how much he passed along the government’s version of events. The government’s “BLOODLESS TRIUMPH FOUGHT WITH RECOGNIZEDWEAPONS OF DEMOCRACY” turned out to be blatantly false, as the government and the “COMMUNISTS [WHO] DISTINGUISHED THEMSELVES” resorted to violent suppression. His blaming the uprising on the anarchist CNT working as Franco operatives parrots the government’s and the communist party’s public position, even though both charges—that the anarchists precipitated the events and that they were under Nationalist direction—were also false. His dispatch’s optimistic close also equivocates the political reality: “NEW GOVERNMENT HAS TAKEN POWER WHICH APPEARS TOVE CONFIDENCE VAST MAJORITY SPANIARDS IN LOYALIST TERRITORY AND TIS HOPED WILL GAIN EQUAL CONFIDENCE ABROAD STOP VIOLENCE AND REVOLUTION BEEN REPUDIATED AND NEWAND FAR HOPEFULLER PERIOD SEEMS BEGINNING.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937a|p=}}The ''Times'', knowing full well the one-sided coverage of a correspondent writing from one side of the conflict, had a reporter on both sides: Matthews with the Republicans, and William Carney with the Nationalists. They got their facts right (or wrong) as often as the other, their editors concluded; and they inspired about the same number of letters of complaint.{{sfn|James|1937a|p=}}{sfn|James|1939|p=}}

Furthermore, Matthews’ dispatches received a great deal of substantive editorial revisions. One of Matthews’ Teruel reports had to be cut for length, as McCaw informed James: “This bird sent 2844 words on the same facts which Hemingway covered much better in less than half that number. I wonder if Matthews thinks the paper is thriving, and that cable tolls do not matter a damn. Of course, it had to be cut for space anyway.” McCaw most likely refers here to Matthews’ dispatch corresponding to Hemingway’s “The Attack on Teruel,” though Matthews’ account of the fall of Teruel is also much longer (and more long-winded) than Hemingway’s, and just as personal in terms of describing the dangers{{pg|429|430}} he faced. Indeed its length allows him to share even more of the action he endured.{{sfn|McCaw|1937b|p=}}

Raymond McCaw held a general professional disagreement with Matthews perhaps tainted with over zealousness. Whether a personal or political motive informed that disagreement can’t be determined from the evidence I’ve seen. It is also clear that McCaw’s charges bear some validity—that any responsible editor could have easily and reasonably taken issue where McCaw did. One of the more interesting examples concerns Matthews’ piece on Guadalajara. Because he only saw evidence on Franco’s side of Italian forces, he only reported on Italians. But the ''Times'' editors heard from other sources that German soldiers also participated in the March offensive. They thought it prudent, from this confusion, to change (nine times) “Italian” to “Rebel,” “the foe,” or “Insurgent.” When Matthews saw the published piece he wrote a strenuous objection. In some instances the editors changed paraphrased quotations from his sources. One large paragraph omitted by the editors stressed the first-hand nature of the information, and Matthews underlines the key words: “All day, at every place we stopped and no matter whom we talked to or what we saw, there was only one label—Italian. The dead bodies, the prisoners, the material of every kind, the men who had occupied Brihuega and then fled were Italian and nothing but Italian.” Here and elsewhere in his original story, Matthews emphasizes the “personal knowledge” of its information.{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}{{efn|James supported McCaw on these changes, though later acknowledged that altering quoted sources was perhaps unwarranted.{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}}}Yet Matthews did not report on the foreigners fighting for the Republic—it was in fact the Italian Garibali Battalion that routed Franco’s Italians. We might surmise government censorship behind this silence, though Matthews would not cable news of “CENSORSHIP STRICTER” and “BAN ON MENTIONING INTERNATIONALS INCLUDING AMERICANS INSTITUTED TODAY” until July.{{sfn|Matthews|1937b|p=}}Perhaps he cautiously self-censored, or politically self-censored for the same reasons the government would eventually ban mention. Still, his stridency about the omission of foreigners on one side is striking given his knowledge of their contribution to the other side. For this reason too, and his omission of other nationalities on the insurgent side, it seemed only fair to his editor “to stand on the statement that the majority of the Rebels were Italians and let it go at that.”{{sfn|James|1937c|p=}} A reasonable decision.

Throughout his correspondence to his editors and his several books,{{pg|430|431}}Matthews maintained a passionate defense of his eyewitness journalistic standard, a position those close to him understood. “Matthews never believed anything he had not seen with his own eyes,” Joris Ivens wrote. “He never saw his job as reporter as one that permitted him to sit in his hotel and read the handouts of the War Ministry.” {{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=112}} Sidney Franklin recalls that some writers wrote their pieces before arriving in Madrid, and came only for the “legitimacy” of the Madrid dateline.{{sfn|Franklin|1952|p=232}}And Matthews hated, on principle, having his name attached to an article that violated the integrity of his witness. The only way to achieve objectivity, for Matthews, was to acknowledge one’s subjective perspective. Writing to his publisher, Matthews argued that “the full documentary value” of his coverage was lost when the editors altered his submissions for “the apparent necessity of giving more or less equal space to both sides.”{{sfn|Matthews|1939|p=}}

As with Matthews, so too Hemingway. Indeed the commitment to subjectivity
fit quite well with Hemingway’s modernist aesthetics. If Hemingway
focused the dispatches on his perspective—on his own experience dodging
artillery—more than Matthews and more than most, he did so at least partially
to fulfill expectations. NANA approached him, after all, for his name
and personality as much as whatever he would write. Before he even left the
states it pitched him to potential publications, sending out a promotional release with text to be used alongside his forthcoming dispatches and suggesting
they include a photograph: “Mr. Hemingway’s assignment is to get both from the bombed towns and bombed trenches the human story of the war, not just an account of the game being played by general staffs with pins
and a map.”{{sfn|NANA|1937|p=}}{{ NANA also released each individual dispatch with a one-sentence “precede” about the “famous” or “noted” author. Ernest Hemingway was not writing as Herbert Mathews, ace reporter; Hemingway was writing as Ernest Hemingway, famous author of novels and stories well known to be drawn from his own experiences.

