The Hemingway hodgepodge
I know I've touched on Hemingway before; Hemingway is one of the handful of real persons identified in
S. In Footnote 2, F.X. Caldeira describes Ernest Hemingway, though originally an admirer, as one of "Straka's harshest critics." In 1935, Hemingway was reputed to have given a interview to Le Monde stating his high regard for Straka. There is no way that Le Monde could have interviewed him in 1935 since Le Monde didn't exist until 1944.
Le Monde started on December 19, 1944 using the same building, machines and masthead of its predecessor, the most circulated paper in France,
Le Temps, which shut down after the liberation of France under accusations of Nazi collaboration.
It is known that Hemingway could be spiteful. I've talked about Dos Passos before, whose friend Jose Robles was most likely assassinated during the KGB purges that took place during the Spanish Civil War. David Burke, author of
Writers in Paris called
A Moveable Feast a hatchet job on the people he once associated with, not unlike the mythical
A Swindle of Cowbirds by Guthrie MacInnes. And as Malcolm Cowley noted to the
Paris Review:
"Hemingway had the bad habit of never forgiving anyone for giving him a hand up."
Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, T.S. Eliot, among others, became targets for his spiteful behavior.
Also interesting is the coded reference to the loss of Straka's valise which mirrors an incident in Hemingway's own life. Hemingway's first wife, Hadley, accidently lost a satchel full of his writings on a train in Europe. Hemingway was deeply upset with the loss and there has been much speculation that given Hemingway's personality, it was something he ultimately couldn't forgive.
In case you missed my earlier posts about John Dos Passos, his break from Hemingway occurred due to the murder of Dos Passos' friend, Jose Robles. Robles was Spanish and was the one who introduced Dos Passos to bull fighting, who in turn, introduced Hemingway to the spectacle. It was Robles who introduced Dos Passos to Spanish culture; and it was Robles who noted that the culture was static, unchanging, and stagnating.
Robles' death galvanized something in Dos Passos and marked the beginning of his political reversal into conservative politics. Dos Passos began to understand that revolution meant nothing without civil liberties, and that communism as administered by the Russians only replaced one form of repression with another. Dos Passos was understandably distraught from Roble's disappearance and when he sought help from Hemingway, was labelled a traitor to the communist cause by Hemingway and Gellhorn who felt that Robles was a fascist spy.
In page 6 of
Ship of Theseus, Eric and Jen discuss the death of Amarante Durand, supposedly shot by the fascists during the Spanish Civil War after being thrown from a roof. Dos Passos, Hemingway and Gellhorn are mentioned in the marginalia as having knowledge of the murder. It is hinted that Dos Passos knew the full details of Durand's death. It's likely though, that Dos Passos never knew the full details of Roble's murder during his lifetime. According to the author Stephen Koch, Robles was killed because as a translator for the Soviets, he knew too much about their activities.
The Spanish Civil War is discussed again later in the marginalia by Eric and Jen, but the timelines are off from the actual events. Page 186 discusses the events again and mentions an October 1937, photo from the Hotel Florida in Madrid. From my research, I know that Robles disappeared in early 1937. Dos Passos left Spain in May 1937 with Liston Oak, saving Oak's life in the process. Hemingway and Dos Passos were both on their way back to the states later that month. And before Dos Passos left, he had an interesting and engaging conversation with the young man later known by his pen name, George Orwell, who had been on the front lines. Hemingway was a known admirer of Orwell, but it's very possible that the feeling was not
mutual. Hemingway seemed to have a knack for self-deception and confabulation. Stephen Koch notes in
The Breaking Point:
"He [Orwell] was not unduly impressed by the power of language to intoxicate. It was a little too close to the original sin of language: the power to lie. His supreme test for seriousness in any writer was whether she or he knew how to undo a lie."
Also, it is mentioned in the marginalia on page 186 that Hemingway made a pass at Durand and she punched him out. Interestingly, I can't find any record of a woman punching Hemingway, although several men had the opportunity throughout the years, including the poet, Charles Wallace Stevens. Hemingway did return to Spain with Gellhorn a few months later and finished his play, The Fifth Column, in December 1937.
And Hemingway's perception of the war is distorted in
For Whom the Bell Tolls according to Arturo Barea, who himself lived through the events in Spain (via
The New Yorker),
“I find myself awkwardly alone in the conviction that, as a novel about Spaniards and their war, it is unreal and, in the last analysis, deeply untruthful.”
And
The Guardian reported that Hemingway was a failed KGB spy according to Stalin-era archives. Hemingway was a volatile braggart who Gellhorn called "...the biggest liar since Munchausen."
Dates are off, perceptions are skewed, at times MacInnes seems to be analog for Hemingway with his
A Swindle of Cowbirds, as is Amarante Durand for Jose Robles. But then MacInnes is listed separately from Hemingway and in his own context, and seems to include echoes of Ford Madox Ford and Ezra Pound with their love lives. The timing for Amarante Durand's murder is off from Jose Robles, who was a translator, professor, and revolutionary. Robles was from the Spanish aristocracy, but Durand was French. And there was the conversation that Mystimus and I had regarding
Vonnegut.
And so we go back to burgoo. Even the theme of defenestration that appears in S. seems to be an allusion to layers, as the victims fall several stories, are they really falling through different books and/or authors?
