The Second Son: A Novel

The Second Son is the final installment to Rabb’s Berlin noir trilogy. Set in 1936, during the Olympics held in Berlin, Chief Inspector Nikolai Hoffner has just been ousted from his position because his mother was Jewish.  His forced retirement comes at an opportune time for him to travel to Spain to search for his son Georg, a Pathe Gazette cameraman, who is filming the People’s Olympics in Barcelona.

When Hoffner learns that Pathe Gazette is in fact a front for British Intelligence and that Georg was in Spain following a list of names, Hoffner decides to travel to Spain with the aid of his gangster connections.

Once in Barcelona, the hunt for Georg  becomes a quest of where the names lead to and how far Georg has traveled through Spain in search of a mysterious cache of weapons. In Barcelona, Hoffner meets Piera, a Catalan Communist, and his daughter Mila, a doctor, who helps the former cop in getting through checkpoints in both Nationalist and Republican territory.

In writing about Civil War Spain and its major players like the anarchist leader Buenaventura Durutti, Rabb’s research is exemplary. He plots Hoffner’s moves like pins along a map, marking each spot in Spain with historical facts about the war that will push many readers to learn more about this period.

Many of the relationships that Hoffner has held in the past are plagued with Hoffner’s sens of guilt especially with his older son Sascha, an angry young man who joined the Brown Shirts and later became a disciple of Joseph Goebbel. Rabb subtly weaves Hoffener’s indirect connections with the Nazis, leaving readers with the hope that the street smart detective will somehow escape the inevitable end to Germany’s half-Jews.

Other relations like his affair with Mila is deftly handled without the sentimental schmaltz that could weigh down the story. And Hoffner’s friendships with gangsters, may come across to some readers as a flaw in Hoffner’s character, yet these scenes add color and a touch or realism of how police officers used all their contacts to their advantage.

Questions of political  intrigue are all handled with expertise. The story’s tempo builds and crescendos with a surprising denouement that will leave readers satisfied.

Fans of Alan Furst, Philip Kerr, and Olen Steinhauer will feel very much at home with Rabb’s The Second Son, and readers of the Spanish Civil War will nod their heads in approval of how well Rabb researched this very important time in history when the world was at the cusp of a long and tragic war.

Part 10

Part 6

The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction

The Very Short Introduction series published by Oxford University Press is a wonderful way to get readers acquainted with various subjects ranging from Marx to Christianity, but be forewarned that these small tomes with their tiny print are nothing like the Dummy or Idiots books. Each of these short books pack a hell of a wallop and, hopefully, they will tempt readers to learn more about a specific subject.

In this case, it’s the Spanish Civil War written by Helen Graham, a professor of Spanish History at Royal Halloway, University of London. She is also the author of The Spanish Republic at War 1936-1939, which was published in 2002. Paul Preston, another historian on the subject, sums up Dr. Graham’s book, “This is far and away the best short introduction to the Spanish Civil War that I have read in any language.”  And there you have it. Graham takes a very complex subject whose history can turn any sane person into a raving lunatic–and that’s after finally figuring out all the acronyms for all the political parties—and puts it all into a context that everyone can understand and, hopefully transition to Preston’s or to Hugh Thomas’ much longer accounts of the war.

To fully understand the implications of the war, readers need to have a pretty solid foundation of what led to Spain becoming a Republic and Graham provides succinct historical background. A Very Short Introduction is divided into seven concise chapters. In the second chapter, “Rebellion, Revolution, and Repression” Graham provides a concise narrative of the violence on both sides, from anti-clerical to the executions of poet Garcia Lorca and Amparo Bayaron, the wife of Republican novelist Ramon Sender. Graham writes:

“Those who did the killing in rebel Spain during the first few months were mainly vigilantes. What occurred was a massacre of civilians by other civilians. Mostly this took the form of death squads abducting people from their homes or else taking them out of prison. In a majority of cases the assassins had close links rightist political organizations that had backed the coup, in particular the fascist Falnge. But the military authorities made no attempt to reign in this terror. In fact the killers were often with the connivance of the authorities, otherwise the death squads who came for Amparo Barayon and thousands of her compatriots would never have been able to take their victims out of gaol at will.”