That he understood this to be his assignment is further evidenced by a
cable Matthews sent to his ''Times'' editors on April 9, 1937, concerning the
Loyalist attack: “WORKED CONJOINTL WITH HEMINGWAY TODAY HE SENDING EYEWITNESS DESCRIPTION WHILE EYE SENT GENERAL STRATEGY.”{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}When a year later the ''Times'' asked NANA to ensure Hemingway’s reports differed from Matthews, NANA complied by asking Hemingway “to emphasize color rather than straight reporting” not necessarily out of dissatisfaction with Hemingway’s reportage as Baker contends,{{efn|Baker’s notes date the Times request to NANA as 8 Apr. 1938, and NANA’s to Hemingway as 15
Apr. 1938 (Princeton University, Firestone Library: Box 18, Folder 8 “1938”), the date of “The Bombing of Tortosa” dispatch.}} but to increase{{pg|431|432}}the chance of selling to the ''Times'' and indeed to ensure the spirit of NANA’s original arrangement with Hemingway. {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}Far from dissatisfied, NANA wrote Hemingway at the end of August 1938 a letter of agreement for his coverage of “a general European war” should it break out, “written in your colorful style” (Hemingway was in Paris, on his way to Spain for the last time during the war).{{sfn|Wheeler|1938|p=}}When Edmund Wilson criticized the selected dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'', Hemingway wrote him that “I was paid to write what are called ‘eye witness’ accounts . . .what is called, or was asked for as ‘color stuff.’ Most of such stuff is faked. Mine was not. It was straight reporting and the personal stuff was what had been asked for by the editors. “Wilson’s estimation was also based upon ''Fact’s'' inclusion of the “The Old Man at the Bridge” story from ''Ken'', “not a news dispatch” at all.{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}Speaking at Carnegie Hall before the showing of a rough cut of ''The Spanish Earth'', shortly after his first trip to Spain and so very much in the context of his wartime work, Hemingway defined the writer’s problem as “project[ing] [what is true] in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2002|p=193}}

Personal, anecdotal journalism had been Hemingway’s signature style from his earliest days filing reports, in the early 1920s from Paris, when his editor at the ''Toronto Star Weekly'' “encouraged [. . .] what Hemingway did best: write about himself in the act of being a reporter.”{{sfn|Reynolds|1989|p=45}}How could he expect that NANA would expect anything else, if indeed NANA did expect anything else? In the Spanish Civil War he at least maintained his eyewitness posture; in World War II, however, he couldn’t keep himself out. His first piece, about D-Day, begins, “No one remembers the date of the Battle of Shiloh. But the day ''we took'' Fox Green beach was the sixth of June, and the wind was blowing hard out of the northwest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1967|p=340}}His venue too—''Collier’s'' magazine—and the fact that he had not written anything in three years further contributed to the story-like nature of the WWII stories, in which he figured as a protagonist—not to mention the stories and involvement he couldn’t write about, armed and running around France more of a free agent than his guerilla-hero Robert Jordan ever was (though he began to transform these experiences into fiction in several unpublished stories). In wartime China in 1943, filing articles for Ralph Ingersoll’s short-lived ''PM'' New York afternoon daily, Hemingway did not even care to be called a news reporter.{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=99}}

It should be mentioned that Hemingway and Matthews enjoyed a great{{pg|432|433}}friendship and working relationship. Hemingway usually brought Matthews, who did not have a car, on his excursions. When Matthews left Madrid for a break in mid April 1937, he had already ensured Hemingway would provide coverage to the ''Times'' through NANA. For one thing, Hemingway did not have to worry about Matthews as a rival for the history books. He could endorse his friends’ book, ''Two Wars and More to Come'', and praise him as “the ablest and the bravest war correspondent writing today “who “when the fakers are all dead [. . .] will be read in the schools” (Advertisement 21) because Matthews posed no threat to Hemingway’s own chances to be read in the schools. The only brief Hemingway ever expressed he really reserved for Matthews’ editors, for not wanting his Teruel street-fighting story and for cutting references to himself in Matthews’ Teruel dispatches so that it appeared only Matthews had been there.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=462}}

As for Hemingway’s neglecting to name everyone with him for every story, the ''Times'' cutting of his name suggests that such exactitude was hardly a priority. A paper had no incentive for announcing the fact that a competitor’s
correspondent stood beside its own to see and report the same
events. NANA changed at least one vague Hemingway “we,” which admits
to the presence of others, to “this correspondent”
—we can hardly fault Hemingway for working in the spirit of his
employer’s standards.{{sfn|NANA|1938|p=}}{{efn|“we” in typescript and radiogram (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 1 and Folder 25).}} Do readers care that Matthews, Delmer, Gellhorn,
and others were there? The story’s effect and the limited word count also
weighed against such roll calls. One editor chose not to clutter the dispatch
on the great retreat across the Ebro with all the names of the American International Brigade volunteers Hemingway encountered, an omission of
Content more far serious than that of omitted correspondent names.{{efn| Radiogram insert dateline 4 April 1938 (HRC: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 25).}} Hemingway
often gave the names of the reporters with him, such as at Teruel;
nor was he the only reporter to sometimes neglect to do so. Martha Gellhorn,
for example, used a vague “we” and singled herself out as the primary
participant in some of her stories.

By using first-person reportage Hemingway—and Matthews and Gellhorn And most of the group covering the war—were operating solidly within
convention. William Stott, in ''Documentary Expression and Thirties America'',
calls this first-person ''participant observer'' technique “the most common sort
of documentary reportage in the thirties” that worked “by vicarious persuasion:
the writer partook of the events he reported and bared his feelings
and attitudes to influence the reader’s own.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=178-9}}{{efn|He specifically includes Hemingway et al (180).}} Stott also observes {{pg|433|434}}another technique to enable documentary reportage to “talk to us, and convince us that we, our deepest interests, are engaged,” in the use of the second person: “Thirties documentaries constantly address ‘you,’ the ‘you’ who is we the audience, and exhorts, wheedles, begs us to identify, pity, participate.” His examples include Dorothy Parker’s Spanish Civil War writing, and Hemingway’s 1935 “First-Hand Report on the Florida Hurricane.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=27-8}} A number of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches employ the second-person as a way of bringing the reader along for the ride.

Hemingway’s dispatches used personal pronouns more artfully than is
generally recognized. “A New Kind of War,” which William Braasch Watson
notes as having been “[w]ritten with more care and imagination” than its
predecessors, begins in second person: “The window of the hotel is open
and, as you lie in bed, you hear the firing in the front line seventeen blocks
away.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=29}} He takes “you” outside, to see the damage and the dead from the bombing. “Someone makes a joke about missing teeth and someone else says not to make that joke. And everyone has the feeling that characterizes war. It wasn’t me, see? It wasn’t me.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} The tension between the first person and second-person pronouns—the movement toward identification with “you” and the insistence that “it wasn’t me”—continues in the next line. Here the reader is at once still in the narrator’s shoes, but strangely distanced from the narrator through biographical tidbit and, at the same time, asked
to see himself in the enemy: “The Italian dead up on the Guadalajara weren’t
you although Italian dead, because of where you had spent your boyhood,
always seemed, still, like Our Dead.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} It is worth quoting at length the dispatch’s transition to first person:<blockquote>
After the shell that lit on the sidewalk in front of the hotel you got a beautiful double corner room on that side, twice the size of the one you’d had, for less than a dollar. It wasn’t me they killed. See? No. Not me. It wasn’t me anymore.

