Adventures of a Postmodern Historian: Living and Writing the Past 9781474274210, 9781474274227, 9781474274258, 9781474274241

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Adventures of a Postmodern Historian

Adventures of a Postmodern Historian Living and Writing the Past Robert A. Rosenstone

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 © Robert A. Rosenstone, 2016 Robert A. Rosenstone has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: PB: ePDF: ePub:

978-1-4742-7421-0 978-1-4742-7422-7 978-1-4742-7424-1 978-1-4742-7423-4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Rosenstone, Robert A., author. Title: Adventures of a postmodern historian : living and writing the past / Robert A. Rosenstone, California Institute of Technology. Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015047334 (print) | LCCN 2016019857 (ebook) | ISBN 9781474274227 (paperback) | ISBN 9781474274210 (hardback) | ISBN 9781474274234 (ePub) | ISBN 9781474274241 (ePDF) Subjects: LCSH: Rosenstone, Robert A. | Historians--Biography. | Historiography. | BISAC: HISTORY / Historiography. | HISTORY / Modern / 20th Century. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / General. Classification: LCC D15.R64 A3 2016 (print) | LCC D15.R64 (ebook) | DDC 907.2/02 [B] --dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2015047334 Cover design: Liron Gilenberg Cover image © Flirt / Alamy Stock Photo Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

Small sections of Chapters 1, 2, and 3 have appeared in the following journals: Antioch Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Reviews in American History, and Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice

In loving memory of my parents My father, Louis, who used to read the Mother West Wind stories in the Montreal Star to me every afternoon in the forties And my mother, Anne, who read all the books I was assigned in literature classes as an English major in the fifties

Contents

Acknowledgments  x Foreword  xii

Prologue: Adventures of a Historian? 1 1 Spain: Crusade of the Left  9 2 Soviet Union: Romantic Revolutionary  49 3 Japan: Mirror in the Shrine  101 4 Hollywood: Visions of the Past  145 Epilogue: Stories from the Past  187 Notes  195 Bibliography  197 Index  201

Acknowledgments

To pay full tribute to all the people and institutions who have provided aid, comfort, and insight to me on the half-century research journey through the projects and lands that I touch in the pages of this work would be to compose another substantial chapter. Each of the four major sections chronicled—Spain, the Soviet Union, Japan, and Hollywood—called upon the resources, friendship, time, suggestions, and effort of dozens, perhaps hundreds of generous people. After the passage of so much time, I may be unable to remember to thank each and every one of them, but I do want to mention as many as I can who contributed in some way to the contents and completion of this novel/memoir. I begin, as always, with my deepest thanks to the California Institute of Technology, and the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences to which I have belonged for half a century, for this is a school which allows, even encourages, professors towards new and innovative ways of thinking. In particular, I owe a deep debt of gratitude to Sheryl Cobb, my secretary and friend for some three decades, who has saved me from more mistakes and lapses of memory than I can count. Among former colleagues at Caltech who gave particularly strong support to me in the days when I was first experimenting with a new form of narrative were two formidable scholars who kept assuring me to go ahead, that what I was attempting was important: Nick Dirks and Jerome J. McGann. Their encouragement also indirectly helped to lead me on to film and, in a way, to this very memoir. Of those outside Caltech, I am particularly grateful for the warm friendship and scholarly acumen of Alun Munslow, founding editor of Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, a man who is at once a brilliant theorist and critic and a most generous supporter of the new, the offbeat, the experimental. Others whose advice and council have been most meaningful to me as I struggled with the internalized super ego of the academic world are two scholars whose own works are exemplars of how history can also be superb literature: James Goodman of Rutgers University and Marjorie Becker of the University of Southern California. I am also indebted to the editors of those journals which published pieces of this

Acknowledgments xi

work: Robert Fogarty, Antioch Review; Larry Goldman, Michigan Quarterly Review; Tom Slaughter, Reviews in American History; and James Goodman, Rethinking History; and also to friends who read and critiqued parts or all of earlier versions of the manuscript for this book: Louis Breger, Aris Janigian, and Jaume Aurell. Thanks, too, to Dan Herron, who helped to grab a screen image from Reds. A scholar is always dependent upon the kindness of strangers, be they individuals or institutions. Among them, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Scholar Program, the East-West Center, the Getty Research Institute, and the Universities of Barcelona, Madrid, Navarra, Santiago de Compostela, St. Andrews, Manchester, Oxford, Tolima (Colombia), Palacky (Czech Republic), Charles (Prague), Salvador de Bahia (Brazil), Finisterre (Santiago Chile), Adolfo Ibanez (Vina del Mar), Toyo (Tokyo), Kyushu (Fukuoka), Cape Town, and the European University Institute in Florence have all played a role, as have my generous hosts at these venues: Jose Maria Caparros, Angel Luis Hueso, Julio Montero, Ian Christie, Robert Burgoyne, Dina Iordanova, Alun Marcus, Rocio Davis, Jorge Prudencio Lozano, Luis Rozo, Jorge Novoa, Luis de Mussy, Luis Widow, Veronika Klusakova, Tomas Jirsa, Kyoko Chinami, Masahiro Okamoto, Fujio Kayama, Vivian Bickford-Smith, and Bo Straath. Although I have received encouragement from and piled up enormous personal and scholarly debts to all these people and institutions (and no doubt to others in the last half-century whose names escape me now, and for that I beg their indulgence and forgiveness), I in no way wish to make any of them responsible for what I have to say in Adventures of a Postmodern Historian, nor for the style(s) in which I have written this work. Theirs has been the inspiration and the support; the oddities, errors, and gaffes belong to me alone. Finally this work would not exist were it not for the constant love and support of the woman who makes life a continual challenge and a joy, my closest companion, best friend, and longtime wife, Nahid Massoud, who has lived more history than I could ever hope to write. Dostet darum. Pacific Palisades, California August 2015

Foreword

Initially I thought of subtitling this work A Novel Memoir because of the way it combines memory and history with some of the techniques of fiction. What I am trying to do is to hold together the disparate impulses that mark the tug of war between private life and career, to suggest how they inflect each other. Yet I fear that this approach may not satisfy some readers, being too historical for those interested in the contemporary, too theoretical for others fixated on the concrete, and too intimate for academics committed to holding reality at a safe distance. The mixture makes me a touch uneasy too, but struggle as I have to keep my different voices apart, they keep demanding to come together. I hope readers will recognize this as an attempt to do away with the compartmentalization that structures our lives and to bring together some of the many selves that jostle within each of us. One way to describe the result is with the word hybrid, which critic Daphne Merkin applied to the works of the late, great writer W. G. Sebald, defining it as another way of saying [it is] committed to but not hindered by the obligations to tell the truth.1 In this attempt to create a work reflective of the realities of my life and work, you will find no mystery that must be solved by the last page, no maguffin to keep you interested, no huge revelations at the end other than the general one that I am still alive to tell my own tale—if anyone wants to hear it. With regard to world events, I have largely played the role of distant observer, someone who participated in the form of attending meetings, marching in demonstrations, making speeches, signing petitions, and, as a historian, writing books and essays about a past whose lessons (which I drew) were meant to impact our ideas in the present. I think this makes me a not untypical example of what it has been like to live as a person devoted to a study of the past in this age of forgetfulness and denial. I broaden this internal self-portrait through some fictional techniques, such as reconstructing the dialogue of conversations that took place decades ago, or adding letters written by women who have shared and helped to create some of the experiences described. This move is based on my notion that the ideas, beliefs, and reflections of our close and intimate companions

Foreword xiii

ultimately seep into everything we do, think, and write. These letters, let me be clear, are not historical documents, but inventions based on the vocabulary and contents of actual letters I have received. To me they seem a vital part of the past which, like all works of history, is here turned into a story, or series of them, meant to help provide insight into not just one life, but perhaps those of others as well, along with that of the larger world in which we live.

Spain 1964: The author in the ruins of the never rebuilt city of Belchite— brooding over the war or hoping for a photo suitable for the dust jacket of the book?

Prologue: Adventures of a Historian?

Study the historian before you begin to study the facts. E. H. Carr, What is History?

Adventures of a historian? An odd idea, don’t you think? I mean it’s not normally a concept you would attach to the life of a sober academic, especially one like yours truly who may have spent a period in the army training for war but who has never done anything particularly dramatic or heroic, never fought in a battle, nor endured an invasion of my homeland, nor joined a resistance movement, nor led a political revolution. There would not seem to be much dramatic to say about we who spend our lives in archives, perusing old records, or, these days, staring forever at digitalized versions of documents on computer screens. If we are important to the culture, it’s not as dashing or romantic figures. Certainly as a society we need people to reflect on the past, to let us know what came before us, to explain the causes and consequences of wars, revolutions, social movements, immigration patterns, genocides, the formation of new societies, the denials or evolution of rights, the changing gender relations and ecologies and geographies of the world in which we live. And sometimes historians do achieve a momentary fame. An upheaval in Myanmar, an Arab Spring, a contested election in Nicaragua, a war (all the wars) in Central Africa, and new faces appear on CNN, BBC, or Al Jazeera, female and male historians out of whose mouths come learned words about context, background, issues, players, possible outcomes. The authority of historians as bearers of truth, even wisdom, used to be much greater than it is today. Or so we in the profession believe. In the nineteenth century, as our own founding myth has it, we were the intellectual arbiters of (European) humankind. Our importance lies in our research and publications, our insights into and judgments upon the mysterious course of human activity, always the same, always different, always somebody exploiting somebody else and vice versa. In making our findings public, in writing works of history, we are supposed—as hammered into us



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in grad school and enforced by the norms of the profession—to separate our life and personal beliefs from our work. Yet this is no more than a vain hope, a fiction. Inevitably the personal bleeds into the historical. The fingerprints of our minds, souls, and ideology are all over what we choose to research and the pages we write. No history without the historian. So the great E. H. Carr of Cambridge was onto something important when he penned the words that head this chapter: Study the historian before you begin to study the facts. That’s what I propose to do in the pages ahead. And since the only historian I know a great deal about is yours truly, this may be seen as a memoir, though you could just as easily call it a kind of fiction. Like any work dealing with the past, this one is created by a person (me), not discovered somewhere in old documents (though I use some of those), or located entirely in my memory (which for certain moments is quite clear). Yet it does draw on both of those kinds of sources as it selects, shapes, and turns events and moments into a story, or series of stories, alongside occasional fragments that don’t easily fit into the narrative flow but certainly inflect its meaning. As for the moral … well, we’ll have to wait a couple of hundred pages to see what that might be. Writing about one’s life as a historian should seem less strange now than, say, a century ago, when there was a stronger and more widespread belief in the objectivity of our findings than there is today. In recent decades the subject matter of our work has broadened enormously, and a host of once unthinkable topics are now explored by academics: sex and love in their many and varied aspects, along with other once unlikely subjects such as perfume, dirt, garbage, grizzly bears, codfish, trees, weather. History is, after all, a grand imperialist enterprise which takes as its subject matter everything which has happened from the Big Bang right up to this very moment when I am writing and the one when you are reading these words. We have given ourselves license to write about anything that humans, animals, or plants have done, do, or think as, in Gore Vidal’s words, we spend a good deal of time answering questions that nobody has asked. My own aim is modest enough: to try to understand, in one career, how the personal has inflected the historical and vice versa. To chart if, and to what extent, the experiences of a historian engaged in doing research reflect the world in which he lives and somehow shape the history he (in this case) writes. If the notion of Adventures is a touch suspect (though we must never ignore the very real adventures of the mind), you may also be worrying about that other problematic word in the title: Postmodern. I certainly do.



Prologue: Adventures of a Historian? 3

The press and everyone else tends to treat it as outdated, and who can blame them? Today we are, I suppose, post-postmodern and post-just about everything else save for terrorism and ecological disaster. I first encountered the word when it was used by a critic to describe a book that I wrote back in the eighties titled Mirror in the Shrine. Later (full disclosure) I had the temerity to use it about myself a couple of times, but given the chance, I’d retract the word if we could just find some other suitable signifier to describe the enormous personal, social, economic, ideological and intellectual changes that have occurred since my (our?) younger days. I, for one, hardly live in the same political, mental, sociological, and intellectual world into which I graduated with a BA in 1958 and a PhD in 1965. Does anyone? We who went to high school and college in the fifties were what you could call Midcentury Modern. How well I remember the special issues of Life that came out in 1950 to celebrate the halfway point in what Time magazine was calling the American Century. Pictures of new freeways virtually devoid of cars, girls in daring one-piece bathing suits, women wearing aprons standing in front of new refrigerators. It was in Life that I first encountered an image of Marilyn Monroe. The photo that filled most of a page at the back of the magazine showed her wearing jeans and a sweatshirt that did not reveal anything much. This was a family magazine after all. How happy a fourteen-year-old I was to learn that she was no simple blonde bombshell but a serious student of existentialism who spent her weekends reading the gloomy Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard. Life said that Marilyn loved bebop, Charlie Parker, and the atonal music of Arnold Schoenberg. I knew all this was true because I was certain that Life would not lie to the American public! Here is a confession: I never really wanted to be a historian. Never imagined myself spending a lifetime teaching in classrooms or sitting in libraries and archives for weeks, months, and years doing research on a narrow topic. Not in high school, where I fell in love with the words of Thomas Wolfe and decided that I wanted to write novels full of the mournful sound of railroad horns in the great and lonely American night. Not in college where, as a literature major, my passion shifted to the writers of the Lost Generation, and above all to Ernest Hemingway, who I admired for the way he calmly faced danger at the front lines, on safari, or in the bull ring as he reported on death in the afternoon. And certainly not in the first year of grad school, when I took a master’s degree in journalism in order to prepare myself for a life as a world traveler, reporter, and novelist who would fearlessly witness wars, social upheavals, and revolutions.



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Only after two years of working as a professional journalist, and God knows how many late afternoon martinis and packs of Camels and stories written in half an hour and cut from six paragraphs to one by editors incapable of recognizing my great reportorial talents, did I begin to think of history as a possible profession. A good friend had in three years sped through Princeton grad school in history, received a PhD, and was teaching at the University of Southern California. From the offices of the Los Angeles Times, it looked like a cushy life. Academia as a kind of refuge for a creative writer who hasn’t written anything very creative. (I may have been ahead of my time.) The university was a great place, after all, a place where people were serious about the world, a place where you had the leisure to research and think and write books on offbeat subjects that would let you travel to the sites of important events and conflicts in far-off countries. Was this late in life to make such a serious choice? I mean, are there youngsters who grow up with the desire to devote their life to history? Apparently so. If you delve into the works of the 450 historians who have published autobiographies, the bulk of them in the last fifty years, you find that the reasons given for this choice of profession are deeply rooted in personal, familial, or social desires or traumas. Such self-reflection among my colleagues became quasi-legitimate after 1987 when French academic, Pierre Nora, published a collection entitled Essais d’ego histoire, which included autobiographies by some of France’s leading figures in the field.1 Since then, historians from many other countries have gotten into the act. It astonishes me, in reading their accounts, to learn that some of them can trace the roots of their desire to become historians back to before puberty. Often this decision seems tied up with their heritage, a kind of homage to the glories of a particular region or the larger culture of their native land. It was not that way with me. I never had a single coherent heritage to embrace—other than Judaism, which I was raised pretty much to ignore. Born in Montreal, I was taken to California by my parents at the age of ten. My paternal grandfather was from Russia, possibly Odessa (nobody is certain), and his wife from somewhere in Poland, though they lived for years in tiny villages in eastern Romania near the city of Iasi. My father claims to have been born in the small town of Tescani and partially raised in nearby Moinesti, the birthplace of Tristan Tzara, one of the original Zurich Dadaists. (Since Tzara’s name, Sami Rosenstock, was close to that of my father, Lazar Rotenstein, I have always felt some kindred spirit with Dada



Prologue: Adventures of a Historian? 5

and have wondered for years how one might write a Dada work of history. Perhaps this is it!) My mother was born in London, but for her parents England was no more than a five-year stopover on the way from Hasenpoth in Latvia to Canada. Literature was my first love. Truth was in the word on the page. As an undergraduate I enrolled in a single history course, a survey of British history, and only because it was required of English majors. You might say that for me, literature was history, and history literature. My favorite novels—The Sun Also Rises, U.S.A., Light in August, The Grapes of Wrath, The Stranger, The Counterfeiters, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The Red and the Black, War and Peace, The Conformist, Christ Stopped at Eboli, Zorba the Greek, Bread and Wine—not only took place in the past, they seemed truer than any work of scholarship I encountered in the sense that they brought the world alive in a way that the historical writing we were given in classes never did. Novels made you care about what happened in the past. They didn’t just explain it, they made you feel as if you had in some way been there. That was what I wanted from history. The literature I liked was that in which great wars or strikes are won or lost, revolutions take place, people triumph or suffer and die but provide hope for others in the future. I cared less about the outcome than about the good fight, the heroic gesture, the moral victory. Not for me as a young man those introspective works in which people sit around, agonizing over their own psyches and over what should happen, or what has already happened, our maybe what shouldn’t have happened even if it did. I also was never much interested in the rulers and generals who believe they alone are shakers of the world. My taste ran towards the downtrodden, the strugglers against injustice, those who took unpopular stands, stirred up the masses, showed the victims of history that they need be victims no longer but could take history into their own hands. My heroes tended to be the outsiders and loners, freethinkers and radicals misunderstood by their families, people who escaped from normal middle-class life. Some were literary characters, some historical. I didn’t much differentiate between the two. Even among radicals, I never was taken with the famous names like Lenin or Marx. They were too established. Too conservative. My taste ran to apparent renegades like Leon Trotsky, who could write a history of the Russian Revolution while living it; Emiliano Zapata, who, at least in the film Viva Zapata, refused to serve as a ruler of the nation and walked away from Mexico City to return to his campesinos in Morelos; the unnamed leaders of strikes who stood up



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to the police on picket lines and all those who voiced unpopular opinions and stood against the tyranny of groups or governments: Thomas Paine, Eugene V. Debs, Big Bill Haywood, André Malraux, Ignazio Silone, the Communards. More than half a century past graduate school, I can see that one possible reason for becoming a historian was to have more adventures than I could have handled in real life. Yes, I was for some years involved in various civil rights and anti-war activities, but these seemed no more than a pale imitation of the great movements in the past that seized my scholarly interest. My research projects were a mixture of the personal and the social, of who I was and the changing times. Which lets me suggest that this book is not just about a single person but also, to some extent, about the world of academia and history as a discipline, its theory and practice. Our past—like everything else in the world—has in recent decades been changing at an increasingly rapid pace. So many movements in the last half-century have flashed up, quickly evolved, and sometimes vanished, and yet changed the way we think: quantitative, social science, structuralist, post-structuralist, psycho, feminist, queer, subaltern, and (of course) postmodern (sometimes called history after the linguistic turn— now there’s an awkward phrase!). The latter involves the realization that the understanding of our lives, including our pasts, is to a certain extent governed by the strictures of our language and the demands of our literary forms. Some of these tendencies have inflected what I write, including this book, which will move from issues of political commitment (engagé would have been our word in the fifties) to those of artistic creation and social justice, to the encounter with the alien, to the possibilities of love amidst the storm of modernity. I have written Adventures of a Postmodern Historian in an attempt to make sense of my particular journey through the profession of history during an era whose ideals, ideologies, and cultural claims were in a period of enormous change. It may be seen in part as the record of a consciousness as it tries to understand its own ideas and actions in relation to the developments of particular cultural moments. And though any historian knows, or should know, that the link I hint at here between the social and the personal is always tenuous, it is possible that my subjects, research, and writings as a scholar in some way shed light on the evolving preoccupations and values of at least certain segments of the larger society; that they have something to say about social, cultural, and intellectual change in the last half-century; that my experiences are to some extent emblematic of issues, currents,



Prologue: Adventures of a Historian? 7

feelings, and movements in what we know to be—even if we don’t like the term—the world of the postmodern.

Belchite: Despite the huge holes made by artillery shells during battles in 1938, the bell tower that for more than eighty years has seemed on the verge of crumbling, remains erect, pointing towards heaven.

1 Spain: Crusade of the Left Oh the Lincoln Battalion, by cracky A bunch of great bozos, though wacky They held down the line For months at a time ‘Gainst Franco, Il Duce’s lackey. Oh the Lincoln boys fought at Jarama They made the fascisti cry mama They held down the line For months at a time And for sport they would play with a bomb’a.

* It was a hot day with a clear, blue sky, and we hiked around the fields of the Jarama river valley where the Americans … fought, sat in the old trenches, looked across at distant ridges and tried to imagine what it would be like to have an enemy there, sitting in their own trenches, machine guns well-greased and ready to fire. It was a calm, warm afternoon, insects droning their eternal noises, birds diving black against the sky, the vineyards blooming green against the red earth, and it was impossible to imagine a war on this pacific land, impossible to think of the ground rocking with the thunder of artillery, the air alive with the noise of machine guns. There was only the peaceful afternoon and the trenches which have been shallowed and eroded by twenty-five years of rain, and the knowledge that in twenty-five more years there will be no sign that these are trenches at all, just dips in the landscape like those made by rainwater running off in the spring. And the knowledge that no one will in twenty-five years remember what happened at Jarama unless it is recorded and recorded well, and that, after all, is my job …

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Five decades later I marvel at the arrogance, faith, and delusion that let a young me, a me who is not the same me as the me I am today but more like an old acquaintance who I no longer quite recognize, conclude a letter written to my parents on October 15, 1964 with the paragraph above. The evidence is in front of me, a sheet of onion skin paper with the slightly uneven line made by the characters of my portable Olivetti Lettera 22. The typewriter was sitting on the small round table of an outdoor cafe at the bottom of the Calle de Alcala, just off the Paseo de Castellana, Madrid’s gloriously wide boulevard. An umbrella shaded me from the afternoon sun as I describe my previous day’s research jaunt to the Jarama Valley. My wife was off somewhere, in a museum or a department store, tired already of my continual lectures on the Lincoln Battalion this, the Spanish Republic that, the fascists, communists, and anarchists something else. What I can’t recall is how I came to believe that it was my task, and apparently mine alone, to save the men of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion from oblivion. Okay. I was a grad student doing research for a doctoral dissertation so I accepted the conceit of the discipline, that you can capture the meaning of the past in words, keep vanished people, events, and movements alive by writing them into history in the form of stories. A lot has happened in the half-century since I wrote that letter that has made me/us far less certain of this idea. We (postmodern) people no longer believe in the power of history to explain how the past became the present in the way we once did; the way our forebears and those who volunteered to fight in Spain did as well. Today there are too many voices, too many media, too many histories, too many countries, ethnicities, genders, classes, too much to convey, too much to absorb or master or remember. Today we have lived through too much to not understand that the past is never fixed, quiet, its issues settled once and for all. We know that other explanations have been made and soon new ones will be made for what we once believed, or thought, or did, or hoped to do, or would have liked to do. This change does not only effect events in the past, but also those who feel their task is to preserve them: we historians. A personal case in point: the Spanish Civil War, the International Brigades, the Abraham Lincoln Battalion. There was a time half a century ago (not so long, really) when these phrases bordered on the holy for we who didn’t believe in God. Yet who in 2015 America can still get a chill up the spine when hearing those scratchy recordings of Ernst Busch leading a chorus of German male voices singing songs learned in the concentration camps from which they escaped to fight in Spain, or in listening to Pete Seeger’s lament for those lost in the great battle of Jarama, sung to the tune



Spain: Crusade of the Left 11

of Red River Valley? Who remembers the battles, advances, retreats, and atrocities of that three-year rehearsal for the Second World War other than specialists in modern history or the descendants of old radicals? In this second decade of the twenty-first century, even I—after decades of thinking and writing about and living that war in my mind—find it difficult to feel again the passion and loss those phrases once called forth. During my undergraduate years of the mid-fifties, anyone whose politics leaned even slightly to the left (pretty much everyone I knew at UCLA except for the sorority girls who wrote social columns for the Daily Bruin, girls I not-socovertly desired, even if I disapproved of their Republican politics) saw the Spanish War as a kind of touchstone, a talisman left over from the previous generation. It was the great lost cause—and what cause can produce more emotion than a lost one? Spain was the place where, as our existentialist hero Albert Camus wrote, we learned the awful lesson that one can be right and still be defeated, that force can vanquish spirit.1 The emotions that once shook me to the core may have dissipated, but certain reminders of that conflict can still touch my heart. The names of the battlegrounds: Jarama, Brunete, Belchite, Gandesa, the Ebro. Of leaders: La Pasionaria, El Campesino, Buenavenuto Durruti, Commandante Carlos. The slogans: It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees. No Pasaran. Madrid Will be the Tomb of Fascism. The songs: Los Quatro Generales, El Frente de Gandesa, Quinto Regimiento. The titles of books: The Last Crusade, The Spanish Cockpit, Not Peace but a Sword, The Last Great Cause, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Wound in the Heart, The Wind in the Olive Trees, Say That We Saw Spain Die. Today the war is best known due to a single painting, Picasso’s Guernica, which like any good work of history has come to replace the event it commemorates. The torment that fills the canvas, the screaming horse, the fallen figure with arms raised, the horror raining down from the sky— images which shocked audiences at the Paris World’s Fair in 1938 and in the Museum of Modern Art in New York for more than three decades now get little more than a passing glance by tourists as they hustle through the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid. Is this because the kind of atrocity it depicts has become too much a part of the daily diet of the contemporary world? So many of the sites that, once upon a time, seemed sanctified by blood spilled to defend the Republic are now forgotten, paved over, ignored, desecrated. In the mid-nineties, when I was teaching at the University of Barcelona, one of the major battlefields of this conflict that killed more than half a million people became a destination for organized tours. A colorful

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brochure promised a historical weekend in the Ebro River Valley east of Zaragoza. Its words went something like this: You will visit the bombed-out church of Quinto. Walk through the trenches outside Villaneuva la Canada. Find rusty cartridges amidst the expanse of rubble that is Belchite (a town captured by the men of the Lincoln Battalion after house-to-house fighting in August 1938—and lost six months later). You will eat a picnic lunch and raise a glass of wine amidst ruins so complete that the town has never been rebuilt, but instead replaced by a wholly new Belchite constructed next to it. You will marvel that despite the enormous holes made by artillery shells in 1938, the bell tower of the church that has for seventy-five years seemed on the verge of crumbling to the ground, still points towards heaven.

* When I first entered Spain in late June 1958, I knew little about the war. It was less than a year after my graduation from UCLA with a major in English and the desire to be a novelist. For three months I had been traveling across Europe as part of what in retrospect seems a traditional post-college wanderjahr, the classic, nineteenth-century jaunt of the literary young male off to discover the world and prove himself. A more up-to-date version of that journey had been undertaken in the twenties when those writers and artists dubbed the Lost Generation (we always spelled and thought it with capitals) by Gertrude Stein fled puritanical, prohibition-ridden America for the more congenial, erotic, sophisticated, and cheaper cultures of the continent, where alcohol flowed as easily as the endless conversations about life, art, the rise of the dollar, the future of literature. Or so we learned in novels and memoirs. My friends and I, along with so many others with artistic or literary ambitions, imagined ourselves similarly stifled by the conservatism of fifties America. We longed to emulate Hemingway, John Dos Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald and all the others by getting ourselves off to Paris and points south. Even our great regional writers like William Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe had spent time on the continent. Why not us? In those days, decades before middle-class college and even high school students began to go abroad for the summer, such a trip seemed venturesome, even slightly dangerous. Difficult it is to remember how distant and remote Europe still seemed in the fifties, how wreathed in some romantic glow of what we would now label with the ugly word “otherness.” To get there was not, at least for me, a simple matter of



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buying a ticket and settling aboard an airplane. Boats were far cheaper than airlines, and to make the experience more romantic and literary, I hitched a ride to the East Coast, then somehow talked my way into a job on a freighter berthed in Newport News, Virginia—the MS Har Gilboa out of Haifa. In the tradition of Richard Henry Dana, Herman Melville, Jack London, and John Reed (a man whose name I did not yet know), I sailed across the Atlantic in a status called workaway—free passage, no pay, twelve days on the stormy winter seas of the North Atlantic, mopping hallways, peeling potatoes, scrubbing pots, chipping paint on hatches, and, over beer at night in the common lounge, trying to teach UCLA drinking songs to fellow sailors who hailed from half a dozen countries in Europe, Africa, and East Asia. We landed in Hamburg, and after one evening of wide-eyed sightseeing on the infamous Reeperbahn with its honkytonk bars, strip clubs, and extravagant hookers, I bought a rucksack, took a streetcar to the edge of the city and stuck out my thumb for a ride. The driver who stopped spoke English well enough to let me know that in Europe you don’t use your thumb but wave your arm. It is February 1958. Eight hundred dollars in American Express Travelers Checks (savings from odd jobs done during my last two years in college) are tucked into the rucksack on this adventurous trip that is somehow meant to transform me into a writer. Like Hemingway, I want some day to report from the front lines of wars and revolutions, make love to broad-hipped Austrian girls in snow-covered Alpine cabins, run in front of the bulls at the Fiesta de San Fermin (only later do I learn that Hemingway, himself, doesn’t run but only observes from his hotel balcony), and then write a great novel about my exploits. For me, The Sun Also Rises seems perfect, a beautiful, spare, minor tragedy suited not just to our age but to my own fantasies, a novel which turns Pamplona into a kind of holy site and makes a journey to the fiesta a kind of secular pilgrimage. So, after hitch-hiking across Germany, Austria, and Italy, and spending two months in France sitting in on classes of the Cours de civilization at the Sorbonne and watching the Fourth Republic slowly collapse from the vantage point of a seat in a cafe at the corner of Boul St. Mich and Rue des Ecoles, and after spending a few days in the dreary city of Madrid where all the men look like bureaucrats or secret policemen and all the automobiles date to the 1930s, I am finally on the road to Pamplona, heading into the Cantabrian Mountains, glimpsing streams where Hem’s characters Jake Barnes and Bill Gorton, or perhaps the master himself, may have fished for trout, passing muddy villages with dimly lit cafes where they drank beer and no doubt discussed the sorry state

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of a world in which, as his friend Scottie Fitzgerald wrote, all Gods are dead, all wars have been fought, all faiths in man shaken. You might say that in Pamplona I expected some sort of revelation, the equivalent of a divine finger pointing down from a cloud and zapping me with extraordinary powers. Here, my son, you will be inaugurated into the great international brotherhood of the Lost Generation, those magic people who cavort through the capitals of Europe and are—some of them—able to toss off literary masterpieces even while sloshed to the eyeballs on gin. But instead of enlightenment, what I played was a small role in a brief farce. Six months earlier, Hollywood had released its latest version of The Sun Also Rises, this one with Ava Gardner playing Lady Brett Ashley and Tyrone Power as Jake Barnes. One result is that I arrive in the town to find it crowded not with imagined comrades, artistic and Bohemian types, refugees from the culture of the great American booboisie, as H. L. Mencken named the middle classes, but with fraternity boys and sorority girls, the very sorts against whom I, as an editor of the student daily, had thundered in editorials about ending discrimination on campus. These youngsters had reserved every last hotel room in Pamplona. They jammed its cafes and restaurant tables to engage in lengthy discussions of the relative merits of Bermuda shorts and the new, scandalous short shorts which barely covered the top of the thigh and were being immortalized in a current pop song, She Wears Short Shorts. Yes, this is Fiesta de San Fermin, and plenty of natives and tourists spill into the streets to dance and sing behind marching bands that endlessly repeat the festival song: Un de Enero, dos de Febrero, tres de Marzo, Quatro Abril. Yes, I join the crowds dancing, whirling, shuffling behind them. Cinco de Mayo, seis de Junio, siete de Julio, San Fermin. Yes, I buy a goatskin bota, fill it with cheap wine in a dingy cafe, share it with others in the streets, then accept drinks from their botas, spilling the requisite amount on my shirt, and repeating the process over again. Yes, I stop in a cafe to refill the wineskin, and then there’s another band to follow, and then another until it gets to be evening and I am muy borracho and it feels good to rest my head on the only place available, the table of an outdoor cafe. Chilly rains arrive around midnight, diarrhea an hour or two later. The rest of the night hours I spend squatting over a foul hole in the unspeakably filthy restroom under the main plaza, thinking: how come Hemingway never mentions toilets? I certainly will. Early in the morning I drag myself up the stairs to the plaza, find my way to one of the nearby barricaded streets, and through elaborate gestures



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and hand signs get myself invited by a friendly local up to the second-story balcony of his apartment. Just as in the novel, a rocket explodes to announce the running of the bulls, and through drooping lids and bloodshot eyes I watch hordes of men dressed in white shirts and pants, sporting red neckerchiefs and berets, streak through the streets beside and ahead of the huge animals who flash by in an instant. As the crowd disperses and most people follow the bulls on towards the Plaza de Toros, I, slightly bent with pain, move off in the opposite direction towards the railroad station. A slow train carries me to the French border. It takes three days of lounging on the beach in Biarritz for my stomach to return to normal. * Pamplona is the final stop on a ten-day trip through Spain with an old college buddy who becomes the first person to move my mind and heart towards the Civil War. Leonard Frank drove me down from Paris in his new, bright yellow Austin Healey Sprite which he bought off the assembly line in Abingdon-on-Thames, England. At UCLA, Len had hung around the office of the Folk Song Club in Kerckhoff Hall, right next door to the offices of the Daily Bruin, where I spent most of my college days writing everything from interviews with football and basketball coaches to those editorials denouncing discrimination on campus and railing against the complicity of the school administration to such an extent that I was informed by an emissary from the Dean of Students that if I didn’t desist, he would name me at the next visit of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, whose forays to Los Angeles he regularly attended as a friendly witness. I didn’t, and, to the relief of my parents (and me), he didn’t as well. Len did not play the guitar or have much of a voice, but he was a good student of history. On our second day in Spain, somewhere between Burgos and Madrid, we pass two soldiers in green uniforms who wear oddly shaped, patent leather hats, one walking on each side of the highway. Len raises his left arm, bent at the elbow in what we used to call the Italian fuck you salute, and accelerates the car. Guardia civil, he says. Who? National police. Used for centuries to terrorize the population and suppress revolt. They patrol all the highways in Spain. In the next town Len points to an unfamiliar symbol stenciled on the side of a building facing the plaza. That’s the yoke and the arrows. The symbol of the Falange.

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The what? The Falange. What’s the Falange? No need to make myself sound more naive than I was. I knew that Francisco Franco was a military dictator, a former ally of Hitler and Mussolini, and a kind of fascist himself. I knew that Spain might be considered part of the Free World by the Eisenhower Administration with its need for air force bases in Iberia, but that in fact it was a country full of secret police and political prisoners, with no freedom of press or assembly. Given my own leftist sympathies, I even felt a slight touch of guilt over journeying to a land ruled by such a dictator, but the pull of Hemingway was stronger than my scruples. What I didn’t know in detail was exactly how Franco had come to power. Len had taken courses from a professor who specialized in Spain that allowed him to provide me with a history of the conflict: the rising of the four Generals against the legal government of the Republic in July 1936; the journey of their leader, Francisco Franco, from Tenerife in the Canary Islands in a British-piloted Dragon Rapide to Morocco to take charge of the Spanish Foreign Legion; the radical decision by the Popular Front government to open the armories and distribute guns to the workers of labor unions and political parties; the storming by those workers of military barracks in Barcelona and Madrid, which kept those cities in the hands of the Republic; the Non-Intervention Committee set up by the so-called Great Powers which winked at Italian and German aid to the rebels; the dropping of bombs on civilians in Barcelona by Mussolini’s air force; the new tactics tried by Hitler’s Condor Legion which flattened the Basque town of Guernica in a single morning; the saga of the International Brigades, workers, students, and leftists from thirty-five countries, including refugees from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, who flocked to defend the Spanish Republic; the arrival of the first foreign units in Madrid in November 1936, just in time to stop Franco’s army on the outskirts; the ensuing struggle over the campus of the newly built University City; and, finally, the two-plus years of bitter struggle across the country as the Republic, embargoed by friends and enemies, was slowly strangled to death. Thanks to the Folk Song Club, Len can sing some of the war’s great songs: the ponderous German dirges, Die Moorsoldaten and Hans Beimler, Komissar that sound as if the world is ending, and not a moment too soon. The jaunty American tunes sung in the scratchy twang of a Woody Guthrie, A Valley in Spain Called Jarama (based on Red River Valley), or



Spain: Crusade of the Left 17

The Quartermaster’s Store (there are rats, rats, in bowler hats and spats at the store, at the quartermaster’s store). The fiery Spanish laments, Quinto Regimiento, Quince Brigada, El Frente de Gandesa, Los Quatro Generales, songs full of mourning and defiance for lost battles that I was still young enough to believe would someday be won. Songs that in later years I would, after too many glasses of wine, sing off-key but with great passion at various academic parties while bored colleagues stared solemnly at their shoes. Before Len’s lectures, a good deal of what I knew about the war came from Hemingway’s novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls. Neither the novel nor the film had much to say about the International Brigades. They are offstage, no more than a distant background to the focus on Robert Jordan, the big, all-American loner—typecast with Gary Cooper—the Westerner who fishes and hunts in Montana, teaches Spanish literature in a small college in Idaho, and believes in all the simple virtues as expressed in the Frank Capra films of the thirties: justice, decency, and fair treatment for everyone, especially little guys. Jordan has volunteered for this foreign war not to support some kind of anarchist insurrection or leftist revolution, but because the little guys of Spain are getting the stuffing kicked out of them by fascists and militarists, and Jordan knows, in some deep corner of his American soul, that as a big guy it’s his duty to defend them. * My favorite professor had once devoted an entire class period to a single sentence in the Hemingway novel: El Sordo was making a stand on a hill. These words, he told us, summed up much of the meaning of twentiethcentury literature. It had something to do with America as a City on the Hill, with Mounts Zion, Ararat, and McKinley, with the fact that Upper Michigan, where Hemingway had vacationed as a child, had no mountains, with the travails of brave men who had crossed the Pyrenees on foot to volunteer to fight in Spain, with the pine forests of the Guadarrama Mountains north of Madrid, and finally with Gibraltar, named after the Arab warrior who had first brought Islam to the Spanish peninsula. Dazzled, we students burst into applause at the end of the hour and left the classroom full of an obscure excitement. Later, talking things over in the cafeteria, none of us could figure out what the professor had been trying to say. * Len’s lectures must have struck my heart and connected with the leftist conscience that ran through my family, for a year later the theme of the

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Spanish Civil War overwhelms that of the Lost Generation in the novel I began to write in Paris weeks before leaving for Spain and continued long after my return to the States. The title betrays its lineage: Another Generation, a phrase lifted from the same passage of Ecclesiastes that Hemingway raided for The Sun Also Rises. In doing this, I was obviously attempting to launch my work on the back of his masterpiece: One generation cometh, and another generation goeth, but the earth abideth forever. The story deals with—surprise!—the adventures of a young American in Europe in 1958. He works on a freighter that lands in Hamburg, hitch-hikes across the continent, visits Innsbruck, Vienna, Venice, Florence, Rome, and Naples before arriving in Paris, where he settles into a room at the Grand Hotel Moderne on the Rue des Ecoles and for several months haunts museums, bookstores, cafes, and other venues where he vainly tried to find a French girl who will coucher with him. In a central scene a hundred pages into the manuscript, he and the American girl with whom he is living sit on the edge of the park at the Vert Galant, that small green triangle of a park that sticks out into the Seine below the statue of Henry IV on horseback. Twilight. Between embraces, nuzzles, and soft words, they drink from a bottle of cheap wine. A group of Spaniards in exile come down the steps, sit a few yards away, and one of them begins to play guitar and sing songs from—you guessed it—the Civil War. This leads the protagonist to make what he thinks is a huge personal confession, one in which the issues of the past clearly shape the mind of the present: I told her the whole story. I told her I had grown up on the expatriate literature of the twenties, and I tried to explain about how it had become all mixed up with my father’s life. I told her that my father had known Hemingway, and that he had known the original of Lady Brett and Robert Cohn, and that they had drunk together all night long and watched the bulls thunder by in the fine, gray mist of dawn. And I told her how my father had left shortly after the beginning of the Civil War supposedly as a correspondent, and that my mother had gotten a couple of letters, the last one saying he had joined a militia unit and might be fighting near Toledo. I told her though I loved the twenties, the thirties had become real for me, and there was my father’s love for Spain, and then the war there, which was fitting and horrible both, because in Spain our fathers had forgotten the future, and that was where they had gone to create one, and that had been the war in which all our fathers died. I told her I had to go to Spain even though the war had ended many years before. There were the two things in Spain that still tore at the fabric of modern life, the hedonism of one age and the conscience of another,



Spain: Crusade of the Left 19

the bulls of Pamplona and the Toledo Alcazar, and I knew there had to be something to learn there or there was nothing we could ever learn from our fathers and from the past. I was going to drink in the streets of Pamplona. I was going to stand in front of the Toledo Alcazar. I was going to both places because they could tell me about a life that had made me what I was.

At a distance of half a century, one has to wonder why the narrator’s companion doesn’t simply say, Stop with the words. Why don’t you just go to Spain? It’s only a day away by train; it’s not like you’re seeking the headwaters of the Nile. A canny later reader (not that there were any, early or late, for the work was never finished) can guess that the overwrought sentiments may be fueled by something outside the text, much of it written in the summer of 1959. At the time, I was working the four-to-midnight shift for the Los Angeles Examiner, sitting on the copy desk, editing stories and writing headlines, or leaving the office to interview liquor store owners who have been robbed at gunpoint, weeping mothers whose children have been seized by estranged husbands, or city councilmen after a ribbon cutting ceremony at the opening of a new supermarket. My stories are usually edited down from two pages to a single paragraph and buried on the back pages, somewhere—as the joke of the time had it—beneath the truss ads. Before leaving for work I spend my mornings at the typewriter attempting to finish the novel which I hope will announce to an eager world the arrival of the next Hemingway. On the long daily drive to downtown Los Angeles, one of the things that occupies my mind is what will appear on the dust jacket. Like other writers, I plan to include my many and varied careers, however brief: the assembly line in the TV factory where I spent a summer inserting a 6BG6 vacuum tube into half-completed sets; the months shelling green beans in a laboratory to extract the gibberellin, which a UCLA botanist hoped to use as the basis of a cheap fertilizer that would green the world; the evenings proofreading for a neighborhood weekly full of advertisements for kosher butchers, delicatessens, and travel agents specializing in cheap flights to Israel; the two weeks working on the Har Gilboa; the months attending classes at the Sorbonne or Communist Party demonstrations on the Place Bastille as the Fourth Republic collapsed slowly into the arms of Charles de Gaulle. Now I could add journalism to the list. I wouldn’t mention the two martinis after work, the pack-and-a-half of Lucky Strikes a day, nor the perpetual drone of cynicism from my newspaper colleagues about everything in the world except the excellence of their own half-written screenplays.

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My decision to forsake journalism after two years for graduate school in history was, no doubt, overdetermined. As was my aim to write a dissertation on the Lincoln Battalion. In retrospect it is easy to see that practicality, family tradition, ideology, politics, and a personal reaction to the larger culture in which I was raised all played a role. I was, after all, born in 1936, a child of the Depression, the son of immigrants from Europe, many of whose uncles, aunts, and cousins had disappeared into the death camps of the Second World War. Almost all of my friends at Fairfax High School came from similar backgrounds. Pretty much everyone I knew was a devotee of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. They were proud to call themselves liberals, save for the few dissenters on the far left, such as my Canadian cousin Leonard, who openly bragged about his membership in the Communist Party. Everyone in my family seemed to think that the state should help take care of those who couldn’t care for themselves, and that it was imperative to right the wrongs that had long been inflicted on those exploited dark people, the Negroes, a word we pronounced as if it contained several “e’s.” My father was what at that time was called a parlor socialist. Almost every night at the dinner table, he would vent his anger at the Big Interests who were controlling and ruining America. And while I fought against his ideas with schoolbook notions of how our democracy gave everyone an equal education and a fair chance at success, I seem to have absorbed quite a bit of his notion that there was not much distinction between the ideals of the Founding Fathers and those of democratic socialism. Not that he, or I, ever became full-fledged ideologues. Like Robert Jordan, I harbored the belief that the little guys were always in the right, and needed defending against those who would exploit and betray them. That was why I joined the NAACP in 1955; it seemed a highly radical act at a time when some commentators and politicians equated that civil rights organization with communism. Little guys in the past counted too. The study of history, when I thought about it, was a way of understanding who we are and how we got here so that we will have some idea how to change things to make the world a better place, particularly for those little guys. It was also, for the wannabe author in me, a way of writing books, telling stories, and getting them published. A year or so after my return from the first trip to Europe, I realized that the manuscript of Another Generation would never be finished. Didn’t deserve to be finished. I had to admit to myself that the narrative was too thin, too derivative, too dull. Besides, I hadn’t the slightest idea what could or should



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happen to my main character if and when he ever does get to stand in front of the Alcazar or run before the bulls in Pamplona. I had no idea what turning point should occur, what revelation awaited him. Perhaps I had to live some more. The question I never raised at the time or could have answered was this: exactly why was I so fascinated with the twenties and then the thirties? What did those decades mean to me? Was it anything more than a romantic feeling for events I had never lived but wished I had, a notion that unlike what seemed the routine days of conformism, consumerism, and the Cold War, those years had been exciting and creative times in which to be alive? Was it a retreat from the present, a kind of nostalgia for things I had experienced only on the page, a desire to somehow live the long-gone adventures of both real people and fictional characters? No doubt it was all of those, along with my distinct failure to make much headway in the world of publishing. The short stories and essays I was sending off to magazines were promptly returned with printed rejection slips, a recurrent and compelling argument against my literary prospects. I was already in my mid-twenties. It was time to get serious about life. * The decision to write on the Lincoln Battalion was made during my six-month tour of duty with the US Army, sometime after basic training at Fort Ord, California, and before my graduation from Armor School at Fort Knox, Kentucky, where more than once I snuck away from the shooting range and the terrifying noise of the 90mm gun on my M48a1 tank, to hang out in the library, reading and dreaming of other lives. You can say I came to graduate school a few months later as a kind of refugee—from journalism, the army, rejection slips, and the manuscript of the now abandoned novel. The year was 1962. I will always remember the scene—the late afternoon shadow of Royce Hall thrown across the quad by the sun setting behind the hills of Westwood (not yet covered with high-rise student dorms). I can’t recall the exact words spoken by my advisor, a distinguished historian named George Mowry, but he must have said something like Yes, I will take you on as my student; yes, you can do a dissertation about the Americans who fought in Spain. No doubt he asked why I was interested in the topic; no doubt I answered with something about the importance of the Left, how no historian had yet done the subject, investigated the sources, produced a scholarly account—all of which was true. Other truths went unmentioned, truths that were years away from reaching consciousness: that choosing to

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write on Spain might be seen as a way of being both brave and careful, of making a political commitment and yet one so far in the past that it had few personal consequences; that writing on the war had as much to do with manhood as with justice, with standing up and not selling out—as I, like any young idealist, bohemian, quasi-radical, or would-be artist about to enter upon an academic career, had to fear I might in fact be doing. The idea of a thesis on the Lincoln Battalion was not popular with the history faculty at UCLA. Some professors considered the topic too recent for serious historical investigation; others thought it too radical in its implications. When I wrote a letter to the then most famous historian of recent American socialism and communism, David Shannon, asking for any possible research leads, I received in reply a testy note: The men who went to Spain were all communists or liars. (Which category was worse? He didn’t say.) I’m going to write to your doctoral advisor and tell him he’s crazy to allow you to waste your time on such a topic. On my oral exams, a young historian of Spain who was already making a career living on fellowships provided by the Franco regime asked, with some hostility, about whether the project had any larger historical meaning. The Lincoln Battalion, I answered, was part of the tradition of the American Left. What tradition? What Left? sneered the professor in an exchange which took place on a late spring day in 1964, three months before the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley would mark the beginnings of an activism that would for a decade tear the United States apart. It was a first, but certainly not the last, lesson in how sheltered many academics are from the larger world around them. * If my first trip to Spain had been marked by fantasies of the Lost Generation and the lectures and songs of Len, the second was shaped by three years of graduate school, by seminars and papers and books and more books, and by more than an intense year of research in archives on the Lincoln Battalion. This time I was the one able to deliver lectures, in this case to my bride of just a few months, Dolores, born in Cairo of Sephardic parents—father from Egypt, mother from Turkey—whose distant ancestors probably left Spain when Jews were expelled in 1492, and whose immediate family fled Egypt for America during the early days of the Nasser regime. Compared to the blonde coeds I lusted after and dated during college years, Dolores is unusual in both looks and mentality. Dark hair, dark eyes, the tinted skin of the Mediterranean where Europe and North Africa come together, along with the mind of someone who spoke French, Spanish, and Arabic before



Spain: Crusade of the Left 23

she learned English. From the moment we met during my journalism days, part of Dolores’s attraction was that being with her made it seem as if I was already a resident of a foreign, culturally diverse, and most sophisticated realm. The information that spills into my lectures in Spain is an amalgam of data, interpretation, and opinion absorbed from works of history, memoir, and eyewitness accounts; from books, pamphlets, magazines, journals, newspapers, interviews, diaries, letters, and folders in archives, both public and personal. On this trip the events of the past help to structure my itinerary, focus the way I see the countryside, underlie the way I relate to people, places, and institutions. The interviews I conducted with some twenty-five American veterans of the conflict have also helped to shape my view of the landscape, battlefields, cities, and people. These meetings were not easy to arrange. The Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade had, for two decades, rested at the top of the Attorney General’s official list of subversive organizations. The unit set up to monitor such organizations, the Subversive Activities Control Board, had held extensive hearings into communism in the Spanish War, with outrageous and often inaccurate claims about the battalion made mostly by people who could be labeled professional ex-communists, that is, witnesses who made a profession out of appearing before investigative committees. Veterans had been spied upon, harassed, named communists to their employers by FBI agents, and sometimes fired from their jobs. All this understandably had left them more than a little suspicious of outsiders. To gain access to the vets, I had to obtain what can only be called a kind of left-wing security clearance. The process began with a friend of a friend from college days who takes me to meet an optometrist at his large home in Hancock Park and introduces me as a young man who has been active in progressive movements. Finally the editorials against fraternities and sororities, my satires of Senator McCarthy, participation in the Joe Must Go green feather clubs, and membership in the NAACP have a practical payoff. A month later I receive a phone call from someone named Gabby, who lets me know that some Los Angeles veterans are willing to meet with me. But we must be careful. You never know who might be watching. So I must go to the coffee shop at Vermont and Sunset in East Hollywood at 6.30 p.m. on Wednesday evening. Carry the LA Times open to the obituary page and you will be recognized by three vets. I do so and they proceed to grill me with an exam centering around my attitudes towards the Soviet Union, Martin Luther King, race relations in Los Angeles and the South. It’s

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all congenial enough until they raise the question of the Stalin–Hitler pact of 1938, which allowed Germany to invade Poland with no worries about Russian intervention. Parroting what my history prof said in his class on modern Europe, I proclaim the pact a mistake, a betrayal of the spirit of the Russian Revolution. No, no, my interrogators shoot back. It was not a betrayal but a smart, tactical move by the Soviet leader to gain time to build up his military for the inevitable war against Nazism. I stifle the impulse to ask then why did Stalin do away with all his generals just before Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. I am not here to score points but to gain access to precious sources. Two weeks later another phone call from Gabby grants me interviews with several other vets in Southern California. After those encounters, I follow a kind of leftist underground railway, sent on with introductions from one person to another for meetings that take me across the country: San Francisco, Detroit, Chicago, New York City. In the summer of 1964, I end up in the cramped Lower East Side offices of the VALB in Manhattan, where I spend some weeks looking through scrapbooks, rare leftist pamphlets, and an enormous, invaluable file of clippings from local American and Spanish newspapers and magazines that someone had the foresight to collect during the war. The flesh-and-blood, middle-aged men I encounter across the country are not quite the romantic figures I expect them to be. Graying, elderly, some in decent physical condition but others bordering on the feeble, they come in a wide variety of shapes and attitudes: pleasant, cranky, prissy, scholarly, unbending, shy, tough, outspoken. After returning from Spain, most of them served in the American military during the Second World War, some with great distinction, and I am treated to the sight of various medals and paper commendations for actions above and beyond the call of duty. One veteran who joined the Office of Strategic Services (forerunner of the CIA) is full of cloak-and-dagger stories about his adventures after parachuting into Yugoslavia to work behind German lines with Marshall Tito’s partisans. Some are currently union organizers; others are professional men, teachers, or owners of small businesses. Some look like they would never kill a fly, let alone fire a gun; others are handsome, burly types who could pose for posters as working-class heroes. Some provide long-winded, detailed accounts of their days in Spain; others remember incidents that seem to be lifted from written accounts, memoirs or novels I have already read. Some dwell at length on their own great bravery; others are laconic and downplay their accomplishments. All share the feeling that



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Spain was the high point of their lives. In Spain they became part of History, and some day History would recognize what they did and judge them as having been right. All pronounce the word History with a tone of reverence that I, myself, have never used nor felt. *

Dear Robert You ask do I remember our trip to Spain? How could I forget? It was our honeymoon, remember? You probably have forgotten everything except your precious hours of research. I was happy to be in Spain. It was my first time there, and in the dim and distant past Spain is part of my heritage. But it was not exactly the honeymoon a girl has in mind. No elegant restaurants. No seaside resorts. No fancy hotels, except maybe for that parador in Teruel, built in an old palace with huge pieces of dark, wooden furniture that had every edge carved into elaborate curlicues. The dining room, the lobby, our bedroom— all the rooms and public spaces were oversized, as if constructed for people far larger than us. Larger than the heating system could handle, too, if there actually was a heating system. I remember having to wear two pair of pants, three sweaters, and an overcoat to dinner, and taking off only the coat when we went to bed. You would not have thought it was October. It was in Teruel that I lost the notion that Spain is a warm and sunny country. I was very excited when we crossed the border. La Junquera. I still remember the name of that little town in the foothills of the Pyrenees. A long narrow street between rows of shops all selling precisely the same things—carved Don Quixotes, serapes, botas, espadrilles, tinny swords, belts, ashtrays bearing pictures of windmills or rampaging bulls, and other tourist junk. You don’t want to stop, of course, you never want to stop unless it has something to do with your precious research on the Lincolns, but I insist. I have about fifteen minutes before you start shifting your weight from one foot to the other and glancing significantly at your watch. By that time I have picked up two odd-shaped, dark green pieces of ceramic at about a dollar each, copies of Roman pots from two thousand years ago. You complain that they are nothing but the cheapest of imitations and you’re right. But I look at them now on my shelf and they have acquired a certain classic feeling of dignity and strength. Fifty years doesn’t do that to all of us.

