Hemingway, the American Left, and the Soviet Union: Some Forgotten Episodes Journal article by Cary Nelson; The Hemingway Review, Vol. 14, 1994
http://www.questia.com/googleScholar.qst;jsessionid=KG9WPQZJhw8PGW8d12NnZQvpqRhgycgTMLcDJQltpBDvWWpXptlt!-229138872!-1934322800?docId=5000276828 Journal Article Excerpt Hemingway, the American left, and the Soviet Union: some forgotten episodes by Cary Nelson RECENT BIOGRAPHICAL scholarship--notably Kenneth S. Lynn's Hemingway (1987) and James R. Mellow's Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences (1992) --suggests that a consensus may be forming about the political judgments that coalesced in For Whom the Bell Tolls and that presumably carried Hemingway through the next two decades of his life. Briefly, the argument as Mellow puts it is that Hemingway by the end of 1938 experienced "growing disillusionment" with the cause of the Spanish Republic. His 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls as a result became, according to Mellow, "among other things, Hemingway's study of cowards and traitors and brave men in battle, as well as his apologia for supporting the Loyalists in the Spanish civil war" (517). "In both the marriage [to Martha Gellhorn] and the romance with left-wing politics," Lynn writes in a similar argument, "Hemingway would discover himself to have been sadly deceived" (442); "he said farewell to the Comintern in For Whom the Bell Tolls" (452). Putting in his own rhetoric the lesson he would have us believe Hemingway learned, Lynn writes that "the anti-Fascist propaganda being generated by the Comintern's cleverest liars, Willi Muenzenberg and Otto Katz (both later liquidated on Stalin's orders) was a rhetorical cover for the imperialistic designs of a system no less ruthless than Hitler's and infinitely more so than the repressive regime that Franco would establish" (444).(1) One exception to this pattern is Jeffrey Meyers' Hemingway: A Biography (1985), which sees For Whom the Bell Tolls as flowing from Hemingway's Loyalist sympathies rather than marking their end point. But Me... _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