Then in a hospital given by the American Friends of Spanish Democracy located out behind the Morata front along the road
to Valencia they said, “Raven wants to see you.”

“Do I know him?”

“I don’t think so,” they said. “But he wants to see you.”

“Where is he?”

“Upstairs.”{{pg|434|435}}In the room upstairs they are giving a blood transfusion to a man with a very gray face who lay on a cot with his arm out looking away from the gurgling bottle and moaning in a very impersonal way. He moaned mechanically and at regular intervals and it did not seem to be him that made the sound. His lips did not move.

“Where’s Raven?” I asked.

“I’m here,” said Raven.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=31}}</blockquote>The piece simply could not have sustained the second-person for the remaining
five pages. More significantly, for this deeply personal exchange between
the writer and the faceless, eyeless soldier, Hemingway could not hide
in the rhetorical device of the second-person. In the process, he effects a reversal
of the usual pronoun game; instead of identifying with the all embracing
“you,” we leave that trick behind and become fully attached to
the narratorial “I” as ourselves, as we might not have been had the article
begun in the first person. And even as the narrator identifies himself by name
for the only time in any of the dispatches—“Hemingway,” and later
“Ernest”—as decidedly not ourselves. We do not say, ''It isn’t me''. The historian
Hugh Thomas notes “the refreshing candour” of Hemingway’s naming
himself “in the world of the International Brigades, where no one’s name
seemed to be truthfully given.”{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=591}}{{efn|For Watson, the dispatch “seems, in fact, on the verge of becoming a story” (29).}}

A year later Hemingway’s “Tortosa Calmly Awaits Assault” resists admitting
the city’s imminent fall. Yet it does so anyway, by subtly alluding to the
wartime rhetoric of sacrificed blood irrigating the earth and rejuvenating
Spain. Such rhetoric was common during the war, appearing in speeches,
print, and poetry. Many of the poems in Cary Nelson’s anthology ''The Wound
and the Dream: Sixty Years of American Poems about the Civil War'' join in the
Spanish and international chorus’s general connection between Republican
soldiers and the land, and the particular singing of their dead nourishing
the land. We find such language in La Pasionaria’s farewell address to the International Brigades, her epilogue to ''The Book of the XV Brigade'', and Hemingway’s famous eulogy “On the American Dead in Spain”: “For our dead are
a part of the earth of Spain now and the earth of Spain can never die. Each
winter it will seem to die and each spring it will come alive again. Our dead
will live with it forever.”{{sfn|Nelson|1994|p=3}}{{efn| Reprinted in Bruccoli 76 and Nelson, Remembering 37 (the drafts at the JFK are titled “The Dead at Jarama”). In addition to the poems in Nelson’s anthology, see the excerpt from Boris Todrin’s “Spanish Sowing” in Guttmann (Wounded 179–180).}} The Tortosa dispatch implies the deaths of{{pg|435|436}}many Republican soldiers in its final paragraph’s description of the newborn onions:
<blockquote>The artillery was picking up a little now. Two came in at a fairly useful place and as the smoke blew away ahead and settled through the trees, you picked an armful of spring onions from a field beside the trail that led to the Tortosa road. They were the first onions of the spring and peeling one I found they were plump white and not too strong. The Ebro Delta has a fine rich land, and where the onions grow, tomorrow will be a battle.
{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=84}}</blockquote>

The echo is quiet, and perhaps unconscious, but there nevertheless. The opening boastfulness of “American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents”
should be taken somewhat ironically. The dispatch begins by announcing
that for “two days we have been doing the most dangerous thing
you can do in this war. That is keep close behind an unstabilized line where
the enemy are attacking with mechanized forces.” Then, a few pages later,
we learn about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade survivors of the spring 1938
Nationalist offensive that took Bob Merriman and eventually reached the
Mediterranean Sea. Reading about these survivors creeping through enemy
camps, stepping on a sleeping German soldier’s hand, sprinting “across an
open field toward the Ebro bank and being sniped at by artillery controlled
by an observation plane overhead” and then “the desperate swimming of
the Ebro” naked, we are asked to place the correspondent’s plight in due perspective.{{sfn|Watson|1988|pp=71-2}} This story certainly escapes the charge of a monotonous
battle and bombing scene; its switch from apparently boastful to
awe-struck witness feels almost deliberately self-conscious. Other choice selfironic
moments come in the dispatches of that pre-Teruel quiet fall of 1938.
The one titled “Hemingway, Covering War, Tells of Brush with Death” has little
to report from Madrid other than the new aftershave brand he is trying.
In “Loyalists’ Drive Seen Progressing as Planned,” he writes that “Shells are
all much the same and if they don’t hit you there is no story and if they do
you won’t have to write it.” {{sfn|Watson|1988|p=58}}

Hemingway’s dispatches are sometimes monotonous because his war was
Usually monotonous—as wars are most of the time. It should also be kept in
mind that scholars reviewing Hemingway’s NANA dispatches one after{{pg|436|437}}another do not relive the original reading experience. Hemingway wrote dispatches sporadically, papers did not run all of his dispatches, papers edited and cut them, and readers read at least a couple of papers’ worth of other articles in between. He told Edmund Wilson as much in defending himself against Wilson’s critique of the selected (and heavily edited and cut) dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'' without his consent: “If you are being paid to be shot at and write about it you are supposed to mention the shooting. [. . .] But I do not go in for re-printing journalism.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}

If we can in this way better understand his style, and at least explain it if
not excuse it, we similarly ought to try to contextualize—and perhaps
excuse—the moral problem. The two issues here are the specific condemnation
of Hemingway’s silence about Republican atrocities and the general
question of biased reporting (the latter of which has already partially been
addressed).

