Hemingway as social and political writer.

Hays, Peter L.

Critics and biographers mistakenly label Hemingway as a writer uninterested in politics. His early reporting covering European politics, as well as his essays in The New Masses, the anti-war sentiment described in A Farewell to Arms, and the political intrigues discussed in For Whom the Bell Tolls demonstrate his career-long interest in politics. But even earlier, in the stories and interchapters of In Our Time, Hemingway makes political observations and offers commentary on the economic situations that give rise to political action.

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Despite Hemingway's political reporting as a correspondent for the Toronto Star both in Europe and in Canada, many critics believe, erroneously, that Hemingway eschewed politics for studies of individual characters and their relationships. Jeffrey Meyers declared that Hemingway "was basically bored by politics" (296); Michael Reynolds wrote that Hemingway "became apolitical" and was "one of the least overtly political writers of his generation" (Young Hemingway 194). James Mellow shows little interest in the politics of Hemingway's publications; Kenneth Lynn has many sub-headings under Ernest Hemingway in the index to his biography, but politics is not one of them. Only Scott Donaldson among his biographers devotes a chapter to politics, focusing mainly on Hemingway's apparent shift to the left during the 1930s. To say that Hemingway avoided politics and the social framework behind it is to ignore his years as a foreign correspondent covering the Lausanne Peace Conference, unrest in the Ruhr as Germany struggled under the crushing conditions of the Versailles Treaty, or even his later publication in The New Masses, denouncing the Roosevelt administration for allowing railroad-building veterans to die on the Matecumbe Keys during the hurricane of 1935.

For as Keneth Kinnamon points out, Hemingway wrote almost two hundred articles for the Toronto Star, and "well over half were political" in nature (150), and his letters to friends often include political opinions. Most overt, perhaps, is Hemingway's 1927 New Republic journalistic account that became "Che Ti Dice la Patria," a denunciation of Mussolini's Fascist Italy, a Mussolini he had called "the biggest bluff in Europe" five years earlier (Baker 103). Some critics have viewed "Che Ti Dice" as an unlikely object in Hemingway's oeuvre. Marisa Anne Pagnattaro in a Hemingway Review article lists the critics who give "Che Ti Dice la Patria" scant attention, including Gary Brenner, Joe DeFalco, Scott Donaldson, Sheldon Grebstein, Peter Griffin, and Arthur Waldhorn (48); but Joe Flora, in his recent Reading Hemingway's Men Without Women, calls "Che Ti Dice" Hemingway's "most political short story" (70), although "The Revolutionist" might be a close second. Political ideology was not Hemingway's main focus ever, as it became for some writers in the 1930s, but his work does explore the intrusion of economics and politics into daily life as part of his intense scrutiny of his characters' lives.

Even before "Che Ti Dice la Patria," we can see these observations, if we take the time to recognize them. In the interchapters of In Our Time, when Hemingway was close to his reporting days, there are early examples. The execution of six cabinet ministers in interchapter V happened because the Colonel Plastiras, who had led a coup against the monarchy of King Constantine I, had to blame someone for Greece's loss of the war against Turkey, and though not stated, the six cabinet ministers are scapegoats in this political process. The King, Constantine's son George II, now under house arrest, appears in the last interchapter of the volume, praising Plastiras for his killing of the ministers, and saying that Kerensky might have saved his government from Lenin's communist takeover if he had shot more communists while he was prime minister. Here, in 1925, Hemingway is demonstrating an awareness of politics that critics denied him until For Whom the Bell Tolls, perhaps because the allusions to 1920s Russian politics escape most current readers. Hemingway's introduction to the volume, when he switched publishers from Boni and Liveright to Scribner's, is "On the Quai at Smyrna," which describes a British ship during the Greco-Turkish War loading Greek refugees from Smyrna, now ruled by Turkey under Kemal Atatiirk. Kemal dismisses his port commander for firing blanks at the British ship; actual rounds would have caused the British ship to fire into the town, killing many, before being destroyed by Turkish shore batteries, drawing Britain into the war. The ship's commander also laments the actions of the departing Greek army, breaking the legs of their baggage animals and pushing them into the harbor to drown. Like the entirety of In Our Time, Hemingway describes the brutality of war, its destructiveness, and unlike the source of the title, from the prayer that there be "peace in our time," there is no peace to be had in the world at large or at home.

