Alvah's Books

Revolution in Cuba, by Herbert L. Matthews

In A World in Revolution (Scribner’s, 1971), Herbert Matthews wrote: “I have been the principal journalistic scapegoat for the rise to power of Fidel Castro and for the success of the Cuban Revolution, Owen Lattimore was assigned a similar role in the case of the Chinese Revoution in 1949 . . . ” The U.S. Senate Internal Security Committee, while never calling Matthews to testify, during its hearings on Cuba, “went on to pin the responsibility for Castro and the Cuban Revolution on me and The [New York] Times . . ” Matthews continued.

Certainly Matthews is one of the most distinguished foreign correspondents any American newspaper has fielded in our century. But the fact that Matthews covered Italy and its war against Ethiopia, the Spanish Civil War, India, England, the Italian campaign in World War II and Cuba is not the major reason for the easily applied (and rarely merited) adjective. What distinguished him over the forty-five years he worked for The New York Times (twenty-seven as foreign correspondent, eighteen on its editorial board), was his passion for the facts, his refusal to give credence to handouts, his insistence on covering wars from the front lines, his risking of his life and reputation to get significant news, and his conviction that “to expound things as they really happened is the sole purpose” of journalism.

That conviction cost Matthews dear, for not only were he and his newspaper attacked for his exposition of “things as they really happened,” but Matthews was also made to suffer by his employer, who did not seem to enjoy the truth about the Spanish Civil war or the Cuban Revolution.

Conflict over Matthews and with Matthews has made journalistic history. In the cases of Spain and Cuba, the Times was attacked for what its correspondent was reporting, and in turn put pressure on its correspondent by censoring his copy after reprimanding him for writing “propaganda,” or killing it outright. The Times’s editors were annoyed because Matthews reported that there were Italian Blackshirts fighting for Franco, when one of their other correspondents, William P. Carney, said there were none. Matthews replied by sending detailed accounts and photographs of the Italian troops routed at the battle of Guadalajara (Brihuega) in March of 1937 – their equipment, documents, uniforms, battle orders, diaries and even their conversations with him (in Italian). He ended his dispatch with the words, ” . . . they were Italians and nothing but Italians.” And since the Times always called Franco’s men “Insurgents,” the assertion came out: “. . they were Insurgents and nothing but Insurgents.”

So far as Cuba was concerned, Matthews was in a unique position. When everybody including the dictator Fulgencio Batista thought and announced that Fidel Castro and his handful of guerrillas had been wiped out in the Sierra Maestra, Matthews cooly up and went there, found Castro, and sent out a sensational interview that scooped the world. Matthews’s admiration for Castro, Che Chevara and their associates was of course reflected in his dispatches; but that alone could not account for the fact that the Times muzzled him continuously.

Why didn’t the Times fire him instead of rejecting many articles and refuse to print anything he wrote between 1963 and 1966? It even prevented him from getting the biggest story of all – the missile crisis of 1962. He still had access to the top Cuban leaders because they knew he told the truth about them even if he did not agree with their ideas or their actions. But as a result of its policy – at once spineless and biased – the Times got no news at all out of Cuba between 1963 and 1971.

Matthews himself may have provided the reason for the Times’s ambivalence toward its best foreign correspondent in making it clear in A World in Revolution, in two books about Cuba and a biography of Castro, and also in this latest book about Cuba, that he was opposed to communism in Cuba (as in Spain), but he was in favor of a radical social revolution in both countries. In other words, he was and is that increasingly rara avis, a genuine liberal. In fact he is so much a liberal that even though he hurts to this day over the treatment he received from the Times for his Spanish and Cuban coverage, he can still “understand” the Times’s position and almost sympathize with it.

Matthews’s new book is the product of enormous labor, and is a deeply researched, detailed and lived history of Cuba. It spans that history from the time of the Spanish-American war which made Cuba our colony in all but name, down to the headlines about the catastrophic U.S.-sponsored invasion at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961, and today’s headlines about the CIA’s continued attempts to assassinate Castro.

Matthews calls his beautifully structured book “An Essay in Understanding.” This will not, of course, protect him from the hatred and contempt of those who simply cannot stand having a Communist country “only 90 miles from Florida.” But even the most prejudiced will be unable to counter the evidence Matthews has marshaled that what los barbudos have done under the leadership of Castro and Guevara has been for the benefit of the vast majority of the Cuban people. Matthews is as adept at re-creating the personalities and histories of Fidel and Che as he is at explaining the circumstances that made the revolution inevitable, the manner in which it was led, the defeats and triumphs experienced, and the reasons for both. The portrait and analysis of Che, ending with his death in Bolivia, in which the CIA played a notorious part, is a high point in this engrossing story.

