Hemingway Barcelona Book

[Cre Moonin]

hirtydispatches written by Ernest Hemingway while reporting from the Loyalist side during the Spanish Civil War have been published for the first time exactly as he wrote them. They include two that have never appeared before in any form.

The 1937-38 wartime cables, written for the North American Newspaper Alliance , show Hemingway's reportorial skills and the terse cadences that have been emulated by generations of novelists, journalists and students.

''Many sides of Hemingway the newspaperman and writer come through in the dispatches,'' said Prof. William Braasch Watson, a historian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is a Hemingway authority. ''Together, they make one thing clear. He was not, as some have asserted, a voyeur, a mere tourist of the Spanish Civil War, but a hard-working, risk-taking correspondent who tried and largely succeeded in becoming the professional reporter and witness that the violence and complexity of the war demanded.''

Professor Watson found the original documents in two different places. The typewritten manuscripts - and, in some cases, handwritten field notes and early drafts - of the dispatches were in the Hemingway archive at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. The RCA cables that Hemingway sent from Spain to NANA, a now defunct news and feature service, were in the Humanities Research Library at the University of Texas.

The full dispatches, as written before they were edited, appear in the latest issue of The Hemingway Review, a semiannual publication put out by the Hemingway Society, which has 450 members. About 1,200 copies of the special Spanish Civil War issue have been printed, with Professor Watson serving as guest editor.

Hemingway's dispatches were written in so-called cablese, a form of writing that economized on transmission costs by dropping punctuation and linking or omitting words. Editors back home deciphered the cablese, inserting words and punctuation, and then rewrote it into a finished newspaper article.

Some correspondents, like Hemingway's friend Herbert L. Matthews of The New York Times, wrote directly in cablese; Hemingway also became adept at cablese, but often wrote out a first or second draft in a full-English version. Field notes and typewritten drafts provided Professor Watson with the clues to Hemingway's original dispatches.

The contrast between what was written, what was cabled and what was printed is illustrated by Dispatch 19. It was the first Hemingway wrote after returning to Spain on March 31, 1938, his third visit to the war during a time of crisis for the Loyalists and of suffering for refugees caught in the advance of Generalissimo Franco's rebel columns. The dispatch was written in early April after Hemingway and Matthews had made a two-day trip to the front lines.

''twas lovely false spring when we started for front smorning stop last night incoming barcelona tad been grey and foggy and dirty and sad but today twas bright and warm and the pink of almond blossoms coloured the grey hills and brightened the dusty green rows of olive trees stop.''

''It was a lovely false spring day when we started for the front this morning. Last night, coming to Barcelona, it had been grey, foggy, dirty and sad, but today it was bright and warm, and pink almond blossoms colored the gray hills and brightened the dusty green rows of olive trees.''

The meaning of the two sentences remains unchanged, but Hemingway's rhythm in the second sentence is broken and the color impressions have been altered by an editor. The original Hemingway text preserves his intended rhythms and phrases, and sounds more like the novelist:

''It was a lovely false spring day when we started for the front this morning. Last night coming into Barcelona it had been grey and foggy and dirty and sad, but today it was bright and warm and the pink of almond blossoms colored the grey hills and brightened the dusty green rows of olive trees.''

In this dispatch, Hemingway compared the American Civil War and Spanish Civil War, noting that the volunteers in the Union Army had run away at Bull Run just as the Spanish militiamen did in their early battles. But he said that, four years later, the same Federal troops were ''forged'' by experience at Gettysburg and stood as ''a granite wall'' against the Confederates. (Hemingway erred here in his Civil War history: Gettysburg was two, not four, years after the first battle of Bull Run.) Another Unused Dispatch Dispatch 28 also did not see the light of publication. Professor Watson surmised that it might not have been distributed by the news service because its political tone was stronger than any of Hemingway's other dispatches. The article, datelined Barcelona, concluded:

''Anyone who thinks the war is over in Spain is a fool or a coward. A great fighting people who are for the first time being led by generals who are of the people, who are not fools, nor traitors, will not be defeated that easily. But she must have plans and guns; and she must have them at once.''

''If your directors kick about expenses make these points. In case of a European war which was then absolutely expected, and for which you had to be covered, you had a trained correspondent on hand with no expense to you or them. My stuff on Spain has been consistently accurate, and if you were betting money on what I said would happen you would have made considerable money. I gave full accounts of government disasters and criticized their weaknesses in [ the ] same measure I reported their success.''

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