In Our Time also considers domestic politics. In interchapter VIII (which was also in 1924's in our time), an Irish cop shoots and kills two Hungarian thieves, believing them to be Italian. He calls them "wops," which originally stood for "with out papers," and for him their foreign ethnicity is justification for killing them. These brief references succinctly capture aspects of American social and political life, including its wild-west, shoot first and apply the law later mind set, as well as ethnic prejudice then present in the country's restrictive immigration policies against southern and eastern Europeans and Asians, the eugenics movement then popular, and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. In "Indian Camp," the poverty of the Native Americans, forced to strip the land of hemlock trees in order to supply tanning businesses with the tannin from the tree bark, is sharply detailed. It's a subtle but damning condemnation of the nations treatment of its earlier inhabitants. The Indians live in shacks that smell, save a little money by blowing out kerosene lanterns to walk under starlight, have little access to medical care, and lack the dignity they once had. In the next story, Hemingway underscores the white despoilation of the land by having the logging company, whose lumber Dr. Adams is taking, be White and McNally. Dick Boulton reclaims some dignity facing down Dr. Adams and then leaving open the gate to the Doctor's enclosure, thereby reminding us that land was shared by Native Americans, and property ownership, enclosure, was foreign to them.

Even earlier, in Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923), the poem "Oklahoma" uses such degrading epithets as "a good Indians a dead Indian" and names what Indians have gained from their white conquerors, gonorrhea and, through their poverty, myopic trachoma (50). The same volume makes a comment about Teddy Roosevelt, onetime hero of young Ernest: "Workingmen believed / He busted trusts.... And all the legends that he started in his life / Live on and prosper, / Unhampered now by his existence" (52), a realistic, if not cynical, comment on how history strips away the propaganda surrounding a politician in his lifetime. Politics enters even "Up in Michigan," which dates itself by referring to James G. Blaine, speaker of the House of Representatives, and later Republican candidate for president in 1876 and 1884.

In Men Without Women (1927), both "The Killers" and "Fifty Grand" allude to fixed boxing matches; in the case of "The Killers," with its location outside Chicago, the corruption ties neatly into the doings of A1 Capone in that city during Prohibition years. That Al and Max have little trepidation in killing Ole Andreson, and George, Nick, and Sam, too, if they need to dispose of witnesses--why else does Al tell George he has "a lot of luck" (285)--speaks to the power of organized crime at the time and the ineffectualness of the law. After all, Prohibition was flagrantly violated throughout the land. "Wine of Wyoming" speaks explicitly about the ignoring of Prohibition. The narrator of the story tells the Fontans that America is his country, but that here one doesn't eat well: "Mais on ne mange pas tres bien" (455). A cousin of the Fontans says that "The Americans don't like you to be catholique.... No, it isn't any good to be catholique in America" (457). And Mme Fontan does not believe that Al Smith, the Democratic candidate for president in 1928, is actually a Catholic, an explicit political reference. They discuss as well as the boorishness of Americans, putting whiskey in beer and vomiting on their own shoes and on the Fontans' tables, drinking not to enjoy the taste of the beverage but to get drunk. Of course, Mme Fontan also shows discrimination against Poles, saying that they "go to church, fight with knives all the way home and kill each other all day Sunday. But they're not real catholiques" (457). Like Irish Boyle and his anti-Italian discrimination, every immigrant group has others it considers beneath itself.

Alcohol is not the only prohibited substance readily available. Billy Campbell in "A Pursuit Race" both drinks and injects heroin. Heroin use was sufficiently common that his manager Billy Turner assures him that they "got a cure for that" (353), and Campbell evidently has no trouble procuring either the heroin or the booze. In "One Reader Writes," the writer of a letter to a newspapers advice columnist expresses concern about her husband's "sifilus" (420), a "malady" which she does not understand, cannot spell, nor know how her husband contracted it, a sorry comment on U.S. education, sexual and otherwise.

