Dead Friends Walking

The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passos and The Murder of Jose Robles, by Stephen Koch. New York: Counterpoint (a member of the Perseus Books Group), 2005. Trade paperback, $15.95.

Reviewed by Kelley Dupuis

In the first definitive biography of Hemingway, published in 1969, Carlos Baker wrote that the Spanish Civil War had cost Hemingway many friends, “including many like [John] Dos Passos who were not killed.”

The Spanish Civil War ended a lot of friendships in the 1930s. And dreams. This dress-rehearsal for World War II had on one side a crazy-quilt of leftist brigades and militias, ranging from anarchists to Trotskyites to Stalinists, and on the other, right-wing forces representing Spain’s old regime, led by General Francisco Franco. Hitler and Mussolini backed and armed the Fascist side and Stalin armed and (sort of) backed the Republican side (while at the same time co-opting and periodically having portions of it murdered, Stalin’s familiar m.o.)

Both sides lied and killed routinely, but if there was one area in which the Communists were always a step ahead of the Fascists, it was propaganda. Fascist lies were bare-faced and chiefly meant for home consumption; they didn’t care if the world believed them or not. The Communists were craftier, and much, much better at P.R. The Communists lied so well, on a global scale, and kept their real identities and motives so well concealed through various front organizations, that legions were duped into thinking that the Spanish “republic,” inclining toward Stalin and stacked in favor of his particular brand of totalitarianism, really was a “democracy,” and worth fighting for. Shortly after the outbreak of the war in 1936, western intellectuals flocked to Spain to fight for the Spanish Republic, the side backed by the Comintern and its propaganda wing, the Popular Front. They had swallowed whole, and happily, the PF pitch that you were either for the Republic or for the Fascists, and if you weren’t part of the solution you were part of the problem, etc. etc. So off they went, humming the “Internationale.” (Not everyone was so sanguine. Ezra Pound, who would later do radio broadcasts for Mussolini, called the Spanish war “an emotional luxury for a gang of sap-headed idiots.”) But many of those intellectuals, lightheaded from sipping at the bong pipe of Greenwich Village or Oxbridge Marxism, soon discovered to their dismay (and sometimes heartbreak) that the Spanish conflict they dreamed of, a black-and-white struggle of good guys (left) versus bad guys (right), was doomed. Spain was like stepping through Lewis Carroll’s looking glass. Nothing was as it seemed. Some, disillusioned, abandoned the left. Some clung to their faith and denounced the backsliders as traitors and fifth columnists. Some vacillated. Many died. Many who didn’t die went home and never spoke to each other again. Some wrote bitter memoirs or ferocious satires, (think of George Orwell.) Some lapsed into a lifetime of embarrassed silence.

None of these destroyed friendships was more noticed in the world media than that between John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway. And the crisis of the doomed friendship, its “breaking point” to use Koch’s title, was the murder of Dos Passos’ old friend Jose Robles Pazos.

Dos Passos and Robles had met, on a Spanish train, in 1916 when they were both in their early twenties. Dos Passos was visiting Spain to study art, chiefly because Spain was a neutral country and his wealthy father wanted to keep him away from World War I. Robles was a native Spaniard who shared his deep knowledge of and love for his country and its culture with his new friend. They also shared a vision of Spain, at some time in the future, as a socialistic utopia shorn of its old regime, no longer ruled, as it had been for centuries, by a triumvirate of monarchy, army and church.

Twenty years later, when the Spanish war broke out, the now-completely radicalized Robles saw his dream of revolution coming true. He had been living in the United States, teaching Spanish at Johns Hopkins University. But he was in Spain when the war broke out and decided not to return to the U.S. He was made a lieutenant colonel in the Republican army and soon rose to prominence in the new government. But apparently he made the mistake of jotting down some notes on the war in a notebook and telling a few friends that he was planning to write a book when the war was over. One night there came a knock on the door of the apartment he shared with his wife and children in Valencia. A person or persons unknown searched the apartment without a warrant or an explanation, found the notebook they were looking for, slapped handcuffs on Robles and, without a charge being made, took him away. He was shot, apparently without any kind of trial, and then buried in a place that remains unknown to this day.

