A Note on the His-story in Historical Writing

Last night I started reading Jorge Semprún’s The Long Voyage, the first novel he wrote (and winner of a pair of French literary prizes).  I think Helen Graham was right in indicating Literature or Life as his greatest literary accomplishment.  Still there is very much of interest in The Long Voyage.  Already Semprún deploys his anti-chronological mosaic technique, complete with authorial intrusions (of the sort, ‘this is my book, so I’ll write it as I damn well please’).  He moves forward, backward, sideways, etc.  Then he draws the reader in with his vivid instantaneos.  It is as if his literature were indeed made up of a collection of moments, sometimes even scenes, often fragmented irregularly, like the cracks in a broken mirror.  The translation appears to be very good, with a language that is in no way dated at all.  This is refreshing.  And in addition, he tells it like it is—or was, with no sentimentality.  This is something to bear in mind.  Semprún allows his characters, all of whom—for the moment—are trapped in the same boxcar, to reveal ugly, perhaps even petty, sides of themselves.  The farmer, for example, who got caught up in the Nazi roundup, and threatens to reveal a plan by some within the boxcar to try to cut through the floorboards.  He’s not presented as a very sympathetic character, and yet neither is he a villain.  I mean, he has a point, since he was a guy—perhaps even a collaborator, or at least someone who was willing to live with the occupation rather than resist it—who just wanted to get on with his own life.  Obviously this is extremely selfish at a time of such widespread tragedy.  But what I appreciate about Semprún’s even mentioning him, is that there must have been many like him, and in this way Semprún—without lecturing us at all—reveals something of the complexity of French society and the diverse attitudes towards the catastrophic capitulation.  And in the end this diversity is not only historically accurate, it’s also psychologically true. 

Yesterday I listened to a brief interview with Ken Follett, who abandoned one gravy train for another (speaking of trains) when he made the decision, in 1989, to write a novel about the construction of a cathedral, rather than continue pumping out the thrillers. That novel, The Pillars of the Earth, met with widespread success as well.  But what I found interesting about the interview was his comment concerning the research behind his historical fiction.  Not simply that he enjoys it, and that it is easier than writing, but that once he begins to write his story he has to relegate the history to the background.  This too is important to remember.  Readers are interested—and this is what I meant to point out with regard to Semprún’s novel—in the intricate psychological interaction between vivid characters.  Even stating it like that makes it sound grander than it is.  People are basically attracted to gossip, much as bears are attracted to honey, because gossip is so intrinsically dramatic and satisfying (even when the reported events aren’t all that dramatic, the retelling of these events, especially when it’s done in such a way as to suggest that the information is somehow contraband, and that the listener is privileged to get a whiff of it, is always capable of hooking its listener).  And the satisfaction in gossip is very similar to the cathartic effect of fiction, wherein one may witness suffering and grief without participating too much in either one of them.

The 'Pornography of Violence'

Last night I finished Gamel Woolsey’s memoir, Death’s Other Kingdom.  This is from the epilogue, and it made me pause.  She is relating a pair of impressions that were made upon her in Lisbon, on her way back to England in 1936/37.  The contrast between an advertisement in a Portuguese newspaper for an arms manufacturer who is selling machine guns, and a scene in which a pair of poor fisherwomen enter a shop where one of them spends some hard-suffered savings to buy a yellow handkerchief, makes her remark:

“Even the Civil War… some day will be over:  even its inevitable aftermath of terror and suffering will be forgotten at last.  Perhaps one day it will please us to remember even these things when generations have passed away and the Civil War is a dim half-forgotten story of old tragedy—as legendary and far away and as shadowy and faint in its power to evoke pain as the War of the Seven against Thebes or the wars of Clusium and Rome.”

