Lying as Hemingways Way to Protect the Truth

But I feel that of all of them, he was the one who practiced the most deception of himself and others. The Spanish government was less prepared to win than he wanted to them to be, but he didn't want to report that. He didn't want to see it, and maybe he didn't see it.

He wrote things that had true things in them and led readers to believe something, but the truth was something else. And the truth was often something he did know but he just didn't want to say. Martha Gellhorn has a history of deception, too, and not just in her personal life. How did she blend truth and lies? Gellhorn was a woman who made a fetish of a kind of ruthless candor. She was very open about herself, but then she wasn't honest about things like her story about an American lynching that she made up. And she and Hemingway were living a deception in terms of his marriage.

They had to do all of this on the QT.

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On the other hand, some of the liberal-leaning American and British writers who headed to Spain seemed to be more clear-eyed and were deeply disappointed by what they saw, right? The author John Dos Passos was very surprised when he found a level of press management that he didn't expect. He was a man who who went on the picket line for Sacco and Vanzetti, who walked the walk as well as talking the talk as a good left-wing liberal.

He goes to Spain and he sees that a small cadre of communist members of the government are trying to manage things to a large extent. He was not comfortable with that, and it was overwhelming to him. George Orwell had the same thing happen in Barcelona, when the Marxist anti-Stalinist party was purged and there was a civil war within a civil war. Orwell was horrified by this and it influenced "Animal Farm" and "," in a way, with the idea of government control as something that could be sinister.

When Ernest Hemingway Nearly Gave Up on His Writing Dreams

What about the remarkable young photographers Robert Capa and Gerta Taro, whom you profile, and the choices they had to each make about the importance of the truth? Capa had moments of trying to fudge the truth himself. He staged photographs, but no more than other people did. Even Henry Luce, the Time Life magnate, supported staging incidents in newsreels, saying they were "fakery in allegiance to truth.

But as time went on for Capa and Gerda, the truth became much more compelling than anything they could make up. It was right there, and they were compelled to follow it and place themselves in great danger. How do the two other stars of your book, the censor Arturo Barea and his deputy Ilsa Kulcsar, fit in? They courted great personal loss by adhering to a doctrine of truth. Barea wanted to say, "This is what's happening in Madrid. This got him in trouble with the higher-ups in the government.

The same thing happened to Ilsa, and they were basically hounded out of their jobs and had to leave Spain in order to save their own lives. Even though they were the poorest and had the least success of anyone in the book, they were the happiest because they were the most truthful. There's an old biblical saying that the truth shall make you free. Truth is the hardest thing, and it can be very painful, but I feel that truthfulness is a really cardinal virtue that's worth trying to achieve it at any cost.

Deception made Hemingway very unhappy. My feeling about him during his Spanish experience is that he found himself in a position of being used by others for purposes that weren't his purposes, necessarily. He wasn't as truthful as he want to be, and he blunted his instrument doing that. I think it made him unhappy and angry. A lot of the anger you feel in his correspondence of that time is that something is deeply wrong about the situation he's gotten himself into. He addresses that in "For Whom the Bell Tolls.

In contrast, Arturo Barea and Ilsa Kulcsar might not have made millions of dollars, but they had something. They died knowing they'd done the right thing. It's sort of quixotic, but it's something to think about. In our own slick era, where spin is everything, they're worth remembering.

Already a Monitor Daily subscriber? This website uses cookies to improve functionality and performance. By continuing to browse the site you are agreeing to our use of cookies. But, shitmaru, she followed us to Schruns, booked herself into the Taube, said she wanted to learn to ski, would I give her lessons.

Would I go to New York for contracts and all that. I took off for Paris immediately and booked myself on the first decent boat, four days later. I spent those four nights in her bed until my boat left for New York. But Pauline met my boat train when I arrived in Paris. I passed up three trains to stay with her at her place. At that moment I wished I had died before loving anyone else. It went like that all that spring. It was now ready for publication.

