Hemingway and the Spanish Civil War: The Distant Sound of Battle by Gilbert H. Muller (review)

This book, which closely follows Ernest Hemingway's involvement in the Spanish Civil War, seems to suffer an identity crisis. Is it a biography of Hemingway in these years? A study of his political commitment in the Spanish Civil War (SCW)? An examination of his diverse writing about the war? Unfortunately, in trying to be all, it fully succeeds in being none. Primarily, it's a biography of Hemingway's political commitment to and involvement in the SCW. As such, it is a detailed record of his comings and goings from 1937-1940 but also of his turbulent married and extramarital life in these years. These were extraordinarily busy years for Hemingway, with four trips to Spain and Paris and numerous journeys to the various battlefields of the war as observer and journalist—in addition to his trips back and forth to Key West, to Cuba, Bimini, New York, Wyoming, etc. Muller also discusses—alas, superficially—Hemingway's literary and journalistic output in these years: his dispatches for NANA, his articles for Ken, his play The Fifth Column, five short stories about the war, and of course, his culminating masterwork For Whom the Bell Tolls.

The book's strongest achievement is in its careful tracing of Hemingway's itinerary in Spain in covering the war for NANA and Ken. If you want to know which battle front he went to on what date, who accompanied him and what he experienced there, this is your book. In fact, it enabled me to discover a chronological error in my own book about Hemingway in this period.¹ Likewise, it follows Martha Gellhorn's even more peripatetic life and writings in this period and her continuous correspondence with Eleanor Roosevelt. But the book's biographical inclusiveness blurs this tight focus; otherwise, why would we need to read about Hemingway's affair with Jane Mason, for example?

Muller presents his thesis in the Preface: "This book asks readers to consider Hemingway's writing during the period framed by the Spanish Civil War as a coherent political project" (ix). And "coherent" supposedly applies to his political views also: "his abiding affection for [Spain] should have alerted critics to the anti-fascist, libertarian, incipiently anarchistic instincts that in a quirky way provided him with a coherent political philosophy" (14). "Quirky" indeed, that this self-professed libertarian² should so eagerly embrace the Communists' control of the war and their murderous repression of all other groups on the Left. But "coherent" is about the last word I would use to describes the wild fluctuations in his writing and political views about the war. Muller pays little attention, for example, to the startlingly uneven quality of Hemingway's dispatches for NANA: excellent on the local military strategy, unreliable on long-range predictions (biased by his need to maintain a positive outlook), and sometimes downright incoherent when he was likely drunk.³ Between these dashed-off and scatter-shot dispatches and the artistic control and complexity of For Whom the Bell Tolls lies a chasm that makes one wonder if they were written by the same person. And Hemingway's political views about the war were hardly "coherent" in his back flips from libertarian before Spain to unquestioning believer in the Communist Party line and actions in Spain (including the murder of José Robles), to disillusioned and privately pessimistic observer by October 1938, when he described the war to Max Perkins as a "carnival of treachery and rottenness on both sides" (Baker 334). It is disturbing that when Muller quotes this statement, even using it as a chapter title, he omits "on both sides."

Perhaps the strangest aspect of Muller's book is its frequent disconnect between vague generalizations that valorize Hemingway and evidence to the contrary sprinkled throughout the book. For example, Muller asserts at the beginning, end and in between that "Ernest Hemingway was at his best as a person...