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39 of 41 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Poisonous Mix of Politics and Fashion, September 30, 2005
This review is from: The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the Murder of Jose Robles (Hardcover)
"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.
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17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"They have sown the wind, July 31, 2006
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 on the relationship between Dos Passos and Hemingway (and Dos Passos and Robles) the story also paints a broader picture of a time and place where many intellectuals and artists (literary or otherwise) on the left had to face an apparent conflict between their personal sense of morality and the socio-political imperatives of their ideology. Orwell and Dos Passos resolved this conflict on the side of their personal morality. Others were not so well-inclined. "Breaking Point" paints a vivid picture of the life of the 'intelligentsia' in the crucible that was Spain. Koch provides the reader with background information on the friendship between Dos Passos and Robles and between Dos Passos and Hemingway. This background also provides the literary and political milieu in which Dos Passos, Hemingway and their contemporaries operated. Koch does not paint a flattering picture of Hemingway. He comes across (rightly I might add) as a raging bully tormented by a lethal combination of arrogance and insecurity. This arrogance and bullying shows up in stark terms once the story moves to Hemingway's and Dos Passos' time in Spain reporting on the War. Dos Passos is confounded and depressed by the murderous political intrigue while Hemingway adopts his typical macho "war is war" posture and doesn't appear to give these horrors a second thought. Hemingway's arrogance and bullying is not news to be sure but it is always worth being reminded that there is no correlation between great talent and a pleasing personality. In fact, to the extent there is a correlation it is just as likely to be an inverse rather than direct one. Dos Passos, though treated better by Koch, does not come across as a hero either. Rather, there seems to be an indecisive, almost Hamlet-like aura to him and his ongoing inability to stand up to Hemingway's verbal and psychological onslaughts. Nevertheless, it is clear that Dos Passos had, like Orwell, a keener, far less naďve eye when it came to the political in-fighting that did as much damage to the Republican cause as Franco (and Hitler's and Mussolini's) bombs. Hemingway was a political naif who had neither the time nor inclination to question Stalin's and the Comintern's murderous intrigues in Spain. In many respect's Hemingway fit Lenin's definition of a "useful idiot" to a t. "Breaking Point" is an excellent political and literary biography. It is well worth reading.
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15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Couldnt Put it Down, May 9, 2005
This review is from: The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the Murder of Jose Robles (Hardcover)
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.
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