Touchstone for Character: Dos Passos, Hemingway, Welles, and 'The Spanish Earth'

By KATHLEEN SPALTRO

During the Spanish Civil War, three Chicago-associated artists and supporters of the Spanish Republic— John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and Orson Welles—intended to raise money for the Republican cause by working on a film, Joris Ivens’s documentary The Spanish Earth. Dos Passos, born in Chicago, initially joined with such other American writers as Archibald MacLeish to combine two short films, Spain — A Fight for Freedom and No Pasarán!, into the two-part film released as Spain in Flames. Dos Passos wrote the first half of the voiceover narration. His friend Hemingway, born in Oak Park, Illinois, wrote the second half. Liking Hemingway’s script, Dos Passos and MacLeish recruited him for a full-length film project, The Spanish Earth, overseen by their film production company, Contemporary Historians.

Early in 1937, as Spain in Flames was raising money for the Republic, Dos Passos, Hemingway, and other members of Contemporary Historians under the leadership of MacLeish (the president of the production company as well as an editor for Henry Luce’s Fortune) met at “21” in New York City to plan The Spanish Earth. MacLeish and Lillian Hellman wrote the scenario. The film was a Comintern (Communist International) project, and Ivens was a Comintern agent.

Ivens had already begun filming the documentary in Spain, where Hemingway and Dos Passos would soon journey. Dos Passos wanted The Spanish Earth to depict how the war affected the Spanish people, but Hemingway wanted the film to focus on the war itself.

This difference of perspectives prefigured other, more substantial disagreements between the two old friends—disagreements that emerged during their time in Spain and essentially ended any trust between them. Hemingway pushed Dos Passos off the film. After filming was complete, Welles, who considered Woodstock, Illinois, his home, was asked to narrate Hemingway’s voiceover script. Like Dos Passos and Hemingway, Welles had loved Spain since his youth.

Each man’s involvement with this film would reveal much about his political journey and, indeed, about his character, motivation, and values as expressed in his life and his art.

John Dos Passos

Edmund Wilson, the eminent social and literary critic, admired John Dos Passos as a socially aware novelist. “Most of the first-rate men of his age … [including Hemingway] cultivate their own little corners and do not confront the situation as a whole,” Wilson charged. “Only Dos Passos has attempted to confront it.” Cultural historian Michael Denning characterized Dos Passos as “perhaps the most important and influential figure among the modernists who affiliated themselves with the left.” Why, then, has Dos Passos acquired the reputation as being a Lost Leader who created such great fictions as the three novels combined in his trilogy U.S.A. but then betrayed his artistry and commitment by moving rightward?

The involvement of Dos Passos with the film The Spanish Earth precipitated the change in his political loyalties that others have mischaracterized as betrayal of his ideals. On the contrary, Dos Passos reacted to his experiences during the Spanish Civil War by remaining faithful to his earlier motivations.

“The most visible radical novelist,” Dos Passos had served on the board of the New Masses, been a director of the New Playwrights’ Theatre, marched with striking textile workers, and lent his prominent voice to the defense of the accused anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. The content and composition of his earlier writing, including the trilogy U.S.A., demonstrated his ardent radical sympathies.

John Dos Passos on the cover of TIME magazine in 1936.

Yet, as an anarchist, Dos Passos resisted the attempted domination by communists of other left-leaning groups. When communists disrupted a Socialist Party meeting in Madison Square Garden in 1934, he protested, and then the New Masses denounced him. His suspicions of totalitarian communism already aroused, Dos Passos received a warning from Carlo Tresca, a radical and a critic of Soviet communism, that, once Dos Passos got to Spain in 1937, he would be used and would have no control: “If the communists don’t like a man in Spain right away they shoot him.”