When the war began, Hemingway and Dos Passos had been friends for almost two decades. Dos Passos’ father had died in 1917. With the old man out of the way and World War I still going on, the son went ahead and volunteered as an ambulance driver in Italy. There he met Hemingway, who was performing the same service. Three years older than Hemingway, Dos Passos also became an established writer first, publishing Three Soldiers shortly after the war ended. When Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley Richardson, were living in Paris in the 1920s, Dos Passos often saw them as he passed through town. Dos Passos’ wife, Katy, was actually an old high school girlfriend of Hemingway’s. Dos Passos’ brilliant Manhattan Transfer was published in 1925, when Hemingway’s first novel, The Sun Also Rises, had not yet appeared. When Hemingway’s first marriage ended, it was Dos Passos who suggested that Key West, Florida would be a good place for him to live with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer. Dos and Katy often visited the Hemingways there.

But things had already begun to sour between the two novelists even before the experience of Spain put the final nail in the coffin of their friendship. As Koch points out, one of the darkest sides of Hemingway’s dark nature was his habit of troweling around blame. He had a paranoid streak which grew to something near psychosis by the time he died. He was quick to see perfidy and betrayal everywhere he looked. Dos had introduced Hemingway to the wealthy Gerald and Sara Murphy, a glamorous 1920s couple immortalized (to their displeasure) in Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night. It was through the Murphys, in turn, that Pauline introduced herself into Hemingway’s circle. After he had left Hadley to marry Pauline, the demons of guilt which were never far away managed to persuade Hemingway that he and Hadley had lived an ideal, romantic existence until their Eden was invaded and wrecked by serpents, and those serpents had names. The breakup of something so perfect as his marriage to Hadley just had to be somebody else’s fault. He decided to blame the Murphys, and by extension, Dos Passos. At the end of his life, in A Moveable Feast, Hemingway painted an extremely nasty picture of Dos, terming him a “pilot fish” of the Murphys. But Koch also makes clear that Hemingway had a habit of arranging such romantic triangles in order to burst out of one phase of his life and move on to the next, hence giving a rebirth-through-death to his art. He would do it again in the late 1930s when he jettisoned Pauline in favor of Martha Gellhorn, the glamorous young journalist whose romance with Hemingway flowered in Spain. “By creating another of his love triangles,” Koch writes, “Hemingway was looking not just for a new woman. He was after renewal as an artist.” (pp. 209). Although Koch does not refer to it, the passage calls to mind Fitzgerald’s prescient remark that Hemingway was going to need “a new wife for each book.” His marriage to Pauline had produced A Farewell to Arms (1929). But by 1936, the year he met Gellhorn, Hemingway had written himself into a corner with the second-rate and nearly-unfinishable To Have and Have Not. His liaison with Gellhorn (they married in 1940) and his experiences in Spain would result in For Whom The Bell Tolls, but as was always the case with Hemingway, the cost was high.

Spain limned the final break between Hemingway and Dos Passos, and Jose Robles’ murder was key to it, because it was an eye-opener for Dos, whereas Hemingway’s eyes remained stubbornly, willfully, shut. Whether he knew it or not, Hemingway had been courted, and was now being duped, by the Popular Front. It’s a supreme irony that Hemingway, who always boasted of having the inside dope, the “true gen” as he called it, was now indirectly serving the Comintern as one of Lenin’s famous “useful idiots.” Stalin’s apparatchiks in Spain stayed busy, in Koch’s words, “keeping Hemingway seeing and saying what the Popular Front wanted him to see and say…” (pp.98-99). Meanwhile, learning that his friend Robles had disappeared, Dos Passos made the rounds of officialdom to try and learn his fate as a favor to Robles’ wife. He encountered bureaucratic evasion and stonewalling at every turn. Since the Republican side in the war had been successful in co-opting Hemingway, they didn’t need Dos Passos and let him know it. Scornful of the way Dos Passos was making a nuisance of himself trying to trace Robles, Hemingway and Gellhorn both treated him coldly when he caught up with them in Madrid. Gellhorn claimed that Dos’ efforts were “embarrassing” both of them, (one wonders why) while Hemingway sneered that Dos shouldn’t worry about “your professor bloke’s disappearance.” “People disappear every day,” he said, reminding Dos that such things simply happened in war. When Dos Passos confronted Hemingway with his own doubts about the rightness of fighting a war for civil liberties in which civil liberties were destroyed along the way, Hemingway responded, incredibly, “Civil liberties, shit. Are you with us or against us?” (Here one is tempted to use Koch’s sometimes-tiresome technique of loading the narrative with his own interjected questions and ask, “Us?”)