The reader is led from the historical background of the revolution, the endless exploitation of the Cuban people by Spain – and the United States which “liberated” them in 1898 – to the failure of the Granma expedition in 1956 that forced a small band of revolutionaries to withdraw into the Sierra Maestra Mountains. From that stronghold they fought and propagandized their way into Havana in January 1959, winning decisive battles against the Batista army of 10,000 men with as few as 300 guerrilla fighters. Matthews continues:

“It is true,” Castro told Lee Lockwood [author of Castro's Cuba, Cuba's Fidel] “that we had many more ready to join us, but they had no weapons . . . We captured 500 and some weapons . . . That allowed us, now with 800 armed men, to spread out throughout the country . . . At the end of the war we had 15,000 soldiers of Batista surrounded in Oriente Province alone. We had some 2500 men there, plus 500 in Las Villas, a total of about 3000men.”

These are the kinds of fact that most of our newspapers do not like to print, just as they did not like the truth about our criminal intervention in Vietnam. Revolutions are never popular with those who benefit by the status quo ante, and Matthews, a reporter who trained himself to get the facts, necessarily became a gadfly and a nuisance to more people than his boss.

While it is possible to be impatient when he seems to misunderstand the difference between socialism and fascism – Castro and his regime are characterized throughout as authoritarian and totalitarian and Western capitalism is always equated with “democracy” – Matthews is brilliant in detailing precisely what the key protagonists of his book did and why they did it. He traces the parallels and points of divergence between guerrilla warfare in Cuba and Vietnam, between Fidel and the late Salvador Allende, between Cuba and Chile. He compares the treatment of Cuba by the American press since 1957 with its treatment of the Russian Revolution of 1917. He exposes the many plans to kill or overthrow Fidel, in which successive American presidents played a major role.

Castro ended U.S. domination of Cuba, which made him no friends on Wall Street or Pennsylvania Avenue. Contrary to U.S. propaganda, however, he never sold his country to the USSR. The roles played in the Bay of Pigs invasion by both Nixon and the late John F. Kennedy are largely forgotten now, but Matthews resurrects them and reveals how that fiasco was an attempt to repeat the CIA-Pentagon-Eisenhower-Nixon-Dulles operation against Guatemala in 1954, which finally left that nation “as corrupt and with the same mass poverty and tiny wealthy minority as of old – but safe for American strategy and business.”

Herbert Matthews always refers to himself as a reporter, a journalist, a foreign correspondent. In this major work he becomes a historian, but one with a difference: he is not “objective,” for which we may be grateful; nor is he the cynic he described himself as being earlier in his career: “In those years of 1931 to 1936,” he wrote in The Education of a Correspondent (1946), “the issues did not touch me personally, and where I later felt willing and anxious to combat the forces which were acting evilly, I was then content to be a mere spectator, to applaud success because it was successful, and to refrain from any moral judgement.”

Unlike the woman in the cigarette advertisement, Herbert L. Matthews has come a long way, but even in 1946 he knew the way he had come and the direction in which he must go:

I was sick at heart that night when I wrote my last dispatch on the Spanish Civil War . . . But the lessons I had learned! . . . Even then, heartsick and discouraged as I was, something sang inside of me. I, like the Spaniards, had fought my war and lost, but I could not be persuaded that I had set too bad an example.

“Open they arms,” cried Sanco Pança, “and receive they son Don Quixote too, who, though he got the worst o’n't with another, he ne’ertheless got the better of himself, and that’s the best kind of victory one can wish for.”

Matthews must be singing inside again. The Cubans won their war, and the Spanish, after thirty-nine years of fascism, are winning theirs today; and he reported both causes “. . . aright to the unsatisfied.”

Revolution in Cuba, by Herbert L. Matthews, The Nation . Posted with permission of The Nation, November 8, 1975,  www.thenation.com.

A Spy by Nature
By Charles Cumming
St. Martin’s Griffin
355 pages
$13.95
In the slowly-paced A Spy by Nature, Charles Cumming introduces readers to Alec Milius, an intelligent, but cocky 24 year-old who is stuck at a dead-end telemarketing job. One evening at a dinner party at his mother’s house, Alec meets an old friend of his father’s, retired diplomat Michael Hawkes, who takes an interest in the young man and very generously arranges an interview for Alec with the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) or MI6.

Excited with the prospect of a challenging and interesting position, Alec goes through the interview process only to find out that he is not SIS material. However, all is not lost, Hawkes hands him a job at Abnex, a British oil company with the promise that if Alec follows instructions, he will be accepted into the British secret service after one year.

