Hemingway, the American left, and the Soviet Union: some forgotten episodes.

Nelson, Cary

RECENT BIOGRAPHICAL scholarship--notably Kenneth S. Lynn's Hemingway (1987) and James R. Mellow's Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences (1992) --suggests that a consensus may be forming about the political judgments that coalesced in For Whom the Bell Tolls and that presumably carried Hemingway through the next two decades of his life. Briefly, the argument as Mellow puts it is that Hemingway by the end of 1938 experienced "growing disillusionment" with the cause of the Spanish Republic. His 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls as a result became, according to Mellow, "among other things, Hemingway's study of cowards and traitors and brave men in battle, as well as his apologia for supporting the Loyalists in the Spanish civil war" (517). "In both the marriage [to Martha Gellhorn] and the romance with left-wing politics," Lynn writes in a similar argument, "Hemingway would discover himself to have been sadly deceived" (442); "he said farewell to the Comintern in For Whom the Bell Tolls" (452). Putting in his own rhetoric the lesson he would have us believe Hemingway learned, Lynn writes that "the anti-Fascist propaganda being generated by the Comintern's cleverest liars, Willi Muenzenberg and Otto Katz (both later liquidated on Stalin's orders) was a rhetorical cover for the imperialistic designs of a system no less ruthless than Hitler's and infinitely more so than the repressive regime that Franco would establish" (444).(1) One exception to this pattern is Jeffrey Meyers' Hemingway: A Biography (1985), which sees For Whom the Bell Tolls as flowing from Hemingway's Loyalist sympathies rather than marking their end point. But Meyers too picks up the theme of disenchantment, arguing that Hemingway "abandoned interest in politics after his side lost the war in Spain" (325).

If these conclusions hold, they will clearly shape not only our view of Hemingway's politics and the cultural work he may have hoped For Whom the Bell Tolls would do but also our view of the popular front politics of the 1930s and what they teach us for the present. In mellow's consistent (and rather monolithic) references to "the Communist side" in the Spanish Civil War and in Lynn's more fully articulated political views there is an effort to recruit contemporary readers to what both biographers consider common-sense political wisdom about modern history and the legacy of the Left in its heyday. One may well, for example, contest Lynn's wisdom, Stalin having murdered rather more of his fellow humans than Franco, but Franco's postwar summary executions being quite notable for a smaller country. One might remind Lynn that the Holocaust for many of us grants Hitler a special status when ruthlessness is being gauged. But this is not the place to carry on that argument. The question here is about Hemingway's attitude toward the Spanish Civil War and toward the international Left in the 1930s and 1940s. On those two related issues I believe Lynn and Mellow are wrong and that there is growing new evidence to prove them so.

The recently released recording of Hemingway's "On the American Dead in Spain" reveals one piece of notable evidence.(2) The original 1939 New Masses elegy is not, as Mellow would have it, only a tribute to those international volunteers who died in Spain. It is also a concise and principled attack on Fascism. In fact, when Hemingway recorded the piece eight years later (in 1947), he made two brief additions to the eighth paragraph that reaffirm his 1938 beliefs about Fascism and establish his current antagonism toward the Franco regime. It is perhaps most appropriate to consider these two new passages not as additions to the original essay but rather as unplanned asides introduced as Hemingway was making the recording. Here is the eighth paragraph of "On the American Dead in Spain" with the new 1947 passages in italics:

The fascists may spread over the land, blasting their way with weight

of metal brought from other countries. They may advance aided by

traitors and by cowards. All these things happened. They may destroy

cities and villages and try to hold the people in slavery. This they are

trying to do now. But you cannot hold any people in slavery.

These eleven words are not earth-shaking. Historically, they are less important than the simple fact that Hemingway reaffirmed the essay by recording it for public presentation in 1947 and did so for the consistently Left-wing Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. But they do help us see that Hemingway's view of the cause itself had not changed.