Politics, intrudes notably into 1929's A Farewell to Arms, where Hemingway details the ambulance drivers' repugnance for the war: "They were all mechanics and hated the war" (48); what is implied is that they're skilled workers, possibly unionized, leftist, and anti-government. The drivers tell about troops who would not fight and how the government punished them: it "lined them up afterward and took every tenth man. Carabinieri shot them" (49). "'One of those shot by the carabinieri is from my town' Passini said.... 'Now they have a guard outside his house with a bayonet and nobody can come to see his mother and his father and sisters and his father loses his civil rights and cannot even vote'" (49). Later Piani tells Lt. Henry that he and the other mechanics are socialists, that everyone in his village is a socialist (208).

In Green Hills of Africa (1935), Hemingway denounces America: "It had been a good country and we had made a bloody mess of it.... Let the others come to America who did not know that they had come too late" (285). Whether economic because of the Depression or ecological, the comment is clearly political. That same year Hemingway wrote his scathing indictment of the government, "Who Murdered the Vets?," published in the Communist The New Masses, in which he condemned the government for allowing close to one thousand veterans of the First World War to die on Upper Matecumbe Key. The vets had been building the railroad from Miami to Key West and were swept away by a hurricane, of which the government had advanced warning. Less an attack on government inefficiency, it was a broadside against lack of caring and responsibility.

I need not dwell on the obvious politics of To Have and Have Not (1937), The Fifth Column (1938), and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Harry Morgan feels that he cannot make an honest living in the depth of the Depression and under government laws and regulations, and so turns to smuggling people and liquor. Meanwhile, World War I veterans who have not gotten their Veterans' Bonus drink to excess in the local bars. The Fifth Column is a play about war and spies and counterespionage during the Spanish Civil War, a fight largely between various Communist factions and fascists. That war also figures in For Whom the Bell Tolls, where Hemingway details much of the cynicism and corruption in the political machinations going on behind those dying on the battle lines. Even in the late The Garden of Eden (1986), David Bourne writes a short story about the Maji-Maji rebellion of 1905-07, when African natives rebelled against the taxes and forced labor levied on them by the German government in German East Africa, in what is now Tanzania. There has always been a strain of political commentary in Hemingway's fiction.

But to return to more subtle references, in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," Hemingway revisits World War I and the Greco-Turkish War. The snow on Kilimanjaro provokes stream of consciousness in Harry, most of which is linked to snow memories of deaths. Harry remembers Greek refugees from the latter war sent into Bulgaria from Thrace to escape Turkish troops, sent into the Bulgarian mountains and snow: "And it was snow they tramped along in until they died that winter" (56). The refugees were dispatched to the Bulgarian mountains by Fridtjof Nansen, the League of Nations' High Commissioner for Refugees; Nansen won the 1922 Nobel Peace Prize for his disposition of the refugees, despite the deaths that Hemingway accords to him. The irony of having Nansen declare "No, that's not snow. It's too early for snow" (56) is that Nansen was a Norwegian, expert skier, who made the first crossing of the Greenland interior in 1888 and a North Pole expedition five years later. One would expect him to know snow, Hemingway implies, and not send refugees to their death in it, let alone win a Nobel Prize for doing so. His satirical scorn of what politics achieves is understated but obvious here. As with Lt. Henry's sympathy for the ruptured soldier who does not want to go back into combat (FTA 34-35), Harry helps a deserter from the Austrian army, a case of humanity over national politics. Another memory of the Greco-Turkish war is one of green officers; Hemingway calls them "Constantine officers" after the king, implying that their qualifications for officerhood were family connections, not ability. These Constantine officers "did not know a god-damned thing, and the artillery had fired into the troops," their own troops (65). Finally, a snow memory of the States, of a mentally challenged "chore boy" who follows orders to prevent anyone from getting feed and shoots a man who had formerly beaten him when that man tries to get feed from the ranch the boy is now working on. Harry helps the boy load the dead man on a sled, and the two on skis take the body to town, where the boy, whom Harry labels a "half-wit," who is expecting to be rewarded for carrying out orders, is instead arrested. The law does not support the mentally challenged (not even now), but as a creature of politics, it applies its strictures often without considering the mentality of those it punishes.

