What's a Hemingway?

[Botnst]

Measured in stone.

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Ernest Hemingway, secret agent
Mar. 19, 2006. 10:43 AM
PETER MOREIRA
SPECIAL TO THE STAR

In 1994, I began to look around Hong Kong for Hemingway the Literary Adventurer. What I discovered instead was Hemingway the Spy.
A few years earlier, I had left my job as a journalist in Ottawa and landed in Hong Kong, where I worked as a business reporter. As soon as I felt the tingling excitement of Hong Kong, I wanted to write a book about the place, but I knew Hong Kong had been done to death. I needed an original angle.
Luckily for me, I had a hidden obsession — well, partly hidden. I was a Hemingway fan. I'd read his books, all the biographies. I knew all the anecdotes and had ruined countless dinner parties by repeating them. I came to realize there was one corner of Hem-iphilia to which biographers had paid scant attention.

Hemingway, the former Toronto Daily Star reporter who revolutionized the English language, spent three months in 1941 travelling to Hong Kong, China and Burma with his third wife, the war correspondent Martha Gellhorn (they were married from 1940 to 1945). Hemingway himself published little about the journey; his best biographers, Carlos Baker and Jeffrey Meyers, covered it in about half a dozen pages each.

Gellhorn wrote 44 pages about it in her 1978 autobiographical work Travels With Myself and Another— a wonderful yarn but hardly blanket coverage. I figured there had to be more — letters, interviews, unpublished text, people who remembered him and Gellhorn — and there would be a grand tale of two literary adventurers on the loose in Asia.
Fortunately, I was right and wrong.

There certainly is a grand tale to tell, but it is not a literary tale at all. This is a story of espionage and the frustrations of journalists covering a war.
What I knew going into the project was that Gellhorn, one of the great war correspondents of the 20th century, had initiated the trip to cover the Sino-Japanese war (1937-1945) for Collier's. Hemingway, to have something to do, agreed to string for a new liberal paper in New York called PM. They spent about five weeks in Hong Kong, during which Hemingway drank and Gellhorn worked.

They flew to China, toured the southern war zone just north of Hong Kong in the rain, then flew to the Nationalist capital of Chungking.
They met secretly there with Communist second-in-command Zhou Enlai, and dined with Nationalist dictator Chiang Kai-shek and his glamorous wife. Gellhorn later wrote in Travels how she argued with Madame Chiang, whom she despised, about the treatment of lepers in China.

Hemingway and Gellhorn subsequently flew to Burma, then Hemingway returned to the U.S. while Gellhorn continued on to Singapore and the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). They later reunited in the U.S. and went together to Hemingway's home in Cuba.

Hong Kong in 1941 had about half a dozen newspapers, and several reported on Hemingway's visit, two of them publishing full interviews with him. But documents and eyewitness accounts were hard to come by. First of all, I learned the Japanese had burned just about all documents they could find during their four-year occupation — not because they were philistines, but because they had no other fuel.

And I interviewed about a half-dozen veterans who had lived in Hong Kong at the time — remarkable men who had survived the Japanese internment. I hoped they would remember a celebrity like Hemingway coming to the colony, but they had no memory of the visit. The horrors they endured during their incarceration loomed large in their minds, and there was little memory left for the time before the war.

Carlos Baker's files at the library at Princeton University contained some intriguing documents, including one that surprisingly had never been published. It was a six-page, single-spaced typed letter Hemingway wrote on July 30, 1941 to United States Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau detailing the conflict between the Nationalists and Communists in China. It said a "Mr. White" had asked him to look into the matter before he left for the Orient.

It was puzzling, because Morgenthau's name had never cropped up in any Hemingway biography, and I wondered who this Mr. White was and how he contacted the author.

As I investigated further, I learned that Morgenthau might be the most under-appreciated hero of his era. A patrician farmer in the Hudson River Valley, he was ushered into the cabinet by his friend and neighbour Franklin D. Roosevelt, and quickly became the head of the Treasury. He engineered the financing of Roosevelt's New Deal, then the financing of World War II. His watch ended with the Bretton Woods conference, which created the World Bank and International Monetary Fund and established a new economic order for the world.

Morgenthau's papers in the Roosevelt Library revealed that Mr. White was Harry Dexter White, Morgenthau's brainy deputy at the Treasury. Morgenthau and White were negotiating loans, silver purchases and other forms of aid to prop up the Chinese Nationalist government in the face of the Japanese onslaught. But Morgenthau had a dreadful relationship with Secretary of State Cordell Hull and therefore had little access to official intelligence on the Chinese regime. So he needed his own spy.

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[Azimyth]

Gellhorn was a family friend of the Roosevelts, and Morgenthau must have heard that the famous writers would be travelling to China. So he had White call Hemingway and ask for information.

