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Abstract:The Spanish Civil War began in July 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally-restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a | |||
deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy. By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches. | |||
THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR BEGAN ON 17–18 JULY, 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally-restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy, to collaborate with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens on the pro-Republican documentary ''The Spanish Earth'', and to pursue his fledgling love affair with Martha Gellhorn. | |||
By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches for NANA.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=4}}{{efn| Quotations from the NANA dispatches follow the Diplomatic Text established by William Braasch Watson’s “Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches.” I prefer NANA’s titles rather than Watson’s. For my disagreements with some of Watson’s datings, see my comments on specific dispatches in ''Hemingway’s Second War.''}} The secondary sources habitually judge them inferior journalism. Carlos Baker in the first Hemingway biography, for example, complains that the dialogue was “so heavily stamped with personal mannerisms as to be of doubtful authenticity.” Baker sees a “curious monotony in his stories of battles and bombardments,” a gratuitous use of graphic imagery “to shock his readers,” and “a note of triumphant boastfulness” in reporting proximity to danger. He also faults Hemingway for “often hint[ing] he was alone when in fact he was usually with Martha Gellhorn, Matthews, and Delmer.” Hemingway lacked Dos Passos’ “eye for telling details” and the “meticulous exactitude and inclusiveness that characterized the best work of Herbert Matthews and Sefton Delmer.”{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}} | |||
Philip Knightley’s ''The First Casualty'', the standard history of war correspondence, paraphrases Baker but with a trouncing final judgment:{{pg|427|428}}Hemingway’s “performance as a war correspondent was abysmally bad.” But Knightley goes beyond “technical” dissatisfaction to moral condemnation. Not just “unjustifiably optimistic”—an excusable offense—Hemingway’s reporting was “unforgivable” in its “total failure to report the Communist persecution, imprisonment, and summary execution of ‘untrustworthy elements’ on the Republican side, when he knew this was happening and when disclosing it might well have prevented further horrors like this.” | |||
{{sfn|Knightley|2004 |pp=231–32}}{{efn|In my view, Knightley does not sufficiently acknowledge his paraphrasing of Baker.}} | |||
Such criticisms in the final analysis might bear out. As Scott Donaldson writes, Hemingway advanced the Republican cause in his dispatches by eliciting “the deepest possible feelings of horror and of sympathy for the victims” of the Madrid bombardment; his “undue optimism” often “ignored Loyalist defeats and exaggerated the importance of its victories”; and “he repeatedly called attention to the participation of Italians and Germans on Franco’s side.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|p=426}} It also served as a recruitment tool—Milton Wolff, for example, acknowledged the strong influence Hemingway’s dispatches had on his decision to volunteer. Nevertheless, I think it a worthwhile exercise to attend a little more studiously to Hemingway’s dispatches, their context, and their artistry. I don’t necessarily intend to reverse the general opinion of the correspondence, only to achieve a better and more sympathetic understanding. | |||
Herbert Matthews’ reporting for the New York Times will serve as a convenient comparison for two reasons. First, because both Baker and Knightley use Matthews’ journalism as the standard of excellence to pass judgment on Hemingway’s; and second, because the two worked practically side-by-side, seeing and reporting on many of the same events. In fact so closely did they work together that NANA sometimes complained that the Times was not buying Hemingway’s pieces because they resembled Matthews,’ and at one point Matthews’ own editors at the Times suspected him of plagiarizing Hemingway.{{sfn|Donaldson|2009|pp=411, 420}} A note from Matthews’ assigned editor Raymond McCaw provides, in two columns, seven quite similar passages from Hemingway’s Aragon front dispatches of September 13 and 14 with Matthews’ of September 14, with a penciled note at the bottom: “a deadly parallel if you ask me.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937|p=Note}} Edwin James, the managing editor and McCaw’s boss, eventually agreed with Matthews’ defense: “It is quite apparent that you did not file any duplicate of the Hemingway story, or vice versa. As I understand it, the similarity arose from the fact that you{{pg|428|429}}both went to see the same show and saw it at the same time [sic], under the same conditions.”{{sfn|James|1937|p=Herbert}} | |||
Matthews’ dispatches ring of Republican bias as much if not more than anything Hemingway ever filed. The Times received many letters to the editor complaining about Matthews’ undisguised politics, which also gave serious concern to some of his editors. His description of the Republican May 1937 infighting in Barcelona is a striking example of how his news veered into propaganda and shows just how much he passed along the government’s version of events. The government’s “BLOODLESS TRIUMPH FOUGHT WITH RECOGNIZEDWEAPONS OF DEMOCRACY” turned out to be blatantly false, as the government and the “COMMUNISTS [WHO] DISTINGUISHED THEMSELVES” resorted to violent suppression. His blaming the uprising on the anarchist CNT working as Franco operatives parrots the government’s and the communist party’s public position, even though both charges—that the anarchists precipitated the events and that they were under Nationalist direction—were also false. His dispatch’s optimistic close also equivocates the political reality: “NEW GOVERNMENT HAS TAKEN POWER WHICH APPEARS TOVE CONFIDENCE VAST MAJORITY SPANIARDS IN LOYALIST TERRITORY AND TIS HOPED WILL GAIN EQUAL CONFIDENCE ABROAD STOP VIOLENCE AND REVOLUTION BEEN REPUDIATED AND NEWAND FAR HOPEFULLER PERIOD SEEMS BEGINNING.”{{sfn|McCaw|1937|p=May}} | |||
The Times, knowing full well the one-sided coverage of a correspondent writing from one side of the conflict, had a reporter on both sides: Matthews with the Republicans, and William Carney with the Nationalists. They got their facts right (or wrong) as often as the other, their editors concluded; and they inspired about the same number of letters of complaint.{{sfn|James|1937|p=Bertrand}}{sfn|James|1939|p=Tenney}} | |||
Furthermore, Matthews’ dispatches received a great deal of substantive editorial revisions. One of Matthews’ Teruel reports had to be cut for length, as McCaw informed James: “This bird sent 2844 words on the same facts which Hemingway covered much better in less than half that number. I wonder if Matthews thinks the paper is thriving, and that cable tolls do not matter a damn. Of course, it had to be cut for space anyway.” McCaw most likely refers here to Matthews’ dispatch corresponding to Hemingway’s “The Attack on Teruel,” though Matthews’ account of the fall of Teruel is also much longer (and more long-winded) than Hemingway’s, and just as personal in terms of describing the dangers{{pg|429|430}} he faced. Indeed its length allows him to share even more of the action he endured.{{sfn|McCaw|1937|p=December}} | |||