Indeed it is unlikely that For Whom the Bell Tolls was Hemingway's "apologia" for his Loyalist views because it is unlikely that Hemingway felt he needed to make one. An April 1940 letter to the American poet and Spanish Civil War veteran Edwin Rolfe--first published in 1990 but still unknown to many Hemingway scholars--makes it clear what Hemingway's attitudes were while he was writing the novel.(3) He attacks La Pasionaria and Andre Marty in the letter but reaffirms his belief in the cause itself. Indeed, he pledges to write something that would make it impossible for Marty to get away again with the sort of executions he carried out in Spain. Before very long, he fulfilled that pledge with his portrait of Marty in For Whom the Bell Tolls. About the war itself and the Loyalist cause he is equally clear: "I miss the spanish war because life is fine and work (as now) the hardest thing to do. But it was fine to fight for something you believed in and be able to go straight to headquarters about pricks instead of having to suffer under them as when I was a kid" (Nelson and Hendricks 91). Throughout the 1940s Hemingway maintained contact with friends from several countries who had fought on the Loyalist side; some, including Rolfe, were Communist Party members. He continued, despite being badly treated more than once, to stand up for Civil War veterans in both public and private and to reaffirm his support for the popular front coalition against Fascism.

As for his general support for the Left, several further gestures need to be placed in the record. The first is confirmed in another unpublished letter. In the summer of 1941 Hemingway was in regular correspondence with Rolfe as part of their combined effort to help Alfred Kantorowicz, a German Communist and veteran of the Loyalist side in the Spanish Civil War, who had been detained in France and was now working to take up residence in the United States. Hemingway sent Rolfe some money for Kantorowicz (Kanto). But other events were also intruding on that summer. On 22 June Germany invaded the Soviet Union. A few weeks later, on 12 July, a British-Soviet mutual assistance treaty was signed. Rolfe, who was living in New York and had begun working at TASS, the Soviet News Agency, the year before, apparently wrote to Hemingway to request a statement in support of the pact for TASS to distribute.(4) Hemingway wrote back to Rolfe offering a more general statement of support for the Soviet Union; here is a transcription of his letter, with the idiosyncracies of Hemingway's typing style preserved:

FINCA VIGIA SAN FRANCISCO DE PAULA CUBA

Dear Ed:

Thanks for looking after the Kanto dough etc. Hope I didn't sound rude or sore when wrote. Was simply in a hurry and spooked Kanto would maybe lose that dough through some sort of regulation that they might be ignorant of. Glad they had as much out of that other as they did.

About the statement telegram; You know how I am about statements. I gag on them like someone with an impedimens of speech trying to get a word out.

They usually start with I and sound so god-awful pompous and it seems to presumptious for the writer to be even commenting if he is doing nothing.

However if they want a statement at your office to send to Russia here is as clear a one as I can make.

"I am with the soviet Union one hundred percent in their war of resistance against Nazi aggression. The people of the soviet union are fighting and dying for the defence of all people who oppose the enslavement of fascism. The war in China has shown that no people who know what they are fighting for can be conquered if they all fight and if their country is large enough so that the invader is cut off from his base and surrounded as he advances. I salute the Soviet Union for their heroic resistance."

If that isn't clear enough can amplify it.

For me to comment on the British pact is no good. I think the British made Hitler, kept the French from destroying him when he marched into Rhineland encouraged and armed him to fight Russia and to hail a pact with them now as anything more than a temporary thing which they will denounce at any time that suits them is something I could not do.

Copy the other statement out though, Eddy and tell them they can send it if it is of any use. I would much rather be there doing anything I could against the Nazis.

Best always

Ernest(5)