In his July 30 letter, Hemingway told Morgenthau and White it was impossible to overstate the animosity between the Chinese Nationalists and Communists, and that Chiang Kai-shek considered the Communists a greater enemy to China than the Japanese occupiers.

He added that civil war was all but inevitable in China unless the Chinese Communists were given their own turf with an identifiable, defensible border, and that the U.S. should ensure that none of the aid or ordnance it gave to the Nationalists was used to fight the Communists.

"I believe we can delay indefinitely any all-out civil war between the Chungking government and the Communists if our representatives make it perfectly clear at all times that we will not finance civil war in any way," he said.

In an oral presentation to White, Hemingway also suggested that if war did break out with the Japanese, the allies should consider launching an offensive from Hong Kong that would drive north to liberate Canton and eventually open up a communication route to Chungking.

As it turned out, the intelligence work proved to be the only success that came out of the trip. The publisher at PM, a former Time magazine executive named Ralph Ingersoll, found Hemingway's articles too dry and analytical.

Hemingway, however, caught the espionage bug in Asia and didn't shake it until World War II ended. When he returned to Cuba, he headed an FBI-funded spy ring to monitor Spanish fifth columnists in Havana. Gellhorn nicknamed the operation "The Crook Factory." After that, he loaded drinking buddies on to his fishing boat with guns and a bomb and plied the Caribbean looking for U-boats.

Later, in France, Hemingway headed a small band of irregulars that moved in tandem with other allied troops heading westward to Berlin.

And Gellhorn? She began the Asia trip with gusto, sending Collier's wonderful dispatches on Hong Kong and the buccaneer pilots of China National Aviation Corp., who braved bad weather and Japanese fighter planes to maintain air links with Chungking.

But Gellhorn endured hell on the South China front. She and Hemingway had to trudge through the rain for five days, and their interpreters spoke almost no English. The writers were bored, confused and despondent, and when they reached the front they found no fighting. They had come to a dormant front. Gellhorn would not be able to cover the story she had crossed the ocean for.

If that wasn't bad enough, Gellhorn then contracted dysentery, an inflammation of the large intestines that causes severe stomach pains and diarrhea. By the time she reached Chungking, she was a physical and mental wreck.

In Travels With Myself and Another, Gellhorn never mentioned how sick she really was. It wasn't in her nature to complain. But the illness may have been one reason her article on her time in Chungking was possibly the worst she would ever write. In Travels, she relishes the story of arguing with the imperious Madame Chiang, and that spat may well have happened. But what she neglected to mention in 1978 was that she actually wrote a profile of Madame Chiang for Collier's that was nauseatingly syrupy. This puff piece gushed about Madame's beauty, her devotion to her husband and her work ethic.

What's sad is not just that Gellhorn could write such pap but that she tried to cover it up years later. She even went out of her way to say in Travels that one Nationalist official let her and Hemingway stay in his house in Chungking, and she accepted his hospitality "knowing" that she would be of no use to the Chiangs and that he had made a "miscalculation" in lending her the house. She added she couldn't quite remember his name.

Press reports at the time in China and Burma show that this unnamed potentate was T.V. Soong, Madame Chiang's brother and one of the richest men in the world. If not a household name, he was certainly known to the chattering classes, and Gellhorn's claim to have forgotten his name is certainly pure balderdash. Although it was a very funny story, the chapter in Travels on China tries to cover up the worst of her reporting during the trip.

Gellhorn also mentions repeatedly in Travels that neither she nor Hemingway really understood what was going on in China, but she was being unfair to her ex-husband. (Given the way he behaved during their divorce, who could blame her.)

Hemingway's articles were indeed heavy on analysis and light on colour, but taken together with his six-page letter to Morgenthau they reveal an incredibly quick read of the Asian situation before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Hemingway only spent 11 weeks in Hong Kong, China and Burma, and he was drunk much of the time, yet he was able to piece together a compelling analysis of the political, economic and military forces at play in the Asian theatre.

His friend, diplomat Addison Southard, said Hemingway's public and private reports from Asia no doubt helped the U.S. government greatly, but they may have helped another government as well.

That's because Hemingway, in collaborating with Harry Dexter White, passed all his confidential intelligence to a Russian spy. In 1948, two former Communists testified that White had given them government documents to pass on to Soviet agents in New York. White immediately made a robust defence of his name before the House Un-American Activities Committee, then died three days later of a heart attack. Though Democrats and Republicans for years debated whether White was guilty, government intercepts released after the Cold War ended verify that White was part of a pro-Soviet intelligence network in Washington during World War II.

Unknown to Ernest Hemingway, the intelligence he worked so diligently to gather in Asia may have ended up in the Kremlin.


Who initiated the House Un-American Activities Committee?

Were the released govt. intercepts called the Venona Project KGB documents?

Were other US govt officials discovered to have been communist spies as a result of the HUAAC?

Which political party despises McCarthy so much that they deny the success of his efforts?

Which political party not only leans left but has embraced leftist/communists?