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

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"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.

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 naïve 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.

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.

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.

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.

The issues Stephen Koch addresses in THE BREAKING POINT revolve around the kidnapping and murder of Jose Robles during the Spanish Civil War. FYI: Robles, a Russian speaking professor at Johns Hopkins and friend of Dos Passos, worked as a translator for Vladimir Gorev, a Russian general who organized the defense of Madrid by the International Brigades in the winter of 1936. Koch speculates that Robles was murdered because he had learned of Russian plans to take control of the Spanish government.

In TBP, the principal storyline examines the contrasting reactions of Dos Passos and Hemingway to the disappearance of Robles and the eventual confirmation of his death by the Republican government. Basically, Dos is concerned about his friend and unable to accept the government lie that Robles was executed because he was a fascist spy. In contrast, Hem embraces this canard. Further, he reacts to Dos Passos and his decency with threats and disparagement. Raising the Robles issue, Hem thinks, threatens the Republican cause.

From this foundation, Koch builds a fascinating multilayered narrative that explores Russian scheming and influence in Spanish Civil War, the presence of Stalinist agents in America's cultural scene in the 1930s, the creative and personal turmoil of Hemingway, and the fading career Dos Passos. Along the way, Koch also entertains his readers with profiles of numerous insidious and devious characters who worked as Russian agents. George Orwell, the Roosevelts, and Stalin make cameo appearances.

TBP is an outstanding entertainment and highly recommended for readers who want a concise examination of Russian influence in the Spanish Civil War or a profile of the ruthless Hemingway and his creative process. I've recently read several of his novels and admire his fiction. But Koch makes it clear: Hem was a bully, careerist, and macho kiss-up.

"The Breaking Point" is an interesting and well-written book, for two reasons: it provides us with deep insights - not always pleasant - into the personalities, working habits and family affairs of Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos, two of the major American authors of the first half of the 20th century. This by itself should make it profitable reading for anyone wanting to acquaint himself with the political, social and literary currents prevailing in the United States at a time when the country was getting ready to assume the leading role in the world, which it has had ever since the end of the Second World War. The two authors who entered the literary scene more or less arm in arm but ended up as bitter enemies constitute one of the two dimensions of the work.

The other dimension is taken up by the historical scenery within which the fate of the two authors evolves and eventually becomes a tragedy: the Spanish Civil War.

The book makes us see the protagonists and the circumstances in which they found themselves in a new light. Hemingway had concluded a Faustian pact with the Devil by which he gained long-lasting fame for some of his works but which made him lose, in the end, both his soul and his life; his soul dissolved itself in whisky and his life ended with a gunshot by his own hand.

Like so many other intellectuals of his generation, Ernest Hemingway had opted for the republican side in the Spanish conflict, for its patently obvious social aims, for its humanistic ideals and its apparently justified political case. He was ready to offer it his talent and ask no further questions. He did not see the Devil who had approached him. Stephen Koch writes: "Hemingway... was clearly in service to Stalin and his state-sponsored terror". The famous writer did not hesitate to debase himself by writing a propaganda piece, "The Fifth Column", which Koch calls "an exceptionally nasty piece of work and the nadir of Hemingway's entire career"; he made himself an accomplice to "the necessary murder" (W.H Auden), to any necessary murder, in fact, as long as it could be justified in terms of the fight against Fascism.

John Dos Passos walked along an entirely different road. His broad and far-reaching description of the difficulties of life in the United States towards the end of the first third of the 20th century had made him famous and, initially at least, he may have perceived the struggle between the Spanish Republic and Franco's rebels as just another example of the forces of Light defending humanity against the onslaught of the armies of Evil. His Trilogy had not really set out individuals and their actions, he had, instead, painted with broad brush-strokes on a large canvas and so one might have expected that he would view and present the Spanish Civil War in the same way.

He may even have taken this approach when he first arrived in the country to help produce a propaganda film for the Cause, but he soon was brought to realize that things were not so simple and that he had to take a moral stand. Twenty years earlier, his friend José Robles had acquainted him with "the real Spain"; Robles had then exiled himself to the US waiting for an opportunity to put his talents to use in the renewal of the country of his birth and had, quite naturally embraced the Republican cause and gone back to Spain. Within a few weeks after his arrival in Republican territory he had suddenly vanished.