Hemingway knew, as Donaldson writes, that mentioning the atrocities
“would arouse anticommunist sentiments back in the States and effectively
undermine any possibility of American intervention.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=394}} It is also doubtful
that reporting them would have stopped them. But reporting Republican
atrocities from Spain was not possible for the simple reason that all dispatches
went through a government censor. Matthews cabled his editors
from Paris in May 1937 to tell them that “censorship does not permit us to
say when the ‘telefonica’ is hit. So whenever you see reference in my
despatches [sic] to ‘an important building in the center of the city’ or words
to that effect, the cable desk can know that it is the telefonica.” {{sfn|Matthews|1937c|p=}} As already noted, by July he would cable “CENSORSHIP
STRICTER” as the ban on mentioning internationals went into effect. {{sfn|Matthews|1937d|p=}}{{sfn|Matthews|1937e|p=}} Cowles’ memoir confirms the
aggressive censorship, observing that it limited journalists to exactly the kind of material Hemingway wrote about:
<blockquote>There were frequent attempts to “beat the censor” by employing American slang expressions, but this came to an end when a Canadian girl joined the staff. The International Brigades were not allowed to be publicized; no reference could be made to Russian armaments, and buildings and streets which suffered
bombardments could not be identified.</blockquote>{{pg|437|438}}

=== Notes ===
{{notelist}}
===Citations===
{{reflist}}
===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker
|first=Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Bruccoli |first=Matthew |date=2006 |title=Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame |url= |location=Columbia |publisher=U of South Caronia P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Cowles |first=Virginia |date=1941 |title=Looking for Trouble |url= |location=New York
|publisher=Harper & Brothers |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Davison |first=Richard Allan |title=The Publication of Hemingway’s The Spanish Earth: An Untold Story |url= |journal=Hemingway Review
|volume=7.2 |issue= |date=1988
|pages=122-130 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson
|first=Scott |date=2009 |title=Fitzgerald & Hemingway: Works and Days |url= |location=New York |publisher=Columbia UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Franklin |first=Sidney |date=1952 |title=Bullfighter from Brooklyn |url= |location=New York |publisher=Prentice-Hall |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Graham |first=Helen |date=2002 |title=The Spanish Republic at War 1936-1939 |url= |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Guttmann |first=Allen |date=1962 |title=The Wound in the Heart: American and the Spanish Civil War |url= |location=New York |publisher=Free Press of Glencoe |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1967 |title=By-Line: Ernest Hemingway |url= |location=New York |publisher=Scibner |pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Trogdon
|editor-first=Robert W.
|author-mask=1
|title=Fascism is a Lie
|url=
|journal=Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference |volume==
|issue=
|date=2002
|pages=193-6
|location=New York
|publisher=Carroll & Graf
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 May 1937
|chapter=Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=nd
|chapter=The Home Front
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938a
|chapter=Letter to Edmund Wilson
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=2 June 1938b
|chapter=Letter to Jack Wheeler
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=14 Feb 1939
|chapter=On the American Dead in Spain
|title=TS. New Masses
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Baker
|editor-first=Carlos
|author-mask=1
|date=2003
|chapter=The Hadely Mowrer
|title=Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Scribner
|pages=462-3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ibarruri
|first=Dolores
|date=1966
|title=They Shall Not Pass: The Autobiography of La Pasionaria
|url=
|location=United States
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|date=1969
|title=The Camera and I
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|author-mask=1
|date=26 Apr 1937
|chapter=Letter to Ernest Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|date=20 Nov 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Bertrand Weaver
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=12 Oct 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=25 Apr 1939
|chapter=Letter to M.B. Tenney
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Apr 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Knightley
|first=Phillip
|date=2004
|title=The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq
|url=
|location=Baltimore
|publisher=John Hopkins
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=
|date=9 Apr 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=TS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=11 Apr 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=8 May 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=6 July 1937d
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=July 1937e
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=22 March 1939
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 9
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=
|date=20 May 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=20 Dec 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 5
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Sep 1937c
|chapter=Note to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moorehead
|first=Caroline
|date=2003
|title=Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Henry Holt
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moreira
|first=Peter
|date=2006
|title=Hemingway on the China Front: His WWII Spy Mission with Martha Gellhorn
|url=
|location=Washington D.C.
|publisher=Potomac Books
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|date=5 Feb 1937
|chapter=Promotion Box: Hemingway, For Immediate Release
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|author-mask=1
|date=4 Apr 1938
|chapter=Promotion Box: American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|editor-last=Nelson
|editor-first=Card
|date=1994
|title=Remembering Spain: Hemingway’s Civil War Eulogy and the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
|url=
|location=Urbana
|publisher=U of Illinois
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Reynolds
|first=Michael
|date=1989
|title=Hemingway: The Paris Years
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Norton
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Stott
|first=William
|date=1986
|title=Documentary Expression and Thirties America
|url=
|location=Chicago
|publisher=U of Chicago P
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Thomas
|first=Hugh
|date=2001
|title=The Spanish Civil War, Rev. ed.
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Modern Library
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine
|last=''Two Wars and More to Come''
|first=
|date=24 Jan 1938
|title=Best Sellers of the Week Here and Elsewhere
|type=Advertisement
|url=
|magazine=New York Times
|pages=
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=
|first=
|title=United States. Dept. of State
|url=
|journal= Foreign Relations of the Untied States, 1937 |volume==1
|issue=General
|date=1954
|pages=
|location=Washington
|publisher=GPO
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Watson
|first=William Braasch
|title=Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches
|url=
|journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=7.2
|issue=
|date=1988
|pages=4-121
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Wheeler
|first=John H.
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938
|chapter=Letter to Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection, Box 3 Folder 14
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}

{{refend}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches

2025-04-19T18:27:47Z

MerAtticus: added page 436

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 

{{byline|last=Vernon |first=Alex |abstract=The Spanish Civil War began in July 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally-restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy. By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches.}}

{{dc|dc=T|HE SPANISH CIVIL WAR BEGAN ON}} 17-18 JULY, 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy, to collaborate with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens on the pro-Republican documentary ''The Spanish Earth'', and to pursue his fledgling love affair with Martha Gellhorn.

By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches for NANA.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=4}}{{efn|Quotations from the NANA dispatches follow the Diplomatic Text established by William Braasch Watson’s “Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches.” I prefer NANA’s titles rather than Watson’s. For my disagreements with some of Watson’s datings, see my comments on specific dispatches in ''Hemingway’s Second War.''}}The secondary sources habitually judge them inferior journalism. Carlos Baker in the first Hemingway biography, for example, complains that the dialogue was “so heavily stamped with personal mannerisms as to be of doubtful authenticity.” Baker sees a “curious monotony in his stories of battles and bombardments,” a gratuitous use of graphic imagery “to shock his readers,” and “a note of triumphant boastfulness” in reporting proximity to danger. He also faults Hemingway for “often hint[ing] he was alone when in fact he was usually with Martha Gellhorn, Matthews, and Delmer.” Hemingway lacked Dos Passos’ “eye for telling details” and the “meticulous exactitude and inclusiveness that characterized the best work of Herbert Matthews and Sefton Delmer.”{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}