As part of the job description, Milius is to befriend Katherine Lanchester and Fortner Grice, a married, middle-aged American couple who are employed at Andromeda, a rival firm. In no time at all, Alec is playing both into the hands of the CIA and MI5, getting himself deeper in lies and secrets that ultimately lead to a personal tragedy.

The primary issue with A Spy by Natureis Cumming’s hero. Right from the very beginning, Alec comes across as an unsympathetic, weasely, and self-centered, who grapples with his insecurities, by covering them with his innate talent for deception. However, this instinctive aptitude for lying does not make a capable or talented spy. Alec proves to be an inept one, starting by the silly ego-boosting lies that he tells his would-be superiors and colleagues about a non-existent relationship with a former girlfriend. These fabrications come into play late in the novel and by that time the reader has lost patience with Alec and with the story itself.

The novel’s main action doesn’t take place until about half-way through the book; Cumming spends an extraordinary long time setting up the interview process with SIS, and then a too fast turnaround with a job at Abnex. There, Alec has to carry out responsibilities for both his cover as an analyst and as an industrial agent. The espionage mostly involves by ingratiating himself with the Americans. However, given the age differences between Alec, Katherine and Fortner, the relationship seems unbelievable. Alec appears to be a pendantic bore as he carries on of how unappreciated he is at his job, and tries to win the Americans’ sympathy. Of course, this is part of his cover, but by page 300, the story, Alec and his half-witted attempts at playing spy have become a tiresome read.

There’s a heavy dose of realism in A Spy by Nature, but as the story plods along, the reader will wish for some high-speed action a la Jason Bourne or even the noirish intrigue found in Alan Furst’s novels, Instead we have Alec Milius, novice spy with a loose tongue. God help her Majesty’s Secret Service.

My attempts to assign myself books to read is an utter and dismal failure. I start one book, put it down, and then start another.  And then there are those “Come Hither” books that seduce you to reading them although they were not on your reading list at all. Damn you, Audrey Niffenegger and The Time Traveler’s Wife!

As much as I am enjoying Ms. Niffenegger’s book, I have set it aside. My list remains the same as last week’s:

• A World I Never Made, by James LePore
• The UnAmericans, by Alvah Bessie
• Men in Battle, by Alvah Bessie
• The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction, by Helen Graham

The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book
By Alice B. Toklas
Penguin Books, 1961
336 pages, prices vary

My goal this week was to review a cookbook that would tie-in with this month’s Alvah Bessie theme. Since Alvah was so enchanted by Spain, I thought a Spanish cookbook would make sense. Unfortunately, none of my Spanish cookbooks are very impressive or exciting to review. So I was in a bit of a quandary in figuring what today’s selection for “What’s Cookin’” would be and then I came across a little gem that’s been in the family since I was born.

I discovered The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book during my “Lost Generation” phase. This was a time when I wanted to escape to Paris and live the life boheme (in relative comfort, of course), writing, eating, and enjoying everything Paris had to offer a thirteen year-old girl.

Now, in all honesty, I have to admit that I found Ms. Toklas very intriguing not so much for her great gastronomic skills, but because of her alternative lifestyle with Gertrude Stein. Remember, I was thirteen and curious.

The recipes (or its variations, including the famous Hashish Brownies) in The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book can easily found in other top-notch cooks books, but what’s remarkable about this little book are Ms. Toklas autobiographical  anecdotes that are generously sprinkled throughout. In the section “Dishes for Artists”she writes of the time she prepared a striped bass for Picasso, which she decorated for his amusement:

A short time before serving it I covered the fish with an ordinary mayonnaise and, using a pastry tube, decorated it with a red mayonnaise, not coloured with catsup – horror of horrors-but with tomato paste. Then I made a design with sieved hard-boiled eggs, the whites and the yolks apart with truffles and finely chopped fines herbes. I was proud of my chef d’oeuvre when it was served and Picasso exclaimed at its beauty. But, said he, should it not rather have been made in honour of Matisse than me.

In “Beautiful Soup” she writes of the finer points and variations of the Spanish gazpacho and then goes on to provide four different recipes from Malaga, Segovia, Sevilla,and Cordoba, along with the Polish, Greek, and Turkish variations of this cold soup.

Food historians might have a special interest in the chapter titled, “Food in the United States in 1934 and 1935. Toklas writes of Stein’s concern about food in America and whether it would be “to her taste.” Here, Toklas describes the different cities and restaurants and all the delicious meals that surpassed both their expectations.

The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book provides readers with a fascinating  and entertaininglook at the eating habits and tastes of two American expatriates who broke bread with Europe’s and America’s leading artists. It’s a worthwhile read, if not for the recipes, but for Toklas’ observations.

[Editor's Note: Ibarruri was still alive, and had not returned to Spain at the time this review was written. After Franco's death in 1975 she returned and was again elected a member of the Cortes, representing Asturias. She died in Madrid at the age of 93.]

