From Mike Gold: A Literary Anthology. (New York: International Publishers, 1972. 322 pages.)
EDITOR’S NOTE Mike Gold (1893-1967) was a novelist, journalist, playwright and literary critic. He was a founding editor of the radical magazine New Masses and a longtime columnist for the Daily Worker. His most famous work is Jews without Money (1930), about his life growing up in poverty on New York’s Lower East Side. Marxism can be a powerful tool to understand literature. Below is Gold’s review of Ernest Hemingway’s 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls.
The Soviet people rooted out and destroyed the Fifth Column. Then, it is now obvious, Hitler flinched before this new perspective of an exhausting and uncertain war against the united Soviet. He turned, therefore, to the west, where the Quislings, Henri de Mans and Lavals, his Fifth Column lackeys, were running governments, directing the armies, and following his blueprints for the “new order.”
Radek, Trotsky, Bukharin, and their fellow-traitors forgot one “minor” factor — the comparative strength of the capitalist and socialist forces in the world today. They despised the people and bowed before the masters. This is the central core of all their vile and enormous treason; and it is also the heart of all petty-bourgeois renegadism, from the Granville Hickses and Edmund Wilsons down to the mangiest yellow dog who ever peddled his honor and his “Confessions of an Ex-Communist” to Hearst and the Dies Committee for thirty silver dollars.
Ernest Hemingway is another example of this same historic process.
There is no better storyteller in America than Ernest Hemingway. A great artist, but limited, narrow, and mutilated by his class egotism, the very brilliance of Hemingway’s talents has only served to illuminate the poverty of his mind.
It is poor because its owner has for years lived the limited life of a rich sportsman and tourist. Hemingway’s novels so often express this spectator without responsibilities, who holds a box seat at the crucifixion of humanity, and is a connoisseur of the agony and sweat of others.
You go through the Hemingway country and find it a world of cafés; bullfighters; big game hunting; scotch, more scotch, absinthe; long-limbed, gallant, “aristocratic,” women who succumb easily; and expensive pleasure fishing; and expensive traveling hither and yon; and bootleggers; and prize fighters — a colorful if sterile world and one completely divorced from the experience of the great majority of mankind.
It is interesting to search through Hemingway’s writings for a single portrait of a man at work. There is never such a hero. The. bondholder lives by coupon clipping or other abstract financial means. He can be very philanthropic and even as “pure in heart” as a lean, ironic, hard-drinking, Hemingway hero. But he knows nothing about the factories and fields where men must work and where the sources of his income arise.
Al these traits account for the strange distortion that affects Hemingway’s recent novel of the Spanish Civil War, For Whom the Bell Tolls.
The hero, Robert Jordan, is the same lean, ironic, hard-drinking, very, very noble Gary Cooper-Ernest Hemingway hero. He meets the same long-limbed, gallant Hemingway-Greta Garbo girl (this time a Spanish maiden). Against the backdrop of the civil war, they go through the same old gallant, skillfully arranged death. The Hemingway pattern of love, by the way, is as juvenile as the Hemingway picture of society. Just as money comes from somewhere, by magic, and not from the most fundamental fact of life, which is labor; just so does love never become marriage, and babies, and common domesticity. Just as he has never been able to portray a worker, so has he been unable to draw the figure of a single mother.
Robert Jordan, former Spanish instructor at an American university, now a volunteer in the International Brigade, had been doing guerrilla work back of the fascist lines. Hemingway’s story is concerned with the last four days of his life when Jordan is assigned to blow up a certain bridge in enemy country.
The inner life of this young volunteer, however, is not that of any loyal member of the International Brigade, so far as one can judge from the letters, writings, speeches and other public records of the majority of them.
It is obviously Hemingway’s inner life, intimately resembling the philosophy, or lack of philosophy, of the autobiographical heroes in his other books. It is interesting to note, first, that this Hemingway-Jordan cannot work up any real hate of the fascists. He is forever searching for excuses for them; he wants to find the “humanity” in these people.
He is so anxious to be “fair” to them, that he goes to the length of spending more time telling of Republican cruelty than of fascist cruelty.