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Your research has already started and so have your lectures, your endless lectures on the Civil War and the Internationals and the Lincolns and Franco and the Falange, and which troops marched up that ridge, or swam that river, or crossed on pontoon bridges over that other one, or stormed across that stone wall to reach that crumbling church, or battled in the streets of that dusty town, or placed their mortars next to this old factory, or maybe it was that one across the road, because the reports aren’t that clear. After a while I stop listening to the endless details that so fascinate you. Before we met I hadn’t even heard of the Spanish Civil War or the International Brigades and after our two months in Spain I would have been pleased never to hear about them again. Not that I was granted that wish. The writing, the rewriting, the articles, the lecturing, the reviews, the conferences seemed to go on forever. And now you’re going over the same ground again? You are stubborn, you do stick to things, I’ll give you that—I said things, not people, that’s another story. On our honeymoon in Spain we saw more godforsaken places, more dreary towns, bleak landscapes, primitive restaurants with toilets from hell: do you remember the toilets? filthy, smelly, you could choke in there, cold cement or cracked tiles with stains that must have dated from the time of the Romans. My introduction to the Spain tourists never visit, and with good reason, comes shortly after you pull me out of the stores in La Junquera, saying there are plenty of other stores in Spain. Half an hour of a bumpy highway where the stone kilometer markers are peeling and illegible, and we drive up a hill to a medieval fortress above the town of Figueras. You are surprised. You have imagined this to be a tourist site but it’s a military base with armed sentries standing outside those silly-looking boxes that look like outhouses. An officer approaches and I have to translate because your Spanish is atrocious and you are shy about your accent. I explain that we have come to see the fortress because we are interested in Spanish history. He looks pleased. You are here to see the famous spot where General Castro was murdered? We both nod, and in a whisper you admit to me you have never heard of General Castro, one of the few times you ever admit to not knowing something. We are told his story by a handsome young lieutenant who leads us through the huge, empty courtyards. Heads of young men pop out of windows high in the walls and someone



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begins singing a folk song about ojos negros and I smile because I know the song is addressed to me but I don’t dare look up and acknowledge the compliment. You seem oblivious to the singers, caught up in the lieutenant’s words and no doubt your own imaginings about the past. Castro, we learn, was an officer who led guerrilla troops against the French in 1810. We descend a flight of steps into a stone cellar with high ceilings lit by bulbs hanging on long cords. You tell me that these have to be the cellars where the International volunteers, weary and sore from hiking over the Pyrenees at night to escape French border patrols, rested, ate, swapped tales, horsed around, began some military drill, and waited for transportation to take them to training camps farther south. The lieutenant explains that in this very room Napoleon’s troops hold Castro prisoner and then offer him a deal: if he tells them where other guerrillas are holed up in the mountains, they will let him go. But Castro is Spanish. The lieutenant sounds very proud when he says that. And there is only one thing a Spaniard can say in such a situation. He refused a blindfold and they shot him sitting in the chair that is there, right in front of us, a crude, wooden object splintered by bullets. The officer points to dark splotches on the wall: General Castro’s blood. Neither of us says what we both have to be thinking: you can still see the stain after one hundred and fifty years? Back at the gate, while I am politely thanking the officer for his trouble, and he answers it was nothing, you suddenly snap to attention and salute, for God’s sake, you actually salute and say in Spanish something you must have been practicing through the whole tour: Muchas gracias para todos. Soy soldato. Un veterano del ejercito Americano. Estoy commandante de un charro. The captain smiles and crisply returns the salute, while I am wondering at the promotion you have awarded yourself. Six months as a PFC in a National Guard training company at Fort Knox and you have promoted yourself to tank commander. I fall in love with Barcelona. Now there’s a romantic city. The harbor, the sea, Mount Tibidabo up above, Montjuich off to the side, the narrow streets of the Barrio Gotico with its wonderful old cathedral and the stone porch in a courtyard where Ferdinand and Isabella did something important—freed the Catalans? met Columbus?—exactly what I’ve forgotten, but it’s the kind of courtyard that has to be a dramatic setting for some great historic act, and the Catalans are a good-looking people, well-dressed, and the shops are smart.

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I want to stay a week, but no, the Lincolns didn’t do anything much except pass through, coming or going. Our first afternoon you drag me out to a broad leafy boulevard named the Avenida Generalissimo Franco, but according to you it’s really the Diagonal, the street where the Internationals marched in their final parade and where the famed Communist leader known as La Pasionaria delivered a farewell address that gets you all teary as you recite the words to me: You are legend. You are history. When the tree of liberty once again puts forth shoots, come back to Spain. We shall await your return. Choked up, you tell me that now we can leave, this is all you needed to see here. But for the first time in our marriage, I put my foot down and say I want to see the sights, visit the shops. So we do get a couple of days away from the Lincolns but not entirely from the Civil War, for you manage to find traces of it everywhere. Sitting at a cafe in the Plaza Catalunya, you deliver a lecture about that big building at the corner of the square, the Telefonica, which anarchists and communists fought over for some obscure reasons during the Civil War. We stroll down the Ramblas, that broad walkway from the plaza to the harbor, with its cafes, flower stalls, birds in cages, Italian ice cream stands, leather stores, street musicians, and noisy crowds perpetually surging back and forth, and all you can talk about is how the American volunteers who got passes into the city would walk up and down, ogling young ladies and hoping vainly for dates with dark-eyed senoritas whose language they didn’t speak. Let me not rub it in. For two days I do get to play tourist. We visit churches and linger in cafes, have a paella at Los Caracoles, and go through a bunch of stores where I bargain and finally get a real deal on both a leather skirt and jacket. But soon we are driving south along the coast, past the Roman arch at Tarragona and then inland on a highway that snakes into the mountains above the Ebro river. For you this stony landscape overflows with memories—other people’s memories. You keep pointing to towns that are no more than bunches of mud huts clustered around a small church tower, and each has a name and is a site where someone was wounded or killed or performed some heroic act. Below one straggle of buildings down a slope towards the river lies the rubble of a stone bridge, blown up during some retreat or other, now in the shadow of a new steel span. Another town was abandoned after the war and a completely new one built below. We stand on the highway, looking up at the ruins, while I translate your conversation with the middle-aged driver of a



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tanker truck full of wine which is stopped nearby. He remembers the fight over this area, remembers that after the battle ended, the town stank of death and that for months afterward, stray arms, legs, hands, heads, and bodies were still being found beneath the rubble. Gandesa is one name I can remember. It was another place where you began to choke up, this time while singing a song, El Frente de Gandesa, a haunting song but God, you were always way off-key, not even close, and I would always get so embarrassed at faculty parties when after a few glasses of wine you would insist on starting with those Civil War songs which weren’t so bad when Woody Guthrie or Pete Seeger sang them, but you were no singer at all, and I would stand with a glass of wine in hand feeling horribly self-conscious because he’s my husband, and thinking that others must wonder why doesn’t she stop him, why doesn’t she tell him his singing is horrible, but on you go, oblivious as a stone. It’s a ragged, dirty town. Three unpaved streets converge on a tiny triangular plot marked by a dusty tree. You explain that it’s a sacred place, made so by stories and song, for it was a promised land never reached by the Lincolns during their last offensive, even though they got to the hills nearby. Naturally such a small town has no hotels, but one of the three cafes has a single, bare room upstairs with a view of the scrubby hills to the north. A little more than dollar a night, and a little less than a dollar for a dinner of salad, a thick stew, bread, wine, a piece of tough pastry. Two dark-skinned guys in their twenties—gypsies? Moors?—pluck on a guitar and sing softly. Everyone ignores us and it’s clear why. I am the only woman in the room. It’s not easy when your husband of a few weeks asks you to go upstairs so he can talk to the guys, but that’s what you do and that’s what I do, and I begin to learn that’s what marriage does to you. Sometime in the wee hours you wake me stumbling into the room, drunk as a proverbial skunk but happy and humming tunes I don’t recognize. The next day I learn it was a typical evening, the boys going from one of the three cafes to another and back again, drinking cheap wine, asking and answering questions, hearing tall tales about the war, pissing in groups against the sides of buildings, calling each other compadre and amigo and indulging in endless abrazos. When I say that I don’t like being left alone like that, that I don’t want it to happen again, you say hey, when in Rome, remember, it’s part of my research, I’m learning about the spirit of Spain. But you’re writing about Americans, I say, and you laugh, but these are the people they

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came to defend. I have to know them too. In Zaragoza I let you go your own way. It’s a real city and for three dollars we have a nice room at the Conde Blanco, a sleek hotel with a modern bathroom and plenty of hot water. While you are off to various towns and fields in the area where the Lincolns fought, I lie in bed until noon, then stroll around poking into shops, museums, and the stunning cathedral, Nuestra Senora del Pilar. You return each night with stories of trenches, bombed-out churches, and rubblefilled villages that make me glad I was not along. The only one I see is on the day we make the drive to Teruel. I can’t forget the name of the town, Belchite. It’s one of only two sites that move me deeply on this voyage into history. We drive for miles across a landscape of red earth, empty as the moon, then see a pointed church tower that, up close, reveals a huge hole in its side, a hole so big it is difficult to understand why the tower hasn’t crumbled to the ground. Made by an artillery shell, you tell me, as if I didn’t know. Inside the low walls surrounding the town lies a scene of total devastation, shocking and strangely peaceful. Except for that tower, and the walls of another church, its roof gone, its altar open to the sky, grass and small flowers poking up through cracks in the stone floor; and the occasional piece of another building jutting up like a rock out of the sea; or the low foundations that allow us, like the footings of an excavated Roman town we have seen earlier in the day, to discern where narrow streets of an ancient city once meandered and people went about their daily tasks, Belchite is no more than a square kilometer of heaped-up rubble. We remain for a couple of hours. You pocket some bullet casings, and after wrestling with your conscience out loud for a while, asking me is it okay or not, you take a crude stone cross from the ruins of a church and put it in the trunk of the car. I take a photo of you sitting on a pile of rubble, cigarette in hand, brooding, the kind of photo you want for a dust jacket of the book. You describe the battle to me and for once I listen to every detail about the terrain over which the Lincolns attacked, how the men first hunkered down in muddy ditches, then had to scurry forward from one low stone wall to another while a machine gun roared down at them from the church tower, and shells exploded all around them, and the air was full of shouts of encouragement and screams of pain as they crawl towards buildings on the edge of town, then battle into the city, house by house. It’s a moving story, but strangely unreal on this cool, gray afternoon, with rain clouds



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lowering, the only sounds in the dead town being our voices, the click of the camera shutter, the whisper of a slight wind in our ears. You walk the ground, measure distances, study lines of approach and angles of fire, and I watch and feel the sadness of the war, and for the first time glimpse how this story of loss tugs at your heart. Madrid is the heart. That’s a line I remember, maybe because you repeated it so often and used it as the title of your opening chapter, these words from a poem by W. H. Auden. For me it seemed not at all beautiful like Barcelona, but kind of drab and down at the heels, the streets full of old cars from the thirties and forties and gray-haired men in shabby dark suits who looked like bureaucrats. What a noisy room you insisted we take, right on a busy corner of that huge boulevard which you called the Gran Vía even though the signs read Avenida de José Antonio, but you wouldn’t use that name because he was some big-time fascist, right? Below our window, three decades ago, the first Internationals marched past cheering crowds and into a battle to save Madrid. About the tenth time you told me that, I said you’ve told me that already and you looked hurt and sulked for hours. You weren’t all that taken with Madrid either. Every morning we left the city in search of various battlegrounds that we usually couldn’t find despite all the detailed instructions you carried from veterans of the war. Two whole days were taken up driving back and forth over a treeless plain in search of a hill named Mosquito Crest. You studied maps, you had me ask directions of a shepherd standing over his flock, and of a bartender in a muddy cafe, and of a woman in black bent beneath a load of kindling. But for all the suggestions they gave, and all the bare hills we climbed, we never found this important spot, and while you were fuming about the Spanish—Don’t even know their own country—I asked what was the difference, all these hills looked pretty much the same, if you needed a description for the book, couldn’t it be kind of a generic description? Who would know the difference? That put you into a rage. What do you mean who will know? What do you mean what’s the difference? This is history. You can’t make things up. You have to be accurate. You have to tell the truth. After Mosquito Crest, you were ready to take your notes and negatives and head for some place in France to begin writing your dissertation, and the only thing that stopped you was your earlier promise that we would make a trip to Andalucia, land of my ancestors who almost 500 years earlier were ordered to convert to Catholicism or leave the country. You probably don’t want to hear about that

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part of the trip, which seemed to bore you, but not me. I loved the olive groves, the starched blue sky, the white towns, the Alcazar in Sevilla, the crooked streets of the Barrio Santa Cruz, and the graceful necklace of white buildings draped around a craggy hillside crowned with a fortress that is Jaen. Here I get to sing for a change. Do you remember the Ladino lament, Tres moriscos de Jaen? For me it was more moving than any of the songs about the war. We reach Granada late on the afternoon of October 12, Columbus Day, and drive up the hill of the Alhambra to take a room in the Washington Irving Hotel. We roll up the blinds and look down at a million-dollar view of whitewashed garden walls, dirt roads, donkeys with loads on their backs, and farther off, a huge green valley of trees and orchards, and beyond that the Sierra Nevada going purple in the sunset, and a red gleam above the mountains, just like on a postcard, and then the lights of the city begin to come on, and the sound of children singing blows up to us on the evening air, and church bells begin to ring across the town, and there is a sudden flash of light and a nearby clap of thunder as an artillery piece goes off, followed by twenty more booms of a salute to signal the end of a Spanish holiday. We spend the next day at the Alhambra, that feast for the eyes and soul to which my words and your words and nobody else’s words can never do justice. This was years before Europeans were rich enough to travel much, years before the tourist boom, and we are almost alone in the courtyards, patios, porticos, and gardens, amidst the endless arabesques carved in plaster and wood, the colorful tiles, the beehive ceilings, the splash of water in the lion fountain, the vistas from the battlements, the lush gardens of the Generalife, the dark interiors that defeat the Spanish sun. In the afternoon we acquire a teenage guide who leads us up the hill across from the Alhambra, the Albaicin, the old Arab section, and through the workshops of artisans. Later on we visit some of the churches and the convents of the city, and the Civil War suddenly returns. In a small, sixteenth-century church, the boy points out some typical grisly Spanish paintings of Christian martyrs being run through with swords, stuck with arrows, burned to death, flayed while still alive, and he tells us these show what the Reds did to Catholics during the Civil War. But you point to the plaques with the dates of the artists and tell him the war was in the 1930s and these date from the eighteenth century. The boy looks at the plaques and then at us, looks at the dates again and up again with a baffled expression, then says



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They have to be from the Civil War, that’s what the priests told us. You know I am saving the best moment in Spain for last. What I think is the best moment. Certainly the most ironic. You probably have other ideas. It takes place at Jarama, and I promise not to mention how many times you sang that song to the tune of Red River Valley on the day we drove out from Madrid to seek the spot where, as you kept saying, the Lincolns underwent their baptism of fire. What’s so wonderful about that phrase that men like to use it, as if war is a holy experience? Not for you it wasn’t. Not in reality. You were very happy to bypass the draft by enlisting for six months in the National Guard and then figuring out how to avoid most of your weekend meetings for the next seven years by finding an obscure provision of the law which says that when you move to a different address you have up to a year to register with a new National Guard unit, so for the next seven years you move once a year and rarely have to attend meetings. We turn off the highway somewhere east of Madrid and onto a dirt road, drive through a dusty collection of mud huts and into hills covered with naked olive trees. This time the place is easy to find. You can’t miss the man-made trenches that scar the landscape and spread across the hills as far as we can see. Three decades of Castilian weather have eroded them less than you expected. Some are still deep, eight-foot gashes in the earth. Walking around them we find debris from the war, empty cartridges, rusty food tins, a broken piece of a pencil, part of an eyeglass frame. It’s a warm afternoon, the sun strong, and you want to linger here. You tell me you wish you could hear artillery and machine guns, see soldiers moving through the landscape, but instead, insects drone by our ears, birds on olive branches call to each other, grapevines bloom against the red earth. Above us is a peak called Pingarron, a point which hundreds of Americans died trying to capture one bloody afternoon. Suddenly you get a bright idea. While I drive up the road to the top, you will emulate the Lincolns, get a feel for what they went through by running on foot up the steep slope, playing at war, just as you once did in Basic Training at Fort Ord, ducking behind folds of earth and clumps of trees as did the Americans on that fateful day in February, 1937 when their commander was ordered by headquarters to take the hill at all costs. You don’t have a rifle or cartridge belts or a pack, and you are not exactly prepared for battle, real or imagined. I point to your loafers and say they don’t seem up to the task, and besides you’re sure to dirty your khakis, the only clean pair of pants you have.

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Just like a woman, you say. Don’t be silly. I’ll be okay. Then you suddenly scramble out of the trench and begin to charge up the hillside, screaming like a madman. It looks like heavy going as you stumble up the rocky, uneven ground and push through bushes that look like they must be full of burrs and other sharp things, and just about the time I am beginning to wonder about men, about marriage, about what I have gotten into, I see you flop onto the ground and I scream Are you okay? Don’t worry, you yell back, just a bit scratched, then you leap to your feet, rush forward, and ten seconds later you are down again. When you get up I can see your shirt is torn, your face and arms scratched, or is that me remembering what I see half an hour later when you reach the top, not running all the way, that was too difficult, but mostly walking, and up close you are a mess of torn clothes, bloody ankles and arms, your face has been ripped by brambles and there is a gash not a quarter of an inch from your left eye, but you are smiling and in a good humor, at least until we stroll the last couple of hundred meters up the dirt road to the line of trees surrounding the summit, both of us anticipating the great vistas we will see from the peak, the hills and valleys of the whole Jarama region. Beyond the trees, we find a wall. Do you remember? A ten-foot stucco wall. A new wall, painted white, with sharp-edged, broken tiles along the top, and a tall, closed, iron gate. Through the gate we see sizable houses in the traditional style of southern Spain, white walls, arched porticos, red tile roofs. To the left of the gate, a billboard with the following words: Pingarron Estates. Your Quiet Home Away From the Noise of the City. Come Enjoy the Country. Learn How Good Life Can Be! How good has your life been since then? I hope you have found all the things you were seeking in history. Whatever it was, you didn’t find it in me, but ours was a pretty decent relationship for the few years we were together. We had lots of good times, but as we both learned, life can move on in unexpected ways. I don’t regret our parting any more than I regret our years together. I suspect you will remember our days well enough to understand that I have been playing with you in these pages. Actually it was a great time for me, our trip to Spain, despite all the discomforts and your obsession with research. The country of my ancestors never seemed so new and fresh on any of my later trips. A couple of years ago when Joe and I spent two weeks in Andalucia, memories of our six weeks in Spain came flooding back. What a horror the Alhambra has become, with



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the need to reserve tickets, and enormous lines everywhere and tour guides babbling and thousands of people from all over the world breathing down your neck in the Courtyard of the Lions and everywhere else. So I owe the Lincolns and you a belated muchissimas gracias for that special honeymoon trip. I also can’t help but wonder how much you must have changed from then to now. But I’m sure much of that old you remains. Somehow I always think of you as a man who is still climbing Pingarron, only today I suppose it has another name and another meaning. Amor y pesetas, Dolores

*

The twenty-seventh dawned wet and cloudy on the Jarama front. Crouched in their trenches, the men of the Lincoln Battalion waited for the big guns to shatter the false calm of morning. They were tense and nervous, their mouths dry. Breakfast had consisted of canned sardines and milk, and Neil Wesson of Detroit attributed the strange feeling in his stomach to that unusual combination of foods. When the artillery began, it was not the massed roar the Americans had expected, and as battalion officers looked through field glasses, they could see the few shell bursts were wide of the hill named Pingarron. As the day brightened and sun broke through the clouds, no friendly aircraft filled the morning sky, no tanks rumbled up to lead the assault. Over the folds of earth Captain Merriman could see the Spanish battalion leave its trenches, advance a short distance, and then pull back quickly as many men fell beneath enemy fire. Merriman was nervous. He knew that without the cover of artillery and the support of the Spanish battalion on his flank it would be suicidal to ask his men to leave their positions. He picked up the phone to headquarters and asked the whereabouts of the tanks and aircraft and received an order to attack without them. Excited and unnerved, he began to shout into the phone that if the Americans advanced without support, it would be a massacre. But the order came back to take the enemy position “at all costs.”

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It was close to noon when Merriman ordered the Lincolns to advance. The soldiers hopped from the trenches a few at a time and darted forward like scared rabbits. The sun was hot now and the enemy machine guns swung toward them and poured a rain of fire down from the hilltops. Men were already hurtling across the fields when bullets began to spray the trenches and many in the second wave were hit climbing and fell back upon those who had not yet left. Merriman, angry and upset, watched his men go toward what seemed to be certain death or injury. Then he leaned forward and waved his arm above the parapet in a signal for another group to move out. He was knocked back into the trench as a bullet drilled through his left shoulder. Just a few feet in front of the trenches his adjutant, Douglas Seacord, already lay dead. Robert Kirby crouched in the trenches waiting for the signal to advance, his limbs trembling. The noise of the battlefield was so deafening he could not hear the shouts of the men around him. Suddenly someone was pushing him up, and he found himself blindly running forward, stumbling over grapevines. He crashed to earth, picked himself up, ran a few steps, and realized people were shooting at him and dived for cover behind an olive tree. Around him soldiers were advancing in little rushes and Kirby began to do the same. After several dashes forward he noticed men firing their rifles, and only then did he consciously remember he was carrying a weapon. Momentarily safe behind a small ridge, Kirby pointed his rifle in the general direction of the enemy lines and began to fire. After a couple of shots, the weapon stopped functioning. It was jammed and Kirby had no idea how to get it working again. All around the Jarama hills, American soldiers were breaking down in tears of frustration as their old rifles jammed and would not come unstuck. Elsewhere on the battlefield, in the dips of earth and through the groves of trees, the men of the Lincoln Battalion were slowly and painfully moving upon Pingarron. They were going forward into a curtain of steel as the blue sky of Spain sang with death. Hidden machine guns high on the right opened up with a deadly crossfire. Still they blundered on, the enemy’s guns piling up a heavy toll as man after man slumped to earth. Those with bodies shredded by machine-gun bullets writhed on the ground and screamed for the first aid men who could not reach them. Those who were untouched deafened their ears to their comrades’ cries as they pressed forward, advancing in little rushes from mound to olive tree to fold of



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earth. The bravest and luckiest even reached the naked approaches to the crest of the mountain. When the few healthy Americans made their way back under cover of evening to their own lines, they left 300 comrades dead and wounded on the slope toward Pingarron. Crusade of the Left, pp. 45–9

* If I had been smart, if I had seen history primarily as a career rather than a way to write books full of interesting characters and exciting events, I might have gone home to Los Angeles to write the dissertation. That’s what my advisor wanted me to do. Over four months beginning in November 1964, he sent that message in half a dozen letters, each one shorter and more peremptory than the last, each insisting that I return for the late December meeting of the American Historical Association in order to be interviewed for positions at universities. But the benefits of a having my advisor or a research library close at hand, even the prospect of a full-time job, could not compete with the attractions of writing a book—I never thought of it as simply a dissertation—in southern France, close to Antibes, where F. Scott Fitzgerald and his friends once cavorted; St. Tropez, recently made famous by Brigitte Bardot; and St. Paul de Vence, where Marc Chagall still lived and worked. These towns were far too expensive for someone on my fellowship from the University of California, so Dolores and I ended up just up the road from somewhat less fashionable Nice. For $70 a month we rented a huge room in a walled villa on the Basse Corniche, complete with a tiny kitchen, bathroom, terrace, and floor-to-ceiling windows with a splendid view of the Bay of Angels. A fifteen-minute stroll took us to the Promenade des Anglais; a 45-minute drive to the pottery village of Vallauris, where one afternoon I paid $12 for a Picasso plate (one in an edition of 500) with the caricature of a face. I would have liked to buy several of them but, on our budget, even one seemed like a huge indulgence. It never occurred to me in late November 1964—as I set up the portable typewriter on the round, oak table with its view of the Mediterranean and began to write a work that I would finish in the late spring of the following year—that neither my mentor, nor any other faculty member had ever lectured or advised or even mentioned anything about how to

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write a dissertation or any work of history. Apparently it was assumed that by reading so (far too?) many works of history in grad school you would somehow absorb, through a process of literary osmosis, the knowledge of how to write one. Or perhaps it was thought that anyone who had been forced to write several seminar papers would understand that you only had to lengthen such works, or perhaps cobble a bunch of them together, to create a book. That a work of history might have an architecture, a form, a vision which held it together was not ever mentioned—and possibly not known?—by my professors. The single, ten-week class grad students had to take on the history of historical writing skimmed through brief selections of great historians from Herodotus to Von Ranke, touching their philosophies but wholly ignoring questions of literary form or expression beyond the ritual statements that all professors made at the beginning of every seminar: keep your prose straightforward and clear. Two decades later, when the ground-breaking theorist Hayden White upset the community of historians by arguing that historical writing essentially followed the form of the nineteenth-century novel, it was not much of a surprise to me. As a would-be writer, I aimed to produce historical works that would be as compelling as a novel, the difference being that my characters and incidents would of course be true, as certified in footnotes and a bibliography. While involved in the process of writing the thesis, however, I knew my pages would be scrutinized by a doctoral committee of traditional historians. This, in my understanding, meant that I could not focus much on the exploits of individuals or colorful characters, nor use too many dramatic or humorous anecdotes. It was also important to keep a lid on adverbs and adjectives, at least until I was certified as a PhD and could rewrite the dissertation into a marketable book. The Lincolns might make for an exciting subject, but I never saw my work as a simple-minded tale of adventure. Their story was to me a saga of political and social commitment, one that began with the heroism of volunteering to defend one’s ideals and beliefs in a far-off land, and continued during the journey across the Atlantic and over the Pyrenees, through the fear and occasional triumph of battles, the life-and-death struggles with the enemies and oneself, the victories and defeats, the wounds and deaths, the long road home, and the shifting meaning of one’s deeds over the decades to come. Two years of research had led me to a thesis that—surprise!—confirmed my initial admiration for men of the battalion, but did so, I believed, with a complexity of detail and thickness of event that created truth. One of my aims was to show that the decision



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to become a volunteer for Spain had arisen out of a specific historical context, that this apparently radical action—including those of the 60 to 80 percent who joined the Communist Party or its youth affiliates—had been a reasonable, even admirable response to the social, economic, and political conditions of the thirties, and particularly to the values and pressures of the subcultures in which the volunteers had lived and worked: communities of recent immigrants, Jews, college students, members of labor unions. Despite this theoretical endorsement of activism, I had already (without consciously knowing it) become enough of an ivory tower academic to let the past blind me to the significance of events in the present. When the Paris edition of the Herald Tribune and Time magazine brought news to Nice of the Free Speech movement in Berkeley—the surrounding of the police car by a thousand students, the impromptu leader, Mario Savio, making his dramatic speech about the need to put one’s body upon the gears, wheels, and levers of the machine of society—I told Dolores that the protesters were no more than a bunch of spoiled kids, making a fuss over nothing. It was clear to me that the University of California was an admirable institution with a gloriously free environment—how else could I be allowed to write a dissertation on such a radical topic? * From the years of wanting to be a novelist (and reading more than a few books on how to become one), I felt that even a dissertation had to be written in a way that made a reader want to continue turning the pages. To me that meant structure was important. Reaching back into classes on literature, I seized upon a classic device we had studied in more than one course and made the decision to start my story in medias res. The first chapter, Madrid is the Heart, opens in the chaotic Spanish capital the first week of November, 1936, at the moment when the rebel armies led by Francisco Franco have four columns poised on the outskirts of Madrid and, as General Emilio Mola announces to the press, a fifth column of sympathizers inside the city is ready to rise and aid them. Everyone expects the capital to fall within a few days, yet it is miraculously saved by the arrival at the last moment of the first International Brigade, composed mostly of Germans and Poles, who march up the Gran Vía past cheering crowds on November 6, 1936, and take up positions on the outskirts of the city on the new campus of the University of Madrid and in the park known as the Casa de Campo. Over a period of months this unit, joined by other international brigades, fights off

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the rebels, stalls the advance, and saves Madrid for the Republic. The city does not surrender until the final days of the war more than two years later. The book then skips ahead a few weeks to the first group of American volunteers, ninety-six in all, who gather in New York City in mid-December and reach Spain in January 1937. For a few weeks at the tiny town of Tarazona de la Mancha they undergo primitive training with wooden rifles, then these fledgling soldiers are prematurely hurled into the front lines during the great battle of the Jarama Valley early in February, 1937. What follows are two chapters of flashbacks meant to provide the context for the actions of the 3,200 American volunteers. The first of these sketches the world economic and political crisis of the thirties; the growth of militant fascism in Europe and its echoes in the US; the rise of the generals against the Spanish Republic; the organization of the foreign brigades by a Communist International that supports the idea of a Popular Front against Fascism. The next (third) chapter focuses on the personal backgrounds of the Lincolns, creating a collective portrait through details of their families, home towns, educational levels, work experience, ethnicity, politics, activities, and beliefs. From that point on, chapters dealing with the battalion’s actions in the field alternate with those devoted to social, personal, and ideological issues. Military chapters detail the decimation of the Americans at Jarama on February 27; the two offensives in the summer of 1937, one at Brunete west of Madrid, the other in the Ebro river valley near Zaragoza; the bitter battle over the city of Teruel in the snowstorms of December 1937; the retreat from Belchite in the spring of 1938; and the final offensive across the Ebro in August 1938 that fails to reach its goal, Gandesa. The more personal chapters cover the conflict between the men in the trenches and the so-called generals of the rear who work at brigade headquarters in Albacete; the issues of desertion, discipline and (occasional) terror in the ranks; the shifting and multifaceted roles of the political commissars; the propaganda of the various leftist factions represented; the evolving beliefs that comprise the mind of the volunteer. If the penultimate chapter covers the lives of the veterans after their return home and up until the time of publication, the title of the final one, An Untarnished Epic, leaves little doubt as to the author’s feeling about the Lincoln Battalion. As does my eventual choice of a title for the book: Crusade of the Left. Despite the elaborate structure created for the work, one that alternates between chronology and topicality, I did not in the two years devoted to producing Crusade come to realize the extent to which the process of turning the traces of the past into history involves enormous acts of the imagination.



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Everything down to the smallest detail could be traced back to some historical source: a letter, diary, journal, leaflet, newspaper story, interview, memoir, or work of scholarly history. This includes the most trivial of elements: complaints about the food and drink delivered to the trenches; the rotten weather, always too hot, too cold, too wet; the tedious political speeches of the commissars; the ridiculous ones made by visiting Communist leaders from home urging commitment to soldiers who were already risking their lives; the perpetual lack of decent toilet paper; the lamentable quality of the ancient rifles that regularly jammed on the battlefields; the lack of progress with local girls in the villages where the battalion was stationed; the very occasional date in which a Lincoln was dismayed to find that he and the girl were chaperoned by her mother, sisters, and brothers. Yet verifiable as all such incidents and moments were, and true as the details of the advances, retreats, wounds, and deaths might be, it was only by my imagining them as fitting together into an invented structure of moments, scenes, and developments—one that heightened the drama, movement, and human feelings of the troops—that I created a history of the Lincolns. The very act of writing made the war more palpable to me, more my own, than it had ever been during the research trip through the battlegrounds of Spain. My accounts of military encounters and states of mind would, ever after, seem to me full of truth in a way that those by other historians of the war were not. What I failed to consider, what a doctoral candidate really need not consider, were the more personal meanings of the work, but for my committee I didn’t need to talk of meaning. It was enough to show that I had undertaken original research, was properly critical of my primary and secondary sources, and could produce a coherent narrative with appropriately long footnotes and an attached bibliographical apparatus. Only while rewriting the dissertation into a book during the social and cultural turmoil from 1965 through 1968—that period of assassinations, urban revolts, student takeovers of college campuses, anti-war protests, and repression, which seemed to underline the need for the kind of activism engaged in by my subjects—did I feel the need to begin exploring some of the personal implications of what I had written. The Introduction, composed just before the book went to press in January 1969, moved towards the idea of an intimate connection between that past and the present: Thirty years later, one may wonder at the actions of militants who volunteer for a conflict thousands of miles from home. Yet the experience of the 1960s

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should help us to understand them. In the past decade, we have become accustomed once again to the idea of the United States as a land of conflict as well as consensus. Student strikes and sit-ins, anti-war marches and demonstrations, black demands and ghetto revolts have reminded us that a native radicalism can flourish in America. It was the same in the thirties. The men who went to Spain came out of a radical subculture that emerged in the era of the Depression and the New Deal. This radicalism was a native plant, but it was also nourished from abroad. For in the thirties the menace of fascism was spreading like a cancer across Europe, and this gave an international aspect to many domestic problems. The threat of fascism to intellectuals, students, unionists, liberals, and leftists was so real that many came to believe it could only be stopped in open combat; the Americans who went to Spain sincerely felt that if reaction were not stopped in that country, eventually they would have to take up arms against fascism here at home.2

When writing those words, I was already a full-fledged member of academia, in my third year as an assistant professor at the California Institute of Technology. You can see them as a nod to the philosophy of existentialism, with its demand that one become politically engaged, that had been all the rage during my undergraduate years, when my friends and I devoured the works of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. The introduction is clearly an affirmation, a claim that no matter what the social pressures, one can always choose to act freely for all mankind. And the subtext of this argument is not difficult to discern. At the moment I might be making my way forward in an academic world with its own boundaries and system of rewards. But I was clearly not about to let the term historian fully define me. It might be my existence, but certainly not my essence. Nor did this profession mean forsaking all other values. Given the right circumstances, I could well be something else, say someone who would—like the volunteers for Spain—be willing to put his life on the line for a just cause. Or so I liked to imagine. * The early years of my career in the late sixties and early seventies offered enough causes to last several lifetimes. With some of them—the anti-war and civil rights movements—I was involved, but never did I forsake being a professor to become anything other than a distinctly part-time activist. Life in those days became a kind of balancing act between the demands of academia and the demands of the heart. I might march in countless peace and civil rights demonstrations (especially in San Francisco, where bands



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like the Grateful Dead and Country Joe and the Fish would be in the parade to help to keep our spirits high), deliver self-righteous or ironic speeches to anti-war rallies (The local delicatessen has added to its menu what they call the Richard Nixon sandwich, but it’s the same old baloney on white!), help to tutor black high school students at a ghetto agency, but never did I let such activities interfere with the normal academic rigmarole of presenting papers, writing essays culled from the dissertation, and starting a new research project. Several trade publishers rejected the book manuscript as too scholarly, and three university presses as too popular, before the fledgling press, Pegasus, decided there was a ready and substantial market for a history of the Lincoln Battalion. (Were they wrong!) Never did I think of the book as solely a contribution to scholarship. Nor did I ever imagine my audience to consist solely of academic specialists. Being a scholar did not make me immune to dreams of literary glory. I envisioned Crusade as being widely reviewed, perhaps even a minor bestseller. I imagined it nominated for awards, praised in the New York Times Book Review, greeted as a vital piece of American history recaptured, part of a legacy of political activism that the consensus-minded historians of the previous generation had ignored, a story in which all liberal-minded Americans could take pride, a history that could nurture the young activists of today by showing they belonged to an important tradition, a longrunning struggle for justice that spilled across the boundaries of the United States into a larger world. Crusade of the Left received a total of nine reviews: two mildly favorable notices in newspapers, two in small leftist magazines, and five rather short (it seemed to me) pieces in scholarly journals. In several cases my work was coupled with another recent book on the Lincolns (Between the Bullet and the Lie by Cecil Eby), which had precisely the opposite thesis to my own: it argued in prose far racier than mine that the volunteers were either hard-core Communists, adventurers, criminals, or vacuous liberals who never understood they served in Spain as dupes of the Kremlin. Most infuriating was the piece in the New York Times Book Review, the first to clue me that reviewers are not close readers, and sometimes not readers at all. Hugh Thomas, author of the then most recent history of the Civil War in English, one both scholarly and popular (if selection by the History Book Club made a work popular), wholly ignored the contents of our two competing visions of the Lincolns to write his own essay on the battalion. Not only was his piece full of mistakes, but his single direct reference to the two books claimed there was essentially no difference between them.

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One day in the spring of 1970, fame brushed by my shoulder when a hurried call from a hysterical publicist at Pegasus in New York let me know that Time magazine had a review set in type, and that ABC’s Dick Cavett Show would fly me to New York for an on-air interview towards the end of the week. The next day, sounding dreadfully sober, she called again, this time to inform me that the appearance had been canceled. Something had pushed the review out of Time and that meant ABC was no longer interested in the Spanish War. More disappointing was the reaction of activists and young radicals: there was virtually none. The underground press and old leftist publications (save for The Nation and The Progressive) ignored Crusade of the Left more completely than did the world of commercial journalism. Naively—or was this a rationalization for confining a great deal of my own radicalism to the written word?—I believed that activists needed historical roots, that knowledge of their forebears in the 1930s would provide sustenance in their present struggles. Personally, I had always been moved by learning that others before me had wrestled with issues of war, peace, commitment, equality, freedom, and justice. When, during downtime at a march against the war, or at the end of one of those late-night planning sessions for a demonstration, I ever so hesitantly got around to mentioning that I was a historian, the reaction—Far out! Groovy!—could be heartening. But on the few occasions when I attempted to edge the example of the Lincoln Battalion into the conversation as a way of explaining to youngsters (some only seven or eight years my junior) that they could look to these men of a previous age to see they were not alone, even those few polite enough to sit still would say things like: Sounds like a gas. No time now, man. Catch you later. Such responses only showed me how much I was becoming (had become?)—and this was a surprise at the time—a Historian. By inclination as well as by job description. Whenever I tried to understand things that were happening in the outside world, I looked to the past. It took me many years to learn that what I found there was not simply in the documents I (or others) had read, but in the explanations we imposed upon them. The one group that, somewhat grudgingly, welcomed Crusade of the Left consisted of members of the Old Left, activists from the thirties, among them veterans of the Lincoln Brigade (as it was called, no doubt to make it sound more important than a battalion). My single book signing (in those days before chain book stores, such signings were rather rare, as they are becoming again in the post-chain, or post-almost any book store, age) came at the annual meeting of the veterans in the basement of Manhattan’s



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Gramercy Park Hotel. A few friendly types who had already read the work let me know that some of their buddies not only disliked what I wrote, but thought me a traitor or an FBI agent for mentioning instances of dissent and desertion in the ranks. My reply was self-righteous: I had a commitment to the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Besides, hiding details only called greater attention to them, and my investigation and revelations worked to the credit of the battalion by showing there was less terror— almost none, really—than that suggested by the much-publicized hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Such explanations hardly satisfied my critics. So it was with a dry mouth and a wet brow that I rose in front of men who were in part my heroes, and in part, I was learning, major pains in the ass. I spoke from the podium as if mine was the voice of a future generation, honoring the deeds of its forebears. They were heroes, I said, in the perpetual struggle against fascism. Their exploits showed the way to today’s young activists. Feeling a surge of sudden emotion, I raised my right fist in the Popular Front salute and shouted Viva la Republica! Viva las Brigadas Internacionales! For my final phrase, a mass of other voices joined me in shouting No pasaran! My publisher, a new—and short-lived—house, had delivered a stack of fifty books to the basement of the hotel. When my peroration and the subsequent book sales and signing were over, forty-three of them remained on the table. * I thought that with publication of the book, I was done with the Spanish Civil War, but I was wrong. The veterans and their wives and children, and their spouses and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, were determined not to let the story of the battalion die. Forty, fifty, sixty, seventy years after the original events, down even to the present day, the Lincolns and their offspring were, in the stories they told and retold, elaborated and refined, still bleeding to death on the slope below Pingarron, storming into the streets of Belchite, suffering frostbite in the trenches outside Teruel, plunging into the swollen waters of the Ebro. At least they were at commemorative gatherings sponsored by the VALB, meetings held in connection with a particular anniversary, exhibitions of Civil War posters, or the publication of a new memoir by a veteran (of which there were many). After attending a few of these nostalgia-fests, whose tone seemed close to that of a religious revival, I began to avoid them. But when in 1987 the vets needed an academic historian on their fiftieth anniversary to moderate

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a day-long public forum at UCLA, I agreed to take the role. This goodwill gesture meant having to endure a certain amount of public abuse from some of these aging men. Forgetting who I was or what I had written, erstwhile commissar Steve Nelson, who had served time in jail as a Communist Party leader in Pennsylvania and had been a guest in my classroom more than once, rose during the Anniversary Symposium, pointed at me with a shaky finger, called me the professor in a contemptuous tone, and denounced me as an example of the conservative academic world clearly involved in a conspiracy to suppress knowledge of the battalion’s great accomplishments. The moment was less painful than humorous. With four scholarly works now devoted to the battalion, several more to the history of the International Brigades, dozens of memoirs by vets, several coffee table picture books now in print, and at least three feature-length documentaries having been devoted to them, the Lincolns would seem to have received their historical due. * The Spanish Civil War and the Lincoln Battalion have continued to pull at me over the years, often in the form of requests from newspapers and journals for reviews of new books on the topic. Over a period of five decades, such activity has taught me something they neglected to let us know in graduate school: that history never dies; that what you write remains part of you, apparently, forever. It makes me feel that perhaps Heraclitus should be honored as the real theorist of history. Like the philosopher’s river, you can’t step into the same history again. Over time, the past and its meanings shift, change shape, come to look and feel different. My own text, the very words fixed in print upon the page, seemed to alter, to suggest new and unexpected meanings. Events in the world (the end of the Franco regime and the radicalism of the sixties) and personal changes in the self (divorce, remarriage, promotions, awards, aging) are all part of these transformations. Regimes, historiography, and historians—all mutate. In the realm of history, as in that of the present, all elements are constantly at play. Changes in the world and in my own consciousness came together most clearly in an essay I wrote for The Progressive in 1978, nine years after the publication of my book, three years after the death of Franco, and shortly after the birth of a new Spanish Republic (or constitutional monarchy?). If for an earlier generation the dark lesson of the Civil War had been, as Camus wrote, learning that injustice could triumph in history, those carrying a social conscience in my generation saw the war as a heroic, lost



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cause, the site of a life-and-death radicalism far beyond our own realm of possibilities. But now the change of the regime provided a new perspective: Spain may now be seen as a lesson that eventually historical wrongs are righted, that justice does triumph in the end. Those like the Lincolns, who had lived in a kind of symbiotic relationship with Franco for forty years, had in a sense been left behind by history; they were now less actors and martyrs than spectators of their own past. I had a different sort of problem. As a historian, I witnessed the past from the sidelines—that was part of the job description. For a long time I had cheered the Lincolns as men who knew that creation and destruction were welded implacably together in the crucible of history, and who understood that individual effort—for the last time in history, it seemed—made a difference. This view was no longer my only one. The sixties were over and the movements in which I had participated had left lots of good memories and more than a few scars. Commitment, I had learned from experience, was not just a matter of heroism, for there was an equally important politics of daily life, of how you treat other human beings, friends, family, students, and colleagues. Public heroism unmodified by the personal seem to lead all too easily towards injustice—manipulating others for your own ends (usually phrased as for their own good). In print I acknowledged that his shift in perspective might merely be the aging process, working its subtle but significant changes. Whatever the cause, by the end of the seventies—twenty years since my first trip to Spain, fourteen since doing research there, eight since the publication of the book—my views of history and its lessons were changing: The Spanish Civil War seems to me more elusive than ever. As recent scholarship continues to deepen and extend our picture of the conflict, it also underlines the fact that the quest for historical truth is as difficult as we always suspected. Yet the complex, ineffable nature of history does not reduce our human responsibilities. It simply means that in extraordinary crises, as in daily life, acts are always a step into uncertainty and darkness. If the Spanish Civil War suggests the sometime necessity for life-and-death commitments, it also indicates that the results of such actions are often unknown, problematic, or largely dependent upon the time period from which we are viewing events. In human affairs, there is neither escape from history nor into it.3

Smolny Institute: Its smooth, classical façade of this Petrograd headquarters of the Soviets in the July sun is so different from the menacing, military spectacle made famous in the night sequences of Sergei Eisenstein's classic film, October.