Raymond McCaw held a general professional disagreement with Matthews perhaps tainted with over zealousness. Whether a personal or political motive informed that disagreement can’t be determined from the evidence I’ve seen. It is also clear that McCaw’s charges bear some validity—that any responsible editor could have easily and reasonably taken issue where McCaw did. One of the more interesting examples concerns Matthews’ piece on Guadalajara. Because he only saw evidence on Franco’s side of Italian forces, he only reported on Italians. But the Times editors heard from other sources that German soldiers also participated in the March offensive. They thought it prudent, from this confusion, to change (nine times) “Italian” to “Rebel,” “the foe,” or “Insurgent.” When Matthews saw the published piece he wrote a strenuous objection. In some instances the editors changed paraphrased quotations from his sources. One large paragraph omitted by the editors stressed the first-hand nature of the information, and Matthews underlines the key words: “All day, at every place we stopped and no matter whom we talked to or what we saw, there was only one label—Italian. The dead bodies, the prisoners, the material of every kind, the men who had occupied Brihuega and then fled were Italian and nothing but Italian.” Here and elsewhere in his original story, Matthews emphasizes the “personal knowledge” of its information.{{sfn|Matthews|1937|p=April}}{{efn|James supported McCaw on these changes, though later acknowledged that altering quoted sources was perhaps unwarranted.{{sfn|Matthews|1937|p=Herbert}}}} Yet Matthews did not report on the foreigners fighting for the Republic—it was in fact the Italian Garibali Battalion that routed Franco’s Italians. We might surmise government censorship behind this silence, though Matthews would not cable news of “CENSORSHIP STRICTER” and “BAN ON MENTIONING INTERNATIONALS INCLUDING AMERICANS INSTITUTED TODAY” until July.{{sfn|Matthews|1937|p=July}} Perhaps he cautiously self-censored, or politically self-censored for the same reasons the government would eventually ban mention. Still, his stridency about the omission of foreigners on one side is striking given his knowledge of their contribution to the other side. For this reason too, and his omission of other nationalities on the insurgent side, it seemed only fair to his editor “to stand on the statement that the majority of the Rebels were Italians and let it go at that.”{{sfn|James|1937|p=Sulzberger}} A reasonable decision. | |||
{{ | |||
Throughout his correspondence to his editors and his several books,{{pg|430|431}}Matthews maintained a passionate defense of his eyewitness journalistic standard, a position those close to him understood. “Matthews never believed anything he had not seen with his own eyes,” Joris Ivens wrote. “He never saw his job as reporter as one that permitted him to sit in his hotel and read the handouts of the War Ministry.” {{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=112 Sidney Franklin recalls that some writers wrote their pieces before arriving in Madrid, and came only for the “legitimacy” of the Madrid dateline.{{sfn|Franklin|1952|p=232}} And Matthews hated, on principle, having his name attached to an article that violated the integrity of his witness. The only way to achieve objectivity, for Matthews, was to acknowledge one’s subjective perspective. Writing to his publisher, Matthews argued that “the full documentary value” of his coverage was lost when the editors altered his submissions for “the apparent necessity of giving more or less equal space to both sides.”{{sfn|Matthews|1937|p=Sulzberger}} | |||
As with Matthews, so too Hemingway. Indeed the commitment to subjectivity | |||
fit quite well with Hemingway’s modernist aesthetics. If Hemingway | |||
focused the dispatches on his perspective—on his own experience dodging | |||
artillery—more than Matthews and more than most, he did so at least partially | |||
to fulfill expectations. NANA approached him, after all, for his name | |||
and personality as much as whatever he would write. Before he even left the | |||
states it pitched him to potential publications, sending out a promotional release with text to be used alongside his forthcoming dispatches and suggesting | |||
they include a photograph: “Mr. Hemingway’s assignment is to get both from the bombed towns and bombed trenches the human story of the war, not just an account of the game being played by general staffs with pins | |||
and a map.”{{sfn|NANA|1937|p=Hemingway}}{{ NANA also released each individual dispatch with a one-sentence “precede” about the “famous” or “noted” author. Ernest Hemingway was not writing as Herbert Mathews, ace reporter; Hemingway was writing as Ernest Hemingway, famous author of novels and stories well known to be drawn from his own experiences. | |||
That he understood this to be his assignment is further evidenced by a | |||
cable Matthews sent to his Times editors on April 9, 1937, concerning the | |||
Loyalist attack: “WORKED CONJOINTL WITH HEMINGWAY TODAY HE SENDING EYEWITNESS DESCRIPTION WHILE EYE SENT GENERAL STRATEGY.”{{sfn|Matthews|1937|p=April}} When a year later the Times asked NANA to ensure Hemingway’s reports differed from Matthews, NANA complied by asking Hemingway “to emphasize color rather than straight reporting” not necessarily out of dissatisfaction with Hemingway’s reportage as Baker contends,{{efn|Baker’s notes date the Times request to NANA as 8 Apr. 1938, and NANA’s to Hemingway as 15 | |||
Apr. 1938 (Princeton University, Firestone Library: Box 18, Folder 8 “1938”), the date of “The Bombing of Tortosa” dispatch.}} but to increase{{pg|431|432}}the chance of selling to the Times and indeed to ensure the spirit of NANA’s original arrangement with Hemingway. {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}Far from dissatisfied, NANA wrote Hemingway at the end of August 1938 a letter of agreement for his coverage of “a general European war” should it break out, “written in your colorful style” (Hemingway was in Paris, on his way to Spain for the last time during the war).{{sfn|Wheeler|1938|p=}} When Edmund Wilson criticized the selected dispatches reprinted in Fact, Hemingway wrote him that “I was paid to write what are called ‘eye witness’ accounts . . .what is called, or was asked for as ‘color stuff.’ Most of such stuff is faked. Mine was not. It was straight reporting and the personal stuff was what had been asked for by the editors. “Wilson’s estimation was also based upon Fact’s inclusion of the “The Old Man at the Bridge” story from Ken, “not a news dispatch” at all.{{sfn|Hemingway|1938|p=Edmund}} Speaking at Carnegie Hall before the showing of a rough cut of The Spanish Earth, shortly after his first trip to Spain and so very much in the context of his wartime work, Hemingway defined the writer’s problem as “project[ing] [what is true] in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2002|p=193}} | |||
Personal, anecdotal journalism had been Hemingway’s signature style from his earliest days filing reports, in the early 1920s from Paris, when his editor at the Toronto Star Weekly “encouraged [. . .] what Hemingway did best: write about himself in the act of being a reporter.”{{sfn|Reynolds|1989|p=45}} How could he expect that NANA would expect anything else, if indeed NANA did expect anything else? In the Spanish Civil War he at least maintained his eyewitness posture; in World War II, however, he couldn’t keep himself out. His first piece, about D-Day, begins, “No one remembers the date of the Battle of Shiloh. But the day we took Fox Green beach was the sixth of June, and the wind was blowing hard out of the northwest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1967|p=340}} His venue too—Collier’s magazine—and the fact that he had not written anything in three years further contributed to the story-like nature of the WWII stories, in which he figured as a protagonist—not to mention the stories and involvement he couldn’t write about, armed and running around France more of a free agent than his guerilla-hero Robert Jordan ever was (though he began to transform these experiences into fiction in several unpublished stories). In wartime China in 1943, filing articles for Ralph Ingersoll’s short-lived PM New York afternoon daily, Hemingway did not even care to be called a news reporter.{{sfn|Moreira|2006|p=99}} | |||
