Hemingway and the Spanish Civil War

The Distant Sound of Battle

Gilbert H. Muller

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783030281236
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030281243
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

During the 1930s, no event was more absorbing or galvanizing to Ernest Hemingway than the Spanish Civil War. Hemingway was passionately devoted to the cause of the democratically elected Spanish Republic and he spent much of the war reporting from its front lines, producing a deeply political body of work that illuminated the conflict and presaged the world war to come. In the end, his immersive journey into the turbulent world of the Spanish Civil War resulted in For Whom the Bell Tolls, a landmark in American political fiction. This book offers a fresh account of Hemingway's adventures in Spain during the Civil War, stressing his embrace of radical political action and discourse in defense of the Republic against the forces of Fascism. On the eightieth anniversary of For Whom the Bell Tolls, Gilbert H. Muller reconsiders Hemingway as an engaged artist, political actor, and visionary. 

© The Author(s) 2019

G. H. MullerHemingway and the Spanish Civil Warhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28124-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. The Distant Sound of Battle, December 1936

Gilbert H. Muller¹

(1)

City University of New York, New York, NY, USA

Gilbert H. Muller

End Abstract

On a late December afternoon in 1936, Ernest Hemingway was sitting at the bar in Sloppy Joe’s, his favorite saloon in Key West, enjoying a few drinks while quietly sorting through his mail. ¹ An autodidact since his teenage years when he devoured everything around the family house in Oak Park, Illinois including his father’s AMA journals, Ernest had already perused the daily newspapers—he typically read at least three—for updates on the Spanish Civil War. ² The insurrection had been launched in Spanish Morocco on 17 July by right-wing generals against the duly elected Republican government, followed the next day by the rebel takeover of numerous military barracks in southwestern and northwestern Spain.

Ten days into the rebellion, Jay Allen of the Chicago Daily Tribune , a friend of Ernest’s, had been the first foreign correspondent to interview a key conspirator (and its future Caudillo) in the uprising. General Francisco Franco had flown from his exile in the Canary Islands to Tetuán, Morocco in order to help launch the rebellion. By chance, Allen, then in San Roque, a small town near the Straits of Gibraltar, was told to cross over to Tetuán in order to meet with Franco. ³ “There can be no compromise, no truce,” the short, bald, corpulent rebel informed Allen. ⁴ “I shall advance. I shall take the capital…. I shall save Spain from Marxism at whatever cost.” When Allen replied that such a strategy would force Franco to shoot half of Spain, the General answered, “I said whatever the cost.”

Hemingway had known Allen, one of the best-informed correspondents working in Spain, since their time together in Paris during the 1920s. He would have an opportunity to discuss the Spanish situation with Allen prior to his own departure for Madrid as a foreign correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA). For the first time in more than fifteen years, when he had covered the Greco-Turkish War of 1922–1923 for the Toronto Star , Hemingway would be filing dispatches from a war zone. He was anxious to return to Spain and once again conduct his life on a decidedly dangerous global stage.

For Hemingway, the distant sound of battle in his beloved Spain signaled a critical moment in his life and career. “I hate to have missed this Spanish thing,” he had telegraphed his editor Max Perkins from Wyoming in late September. ⁵ He had fretted from afar as Nationalist rebels under the command of General Queipo de Llano quickly took Seville on 19 July, launching a massive purge of union members and Republican sympathizers. ⁶ There followed another rebel victory and massacre of civilians in Badajoz near the border with Portugal on 14 August. Then, on 27 September, Franco broke the Republican siege of the rebel garrison in Toledo, where reprisals once again made the streets flow with blood. Throughout the summer and fall of 1936, the rebels advanced inexorably on Madrid, hoping for a quick triumph, only to be halted at the city’s outskirts in mid-November by the furious resistance of the capital’s citizen militias.

How could any writer resist the clarion call to arms against Fascism and in defense of the beleaguered Spanish Republic? Already men and women in the International Brigades were fighting and dying in Madrid, thrown into the breach at University City on the western edge of the city during the fraught days of 7–12 November in order to counter Franco’s dreaded Army of Africa , which had been airlifted to the mainland by German and Italian transport planes, and General Emilio Mola’s legions based in the northern province of Navarre. ⁷ The Civil War in Spain was too compelling for any writer worth his salt to ignore. In truth, war was Hemingway’s greatest subject, the ruling principle in his modernist renditions of the First World War in The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms . “War,” he wrote to Scott Fitzgerald, “groups the maximum of material and speeds up the action and brings out all sorts of stuff that normally you have to wait a lifetime to get.” ⁸ Moreover, as he observed in his typically laconic and self-referential style in Green Hills of Africa , “Civil war is the best war for a writer, the most complete.” ⁹

