Ernest Hemingway and Charles Sweeny

In September 1922, while reporting on the Greco-Turkish War in Constantinople, Hemingway met the adventurous soldier of fortune Charles Sweeny, who weaved in and out of his life for the next forty years.  Sweeny (1882-1963) was born in San Francisco, the second oldest of twelve children, son of a mining engineer who’d made a fortune excavating gold and silver in Idaho.  Both parents came from an Irish-Catholic background, and sent him to the Jesuit Gonzaga prep school in Spokane, Washington.  After a year at Notre Dame University in Indiana, he attended West Point but—like Edgar Allan Poe and James McNeill Whistler—was expelled.  He was later readmitted, but resigned after another half year.

Though Sweeny’s military record is often unclear or non-existent, he apparently fought in eleven wars in eight countries, moving up (and sometimes down) in rank from private to brigadier general.  In his twenties he joined revolutions against corrupt and murderous dictators: Porfirio Díaz in Mexico in 1906, Cipriano Castro in Venezuela in 1907 and José Zelaya in Nicaragua in 1910.  These revolutions were crushed, Sweeny barely escaped with his life, and the dictators were later overthrown and replaced by equally brutal despots.  In 1911 Sweeny married a Belgian woman, Eva Vons, and they had four children.

When World War I broke out, he joined the French Foreign Legion.  In the spring of 1915 he won the Croix de Guerre for capturing a German machine-gun crew.  In September 1915 he was wounded by a machine gun bullet in his right lung and liver, and awarded the French Legion of Honor.  The photo of Sweeny and his nurse in the French hospital foreshadows the one of Hemingway and his nurse in the Milan hospital in 1918.  Sweeny became a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army from 1917 to 1919.

Like most officers blind to the reality of combat, he used suicidal tactics and sustained heavy casualties when leading troops in the fierce battles of Champagne and the Argonne Forest.  When he ordered his men to charge two lines of German trenches and his lieutenant said the enemy machine guns made the attack impossible, Sweeny flew into a rage and shouted, “I’ll not have my orders debated.”  Within 25 yards the machine gun fire cut down the entire first wave.  In the Argonne he commanded his soldiers to charge down a slope into mustard gas and a rain of shrapnel, and once again all his men were wiped out.  In April 1917 he accompanied Marshal Joseph Joffre on a propaganda trip that helped to persuade America to enter the war that month.  He commanded a group of the newly invented tanks in the Nivelle offensive that spring, and sustained a minor bullet wound shortly before the Armistice of November 1918.

Though Sweeny offered no details of his action in the Polish-Russian War of 1920, he supposedly organised guerrilla forces to fight the Bolsheviks and served under the French General Maxime Weygand in the Battle of Warsaw.  Posing as a war correspondent, Sweeny was a French Intelligence agent in the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-22.  After the Turkish victory, he became a military advisor to the future dictator Kemal Ataturk. Acting on behalf of the Turks, he tried to discredit accounts of the Armenian genocide.

Hemingway arrived toward the end of this war, after the defeat, the retreat and the evacuation of the Greek army from Smyrna, and after the fire and the massacre that followed the Turkish occupation of the city.  Sweeny helped the young war correspondent obtain information for his dispatches from Turkey and cared for him during his attacks of malaria.  Though Hemingway sympathised with the Greeks, he was tremendously impressed by Sweeny, who was 17 years his senior.  He thought the older man had a brilliant military mind, and became his close lifelong friend.

In the Rif War of 1921-26, Moroccan tribesmen led by Abd el-Krim rose against Spanish and French colonial rule.  In 1925 Sweeny recruited — his specialty — American pilots to fight for the French.  He did not think the Arabs were capable of self-rule and declared, “We are going to Morocco believing we can sustain the civilising work the French have done under the Protectorate.”  This “civilising work” included bombing Chefchaouen, a defenseless city of 7,000 civilians. This was then a new horror of war which foreshadowed the Nazi bombing of the Spanish city of Guernica in 1937.  After his initial victories, Abd el-Krim surrendered to the French, was exiled on the Indian Ocean island of Réunion, escaped to Egypt and died (the same year as Sweeny) in 1963.