Philip Knightley’s ''The First Casualty'', the standard history of war correspondence, paraphrases Baker but with a trouncing final judgment:{{pg|427|428}}Hemingway’s “performance as a war correspondent was abysmally bad.” But Knightley goes beyond “technical” dissatisfaction to moral condemnation. Not just “unjustifiably optimistic”—an excusable offense—Hemingway’s reporting was “unforgivable” in its “total failure to report the Communist persecution, imprisonment, and summary execution of ‘untrustworthy elements’ on the Republican side, when he knew this was happening and when disclosing it might well have prevented further horrors like this.”
{{sfn|Knightley|2004 |pp=231–32}}{{efn|In my view, Knightley does not sufficiently acknowledge his paraphrasing of Baker.}}

Such criticisms in the final analysis might bear out. As Scott Donaldson writes, Hemingway advanced the Republican cause in his dispatches by eliciting “the deepest possible feelings of horror and of sympathy for the victims” of the Madrid bombardment; his “undue optimism” often “ignored Loyalist defeats and exaggerated the importance of its victories”; and “he repeatedly called attention to the participation of Italians and Germans on Franco’s side.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=426}} It also served as a recruitment tool—Milton Wolff, for example, acknowledged the strong influence Hemingway’s dispatches had on his decision to volunteer. Nevertheless, I think it a worthwhile exercise to attend a little more studiously to Hemingway’s dispatches, their context, and their artistry. I don’t necessarily intend to reverse the general opinion of the correspondence, only to achieve a better and more sympathetic understanding.

Herbert Matthews’ reporting for the ''New York Times'' will serve as a convenient comparison for two reasons. First, because both Baker and Knightley use Matthews’ journalism as the standard of excellence to pass judgment on Hemingway’s; and second, because the two worked practically side-by-side, seeing and reporting on many of the same events. In fact so closely did they work together that NANA sometimes complained that the ''Times'' was not buying Hemingway’s pieces because they resembled Matthews,’ and at one point Matthews’ own editors at the Times suspected him of plagiarizing Hemingway.{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|pp=411, 420}} A note from Matthews’ assigned editor Raymond McCaw provides, in two columns, seven quite similar passages from Hemingway’s Aragon front dispatches of September 13 and 14 with Matthews’ of September 14, with a penciled note at the bottom: “a deadly parallel if you ask me.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937c|p=}} Edwin James, the managing editor and McCaw’s boss, eventually agreed with Matthews’ defense: “It is quite apparent that you did not file any duplicate of the Hemingway story, or vice versa. As I understand it, the similarity arose from the fact that you{{pg|428|429}}both went to see the same show and saw it at the same time [sic], under the same conditions.”{{sfn|James|1937b|p=}}

Matthews’ dispatches ring of Republican bias as much if not more than anything Hemingway ever filed. The ''Times'' received many letters to the editor complaining about Matthews’ undisguised politics, which also gave serious concern to some of his editors. His description of the Republican May 1937 infighting in Barcelona is a striking example of how his news veered into propaganda and shows just how much he passed along the government’s version of events. The government’s “BLOODLESS TRIUMPH FOUGHT WITH RECOGNIZEDWEAPONS OF DEMOCRACY” turned out to be blatantly false, as the government and the “COMMUNISTS [WHO] DISTINGUISHED THEMSELVES” resorted to violent suppression. His blaming the uprising on the anarchist CNT working as Franco operatives parrots the government’s and the communist party’s public position, even though both charges—that the anarchists precipitated the events and that they were under Nationalist direction—were also false. His dispatch’s optimistic close also equivocates the political reality: “NEW GOVERNMENT HAS TAKEN POWER WHICH APPEARS TOVE CONFIDENCE VAST MAJORITY SPANIARDS IN LOYALIST TERRITORY AND TIS HOPED WILL GAIN EQUAL CONFIDENCE ABROAD STOP VIOLENCE AND REVOLUTION BEEN REPUDIATED AND NEWAND FAR HOPEFULLER PERIOD SEEMS BEGINNING.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937a|p=}}The ''Times'', knowing full well the one-sided coverage of a correspondent writing from one side of the conflict, had a reporter on both sides: Matthews with the Republicans, and William Carney with the Nationalists. They got their facts right (or wrong) as often as the other, their editors concluded; and they inspired about the same number of letters of complaint.{{sfn|James|1937a|p=}}{sfn|James|1939|p=}}

Furthermore, Matthews’ dispatches received a great deal of substantive editorial revisions. One of Matthews’ Teruel reports had to be cut for length, as McCaw informed James: “This bird sent 2844 words on the same facts which Hemingway covered much better in less than half that number. I wonder if Matthews thinks the paper is thriving, and that cable tolls do not matter a damn. Of course, it had to be cut for space anyway.” McCaw most likely refers here to Matthews’ dispatch corresponding to Hemingway’s “The Attack on Teruel,” though Matthews’ account of the fall of Teruel is also much longer (and more long-winded) than Hemingway’s, and just as personal in terms of describing the dangers{{pg|429|430}} he faced. Indeed its length allows him to share even more of the action he endured.{{sfn|McCaw|1937b|p=}}

Raymond McCaw held a general professional disagreement with Matthews perhaps tainted with over zealousness. Whether a personal or political motive informed that disagreement can’t be determined from the evidence I’ve seen. It is also clear that McCaw’s charges bear some validity—that any responsible editor could have easily and reasonably taken issue where McCaw did. One of the more interesting examples concerns Matthews’ piece on Guadalajara. Because he only saw evidence on Franco’s side of Italian forces, he only reported on Italians. But the ''Times'' editors heard from other sources that German soldiers also participated in the March offensive. They thought it prudent, from this confusion, to change (nine times) “Italian” to “Rebel,” “the foe,” or “Insurgent.” When Matthews saw the published piece he wrote a strenuous objection. In some instances the editors changed paraphrased quotations from his sources. One large paragraph omitted by the editors stressed the first-hand nature of the information, and Matthews underlines the key words: “All day, at every place we stopped and no matter whom we talked to or what we saw, there was only one label—Italian. The dead bodies, the prisoners, the material of every kind, the men who had occupied Brihuega and then fled were Italian and nothing but Italian.” Here and elsewhere in his original story, Matthews emphasizes the “personal knowledge” of its information.{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}{{efn|James supported McCaw on these changes, though later acknowledged that altering quoted sources was perhaps unwarranted.{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}}}Yet Matthews did not report on the foreigners fighting for the Republic—it was in fact the Italian Garibali Battalion that routed Franco’s Italians. We might surmise government censorship behind this silence, though Matthews would not cable news of “CENSORSHIP STRICTER” and “BAN ON MENTIONING INTERNATIONALS INCLUDING AMERICANS INSTITUTED TODAY” until July.{{sfn|Matthews|1937b|p=}}Perhaps he cautiously self-censored, or politically self-censored for the same reasons the government would eventually ban mention. Still, his stridency about the omission of foreigners on one side is striking given his knowledge of their contribution to the other side. For this reason too, and his omission of other nationalities on the insurgent side, it seemed only fair to his editor “to stand on the statement that the majority of the Rebels were Italians and let it go at that.”{{sfn|James|1937c|p=}} A reasonable decision.

