I never liked Ernest Hemingway, and now here's another reason.

[Archae]

I felt he glorified war as the ultimate "manly pursuit," ignoring the innocents who always suffer.

Now it turns out the asshole wanted to be a KGB spy for Joe Stalin.

Up till now, this has been a notably cheerful year for admirers of Ernest Hemingway – a surprisingly diverse set of people who range from Michael Palin to Elmore Leonard. Almost every month has brought good news: a planned Hemingway biopic; a new, improved version of his memoir, A Moveable Feast; the opening of a digital archive of papers found in his Cuban home; progress on a movie of Islands in the Stream.

Last week, however, saw the publication of Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (Yale University Press), which reveals the Nobel prize-winning novelist was for a while on the KGB's list of its agents in America. Co-written by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev, the book is based on notes that Vassiliev, a former KGB officer, made when he was given access in the 90s to Stalin-era intelligence archives in Moscow.

Its section on the author's secret life as a "dilettante spy" draws on his KGB file in saying he was recruited in 1941 before making a trip to China, given the cover name "Argo", and "repeatedly expressed his desire and willingness to help us" when he met Soviet agents in Havana and London in the 40s. However, he failed to "give us any political information" and was never "verified in practical work", so contacts with Argo had ceased by the end of the decade. Was he only ever a pseudo-spook, possibly seeing his clandestine dealings as potential literary material, or a genuine but hopelessly ineffective one?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jul/09/hemingway-failed-kgb-spy

[HardTimes99]

2. Have you even bothered to read "A Farewell to Arms"??? - the

protagnist deserts, for Christ's sake. EH was no pro-war Yahoo!

[deutsey]

11. The Sun Also Rises also explores the moral and social decay after WWI

[HardTimes99]

16. I haven't read everything EH wrote, but have read the major novels and you have

to be reading with a pre-determined bias to get 'war as a test of manhood' out of his novels by equating the 'Hemingway code' into pro-war sentiment. I suppose one could say that EH valorizes war in For Whom the Bell Tolls, but it's war against Franco's fascists. And Robert Jordan, the protagonist, dies at the end. The love scenes in FWTBT are way better anyway. EH was a lover, not a fighter!

[AngryOldDem]

12. That's why he became an ambulance driver.

If he did want to spy for Stalin, I think it probably was from a sense of adventure more than anything else.

BTW...I like Hemingway. A lot. Many of today's writers could learn a lot from his starkness of prose.

[HardTimes99]

15. Way OT, but you will probably also enjoy the short fiction of Raymond Carver who was

also great with economy and letting silences do the talking. Carver's story "A Small, Good Thing" is probably one of the best examples of this.

[stevenleser]

28. Not to mention For Whom the Bell Tolls. That is no glorification of war novel. nt

[HardTimes99]

31. I agree, with the caveat that Hemingway (and his main character Robert Jordan)

were both resolutely anti-fascist and, if any war were going to be justifiable, it would be the war against fascism, as contrasted to World War I, a conflict between decadent empires, and one which Frederic Henry understandably bails out on.

[octoberlib]

3. It was the times.

For the first half of the 20th century, the CPUSA(Communist Party of America) was a highly influential force in various struggles for democratic rights. It played a prominent role in the U.S. labor movement from the 1920s through the 1940s, having a major hand in founding most of the country's first industrial unions (which would later use the McCarran Internal Security Act to expel their Communist members) while also becoming known for opposing racism and fighting for integration in workplaces and communities during the height of the Jim Crow period of U.S. racial segregation. Historian Ellen Schrecker concludes that decades of recent scholarship[3] offer "a more nuanced portrayal of the party as both a Stalinist sect tied to a vicious regime and the most dynamic organization within the American Left during the 1930s and '40s".[4]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_USA

[Douglas Carpenter]

4. willing to spy for the Soviets in 1941 is a very different context than how things turned out later

The Communist were largely seen in the late 30's and early 40's by almost everyone as leading the fight against the Nazis and the Fascist. Most people didn't know about Statin's atrocities at that point. In 1943 at the request of the FDR administration the movie, Mission to Moscow was made in Hollywood and released to assure the American public that The Soviets were our friends and Joe Stalin may have had his faults but was in fact a really nice guy - This popular mainstream movie which was applauded by the U.S. government itself even defended the purges of Stalin and the invasion of Finland. So, in the context of that time having a romanticized and very favorable view of the Soviet Union would have been very common among a certain wing of the international intellectual class. The timing in which Hemmingway volunteered to spy for the Soviets - was a very different time and context than if he had done so a decade or two later.

[Tom Ripley]

14. +1000

[HiPointDem]

5. You never liked him? Were you acquainted? I believe the US & USSR were allies 1941-1945 or

thereabouts. I think i remember something like that, anyhoo....

[BainsBane]

6. No one knew about Stalin's atrocities at that point

[Warpy]

8. Some information was starting to come out by then

and a lot of people (my mother included) abandoned the Party once they found out where Stalin was at and just how miserable he had made his people during his mad rush to drag the USSR from a feudal country into an industrial superpower. He did ultimately succeed, but the cost in human life was appalling.

However, during most of the 30s, the Communists were pretty much alone in standing up to Hitler and his sympathizers here. A lot of people went to meetings, leafleted, and supported the party then.

[LostOne4Ever]

7. My American literature and madness in literature professor

LOVED Hemmingway...but reading him was a struggle for me. He usually put me to sleep for most of the story.

[Warpy]

9. Me too. There wasn't much for women to relate to in most

of his novels. "A Farewell to Arms" was arguably the most accessible.

