User:KWatson/sandbox

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 (Watson 4).2** 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” (Baker 329)**.