Mark Mason

Fighting talk, but little action

War was the thing he loved best, but he achieved surprisingly little in a lifetime’s struggle against fascism

On 11 May 1937, at the Gare St-Lazare in Paris, Ernest Hemingway said goodbye to a friend who was leaving Europe. Like Hemingway, John Dos Passos had been in Spain to support the Republic in its civil war against the fascist Franco. But he became disillusioned when the Soviets (also fighting against Franco) murdered someone he knew. As the train was about to leave, Hemingway asked Dos Passos not to report the event. Dos Passos refused: what was the point of fighting a war for civil liberties if you destroyed those liberties in the process? ‘Civil liberties, shit,’ replied Hemingway. ‘Are you with us or are you against us?’

The writer’s ‘at all costs’ opposition to fascism forms the theme of this book, an account of his fighting and spying adventures from the Spanish episode through the second world war to Castro’s revolution in Cuba. There was ‘only one form of government that cannot produce good writers’, said Hemingway in a speech, ‘and that system is fascism… a writer who will not lie cannot live and work under fascism.’ At this point you’re tempted to lump him in with today’s vacuous luvvies pontificating on politics as they collect the latest Oscar. But Hemingway was better than that, and knew exactly how liberated writers had become under Stalin. Years after that speech, he admitted that in Spain he’d become ‘so stinking righteous’ it gave him ‘the horrors to look back on’.

And he was always careful to insist that he was an anti-fascist, not a communist. This helps explain why he survived McCarthyism, and was never called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. A pity, really, because he told a friend that had the summons arrived he’d have said ‘slowly and carefully for the microphone’ that the committee members ‘appear to me to be cocksuckers’.

His actual achievements never amounted to very much.

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