With this warning in his mind, Dos Passos arrived in Spain only to learn of the disappearance of his friend of 20 years, José Robles Pazos. They had befriended each other in Spain when they were adolescents. Eventually, Robles taught Spanish literature at Johns Hopkins University, translated Dos Passos’s novel Manhattan Transfer into Spanish in 1929, and returned to Spain after the establishment of the Spanish Republic. An interpreter for a Russian general, Robles worked for the War Ministry.

By persisting in trying to discover the truth about the disappearance, and then the reported death, of Robles, Dos Passos annoyed other supporters of the Republican cause. Ivens commented to Hemingway, “Hope that Dos will see what a man and comrade has to do in these difficult and serious wartimes.” But his priority was to help Robles’s family emotionally and financially. In addition to the shock of Robles’s murder, Dos Passos now believed that the Republican cause was betrayed by its supposed communist ally, which “had climbed into the shell of the Republic and [was] eating it up the way a starfish eats an oyster.”

As Dos Passos left Spain, he smuggled out of Spain an American who had told Robles’s son of the murder and who now feared his own death after being denounced as a Trotskyist. Just before this disillusioned departure, an admirer of Dos Passos, Eric Blair [pen name, George Orwell], had discussed with him the communist purges of alleged Trotskyites and predicted a fascist victory.

Fighting for the Spanish Republic, Orwell had come to realize, “The thing for which the Communists were working was not to postpone the Spanish revolution till a more suitable time, but to make sure it never happened.” Denounced as Trotskyist, Orwell saw his non-Stalinist force defamed as a covert fascist ally paid by Franco and Hitler. Anarchists were treated like enemies because anarchists believed in the revolution.

Dos Passos’s politics consequently edged rightward, and his literary reputation sank. “He began as a left-leaning anarchist,” Denning explained, “and ended as a right-leaning libertarian.” With the strong family resemblance of the principles of anarchism and libertarianism, we can perhaps more easily understand that, in Dos Passos’s own reckoning, his political principles never changed. But totalitarian communism forced his re-evaluation of anarchism and his transmutation of it into libertarianism. No social conservative, indeed an atheist, Dos Passos turned back to foundational American values within which to ground his principles. Exiled by and self-exiled from the American left, Dos Passos allied himself with anti-communist conservatives but remained libertarian.

Even U.S.A., as Denning pointed out, had envisioned a lost “Lincolnian republic” saved from slavery but betrayed by industrial capitalism and imperialism. This supports Dos Passos’s self-understanding of his own ideological consistency despite apparent change. He perceived yet another betrayal, by totalitarian communism, of the idealism of the left in Spain and elsewhere. As Orwell commented, “what was undertaken by many good people as a moral commitment of the most disinterested kind turned out to be an engagement to an ultimate immorality.”

Encountering the execution of Robles during his time in Spain during which he was pushed off The Spanish Earth, Dos Passos could never accept rationalizations justifying Robles’s murder. Remaining concerned about actual people—Robles, his friend’s family, the terrified American he smuggled out of Spain, Dos Passos asserted that an ideology that sacrificed the innocent and muddied the truth was unworthy of his loyalty. He declined to allow ideology to blind him into deep moral confusion.

Ernest Hemingway

Dos Passos’s political awareness was of long standing; Hemingway’s, very recent. Dos Passos had, in fact, striven vainly for years to enlist Hemingway in radical causes. Hemingway had declined, for example, to fight against the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. Yet, by 1937, a shift had altered the trajectories of both friends. Hemingway had tired of criticism of his writing as apolitical; at the same time, Dos Passos had begun to doubt his former faith in Marxism. As James McGrath Morris put it, “He had become convinced that oppression creates more oppression, and the use of inappropriate means resulted in a bad end.” While Dos Passos became a sceptic, Hemingway became a true believer.

Reporting on the Spanish Civil War for the North American Newspaper Alliance, Hemingway flew with Joris Ivens from France into Spain on 16 March 1937 to complete filming The Spanish Earth. His blind faith in the communist support for the Republican cause motivated Hemingway to discourage Dos Passos from investigating Robles’s death. Hemingway speculated that Robles had been guilty of treason, to which Dos Passos countered, “I’ve known the man for years. He’s absolutely straight.” Hemingway repeatedly dismissed Dos Passos’s anguished concern, “People disappear every day.”