Pasionaria’s story of Spanish War

THEY SHALL NOT PASS (EL UNICO CAMINO)
By Dolores Ibarruri, International Publishers,
New York, 368 pages.

Reviewed by Alvah Bessie for the National Guardian, 1966

For some reason we will never know, the late Ernest Hemingway, in his Cosmopolitan magazine version of the Spanish Civil War, For Whom the Bell Tolls, felt it necessary to slander one of the greatest women of our time: Dolores Ibarruri, known then and now as Pasionaria.

The slander was not placed in the mouth of his hero, Robert Jordan, who “had no politics,” but it was uttered twice: once by a Spanish guerilla, who baited a young Spanish communist by telling him that Dolores “has a son in Russia since the start of the movement” – to save him from the war; the second time by a Soviet correspondent who referred to her contemptuously as “that great face . . . that great voice.”

It is true that Dolores Ibarruri’s son turned up in the Soviet Union, and he died there. He was buried in Stalingrad (Volgograd), where he fell with Soviet soldiers under his command, and his tomb may be found on its Avenue of Heros, where you will not notice his name unless you can transliterate the Cyrillic alphabet and read: Ruben Ibarruri. He was 18 when he died – in 1942.

Ruben Ibarruri’s mother, who will be 71 this winter, has lived in the U.S.S.R many years, ever since the French Republic made her life in southern France impossible through harassment and the same sort of slander Hemingway employed.

La Pasionaria’s “great voice” may be heard again – in all its eloquence, its passion and its dedication to her people and her cause – in the pages of her “autobiography,” originally titled El Unico Camino (the only way). It is the same voice that spoke on Radio Madrid July 18, 1936, and which has been quoted ever since: “It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.”

That Dolores Ibarruri was and is something more than a sloganeer scarcely needs documentation, for even her worst enemies acknowledge she was a leader and a major focus of the resistance of her people during three years of war against Franco’s forces and the Nazi and Italian invaders. If quotation marks are used around the word autobiography, it is only because her book is far more than the history of her tortured country and her heroic people than it is the sort of personal history to which Western readers are accustomed.

The daughter of a miner, born in Gallarta in the Basque country, Dolores “finished” her education at 15; she had neither the money nor the health to continue. At 20 she married a miner and at 20 she became a communist. She bore six children, of whom four died in infancy – a tragedy common enough to her time, place and class. With her husband she was not happy, although they shared the hardships of organizational work among the miners, as well as several individual jail sentences. By 1936 she was in Madrid and a communist deputy in the Spanish Republican Cortes.

On August 12, 1961, near Moscow, a handful of veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade sat in her dining room at a lunch she had prepared and served herself, and listened, as she spoke for 20 minutes without interruption about the situation in Spain, its present and its future. The detailed information she had astonished us; you would have thought she had a pipeline to Madrid or had just returned from Barcelona that afternoon.

But it was her confidence in the future of a Spain she had not seen in 22 years that astonished us even more: this was no bitter, sad, defeated expatriate such as we have all met from time to time; this was a Spanish woman who had never been separated from her people since she was born in a mud hovel in Vizcaya.

She may not live to return to a new Spanish Republic, but when that republic is reborn, it will owe much of its vitality and health to this powerful and utterly feminine woman who was for so long its great face, its great voice.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY: A LIFE STORY
by Carlos Baker; Scribners, 697 pages.

Reviewed by Alvah Bessie in the
Marin Independent Journal, Saturday, April 26, 1969

Although Carlos Baker says that no definitive biography of Ernest Hemingway is likely to be undertaken until after the year 2000, he has come very close to writing it himself. And since Baker had previously published a critical estimate of the American novelist’s work that is still in print, the reader will not find such an estimate here. This is precisely what its author says it is: the story of a man’s life from his birth in Illinois in 1899 to his suicide in Idaho in 1961.

It was a relatively incredible life in many ways and the man who lived it deliberately created a legend about himself in addition to leaving a body of fictional work that may or may not live beyond the year 2000. His biographer obviously feels it will.

This attitude is implicit throughout the long narrative and the story itself generally maintains the reader’s interest, for Baker writes very well.

Since this is an “official” biography (it is even copyrighted jointly by its author and Hemingway’s widow) the reader will understand the integrity of Baker’s achievement when he discovers that Hemingway bore little resemblance to the legend he so successfully created about himself – a legend that in time returned to plague him.

Given his estimation of the man as a writer it is most gratifying that his biographer resisted any temptation toward the sort of craven adulation to be found in A.E. Hottchner’s cheap little memoir called Papa Hemingway. To the contrary, Baker’s book reveals the fact that the man who could be loyal, generous, warm and modest to those he considered his friends could also be (and much too often was) cruel, petty, a braggart, a bully, an anti-Semite and a permanent adolescent.