2 Soviet Union: Romantic Revolutionary This class struggle sure plays hell with your poetry. John Reed

The epigraph says it all. Art and revolution. Two of the unspoken fantasies of my younger days, with the other two easily implied. Sidewalk cafes in foreign cities, hotel rooms with the curtains drawn, sultry beauties whose appeal is intensified by gunshots outside the window, barricades in the streets. Not that I would or could have put it this way at the time. Such later insights were not part of my consciousness in the late sixties, an era when the word revolution came too easily from the lips of angry students and the pens of adults who should have known better. I was already too much the acculturated historian to believe revolution in America possible or even desirable, yet the upheaval of the sixties days could be so exhilarating— marches against the Vietnam War down Market Street in San Francisco and up along Golden Gate Park all the way to Kezar Stadium accompanied by the music of the Grateful Dead, the Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe and the Fish, Big Brother and the Holding Company; campus rallies, love-ins, sit-ins and takeovers; urban riots (or uprisings, depending upon your point of view); assassinations—that it was difficult not to sometimes imagine the world was turning upside down. Explanations for what was happening in the streets and in our minds would come long after the fact. Personal life is not much different from history: we struggle through our days, then struggle to understand what we have lived. John Reed, author of the epigraph, was a figure out of a romantic novel, a hero in his own time. Or so some of his contemporaries thought. Others found him an insufferable egotist and bore. In the decade prior to the First World War, during the heyday of America’s flourishing Bohemia, some

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feature writer dubbed him the Golden Boy of Greenwich Village, and the label stuck, though many Villagers no doubt used it with irony. Well-known in both the underground and commercial press as a poet and short story writer, Jack made his living as a journalist who covered major industrial upheavals (silk workers in Lawrence and Paterson, New Jersey; copper miners in Ludlow, Colorado) with such sympathy for the workers that he ended up in jail more than once. In mid-1914 he became the highestpaid journalist in the country ($500 a week plus $500 for every article, $500 equaling $11,700 in 2015 currency) after he spent six weeks with the horseback troops of the already legendary Pancho Villa, the only reporter writing from the front lines of the Mexican Revolution. His stories were published in the mass circulation Metropolitan Magazine, and advertised with a fanciful image of Reed, standing on a battlefield, sombrero on his head and bandoliers of cartridges across his chest. Becoming popular did not mean giving up his attachment to the thriving counterculture of his day. Reed served as an editor of The Masses, the house organ of Greenwich Village, in which the modernist art of Picasso and the political radicalism of the IWW lived on the pages side by side; he supported Margaret Sanger in her campaign for birth control, and helped to found that important avant-garde theater company, the Provincetown Players. An instinctual leftist, he dubbed the European conflict “A Trader’s War” in pages of The Masses immediately after its outbreak in 1914, and for the next two-plus years spoke out against possible American involvement. This stance was only strengthened after tours in 1914 as a reporter on both the Western and Eastern Fronts in France and Germany. By mid-1917 he was banned from all major US commercial publications because of his overt anti-war activities, and, sniffing a major story brewing in Russia, he borrowed money from a friend, got himself an assignment from two tiny leftist publications, and went off to Petrograd, arriving just in time to witness the October Revolution (or coup, depending on your point of view). Two years later he became its first and most famous chronicler when he wrote Ten Days That Shook the World, a book which for the next halfcentury would define how much of the world would understand the shape and course of the Bolshevik takeover. Following its publication, he helped to organize the Communist Labor Party of the United States, returned to Moscow as the tiny group’s representative to the Second Congress of the Communist International, and argued with Bolshevik leaders over the tactics of how to bring the revolution to America. When outvoted, he resigned as a delegate, then withdrew his resignation and was sent off to



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the Congress of the Peoples of the East in Baku, where he contracted the typhus which would kill him in November 1920, just short of his thirtythird birthday. Reed was, in short, a flamboyant and very attractive character who struggled with issues that seemed absolutely contemporary and personal for my generation: how to balance one’s life between activism and art, between working to change the world and trying to describe that change. His personal and political development made the issues of the Lincoln Battalion seem simple: in Spain you put your life on the line, committed yourself to the struggle for justice, and accepted the consequences in terms of pain, suffering, injury, and death. With Reed the picture is more complicated. He was a writer long before he was an activist, and in his case the cause was not defeated, as in Spain, but victorious. For a few weeks he gave himself to the revolution enough to play a tiny role in the new regime by working in its propaganda office, even though he knew what was happening was not, as he told Emma Goldman in Moscow in 1920, quite the revolution they both expected. So for him and his biographer, the questions become: how do your art, your core values, relate to the new world whose birth you have witnessed, helped, and cheered into being? Later I could never recall if I had come across the words This class struggle sure plays hell with your poetry before making the decision to write on Reed. What I do remember is telling the friend whose example I had followed to become a historian, as I proudly handed over a copy of Crusade of the Left in the winter of 1969–70, that my next project would be on Reed. This choice made sense not just because of the social and political parallels of our generations, but for literary reasons as well. For someone who originally wanted to be a novelist, writing a biography is the closest you can come to that form. No genre of historical writing is more like a work of fiction. To tell a life story is to take the details of a person’s days and give them shape and meaning. In this process the documents and other traces of the past are hardly more important than the narrative skills of the writer. That is no doubt why traditional historians, since the professionalization of the late nineteenth century, have for the most part treated biography as a rather suspect form, closer to imaginative literature than to history (though this has not stopped scholars in the profession with some regularity attempting the form). Naive about the profession (and much else), I didn’t understand that by focusing on Reed I was in certain quarters raising suspicions about my own commitment to history. But I had my own definition of the field. For

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me, any true story set in the past which used the apparatus of the discipline—archives, primary sources, footnotes, bibliography—was history. A few colleagues muttered objections, ideological as well as professional, but promotion to tenure had come with Crusade of the Left, which meant I could research whatever I wanted without fear of institutional reprisal. So quickly did I score a contract for the Reed book from Alfred A. Knopf, at the time among the most prestigious of trade publishers, that not until years later did I come to appreciate the unlikelihood and simplicity of how it had happened. A Caltech colleague who was under contract to Knopf introduced me by letter to his editor, Harold Strauss, and I followed with an informal five-page letter explaining that the only biography of Reed had been written in the 1930s by Granville Hicks, a member of the Communist Party, and that while the book was decent enough, it had largely downplayed the importance of the vibrant counterculture of the early twentieth century that was so crucial to understanding Reed’s trajectory. It was a time for a biography that situated Reed within the realm of Bohemia and well as that of the Left, and I, with a book on the Lincoln Battalion in print, was the one to write it. In later years, proposals for books would balloon into lengthy disquisitions full of elaborate justifications underscored by footnotes and often backed by letters of recommendation, but in 1970 that rudimentary letter did the trick. A contract reached me within a few weeks. The parallels between Reed’s America in the decade before the First World War and the sixties was palpable. Both eras featured a growing counterculture of well-educated young men and women with an antibourgeois ethos; innovation in the arts (cubism/psychedelia; jazz/rock’n’roll), commitment to radical politics (the anarchist Industrial Workers of the World, the Socialist Party/Students for a Democratic Society, Peace and Freedom Party, Black Panthers), leftist heroes (Bill Haywood of the IWW, Emma Goldman/Bill Harris, Abbie Hoffman, Malcolm X), charismatic foreign revolutionaries (Pancho Villa, Emiliano Zapata/Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh), a proliferation of small radical publications that mixed leftist politics and avant-garde art (The Masses, Poetry, The New Republic, Seven Arts/The Free Press, The Oracle, Ramparts, Zap Comix), sexual liberation for both men and women, street theater (the Provincetown Players/the Living Theater, the San Francisco Mime Troup), experimentation with drugs (opium, peyote, cocaine/marijuana, LSD, mushrooms, cocaine), a major war in a distant land and attacks by the press and government on members of the anti-war movement as disloyal Americans.



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The next two years I devoted to what a historian is trained to do—hunting down relevant sources in various libraries and archives across the United States: in Portland, Oregon, where Reed was born and grew up; Morristown, New Jersey, where he went to a private high school; the Houghton Library of Harvard, which holds the bulk of his papers; Syracuse University, which has the archive of Hicks, his previous biographer; the National Archives; the Chevy Chase home of Reed’s nephew, also named John Reed, who gave me access to a large box full of family material which had never been seen by any other scholar. (Subsequently it was added to the Houghton collection.) I also tracked down a few elderly people who had been friends of Jack, including, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, his freshman roommate, Carl Binger; and in Taos, New Mexico, the artist Andrew Dasburg, with whom he had toured the battlefields of the Western Front in late 1914. With Reed it always comes back to the Russian Revolution. For all his notoriety, his larks and accomplishments as poet, reporter, and activist, he would not be remembered were it not for Ten Days That Shook the World. This fact posed a problem which for a long time I brushed aside. Personally I might be sympathetic to radical ideas and movements, past and present, yet I well understood that Russia had long since betrayed whatever revolutionary promise it once had. I had read the works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn; knew about the Gulag with its millions of slave laborers; had studied the show trials and great purges of the thirties which led to the disappearances of tens of thousands and the deaths of great writers like Ovsip Mandelstam and Isaac Babel; knew that forced collectivization of the Ukraine in the thirties had led to mass deportations of peasants and millions of deaths due to famine. That the revolution had gone terribly wrong, that its developments darkened the future for all of us, might be true, but there was still something dramatic and important about those Ten Days. The difficult questions were: why spend time on a man who gave his life for a revolution that ultimately turned out to be a deadly swindle? What could you extract from his life that was important? Reed didn’t shake the world; he only named that shaking. Yet he was an emblem of a vibrant counterculture at a time of great social change, a man who went all the way by carrying its impulses into action. Reed’s life was symbolic, as was the revolution that ultimately killed him. In such ways one might justify time spent researching and writing his biography, but they were not arguments that I made, either overtly or to myself, at the time. For me, his life was a bracing story of a man torn between art and politics. Extrapolate just a bit and you had a version of

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the current conflict between personal fulfillment and larger social obligations (war, race, generation gap). Reed’s life seemed to me in part not just my own story but that of the current generation. It was a story I wanted to live as much as to tell, and yet I dimly understood the contradiction: such a story would never be lived to the full by a tenured faculty member at a rich private university. It only could become my story if enacted in my mind, and on the page. * In the second decade of the twenty-first century, it is difficult to recall how a trip to the Soviet Union in the early 1970s could seem a strange and slightly dangerous thing to do. Russia was terra incognita, a huge blank space on the map of world travel. Tourism to the Soviet Union had begun sometime in the late fifties, but few Americans wanted to make the trip to the home of Godless Communism, as conservative newspaper columnists insisted on calling the Soviet system. Oddly enough, two members of my family had been to Russia in recent years: my wealthy Uncle Moshe from Montreal, who had spent a week in the Black Sea resort of Sochi as an extension of his trip to the land of his birth, Romania; and my impoverished Aunt Hanchin, who went to visit her ex-husband and son, both members of the Communist Party, who had returned to the land of revolution back in the late thirties (and whose story I told in the book of [mostly true] stories, The Man Who Swam Into History). Neither relative would or could provide any serious information about travel to Russia. Moshe, the ex-racketeer turned successful legitimate businessman, hated everything to do with communism, and Hanchin, interrogated more than once by the FBI after her return to California, refused to say anything at all about her experiences in the Soviet Union. Knowing vaguely that some of my colleagues in science had connections to Russian scholars, I snooped around the labs at Caltech until I found a physicist who had been to Moscow more than once. He wasn’t exactly encouraging: Don’t bother making the trip. Not if you expect to do any research or get much of anything done. All you’ll do is waste your time. The bureaucracy is horrendous, the secret police everywhere, even the vodka is watered these days. Words cannot stop a determined young historian. I wrote a letter to the cultural attaché at the Russian Embassy in Washington, stressing John Reed’s role as a bridge between our two nations and suggesting, in one of those grandiose gestures to which young scholars are given, that a new



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biography could perhaps be a factor in helping to ease Cold War tensions. A few weeks later there came an enthusiastic response: How wonderful that an American scholar and comrade was undertaking this highly important project which would help to show what our two great countries had in common. It would be his great pleasure to do whatever he could to help facilitate the trip. Please come to visit him at the Soviet Embassy. I stay in Bethesda at the house of a friend from California, an MD who, in lieu of military service, is doing research at the National Institutes of Health. On the morning of May 5, 1970, I drive his car with its California license plate into DC and park on 16th Street, not far from the mansion which houses the Soviet Embassy. Inside, the building looks just like anyone who has seen a lot of Cold War movies would expect—a huge, tomb-like foyer with marble floors, dark period furniture, and thick drapes. A guard examines my driver’s license, passport, and the letter of invitation, then examines them again. He hands them to an assistant whose footsteps echo as he walks down a long corridor, vanishes, and returns to usher me into a small room paneled in wood. A middle-aged man in a dark suit enters the room, identifies himself as the cultural attaché, then pumps my hand vigorously and clasps me in a kind of bear hug, as if we are long-lost friends. Behind him are two younger men, wearing blue blazers and striped ties, alternating bands of bright color on a diagonal. My young assistants have just arrived from Moscow, the attaché explains. It’s their first time in the United States. You would do me a great favor if you could spend a few minutes filling them in on what’s happening, only it sounded more like vat’s heppening. He winks. You know, politics, culture, demonstrations. He leaves and for the next half-hour these young men with short hair and shiny faces ask an endless series of what are clearly faux naive questions about student unrest, ghetto movements, Black power, anti-war activities, drugs on campus, and—very obliquely—scientific research at Caltech. (As if I knew. As if I would understand if I did know.) Don’t we make rockets? I shake my head a lot, talk instead about the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane. I am hip. I have read John le Carré and Ian Fleming and feel as if I am in a spy novel. The room must be bugged. My words will be listened to somewhere in Moscow. Aren’t they going to try to recruit me as they always do in films? Make me some sort of offer? Money? A woman? Apparently not. Historians aren’t important enough. Damn! The attaché returns. The young men say goodbye, then das vedanya. The attaché offers to write on my behalf to Professor Gilenson, head of the

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American History Section of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and urges that I do so as well, explaining my project and asking for assistance. Be as specific as possible, he says. Mention the Reed archive at the Institute of Marxism– Leninism. Before I leave, he offers another bit of advice: Don’t apply for a cultural visa. It would have to go through so many ministries and security checks that it might get stalled for months, even years. He smiles. Remember, some of our folks are suspicious of Americans. It’s best just to get a tourist visa. That way you can avoid any problems with government bureaucracy. I leave the embassy in a hurry. My flight home is later that afternoon, and I must drop off the car, pack my clothes, and get a cab to Dulles Airport. Traffic is heavy and the going slow. Five days earlier, President Nixon announced the movement of American troops from Vietnam into Cambodia. Huge anti-war demonstrations broke out all over the country. The day prior to my embassy visit, National Guard units shot and killed four protesting students at Kent State University in Ohio. The nation’s campuses exploded into massive confrontations with authorities. Driving past American University, I catch glimpses of cops and demonstrators charging back and forth across lawns, hear distant shouts and curses. My eyes water slightly with a few whiffs of tear gas that I have become familiar with in recent years. Across the Maryland border in Chevy Chase, a siren interrupts my thoughts. Lights flash behind me. I pull over. A State Trooper saunters up the way they always do in movies. Didn’t I see the stop light? I could have been killed running it. No. I am genuinely apologetic. He looks over my papers. Not your car? I explain. An out-of-state driver’s license? Too bad. I must go with him to headquarters to pay the fine. Can’t he just ticket me? I have a plane to catch. Can’t I just write a check? No. Out-of-state people have to make an appearance. Out of state you have to pay cash to the court. But I’ll miss my flight. Sorry. Rules are rules. Laws are laws. Nobody bothers to explain what rules keep me sitting in the station for more than two hours. I pester the sergeant at the desk, keep asking can’t I pay now? Not yet. Everyone is busy. These things take time. There’s paperwork to be done. Eventually I have to catch a later flight. * A few months later I answer the phone at home to hear the following: Professor Rosenstone. This is agent Roger Sullivan, with the Los Angeles office of the FBI. We would like to interview you on a matter of some importance. I hesitate for a moment.



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Okay. Why don’t you just drop into to my office at Caltech. Just let me know when you’re coming. I think it’s better if we meet at your home. You wouldn’t want your colleagues to know the FBI was interviewing you. It’s the fall of 1971, a moment when, in my circles, such a visit seems a badge of honor. The sixties are not yet over. Tell the truth, it’s too soon even know they are the sixties. There is as yet no label for the turbulent days and weeks of anti-war protests, ghetto riots, and assassinations through which we are living. But Agent Sullivan is adamant. He won’t come to what he calls my work site. He must come to my house. I don’t have anything to hide. My political activities are no secret, nor would I want them to be. As a spokesman for the anti-war movement on campus, I enjoy delivering self-righteous speeches at campus rallies. Twice a week I go to an agency in the Pasadena ghetto, where I tutor kids and help administrators write grant proposals, even though I am aware of the rumors (which I don’t believe for a moment but which could well have been true) that its leaders have made a clandestine trip to Hanoi and are being funded by the Viet Cong to foment ghetto uprisings. Perhaps the FBI worries about scholarly work. Crusade of the Left certainly makes heroes out of a bunch of radicals. Some 60 to 80 percent of the Lincolns belonged to either the Communist Youth League or the Party. My only book signing took place at a meeting of the VALB, an organization listed by the Attorney General as subversive. Now I am involved in doing research for a biography of one of the founders of the Communist Labor Party, an American (the only one, it is often incorrectly said), who is buried in the Kremlin Wall. (Actually in front of the wall, Reed being one of four Americans buried in and around the Kremlin.) As an avid reader of the underground press and a devotee of novelist Ken Kesey, I know that you never meet an FBI agent without a witness. So the afternoon Sullivan shows up at my door, I introduce him to a friend, who throughout our talk conspicuously hovers nearby, listening to all that we say. Even before he flashes his badge the way they do in the movies, I know Sullivan really is with the FBI. It’s the crew-cut hair, the clean-shaven face, and the shiny black wing-tip shoes. Even bankers have given up such haircuts and footwear—but not the FBI. Sullivan has a bland, slightly pudgy, innocent face. We sit in the living room. He refuses a drink, opens a briefcase, pulls out a file, shuffles papers, and studies them for a moment. I enjoy the performance. After some more shuffling and throat clearing, the play begins.

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I hate to bother you, but this won’t take a minute. The tone is apologetic. On May 5 last year, he explains, an FBI man was involved in a car accident on 16th Street in DC. There’s some question of who was at fault. It’s a matter of insurance. Who is going to pay? Even the FBI has to worry about rising costs. He smiles. The agency is certain the other party was at fault. An investigation has turned up the fact that a car I was driving was parked on 16th Street at that time. He is here to find out if I witnessed the accident. If I could testify on behalf of the FBI. You’re right, I tell him. I was parked there. But I didn’t see any accident. What I don’t say is that I was parked there while visiting the nearby Soviet Embassy. I don’t say this because I realize he must know it. Sorry to bother you. He puts the papers back in the folder, stands up, and begins to walk towards the front door. That’s it? Not quite. He turns around. Are you, by any chance, the Professor Rosenstone who is writing a biography of John Reed? I avoid the temptation of sarcasm. I don’t say there are no other Professor Rosenstones. I don’t say there is nobody else writing a biography of John Reed. I just nod. Is that the John Reed who took part in the Russian Revolution? Another nod. An unusual guy. I’ve long had an interest in him. Two minutes later we are back in the living room, talking about Reed. Sullivan is full of questions. Are you working on the Reed who did this? Went there? Knew him? Wrote that? So detailed do the questions become that I realize he knows things about Reed that I don’t. But of course. He has read the FBI files, which are closed to me. I should be taking notes. Mr. Sullivan, I finally say. Let’s be honest. You know why I was parked on 16th Street. You know I was in the Soviet Embassy on May 5. You watch the Embassy and check up on who goes in and out. He looks offended. You were in the Soviet Embassy? How would I know that? We don’t watch the Soviet Embassy or any other embassy. Why, more than 250 people a day go in there. How would we have the time to check each one of them out? Now he begins to follow up on my confession. So why was I in the embassy? Oh, scholarship. Of course. It’s your duty as a historian to see historical sites, consult appropriate documents, learn everything you can. He makes understanding noises. Still he can’t help wondering. Did anyone



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question me about politics? Ask me to say negative things about the United States? No, I assure him. It was just routine bureaucratic stuff. A discussion with the cultural attaché about how to obtain an invitation from the American History Section of the Academy of Sciences. An offer to write letters on my behalf. A suggestion that I not apply for an academic but for a tourist visa. All the while I wonder if the FBI has an agent in the embassy, if they know I met with the young men who may well be KGB, but I am not under oath. At the door, we shake hands. Sullivan says, casually, When you’re over there, keep your eyes open. Let us know if you see anything interesting. God help me, I nod. Involuntarily. But I do manage to keep my mouth firmly shut. And I refrain from asking exactly how the FBI would define something as interesting. From the moment he walks out the door until today, the real purpose (assuming there was one) of Sullivan’s visit remains a mystery. Was it a veiled threat? We are keeping close tabs on you professors who oppose the war and write on radical topics. Was it an attempt to recruit me? Keep your eyes open in Moscow and you can get on the payroll for life. Was it bureaucratic bookkeeping, the need to check out anyone who visited the Soviets to make sure he’s not another Lee Harvey Oswald? Was it perhaps all three? I put in a call to my friend in Bethesda, but he won’t talk about it on the phone. The next time we meet in California he says that various agencies have interviewed him, asking: who borrowed your car on May 5? Do you know about his politics? His activities? His beliefs? His connections to the Soviet Union? My friend is worried. What if he gets booted out of NIH and has to do time in the army? Sure. The government is suspicious. Radicals are abroad in the land these days. Then comes the Cambodia incursion, as Nixon called our invasion of that country, the huge demonstrations, the killings of four students at Kent State—and, at that moment, a historian of radicalism driving a car owned by a government researcher waltzes into the Soviet Embassy for a couple of hours. Who can blame the FBI for following up? * The KGB, secret police, spies, eavesdroppers, tiny listening devices hidden in hotel rooms—that’s what we who read John le Carré and Ian Fleming expected. What we were never warned about was the real Red Menace for travelers to the Soviet Union: Intourist. The state agency for tourism. You’ve never heard of it? It’s still around but now as a private company. In Soviet

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times it controlled everything pertaining to the welfare of foreign travelers; hotels, restaurants, trains, buses, airplanes, tickets for the theater, opera, and circus, all had to be paid for with Intourist coupons. When applying for a visa to the Soviet Union, you had to have a complete itinerary booked through Intourist, and pay for it up front. Do I really have to buy the tours? I ask the short, balding man with the heavy Russian accent who runs the single travel agency which deals with Intourist in Los Angeles. His office is in a dilapidated storefront on south La Cienega Boulevard, stuck between a pawn shop and a place with peeling signs on one window for TV repair and on the other window for a Four Square Gospel Church. It’s all part of the package, he answers. Tours go with hotel rooms. It’s a good deal. They take you everywhere. You get into museums ahead of the crowds. No waiting. It doesn’t cost extra. It’s not a question of money, I say, though in truth it is. The $45 a day for mid-price accommodations worried me (you could also go for the $34 budget tour, which meant no private bathrooms, or for the $85 luxury tour, which seemed like a fortune in 1972, and would be $489 in 2015). As I told you, I’m writing a book on John Reed. I’ve done plenty of research. I already know a lot about Russia. There are special places I must see for my research and they’re probably not on tours—like the Smolny Institute. The tour coupons can be used many ways. If anything you want to see is not on a regular tour, Intourist will be happy to create a special one just for you. As long as you have a coupon. My anxiety began to rise when, almost two months after I had paid my $1,250 for two weeks in the Soviet Union, the visa, itinerary, and coupons had not yet arrived. With ten days to departure, I began to call the agent’s office twice a day, only to be told to relax and not worry, there was plenty of time. Just twenty-four hours before my scheduled departure, I was called to the office and given the coupons, printed on brown paper and stapled into booklets in no discernible order and with no visible distinction between them save for the single word on each one: hotel, restaurant, train, tour. The itinerary that went with them presented a problem. My request had been for five days in Leningrad, seven days in Moscow, three in Kiev, and three in Odessa, the latter two cities mostly for touristic purposes. The itinerary and coupon books handed to me by the agent specified four days in Leningrad, three in Moscow, three in Kiev, and eight days in Odessa. Eight days in Odessa! Eight days! I need to see the sites of the revolution. John Reed was never in Odessa.



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Mistakes happen, says the travel agent. It’s no big worry. You can easily straighten this out when you get to Leningrad. Are you sure? I need to be in Leningrad and Moscow for research. What would I do in Odessa for eight days? It’s a nice city. One could do worse than Odessa. What if I can’t change? At these prices I don’t want to stay in Odessa eight days. What happens if I want to leave early? If you have to cut the trip short, all you need for a refund is a Spravka from Intourist. Ask for a Spravka. S.P.R.A.V.K.A. Make sure somebody signs it. * Leningrad. Second class. I am standing at the ticket window in the Helsinki railroad station. Or should I say we? My traveling companion, in line with the back-to-the-earth, we-love-native-people movement of the sixties, calls herself Cheyenne, this largely on the strength of the photo of her long-deceased, rural grandfather, who looks a touch darker than the average Nevada goat farmer. A year or so after our trip, we move in together as part of a vain mutual attempt to settle ourselves down. It takes a while to find out that strategy won’t work. There are no classes in the Soviet Union, answers the woman behind the window. She seems to speak English with a Russian accent. Do you want hard seats or soft seats? I could swear she adds, Tovarisch! Comrade! But how can this be? This is capitalist Finland. I am not yet in Russia. I’ll take second class. Hard seats or soft seats? She sounds impatient. What’s the difference? Hard seats are hard, comrade, and soft seats are soft. It is a romantic notion to go second class when you can afford first. But writing a book on John Reed and the Russian Revolution has put me in a mood (or so it seems) for romantic gestures. I am here rather than in an airport because my aim is to ride the train from Helsinki to the Finland station as Lenin did on the trip from Zurich in 1917, the same route followed by so many of the Russian exiles who returned from Europe and America to help make the revolution, the same one that John Reed traveled in September 1917. I want to ride not in the luxury cars of the ruling classes but with the workers. The kind of people who made the revolution. The people who had the revolution made in their name. Did Lenin go first class—on soft seats? Did Reed?

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No doubt they did, but that realization will only come later. Now I say hard seats, take my tickets, and walk with my companion through the gate onto a platform crowded with Russians, bulky, red-faced men and women in ill-fitting print dresses, their arms heaped with packages from Helsinki’s splendid food, clothing, and department stores, as they climb awkwardly through the doors of oversized, dark green metal soft seat parlor cars that look as if they date from before the revolution. I ask the platform guard for hard seats. He waves us towards the last car on the train, the one constructed of wooden planks like a boxcar. Lots of wood inside, too, hard wood, particularly the backless benches which seem modeled on the bleachers of an American high school football stadium. To complete the picture, the car is filled with some fifty scrubbed, exuberant American high school students, a junior class from Kenosha, Wisconsin, on a summer field trip. They are clapping hands in rhythm, joining voices in a school song: On you lions, on you lions, march right down that field, with our banners flying o’er us we shall never yield. The only free bench, the one closest to the door, is ours. Across the way sits the solitary Russian in the car, a slender, middle-aged man with the shadow of a beard and the wary look of someone who fears he has wandered into a psychiatric ward. My appearance, faded Levi’s, blue work shirt, and handmade sandals, hair hanging down to my shoulders and my face covered with the enormous beard of a senior rabbi or a church patriarch, does nothing to reassure him. From a bag, he pulls out a bottle, takes a long sip, puts it away, then immediately takes it out for another swig. Before the train has jolted and bumped out of the industrial suburbs of Helsinki, he leaps up and bolts through the door into the next car. We last as far as the border, forty-five minutes away. Hard seats is an understatement, one that fails to mention that the car has been built without shock absorbers. I try to focus on the manicured green fields, geometric stands of pine, and immaculate country houses of Finland. No use. The singing is too loud, the kids too boisterous, the shake, rattle, and lurch too hard on the body. If Lenin had arrived on hard seats, he might have been too tired to pronounce the April Theses, let alone make the revolution. On the platform of the last station in Finland, I bargain with a Russian conductor by holding up two fingers. He shakes his head and counters with five fingers. I hold up four. He smiles: Da. I hand over the dollars and we climb into a car that might have made the



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Tsar happy. Huge individual compartments. Heavy green velvet upholstery and curtains. Imitation Tiffany lamps. Soft cushiony seats! Now I understand: We made a revolution, comrade, so that everyone could have soft seats. At the border, the train emerges from the woods and comes to a halt in a vast meadow. I stick my head out the window. Soldiers with submachine guns stroll along the tracks. One yells at me, gestures sharply with his weapon. I pull my head back inside. Just as serious are the twin border agents in peaked caps who enter the compartment, stare at our passports, look at us, stare some more as if attempting to see secrets hidden behind our photos. They paw through suitcases, then triumphantly pull out my copy of Sexus, clearly the wrong sort of title for this country. Henry Miller is what I think one guard says in an accented voice to the other, pronouncing the words slowly and carefully, as if they might explode. They exchange looks, then go through the book page by page—are they looking for pictures?—before handing it back. Our first Soviet smile comes from the young, round, rosy-cheeked agricultural inspector who asks, Do you have any food? Her English is not bad. No. No fruit? Apples. Three huge, juicy red apples from Helsinki. I pull them out of my shoulder bag. They can’t come into the country. We look at each other. You should not waste such nice fruit. Eat them now. We just ate breakfast. We’re not hungry. Please, you take them. She shakes her head. We strike a deal. Each of us will eat one right now if she will. All three of us bite into apples. We smile. Nice weather, I say, wanting to talk about anything else but not knowing how to begin. Together we munch apples. The train rolls into the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union! In that Cold War era the name is filled with overtones and hidden meanings. Those dark pine forests beneath the cloudy sky—they must be different from pine forests at home. Things are hidden here, the landscapes full of secret acts of liberation, terror, and blood. That solitary car speeding along the narrow highway, its headlights on against the long twilight—a courier on his way to a rendezvous, a party official heading for a weekend

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of debauchery in a secret dacha. Who other than some apparatchik would own private a car in this land of the collective? Vyborg. Our first Russian stop, the platform where in 1917 the revolution swarmed out to greet the returnees and hopefuls. Lenin in a fur cap; Trotsky peering through thick glasses; John Reed, his face full of the freshness and wonder of the New World, confronted in the dark and flickering torchlight by a realm of mud and wounds, soldiers, peasants, factory workers, clerks in long, ragged coats, leaning on rifles or crutches, bandages on heads, arms in splints, trousers pinned to the knee where there is no longer a leg to reach the ground, fingers clutching, grasping, saluting: we have left the front, we have chased away the Czar, and we are still cold and hungry. In 1972 it is a shock, an unimaginably different universe from the one just across the border. The days of 1917 are still alive in the drab station buildings with peeling paint, the muddy streets of the town where everything seems frozen, immobile, a dim gray image caught in the frame of an old painting. We see no color, no signboards over stores, but a world full of thick people in drab, square clothing. Not a single smile, not a pleasant face to be seen. Now they begin to move, but only in slow motion, men on the platform carrying bags, workmen unloading carts, conductors putting whistles to their mouths, old women in babushkas pushing street brooms. Their body language seems to ask: where is that revolution we made, comrade? What happened to the new world it promised? We move into the late afternoon shadows of the past. Did they—Lenin, Trotsky, Reed, all the others—see that stand of trees, focus on that bend of river, look at that field and think it is a Russian field worked with the wooden ploughs of mujiks for a thousand years? Probably not. When they return it is always winter, the fields frozen solid, their mittens full of holes. For them there was no time for the past, only the future counted: meetings to plan, speeches to prepare, Russian phrases to learn from a worn dictionary purchased in a secondhand bookstore on Bleecker Street. Huge rail yards, switches, black warehouses, boxcars, and idle engines signal the approach of a city: Leningrad now, Petrograd then, Saint Petersburg a touch earlier—and again today. Lenin adjusts his workman’s cap, steps out of his compartment and down into the roaring throngs. Trotsky pumps his hand, Karl Radek smiles, Grigori Zinoviev pounds him on the back. Shouts and cheers drown all conversation as the tight knot of friends hustle him along the platform, through the waiting rooms and out to a wooden stand in front of the Finland Station. Red banners flap in the breeze, a brass band plays something he can’t quite hear, but it must be The



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Internationale. Rough hands push him up the stairs. From the platform, he looks down and out at the multitudes, removes his cap and clutches it in his left hand, raises the right hand, takes a deep breath, stabs the air with his index finger and begins with a single word: Tovarischki! Comrades! and goes on to pronounce what historians will call his April Theses – no compromise with the bourgeoisie, forward to the workers’ and peasants’ revolution! In 1972 the platform is still mobbed. I hesitate at the door of the car until someone behind me with a huge suitcase bumps me down the steps. A short, sweaty man slides forward, pronounces my name, follows with a word I recognize: Intourist, then begins to hurry us away. It looks like wartime—the city must be under attack, the foreign bombers are overhead, the refugees are waiting to flee to safety. What else could account for these multitudes, thousands of people in the vast dark cavern of the station where a dim light falls in feeble circles beneath an occasional bulb hanging on a long wire from an invisible ceiling—entire families squatting on the tile floor, sitting on bundles and suitcases tied with rope, mothers, fathers, babies in makeshift cribs, grandparents, silent, patient, smoking cigarettes, boiling tea on tiny cans of Sterno, staring into the gloom, waiting, waiting. I want to ask what’s happening. I want to see the spot where Lenin spoke to his supporters, launching the Bolsheviks on the path to power. But the guide rushes ahead of us through the crowd without looking back, hustles us through huge and endless waiting rooms and into a car outside the station. The driver starts the engine, shifts into gear, and roars away from the curb. We careen down empty boulevards, along deserted streets, past the featureless facades of dark stone buildings. It’s a ghost town. No pedestrians, no shop signs, no restaurants or bars, no neon, no street life, nothing but an occasional dim lamp on an empty corner. I shout to the driver, where are we going, to what hotel? He doesn’t answer. I shout louder. Fear touches my heart. Here we are in an unmarked car in an alien city in an enemy land. The driver is a madman working for the secret police. They know I have relatives in Canada who quit the Communist Party, relatives in Moscow who are still members. They know I am at Caltech. They think I know secrets about rockets and bombs. They have ways to make me talk. The car screeches to a halt in the courtyard of a huge, well-lighted, glass and concrete structure facing a river. Hotel Leningrad. The vast, almost empty lobby echoes with footsteps, words shouted from the desk clerks to the bellhops, aged men bent beneath the weight of our suitcases. Only one of the four elevators is in service. The sixth-floor room is narrow, functional. Bunk beds fitted to the walls, foam mattresses, gleaming porcelain sink in

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the bathroom, no hot water. The view is magnificent. Directly across the way, the Battleship Aurora, whose gunshots signaled the beginning of the revolution, lies at anchor in front of the blue buildings of the Naval College. To the left I can see the Neva river, bridges raised, the tall spire of Peter and Paul Fortress, and much farther away, the green gleam of the Winter Palace. Some people struggle to make a revolution. The struggles of others have more modest aims: like getting dinner. It’s nine o’clock. We haven’t eaten since devouring the apples and before that, breakfast in Helsinki. The dining room is large, circular. Most of the tables are empty. Two-story plate glass windows open onto the river, a ten-piece band on the stand plays swing era tunes, the drummer beats his instrument with the regularity of a metronome. Couples on the dance floor, men in oversize sport jackets or suits, women in summer dresses, some wearing white heels, with flowers in their hair. The two of us stand behind a velvet rope draped between two metal poles and wait for the head waiter. And wait for the head waiter. And wait for the head waiter. A patron sitting nearby table stands up, gestures, shouts in Russian, then comes over, takes me by the arm and leads us around the cord and to an empty table as the smell of vodka emanating from his pores envelopes us. Spaseeba. I have exhausted my Russian vocabulary. Pazhalsta. He smiles and returns to his friends. We listen to the music. We smile around the room. We watch the couples on the dance floor. We try to smile at each other. We wonder at the rows of empty tables where full dinners sit—soup, salads, plates of chicken—apparently waiting for customers. Furtive men in dark jackets who appear to be waiters lurk in far-off corners of the room. Occasionally one comes our way, but he speeds by the table without acknowledging my outstretched hand or desperate grunts in English. Our smiles fade away. Forty-two minutes after we sit down, a waiter arrives with menus. On the table he places a dish containing four olives, a small mound of caviar, and several tiny slices of toast. Vodka? Is that what he says? Da. I nod: water too. He looks blank. Wasser. De l’eau. Agua. He is still blank. I mime drinking a glass of water. He scratches his head and wanders off. Five minutes later he returns with a bottle of vodka, a carafe of water, and two tumblers. We wolf down the caviar. Drink vodka. Study the menu—two feet tall and printed in English, French, and Russian. The number, the variety of dishes is astonishing: Eastern European stews and goulashes; roasts of lamb, beef, venison; steaks, meat pies, hamburgers, and



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sausages; chicken Kiev style, or roasted, fried, broiled, stewed; partridges and squab, rabbit and hare; fish of all sorts, shelled creatures, and eels from the rivers and the sea; eleven kinds of pasta, a dozen varieties of summer salads, eight kinds of potatoes, six cheese plates; and for dessert: raspberry torts, baklava, chocolate, vanilla, rum and nut cakes, ice cream in seven flavors, fruit plates of berries, pears, apples, melons. To read the list is exhausting, to choose difficult, but eventually I decide on something simple and native: beef stroganoff and a summer salad. The caviar is gone. So is the waiter. One hour and twenty-seven minutes after we sat down (and thirty-eight after his last appearance) he returns to stand above us, pencil poised over a small pad. I point to the stroganoff on the menu. Nyet. Nyet? Nyet. The goulash? Nyet. Chicken Kiev? Nyet. I shrug. He shrugs back. Sausage? Nyet. I shrug again, open my hands in a question. He points to hamburger. Now it’s my turn to say Nyet. He shrugs, rolls his eyes towards the ceiling. Hamburger? He says: Da, da. I point to baked potatoes. He points to French fries. I point to summer salad. Nyet. Cheese plate? Nyet. Raspberry tort? Nyet. Rum cake? Nyet. He points to pears. I shrug. Pears? Da, da. He nods and walks away. The vodka is slowly vanishing. So is our sanity. A little after ten, a huge party of East European tourists arrives and begins to devour the slightly dusty chicken dinners that have been on the tables for who knows how long? The restaurant is full by now, most of the tables crowded with people who toss back tumblers of vodka, laugh and sing aloud. At ten thirty-five the waiter sets before us another bottle of vodka, a small basket of bread and two plates, each containing a small gray steak swimming in grease and soggy fries that look as if they were cooked three hours—or three days— ago. No hamburgers. No pears. When I look up to complain, the waiter has gone. What the hell. By now the vodka has worked. When in Rome eat whatever you can get. Paying for the meal proves to be no easier than ordering. Gestures, grunts, hand waving, shouts in English and French—nothing works to get the waiter back. Okay. Maybe it isn’t necessary. I have a book of coupons for meals—good at any Intourist dining room in the country. One coupon one meal, or so I have been told. Time for direct action. I leave two coupons on the table, we stand up and walk purposefully across the room, around the

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velvet rope, and just before the two of us step through the door into the hotel lobby, the waiter stands before us, smiling, holding out a check. Nine roubles? Da. He shakes his head. Da, da. I hold up two fingers and say, imitating Russian as best I can, Two Kouponie. Vodka. He answers with two fingers. Vodka. I hand him a twenty-ruble note, a hundred dollars at the official exchange rate which, as I have been warned by our travel agent, a colleague who specializes in Eastern Europe, two members of the State Department, and the attaché at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, is the only rate I had better count on getting. Their advice was unanimous and firm. Don’t sell your Levi’s no matter how much some youngster begs you. Carry ballpoint pens to give away as presents. Don’t buy money at unofficial rates on the street unless you want to tangle with the KGB—they’re the only ones who are selling it. Change, I say hopefully. Da, da. He smiles and disappears through the swinging doors into the kitchen. Five minutes go by. Ten minutes. Twenty. He doesn’t come back through the doors. I hail other waiters with no success. Grab one by the arm. My waiter. There is passion in my voice, or is it hysteria. Where is my waiter? He tries to pull away but I hold tight. People nearby are becoming aware something unusual is going on. They stare, point, make remarks. The waiter struggles and talks heatedly in Russian. Other waiters approach, make angry gestures. I let him go, stand up, and march towards the kitchen, announcing in a loud voice—as if anyone will understand—my money! I sound like a capitalist, a bloodsucker of the people, an ugly American, an imperialist warmonger—but he’s holding more than fifty bucks! It’s way too much for a tip in this country where tipping is forbidden. My money! I want my money! I storm through the swinging doors. Chefs and kitchen workers look startled and draw away. The waiter isn’t there, so I keep going on through the kitchen and into the hall beyond, where I throw open doors—a storeroom, a pantry, a hallway, a stairway, a wine cellar, a toilet—and there he is, sitting on the commode, smoking a cigarette and reading a newspaper. He looks up, smiles, and without rising, holds out a fistful of crumpled notes. The next morning I don’t feel well—a throbbing head and a thick tongue. Too much vodka. Too little food. Time for some very strong coffee. Upon



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entering the breakfast room on the landing between the sixth and fifth floors, I smile to see a counter dominated by the silver gleam of the latest model, streamlined Italian espresso machine. Kaffee. A gloriously universal word. The stolid, red-faced woman behind the counter, head covered with a babushka, fills a small pitcher with water, places it beneath the spout on the espresso machine, and opens the valve until the wonderful sound of pressured steam fills the room. Then she takes a jar of instant coffee, spoons some into the cup, pours the boiling water from the pitcher over it, and tops it off with a slosh of condensed milk from a can. It is at this precise moment that I understand why the Soviets lost the space race to the moon and why they will never win the Cold War. * What does a young historian do on his first day in Leningrad? Walk around. Look about. Soak up atmosphere. Let the cobblestones and churches, boulevards, palaces, storefronts, gardens and canals, the encounters with officials in offices and people in the street speak to him of a vanished realm. What will they say? Nothing precise. But he is not after precision. The historian sees himself as a kind of impressionist with a canvas to paint. Moments, events, actions to recreate and (somehow) save from oblivion. Or so he believes as he seeks the shapes, colors, and textures of people and things from the past. The first lesson has to do with time and space. Leningrad is built for giants. From our sixth-floor window, I can see my major destination, the far-off Winter Palace, an immense structure that from this distance looks like a toy. But I feel ready to match my strength with the plans of any Czar or commissar. So off we go, out the door of the hotel and into the vast Soviet morning, the two of us wearing matching, California, handmade-toorder, rubber-tire-soled sandals, me in Levi’s and a T-shirt, she in a long, shimmery, pink summer dress that at home would say Flower Child. Decades later, first moments can return with startling clarity. Before we can walk the hundred yards towards the bridge spanning the river, a police car screeches to a halt, two officers jump out, drag a drunk out of the gutter, hustle him into the vehicle and speed off. The whole operation takes no more than fifteen seconds and leaves a distinctly wrong impression: that these are an efficient people. A minute later, on the other side of the river, we two Americans stand before the cruiser Aurora. Every inch of its surface buffed to a high sheen, the vessel placidly floats in the water. No hint here

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that one dark evening in October or November 1917 (depending on which calendar you use) this ship steamed slowly up the Neva from the Kronstadt naval base, sent its marines with machine guns swarming ashore, and then, while the Congress of People’s Deputies sitting in Smolny Institute endlessly debated the future, gunners on the ship fired a few blank shells at the Winter Palace and the Provisional Government came tumbling down. Peter and Paul Fortress next. From far away, you can pick out the spire, the low domes, the brooding brick shape which up close is softened by the leafy trees in the surrounding park where an old man approaches, comes right up and looks into my face, smiles, cackles in a high voice, then reaches out and takes my beard in his hand, slowly strokes it and repeats over and over a single word like a mantra, a word I will not understand until three hours later, when buying iced tea at the counter of the restaurant of the Hotel Europa. I ask an English-speaking customer about the piles of pineapples on sale at three rubles ($15 at the official rate) each and am told that, two days earlier, the shipment had arrived as a gift from the people of Cuba as part of Fidel Castro’s official state visit, and I realize that in this land of the cleanshaven, the old man either thought I was, or at least saw my resemblance, beard-wise, to the Cuban leader. The mantra had been Castro, Castro, Castro. The beard gets attention everywhere, as does the shoulder-length hair and my companion’s shimmery floor-length dress. At home the hippie moment is waning, even as suburban fashion. But Leningrad feels like the 1950s. The young women wear slightly below-the-knee pastel dresses, the men ill-fitting light gray gabardine suits without ties, or simply short-sleeve white nylon shirts. All of them stare as the two of us trudge along the Neva river embankment and cross over one of the bridges that Sergei Eisenstein turned into visual poetry in his great film, October. A bus goes by, hundreds of pale faces jammed against the window, and we turn with relief to the three dark-skinned gypsy women, clad in colorful rags, who approach, fondle the dress, and in the language of universal gesture, try to bargain it off my companion’s back. Don’t sell Levi’s, don’t sell anything! I say, recalling the strong admonitions of the State Department brochure. Besides, if she sold the dress what would she wear? * My first visit to the Intourist office at the Leningrad Hotel is about the tours. To a dour, thickset women, I explain my special needs—as a historian writing a biography of John Reed, the American hero and chronicler of the revolution, I must see the important sites of the events he described.