It should be mentioned that Hemingway and Matthews enjoyed a great{{pg|432|433}friendship and working relationship. Hemingway usually brought Matthews, who did not have a car, on his excursions. When Matthews left Madrid for a break in mid April 1937, he had already ensured Hemingway would provide coverage to the Times through NANA. For one thing, Hemingway did not have to worry about Matthews as a rival for the history books. He could endorse his friends’ book, Two Wars and More to Come, and praise him as “the ablest and the bravest war correspondent writing today “who “when the fakers are all dead [. . .] will be read in the schools” (Advertisement 21) because Matthews posed no threat to Hemingway’s own chances to be read in the schools.{{sfn|?}} The only brief Hemingway ever expressed he really reserved for Matthews’ editors, for not wanting his Teruel street-fighting story and for cutting references to himself in Matthews’ Teruel dispatches so that it appeared only Matthews had been there.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=462}} | |||
As for Hemingway’s neglecting to name everyone with him for every story, the Times cutting of his name suggests that such exactitude was hardly a priority. A paper had no incentive for announcing the fact that a competitor’s | |||
correspondent stood beside its own to see and report the same | |||
events. NANA changed at least one vague Hemingway “we,” which admits | |||
to the presence of others, to “this correspondent” | |||
—we can hardly fault Hemingway for working in the spirit of his | |||
employer’s standards.{{sfn|NANA|1938|p=American Veterans}}{{efn|“we” in typescript and radiogram (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 1 and Folder 25).}} Do readers care that Matthews, Delmer, Gellhorn, | |||
and others were there? The story’s effect and the limited word count also | |||
weighed against such roll calls. One editor chose not to clutter the dispatch | |||
on the great retreat across the Ebro with all the names of the American International Brigade volunteers Hemingway encountered, an omission of | |||
Content more far serious than that of omitted correspondent names.{{efn| Radiogram insert dateline 4 April 1938 (HRC: Ernest Hemingway Collection Box 1 Folder 25).}} Hemingway | |||
often gave the names of the reporters with him, such as at Teruel; | |||
nor was he the only reporter to sometimes neglect to do so. Martha Gellhorn, | |||
for example, used a vague “we” and singled herself out as the primary | |||
participant in some of her stories. | |||
By using first-person reportage Hemingway—and Matthews and Gellhorn And most of the group covering the war—were operating solidly within | |||
convention. William Stott, in Documentary Expression and Thirties America, | |||
calls this first-person participant observer technique “the most common sort | |||
of documentary reportage in the thirties” that worked “by vicarious persuasion: | |||
the writer partook of the events he reported and bared his feelings | |||
and attitudes to influence the reader’s own.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=178-9}}{{efn|He specifically includes Hemingway et al (180).}} Stott also observes {{pg|433|434}}another technique to enable documentary reportage to “talk to us, and convince us that we, our deepest interests, are engaged,” in the use of the second person: “Thirties documentaries constantly address ‘you,’ the ‘you’ who is we the audience, and exhorts, wheedles, begs us to identify, pity, participate.” His examples include Dorothy Parker’s Spanish Civil War writing, and Hemingway’s 1935 “First-Hand Report on the Florida Hurricane.”{{sfn|Stott|1986|pp=27-8}} A number of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches employ the second-person as a way of bringing the reader along for the ride. | |||
Hemingway’s dispatches used personal pronouns more artfully than is | |||
generally recognized. “A New Kind of War,” which William Braasch Watson | |||
notes as having been “[w]ritten with more care and imagination” than its | |||
predecessors, begins in second person: “The window of the hotel is open | |||
and, as you lie in bed, you hear the firing in the front line seventeen blocks | |||
away.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=29}} He takes “you” outside, to see the damage and the dead from the bombing. “Someone makes a joke about missing teeth and someone else says not to make that joke. And everyone has the feeling that characterizes war. It wasn’t me, see? It wasn’t me.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} The tension between the first person and second-person pronouns—the movement toward identification with “you” and the insistence that “it wasn’t me”—continues in the next line. Here the reader is at once still in the narrator’s shoes, but strangely distanced from the narrator through biographical tidbit and, at the same time, asked | |||
to see himself in the enemy: “The Italian dead up on the Guadalajara weren’t | |||
you although Italian dead, because of where you had spent your boyhood, | |||
always seemed, still, like Our Dead.”{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=30}} It is worth quoting at length the dispatch’s transition to first person: | |||
{{quote|After the shell that lit on the sidewalk in front of the hotel you got | |||
a beautiful double corner room on that side, twice the size of the | |||
one you’d had, for less than a dollar. It wasn’t me they killed. See? | |||
No. Not me. It wasn’t me anymore. | |||
Then in a hospital given by the American Friends of Spanish | |||
Democracy located out behind the Morata front along the road | |||
to Valencia they said, “Raven wants to see you.” | |||
“Do I know him?” | |||
“I don’t think so,” they said. “But he wants to see you.” | |||
“Where is he?” | |||
“Upstairs.”{{pg|434|435}} | |||
In the room upstairs they are giving a blood transfusion to a | |||
man with a very gray face who lay on a cot with his arm out looking | |||
away from the gurgling bottle and moaning in a very impersonal | |||
way. He moaned mechanically and at regular intervals and | |||
it did not seem to be him that made the sound. His lips did not | |||
move. | |||
“Where’s Raven?” I asked. | |||
“I’m here,” said Raven.{{sfn|Watson|1988|p=31}} }} | |||
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.”{{sfn|Thomas|2001|p=591}}{{efn|For Watson, the dispatch “seems, in fact, on the verge of becoming a story” (29).}} | |||
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.”{{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 | |||
{{pg| | 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 | |||
{{pg| | 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=}} | |||
The | 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=== | |||
{{ | * {{cite book | ||
|last=Bruccoli |first=Matthew |date=2006 |title=Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame |url= |location=Columbia |publisher=U of South Caronia P |pages= |ref=harv }} | |||
* {{cite book |last=Cowles |first=Virginia |date=1941 |title=Looking for Trouble |url= |location=New York | |||
|publisher=Harper & Brothers |pages= |ref=harv }} | |||
* {{cite journal |last=Davison |first=Richard Allan |title=The Publication of Hemingway’s The Spanish Earth: An Untold Story |url= |journal=Hemingway Review | |||
|volume=7.2 |issue= |date=1988 | |||
