Posted on 09/27/2014 7:22:48 AM PDT by Kaslin
Can you imagine the reputation of a literary figure surviving the disclosure that he worked (however briefly and ineffectually) for Hitler's Abwehr?
Yet Ernest Hemingway worked for Stalin’s KGB and nobody (among the “smart set”) seems to bat an eye.
According to KGB defector Alexander Vassiliev "the 42-year-old Hemingway was recruited by the KGB under the cover name "Argo" in 1941, and cooperated with Soviet agents whom he met in Havana and London. This comes from a book published in 2009 by Yale Univ. Press (not exactly a branch of the John Birch Society.)
"Castro's revolution," Hemingway wrote in 1960, “is very pure and beautiful. I'm encouraged by it. The Cuban people now have a decent chance for the first time." Perhaps this was fitting praise from Hemingway for a regime that transplanted Stalin’s into the Caribbean. Except that Castro and Che Guevara’s regime jailed and tortured political prisoners at a slightly higher rate than did Stalin’s.
Hemingway knew full well what was going on “behind the scenes” of Castro and Che’s “pure and beautiful” revolution. To wit: as commander of Havana's La Cabana prison and execution yard in the early months of the Revolution, Che Guevara often coached his firing squads in person then rushed up to shatter the skull of the convulsed man (or boy) by lovingly firing the coup de grace himself. When other duties tore him away from his beloved execution yard, Che consoled himself by viewing the slaughter. His second-story office in La Cabana had a section of wall torn out to better view his darling firing-squads at work, often in the company of distinguished friends. Havana resident Ernest Hemingway was one of these.
Accounts of "Papa's” Hemingway’s presence at these massacres comes courtesy of Hemingway's own friend, the late George Plimpton (not exactly an “embittered right-wing Cuban exile”) who worked as editor of the Paris Review, (not exactly a "Mc Carthyite scandal sheet.")
In 1958 George Plimpton interviewed Hemingway in Cuba for one of the Paris Review’s most famous pieces. They became friends and the following year Hemingway again invited Plimpton down to his Finca Vigia just outside Havana. An editor at The Paris Review during the 1990’s, while relating how this high-brow publication passed on serializing the manuscript that became Che Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries, reveals “Papa’s” unwitting role in the rejection.
“I took the paper-clipped excerpt upstairs to the Boss (Plimpton),” writes James Scott Linville, “and said I had something strange and good. As I started to tell him about it, his smile faded. I stopped my pitch and said, "Boss, what's the matter?"
"James, I'm sorry." Linville recalls Plimpton replying. A sad look came over him, and he said, "Years ago, after we'd done the interview, Papa invited me down again to Cuba. It was right after the revolution. “There's something you should see,” Hemingway told Plimpton while preparing a shaker of drinks for the outing.
“They got in the car with a few others and drove some way out of town.” Continues Linville (who is recalling Plimpton’s account.) “They got out, set up chairs and took out the drinks, as if they were going to watch the sunset. Soon, a truck arrived. This, explained George, was what they'd been waiting for. It came, as Hemingway knew (italics mine), the same time each day. It stopped and some men with guns got out of it. In the back were a couple of dozen others who were tied up. Prisoners.
“The men with guns hustled the others out of the back of the truck, and lined them up. Then they shot them. They put the bodies back into the truck.”
“A writer without a sense of justice and of injustice would be better off editing the yearbook of a school for exceptional children than writing novels,” wrote Hemingway in that very Paris Review interview with George Plimpton. “The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, sh*t detector.”
So was Hemingway duped by Castroism? Did his sh*t-detector malfunction? Or was it on high-alert? Few people, after all, had such access to Castroism’s crime scenes. And the KGB, while certainly appreciating the work of dupes and useful idiots, was not known to (openly) sign them on.
And speaking of Hemingway’s grandsons, John and Patrick. Earlier this month they signed on as Castro-regime travel agents by promoting tourism and fishing to the Stalinist island. Imagine the snark-fest such as Saturday Night Live, Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, etc. might indulge about a fishing tournament in a nation whose subjects (who pre-Castroism considered boat-ownership almost a birthright) are now prohibited by jail and torture-chamber from owning boats.
Even snarkier, the tournament is promoted by a pair of gold-digging celebrity progeny who make Paris Hilton look like Rosie the Riveter. Imagine such a thing--that is--if the beneficiary of their tourism promotion ad been a “U.S.-friendly right–wing dictatorship,” instead of a Stalinist dictatorship who craved to nuke the U.S.
Oh I know, I know , many folks out there with a bumper-sticker knowledge of Castroism and a fetish for swallowing and parroting utopian dogma as revealed by their cult leaders rather than examining the actual evidence of human action ( i.e. some libertarians) claim tourism to Cuba will magically eradicate Castroism, and KGB-trained secret police and their torture-chambers will be magically replaced by unicorns and rainbows--if only given a chance.
Similar to another drug-addled utopian fantasist, all they are saying is: give tourism a chance.
You might recall the disaster for Southeast Asians when “peace was given a chance” in Southeast Asia (hundreds of thousands murdered in a “re-education” Gulag or drowned while attempting escape.) Well the tourism given a chance in Cuba has also ended disastrously for Cubans.