Throughout his correspondence to his editors and his several books,{{pg|430|431}}Matthews maintained a passionate defense of his eyewitness journalistic standard, a position those close to him understood. “Matthews never believed anything he had not seen with his own eyes,” Joris Ivens wrote. “He never saw his job as reporter as one that permitted him to sit in his hotel and read the handouts of the War Ministry.” {{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=112}} Sidney Franklin recalls that some writers wrote their pieces before arriving in Madrid, and came only for the “legitimacy” of the Madrid dateline.{{sfn|Franklin|1952|p=232}}And Matthews hated, on principle, having his name attached to an article that violated the integrity of his witness. The only way to achieve objectivity, for Matthews, was to acknowledge one’s subjective perspective. Writing to his publisher, Matthews argued that “the full documentary value” of his coverage was lost when the editors altered his submissions for “the apparent necessity of giving more or less equal space to both sides.”{{sfn|Matthews|1939|p=}}

As with Matthews, so too Hemingway. Indeed the commitment to subjectivity
fit quite well with Hemingway’s modernist aesthetics. If Hemingway
focused the dispatches on his perspective—on his own experience dodging
artillery—more than Matthews and more than most, he did so at least partially
to fulfill expectations. NANA approached him, after all, for his name
and personality as much as whatever he would write. Before he even left the
states it pitched him to potential publications, sending out a promotional release with text to be used alongside his forthcoming dispatches and suggesting
they include a photograph: “Mr. Hemingway’s assignment is to get both from the bombed towns and bombed trenches the human story of the war, not just an account of the game being played by general staffs with pins
and a map.”{{sfn|NANA|1937|p=}}{{ NANA also released each individual dispatch with a one-sentence “precede” about the “famous” or “noted” author. Ernest Hemingway was not writing as Herbert Mathews, ace reporter; Hemingway was writing as Ernest Hemingway, famous author of novels and stories well known to be drawn from his own experiences.

That he understood this to be his assignment is further evidenced by a
cable Matthews sent to his ''Times'' editors on April 9, 1937, concerning the
Loyalist attack: “WORKED CONJOINTL WITH HEMINGWAY TODAY HE SENDING EYEWITNESS DESCRIPTION WHILE EYE SENT GENERAL STRATEGY.”{{sfn|Matthews|1937a|p=}}When a year later the ''Times'' asked NANA to ensure Hemingway’s reports differed from Matthews, NANA complied by asking Hemingway “to emphasize color rather than straight reporting” not necessarily out of dissatisfaction with Hemingway’s reportage as Baker contends,{{efn|Baker’s notes date the Times request to NANA as 8 Apr. 1938, and NANA’s to Hemingway as 15
Apr. 1938 (Princeton University, Firestone Library: Box 18, Folder 8 “1938”), the date of “The Bombing of Tortosa” dispatch.}} but to increase{{pg|431|432}}the chance of selling to the ''Times'' and indeed to ensure the spirit of NANA’s original arrangement with Hemingway. {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}Far from dissatisfied, NANA wrote Hemingway at the end of August 1938 a letter of agreement for his coverage of “a general European war” should it break out, “written in your colorful style” (Hemingway was in Paris, on his way to Spain for the last time during the war).{{sfn|Wheeler|1938|p=}}When Edmund Wilson criticized the selected dispatches reprinted in ''Fact'', Hemingway wrote him that “I was paid to write what are called ‘eye witness’ accounts . . .what is called, or was asked for as ‘color stuff.’ Most of such stuff is faked. Mine was not. It was straight reporting and the personal stuff was what had been asked for by the editors. “Wilson’s estimation was also based upon ''Fact’s'' inclusion of the “The Old Man at the Bridge” story from ''Ken'', “not a news dispatch” at all.{{sfn|Hemingway|1938a|p=}}Speaking at Carnegie Hall before the showing of a rough cut of ''The Spanish Earth'', shortly after his first trip to Spain and so very much in the context of his wartime work, Hemingway defined the writer’s problem as “project[ing] [what is true] in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2002|p=193}}

Personal, anecdotal journalism had been Hemingway’s signature style from his earliest days filing reports, in the early 1920s from Paris, when his editor at the ''Toronto Star Weekly'' “encouraged [. . .] what Hemingway did best: write about himself in the act of being a reporter.”{{sfn|Reynolds|1989|p=45}}How could he expect that NANA would expect anything else, if indeed NANA did expect anything else? In the Spanish Civil War he at least maintained his eyewitness posture; in World War II, however, he couldn’t keep himself out. His first piece, about D-Day, begins, “No one remembers the date of the Battle of Shiloh. But the day ''we took'' Fox Green beach was the sixth of June, and the wind was blowing hard out of the northwest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1967|p=340}}His venue too—''Collier’s'' magazine—and the fact that he had not written anything in three years further contributed to the story-like nature of the WWII stories, in which he figured as a protagonist—not to mention the stories and involvement he couldn’t write about, armed and running around France more of a free agent than his guerilla-hero Robert Jordan ever was (though he began to transform these experiences into fiction in several unpublished stories). In wartime China in 1943, filing articles for Ralph Ingersoll’s short-lived ''PM'' New York afternoon daily, Hemingway did not even care to be called a news reporter.{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=99}}

It should be mentioned that Hemingway and Matthews enjoyed a great{{pg|432|433}}friendship and working relationship. Hemingway usually brought Matthews, who did not have a car, on his excursions. When Matthews left Madrid for a break in mid April 1937, he had already ensured Hemingway would provide coverage to the ''Times'' through NANA. For one thing, Hemingway did not have to worry about Matthews as a rival for the history books. He could endorse his friends’ book, ''Two Wars and More to Come'', and praise him as “the ablest and the bravest war correspondent writing today “who “when the fakers are all dead [. . .] will be read in the schools” (Advertisement 21) because Matthews posed no threat to Hemingway’s own chances to be read in the schools. The only brief Hemingway ever expressed he really reserved for Matthews’ editors, for not wanting his Teruel street-fighting story and for cutting references to himself in Matthews’ Teruel dispatches so that it appeared only Matthews had been there.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=462}}