Seventy years later, in Spain, the Republican victims have never been allowed to make their peace with what happened, and therefore they cannot remember without pain.  There are no memorials to the Republican dead and no national museum of the Civil War.  It was Franco’s intention that no one be allowed to remember what really happened, at least that no one be allowed to remember those who lost the war.  This highly enforced obligatory collective amnesia has operated within the body politic of Spanish society like a malign tumor, and needs to be extricated.  Until the illness is fully recognized—the first step in any curative process—there can be no “dim half-forgotten story of old tragedy,” because the tragedy continues in the form of all the unanswered questions.  And even if the direct memory of these questions are taken to the grave, the questions will outlive those who used to fearfully ask them because some trace of the doubts about what actually happened to some beloved individual in one’s life-line will linger in the young minds of the descendents who know only that a mystery still shrouds their own undeclared past.  This is the sense in which the wound continues to suppurate, even if invisibly, deep within the body politic, and spreads its venom, like a metastasizing cancer.  Those who fear “opening the wounds” fear the revelations that might solve some of the mysteries, because so much of what happened happened, as Woolsey pointed out, not because of political and ideological disputes, but simply because the opportunities arose for the vengeance of petty griefs and few could resist this temptation.  In addition, as Helen Graham has noted in her brief history of the Spanish Civil War, the nature of the authoritarian system established by Franco required—and succeeded in attaining—widespread collaboration on the part of many otherwise disinterested citizens.  This happened throughout Nazi Germany and occupied Europe as well, where practically anyone who did not actively resist collaborated with the regime—if not by actually persecuting the regime’s victims or denouncing them to the authorities—by merely looking the other way.  These memories too are extremely painful, and usually avoided at all costs.  Hence the reluctance in Spain by one segment of society (usually those who one way or another pertain to the side that won the Civil War) to allow the disinterring of the mass graves and the DNA sampling that can help answer at least some of the outstanding questions concerning what really happened.

Yet Another Hill (and one well worth reading about)

Milton Wolff was the last commander of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, the group of volunteers the FBI classified as ‘premature antifascists,’ the brave men and women who went to Spain in the late 1930s to fight against Franco and the forces—both domestic and international—that he had allied in his bid to topple the duly elected and progressive Second Republic government.  Wolff was a high school dropout and something of an anti-intellectual who disdained talk about the larger, political and tactical, conception of the war he was involved in, though he was fully aware of the consequences of defeat.  Like most of the 2,800 American volunteers, Wolff had no military training or experience prior to that which he gained on the front lines of the battle for Brunete, outside of Madrid, in July of 1937, when he assumed his first command, that of a machine gun unit.

But Wolff was a natural, and this is something that comes through quite clearly in his autobiographical novel which relates his experiences in Spain, fifty-six years prior to the publication of Another Hill, by the University of Illinois Press, in 1994.

Through the eyes of his alter ego, Mitch Castle, the reader gets a very good idea of what it was like to form part of the vanguard in the early violent and enthusiastic struggle against the spread of European fascism.  Wolff is an uneven stylist, but that fits his character perfectly:  that of a man who was largely self-educated, detested the pomp of rank and the comforts of privilege, and gained a reputation for being fearless of the stray rounds that took the lives of so many of his comrades (over a third of the Lincolns were killed in Spain, as were half of the eight Lincoln Battalion commanders who preceded Wolff, the other four being wounded; Wolff was twenty-two years old when he assumed command).

But the writing is above all, honest and true to the gritty and unforgiving experience of being involved in the last great ideological war, when the odds, at least in the beginning, were so heavily stacked against the cause of democracy.  Though Wolff—and like him, Castle—was a member, as were most of the volunteers, of an organization related to the American Communist Party (the Young Communist League), he was much more interested in protecting his men and killing the enemy and advancing if possible to take another position, usually atop another hill, than he was in towing the party line that the political commissars attached to each battalion sought to inculcate in the minds of the weary and brave men who fought for the Republic[1].

It’s true that the “history of the Spanish civil war is consumed by mythology and legend, so much so that it is extremely difficult to separate fact from fiction,[2]” and that’s why Wolff chose to blend the two in an avowedly autobiographical piece of writing, where real and imagined characters interact with each other. 

Wolff puts together this story in a roughly chronological fashion, though there are sometimes abrupt leaps from one scene to another.  Sometimes the writing as writing per se doesn’t shine or hold much intrinsic interest, but there are moments, throughout the novel, when the writing acquires the concision and suggestive power of poetry, particularly towards the end, when Mitch Castle is in Barcelona, having been withdrawn from the last fight, and he’s sitting around a table with Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn and Jo Davidson and the NY Times reporter Herb Matthews and Joe North, a reporter for the Daily Worker and the New Masses, and Castle is recounting for the others that last night and day in the field, when he had been ordered first to cut a road (which he failed to do) and then to take and hold a hill (number 666 in the Sierra de Pándols), and the writing, in this denouement of the novel, becomes brilliant.