Hemingway was, as both Scott Donaldson and Ken Kinnamon said, a writer about politics. As Harry says in "Snows," speaking for Hemingway, "He had seen the world change; ... and had watched the people, but he had seen the subtler change and he could remember how the people were at different times. He had been in it and he had watched it and it was his duty to write of it ..." (66). To write about the world whole is to report on its politics; to see how people change is to see how they respond to political choices made by their governments, the First World War, the Greco-Turkish War, the seven wars and four revolutions in The Sun Also Rises, and the Spanish Civil War. As Kinnamon notes, after returning from Spain, Hemingway predicted in the 11 August 1938 issue of Ken "that war would break out within a year as a consequence of continuing appeasement to fascism. Six weeks later Chamberlain signed the Munich pact, ... and ... on September 1, 1939, Hitler unleashed the blitzkrieg against Poland. Hemingway, whose political prescience has too often gone unremarked, had missed his prediction by only twenty-one days" (154-55).

Hemingway was an astute observer of peoples daily lives, and he reported on politics and economics long before the Depression and the government limited Harry Morgan's lifestyle or Robert Jordan went to fight fascism on the Communist side in Spain. He reported of common people, not the well-to-do of Edith Wharton or the middle class of Willa Cather; even though Cather had a political education as an editor of McClure's Magazine, a muckraking journal, it's not an obvious subject in her writings. Cather said, "economics and art are strangers" (qtd. in Woodress 188). Hemingway knew that economics was one of many facts of life, often a determining one, and that politics and economics were inextricably intertwined as his coverage for the Toronto Star of the burden Germany faced for war reparations had shown him, and as the World Economic Conference in Genoa (1922) had demonstrated. What the country said to him was that most people were having a rough time of it. But unlike John Dos Passos or Upton Sinclair, Hemingway did not write political novels (unless we take For Whom the Bell Tolls as one). Instead, he wrote about life situations that, inevitably, were affected by politics, and that notice of politics is apparent in much of what he wrote.

WORKS CITED

Baker, Carlos. Hemingway: A Life Story. New York: Scribner's, 1969. Print.

Donaldson, Scott. By Force of Will. New York: Viking, 1977. Print.

Flora, Joseph. Reading Hemingway's Men without Women. Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 2008. Print. Hemingway, Ernest. Farewell to Arms. 1929. New York: Scribner's, 1956. Print.

--. For Whom the Bell Tolls. 1940. New York: Scribner's, 1968. Print.

--. The Garden of Eden. New York: Scribner's, 1986. Print.

--. Green Hills of Africa. 1935. New York: Scribner's, 1963. Print.

--. The Short Stories. New York: Scribner's, 1995. Print.

--. The Sun Also Rises. 1926. New York: Scribner's, 1954. Print.

--. Three Stories and Ten Poems. 1923. New York: Scribner's, 1977. Print.

--. To Have and Have Not. 1937. New York: Scribner's, 1996. Print.

Kinnamon, Keneth. "Hemingway and Politics." The Cambridge Companion to Ernest Hemingway. Ed. Scott Donaldson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. 149-69. Print.

Lynn, Kenneth S. Hemingway. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987. Print.

Meyers, Jeffrey. Hemingway: A Biography. New York: Harper & Row, 1985. Print.

Pagnatarro, Marisa Anne. "Che Ti Dice La Patria?: Shadows of Meaning." The Hemingway Review 14:2 (Spring 1995): 37-49. Print.

Reynolds, Michael. The Young Hemingway. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986. Print.

Woodress, James. Willa Cather: A Literary Life. Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska P, 1987. Print.

Peter L. Hays

University of California, Davis