As for Hemingway’s neglecting to name everyone with him for every story, the ''Times'' cutting of his name suggests that such exactitude was hardly a priority. A paper had no incentive for announcing the fact that a competitor’s
correspondent stood beside its own to see and report the same
events. NANA changed at least one vague Hemingway “we,” which admits
to the presence of others, to “this correspondent”
—we can hardly fault Hemingway for working in the spirit of his
employer’s standards.{{sfn|NANA|1938|p=}}{{efn|“we” in typescript and radiogram (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 1 and Folder 25).}} Do readers care that Matthews, Delmer, Gellhorn,
and others were there? The story’s effect and the limited word count also
weighed against such roll calls. One editor chose not to clutter the dispatch
on the great retreat across the Ebro with all the names of the American International Brigade volunteers Hemingway encountered, an omission of
Content more far serious than that of omitted correspondent names.{{efn| Radiogram insert dateline 4 April 1938 (HRC: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 25).}} Hemingway
often gave the names of the reporters with him, such as at Teruel;
nor was he the only reporter to sometimes neglect to do so. Martha Gellhorn,
for example, used a vague “we” and singled herself out as the primary
participant in some of her stories.

By using first-person reportage Hemingway—and Matthews and Gellhorn And most of the group covering the war—were operating solidly within
convention. William Stott, in ''Documentary Expression and Thirties America'',
calls this first-person ''participant observer'' technique “the most common sort
of documentary reportage in the thirties” that worked “by vicarious persuasion:
the writer partook of the events he reported and bared his feelings
and attitudes to influence the reader’s own.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=178-9}}{{efn|He specifically includes Hemingway et al (180).}} Stott also observes {{pg|433|434}}another technique to enable documentary reportage to “talk to us, and convince us that we, our deepest interests, are engaged,” in the use of the second person: “Thirties documentaries constantly address ‘you,’ the ‘you’ who is we the audience, and exhorts, wheedles, begs us to identify, pity, participate.” His examples include Dorothy Parker’s Spanish Civil War writing, and Hemingway’s 1935 “First-Hand Report on the Florida Hurricane.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=27-8}} A number of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches employ the second-person as a way of bringing the reader along for the ride.

Hemingway’s dispatches used personal pronouns more artfully than is
generally recognized. “A New Kind of War,” which William Braasch Watson
notes as having been “[w]ritten with more care and imagination” than its
predecessors, begins in second person: “The window of the hotel is open
and, as you lie in bed, you hear the firing in the front line seventeen blocks
away.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=29}} He takes “you” outside, to see the damage and the dead from the bombing. “Someone makes a joke about missing teeth and someone else says not to make that joke. And everyone has the feeling that characterizes war. It wasn’t me, see? It wasn’t me.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} The tension between the first person and second-person pronouns—the movement toward identification with “you” and the insistence that “it wasn’t me”—continues in the next line. Here the reader is at once still in the narrator’s shoes, but strangely distanced from the narrator through biographical tidbit and, at the same time, asked
to see himself in the enemy: “The Italian dead up on the Guadalajara weren’t
you although Italian dead, because of where you had spent your boyhood,
always seemed, still, like Our Dead.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} It is worth quoting at length the dispatch’s transition to first person:<blockquote>
After the shell that lit on the sidewalk in front of the hotel you got a beautiful double corner room on that side, twice the size of the one you’d had, for less than a dollar. It wasn’t me they killed. See? No. Not me. It wasn’t me anymore.

Then in a hospital given by the American Friends of Spanish Democracy located out behind the Morata front along the road
to Valencia they said, “Raven wants to see you.”

“Do I know him?”

“I don’t think so,” they said. “But he wants to see you.”

“Where is he?”

“Upstairs.”{{pg|434|435}}In the room upstairs they are giving a blood transfusion to a man with a very gray face who lay on a cot with his arm out looking away from the gurgling bottle and moaning in a very impersonal way. He moaned mechanically and at regular intervals and it did not seem to be him that made the sound. His lips did not move.

“Where’s Raven?” I asked.

“I’m here,” said Raven.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=31}}</blockquote>The piece simply could not have sustained the second-person for the remaining
five pages. More significantly, for this deeply personal exchange between
the writer and the faceless, eyeless soldier, Hemingway could not hide
in the rhetorical device of the second-person. In the process, he effects a reversal
of the usual pronoun game; instead of identifying with the all embracing
“you,” we leave that trick behind and become fully attached to
the narratorial “I” as ourselves, as we might not have been had the article
begun in the first person. And even as the narrator identifies himself by name
for the only time in any of the dispatches—“Hemingway,” and later
“Ernest”—as decidedly not ourselves. We do not say, ''It isn’t me''. The historian
Hugh Thomas notes “the refreshing candour” of Hemingway’s naming
himself “in the world of the International Brigades, where no one’s name
seemed to be truthfully given.”{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=591}}{{efn|For Watson, the dispatch “seems, in fact, on the verge of becoming a story” (29).}}

A year later Hemingway’s “Tortosa Calmly Awaits Assault” resists admitting
the city’s imminent fall. Yet it does so anyway, by subtly alluding to the
wartime rhetoric of sacrificed blood irrigating the earth and rejuvenating
Spain. Such rhetoric was common during the war, appearing in speeches,
print, and poetry. Many of the poems in Cary Nelson’s anthology ''The Wound
and the Dream: Sixty Years of American Poems about the Civil War'' join in the
Spanish and international chorus’s general connection between Republican
soldiers and the land, and the particular singing of their dead nourishing
the land. We find such language in La Pasionaria’s farewell address to the International Brigades, her epilogue to ''The Book of the XV Brigade'', and Hemingway’s famous eulogy “On the American Dead in Spain”: “For our dead are
a part of the earth of Spain now and the earth of Spain can never die. Each
winter it will seem to die and each spring it will come alive again. Our dead
will live with it forever.”{{sfn|Nelson|1994|p=3}}{{efn| Reprinted in Bruccoli 76 and Nelson, Remembering 37 (the drafts at the JFK are titled “The Dead at Jarama”). In addition to the poems in Nelson’s anthology, see the excerpt from Boris Todrin’s “Spanish Sowing” in Guttmann (Wounded 179–180).}} The Tortosa dispatch implies the deaths of{{pg|435|436}}many Republican soldiers in its final paragraph’s description of the newborn onions:
<blockquote>The artillery was picking up a little now. Two came in at a fairly useful place and as the smoke blew away ahead and settled through the trees, you picked an armful of spring onions from a field beside the trail that led to the Tortosa road. They were the first onions of the spring and peeling one I found they were plump white and not too strong. The Ebro Delta has a fine rich land, and where the onions grow, tomorrow will be a battle.
{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=84}}</blockquote>

