The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the Murder of Jose Robles

Literary biography is a precipitous genre -- you get the academic overkill on one end of the scale and tabloid junk on the other. This book is neither -- it goes right down the middle stylistically, telling an important piece of American literary history in the process. Hemingway and Dos Passos in fiery Spain of the 1930s--breaking ostensibly over the murder of Dos Passos' close friend Robles-- serves as the matrix of many issues personal, political, historical, psycholgical--yet is told economically like a high level detective story. The story is told better than anyone has told it yet, or likely could ever tell it. The basic story is well known, but here deepened by reasearch and broadened by several other word portraits of secondary figures large and small. Koch obviously has closer affinity with Dos Passos, but not far enough to be unfair. He carefully underscores his apparently "negative" portrait of Hemingway with sensitivity to the thesis Hemingway was already showing signs of the mental illness which would lead to suicide in about 24 years. This thesis is well supported by Koch and is something new, at least to the degree that it has ever been woven into any Hemingway bio this well. Indeed, the great gift of this book -- which brings it up to masterpiece status -- is the writer's maturity and sensitivity in dealing with biographical puzzles and loaded political issues. Koch has a maturity rare in literature now or ever, and is not afraid to bring in his own thoughtful analysis of the people involved to complete and highlight the story. As a person who has read several dozens of literary bios in his life, my verdict is this: as good as the genre gets, easily in the top 5 of any such book I have ever read.

and they shall reap the whirlwind." "Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the Murder of Jose Robles" is Stephen Koch's excellent examination of the destruction of the friendship between American writers Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos during the Spanish Civil War. The Spanish Civil War served as a crucible on which many relationships (between people and between people and their ideology) were either forged or broken. In the case of Dos Passos and Hemingway once they entered the political whirlwind of the Spanish Civil War that friendship was irretrievably fractured. It is not well-remembered that, at the height of his fame, Dos Passos was placed on the same pedestal as Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner. The first two volumes of his masterpiece, the USA Trilogy (42nd Parallel and 1919) had been enormous successes. By the time Volume III, "The Big Money", was released in 1936, Jean-Paul Sartre hailed him as "the greatest writer of our time". Edmund Wilson's review went so far as to claim that Dos Passos was "the first of our writers, with the possible exception of Mark Twain, who has successfully used colloquial American for a novel of the highest artistic seriousness." Dos Passos' literary reputation began to change during the Spanish Civil War. Dos Passos, along with Hemingway and many other literary figures including George Orwell made his way to Spain to assist in the Republican cause. Like Orwell, Dos Passos was deeply affected by the brutal infighting amongst Republican supporters. In the case of Dos Passos, he was deeply distressed by murder of a friend, anarchist and Johns Hopkins Professor Jose Robles, apparently executed by Stalinist cadres for his nonconforming radicalism. Hemingway mocked Dos Passos for his unmanly concern for his friend. Dos Passos reports that he told Hemingway that "the question I keep putting to myself is what's the use of fighting a war for civil liberties, if you destroy civil liberties in the process?" Hemingway replied "civil liberties, [__ _ _ ]. Are you with us or against us?" It is no surprise that Dos Passos' next book was criticized severely. The New Masses magazine referred to it as a "crude piece of Trotskyist agit-prop". Dos Passos never reclaimed the popularity he had achieved with the USA Trilogy. The Civil War proved to be the point in time during the first half of the 20th-century at which many intellectuals and artists (literary and otherwise) of the left had to face an apparent conflict between their personal sense of morality and their ideology. Until the Civil War the various factions of the European and U.S. left seemed to live together (with the exception of post-revolutionary Russia) in a fractious and far from symbiotic relationship. However the Civil War transformed what had merely been a dysfunctional relationship among various Marxist groups, anarchists, and socialists into one that was physically dangerous and fratricidal. Although Koch's "Breaking Point" focuses

"The Breaking Point" is carefully written history but it reads like a mystery/suspense novel thanks to the gifted storytelling of author Stephen Koch. The book retells the story of the misadventures of Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos in Spain during the Civil War of 1936-39. Koch has meticulously pieced together from primary sources the puzzle of who killed Dos Passos' friend Jose Robles, and who knew about it and tried to cover it up. The book is a tragedy of almost Shakespearean intensity as we watch the innocent killed, good men deceived and destroyed, and the wicked (temporarily) prosper. It's also a fable of the dangers of radical chic: how groupthink and intellectual fashion-mongering can maim a good cause. Civil-war Spain is where George Orwell learned all he needed to know about the Communists and the rest of the "progressive" left to write "1984" and "Animal Farm" (he makes a cameo appearance in this book.) Dos Passos arrived in Spain in March 1937 wanting to help the besieged Republic, but he soon learned that his good friend Jose Robles, a former professor of Spanish at Johns Hopkins University, was missing. He made one fruitless inquiry after another until it was his good friend Hemingway who dropped the bombshell on him that Robles was a "fascist spy" who had been executed. In reality, the Soviets has exported their Stalinist Great Terror to Spain and were murdering thousands of left-wing non-Communist "allies" (Robles had also been a translator for a Russian general and may have known too much about Soviet intrugues in Spain.) There's no way to get around it: Hemingway is one of the villains of this book (although one whose bad character we eventually come to understand and even sympathize with, and whose greatness as a writer is never questioned.) During the conflict he became a literary enforcer for the Communists, along with his mistress and 3rd-wife-to-be Martha Gellhorn. This, along with envy of Dos Passos (who at the time was the more acclaimed writer) produced Hemingway's assault on his friend. As Hemingway warned Dos Passos, after Dos turned against the left because of Robles murder the American critics, lead by Malcolm Cowley and heavily influenced by Stalin, trashed Dos Passos' reputation. After 1937 what he wrote was either ignored or deprecated by the critics. Although Koch is shrewd enough to note that the fire did in fact leave much of Dos Passos' fiction; his disillusionment coincided with a general recognition that modernism's lack of concern about objective truth helped usher in Communism and Fascism in Europe. This book is a superbly written bit of literary history that I highly recommend.

Although perhaps treading on the corns of some by its directness in giving the 'behind the scenes' of the Spanish Civil War, this account of it, braided with the bios of Dos Passos and Hemingway, is compellingly frank and makes clear the way idealism turned into entanglement. Zeroing in on the way two novelists experienced the conflict effectively penetrates the labyrinth of mystifications and corrects the record on the abonimable treatment of Dos Passos who was sacrificed on the altar of Stalinist cynicism. At a critical point in an important history, audacious slimeballs and vipers appear out of the woodwork pursuing their obscure agendas. Although a minor cameo appearance by Orwell is all the narrative permits, his transformation during the Civil War becomes clear. Quite an exciting read, no doubt not the final view, but the tale is better than fiction.

A fast paced, wonderful and insightful read. For those Hemingway fans who have gone through all of Hemingway, this book reads like the memory of an old friend. Hemingway is further depicted as a flawed and unlikeable man but a deeper understanding of the source of his talent and material is supported through the weaving of his personal life with the works he had produced during and shortly after the Spanish Civil War. Dos Passos is depicted as sincere and caring in his search for the truth of the demise of Jose Robles. The strained relationship between Hemingway and Dos Passos and thier reasons are carefully constructed throughout the book. The real hero of the book is Jose Robles himself, who silently haunts throughout the chapters. Dos Passos and Hemingway were American spectators of the Spanish Civil War. Jose Robles Pazos was the real thing, a Spaniard committed to his beliefs, rightly or wrongly, for the betterment and love of Spain.