READING FROM LEFT TO RIGHT
27
to free themselves from the program. It may be, however, that they merely
become
unconscious
of their political values.
Thus it is precisely that lack of political consciousness which Mr.
Wilson finds so admirable that prevents Hemingway from really breaking
with Stalinism. Jordan 'turns off the thinking' only to act the more freely
in
accordance with the very political formulae he has come to distrust so
deeply as not to want to think about.
"Here in Spain the Communists offered the best discipline and the
soundest and sanest for the prosecution of the war. He accepted their dis–
cipline because, in the conduct of the war, they were the only party whose
program and discipline he could respect. What were his politics, then?
He had none now, he told himself. But do not tell any one else, he
thought. •.." Hemingway tries to write a non-political political novel and
Jordan tries to participate in a revolutionary war and yet reject politics.
But these are merely
other forms
of political thought and action.
"He would not think himself into any defeatism. The first thing was
to win the war.
If
we did not win the war, everything was lost." Here we
see a false antithesis, between thinking and successful action (thought
leads to defeatism) similar to that already noted between politics and
human reality. This corresponds in turn to the false antithesis made by the
Stalinists in Spain between the task of winning the war (a 'practical'
matter which must be settled first ) and that of creating a new society (a
'theoretical' matter, to be left to the distant future, a sort of dessert to be
enjoyed after the war). But there was no real antithesis between the two
tasks:
the war could have been won only by carrying through the social
revolution.
I will be told that Hemingway directly attacks the Stalinists in his
portrait of Marty and in his rendering of the cynical atmosphere of Gay–
lords. It is true that these represent a shift away from Stalinism-but of
a superficial nature, like his rejection of the Party catchwords. Hemingway
is
at pains to indicate that Jordan's first reaction to Gaylords was naive,
that war is an ugly bu&iness, and that cynicism may be permitted those
who are really facing the realities and 'doing the job.' And Marty is
presented as literally half-crazy, his lunacy consisting in a passion for
shooting Trotskyists and Anarchists-thus attributing the settled and
rational (from its viewpoint) policy of the C.P. in Spain as the vagary of
an
eccentric individual!
It
is notable that in his attempts to define to himself why he finds it
increasingly harder to believe in the Loyalist cause, Jordan often blames
the
Spanish national character (which he feels is treacherous, provincial,
cruel, etc.) and sometimes even certain disturbing moral characteristics
of individual Stalinists. But he never gives a thought to the really dis–
illusioning development: the slow strangling, by the Stalino-bourgeois
coalition, of the revolutionary upsurge of the Spanish masses. The most
politically revealing thing in the book is Hemingway's vindictive picture
of the Anarchists-" the crackpots and romantic revolutionists," "the wild
