To Die In Madrid

WRITERS AND WARS HAVE A distinctive history. Reporting on wars has completely changed the lives of some authors, even after they have established their careers. But the spectacle of armed combat, whether or not it is directly experienced, may be a breaker as well as maker of literary reputations.

The Spanish Civil War, approaching its 70th anniversary, has largely slipped over the horizon of contemporary consciousness, but it remains the quintessential “writers’ war.” The conflict attracted talents as varied as those of George Orwell and André Malraux. Homage to Catalonia, based by Orwell on his experience as a soldier in the trenches, sold few copies over some decades but is now considered the greatest literary work produced by the Spanish torment in any language, including the Castilian and Catalan of the Iberian peninsula itself. Malraux, a gaudy star of French culture, produced an overwrought novel about the war, Man’s Fate, but has meanwhile been exposed by such biographers as Curtis Cate and Olivier Todd as a falsifier of his revolutionary exploits.

For Americans, two novelists are prominently associated with the Spanish war: Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos. They had been close friends, as American participants in the Paris literary scene of the 1920s, and both had gained critical and financial success by the time the Spanish war erupted. But by then their friendship had become strained by personal rivalry. The moral complexity of Spain, in which a conservative military faction was supported by Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, and left-wing Republicans were betrayed by Soviet agents allegedly sent to reinforce their defense, soon drove “Hem” and “Dos,” as everyone knew them, irrevocably apart.

Their split was made inevitable by the Soviet secret police liquidation, in Spain in 1937, of José Robles, a professor of Spanish at Johns Hopkins, who had been a companion of Dos Passos, and translator of his work, for 20 years. The break has been chronicled by every major historian of the war and all the biographers of the two literary giants. Stephen Koch, a New York writer, has aimed at a definitive account of this defining moment in 20th-century intellectual history. Although his attempt at an authoritative retelling may ultimately have failed, this book nonetheless deserves to be read.

As Koch describes the sequence of events, Hem and Dos were each at a crossroads when the fighting in Spain began in July 1936. Hemingway, who turned 37 that month, had attained considerable fame with such novels as The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929), but his productivity had slowed, and he faced serious difficulties in completing To Have and Have Not, which would appear in 1937. Hemingway’s books were driven by the fatalism and narcissism of his characters. It should come as no surprise that Hemingway was enraged with jealousy at the growing reputation, just at that time, of Dos Passos. The latter’s great achievement, the U.S.A. trilogy, had just been completed with the publication of The Big Money. Dos Passos was an authentic radical celebrity, whose picture had appeared on the cover of Time.

Dos Passos was 40, and possessed a body of work that could not have been more different from Hemingway’s. His trilogy, which had begun with The 42nd Parallel (1930) and continued with 1919 (1932), lacked a narrative consistency or character development. Rather, the series introduced “Camera Eye” and “Newsreel” passages in an illuminated view of American life during and after World War I. But both men learned much from the European avant garde. Hemingway adopted the spare realism of the Spanish author Pío Baroja; Dos Passos was also influenced by Baroja, but borrowed much more from the spontaneous, stream-of-consciousness technique associated with French poet and traveler Blaise Cendrars.

Both men also identified with Spain, although Dos Passos really knew Spanish history, literary traditions, and religious culture, while Hemingway reveled in “tourist Spain”–exemplified by his fixation on bullfighting, even then considered by most Spaniards an affectation of the decayed ruling classes. Much more important, however, Dos Passos had been one of America’s most prominent extreme leftists for a decade, and had a deep emotional identification with the revolutionary movements of the Spanish labor and peasant classes.

When Hemingway felt called to Spain, his politics were vague, and he barely comprehended which side was which. All Hem knew was that his inspiration had gone sour, and that he needed a new war, preferably in a picturesque, dramatic setting. But the identification of Dos with the radical left, at a time when communism seemed to grow ever stronger in America, allowed him temporarily to outpace Hem as a public personality, which naturally fed Hemingway’s irritability.

It has been understood since the end of the Spanish war that it was the great watershed for the Western left of the 1930s, pitting idealists, who became anti-Stalin and eventually anti-Communist, against cynics and opportunists pleased to follow whatever demands the Kremlin might make, at least in the short term. Dos Passos epitomized the disillusioned, while Hemingway, as portrayed by Koch and many others before him, and as made clear by his own statements, was a perfect embodiment of the “fellow-traveling,” pro-Stalin “liberal.”