As far as manly men went, I preferred Kenneth Roberts.

[HardTimes99]

17. If you want to understand the power of silence in fiction, read EH's short story "Hills Like

White Elephants," as powerful for what is not said as for what is said.

[MADem]

10. Eh...he was a booze hound; maybe he thought there was a paycheck in it. nt

[bemildred]

13. He wrote some good books, he was a seminal influence in English letters.

But I never liked him much either, and mainly for the macho bullshit too.

[HardTimes99]

18. It was a different age back then, with different standards and codes. The

male narrator and hero of The Sun Also Rises, Jake Barnes, has lost his 'macho bullshit' (and possibly his male 'business' to boot) from a war wound. Barnes and Brett still partake of the Hemingway code (exemplified through the ethos of bull-fighting), but I've just never felt an overwhelming 'macho bullshit' vibe off the novel.

But I'm a man, so there you have it

[bemildred]

19. Yeah, I know.

It's not personal, I've just never liked that stuff, and I'm a guy too. Mostly the "big man" aspects of it. As long as you are not into bullying, you can be as tough as you like by me. And killing animals for "sport" I can do without too, if you kill it, you better eat it.

[Douglas Carpenter]

20. that was back when leftist were real men and knew how to kick ass

I'm being facetious of course. But back in those days being radically left-wing just did not carry the image of Prius driving, Birkenstock wearing, Pinot Noir sipping, organic farming metro-sexual, "Modern Family" sensitive men.

[bemildred]

21. There is some truth in that, Orwell sure walked it the way he talked it. nt

[hughee99]

22. Billy Jack, where have you gone. n/t

[ismnotwasm]

23. He's a great writer

I read a lot of his stuff, and got tired of the macho, sexist crap. But as far as being a wordsmith, he is up there with the greats and no personal dislike of mine is ever going to change that.

I don't think he was an anti-American spy per se being a communist sympathizer was popular for many back then--almost a fad-- and this would fit his search of 'adventure'

(Besides using the book "A Farewell To Arms" to contain Ash's possessed chopped off forearm in "Evil Dead 2" was comedic genius and we would have missed out on on it if he never wrote that book)

[LanternWaste]

24. it's not too great a stretch to liken this to American pilots in 1939-1941 who fought under British

I've found it a great relief to separate the art from the artist, else I'd be very, very bored in my off-time.

Additionally, it also helps to know not only his writings, and the genesis of those writings, but also the political feel of the late twenties and early thirties. For example, For Whom the Bell Tolls was written in, during, and about the Spanish Civil War which was fought (on the Republican side) by and large Soviet proxies... including the American Abraham Lincoln brigade-- which was considered an heroic unit for standing up to and against Fascism.

The enemy, Fascism. The ally, Socialism and Communism.

So it's not too great a stretch to liken this to American pilots in 1939-1941 who fought under British command (our ally) against the Germans (our de-facto enemy).

[Demoiselle]

25. I probably wouldn't like him either.

But any writer who can get me to cry while I'm sitting on a beautiful beach without a care in the world has my unalloyed respect.(Islands in the Stream.) And, as my father said once, anybody who wasn't a Leftist in those days was a jerk.

[markiv]

26. Had to read 'the old man and the sea' in high school

kept wondering 'how long is this part about the guy talking to himself, while trying to real in the fish' was going to go on

AND IT WAS THE WHOLE F--KING BOOK!!!!!!!

[CTyankee]

27. I recently read A Moveable Feast and was struck by the man's sadness at the end of his

life. He realized he had REALLY screwed up when he foolishly lost the love of his first wife, Hadley. He said in Moveable Feast "I wish I had died before I loved anyone other than Hadley..." He realized that his best days were in Paris with her. He really felt his genius then. And, sure enough, he killed himself not too long after Feast was published.

It's a sad story...

[Generic Other]

29. He tried to be a man's man

but mostly he was just a scared little boy.

In so many ways, he acted like the male embodiment of Ayn Rand. A hell of a lot better writer though.

[Babel_17]

30. IIRC Hemingway was anti-fascist

And the most aggressive anti-fascists in Spain and Germany were the Communists.

So I'll cut Hemingway some slack if he sided with Commies over Hitler and Franco.

Naturally, if he put the blinders on after WWII, and our government stopped covering for Stalin, then I'll be less happy with him.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln_Brigade

Supporters of the Spanish Republicans

Paul Robeson -Honorary member
Dashiell Hammett
Lillian Hellman
Gypsy Rose Lee
Dorothy Parker
Pablo Picasso
Sam Yorty
Helen Keller
Ernest Hemingway
Woody Guthrie
George Orwell

Pretty sweet company he kept.

[Zen Democrat]

32. So? This was during the war when Russia was our ally. It was Russia that marched into Berlin.

Roosevelt thought better of Stalin than of Churchill. FDR actually found little to trust in Churchill and believed that the Soviets would be our greatest ally post-war.

Some people are more anti-Nazi/Fascist than pro-Communist.

[Squinch]

33. I'm so not a fan of his writing.

If I have to read one more review of his work that talks about "muscular sentences," I am going to scream.

[misanthrope]

34. This was a prescient thread

Hemingway was arrogant, cruel, and misogynistic. A braggart and boor, he could be passive-aggressive, duplicitous and thin-skinned. The alcoholism isn't endearing either.

I can admire his stylistic conventions and developments without admiring or even liking him the person his actions and words show him to have been. At worst, he is utterly revolting. At best, pitiable.

The Ken Burns series currently being televised contains plenty of Hemingway worshippers. More power to them, but I prefer Steinbeck.