User:KWatson/sandbox: Difference between revisions

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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.

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

Page break 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” (Donaldson 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” (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.14** 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.15** Nor did he write articles asserting the limited role of the communists in the government, or explaining Spanish anarchism, also as Matthews had done.16**

During one of Hemingw

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 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.
+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
+Page break 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” (Donaldson 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” (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.14** 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.15** Nor did he write articles asserting the limited role of the communists in the government, or explaining Spanish anarchism, also as Matthews had done.16**
+During one of Hemingw