Like many other people strongly committed to Spain, Hemingway found it difficult to trust the British. their disingenuous policy of nonintervention in Spain had been difficult enough to tolerate; the appeasement of Hitler at Munich in 1938 had confirmed his doubts. Their long-standing resentment over the Russian withdrawal from the First World War was well known. Thus Hemingway makes a political distinction--the sort his biographers sometimes consider him incapable of making--and thereby finds it possible to offer a significant public gesture, one made six months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the United States' entrance into the war. And this he sends to Rolfe to give to his employers at TASS, the Soviet News Agency, despite purportedly having "said farewell to the Comintern in For Whom the Bell Tolls." Hemingway, it should be noted, had refused a similar request from Rolfe a year earlier during the Soviet invasion of Finland, but now the issues seemed clear, and he acted accordingly. A slightly revised version of Hemingway's statement was issued shortly in translation in the Russian-language edition of the Moscow-based journal International Literature. It appears on page 194 of issue No. 7-8 (1941), the sixth statement in a series titled "Cultural Masters on Hitler's Villainous Assault on the USSR." Hemingway's contribution follows statements from Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Heinrich Mann, H.G. Wells, and Hewlett Johnson. It is preceded by a one-sentence introduction: "The famous writer Ernest Hemingway, who is now in Cuba, sent the following statement to a TASS correspondent." Statements by eight additional people, including Kantorowicz, round out the article. Hemingway's statement, long forgotten in the U.S., was published and now for the first time we know the name of the TASS correspondent (Rolfe) to whom Hemingway wrote and possess the original English language version of his statement. The published version, translated into Russian, omits Hemingway's third sentence (about China) and makes a few other changes.(6)

Notably, this was neither Hemingway's first, nor his last comment written expressly for publication in the USSR. The first, of course, was his now famous April 1938 statement in Pravda about the Spanish Civil War, the manuscript of which was discovered in the Hemingway archives at the Kennedy Library by William Watson. Hemingway wrote briefly for Pravda again in 1942. He wrote to Rolfe in February of that year to say "They [TASS] asked me for a statement for publication in the press of the Soviet Union for February 23 and I sent it off, I think in plenty of time, by cable. Do let me know if it was received." In fact the statement appeared in Russian on page four of the 23 February 1942, issue of Pravda. An English translation follows:

Twenty-four years of discipline and labor have created an eternal glory, the name of which is the Red Army. Anyone who loves freedom owes such a debt to the Red Army that it can never be repaid. But we can declare that the Soviet Union will receive the arms, money, and provisions it needs. Anyone who fulminates against Hitler should consider the Red Army a heroic model which must be imitated.

Hemingway's statement is the fourth in a series of five, the first three being by the Canadian Minister of Aviation (Mr. Power), Cuban President Batista, and the Czechoslovak Military and Aviation Attache (Colonel Spaniel) in the U.S. Hemingway's contribution is followed by one from the Commander of U.S. forces in the Far East, General Douglas MacArthur. The overall heading is "The Red Army is the Pride of Peace-Loving Peoples: Foreign Figures Salute the Red Army." The front page of that issue of Pravda, it should be noted, commemorates the twenty-fourth anniversary of the Red Army and includes a large picture of Stalin.

As one might expect, in the United States much was made of the Red Army's anniversary by the Communist Party's newspaper The Daily Worker. The paper gave advance notice of the event and its 24 February 1942 issue published MacArthur's comments in a news story, "General MacArthur's Greeting to Red Army on 24th Anniversary" (4). An editorial, "MacArthur Hails the Red Army" (6), reinforced the story's importance. Hemingway's greeting, however, was ignored, receiving no mention whatsoever. Still an honored name in the Soviet Union, Hemingway was persona non grata to the American party, which had actively joined the condemnation of For Whom the Bell Tolls in 1940. Indeed, two years later, Samuel Putnam's 1944 Daily Worker article "The Odyssey of Ernest Hemingway" would attack the novel yet again.

Meanwhile, despite these attacks from the Left and despite his own considerable misgivings about Soviet Communism, Hemingway himself remained steadfast. It was the Russians, after all, not anyone else, who were killing German soldiers in significant numbers. It was partly that awareness that led him to appear in Pravda one more time--with a New Year's greeting published on page four of the 3 January 1943, issue. Under the heading "New Year's Greetings to the Soviet Union from Foreign Writers," Pravda's back page issues statements by Dreiser, Hemingway, Leon Feuchtwanger, and Thomas Mann. Hemingway's statement may be translated as follows:

In 1942 you saved the world from the forces of barbarity, offering resistance alone, almost without help.

At the end of the year our first efforts in Africa were launched. This is a symbol of a promise. Every able man in America will work and fight, together with the workers and peasants of the Soviet Union, for our common cause--the complete obliteration of fascism from the world and the guarantee of freedom, peace, and justice for all people.

