User:KWatson/sandbox: Difference between revisions

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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” (591).9**

“Ernest”—as decidedly not ourselves. We do not say, ''It isn’t me''. The historian Hugh Thomas notes “the refreshing candor” of Hemingway’s naming himself “in the world of the International Brigades, where no one’s name seemed to be truthfully given” (591).9**

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” (3).10 The Tortosa dispatch implies the deaths of

page break 435-436

many Republican soldiers in its final paragraph’s description of the newborn onions:

blockqoute** 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. (Watson 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 un stabilized 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 (Watson 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 self-ironic 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” (Watson 58).

@@ Line 86: / Line 86: @@
 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” (591).9**
+“Ernest”—as decidedly not ourselves. We do not say, ''It isn’t me''. The historian Hugh Thomas notes “the refreshing candor” of Hemingway’s naming himself “in the world of the International Brigades, where no one’s name seemed to be truthfully given” (591).9**
+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” (3).10 The Tortosa dispatch implies the deaths of
+page break 435-436
+many Republican soldiers in its final paragraph’s description of the newborn onions:
+blockqoute** 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. (Watson 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 un stabilized 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 (Watson 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 self-ironic 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” (Watson 58).