The Insider, page 29
These sentiments were shared by the vast majority of American literati. In the spring of 1938 the League of American Writers published a thick pamphlet titled Writers Take Sides, summarizing the results of a poll of 418 authors on their opposition to Franco and support of Republican Spain. Only 7 writers, including the poets E. E. Cummings and Robinson Jeffers, declared themselves neutral, and just one brave soul, Gertrude Atherton, offered support for Franco and fascism over what, she argued, was de facto communism. All the rest echoed the sentiments of Ernest Hemingway—“Just like any honest man I am against Franco and fascism”—though few emulated his terseness.
Late that evening at dinner the writer-delegates from the International Brigade were singing marching songs when the hotel began to shake from a new Fascist bombardment. A hundred writers were herded in darkness to the lowest floors to wait it out. Their reactions varied from near-hysteria to stoic calm. When the explosions let up, Cowley, Strong, and the English delegation left the hotel to witness a conflagration two blocks away. The apocalyptic spectacle put him in a somber mood: “The end of the world, I think, will be like this—not a sudden immense catastrophe but a slow attrition, as in Madrid…not a great disaster but an accumulation of small disasters, while people carry on their business and try to repair the damage, never quite fast enough to keep up with the attacks of the enemy.”
Cowley would spend ten more days in Spain, including two more sessions of the Congress, one in Valencia on July 10 and a concluding one in Barcelona on July 12. Air raids aside, he did not see much of the war. The closest he came to the front lines was a tour with twenty other writers to Guadalajara to the northeast, where the war had ground down to a stalemate: impregnable Fascist and Loyalist trenches two thousand yards apart, too distant for either side to inflict much damage. Moving on to Brihuega, a ravaged town that four months earlier had been the site of a fierce battle, he and Anna Louise Strong stopped by a fountain, where she proceeded to take pictures of a little Spanish boy “against a background of utter ruin and desolation.” Looking at his face, Cowley thought of the far luckier children of Sherman, Connecticut. He had already on more than one occasion found himself enchanted by the children of Spain and moved by their plight. He suddenly made a startling decision.
“Listen, Anna Louise,” he declared. “Why couldn’t I adopt some Spanish children and take them back to the States—four or five of them, perhaps, or three? I think they are the finest kids in the world.” Strong, who had spent a good deal of time in Spain and knew its bureaucratic ins and outs well, said there was no reason this could not be arranged. So Cowley shortly found himself being interviewed in Madrid by the woman in charge of war orphans, of whom there were quite a few, the result in part of the indiscriminate Fascist bombardment of civilians. In under an hour the arrangements were concluded: The authorities would pick out two girls and a boy between three and five years of age—“the children of workers, not rich people or intellectuals,” she was careful to explain—for adoption. Meanwhile, Cowley traveled to Valencia to arrange passage for his charges on the airliner that flew to France. All that was left to do was to arrange for the children’s passports at the American consulate there. However, the vice-consul informed him that adopting a child did not exempt that child from the immigration quotas set for Spain, and only 252 Spanish immigrants a year were being allowed into the country. So he really couldn’t be of any help in this case, but in a clumsy attempt to be reassuring, the vice-consul said, “If the children stay in Madrid, I’m sure they’ll be taken care of.”
“Yes, Franco’s bombers will take care of them,” Cowley replied bitterly. He was so ashamed of this outcome that he asked Strong to go in his stead to the children’s bureau to explain the result. The American official may have done Cowley a favor. The desire to adopt, while sincere, was not at all thought out. He had not asked his wife, Muriel, how she might feel about taking in three Spanish war orphans, when the burden of raising them would have fallen on her.
The other players in the drama of the civil war who most attracted his sympathies were the American volunteers of the International Brigade, the members of the Lincoln Battalion. Three thousand–plus soldiers of the Fifteenth International Brigade had been used as cannon fodder in the fighting along the Jarama River earlier that year and taken fearful casualties; the Americans lost almost a third of their men in a half hour’s fighting. They had spent seventy-six straight days on the front lines, and then, after a few days’ respite, were sent back. Cowley deeply admired their courage, endurance, and unshakable devotion to the cause of the Republic under the most trying circumstances.