Hemingway was unsympathetic to Dos Passos’s concern about and loyalty to the missing Robles because, as Morris characterized it, “Desperate to be loved by the left and wanting to be on a battlefield, Hemingway was blind to the dangers that the Communists posed.” Desire for acclaim and the need to prove virility in wartime, coupled with an envious denigration of Dos Passos’s own solid record of social commitment and literary success, caused Hemingway to turn away from his old friend and then to destroy Dos Passos’s reputation, caricaturing him in fiction as a “sexually impotent phony-radical novelist.” (The 10 August 1936 cover story for Time had portrayed Dos Passos, and Dos Passos had married Hemingway’s girlfriend from boyhood.) Hemingway would accuse Dos Passos of betraying the Republic and incorrectly assert that Robles “had been shot as a spy after a long and careful trial in which all the charges against him had been proven.”

Pushing Dos Passos out of the film project, Hemingway now controlled the film’s screenplay. After Ivens had completing filming, soundless footage was screened on 4 June 1937 in New York City for a fulled-to-capacity Carnegie Hall. Hemingway passionately addressed the audience to plead for funds for the Republic. His lover and fellow writer Martha Gellhorn, a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, arranged for the complete film’s first screening (now with recorded voiceover) for the Roosevelts at the White House on 8 July 1937. Lillian Hellman set up a screening at the California home of Fredric March and Florence Eldridge that raised enough money to buy and outfit 17 ambulances. Besides screenings hosted by Joan Crawford, John Ford, and Darryl Zanuck, The Spanish Earth became a sold-out event at the 3,500-seat Paramount Theatre, at which both Hemingway and Ivens spoke.

Hemingway’s complaint that “I had to go to Spain before you liberal bastards would believe I was on your side” and his lies about Dos Passos’s behaviors reveal his motivation to wrest critical acclaim away from Dos Passos and toward himself. In addition, as Morris commented, “Hemingway, unlike Dos Passos, worried less about war itself than coming to terms with it. War was personal for him, not political.” Being in wartime Spain tested Hemingway’s physical courage. He waged the Spanish Civil War in his imagination, on an inner psychic battlefield. The war’s cost for real people like Robles was less of a concern. As a review in Horizon of his Spanish Civil War novel For Whom the Bell Tolls put it, his focus was “Not Spain But Hemingway.”

Orson Welles

After Hemingway finished the script for The Spanish Earth, MacLeish arranged for Orson Welles to read the voiceover narration. Two years before Welles acted the lead role in MacLeish’s 1937 radio play Fall of the City, Welles had starred in MacLeish’s stage play Panic. Welles was also associated with Marc Blitzstein, creator of a Spanish folk music soundtrack for The Spanish Earth. Blitzstein worked with Welles on his 1937 anti-fascist stage rendition of Julius Caesar. Welles would later work with Blitzstein and MacLeish on the famous staging of the labor musical The Cradle Will Rock, and Welles joined Blitzstein in holding an auction to raise money for the Spanish Republic’s medical needs.

Welles and Hemingway, however, clashed in late June 1937 over Welles’s vocalization of Hemingway’s words, a highly testy encounter that Welles enjoyed embroidering as he retold it over many years. More importantly, Welles transmuted his encounters with Hemingway into the creation of the Jake Hannaford character central to Welles’s late (completed and released in 2018) film, The Other Side of the Wind.

caesar — Orson Welles in the 1938 stage production of *Caesar*

Eventually, several other people shared Hemingway’s doubt that Welles’s voice provided the best interpretation for the film. Director Joris Ivens recalled the circumstances: “it seemed like a good job; but there was something in the quality of his voice that separated it from the film, from Spain, from the actuality of the film….In any case, when I took the film to Hollywood, the other people in Contemporary Historians—Herman Shumlin, Lillian Hellman and Dorothy Parker—sensed what was wrong and suggested that Hemingway try reading it himself. That was right. During the recording his commentary sounded like that of a sensitive reporter who has been on the spot and wants to tell you about it—a feeling that no other voice could communicate. The lack of a professional commentator’s smoothness helped you to believe intensely in the experiences on the screen.”

