Title
André Marty and Ernest Hemingway
Document Type
Article
Annotation
Examines a controversy arising from the characterization in For Whom the Bell Tolls of a real-life Communist figure associated with the International Brigades. Hemingway presents Marty as a “bloodthirsty” and “crazy” revolutionary, a portrayal that outraged and disappointed leftist and communist partisans. The author finds Hemingway engaging “more in polemic than epic, openly settling accounts over the fresh demise of the Spanish Republic” and driving a wedge between himself and such former allies as Milton Wolff and other members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. The hard feelings extended past World War II, and Marty’s unpublished papers reveal the extent of his own animosity and mirror the disdain for Hemingway expressed especially in postwar French intellectual circles. Curiously, Marty’s reputation declined in the 1950s and Hemingway’s improved in France, Spain, the Soviet Union, and among scholars who recognize the moral complexity that underlies For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Published in
Forum for Modern Language Studies
Volume
55
Issue
1
Date
2018
Pages
1-19
Citation
Bowd, Gavin. “André Marty and Ernest Hemingway.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 55, no. 1 (Sept. 2018): 1-19.