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PARTISAN REVIEW
against exactly what you were doing and being forced into doing to have
any chance of winning." Jordan is aware of the necessity of the Party
line-the war must be won before the Revolution can be achieved-but
that does not mean he sees it as democratic or without blemishes. Jor–
dan's political pronouncement sounds more Jeffersonian than Loyalist:
"He believed in Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness."
That there are links between these novels not only destroys the model
of Hemingway's embrace and then abandonment of communism; it also
reveals that Hemingway still believed that good literature was neither
Left nor Right. Like George Orwell, whose anti-Stalinist but pro–
Loyalist
Homage to Catalonia
he admired, Hemingway was far too
honest a writer to ignore the blemishes of the Left. He presented real–
life characters-not characters designed to make a propagandistic point.
This willingness to record honest experience put him at odds with a
Popular Front that wanted revolutionaries to be noble, not bloodthirsty.
For all of Hemingway's supposed susceptibility to the Popular Front,
he never succumbed to one of its foremost tenets: the need for America
to arm to fight fascism . Throughout this period, Hemingway sounded
more like an America Firster than a collective security Communist. In
1935,
the first year of the Popular Front, Hemingway declared in a let–
ter to
Esquire
that the only country worth dying for was one's own and
that America should never be "sucked" into a European war. Exposure
to the Spanish conflict had not changed these views. Never once in his
famous American Writers' Conference speech is there a mention of arm–
ing against fascism, merely a warning of many "years of undeclared
wars" for "writers to study." A year after this speech, he was still urg–
ing the United States to stay out of the European conflict, even advanc–
ing the position that the United States should not sell arms to either side.
In foreign policy, Hemingway's focus was always on the carnage of the
Great War, not the Party line of the moment. Hemingway maintained
this consistency, arguing for war only when his country was attacked at
Pearl Harbor. By then, the remnants of the Popular Front had reversed
their position twice.
Hemingway had other lifelong allegiances which led him into hereti–
cal deviations from Popular Front orthodoxies. In a time when the Party
supported Roosevelt and Stalin, Hemingway denounced both. He
despised the literary Left in America and complimented Franco. He
believed in the "absolute minimum of government" at a time when the
Popular Front praised collectivist efforts. Hemingway's lifelong admira–
tion of those tested by combat partially accounted for his attacks on the
sacred cows of the Popular Front. In his view, the Communist Luis Quin-