Stephen Koch describes the efforts by Dos Passos to locate his friend or, at least, to find out what had happened and why. At the same time, Koch's book tells us of the attempts by Hemingway to hide the truth from him (it had been, after all, nothing but the necessary murder of a fascist spy). The murder of José Robles and the political terror unleashed on the Republican side eventually caused Dos Passos to expose the mendaciousness of the propaganda spread abroad and to criticize and stigmatize the criminal character the Republican cause had assumed as a result of the ever-growing influence of Stalin's local delegates.

In an earlier work ("Double Lives"), Koch describes the infiltration of the Bolsheviks into the cultural elites of the West and makes it clear how long the venom would remain active in the circles concerned. It is thus not surprising that Dos Passos' repudiation of communist ideas should bring his literary career to a rapid end - as Hemingway had told him. Today, Hemingway's books are still in print whereas the works of Dos Passos are gathering dust on the shelves of university libraries..

The final chapters of the book describe the situation in the Republican territories, describe the grisly murder of Andrés Nin (who had, at one time, been Trotsky's secretary and was now the leader of POUM, the deviant workers' party - always ready to oblige, Hemingway, in "For whom the Bell tolls", blames it on the Germans - describe the flight of the American communist Liston Oak in Dos Passos' car, and finally the liquidation of General Gurev, the republican (i.e. Soviet) defender of Madrid, who was shot in Moscow two days after a banquet given in his honor. This is also the time of a meeting Dos Passos had with Eric Blair, the Englishman who would later, under the pen-name of George Orwell, become one of the few western authors to draw unorthodox conclusions from his time in Spain.

More than once, Stephen King tells us that early into the Civil War, Stalin basically lost interest in Spain, for various reasons. He may have realized that Italian and German support for Franco would, in the end, prevent a communist take-over. Still, it is legitimate to wonder how things would have developed if that support had been insufficient and what Europe would look like today if Stalin had succeeded in his attempt to bring the Iberian peninsula under his domination.

Over the years since the end of WW2 we have learnt many things about the Soviet Empire and it is therefore not surprising that the cultural elites in the West have avoided, for the most part, any sort of critical analysis of their attitudes and actions in this regard. Perhaps Hemingway was the only member of these circles to face this question and to assume the consequences in his very personal manner.

I devoured Stephen Koch's intriguing book "The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the Murder of José Robles," in a few sittings. I have always been curious about the Spanish Civil War, which coincided with the first two or three years of my life, as it seems to receive little attention in the popular literature.

Koch takes the reader into the heart of it, exploring those troubled times by delving into the lives of two of America's greatest writers of the first half of the twentieth century, John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway, both of whom were at the peak of their literary reputations by the 1930s, and whose friendship dating from Paris in the 1920s was sundered by their differing reactions to this conflict

The Soviet sponsored Comintern or Communist International was manifested in the Popular Front, a propaganda campaign "designed to pull the democracies leftward by affiliating democratic liberals with the Soviets against fascism." Both Hemingway and Dos Passos, along with a good many of the intellectuals of that era, were sympathetic to the Popular Front, and when it was evident that Spain was drifting into a civil war, pitting a side backed by Stalin's Soviet Russia against the forces of fascism, it seemed morally correct to side with the Communists against Franco and the fascists.

Koch, however, reveals Stalin's duplicity, seeming to oppose Hitler, while secretly preparing for an alliance with him as the world drifted into World War Two. At this point Stalin pulled his support from the Republicans, and Franco's totalitarian forces were soon victorious. The purging of Trotskyites and their executions in Russia and their murder by Popular Front assassins outside of Russia coincided with the Spanish Civil War. It was in this context that Dos Passos realized that the secret murder of his friend José Robles, a Spanish-born professor at Johns Hopkins University, who had gone to Spain to support the Republican cause, was the work of Stalin's agents. Hemingway would not accept this reality, and it was this difference that alienated them from each other.

Into this political saga, Koch weaves interludes of Hemingway in Key West and Havana and on his boat, the Pilar, the break up of his second marriage as he romances and marries the war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, and his writing life in these years. Hemingway's role in Dos Passos' loss of his literary reputation is also covered.

The book is rich with incident and intrigue and moves deftly through these complicated lives in such complex times. One niggling shortcoming of Koch's book for me was its lack of an index. A book about such a complex historical era, it seems to me, is well served by an index. That criticism aside, the book reads like a thriller from start to finish.