|pages=122-130 |access-date= |ref=harv }} | |||
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson | |||
|first=Scott |date=2009 |title=Fitzgerald & Hemingway: Works and Days |url= |location=New York |publisher=Columbia UP |pages= |ref=harv }} | |||
* {{cite book |last=Franklin |first=Sidney |date=1952 |title=Bullfighter from Brooklyn |url= |location=New York |publisher=Prentice-Hall |pages= |ref=harv }} | |||
* {{cite book |last=Graham |first=Helen |date=2002 |title=The Spanish Republic at War 1936-1939 |url= |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |ref=harv }} | |||
* {{cite book |last=Guttmann |first=Allen |date=1962 |title=The Wound in the Heart: American and the Spanish Civil War |url= |location=New York |publisher=Free Press of Glencoe |pages= |ref=harv }} | |||
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1967 |title=By-Line: Ernest Hemingway |url= |location=New York |publisher=Scibner |pages= | |||
|ref=harv }} | |||
* {{cite journal | |||
|last=Hemingway | |||
|first=Ernest | |||
|editor-last=Trogdon | |||
|editor-first=Robert W. | |||
|author-mask=1 | |||
|title=Fascism is a Lie | |||
|url= | |||
|journal=Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference |volume== | |||
== | |issue= | ||
|date=2002 | |||
|pages=193-6 | |||
{{ | |location=New York | ||
=== | |publisher=Carroll & Graf | ||
|access-date= | |||
|ref=harv }} | |||
*{{ | * {{cite book | ||
* {{cite | |last=Hemingway | ||
* {{ | |first=Ernest | ||
* {{cite book|last= | |author-mask=1 | ||
* {{cite | |date=10 May 1937 | ||
* {{cite | |chapter=Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win | ||
* {{cite | |title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection | ||
* {{cite book|last= | |url= | ||
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston | |||
* {{cite book|last= | |publisher= | ||
* {{cite | |pages= | ||
* {{cite | |ref=harv }} | ||
* {{ | * {{cite book | ||
* {{cite book|last= | |last=Hemingway | ||
* {{cite book|last= | |first=Ernest | ||
* {{cite book|last= | |author-mask=1 | ||
* {{cite book|last= | |date=nd | ||
* {{cite book|last= | |chapter=The Home Front | ||
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection | |||
* {{cite book|last= | |url= | ||
* {{cite book|last= | |location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston | ||
* {{cite | |publisher= | ||
* {{cite book|last= | |pages= | ||
* {{cite book|last= | |ref=harv }} | ||
* {{ | * {{cite book | ||
* {{ | |last=Hemingway | ||
|first=Ernest | |||
|author-mask=1 | |||
|date=10 Dec 1938 | |||
|chapter=Letter to Edmund Wilson | |||
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection | |||
|url= | |||
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston | |||
|publisher= | |||
|pages= | |||
|ref=harv }} | |||
* {{cite book | |||
|last=Hemingway | |||
|first=Ernest | |||
|author-mask=1 | |||
|date=2 June 1938 | |||
|chapter=Letter to Jack Wheeler | |||
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection | |||
|url= | |||
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston | |||
|publisher= | |||
|pages= | |||
|ref=harv }} | |||
* {{cite book | |||
|last=Hemingway | |||
|first=Ernest | |||
|author-mask=1 | |||
|date=14 Feb 1939 | |||
|chapter=On the American Dead in Spain | |||
|title=TS. New Masses | |||
|url= | |||
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston | |||
|publisher= | |||
|pages=3 | |||
|ref=harv }} | |||
* {{cite book | |||
|last=Hemingway | |||
|first=Ernest | |||
|editor-last=Baker | |||
|editor-first=Carlos | |||
|author-mask=1 | |||
|date=2003 | |||
|chapter=The Hadely Mowrer | |||
|title=Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961 | |||
|url= | |||
|location=New York | |||
|publisher=Scribner | |||
|pages=462-3 | |||
|ref=harv }} | |||
* {{cite book | |||
|last=Ibarruri | |||
|first=Dolores | |||
|date=1966 | |||
|title=They Shall Not Pass: The Autobiography of La Pasionaria | |||
|url= | |||
|location=United States | |||
|publisher=International Publishers | |||
|pages= | |||
|ref=harv }} | |||
* {{cite book | |||
|last=Ivens | |||
|first=Joris | |||
|date=1969 | |||
|title=The Camera and I | |||
|url= | |||
|location=New York | |||
|publisher=International Publishers | |||
|pages= | |||
|ref=harv }} | |||
* {{cite book | |||
|last=Ivens | |||
|first=Joris | |||
|author-mask=1 | |||
|date=26 Apr 1937 | |||
|chapter=Letter to Ernest Hemingway | |||
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection | |||
|url= | |||
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston | |||
|publisher= | |||
|pages= | |||
|ref=harv }} | |||
* {{cite book | |||
|last=James | |||
|first=Edwin | |||
|date=20 Nov 1937 | |||
|chapter=Letter to Bertrand Weaver | |||
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4 | |||
|url= | |||
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin | |||
|publisher= | |||
|pages= | |||
|ref=harv }} | |||
* {{cite book | |||
|last=James | |||
|first=Edwin | |||
|author-mask=1 | |||
|date=12 Oct 1937 | |||
|chapter=Letter to Herbert Matthews | |||
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10 | |||
|url= | |||
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin | |||
|publisher= | |||
|pages= | |||
|ref=harv }} | |||
* {{cite book | |||
|last=James | |||
|first=Edwin | |||
|author-mask=1 | |||
|date=25 Apr 1939 | |||
|chapter=Letter to M.B. Tenney | |||
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10 | |||
|url= | |||
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin | |||
|publisher= | |||
|pages= | |||
|ref=harv }} | |||
* {{cite book | |||
|last=James | |||
|first=Edwin | |||
|author-mask=1 | |||
|date=23 Apr 1937 | |||
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger | |||
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3 | |||
|url= | |||
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin | |||
|publisher= | |||
|pages= | |||
|ref=harv }} | |||
* {{cite book | |||
|last=Knightley | |||
|first=Phillip | |||
|date=2004 | |||
|title=The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq | |||
|url= | |||
|location=Baltimore | |||
|publisher=John Hopkins | |||
|pages= | |||
|ref=harv }} | |||
* {{cite book | |||
|last=Matthews | |||
|first=Herbert | |||
|author-mask= | |||
|date=9 Apr 1937 | |||
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James | |||
|title=TS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3 | |||
|url= | |||
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin | |||
|publisher= | |||
|pages= | |||
|ref=harv }} | |||
* {{cite book | |||
|last=Matthews | |||
|first=Herbert | |||
|author-mask=1 | |||
|date=11 Apr 1937 | |||
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James | |||
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3 | |||
|url= | |||
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin | |||
|publisher= | |||
|pages= | |||
|ref=harv }} | |||
* {{cite book | |||
|last=Matthews | |||
|first=Herbert | |||
|author-mask=1 | |||
|date=6 July 1937 | |||
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James | |||
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3 | |||
|url= | |||
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin | |||
|publisher= | |||
|pages= | |||
|ref=harv }} | |||
* {{cite book | |||
|last=Matthews | |||
|first=Herbert | |||
|author-mask=1 | |||
|date=July 1937 | |||
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James | |||
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4 | |||
|url= | |||
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin | |||
|publisher= | |||
|pages= | |||
|ref=harv }} | |||
* {{cite book | |||
|last=Matthews | |||
|first=Herbert | |||
|author-mask=1 | |||
|date=22 March 1939 | |||
|chapter=Letter to Sulzberger | |||
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 9 | |||
|url= | |||