One of the strongest chapter, “The Making of Rebel Spain” Graham provides tight summary of how Franco came to power through skill, but also with some luck thanks to a few “fortuitous deaths” of some serious rivals—either by accident as in the case of General Sanjurjo or through Republican execution. However, Graham points out that Franco’s great advantage at war’s start was his command over the Army of Africa, and aid from Hitler and Mussolini.

The only drawback to Graham’s tight presentation of the Spanish Civil is that her subject–which rouses strong opinions from both sides of the political spectrum—is written a fairly dry manner and rarely interjects any of the passions of the war. However, for readers who want a short  overview on a vast and difficult war, The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction is a good place to start.

The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution, and Revenge

 Reviewed by Randall Radic

 In The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler wrote:  “With this enters the age of gigantic conflicts, in which we find ourselves today.  It is the transition from Napoleonism to Caesarism….  The Chinese call it Shan-Kwo, the period of the contending states.”  Spengler was not writing about the Spanish Civil War, of course.  His perspective was purely historical and not specific to one event.  Nevertheless, his statement provides an explanation for the Spanish Civil War.

Jesus took the long view, too, when he said, “There will be wars and rumors of wars until I come again.”  Indirectly, his words provide another explanation for the Spanish Civil War.  Something along the lines of “that’s just the way people are.” 

Paul Preston, the author of The Spanish Civil War, wanted a more specific answer, so he wrote a book in which he examined the causes and effects of the Spanish Civil War (SCW).  A war, according to Preston, that set the stage for World War II.  In the first chapter of his book, Preston implies that – generally speaking – the SCW was the result of growing pains – “the struggles of a society in the throes of modernization.”  The SCW was “the culmination of a series of uneven struggles between the forces of reform and reaction which had dominated Spanish history since 1808.”

In other words, there were two groups of people in Spain.  Those that wanted to change things and those that wanted things to stay the same.  The reformers wanted to modernize Spain, pushing it out of the past into the 20^th century.  Like most people who are afraid of change, the reactionaries liked things the way they were.  And they liked it even more if they got to be in power.  That way they could make sure the status quo was preserved.

In chapter two, Preston begins breaking his general explanation for the SCW down into specific factors.  The reformers, called the Second Republic, were liberals with wonderful ideas that they couldn’t implement effectively.  Their failure caused them to revert to “revolutionary solutions.”  And that’s when everything went to hell in a hand cart.  Preston details the conflict and its aftermath in the succeeding chapters.           

Before reading Preston’s book, the reviewer’s knowledge of the SCW was scanty to almost non-existent.  After finishing the book, the reviewer would like to know more, especially about General Franco, who led the Nationalist forces to victory – if one wants to call it that – and set himself up as dictator for life.  The reviewer would also like to read more about the 3000 Americans who took up arms and fought against Franco.  What motivated men whom, for the most part, had no military experience, to take part in the civil war of a foreign country?  Preston merely writes, “the volunteers went to Spain to fight Hitlerism.”  The reviewer suspects there’s more to it.  He also admits that the subject probably commands a separate book, dedicated to the topic.  

Preston does a remarkable job in relating the story of the SCW.  His presentation and knowledge of General Franco is stunning.  To the reviewer, it appeared that without Franco the outcome of the civil war might have been different.  For Franco did whatever needed to be done to win.  He was ruthless, driven by an inner energy, which the Republicans could not muster.  Franco’s mantra seemed to be “kill, kill, kill.”  And although a little simplistic, his willingness to kill provided the crucial advantage to the Nationalists.         

Previous reviewers have accused Preston of “leftist bias.”  In the book’s preface, Preston himself acknowledges that he has no sympathy for the Nationalists.  He writes, “it is not a book which sets out to find a perfect balance between both sides.”  He then explains that he lived in Spain during Franco’s domination.  In other words, Preston is not writing history from his penthouse suite at the Ivory Tower Hotel.  To this reviewer, that means he knows what he’s talking about, because he actually experienced it.  And that means his book tells what really happened.  Which is called “the truth.”

Truth is a bias only to those who want to believe a lie.

All in all, The Spanish Civil War is essential reading for a better understanding of the dynamics of history as it occurred in Spain just prior to World War II.

