RON CAPSHAW
Hemingway: A Static Figure Amidst the Red
Decade Shifts
F
OR BIOGRAPHERS, Ernest Hemingway's life has always been a
litany of legends: the shrapnel-shattered knee, Hadley's loss of the
suitcase containing stories, Ernest crouched at the feet of Stein.
When covering the 1930S, biographers offer the legend of the political
awakening: Hemingway on the stage of the League of American Writ–
ers, trading his safari hat for the beret of a Loyalist soldier. According
to chroniclers of this legend, Hemingway abandoned his apolitical
twenties phase ("a writer belongs to no faction"), dabbled in proletar–
ian fiction, embraced Popular Front Communism, and then made the
already well-traveled evacuation from the Stalinist Left with
For Whom
the Bell Tolls
(1940). But Hemingway did not travel this familiar tra–
jectory for numerous literary figures. His politics remained consistent
amidst various shifts of the American Left.
First, let us look at one portion of the myth. According to Edmund
Wilson, Malcolm Cowley, Granville Hicks, and
New Masses
writers, in
the mid-1930S Hemingway awoke to the literary potential of revolu–
tions. For many on the Left, this awakening was long overdue . Writing
in 1936, Granville Hicks complained that Hemingway stunted his
growth as an artist by refusing to look "squarely" at contemporary pol–
itics. This outcry had reached such a crescendo that Hemingway com–
plained about "chickenshit communists" insisting on him writing a
proletarian novel. With the arrival of
To Have and Have Not
(1937),
Communist critics praised Hemingway's sudden awareness of politics.
And with
The Fifth Column
(1938), a tale of an American spy on the
side of the Loyalists, critics saw Hemingway moving beyond mere
awareness and becoming aligned with Popular Front Communists.
However, Hemingway had been a student of revolutionary politics
since the 1920S and had always intended to write a novel with that as
a subject. Sixteen years before his "awakening" in
The Fifth Column,
while covering the Genoa Conference as a reporter, he wrote more arti–
cles about the Bolshevik representatives than any other delegation. The
next year he reported on Italian Communists sympathetically: "The