He visited several hospitals to speak to the wounded American volunteers. He found most of the hospitals “good by wartime standards,” but “[one] of them—Hospital 16—was bad by any standard.” It was crowded with cots holding the seriously hurt, and the general conditions were hot and dangerously unsanitary, with unemptied bedpans, blood-spotted sheets, buzzing flies, and few nurses or doctors around. Cowley and Dick Mowrer asked one “wounded boy” if they could do anything for him, but he stubbornly maintained that everything was fine, unwilling probably to register a complaint about conditions in front of two newsmen. For the most part, though, the Americans he spoke to in those hospitals were well cared for and in good spirits. They shared their battlefield experiences frankly, but without bitterness or complaint, despite reasons for both.
Cowley would be haunted by these men of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion and their fate for the rest of his life. One of the last and longest pieces he ever wrote, “Lament for the Abraham Lincoln Battalion,” ran in The Sewanee Review in the summer of 1984, when he was eighty-six years old. He described their experiences in battle, sad chronicles of incompetent leadership, coldhearted calculation, and human waste. He also evoked how poorly the survivors among these idealists, who gave their all for a doomed cause, were treated once the civil war ended: hounded by the FBI, howled down in Congress and persecuted in the right-wing press, and used by the Communist Party for fundraising purposes but given little in the way of help in gaining employment or medical treatment. Cowley’s verdict on them and their fate was bleak and bitter: “The plain facts to remember are that the volunteers offered themselves unselfishly, that all of them suffered, and that half of them died of their wounds. Their zeal and their losses both made them resemble medieval crusaders; Spain was their Holy Land. Like earlier crusaders they were massacred by their enemies and used without compunction by their allies. The part they played in the Spanish war now seems a long record of heroism and victimage.”
Cowley never spoke or wrote about how much of the Soviet control of the Republic’s conduct of the civil war he knew about. It is telling, though, that Cowley would steadfastly avoid reading George Orwell’s classic memoir Homage to Catalonia until 1978. And it would take him until 1982 to publish an essay bluntly titled “No Homage to Catalonia.” He offers due praise for Orwell’s vivid account of the misery of life on the Aragon front, the accuracy of his firsthand reports from Barcelona, and his “poet’s intuition of the future”—of the prospect of a repressive social order built on a foundation of lies. But he dissents against Orwell’s case for the Catalonian “revolution-firsters,” whose blind passion for, in his view, their own social revolution led them to fight harder against the “victory-firsters”—the Republican government and their Communist supporters—than against the Fascists. His view in 1982 was very much the same view as he had in 1937: “The Communists advocated a policy for Spain”—victory first, social revolution to come later—“that was in many ways inescapably logical, and right.” The difference in 1982 was that Cowley was also forced to acknowledge the “terrible flaws” in the pursuit of that policy: the ruthless tracking down of dissidents, the confessions extorted by torture, the secret executions, the systematic deployment of falsehoods against opponents. He ends the piece with a hedged mea culpa: “Totally engrossed by the war, I didn’t look hard for flaws in that stern but necessary program…. It wasn’t my business to examine closely into [the Russians’] manner of being helpful.” Well, why wasn’t it?
John Dos Passos did, and Cowley’s time in Spain and the convictions he formed there would lead to an unfortunate conflict with him. In early March of 1937, Dos Passos sailed to Europe, chiefly to write and produce the documentary movie The Spanish Earth, along with Dutch documentary filmmaker Joris Ivens and Hemingway.
Dos Passos’s first stop in Spain was Valencia, the capital, to get his correspondent’s credentials in order and to look up an old friend and translator of his, José Robles. Robles was the scion of an aristocratic Spanish family who had returned to Spain to work on the Republic’s side, first as a cultural attaché and later as an interpreter for the ranking Soviet general Goriev. Others in his family were working on the side of the Nationalists; his brother was an officer in Franco’s army. Locating Robles proved impossible because, as his distraught wife would tearfully inform Dos Passos, he had been arrested several weeks earlier and was being held under conditions of total secrecy. Dos Passos recalled something that the Italian anarchist Carlo Tresca had warned him of at dinner before he boarded his ship: “If the Communists don’t like a man in Spain, right away they shoot him.”
