Fighting talk, but little action

On 11 May 1937, at the Gare St-Lazare in Paris, Ernest Hemingway said goodbye to a friend who was leaving Europe. Like Hemingway, John Dos Passos had been in Spain to support the Republic in its civil war against the fascist Franco. But he became disillusioned when the Soviets (also fighting against Franco) murdered someone he knew. As the train was about to leave, Hemingway asked Dos Passos not to report the event. Dos Passos refused: what was the point of fighting a war for civil liberties if you destroyed those liberties in the process? ‘Civil liberties, shit,’ replied Hemingway. ‘Are you with us or are you against us?’

The writer’s ‘at all costs’ opposition to fascism forms the theme of this book, an account of his fighting and spying adventures from the Spanish episode through the second world war to Castro’s revolution in Cuba. There was ‘only one form of government that cannot produce good writers’, said Hemingway in a speech, ‘and that system is fascism… a writer who will not lie cannot live and work under fascism.’