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin | |||
|publisher= | |||
|pages= | |||
|ref=harv }} | |||
* {{cite book | |||
|last=McCaw | |||
|first=Raymond | |||
|author-mask= | |||
|date=20 May 1937 | |||
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James | |||
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3 | |||
|url= | |||
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin | |||
|publisher= | |||
|pages= | |||
|ref=harv }} | |||
* {{cite book | |||
|last=McCaw | |||
|first=Raymond | |||
|author-mask=1 | |||
|date=20 Dec 1937 | |||
|chapter=Letter to Edwin James | |||
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 5 | |||
|url= | |||
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin | |||
|publisher= | |||
|pages= | |||
|ref=harv }} | |||
* {{cite book | |||
|last=McCaw | |||
|first=Raymond | |||
|author-mask=1 | |||
|date=23 Sep 1937 | |||
|chapter=Note to Herbert Matthews | |||
|title=MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4 | |||
|url= | |||
|location= Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin | |||
|publisher= | |||
|pages= | |||
|ref=harv }} | |||
* {{cite book | |||
|last=Moorehead | |||
|first=Caroline | |||
|date=2003 | |||
|title=Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life | |||
|url= | |||
|location=New York | |||
|publisher=Henry Holt | |||
|pages= | |||
|ref=harv }} | |||
* {{cite book | |||
|last=Moreira | |||
|first=Peter | |||
|date=2006 | |||
|title=Hemingway on the China Front: His WWII Spy Mission with Martha Gellhorn | |||
|url= | |||
|location=Washington D.C. | |||
|publisher=Potomac Books | |||
|pages= | |||
|ref=harv }} | |||
* {{cite book | |||
|last=NANA | |||
|first= | |||
|date=5 Feb 1937 | |||
|chapter=Promotion Box: Hemingway, For Immediate Release | |||
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection | |||
|url= | |||
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston | |||
|publisher= | |||
|pages= | |||
|ref=harv }} | |||
* {{cite book | |||
|last=NANA | |||
|first= | |||
|author-mask=1 | |||
|date=4 Apr 1938 | |||
|chapter=Promotion Box: American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents | |||
|title=TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection | |||
|url= | |||
|location=John F. Kennedy Library, Boston | |||
|publisher= | |||
|pages= | |||
|ref=harv }} | |||
* {{cite book | |||
|editor-last=Nelson | |||
|editor-first=Card | |||
|date=1994 | |||
|title=Remembering Spain: Hemingway’s Civil War Eulogy and the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade | |||
|url= | |||
|location=Urbana | |||
|publisher=U of Illinois | |||
|pages= | |||
|ref=harv }} | |||
* {{cite book | |||
|last=Reynolds | |||
|first=Michael | |||
|date=1989 | |||
|title=Hemingway: The Paris Years | |||
|url= | |||
|location=New York | |||
|publisher=Norton | |||
|pages= | |||
|ref=harv }} | |||
* {{cite book | |||
|last=Stott | |||
|first=William | |||
|date=1986 | |||
|title=Documentary Expression and Thirties America | |||
|url= | |||
|location=Chicago | |||
|publisher=U of Chicago P | |||
|pages= | |||
|ref=harv }} | |||
* {{cite book | |||
|last=Thomas | |||
|first=Hugh | |||
|date=2001 | |||
|title=The Spanish Civil War, Rev. ed. | |||
|url= | |||
|location=New York | |||
|publisher=Modern Library | |||
|pages= | |||
|ref=harv }} | |||
* {{cite magazine | |||
|last=''Two Wars and More to Come'' | |||
|first= | |||
|date=24 Jan 1938 | |||
|title=Best Sellers of the Week Here and Elsewhere | |||
|type=Advertisement | |||
|url= | |||
|magazine=New York Times | |||
|pages= | |||
|access-date= | |||
|ref=harv }} | |||
* {{cite journal | |||
|last= | |||
|first= | |||
|title=United States. Dept. of State | |||
|url= | |||
|journal= Foreign Relations of the Untied States, 1937 |volume==1 | |||
|issue=General | |||
|date=1954 | |||
|pages= | |||
|location=Washington | |||
|publisher=GPO | |||
|access-date= | |||
|ref=harv }} | |||
* {{cite journal | |||
|last=Watson | |||
|first=William Braasch | |||
|title=Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches | |||
|url= | |||
|journal=The Hemingway Review |volume==7.2 | |||
|issue= | |||
|date=1988 | |||
|pages=4-121 | |||
|access-date= | |||
|ref=harv }} | |||
* {{cite book | |||
|last=Wheeler | |||
|first=John H. | |||
|author-mask=1 | |||
|date=10 Dec 1938 | |||
|chapter=Letter to Hemingway | |||
|title=MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection, Box 3 Folder 14 | |||
|url= | |||
|location=Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin | |||
|publisher= | |||
|pages= | |||
|ref=harv }} | |||
Latest revision as of 16:15, 19 April 2025
This is the user sandbox of MerAtticus. A user sandbox is a subpage of the user's user page. It serves as a testing spot and page development space for the user and is not an encyclopedia article. Create or edit your own sandbox here. |
Abstract:The Spanish Civil War began in July 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally-restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy. By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches.
THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR BEGAN ON 17–18 JULY, 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally-restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy, to collaborate with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens on the pro-Republican documentary The Spanish Earth, and to pursue his fledgling love affair with Martha Gellhorn.
By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches for NANA.[1][a] The secondary sources habitually judge them inferior journalism. Carlos Baker in the first Hemingway biography, for example, complains that the dialogue was “so heavily stamped with personal mannerisms as to be of doubtful authenticity.” Baker sees a “curious monotony in his stories of battles and bombardments,” a gratuitous use of graphic imagery “to shock his readers,” and “a note of triumphant boastfulness” in reporting proximity to danger. He also faults Hemingway for “often hint[ing] he was alone when in fact he was usually with Martha Gellhorn, Matthews, and Delmer.” Hemingway lacked Dos Passos’ “eye for telling details” and the “meticulous exactitude and inclusiveness that characterized the best work of Herbert Matthews and Sefton Delmer.”[2]
Philip Knightley’s The First Casualty, the standard history of war correspondence, paraphrases Baker but with a trouncing final judgment:
page 427
Hemingway’s “performance as a war correspondent was abysmally bad.” But Knightley goes beyond “technical” dissatisfaction to moral condemnation. Not just “unjustifiably optimistic”—an excusable offense—Hemingway’s reporting was “unforgivable” in its “total failure to report the Communist persecution, imprisonment, and summary execution of ‘untrustworthy elements’ on the Republican side, when he knew this was happening and when disclosing it might well have prevented further horrors like this.”
Such criticisms in the final analysis might bear out. As Scott Donaldson writes, Hemingway advanced the Republican cause in his dispatches by eliciting “the deepest possible feelings of horror and of sympathy for the victims” of the Madrid bombardment; his “undue optimism” often “ignored Loyalist defeats and exaggerated the importance of its victories”; and “he repeatedly called attention to the participation of Italians and Germans on Franco’s side.”[4] It also served as a recruitment tool—Milton Wolff, for example, acknowledged the strong influence Hemingway’s dispatches had on his decision to volunteer. Nevertheless, I think it a worthwhile exercise to attend a little more studiously to Hemingway’s dispatches, their context, and their artistry. I don’t necessarily intend to reverse the general opinion of the correspondence, only to achieve a better and more sympathetic understanding.