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Of course, of course, she says. All Leningrad is a site of the revolution. It’s the cradle of revolution. The normal city sightseeing tour focuses on the revolution. You’ll learn about the history, the architecture, the customs of our people, and you’ll get to see modern things like our Wedding Palace. Americans always like the Wedding Palace. That’s where we get married. Yes, but it’s very important that I see Smolny Institute. Smolny is on the tour. I repeat the request to the blonde in a form-fitting suit and cute, militarystyle cap who is our guide. We have just settled into the back seat of a large, gray sedan in front of the hotel. In almost flawless English, and with what seems at first like a wonderful accent, she gives the same answer: Of course you’ll see Smolny. What would a tour be without Smolny? But first there are so many other things you’ll enjoy to see. The car is comfy, the woman attractive. The long walk of the previous day to and through the enormous Hermitage Museum has left my feet sore and my lower back aching. Maybe a tour won’t be so bad after all. Or so I think in the two minutes before we reach our first destination, the cruiser Aurora. It’s not just that it is anchored across from our hotel room, or that the day before we saw it and learned that tourists are not allowed aboard. It’s the spiel. As the guide starts to explain the role of the ship in 1917, I interrupt to tell her she needn’t bother. I’m writing a biography of John Reed. I know all about the revolution. All about the Aurora. She can save her voice. Thank you very much, she says, continuing on in the tones of someone who has memorized a speech without caring about its contents and proceeding to tell us more about the Aurora than anyone could possibly wish to know: the biography of the marine engineer who designed it; the history of the shipyard where it was built; the amount of steel and copper cables used in the construction; the number of toilets on board; the size and range of its guns; the names and decorations of every captain who served as commander; the extent and nature of the crew, broken down into specialties—deck hands, gunners, chefs, engineers, marines; the contents of a typical day’s menu for both officers and enlisted men; the location and course of every combat in which it engaged; the dates of its periods being repaired in dry dock. When she reaches October 1917 and launches into the traditional but fanciful account of how extensive shelling from the Aurora destroyed part of the Winter Palace and caused the downfall of the Provisional Government, I interrupt: That’s not true. The Aurora only fired blanks. She neither contradicts me nor stops talking, but the expression in her eyes seems to say: This is the kind of capitalist provocation about which we’ve

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all been warned. In a mechanical voice, she repeats the remark about the shells and continues on to the glorious role of the ship in the revolution— the marines coming ashore to close the bridges across the Neva, opened by the government, to keep the workers from crossing the river to assault the government buildings in the center of town (true); the way a small band of sailors kept the Committee for the Salvation of the Government from reaching the Winter Palace by threatening to spank the mayor (a mixture of truth and myth); the great help the sailors gave the Red Guards in storming the Winter Palace and taking prisoner the members of the Provisional Government (there was no “storming”; the Red Guards fired a few shots and strolled into the palace). The same tone, the same mishmash of dates and details, the same mixture of history, myth, and propaganda mark all the sites (many of which we visited the day before) we see that morning: the Peter and Paul Fortress; the huge Palace Square from which the Red Guards are supposed to have stormed their way into the building; the Admiralty; the Tauride Palace, where the doomed Provisional Government debated endlessly in the fall of 1917 while the Bolsheviks prepared to seize power; Isaac Cathedral, where a few elderly women in babushkas linger in the doorways; and the Kazan Cathedral on the Nevsky Prospekt, now the Museum of Religion and Atheism. If the guide’s words aren’t enough to fuel my growing annoyance, the nature of the tour certainly is. Never are we allowed to descend from the car, let alone enter one of the buildings. By the time I suggest we get out to stretch our legs, we are sitting in front of the Palace of Marriages, a nondescript structure with one of the only external signs I have seen on a building: two large, intertwined rings. Our guide is warmed up and statistics flow effortlessly from her lips: how many people are married each week in this building, in Leningrad, in all of the Soviet Union; how many guests on average attend the wedding; what the parties tend to give each other as presents; how much time off from work the state allows them; where they go on honeymoons; how many children they will have; how little time they will have to wait (I don’t remember the number, but it seemed a matter not of months, but years) for a telephone, a refrigerator, an apartment. She answers my request by saying: We can get down here if you like. Go inside and watch a wedding. It’s good luck to watch a wedding. I decline the offer and ask again about Smolny. It’s hardly the first time. All morning I have been pestering the guide with the same question. Now, with the clock close to noon, the end of the tour, she says: Okay. We are



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almost there. Five minutes later, as we speed down a broad boulevard, she takes my arm and points: Look over there. That’s Smolny. Across a park and through some trees I see the elegant, pale yellow, eighteenth-century structure so familiar from photos, as the guide begins to intone that this school for the children of the nobility was taken over in 1917 as a headquarters by the Petrograd Soviet. Stop, I say. Sorry. We’re late. There’s no time. Turn around. My voice is sharp. I need to see Smolny. You are seeing Smolny, she says evenly as we watch the building recede into the distance. I need to see the INSIDE of Smolny. Despite the near-hysteria in my voice, the words only seem to amuse her. Impossible! It’s a government building. There are offices inside. You can’t go into a government building. It’s just like anywhere else in the world. Just like in the United States. You’re full of shit. It is hysteria. I can enter any government building in the United States. I can enter the goddam FBI headquarters. I can get into the White House. Her eyes say more capitalist deception, but her voice is calm: I’m sorry. Nobody who doesn’t work for the government can get into Smolny. The dour woman in the Intourist office repeats the line. Nobody can get into Smolny unless they work for the government. Isn’t Intourist part of the government? Yes, but tourists aren’t. I patiently explain, as I have more than once, that I’m not a normal tourist. I am a historian. I am writing about one of the heroes of your revolution. Reed was a friend of Lenin. Lenin wrote an introduction to his book. You know, Ten Days That Shook the World. Reed spent a lot of time in Smolny. That means I need to spend time in Smolny. At least see what it looks like, what Reed saw. I pull out a letter from Professor Gilenson of the Academy of Sciences. See this invitation from a government official. It shows I’m not a tourist. A noncommittal grunt suggests that maybe I have a point. Then again, maybe not. She holds up my passport: If you’re not a tourist why do you have a tourist visa? Why don’t you have a cultural visa? I tell the truth: that the cultural attaché in Washington told me a tourist visa would avoid bureaucracy. I add that he also told me that Intourist was such a helpful and patriotic organization that they would be happy to take

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me anywhere I needed to go to complete research on a topic so important to our two countries. We circle these issues until she begins to speak in the conditional. Words to the effect: if it were possible to get you into Smolny, how long would you need to be there and what would you need to see? Not long, I explain. An hour or so. I just want to look around. See the assembly hall where the Soviets debated other political parties over the issue of overthrowing the government, the offices where the Military Revolutionary Committee plotted seizing power, the rooms where Lenin lived, the basement which served as a huge cafeteria during revolutionary days. Special tours are very difficult to arrange. Very very difficult. And if they can be arranged, they are not cheap. A tour of Smolny, for instance. That would cost at least ten rubles. Ten rubles! That’s fifty dollars! Why can’t I just use one of my coupons? I have plenty of them. Coupons are good only for regular tours. Just like in the United States. Smolny is a government building. We have to get special permission for someone in the government to go inside. This means a lot of extra work. Don’t you Americans say time is money? Ten rubles is triple the normal price of a tour! Comrade—she uses the word for the first time—maybe for you, since you’re a historian writing on John Reed, a hero of the Soviet Union, maybe for you we could get it down to eight rubles. Eight rubles! I can’t possibly pay more than two. Five is the lowest we could go. It’s a deal. We shake hands and look at each other, our faces shining with the expression of kids who know they have done something naughty. Haggling like merchants in a bazaar in a state where private trade is illegal! What would Lenin say? More to the point: who will pocket the money? What my partner in crime doesn’t say is that five rubles will make this tour strictly bargain basement. The next morning we are greeted in the lobby by another attractive blonde with the same cute cap, a face full of questions, and an impatient tone of voice: There’s no car for your tour! We have to take a streetcar. I’ve never heard of such a thing! A twenty-minute walk takes us to the streetcar stop, where we have to queue in a long line, then ride for a while and change to another streetcar. The journey takes almost an hour. For me, this is a way of experiencing how



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real Russians get around, though all the stares, overt and covert, that we draw from young, old, and middle-aged are less pleasant than annoying. So is the fact that when I make attempts at conversation in my meager Russian, people turn away and pretend they haven’t heard me. For the tour guide, the experience is a status crisis. Repeatedly she mutters a variation of her original complaint: I’ve never led a tour without a car! Not rating a car must mean we are unimportant visitors, and this gives her license to be surly and uncommunicative. Fine with me. At least it saves us from a drone of official facts and fictions. Smolny would be worth many streetcar rides. The park which surrounds it, the huge, cobblestone courtyard, the smooth, classical facade—all seem tranquil in the bright July sun. So different from the dark, menacing spectacle you see in Eisenstein’s October, where trucks and armored cars rev engines and maneuver around companies of Red Guards shouldering rifles, marking time, marching through the gates and into history. The interior is vast; its hallways with high, arched ceilings are empty, hushed, not jammed as they are on screen and were on those chill autumn days of 1917 with ill-clad, unshaven, hurrying, weary, purposeful soldiers, sailors, messengers, spies, delegates from military units—the motorcycle brigade, the sailors of Kronstadt, soldiers from the Latvian front—along with men of half a dozen parties and unions—Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Jewish Bund, Socialist Revolutionaries, Railway Workers, Munitions Workers—all too busy to wonder what I find myself more than half a century later wondering for them: what will the next few days or hours bring? Triumph, failure, death? The great assembly hall, once a ballroom in this erstwhile school for the daughters of the nobility, is serene, the purity of its elegant proportions, delicate light fixtures and stark white walls jarred by the huge red banners with gold lettering draped across the front wall. You don’t have to read much Russian to understand they carry the sentiments voiced by Lenin from the dais on the evening of November 7 more than half a century earlier, just after the Bolsheviks had achieved a majority on the Presidium of the Soviet Central Committee, voiced to more than a thousand cheering delegates crammed into this room meant for five hundred, with thousands more packing the long hallways, voiced to a room which stank of unwashed bodies, rotten cabbage, muddy boots, cigarette smoke and the pungent odors of oppression, hope, and fear: Long Live the People’s Revolution! Let us now begin to construct the Socialist State! Some fifty men noisily push through the door, march to the front of

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the room while their guide lectures aloud in German, a language I know well enough to understand she is giving the usual heroic stuff about Lenin and Stalin, even though the latter played almost no public role in the great October days. Never does she mention Leon Trotsky, who not only made the most colorful speeches of the era from this platform, but delivered what has to be the greatest line of the revolution, delivered it to the backs of the exiting members of the Jewish Bund after they refuse to endorse military action against the Provisional Government and are stalking towards the door: Go, then. You are consigning yourself to the dustbin of history. The guide addresses her audience as tovarischki, comrades. So it seems Smolny is open to tourists after all, at least if they are foreign communists. The capitalist in me has to wonder: do they also pay an extra ten—or five—rubles to worship at this shrine of the revolution? * Lenin’s two rooms are a moving sight, even to someone with little use for Bolshevism. Here he and his wife, Krupskaya, lived for a couple of months before the new government, fearing a German invasion, moved its capital eastward to Moscow. The modesty of the rooms, the disproportion between the power this man wielded and the simplicity of his lifestyle is eloquent. A sitting room and a bedroom, each about ten by twelve feet, with sparse and uncomfortable furnishings that may well be what the guide claims them to be, the originals from Lenin’s day: a worn couch, a table, a couple of chairs, a bed, a dresser with a basin and pitcher, a chamber pot, a small desk on which to write proclamations that helped to shape the rest of the twentieth century. On the walls, a few faded photos of Lenin alone or with Krupskaya, some with images of other party leaders (but no Trotsky), apparently taken during the years of exile. We pass through the parlor to the bedroom, where a man described by our guide as the Keeper of the Rooms is lecturing to five middle-aged men. Our guide begins to translate. Soon we wish she hadn’t: This is the bed where Lenin and his wife slept. He slept on the right and she slept on the left. When he had trouble sleeping, which was often during the first tumultuous weeks after taking charge of the country, he would get up and go over to this desk, sit in this chair, turn on this light, put on those glasses, pick up this pen, and write in this notebook the words that would soon become new laws. When he began to feel sleepy, he would close the book, put down his pen, turn off the light, get up from the chair, go over to the bed and, very carefully so that he did not wake up Krupskaya, he would get back into bed. He was always a



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very considerate husband and she was a most attentive wife. When he caught a terrible flu, she made him stay in bed and when he had to go she would not let him get up but made him use that chamber pot you see right there, and she would go down to the kitchen in the basement to cook soup herself and bring it to him in that bowl sitting on the night table, and she would feed him with that spoon. My mind begins to drift and my eyes to wander across the pictures on the wall, until the lecturer turns my way and says something which the Intourist guide translates: Pay attention, young man. It’s not yet time to look at the pictures. We will get to them soon enough and I will tell you all about them. Right now we are concentrating on the bed and the night table. Eventually the Russian group departs and the guide leads us back into the parlor. Now we learn which was Lenin’s favorite chair and footstool, and how he loved that old copper samovar, and how that cup he used every day was one he brought with him from Switzerland, while Krupskaya used that other one from France, and what sweets he liked to have with tea, and how he insisted that it wasn’t proper to discuss national issues when drinking with visitors, who would sit on that small sofa, and Vladimir Ilyich liked to tell each one precisely where to sit, and he always had Comrade Stalin sitting on the left side (where else?), right next to him so they could exchange important ideas without raising their voices. Finished with the furniture, rugs, implements, and photos, the Keeper of the Rooms leads us back into the bedroom, where he begins to give exactly the same spiel we had heard before: This is the bed where Lenin … I interrupt and say to the guide: He doesn’t have to say this again. We’ve heard it already. Doesn’t he remember? She refuses to translate. You have to have the full tour. In the proper order. But we’ve heard this. He’s doing his job. He’s telling you about Lenin. You can never hear too much about Lenin. Listen! *

Hurrying back and forth between factories and the Marinsky Palace, damp huddled breadlines in the Viborg and smart cafes on the Nevsky Prospekt, John Reed increasingly focused attention on Smolny Institute. Here, far from central Petrograd, in what had once

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been a finishing school for the daughters of the nobility, was the center of opposition to the Provisional Government. The institute was now the improbable home of both the Petrograd Soviet and the Central Committee of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets. An elegant, pale yellow, three-story structure, Smolny in October crackled with excitement. In its dim, vaulted corridors, soldiers and workmen bent under the weight of huge bundles of newspapers and proclamations. In bare white rooms where delicate young ladies had once studied French, radical parties caucused, committees debated policies, men’s voices grew shrill and loud in argument. Hanging around the hallways, Reed and Louise Bryant buttonholed leaders like Kamenev or friends like Bill Shatov to catch both statements and evasions that gave glimpses of events behind the scenes. For meals they went to the wooden tables of the basement dining hall to share cabbage soup, piles of kasha, and slabs of black bread with hordes of hungry proletarians, wolfing their food, plotting, shouting rough jokes across the room. On October 30 they were ushered into a bare attic room to talk with Leon Trotsky, president of the Petrograd Soviet. While downing a huge meal, he talked steadily for an hour, condemning the PG (Provisional Government), worrying over counter-revolution, speaking of the Soviets as the most perfect representatives of the people, and flatly predicting: It is the lutte final … We will complete the work scarcely begun in March. In the first week of November, the opening of the new Congress of Soviets was postponed five days. Municipal government seemed to have broken down and the morning papers were filled with accounts of robberies and murders. On gloomy evening streets, tides of people flowed slowly along, arguments flared on corners, and mysterious individuals circulated anti-Semitic and anti-Bolshevik rumors. Armed guards now barred Smolny’s door and demanded passes. Upstairs in the great white hall, a former ballroom with delicate columns and crystal chandeliers, the Petrograd Soviet met in day-and-night sessions. Workers, soldiers, party leaders, spoke at length, fell asleep on the floor, then rose to roar approval for calls to action. Downtown, luxurious gambling clubs functioned from dusk to dawn, the streets were thick with prostitutes, and cafes buzzed with talk of monarchist plots, German spies, schemes for smuggling black-market goods, and the anticipated Bolshevik move. When it came, it was like nothing anyone had foreseen. Revolution meant violence, pitched battles over barricades, machine guns



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roaring, armored cars in the streets, snipers on rooftops and blood running in the gutter. Hectic as were the preparations, feverish as were the government leaders, the takeover was almost as quiet and orderly as a normal transfer of power, with only part of the population aware of what was happening before leaflets announced the news … virtually no troops stood with the PG other than a few companies of Junkers – officers in training – and a well-publicized but ineffectual Women’s Death Battalion. The Cossacks held aloof, the Petrograd garrison declared for the Soviets, and on November 6–7, while people went to work, ate dinner in restaurants, attended the ballet, shopped in department stores, and told stories to their children, one social order died and another was born … . By the time Jack and Louise rose on November 7, Kerensky had fled the city and troops had dispersed the Council of the Republic. The noon cannon boomed from Peter Paul Fortress as they noticed soldiers guarding the closed gates of the State Bank. What side do you belong to, the government? asked Reed. “No more government, Glory to God! … Later in the afternoon, forgetting about tickets to the ballet, Jack and Louise caught a taxi to Smolny. The massive façade was ablaze with lights, in the courtyard auto­ mobiles and motorcycles raced engines, an enormous gray armored car lumbered through the gate, and huddled around bonfires were groups of Red Guards. Inside, crowds fought through hallways … a four-day-long meeting of the Petrograd Soviet had just concluded. They had missed Trotsky declaring The Provisional Government has ceased to exist, as well as Lenin’s first public appearance in four months and his announcement, Now begins a new era in the history of Russia, and this third Russian Revolution must lead to the victory of Socialism. Romantic Revolutionary, pp. 293–5

* A major struggle with Intourist begins the next day when I tell the same dour woman that I want to change my schedule. I want to extend my stay in Leningrad and Moscow and cut down the time in Odessa. Nyet. Impossible. Once you have a schedule you have a schedule. We can’t go around changing everyone’s schedule.

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Perhaps familiarity will help. But comrade, I’m not everyone. I’m writing … Yes, yes. I know all that. But we can’t change the schedule even for the biographer of John Reed. Changes can only be made at our offices in Moscow. I want to spend more time in Leningrad roaming along the Nevsky Prospekt and around the Winter Palace, taking photos and jotting notes to use for the book. Trying to imagine what John Reed would do in this situation, I decide to act as he would have. So the next day, instead of leaving to catch the noon train on which we are booked, we return to the center of town. All afternoon I find myself glancing around nervously, waiting for a police car to pull up and hustle us away. Coming back to the hotel in the late afternoon, we expect to see our bags piled in the lobby, but they are still in the room. When I ask for a car to the train station the next morning, one arrives without any questions asked. The conductor doesn’t seem to notice that our tickets are stamped for the previous day, but perhaps the five-ruble note tucked under them takes care of any objection. The woman in charge of Intourist at the National Hotel in Moscow looks so much like her counterpart in Leningrad that I have to resist the temptation to ask if they are sisters. Her manner and attitudes are also the same. Nyet. Impossible. Once you have a schedule you have a schedule. We can’t go around changing everyone’s schedule. But your agent in Los Angeles told me it would be easy to change … You are in the Soviet Union now. We have rules. We can’t just go around changing reservations to please everyone. We have to think about trains and hotels and schedules for everyone, and not just tourists. We have to keep things in order. Just like in any other country. Just like in the United States. But I’m not just everyone. I’m not really a tourist. I’m doing research on a hero of the revolution. We know all about that, comrade, but it makes no difference. I want to talk to someone higher up. There must be a way to change. She balks, but I grow insistent, and finally she makes a phone call to the head Intourist office, and gets me an appointment—for the next day. My next request is that she make another phone call for me. The cultural attaché in Washington has come through. I show her the official letter to me from Professor Gilenson, Director of the American History Section of the Academy of Sciences. An effusive letter full of comradely greetings, a letter which praises my interest in this important historic figure who unites the history of our two countries, a letter which promises to help me enter



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the John Reed archive housed under the name of its donor, Lee Gold, at the Institute of Marxism–Leninism. I need to contact Gilenson as soon as I get to Moscow. The woman dials a number and engages in what seems to be a heated conversation with someone that ends with the word spaseeba repeated several times. She hangs up and says, There is no Professor Gilenson. What do you mean there is no Professor Gilenson? She repeats the phrase with emphasis and I repeat my question. I talked to the secretary of the American History Section of the Academy of Sciences. He told me there is no Professor Gilenson there. But look, there’s the letter, in front of you, on letterhead from the American History Section. It has the signature of Professor Gilenson. She shrugs. Opens her hands wide, palms up. He says there is no Gilenson, so there is no Gilenson. But I want to meet with them. I have to meet with them. I told him that. He said you need a letter of invitation. You have to write from America to get one. But I have a letter of invitation. No you don’t. There’s no Gilenson, so there can’t be a letter of invitation. * Luckily, I have other resources. A cousin named Bertram, born as was I, in Montreal. A cousin whose father, an emigrant to Canada from Russia and a fervent member of the Canadian Communist Party, went back to his land of origin during the Great Depression and took along one of his sons (the other remained with his mother, my aunt Hanchin, in Montreal). Bertram, who was wounded during the Battle of Moscow, is a renowned composer, a member of the Composer’s Union, and, more important, a member of the Communist Party. Through connections, he wangles me an invitation to meet with the members of the American History Section at the Academy of Sciences, and comes along to serve as my interpreter. Fourteen of us sit around a huge table in a shabby seminar room next to the Section offices. Six men are introduced to me as historians of the United States. The others, as secretaries—no doubt KGB officers—who take notes. Starting with the youngest and proceeding to the eldest, each historian smiles and makes a short speech in English. The same speech. Welcome to our distinguished colleague from America. How happy we are to know you are working on a topic of such importance to both our countries as the great hero John Reed, a topic which will surely help promote international

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understanding and goodwill. We wish you a good stay in our country. We wish you well in your research. Don’t miss John Reed’s grave at the Kremlin. It’s a sight you must see. When the final talk ends, all eyes turn to me, and I find myself making a similar speech. How wonderful to be among Russian colleagues working on a man who is a hero to both our nations. I hope my book on Reed will promote peace on earth and goodwill among men. Et cetera. When I finish, everyone is smiling. The senior historian leans forward and asks if I have any specific questions to ask them? How can they help me? By telling me how I can get into the archives. All six stiffen. Archives? What archives? The Lee Gold archive at the Institute of Marxism­–Leninism. It has some of John Reed’s papers. The smiles vanish. The senior historian speaks: You have to apply to see that archive, just like any archive in the United States. Not just anyone can walk into the archives. You must obtain a letter of permission. I open a folder, pull out Professor Gilenson’s letter, and read aloud the third paragraph, which promises access to the John Reed archive. Then I pass the letter to the senior historian. He glances at it for a moment, looks queasy, and begins to speak—in Russian. Suddenly everyone has forgotten English. Everyone is speaking in Russian. My cousin starts to translate, but there is so much babble that he gives up. The secretaries are writing more vigorously than before. Two minutes later everyone falls silent. The senior historian returns to English. There is no Gilenson in this section, he says. It’s been a mistake. Some kind of mix-up. The best thing would be for me to return to America, write a letter to the Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Marxism– Leninism requesting official permission. Then I can return with the proper credentials. Before I can argue, or ask more questions, or explain that it’s not so easy to return, everyone stands up, waves goodbye, and splits. Betram is not much help. He is a loyal Soviet citizen. This Gilenson, he says. He was probably removed for exceeding his authority. Maybe he wanted to meet an American scholar. Maybe he thought a foreigner could help his career. It’s not uncommon for people in power to get too big for their britches. So much for serious research in the Soviet Union. At least what historians



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consider to be real research, primary research, work in archives. Sure, I have visited, or seen, the sites of the October Revolution in Leningrad: Smolny Institute, the Winter Palace, Fontanka Canal, the Marinsky and Tauride Palaces, Peter and Paul Fortress, the Vyborg district, the Finland Station. Now I visit the sites in Moscow: the Kremlin, the Bolshoi Theater, the Tretyakov Gallery, the Circus, the Arbat, Red Square, GUM department store. In a final attempt to prove my bona fides by doing some paper research, so that when I am among colleagues I can drop a remark like, When I was working in the Soviet Archives, I head for the Lenin Library. A few hours of digging turn up some rare radical American publications from early in the century that even the Library of Congress doesn’t possess. Late in the afternoon, my cousin joins me. I show him the items, say I want to copy them, and ask if they have Xerox machines. He bridles. What do you mean do we have Xerox machines? You think we’re a backward country. You think only Americans copy things. They’re not called Xerox but certainly we have copy machines. He marches me towards the main counter. A clerk directs us towards an office down a hall from the reading room. We stand in front of the desk of a rather sour-looking man, while my cousin talks and I catch a few words: Amerikanski, professor, University, John Reed, pazhalsta. The man shakes his head, says something, and we go out the door. Copying is not his department. We have to see his boss. The office on the second floor is larger and the man behind the desk seems almost pleasant. Bertram makes the same speech and the results are the same. As we climb to the third floor, I say What’s the big deal. Can’t we just find a machine, make copies, and pay for them? Bertram shakes his head. No. You have to get permission. Just like in America. A bigger office with a bigger desk and a man with something of a smile on his face. The conversation is longer. He asks questions and my cousin answers them. When we leave, he gets up and shakes my hand. He’s wishing you a good journey home. Spaseeba, I say, using one of my Russian words. Thank you. The fourth floor. We can’t go any higher. Literally. The office is very large and very plush, with dark wood furniture and thick Persian carpets. The heavyset man who comes out from behind the desk, drops into an armchair, and motions us towards the sofa, is the head of the library. A secretary brings tea and small cakes. The conversation is slow and pleasant.

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We all smile a lot. I don’t hear him say Nyet but I also don’t hear Da. Finally Bertram explains. It’s a shame we got here so late in the day. It’s almost five o’clock. The copying machines shut down at four. What do you mean shut down? Can’t they be turned back on? They speak in Russian. It’s the rules. The machines can’t be used after four. A library has to have rules. Just like in America. I have only one more day in Moscow. Can I use the machines tomorrow morning? They talk. The director looks sad as he shakes his head. Unfortunately tomorrow the machines will be taken away for servicing. Once a year they are sent to the shop for a tune-up. It takes about two weeks. As the director says, just like in America. I smile and agree. Just like in America. * My own lutte finale begins on our second morning in Moscow at the head office of Intourist and occupies a good deal of my time in that city. Entries in my notebook are laconic enough: Fighting with Intourist, or Trying to change my reservations for more time—the fight through many offices. My memory brings back stormy sessions with a variety of officials in different buildings in different parts of Moscow, sessions full of angry voices, broad gestures, vaguely spoken threats, and a lot of swearing, at least in English. In Russian the most frequent word is Nyet. After a couple of sleepless nights, I make a decision, march into the Intourist office at the National Hotel, and use one of those delicious lines you only hear in movies: Get me on the next plane out of here. When it turns out that the next plane is going to Sofia, Bulgaria, I have to back-pedal. Okay. How about the one after that? To Istanbul? Fine. Get us on it. The woman who heads the office seems upset. By now we have spent so much time together than she is the closest thing I have to a friend in Moscow. On occasion she has obliquely expressed sympathy with my problem, both with the American History Section and with my schedule. Comrade, she says. You really shouldn’t leave. You can’t. You’ve paid for twelve more days. You have coupons left. It’s a lot of money to waste. It won’t be wasted. I want a refund. As she begins to splutter about the difficulty, the impossibility, I interrupt and say: I want a Spravka.



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A SPRAVKA! She looks horrified, as if the very word betrays a state secret. How do you know about Spravka? Nobody has ever asked for one before. I don’t think we have the forms for a Spravka. Then please get them. What I know is that you have to list all the unused coupons I give you. And I get a refund after returning home. Twenty-four hours later, she has a Spravka. It’s not an impressive form— no more than a lined page, torn out of a small pad, with handwritten notations in ink. I can’t read the Cyrillic letters, but the number of coupons listed looks correct, and when she translates everything seems in order. I can read the letters of the splendid, bold-faced word SPRAVKA at the top of the page. And I can see that there is no signature at the bottom. Excuse me, I say, pointing at an empty line. You need to sign this to make it valid. Do I detect guilt on her face? Was this a last-ditch attempt not to have to refund my money? Sorry, comrade, she says. I forgot. I have never done one of these before. She signs the Spravka with a flourish, hands it to me and says: Bon voyage. Four months after my return to Los Angeles, a check arrives from Intourist for around $600, which would be more than three thousand dollars today. *

Geez Louise, R. You gotta be kidding. Me write? About our trip to Russia? Years of silence and now suddenly you expect my help!! A memoir this time? Nothing like narcissism!! Are you about to settle old scores? What you gonna say ’bout me?. Will you call me the hippy or the artist or maybe the kleptomaniac? It’ll be your truth, and different from mine, I know that. And you’ll have the last word as always. With you everything came after your precious work work work. Write, write, write. Seemed like you’d sacrifice anything and everything for that. Okay, you know that after all these decades I still have a soft spot for what we were. What I can’t believe is that I let you take me off to the Soviet Union. Shit. I’d never been east of what, Palm Springs, and suddenly we’re driving across the whole USofA with that couple of hippies, not that I mind hippies but I mean who

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drives across the country to get to Europe, so it’s a week on the road and then a boat on the ocean which has me hanging over the rail throwing up all the time. We reach France I’m ready to turn around and go home. On that train to Copenhagen in the middle of the night the conductor bangs on the door when we’re sleeping and begins to scream. He’s wearing a long coat and shiny cap and he shouts at us for papers or whatever just in the way all the Nazis always do in films, and all I can think is that they’re about to haul you away to a camp and put you in an oven or something and believe me this is one shiksa who will not volunteer to go with you. Not that I want to go to the Soviet Union either. I mean I finally meet a man who wants to take me to Europe and where do we end up? Everyone else gets to go to France and Italy to see great art and eat great food and meet lots of sexy men, and I’m going to Russia! On the overnight boat from Denmark to Finland everyone is partying and I am throwing up some more, and in Helsinki what I remember best are the mosquitos. Fifteen minutes in some park at twilight and I look like I have measles and have to scratch my ass off for weeks because nobody in the Soviet Union has ever heard of calamine lotion. Helsinki is full of this pasty sunlight that is there when you go to bed and still there when you wake up. That city weirded me out, made me happy to get on the train to Russia, but at the border I could have dropped a load when those soldiers with machine guns point them right at us when we stick our heads out the window. What I doing here? I feel pretty much the same after you find those tour guides in their cute outfits and cocky hats attractive. They turn you on, don’t they—Ivana, Svetlana, Tatyana—you loved rolling their names off your tongue as you argued with them, smiling all the while. No Lenin didn’t say this he said that or the other, and how about getting to see the old headquarters of the Jewish Bund, I remember that one, and also that you felt so proud of yourself for having worked the name of Trotsky into the conversation a couple of times and nobody arrested you. And that whole business with Smolny. I could by the way have done without that screaming about SMOLNY!! And then when we finally get there and you shoot all those photos and in the hallway where you’re trying to get an image of the high, arched ceilings the camera jams and you try to unjam it and can’t. You’re cursing like a truck driver and decide you have to open up the back to see what’s happening. The film pops out, ruined, exposed, and you start wav-



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ing your arms and shrieking Shit! Fuck! Goddammit! until the guard comes over and salutes politely and says I don’t know what but it must be that you have to leave the building for he points towards the exit, at least that’s what I think he must be saying but all the while he’s smiling at me and looking me up and down and with the mood you’re in at the moment it feels pretty good to have someone else take notice of me as a woman. I liked to shock you. It starts from the first time we’re together. You’re so straight but play at being in the know, cool, with it, hip. That art opening where we met? You homed in on me like a guided missile. Was it the blond hair down to my waist, my flag I like to call it, wave the flag and the guys come running, or the combat jacket and high-heel boots, or the two black eyes which you never mention and I never explain. You ask what I do and I tell you I’m an artist and hand you my card, Creative Expression by Donna Duz. You said C’mon that can’t be your name but it was my first husband’s last name, really, Duz, and I liked the joke of it so much I kept it until that friend sees a photo of my Dad and says he looks like an Indian and I realize Cheyenne is a lot better than Donna Duz. In the gallery I ask who are you and you say I’m a historian and I say I thought all historians were dead and you say you may be right. That set me off laughing and makes me laugh still though it never was true for you. You always made me laugh. Laughing was good for me, my shrink said when I told her. She always said I was too serious about life. That I didn’t trust people and I didn’t trust myself. It was the same with you. I put you to a bunch of tests that first night out. You said hey, it’s just like Europe, when I take you to the outdoor cafe on La Cienega and we drink white wine. You don’t say anything but I can see the weird look in your eyes when we’re leaving and I slip the two wineglasses into my big handbag, but I think maybe you blink a few extra times. You definitely blink some more at the County Museum where the line to hear a lecture by Rollo May stretches halfway down the block on Wilshire and I say don’t worry and take your hand and we sail past the crowd and you keep saying shouldn’t we stand at the back, we’re late, but I wink at the guards who keep the lines in order and we march right up to the door where I whisper something in the ear of the doorman and he lets us in. You didn’t know that he and I were playing around that summer. You liked my crazy stuff. Got you away from all those serious colleagues. You saw me as a Flower Child and an Artist!! That was most

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important to you, along with my don’t give a shit attitude. That’s what you were looking for. John Reed, Greenwich Village, artists, radicals, bohemians. You liked the idea of people who didn’t follow the rules and made up their own as they went along. It was the time for all that freedom stuff and I fit in real well, the end of the sixties, sex, drugs, rock’n’roll, and plenty of them. Everybody let’s get stoned and let’s get it on, though you were real surprised that I wouldn’t smoke dope. Well once you got started you did enough of that for both of us. But this is supposed to be about Russia, not me and not my apartment on Alta Vista that you move into after your six months at Harvard and like because in the morning you have the pleasure of walking past all those sorry ass hookers on Sunset just to get to Ralph’s to buy orange juice and bagels for breakfast. You know it’s not that the trip to Russia was so different from the rest of our life. You are always in a hurry, always fuming that things are not getting done fast enough or well enough. And you are stubborn too, especially about not asking directions. That first day there you are trying to find your way through the city with a map written in Russian, which you don’t really read. Leningrad is a fucking huge city and we walk our feet off that day and only later do you find out that if you had asked you would have learned there was a shuttle from the hotel to the Winter Palace and we could have gotten there in fifteen minutes, not dragged our asses through the street for three hours. It looks good from a distance but it’s a real boring city, and apart from a few official buildings drab as all getout. The people, the buildings, everything is gray and kind of worn out looking except the hotel is modern even if there is no hot water and the lights flicker on and off. The best part of the first day was when we ran into those dark gypsies who fingered my long pink silky dress and wanted to buy it right there on the street but you said no, and whispered that it might be some kind of a provocation by the government. Those women in colorful skirts and blouses were the only real friendly people we met. Most everyone else looked blank, sour, hostile, or worn to a frazzle. I’ll give you this: the afternoon at the Hermitage made my whole trip worthwhile. The art work going on forever, room after room, staircases, chandeliers, gorgeous old furniture and above all the Matisses. It takes forever to find that room for modern art because it’s so far away from everything else, and we have to ask and ask and nobody not even the guards seem to know exactly where it is until



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after hours of looking we stumble on it way up on the top floor and half a mile from the entrance. Picasso and all the other usual suspects are there but the Matisses knock me out, the dancing circle covering a whole huge wall. The freedom of those bodies, the brush strokes, the simplicity, the strength, the joy, how does he do it I’ll never know—but I stand in that room and don’t want to leave. You try to pull me away but I say no, leave me alone and you go off and come back and go off again and the longer I look the more I feel like I am up there on the wall dancing with all those figures holding each other’s hands and celebrating life by moving in an endless circle. Eventually you drag me away, but all those images are still dancing in my head to this day. For me that is what makes my Russian trip worth all the fear. Not Lenin’s room and not Smolny and not John Reed’s grave and not the Kremlin with its huge meeting halls and ancient churches with gold onion domes and not your cousin’s apartment where the elevator is broken and we have to climb six flights of stairs but we do get a good view of the Moscow skyline, and not the kvass he serves us, that weird fermented drink that tastes like horse piss, and certainly not the circus we attend, though it is really fun when one of the clowns picks you out of the crowd and sketches your face and everyone laughs at your long hair and huge beard, by God you look like the few church men we see on the streets except they wear black robes not Levi’s and workshirts. Do you remember the faces on the women who guarded the keys on the floor of the National Hotel in Moscow? They looked like they were buried alive and then dug up and brought here to frighten the guests, which they did very well. No matter how many times we went in and out and showed our passports to them, it’s as if they never recognized us and had to look at them again and even so it always seemed touch and go as to whether they would give us a key or hand us over to the secret police. I can add stuff about the group of teenagers down by the river in front of the hotel, four or five of them, one with a guitar who played some American protest songs. They promised to take us to an underground club the next night but never showed up and you worried that maybe meeting us got them into some sort of trouble, but we had no way of finding out. And how about that writer or journalist from some newspaper. You had contact with him through Spanish vets by mail before arriving. He comes to the hotel, a nice-looking middle-aged sort of guy who spoke English pretty well and takes

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us out to a park to talk so no one can hear what we say, and while you are trying to ask him about John Reed stuff, all he’s interested in is whether you have any Playboy magazines with you and is real upset when you say you don’t read Playboy. Your cousin comes up to our room in the National past those sour-faced women. He has to show some sort of identity card before they let him go with us and when we close the door the first thing he wants to know is if you have any Beatles records, and he’s real disappointed when you don’t. When you ask hasn’t he heard the Beatles he says yes, of course, you can hear anything in the Soviet Union but it’s hard to buy some things and he wants to study their music. He’s a sad sort of man. He says he’ll cook dinner for us but when we go to the market with him there’s no meat or chicken so he says it’s a hot day, and it was real hot, 100 degrees hot, too damn hot to climb all those stairs to his apartment because the elevator isn’t working, so let’s just have a salad for dinner, better for the health: lettuce, tomatoes, and some cheese. We’re okay with that but he seems embarrassed and he’s embarrassed again the next day when he takes us to the composer’s union hall for lunch and there’s only salad there too. It was GREAT! to finally escape the Soviet Union. They must have checked over our passports at the airport a million times. Every couple of feet we walk another guy in a uniform with a huge hat has to look at our docs and at us and back again. Once we get to it, the airplane is pretty sorry ass. Not clean or comfortable looking. Crumpled papers on the floor, the seat covers are worn through and the headrests greasy, and in a couple of places wall panels are peeled back so you can see the struts that hold the body together. But shit, I think, this is the Soviet Union. They put Sputnik up before we had anything in space. They shot down that American spy plane with a missile. They test nuclear weapons. So they must know how to build airplanes that can get us safely from Moscow to Istanbul? We are seated towards the rear with some other foreigners. Two are young women from Chile who speak about as much English as you speak Spanish, not all that much, but they get across to us that they have finished a summer course at Patrice Lumumba University. There’s also a young Japanese guy who has a few words of French which you can speak and a few of English too. After we take off he asks us why are we going to Tashkent? We say we aren’t, we are going to Istanbul. He looks real upset. He was told this was the flight to Tashkent.



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In the air things get weirder. The Russians who fill the seats in front of us shout back and forth and laugh a lot as if they know each other well. But unlike all the other people in this country, where men and women wear drab and boxy clothing and blank and boxy expressions, this is a flashy group. There are real handsome, muscular men, with long hair and and rings in their ears, and slender women in bright, off the shoulder dresses or sleek leotards, their faces made up with mascara and eye shadow. To top it all there are four midgets, sitting in the same row across the aisle from each other, all of them dressed in sharp-looking suits with white shirts and neckties and wearing 1940s fedoras. The women from Chile find out and explain that we are sharing the flight with the members of a circus. Forty-five minutes into the flight comes the announcement that we are now flying over Kiev. You smile at me and say this means about another hour or so and we can see the Black Sea and escape Russian air space, and get out of the clutches of Intourist and be done with this goddam trip. Maybe an hour later we still haven’t seen the sea and you keep saying any minute now, any minute now, and then comes an announcement, just as the plane begins to descend. The Chileans translate. We are landing in Kiev. You ask in Kiev, why? We passed Kiev hours ago. They don’t know. The sun is right above us and it’s very very hot as we trudge across the runway to a small terminal with walls of glass. It’s the first modern architecture we’ve seen and we’re happy it will be nice and cool inside. But no. It may be modern but with no air conditioning. Armed police lock the door, all the doors, and that is pretty scary. When will they let us out? Nobody knows why we are there. In a few minutes it’s goddam awful, a huge uproar of people all talking at once in loud voices and lighting up cigarettes of such foul-smelling tobacco. And the heat!! In a few minutes we’re living in a steamy smoke-filled Turkish bath. The only water comes in a thin stream from the tap of the sink in the bathrooms where I have to cup it in my hands to drink. Stewardesses from the flight bring us a tray full of hard candies and that’s all the refreshments during a three-hour wait which ends when a bus pulls up outside the window and all the members of the circus are escorted to it by armed guards. Fifteen minutes later we foreigners are back on our way. When the plane lands in Ankara we rush directly to the bar in the terminal and drink vodka tonics real fast and then order another.

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We laugh a lot and when you go off to the bathroom I toss my hair around kind of flirting with some of the really hot-looking dark men at the bar who probably don’t see many blondes in low-cut shimmery dresses. I feel real good for the first time in weeks and so do you. We are out of the Soviet Union!!! and for me this new country looks promising already. So promising that we are starting on a third drink when a young man in uniform comes up to us and says something we don’t understand at first and he repeats and repeats it until we realize he’s saying something like Istanbul, plane, runway. We race down the stairs and through a gate waving our tickets and outside we can see our plane is at the end of the runway getting ready to take off. We begin running towards it screaming like maniacs and the plane taxis towards us and stops and they open the door and someone pushes a rolling staircase and we stumble aboard. Istanbul is lots more fun and much more colorful than Russia or anywhere else I have ever been and the food is great, especially all the watermelon. After that it’s the Greek island of Alonissos for a month. You have all these notes which you set on a table in our tiny room at the Villa Marpounta (amazing I remember the name), along with that portable Italian typewriter you have lugged everywhere, and for the first few days you sit there trying to write a chapter about John Reed in Russia but you give up pretty damn quickly and decide Reed can wait until we get home, and so we get to spend the next month swimming, lying on the beach, hiking up the dusty mountain trails, and eating so much feta that I have never had the stomach to eat it again in the last how many years? forty? Shit man, four zero. Can you believe it? I can’t! Just as I can’t believe I’ve actually written this for you. I always liked men too much for my own good. Cheyenne

* This tale of research in a time of Cold War has an epilogue, perhaps even a moral. Late in the summer of 1972, Time carries an article about the recent disappearance of several Soviet officials. No longer are such people being jailed or sent to the gulag or shot, as they were in Stalin’s time. Now they are



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simply put away in mental hospitals. Among those mentioned is one Boris Gilenson, head of the American History Section of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. He disappeared, the magazine suggests, for consorting too frequently with the enemy—no doubt American academics. The following winter, I receive a letter on the stationery of the American History Section of the Soviet Academy of Sciences from a Professor Startsev, who regrets being away from Moscow during my visit. As someone with a professional interest in John Reed, he wonders if he can in any way help me with my research. Did I, for example, have a chance to examine the Lee Gold archive at the Institute of Marxism–Leninism? My response—yes I can use help, no I did not see the archive—is answered, a few months later, with the arrival of a large carton bearing the return address, the Institute of Marxism–Leninism, Moscow, USSR (to be precise, CCCP) containing some 2,000 pages photocopied from the Lee Gold archive, pages that provide me with the closest thing an academic can have to a scoop: I am the first historian, and this includes Russian scholars, to use this material in a published work. How to account for my luck? The summer of 1972 was when the US government made its first deliveries of surplus wheat to a hungry Soviet Union (which, fifty years after the revolution, still could not produce enough grain for its people). This was not altruism, but business: good for American farmers (and the farm vote). The wheat led to a thaw in many fields, including the arts, sciences, and humanities. Academic exchanges which had long been forbidden suddenly became possible, and long-closed archives opened up to American scholars. The architect of this policy was Richard Nixon, a man I never saw except on television. The first time was as a fourteen-year-old during the famous Checkers speech, which I found to be as self-righteous and smarmy as his presidential resignation speech twenty years later. My opinion of Nixon over the years—as vice president, perpetual candidate, and disgraced president—was not exactly high. You could sum it up in phrases I had learned as a teenager. I always thought of him as Tricky Dick and liked to repeat the old line: Would you buy a used car from this man? Yet fair is fair. More than four decades after the fact, I at last want to publicly acknowledge my debt to the late president for his contribution not only to my career, but also to the history of American radicalism. Today I wish to say: Spaseeba, Tricky Dick! *

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Odd it is, even to me, that in retrospect my research trip to the Soviet Union can seem amusing. I was not much given to laughter during my two weeks in Leningrad and Moscow. Frustration was my primary emotion, the feeling that if only I could somehow break free of the system—the waiters, tour guides, Intourist officials, historians, administrators of the Lenin Library—I might somehow be able to catch more meaningful glimpses of a revolutionary past. Not that I had expected a tranquil time in Russia, but I was still in thrall to the notion that not been disabused by my day at the trenches of Jarama, that quiet moments of contemplation at historical sites would let the ghosts of the revolution whisper to me. I shared the desire of many historians to have the kind of experience which would lead to a feeling, an insight, a metaphor of the kind the great Edward Gibbon claimed to have had when he was brooding over the crumbling remains of the Roman Forum and was struck by the idea of decline and fall which would start him on the road to immortality as a historian and ever after shape our view of the ancient world. Historians are no longer—if they ever were—taught to think much about either metaphors or immortality, for that matter, at least not for themselves. They know (or should know) all too well that their research, their words, their contributions, their most brilliant interpretations of the human drama will be superseded by those of the next generation, or the one after that. All they can really hope for is being able to create an explanation of their subject which will for a time somehow make the world more understandable, more comfortable for them, and if they are lucky, for some readers as well. Certainly nobody in grad school or the history profession had ever mentioned the possibility of metaphors as carriers of historical meaning. I had been taught and still (more or less) accepted the idea that historical knowledge was created by research into primary sources and in the narrative which somehow emerged from the data collected. It was as if the job of the historian was to channel the past, to be a conduit which let its stories tell themselves. By the time I finished writing Romantic Revolutionary: A Biography of John Reed and saw it published to a good deal of acclaim in the fall of 1975 (reviews in some fifty publications, starting with the New York Times, virtually all highly favorable), it was becoming clear to me that it was not the demands of the past but I, myself, who had given a shape to and created meaning for the life of John Reed. This came to me without my having ever read a book on the theory or practice of biography, came in the process of making the choices of how to tell Reed’s story, not just in the



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endless decisions over which sources to believe and which to discount, what incidents to include and what to exclude, but in the ultimately impossible process of trying to understand, from no more than reading words on the page, someone else’s thoughts, desires, moods, choices, beliefs during three decades of life in tumultuous times of strikes, wars, and revolutions both on the ground and in the vision of artists, writers, and filmmakers. From the outset I knew that the Bolshevik Revolution was crucial for Reed, a culmination of themes that run through the first three decades of his life—rebellious behavior at school, the mixture of artistic innovation and leftist politics in Greenwich Village, the life of a reporter, an identification with striking workers and Mexican revolutionaries, the dismay caused by encountering blind patriotism, censorship, and government crackdown on opponents following US entry into the First World War. I was aware, too, that Reed saw the revolution as a kind of dramatic performance acted on a huge scale, that in a way—as the communist playwright and member of the Hollywood Ten screenwriter John Howard Lawson once put it—Ten Days That Shook the World created the Russian Revolution as a drama with chapters that served as a prologue (Russia before the revolution), a first act (the rising of the people and their victory), a second act (the reversal of fortune of the counter-revolution), and a third act (the workers led by the Bolsheviks defeat the counter-revolution and joy reigns supreme). Early in the process of trying to write the work, as I wrestled with tens of thousands of bits of data, and read Reed’s own words over and over, attempting to feel my way into the days of his life, it came to me that a man who lived largely and saw the world in terms of drama should be written about in a form that attempted to catch the drama of his own life. That the color and intensity of Reed’s days would not be true to his experience if they were not rendered with color and intensity. The normal form of biography, the sprawling cradle-to-grave narrative, works against a dramatic structure, and I was not prepared to wholly dispense with the traditions of a genre I was trying out for the first time. Yet the idea came to me that it might be possible to push at the boundaries of the form, to make each chapter a kind of mini-drama, to capture on the page Reed’s emotional highs and lows, his doubts and triumphs, his publications, adventures, and love affairs, along with the adventure of the strikes, wars, and revolutions he witnessed and described. It was all there in his writings, public and private, fiction and reportage. My at first inchoate notions eventually coalesced into the idea to tell each stage or chapter of his life—childhood, boarding school, Harvard,

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Greenwich Village, Mexico, the First World War, the Bolshevik Revolution, organizing a Communist Party—by centering it on a document he penned during that particular period, one which somehow expressed the essence— or at least I could use it to express the essence, the theme, the meaning of that period of development for Reed, for me, for the reader. The result was a series of chapters structured in a kind of circle. Each began with a fragment from a document which seemed central to a particular moment in Reed’s life, then went on to an explanation of the source and meaning of that document (as I interpreted it), followed by a description of the context in which it was written. This was followed by an explication of the events before and after he produced the initial piece, which was a way of underlining its centrality for understanding Jack and his milieu at that particular period. Creating such a structure and carrying it through an entire manuscript was a learning process, one that began to make it clear to me that a biography is a story as much imposed upon as reflective of the details of a life in the past. And if this was so of biography, why was any other sort of history different? The publicity which Romantic Revolutionary received, the positive reviews in newspapers, magazines, and (eventually) journals, and the sales figures were gratifying. But no reviewer out of more than some fifty, save for a single grad student writing in the University of Minnesota Daily, made any comment on the structure of the chapters and how that might affect the meaning of Reed’s life story. This provided a lesson that I learned slowly over the coming years. You could play with form to make a work of history or biography more truthful to the feelings you took away from a study of the past, but that ultimately the form you chose was of little concern to the profession of history or to reviewers. That in the world of academic history, of which biography is an uneasy part, content inevitably triumphs over form. But how, the conscious author has to ask, is it possible to separate a work’s content from the package in which it is delivered? Literary form, like language itself, is hardly a neutral carrier of reality. This is another lesson not taught in graduate school and honored more by philosophers and literary critics than historians. It was one which would seriously affect my next historical undertaking. * How did my experiences in the Soviet Union inflect the text of Romantic Revolutionary? It has always been difficult for me to say. No doubt that the chapters on the Bolshevik takeover have a feeling for sites of the revolution— Smolny Institute, Peter and Paul Fortress, the Winter Palace, the Nevsky



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Prospekt, Catherine the Great’s palace at Tsarskoye Selo—that must in part derive from my having walked Leningrad’s streets, stood in its squares, climbed the stairs of its palaces. Perhaps I also learned something about the enormous rigidity, inefficiency, and contradictions of the culture which predated the Bolsheviks, and which the revolution didn’t affect—the taxi driver who refused a tip in the name of egalitarianism, the Intourist driver who demanded one at the end of a short ride; the humanity of the Russian people (the hundreds in the enormously long line at the Winter Palace who insisted on hustling the two of us to its front); the Izvestia journalist who denounced Western decadence after first inquiring if I had brought any copies of Playboy with me—that led me to realize that the practice of history could only point to, but never capture, the reality of the past. My own major insight came a year or so after the trip to the Soviet Union, came while I lounged on pillows on the floor of my living room, nicely stoned and listening to Jim Morrison of the Doors sing about love and death. Suddenly it was clear. Not just why Reed embraced the Russian Revolution—the excitement and drama of Petrograd in October 1917 made that easy enough to understand. But why this poetic soul, who all his life had fought against authority in the name of adventure, hung on to that vision of extreme social change for the remaining three years of his life, hung on stubbornly through the tedious work of trying to organize the Communist Labor Party and trying to get that party recognized by the Communist International, hung on while around him grew the signs of the Soviet repression, intransigence, and brutality that would soon enough smother the many generous impulses which had brought the regime into being. Revolution allowed the world to make sense again. It was a new belief system, a way of organizing and understanding a world that had, in the years of war, spun out of control. Once upon a time Reed and his generation of bohemian radicals had been full of great hopes for the future: hopes for self-expression and personal success meshing with hopes for a more just, egalitarian, and colorful social order in which the arts would flourish. His role as a hero of the Greenwich Village subculture in art, lifestyle, and radicalism; his triumph as a foreign correspondent in Mexico, where the vibrant spirit of the revolutionaries entered his soul—all made it seem as if such a world was just over the horizon. Catch it, reach out, it’s right there. Then came the First World War, the slaughter of the trenches, government censorship and repression, the collapse of friends into patriotism (artist George Bellows going from fervent anarchism to drawing pro-war posters),

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the loss of outlets for journalism because of Reed’s anti-war stance, along with a certain feeling of personal decline (had he become dependent upon success and adulation?). The Bolshevik Revolution ended his doubts and uncertainty. It gave Jack something to believe in wholeheartedly, a political, social, and cultural movement which seemed to provide the world with a future once again. During the ten days of October, Reed was bitten by the bug of faith. It infected him with that state of consciousness which, as so many witnesses tell us, makes life more meaningful, dying less difficult. But if the Russian Revolution did that for Reed, what—if anything—did it do for his biographer? Let me live through a revolution in the mind without all the fears, discomforts, and difficulties of encountering one in real life? Made the waning of the joyous and purposeful radicalism of the sixties era less difficult to accept? No doubt. But it also taught me a great deal about how the very writing of the past inflects the meaning of the data used by the historian. Any illusions I might have once harbored about the singular truth of biography or history—for example, that my Lincoln Battalion was the real one—­certainly vanished as I created the life of Reed. Writing his biography showed me—not immediately but over time—that imagination and vision were as important to the creation of the past as the footnoted information which we used as evidence. Once I had chosen Romantic Revolutionary as my title, the subtitle became something of a quandary. My initial impulse was to call it The Biography of John Reed, but ultimately that seemed to contain a major false assertion. Reflection made me change the first word from The to A. With history, as with life, there can never be a single, definitive version.

Matsue: The 400-year-old castle which looms above the samurai quarter, one of the few such structures in the country never destroyed, by fire, earthquake, or war, still standing as a symbol for those like Lafcadio Hearn on the trail of Old Japan.