The echo is quiet, and perhaps unconscious, but there nevertheless. The opening boastfulness of “American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents”
should be taken somewhat ironically. The dispatch begins by announcing
that for “two days we have been doing the most dangerous thing
you can do in this war. That is keep close behind an unstabilized line where
the enemy are attacking with mechanized forces.” Then, a few pages later,
we learn about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade survivors of the spring 1938
Nationalist offensive that took Bob Merriman and eventually reached the
Mediterranean Sea. Reading about these survivors creeping through enemy
camps, stepping on a sleeping German soldier’s hand, sprinting “across an
open field toward the Ebro bank and being sniped at by artillery controlled
by an observation plane overhead” and then “the desperate swimming of
the Ebro” naked, we are asked to place the correspondent’s plight in due perspective.{{sfn|Watson|1988|pp=71-2}} This story certainly escapes the charge of a monotonous
battle and bombing scene; its switch from apparently boastful to
awe-struck witness feels almost deliberately self-conscious. Other choice selfironic
moments come in the dispatches of that pre-Teruel quiet fall of 1938.
The one titled “Hemingway, Covering War, Tells of Brush with Death” has little
to report from Madrid other than the new aftershave brand he is trying.
In “Loyalists’ Drive Seen Progressing as Planned,” he writes that “Shells are
all much the same and if they don’t hit you there is no story and if they do
you won’t have to write it.” {{sfn|Watson|1988|p=58}}

Hemingway’s dispatches are sometimes monotonous because his war was
Usually monotonous—as wars are most of the time. It should also be kept in
mind that scholars reviewing Hemingway’s NANA dispatches one after{{pg|436|437}}

=== Notes ===
{{notelist}}
===Citations===
{{reflist}}
===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker
|first=Carlos |date=1969 |title= Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Bruccoli |first=Matthew |date=2006 |title=Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame |url= |location=Columbia |publisher=U of South Caronia P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Cowles |first=Virginia |date=1941 |title=Looking for Trouble |url= |location=New York
|publisher=Harper & Brothers |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Davison |first=Richard Allan |title=The Publication of Hemingway’s The Spanish Earth: An Untold Story |url= |journal=Hemingway Review
|volume=7.2 |issue= |date=1988
|pages=122-130 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson
|first=Scott |date=2009 |title=Fitzgerald & Hemingway: Works and Days |url= |location=New York |publisher=Columbia UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Franklin |first=Sidney |date=1952 |title=Bullfighter from Brooklyn |url= |location=New York |publisher=Prentice-Hall |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Graham |first=Helen |date=2002 |title=The Spanish Republic at War 1936-1939 |url= |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Guttmann |first=Allen |date=1962 |title=The Wound in the Heart: American and the Spanish Civil War |url= |location=New York |publisher=Free Press of Glencoe |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1967 |title=By-Line: Ernest Hemingway |url= |location=New York |publisher=Scibner |pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Trogdon
|editor-first=Robert W.
|author-mask=1
|title=Fascism is a Lie
|url=
|journal=Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference |volume==
|issue=
|date=2002
|pages=193-6
|location=New York
|publisher=Carroll & Graf
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 May 1937
|chapter=Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=nd
|chapter=The Home Front
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938a
|chapter=Letter to Edmund Wilson
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=2 June 1938b
|chapter=Letter to Jack Wheeler
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=14 Feb 1939
|chapter=On the American Dead in Spain
|title=TS. New Masses
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|editor-last=Baker
|editor-first=Carlos
|author-mask=1
|date=2003
|chapter=The Hadely Mowrer
|title=Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Scribner
|pages=462-3
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ibarruri
|first=Dolores
|date=1966
|title=They Shall Not Pass: The Autobiography of La Pasionaria
|url=
|location=United States
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|date=1969
|title=The Camera and I
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=International Publishers
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Ivens
|first=Joris
|author-mask=1
|date=26 Apr 1937
|chapter=Letter to Ernest Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|date=20 Nov 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Bertrand Weaver
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=12 Oct 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=25 Apr 1939
|chapter=Letter to M.B. Tenney
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=James
|first=Edwin
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Apr 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Knightley
|first=Phillip
|date=2004
|title=The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq
|url=
|location=Baltimore
|publisher=John Hopkins
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=
|date=9 Apr 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=TS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=11 Apr 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=6 July 1937c
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=July 1937d
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Matthews
|first=Herbert
|author-mask=1
|date=22 March 1939
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 9
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=
|date=20 May 1937a
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=20 Dec 1937b
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 5
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=McCaw
|first=Raymond
|author-mask=1
|date=23 Sep 1937c
|chapter=Note to Herbert Matthews
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4
|url=
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moorehead
|first=Caroline
|date=2003
|title=Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Henry Holt
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Moreira
|first=Peter
|date=2006
|title=Hemingway on the China Front: His WWII Spy Mission with Martha Gellhorn
|url=
|location=Washington D.C.
|publisher=Potomac Books
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|date=5 Feb 1937
|chapter=Promotion Box: Hemingway, For Immediate Release
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=NANA
|first=
|author-mask=1
|date=4 Apr 1938
|chapter=Promotion Box: American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection
|url=
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|editor-last=Nelson
|editor-first=Card
|date=1994
|title=Remembering Spain: Hemingway’s Civil War Eulogy and the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
|url=
|location=Urbana
|publisher=U of Illinois
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Reynolds
|first=Michael
|date=1989
|title=Hemingway: The Paris Years
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Norton
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Stott
|first=William
|date=1986
|title=Documentary Expression and Thirties America
|url=
|location=Chicago
|publisher=U of Chicago P
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Thomas
|first=Hugh
|date=2001
|title=The Spanish Civil War, Rev. ed.
|url=
|location=New York
|publisher=Modern Library
|pages=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine
|last=''Two Wars and More to Come''
|first=
|date=24 Jan 1938
|title=Best Sellers of the Week Here and Elsewhere
|type=Advertisement
|url=
|magazine=New York Times
|pages=
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=
|first=
|title=United States. Dept. of State
|url=
|journal= Foreign Relations of the Untied States, 1937 |volume==1
|issue=General
|date=1954
|pages=
|location=Washington
|publisher=GPO
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal
|last=Watson
|first=William Braasch
|title=Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches
|url=
|journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=7.2
|issue=
|date=1988
|pages=4-121
|access-date=
|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book
|last=Wheeler
|first=John H.
|author-mask=1
|date=10 Dec 1938
|chapter=Letter to Hemingway
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection, Box 3 Folder 14
|url=
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
|publisher=
|pages=
|ref=harv }}

{{refend}}