The Breaking Point is a wonderful book, but there’s no getting past it. The book starts badly. By the second sentence, there’s already trouble.

In 1916, a third-class ticket on the dilapidated old clunker that ran from Toledo to Madrid must have cost next to nothing, and the ride would have been jolting and slow. It probably took the train hours to crawl the fifty miles…

The author, Stephen Koch, should be commended for making his ambiguities clear. He is doing his best to stick to the facts as he could find them, hence the rush of qualifications and vague quantities. The train probably took hours. But how many hours? How probably? Instead of telling details, all Koch provides is a cloud of probabilities and likelihoods. The devil is in the details. Research it or cut it, Mr Koch. Also, the text is peppered with awkward outbursts of vernacular that could have come from the mouth of a Valley Girl! Way much. With emphases and exclamation marks!

And later, much later, Koch has written a sentence in the same way that a mangler writes sausage meat.

An admiring Martha watched Ivens do the job: Joris had had, she wrote Hem, “a dandy meeting with our pals Archie [MacLeish] and Doss, [sic] and it must have been something.”

Even reading it in context and knowing that Joris and Ivens are the same person, it took me three attempts to follow it. Notice how the sentence becomes clear once Koch begins quoting someone else. I don’t know how many subordinate clauses died for this sentence, but there ought to be a charity against it.

Despite this, The Breaking Point fascinates. Like listening to a speaker with a lisp, at first the sound is irritating but over time the lisp becomes inaudible until all you hear is the story.

And The Breaking Point is an outstanding story. It covers the same events as George Orwell’s magnificent Homage to Catalonia, adding depths and shades that Orwell could not have known. Koch makes a powerful argument that Stalin deliberately destroyed the Spanish Republic. Far from a friend of the nascent communist societies that were springing up spontaneously, Stalin was using the Spanish Civil War to force a war between Hitler and the Western democracies.

After reading Homage to Catalonia, I had assumed that Stalin’s betrayal of the Republican forces was just a power play to take over the Spanish communist movement. But it never occurred to me to wonder why Stalin’s armies fell to pieces after three years of modest success. The histories tend to end with the massacre of the non-Stalinist communists. That was, after all, the end for most of the Internationalists. The English and French and American Republicans either died or escaped to their homelands. To Orwell, that was the crux of the story: the betrayal of socialism by totalitarianism. But, of course, it leaves the other story, the story of the Spanish Civil War unfinished.

By 1938, Spain was divided in two. The Republican movement, now firmly in the grip of Stalin’s generals, stood directly against the fascist forces of General Franco. With these two implacable foes, one supported by Hitler and the other by Stalin, one would have expected a terrible, grind-to-the-dust war. Instead Franco won easily. How did he defeat Stalin? How did he wrest control so decisively that his military dictatorship was to rule Spain for another two generations – almost as long as the Soviet Union itself?

Franco, it turns out, never really defeated Stalin. Many histories blame the fall of the Republicans on the Western powers turning away — but in fact, the Republicans had never had much material support from the Western democracies. The collapse of the communist armies was not due the withdrawal of Western support but Soviet support. Franco crushed an army that Stalin had deliberately eviscerated. After purging the non-Stalinist communists, Stalin withdrew all military support to the very armies he had built up. Stalin had no interest in the communist experiment in Spain or even in fighting fascism. After his forces won a major battle, he recalled his generals and shot them — incredibly — for the crime of “antifascism.”

The Breaking Point covers this political betrayal, but like Orwell, Koch’s vision is fixed not on the horrors of Stalin’s Terror Trials, but on the complicity of many Western writers and artists. After the Spanish Civil War, Ernest Hemingway, having built his early career on a philosophy of vocal apoliticism, became the biggest, most famous, and most reliable of all the propagandists for the Popular Front. Some of this can be put down to Hemingway’s egotism and naïveté, but that is scarcely an excuse for Hemingway’s refusal to deal with the plain facts that were put before him by Dos Passos, or even worse, his subsequent participation in the vicious destruction of Dos Passos’s career. The Soviets wanted to destroy Dos Passos because he was much-admired leftist who refused to accept Stalinism. Hemingway threw himself into the task of crucifying his friend’s career, supplying his own lies and innuendo for public use. Hemingway himself was probably never aware of the Soviet agenda, but it hardly matters. That Hemingway’s spitefulness was so easily harnessed makes him just as criminal as his Soviet handlers.

The book’s saddest point is that the Spanish Civil War, and Hemingway’s betrayal of his ideals, his friends, and even his wife and lovers, lead Hemingway to recapture his genius after a fallow period and to the 1953 Pulitzer and the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature. Meanwhile Dos Passos was destroyed, who took great personal risks for his friends, and in one case a near-stranger called Liston Oak who begged his help in avoiding Stalin’s secret police. Dos Passos kept his ideals (although in later life he drifted away). He helped many in dire need. And for this, he was rewarded with public attacks and the turning away of the literary establishment. The critics who had lauded his three great novels were suddenly critical – and savagely so – when he released them as the U.S.A. trilogy. Same books, same reviewers. Even more heartbreaking than that, where Hemingway regained his powers, Dos Passos lost them. After Spain, he never wrote with the same vigour. Being betrayed did more than shake him personally; it cracked the foundations of his writing.

There is a touching scene about halfway through the book when George Orwell, then an unknown volunteer for the Republicans, met Dos Passos. Having heard that his great literary hero was in Barcelona, Orwell camped out in the hotel foyer until Dos Passos passed by. They shared a long conversation. It is as if a baton was passed from Dos Passos to Orwell. The great betrayal ruined the older man, but it gave voice to a young writer who would one day wash away the slime and the poison of the Popular Front…although even Orwell never managed to cast down the Front’s most venomous serpent.

The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the Murder of José Robles by Stephen Koch. Robson Books, London, 2006.