Republicanism and Anticlerical Nationalism in Spain

 Reviewed by Randall Radic 

In today’s world, most people have some familiarity with what is known in history as The Inquisition, which was when – during the 13^th century – the Roman Catholic Church established a tribunal called the Holy Office.  The function of this tribunal was the discovery and suppression of heresy, and the punishment of heretics.  In other words, the Church went after people who didn’t do, believe, and act the way the Church wanted them to. 

Monty Python did some great spoofs on the Inquisition, by the way.

What most people don’t know is that the Church got its comeuppance a few hundred years later.  In other words, every dog has its day.  There comes a day when the dog bites back.  During the 16^th century, the dog got tired of being kicked around and turned on its master.  The turning movement was called anti-clericalism.  Anti-clericalism is an attack on the Church, its clergy, and their power. It’s still around today, too.  Only it’s not as violent or bloody as it used to be.  Nowadays, instead of killing priests, vandalizing religious sites, and seizing churches, the anti-clerics commit a different kind of violence.  They kill their victims softly – with words.  They write books exposing them and articles that flay them.  For example, Saussy wrote Rulers of Evil, and Malachi Martin wrote The Jesuits.

In his new book, Enrique Sanabria, who is a professor of Iberian and Atlantic World History at the University of New Mexico, uncloaks the anti-clericalism that took place in Spain in 1931. The book is entitled Republicanism and Anticlerical Nationalism in Spain.  And it’s a humdinger!  Professor Sanabria knows his subject matter inside and out.  And what is most astounding is this:  for an egghead, he writes very, very well.  He keeps it interesting.  There is a small delightful spark of life in his sentences, which means his readers can set aside their stoic resignation, and actually enjoy the book and the story it tells.

The story goes like this: the Republican government came to power in Spain in 1931.  Now this kind of Republican is not like a Republican in the USA circa 2009.  No sirree, Bob.  Some of the Spanish Republicans were Communists.  You know, the guys McCarthy got apoplectic about after WW2.  Anyway, these Spanish Republicans didn’t like the Spanish Monarchy, naturally.  And they didn’t like the Catholic Church and its priests because they supported the monarchy.  In other words, the Church knew which side its bread was buttered on. 

The Republicans secularized education, which meant no more private, religious schools.  And they tossed the Jesuits out of the country.  Then they nationalized the Church’s properties and made the Church pay rent and taxes in order to use what had once upon a time been theirs. 

Payback is a bitch, isn’t it?  

It was politics is what it was.  And as usual, the political junk got out of hand and the next thing that happened was Civil War in Spain.  During the Civil War, lots of churches were destroyed.  Thirteen bishops and about 7000 priests were executed, along with 283 nuns.  Needless to say, the Catholic Church opted to support General Franco and the Nationalist forces.  From the Church’s standpoint, it was a good choice, especially since Franco won and became dictator of Spain.  The Church knows how to pick a winner.

Professor Sanabria spices up the story by focusing on Jose Nakens, who was the editor of the most important liberal magazine in Spain.  The magazine was called New Life, which is almost humorous, because the name carries its own religious connotations.  Nakens was a Communist, and part of the industrialized production of anticlerical newspapers, books, cartoons and propaganda against the corruption of the Church and the monarchy.  The fascinating result of all the propaganda was this:  hatred of the Church and its clergy was used as a unifying agent by the Republicans.  Of course, the reason it worked as a unifying agent was because it was true.  The Church and the monarchy were corrupt, and everybody knew it. 

All in all, it got kind of complicated, but Sanabria does a good job of untying the knot so the reader understands what’s going on and why.

It’s a very good story – and a true one – told in a rich voice, under exquisite lilting control.  And in the end it leads the reader to some inescapable conclusions:  for one, extravagant ambition is bad.  For two, it’s probably best for everyone concerned if Church and State never get married. 

“You gotta’ keep ‘em separated.”

Readers of this site know that I have a mild obsession concerning the Spanish Civil War. This month marks the 73rd anniversary of the start of the war. If you don’t know much about it (and confuse it with the Spanish-American War) and its importance in history, then come visit and read all the book reviews that will be posted for the next 31 days and beyond.

Once you start to read about the SCW–and there’s a lot of reading, more than 15,000 books have been written on the subject; a Google search will come up with 3.4 million entries—you’ll understand the fascination.