Hemingway and Sweeny met again more than a decade later during the Spanish Civil War, when Sweeny, advisor to the Loyalists or Republicans, exhibited his expertise.  During the battle of Teruel, east of Madrid, the Loyalists captured the town after a bitter struggle.  But they were unable to sustain the attack and a counteroffensive by Franco’s Nationalists retook the city.  Hemingway wrote that Sweeny “made the plans for the Teruel offensive.  Rather he corrected them and showed everything that was wrong with the Russian staff work and every goddamned thing came out exactly as he said it would including how we lost the town and why because of not doing one thing which should have been done when it was taken.”

In World War II Sweeny again spied for and delivered reports to French Intelligence.  Before America entered the war in December 1941, Sweeny became a Group Captain (the equivalent of an army colonel) in the RAF, where he again recruited American pilots to fight against Germany and enraged the FBI for violating neutrality.  His Eagle Squadron once again sustained high casualties.  Of the 244 Americans, 140 were either killed in action or shot down and taken prisoner.  He also served obscurely with Wild Bill Donovan’s guerrilla campaigns in North Africa and Europe.  Sweeny fought courageously from war to war, but fighting and losing foreign wars had no future.  He often refused to take orders and quarrelled with his superiors.  After World War I he could not submit to military discipline and never became a career officer in any army.

Sweeny’s Moment of Truth: A Realistic Examination of Our War Situation (Scribner’s, 1943) praised Hemingway’s bullfighting book Death in the Afternoon (1932) and took his title from the moment the matador kills the bull: “Its Rabelaisian presentation did not have the good fortune to please our neo-Puritan public.  The sword represents force, the red cloth deception.  These are the man’s weapons to counterbalance the bull’s advantages in speed and strength and ferocity. . . . America, today, is also face to face with that ‘Moment of Truth.’ ”

But Sweeny was less successful as a writer than as a soldier. He unwisely rejected Hemingway’s introduction, which would have greatly increased the prestige and sales of his book.  In October 1942 Sweeny wrote dismissively to their mutual editor Max Perkins: “The first part is very brilliant.  The  rest did not impress me.  I disagree with his judgment both military and political.”  Sweeny’s strategic conclusions were unconvincing even at the time.  He predicted a stalemate between Germany and Russia, and said the decisive battle would take place in Siberia—7,000 miles from the European war—when American troops in Alaska crossed the Bering Strait. He was, of course, wholly mistaken.

Hemingway thanked Sweeny for advice with his 1,000-page anthology Men at War (1942), but didn’t include him in the book.  Sweeny’s biographers Charley Roberts and Charles Hess write that during the war in July 1944, Scribner’s “were shocked and appalled by Sweeny’s harsh denunciations against Roosevelt [whom he blamed for Pearl Harbor] and the Allies and immediately decided to cancel his contract.”  The Ring in Our Nose remained unpublished.  Sweeny had served under Marshal Philippe Pétain in the Rif War, and defended him after the war. In October 1945 Hemingway told Perkins: “Charley sent me his Pétain pamphlet.  It has much excellent sense in it but it also ignores many unpleasant things about the Marechal.  Charley admired him so much he deliberately closed his eyes to much.”  Sweeny’s privately printed work defended the World War I hero of Verdun and head of the Vichy government, who had collaborated with the Nazis during the Occupation of France.  In August 1945 Pétain was convicted of  treason.  After many pleas for mercy, his death sentence was commuted to life in prison, he was exiled on a small French island in the Atlantic and died there in 1951.

Hemingway often praised Sweeny’s military genius (and gave Teruel as his only example), but also disagreed with and criticised him on crucial issues.  Sweeny used suicidal trench warfare tactics in World War I; defended French colonialism and bombed defenceless cities in the Rif War; made several mistaken predictions in Moment of Truth; and was completely wrong in predicting that Japan would not attack America.  On December 11, 1941, four days after Pearl Harbor, Hemingway told Perkins that Sweeny would never moderate his views: “Don’t take Charley Sweeny seriously when he baits you about the Civil War: when he is angry he always says such wild unjust things.  He
. . . was completely and fatally wrong about the war with Japan when we argued it in Washington as events have proved.”