3 Japan: Mirror in the Shrine It is because the Far-East holds up a mirror to our civilization … because by her very oddities, as they strike us at first, we truly learn to criticize, examine, and realize our own way of doing things, that she is so interesting. Percival Lowell, Choson (1886)

Nothing romantic, mysterious, or particularly Asian comes into view that first morning in the port of Yokohama. From the deck of the SS Philippine Mail I gaze out at a world of gray docks, trucks, forklifts, and giant cranes, my ears assaulted by ship’s horns, steam whistles, the grinding of huge gears, the shouts of workers. Ten minutes after walking down the gangplank I am in a taxi on the way to Immigration and Customs. As the driver and I sit immobilized in an enormous traffic jam, looking at an endless vista of tiny cars and huge trucks, he turns and asks, How is your impression of Japan? Too many cars, I answer, not yet knowing how difficult it is to translate irony into Japanese. I am so happy. I am your first friend in Japan. The second and third friends are customs officers. With bows and many repetitions of the word sumimasen (I have studied enough Japanese to know this means excuse me), the two men wearing snowy white gloves and blue uniforms, which look as if they were pulled from a cleaner’s press two minutes earlier, proceed to remove every item from my two suitcases and examine each one as carefully as if I were arriving not from another continent but another planet. Never seen jockey shorts before? This under my breath. No colored T-shirts in Japan? They’re all the rage at home. That tape recorder, it’s Japanese. Bought it in the States. I want to record my impressions of your country. Panasonic. Good brand. The rest is personal. Socks, sweaters, shirts, neckties. You know. The usual stuff. But it isn’t, not all of it, and that’s why I babble on, trying to divert their attention, hoping to keep them away from the three bottles of Johnny Walker Black Label Scotch wrapped inside the pairs of long johns I will

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never wear but have purchased on the advice of a Nisei friend who apprenticed in a Kyushu pottery village and assured me that during the winter I would freeze my ass. The program officer on the Fulbright Commission in Washington was responsible for the Scotch. Best present you can give a Japanese. Take a few bottles. They’ll come in handy. It’s extremely expensive there. What the adviser didn’t say was whether you should declare the liquor on the customs form, and if you did, would you have to pay duties? In the cabin just before landing, I decide that yes, maybe duties will be high, so I didn’t declare the whiskey. Nobody would search the suitcases of a visiting American scholar closely, would they? Who won the war after all? The first bottle brings a sharp exclamation from one officer: So desu ka! The second evokes the same phrase from the other. By the time the three bottles lie naked and defenseless on the counter, the two are engaged in a heated discussion and wholly ignoring me. Am I in trouble? Their faces are no more expressive than before. A couple of times they look toward the bottles but never does either one meet my eyes. Will there be a fine? Could it be a major offense? Might it affect my Fulbright Fellowship? A third officer appears. One who speaks English. Sort of. Excuse me, we are concerned. Bottles not have correct wrapping. We wish making safe trip for bottles. Very valuable. Johnny Walker ichiban. We wish to protect better. You agree? All three bow and I manage a weak arigato. They pull packing material from beneath the counter and encase the bottles in thick layers of bubble wrap, repack the suitcases, bow, and stamp my passport. Again they bow and I find myself bending slightly at the waist and saying a very formal thank you: Arigato gozaimasu. You can see in this encounter with Japanese Customs a symbol of the year I spent on a teaching Fulbright in Japan, if you are a reader inclined to search for symbols. Authors need to use them all the time in order to suggest moments that evade the linearity of explanation. For if I never come close to adopting the view so common among nineteenth-century travelers, that somehow Japan is the opposite of the West, its mirror image, I do find it a culture that continually challenges expectations. Four weeks into the sojourn I will write in my journal: Japan is exactly like the United States and nothing like the United States. There is no culture shock. But there is no similarity except that everything is the same. Neither when I penned those words nor forty years later when I type them on my computer will I know exactly what this means, but it still seems true. It’s Japan, after all. Call it a koan. Great similarities between the cultures assault the eye in Tokyo, an hour’s taxi ride from Yokohama: tall steel and glass buildings, traffic jams, elevated



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trains, subways, taxis, neon lights, colorful displays of European fashions in shop windows, well-dressed crowds hurrying along sidewalks and filling the cafes and restaurants. The differences sneak up so quietly that at first you are hardly aware of them. At the office of the Fulbright Commission, where I spend two afternoons being briefed on the prospects and perils of my upcoming position by its local director, Caroline Yang, everything is familiar enough: assistants and secretaries typing, shuffling papers, talking on the phone. But the atmosphere is unlike any office back at home. There is something soft, sweet, vaguely erotic about the room, pervaded by a low hum of female voices and the precise yet delicate movements of women going about their business. One assistant brings over documents for me to sign, another comes by to arrange train tickets and accommodations for Kyoto, a third sets down cups of green tea and tiny sweets on the low coffee table. In certain ways, they look and act alike. Not one of them meets my gaze. Each bows deeply and speaks in hushed and formal tones. All three possess an aura that, despite modest clothing—skirts below the knee, dark suits, low-heeled shoes—seems like some kind of oblique invitation. But to what? A performance at Kabuki-za the next afternoon presents a similar mixture of the aesthetic and the erotic. This has nothing to do with the story or plot, which remain totally mysterious, nor with the simple, strongly stylized sets, the gorgeous costumes, the freeze-frame poses struck by male figures—nobles, warriors, and priests. Nor with the loudly declaimed dialogue, the clack of wooden clappers, the rhythmic drum beats, the twang of string instruments, or the strange, wailing voices of the chorus. It comes through most strongly in the female characters. Following tradition, they are all played by men, the famed onnagata, who on stage appear more fragile, delicate, and feminine in their movements than any woman I have ever known. Two days later at the 300-year-old ryokan (traditional Japanese hotel) named Tawaraya, females in kimono almost as beautiful as the ones in the kabuki performance hover in the hallways, waiting to answer requests. Do you need handmade paper on which to write letters, an inkstone for your sumi brush (as if I have such a brush)? A drink perhaps: sake, beer, scotch? A snack? Edamame or perhaps shrimp on skewers? Would you like your ashtray emptied or the lid removed from the teak ofuro (hot tub)? Like the kimono, the room seems lifted directly from a samurai film (except for the toilet, sink, and shower which are sleek and contemporary) with its traditional tokonoma (alcove) that shows off a seasonal scroll painting

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and a flower arrangement set in an ancient vase. Save for a low, lacquered table, so empty is the space, so aesthetically pleasing every object—the tiny stoneware teapot and cups, the iron ashtray, the box of matches, the packet of sculpted toothpicks—that suddenly I find the green cardboard cover and lined pages of the school notebook I use for my journal to be so ugly and utilitarian, so awful in this setting, so out of place. Some subtle aesthetic spirit is capturing me. Writing itself, putting words on paper is becoming a pleasure. For three days I play tourist in Kyoto, visiting temples, shrines, gardens, and palaces. The one I most anticipate is the famed Ryoanji, with its walled garden of fifteen rocks floating in a sea of raked stones which express, or so all the books on Japanese culture maintain, the voiceless soul of Zen. On the engawa (porch) overlooking the garden, I join a class of junior high school girls in uniform and several elderly women in kimono who kneel in what I imagine to be reverence. The best I can do is a modified lotus position. With my legs sort of folded over each other, I hover for one brief moment on the edge of something new—a silent, waiting spirit that eludes words. The English guidebook urges me towards the contemplation of temporality, eternity, enlightenment, but before any such feelings can flood my consciousness it becomes necessary to try to ignore the great discomfort of my ankles pressed to the hard wooden planks. The spell, if spell it is, shatters with the sound of a harsh mechanical voice that begins to blast out of loudspeakers surrounding the garden, a voice which goes on and on, evidently explaining at great—and to tell by the restlessness of the schoolgirls, tedious—length the inexplicable wordless mysteries of Zen. * What, you may ask, is this historian who specializes in modern Western history doing in Japan? It is a question I often ask myself. The best I can tell is that I am there on what you might call a hunch, a quest, a dare, a desire to expand my experiences and sense of self by engaging with another civilization. At the same time I am acknowledging the death of a certain dream of social and cultural change. The year is 1974, a painful time for anyone who has identified with The Movement, that shorthand for the anti-war, pro-civil rights, and ethnic movements which filled so much of my consciousness in recent years. Romantic Revolutionary, with its celebration of native and foreign radicalism, is in press, and reaction is in the air. With Tricky Dick clinging onto the White House despite the ongoing Watergate investigations, and more and more evidence piling up of presidential malfeasance, the war in Vietnam grinding on, and Ronald Reagan serving



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a second term as governor of California, the sixties—however you wish to define the term—are clearly at an end. But not yet, it seems, interest in the topic of radicalism. A certain amount of pre-publication hype surrounding the book, and its inclusion on the New York Times list of notable works of the new season, encouraged several publishers to contact me about my next work. Editors were full of suggestions: why don’t I write another biography about another radical American, such as Max Eastman or Bill Haywood? Or how about a general history of the Left in America? To me such topics felt outdated, even redundant. Those few movements that seemed to have a future centered around ethnic or gender identity. I supported both, but neither spoke directly to the writer in me, the historian who wanted to tell good stories. Yet they did help raise an awareness of new identities as the beginnings of what we would soon call multiculturalism was entering common speech. In retrospect it may seem that my decision to spend a year in Japan was a withdrawal from the radicalism which previously structured my writing life, an abandonment of the desire to use a knowledge of history to change the world. But it can also be seen as a reflection of an altered social order, perhaps a way of expanding what one means by the term radicalism into questions that move beyond those of politics and into the realms of ethnicity and culture. That fearsome French word, l’autre, was just about then slipping into academic discourse as the Other. Not that I had yet encountered it, but the impulse that gave birth to the idea was in the air. How to engage with what is not oneself, how to live with the alien, perhaps even learn from it, was becoming a topic of concern and study. Perhaps in deciding on Japan, I was no more than a creature of a larger cultural impulse. Not that I knew very much about that country, and most of what I did know hardly transcended the usual clichés. How well I remember the day Pearl Harbor was attacked, for my father—we were together in the car, watching airplanes take off and land at Montreal’s Dorval airport—slammed his hand on the dashboard and yelled Now the goddam Americans will have to get into it! Five years later we were on vacation in the Laurentian Mountains when news bulletins on the radio announced the explosion of bombs so powerful their blasts darkened the sun, wiped out two cities, and brought the Second World War to an end. During the intervening war years I pretty much accepted the stereotypes about that country and its people which circulated so freely in the press, on the radio, in classrooms, among relatives, and on playgrounds. The Japs, everyone

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knew, were a sneaky people who had buck teeth and poor night vision, and were cruel enough to enjoy committing atrocities against American and British soldiers. The Japs were crazed enough to turn their airplanes into suicide weapons. War movies were full of sequences showing kamikaze pilots, screaming the word banzai as they dove their aircraft directly into vessels of the American fleet. After 1945 you didn’t hear much about Japan. Particularly if, like me, your family moved from Montreal to Los Angeles, you were entering your teens, and beginning to recognize that the differences between boys and girls were kind of cool and rather time-consuming. Soon newspapers were full of stories from the conflict—not called a war but a Police Action—in Korea, with names like Pusan, Inchon, and the Yalu river in the headlines. Japan was offstage, occasionally mentioned as a base for American troops, ships, and aircraft. At mid-century I would have probably characterized it as a country that indulged in the outmoded practice of Emperor-worship and produced cheap products, flimsy wooden toys which broke the day you got them, fragile ceramics that easily shattered, tiny umbrellas that tore the third time you opened them. When a friend bought a Datsun convertible, the first Japanese car I ever remember seeing, we guys ragged him and laid bets as to how soon it would fall apart. Yet sometime in the mid-fifties, a different sort of Japan began to edge into my consciousness. I was an undergraduate at UCLA studying British and American literature but actually devoting most of my hours to working on the school newspaper, the Daily Bruin. During my junior year I became its Feature Editor, a position with one major fringe benefit: free tickets to review concerts, plays, and films. At the age of nineteen I already had something of a taste for foreign movies, one fostered by my mother, who had taken me during teenage years (my father refused to go) to see foreign films such as Roberto Rossellini’s Open City. As editor, the films I preferred to review were from France, Italy, and Sweden, for they seemed so much more truthful to life, or at least to life as depicted in the serious novels we were assigned to read in lit classes, than most of what came out of Hollywood. Yet the bleak neorealism of Italian directors like Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, and Vittorio De Sica, with their tales of the poor, the downtrodden, and the exploited, did little to prepare me for the compelling visual poetry of my first Japanese film, Ugetsu Monogatari, directed by Masahiro Kenji Mizoguchi, with its odd mixture of heroics, magic, cowardice, and selfabasement; its portrait of a world where ghosts interacted with the living; its overt sexuality and violent rape; its luscious black-and-white photography;



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its spare soundtrack of wooden clappers, plucked strings, and the haunting wail of bamboo flutes. In retrospect, that film seems to have been the harbinger of a new cultural tendency, at least within UCLA student literary and artistic circles where I felt most at home. Soon some of us were going off to the Toho La Brea Theater to see the films of Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu, and Masahiro Shinoda—works which provided powerful visions of a world that seemed at once alien and attractive. During the same period there was a spurt of interest in other aspects of the culture until, by the second half of the fifties, Japan seemed to be everywhere: on the motion picture screen; in art gallery exhibitions of Ukiyoe masters like Hiroshige and Hokusai; on the page in the writings of the Beat Generation, which flirted with the apparent simplicity of the haiku and the eternal paradoxes of Zen. Japan inflected the words of our contemporary literary heroes like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and flowered fully in the poems of Gary Snyder, who— and everyone seemed to marvel at this fact—had actually lived for some years in a Zen temple in Kyoto. The country’s culture was central to the essays of the scholarly D. T. Suzuki, whose thick books that specialized in explaining the inexplicable aspects of Buddhism were suddenly popular, and for a time it seemed that everyone I knew was reading Zen and the Art of Archery, Eugene Herrigel’s memoir which included the tale of a blind archer who could hit the center of a target at a hundred meters (and which we skeptics thought had to be fiction). Like generations of Westerners, I found myself intrigued by these mysterious images, words, ideas, and visions, and above all by the eternal paradox of the koan: What is the sound of one hand clapping? This peripheral contact with Buddhism in the fifties had one very positive effect: it inoculated me against the witch’s brew of religions, cults, sects, gurus, and ideologies that spilled through the counterculture of the sixties. From the Sufism of Idries Shah, to the vision quests and dances of Native Americans, to the favorite savant of the Beatles, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, everything preached by the gurus of that decade felt as if it were inauthentic, commercial, recycled, and bogus compared to what I already knew about the deeply rooted traditions of Japan. (Though I had to admit that when the Maharashi came to Caltech, ostensibly to talk with scientists about how to get his message of world peace onto a satellite circling the globe, and was instead fobbed off on the humanities faculty because all the scientists claimed to be busy, the guru’s so-called seminar—two hours in which we sat around him in a circle on the grass outside Dabney Hall while he spouted

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what seemed to be childish nonsense, giggling all the while—did leave me smiling and feeling upbeat for the next couple of days.) Sometime during 1973, I began to feel it was time to take a break from the realm of Nam and Nixon, to try to see the world from a different perspective. The green Fulbright Fellowship application for teaching abroad showed a one-year post in Bologna, but I had been to Italy and, like everyone else, had fallen in love with the people, the landscape, the endless masterpieces in architecture, art, cuisine, and coffee. The listing for a position in modern American history at Kyushu University was more interesting. Japan was the country which those humorous squibs at the bottom of the page in the New Yorker always referred to as the mysterious east, a place where some of the basic premises of Western life were apparently called into question, a land that honored simplicity and made aesthetics one of its guiding principles— or so my reading and viewing had led me to believe. Warnings that a year abroad was not a smart career move had no effect. I always thought less in terms of advancement in my profession than of the challenge and meaning of the books I would write. The award of the Fulbright hurled me into activity. I took a short course in conversational Japanese at the local Berlitz school and began to devour relevant books: the classic anthropological study by Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword; the modern novels of Yukio Mishima, Yasunari Kawabata, and Junichiro Tanizaki; studies of history by Edwin Reischauer, art by Langdon Warner, literature by Edward Seidensticker, and film by Donald Richie. More disturbing to my equilibrium were the sartorial changes necessary to prepare for a country where, as I had read, men wore their hair short and always dressed in sober business suits. Much as I hated the idea, out came the scissors and a razor to cut away my enormous beard until I sported no more than a kind of drooping, Mexican bandido-style moustache; then I visited a barber for the first time in years to have my almost shoulder-length hair trimmed into a cut which, while preserving the long sideburns, was, I hoped, short enough on top to not offend my hosts. Clothing was another problem. Since I could not see myself wearing a traditional dark blue or gray suit, I went off to a very hip store, Zeidler and Zeidler on the Sunset Strip, and chose one suit in forest green corduroy and another kind of leisure outfit in electric blue rayon that seemed to glow in the dark. I also acquired two formal shirts, white and blue, two neckties with patterns of bright flowers and arabesques, and two pairs of shoes that were not sandals. Sometime before my departure in August 1974, I made the decision to write a book about Japan. I don’t remember making it, but the written



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evidence is in the journal I would keep during the year abroad. Amazing it is to me now to see that I had even chosen a title: The Journey East. Clearly implied was a theme: what Asia had to teach the West. Did I know this was the oldest of clichés? Perhaps. Books about the various wisdoms of Asian traditions, spiritual or religious, had surrounded us in the sixties. Of the contents I had no idea, so I must have expected the year in Japan to take care of that. As important to me as the subject was the form of the work. Two weeks before sailing from Tacoma (the week Richard Nixon resigned from office) on a freighter bound for Yokohama, there is this entry in the journal: The beginning of a new book … No bowing to convention or career or market place. The idea has been slowly growing for months. History, fiction, poetry … All a search for the same. A dialogue with the past, with death, with life. Reading this over today, all I can think is: What a hugely ambitious, wholly unrealistic, and largely insane goal for a historian! * Forty years after landing, it is more difficult to turn my Fulbright year in Japan into a story than to do the same for my six research weeks in Spain in 1964 or my three in the Soviet Union in 1972. This is not due (just) to my fading memory, nor to lack of sources, for that year was one of the few times in my life that I kept a journal with some regularity, and my parents and friends later returned to me the letters and cassette tapes recording daily events which I had sent to them over the months. The problem is that of having too much information. During the years of research for what would become Mirror in the Shrine, I read hundreds of works— autobiographies, memoirs, travelogues, histories, guides—written by both short- and long-term visitors to Japan in the years following its opening to the world in the 1850s. These American, British, French, Dutch, and German authors, despite their varying backgrounds and beliefs, created a substantial library of books, essays, magazine articles, and newspaper features that were remarkably similar in their reactions to and judgments of this Asian culture. The same observations, exclamations, criticisms, and appreciations repeat across their texts to the point that you want to shriek on reading yet another description of doll-like, extremely polite people; immaculate Zen gardens, Shinto shrines, and Buddhist temples; elegant detached palaces of emperors and shoguns; exhibitions of bonsai, sumo wrestling matches, performances of kabuki or noh drama; public baths in which men and women soak together; raucous street festivals, and sacred

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dances by women in kimono such as the one for the dead during the fall festival, Obon. My goal in the pages ahead is to avoid producing yet another account detailing the exotic cultural and religious practices of the Japanese, for though I went to the same famous sites and had many of the same experiences as earlier travelers, they were but a tiny part of my daily life as a professor at two universities. So let me begin with the simple data that we turn into facts. For a year I lived in Fukuoka, a city of more than a million located on the western island of Kyushu. I taught courses at both the public, national Kyushu University, as well as at a private one named Seinan Gakuin, and one semester I hosted a weekly seminar for my best students at the American Center, run by the USIA. I traveled to many other parts of the country, sometimes to lecture, sometimes as a tourist. On three visits to Kyoto, home to the Emperor for more than a thousand years, I visited far too many shrines and temples to remember their names, along with famed gardens of rock, sand, and moss, and the geisha quarters of Gion and Shimabara. Once I stopped in the ninth-century capital of Nara, where deer wander through its vast parkland. I toured samurai neighborhoods and climbed to the top of castles in Kumamoto and Matsue; soaked in hot springs at Beppu and Tamatskuri; spent a warm spring afternoon lounging in the garden next to Shimabara Castle in Kyushu, where persecuted Japanese Christians made their last stand in the seventeenth century. I attended local fire festivals, sumo matches, and baseball games, and once from a bullet train I caught a fleeting glimpse of Mount Fuji, a pale ghost soaring upward not into clouds nor an azure sky but into an enormous bank of yellow smog. Home, where I spent most of my time, was a tiny, partially Westernized traditional house set on an estate of some ten acres surrounded by a thick grove of thirty-foot bamboo. The main room, no more than fifteen feet square, boasted the traditional tokonoma (alcove) with its seasonal scrolls and flower arrangements provided by the maids of the landlord, along with untraditional sliding glass doors that led to an untraditional stone patio with untraditional plastic furniture. The tatami floor was covered by imitation Persian carpets, and the living area stuffed with so much bulky Western furniture—a leather armchair, a sofa, two end tables, a dining room table, four dining chairs, and a tiny desk with a stool in front of it—that it was difficult to move around without banging into something. After the first few bruises, I suggested, through my department chair, that I didn’t need quite so much furniture. Perhaps some could be taken away. This would



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be an insult to the owner, I was immediately informed. The man had done his best to meet Western housing requirements. I already knew enough to realize this was as direct a No as a Japanese could speak aloud. The furniture remained in place. My shins were black and blue for most of the year. The landlord, a man in his eighties named Toshiki Suenaga, lived in an elegant modern version of a traditional Japanese house just a few steps from my back door. A retired businessman whose father became very wealthy after starting the first bento box company in Kyushu at the beginning of the twentieth century, he was rich enough to be called doctor by everyone. Suenaga spoke enough English to tell me he liked Fulbright scholars because he felt so grateful towards the American military. During the occupation, the estate had been requisitioned as the local US Army headquarters, but the Suenaga family was allowed to go on living in their own home and American GIs often shared rare supplies—meat, chocolates, and cigarettes—with them. The first time he raised a glass of scotch and shouted America, banzai, I could only think of fanatic kamikaze pilots shouting that on screen as they dove their planes into American ships. Even after learning banzai is no more than a traditional cheer for the Emperor— ten thousand years!—I cringed every time the doctor toasted my homeland. Once a week he invites me over for an evening of food and drink. Other guests are always present, elderly folk who are never formally introduced. They speak no English and my Japanese is that of a five-year-old, so during the evening I vainly try to follow the conversation as we sit around a huge low lacquer table filled with bottles of scotch, beer, and sake, plates of rice crackers, sashimi, dried squid, and other mysterious nibbles whose origins often mystify me. One evening Suenaga stands up, motions for me to follow, and ushers me with great ceremony into the kitchen where two chefs clad in white bow in my direction. One holds up a large live tai (sea bream) that has to weigh several pounds, ceremoniously places it on a carving board, and, while the fish furiously thrashes about, the other chef, with many elegant flourishes of the knife, carves it swiftly into sashimi. The thrashing stops midway through the process. Exhibiting the tray on which the pieces are beautifully arranged, the two chefs bow again and join voices to say: Atarashi. Atarashi. Fresh. Very fresh. Another evening is preceded by an invitation from one of the household maids, delivered in a mixture of Japanese and English simple enough for me to understand. Geisha ski desu? You like geisha you come meet tonight, yes? Imagine my fantasies. Geisha are, I know, not the prostitutes they are often thought to be by Westerners, but incredibly expensive and skilled

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entertainers, women trained to provide the exquisite pleasures of music, dance, and, yes, sometimes sex but the latter only for the wealthiest of patrons. As I put on an extra dash of cologne after shaving, choose a particularly nice shirt and even consider a necktie before shrugging off the idea, I picture a young beauty clad in a sumptuous and colorful kimono, black lacquered hair piled high and filled with glittering combs, her movements silky as she kneels (just as in samurai films) to pour my cup full of sake, then she rises and begins a slow and erotic dance across the tatami … On entering the doctor’s home, I am disappointed to see the usual suspects. There are, as always, a few unknown, elderly faces, but none are glamorous, let alone a day younger than sixty—an age which seems impossibly old to someone like me, still a couple of years shy of forty. I take a seat, nod to the others, give the ritual evening greeting, komban wa, and pour a glass of scotch. The usual conversation in is in progress, but I don’t really try to follow as I down a second drink and begin to brood: did I misunderstand the message? Could it be no more than the maid’s idea of having fun with a foreigner? A third scotch makes me reckless enough to ask the doctor a direct question which I know to be rude: I thought you were having some geisha here tonight? My host laughs and holds out his arms in a gesture towards two rather plain, elderly women sitting close by him, their dresses buttoned to the neck, their hair in short permanents, women who have been pouring the doctor’s sake and talking with him in low voices. My geisha, he says smiling, then follows with a few words in Japanese. The two women turn towards me and make remarks that cause the crowd to burst into laughter. Aren’t they clever? says Suenaga. They’ve been with me since I was a college student more than fifty years ago. Too bad you don’t understand Japanese. * A couple of days after my arrival in Fukuoka, when the country is still no more than a blur of impressions—the towers of Tokyo, the temples of Kyoto, the sleek bullet train, the endless rice paddies of the countryside, the drab streets of this city in which I am to spend the year—I arrive for the first time at the campus named Ropponmatsu, which means Six Pines, but those trees vanished years ago to make way for the featureless gray buildings that are the College of General Education of Kyushu University. I am here for my first official meeting with Shinji Takuwa-sensei, head of the program hosting me. In labored English he explains the nature of my duties. The university’s American Studies Program has been going on for several



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years without full recognition from the government. Their hope is that the yearly presence of a Fulbright scholar—I am the fourth—means that soon Mombusho, the Ministry of Education, will make the program official and let it grant degrees. Eight professors from various fields are involved: literature, economics, political science, law. Fulbrighters are not just here to add to the curriculum but to enhance the American experience, to show Japanese students how Americans look, dress, live, and sound. This means that I should teach courses the same way as I do at my home institution. I am to make no special allowances for the fact the students are Japanese. I should treat them just like Americans. Exactly the same as at home? I ask. Hai. Yes. Exactly. Okay. If you say so. Arigato. Except, Takuwa adds, you might do one thing a little different to help some of our not so good students. Most of them are not used to hearing Americans and may not be able to follow all your lectures at first. Perhaps you could prepare summaries. The last Fulbright professor did that. It worked very well. Three- or four-page summaries of your lectures would help the students very much. Yes I can do that. Maybe just photocopy my notes for the lectures. Very good. Do you sometimes do that in America? Sometimes, I lie. It can help sleepy students. Takuwa smiles. Very good. We are agreed. You will teach just as you do at home. Consider Ropponmatsu to be part of America. It is your class. Fine. Thank you very much. We will have a good year, says Takuwa. You will have a good year. Our Fulbright professors have good years. I take this as a signal to leave. One more thing, he says. I hope you don’t mind if colleagues in American Studies sit in on your lectures. No, of course not. That would be fine. Perhaps it would not interrupt you too much if every ten minutes one of your colleagues summarized your remarks for the students in Japanese. I don’t do that in America. My voice is rather sharp, and I mentally kick myself. This is Japan. You can’t be so blunt. You have to be polite. Takuwa draws back a little. I know, he says. I understand. I know American universities. I went to the University of Birmingham summer session for six weeks. No summaries in English. He giggles and puts his hand over his mouth. Summaries also help your colleagues to improve their English.

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They help students who are not maybe well prepared. We Japanese are not so good in foreign languages. He giggles again. Okay, I say. Summaries are okay. It will give me a chance to rest my voice a little. An hour and a half is a long time to lecture. Very good. Thank you very much. Please remember it is your class. Please honor us by teaching just as you do in the United States. Despite the assurances, I realize that I can’t do that. Caltech is a small school where my classes normally have around ten to twelve students. Rarely do I give a formal lecture, but instead usually lead give-and-take discussions. At Ropponmatsu I will be teaching a class of more than 250, or so they tell me. To introduce Japanese students to US history and culture I have decided to lecture on the lives of important figures, one person a week, beginning with Benjamin Franklin, whose story of leaving home and never returning is the ur-American tale, through Bob Dylan, another wanderer whose life exemplifies current youth culture. Caltech is one of those rare schools with an honor system. Exams cannot be monitored. Most professors have given them up entirely in favor of having students write two or three papers each term. I explain this carefully to the most Americanized of my colleagues, Seiichi Ueno, who has a Master’s Degree from the University of Oklahoma. What does he think? We give exams, he says. Multiple choice. Short answers. They’re easy to grade. You may find our student essays difficult to read. Student English writing not so good. Too many students will get bad grades. I’ll make allowances, I say. But I think papers are best. Tests mean they have to hurry. If they don’t write English well, they will be able to write it better with more time. I’ll give them the whole term for their papers. Takuwa-sensei said he wants the class to be just like in America. I will make it like Caltech. One paper for each student. So desu ka! If there is doubt in Ueno’s tone, I manage not to hear it. The first day of the term it seems as if the whole campus has turned out to hear the new American professor. Students pile into the huge lecture room until all the seats are filled, the aisles crowded, the walls and windows blocked with youngsters lounging against them. Standing at the lectern, I am momentarily overtaken with the fear that strikes any Westerner who has ever faced a large Japanese audience. Before me are row upon row of faces which to my American eyes are terrifyingly blank, expressionless, as if I have been thrust into a remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers with its emotionless hordes. Colleagues from American Studies stare at me from



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the front row, refugees from some zombie flick in identical gray suits. Only Ueno manages a slight smile and a furtive thumbs-up. Takuwa stands beside me and reads a long introduction which nobody bothers to translate, but I do recognize the words Rosenstone-sensei repeated from time to time. When he finishes and steps down, there is a huge round of applause that goes on so long that I begin to feel, well that’s over, now let’s go have a beer. Minna-san, konnichi-wa. My first words, good afternoon everyone, bring a slight stir to the audience, then I outline the nature of the course and its requirements. I speak slowly, clearly, stopping at periods. There will be no tests. They will have to write one paper. They must choose a topic for me to approve. They have all term to work on the paper. All these statements draw a certain rustle from the audience. I amplify, saying I don’t give tests at Caltech and this course, as Takuwa-sensei has suggested, will be taught just like the ones I run in the United States. For three hours a week, you can think of yourselves as sitting in an American classroom. Another round of applause sweeps through the audience. This is fine. A piece of cake. And so it is. Sort of. The biographical stories—Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Lewis and Clark, Abraham Lincoln, Jane Addams, John D. Rockefeller, Ernest Hemingway, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Jack Kerouac, Betty Friedan, Bob Dylan—seem to go over well with those few students who can follow my English. Over the weeks I see how important for their understanding are the photocopied pages of notes I hand out, as are the three translation breaks during each lecture while a summary of what I have said is delivered by a colleague in Japanese. I come to like those breaks. It’s nice to rest my voice, nice to see that when listening to their native language, the students exhibit a bit more animation. Sometimes they even titter at the jokes. Sometimes they titter when nothing I have said seems funny. Are my colleagues riffing? The crowds who cram the first lecture slowly drift away. By the third week, the American professor is no longer a novelty. Halfway through the twelve-week term, the initial 400-plus have dwindled to around 125. Among the regulars are some twenty members of the English Speaking Society. Once a week I spend part of an afternoon in what they call their Club Box, a small room in a weathered wooden building behind the playing fields. Here I give informal talks in response to their questions about American culture: pop music, long hair, drugs, movie stars, food. Other days ESS members say: Let’s speak English conversation, and we just practice talking for an hour. Three of the best female students offer to clean my house once

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a week, and they and the boys who hang around with them become as much my teachers about Japan as students of American life and literature. These youngsters seem not only willing, but happy, to help with shopping and other practical problems, and also to serve as guides and interpreters on jaunts in, around, and out of town, to places like Dazaifu, a famed shrine for the tenth-century courtier and poet, Michizane, now considered the god of calligraphy; or to nearby Yanagawa, with its enormous willows drooping over canals teeming with what turn out to be delicious unagi (eels) which are barbecued in hibachi on the embankment; or to Karatsu, Koishiwara, or Onda, villages known widely for their pottery made by the descendants of Korean artists captured and brought back to Japan in the tenth century. Occasionally we go to an Udon or Soba shop for lunch, or have dinner at one of the few foreign restaurants in town: Rosita for Mexican food, Tsundra for Russian, and McLintock for a reproduction of a Southwest burger palace. A few times I am taken to thunderously loud discos where I show the students what I know of the latest American dances and even try to explain their names. This can be difficult. What exactly is a Funky Chicken? You must be the only professor in all of Japan who dances with his students, they tell me at the end of these evenings. Forty years later a couple of them reiterate the sentiment in emails responding to my questions about their impression of my stay at Kyushu University. It’s a comment I cherished then—and even more today. On occasion there are social events in restaurants with my colleagues, but these tend to be staid and formal. At least at the outset. Once everyone has a cup or two of sake, these normally restrained men become playful, silly, hurling tiny shrimp and other bits of food across the table, laughing aloud, engaging in repartee which makes everyone roar except the one person who can never quite get the joke, even when someone tries to translate it: me. After I voice my dismay at the absence of women at these dinners, our two female faculty members, low-level language instructors, are invited, perhaps dragged, to the next outing. Both sit through dinner looking extremely uncomfortable, hardly raising their eyes from the table and rarely opening their mouths, casting an air of slight gloom over the proceedings. After their early departures the normal fun begins. So much for my desire to extend Women’s Lib to Kyushu. The most serious partying takes place not with colleagues who, after a few cups of sake and a beer, are ready to call it a night, but with two figures who have nothing to do with the academic world. One is Sengai Ato, a Shingon priest, eleventh in a family a line—or so he says—stretching to



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the early Edo period (seventeenth century), who likes to down teacups full of 140 proof shoju while painting exquisite watercolor mandala meant to enlighten the soul. He takes me off to clubs in Nakasu, the city’s pleasure quarter, to drink, dance and, in his case, play grab-ass until the early hours of the morning with elaborately gowned, coiffed, and made-up hostesses. Another is a famous local potter, Kozeru Gen, who will later spend a couple of years in residence at Harvard University. The first time I visit Gen’s studio, he insists we kill off a huge bottle of cold sake, then, both of us tipsy, he leads me on a jog of several kilometers through the city streets. We finish the evening by moseying through a series of Nakasu bars, lingering well past midnight, while giggling young hostesses in cocktail dresses cluster around us, pouring drinks, snuggling close, and repeatedly asking in babyish tones for me to help them learn how to speak English conversation. When Gen suggests that I slip with a friendly one named Yuki into a back room to get better acquainted, I beg off. She looks far too much like one of my students. * Daily life in Japan soon becomes much like daily life anywhere else, full of routine work and socializing, and a little dull from time to time. Since no more than half a dozen Westerners reside in this city of more than a million, my face at first causes people in local grocery stores, restaurants, and other shops to stare, and children to point and yell gaijin gaijin, foreigner, foreigner, as I walk past, but after a few weeks the fuss pretty much stops and I become an unremarkable part of the neighborhood. With only three days of teaching a week, there is plenty of opportunity for travel to other parts of the country. Some of my excursions are to traditional tourist spots: temples, shrines, castles, and gardens that one could have visited in the nineteenth century, but a couple of trips are to sites unimaginable to earlier generations. It is less than three decades since the A-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, and through some combination of duty and responsibility (but to what or to whom?), I feel it important to visit the city whose very name denotes the most extreme terror. The city has been rebuilt and thrives, but the site directly below the explosion has been left empty, desolate, frightening, a huge expanse of rubble punctuated by the remains of a single concrete building out of which juts the metal skeleton of a round tower and takes me back a decade to the church at Belchite in Spain. To go through the museum is a ghastly experience. Every display makes me cringe. Walls bear mural-size photo blow-ups of the flattened city shortly after the blast. Endless rows of shelves hold bottles in which deformed fetuses float in dark

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liquid. Scrunching down into my jacket, I avoid looking at the Japanese who surround me as I force myself to pause before each exhibit. How awful to think these displays speak the name of my country. Never can I find words to describe what I feel there. Nor, I think, then and now, will anyone else. The visit to Hiroshima makes me decide to avoid Nagasaki, which is not far from Fukuoka. But when one of my best students, a young woman named Chiharu, asks me to come for a visit to her home town, I feel some obscure obligation to her—or is it to history? She greets me on the platform at the railroad station and hustles us onto a bus which soon lets us off at the green, hilly Peace Park. Below ground zero sits the huge sculpted figure of a seated man, one hand pointing skyward. Chiharu leads me through the park, translates signs, guides me into an exhibition hall which houses displays much like those in Hiroshima, and are equally difficult for me to view. When we exit the building, she startles me by asking: How did you enjoy the museum? I change the subject by asking about her family. She waves at the high hills behind the park. My parents lived on the other side. Father rushed into town right after the bomb to help with the survivors. He worked for many days. I’ll never get married. Too many deformed babies from the children of people exposed to radiation. I make muffled noises meant to be a sign of sympathy, then a deeply somber mood grips me until, on the way to lunch, we pass a store named Atom Records. I stop, slightly stunned, and sacrilegious thoughts begin to flood my mind. Does the store have advertising campaigns? If so, how about these slogans? Shopping here is a blast! Our records will blow you away! * By mid-November I am in love with Japan. How to explain it? Not usual it is to think about love and the historian. Not writing about love, not making love, but living it and not knowing how to put this primal feeling into words. They didn’t mention love in graduate school, where sublimation is all (though today, more than half a century after my own training, love could be a fit subject for a dissertation). In my early academic years, long before the phrase sexual harassment had even been voiced, let alone written into university codes of conduct, there was a certain amount of love, even intimacy, between students—graduate and undergraduate—and professors. Love does not necessarily mean sex, though in your younger years it can be difficult to separate the two. Thirty-eight when I arrived in Japan, the fires that would make my forties a decade of turmoil and anguish were already beginning to burn. Or was it Japan that lit the fire? What I know was that



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huge feelings of love broke over me one day like Hokusai’s great wave at Kanazawa. In my journal the precise moment is recorded: November 14, 1975. The place is the Fukuoka Kaikan, one of the city’s major concert halls. The occasion: a performance by the local symphony orchestra. As the musicians struggled, labored, and gasped their way through Brahms’ First Symphony, that huge, sprawling, romantic work so alien to the cool, swift, minimalist aesthetic of Japanese art and music, a strong feeling of love suddenly engulfed me. Love not just for the earnest performers, working so diligently at something that seemed beyond their essential spirit; love not just for the impassive faces which filled the concert hall, my classroom, the city, the entire country; but a happy wave of love for the culture, the world, for all my relatives and friends and colleagues here and back home, even for myself. Japan was a sweet, subversive country. The emotion was cumulative, comprised of a host of banal, individual moments that added up to something large, important, overwhelming. How to name it? In my diary the next day I pen words that attempt to explain something of the feeling, if only in a most oblique way: The most stunning visual culture in the world. Pottery, houses, gardens, costumes. A culture with a special sense of time that seemed so unlike that of the West: The lesson: look, there it is now; beauty in the moment. Pottery, kabuki, sumo—slow down, look, and feel. There is no time, time is now, is never. Not sensual. But beauty, pure and simple as a sumi-e stroke. The cause of this eruption of emotion was the great variety of experiences of the last ten weeks, some of which spoke of what nineteenth-century travelers always called Old Japan. A dinner of chanko nabe, a huge stew of pork, chicken, and vegetables, prepared by three enormous and bashful sumo wrestlers in the kitchen of a restaurant across the street from the campus, with me as the only guest. A trip to Hagi on the Sea of Japan in nearby Yamaguchi Prefecture, where the beauty of the local pottery, the wabi and sabi (those difficult-to-translate words, so central to the Japanese aesthetic, that suggest transience, imperfection, incompletion) of its subtle shapes and glazes make me want to buy, possess, devour them all, along with the gardens of the potter’s workshops, the stones of the paths that lead to them, the November trees going red and yellow, the minimalism of the displays in the tatami showrooms, somehow ageless, timeless, eternal. A second evening at kabuki, this time in Fukuoka, where the men playing the roles of women wear kimono heartbreaking in the splendor of their design. Fragile, delicate, the spirit of Yin. Falling in love with hands, folding clothes,

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sewing, reaching out to touch. Falling in love with a small white foot, appearing under a gorgeous kimono. This is Japan, the color and dancing hands, the garden stones, pottery earth pink glazes, stark samurai living rooms, men more delicate than any woman, all this somehow shared along with the butchered Brahms. * The day I learned that I was really working in a Japanese organization was the day all my colleagues stopped talking to me. It began about 10:30 a.m. That was when I always made my first trip of the day to the departmental office for a cup of green tea. At that time the leaves were still fresh. You filled up your small cup from the hot water pot on the table at the side of the office, poured the water into the small, black teapot which rested on an imitation lacquer tray, swirled it around for a few seconds, and then poured the liquid into your cup. When you finished, you poured more hot water, swirled it around to clean the cup, then emptied it into the office sink, and replaced the cup in the rack above the table. Members of the faculty met several times a day over cups of tea, chatting a few moments about the students, the weather, the progress of the current sumo tournament, anything to pass the time before returning to their offices to prepare lectures, grade papers, or snooze. This morning I am the first to enter, saying hello to Kobayashi-san, the secretary sitting at her desk under the window. As I drink a first cup, Professor Ohara comes into the office, takes two steps towards me, stops, and as I speak the ritual Ohayo gozaimasu, Ohara-sensei, turns on his heel in a military about face, and goes out the door without saying a word. Before I can puzzle out that behavior, Professor Hamamatsu walks in and out so quickly it seems as if the office has a revolving door. A moment later in stalks Takuwa-sensei, the only faculty member at the university with a beard, short, white, Freud-like. Gruff-looking, Takuwa always gives the cheeriest of greetings, but this time the elderly man looks right through me, speaks a few words with Miss Kobayashi, pulls some papers out of the mail box, and walks out the door. Do siteru? I say to Kobayashi-san. What’s going on? Hai, she shouts, smiling sheepishly. Yes. That is her answer for just about everything and my Japanese is not good enough to make the question more specific. Where else in the world, I wonder, would the secretary of an English Department have only three words of English? Hello. Goodbye. Yes. As I walk down the hall, Professor Imai sidles past without a glance in my direction. That was nothing unusual. An economist who specializes in



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US industry, and a faculty member of the American Studies program in which I am teaching, Imai passes me several times a day without making eye contact. The two of us have never spoken. Never been formally introduced. At faculty dinners, Imai always manages to sit at the far end of the table and never looks toward me. It was a long time before anyone told me that the elderly professor did not speak any English. This might be common enough among Japanese academics, but is apparently unseemly for a professor of American Studies. By not having to meet me, by not being put in a position where he would be expected to speak English, Imai apparently avoided any feeling of shame. Back at my desk, I suddenly understand. It’s the test I refused to give. I should have realized there would be a problem with a final No in a culture where one never said No. By putting the word in writing, by sending it in a letter to the chair, I have no doubt compounded the offense. Takuwa has received the letter. By now everyone else must know what message it contained. It all went back to that first meeting when I was told to teach the class exactly as I would teach it back home. And even though I agreed to modifications (written notes for lectures, oral summaries), I naively believed the rest of the class was mine. So I am surprised at the beginning of January, three weeks before final exams, when Takuwa-sensei comes to my office and, after the normal ritual greetings and small conversation (How are your classes going? Are the students okay?), he asks for the questions for the final exam. Finals, he explains, have to be photocopied by the secretary on a particular departmental form, and because there are so many classes, it’s best to get the questions to her a couple of weeks beforehand. Perhaps you have forgotten, I answer. I’m not giving a final exam. Just a take-home paper. Some students have been working on it already. So desu ka!, says Takuwa, who goes away and returns a week later with the same question, leading to the same conversation. Well, he’s a department chair and has a lot on his mind, I think after he leaves my office. He can’t be expected to remember all the details of what everyone is doing. He returns the following week and we start to have the same conversation once again, only this time I detect a touch of uncharacteristic urgency in Takuwa’s voice. He really needs the questions for my final now. Time is drawing short. The secretary is getting busy. There are deadlines to meet. But Takuwa-sensei, I respond, raising my voice and sounding impatient. We had this conversation last week and the week before that. This is the third time you have asked me. Don’t you remember? I am not giving a final, only a

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term paper. We discussed this at the beginning of the course. You said teach as I do in America. I don’t give finals in America. I give papers. Yes, he says. I remember. But we Japanese give finals. I need your questions now. You can have a paper too if you like. I can’t give a final. I promised the students. You heard me at the first class. I said no final. Just a paper. I can’t go back on my word. In Japan we give final exams. I don’t. Takuwa’s normally bland manner vanishes. He screws up his face, looks directly into my eyes and says in a commanding voice: I must have those questions. I have no questions. I will have no final. I’m sorry. He looks at me for a long moment, as if seeing a creature risen from some dark and unfathomable swamp, then stands up and leaves, quietly closing the door behind him. What to do? I know I have been offensive. I know that if I were Japanese I would have simply given him the questions. But I am not Japanese. A fact which, after a few days of being put into isolation by my colleagues, leads me to phone the Fulbright office in Tokyo, explain the situation to a program officer, and ask for advice. Stick to your guns, the officer says. We’re paying your salary and you are teaching American Studies. You’re teaching them about the USA. Don’t give in to their antiquated ways. Our aim is to improve their schools. Make them more like ours! We’re behind you 1,000 percent! In these words I cannot fail to hear the imperialist ideology that we struggled against for so many years as part of anti-Vietnam War activities. They also, I am horrified to realize, give voice to some of my own hardly submerged beliefs: Let’s teach them how to be modern. Maybe, I think with some desperation, Takuwa doesn’t understand my reasoning. Maybe something is lost in translation. In an attempt to clear the air, I write a letter to explain the whole situation, its history, its morality, the notion of a verbal contract, for such is what I firmly believe I have with the students. Surely he understands that one does not go back on one’s word. Even in Japan, education must be a matter of trust. The day after I place the letter in Takuwa’s office mailbox is the day everyone stops speaking to me. Alone in my office, I wonder how to extricate myself from this situation honorably. Surely they can’t keep me in isolation. I have six more months in Japan. What about Ueno? He’s the most Americanized. Maybe he can help.



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I stride out of the office and race up the stairs two at a time, knock on the door of Ueno’s office, and then, as I often do, throw it open. My colleague looks up from his desk, startled, the same expression on his face that was on Takuwa’s during our last talk. Seiichi, I say, consciously using his first name. Do you know what’s going on? Ueno’s face goes blank as he stands up, brushes by me and rushes through the door without so much as a hello. I trail him down the hall to the men’s restroom and watch him go into a cubicle. Standing outside the door, I say Seiichi, Ueno-san, my friend a couple of times. No response. I linger a bit, then leave. This cannot be happening. *

Dear Sensei Ogenki desu ka? Do you remember that much Japanese? After all these years you now want to write about Japan? Again? And you want your old students to help? To add stuff about your Japan. My Japan. I want to say our Japan but it was never that, was it? How long ago it seems. More than a lifetime. You are still my sensei even though we never see each other since I went off to University of Wisconsin. So I guess I can write though I don’t know what to say. And not online but in a letter. I suppose it is okay, but who writes letters any more? Do you know I never go home to Japan. My parents are dead many years ago and here is my home and husband now in the good old USA. What is the point anyway? No brothers or sisters and you may know I never much like the rest of my family. Uncles, aunts, cousins, they are too traditional. That is why I like you from the first I suppose. You were not traditional. You were not Japan. Definitely. You were America with your green corduroy suit and that other bright blue suit in nylon or rayon and your messy hair sticking out all over the place and that moustache. Huge moustache. Only Yakuza and young radicals and crazy people have moustache in those days. I wonder how it is now. Things change even in Japan. People change. I change. You too? I hope so. You always need a change and you are always a sensei even when we are in your very old house in Arae Yottskaddo. You were the only person I know proud of living in an old house. How funny it was, your house. We Japanese all live in new ones or want to. And you like the old, the traditional, or so you say. You always ask

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things and say things and touch things you are not allowed. Not in public place anyway. It was sometimes embarrassing with you in restaurant. Many times I must apologize to the waiter about the Americajin. The way he acts and says. I apologize. I say, foreigners are more different than you can know. Do you know? You know a lot about Japan. Too much I sometimes think. You ask us many questions and we students don’t know answers because we don’t think about Buddhism and Shinto and all that old stuff. We just do them. We care more about rock and roll and what’s happening today. You read more Japanese history and literature than us. Like The Tale of Genji. We learn it is the most important book even if written by a woman. The first novel in the world, they tell us. But we don’t read the whole thing like you. We read maybe chapter or two in high school. We don’t really care much about all that stuff, about women with long long black hair and white white faces. It is an American Studies class but you spend part of the time telling us about our history. I remember you very much like Takamori Saigo. You really like him because he fought against the Meiji government. The last holdout. He was a rebel, that’s what you liked. I remember you compare him to Zapata, from the Mexico revolution, who got right up out of the president’s seat and went back to his people on the land. Saigo commits suicide when all is lost on the battlefield. No more men like that, you say. Men who do what they say and even if you think it is wrong, at least they do it. That’s something. You ask us lots of questions and if answers don’t come right away you answer them yourself. You say we Japanese are too hazokashi. You like using that word. It means bashful, a word I never heard an American speak in all the years I live here, but it’s right there in some old novels. Yours was the only history class I didn’t sleep through but it wasn’t the subject matter. Is that what you are thinking? Today I sleep through the History Channel. Ha! Ha!! My husband’s favorite. It puts me to sleep. All the programs about the war. About victory at sea, victory on land, American victory everywhere except not so much lately, ne? Since I live in America the victories stop even if they still call them victories. Vietnam. Iraq. Afghanistan? The biggest best victory is really over Japan, right? What we Japanese call the Great Pacific War. You think us very sneaky people. They BOMBED PEARL HARBOR!!! How many times do I hear that over the years? Not from you but from everyone else and on TV. How often do I want to say they is me and I don’t bomb.