Why am I so passionate about it? My mother was from the Asturias–located in Northern Spain and known as “Zona Roja”—and I grew up listening to all the horrors of the war. Sadly, after several years of hearing the same old stories over and over, I tuned my mother out. However, my personal interest wasn’t sparked until a few years ago when I started writing my novel Julius. It started with one sentence, some research and then BANG! I was hooked.

Although there are thousands of books on the topic, if you visit your local bookstore (chain or independent) you’ll discover that many of these don’t carry any of the titles at all. I have recreated my mother’s collection (they were damaged in storage) via Amazon and combing through used bookstores.

If you want to familiarize yourself with the subject before you go and spend a small fortune,  below are some websites that hopefully will inspire you to learn more about the subject:

• Wikipedia.  This is a good start. There’s so much information and it can be overwhelming, but spend a few hours with it and you’ll have a decent introduction.
• Spartacus Educational. Another good source. The opening page is broken down by subtopics or chapters.
• About the Spanish Civil War. This site is compiled by Cary Nelson, a professor at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.
• La Cucaracha. This site has a lot of fun stuff, music of the Spanish Civil War, links to just about anything related to the war.
• Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives. This is a great site for readers interested in the volunteers who went to Spain (including this site’s namesake and my hero, Alvah Bessie, but you all knew that, right?)

Not interested in reading and spending your entire day clicking links? This month, I have a special treat and I might do this more often if readers drop me a comment and tell me if they liked it or not.  Thanks to the folks at Viddler and embedding technology, I’ll be posting Granada’s The Spanish Civil War series. You’ll be able to watch all six parts.

Salut!

For yours truly, I have an esoteric list that might make some eyes glaze over or maybe roll up to the ceiling–that’s what my husband does accompanied by a muttered, “Fun stuff, Boo.” But then again HE’s reading a book about the Romany (which does seem fascinating).

For  the next three months, my reading will focus on the Spanish Civil War, the history of Communism and two classics, but don’t fret I do have some “fun stuff” thrown in between the serious subjects. So here’s a rundown of my Beach Reads:

June (fun stuff in italics)

Men in Battle, Alvah Bessie

The Un-Americans, Alvah Bessie

A World I Never Made, James LePore

If the Buddha Came to Dinner, Hale Sofia Schatz

July

The Spanish Civil War, Hugh Thomas

A Passionate War, Peter Wyden

The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction, Helen Graham

Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

From Where the Rivers Come, Terin Tashi Miller

The Last Dickens, Matthew Pearl

August/September

The Rise and Fall of Communism, Archie Brown

The Roots of Amercan Communism, Theodore Draper

The Communist Party of the United States, Fraser M. Ottanelli

Black Boy, Richard Wright

Stardust, Joseph Kanon

Fun stuff,eh? I think so…

For Whom the Bell Tolls, By Ernest Hemingway

Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940, 471 pages

Reviewed by Alvah Bessie, New Masses, November 5, 1940

“No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.”

This is the quotation from John Donne which Ernest Hemingway sets as rubric for his new novel, and this is the touchstone by which that novel must be evaluated. Since we must assume that Donne was speaking of the universal brotherhood of man, of the inter-relationship of human life and its indivisibility, we have a right to expect that Hemingway’s long novel of the war in Spain will illuminate that text and not obscure it, will demonstrate the novelist’s realization of the significance of that war, and find him at the peak of his achievement.  For that war, which Hemingway witnessed at close hand, is being revealed with every day that passes to have been a touchstone and a turning point in human history which those who had foresight in 1936 stated it would be: “the cause of all advanced and progressive mankind.”

Ernest Hemingway’s relationship to the war was intimate and varied. In many senses he was as much a participant as those men he knew and loved who now are gone—Lucasz, Werner Heibrunn, and the many anonymous dead of the glorious Twelfth International Brigade. The novelist gave freely of his substance and his spirit in the cause for Spain; he wrote and he spoke and he acted.  And he commanded the admiration and respect of the men of many nationalities who fought there and who knew his name. It was during that war that he wrote a novel that represented what should have been—and what many thought was—a transition book: To Have and Have Not. It was both interesting and inevitable that the novel should have been the first work from his hand that was not greeted with unanimous enthusiasm by the critical fraternity of the bourgeois press. For in its pages a new note had been sounded. The old Hemingway of the postwar what-the-hell-boys and the old let’s-have-another-drink was gone. A new Hemingway made his appearance, a new theme emerged, Whereas in his short stories and in two previous novels the author had exasperated his most perspicacious admirers by his inconclusive treatment of the necessity for manliness and the pervasive horror of death, a maturing artist, found another subject—the problem of making a living, the necessity of human solidarity.  “One man alone ain’t got,” whispered the dying Harry Morgan, an honest man who had found that he could not feed his wife and children by honest labor.  “No man alone now.” He stopped “No matter how a man alone got no bloody —ing chance.”