For Hemingway, Spain was the ideal nation, the most complete, in which to view the course of a civil war. Many readers keeping abreast of the Spanish Civil War in The New York Times would have caught the allusion to Hemingway’s affinity for Spain in a front-page article that had appeared in early October. The headline, “Death in the Afternoon—and at Dawn—A Picture of Mad War in Spain, Where Murder Stalks Behind the Lines of Fighting Men,” references Hemingway’s innovative 1932 treatise on bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon . ¹⁰ The illustrated article captures at length the distinctively modern brutality of the conflict: “The newest methods of warfare are blended with the oldest in this fantastically bitter Spanish civil war. There is no uniformity of action on the part of either side, Red or White, except in the ferocity with which the struggle is waged.” The photographs interspersing the account highlight the “reign of fear” that had immediately become apparent in the early months of the Spanish Civil War.

Aside from the slaughter of combatants and civilians by both sides but primarily by the Nationalists as Paul Preston, the preeminent scholar on the Spanish Civil War documents, new forms of horrifying mechanized warfare had quickly emerged. ¹¹ Even as Hemingway anticipated his return to Spain as a foreign correspondent, Italian and German planes were bombarding Madrid in an effort to terrify the population and destroy its eighty thousand poorly organized civilian and militia defenders—the first blitz of a European capital in the annals of warfare and a prelude to the savagery that would be unleashed by Germany’s Condor Legion on the Basque town of Guernica in April 1937. In time, Hemingway would weave these planes—German, Italian, Russian—into the fabric of For Whom the Bell Tolls , a masterpiece of political fiction based on his experience and understanding of Spain and the tragic outcome of the Spanish Civil War.

Hemingway worried that he would be late to the Civil War but sensed correctly that the conflict would be prolonged. In a 15 December letter to Max Perkins, his editor at Scribner’s, he observes, “I’ve got to go to Spain. But there’s no great hurry. They’ll be fighting for a long time and it’s cold as hell around Madrid now! I’ve paid two guys over there to fight (transportation and cash to Spanish Border) already. If I could send seven more could probably be a corporal. But I’m not going there as head of the Hemingstein Legion.” ¹² He comments on the generalissimo now leading the rebellion: “Franco is a good general but a son of a bitch of the first magnitude and he lost his chance to take Madrid for nothing by being over cautious.”

Sitting at the bar in Sloppy Joe’s, Hemingway was preparing to join the cavalcade of correspondents , writers, and artists already in Spain recording their impressions of the Civil War and the internal and external forces dividing that fated nation. After the influential newspaper and radio gossip commentator Walter Winchell informed the American public around Thanksgiving that Hemingway was bound for Spain, the celebrated author had been offered a lucrative contract by John Wheeler, the manager of NANA, to report on the conflict. ¹³ NANA , which provided copy for more than fifty newspapers including The New York Times and The New Republic , agreed to pay Hemingway handsomely for his war cables from the Spanish front. Wheeler promised Hemingway the astronomical fee of $1000 for posted longer pieces of about one thousand words ($18,000 in today’s money) and $500 for shorter cabled items.

After taking his cabin cruiser Pilar over to Cuba for a week in order to ponder the offer from Wheeler, Hemingway returned to Key West and informed his wife Pauline that his pal Sidney Franklin, the tall, angular bullfighter from Brooklyn, had agreed to accompany him to Spain. Despite Pauline’s reservations, Hemingway was impatient to depart. ¹⁴ He had no intention of passing on the opportunity to serve as an international correspondent—and to be paid well for it. Once again, he would be confronting war and covering vast geopolitical events. These forces had been the thematic nodes of much of his reporting for the Toronto Star Weekly during his early years in Europe, and they had informed the lives of the main characters in Hemingway’s two groundbreaking novels, The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms .

Perhaps Hemingway imagined that he could chronicle the events of the Spanish Civil War while exploring new protocols of literary production, seeking the special dimensions required, he believed, to write a truly great novel. During the 1930s, his books Death in the Afternoon and Green Hills of Africa had been experimental excursions in nonfictional prose. Even a collection of stories, Winner Take Nothing , had been a diversion from what Hemingway perceived as a need for a major work of fiction that would elevate his reputation to the highest rank of authors. He did have high hopes for an untitled Key West novel (which he would finally name To Have and Have Not), but completing the manuscript was taking longer than expected. Hemingway was ponderi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. The Distant Sound of Battle, December 1936
• 2. Conspirators, January–February 1937
• 3. Madrid, March–May 1937
• 4. The Spanish Earth, June–August 1937
• 5. The Fifth Column, August–December 1937
• 6. The Time Now, the Place Spain, January–May 1938
• 7. The Carnival of Treachery, June–November 1938
• 8. No Man Is an Island, December 1938–December 1940
• Back Matter