Sweeny had a quick temper and a sharp tongue; was self-confident, impulsive and dogmatic; rebellious, competitive and domineering; aggressive, argumentative and abusive.  Hemingway had some of these traits and, rather surprisingly, meekly submitted to Sweeny and tolerated his constant ranting.  The two friends had a lot in common.  Both were six-feet, one-inch tall, though Hemingway was heavier.  Both always dominated women, and were experienced correspondents and cosmopolitan travelers.  They took many risks, were brave under fire and involved in many wars: Hemingway in Italy, Turkey, Spain, China and France.  Both had been wounded in combat and decorated for bravery.  They created myths about themselves, and Hemingway exaggerated his exploits: in battle in World War I, hunting German submarines in the Caribbean, leading men in France, killing Germans and helping to liberate Paris, as well as collecting huge trophies as a big-game hunter and deep-sea fisherman.  Their feats were widely publicised in newspapers and magazines; and both men aroused the suspicion of the FBI.

Sweeny’s first biographer, Donald McCormick, states in One Man’s Wars (1972) that Hemingway “saw in Sweeny the kind of man he wished to be, a tough, battle-scarred man of action, a war hero and a romantic soldier of fortune following whichever side captured his imagination and sympathy, an extrovert who enjoyed life and could hold his own with women.”  Sweeny was one of his few “intelligent friends,” and became Hemingway’s military mentor along with his other heroes: Eric Dorman-Smith in World War I, Gustavo Durán in the Spanish Civil War and Charles Lanham in World War II.  In Paris in the 1920s they were athletic and spiritual friends.  They watched the six-day bike races until Sweeny discovered they were fixed and refused to go.  After Hemingway had married Pauline Pfeiffer and became a temporary Catholic\, the two ex-choirboys went to Sunday Mass together in St. Sulpice.

Hemingway portrayed, analysed, admired and eviscerated Sweeny’s character in letters to mutual friends and in his posthumous novel.  He wrote to Gertrude Stein that he was sceptical about Sweeny’s heroics for obscure and sometimes hopeless causes, especially since he’d already won France’s highest medal: “[Sweeny] off to fight the Riffs.  Awfully sweet thing to do.  But if you’ve got the legion of Honor already what’s it all about?”  In a 1930 letter to the artist Waldo Peirce, he emphasized and then dismissed Sweeny’s mythmaking: “He’s a damned good Bird—Even if he’s only done 1/8 things he’s supposed to have done he’s a hell of a citizen—I’m damned fond of him.”

In a 1943 letter to Perkins he praised Sweeny’s stern attitude to women: “That’s one thing you have to hand to Charley Sweeny.  He doesn’t take nothing from them.  If they start to make any trouble with Charley he gives them that old tone of command.”  In 1946 Hemingway again expressed approval in a letter to Sweeny’s recent rival Charles Lanham: “Charley Sweeny, very old pal and soldier in various armies. . . . We were together in Near East and in Spain and he is one of [my] very oldest friends.”

In 1940 Sweeny was pleased to receive an inscribed copy of Hemingway’s Spanish War novel For Whom the Bell Tolls: “For Charley with the same affection and the same admiration as always. Ernest.”  In 1952 he was delighted by Sweeny’s response to The Old Man and the Sea: “I was surprised and pleased.  It is magnificent.”  In The Garden of Eden (posthumously published in 1986) Hemingway portrayed Sweeny in Madrid as Colonel John Boyle, whose name suggested his hot temperament and was linked to the name of the hero David Bourne.  Boyle spoke outrageously, and “was wearing a dark blue suit of a cloth that looked stiff but cool and a blue shirt and black tie. . . . [He] had deep blue eyes, sandy hair and a tanned face that looked as though it had been carved out of flint by a tired sculptor who had broken his chisel on it.”  He barks orders to the Spanish waiter as if he were commanding a regiment and criticises the restaurant: “Bring a cold bottle.  You don’t need to ice it.  Bring it immediately. . . . No anchovies?  What sort of fonda is this?”