These three contributions to Soviet publications--in 1941, 1942, and 1943--suggest that if Hemingway said farewell to the Comintern in 1940, as Kenneth Lynn claims, it was a very long goodbye indeed.(7) In fact Hemingway stayed in contact with Communists he met in Spain still longer than that; his last letter to Rolfe was written in 1953, the year before Rolfe died. For too long, evaluations of Hemingway's politics have been dominated by the cold war ideologies of a number of his biographers. That has led to ignoring friendships Hemingway chose to maintain and even to ignorance about several of his political statements. It is time we assess his politics in the light of all his relevant actions. We need to ask what cultural forces led Hemingway to believe and act as he did and to consider both as potentially reasonable, not to assume that conformity to our beliefs would have been his only reasonable course.

There was nothing extraordinary, certainly, about Hemingway being a fellow traveller in the 1930s, nothing extraordinary about his supporting the Soviet Union during the Second World War. Hemingway's repeated willingness--from 1938 to 1942--to write statements expressly for publication in the Soviet Union is another matter, as is his repeated eagerness to give financial support to Communist veterans of the Spanish Civil War. The first shows a willingness to cooperate with institutionalized Communism that many American writers would not have shared; the second shows a depth of personal commitment to that most passionate of all 1930s Left-wing causes--the defense of the Spanish Republic--that puts Hemingway in a special status amongst his peers. Finally, his public decisions to stand by his Spanish comrades at the outset and well into the McCarthy period--in 1947 and again in 1953, as documented in Remembering Spain--shows a steadfastness and courage on Hemingway's part that has not always been acknowledged. All this required continued contact with the international Left and more sustained commitment than Hemingway's recent biographers have been willing to admit. Instead, we have sometimes been subjected to judgments filtered through a cold war anti-Communism that had no place in Hemingway's world.

It is contemporary anti-Communism that gives us such comments as Mellow's observations about Hemingway's decision to publish "On the American Dead in Spain" in New Masses in 1939: "That Hemingway's elegy appeared in the magazine he hated so virulently years before was a testimony to how much a man's political faith could be eroded in a crucial decade" (516). Now anyone who takes the trouble to look through New Masses from 1926-1947 will find a wide range of American writers there--Communists, fellow travellers, liberals, and occasionally people closer to the right. So the willingness to publish there is hardly exceptional. In Hemingway's case, however, a political gesture was implicit. It was, after all, a special issue honoring the Lincoln Battalion, a battalion within the International Brigades organized by the Communist International. Some sixty percent of the Americans who went to Spain were members of the Young Communist League or the Communist Party, and a majority of those who died were no doubt Communists as well. The Communist-sponsored New Masses thus had a special right to honor the American volunteers. Hemingway's publication of his elegy in New Masses testifies to his political understanding--to his grasp of the political context of the sacrifice these young Americans made--not to any erosion of his political faith. It is the shape and character of that political understanding that needs to be restored in its own right. It is a project rather larger than this essay, but I offer this small body of evidence as a way of opening discussion of the issue.

Further research of a difficult sort will be required to begin filling out the picture of Hemingway's relations with the Left. Carlos Baker gathered some (though by no means all) relevant information in his 1969 biography that most Hemingway scholars since have either ignored or actively disparaged. Thus Baker at least keeps Hemingway in active contact with Spanish Civil War veterans like Milt Wolff through the 1940s; such incidents mostly disappear from later biographies. The opportunity to interview some of Hemingway's contacts and friends on the Left has now mostly been lost; most are dead. There are, however, potentially helpful if far-flung diaries, letters, and archives still unused by Hemingway scholars, including some in Moscow that have been unavailable until now. Spain, I believe, is the key, the center of the story. For the relationships with the Left he formed during Spain's 1936-39 Civil War (like the relationship with Edwin Rolfe) are those to which he remained most committed.

NOTES

(1.)The argument that Hemingway was duped by an international Communist conspiracy finds its most recent expression in Stephen Koch's highly speculative Double Lives (1994). This scenario does not survive reflection about Hemingway's actual experience in Spain and the large number of ordinary men and women from many countries he met there.

(2.)See Cary Nelson, ed. Remembering Spain, which is accompanied by a cassette recording of Hemingway reading and commenting on "On the American Dead in Spain."