Wolff always manages the speech of his characters from all over the world with considerable talent, though his Spanish is atrocious.  But the things Hemingway says, for example, are consonant with all we know of Hemingway, and the British speech patterns are true to the ear too.  And yet it’s more than this sort of accurate reportage, even at a distance of over fifty years from the memories, that makes the book worth reading.  The way Wolff treats the parallel and often intersecting story of Leo Rogin is handled with considerable mastery, especially once Castle shoots Rogin for being a compulsive and recurrent deserter and tosses his body in a slit trench where he’s buried while still warm.  In the end the exceptional honesty of the prose together with its reticence works for a forceful and memorable reading experience, while the autobiography, though always relevant, blends effortlessly with the fiction.

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[1] “Though a man of great principles and ideals, he avoided dogma and rhetoric, and appreciated the imperfections of given situations.”  Quoted from an article written by Peter N. Carroll that appeared in counterpunch (http://www.counterpunch.org/carroll01192008.html ), A Lincoln Brigader Passes at 92, In Memory of Milton Wolff, 1915 - 2008

[2] Carroll, Peter N.:  Odyssey of the Lincoln Brigade, Americans in the Spanish Civil War.

The Expulsion of the Gypsies from France

I just wanted to note my reaction to the dispute over France’s expulsion of gypsies who had settled ‘illegally’ in officially unrecognized caravan camps. Earlier in the week, the vice-president of the European Union, Viviane Reding, had criticized this decision, saying she didn’t expect to see something like this again, something that was reminiscent of scenes from WWII. Of course she was referring to the Holocaust and in particular to the deportations of Jews to the death camps and gas chambers. When the European heads of state got together this week, they unanimously defended Sarkozy, and derided this woman. Obviously Sarkozy can expel these people (European citizens) because they are gypsies. If they belonged, collectively, to any other (racial) group, this wouldn’t be possible (unless, of course they were black, or Hispanic). No one seems to remember, or want to recall the fact that the gypsies were the only other group that some scholars are willing to include in the Holocaust. And this is precisely because they, as a group, were targeted as much as the Jews, though they didn’t perhaps occupy such a ‘privileged’ place in the Nazi biological theories of ‘contamination.’ Perhaps this was merely because, unlike the Jews (particularly the middle and upper class Jews), who were fully integrated in Western Europe by the time the Nazis came to power, and especially in Germany, the gypsies always remained social outcasts. Regardless, they suffered decimation during the Nazi era similar to that of the Jews (and Poles, and Russian POWs), but unlike the Jews, who have Israel behind them now, the gypsies have no state (just as the Jews had no state at that time) and no one has made much of an effort to preserve the memory of their suffering during the Holocaust. But this is not because they didn’t suffer, or because they weren’t singled out, just as they are obviously being singled out now in France (this can’t be denied, can it, when the police circular that originally went around referred specifically to ‘Rumanian gypsies’?). After the catastrophe in Europe, the state of Israel usurped the memory of the Holocaust for the Jews. I have heard a Jewish survivor say in an interview that no other genocide anywhere in the world is properly a ‘holocaust,’ that this term needs to be reserved for the Jews, and that the Jews need not remember anyone else who was killed alongside other Jews, that such remembering is the business of those others, assuming they want to preserve the memory of their own people.

What is happening in France is very similar to what is happening in the state of Arizona. Whatever you want to call it (racial profiling), it affects the targeted people in the same way, by threatening them with expulsion from the place they have at least temporarily regarded as home. Perhaps you could make some sort of argument against the gypsy way of life. Throughout Europe gypsies are regarded as untrustworthy, and likely to be involved in illegal activities such as drug dealing and thieving. These stereotypes, like all stereotypes, obviously come from somewhere, and usually from the same place in our collective minds: that place where we harbor our fears and insecurities, especially regarding those who are unlike us. The thing to be remembered about the events of the Nazi era is not so much perhaps that the Jews were murdered in huge numbers, and merely for being—via birth—Jews (for having ‘Jewish blood’, defined as at least one of their four grandparents being Jewish by birth, and never by religion), but that the persecution of these people began with small crimes of humiliation committed against them. The Nazis murdered the Jews socially long before they burned their remains in ovens that operated around the clock. It’s this social ostracism that we ought to fear now in Europe, wherever it comes from. And we—the common citizens of Europe and the world—should be particularly leery when this ostracism is organized and carried out via the means at the disposal of our governments. It is always a politically popular decision to brand a scapegoat during times of economic crisis, when the demand for illegal immigrant labor is lowest. And this is the root danger we must watch out for, the way popular psychology works against our better judgment and our firm belief in the equality of all men and women, everywhere.