In fact, José Robles had already been shot and killed by the Communists, for reasons that remain unclear. This was already known to two Americans, the writer Josephine Herbst, who had been told of it in strict confidence in Valencia, and Liston Oak, who worked in the Propaganda Department of the Republic. But no one dared to inform Dos Passos of this in the atmosphere of supercharged paranoia, so he was reduced to frantically canvassing the government offices in Valencia and then in Madrid for news of his friend’s fate, only to be given the runaround with empty reassurances that Robles would soon be found. He finally learned the truth of Robles’s execution from the head of the Republican counterespionage service.
Dos Passos’s search made many people deeply nervous or annoyed, no one more than his friend Ernest Hemingway. He complained that Dos Passos’s persistent inquiries were stirring up trouble and casting a shadow on all the international correspondents with the Spanish government. Hemingway also accused Dos Passos of being naive about where things really stood politically. Hemingway always felt that he had the inside line, and he had been convinced by his sources that Robles had probably been a traitor and deserved his execution. He callously shared all this with Dos Passos at a ceremonial luncheon for one of the International Brigades.
The resulting rift between the two men would never heal. The disheartened Dos Passos remained in Spain for two weeks, but he distanced himself from the making of the film. He attempted to get a death certificate so his friend’s destitute wife could get life insurance money to live on. Far from being naive, he was much better informed than Hemingway on the truth of how it stood in Spain. In his view Hemingway had been played perfectly by the Communists. In late April, Dos Passos left to return to Paris and the States, stopping in Barcelona to interview the soon-to-be murdered Andrés Nin. While he was there he also had a bracing and frank conversation with George Orwell, recently back from the front. On the way back across the border into France, Dos Passos allowed a badly frightened Liston Oak to travel with him in the guise of his assistant, perhaps saving him from the same end as Robles.
Hemingway, for his part, took revenge on Dos Passos by energetically putting about libels, such as that he was a Trotskyite and that he had fled Madrid in cowardly fear for his life after the first night of bombing. He would eventually write a polemical play titled The Fifth Column that posits that Madrid was rife with traitors like Robles who deserved exactly the same fate. In a scurrilous 1938 article in a short-lived magazine called Ken, Hemingway caricatured Dos Passos as a bald-pated, nearsighted journalist whose dispatch accusing the Republican government of the murder of thousands of their own Loyalists only he, Hemingway, was able to prevent from reaching print—a malignant fabrication in every detail, Dos Passos’s pate and eyesight aside.
When Hemingway set his mind to put something about, it really got about. Upon his return to the States, Dos Passos would begin to be shunned and even pilloried by his former friends and admirers on the left for his, to them, inexplicable apostasy in the matter of the noble cause of the Spanish Republic. The affair accelerated his already well-advanced process of disillusionment with communism and its People’s Front facade.
At their stormy final meeting in Paris at the end of April, in response to Dos Passos’s assertion that he would tell the truth as he had learned it of José Robles’s murder, Hemingway predicted, “You do that and the New York reviewers will kill you. They will demolish you forever.” Hemingway spoke the truth. The predicted crucifixion would arrive in 1939 with the publication of his first novel since the triumph of The Big Money, Adventures of a Young Man. Cowley hammered in one of the nails in the pages of The New Republic.
Dos Passos’s novel is a kind of inverted Pilgrim’s Progress, in which a thwarted idealist, Glenn Spotswood, travels through many of the familiar episodes of left radical activism to enlist in the International Brigade in Spain—only to arrive not at some political Celestial City but at an engineered battlefield death for his ideological unreliability. It is the product of Dos Passos’s comprehensive disillusionment with the ceaseless dissembling and manipulations of the Communists, and his bitterness over the murder of his friend Robles. But while U.S.A. was the epic result of a vast and many-peopled argument against the spiritual depredations of American life, Adventures of a Young Man narrows Dos Passos’s vision down to a thesis-driven and predictable exercise in revenge.