I was thrilled to read this book. As a young man, my first reaction when I read the early Hemingway was literary enthusiasm, an enthusiasm that waned as I matured. I also have been ambivalent about Dos Passos. I was never quite convinced by the official story that Dos Passos' writing got progressively worse as his politics did too. I have read the late Dos Passos and the early Dos Passos. Whatever "changed" about his work to justify condemning the later works to oblivion while keeping the early works in print was lost by me - the late Dos Passos was as good a writer as the early Dos Passos.

This book filled in a lot of gaps and lacunae in my own understanding of Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the 1930s. It should be noted that for many decades there was an official story about Spain, America, and communism in the 1930s. In the official story, the Spanish civil war was a real war fought to win between the leftist republicans (the good guys) and the fascists of Franco (the bad guys) and in the end the bad guys won.

The fall of the Soviet Union has turned the official story on its head, but only for those who have paid attention. Anyone unfamiliar with this change in our historical understanding of the nature of the role of the Soviet-Stalinist machine in the US, Spain, and elsewhere should review the "annals of communism" series published by Yale.

In general Koch makes a good case as a detective, putting forth a plausible hypothesis that fits the the post-soviet facts. Koch's argument is consistent with what we now understand the situation in Spain in 1936 to be. I found nothing Koch says about Hemingway or Dos Passos that is inconsistent with what I already knew about these two and their relationship. And Koch hangs all the facts together in a fun, vulgar, cheap, pot-boiler, pulp fiction style that actually makes it fun.

What I find amazing are the reactions other readers have had to this book on Amazon. They range from the enthusiastic (like me), to those who find Koch's style awful, to those who are upset by either Koch's post-soviet notion of the history of communism, Spain and America in the 1930s or by Koch's depiction of particular people, most notably, Hemingway. Koch is not a bad writer. But he has written this book in a rather crass, tabloid style that, in my mind, fits the material of his story perfectly. Heavily footnoted, academic prose would have suffocated the story Koch is telling. Instead, we get a chummy narrator who cajoles, contradicts himself, back tracks, and then sets the record straight. It is all quite entertaining and easy to read. If you want the footnotes, they are in the back of the book, and should be consulted in due course. As I mention above, some people have difficulty believing that Stalin was able to play the world as we now know he did. Everyone got played. Hemingway the least of them.

As for Koch's depiction of Hemingway, there is nothing outrageously new here for anyone who has ever done any sort of real research into Hemingway. Hemingway changed women like he changed underwear. Hemingway was drunk most of the time. Hemingway had a peculiar moral compass that placed great importance on personal bravado and acts of courage. Hemingway was a politically uncommitted, largely disengaged, and easily influenced by the times. Hemingway had the ego of a rock star. And now we know, Hemingway, like dozens of others of his generation, got played by the Stalinists. Is any of this controversial? And yes, To Have and Have Not was a cut-and-paste job. Who can fault Koch for opining that the book was trash?

For me, Koch's story does what every good piece of non-fiction should do - send me to the end notes to find out what books to read next.

To the earlier, thoughtful, informed reviews of this book should be added that this piece of docu-drama is seriously marred by the author's apparently ungovernable dislike for Hemingway the person, his overweening condescension to just about everyone else involved with him, and his insupportably subjective evaluations of Hemingway's output--offered as the Final Word. The implication is clear on almost every page that Mr. Koch, had he faced the problems, dilemmas, passions, disappointments that afflicted his subjects, would himself have responded so much more wisely, nobly, ethically, soberly. He would clearly have proven un-dupe-able, invulnerable to the myriad, swirling, false-god, bad booze ideologies of the time.

Even those never enthralled by "Hem", some who may consider him the great literary fraud of the 20th Century don't need to be reminded incessantly --from the wings, as it were-- how petulant, devious, and utterly despicable he was. Give us the facts--where facts are available--we might ourselves be capable of telling the good guys from the bad.

Mr. Koch's novelistic gifts do not serve him well in this venture; he is forever letting them run away with the show:no one involved in all this, it appears, had any nuance, any complexity, any side, all were either fully frontal Cartoon Villain Bad Guys or hapless Sad Sack not-terribly Good Guys. And it becomes tiresome to have to resort again and again to his lengthy end-notes to try to figure out from what sources he's pieced together the fictional minutiae of a given encounter, confrontation, or thought process, and then to wonder--frequently--whether the reliability of such sources merits main text entry.