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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.[1] 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.”[2]
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.”[3]{{ 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.”[4] 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,[a] 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. [5]
- ↑ Franklin 1952, p. 232.
- ↑ Matthews 1937, p. Sulzberger.
- ↑ NANA 1937, p. Hemingway.
- ↑ Matthews 1937, p. April.
- ↑ Baker 1969, p. 329.
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