He also practiced his cruelty on those he claimed to love, including his four wives, two of whom he rejected and one of whom rejected him. It is this third wife, the gifted writer Martha Gellhorn, whose treatment in the biography is the sketchiest and the least satisfactory, but it could very well be that she refused her cooperation to the biographer. The portrait that emerges bears little resemblance to the actual woman.

Given his honesty it is curious that Baker could still retain such admiration for Hemingway the artist once he had developed such cogent insights into Hemingway the man. For the two are inseparable and anyone who has read the bulk of his work is aware that he was in no way comparable to Tolstoi, Dostoevsky or Balzac – or even to Faulkner, Sinclair Lewis, Thomas Wolfe or Theodore Dreiser, most of whom Hemingway denigrated in one way or another.

Hemingway worshiped what he thought was courage, virility, endurance and “honor”; he feared and was obsessed by death; he did not understand (and was contemptuous of) women. He adored soldiers (especially officers), bullfighters and prize-fighters, hunters and sportsmen. It was crucial to him to be thought a man of courage, a lover “who bedded every woman he ever wanted,” a marksman, an authority on military science, a fighter and two-fisted drinker. And while Baker’s biography makes it plain how these qualities led step by step to the man’s pathetic disintegration, it also makes plain to the critical reader why his perception of life was so limited and his range as an artist so narrow.

Baker is gentle in the extreme when faced with Hemingway’s mendacity, preferring to call it “romantic pretending.” For Hemingway boldly claimed that he had commanded troops, had gone ashore in the Normandy invasion, was present at the breaching of the Nazis’ West Wall, “killed plenty Nazis” himself and was the first man into liberated Paris – when none of these things were true.

They were part of the legend he was compelled to create out of his own sense of insecurity, which was also manifested by his inability to accept criticism, to tolerate the idea that anyone could write a better book, make more money, shoot a bigger lion, catch a bigger fish, or be more widely admired as a person and as an artist.

As a political thinker Hemingway was a child, which explains why his picture of the Spanish Civil War was attacked by the men he so much admired: the American veterans of that war. Curiously enough, Baker features a scurrilous letter E.H. wrote to the last man to command the Lincoln Battalion – Milton Wolff – but fails to give equal prominence to Hemingway’s honorable apology a short time later.

This unfortunate slip in judgement aside, the book is a solid and almost final telling of the story of a man whose appetites were sometimes larger than life, but who was generally much smaller than the man that he – and that his biographer – thought he was.

[Editor's Note: Since the publication of Landis' book, another definitive history of the Lincolns was chronicled in 1994 by Peter Carroll's The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigades. In this book Carroll presents (with differences) an honest picture of the volunteers and their role in the war.]
At Last – The Definitive History of the Lincoln Brigade in Spain

THE ABRAHAM LINCOLN BRIGADE, by Arthur H. Landis.
New York, The Citadel Press.

Reviewed by Alvah Bessie in
The Worker, Sunday, July 31, 1966

“Since so many anti-human victories have been won in the name of a puerile anti-communism,” writes Arthur Landis, “this work will not seek to advance itself by either adopting that tactic, or its opposite . . . It should, in fact, be sufficient to honest inquiry that judgement be made on that which was, factually, and that which was done, literally. For all men in truth, should answer only to how they have lived within their milieu, and how they have shaped up to the social crises of their times.”

The men of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade “shaped up” to the social crises of their time in so integral and so passionate a manner that the time is not far off when their contribution to the preservation of American (and world) democracy will be honestly appraised.

*

This book by one of the veterans of that volunteer outfit in the Spanish war will not be published until September, but it is – on this 30th anniversary of the day Francisco Franco and his supporters rebelled against the democratic Spanish Republic – the definitive history of the Brigade, and the measure of Landis’ achievement lies in the patent fact that the job will never have to be done again.

For Landis has not only spent many years in research and study in preparation for this history, but he has so thoroughly examined, understood, digested and projected the very mood and temper of the times, and precisely what “was done literally,” that there is not one aspect of American participation in Spain that he has missed; not one facet of that crucial struggle that he has failed to evaluate – and evaluate on sound, historical grounds.

*

There had been one previous history of the Abraham Lincoln battalion, but it was written in 1939 in the months immediately following the “end” of the war, and Edwin Rolfe, its poet-author, and himself a veteran of Spain, accomplished a near-miracle that was of major assistance to the author of the present history.