I was asking too much of her. We decided to split up. Also, knowing I was broke, he slipped bucks into my checking account at the Morgan Guaranty, which I used to repay some debts.

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The next time we actually got together was in the summer of The main house was a stone Spanish Colonial with a veranda. Ernest had not lived there since , when, after a long separation, he was divorced from Pauline; it had become her property as part of the divorce settlement and she had lived there until her recent death, when the property had passed to the children.

But the children did not want to live there. At dusk, we sat on the terrace as the first pale fireworks invaded the sky. I should have known better than to even hope for redemption. I asked him what had occurred after he and Hadley went their separate ways. Did he continue seeing Pauline? I said it read like a goddamn death warrant. Took the pen and signed. She smiled and said that was perfectly okay with her. She took a rose from the vase on the table and handed it to me and told me to be sure to press it under our mattress.

She said she had the wherewithal for us to live very well. With the prospect of one hundred days of misery ahead of me, I was ready for one of the tombstones: Here lies Ernest Hemingway, who zigged when he should have zagged. I thought this was a good time to get Ernest back to talking about the hundred days. That and daily letters from Pauline, lamenting the pitfalls of boring Piggott, plus her wild yearning for me. I said yes, they were, that Hadley was simple, old-fashioned, receptive, plain, virtuous; Pauline up-to-the-second chic, stylish, aggressive, cunning, nontraditional.

Pauline explosive, wildly demonstrative, in charge, mounts me. Me in charge of Hadley and Pauline in charge of me. You need the shining qualities of Hadley. Neither Pauline or her money can provide that. The following day was very hot, buzzing squadrons of insects hovering over the garden. We sat on the edge of the shady side of the pool, our legs in the water.

The nights were particularly bad, but some places helped take my mind off them. One of them was Le Jockey, a classy nightclub in Montparnasse—wonderful jazz, great black musicians who were shut out in the States but welcomed in Paris. Very hot night, but she was wearing a black fur coat. The woman and I introduced ourselves. She slid open her coat for a moment to show she was naked. I said I was suspended, that there were two women, one my wife, and neither wanted to compromise. I carried on nonstop about my trouble, analyzing, explaining, condemning, justifying, mostly bullshit. Josephine listened, intense, sympathetic; she was a hell of a listener.

She said she, too, had suffered from double love. I was having a drink at the Dingo Bar. I was using the Dingo as my mail drop, and on this night the bartender handed me my accumulated mail.

Hemingway in Love

My breath caught in my throat. Why would Hadley write to me? I dreaded opening it. It said although thirty days short of the time she had set, she had decided to grant me the divorce I obviously wanted. She was not going to wait any longer for my decision, which she felt was obvious. I sat down at the desk, began to write a letter to Hadley. I told her that Bumby was certainly lucky to have her as his mother. That she was the best and honest and loveliest person I had ever known.

What I felt was the sorrow of loss. I had contrived this moment, but I felt like the victim. Hadley usually absented herself, but one time she was still there when I arrived. Rather to my surprise, not having planned it, there suddenly blurted out of me that if she wanted me, I would like to go back to her.

She smiled and said things were probably better as they were. Afterward, I spent some time at the Dingo Bar berating myself. For my part, I wore a tweed suit with a vest and a new necktie. I guess it started when we went to live with her folks in Piggott. I wrote early every morning in Piggott before the suffocating heat took over.

The days and nights were as bleak as a stretch of Sahara Desert. Gentle, thoughtful man, he was Paris correspondent for the Chicago Daily News. What threw me was how quickly Hadley had married. Just as marriage had reared up too soon, so was I not ready for the upset of having a baby around.

Pauline had a horrendous battle in the delivery room for 18 grueling hours that surrendered to a cesarean operation. I worked mornings on my new book, A Farewell to Arms. The first one had made me bughouse and a second one, howling and spewing, would finish me off. And it nearly did. I went for a two-week spell in Cuba.

The two weeks stretched to two months. Gregory will put out a couple of lines.