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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).

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

Page break 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” (Hemingway, Letter to Edmund).

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” (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 dispatches [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” (Letter to Edwin, 8 May 1937). As already noted, by July he would cable “Censorship Stricter” as the ban on mentioning internationals went into effect (Letter to Edwin,6 July 1937; Letter to Edwin, July 1937). Cowles’ memoir confirms the aggressive censorship, observing that it limited journalists to exactly the kind of material Hemingway wrote about:

blcokquote** 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.

Page break

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.

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 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 (Hemingway, “Home Front”). 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 (Thomas 628; Graham

page break

184). Hemingway declined to follow Joris Ivens’ suggestion that he write a dispatch on the significant role of the political commissars in the Republican military (Ivens, Letter to Ernest), even though that would have meant featuring his brave new friend Gustav Regler. 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).

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.

@@ 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).
+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
+Page break 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” (Hemingway, Letter to Edmund).
+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” (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 dispatches [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” (Letter to Edwin, 8 May 1937). As already noted, by July he would cable “Censorship Stricter” as the ban on mentioning internationals went into effect (Letter to Edwin,6 July 1937; Letter to Edwin, July 1937). Cowles’ memoir confirms the aggressive censorship, observing that it limited journalists to exactly the kind of material Hemingway wrote about:
+blcokquote** 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.
+Page break
+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.
+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 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 (Hemingway, “Home Front”). 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 (Thomas 628; Graham
+page break
+). Hemingway declined to follow Joris Ivens’ suggestion that he write a dispatch on the significant role of the political commissars in the Republican military (Ivens, Letter to Ernest), even though that would have meant featuring his brave new friend Gustav Regler. 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).
+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.