Meanwhile, despite these attacks from the Left and despite his own considerable misgivings about Soviet Communism, Hemingway himself remained steadfast. It was the Russians, after all, not anyone else, who were killing German soldiers in significant numbers. It was partly that awareness that led him to appear in Pravda one more time— with a New Year’s greeting published on page four of the 3 January 1943, issue. Under the heading “New Year’s Greetings to the Soviet Union from Foreign Writers,” Pravda’s back page issues statements by Dreiser, Hemingway, Leon Feuchtwanger, and Thomas Mann. Hemingway’s statement may be translated as follows:

In 1942 you saved the world from the forces of barbarity, offering resistance alone, almost without help.

At the end of the year our first efforts in Africa were launched. This is a symbol of a promise. Every able man in America will work and fight, together with the workers and peasants of the Soviet Union, for our common cause— the complete obliteration of fascism from the world and the guarantee of freedom, peace, and justice for all people.

These three contributions to Soviet publications— in 1941, 1942, and 1943— suggest that if Hemingway said farewell to the Comintern in 1940, as Kenneth Lynn claims, it was a very long goodbye indeed.(7) In fact Hemingway stayed in contact with Communists he met in Spain still longer than that; his last letter to Rolfe was written in 1953, the year before Rolfe died. For too long, evaluations of Hemingway’s politics have been dominated by the cold war ideologies of a number of his biographers. That has led to ignoring friendships Hemingway chose to maintain and even to ignorance about several of his political statements. It is time we assess his politics in the light of all his relevant actions. We need to ask what cultural forces led Hemingway to believe and act as he did and to consider both as potentially reasonable, not to assume that conformity to our beliefs would have been his only reasonable course.

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