In Cuba we’re dealing with true-life Communists, amigos. Not with think-tank eggheads, coffee-house poets, or Wavy-Gravy handing out love-beads at Woodstock. If the history of the 20th century teaches anything it’s that giving diehard Commies unfettered access to guns and money entails woe for any prospect of their subjects’ freedom.
For two decades now Cuba has been hosting from five to ten times the number of tourists annually as it did in the 1950’s, when it was known as a “tourist playground.” Result?
Record repression for Castro’s subjects. The Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom shows no loosening in Cuba’s repression during this tourism windfall. It’s as bad or worse as during the long years of Soviet overlordship. In fact, for over a decade, Cuba has consistently ranked as the most economically repressive regime in the hemisphere and among the four most repressive on earth, consistently nudging North Korea for top honors.
Welllll....okayyy.
So you think the literary giants who wrote "Dreams From My Father" and "It Takes A Village" were better, huh?
You certainly are a savage beast.
You might try his short stories. They’re very good and less bulky than those long-winded novels.
If I understand the Hemingway biography (bore-ogrophy) correctly, He had those kind of 'problems' as a recurrent thing in his life, due to an injury suffered during WWI...
the infowarrior
It was a bit of hyperbole. But the keyword is ‘overrated’. I have heard some leftists speak highly of Dreams from my Father, but I haven’t heard it widely praised among less biased readers/judges. If it is considered Nobel Prize material by any serious authors/editors, etc., I have yet to hear of it.
As for rating It Takes a Village, has anyone in the world suggested it is great literature? It’s just a political tome, written by a person some in the left really like. If you are inclined to that political philosophy, then you like that aspect of the book. But to agree politically with a book is not to rate it as a literary masterpiece. No one, but no one has suggested It Takes a Village should rank alongside Shakespeare, Mann & Faulkner.
People do slobber over Hemmingway. Some claim he’s the greatest writer to ever draw breath. That’s the ‘overrated’ part. If you see the distinction?
Dean Koontz is my fav
“So he was not only an awful writer and a slobbering drunk, but a sadist, too.”
And, reportedly, committed suicide when he realized his own homosexuality.
It takes a Village, written by Barbara Feinman.
I never knew that about Hemmingway. I knew he was very, very left-wing, but I never knew he actually worked for the KGB. Yikes!
As for his writing...I like Hemmingway okay. He’s middle of the pack in the field of the “classic” writers I’ve read. I’d take him over Joseph Conrad (just never could get into that guy’s writing), but he’s got nothing on Steinbeck (for my tastes, anyway).
I would agree. If your going to read the writings of a communist, at least Steinbeck could be entertaining.
Wavy Gravy was born Hugh Romney. Far out, man.
It was an education. I had it. They told me about the greats, the great authors. We read Hemingway. We read everything. I went on TV once to talk about it. What I talked about was The Sun Also Rises. I did not like that book, but I pretended that I did. It was boring. It was narcissistic. It was silly. “Silly,” I called it. Time passed. I became more comfortable with opinions. The opinions were my own. I joined Free Republic. There was a time I wrote there. What I wrote was that Hemingway simply sucks. His work is just as silly as it ever was. And the sentences are short. Very, very short. Hemingway sets off my “sh+t detector.” Yes.
Semper Fi my FRiend
No magic, just mental illness which is hard for the rational and healthy mind to digest therefore it is cherry picked for reasoning and equated with whatever bits of normalcy can be found. For the liberal, also demented thinking, it is a treasure trove of maze-like emotional responses and a quagmire of battles within.
Listening to Hemingway throughout a lifetime would have been like listening to Gollum, if you have read the trilogy, but have hope Frodo and faith in gardening.
I agree about the short stories — much better than the novels. I long ago came to the Dorothy Parker conclusion that “Deep down he’s shallow.” But he was one of the finest prose stylists writing in the English language. The opening paragraph of “A Farewell to Arms” displays the spare, vivid style that made him famous. As I’ve often told my friends, he had very little to say but had an amazing gift for saying it.”
Some of his short stories are unforgettable to me, like “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” But in the long run I suspect he won’t have a high place in the pantheon of 20th Century writers.
Hemingway was ‘cleaning his gun’ according to his relatives probably in the same way that my grandfather ‘had a heart attack.’ Many years later I learned that, by purest coincidence, he happened to have it in a closed garage with the auto exhaust running.
IRRC, Hemingway’s death was somehow ruled accidental & his widow saw to it that he received burial according to Catholic ritual.
FWIW, I’m Catholic & in the back corner of our parish cemetery is the grave of a suicide. The ground there is unconsecrated & a large pine tree grows out of the middle of it.
Nowadays suicides routinely receive Christian burial by reason of insanity (no sane person would do such a thing!).
It appears Hemingway knew exactly what he was doing & made a cold rational decision. His health was mostly gone by age 61.
The shotgun he used to commit suicide was immediately gnashed up into bits of wood & metal, & then scattered to thwart ghoulish souvenir hunters.
Your sentences are short. Their lives flee in seconds. Then they are dead. Like those for whom the bell tolls.
;^)
+1
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