(3.)See Nelson and Hendricks, eds. Edwin Rolfe for photographic reproductions of this and one other previously unpublished Hemingway letter to Rolfe. A third unpublished Hemingway letter is included in Remembering Spain.

(4.)So far as I can determine, Rolfe's letter to Hemingway has not survived. Part of its content, however, can be inferred from Hemingway's response.

(5.)Hemingway's letter to Rolfe is in the Edwin Rolfe Archive in the Rare Books and Special Collections Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Although it is undated, the letter's approximate date--July 1941--is apparent from the events referred to and from its place in a sequence of letters about Kantorowicz. The date on Hemingway's envelope is unreadable.

(6.)Hemingway's statement, published in Russian, may be translated as follows. Italicized passages represent changes made either by Tass or by Pravda editors; passages in brackets are Hemingway's original words as sent to Rolfe: "I am with the Soviet Union one hundred percent in their military [war of] resistance against fascist [Nazi] aggression. The people of the Soviet Union, through their struggle, defend [are fighting and dying for the defense of! all people who oppose the enslavement of fascism. I proudly salute the Soviet Union for their heroic resistance."

(7.)Hemingway's 1938 essay on the Spanish Civil War in Pravda, his 1941 statement in International Literature, and his 1943 greeting in Pravda--but not his 1942 publication about the Red Army in Pravda--are all listed in the useful Russian-language bibliography Ernest Kheminguei: Biobibliograficheskii ukazatel. It was compiled by I. M. Levidova and B. M. Parchevskaia at the All-Union State Library for Foreign Literature and is part of a series of books on writers from foreign countries. Hemingway's 1942 statement, it should be noted, was reprinted in the Russian-language journal Soviet Culture in May of 1965. I was led to the original 1942 publication by Hemingway's 23 February 1942 letter to Rolfe, which is in the Edwin Rolfe Archive at the University of Illinois. Translations of passages in Russian were provided to me by Emilio Millan, a graduate student at the University of Illinois, for which I express my considerable appreciation.

It is worth noting that Hemingway's four Soviet publications are not listed in Hanneman (1967) or Hanneman (1975), although the Levidova bibliography listing three of them was published in 1970. American Hemingway scholars might thus have rediscovered these publications twenty years ago.

WORKS CITED

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

Hanneman, Audre. Ernest Hemingway: A Comprehensive Bibliography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1967.

_____. Supplement to Ernest Hemingway: A Comprehensive Bibliography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1975.

Hemingway, Ernest. [Statement]. In "Mastera kul'tury o razboinom napadenii Gitlera na SSSR" ("Cultural Masters on Hitler's Villainous Attack on the USSR"). International Literature No. 7-8 (1941), 194.

_____. [Statement]. In "Krasnaia Armiia--gordost' svobodoliubivykh narodov: Inostrannye deiteli privetstvuiut Krasnuiu Armiiu" ("The Red Army is the Pride of Peace-Loving Peoples: Foreign Figures Salute the Red Army"). Pravda. 23 February 1942, 4.

_____. [Statement]. In "Novogodnie privetstviia inostrannykh pisatelei Sovetskomu Soiuzu" ("New Year's Greetings to the Soviet Union from Foreign Writers"). Pravda, 3 January 1943, 4.

Koch, Stephen. Double Lives: Spies and Writers in the Secret Soviet War of Ideas Against the West. New York: Free Press, 1994.

Levidova, I. M. and B. M. Parchevskaia. Ernest Kheminguei: Biobibliograficheskii ukazatel'. (Ernest Hemingway: A Biobibliographical Index). Moscow: Kniga, 1970.

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

Mellow, James R. Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992.

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

Nelson, Cary, ed., Remembering Spain: Hemingway's Civil War Eulogy and the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1994.

Nelson, Cary and Jefferson Hendricks, eds. Edwin Rolfe: A Biographical Essay and Guide to the Rolfe Archive at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Urbana: U of Illinois, 1990.

Putnam, Samuel. "The Odyssey of Ernest Hemingway," The Daily Worker (Sunday Magazine), 29 October 1944, 20.