The critics deplored this new and serious note in their pet disillusioned author, an author they had praised being above the political arena, who dealt with eternal realities in a “lean, athletic prose.” It was whispered freely among those objective gentlemen that Hemingway was slipping; he was a member of the League of American Writers; he had discovered that non-existent figment of the Reds’ imagination—the Class Struggle. But many who had thought Hemingway was dead (for more valid reasons) took new hope with the appearance in his work of this wider realization of man’s humanity, this deeper understanding of his struggle. Sex and death were eternal verities, but it was not until 1937 that Hemingway discovered taxes.  To Have and Have Not was a vastly imperfect work; the author’s satirical treatment of the human parasites who lived on luxury yachts of the Florida keys was both brittle and jejune, and his old limitations were amply manifest: the interchangeability of his conversation; his feeble understanding of female character; his inability to fully explore and plumb character at all. For with the rarest of exceptions few characters that Hemingway has dealt with  up to date have been more than pegs on which to hang those moods and intimations of mortality which have been the author’s forte, and which reveal his greatest gifts.

That those gifts are considerable no sensitive person could doubt. He has an ear for the language (in dialogue) that is unique. No human being ever talked the way Hemingway’s characters talk, but every word they speak makes the reader say, “How true to life.” This is real artistic triumph. This man can create moods and crystallize certain fundamental emotions in a way few writers have ever been privileged to achieve.  And it is these moods and these emotions that the reader generally remembers, not the people who live through them—the futility  of the life of the expatriate, his emptiness and his frantic search for a kick; the horror of the retreat from Caporetto; the loneliness that surrounds the death in childbed of the heroine in A Farewell to Arms, the brutality of The Killers, and the frustration of Fifty Grand; the loneliness and incongruity of drunkenness, and the sense of decay that pervaded all his work up to To Have and Have Not, where the wider significance of living made a momentary appearance.

Many expected that Hemingway’s experience in Spain would so inflame his heart and talents, that his long-announced novel of that war would be both his finest achievement and “the” novel about Spain. It is not. It is his finest achievement only in the sense that he has now perfected his extraordinary technical facility and touched some moments of action with a fictional suspense that is literally unbearable. But depth of understanding there is none; breadth of conception is heartbreakingly lacking; there is no searching, no probing, no grappling with the truths of human life that is more than superficial. And an astounding thing has happened, that anyone who was even remotely concerned with what happened in Spain will find almost incredible: Hemingway has treated that war (in an essential way) exactly as he treated the first world war in A Farewell to Arms. Touched in his own flesh and spirit by the horrors of that first great imperialist conflict, struck into a mood of impotent despair by its utter lack of meaning and its destruction of everything all decent human beings value, Hemingway proclaimed the futility of life and love and happiness. He killed his heroine and in a memorable evocation of utter human loneliness, his hero “walked home in the rain.” The Farewell was so bitter a condemnation of imperialist war that it aroused the ire of Archibald MacLeish, who found that it had been largely responsible for destroying the new generation’s faith in its misleaders.

Let us examine For Whom the Bell Tolls, and see what the author (who only recently aptly replied to MacLeish) has done with one of the greatest human facts of our century—the two and a half years during which the Spanish people held in check, with their bare hands, the forces of international fascism. His hero this time is Robert Jordan, American volunteer who is a partizan fighter—one of that small band of extremely courageous men who worked behind fascist lines. Jordan is sent behind the lines again to blow up a strategic bridge—his signal for the explosion is to the beginning of a government attack upon Segovia.

The action takes place in three days’ times. Jordan makes contact with a group of Spanish guerilleros, meets a Spanish girl who had been captured and raped by the fascists, falls in love with her, makes his plans to blow the bridge—a difficult enterprise in which he fully expects to lose his life.  His guerillas attack the fascist garrison, and he blows the bridge as what is to be a futile attack gets under way—for the fascists have learned of the plans for the offensive and are prepared to meet it. In escaping, Jordan’s horse is wounded, falls upon the man, and breaks his leg. He is too badly injured to be carried, and must be left behind to do what damage he can with a light machine-gun, and then to end his life.