The Stalinists and their acolytes broadcast far and wide their allegedly implacable hatred of fascism and profound love for humanity. But in reality, they were more typically avid for the secret-police power of life and death over those they resented, and were excited to excess by the fantasy that they had joined the winning side in the battle for the future. They gloried in their hardness, heartlessness, and subservience to Moscow’s killing machine.

The exiled Leon Trotsky, and the surrealist poet André Breton, in a statement published coincidentally with the events described in this book, wrote: “The totalitarian regime of the USSR, working through the so-called cultural organizations it controls in other countries, has spread over the entire world a deep twilight hostile to every sort of spiritual value; a twilight of filth and blood in which, disguised as intellectuals and artists, those men steep themselves who have made of servility a career, of lying-for-pay a custom, and of apologetics for crime a source of pleasure.”

Hemingway, with his obsessive machismo, cruelty to “his” women, and sadism in other personal relationships, was the perfect collaborator for the Stalinists in Spain. To him, the brutalities of the Russian secret police were little more than a variation on his favorite manly pursuits, a kind of big-game hunting with dissident leftists as objects of the safari.

In Koch’s retelling, Hem and Dos had joined a number of leftist writers and intellectuals, including Dorothy Parker and Lillian Hellman, in producing a documentary film on the war, to be titled The Spanish Earth. Both Hem and Dos went to Spain, but in the age when such journeys were slow and complicated, they did not arrive until some seven months of war had gone by: Hemingway in February 1937, and Dos Passos a few weeks later. And just as Dos Passos had a deeper understanding of Spanish mores than Hemingway, so he also had a clearer perception of the political conditions imposed by Stalin’s support for the Spanish Republicans.

The Spanish war had begun as a social revolution, led by militant socialists, anarchists, and anti-Stalinist Marxists–all of whom viewed the Soviet model of governance with great suspicion, and who genuinely believed, rightly or wrongly, that a radical transformation of the country could be effected without transgressing personal or collective freedoms. But after those seven months, Soviet controllers had significantly usurped power from the indigenous Spanish revolutionaries.

When Hemingway got to Madrid, which was still under siege by the forces of Gen. Francisco Franco, he turned himself out in fancy high boots and pseudo-military dress, and began his usual public celebration of “the good life.” The leftist author Josephine Herbst, in her memoir The Starched Blue Sky of Spain, recalled with disgust how, amid general hunger and severe rationing in the city, when a slice of bread was the daily allotment of food, Hem lived in a cloud of tantalizing odors: those of fresh coffee, fried eggs, and sizzling bacon. Herbst and Dos Passos made a point of sharing the meager diet of the ordinary people of Madrid.

Dos had a special mission from very early in his visit to the war-torn country: to be reunited with his friend Robles. Gifted in languages, as well as being of Spanish birth, Robles had been assigned as a translator to the Russian military attaché in Madrid, known as Gorev. But as Dos learned almost immediately, Robles had been arrested, apparently by Soviet agents, and had disappeared. All we know, and have known for a long time (but of which Koch properly reminds us), is that Hemingway took a saturnine pleasure in informing the “naive” Dos Passos that Robles had been shot as a “spy.”

The logic of Robles’s martyrdom, and that of some dozens of anti-Stalinists assassinated by the Russians in Spain, was eloquently evoked by Orwell, who, like Melville’s Ishmael in Moby Dick, long seemed to have alone survived to tell the tale, after totalitarianism had sunk the Spanish Republic. Nobody, to this day, knows why Robles became a victim of Stalin’s global purges; the Moscow archives may contain a file on him, but the documentation is closed to outside researchers. In the convoluted system of Soviet suspicions, he may have been associated with the anti-Stalinist movement for which Orwell fought, the Workers Party of Marxist Unification, or POUM.

