National Post (National Edition)
WAS HEMINGWAY THE HERO OF FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS?
A cryptic note places him behind enemy lines in Spain's civil war
On Feb. 27, 1937, Ernest Hemingway embarked on the SS Paris from New York and headed into a war zone. “For a long time me and my conscience both have known I have to go to Spain,” he wrote before leaving. Hemingway saw the ongoing fighting in his most cherished “damn wild country” as nothing less than a “dress rehearsal for the inevitable European war.”
What the novelist did not suspect was that, while in Spain, he would end up leading a behind-the-lines mission targeting General Franco's Nationalist forces — an episode that does not appear in any biography and of which even his most devoted readers remain unaware. Nor could he know that the experience would inspire his next great novel.
For Hemingway, the trip was serious from the start. At 37, he was in crisis: his second marriage was failing and, more catastrophically, his popularity among readers was waning and his writing was drying up. He hadn't published a novel in seven years, since A Farewell to Arms.
Hemingway had described his problems in a story published six months earlier — The Snows of Kilimanjaro — about a dying writer who does not love his wife. “He had destroyed his talent by not using it,” he wrote, “by betrayals of himself and what he believed in, by drinking so much that he blunted the edge of his perceptions.”
Nominally, Hemingway was now going to Spain to practise his original trade as a journalist, with a generous contract from the North American Newspaper Alliance, but really he was after inspiration. He found what he was looking for. In October 1940, after four long spells in Spain, he published For Whom the Bell Tolls, about the fortunes of an American guerrilla called Robert Jordan. A former university literature lecturer and explosives expert, Jordan joins a guerrilla unit fighting to defend democracy and the Spanish Republic, before going on a daring raid behind enemy lines. In just a few months, the novel sold half a million copies.
Jordan's character is based on the volunteers of the International Brigades — a remarkable army of around 35,000 people from 80 countries, who formed an “anti-fascist” force in Spain that contemporaries compared to the Crusades and the Tower of Babel. Several of these volunteers would be mooted as specific models for Jordan. They included the Coney Island muscleman, acrobat and adagio dancer Irving Goff, who famously went on to spring 300 Republican prisoners from a seaside fort and joined General “Wild Bill” Donovan's Office of Strategic Studies (a precursor to the CIA) in the Second World War. The daring Polish volunteer and guerrilla commander Antoni Chrost is another contender.
But what if Hemingway himself were the model for Jordan? “He fought now in this war because it had started in a country that he loved,” the author wrote of his hero, expressing his own thoughts. “And he believed in the Republic and that if it were destroyed life would be unbearable.”
Like Jordan, too, he knew guerrilla warfare provoked a constant inner battle against the “fear and apprehension” of being caught and shot. What's more, in a brief note held in the archive of poet and former International Brigades member Edwin Rolfe at the University of Illinois, Hemingway reveals that he personally carried out a frightening, behind-the-lines mission.
The note, published in 2012 in the American literary magazine The Antioch Review by the historian Peter Carroll, but otherwise unknown to the world (and absent from Mary V. Dearborn's 2017 biography), sees Hemingway at his most coarse and cryptic. Written to Rolfe in 1940, just as he was finishing For Whom the Bell Tolls, it reads: “O.K. Once I had to go to a town (I) will not name to check personally (knew many people there) on effect of something that happened from the air and its true effect. Also on possibility of rising there… And to carry dough… Was scare(d) pissless all the time, really scared… there is an indignity in that kind of finish that scares long in advance.”
There are no solid clues as to where Hemingway went, but the mission ended in failure. “On return had to report that they (1) hate our guts. 2. It would be pouring dough down a rathole. 3 Didn't trust the bastard(s w)ho were handling what there was,” he told Rolfe. “Report was considered defeatism of the deepest dye. Only (it) was true and save(d) much lives and money.”
Hemingway loved to place himself at the centre of everything, and often exaggerated. But was he a fantasist? I have been unable to find any reference to this mission in the International Brigades archive in Moscow, but then guerrilla operations are generally not recorded.
Carroll, the historian who found the note, does not believe he was making it up. “Hemingway's letter to Edwin Rolfe in 1940 conveys an authentic experience that the novelist undertook behind enemy lines. The level of danger, of course, is unknown, though Hemingway certainly felt endangered,” he told me, highlighting the phrase “scared pissless.” “That's how he felt. I don't think this was a made-up story; he had no reason to lie or exaggerate to Edwin Rolfe in a private letter.”
Whatever the true nature of his mission, Hemingway's dedication to the Republican cause was unquestionable. “I think it was the only time of his life when he was not the most important thing there was. He really cared about the Republic and he cared about that war,” wrote his new girlfriend, Martha Gellhorn, who became one of the world's first great female war correspondents. “I believe I never would have gotten hooked otherwise.”
His love of the foreign volunteers was genuine, too, even if he spent more time drinking whiskey with them at the Hotel Florida in Madrid than on the front. In fact, the mostly dormant Madrid front was only a short stroll away. “Ten blocks from the hotel, 15 blocks, a good brisk walk in the rain, something to circulate your blood,” as Gellhorn put it.
If Hemingway loved the International Brigades, the feeling was sometimes — but not always — mutual. He “had the calming effect of a buffalo straying shaggily over the tundra, knowing its waterholes and its pastures,” wrote German commissar Gustav Regler. “For him we had the scent of death, like the bullfighters, and because of this he was invigorated in our company.”
Milton Wolff, commander of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, called Hemingway a “tourist” and a “prick,” but noted that “he wants very much to be a martyr.” The future Hollywood screenwriter Alvah Bessie found him to be a “man who could be loyal, generous, warm and modest,” but also “cruel, petty, a braggart, a bully, an anti-Semite and a permanent adolescent.” On an unannounced visit to the British Battalion, Hemingway was told to “piss off ” by commander Fred Copeman — one of 2,500 British and Irish volunteers, 540 of whom died.
The more radical International Brigade veterans were furious that communists, who accounted for half of the volunteers, were portrayed in For Whom the Bell Tolls as ruthless killers, but Hemingway never stopped praising the men and women who fought fascism while their governments pursued “non-intervention” in Spain.
Gellhorn recalled him weeping after the International Brigades were disbanded in 1938, especially when he discovered that his good friend, the Garibaldi Battalion commander Randolfo Pacciardi, was now a penniless exile. “All of a sudden I heard Ernest, leaning against the wall, on the steps, and crying. I never saw him cry before or since,” she wrote. It may have been the moment she decided to become his third wife. “I really did love E then,” she added.
The Republic lost the war in 1939, ushering in Franco's 36-year dictatorship. Hemingway wrote a tender poem to the dead American volunteers, whose ranks the wounded Jordan expects to join as he lies in enemy territory at the end of For Whom the Bell Tolls. It is addressed to those left lying under Spanish earth, and ends: “No men ever entered earth more honourably than those who died in Spain, having already achieved immortality.”
Perhaps Hemingway realized that, had things gone wrong on that mysterious “mission,” he might have been lying with them.
I HEARD ERNEST, LEANING AGAINST THE WALL, ON THE STEPS, AND CRYING. I NEVER SAW HIM CRY BEFORE OR SINCE.