That there must have been, in a merciless civil war, some typical peasant excesses against landlords, cannot be doubted. But Hemingway is unable to see, what even the aged Miguel Unamuno saw, that peasant terror is sporadic and individual, but fascist terror is organized in cold blood, on a mass scale. “All these crimes are committed in cold blood,” wrote the heartbroken old philosopher,
all these brutalities result from collective orders by the General Staff, which calls itself national. The horrors reported to me as having been committed by the “reds”- and in which I by no means believe–are pale trifles compared to the cruelty, the systematic and organized sadism which every day here accompanies the execution of the most honest and innocent people, irrespective of their party label, simply because they are liberal and Republican.
And the old philosopher ends: “All this in response to the cry of this insane general called Millan Astray: ‘Death to Intelligence! Long live Death!’ ” Yes, even Unamuno, a vacillator between fascism and democracy, could read at least some of the class lineaments of fascism that made it so different from democracy.
But from Hemingway’s book, it is obvious that he cannot see the class difference. The war to him is exciting, terrible, dangerous: really a bullfight on a vast scale. If one takes sides in it, it is for this very personal reason:
He fought now in this war because it had started in a country that he loved and he believed in the Republic and that if it were destroyed life would be unbearable for all those people who believed in it.
But the majority of the Spanish people fought not only for the forms of a republic. They also fought for bread, against feudal taxes, against the great estates. They were fighting against the fascists so fiercely because they hated the landlords, usurers, and bloated hierarchs and generals who had oppressed them for centuries.
Regarding these class lines, or the enormous central fact of hunger in Spain, Hemingway has not a sentence. Not a word. Not a hint. He doesn’t know it exists. The war is some sort of vague battle over words, without roots in man’s earth. It is like every other war. It is a thrill.
It is an accident, into which Jordan-Hemingway has been accidentally placed, “because he loved Spain.” When it is over, Jordan-Hemingway means to lose all further interest in the people.
People should be left alone and you should interfere with no one. So he believed that, did he? Yes, he believed that. And how about a planned society and the rest of it? That was for the others to do. He had something else to do after this war. What were his politics then? He had none now, he told himself. But do not tell anyone else that, he thought. Don’t ever admit that. And what are you going to do afterwards? I am going back and earn my living teaching Spanish as before and I am going to write a true book.
But can the man “who has no politics” and hence no loyalty to democracy or the people write a true book about the Spanish Civil War, which was a political war, made by the people in defense of democracy and their right to bread? Of course not, and Hemingway’s novel, despite its narrative genius, is a false picture of the war. “He was under Communist discipline for the duration of the war,” Hemingway-Jordan soliloquizes,
Here in Spain the Communists offered the best discipline and the soundest and sanest for the prosecution of the war. He accepted their discipline for the duration of the war because, in the conduct of the war, they were the only party whose program and whose discipline he could respect.
Very good. Maybe, at last, the boy has grown up. Maybe he has at last matured enough to understand “Communist discipline,” which is not the strange and sinister thing it seems to philistine bourgeois minds, but is merely the organized responsibility of men and women who are in deadly earnest about the fate and victory of the people.
But only a paragraph later, the tourist Hemingway is back where he started from.
Enemies of the people. That was a catch phrase he could skip. He had gotten to be bigoted as a hard-shelled Baptist about his politics and phrases like enemies of the people came into his mind without much criticism. . . . But since last night his mind was much clearer and cleaner on that business. . . .
And why clearer? He had slept last night with Maria! “That was one thing sleeping with Maria had done.” It had made him doubt the “party line” and to question phrases like this one: “enemies of the people.” No wonder, the bullfighter, bartender hero reflects, “the Communists were always cracking down on Bohemianism. When you were drunk or when you committed either fornication or adultery you recognized your own personal fallibility of that so mutable substitute for the Apostles’ Creed, the party line.”
One of the tricks of the Hemingway style consists of its short, positive, declarative sentences, each of them a final and authoritative judgment on everything. This rhetorical device never admits modifying clauses, or doubt, or, let us add, the painful processes of thought.