Herbert Matthews’ reporting for the New York Times will serve as a convenient comparison for two reasons. First, because both Baker and Knightley use Matthews’ journalism as the standard of excellence to pass judgment on Hemingway’s; and second, because the two worked practically side-by-side, seeing and reporting on many of the same events. In fact so closely did they work together that NANA sometimes complained that the Times was not buying Hemingway’s pieces because they resembled Matthews,’ and at one point Matthews’ own editors at the Times suspected him of plagiarizing Hemingway.[5] A note from Matthews’ assigned editor Raymond McCaw provides, in two columns, seven quite similar passages from Hemingway’s Aragon front dispatches of September 13 and 14 with Matthews’ of September 14, with a penciled note at the bottom: “a deadly parallel if you ask me.”[6] Edwin James, the managing editor and McCaw’s boss, eventually agreed with Matthews’ defense: “It is quite apparent that you did not file any duplicate of the Hemingway story, or vice versa. As I understand it, the similarity arose from the fact that you
page 428
both went to see the same show and saw it at the same time [sic], under the same conditions.”[7]
Matthews’ dispatches ring of Republican bias as much if not more than anything Hemingway ever filed. The Times received many letters to the editor complaining about Matthews’ undisguised politics, which also gave serious concern to some of his editors. His description of the Republican May 1937 infighting in Barcelona is a striking example of how his news veered into propaganda and shows just how much he passed along the government’s version of events. The government’s “BLOODLESS TRIUMPH FOUGHT WITH RECOGNIZEDWEAPONS OF DEMOCRACY” turned out to be blatantly false, as the government and the “COMMUNISTS [WHO] DISTINGUISHED THEMSELVES” resorted to violent suppression. His blaming the uprising on the anarchist CNT working as Franco operatives parrots the government’s and the communist party’s public position, even though both charges—that the anarchists precipitated the events and that they were under Nationalist direction—were also false. His dispatch’s optimistic close also equivocates the political reality: “NEW GOVERNMENT HAS TAKEN POWER WHICH APPEARS TOVE CONFIDENCE VAST MAJORITY SPANIARDS IN LOYALIST TERRITORY AND TIS HOPED WILL GAIN EQUAL CONFIDENCE ABROAD STOP VIOLENCE AND REVOLUTION BEEN REPUDIATED AND NEWAND FAR HOPEFULLER PERIOD SEEMS BEGINNING.”[8]
The Times, knowing full well the one-sided coverage of a correspondent writing from one side of the conflict, had a reporter on both sides: Matthews with the Republicans, and William Carney with the Nationalists. They got their facts right (or wrong) as often as the other, their editors concluded; and they inspired about the same number of letters of complaint.[9]{sfn|James|1939|p=Tenney}}
Furthermore, Matthews’ dispatches received a great deal of substantive editorial revisions. One of Matthews’ Teruel reports had to be cut for length, as McCaw informed James: “This bird sent 2844 words on the same facts which Hemingway covered much better in less than half that number. I wonder if Matthews thinks the paper is thriving, and that cable tolls do not matter a damn. Of course, it had to be cut for space anyway.” McCaw most likely refers here to Matthews’ dispatch corresponding to Hemingway’s “The Attack on Teruel,” though Matthews’ account of the fall of Teruel is also much longer (and more long-winded) than Hemingway’s, and just as personal in terms of describing the dangers
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he faced. Indeed its length allows him to share even more of the action he endured.[10]
Raymond McCaw held a general professional disagreement with Matthews perhaps tainted with over zealousness. Whether a personal or political motive informed that disagreement can’t be determined from the evidence I’ve seen. It is also clear that McCaw’s charges bear some validity—that any responsible editor could have easily and reasonably taken issue where McCaw did. One of the more interesting examples concerns Matthews’ piece on Guadalajara. Because he only saw evidence on Franco’s side of Italian forces, he only reported on Italians. But the Times editors heard from other sources that German soldiers also participated in the March offensive. They thought it prudent, from this confusion, to change (nine times) “Italian” to “Rebel,” “the foe,” or “Insurgent.” When Matthews saw the published piece he wrote a strenuous objection. In some instances the editors changed paraphrased quotations from his sources. One large paragraph omitted by the editors stressed the first-hand nature of the information, and Matthews underlines the key words: “All day, at every place we stopped and no matter whom we talked to or what we saw, there was only one label—Italian. The dead bodies, the prisoners, the material of every kind, the men who had occupied Brihuega and then fled were Italian and nothing but Italian.” Here and elsewhere in his original story, Matthews emphasizes the “personal knowledge” of its information.[11][c] Yet Matthews did not report on the foreigners fighting for the Republic—it was in fact the Italian Garibali Battalion that routed Franco’s Italians. We might surmise government censorship behind this silence, though Matthews would not cable news of “CENSORSHIP STRICTER” and “BAN ON MENTIONING INTERNATIONALS INCLUDING AMERICANS INSTITUTED TODAY” until July.[13] Perhaps he cautiously self-censored, or politically self-censored for the same reasons the government would eventually ban mention. Still, his stridency about the omission of foreigners on one side is striking given his knowledge of their contribution to the other side. For this reason too, and his omission of other nationalities on the insurgent side, it seemed only fair to his editor “to stand on the statement that the majority of the Rebels were Italians and let it go at that.”[14] A reasonable decision.
Throughout his correspondence to his editors and his several books,
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Matthews maintained a passionate defense of his eyewitness journalistic standard, a position those close to him understood. “Matthews never believed anything he had not seen with his own eyes,” Joris Ivens wrote. “He never saw his job as reporter as one that permitted him to sit in his hotel and read the handouts of the War Ministry.” {{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=112 Sidney Franklin recalls that some writers wrote their pieces before arriving in Madrid, and came only for the “legitimacy” of the Madrid dateline.[15] And Matthews hated, on principle, having his name attached to an article that violated the integrity of his witness. The only way to achieve objectivity, for Matthews, was to acknowledge one’s subjective perspective. Writing to his publisher, Matthews argued that “the full documentary value” of his coverage was lost when the editors altered his submissions for “the apparent necessity of giving more or less equal space to both sides.”[16]
As with Matthews, so too Hemingway. Indeed the commitment to subjectivity fit quite well with Hemingway’s modernist aesthetics. If Hemingway focused the dispatches on his perspective—on his own experience dodging artillery—more than Matthews and more than most, he did so at least partially to fulfill expectations. NANA approached him, after all, for his name and personality as much as whatever he would write. Before he even left the states it pitched him to potential publications, sending out a promotional release with text to be used alongside his forthcoming dispatches and suggesting they include a photograph: “Mr. Hemingway’s assignment is to get both from the bombed towns and bombed trenches the human story of the war, not just an account of the game being played by general staffs with pins and a map.”[17]{{ NANA also released each individual dispatch with a one-sentence “precede” about the “famous” or “noted” author. Ernest Hemingway was not writing as Herbert Mathews, ace reporter; Hemingway was writing as Ernest Hemingway, famous author of novels and stories well known to be drawn from his own experiences.