In a chilling scene, Hemingway is engineered, through a carefully-orchestrated contact with Greenwich Village journalist Josephine Herbst, into informing Dos Passos, in the middle of a gala party no less, that Robles has been shot “as a fascist spy,” a lie that Hemingway was only too happy to believe. Koch’s account of the glee Hemingway took in his messenger role that day, as he and Dos Passos sat together at the same table, is a very ugly picture indeed. “Hemingway was grinding away especially hard on his own newfound certainty that Robles had been a traitor,” Koch writes. “Jose Robles was not simply a man in trouble: he had been shot as a proven fascist collaborator, a renegade, a dirty spy, a betrayer of his friends. He’d been exposed, tried and shot for treachery, fair and square. So it was time to stop the hand wringing and the whining. Dos’ friend was a fascist, and he’d gotten what he deserved.” (pp. 154.) Hemingway’s certainty on these points was based upon information that Herbst had been given in conversation by one of Stalin’s henchmen in Spain. Hemingway never bothered to so much as ask its source. It was what he wanted to think, and what the Popular Front wanted him say.

If the snapshot is a typical illustration of how the Spanish war divided opinion, (and admittedly, very little involving a man as complicated as Ernest Hemingway could be called “typically” anything) then it’s small wonder that Spain ended so many friendships among western intellectuals. To Hemingway’s credit, after his intoxication with the Popular Front had passed, he gradually recovered a degree of equanimity, starting with a story called Old Man At The Bridge, two short pages of remarkably un-propagandistic prose about the Spanish war, and then going much further in For Whom The Bell Tolls. In fact, For Whom The Bell Tolls ultimately caused Hemingway to fall from grace with the left, as it abandoned the black hat-vs.-white hat, democracy-vs.-fascism view of the war that the left had been peddling and presented a more balanced picture of the horrors.

When Spain ceased to be of strategic interest to Stalin, he simply withdrew his support for the Republic’s cause. Japan had invaded China by late 1938, and Stalin turned his attention to the east. With Soviet support for Republican Spain withdrawn, Franco triumphed by the spring of 1939. In one way the collapse of la causa came as a relief to Hemingway, in that it liberated him, as Koch says, from all the lying and complicity that being a good stooge required. One of the best turns of phrase in Koch’s story occurs near the end, summing up the dynamics of Hemingway’s experience in Spain nicely:

“He [Hemingway] had entered into a faustian bargain with the Popular Front. Yet this time, and for once, Faust got lucky. When Stalin pulled the plug on the Popular Front, it was Mephistopheles who was first to back out of the deal.” (pp. 276).

Hemingway and Dos Passos would never be friends again, although Hemingway did later come to regret what he called “my self-righteous period in Spain” and the lost friendships that resulted from it. Koch concludes his tale on a touching note, in fact, mentioning that amidst the hell of Hemingway’s last days, when his “paranoia and psychotic depression” (pp. 280) were in the final stages of bringing him and the shotgun with which he would take his own head off face-to-face, a few get-well notes did come in, and one of them, “especially warm, playful and concerned,” was from Dos.

But The Breaking Point is a cautionary tale for those who would make a fetish of “commitment,” particularly intellectuals who would do so. Reviewing this same book in The New Yorker, George Packer wrote, “Intellectuals can hardly keep away from politics any more than other citizens, and probably less, especially in decades like the nineteen-thirties (or this one, for that matter). But, because they typically bring to it an unstable mix of abstraction and narcissism, their judgments tend to be absolute, when nothing in politics ever is.”

One can almost see Stalin grinning, his pipe clenched in his teeth. After all, Stalin was the man who famously remarked that the death of one person is a tragedy, while the death of millions is a statistic. Friendships too.

Kelley Dupuis - July 2007

Kelley Dupuis is one of the most informative people on Hemingway we have ever come across. He can help American students with their studies on Hemingway, but please respect his immense literary insight and knowledge and do not ask him to do your homework. Your understanding of Hemingway comes from your own personal research. Kelley Dupuis can help with his literary insight of Hemingway but his help is for serious students of Hemingway. Thanks. kelley@kelleydupuis.com

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