Hemingway’s fascinating letter to Perkins, his final tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner judgment, gives the most complete account of his exasperating friend.  Hemingway was one of the very few people who could sympathise with and restrain the impulsive Sweeny: “He can’t get along with anybody in action.  He can with me  because I love him and understand him and will take anything from him knowing he doesn’t mean what he says when he is angry.  But he is always angry when things are bad.  He has one of the most brilliant military brains I have ever known and the French General Staff trust and respect him.”  Sweeny wanted to kill men the way Hemingway killed animals: “every time Charley gets angry he wants somebody shot.  Well I agree and they are [to be] shot.  Only I wouldn’t shoot them and afterwards it would be o.k.”

In Madrid, Sweeny argued fiercely and abusively about the Spanish War, “Sweeny calling me all sorts of names, continually insulting me, harping on my lack of military education, my abysmal ignorance, my lack of this, my lack of that, bawling me out in front of everybody and everyone there thought we must be bitter enemies.  Then at three a.m. they all were very surprised when Charley said, ‘You old bastard.  You’re getting a little sense after all.’ . . . He’s really absolutely goddamned insufferable sometimes but I know he won’t shoot me and I’m about the only white man alive that can get along with him all the time.”

He could maintain their friendship only by accepting Sweeny’s dismissal of Hemingway’s extensive experience and ignoring Sweeny’s insults and overweening egoism about his role in Spain: “the minute he got into it he acted as though all the rest of us were simply criminal lunatics and the minute the war started was when he entered.  And the war stopped when he left.”

Hemingway didn’t name any of his sons after himself, but Sweeny named his grandson Ernest Hemingway O’Hare.  Hemingway often wrote about Sweeny, but in a 1929 conversation in Paris with the poet Allen Tate, Sweeny gave a rare description of the writer.  Tate and Sweeny “talked about war, safaris, the rise of Hitler, women—the usual subjects of conversation between intelligent men.”  Sweeny self-reflectively said that Hemingway, who often rejected his wild assertions, “although from Oak Park Illinois, was a Mediterranean type, extroverted, suspicious, unloyal and violent.”

Estranged from his wife, Sweeny spent the last 16 years of his life in Salt Lake City with Dorothy Bamberger Allen: the Jewish, wealthy, childless widow of a professional soldier.  Five feet tall and weighing less than 100 pounds, she had red hair and intense blue eyes, and was crazy about the cats that swarmed around her luxurious mansion.  Her father, like Sweeny’s, was a mining tycoon, and she had a vast estate served by two maids, a cook, butler, chauffeur and gardener, as well as a guest house, large swimming pool and 7-car garage.

In February 1959 Hemingway wrote to his editor denying the serious effects of his friend’s illness: “Just had a telephone from Charley Sweeny from Salt Lake.  He had another stroke after visiting here.  But waited to let me know until he was well enough to call.  Says he is fine.  Strokes don’t mean anything any more.  This one paralyzed him slightly on one side.”  In July 1961 Sweeny travelled from Salt Lake to Ketchum, Idaho, to attend Hemingway’s funeral and was an honorary pallbearer.

Like Hemingway, Sweeny loved France and devoted a great deal of his life to that country.  His wife and children had been brought up in France.  He was wounded when fighting in the French Foreign Legion, fought for France against the Moroccans in the Rif War, worked for French Intelligence and recruited American pilots to join the French in World War II.  After that war, when he believed that Britain was provoking a conflict between America and Russia while also trying to demolish France, he came to a tragic conclusion about all his mistakes, losses and disasters: “Why have I lived?  Why have I fought?  Why have I suffered?”

Sweeny was pro-Turk and anti-Armenian, pro-French colonial in the Rif War, violently anti-Roosevelt and pro-Pétain.  Despite their very different political views, Sweeny’s irascibility and abusive personality, and his unwillingness to tolerate any contradiction of his views, Hemingway always deferred to his charismatic hero. The two remained lifelong friends.

Jeffrey Meyers has published Hemingway: The Critical Heritage (1982), Hemingway: A Biography (1985) and Hemingway: Life into Art (2000).

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