That he understood this to be his assignment is further evidenced by a cable Matthews sent to his Times editors on April 9, 1937, concerning the Loyalist attack: “WORKED CONJOINTL WITH HEMINGWAY TODAY HE SENDING EYEWITNESS DESCRIPTION WHILE EYE SENT GENERAL STRATEGY.”[11] When a year later the Times asked NANA to ensure Hemingway’s reports differed from Matthews, NANA complied by asking Hemingway “to emphasize color rather than straight reporting” not necessarily out of dissatisfaction with Hemingway’s reportage as Baker contends,[d] but to increase
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the chance of selling to the Times and indeed to ensure the spirit of NANA’s original arrangement with Hemingway. [2]Far from dissatisfied, NANA wrote Hemingway at the end of August 1938 a letter of agreement for his coverage of “a general European war” should it break out, “written in your colorful style” (Hemingway was in Paris, on his way to Spain for the last time during the war).[18] When Edmund Wilson criticized the selected dispatches reprinted in Fact, Hemingway wrote him that “I was paid to write what are called ‘eye witness’ accounts . . .what is called, or was asked for as ‘color stuff.’ Most of such stuff is faked. Mine was not. It was straight reporting and the personal stuff was what had been asked for by the editors. “Wilson’s estimation was also based upon Fact’s inclusion of the “The Old Man at the Bridge” story from Ken, “not a news dispatch” at all.[19] Speaking at Carnegie Hall before the showing of a rough cut of The Spanish Earth, shortly after his first trip to Spain and so very much in the context of his wartime work, Hemingway defined the writer’s problem as “project[ing] [what is true] in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.”[20]
Personal, anecdotal journalism had been Hemingway’s signature style from his earliest days filing reports, in the early 1920s from Paris, when his editor at the Toronto Star Weekly “encouraged [. . .] what Hemingway did best: write about himself in the act of being a reporter.”[21] How could he expect that NANA would expect anything else, if indeed NANA did expect anything else? In the Spanish Civil War he at least maintained his eyewitness posture; in World War II, however, he couldn’t keep himself out. His first piece, about D-Day, begins, “No one remembers the date of the Battle of Shiloh. But the day we took Fox Green beach was the sixth of June, and the wind was blowing hard out of the northwest.”[22] His venue too—Collier’s magazine—and the fact that he had not written anything in three years further contributed to the story-like nature of the WWII stories, in which he figured as a protagonist—not to mention the stories and involvement he couldn’t write about, armed and running around France more of a free agent than his guerilla-hero Robert Jordan ever was (though he began to transform these experiences into fiction in several unpublished stories). In wartime China in 1943, filing articles for Ralph Ingersoll’s short-lived PM New York afternoon daily, Hemingway did not even care to be called a news reporter.[23]
It should be mentioned that Hemingway and Matthews enjoyed a great{{pg|432|433}friendship and working relationship. Hemingway usually brought Matthews, who did not have a car, on his excursions. When Matthews left Madrid for a break in mid April 1937, he had already ensured Hemingway would provide coverage to the Times through NANA. For one thing, Hemingway did not have to worry about Matthews as a rival for the history books. He could endorse his friends’ book, Two Wars and More to Come, and praise him as “the ablest and the bravest war correspondent writing today “who “when the fakers are all dead [. . .] will be read in the schools” (Advertisement 21) because Matthews posed no threat to Hemingway’s own chances to be read in the schools.[24] The only brief Hemingway ever expressed he really reserved for Matthews’ editors, for not wanting his Teruel street-fighting story and for cutting references to himself in Matthews’ Teruel dispatches so that it appeared only Matthews had been there.[25]
As for Hemingway’s neglecting to name everyone with him for every story, the Times cutting of his name suggests that such exactitude was hardly a priority. A paper had no incentive for announcing the fact that a competitor’s correspondent stood beside its own to see and report the same events. NANA changed at least one vague Hemingway “we,” which admits to the presence of others, to “this correspondent” —we can hardly fault Hemingway for working in the spirit of his employer’s standards.[26][e] Do readers care that Matthews, Delmer, Gellhorn, and others were there? The story’s effect and the limited word count also weighed against such roll calls. One editor chose not to clutter the dispatch on the great retreat across the Ebro with all the names of the American International Brigade volunteers Hemingway encountered, an omission of Content more far serious than that of omitted correspondent names.[f] Hemingway often gave the names of the reporters with him, such as at Teruel; nor was he the only reporter to sometimes neglect to do so. Martha Gellhorn, for example, used a vague “we” and singled herself out as the primary participant in some of her stories.
By using first-person reportage Hemingway—and Matthews and Gellhorn And most of the group covering the war—were operating solidly within convention. William Stott, in Documentary Expression and Thirties America, calls this first-person participant observer technique “the most common sort of documentary reportage in the thirties” that worked “by vicarious persuasion: the writer partook of the events he reported and bared his feelings and attitudes to influence the reader’s own.”[27][g] Stott also observes
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another technique to enable documentary reportage to “talk to us, and convince us that we, our deepest interests, are engaged,” in the use of the second person: “Thirties documentaries constantly address ‘you,’ the ‘you’ who is we the audience, and exhorts, wheedles, begs us to identify, pity, participate.” His examples include Dorothy Parker’s Spanish Civil War writing, and Hemingway’s 1935 “First-Hand Report on the Florida Hurricane.”[28] A number of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches employ the second-person as a way of bringing the reader along for the ride.
Hemingway’s dispatches used personal pronouns more artfully than is generally recognized. “A New Kind of War,” which William Braasch Watson notes as having been “[w]ritten with more care and imagination” than its predecessors, begins in second person: “The window of the hotel is open and, as you lie in bed, you hear the firing in the front line seventeen blocks away.”[29] He takes “you” outside, to see the damage and the dead from the bombing. “Someone makes a joke about missing teeth and someone else says not to make that joke. And everyone has the feeling that characterizes war. It wasn’t me, see? It wasn’t me.”[30] The tension between the first person and second-person pronouns—the movement toward identification with “you” and the insistence that “it wasn’t me”—continues in the next line. Here the reader is at once still in the narrator’s shoes, but strangely distanced from the narrator through biographical tidbit and, at the same time, asked to see himself in the enemy: “The Italian dead up on the Guadalajara weren’t you although Italian dead, because of where you had spent your boyhood, always seemed, still, like Our Dead.”[30] It is worth quoting at length the dispatch’s transition to first person:
After the shell that lit on the sidewalk in front of the hotel you got
a beautiful double corner room on that side, twice the size of the one you’d had, for less than a dollar. It wasn’t me they killed. See? No. Not me. It wasn’t me anymore. Then in a hospital given by the American Friends of Spanish Democracy located out behind the Morata front along the road to Valencia they said, “Raven wants to see you.” “Do I know him?” “I don’t think so,” they said. “But he wants to see you.” “Where is he?” “Upstairs.”
