Hemingway’s The Fifth Column, Fifthcolumnism, and the Spanish Civil War Noël Valis The Hemingway Review, Volume 28, Number 1, Fall 2008, pp. 19-32 (Article) Published by University of Idaho Department of English DOI: 10.1353/hem.0.0022 For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/hem/summary/v028/28.1.valis.html Access Provided by Yale University Library at 05/27/10 3:30PM GMT hemingway’s THE FIFTH COLUMN, fifthcolumnism, and the spanish civil war noël valis Yale University the fifth column is a disturbing play. The first time I read Heming- way’s only full-length work of theater it seemed dated to me. A Hispanist, I was teaching a course on the Spanish Civil War and wanted to include something of Hemingway’s. After that, I stuck with For Whom the Bell Tolls, which students either loved or hated with equal ferocity. In returning to the play, I find myself in the embarrassing position of going back on my words (Valis 258).1 The Fifth Column is a much more interesting work than I re- membered, though it is still a very flawed one. The plotting, structure, and characterization have been raked over the coals enough since 1938, but the most serious criticism, in my view, has to do with its moral center. Lionel Trilling implied in 1939 that the play appears to advocate the notion that “oppression by the right people brings liberty” (59). There is “a Machiavel- lian indifference to [the] moral dimensions [of political questions],” ac- cording to John Raeburn (15). Stephen Koch and the distinguished historian Stanley Payne are even harsher. Koch wrote, “The Fifth Column is an exceptionally nasty piece of work and the moral nadir of Hemingway’s entire career” (240). Payne thought the play “was a grotesque romance of the Republican terror, in which the protagonist . was a swaggering Amer- ican who specialized in political liquidation . [perhaps] the ugliest Amer- ican in all world literature.”2 At stake is whether we consider The Fifth Column political propaganda or a political morality play.3 I argue here that the work is too morally con- fused to be either. That confusion, I suggest, is the fifth column itself, the THE HEMINGWAY REVIEW, VOL. 28, NO. 1, FALL 2008. Copyright © 2008 The Ernest Hemingway Foundation. Published by the University of Idaho, Moscow, Idaho. 20 • THE HEMINGWAY rEVIEW notion of an enemy within sabotaging and undermining a nation’s defense efforts. The power of fifthcolumnism resides precisely in its lack of location and slippery sense of identity. Who is the fifth column, and where can it be found? Moreover, fifthcolumnism can be characterized, paradoxi- cally, as a structure of moral and political disorder. That is its purpose: to create disorder. Hemingway’s play internalizes fifthcolumnism through the moral ambiguities of its protagonist, Philip Rawlings, whose unquestioning political allegiance ironically betrays Republican ideals.4 In other words, there is a destabilizing fifth column of moral confusion inside Loyalist forces that is eating away at the heart of the Republican cause. To what extent Hemingway was aware of the play’s muddied ethical core is another question. In a review of the play-doctored production of 1940, Joseph Wood Krutch thought Hemingway failed to pursue the unsettling moral-political implications of The Fifth Column “because it is plainly so much easier to develop instead the easily managed story of the hero’s love affair with an American girl” (372).5 Benjamin Glazer, not Hemingway, was responsible for this heavily reworked, Hollywoodized version, which stressed the love story over politics, as recent unpublished research by Jonathan Bank reveals. Did Glazer find the political message too cloudy and go for something more conventional and straightforward? In any event, it was easier for Glazer simply to ignore that the hero of the play is not what he appears to be. Indeed, Hemingway seems to have mod- eled Rawlings in part as a modern version of the popular Scarlet Pimper- nel, the English patrician Sir Percy Blakeney whose foppishness disguises his identity as the quick-witted savior of French revolutionary-era aristo- crats from the guillotine.6 Baroness Orczy’s creation was, interestingly enough, first a play in 1903, which she turned into a novel two years later. The classic—and best—film version, starring the inimitable Leslie Howard, had appeared in 1934. Rawlings is a counter-espionage agent of the Republic masquerading as a journalist, or as he says: “I’m a sort of a second-rate cop pretending to be a third-rate newspaperman.”He also sometimes affects British speech and, like Sir Percy, who has his band of brothers, goes out “with the boys.” The society girl Dorothy Bridges, with her cultivated voice, clearly stands in for the aristocratic Marguerite, Sir Percy’s clueless wife. Dorothy calls Philip “a Madrid playboy” and says: “You could do something serious