Even with Welles’s narration discarded and Hemingway’s substituted, Welles’s involvement with The Spanish Earth revealed much about Welles as a man and an artist. Called by Denning “the single most important Popular Front artist in theatre, radio, and film,” Welles constantly campaigned against fascism. Denning’s splendid chapter on Welles in The Cultural Front explained how Welles’s “aesthetic of anti-fascism” characterized his modern-dress stage production of Julius Caesar (in which the stage lighting imitated the Nazi rallies at Nuremburg), his stage direction of Native Son, his radio broadcast of War of the Worlds, as well as his films Citizen Kane and Touch of Evil.

Welles’s commitment to an anti-fascist perspective extended beyond theatre, radio dramas, and film into nonfictional radio broadcasts and newspaper columns. Profoundly affected by his education at Woodstock’s Todd School for Boys under the influence of Roger Hill, Welles desired to be an educator, not only to bring great art to the masses, but to persuade the masses of the evils of fascism and racism. Welles’s indignant and persistent exposure in 1946 of the vicious blinding of a black veteran, Isaac Woodard, cost him one of his radio programs.

His radio series included Hello Americans and Orson Welles Commentaries. Orson Welles Almanac was both a newspaper column and a radio show. Another column was Orson Welles Today. As an editor for the newspaper Free World, he contributed political articles. Encouraged by FDR, Welles even envisioned a political career but reported that he turned down offers of support for senatorial ambitions in both California and Wisconsin (the state of his birth).

Although Welles’s vigorous political activities caused him, like both Dos Passos and Hemingway, to come under the scrutiny of the FBI, he identified himself as a liberal devoted to democratic values and not a communist. Above all, he emphasized his loathing of fascism, which he called “a putrefaction of the soul, a perfect spiritual garbage.”

Conclusion

Like Welles, both Dos Passos and Hemingway remained resolutely anti-fascist. Yet their long friendship withered because of their disagreement about Robles’s execution. Hemingway rationalized that Robles’s death was necessary, while Dos Passos found his murder painfully disillusioning.

In a way, Hemingway cast the issue as Robles versus the Spanish people, while, for Dos Passos, Robles epitomized the Spanish people, who were prey for all of the great powers that participated or declined to participate in the Spanish Civil War. The great democracies held off because communism seemed more threatening than tolerable versions of fascism; Hitler and Mussolini supported Spanish fascism to distract the world’s attention from their rearmament and plans for eventual aggression; Stalinist Russia, disguising its aims as support for the Spanish Republic, sought to crush anarchists, socialists, and other leftist factions as it also secretly pursued a nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany. Fascists, communists, democrats—all picked Spain’s bones clean.

Richard Rhodes called the Spanish Civil War “that first desperate war against fascism to which the Spanish people were abandoned by the democracies and by the Soviet Union as well, so that of Spain’s 24 million souls, fully half a million died directly, or from hunger and disease, or immediately afterward in Franco’s hundred thousand vindictive executions.” Besides this record of expediency and political calculation, the war called forth idealism. More than 40,000 international volunteers fought for the Republic, with American volunteers in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade numbering about 3,000. Their idealism and their sacrifice were betrayed as well.

Unlike Dos Passos and Orwell, many—perhaps most?—of those idealists probably tolerated the use of unsavory and immoral means to the idealistic ends that they pursued. But, as Dos Passos insisted, “all you have in politics is means; ends are always illusionary.”

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