This is a story of action, and the action is fast and furious, fused with a suspense that is magnificently handled in every incident. But this is also A Farewell to Arms, slightly in reverse. For the total implication of the novel is, again, the necessity for the virility, the pervasive horror of death, the futility—nay, the impossibility of love. Given only seventy-two hours in which to live, Robert Jordan must live his life within that span. He accepts that fate, but the reader’s disappointment in his fate is Hemingway’s disappointment with life—for there is no tragedy here, merely pathos. Here, again, are long and fruitless and somewhat meaningless disquisitions upon the significance of death and killing (in war, in murder, in the bull-ring, by accident, by design). Here again is the small and personal (and the word personal is the key to the dilemma of Ernest Hemingway’s persistent lack of growth) frustration of the individual, and here again is the author’s almost pathological preoccupation with blood and mutilation and sex and death—they all go together and are part and parcel of his attitude toward life, and they are the only facts of life with which he has consistently dealt. I do not mean to imply that these subjects are unworthy or incapable of profound treatment, singly or together; I do mean to insist that in Hemingway’s hands they have never achieved the stature of universality, perhaps because Hemingway cannot see them in perspective, cannot see them more than sentimentally.

It must be clearly stated that Hemingway’s position in this novel is unequivocally on the side of the Spanish people; there can be no question of his defection from that cause. It is, however, a tragic fact that the cause of Spain does not, in any essential way, figure as a motivating power driving, emotional, passional force in this country. In the widest sense, that cause is actually irrelevant to the narrative. For the author is less concerned with the fate of the Spanish people, whom I am certain that he loves, than he is with the fate of his hero and his heroine, who are himself. They are Hemingway and Hemingway alone, in their (say rather his, for Jordan is the mainspring of the narrative, and the girl Maria is only lightly sketched) morbid concentration upon the meaning of individual death, personal happiness, personal misery, personal significance in living and their personal equation is not so deeply felt or understood as to achieve wide significance. For all this groping, the author of the Bell has yet to integrate his individual sensitivity to life with the sensitivity of every living human being (read the Spanish people); he has yet to expand his personality as a novelist to embrace the truths of other people, everywhere; he has yet to dive deep into the lives of others, and there to find his own.

The personal constriction has long been evident and has made inevitable other aspects of Hemingway’s personality that are, to say the least, reprehensible. I refer to his persistent chauvinism, as referred to the Italian people, and to women; to the irresponsibility he has shown in publishing in Hearst’s Cosmopolitan such a story as Below the Ridge, a story whose implications gave deadly ammunition to the enemy—Hemingway’s enemy, the fascist-minded of America; to the irresponsibility in permitting his play, The Fifth Column, to be mutilated and distorted out of all semblance of what he originally wanted to say, to the point where it was actually a slander to the Spanish people.

There are many references in Bell to various political aspects of the struggle in Spain. And few of these references do more than obscure the nature of that struggle. Robert Jordan, his American anti-fascist fighter, wonders ‘what the Russian stand is on the whole business.” If Jordan, who is pictured as an utterly inflexible anti-fascist, did not understand what the Soviet Union felt about Spain, surely his creator did and and does. And just as in his story Below the Ridge, Hemingway’s sins of omission in the Bell allow the untutored reader to believe that the role of the Soviet Union in Spain was sinister and reprehensible. For certainly he must himself know—and it is his obligation to clearly state—that the role was clear and well-defined, and so honest as to command the entire respect and adherence of the Spanish people, who hung banners in their towns which read: Viva La U.R.S.S.; Mejor Amigo del Pueblo Español (Long Live the Soviet Union, Best Friend of the People of Spain!).

