User:KWatson/sandbox: Difference between revisions

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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. (20)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. (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 30,1938. It is hardly “petulant,” he scolded, “not to wish to be shot” (Davison 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” (United States 292).11**

It is possible that Hemingway’s dispatch stating that “not one friend [...] has been executed or is missing” (Watson 34) 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. 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” (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

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cover the war and support the cause— a justification other journalist, 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).13** 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”(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 (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” (Stott 11), anticipated post war 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''. Some of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches fall in this line of development.

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-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. (20)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. (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 30,1938. It is hardly “petulant,” he scolded, “not to wish to be shot” (Davison 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” (United States 292).11**
+It is possible that Hemingway’s dispatch stating that “not one friend [...] has been executed or is missing” (Watson 34) 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. 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” (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
+page break 438-439
+cover the war and support the cause— a justification other journalist, 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).13** 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”(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 (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” (Stott 11), anticipated post war 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''. Some of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches fall in this line of development.