Hemingway's the fifth column, fifth columnism, and the Spanish Civil War

Hemingway Review, The, Fall, 2008 by Noel Valis

The central issue in Hemingway's play, The Fifth Column, is its moral core, which determines whether the work is political propaganda or a political morality play. The work, however, is too morally confused to be either. This confusion is the fifth column, the idea of an enemy within sabotaging the Spanish Republic's ideals. This essay examines the historic context of real fifthcolumnism as a structure of moral and political disorder and Hemingway's internalization of fifthcolumnism through the moral ambiguities of his protagonist, Philip Rawlings.

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THE FIFTH COLUMN is a disturbing play. The first time I read Hemingway'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 remembered, 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 Machiavellian indifference to [the] moral dimensions [of political questions]," according 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 American who specialized in political liquidation ... [perhaps] the ugliest American 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 confused to be either. That confusion, I suggest, is the fifth column itself, the notion of an enemy within sabotaging and undermining a nation's defense efforts. The power of fifth columnism 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, paradoxically, 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 modeled Rawlings in part as a modern version of the popular Scarlet Pimpernel, the English patrician Sir Percy Blakeney whose foppishness disguises his identity as the quick-witted savior of French revolutionary-era aristocrats 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) Franchot Tone, who played Rawlings in the 1940 production of The Fifth Column, eventually became typecast in the role of cafe 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.