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of documentary reportage in the thirties” that worked “by vicarious persuasion:
of documentary reportage in the thirties” that worked “by vicarious persuasion:
the writer partook of the events he reported and bared his feelings
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}}
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
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===
* {{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
|last=Hemingway
|first=Ernest
|author-mask=1
|date=10 May 1937
|chapter=Hemingway, en Route Home Expects Loyalists to Win
|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=nd
|chapter=The Home Front
|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=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 }}