Now this concentration, this constriction of Hemingway’s indubitable genius, to the purely personal, has resulted in the intensification of his idiosyncratic tendencies to the point where he, an inflexible supporter of the loyalists and avowed admirer of the International Brigades, can conceive and execute as vicious a personal attack upon Andre Marty, the organizer of the International Brigades, as could be and has been delivered upon him by French fascist deputies themselves! This attack upon Marty, who is portrayed in the novel under his own name, and upon whom Hemingway exercises the presumption (both personal and artistic) of thinking for him, is entirely irrelevant to the narrative. To understand it all, one would have to know, at first hand, the nature of Hemingway’s personal contact with this man—a revolutionary figure of the first magnitude, organizer of the Black Sea mutiny of the French navy (an achievement that could scarcely have been conceived and executed by the criminal imbecile Hemingway portrays), a monolithic representative of the French working class, and the man who was the organizational genius and spirit of the Brigades. Hemingway makes such protestation of admiring. Both as novelist and reporter Hemingway had an obligation to understand this man, whatever his personal experience with Marty, whatever his personal opinion of Marty’s personality might have been. He cannot plead that his intentions in attacking Marty were good; that it was his honest conviction that Marty was a part of the incompetence, the red tape, and the outright treachery that strangled Spain, for such “facts” simply will not hold water; they are lies. And I am afraid that Hemingway will live to see his book hailed by our universal enemy precisely because of his attack upon Marty; I am afraid he will live to see every living and dead representative of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion attacked and slandered because of the great authority that attaches to Hemingway’s name and his known connection with Spain.

Yet this man Marty is the man the author portrays as a fool, a madman, and categorically indicts as a murderer! And I wonder, when he wrote these pages, whether he considered for a moment that he was attacking him with the very terms that have been leveled at him by the French fascists who sold France down the river to Hitler. I wonder if he considered he was accusing him in the very same way that were used by American deserters who appeared before the Dies committee and attempted to smear the Veterans of the Lincoln Brigade, with the very words of the Hearst press which, throughout the war in Spain, characterized the Internationals as the scum of the earth, international bums, gangsters, and murderers.

This is the trap into which the individualism Hemingway’s bourgeois critics so admired, has led a man who is still one of our most greatly endowed creative artists. For he has written a novel of Spain without the Spanish people, a Hamlet without the Dane. And he has forgotten the words he wrote earlier this year: “There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write them truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.” For the author of the Bell does not convince us, with this novel, that “any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde.” He only convinces us—no matter how tenderly he may write of the love of Robert Jordan and Maria—that the imagination of his own death may yet destroy him as an artist.

It seems certain that Hemingway did not intend to write a Cosmopolitan love story against a background of the Spanish Civil War; yet this what he has done. It is certain that he did not intend to slander the Spanish people or the Soviet Union; yet his method of telling the story has resulted in both. With minor exceptions, the Spanish people portrayed here are cruel, vindictive, brutalized, irresponsible. Throughout the long narrative there is evidence of much confusion: Hemingway praises the individual heroism of individual Communists, impugns and slanders their leadership, their motives, and their attitudes. He admires the Brigades, and assails their leadership (and surely he knows enough about military affairs to realize that no soldier can fight well unless his officer commands his respect).

Already this great endowed writer, who on innumerable occasions has placed himself without equivocation on the side of the people against their enemies, has been readmitted by the most reactionary critics to the Valhalla of the Literary Giants. J. Donald of the New York Times has forgiven him for writing To Have and Have Not; the defected liberal, John Chamberlain, absolves him for having (in the same novel) made “a common murderer of inferior sensibility and no moral sense whatever. . .do duty as a symbol of downtrodden humanity,”  cheers the fact “If Archibald MacLeish still thinks of Hemingway as an underminer of the soldierly virtues he will have to change his mind,” and becomes shrill with joy over the attack on Marty, Hemingway’s “turn(ing) on the politicos of  Moscow” and finally arriving at the point announced by John Dos Passos in Adventures of a Young Man. (This should be news to Hemingway, for Dos Passos ultimately became an avowed enemy of the republican government of Spain.) Edmund Wilson also points the Dos Passos parallel in the New Republic, lauds Hemingway for being more interested in “The kind of people. . .rather than social-economic relations. . . .”

But this is strange company for a man like Hemingway, a man who transcended the futility created in him by the first world war, was vitalized, as a man and as an artist, by Spain; a man who won the respect and admiration of almost every International Brigade man who met him, and who gave liberally to these men of his own substance. For at the moment he is found in bad company; in the company of his enemies, and the people’s enemies—clever enemies who will fawn upon him and use him, his great talents and his passion for the people’s cause, to traduce and betray those talents and those people.

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.