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Are you going to write about us? Maybe not so good idea. What does it mean anyway? I remember the first day Saturday morning, 9 a.m. You are very tall next to Omori-sensei wearing your bright green suit next to his gray one up by the blackboard in front of the classroom. He waves me up and he introduces us. He says to you this is Kawakami Reiko-san, she is your assistant. She works on master’s degree in American literature. She will help you grade papers and keep track of students if they attend. Maybe she will ask you help with questions about American literature and poetry. You not mind, I hope. She is very good student with very good future. Japanese sensei never look me in the eye like you. Japanese sensei bow, not reach out and take my hand and shake it. You tell me How nice to meet you, you need an assistant in this beautiful country. You say you will be happy to help me with literature and poetry. You ask me who I am reading now? I don’t answer right away. I am lost in your grey eyes. You don’t know how strange it is to look into light eyes, to look into eyes at all. Oni and other devils have eyes like that. Your eyes are personal and strong at the same time as they look through me. I say Richard Wilbur. He is very difficult. Yes, you say, he is. I don’t understand him very well either. Maybe we can work on him together. I am very surprised. Japanese teachers do not say anything like that. They don’t joke with students or offer help. They don’t wear bright green suits. But maybe you are not joking. I like what you say and wonder who is this man? I am twenty years old. I dream of the future men. The right one will come along some day. Or maybe more than one. You can’t imagine that when you are young. You can’t not imagine it at our age. You are seventeen years older than me, but maybe in a way you are younger too. Not so caught up by so many rules, not rules at all except the ones you make up. You cannot imagine what we Japanese go through. The war. The time after the war. The way everyone says we Japanese must work to raise our country in the eyes of the world to where it belongs for our ancestors and our descendants. I do not believe such words then or I would not be me sitting in my breakfast room and writing to you forty years later. Maybe to someone else? Life is very strange, isn’t it? I bet you are going to write about us. I know you will write about us. It is shame to expose things in public. You Americans have no shame, not like we Japanese. You will tell how it begins in the coffee shop after class one Saturday, didn’t it? You said it was about Richard Wilbur but it wasn’t. Okay we did a

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poem or two. You helped figure them out but not that much but it didn’t matter. It was rainy that day, chilly too. In Nishijin, remember, upstairs to the warm and friendly coffee shop. Lots of students but I don’t think you notice. You ask about me, instead. My life, my family, my goals. Girls in Japan don’t have goals then. Maybe now. We have one goal. We are to get married to a man with good job. Saruriman. My mother did that. My parents are very unhappy. My father shouts and throws things sometimes. My goal is to get away. You are part of that but I don’t know it then. Do you? I remember a day struggling in the snow storm going up the road to your house. We pass by the old tofu factory, the saggy thatch roof that you like so much. You have many electric heaters, more heaters than anyone I know. It is warm inside. We sit on the couch and drink tea and you put out your hand and touch my face and I can remember your hand is trembling. I hope you will me touch more but you pull away and ask me a very funny question but I don’t laugh. You ask if I am virgin. I say yes, of course, but I am not telling the truth. Don’t you know? I am not virgin since fourteen, like most girls I know. It is not such a big thing in Japan as long as no one finds out. No older people or parents. I have boyfriend. We have sex. You know him. Hiroshi. He is in class, a good student you say. I don’t pay attention to him when you are around. Now you smile and say something like you cannot touch me. The man is responsible. I think you look relieved when you say this but I am not sure. Were you? Over the months we still go to coffee sometime, and we talk about poetry but it is not the same. We talk about Japan too a lot. You ask questions as if it is research project. The thing you worry about most that year is the problem you have with the head sensei at Kyushu University. The problem of not giving final exam. You confide in me about what you should do. I tell you to forget your promise to students and give a final. Why create trouble? I quote the oldest of our Japanese sayings, the nail which sticks out gets knocked down. You tell me in America the nail is supposed to stick out. That’s how you get somewhere. So you don’t compromise and worry for weeks but the problem gets solved anyway. The sensei thinks that you will tell the embassy no more Fulbrights for Fukuoka, they give bad exams. When that gets straightened out by someone at the embassy, he starts to talk to you again. Everyone does. Not that they have much to say. You tell me that too. My colleagues are



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very boring, you tell me. Not like you. I mean me. I was happy you do not find me boring. How many months later do I get tired of waiting? I want to let you know. It is spring because we are outdoors at the roof beer garden of a department store in Tenjin when I finally tell you. We are nibbling on whale with our beers but I don’t tell you whale until after you have tasted it. I know you will be like all Americans and say you shouldn’t eat whale, they are smart as humans and sing beautiful songs to each other and Japan should stop killing them. But you like the taste and then I tell you and then you are upset a bit or maybe confused and that’s when I take the moment to say I am not any longer and you say any longer? and I can’t look at you while I say I am not what I was in your house that snowy day any more. The silence is very long. It is the first time you have no words, so I say something like you are not responsible for me any more. I went with my boyfriend. You understand slowly but you understand. Okay. This is new for you, isn’t it? A surprise to know what a Japanese girl can do if she wants something. I guess it’s okay when you are almost sixty and married and have two children but I don’t want to write about them or my life now. You have got me thinking about your little house with the bamboo all around and our sweet days. Not so many of them but very sweet. For a long time I miss them but now they are only a memory. I am at the station to wave goodbye to your train a few weeks later along with so many other students including my boyfriend. It’s not the same with him any more either. After you I know I must get out of Fukuoka. Out of Japan. I am a silly girl. I think it will be the same with us when I get to America for school even if Wisconsin is far from California. But it’s not of course. There are other people and other women and other lives, I suppose, and the years count for more there, don’t they? The years count when you are at home. Shigata ganai wa ne. Remember that phrase. It can’t be helped. None of it. Not by us or anyone else. Wherever love goes to live afterwards, I still love you. I won’t ask if you feel the same but I would like to. I guess it is something I can go on wondering about. There is always something to wonder about, isn’t there? Always R

*

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Coming home was a shock. I knew there would be some sort of readjustment period, but I did not expect to feel so ill at ease in Los Angeles, so uncomfortable with family, friends, colleagues, and students, so annoyed at the generally bright, garish, rude, and bumptious quality of American life. It was as if during the year in Japan my eyes, ears, and sensibility had changed, leaving my home town feeling strangely alien. In the weeks and months after my return, I found myself seeking out noodle shops and sushi bars all over town, haunting the stores that sell ceramics, toys, futons, and manga in Little Tokyo, regularly attending events at the Japanese American Cultural Center: kabuki, sumo wrestling, a symphony orchestra from Tokyo, popular singers and dancers whose stereotyped moves and banal songs had always caused me to turn off the TV in Fukuoka. Odd behavior, to be sure, but there is a simple way of describing it: love. I was in love. It took me a long time to fully realize this, and when I did it led directly to the question: in love with what exactly? A country, a culture, an aesthetic, a way of life that was certainly not me? It was not just a woman, though my feelings temporarily became focused on one. But she was less a cause than a symbol of my state of mind, of so much that wasn’t and never could be me. When this mood persisted for months, I was moved to explore what was happening, and I did so in the manner absorbed from both my professional and personal life—as a historian whose normal way to understand one’s own reality is to investigate what happened to others who have lived through similar experiences. So I began by delving into the small library of accounts written over the last hundred years by Western sojourners in Japan. Most interesting were those produced by the first wave of visitors when, after three centuries of isolation, the country, prodded by the United States, opened up to the outside world and the government of the new Meiji emperor began to pay high salaries to experts from the West—engineers, financiers, doctors, scientists, agronomists, legal experts, businessmen—to introduce the practices and techniques of the modern world. The theme of the vast majority of these works was what one would expect from good Victorians, both men and women (though books by the latter are few): how we are helping these backward people to become modern by teaching them our ways. Almost every such account admits that the Japanese are charming and polite, that they possess a unique and powerful culture, practice many of the virtues familiar at home (hard work, thrift, reverence for parents), and are in many ways more civilized than you might expect from people who are not Christian. Yet the land, all agree, is marred by backwardness and immorality: slavery, prostitution, mixed bathing of



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the two sexes, the multiple gods of two religions. Occasionally a Westerner would voice mild doubts about the changes he or she was helping to bring to the country, changes that well might alter some of the appealing aspects of traditional Japan—the manners, the hospitality, the elegant aesthetic qualities which pervaded the culture, from the design of tools to the packaging of candies, from the peaceful gardens in rock, stone, and moss, to the bold and striking images one saw everywhere, on kites, kimono, screens in shrines, from the charming tiny kokeshi dolls to the great bronze Buddhas that adorn vast temple complexes. In the contradictions that lurk between pride in helping the process of modernization (not yet called that) and fear of destroying the country’s unique qualities and charm, I found a compelling theme, one which certainly contains a personal element. What, if anything, does one learn living in Japan? What do their cultural practices and forms point to which might be missing in America, or the West? This harks back to the question I posed before leaving home: what can one learn on the journey east? Now it becomes more specific: what did these sojourners learn?—a question fueled, no doubt, by a compelling personal interest: what did I learn? Nothing you could point to on a macro level; nothing like what Japan had to absorb to become an industrialized country. Whatever I learned was far subtler, something having to do with the spirit or vision, something hardly noticeable because we historians don’t have a language to define or describe it, but for someone who has lived it, definitely there. Now how do you make a book out of that? For all the writing by and about sojourners in Japan, from first-hand travel accounts to academic studies, this aspect of the encounter between cultures had never been explored. Unlike the huge literature on my previous topics—the Spanish Civil War, radicalism and bohemia, the Russian Revolution—there was no tradition of works addressing this theme, no academic debates, no historical questions which (supposedly) needed to be answered by new research or interpretations. There was nothing to set the stage, nothing to push against, no way of situating my argument. And though I did not yet exactly realize it, that is precisely how historians normally proceed—by adding to, arguing with, and/or overturning the interpretations of their predecessors. But what if there are no prior interpretations? In a sense you have a clear field, but how and where to begin? Research does not make a book. Nor does inventing a theme, however unusual or clever the author may think it to be. The past only becomes history when it is put into a story. But what sort of story? The ideal of the

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history profession is one that strives towards objectivity, as if the very best history would not be written by a human being but by some emotionless creature—perhaps a computer?—who could put aside all beliefs and values, likes and dislikes, and render an unvarnished truth. Virtually all works of history produced in the last century are written with this impossible ideal in mind; they are third-person narratives in which the author is nowhere to be seen, his or her personal voice erased, save perhaps in the introduction and acknowledgments. But what if the experiences about which the historian writes overlap with or parallel his own? What if my Fulbright year was shaping how I saw, interpreted, and structured the past? Wouldn’t a truthful account necessarily include that notion as part of the history it tells? It was clear to me early on in the period of research that a collective history of Westerners or Americans in nineteenth-century Japan would suit neither my theme nor inclinations. By then I had come to realize that at heart my interests lie with those micro-units of history: individuals. The changes I aimed to describe took place at a personal level and demanded the intimate form of biography. For more than a year I worried over the process of winnowing down the field from hundreds of potential subjects to a few figures, eventually choosing three men—a crypto-missionary, a scientist, and a writer—to stand in for encounter of East and West. That they all had large collections of papers in research libraries was an important factor. These were men who you could get to know well in their own words. Or so I thought, not yet realizing that words can conceal as much as they reveal about the past, not yet knowing that nineteenth-century men were not prone to share self-reflections (if they had them) with their audience. The earliest of the three to arrive was William Eliot Griffis, a Rutgers graduate who landed in Yokohama in 1871 under contract to take a position as a chemistry teacher; though he knew it was unlawful to preach Christian doctrine here, he told friends before leaving home that he would teach Japanese students not only science, but also the gospel. Six years later the distinctly non-religious Edward Sylvester Morse, a natural scientist with a passion for marine life, landed in Japan with the aim of searching for rare, tiny shelled creatures called brachiopods, rumored to be plentiful in local waters. The third of my subjects, Lafcadio Hearn, a Greek-born writer who had worked as a journalist in both Cincinnati and New Orleans, and had written a popular book about his two years of residence in Martinique, stepped ashore in 1890, seeking fresh subjects for his pen. All three eventually ended up in Tokyo, but they earned their credentials in other parts of the country: Griffis as a teacher in the still feudal but



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progressive domain of Fukui, ruled by a daimyo (lord) appointed by the Emperor; Morse as a marine biologist with a laboratory on the pilgrimage island of Enoshima, sacred to Benten, goddess of literature, music, and luck; Hearn, first in the remote town of Matsue on the Sea of Japan side of the country, then in Kumamoto in the far west of Kyushu. Griffis and Morse were in the country for about three years; Hearn, who married a native woman and raised a family of five children, remained for fifteen years until his death. All had careers under way in the US before leaving for Asia. But Japan became central to their subsequent lives and reputations. All were prolific writers who produced newspaper and magazine articles and published popular books about this little-known society. The two who returned home also became popular on the extensive public lecture circuit. You might want to call them Japanologists long before the term is coined. After finishing research in their collections of papers (Rutgers for Griffis, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Peabody Museum in Salem for Morse, the University of Virginia for Hearn, and the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress for all three), I began the process of writing and immediately learned that it is easier to foresee a new way of doing history than to actually create one. Training, habit, fear of breaking the rules, the substantial success of Romantic Revolutionary—whatever the reason, I worked for more than a year in much the same style as I used for John Reed: third person, past tense, omniscient narrator, the text flavored to some extent by my usual non-academic tendencies to dramatize situations and indulge in emotive language. Yet this form of narrative didn’t let me feel close enough to the three men; didn’t allow me to evoke the tiny incidents, moments, visions, daily sights, sounds, smells, and encounters that helped to alter their consciousness. Just as bad, the words, sentences, and paragraphs, all 180 pages of them, felt stiff, awkward, left over from another project, wholly unable to convey the sense and feeling of Japanese life and culture which I imbibed during my own sojourn and now wanted to express. What to do? Try to write the past in a fresh way by avoiding the familiar. Draw on my knowledge of narrative forms other than the one endorsed by academia. Experiment by utilizing some of the techniques of contemporary fiction I had encountered in authors such as Mario Vargas Llosa, Milan Kundera, and Gabriel García Márquez. And while you’re at it, make another trip to Japan to refresh the experience of that culture. Of course, the idea of such a trip was embedded in the project from the outset. My hope was that the journey would let me touch more closely the world in which Griffis,

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Morse, and Hearn lived, remind me of my own year there, and somehow help to suggest a different way of rendering their lives in a language and form that would express the feelings of meeting, loving, hating, and coming to grips with a culture that could seem at once so attractive, so alien, so ineffable. Was it my experience I wished to relate or theirs? Much later I would realize it was impossible to separate the two. * Eight years after the end my Fulbright, at the beginning of April 1983, I return to Japan for ten weeks in an effort to connect to the world of the nineteenth century, return in an attempt to share experiences and feelings buried in the past—theirs and my own. How to do it? Rush about the country seeking the places where they lived and worked? Visit sites important to the nation’s history while trying to imagine away the skyscrapers, bullet trains, traffic jams, store windows full of the latest television sets, stereo equipment, transistor radios, the whole terrifying contemporaneity of this country in which gadgetry was in the process of being raised to an art form? Hints of the past do remain, even in Tokyo. Away from the huge buildings of the business districts—Maranouchi, Ginza, and Shinjuku—the city can seem like a sprawling village, everything scaled down and packed together, alleys too narrow for cars, tiny Shinto shrines tucked between buildings, mysterious black kanji dancing on banners hanging from rooftops, noren (short curtains) spelling out the name of the establishment swaying over sliding doors to noodle shops. It is sakura (cherry blossom) season, and the parks along the moat of the Emperor’s huge compound are filled with office workers, ties loosened, jackets abandoned, sitting on tatami mats beneath dazzling white trees, drinking cold sake, munching on dried squid, seaweed, raw fish from bento boxes, and raising their voices in song, until the rains come and they must seek shelter. It is a season of strikes against the government, where protesters and police dance around each other far more gracefully than in the anti-war demonstrations we held during Vietnam days. My first research jaunt begins with a half-hour train ride to Yokohama, where all of us, my subjects and I, first set foot on Japanese soil. Created in the 1860s as a special port meant both to welcome and isolate foreigners— merchants, missionaries, and that new species called globe-trotters—the city’s original walls and guard posts aimed to keep strangers from contaminating natives with their outlandish beliefs and weird habits. In 1982 it seems a typical drab modern city, with no especially attractive features. Long gone



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are the structures of the nineteenth century: the custom house shed where visitors landed, the Western-style banks, the hotels and rooming houses, the offices of trading companies built along a stone waterfront road named the Bund, the three churches—Catholic, Dutch Reform, Methodist—the handsome racetrack built by the British, the walled pleasure quarter of tea houses with their dancing girls and prostitutes. Due to American bombing and the necessary reconstruction of the post-war years, all have been buried beneath the tons of concrete used to construct new streets and buildings. One old section which does remain, Motomachi, a narrow slice of tiny wooden structures originally built along a stream to house laborers who once worked for foreigners, is now lined with high-end stores: Gucci, Armani, Yves St. Laurent. On the Bluff (always capitalized by its residents) above the town, overlooking what American visitors used to call Mississippi Bay, you can still find a few Victorian mansions, along with a single wooden church built by those who made fortunes here. A plaque on its gate reads: Destroyed by bombs in 1945. Rebuilt for God in 1948. South of Yokohama lies the sacred island of Enoshima, an hour by train from Tokyo (eight hours by rickshaw in Morse’s day), connected to the mainland by a thin sandy spit, as jam-packed with tourists today as it was a century earlier when Morse arrived there. Noisy, festive pilgrims sporting colorful headbands and white jackets struggle up narrow stone streets squeezed between restaurants, ryokan, and souvenir stores. Touts grab at you as they shout the wares and pleasures of their establishments. At the top of the hill you reach the surprisingly small and rather worn (an opinion I share with Morse) sacred statue of Benten, in which the good Victorian anti-religionist showed virtually no interest. Morse’s days in Enoshima were devoted to serious scientific work: dredging in the bay for mollusks and other marine creatures; sorting, studying them through a microscope, and classifying them in a small building he called a marine laboratory. But even with a former student as my translator, I can find nobody here who knows his name, nor anything of his scientific discoveries, nor where the building was located, nor which inn served as his home for three months. Kyoto, capital of the nation for a thousand years, was (oddly it seems) not of particular importance for any of my subjects. But thanks to art historian Langdon Warner, whose advice to the American Air Force that it was not a military target and should not be bombed was taken seriously, the city has to remain the prime destination for anyone interested in tasting, savoring, and sinking into traditional Japanese culture. The problem for the researcher here is that the city is an embarrassment of riches. No matter

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how many gardens, temples, shrines, museums, and palaces I visit each and every day, more masterpieces of design and architecture await, and then still more. Two weeks of ferocious touring and, with a certain amount of relief, I manage to escape, overloaded with visions of Old Japan that connect obliquely to my subjects. Fukui, where Griffis taught chemistry every weekday and preached the gospel surreptitiously in his home on Sundays, is my next destination. The journey from Kyoto in April 1982 takes half a day on a rather rickety and uncomfortable local train. Following a similar route, it took Griffis, surrounded by an honor guard of twelve samurai, a week to cover the same ground on horseback in March 1871. His entourage stopped at the wooden barrier gates that marked the borders between different fiefdoms, and each time officials in formal kimono bustled forth to make welcoming speeches while crowds of commoners touched their heads to the ground. At Fukui, the governor and his aides rode out to meet the new teacher and accompanied him back to the huge traditional mansion in which he would live until a suitable Western house could be built. My own arrival is much more modest. At an aged railroad station I am greeted by a gray-suited Professor Yamashita, the local Griffis expert, who, after a suitable amount of bowing on the platform, rushes me off to the city museum. From the cab, I can see that the beautiful wooden mansions along Asawagaya river that Griffis describes in loving detail have been replaced by the featureless concrete buildings of the typical Japanese city. The museum itself is largely devoted to what by now I call the usual suspects: collections of samurai armor, swords, and pikes; screen paintings; carved wooden sculptures of angry-faced temple guardians; colorful prints of actors and geisha; maps that are impossible to decipher; and the ironwork kettles and various items of pottery meant for tea ceremony. The displays devoted to Griffis—blow-ups of photos, letters in glass cases, scraps of clothing, utensils of American origin—tell me little I don’t already know. What brings me closest to the past are two three-foot-tall wooden dissection models, male and female, made in France and already in the Fukui school when the young American arrived in 1871. These he used to illustrate human anatomy while teaching informal classes in physiology to his ever-curious students. When, after checking around to make sure no guards are watching, I put my hand out to touch each one, it is as if I am having momentary contact with the man himself. Griffis was a sensible Victorian who liked to take long walks—good for the health!—along the river. I ask Yamashita to join me in a similar stroll,



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but the idea makes him nervous. I understand why. In pre-modern times, Japanese did not take walks for pleasure, and, as I learned in Fukuoka, modernity has not altered that attitude. Well-marked hiking courses may be laid out in country parks and along the seashore, but strolling in a city without a specific destination is an alien concept. When Yamashita hesitates, I explain the action in terms of research. Let’s see if we can feel like we are Griffis. With obvious reluctance, he agrees, but once we begin to stroll along the stone embankment, he keeps looking around anxiously, as if we are engaged in some sort of forbidden act. After two hundred yards he asks if we haven’t already gone far enough. Another two hundred and he comes to a full stop. Walking okay, he says, don’t you think? We feel like Griffis now. Maybe we go for coffee, okay? *

Temptation—that’s the title of a story that has been building to a climax all year long. The word occurs only in letters to Maggie, not often, but always laden with so much emotion as to suggest something more felt than named. Worried over falling into the slime or yielding to human weaknesses never cease. Nor does the concurrent feeling, I am very busy here. I must be. Little doubt as to the nature of this temptation. Expressions of homesickness … are linked to laments that he lacks female society … Perhaps we should not be surprised—since the first moments in Japan, Griffis has been obsessed with native females. Recurrent images of the beauty and charms of the invariably dark-eyes moosmies—encountered at teahouses, restaurants, and rural inns, at picnics and temples, in city streets and remote hamlets—fill letters, the journal, and published articles. Perhaps such comments are a safety valve. To name the object is somehow to control it, to exorcise its power. Not that he entertains such ideas. His is a simpler mentality. Work and denial, surrounding oneself with people, teaching and more teaching, gardening, swimming, horseback riding, reading, writing—these are the ways to handle improper thoughts, unwanted desires, unnameable longings. For a long time it works; by God, it works. But you cannot expect it to go on working, not if you know Japan. Not if you know the lure of summer, those warm nights along the river, stars powdering the skies above the hills, the soft air full of nameless invitations,

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subtle hints of pleasure. August is a season of celebration, a sensuous and happy time of continual matsuri (festivals). The banks of the Asawa and the bridges over it are lined with booths, strung with red lanterns; here you buy food and drink—sugar water, watermelon, candied seaweed, rice jelly, broiled eel, sake. The night streets are thronged with strollers, dancers, musicians, itinerant comedians, story-tellers, jugglers, buffoons, geisha … To wander among them, to eat, drink, and share the feelings of festivity … is not enough. That spectacle out there is simply too tempting … A resolve to keep busy is difficult to fulfill on the … days when the temperature hovers around 100 degrees and the humidity is oppressive. But Griffis does his best to maintain discipline: he visits the military school; studies facilities at the local hospital; measures the height of the castle walls and towers … spends time at the lab planning experiments and demonstrations; tutors several students; passes hours at his desk pushing forward on a chemistry text. But it is vacation after all, and the phrase dolce far niente enters the journal to describe naps, walks, rides, swims, strolls with the evening crowds. Something in all this does not agree with him. He falls ill, begins to run a fever. Massages, quinine, going to bed early—nothing seems to help. At night he sleeps poorly. We may blame the heat, or the free time, or perhaps see it as a reaction to a decision announced in a letter to his sister on the seventeenth: “I must take on a new servant … a girl of about 17, who will wait on the table, and take care of my room specially.” The rest of the story is told in two diary entries and two letters. August 28. “Rose at 6. Breakfasted and waited on by my new servant.” September 4, to Maggie: “Nor can any, but they who suffer the fearful temptations of loneliness know how strong the feeling is, to abandon all true principle, and live the Epicurean life.” September 7, diary: “Consulted with Iwabouchi … relative to sending away the _____.” Two words fill the space, one on top of the other. He has first written “temptation,” then covered it over with “servant.” A full explanation two days later to Maggie: “In my own household I have made another change. The young girl of eighteen, whom I took to wait specially upon me, proved to be very faithful, diligent, and pleasant in every way, anticipated my every want, and made my house as comfortable as a home. I liked her very much. All of which to a sometimes weary and home-sick young man must necessarily be a strong temptation in his lonely hours. I found after two weeks,



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that she made too much comfort for me, and was too attractive herself … I sent her away before temptation turned into sin.” There it is, the whole story. Or at least all the available evidence. We are at the mercy of a single firsthand report from a witness who can hardly be neutral, one who has already bent evidence on similar sensitive issues—drinking, Sunday parties, prostitution. How we wish for more … those lost, secret moments between two human beings when emotion suddenly flows into unsuspected channels. What we want are pictures of them together, the pleasure he begins to feel as she moves in silken grace about his room, the arousal as she bends her head over a tea set and fills his cup, the trembling of his hand as it begins to reach towards the forbidden … At the most crucial of moments we are locked outside, prevented from knowing more than our source chooses to tell. No doubt our prurience is disappointed, our modern sense that sexuality may be the key to some long-lost door of understanding is frustrated. We are left only with this: one young American named Griffis experienced temptation and succumbed to it or did not … To act or not to act; either way, he ran up against the boundaries of who he was, learned that the world is more complicated, difficult, and serious than he once believed. Before this moment Griffis knew sin as something that could happen to others. Now he understands that it is possible to become one of those others himself. Mirror in the Shrine, pp. 110–13

* If you are looking for Old Japan in the 1980s or even today, Matsue is the place. Brooding over the modern city on the top of a steep hill is a blackwalled castle, four hundred years old, one of the few in the land never destroyed over the centuries by war, earthquake, or fire. A hundred meters below lies a picture-perfect, willow-draped, stone-lined moat facing a quiet street of one-story traditional samurai homes in unpainted wood with heavy, blue-tiled roofs. The house which belonged to Hearn during his first year of teaching has been kept as a shrine, its interior cleared of the Western furniture, the chairs, tables, and desks which the 40-year-old American found necessary to use. I sit on the tatami of his small study, gazing out at a garden of sand, rocks, low bushes, and a single stone Buddha, waiting for

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the voices of the past to whisper their secrets to me. But they don’t speak here, nor in the Hearn museum next door, where you can see his eyeglasses, pipe, and winter underwear, nor during the climb of the six flights of smoothly worn steps inside the castle for a view of Lake Shinji, shining in the distance, nor at nearby Gesshoji Temple, where next to a five-foot-tall stone statue of a turtle lie the longtime rulers of Matsue, buried beneath a row of lanterns in an empty graveyard where frogs splash into a pond, tiny turtles sun on rocks, a green snake slides silently away. The moment I come closest to Hearn’s world is at the Shinto shrine for Inari, the popular fox god, patron of prosperity and success, carved out of a dense grove of trees halfway down castle hill. Hearn loved this spot, stopped here almost every day on his way home from teaching, wrote about it in more than one essay. The haunting warble of a hidden bird greets me as I stand before the four-foot-high stone image of the god, brought here by a ruler to protect the town from fire (it seems to have worked). Yet the alien quality of an animal as a god, of a compound overflowing with tens of thousands of three-inch-tall, white porcelain images of Inari, tale erect, paws lifted, deposited by worshipers in and around the small wooden shrine, resting on the altar, sitting in long rows on shelves and benches, tucked under the trees, and in the underbrush, produce a momentary shiver. Later I will be told that the bird is named uguisu and that to hear its call is a rare and lucky experience. I pick up one of the ceramic foxes and put it in a pocket, not yet having learned—as I do in an email from a former student shortly before writing these lines almost forty years later—that a curse will follow those who take Inari from his shrine. When I respond that as far as I can tell my luck has been pretty good over these many years, the student writes again: perhaps the curse cannot cross such a big ocean. Shimoda is my final stop. Here in this fishing port on the tip of the isolated Izu peninsula, beginning in September 1856, lived Townsend Harris, first American Consul General to reside in Japan. Harris was a man with two aims: his official goal was to negotiate a trade treaty with the government; his personal one, to be the first Westerner to meet the Shogun face to face. Both acts would be a way of redeeming his standing in the New York business community, which he had fled a decade earlier after some questionable business dealings on his part left a group of investors bankrupt. Ever since, Harris had knocked about the ports of Asia, engaging in various trade and commercial enterprises. Old political connections managed to get him appointed by President Franklin Pierce to the post in Japan, though in truth it was not considered a desirable one.



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Japanese authorities provided Harris a home in a converted Zen temple named Gkyokuzenji, situated on a rise above the bay, but it has long since returned to its original function. From its steps, the view of the harbor is blocked by modern buildings, but the round green hills above the bay—which the Japanese call breasts—are clearly visible. A garden and a graveyard surround the modest, unpainted structure. Water trickles in an unseen stream and the chant of sutras from within keeps me from sliding open the door until the voices fall silent. The inside is simple, empty, immaculate. Clean tatami on the floor, yellow and purple flowers on the altar, a calm bronze Buddha suggesting by his posture that we slow down and accept the world. In Harris’ day, the space was crowded with Western furniture. Here he sat, ate, read, and lounged during the fifteen months it took to make a deal with leisurely officials. Dutch was the only Western language the Japanese understood. Negotiations were a tedious three-way process, from English to Dutch to Japanese and back again, the chore handled by Harris’ companion, Henry Heusken. The presence of this 23-year-old Dutch-born interpreter did little to prevent the enormous loneliness which pervades Harris’ diary. Not once does he mention a woman named Tojin Okichi-san, assigned by the government to clean and cook for him, to spy on him, to keep him sexually satisfied, or perhaps all three, depending upon which version of the legend you prefer. Okichi-san lived on in Shimoda for many years after Harris departed, but the 1958 film, The Barbarian and the Geisha—John Wayne as Harris and the beautiful So Eiko Ando as Okichi—settles for a doomed romantic tale: the two fall in love, but to save him from assassination she violates her obligation to her superiors and must depart alone to atone. The fifties was not a time for Hollywood to celebrate interracial love. Harris’ diary, one of the early books I read in an effort to understand my own reactions after living in Japan, started me on the road to writing Mirror in the Shrine. What amazed me was the extent to which his judgments, pleasures, misunderstandings, and conflicts with his hosts seemed so similar to experiences I had during my own year in Fukuoka. One hundred and twenty years of modernization for both countries, Japan going from being a feudal order to a major industrial power, the United States from a backwater nation to the richest and most powerful country in the world, and yet the human reactions of one people to the other have changed so little. Most moving is the entry made on the day the American vessel that brought him to Japan sailed for home and left him and his translator as the only two foreigners in the country. I like to read it as a koan: Grim

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reflections—ominous of change—Undoubted beginning of the end. Query,—if for the real good of Japan?1 * The breakthrough comes when I am sitting at my desk in the East–West Center in Honolulu where I am on a fellowship for the year, comes while I am staring out the window at a hillside covered with thick tropical underbrush punctuated by palms and guava trees, comes as I reread notes taken from Griffis’ diaries and publications, comes as I try to picture what it was like for this young American to ride through a wintry landscape, guarded by a dozen samurai, comes as I realize that all the images that dance in my mind—the snow-covered hills and leafless trees, the unpainted wooden wayside shrines with their statues of Jizo, guardian of children, the steaming bodies of the horses, the muffled figures of the riders, the expressionless faces, the two swords worn by the samurai—have been created by directors like Kurosawa in films set during the feudal period. To suggest that today we see the past in the form of moving images on a screen, I begin the chapter with the words Like a motion picture, then go on to describe the young man’s six-day cavalcade from Osaka to Fukui in terms of details which might be captured by a camera. That moment helps to make the rest of Mirror in the Shrine possible. In a way it is fitting: the experience of the author inflected by that of his characters, and vice versa. Each had a rupture with the past in Japan, a moment, or a series of them, which changed the direction of their lives and careers. Or so I write their stories, conscious of the fact that turning points are as much my invention as their experience, for the incidents, events, and moments that lead up to change are buried behind the words they used to describe their days. For the straight-laced Griffis it was the moment in Fukui when the temptation posed by the young serving girl in his house caused him either to lose, or to fear losing, his Christian morality; for the practical, no-nonsense Morse it was when he turned from studying marine creatures to collecting traditional stoneware pottery; for Hearn it was when he decided to give up his restless, lifelong search for adventure and turn his initially temporary marriage to a local woman into a permanent one. And for me it was the decision, perhaps foreshadowed in the structure of Romantic Revolutionary, to break with the current practices of historical writing, with what you might call the internalized superego of academia, and write in a way suited to the contemporary—or at least, my contemporary—taste and sensibility.



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The moving camera for Griffis’ journey to Fukui was only the first of my innovations. The others could not be hurried, but arrived in their own sweet time over the next few years of struggle with the manuscript, which ultimately took me more than a decade to produce. A most important one had to do with structure. Rather than taking the traditional road of telling three biographies in sequence, I found that there was a kind of synergy to be gained by ignoring chronology in favor of setting the three stories side by side in terms of what I called the stages of the Japan experience: Landing (first weeks), Searching (life before Japan), Loving (falling under the spell of the culture), Learning (coming to grips with its contradictions), Remembering (lives after the initial years). And if I didn’t quite realize it then, it seems clear now that these were also the stages of my own year in Japan, projected into the past, the final one being the struggle I was having to write the book. To increase the immediacy of the historical experience, I decided to use the present, not the past tense, and the work included a touch of the self-reflexive, having the biographer appear from time to time as a kind of minor character who assesses and complains about the shortcomings of the evidence with which he has to work and shares the problems of constructing the narrative while he is in the process of constructing it. A few passages speak in the second person, with the ambiguous effect that the book, or its author, is directly addressing the characters, or the audience, or both. Several times I dare to use the (dreaded by historians) I word, as one of the historical characters speaks or paraphrases words he wrote in a letter or diary entry. These innovations let me imagine I was involved in creating new possibilities for writing history. They were unusual and provocative enough to ensure that my current editor at Knopf would shoot off a letter declining to exercise the publisher’s option on the work on the grounds that This is not the proper way to write history. Several other trade presses also had negative responses, though with rejections that were more standard and oblique: Unusual and interesting as we find this manuscript, it is really not suitable for our list. It took an editor with an open mind and a great imagination at Harvard University Press, Aida Donald, a historian herself, to see that one could play with the form of narrative and still be writing history. The first outside reader, Edwin O. Reischauer, Harvard professor, former ambassador to Japan, and dean of Japan studies in the US, found the manuscript to be absolutely delightful for its portrait of nineteenth-century Japan seen through the eyes

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of three remarkable but very different Americans, and then for the marvelous reconstruction of how Japan worked on their minds, radically changing their perception of the country and the whole relationship of East and West … The book is a tour de force. The History Book Club chose Mirror in the Shrine as a monthly selection and the reviews in newspapers, magazines, and academic journals were generally positive, even in specialized publications dealing with Japanese or Asian history. One reviewer in a literary quarterly gushed over it as our first piece of postmodern history. This was pleasing enough even though it must be admitted that in 1988, the year the book appeared, I had no idea what the word postmodern meant. In a way, that review was a wakeup call. During the thirteen years between my return from teaching in Kyushu and the publication of Mirror in the Shrine, the world at home and abroad had undergone enormous changes, but my focus on the problem of how to write about nineteenthcentury Japan—along with the time-consuming, normal academic business of classes, meetings, and conferences—let me to a large extent ignore them. Of course I knew that Ronald Reagan’s presidency, with its trickle-down economics, Star Wars, and the Iran–Contra affair were all signs of a shift to the right in the body politic. But to a large extent I was still living in the mental realm of the sixties, one in which play, experimentation, and innovation were highly valued. The unfamiliar word suggested that the issues with which I struggled in order to create a new sort of historical narrative were not mine alone. Radical political and social movements might be dead, but something odd was happening in the social, artistic, and intellectual world into which I had inadvertently stumbled, and the current word for this—though nobody could clearly define it—was Postmodernism.

The Alcazar of Seville: The sequence in Reds showing Congress of the Peoples of the East, shot in the Patio de las Doncellas—an epiphany for the author and a metaphor for the impossibility of capturing moments of the past solely in words?

4 Hollywood: Visions of the Past Cinema has not changed the world, but the way of understanding the world. Carlos Diegues

As in an old film noir, an unexpected phone call sets in motion a series of events that will significantly alter the path of my life and career. I can’t be precise about the date but I remember the scene clearly. It is a late fall afternoon in 1972, a few months after my return from the Soviet Union. I am at the moment staring at a blank sheet of paper in the gray Olivetti Lettera 22 portable typewriter that I purchased fourteen years earlier in Venice, on my first trip to Europe. At the moment it is set on an improvised desk—a door held up by two saw horses—in the second bedroom of an apartment on Alta Vista, a wide street with a row of lofty palms down its center just south of Sunset Boulevard, three blocks from Charlie Chaplin’s old studio on La Brea in the center of Hollywood. I am some two hundred pages into the first draft of what will become Romantic Revolutionary, my biography of John Reed, poet, short story writer, journalist, radical, and author of Ten Days That Shook the World, a man remembered in 1970s America mostly by old leftists or those who have taken history or political science courses that cover the Soviet Union. When people pose that inevitable question to any writer—What are you working on?—I find that so few recognize his name that my lengthy and elaborate explanations only underscore how far I am from that grassy slope behind Lenin’s mausoleum in front of the Kremlin wall where the previous July I stood looking at Reed’s grave. Almost every Russian who filed by exclaimed his name in reverential tones. Some of the men took off their caps and stood for a while looking at the Cyrillic letters inscribed on a bronze plaque set into a simple grey stone. One elderly woman kneeled and crossed herself.

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I pick up the phone. Professor Rosenstone? This is Warren Beatty. I’m about to make a film on John Reed. They told me at Harvard that you’re writing a book about him. We need to talk. Let’s have dinner tonight. Tell me where you live. I’ll pick you up in half an hour. Beatty, who for several years was little more than one of Hollywood’s pretty (beautiful?) faces, became a megastar after the 1968 film, Bonnie and Clyde, with its outrageous mixture of jaunty humor and graphic violence, was nominated for eleven Oscars. A year before the phone call, he had starred in another strong film rooted in history, director Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller, one of the rare Hollywood products to excite my historical imagination. As a kind of anti-western which uses a whorehouse as a metaphor for capitalism, the film presented the sharpest critique of predatory capitalism to come out of Hollywood since the thirties. For me it had a special kind of appeal. Though we never see the chief bad guys on screen, the film makes it clear who they are: the lumber barons of the Pacific Northwest at the turn of the twentieth century, monopolists who want to take control of all the timber in the region. First they send in attorneys to buy out the holdings of locals on the cheap, then when most of them refuse to sell, in comes a squad of goons to crush the small loggers and businessmen and torch the town. These same bad guys are the ones often blamed for the death of John Reed’s father, a Progressive US Marshall chosen by Teddy Roosevelt to help curb the financial and environmental excesses and corruption of these predators of great wealth, as the president would call them. Forty years later, it is impossible to remember my mood or thoughts in the interval between the phone call and Beatty’s arrival at my door, but surely they had to do with the temptations of Hollywood. Much as I liked movies, I had little taste for most of the fare that the studios turned out, particularly the sort of film in which Beatty had starred early in his career: overwrought melodramas like The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone or Splendor in the Grass. My personal preference was for films that were less formulaic and more artistic, preferably works that contained some sort of social conscience or political resonance, as did the recent flood of movies that overflowed with a somewhat belated anti-war or countercultural sixties sensibility: The Graduate, Midnight Cowboy, Easy Rider, MASH, Coming Home. I open the door to see a very tall man who is so handsome it is difficult to look him directly in the face. His first words break the spell: Let’s trade John Reed fuck stories!



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Neither of us has all that many to share. It’s no secret the charismatic and attractive Reed had many affairs, but details and names, other than that of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay whom he wooed by reciting poetry as they rode back and forth on the Staten Island ferry, remained unknown to me even after years of research. Beatty’s contribution was also unnamed. In the Soviet Union the previous year, where he tried to get permission to shoot the film in Leningrad (Russian officials were interested, but wanted to have the last word on the script and rights to the final cut, and Beatty was too savvy for that), he took to dinner an elderly woman who claimed to have been Reed’s lover in Moscow during the last year of his life. I was able to supply her name: Elizaveta Drabkina. Her confession (boast?) about the relationship with Reed had appeared in some obscure British Communist journal I had unearthed the prior year. That night and the next one we dine at the Aware Inn, a quasi-vegetarian place on the Sunset Strip across from the famed Tower Records. Largely because of the phones on each table rather than the cuisine, the restaurant has become a hangout for hip Hollywood folk. Our conversation both evenings is repeatedly interrupted by calls which make Warren cup his hand over his mouth and speak in conspiratorial tones, as well as by minor celebs like Goldie Hawn, the Smothers Brothers, and Lily Tomlin stopping by to say hello. Meet the professor, says Warren, who never gets around to my name as he waves people off. For the moment he seems less interested in playing star than in hearing anything and everything I can tell him about Reed’s life and loves, writings, friends, and politics. Even though he claims to have done research at Harvard, it’s not clear to me how much he knows about Reed and how much he is faking. My suspicion is that he did little more than make a symbolic stop by the Houghton Library, perhaps just long enough to learn that someone was working on Reed’s biography. He is particularly surprised and pleased when I tell him about the pictures of Louise Bryant, Reed’s lover, nude on the Provincetown dunes, that I found in the collection. We must get copies of them, he says. They could be important for the film. It isn’t difficult to understand why Beatty has sought me out. If in the year 1972 you are interested in learning about John Reed, the details of his life, work, and milieu, then I am your man. Do you want to know about Greenwich Village in the teens, The Masses magazine, the Armory Show, the bitter silk strikes led by the Industrial Workers of the World in Lawrence, Massachusetts and Paterson New Jersey? Are you interested in the Mexican Revolution, the weeks Reed spent in the city of Chihuahua interviewing

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Pancho Villa, who gave him a nickname: Chatito, pug nose? Maybe you want details of the weeks he rides with Villa’s troops, or of his reporting from the crucial battle of Torreon? Perhaps you are interested in his family background, his secret desires, habits, lovers, friends, motivations, writings, fears, illnesses, disappointments, victories, arrests, failures? For all that you have to talk to me. Nobody else has worked extensively on Reed since the mid-thirties, long before his official archive existed. At the end of our first evening together, Warren insists that I must serve as historical consultant on the film. He can’t, or so he says, do it without me. Not that he can put me on the payroll just yet. There isn’t any payroll. A script has to be written, money has to be raised, a production company formed. This could take a couple of years. But he is already in the process of planning for the production and wants us to continue the conversation. Together, he says, we can make a great film about this important forgotten American. We can make him a hero for our anti-war generation. At the age of thirty-six, I am naive about a lot of things, but Hollywood isn’t one of them. A promise on the handshake of a star? You’ve got to be kidding. But Beatty is a really big name and it’s just possible, isn’t it, that a film might somehow get made? That would be good for the book once it’s published. How many historians are offered a chance like this? A slim chance, sure, but having lived in the town most of my life, I know that Hollywood is full of surprises. You never know what will make it to the screen. This doesn’t mean that in the coming months and years I will ever let myself fully believe that Beatty will raise enough money in Cold War American to make a film about a man who not only endorsed the Bolshevik Revolution but helped to found the Communist Labor Party of the United States. (I was, in a way, right: British bankers would ultimately finance the production.) And what, I must have thought—if by some wild stretch of the imagination he actually makes the film—are the chances it will be anything like my (as yet partially written) biography of Reed? Certainly it won’t be as serious and deep, as committed to social change. Surely it won’t wrestle with agonizing questions of personal life versus political commitment, art versus ideology. Chances are it will end up being yet another empty adventure tale with a clueless star pretending to be a bohemian, a radical, a revolutionary. Isn’t it likely Beatty will turn Jack into a Frank Capra hero, one of those wellmeaning simpletons like James Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington or Gary Cooper in Meet John Doe? Characters who seem as far removed from the life of America as Walt Disney’s Snow White and her seven dwarves.