Landis has corrected many of the errors Rolfe inadvertently made, just as he corrects the deliberate misinterpretations and scandalous distortions of history perpetrated by both honest – and frankly fascist -”interpreters” of the role the Americans played in the Spanish war.

He has done far more than this; he has examined the background of the volunteers and their subsequent history. He has re-created the temper of the 1930s (in America and the world), to explain why they volunteered to fight and die in a cause that “was not their own.” He has traced the open and the secret history of the diplomatic intrigue that spelled the death of the Spanish Republic -and he has laid the guilt where it belongs.

He has not missed a single action in which the American participated – from that hideous (and actually criminal) baptism of fire on the slopes of Pingarron Hill in the Jarama Vally of February 23 and 27, 1937, to the final holocaust that ended the great Ebro offensive in the Sierra Pandols and the Sierra Caballs of Catalonia in September, 1938.

Each of these actions is placed in perspective in the overall strategy and tactics of the war. Eye-witness accounts that recreate the very personalities of the men involved alternate with logistical studies made decades after the events they describe. Landis has plumbed the work of such fascist “historians” as Manuel Aznar, and such honest reporters as Herbert Matthews, Vincent Sheean and Ernest Hemingway, as well as endless books and newspaper accounts, in many languages, in order to present a balanced picture of the truth and the lie, the misinterpretation and the facts.

*

Veterans of the Brigade will cherish this book as the total expression of what they believed – and suffered – so many years ago. The generation that has grown up since 1939 will find in it what they will not find in any of their history books today – the true story of the Spanish conflict. The casual reader will not remain casual for he will find himself under the screaming shells and the white-hot sun, the freezing rain, the machine-gun, rifle and mortar fire that tortured the American volunteers in all those places whose names will live forever in the annals of man’s struggle against oppression and degradation: Jarama, Villaneuva del Pardillo, Quinto and Belcite, Brunete, Fuentes de Ebro, Teruel and that town called Atlas de Celedas that the Americans called “The North Pole,” Seguro de los Banos, Caspe, Alcaniz, Batea and Gandesa, Corbera and Villalba de los Arcos – all are here, all live again and rise to memory or are created for those who knew them only as newspaper headlines or never heard about them till today.

The Abraham Lincoln Brigade is a monumental contribution to American history, for what the Lincolns did in Spain was American (as well as world) history, and the book will be mined for decades by historians, scholars and ordinary readers who want to know “that which was, factually, and that which was done, literally.”

This is the true and indispensable role of honest history, which to Napoleon may have been “a fable agreed upon.” Emerson was closer to the truth when he said, “There is properly no history, only biography.” In Landis’ hands, however, history is the unadulterated truth about how a specific body of men lived in their milieu and shaped up to the social crisis of their times.

[Editor's Note: As part of the tribute to Alvah Bessie, we are running several of his book reviews that he wrote for numerous publications. Below is the first one of the series. Special thanks goes to Dan Bessie for typing and forwarding these reviews]

A LOOK AT SPAIN BY MICHENER

IBERIA
by James Michener,
Random House, 313 Pages.

Reviewed by Alvah Bessie in the Marin Independent Journal,
Saturday June 1, 1968

James Michener is a professional tourist and every few years he comes up with an enormous book, either fiction or non-fiction, covering his most recent travels or continuing interest in foreign lands.

In this way he has made a considerable reputation out of lengthy accounts of Oceania, Japan, Hawaii and Israel, among others. Now he has “done” Spain, and the reader interested in this fascinating country will be able to pick up an enormous amount of undigested information – and enjoy a remarkable series of fine photographs made by a young man named Robert Vavra.

The photographs, unfortunately, are far more evocative of Iberia than the text. For while Michener presents himself as an authority on the history, language, religion and philosophy of the peninsula, its music and theater, dance, poetry and drama, painting, sculpture and architecture (both lay and ecclesiastic), its food and drink, amusement, literature and geography, flora and fauna, the most important resource of Spain is singularly skimped: its people. The aristocracy, the wealthy and “government officials” are quoted, but not the working people who constitute the majority.

Even stranger is his omission of any comprehensive analysis of the Spanish Civil War, the central fact of Spain’s recent history, or of the Spanish scene today, 30 years after the “victory” of Francisco Franco. These omissions are doubly strange, because Michener makes it plan that he was deeply grieved by the defeat of the Spanish Republic, for which he had contemplated fighting “in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade . . . Some of the men I respected most in American life were so serving, and when I thought of them doing the job that I should have been engaged in, I felt ashamed . . . ”
Why, then, didn’t Michener enlist? He gives three reasons:

1. “I was not invited.”

2. He was (correctly) convinced America would soon be at war, and “I was willing to wait until we made our entrance, satisfied that the Republic could hold out till then.” (It couldn’t.)