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page 435In the room upstairs they are giving a blood transfusion to a man with a very gray face who lay on a cot with his arm out looking away from the gurgling bottle and moaning in a very impersonal way. He moaned mechanically and at regular intervals and it did not seem to be him that made the sound. His lips did not move. “Where’s Raven?” I asked. “I’m here,” said Raven.[31]
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.”[32][h]
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.”[33][i] 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).[34][35][j]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.”[36] 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.[37] 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.[38] 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
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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.”[39] 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.” [40] 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.[k]
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.[l]Nor did he write articles asserting the limited role of the communists in the government, or explaining Spanish anarchism, also as Matthews had done.[m]
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. [41] 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.[42][43]
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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.[44] 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).[45]
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.
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- Cowles, Virginia (1941). Looking for Trouble. New York: Harper & Brothers.
- Davison, Richard Allan (1988). "The Publication of Hemingway's The Spanish Earth: An Untold Story". Hemingway Review. 7.2: 122–130.
- Donaldson, Scott (2009). Fitzgerald & Hemingway: Works and Days. New York: Columbia UP.
- Franklin, Sidney (1952). Bullfighter from Brooklyn. New York: Prentice-Hall.
- Graham, Helen (2002). The Spanish Republic at War 1936-1939. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
- Guttmann, Allen (1962). The Wound in the Heart: American and the Spanish Civil War. New York: Free Press of Glencoe.
- Hemingway, Ernest (1967). By-Line: Ernest Hemingway. New York: Scibner.
- — (2002). Trogdon, Robert W., ed. "Fascism is a Lie". Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference. New York: Carroll & Graf. =: 193–6.
- — (10 May 1937). "Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win". TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection. John F. Kennedy Library, Boston.
- — (nd). "The Home Front". TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection. John F. Kennedy Library, Boston.
- — (10 Dec 1938). "Letter to Edmund Wilson". TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection. John F. Kennedy Library, Boston.
- — (2 June 1938). "Letter to Jack Wheeler". TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection. John F. Kennedy Library, Boston.
- — (14 Feb 1939). "On the American Dead in Spain". TS. New Masses. John F. Kennedy Library, Boston. p. 3.
- — (2003). "The Hadely Mowrer". In Baker, Carlos. Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961. New York: Scribner. pp. 462–3.
- Ibarruri, Dolores (1966). They Shall Not Pass: The Autobiography of La Pasionaria. United States: International Publishers.
- Ivens, Joris (1969). The Camera and I. New York: International Publishers.
- — (26 Apr 1937). "Letter to Ernest Hemingway". MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection. John F. Kennedy Library, Boston.
- James, Edwin (20 Nov 1937). "Letter to Bertrand Weaver". MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin.
- — (12 Oct 1937). "Letter to Herbert Matthews". MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin.
- — (25 Apr 1939). "Letter to M.B. Tenney". MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 10. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin.
- — (23 Apr 1937). "Letter to Sulzberger". MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin.
- Knightley, Phillip (2004). The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq. Baltimore: John Hopkins.
- Matthews, Herbert (9 Apr 1937). "Letter to Edwin James". TS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin.
- — (11 Apr 1937). "Letter to Edwin James". MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin.
- — (6 July 1937). "Letter to Edwin James". MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin.
- — (July 1937). "Letter to Edwin James". MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin.
- — (22 March 1939). "Letter to Sulzberger". MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 9. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin.
- McCaw, Raymond (20 May 1937). "Letter to Edwin James". MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 3. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin.
- — (20 Dec 1937). "Letter to Edwin James". MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 5. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin.
- — (23 Sep 1937). "Note to Herbert Matthews". MS. Herbert Matthews Collection, Box 1 Folder 4. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin.
- Moorehead, Caroline (2003). Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life. New York: Henry Holt.
- Moreira, Peter (2006). Hemingway on the China Front: His WWII Spy Mission with Martha Gellhorn. Washington D.C.: Potomac Books.
- NANA (5 Feb 1937). "Promotion Box: Hemingway, For Immediate Release". TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection. John F. Kennedy Library, Boston.
- — (4 Apr 1938). "Promotion Box: American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents". TS. Ernest Hemingway Collection. John F. Kennedy Library, Boston.
- Nelson, Card, ed. (1994). Remembering Spain: Hemingway’s Civil War Eulogy and the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Urbana: U of Illinois.
- Reynolds, Michael (1989). Hemingway: The Paris Years. New York: Norton.
- Stott, William (1986). Documentary Expression and Thirties America. Chicago: U of Chicago P.
- Thomas, Hugh (2001). The Spanish Civil War, Rev. ed. New York: Modern Library.
- Two Wars and More to Come (24 Jan 1938). "Best Sellers of the Week Here and Elsewhere". New York Times (Advertisement).
- "United States. Dept. of State". Foreign Relations of the Untied States, 1937. Washington: GPO. =1 (General). 1954.
- Watson, William Braasch (1988). "Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches". The Hemingway Review. =7.2: 4–121.
- — (10 Dec 1938). "Letter to Hemingway". MS. Ernest Hemingway Collection, Box 3 Folder 14. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin.
- ↑ Watson 1988, p. 4.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Baker 1969, p. 329.
- ↑ Knightley 2004, pp. 231–32.
- ↑ Donaldson 2009, p. 426.
- ↑ Donaldson 2009, pp. 411, 420.
- ↑ McCaw 1937, p. Note.
- ↑ James 1937, p. Herbert.
- ↑ McCaw 1937, p. May.
- ↑ James 1937, p. Bertrand.
- ↑ McCaw 1937, p. December.
- ↑ 11.0 11.1 Matthews 1937, p. April.
- ↑ Matthews 1937, p. Herbert.
- ↑ Matthews 1937, p. July.
- ↑ James 1937, p. Sulzberger.
- ↑ Franklin 1952, p. 232.
- ↑ Matthews 1937, p. Sulzberger.
- ↑ NANA 1937, p. Hemingway.
- ↑ Wheeler 1938.
- ↑ Hemingway 1938, p. Edmund.
- ↑ Hemingway 2002, p. 193.
- ↑ Reynolds 1989, p. 45.
- ↑ Hemingway 1967, p. 340.
- ↑ Moreira 2006, p. 99.
- ↑ ?.
- ↑ Hemingway 2003, p. 462.
- ↑ NANA 1938, p. American Veterans.
- ↑ Stott 1986, pp. 178-9.
- ↑ Stott 1986, pp. 27-8.
- ↑ Watson 1988, p. 29.
- ↑ 30.0 30.1 Watson 1988, p. 30.
- ↑ Watson 1988, p. 31.
- ↑ Thomas 2001, p. 591.
- ↑ Nelson 1994, p. 3.
- ↑ Knightley 2004, p. 232.
- ↑ Baker 1969, p. 402.
- ↑ Moorehead 2003, p. 125.
- ↑ Knightley 2004, pp. 234-5.
- ↑ Stott 1986, p. 11.
- ↑ Donaldson 2009, p. 433.
- ↑ Donaldson 2009, p. 436.
- ↑ Hemingway nd.
- ↑ Thomas 2001, p. 628.
- ↑ Graham 2002, p. 184.
- ↑ Ivens 1969.
- ↑ Hemingway 1938b.
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