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Sure, let’s meet, I tell him. As often as you like. Our conversations about Reed would continue for the next seven years. For two or three days in a row we would have intense meetings, then not see each other for months, or years. Though I could hardly know it at the time, the words we exchanged, my subsequent role in the production of Reds, which would win Beatty an Academy Award as Best Director, were for me part of something larger: a process that would help turn a traditionally trained historian with a taste for innovation into a kind of renegade character, honored in certain quarters of academia but also somewhat suspect by much of my own profession for deviations from its governing practices and ideology. But let me not oversimplify. I would never want to suggest that it was solely my involvement with Reds that would lead me to raise questions about the literary practices and truth claims of traditional academic history. Technological change, along with the political, social, intellectual, and artistic movements in the last third of the century, helped to prepare the way for, even to demand—or so it seemed to me—that we who make it our job to preserve a sense of the human journey through time embrace new ways of thinking about and telling our stories set in the past. The world towards the end of the century and that of the new one in which we live is so different from the world in which I was trained as a historian that we have a label for it, though it is one that nobody seems to like: postmodern. It’s one I would gladly give up if someone would come up with a better term to describe this brave new electronic realm in which we live and—some of us—write history. * The dinners with Beatty were hardly my first encounter with film world. I grew up in Hollywood, which is no doubt why I have never harbored those many illusions about the town that grip people in other parts of the country and around the world. We arrived in the city on October 12, 1946, precisely six months past my tenth birthday, after twelve exhausting days crossing the country in my father’s refurbished 1941 Packard sedan which, over the objections of my mother, he insisted on driving all the way from Montreal. My first taste of filmmaking came just a few weeks later, and it wasn’t sweet. A buddy of my Aunt Polly’s late husband, who worked as a grip at RKO, took us all for a treat: to see a night shoot at a ranch somewhere way out in the San Fernando Valley. The film in production was called It’s a Wonderful Life, but the evening was hardly wonderful for me. Mostly I was

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bored and restless. It took forever for anything to happen, and the lights from the set were so glary that they hurt my eyes, and so many tall people crowded in front of me that when there was some momentary action, I couldn’t see anything anyway, but only heard a crash and a lot of shouting. We were promised that we’d see the star, Jimmy Stewart, but he never did show up, only some stand-in who looked pretty much like anybody else. It didn’t help that I got the runs from drinking two cherry cokes and the smell in the portable toilet was so awful that I nagged the folks to take me home. One result was that for many decades I refused all invitations to go on location or visit any shoots, even on the projects of friends who were part of what everyone in this town calls the Industry. Growing up here meant that Hollywood had less to do with movies than with Ralph’s grocery on Third Street where mother always sent me for the things she forgot to buy, the shoe repair shop whose owner spoke only in Yiddish, Farmer’s Market where you could use your lunch money to buy the greatest French fries, Wong Wing hand laundry, where they always put too much starch in Dad’s shirts, leading him to curse, humorously he thought, about the Heathen Chinee, La Cienega Park for touch football games in the winter and softball in the summer which competed with the overcrowded swimming pool until the polio scare kept all the Jewish kids at home. On Saturday nights the big red trolley would deposit a bunch of us from our block—Max, Herbie, Neil, Don, Lennie—at the corner of La Brea and Hollywood. The mile-long walk to Vine was full of thrills and perils: the disheveled drunks who panhandled for quarters; the groups of toughs in black leather jackets with ominous buckles and straps who shouted What you lookin’ at, four eyes?; the girls in tight skirts and high heels, bleached hair piled high, who wriggled their hips and winked. We were far too sophisticated to stop at Grauman’s Chinese to see the footprints of stars (strictly for kids and tourists, and besides we had done that when we were young), but we liked to hit the newsstand on Las Palmas where, if the owner was leaning on a cane studying the Daily Racing Form, as he usually was, you could quickly leaf through the girly magazines (naked breasts in those days, no muff), then hasten down Vine to Wallach’s Music City on the corner of Sunset, where in brightly lit booths you could listen to the latest recordings by the Ink Spots, Guy Mitchell, the rage, Miss Patty Page, or Les Brown and His Band of Renown without ever having to buy anything. Hollywood in those days was associated with certain vaguely leftist political issues that were of interest to my family. Mother went with friends to a rally in Gilmore Stadium for Henry Wallace, candidate for president



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in 1948 on the Progressive ticket, who was being tarred in the press as a pinko, if not a full-fledged Red. At the dinner table every night my father denounced the Big Interests which ran the country, and often he shouted at the radio when the conservative commentator, Gabriel Heatter (with his daily intro Ah, America, there’s good—or bad—news tonight!) hinted that all witnesses who took the Fifth Amendment before the House Un-American Activities Committee must be members of the Communist conspiracy. On the Fairfax High tennis team I became friends with the son of one of the famed Hollywood Ten, all of whom ended up spending a year in jail for Contempt of Congress after they tried to use the First rather than the Fifth Amendment to protect themselves from interrogation. His family lived near the Poinsettia courts. After practice, we’d go to his house, where his screenwriter dad would come out of his study to hand us glasses of lemonade and ask us lots of questions about our history and literature classes. My friend’s father was one of many reasons I couldn’t believe that communists were all that bad. Another was my older cousin Leonard, a foreman at the huge Canadair factory in Montreal, who was proud of being one of the heads of the Communist union. He was the only one in the family who talked to me as if I were an adult. Leonard told me stuff nobody else ever mentioned, things like about how many long hours workers slaved on the assembly line, and how they were exploited by their bosses who paid them so little and kept all the profits for themselves. Someday, he assured me, workers would realize their situation and he wanted to help them get organized enough to make for some big changes in the world. After that there would be no more rich people who owned yachts and no more poor people starving and no more wars and everyone would have food and warm clothes and a place to live. To me those seemed like really good ideas. I might not see my home town as the glamorous place that most of the world imagined it to be, but I did love movies. When we were around eleven or twelve, a bunch us would go off to the Picfair Theater, corner of Fairfax and Pico, Saturday afternoon for a show which featured two serials (Flash Gordon vs. Ming the Merciless, The Clutching Hand, Dick Tracy), eight cartoons, and two features, usually old westerns (featuring Hopalong Cassidy, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers) or war films (Back to Bataan, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, Wake Island). Some of the guys liked to boo the Japs and throw jujubes at the heads of other kids, and occasionally there was a scuffle in the aisles. In westerns we naturally rooted for the guys with blond hair and pale skin, cheered when they shot Injuns, and never cared much about the girls who made brief appearances on screen, until a young starlet

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not much remembered today moved into a one-story house no bigger than ours just down the block, at the corner of Orlando and Fifth Street. We pored over the story in the glossy Sunday supplement of the LA Times and learned that she was barely older than us. The paper didn’t give the address, but it didn’t have to, for one photo showed a house we all recognized. After that, all of us began to walk past that house several times a day, pretending we were on errands, dutiful boys, going to the store for our mothers, as we peeked out of the corner of our eyes without ever managing to catch a glimpse of her. Once in a while we did see her mother, who wasn’t half bad herself for a woman in her forties; that is elderly like our moms, except none of them lounged in the front garden wearing one-piece bathing suits. The daughter hadn’t yet had a speaking role in a film, but that didn’t matter to us. We knew the Times was telling the truth when it said that she was just a regular girl, sweet and caring, a good student too, who liked math and literature and history, though she didn’t go to John Burroughs Junior High with us but some sort of special school run by the studio. Only once did we ever get a look at her. It was on a Saturday evening as the sun was going down and we were winding up a game of football or baseball, I can’t remember which, but I do know that we were arguing, as usual, over a ball, foul or fair, in or out of bounds, when this huge black limo, a Caddy in those days when a Mercedes still suggested SS officers on the prowl, pulled up in front of her house. As the driver in a uniform and cap got out and went to the door, a hush fell over all of us. We stood like pillars of salt as, wearing a white dress and silver shoes, her dark hair glittering in the glow of the street lamps, Debra Paget came out the door, floated across the yard, was helped into the limo by the driver, and rode off towards what we assumed would be immortality. I wonder: have you ever heard of her? * My love for film never waned, but my vision widened and altered over the years as I began to acquire a taste for foreign, or what were then called art films. I was only thirteen when mother, whose family was much more cultured than my dad’s—they had a lot of thick books in their house, and Mom had once looked forward to a career as a concert pianist—began to take me to see films at the local Art House on Fairfax which my father refused to attend. One that I remember is Spectre de la Rose, a murder mystery centering around a ballet company made (I now learn by looking it up on Google) by famed writer Ben Hecht; another was Open City, Italian



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director Roberto Rossellini’s initial contribution to what would be the influential neorealismo movement of the forties. Half a century later I would use it every year in my classes on modern Europe. Undergraduate years at UCLA provided me a crash course in contemporary world cinema due to the free tickets to review films that I received as Fine Arts Editor on the Daily Bruin. In the mid-fifties I saw the latest works from Italy, France, Sweden, Japan, and India, and found myself initiated into the wide world of directors, people like Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman, Satyajit Ray, Yasujiro Ozu, and Masahiro Shinoda. By the time of graduation I was hooked, and in subsequent years I indulged in a sort of continuing education, pulled towards a series of edgy and challenging visual realms—the French New Wave (Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol), followed by the New German Cinema, the Brazilian Cinema Nuovo, the Czech New Wave, and a flood of movies from Cuba, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Argentina, and Senegal. This taste for films full of what I would have then called real life—poverty, existential angst, unresolved or unhappy endings—did not entirely destroy my interest in American movies, but the ones that touched me were those with serious themes, films like High Noon, A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront, A Place in the Sun, The Big Knife, The Killers. I watched Rebel Without a Cause three times during its first two weeks of release and was so taken with its teenage hero that I used my position as an editor to pester publicists at Warner Brothers for an interview with James Dean, saying it would focus on the young star’s UCLA days (rumor had it he had briefly attended the school). Several Special Delivery letters on Daily Bruin stationery and numerous phone calls to Warner’s PR office went unanswered. But after what seemed like a hopeless wait of several months, some publicity person at the studio, perhaps worried about rumors that Dean was dreadful in his first adult role in the just-finished Giant, called and set a date. Next week, I was told over the phone. That Friday night the actor left Los Angeles for the auto races in Salinas in his new Porsche speedster and the rest is history: during the early morning hours of September 30, 1955, Dean crashed his way into immortality by ramming head-on into a truck at eighty-five miles an hour. He did not, as I am sure you know, survive the crash. Over the years, I had other brushes with the Industry, usually through friends who worked as film editors, musicians, or foley artists. The brother of someone I knew married the hot young actress Sheree North, and I was

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disappointed to learn that hanging around the house in jeans, she didn’t look anything at all like her glamorous on-screen image. Each Christmas season in grad school, I took a three-week job with the US Postal Service, delivering mail by truck through the hills of Bel Air, high above UCLA. My clients included an odd collection of old and current stars: comedienne Ann Southern, perpetual Italian lover Rossano Brazzi, perennial TV music host Dick Clark, hotelier Conrad Hilton, and Elvis Presley. The only star I ever talked to in my mailman days was the elderly actor Walter Pigeon, who usually played a sober, welldressed, middle-class man with an accent you just might mistake for British. Wearing a tweed jacket, he would jog slowly across his lawn to meet the van, and he always seemed disappointed at the small number of envelopes I handed over. Yet Pigeon always smiled, shook my hand, and thanked me, saying Merry Christmas, before he turned and strode back towards the house. I trot out these examples and incidents as an attempt to explain something of the complex ways I related to the world of film. You could call me an elitist, for I was more or less contemptuous of a great deal of the regular Hollywood product. Yet this did not prevent me from, seated in the darkness of a theater, becoming fully caught up in the world on the screen. How to put it simply? I loved the possibilities of a world created by movies, the way the screen could take you into other and unknown realms through visceral experiences that let you understand something about realities which had until then only been theoretical. What I didn’t like was the way Hollywood was too formulaic, too anxious to get cheap laughs or easy tears. Its films showed you too many lives that were trivial in their themes and consequences, juvenile in their vision of reality, conventional in imagery and sound, and banal in content. This backstory about my taste is a way of trying to explain how and why in 1975 I decided to create what one social science researcher would some years later tell me was the first class in film and history to be taught in the United States. (I have no idea if this is true.) But elaborating the deep background does not provide a complete explanation for this act. Proximate causes are important too, and these had to do both with my specialty after publishing two books dealing with radicals and revolutionary movements, as well as with larger shifts in the culture. From the time I began at Caltech in 1966, my most popular class—so popular that I had to limit enrollment— was titled “Radicalism and Revolution,” a survey that started with the French and American upheavals of the eighteenth century, continued through leftist movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and ended up with contemporary anti-war, ethnic consciousness, and hippie



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movements. But with the slow winding down of the Vietnam War and the new air of conservatism in seventies America, the numbers enrolling began to decline year by year until the term when only a single student showed up on the first day of class. What to do? I can’t remember exactly when and where the solution came to me. Perhaps during the year in Japan? Or after a meeting or two with Beatty? Or was my decision no more than a logical expansion of the freshman course in which I already screened Sergei Eisenstein’s October as a way of giving students some introduction to the events of the Bolshevik Revolution? The first time I offered “History through Film,” it bore the subtitle “Radicalism and Revolution.” Contents included Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, used to illustrate aspects of Marx’s Communist Manifesto; Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin for the Russian Revolution; André Malraux’s Espoir for the Spanish Civil War; Tomas Gutierrez Alea’s Lucia for the Cuban Revolution; Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers for anti-colonial movements; Arthur Penn’s Alice’s Restaurant for the counterculture. You get the idea. The strategy worked well enough that soon I once again had to limit enrollment. In subsequent years the course went on to other topics: the Third Reich, the Soviet Union, Labor on Film, and the United States in the sixties. In retrospect it may seem natural that, faced with declining enrollments in a popular class and not wanting to turn away from my specialty, I decided to use films. But some of my colleagues found it a suspicious strategy, perhaps a way of avoiding the hard work of preparing classes. At the outset I treated the films as no more than teaching tools, a strategy for engaging students in historical issues. I certainly did not, at that point, believe that films could deliver important truths in their depictions of the past (though I would make that argument years later). At the time it seemed a useful tool for drawing an audience into historical issues, moments, and people, as the screen created a kind of feeling for the past. Perhaps I was open to such an approach because I never fully believed that words on a page could render all of life, or that a written work of history provided some sort of absolute truth. By then, I had spent enough time writing to know that the issue was not just how words express our understanding of the world, but how they also screen out a great deal of that world and limit what you can say about it. * My ongoing relationship—if that’s the proper word—with Warren Beatty over the seven years following our first dinners is intermittent. Occasionally

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we meet to indulge in rambling conversations much like the first one. Increasingly the star likes to talk rather than listen. Often I find myself subject to explications of my own research findings and ideas. Most of our meetings take place in Beatty’s penthouse apartment at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, in a living room strewn with magazines, newspapers, books, and screenplays. But a phone call can come from Warren at almost any hour of the day or night with a request that we meet immediately. Once I am awakened at three in the morning at my tiny house in Fukuoka, and even though I try to beg off until a better time of day, we end up speaking for almost an hour; another time he catches me at a hotel in Montalcino, Italy, where halfway through a splendid dinner of wild boar complemented by a bottle of Brunello I can ill afford, I tell Beatty to call back. He does, four months later. During these years of desultory conversations my academic career moves forward. The publication of Romantic Revolutionary in 1975 leads to a promotion to Full Professor. I spend that year teaching in Japan and return home to begin research on what will become Mirror in the Shrine. When two of my favorite Japanese students visit Los Angeles in the summer of 1976, I take them to the penthouse to meet the man they insist on calling Warren Beauty. Charming and seductive as he is with all females—young, old, or in between—the star offers the rare privilege of letting me take a snapshot with him in the middle, towering above them, his arms draped over their shoulders. But to my questions about any progress in funding the film, Warren provides no answer. Like the original contact, the phone call from a Beverly Hills attorney in the spring of 1979 comes as a surprise to me with its offer of a personal contract with Warren Beatty to work as Historical Consultant on a film about John Reed. The amount of compensation, $10,000, seems, given Hollywood budgets, rather skimpy, particularly since I have already spent so many hours with the man. What this means is that I have to find myself an attorney and go through various meetings and conference calls and negotiations back and forth before the terms are finally settled at $30,000 ($125,000 today) for up to 100 hours of my time. During these hours, Beatty, or anyone he designates, can have access to any or all of my research materials and files. Members of his staff also have the right to call on me for consultation as long as the requests don’t interfere with my academic duties and schedule. One result of signing the contract is that I spend more than a week attempting to impose some order on research material chaotically jammed into three filing cabinets and a large cupboard in the basement of my Laurel



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Canyon home. A second is my annoyance that, over the life of the project, nobody ever asks to look at the now neatly arranged and organized material. Over the next two years, I am the only one to consult the files. Usually I do this in response to questions from members of the production team who phone to ask for details about events, moments, locations, people, costumes, weapons, furnishings, food, and language, wanting to know what kind of words a certain historical character might have used on a particular topic. Normally it doesn’t take much time to locate answers, but sometimes the details are simply not available. One example is my attempt to answer the producer’s demand to know the number of people who attended the founding convention of the Communist Labor Party, held in the basement of a union building on the South Side of Chicago in October 1919. I try to explain to him that no amount of research will ever make the number clear. If minutes were taken at this informal—read chaotic—meeting, they have never been found. First-hand reports by participants vary widely in their estimates. And since it was a kind of ad hoc gathering made up of people belonging to three splinter groups from the Socialist Party, all of them meeting in the same building at the same time, all of them trying to form separate Communist parties, with lots of the participants wandering back and forth between the rooms, the numbers clearly differed from one minute to the next. Not my problem, the producer screams at me. Just tell me how many were there. You’re the historian. Give me a number. Somewhere between 55 and 100. Not good enough. I have to know how many extras to hire for the shot. Okay. I take the hint and for the first time—at least knowingly—do what history filmmakers always have to do: I invent a fact by deciding that precisely eighty-seven people attended the founding convention of the CLP. Some months later, eighty-seven extras are shepherded onto a set. Less of my time is taken up chasing down specific details than in hanging out at Beatty’s new home up on Mulholland Drive, a classic Bauhausinfluenced mansion once owned by the opera star, Lauritz Melchior. The walls of the huge white living room are devoid of any images and its entire furnishings consist of two tiny white loveseats set in a far corner. Here Warren and I can be alone to talk, though sometimes we are joined by producer Dave McLeod or Jeremy Pikser, a college teacher whose job as project historian is to help with what you could call the intellectual grunt work, the low-level research stuff which is evidently thought to be beneath the dignity of a professor. From time to time I receive requests to provide

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passages from letters by Reed or Louise Bryant, his lover and then his wife, to be used as voiceovers for montage sequences that occur when the two of them are apart. If the words on the hundreds of photocopied letters I brought back from the Houghton Library aren’t apropos or punchy enough, I begin to take it upon myself to add or subtract phrases, or make changes by altering or rearranging them, thus inserting my own small bit of creativity into the project. It’s the same with the many versions of the screenplay which pass by for my inspection. Supposedly, my task is to check for factual corrections, but this doesn’t stop me from adding to or subtracting words to make sentences sound better. On occasions when I dislike the phraseology, I compose a line or two of my own, and later feel pleased when a couple of them make it to the screen. (Don’t ask me which; I no longer remember.) Some days, I am part of a shifting crowd of people who come and go: producers, advisors, friends, technicians, script doctors, actors, gofers, and lots of others whose role in the proceedings are never entirely clear. Occasionally one of them wants to pick my brain about what Reed or some other character in the film—Louise Bryant, Emma Goldman, Max Eastman—might have said about some event: the Paterson Silk Strike, the First World War, the birth control movement of Margaret Sanger, the political conventions of 1916, the policies of Woodrow Wilson, or the Russian Revolution. But for the most part I am politely ignored and left with the distinct feeling of being an outsider. Such feelings intensify on those days which stretch out into dinners prepared by Beatty’s chef. Of course I like it when Warren, as if to show off me or my credentials, poses a question in front of the table and lets me deliver a mini-lecture with a certain authority, but such moments are soon trumped by the usual Hollywood gossip: who is financing, sleeping or breaking up with, or firing whom. Since nobody ever uses anything but first or nicknames—Jack, Merle, Jill, Bobby—this is a world to which I am unable to contribute anything beyond the occasional nod or tight smile. My awkwardness can become acute when someone I admire is present, a famous screenwriter like Robert Towne or Elaine May, in whose presence I tend to become tongue-tied. Never can I figure out what topics might be of interest to such people. When I do speak up, my words seem forced, because I worry about saying things that might make me sound hopelessly academic. Sometimes, I fear these film people think me slightly retarded, stuffy, or incredibly naive. Well, perhaps I am. Or is it possible that we have similar feelings of unease? Do they wonder what you talk about with an academic who has written books with footnotes and extensive bibliographies, books



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reviewed in the New York Times, especially the book on Reed which seems to have so much impressed Beatty? The professor is, after all, from a school where they have a large number of Nobel Prize-winners. Perhaps behind his silence lies some sort of genius. Perhaps he finds us stupid and ill-informed about the world outside of Hollywood. We better not say anything that lets him see how uneducated we are. Whatever the cause, the consequence is that our conversations often seem full of long pauses punctuated by largely banal remarks about the weather, the Dodgers, real estate prices, and the latest drought or canyon fire. Having a specific task to complete is what makes me happiest. Such as the afternoon when a group of us are sitting around, trying to think up the names of elderly folk for the documentary part of the movie, the so-called Witnesses, people who had known Reed or Bryant and who, as talking heads, will provide a documentary counterpart to the dramatized storyline. By 1980 such people are far less easy to find than when I did my own research a decade earlier. Once we run out of names of those who actually were friends with our characters, we begin a search for anyone who moved in the bohemian and radical circles of Greenwich Village, or had some connection, however distant, to the IWW, the Socialist or Communist parties, the First World War, or the Bolshevik Revolution. As we brainstorm, the name Henry Miller pops out of my mouth. Two minutes later an assistant producer is on the phone, tracking the author down to nearby Pacific Palisades. The next day we interview him on camera. Predictably Miller says what you would expect the author of Tropic of Cancer and other one-time banned books to say: There was as much fucking in those days as there is today! Tragedy follows one interview when the long-ailing artist, Andrew Dasburg, Louise’s lover while Jack was a delegate to the Second Congress of the Communist International in 1920, passes away the day after we film him in Taos, New Mexico. I feel more than a twinge of guilt at having been the one who suggested we call Dasburg and provided his phone number. During these months of pre-production my relationship with Beatty is never exactly warm or close. We are creatures from different worlds (sometimes it feels like species), slightly suspicious of each other’s backgrounds and values. To me, Warren always feels distant and affected, a man whose behavior is calculated rather than spontaneous, someone acting out rather than inhabiting the role of star and director. You might characterize our relationship as, largely, correct; for the most part we maintain a kind of civility around each other. Never does he subject me to the abuse that

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sometimes gets heaped on subordinates who have failed to do something or not done it fast enough. Occasionally he rags on me just a touch, like the time he laughs over the dedication to the biography of Reed—love is work is love—and insists that only a Jewish writer could consider love to be work. Perhaps he is right. But in fact I used this paraphrase of Freud only because I was asked to do so by my distinctly Protestant companion, to whom the biography was dedicated. One of Warren’s characteristics is what the once famous sociologist David Riesman called the inside dopester, the person who always likes to be in the know, on top or ahead of whatever is the latest political or social trend or argument, as expressed by Beatty’s one-time girlfriend, Carly Simon, in the pop hit based on their relationship, You’re So Vain. His liberal opinions on politics and social conditions might be heartfelt, but they often sounded like what I had recently read in the Nation or the New Republic. Beatty was certainly known to have given time and money to various liberal political causes and candidates, and the content of movies such as McCabe and Mrs. Miller or Shampoo contained far more social critique than the usual Hollywood flick. Ultimately, our politics were probably not that different, though this did not prevent him from, on more than one occasion, pontificating, sometimes on very obscure subjects. One afternoon he went on for what seemed like hours about a secret report he had read which proved that bottled water, which everyone was switching to in those days, was less safe than what came out of our taps, for evidently the water industry was involved in a huge cover-up of the polluted sources of its streams. On a few rare occasions there was a brief feeling of closeness between us, or so it seemed to me. A couple of times late at night Beatty relaxed enough to talk about his parents and family and to mention his personal need and drive for success. Another moment between us that had a feeling of nearintimacy, at least on my part, came on the afternoon I posed a question which had been on my mind for months: would he let me play the role of Leon Trotsky? This most eloquent and colorful of the Bolshevik leaders has a very tiny part in the film, one with only a couple of speaking lines. He appears onscreen only in long shots that show him as part of a milling crowd or seated at a desk while being interviewed by Reed and Bryant. Warren bent way down, put his face almost right up against my own, and stared at me for what seemed like half an hour but was probably no more than thirty seconds. No, he finally said, straightening up and turning away. Wrong bone structure.



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Much of the principal shoot took place in the UK and Finland during the 1979–80 academic year, a period when I was teaching. Even so, I was slightly hurt that no one asked me to go on location with the company. With production under way, I didn’t hear a word from anyone involved with the film for several months; then late in June, when I was on vacation in Rome, I received a call in my hotel from one of the producers. After we discussed some minor detail, Warren grabbed the phone away from him and said: Professor, why don’t you come join us in Spain? Don’t you want to see the action? We’re shooting some of the final sequences. Come meet us in Seville. We’ll take care of the costs. * You never know the exact source of new ideas or insights when they suddenly appear in your mind, but as historians and writers we are always seeking incidents to use as turning points, for what you might call Aha! moments which change—or so we like to think—the course of history or our lives. On that first day in Seville, during my first hours on location with the film company that is shooting what has now been officially titled Reds, I had such an experience. But the consequences, the full development of the ideas which flowed from that moment would only come to fruition a few years later. It happens shortly after I walk through the huge doorway of the Alcazar, built as a fortress during the eleventh century by Muslim rulers, expanded two centuries later after the Christian Reconquista into a grand palace for the new ruler of the city, King Ferdinand III. I make my way to an inner courtyard, the elegant Patio de las Doncellas (Virgins), so named because of the myth that the Islamic rulers of the city demanded 100 virgins from the subject Christian population each year. In this large, rectangular, two-story courtyard flanked by loggia, they are filming the Congress of the Peoples of the East, held in Baku in 1920, the major part of the Bolshevik attempt to rally the Islamic population of the Russian empire to support their revolution. At one end of the ornate, Moorish patio with its slender columns, high, scalloped arches, and incised abstract designs (built by Muslim architects for the new Christian king), actors playing Bolshevik leaders stand on a high platform covered with red flags and into microphones shout speeches in Russian or English about the glories of the revolution and the need to spread the word of the people’s takeover to all the workers of the world. Below them, all around me, hundreds of jostling men jam the courtyard, their faces, costumes, and head gear those of Central

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Asia: colorful, fluttering robes, kaffiya, turbans, skull caps, huge beards, military outfits with peaked caps, holsters, and cartridge belts. Many of the men grasp pistols, others hold carbines and rifles aloft. They cluster close to one another in restless groups, each one centered around an interpreter who, in the enormous babel of competing voices, shouts a translation of the speeches into his own language—Turkish, Farsi, Dari, Uzbek, Tajik, Arabic, Urdu. Moving along the edge of this colorful mass I glimpse the breadand-butter face of John Reed, only it’s not the lumpy-faced figure of history I know from old photos, but—I am shocked to realize—that of Warren Beatty, smooth, sleek, and handsome. Yet for a few moments I retain the image of him as Reed, a face with a simple American openness of expression that seems innocent of history and sin. Colorful and raucous, organized yet chaotic, the scene reeks with inevitabilities for mistranslation and misunderstanding. Is it too much to see this vision as a metaphor for the impossibilities of capturing moments of the past solely in words? How could one possibly render the experience of such a complex and multilayered instant during which so much is happening at the same time—speeches, translations, jostling, waving, shouts and cheers, noise, the sounds of voices raised in the Internationale—in paragraphs composed of words arranged in a linear manner on the page? How could one hope to capture the feeling, if not the meaning, of such an historic event except with the audio and visual capabilities of film? It’s not just the live takes and retakes. Even more do the replays on the video monitors—watched by the director, producers, cameramen, and the historical consultant—stun me with their power. Here the moving images screen out all the extraneous stuff and people you find on a set: the onlookers, cameras, banks of lights, grips, sound men, and all the others who hang around the edge of the patio, including me. On screen the images and sounds present a startling vision of a past that must or should have looked just like that. Of course, I know there is no palace courtyard comparable to the Alcazar in Baku, that these men are no more than actors, extras, some Spanish, some North African, some crew members off of American warships anchored in Algeciras; yet on that day, and increasingly in the months and years ahead, I feel that these moving images have somehow allowed me—even knowing the sequence to be partly comprised of invented elements—to visit, experience, and absorb a slice of the past. For a month I remain with the company, but it is those first moments that remain freshest in my mind more than forty years later—moments which will inflect the future direction of my scholarly writing. Perhaps I hold onto



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it because, soon enough, being on location becomes routine and I learn that what everyone has always told me is true: there is nothing quite as boring as watching people make a film; nothing more like a small town with its nosiness, rivalries, bickering, and hurt feelings than a film company which has been on location for a long time, and this shoot is approaching a full year. I work to avoid getting caught up in the ongoing disputes into which members of the company wish to enlist me: he said that to her, she did this to him, isn’t it terrible when someone tells you … Joints of marijuana from Morocco, sold by a couple of gofers, help to pass the daylight hours pleasantly enough as I sit in the gardens of the Alcazar or strike up conversations with some of the females playing Central Asian women. In the evenings, dinner in the Presidential Suite of the Alfonso XIII Hotel with Beatty can be somewhere between tedious and tolerable, depending upon whether novelist Jerzy Kosinski—playing the role of Zinoviev, head of the Communist International—is around to tell elaborate, funny stories. By himself, Warren, who neither drinks nor smokes anything legal or illegal and is sick with a fever and cough, does not provide many laughs as a host. The personal highlight of my time on location comes at lunch the day I am introduced to cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, cameraman for Bernardo Bertolucci’s great films such as The Conformist and Last Tango in Paris. Already he has won an Academy Award for Apocalypse Now, and will win a second one for Reds, and a third one for The Last Emperor. In front of the dining company and crew, the bushy-haired, middle-aged Italian bows theatrically to me and says: Maestro, your book is my Bible. I never fix the lighting or place the camera until I have read the description of the scene in your masterpiece. After some days in Seville, tired of hanging around the Alcazar, I catch a bus to Algeciras and take a ferry across the Straits of Gibraltar to Tangier in Morocco, where the labyrinthine souks and winding streets of the old city provide three days of escape from the pettiness and tedium of the shoot. I rejoin the company in Guadix, high in the mountains outside Granada, where they are shooting one of the last action sequences of the film: the attack by counter-revolutionaries on the train carrying Bolshevik leaders back from Baku. The following week in Madrid—where filming is taking place in an old abandoned hospital that will a few years later be reborn as the splendid Reina Sofía Museum, home to Picasso’s Guernica—I have my first and only confrontation with Warren. This showdown is not over anything in the movie but over my book. Paramount has approved a direct tie-in with the paperback, and has agreed to have the official poster for the film used on

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the Vintage edition of Romantic Revolutionary, which will be timed to come out when the film is released. My editor has made clear that only one thing stands in the way: Beatty, who controls every decision to do with the film, must give his assent. Several times I have raised the issue, but Warren always says not now, we’ll talk about it later. This time I insist, and after a great deal of hedging, Warren says no, he doesn’t want a tie-in; what he wants is someone to write a novelization of the screenplay. Would I like to do it? I answer with a shout: For Christ sake, Warren. How can you ask me to write a novelization of my own biography? How can I turn my scholarship into a fictional version that follows your script? That would be obscene. Why not? My film doesn’t tell the whole life story of Reed. It doesn’t cover all the same ground as your book. I don’t want my film compared with your take on his life. You’d get a couple of hundred thousand. You should really do it. That’s it. A novelization or nothing. For the naive and too idealistic author, proud of his literary creation, this decision can mean only one thing. Oddly enough, Beatty never pursues the idea and no novelization appears. This leaves room for several publishers to take the opportunity to reissue old books by Reed (Insurgent Mexico, Ten Days That Shook the World) or tangentially about him (So Short a Time, which focuses on the love triangle between Reed, Louise Bryant, and Eugene O’Neill), each one with a cover featuring words meant to suggest some close connection with the film. The person who does have a connection to the film, yours truly, has some trouble getting a new edition of his book published. A year before Reds is due to be released, I ask my editor at Knopf to sell paperback rights, but he keeps saying things like we don’t know if the film will really come out, and persists in this position over a period of months until I become desperate enough to write letters to half a dozen publishers in New York explaining who I am, what I have written, and how I have worked on the film for years. Three houses become involved in a very brief bidding war that results in Vintage winning the contract because, as part of the same conglomerate as Knopf, it will pay me higher royalties. The paperback features a photo of Reed from Mexican reporter days with an image of a church in the Kremlin behind him, and words which represent our own attempt at connection to Hollywood: The incredible story of the man whose life inspired the motion picture Reds. The film is released to much publicity in December, 1982, a week before the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, which attracts several thousand scholars. That year, for the only time in living memory, the convention was being held in Los Angeles, with the headquarters in



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the historic, downtown Biltmore Hotel. For me it was a heady experience. You might even call it my Andy Warhol moment: fifteen minutes of fame. Someone at Paramount arranged for a free screening of Reds, already being touted as an Academy Award contender, apparently hoping to capitalize on whatever imagined clout academic historians might possess. Posters advertising the show and free bus rides to the Motion Picture Academy in Beverly Hills were plastered all over the hotel. Rumors circulated that Beatty himself would introduce the film, but I knew Warren well enough to realize this had to be no more than the dream of some studio flack. Beatty was not a man to risk a speech or possible question-and-answer session with a crowd of academics. The huge auditorium was packed with hundreds of historians, many of them with powdered sugar on their faces and clothes, the result of munching on the only refreshment provided by the studio, cream puffs, and I, for one, had to wonder at the symbolism of that choice. When my name came up during the credit roll at the end of the screening, I was disappointed at the small size of the type and its location way down near the caterers and best boys, but my editor shouted the name aloud and the audience applauded and cheered. For the next two days I hung out in the book exhibition hall, where historians stock up on freebies and pitch their next projects to elusive editors. I station myself alongside the Random House booth, which features a large blow-up of the cover of the just-published Vintage edition of Romantic Revolutionary, with its ringing endorsement by Jerzy Kosinski: A brilliant, splendidly researched study of John Reed, that stubbornly idealistic American writer with a consuming passion—to shake the world in order to improve it. Here I more or less hold court, accepting the handshakes and congratulations of scholars I have never met, telling exaggerated stories about the joys and pains of working with Warren Beatty over the years, endlessly repeating Storaro’s comment, and vainly reminding myself from time to time to stop swelling with pride. I might not have tried so hard if I had realized that such a moment would never come again. * In the 1970s and 80s, the growth of the visual media reached something of a critical mass that exploded, blowing an (ever so tiny) hole into the world of academia, including that backward-looking discipline, history. Reds may have been unusual for a historical film in that it was directed by a major Hollywood star, involved two other big names—Diane Keaton, Jack

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Nicholson—and was possibly the most expensive movie made to that date ($40 million, or over $100 million in 2015 terms). But my experience as a historian working on a feature film was not unique. Others in the discipline were becoming involved in productions as consultants (Natalie Davis of Princeton on The Return of Martin Guerre), writers (Daniel Walkowitz of New York University on The Molders of Troy), or advisers on the large number of documentary and dramatic projects funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, each of which required an academic advisory board. In one capacity or another—academic adviser, script consultant, talking head, writer—I became involved in half a dozen such productions, both dramatic and documentary. The two which occupied the most time were the dramatic feature named Darrow, a biopic of the famed early twentieth-century attorney who specialized in defending radicals, labor leaders, and outcasts; and The Good Fight, a documentary that presented a history of the Lincoln Battalion. With the latter film, I was most closely involved. Even before applying for an NEH grant in the late seventies, the three young filmmakers—Mary Dore, Sam Sills, and Noel Buckner—came to ask me, as author of Crusade of the Left, both to serve on their advisory board and, perhaps more important, to read over and to help them write a stronger proposal to the NEH for a $250,000 grant. The initial aim of the trio was to shoot the film using what was at that moment the reigning documentary aesthetic, one that marked several of the mildly leftist films the Endowment was supporting, such as The Wobblies and Harlan County USA. The idea was that the history would be told entirely in the words of talking heads. These would not be the usual academic experts, professors wearing neckties, but regular down-to-earth folk, the men and women who had participated in particular historical events: industrial workers, activists and labor organizers who had led strikes, or had been arrested by authorities and spent time in jail—or, in this case, had volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War. Implicit was the idea that their weathered, elderly faces carried a certain kind of historical authenticity, while their gravelly voices provided a narrative of events that was both true (in line with current notions of History from Below) and moving when spoken over appropriate archival footage and photos. Yet when the words of the fourteen veterans chosen by the directors of The Good Fight failed to tell the full story of the battalion—that is, the story the filmmakers wanted to tell—a scripted, voiceover narration became necessary. Late in 1982, with the budget depleted and a ninety-minute rough cut in place, I offered to rewrite and expand a very sketchy narration the filmmakers had thrown



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together to go with the images. Part of the task consisted of cutting various traditional leftist cliches (such as the struggling peasants of America) that owed more to the influence of Karl Marx, as translated through the prose of the People’s Daily World, than to the historical realities of the United States. As with the time spent on Reds, The Good Fight provided me with something of an education in how the documentary delivers the world of the past and the nature of historical truths it contains. The biggest surprise was learning how close to the drama is this supposedly fact-based genre, and how both forms share so much with traditional written history. Each proceeds by telling a story rooted in the historical data and memory of some person, event, movement, or era, but that story, and the way it unfolds on the page or on the screen, is very much the product of the beliefs and aesthetic choices of the historian, writer, or director. In The Good Fight, the fourteen veterans meant to represent the battalion were selected much for the same reasons as Hollywood actors would be: for their particular look, the colorful qualities of their speech, their storytelling abilities, their very presence on screen as characters with interesting faces. Such elements are intimately tied up with the impact of the film and the meaning which the members of an audience draw from it. The same is true of the music used to emphasize feelings from or about the past (in this case, alternately militant and mournful), and the way the film concludes with some of the elderly vets on a picket line protesting American support for the right-wing Contras in the current war in Nicaragua—a clear suggestion that the good fight not only continues but that you, the viewer, would do well to join it. Only after the release of Reds in the fall of 1981, and The Good Fight a year later—I screened it to an audience of some 300 at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians and again at a day-long symposium organized by the Smithsonian in Washington DC—was I faced for the first time with the issue of defining just how I felt about this visual sort of history. How did it compare to the traditional written form? How should we historians think about the possible contribution of film to our knowledge of history? It would take years for me to work out this issue to my own satisfaction. The process began with an invitation to write on Reds from Reviews in American History, a journal which allows several thousand words to discuss a book, or in this case and for the first time in the publication’s history, a film. My essay straddled the line rather than make a definitive judgment on the film. On the one hand, I argued that this is an impressive work that deals more honestly with native radicalism than any earlier American film;

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it does not hesitate to call a Communist a Communist, and it also manages to provide a window into the vibrant Bohemian subculture which helped to nourish such leftist attitudes. On the other hand, I argued that Reds places too much emphasis on the personal rather than the political, that it depends too much on Reed’s domestic drama rather than international events. Certainly Beatty had done a service in making a hero of a native leftist without concealing his true beliefs, for the first time bringing a story of a native Communist to the screen. But the rich and famous Hollywood star, I suggested, ultimately could not quite catch the full radicalism of his subject. Almost a quarter of a century later, and armed with the criteria I had developed over the years for assessing history films, I would return to Reds and offer a more positive judgment of the film’s portrait of Reed, his friends, the issues they faced, and the milieu in which they operated. This lengthy review of Reds was the first of some thirty pieces on what I would come to call the history film (as opposed to the historical film, which to me meant any work that was important in the development of the medium) that I would produce over the next quarter-century. These essays would eventually form the basis of two books and become part of a larger body of writing that included two edited collections, as well as numerous lectures, conference papers, and commentaries on the work of other scholars. If I can’t number them precisely, it’s because I received so many requests for presentations, oral or written, that I often had to cobble together new talks or articles from parts of older ones. Early on I realized that it was not solely the particular insights of my work which snagged the invitations to write essays or give lectures, but the mere fact that an academic historian with a decent record of publication was wrestling with the questions raised by the use of the visual media to tell the past. I was lucky in my timing, for during the years in which I was first writing about film, curiosity about the relationship between history and media had sprung up and spread throughout the field. At the same time, other disciplines such as Film Studies and Communications were turning towards history. It was if the professoriate at large had finally realized that fewer people were devoting time to serious books, and that the audience for works of scholarly history, save for a few fields such as Military History or Civil War, was shrinking away. My first three history books had been aimed, at least in my mind, not just at specialists in particular fields—the Spanish Civil War, the Russian Revolution, nineteenth-century Japan—but at what we in those days thought to be the general reading public. But in the nineties I too



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was beginning to realize such an audience barely existed any more (if it ever had). Romantic Revolutionary was favorably reviewed in some fifty newspapers and magazines across the country, and it was listed in the New York Times more than once as a notable book of the year, yet sales had totaled no more than 6,000 before Reds was released and the first paperback version sold eight times that many. For a work of serious history or biography, 6,000 itself was considered something of a success (indeed 2,000 was a major triumph for a university press publication). This decline in the history-reading public has been a problem perceived by many members of the profession. During the last quarter of the twentieth century and down to today, worried essays have popped up with some regularity in journals and bulletins, usually written by older scholars, agonizing over the lack of readership for history and expressing concern that we professionals were writing too technically and focusing on far too narrow topics. The call was for them (us) to write more vivid prose and create more exciting narratives. Even the most ivory tower of academics no longer could fail to notice that while a well-reviewed book on Mahatma Gandhi or Lawrence of Arabia or John Reed might sell thousands, even tens of thousands, a film or a television mini-series on the same topic could often reach tens or hundreds of millions. It would be of little use and less interest to follow the evolution of my thoughts on and analyses of the history film, even were I able to reconstruct something of the mental processes that took me through the next two decades. The movement was hardly clear, direct, or linear, but blurry, fragmented, and intuitive, the result of input from external sources as well as events in my personal life. For the first couple of years I focused a great deal of energy on mixed-genre documentaries, works which in many ways seemed parallel to my own experiments in Mirror in the Shrine in that they narrated stories set in the past and simultaneously raised questions about their own strategies of telling. But the corpus and distribution of these works was distinctly limited, and eventually, prodded by friends in both History and Film Studies, I turned to dramatic feature films, first European and Third World productions, then with a mixture of reluctance, dread, and anticipation, to (some of) those coming out of Hollywood. If my first epiphany regarding film came in the patio of the Alcazar in Seville in 1981, a second swept over me when in 1987 I first viewed director Alex Cox’s film Walker. This film delivers its history not with the solemnity usually accorded to the past, but, rather, as black comedy. The story is that of a notorious American freebooter who led a small army into Nicaragua

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in the 1850s to help the local liberal party in its armed confrontation with conservatives, managed in a rigged election to get himself voted president of that country within a year, killed off political leaders who opposed him, instituted the practice of black slavery supposedly to help the economy, and was eventually driven from power and killed by combined forces from the other Central American countries. Walker overflows with outrageous, over-the-top humor, along with many overt absurdities and anachronisms (for instance, computers in nineteenthcentury offices, soldiers drinking cokes). Its aesthetic, which derives from the so-called spaghetti western—blood splatters on the screen as men are blown apart by artillery shells, others fall from second-story windows in graceful slow-motion ballets—interested me as much as the film’s content and sent me to the library to learn everything I could about this historical figure. Dozens of books and essays in English, French, and Spanish led me to see that the film, for all its visual fireworks, managed to incorporate many of the varying, and sometimes contradictory, interpretations of the historical Walker: the accounts of his motivations, beliefs, sexual proclivities, and accomplishments (such as they were) that had been offered by writers and historians over the last 150 years. This moved me towards a simple if radical conclusion: for all its offbeat way of telling the past, indeed because of it, Walker was able to provide a complex portrait of its subject as seen from the intellectual vantage points that are very much part of the consciousness of an era familiar with the works of Marx, Freud, and the postcolonialists. If the film’s confrontational style was extreme, that is because it ran parallel to the work of the most avant-garde of current theater groups, those which under the influence of Bertolt Brecht engaged in the distancing of emotion in order to force the spectators to think about rather than just feel the story, or those which indulged in breaking the fourth wall of the stage and confronting the audience directly with the issues at hand. My study of Walker led to the question that, if a film this over-the-top and out-of-the-ordinary could deliver a kind of critical history, then why not others? Indeed, why not consider those who direct such films as people engaged in trying create a particular form of history—that is, as trying to make the past meaningful to us in the present? Rather than simply criticizing them for not measuring up to the standards of its written form (the normal approach of historians writing on film, including, until then, yours truly), why not try to learn by what rules and practices directors over the last century have created these visual works dealing with history? The important issue now seemed to be this: what are the historical film’s rules



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of engagement with the past? The search to find an answer occupied me for the next few years and led to the development of some rough criteria for how to distinguish a history film, one which addresses the kind of issues about the past that occupy historians, from a mere costume drama, the film that utilizes the past as a backdrop for romance and adventure. Ultimately, it seemed to me, the only way to assess a film is by using the same criteria which we use when evaluating written works of history: we do not judge them on the basis of individual data points or factual statements, but by how well a work engages, reinforces, takes issue with, adds to, or alters the ongoing discourse on a particular topic. This may be a difficult concept for someone who is not a historian to grasp. It is, frankly, difficult as well for historians to grasp, or at least accept. We are—or were—taught in grad school research techniques for finding and assessing evidence, and simple ways of presenting that evidence in a straightforward narrative. We are never taught that while a single piece of data may be verifiable, the moment we start connecting pieces of data to tell a story we are involved in creating a past through our own choices and beliefs, as well as through the demands of literary form. Which is precisely why ten historians can look at the same body of evidence and create ten works with different interpretations about the issues in question. Part of my own struggle for a new way to tell the past that resulted in Mirror in the Shrine was the attempt to make the process of doing history more transparent, to show not just the drama and meaning in the lives of my subjects, but, at the same time, to reveal something of the process by which the historian makes choices to create that drama. This meant that my interest in innovative narrative connected to my developing ideas on film. So did a new and vibrant flood of theory into the field of history—as well as into film, literature, cultural and other humanistic studies. Under the general rubric of the Linguistic Turn, Post-Structuralism, or Postmodernism, this theory is associated in history with such scholars as Hayden White, Frank Ankersmit, Richard Koselleck, and Paul Ricoeur. Like many practicing historians, I was never much interested and poorly trained in theories of history. It came as a kind of revelation when, just about the time I was finishing with the writing of Mirror, I encountered an essay by White entitled “The Burden of History,” a then decade-old piece from which I absorbed three delicious ideas: That historians are rather shifty folk who, when criticized for not being scientific enough, claim that history is an art, but when told their writings are not really artistic, claim that it is really a social science. That to be relevant to the age in which they live, the work

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of historians should engage with the cultural ideas, issues, and discourse (a new word for me) of their times. That academic history had long since give up the idea of being relevant to the contemporary world since it presented its findings in the form of a narrative that slavishly followed the model of the nineteenth-century novel. Where, the essay asked, were the contemporary forms of history, ones that paralleled the art movements of the twentieth century: action painters, kinetic sculptors, existentialist novelists, imagist poets, or nouvelle vague cinematographers?1 Important for me was the way in which White’s essay provided intellectual and philosophic support for the innovations that filled Mirror in the Shrine and would help, or so I thought, to legitimize my writings on film. This was more than welcome, for among scholars in the history profession, particularly senior scholars—with a few exceptions—there was little interest in what I was doing. When I tried to explain the reasons for attempting to write a new sort of history, or to locate the historical meanings in certain films, colleagues tended to look bored, or annoyed, or both. When I shared sections of Mirror which I had published in a literary journal (Ploughshares) because those devoted to history had no room for experimental writing, colleagues would say things like brilliantly innovative, or you write so well in tones which suggested that innovation or good writing were less-thandesirable qualities in a work of history (the subtext being that they no doubt mask poor scholarship). My main support at Caltech came from a colleague in literature (Jerome McGann) and another in anthropology (Nick Dirks), fields in which theory had already made major inroads. I had no shorthand label for my innovations, but whatever you called them, Mirror seemed to fill the hole towards which White was pointing: in structure and writing it was more like a contemporary than a nineteenth-century novel, and because it was about an encounter between cultures, it seemed relevant to a world rapidly shrinking due to accelerating revolutions in transportation and communication. White’s essay had another effect: it moved me towards reading and engaging with other theorists in search of understanding and, I suppose, justifying my own historical innovations. Soon enough I was seized with the temptation to become a theorist myself. There was something delicious about the idea of producing the type of slender book of essays with provocative, contemporary images on the cover in which theory usually appeared, books which involved a sort of instant gratification, for you could write them one essay at a time, publish them individually in journals, and then later collect them into a volume. How much more immediately satisfying



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than laboring over the time-consuming extended narratives—Mirror took me a decade to produce—which had been my lifelong goal. Writing theory also meant you need not journey to archives, need not indulge in the eye-wearying task of reading faded letters and journals scribbled in impossibly ambiguous handwriting like that of Edward Morse, need not spend days in dark rooms, staring at the screens of microfilm reading machines. Yet, for me, theory quickly proved to have distinct limitations. Each work I read led to another and then to another in a kind of infinite regression in which each theorist seemed only to analyze the work of other theorists rather than dealing with questions that could be useful to someone wanting to write or film historical events. Soon I found myself swimming—no, it was more like drowning in a swelling ocean of writings that pertained not just to stories about events and people in the past, but to other theories dealing with literature, film, and cultural studies. Some of these theorists, I was dismayed to learn, dismissed the practice of traditional history as an outworn genre, one that—like those cartoons in which a character runs off a cliff and keeps moving forward until, realizing there is no solid ground beneath, plunges into an abyss—no longer had any solid intellectual support or rationale and was on the way towards becoming the dodo bird of academic disciplines. With such an idea I could never agree, for I believed (as I believe today) in the truths of stories, the notion that the story in its complexity is the best way of understanding the multiple dimensions of the human experience over time, that the kind of innovative writing I had done about Japan, as well as the potential contributions of the visual media, created possible ways of reviving, expanding, and making more complex the relevance of historical consciousness to contemporary culture. Not all my insights into how film works as history came from watching (way too many) movies, or serving as consultant on Reds, The Good Fight, or other productions, or from reading cultural theorists. I also learned a great deal about the medium and its possibilities by hanging around with filmmakers who cared about the issues involved in putting the past onto the screen. Some are little known outside of documentary circles—directors like Jill Godmilow and Trinh Minh Ha, whose mixed genre documentaries (Far From Poland, Surname Viet Given Name Nam) show that film can present not only a multi-level, complex vision of the past, but can be capable of both telling a history and simultaneously making problematic its own assertions. Among feature film directors, I spent time with Oliver Stone after he sent me a fan letter saying words to this effect: You are the only one who understands what I am doing. This came in response to an essay I wrote

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in an AHR Forum devoted to his most controversial and most misunderstood film, the multi-perspectival JFK, which I suggested was a work of history not meant to be definitive, but more like a series of propositions as to what might have happened. In our encounters in the early nineties, Stone revealed that he was haunted by the recent past and passionate about putting the (his?) lessons of history on the screen, particularly those dealing with American society during the latter third of the twentieth century. The possibilities of cultural differences in creating historical meaning were suggested to me by actor/director Edward James Olmos (Zoot Suit, The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez, American Me) and later underlined during my friendship with African director Med Hondo, whose films portraying the colonial situation and its aftermath—such as Sarraounia and Fatima, the Algerian Girl of Dakar—avoid the simplistic clichés of too many post­colonial theorists and historians by embodying the complex sense of the past that can emerge when oral and written traditions of history come together to fertilize each other. Such differences were underlined for me during a month spent at the enormous archive of African films at the Ministry of Cooperation in Paris, where I was the sole researcher watching works which may violate Western notions of how to create history but are clearly filled with a huge desire to come to grips with the legacy of both a tribal and a colonial past. * Starting around 1990, an interest in the visual media spread through the world of academia, touched many disciplines, and flourished enough within the field of history to take on a life of its own. This was an international phenomenon. Frankly, I was amazed by the reception of my own work when, during that period, I was invited to present seminars and workshops, give lectures or deliver keynote addresses more than seventy times at meetings in more than twenty countries on six continents. The Getty, the NEH, and Fulbright awarded me fellowships, and I accepted short-term positions as a visiting scholar at the European University Institute in Florence, the University of Barcelona, and at both Manchester and St. Andrews universities in the United Kingdom. In 1988, the editor of the American Historical Review asked me to create an annual section devoted to historical films, which I edited for six years before turning the job over to a younger scholar. I chaired film award committees for both the American Historical Association and the Association of American Historians, and in



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2009, I created a film festival for the AHA’s annual meeting. Yet a goodly number of the invitations came not from history faculties but from Film, Communications, Literature, and Cultural Studies. Within the field of history, the interest comes largely from graduate students and younger scholars, most of them still involved in jumping through the hoops of a career which does not provide a reward structure for discussing or writing about film and history. Let me admit that this recognition tended to make me feel like a minor star. Yet this touch of academic fame has not been devoid of paradox. To the extent that my name was (and is) now regularly linked with film, I am as much annoyed as pleased. For my writings on the visual media seem to have largely obliterated consciousness of my earlier scholarly career, the quarter-century when I was doing what I aimed to do as a historian: tell true stories from the past. My books on the Lincolns, Reed, and Japan feel in many ways closer to me than what I have written on film, but then one might pose the question: who am I to pass judgment my own work? No more no less than a scholar caught in the kind of changing times which alter the consciousness of a culture, trying to come to grips in my own way with those changes. Lecturing in so many different countries forces you to confront the issue of how and if and whether you can actually get an argument across, and does it matter if your words are not understood in the way you hope they will be. Part of this has to do with what becomes lost or distorted in translation, but it can be equally true in English-speaking lands. So often the questions and comments that follow talks or seminars have little or nothing to do with my thesis: that film is capable of providing an important vision of the past which we should see as a kind of history which teaches us much about the past. Often people get stuck on the details or meanings of individual images from the films I use to illustrate how visual history creates a world. If I am using clips from the American film Glory, the discussion is likely to become about racism in America today, or whether the story of Massachusetts’ first black regiment in the Civil War should have been told without focusing so much on its white officers; if Eisenstein’s October, the issue of whether the Bolshevik Revolution represented the Russian masses or was instead a coup d’etat by a tiny party will often be raised; if The Return of Martin Guerre, someone is sure to point out that the streets of a sixteenthcentury French town would be far filthier than what we see onscreen, and if piles of horseshit have been eliminated, then what other parts of history may have been left out?