Since his death is still mysterious, and because Stephen Koch is manifestly more concerned with the Hem-Dos imbroglio, Robles is a spectral figure in this book, appearing slender and handsome in a photograph taken during his early adulthood; but otherwise a name without much substance. Except that he was a victim of Stalin. And Dos Passos, who already had a reputation as a possible “Trotskyite,” then the worst insult imaginable to an orthodox Communist, began, in mourning for his friend, a journey away from the left. It would carry Dos, before his death in 1970, to the Republican party and admiration for Gov. Ronald Reagan of California. Unfortunately, his literary work would never regain the momentum it possessed in 1936, when he was at the height of his powers.

As the cynic he was, Hem did not long remain in thrall to the Stalinist adventure. His Spanish war novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, came out in 1940. There he expressed his distaste for the Stalinist manipulation of the Spanish cause, and the book was brutally denounced by party-line critics. It became an excessively slow and talky movie, chiefly remembered for Ingrid Bergman’s cropped hairdo in the role of the passionate Maria. But few today would argue that Hemingway’s later career showed sustained excellence. Spain, in a sense, broke both American writers.

Koch’s lack of familiarity with Spanish sources has prevented him from thoroughly fleshing out the biography of Robles, or the broader Spanish background of these bloody and depressing struggles. In that regard, he is almost inadvertently closer in spirit to Hem than to Dos, although his political sympathies lie manifestly with Dos Passos. Koch’s clumsiness with the Spanish side of the war extends to his difficulty with Spanish names, which he repeatedly misspells. He also indulges in anachronistic clichés and other stylistic gaffes that, after awhile, become vexing. Is it really correct to say that F. Scott Fitzgerald was “blown away” by Dos Passos’s first successful book, Manhattan Transfer (1925)?

In one of those frequent coincidences of publication, a new book on the Dos Passos/Robles case appeared in Spain just as Koch’s volume came out here: Enterrar a los muertos (Burying the Dead) by the novelist Ignacio Martínez de Pisón, issued by the Barcelona publisher Seix Barral. The Spanish account includes many more photographs, more about the war from the Spanish viewpoint, and even hazards a guess as to the identity of Robles’s killer.

Hemingway seemed to have become well and truly intoxicated by the aura of Soviet power when he became entangled with the Stalinist purge system in Spain. At the end of 1938, he wrote to Edmund Wilson, who had been an early champion of his work, but who had also gone over to the side of Trotsky, “I understand that all of you who took no part in the defence of the Spanish Republic must discredit those who did take part.” He continued sarcastically, listing the names of anti-Stalinist dissidents, whom he denounced as cowards, and of the Stalinist leaders glorified as champions of the Spanish Republic: “I hope to live long enough to see John Dos Passos, James [T.] Farrell . . . and yourself rightly acclaimed as the true heroes of the Spanish War and Lister, El Campesino, Modesto, Durán, and all our dead put properly in their place as stooges of Stalin.”

Hemingway’s suicide in 1961 prevented him from learning that his jeers would be prophetic. Of the Communist leaders he once professed to idolize, Enrique Lister would be condemned by the left in Spain for his bloodthirsty suppression of anarchist peasants, and expelled from the Spanish Communist party as a Stalinist, after the Soviet dictator’s death. The commander known as “The Peasant” (El Campesino), whose real name was Valentín González, defected from communism and produced a bitter volume of memoirs titled Listen, Comrades: Life and Death in the Soviet Union. Juan Modesto, a clandestine Soviet operative before the outbreak of the civil war, died in exile in 1969. And Gustavo Durán, who went to work at the State Department after the Spanish war, and later became a target of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, was also expelled from Spanish Communist ranks, soon after the end of World War II. He fell under secret police suspicion because of his success at State. Had he chosen exile in Moscow over life in the United States, he, like José Robles, would have been executed.

One item remains. Both this book and Martínez de Pisón’s owe a great deal to the work of my late mentor in these matters, the Catalan author Víctor Alba, who died in 2003 at 86. He had been a POUM militant and met Orwell in Spain. He was also the longest-lived participant in the war to continue producing significant historical testimony, and was an anti-Stalinist to the end. Thanks to his efforts, and those of others in Spain, the friends of Dos Passos and Robles have clearly won the battle of historical memory on the ground where the war was fought. George Orwell, for example, is memorialized by a square in Barcelona.

The Breaking Point is similarly important, because it will help bring to a close the controversy over the Spanish Civil War here in America, far from the bloody battlefields and cemeteries it left as its legacy.

Stephen Schwartz is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.