and decent. You could do something brave and calm and good” (TFC 36, 22).7 noël valis • 21 Franchot Tone, who played Rawlings in the 1940 production of The Fifth Column, eventually became typecast in the role of café society playboy, the 20th century equivalent of an aristocratic fop. Rawlings, however, is really an inversion of the Scarlet Pimpernel. Sir Percy saves people. Rawlings kills them. He is, in more ways than Hemingway perhaps intended, not what he appears to be. But then not much was in 1937 Spain, where Hemingway wrote The Fifth Column in the fall of that year. Deception and betrayal, large themes in his work, permeated the besieged city of Madrid, where fifthcolumnism contributed to the poisoned atmosphere. The term “fifth column” was first used during the Spanish Civil War in the fall of 1936, when one of Franco’s generals, most likely Mola, said there were four columns advancing towards the capital, while a fifth burrowed deep within the city was preparing for a Nationalist victory. To understand how the mindset and structure of the fifth column operate inside Hemingway’s play, it is worth looking at the real fifth column at work in Madrid and elsewhere. Mola’s remarks provoked panic among madrileños, leading the Republi- cans to exaggerate the number and impact of fifthcolumnists and to try and hunt them down.8 This initial propagandistic salvo from the Nation- alists was effective in sowing confusion, fear, and mistrust among the gen- eral population. Fifthcolumnists were organized mostly in clusters of cells called Banderas by the fascist-minded Falangists, who dominated such activities. Small and secret by nature, these groups were highly organized, though how much they actually accomplished is open to question, as Rawlings comments in the play: They have A numbered one to ten, and B numbered one to ten, and C numbered one to ten, and they shoot people and they blow up things and they do everything you’re overly familiar with. And they work very hard, and aren’t really awful- ly efficient. But they kill a lot of people that they shouldn’t kill. (TFC 36) The idea of fifthcolumnism possesses imaginative power because it works through the mechanism of proliferation, like a kind of accumulat- ing fiction. Fifthcolumnists appeared to be everywhere to madrileños,who found the tactics of snipers firing from rooftops or windows upon unsus- 22 • THE HEMINGWAY rEVIEW pecting passers-by especially unnerving (Cervera Gil 263).9 The assassina- tion of the young International Brigader at the end of Act I of The Fifth Col- umn is clearly meant to be the act of a fifthcolumnist, waiting in ambush like a sniper. The electrician who appears in the first act is reported dead in Act II, Scene III, a sniper’s victim, as Petra the maid remarks: “Oh, they always shoot from windows at night during a bombardment. The fifth col- umn people. The people who fight us from inside the city” (TFC 46). The seeming ubiquity of the fifth column has an antecedent in the extended network structure of espionage, unsurprisingly one of the primary activities of such groups. Spies tend to multiply, whether in streets and back rooms or in the mind’s eye. All such figures share in the imaginative hold of shape-shifting. They provoke both delight and alarm, as Baroness Orczy cleverly intuited when versifying the Scarlet Pimpernel’s fascination: We seek him here, we seek him there, Those Frenchies seek him everywhere. Is he in heaven?—Is he in hell? That demmed, elusive Pimpernel? (87) Fifthcolumnism in civil war Spain was not, however, romance but a sinis- ter reality to the Republican side. The hunt for saboteurs, infiltrators, and defeatists was intensifying by the time Hemingway began to write his play (see Alcocer 267–69). In December 1937, posters depicting a giant enemy ear listening were plastered everywhere, warning madrileños to be discreet, while the message of rear-guard vigilance appeared on earlier posters (Alcocer 269; Fellner 74;Cowley 122). Imagined as all-pervasive, fifthcolumnists were also seen as filled with contagion spilling over to the other side. The Spanish Republic was split by bitter internal political rivalries, which erupted in revo- lutionary street battles during the Barcelona May Days of 1937. The Stalinist- inclined Communist press accused the anti-Stalinist POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista/Workers’ Party for Marxist Unification) of being fas- cist agents. The charges, as George Orwell brilliantly observed and later his- torical accounts demonstrated, were fabrications. Nonetheless, many POUMists, smeared as “Trotskyists,” were rounded up, imprisoned, and even executed.10 One gets a taste of such propaganda in Constancia de la Mora’s 1939 autobiography, In Place of Splendor: noël valis • 23 Franco’s “Fifth Column” operated more powerfully in Catalo- nia than anywhere else in Spain.