Hemingway and Gellhorn

View 726 Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Over the weekend, we recorded Hemingway and Gellhorn, the HBO movie about Ernest Hemingway and his third wife Martha Gellhorn, and watched it last night. I’m not sorry to have seen it. There was little remarkable about the performances except that Nicole Kidman showed great versatility in being both younger and much older than her present age. If you like sex scenes there were plenty of them, not quite hard core but certainly what would have been called pornography only a few years ago. They went on longer than I cared for, but there were plenty of them with lots of intensity. The real life Martha Gellhorn once made a point of saying in interviews that she didn’t enjoy sex, and Kidman almost says that in her comments to the viewers done, supposedly, thirty years after Hemingway’s death, but that hardly comes through in the sex scenes.

Much of the film takes place during the Spanish Civil War, and much of it purports to be an objective account of the war as seen by Gellman and Hemingway, who were of course Republican sympathizers and dedicated anti-fascists. Neither Gellman nor Hemingway was a member of the Communist Party, but both were ardent supporters of the Republican side during the civil war, and their reporting from Spain contributed to the nearly universal intellectual view that there is only one respectable view of that war, and anyone not for the Republican cause must be a fascist sympathizer. This is of course the communist party line on the war, and it has been so successfully promulgated that few know there is any other possible view.

In the real world matters are not so simple.

The film shows John Dos Passos and other western intellectuals, all supporters of the Republican cause, and it does show, without much emphasis or explanation, some of the actions of the Russian communists who operated as allies of the Republic. It shows Nationalist atrocities in plenty, but barely mentions the communist operations against the anarchists and their frequent purges. There is no mention of George Orwell’s accounts.

It is highly unlikely that neither Hemingway nor Gellhorn was aware of the violent divisions within the Republican cause (at one point a near civil war between POUM and Communist forces). There is some hint of these activities, with John Dos Passsos’ friend shown kidnapped by NKVD agents causing Dos Passos to question the Russian involvement, but it is not given much emphasis. Actually, Dos Passos moved from being a committed left wing writer to a libertarian position. He retained much of his sympathy for the IWW and some of his old comrades, but also recognized that not all good comes from the left, and in fact the old slogan that there is no enemy to the left was false and dangerous. The result of all this, not mentioned in the film at all, is that Dos Passos wrote Midcentury, his last and some would say his greatest novel. Like his earlier trilogy collectively called U.S.A., Midcentury is a “collage”, consisting of many scenes and viewpoints woven together to form a story as seen from many angles. I read it as an undergraduate and it had a great influence on me, presenting a viewpoint I had not seen before. The film merely dismisses Dos Passos as having moved to the right. That too is the standard left view – Dos Passos has become an unperson in modern academia, and Midcentury is never discussed in intellectual society.

But Hemingway and Gellhorn does a reasonable job of showing the standard intellectual view of the Spanish Civil War, and particularly the period before the Hitler-Stalin pact that united the Communists and the Nazis. That happened after the Franco victory in Spain, when Hemingway and Gellhorn were together. The film makes no mention of that pact and what followed with communists proclaiming the fall of Paris to the Wehrmacht as the victory of the working class. If Hemingway or Gellman has ever written of that event I am unaware of it. It was traumatic to many left wing intellectuals, and played a massive role in converting Trotskyite leftists toward libertarianism and what became “neoconservatism”.

The film is, as nearly all major films are, mostly sympathetic to the left wing cause, and while purporting to show a distance between the communists and the anti-fascist popular front, it doesn’t do much of that, and shows none of the stresses that resulted from the massive change in the party line the day after Hitler invaded Russia. Of course there is no reason why a biographical film should cover such intellectual events unless they impacted on the principals: but one does wonder why there is so little information on that period in the lives of Hemingway and Gellhorn. They were certainly together then.

All told it’s a good film with good performances, and shows something of the intellectuals in America in that formative period. And if you like sex scenes, there’s plenty of them. Maybe Julianne Moore will be jealous.