Thus, with the usual swagger, Hemingway-Jordan explains all there is to be known about that little subject, communism. What is communism? It is bigotry, he dogmatizes airily. And what is bigotry? Bigotry is something that happens to you when you have not slept for a long time with a woman. “Maria was very hard on his bigotry.” After he slept with this long-limbed, gallant dream-girl, he tells us, his bigotry and his “communism” left him. But drunkenness would have served just as well. A drunkard is as little “bigoted” as an adulterer, he says.
Based on this piffling barroom philosophy, this class persiflage of the rentier, is it any wonder that Hemingway-Jordan, after respecting “Communist discipline, because it is the soundest and sanest for the prosecution of the war,” immediately repeats the filthiest slanders that appeared in the Spanish fascist press during the war? He employs and even adorns their slanders of Andre Marty, a man who has lived for twenty-five years the life of a heroic leader of the people, a man who was the brains of a great naval revolt, who was the first Communist deputy of France, who spent years in prison for his beliefs, and who has led great strikes. No rich tourist can ever understand the mind or heart of such a man. It must always remain a mystery to him; since, if understood, it might shatter his own smug universe. He is fatally compelled to slander all the ethical and moral values forming such a mind, lest they destroy him. He must slander the Russian technicians and officers he met in Madrid. He must even slander La Pasionaria.
Here again one meets the opportunist strain that corrupts the intellectual under capitalism. If the Spanish Civil War had been won by the people, Hemingway would not have thus slandered the Communists, and been so painfully fair to fascists and “enemies of the people.” But the people lost. One of the obvious reasons for their losing was that the Soviets could not afford to intervene on a major scale. That was exactly what the British and French statesmen of Munich wanted. It would have opened the war of a united capitalism against the Soviets for which they had been plotting with Hitler and Mussolini. The Soviets evaded the trap. Yet they did risk the security of their own great Socialist land and stretched the diplomatic limits to help the Spanish people. They were the only nation other than Mexico that helped. The French and British ruling class conspired with the fascists. They gave no help. They assisted in the treacherous murder of Spain. But you will not find a harsh word or even a little “slander” against them in Hemingway’s book. He is too busy kicking La Pasionaria around, the “gallant” soldier!
How different is the pattern of the overwhelming majority of the Americans who fought in the Lincoln Battalion in Spain! In the New York Post of their organization you can find men like Irving Goff and Bill Aalto who actually did the dangerous guerrilla fighting behind the fascist lines, which is the theme of Hemingway’s book. Perhaps from their stories he may have even collected his material. He has retailed their physical adventures brilliantly in his novel, but has he captured the soul of these men?
That was a bigger story than the actual fighting. Fascists can fight bravely, too. Bullfighters and prize fighters are often brave, too. But it is how and why you fight that separates a Stork Club brawl from the battles of a Garibaldi or Lincoln. It was not for adventure or because they “had lived in Spain and loved it” that the young Goffs and Aaltos left their jobs, their sweethearts, their security. It was because they had a profound principle inside them.
For years before the Spanish conflict many of them had been fighting the same battle for democracy in America. The Spanish trenches were but an extension of the home front, a spot that most needed reserves. From the heart of the American democracy went its bravest and truest sons to aid the sister democracy of Spain. When that battle was lost, such men were not left hanging in the vacuum, nor did they succumb to what Gorky called the “anarchism of the defeated.” They came back to work, to their people, to their comrades. They fell back into the familiar ranks of the American democracy. The war was still going on here and they were still in it.
Hemingway-Jordan tells himself that after the Spanish war, he will return to his old job. Of teaching Spanish at an American university. It is a sign of how ignorant of social reality Hemingway is that he can make this sound like some sort of cushy peace for a former Lincoln brigader. There were actually a number of university teachers in the Brigade. But when they came home, they found no such peace. They found boycott, persecution and blacklist. Can one conceive of that furious red-baiter, the president of Brooklyn College, returning his job to David McKelvey White, a former professor who fought in Spain? Of course not; for to the reactionaries of America, the Spanish veterans are poison. It is a black mark against any young American conscripted in the present “war for democracy” that he has previously fought for democracy in Spain.
Yes, it is the story of democracy itself that Hemingway has missed.