3. The people engaged in enlisting Americans for the Brigade were “Communists,” who he had never been able to trust.

It is scarcely worth laboring the point, but nobody was “invited” to fight in Spain; people volunteered and Michener “rarely volunteered for anything.” Less honest, however, if he was as well informed about the course of the war, as he wants the reader to believe, is his contention that in 1938 “The defense of a free democracy had been subordinated to the expanded goal of establishing a Communist government. . (Page 697). Such a “goal” never exited.

With such an interpretation of the conduct of the war it is scarcely surprising that on those few occasions when Michener refers to the war itself or details one of its more celebrated incidents (such as the siege of the Alcazar of Toledo, the fascist massacre at Badajoz, etc) he chooses to rely on accounts written by Franco apologists rather than the opposite. Example:

“Facts concerning the Alcazar are so confused and open to challenge that I have relied upon one principal source, The Siege of Alcazar, by Cecil B. Eby (1965), which is in the main pro-Franco.” (Page 140). Or, concerning the current “Bible” of the war, Hugh Thomas’ The Spanish Civil War, Michener says, “It seems to me that he writes the general truth concerning these sad events. . . ”

These “sad events” determined the subsequent history of Spain – and determine it today. Not a week passes that we do not read of mass demonstrations of workers and students, supported by priests, directed against the regime, demanding an expanded democracy and a decent standard of living (The minimum wage in Spain is 96 pesetas a day – currently worth $1.37.)

Such facts do not seem to trouble the professional tourist.

TWO FINGERS AND A THUMB, by Dan Bessie

With just those three digits my Pop (we never called him Dad, Father, or Alvah), pecked out, during his 65 year writing life, six novels, three book length works of non-fiction, several translations from the French, dozens of shorts stories, perhaps a dozen screenplays, hundreds of articles, poems, theater pieces, speeches (to be delivered by himself and others), and countless book, theater and film reviews, flyers, leaflets, essays and newspaper copy. And he edited two anthologies. In a career that began during high school with indignant letters to the New York Times, blasting hunters who callously shot American eagles, to an affectionate piece on his pet Iguana Jaime (written a few years before his ancient typewriter was stilled), Pop’s literary output dealt almost exclusively, as does that of many writers, with what he knew, or what intimately concerned him.

He had initially hoped for a career dealing with reptiles and amphibians. But when a departmental head at New York’s Museum of Natural History let him know- after he’d spent weeks misclassifying 7,826 specimens of Hyla crucifer (the spring peeper), that “You don’t a scientific mind, Alvah,” he gave it up. And went on to author, among so much other writing:

A first book, of which writer and editor Whit Burnett (who he met in Paris in 1928) said, “That was a novel. Full of humor and young love which became, we think, slightly contaminated due to the indiscretions of the young protagonist’s merry old aunt.” Pop never did tell me what caused him to finally burn the manuscript instead of submitting it to a publisher. Was it because he passed out from the immense “glass washtub” of Spatenbrau he downed at the Café Balzar one evening? Or perhaps he decided that since he himself was the young protagonist, and his cousin’s mother, Ella, the model for the merry old aunt, he’d be revealing too many purple family secrets?

Dwell in the Wilderness: his first published novel (and best in my view), tracing the life of a Michigan family from 1876 to 1925, was culled from my mother’s memories during a long Vermont winter that she and Pop spent “gracefully starving to death” (as he once put it), and closely details my mother’s early life and those of her parents and brothers. (Some in her family were not too happy with the portrait.)

Men in Battle / Alvah Bessie’s Spanish Civil War Notebooks (the latter published posthumously, and on which Men in Battle is based), detail his 1938 experience, along with other American and international volunteers, opposing Franco’s revolt against the Spanish Republic. Gritty and honest, the memoir and notebooks reveal his hope to return alive, and his eagerness to shed himself of a privileged early life by submerging himself in a body of ordinary men championing a cause. Hemingway, who Pop (as both a foot soldier and as a front line reporter) met in Spain, called Men in Battle “A true, honest book … Bessie writes finely of all that he could see of it and he saw enough for one man.”

Bread and a Stone: once again drawing on my mother’s life, this time Pop, who appears in the novel as brother-in-law Bill Hogan, recounts a Pennsylvania case in which Mom’s new husband (she and my father had been divorced for three years) is tried for a murder committed during a muddled armed robbery, carried out in an effort to keep our family’s head above water during the last days of the Great Depression.

Objective Burma: an original story for Warner Brothers, for which Pop received an Oscar nomination, the film finds Errol Flynn leading a troop of American soldiers on a search and destroy mission against a Japanese radar facility. The character of a middle-aged journalist clearly represents Pop. (Shown in London, the audience pelted the screen with rotten vegetables, because it was well known that Allied activity in Burma was strictly a British operation.)