The attacks came from various angles. In the Marxist New Masses, the reviewer Samuel Sillen called the novel “a crude piece of Trotskyist agit-prop” and proclaimed that Dos Passos’s “literary failure is very definitely related to his reactionary political orientation.” Reviewers from publications closer to the political center were more inclined to regret the book’s decline in quality from the literary heights of the U.S.A. trilogy and blame its deficiencies on its overly explicit and narrow political content. Clifton Fadiman’s verdict in The New Yorker was typical: “Whatever representative value the story has is marred by the introduction of a special theme—intra-Communist party politics…the general reader is hardly apt to get all heated up over it.” Mary McCarthy wrote the shrewdest and most honest critique in Partisan Review. While praising the novel for “its honesty, its courage, its intellectual clarity,” she deemed it an “unsatisfactory book” for its absence of simple human feeling. The intellectuals with whom Glenn Spotswood consorts she found to be “harsh and repulsive caricatures” and he himself was reduced to “the status of a stooge.”
Malcolm Cowley’s review in The New Republic, bluntly titled “Disillusionment,” stood out from the others. He took Adventures of a Young Man quite personally and as a result wrote an extremely personal and hurtful review. Much like McCarthy’s, his negative literary judgment of the book hinges on Spotswood’s being “simply not interesting or strong enough to carry the burden of the story.” But the real intent of the piece is to deliver a lecture to Dos Passos about his political naivete from his, Cowley’s, wised-up perspective as to the real facts in Spain. He rehashes the Robles affair and the painful crack-up with Hemingway with such smug and mistaken asides as “People who ought to know tell me that the evidence against him was absolutely damning.” From start to finish, the piece is cocksure and condescending.
If Cowley’s intention was to wound John Dos Passos, he succeeded. The implications of the piece forced Dos Passos’s hand and he had to write a dignified letter to the magazine in self-defense, outlining what he had discovered before he felt entirely comfortable that he had gleaned all that could be learned about the death of José Robles. It must have been a painful exercise to have to do so prematurely. This sentence captures the tone of the letter: “As the insurance has not yet been paid I am sure that Mr. Cowley will understand that any evidence he may have in his possession as to how Jose Robles met his death will be of great use to his wife and daughter, and I hope he will be good enough to communicate it to me.”
American literary history offers few more painful ironies than the contrast between the effect that the Spanish Civil War had on the careers of John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway. Dos Passos went to Spain, saw beneath the surface of events, and got almost everything right, and yet the novel that resulted essentially put paid to his stature as one of the reigning giants of American literature. Hemingway went to Spain, was expertly manipulated, and saw only the surface of events through the distorting lens of his giant ego, and got many important things wrong. Yet the novel he quarried from that experience, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), became one of his bestselling and most highly regarded novels and one that revived his critical reputation, which had been flagging throughout the thirties. Cowley would give it a rave review in The New Republic, calling it “certainly the best and richest of his novels.”
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In 1936, F. Scott Fitzgerald published one of the most famous literary artifacts of the thirties, his essay “The Crack-Up,” an intimate account of his spiritual depletion. Malcolm Cowley returned from Spain in 1937 to confront a different kind of crack-up occurring in his world, that of the literary-cultural left. Despite the camouflage afforded by the apparent unanimity of support for Loyalist Spain, the fissures dividing the different groups were already well advanced and now ever-widening. As one of the most highly visible fellow travelers on the scene, he attracted a great deal of attention, much of it unfriendly. He was forced to navigate many tricky and perilous fault lines and, in doing so, made a number of serious mistakes and missteps that would haunt him for the rest of his life. He would place himself in the unenviable position of essentially having few or even no allies. The Communist Party, the Socialists, the Trotskyists, quite a few liberals, and the anti-Communists all had him on their do-down list, sometimes for similar, sometimes for different reasons. In the final years of the thirties, Malcolm Cowley would undergo his own politically charged version of Fitzgerald’s crack-up, with bitter and long-standing consequences.
