User:MerAtticus/sandbox: Difference between revisions

Line 121:

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.

===Works Cited===

@@ Line 121: / Line 121: @@
 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.
 ===Works Cited===