The Heart of Spain: an anthology of writing about the Spanish Civil War. This fine collection, edited by my father, and introduced by Dorothy Parker, includes work by such writers as Langston Hughes, Pablo Neruda, Martha Gellhorn, Frederico Garcia Lorca and Lillian Hellman – as well as by many veterans of the war, including Pop. Significantly, Hemingway isn’t included; because at that point the American vets who had volunteered for Spain felt that his For Whom the Bell Tolls was a dishonest view of the war.

The UnAmericans: drawn from his experience in Spain and that during the witch-hunt period, this somewhat didactic work (as I consider it retrospectively) melds several former Communist Party comrades (among them, CBS correspondent Winston Burdett), with non-communist individuals Pop knew (such as journalist Vincent Sheean) into the fictionalized informer Frances Xavier Lang. Ben Blau, the novel’s protagonist, combines several veterans my father knew (principally Joe Hecht and Aaron Lopoff) with aspects of his own personality.

Inquisition in Eden: a straightforward, often amusing, sometimes revealing and always colorful account of Pop’s two year internment as a screenwriter at “Warners concentration camp,” followed by his ten-month incarceration at the Federal Correctional Institute in Texarkana, Texas, for Contempt of Congress, following his appearance before the House Committee on UnAmerican activities.

The Symbol: though not terribly successful at marriage, Pop often had an uncanny knack of getting into the minds of women for whom he had great sympathy. In this case Marilyn Monroe is the thinly disguised subject, in the person of movie star Wanda Oliver. Trashed by several reviewers, writer and journalist Martha Gellhorn nevertheless felt that “Bessie has accomplished a superb feat of the imagination by inventing a woman who is not a man-made puppet; she is a breathing female, alive on her own. That is a magical achievement and cannot be explained. It has happened.”

One for my Baby: the Night Box stands in for San Francisco’s legendary hungry i. Headlining comedian Dr. Sour is a composite of the hungry i’ mainstay, “Professor” Irwin Corey – along with Aaron Sussman, an aesthetic young man Pop had known as a youth. Jose “Pepe” Gonzales, the proprietor, is loosely modeled on hungry i owner Enrico Banducci. And the character of Dan Noble, a blacklisted actor who announces the acts, is Pop himself. (He later wrote an excellent screenplay based on the novel. It has never been filmed.)

Alvah Bessie’s Short Fictions / The Serpent Was More Subtil (that’s the Biblical spelling), comes full circle, combining my father’s youthful and often hysterical misadventures as an aspiring herpetologist, with several of his early short stories. Fictionalizing himself as Julian Leonard, the thinly disguised Serpent memoir also reveals a great deal about life in the Bessie family, including Pop’s dislike (that’s too mild a word) of his stuffy and conservative father.

With the exception of a few comments herein, I don’t feel it’s my job to analyze Pop, my relationship with him, or his writing. But I can honestly say that I’ve enjoyed his work, and found him to be an unusually skilled and often perceptive writer. (And once in a while a less than adequate one.)

In spite of our occasional differences, the angst that crops up now and then between fathers and sons (or mothers and daughters), I’m enormously proud of the part he played in the drama of our times; of his standing shoulder to shoulder with the Spanish people in their fight against fascism, and for the courageous and self-sacrificing position he took against our own native reactionaries. Not too many sons can say that. It pleases me that I can.

And that the vast majority of his creative life was accomplished with just two fingers and a thumb is something I find quite astonishing.

About Dan Bessie
Dan Bessie began his film career in 1956, with MGM’s animation department. Later staff and freelance assignments saw him contributing to TV cartoon series such as Spiderman, Lineus the Lionhearted, and Mr. McGoo, Moving on to educational films, he wrote, produced and, or, directed more than 125 titles, including several award winners. In 1973 he co-produced Executive Action (Burt Lancaster), a dramatic feature dealing with the assassination of JFK. From 1979 until 1995 he was a partner in Shire Films of Santa Cruz, California, writing and directing the feature Hard Traveling (New World Pictures, 1986), and Turnabout: the Story of the Yale Puppeteers (PBS,1993)., along with Peter and the Wolf, The Ugly Duckling and Beware the Jabberwock (all starring Ray Bolger), which appeared on CBS, HBO, Showtime and the Disney Channel. Author of the family memoir Rare Birds (University Press of Kentucky, 2000) and Reeling Through Hollywood (Blue Lupin Press, 2006), detailing his 40 years in film, Dan also critiques and consults on screenplays and novels, and takes freelance assignments as a writer and cartoonist. With his wife Jeanne Johnson, also a writer, he lives in southwestern France.