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In South America and Eastern Europe, there is always at least one hardline Marxist in the crowd who inevitably suggests that I am little more than a propagandist for the American government and/or an apologist for late industrial capitalism. In the US, by contrast, I am accused of being an entertainer, someone who trivializes the serious business of history by pretending commercial products can compete with scholarly understanding. Perhaps my favorite response came after a lecture at the British Academy. A white-haired, well-dressed (tweed jacket, sober necktie, gray flannel trousers) scholar who seems to be a living caricature of traditional British culture confronts me at the reception and says: Very interesting talk, young man—we are about the same age—but of course what you said about film is complete and utter nonsense. More rewarding is the encounter with a young Italian scholar who, at the end of my ten-week seminar at the European University Institute, lets me know that my proposals about the history film are absurd; a year later at a conference in Florence, he apologizes, saying it has taken him a long time to accept my arguments, but now he finds them interesting, even persuasive. Some places to which I travel tend to confirm stereotypes; others destroy them. At the University of Tolima in the sleepy, rural Colombian city of Ibague, I am taken to task by a supporter of the revolutionary group, the FARC, for not realizing that history is, as Marx proved, a science. In Paris, at the Centre d’Etudes Critiques of the Sorbonne, two factions with opposing views on the nature of history (the empirical versus the discourse oriented, as best I can tell) wrangle endlessly after my seminar without letting me into the discussion. At Mohammed V University in Rabat, the girls in European dress and those whose heads are wrapped in tight hijabs ask equally acute questions about the intersection of film and history. The challenges involved in lecturing along with projected images are a constant problem, even in technologically advanced countries. Ibague, Colombia; Rabat, Morocco; and Timisoara, Romania turn out to have flawless facilities in which sound systems work well and the screening of clips goes off without a hitch. Yet at Sydney Technical University and the brand new campus of Adolfo Ibanez University in the hills above Vina del Mar, Chile, the images are too dark for the audience to see any details, and at Palacky University in the Czech Republic a program is delayed for almost an hour while technicians labor over the interface between a computer and a projector. The worst case occurs where you’d least expect it: in Tokyo, where the staff at Toyo University—the school attended by the Emperor and the rest of the royal family—failed to get a single image onto the screen during



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my seminar. When there’s a problem with the first laptop, I tell my hosts not to worry, I can deliver the talk without clips. But no, they say, that would be a terrible shame. So while I try to speak, a series of youngsters shuffles in and out to play with or to change the laptop on the desk in front of me, sometimes softly arguing with each other while I lose the attention of the audience as eyes focus on the young men and women struggling with wires, keyboards, and USB ports. Only during the post-seminar reception, as my hosts are bowing low and profusely apologizing, do images suddenly begin moving on the screen. With a glass of beer in hand, I have to explain my ideas all over again. * One major thing that distinguishes the world of film from that of academia is the festivals. Academic celebrations such as award ceremonies and installation of new officers, even the mini-film festival I created for the AHA, are largely decorous and drab events, with lots of speeches, men wearing jackets, or sometimes suits and ties, and women clad not all that differently. Film festivals are something else again: bright lights, red carpets, glamour, floor-length gowns, elaborate hair-dos, TV cameras. Not that anyone invited me to the big commercial bashes such as Cannes, Venice, Berlin, or Toronto. Instead the call came from less well-known events in places like Sydney, Rabat, Honolulu, and Olomouc (a beautiful town in the Czech Republic of which I had never previously heard). Usually the festivals that summoned me had socially conscious agendas, such as a commitment to human rights, or ethnic awareness, or historical understanding, Was I invited because of my books, my publications in historical, cultural studies, and film journals? No doubt to some extent. But it was impossible to forget that Reds, with its three Hollywood stars, eight Oscar nominations, and radical subject matter cast a long shadow across the world of cinema. For those festivals which sought some kind of intellectual legitimacy—and this also happens at academic meetings which open themselves to the visual media—I began to feel as if I had been cast in the role of a lifelong series entitled “The Man from Reds” (the one you can get ahold of because the really big names involved are busy making more films). Fun as they can be, festivals also have their awkward and embarrassing moments. Everyone connected with such events seems to have a stake in overstating and magnifying my role in the production. At first the gross exaggerations make me feel slightly bogus and more than a little uneasy.

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People gush over my wonderful screenplay, and I say, reluctantly to be sure: No, it’s not my film, I didn’t write the screenplay, though I do have a few lines in it. Or someone will marvel over Beatty’s wisdom in purchasing my superb biography, and I have to confess: He didn’t really buy the book, he bought me. Such words tend to make listeners think I am being overly modest, and often enough cause them to redouble their praise, making me realize that my imagined fame helped to make the festival more noteworthy, its sponsors more important for having invited someone from Reds. After a few such conversations I grow tired of qualifying my statements and making elaborate explanations as to my real and rather diminished role in the film. If someone wants to believe that my book was the basis of Reds, or that I can write crack dialogue, what, after all, is the harm? Why disillusion them? Soon enough I find myself agreeing with my hosts that my involvement was crucial to the film’s success. Was that my voice saying, Warren couldn’t have done it without me!? The glamour, the presence of famous actors, actresses, international directors, and important writers can provide a temptation to try on new roles, to have a go at becoming a (minor to be sure) star. Confession: in an idle way, I had long fancied myself as a potential stand-up entertainer. After all, I had no trouble amusing students with my historical anecdotes and stories. Why not a larger public? The opportunity presented itself on my third consecutive year as a consultant to the Hawaii festival, a sweet annual ten-day gig for which my expenses were handled by the organizing committee. A few days before I was to fly to Honolulu in 1982, the director phoned, explained that an important critic who was scheduled to MC the opening event had canceled due to illness, and asked if I would take his place. You’re a professor. You wrote an award-winning film. You’re used to lecturing. This’ll be a piece of cake. You don’t even have to prepare. We’ll provide cue cards for you. Just read from them and smile a lot. So there I am on a warm early November evening, standing on a makeshift stage set up in the open-air lobby of Lincoln Hall, part of the East–West Center, a government-sponsored research facility located on the campus of the University of Hawaii (it’s a Pacific Rim festival with the theme When Strangers Meet). I’m wearing a light summer suit over a Hawaiian shirt and reading what turn out to be the most godawful jokes from the cue cards handed to me just before I go on stage, right after I have been introduced to three island queens (Miss Filipino Hawaii, Miss Japan Hawaii, Miss Korea Hawaii) who wear formal gowns, have fragrant flowers



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in their dark hair, and leis around their necks, and whose giggles show them to be, despite their startling beauty, teenagers. The blinding lights—are they for the TV cameras?—keep me from having more than a hazy view of the audience of several hundred people down below, busy slurping pineapple juice punch spiked with cheap vodka and stuffing themselves on lau lau pork. The opening remarks—Welcome to the second annual … Let me take just a moment to thank our generous sponsors … etc. etc.—and a couple of interviews with local documentary filmmakers go well enough. But then the proceedings take a terrible turn. My first important international visitor is the great Hong Kong martial arts director King Hu. Since I don’t know his films, I dutifully begin to follow the prompts through an outrageous series of questions in which both sides are scripted on the cards. But of course he doesn’t have any cards. So when I ask Who are you?, he answers, as expected, I’m Hu. My next line is Which Hu? and when he fails to answer that, I go on to What Hu? Who Hu? At this point, and who can blame him, he stalks offstage. I stick the cards in my pocket and think: No more of this stupid script, I’ve spent thirty years in the classroom, I don’t need help, I’ll improvise—just as, coming towards me on stage, is the most glamorous woman I have ever seen, a woman wearing a blood-red sari, red dot on her forehead, dark hair piled up and covered with a multicolored scarf, gold clinking on both wrists and, like the promise of some forbidden pleasure, a diamond-like jewel shimmering in her nose. We stand together at the microphones and I can’t think of a thing to say. After a long beat, and then a second one, in a voice that mixes Oxford English with the song of India, she says: This isn’t a silent film festival, is it? When the laughter subsides, she speaks her name into the microphone, and tells the audience that being in Hawaii is the dream of a lifetime. I finally find my voice and gasp the clever line, What’s it like to be a female director? I don’t know, she replies, I’ve never been any other kind. So much for my great abilities at ad-libbing. From that point on it is all pretty much downhill as I struggle through increasingly awkward interviews, which feature questions nobody in the audience cares much about, and I begin to realize that the ongoing hubbub indicates they are far less interested in my words than in the food and drink. Slowly my dreams of glory fade away. Damn. I was meant to be a professor after all. *

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Almost a century after the birth of the motion picture, film presents historians with a challenge still unseized, a challenge to think of how to utilize the medium to its full capabilities for carrying information, juxtaposing images and words, providing startling and contrastive mixtures of sight and sound, and (perhaps) creating analytic structures that include visual elements. Because its own conventions are so strong and, to the historian, so initially startling, the visual media also serve to highlight the conventions and limitations of written history. Film thus points towards new possibilities for representing the past, possibilities that could allow narrative history to recapture the power it once had when it was more deeply rooted in the literary imagination. The challenge of film to history, of the visual to the written culture may be like the challenge of written history to the oral tradition, of Herodotus and Thucydides to the tellers of historical tales. Before Herodotus there was myth, which was a perfectly adequate way of dealing with the past of a tribe, a city, or people, adequate in terms of providing a meaningful world in which to live and relate to one’s past. In a postliterate world, it is possible that visual culture will once again change the nature of our relationship to the past. This does not mean giving up on attempts at truth, but somehow recognizing that there may be more than one kind of historical truth, or that truths conveyed in the visual media may be different from, but not necessarily in conflict with, truths conveyed in words. History does not exist until it is created. And we create it in terms of our underlying values. Our kind of rigorous, “scientific history” is in fact a product of our history, our special history which includes a particular relationship to the written word, a rationalized economy, notions of individual rights and the nation state, and many cultures have done quite well without it. Which is only to say that there are, as we all know but rarely acknowledge, many ways to represent and relate to the past. Film, with its unique powers of representation, now struggles for a place within a cultural tradition which has privileged the written word. Its challenge is great, for it may be that to acknowledge the authenticity of the visual is to accept a new relationship to the word itself. We would do well to recall Plato’s assertion that when the mode of the music changes, the walls of the city shake. It seems that to our time is given this vital question to ponder: if the mode of historical representation changes, what then may begin to shake? Visions of the Past, pp. 41–4



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Dear Janima I once said that you should make this book so far out that a thousand years from now people will still be quoting your words. You laughed and answered that you’d be satisfied to be quoted in Rethinking History, the journal you helped to found, or the American Historical Review. But I know you well enough to realize that you like to downplay your expectations. You really wish it would make a big splash on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, but no, you’d never admit that out loud. You’re annoyed they haven’t mentioned your name since Romantic Revolutionary in 1975, long before we were together. You say that it’s gotten so thin they hardly review any books any more, but take up most of the pages with endless lists of best-sellers: hardback, paperback, ebooks, fiction, non-fiction, young adult, mysteries, romance, detective, self-help. Yet it’s still the New York Times and somewhere in your heart you lust after its pages. Well who knows if anyone will be quoted anywhere in a thousand years? If there will be people around to read or quote anything, and if there are, what medium will they use? If there is still electricity to run the kinds of gadgets which currently devour our lives, no doubt algorithms will choose their reading as they do ours. Just twentyfive years ago when we were first together you used to write me letters, remember? Words on paper that touched my heart and soul. I fell in love with your words before I fell in love with you. I hope you are using those kinds of words in this book. Not so intimate, of course, but full of the feelings that you always get from listening to jazz—those long, complicated, powerful solos on piano or saxophone by musicians like Thelonius Monk and John Coltrane that I have learned to love as well and that send you back to the computer with the feeling that it’s important to sing to the world the melodies you create, even if they’re in prose. Who could imagine back in the eighties when we were first together swimming in the YMCA pool high above the Pacific Ocean, or hiking the trails in the Santa Monica Mountains, that the essays you were beginning to write on film and history would carry us around the world? I couldn’t take them very seriously at first. For me film was entertainment, fun, what you did on a Saturday night in Kabul, went to the Cinema Zeinab in Shari Now to see movies of American cowboys or detectives or teenage lovers—or even better, Bollywood extravaganzas full of elaborate song-and-dance numbers that go on

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forever. After I came to the States to school in Omaha, movies were much the same: for dates, or nights out with the girls, with popcorn and cokes and sometimes a little flirting with the local boys. Where I come from, history and film exist in completely different realms. The study and teaching of history—Tarikh in Dari—is a weighty and much honored profession. A historian is considered to be an important person, full of knowledge and wisdom. The title earns everyone’s respect, for the historian carries the knowledge of our tradition, and is someone able to make us understand our lives and those of our ancestors. So when you showed me the introduction you had just finished for your first film book, Visions of the Past, the subtitle seemed so odd: Personal, Professional, and (a Little) Theoretical. Why the parentheses? I asked. Why mix personal and professional? And why only a little theoretical? Isn’t it either theoretical or not? I don’t remember your answer at the time, but I felt then—have felt ever since—that you were playing with your readers. It took years to understand that playfulness is part of the way you approach the world. It gets into your writing too. You feel there is something to be learned by upsetting expectations, by creating different angles on events and people in order to see the past in a different light. That may help to explain your early passion for radical movements and the later one for film. Maybe for me as well? As the daughter of a diplomat, I grew up in many countries. So when we started traveling together, following your invitations to lecture around the globe, it was a familiar and happy time for me, though I have to say that academics do not live as well as diplomats and their parties are a lot less lavish. Many places we visited in Europe, Asia, Latin America, Australia, and Africa were new and exotic to me, but some of the best times were when I got to share parts of the Islamic world with you. You can forget, after living in the West, the pleasures of dense crowds, street vendors, jammed bazaars, bargaining, the myriad smells of spices and kabobs, the jumble of sounds and language that assault the ear, the powerful haunting voice of the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer. In Morocco, Egypt, and Turkey it was like reawakening to a past and a part of myself that can get buried but never vanishes. Thank goodness. Our travels centered around lectures and seminars. Endless lectures and seminars on history and film. Over the years they worked to open my eyes, change my mindset. I came to understand what you were talking about. How films about black Americans like Glory and Selma, or Oliver Stone on Vietnam, or that recent Chilean film No



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about voting Pinochet out of power, or The Return of Martin Guerre about French peasants, or The Lives of Others on spying during the East German Communist regime, or Sarranounia about an African queen who fought the French, can be both fiction and history at the same time. But this was hardly true of your audiences. The first question, no matter what the country, was always something about why the film got a particular fact wrong. Everyone seemed stuck on the details rather than the larger picture. Everywhere you met with resistance, for everyone seems to be a film critic and everyone knows that history is not something you see on a screen. Rarely did anyone ever say: Yes, I get it. You’re right. What a brilliant insight! Often members of the audience seemed to feel your far-out ideas were an attempt to put something over on them, as if you were an agent of the US government or a publicist for Hollywood, trying to remake the world in the image of America, even when you used foreign films as your examples. Or perhaps the ones who did get your arguments just failed to speak up. I admired your patience in answering the same questions a million times, voiced in different languages, particularly admired your stamina, because so often you confessed to me that maybe your ideas were a bit over the top, but that provoking thought on the topic was important because so much of the world now came to us on a screen. After a few years you began to complain that you were fed up with film and history, and too bored to ever give another lecture on the topic. But then an invitation would come to give a keynote at conference in a country or city neither of us had ever visited, and off we’d go. Not that I listened to all your lectures. Not by a long shot. They were, let’s face it, pretty repetitious after a while. So I began to sneak away to visit local sites—returning to the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem for a second visit, or leaving Ghent to spend an afternoon along the wonderful canals of Bruges. My great joy, as you well know, comes from plants, and one of the greatest benefits of our travels was that I had a chance to experience so many botanical gardens. Some of them were spectacular; in Canberra, Capetown, and Edinburgh I got so lost wandering for hours through the vegetation that you had to send out search parties to find me. The other really happy times came when I realized that much as you may have studied history over the years, I had things to teach you as well. That first happened when we were living in Barcelona for six months in 1994 while you taught at the university. You always

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claimed it was your favorite country, and acted as though you knew pretty much everything about Spain’s history and culture after taking so many trips there over the years. But you began to learn lots of new things when you started to see the land in part through my eyes. For you Spain was all about left-wing politics, communism, anarchism, revolution, and radical heroes. But on our first trip to Andalucia you began to touch and feel something deeper about its Islamic and Jewish heritage. You had been in the south, but had never visited Cordoba, with its grand Mezquita (mosque) dating from the eleventh century—a structure which is one of the architectural wonders not just of Islam but of the entire world. You had never entered that beautiful jewel of a synagogue located just a few hundred yards away, with its Moorish architecture, Arabic decorations, and wall quotations in Hebrew. That afternoon when we entered those historical and holy sites, film was far away. In the mosque it seemed that the world of the spirit became more real than ever before it had been for you. We wandered for what seemed hours up and down the dim aisles, losing ourselves in the endless rows of pillars with their red and white striped arches and double arches that seem to speak the silent language of infinity, as unfamiliar to you as it was homey to me. It struck me that perhaps such a feeling is what you have always looked for in history. After that, you began to study the world of Al Andalus, the seven centuries when Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived in relative harmony and creativity. They led you to suggest we make that six-week pilgrimage in 2006, seeking out the most remote remains of Islamic and Jewish culture, fortresses, synagogues, and mosques, now abandoned, all across Portugal and the south of Spain. In these years since that first visit to Cordoba, I have been trying to show you that whatever the source of that feeling for the past, the unknown, the sacred, it may well be located somewhere outside of time, in what we share with each other and the universe. I may not have convinced you of that yet, but you know how stubborn I am, which means I will keep on trying. One thing I have learned from us being together all these years is that love can do wonders. Really. You may not yet believe that, but just think about the unlikelihood of you and I, Montreal and Kabul, Jew and Muslim, meeting one afternoon in a YMCA swimming pool in Pacific Palisades, California. To the world you may be a historian, but to me you are more like an old-fashioned bard, telling stories. It’s a rare gift in this culture



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where the attention span is usually no more than a few seconds. Stories are full of the meanings by which we understand the world and guide our lives. Is it a gender reversal for me to think of you as my Scheherazade? At home or abroad, no matter what the continent or culture, you overflow with tales. And if I sometimes get tired of listening and shut my ears for a while, I’m always happy to know that you continue. For it is just such stories that help to keep the tears in my heart from overflowing, tears over the great losses my people and I have suffered these last few decades. Dostet darum Nana

Ojai, CA: The author and his wife, Nahid Massoud, on their wedding day in March 1997—married at the country club overlooking the valley used for Shangri-La in Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon at the hour of high noon, making straw hats necessary.

Epilogue: Stories from the Past

What experience and history teach is this—that people and governments never have learned anything from history. G. W. F. Hegel

I didn’t come across this quotation from the famed German philosopher until a couple of years ago. You can find it near the beginning of the introduction to his monumental work, The Philosophy of History. It’s a sentiment that can give one pause, one that underscores whatever doubts you may harbor with regards to the normal reasons given to us for learning history—that is, some version of George Santayana’s claim that Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Hegel goes on for the next 500 pages to explain that history is not a piling up of data or a search for parallels from one era to another, but a method for charting the course of the Spirit of Freedom as it moves mysteriously through human beings and the civilizations they create. Fair enough, I suppose, if you believe in such a Spirit, but if you don’t, and if you also don’t quite swallow the other usual meta-theories about the meaning of history—Marxism with its dialectics, the Progressive notion of continual improvement in the social order with which I grew up—what you are left with are the stories from and about the past, stories that comprise a kind of laboratory of human behavior, and provide insight into and help us understand the varieties and complexities of our actions in a wide variety of situations and cultures human beings have created over the millennia. Which is to say that from my point of view, Hegel is wrong. For I believe we do learn from history, but what we learn does not add up to simple or clear lessons. Our stories from the past are always wrapped in the ambiguities, improbabilities, and surprises of the human condition, and we take from them what we need to create our understanding of the past. I write this final chapter of the book in August 2015, at a moment when several of my essays on the history film are working their way through the production process of journals and books in English, Spanish, and Japanese.

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It is now over a quarter of a century since the publication of my last work of narrative history. Why, you may wonder, does someone who claims a preference for writing stories and extolls the kinds of truth they convey, let himself drift for so long from his original purpose? I would wonder, too, if it were true, but in fact I never have abandoned storytelling. It’s just that after the experiment of Mirror in the Shrine, and my years of theorizing about films as history, and my role as one of the founding editors of Rethinking History in 1997, the only academic journal which encourages innovative historical writing (now in its eighteenth year), I succumbed to the desire to move back to my original impulses as a writer, and to pursue the past in different genres. Since 2000 I have published three works of narrative. All are historically researched works of fiction. The first of these, The Man Who Swam Into History: The (Mostly) True Stories of My Jewish Family, is an offbeat “history” that chronicles the exploits of several members from three generations of my own family. These were Eastern European immigrants, from Romania and Latvia, who reached Canada around the beginning of the twentieth century. I put “history” in quotation marks because of the way the work consciously positions itself in opposition to the traditional form in which family stories have come to be told—as lengthy sagas that include a panoramic view of several generations; as works that all have pretty much the same theme: how we came to America as poor immigrants, were discriminated against, reviled, and spat upon, but by hard work and persistence we overcame tremendous obstacles, ultimately prospered and became upstanding and successful citizens of this great country! The problem I have with such tales is not that they are untrue, but that they are so true, and can be told of so many different ethnic and national groups, that they comprise a single story and are no longer very interesting unless you are descended from that particular group and have a desire to know your own past. Besides, it was never clear to what extent this genre fully applied to my own family in which racketeers, gangsters, socialists, and communists lived side by side, the better, apparently, to engage in enormous and endless arguments over economics, politics, and social systems, past, present, and future. Like other such works, my family tales are in part based on time spent in archives and libraries, public and private; on diaries, letters, photos, newspaper clippings, and other stuff tucked away in family albums, such as the certificates from the various bearded mohels who circumcised my two brothers and I; as well as on interviews with sometimes recalcitrant, often forgetful, and occasionally boastful relatives. As I wrote in the



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introduction: The reality of the past—national, familial, personal—does not lie in an assemblage of data but in a field of stories—a place where fact, truth, fiction, invention, forgetting, and myth are so entangled that they cannot be separated. Ultimately it is not the facts that make us what we are, but the stories we have been told and the stories we believe.1 My first novel, King of Odessa, started out as a screenplay. After devoting so many words to what makes a historical film history, it seemed inevitable that I try the genre myself. There was a more traditional historical reason as well. For years I was obsessed with the life and work of the Russian Jewish writer Isaac Babel, who came to worldwide fame in the mid-twenties with Red Cavalry, a vivid account of his experiences as a reporter riding with Cossacks during the Civil War that followed the Bolshevik Revolution. He then wrote short stories about the Odessa underworld with a main character named Benya Krik, a prototype of the modern Godfather, a man at once well dressed, courtly, and a killer. To write a traditional biography was impossible—and in fact to this day one has never been written—for the sources one would normally use have largely vanished. When Babel was arrested during the great Stalin purges of the late thirties, tortured for some weeks in Lubyanka prison, and put to death after a trial that lasted twelve minutes, all his papers—a trunkful, according to his wife—were seized by the NKVD. Though scholars in post-Soviet Russia have diligently searched for them in the archives, they have never been found. All I had available to construct a portrait of his life were the autobiographical hints in some of his published works, the traces he left in the memories and memoirs of others, and a book of letters to his first wife, his mother, and sister, all of whom lived in Western Europe, written over two decades and published in an English translation (they did not appear in Russia until after the fall of the Soviet regime). Those letters became the key to my story, particularly the seventeen he wrote in the summer of 1936 (the year of my birth and of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War) during his last extended sojourn in his birthplace and favorite city, Odessa. They provided the general outlines for Babel’s activities over a three-month period: his treatments at a hospital for recurring health problems, his visits to relatives and old friends, his brief jaunt by sea to Yalta. Using them as a template, I created what you might call a fictional biography (a form which has become popular in the last decade or so), drawing out the details of his life and career from his stories of childhood and tales of Odessa’s Jewish gangsters, tough and violent but often warm-hearted men whom he both feared and admired. The plot—my

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invention—revolves around Babel being stalked by the secret police in the shape an attractive woman, which, given his well-documented sexual meanderings and his eventual arrest on bogus charges (supposedly as a spy for France and Austria) two years later, seems well within the realm of the plausible. The screenplay was, as I knew from the outset, too long and far too complex in structure. Contacts made during my days with Reds and other film projects allowed me to circulate it to a number of agents, producers, and directors, all of whom had a similar response: this is not an American, it’s a European film! By which they meant that all my flashbacks, flashforwards, and flash-sideways, and my stories-within-stories would be too confusing for any audience other than a sophisticated, art-house crowd. That they were right was underscored when the sole person to respond positively to the script was Russian director Sergei Bodrov, who phoned to tell me how much he liked the work, how he thought it caught a certain setting and character that helped to illuminate a moment in Soviet history. He wished me well, but explained he could not undertake the film because he only worked from his own screenplays. I was not ready to give up on Babel, and the criticism of the screenplay as too complicated would not apply to a novel, where its moves, which could utilize different typography, headings, subtitles, and voices, would be easy enough to follow—at least by an audience familiar with the writings of authors like Milan Kundera, Italo Calvino, and Gabriel García Márquez. The work of turning the screenplay into a novel let me experience first-hand how different are worlds created in words from those created in images and sound. The story, events, and characters all remained the same, but what had been a portrait of a man seen from the outside had to become an internal vision—yet another reason that any history created on screen is inevitably different in its depiction of the past than history on the page. My second novel, Red Star, Crescent Moon, is less linked to historical events than to my personal experience. The story centers around a historian during the weeks he spends on location in Spain working as a consultant on a Hollywood film being made from a book he wrote about the Lincoln Battalion. Heading the production in his first effort as a director is a Hollywood megastar always referred to by his initials. Does this sound familiar? There is a woman, too, as there always has to be, in this case a documentary filmmaker born in Afghanistan who attended university in the United States and was granted political asylum after the Soviets invaded her homeland in 1978. One theme highlighted in the story, with its public



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confrontations, terrorists, kidnappings, and shootouts, is the vast difference between those who actually live through historical events and those who research and write about them. You will understand that Red Star, Crescent Moon derives in part from my time working on Reds even before I tell you that I am married to a woman who was born in Afghanistan, lived through the Civil War as a student in the American University of Beirut, was transferred to the University of Nebraska, and obtained political asylum when the Soviets invaded her country. Being her husband for more than two decades has been like ingesting the history of a country other than my own. It leads to the powerful question: How do pasts live on in our relationships and ourselves? But I’ll have to deal with that later in another book, one which is already partially written. You may wonder—I certainly do—as to where such fictional works that center around historical people, moments, or events sit in relation to more traditional history. What kind of relationship to the past do they create? What can we learn from them? It’s hardly a question based on my works alone, for this genre—the well-researched, fictionalized life of some famous figure from history—has become a popular subspecies of the historical novel in recent years. Perhaps it should best be folded into a larger question: Why do we care about the past at all? What do we want from those who have gone before? Is the very writing of history itself a worthwhile activity? Sometime late in the seventies, during the period when I was working on Mirror in the Shrine, I spent a good deal of time worrying about such questions. Did it make sense to spend my days studying the past when the present is so full of pressing problems and issues? As part of a course I taught on Japan and the United States, I took my students to the Zen Center in midtown Los Angeles. Our host was its founder, Roshi Tetsugen, a man who started life with the name Bernard Glassman. Before becoming involved in Zen, he had taken advanced degrees in engineering and mathematics at UCLA and had worked for some years as a scientist. After his talk to the small group of students that centered around the importance of Being Here Now, each of us in the audience was able to pose a question which he answered, or avoided answering, with a great deal of verve and good humor. My own was about Zen and history. What was the use of thinking about the past if everything is now? Without a pause, he answered: But history IS now. It’s always now. One studies the past as it remains alive in the present. It contains lessons for this moment. These words led to a further question that I wasn’t brave enough to pose: Did this idea of history actually come from Zen or from reading William Faulkner—The past is never dead. It’s not even

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past. Or was it simply a reflection of the same tradition of historical writing in which we Americans are all acculturated? I certainly find vast areas of overlap in the worlds of the past as they exist in my historical and fictional works. Both involve extended reflections on the individual’s relationship between him/herself and the larger social order, including its reigning ideologies; both are based on extensive historical research, almost a decade in the case of King of Odessa. Because my narratives have a biographical slant (even the Lincoln Battalion book can be seen as a collective biography), they tend towards the notion that individuals can also be seen as emblems. The men of the Lincoln Battalion exemplify the radical activist conscience of the Great Depression; John Reed, a generation of bohemians and radicals; Griffis, Morse, and Hearn, the American (Western?) encounter with Asia; King of Odessa, the problems of the creative artist in a totalitarian state; The Man Who Swam, another chapter in that immigrant saga; and Red Star, Crescent Moon, an examination of the temptations and pitfalls for the academic who dares to enter the world of the mass media. If my previous works have created such emblems, how about this one? On these pages am I trying to make myself a kind of emblem, and if so, for what? My own trajectory as a historian seems singular and wayward, even to me. In graduate school more than half a century ago, I could not have imagined a career that would take me from the trenches of Jarama and the ruins of Belchite to struggles with Soviet bureaucracy over entering Smolny Institute, to samurai houses along the willow-draped canals of Matsue and the temple of Gyokuzenji on the remote Izu peninsula, to an involvement for seven years with a Hollywood star in his efforts to put the life of an American communist on screen, to a kind of epiphany over the possibilities for film as history that took place in the Alcazar of Seville. Nor could I have foreseen myself experimenting with new ways of writing history or making arguments in favor of the value of history on the screen, let alone find myself traveling to lecture halls, seminar rooms, and film festivals around the world to talk about the contributions of the dramatic film to our understanding of the past. Broader developments in the worlds of thought and art—such as the collapse of the distinction between high and low culture after the sixties— certainly underlie these changes, which could seem so personal and quirky even to me when I was struggling to make them. I was, of course, not alone. My changing views and experiments were to some extent encouraged by book publishers and editors of journals looking for something new, and



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by invitations to academic meetings, conferences, and universities in many countries. If much of the interest in my work on film has come from fields not my own—Cinema, Cultural, Language, and Communications Studies— there has also been significant support from fellow historians, something I have probably underplayed in the pages of this work. One early reader of this manuscript took me to task for too often dismissing my colleagues as hopelessly obdurate, conservative, and deeply set in traditional ways, and urged me to acknowledge that the profession has begun to change and has grown more open to different kinds of historical voices. Certainly this is true with regard to topics and personnel. The voices of women, members of various ethnic and national groups, and alternate sexual identities have been busy in recent decades creating their own histories. But the flurry of interest in new ways of writing the past, which produced several very fine books, has diminished in recent years.2 As for recognition of the visual media, it says something about turning away from innovation when the American Historical Review discontinued in 1997 the section on historical films which I was asked to start in 1988, and then banned all film reviews in 2006 on the grounds that historians didn’t know how to write about films. Didn’t it occur to anyone that, given the fact the visual media are playing an increasingly large role in the culture, maybe it was time for historians to learn to do so? My desire to understand my own career and to share it with others in this book has, I suppose, no more (nor less) intellectual or historical justification than those some 450 other works of autobiography and memoir produced by historians, most of them in the last half-century. It is an astonishing number, one I only know because the well-known Spanish medievalist, Jaume Aurell of the University of Navarre, has recently taken time out from studying the autobiographies of Catalan kings to devote several years to researching a book that categorizes and analyzes these works. His study seems to underline the notion that even the halls of academia, with its claims to objective knowledge, have not been immune to the plague of narcissism that infects the contemporary literary world.3 I have delved into some of these works, including the volume which did more to justify this subjective activity for historians than any other, Essais d’ego-histoire, edited by French historian Pierre Nora. Most such accounts tend to be solemn, even pious tales of upbringing, education, mentors, publications, scholarly debates, and academic positions. They are books that underline the notion that history and the work of historians is a serious business, with important consequences for the field or the world.

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Very little space is devoted to the intimacy of personal lives, and there is not much about spouses, children, families, friends, and lovers, who certainly inflect, however obliquely, our ideas and publications. Few pages touch on the psychic joys, pains, and adventures of doing research, or deal with the impact of encountering new and different sorts of people, social practices, belief systems; neither is there anything about how the experience of research itself can be part of the fabric and meaning of an academic’s life, with consequences for what the historian ultimately produces. In these pages I have no doubt tilted the balance the other way. History may be a solemn practice, and my own books have certainly been serious enough if you consider the impulse to chronicle adventurous lives or to analyze films as possible ways of doing history to be serious undertakings. But the reasons for and the process of research and writing books can themselves lead to unexpectedly odd, unusual, ironic, romantic, erotic, and humorous encounters and situations that weave themselves into the fabric of our histories. We all know that you can’t tell a story without a moral, and for those of us who have given up on the late nineteenth-century notion of history as a scientific pursuit and see it as a discourse (which has been its justification for most of its history), stories are their own justification, even if this moral is not specified or underlined at the end, as it is in children’s fables. The problem is that making a lesson out of one’s own life seems to me to involve an act of nerve (chutzpa would be the word in Yiddish) which I would be ashamed to undertake. Perhaps, then, it is not too much to ask you who have read these pages to find, if you can, your own moral in my stories. If you have read this far, you too are implicated in the meanings they create. Good luck with that undertaking. Let me know what you come up with. I am always interested in getting a fresh perspective from the point of view of others. Tell the truth, at this age I really can use one.

Notes

Foreword 1. Daphne Merkin, “Dust to Dustness,” The Fame Lunches (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2014), 183.

Prologue: Adventures of a Historian? 1. Pierre Nora, Essais d’ego histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1987).

Spain: Crusade of the Left 1. Quoted in Robert A. Rosenstone, “Reflections on the Spanish Civil War,” The Progressive 42 (5) (1978): 20–1. 2. Robert A. Rosenstone, Crusade of the Left: The Lincoln Battalion in the Spanish Civil War (New York: Pegasus, 1969), vii–viii. 3. Rosenstone, “Reflections on the Spanish Civil War,” 20–1.

Japan: Mirror in the Shrine 1. Mario E. Cosenza (ed.), The Complete Journal of Townsend Harris (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1930), 225.

Hollywood: Visions of the Past 1 Hayden White, “The Burden of History,” in White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Culture Criticism, 27–50 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins, 1978).

196 Notes

Epilogue: Stories from the Past 1. Robert A. Rosenstone, The Man Who Swam Into History (Austin: University of Texas, 2005), xv. 2. Excellent examples of innovative historical writing include, but are hardly limited to, the following: Sven Lindqvist, A History of Bombing (New York: New Press, 2001) and Exterminate All the Brutes (New York: New Press, 1996); Jonathan Walker, Pistols! Treason! Murder! (Melbourne: Melbourne University, 2007); Marjorie Becker, Setting the Virgin on Fire (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995); Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, In 1926 (Cambridge: Harvard, 1997); Luisa Passerini, Autobiography of a Generation (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1996); Maria Theresa Hernandez, Cemeteries of Ambivalent Desire (College Station: Texas A&M, 2007) and Delirio (Austin: University of Texas, 2002); and all three of James Goodman’s books, Stories of Scottsboro (New York: Pantheon, 1994), Blackout (New York: Northpoint, 2003), and But Where is the Lamb? (New York: Shocken, 2013). Examples can also be found in many issues of Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice. A selection of innovative historical writing from that journal is collected in a volume edited by Alun Munslow and Robert A. Rosenstone entitled Experiments in Rethinking History (New York: Routledge, 2004). 3. Jaume Aurell, Theoretical Perspectives on Historians’ Autobiographies: From Documentation to Intervention (Routledge: New York and London, 2015).

Bibliography

Major Publications of Robert A. Rosenstone Author Crusade of the Left: The Lincoln Battalion and the Spanish Civil War. New York: Pegasus, 1969. Romantic Revolutionary: A Biography of John Reed. New York: Knopf, 1975. Mirror in the Shrine: American Encounters in Meiji Japan. Cambridge: Harvard, 1988. Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History. Cambridge: Harvard, 1995. King of Odessa. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003. The Man Who Swam Into History: The (Mostly) True Story of my Jewish Family. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005. History on Film / Film on History. London and New York: Pearson, 2006; 2nd edn, 2012. Red Star, Crescent Moon. Washington, DC: NAP, 2010.

Editor/Author Seasons of Rebellion: Protest and Radicalism in Recent America. New York: Holt, 1972. Revisioning History: Filmmakers and the Construction of a New Past. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. Experiments in Rethinking History. Co-editor with Alun Munslow. New York and London: Routledge, 2004. A Blackwell Companion to Historical Film. Co-editor with Constantin Parvulescu. Oxford: Blackwell-Wiley, 2013.

198 Bibliography

Essays “The Men of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion,” Journal of American History 54 (September 1967): 327–38. “American Commissars in Spain,” South Atlantic Quarterly 67 (Autumn 1968): 688–702. “The Times They are a‑Changin’: The Music of Protest,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 382 (March 1969): 131–44. “Mabel Dodge: Evenings in New York,” in Peter Quennell, ed., The Genius in the Drawing Room: The Salon in Europe and America from the 18th to the 20th Century (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980), 131–51. “Learning From Those ‘Imitative’ Japanese: Another Side of the American Experience in the Mikado’s Empire,” American Historical Review 85 (June 1980): 572–95. “Reds as History,” Reviews in American History 10 (September 1982): 299–310. “Genres, History and Hollywood: A Review Article,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 27 (April 1985): 367–75. “History in Images / History in Words: Reflections on the Possibility of Really Putting History on Film,” American Historical Review 93 (December 1988): 1173–85. “The 50‑Year Wound in the Heart—Reliving the Spanish Civil War,” Michigan Quarterly Review 27 (Spring 1988): 342–54. “History, Memory, Documentary: ‘The Good Fight’”, Cineaste 17 (1) (1989): 12–15. “Revisioning History: Contemporary Filmmakers and the Construction of the Past,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 32 (October 1990): 822–37. “JFK: Historical Fact/Historical Film,” American Historical Review 97 (April 1992): 506–11. “The Historical Film: Looking at the Past in a Post‑Literate Age,” in Lloyd Kramer (ed.), Learning History in America: Schools, Cultures, and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1994), 141–60. “The Future of the Past: Film and the Beginnings of Postmodern History,” in Vivian Sobchack (ed.), The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), 201–18. “Oliver Stone as Historian,” in Robert Toplin (ed.), Oliver Stone’s USA (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000), 26–39. “October as History,” Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 5 (1) (Summer 2001): 255–74. “Film, Television, and Historical Knowledge,” in Sarah Maza and Lloyd

Bibliography 199

Kramer (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Historical Thought (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 466–81. “Does a Filmic Writing of History Exist?” History and Theory 41 (4) (December 2002): 134–44. “Confessions of a Postmodern (?) Historian,” Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 8 (1) (March 2004): 149–66. “Inventing Historical Truth on the Silver Screen,” Cineaste 29 (2) (Spring 2004): 29–33. “My Wife, the Muslim,” Antioch Review 63 (2) Spring 2005), 234–46. “In Praise of the Biopic,” in Richard Francaviglia and Jerry Rodnitzky (eds.), Lights, Camera, History: Portraying the Past in Film (Arlington: Texas A&M University Press, 2007), 11–29. “Space for the Bird to Fly,” in Sue Morgan et al. (eds.), Manifestos for History (New York: Routledge, 2007), 11–18. “A Historian in Spite of Myself,” Rethinking History 11 (4) (December 2007): 589–95 “My Wife, Their Sister,” Anitoch Review 66 (Winter 2008): 62–74. “What’s a Nice Historian Like You Doing in a Place Like This?,” Rethinking History 13 (1) (March 2009): 17–25. “The Only Jew in Jinat,” Anitoch Review 68 (4) (Fall 2010): 642–54. “A Muslim–Jewish Pilgrimage,” Anitoch Review 74 (Winter 2016): 29–43.

Index

Entries in italics refer to images Abraham Lincoln Battalion 9–11, 21–2, 28–9, 40, 47, 57 Belchite and 12, 30–2 dissertation 21–2, 23–6, 28, 37–46 as emblem 192 Good Fight, The 166–7 Jarama Valley and 17–18, 33–4, 35–6 military engagements and 40 Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (VALB) 23–5, 44–6, 57 Adolfo Ibanez University 176 Al Andalus 184 Alcazar 161 Alea, Tomas Gutierrez: Lucia 155 Alfred A. Knopf 52, 164 Alhambra, the 32, 34–5 Alice’s Restaurant (Penn, Arthur) 155 Alonissos 92 American Historical Association 164–5 American Historical Review 193 American History Section of the Soviet Academy of Sciences 81–2, 93 Andalucia 31–2, 184 Ankersmit, Frank 171 Another Generation (Rosenstone, Robert A.) 18–19, 20–1 anti-war demonstrations 42–3, 56 Antonioni, Michelangelo 153 Apocalypse Now (Coppola, Francis Ford) 163 Ato, Sengai 116–17 Aurell, Jaume 193 Aurora (battleship) 66, 69–70, 71 autobiography 193–4

Aware Inn 147 Babel, Isaac 53, 189–90 Red Cavalry 189 Barbarian and the Geisha, The (Huston, John) 139 Barcelona 27–8 Bardot, Brigitte 37 Battle of Algiers, The (Pontecorvo, Gillo) 155 Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein, Sergei) 155 Beat Generation 107 Beatty, Warren 146–9, 155–60, 163–4 Reds 149, 156–66, 167–8 Belchite 8, 12, 30–1 Bellows, George 97 Benedict, Ruth: Chrysanthemum and the Sword, The 108 Bergman, Ingmar 153 Bertolucci, Bernardo Conformist, The 163 Last Emperor, The 163 Last Tango in Paris 163 Bertram (cousin) 81, 82, 83, 89, 90 Between the Bullet and the Lie (Eby, Cecil) 43 Big Brother and the Holding Company 49 Big Knife, The (Aldrich, Robert) 153 Binger, Carl 53 biography 51, 94–6, 98 Bodrov, Sergei 190 Bonnie and Clyde (Penn, Arthur) 146

202 Index Brazzi, Rossano 154 Brecht, Bertolt 170 British Academy 176 Brown, Les 150 Bryant, Louise 78, 79, 147, 164 Buddhism 107 “Burden of History, The” (White, Hayden) 171–2 Busch, Ernst 10 Caltech 114 Camus, Albert 11, 46 Capra, Frank 17 It’s a Wonderful Life 149–50 Meet John Doe 128 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington 148 Castro, Fidel 52, 70 Castro, Mariano Álvarez de 26–7 Chabrol, Claude 153 Chagall, Marc 37 Chaplin, Charlie: Modern Times 155 Chrysanthemum and the Sword, The (Benedict, Ruth) 108 cinema see film Clark, Dick 154 College of General Education of Kyushu University 112–15, 120–3, 126–7 Coming Home (Ashby, Hal) 146 communism 15, 23, 151 Communist Labor Party 157 Communist Manifesto (Marx, Karl) 155 Conformist, The (Bertolucci, Bernardo) 163 Congress of the Peoples of the East 144, 161 Cooper, Gary 17, 148 Cordoba 184 counterculture 52, 55, 88, 107 see also anti-war demonstrations Country Joe and the Fish 43, 49 Cox, Alex: Walker 168–9 Crusade of the Left (Rosenstone, Robert A.) 43–5, 57 see also Rosenstone,

Robert A., Abraham Lincoln Battalion dissertation Dana, Richard Henry 13 Darrow (Coles, John David) 166 Dasburg, Andrew 53, 159 Davis, Natalie Zemon 166 Dean, James 153 Dick Cavett Show (ABC) 44 Dirks, Nick 172 Donald, Ada 141 Doors, the 97 Dos Passos, John 12 Drabkina, Elizaveta 147 Easy Rider (Hopper, Dennis) 146 Eby, Cecil: Between the Bullet and the Lie 43 Eisenstein, Sergei Battleship Potemkin 155 October 70, 75, 155, 175 Enoshima 131, 133 Espoir (Malraux, André) 155 Essais d’ego-histoire (Nora, Pierre) 4, 193 Europe 12, 13 Far From Poland (Godmilow, Jill) 173 Fatima, the Algerian Girl of Dakar (Hondo, Med) 174 Faulkner, William 12 Fellini, Frederico 153 Fiesta de San Fermin 14 Figueras 26–7 film 107–8, 140, 146–55, 180, 181–2 see also Hollywood historians and 166 history and 167–74, 175–6, 180, 182–3 see also history films history films 169–72, 173–6, 193 Reds 149, 156–66 Walker 177–9 film festivals 177–9 Finland 4–3, 86

Index 203 First World War 50 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 12, 14, 37 Fleming, Ian 55, 59 For Whom the Bell Tolls (Hemingway, Ernest) 17 France 13, 37 Franco, Francisco 16, 39 Frank, Leonard 15–16 Free Press, The 52 Frente de Gandesa, El (song) 17, 29 Fukui 131, 134 Fulbright Commission 103, 113–14 Gandesa 29 Gardner, Ava 14 geisha 111–12 Gen, Kozeru 117 Giant (Stevens, George) 153 Gibbon, Edward 94 Ginsberg, Allen 107 Gkyokuzenji 139 Glory (Zwick, Edward) 175, 182 Godard, Jean-Luc 153 Godmilow, Jill: Far From Poland 173 Goldman, Emma 52 Good Fight, The (Dores, Mary/Sills, Sam/Buckner, Noel) 166–7 Graduate, The (Nichols, Mike) 146 Granada 32 Grateful Dead, the 43, 49, 55 Greece 92 Griffis, William Eliot 130–1, 134, 135–7, 140, 172 Guernica 16 Guernica (Picasso, Pablo) 11, 163 Ha, Trinh Minh: Surname Viet Given Name Nam 173 Hans Beimler, Komissar (song) 16 Harris, Bill 52 Harris, Townsend 138–40 Hawaii International Film Festival 178–9

Hawn, Goldie 147 Haywood, Bill 52 Hearn, Lafcadio 130, 131, 137–8, 140, 192 Heatter, Gabriel 151 Hecht, Ben: Spectre de la Rose 152 Hegel, Georg: Philosophy of History, The 187 Helsinki 61–2, 86 Hemingway, Ernest 12, 13 For Whom the Bell Tolls 17 Sun Also Rises, The 13–14, 18 Heraclitus 46 Hermitage Museum 88–9 Herrigel, Eugen: Zen and the Art of Archery 107 Heusken, Henry 139 Hicks, Granville 52 High Noon (Zinneman, Fred) 153 Hilton, Conrad 154 Hiroshige, Utagawa 107 Hiroshima 117–18 historians 9–10, 53, 69, 94, 182, 192–3 autobiography and 193–4 film and 166 White, Hayden and 171–2 historical writing 37–8, 40–1, 52, 131–2, 140–1, 171–3, 192 see also Abraham Lincoln Battalion, dissertation examples of innovative history 196 n.2 history 10, 20, 25, 46–7, 180, 182, 194 fiction and 191–2 film and 167–74, 175–6, 180, 182–3 see also history films theory and 171–4, 187 Zen and 191–2 history books 168–9 history films 169–71, 173–6, 173 Ho Chi Minh 52 Hoffman, Abbie 52 Hokusai, Katsushika 107

204 Index Hollywood 146, 148, 149–54, 155–9 see also film Hollywood Ten 151 Hondo, Med 174 Fatima, the Algerian Girl of Dakar 174 Sarraounia 166 House Committee on Un–American Activities 15, 151 Hu, King 179 Inari 138 Ink Spots 150 Insurgent Mexico (Reed, John) 164 International Brigades 10, 16, 17, 39 Intourist 59–61, 70–1, 73–4, 79–80, 84–5 Islamic world 182 Istanbul 92 It’s a Wonderful Life (Capra, Frank) 149–50 Japan 101, 108, 123–8 Ato, Sengai 116–17 College of General Education of Kyushu University 112–15, 120–3, 126–7 culture and 102–4, 107, 119, 128–9 customs authority 101–2 English Speaking Society (ESS) 115–16 Enoshima 131, 133 film and 106–7 Fukui 131, 134 geisha 111–12 Gen, Kozeru 117 Gkyokuzenji 139 Griffis, William Eliot and 130–1, 134, 135–7, 140 Harris, Townsend and 138–40 Hearn, Lafcadio and 130, 131, 137–8, 140 Hiroshima 117–18

Inari 138 Kabuki-za (theater) 103 Kanazawa 119 Kumamoto 131 Kyoto 104, 110, 133–4 literature about 109–10, 128–9 Matsue 100, 131, 137–8 Morse, Edward Sylvester and 130, 131, 133, 140 Nagasaki 118 Nakasu 117 Old Japan 119–20, 137 Ropponmatsu 112 Ryoanji temple 104 Shimoda 138–9 stereotypes 105–6, 124 Suenaga, Toshiki 111–12 Takuwa-sensei, Shinji 112–14, 115, 120–2 Tawaraya hotel 103–4 Tojin Okichi 139 Tokyo 102–3, 132 touring 110, 117 Ueno, Seiichi 114, 115, 122–3 walking and 135 Yokohama 101, 132–3 Jarama Valley 9–10, 33–4, 35–7 Jefferson Airplane 49, 55 JFK (Stone, Oliver) 174 journalism 19–20 Journey East, The (Rosenstone, Robert A.) 109 Kabuki–za (theater) 103 Kamenev, Lev 78 Kanazawa 119 Kawabata, Yasunari 108 Keaton, Diane 165 Kerensky, Alexander 79 Kerouac, Jack 107 Kesey, Ken 57 Kiev 91 Killers, The (Siodmak, Robert) 153

Index 205 King of Odessa (Rosenstone, Robert A.) 189–90, 192 Kirby, Robert 36 Knopf 52, 164 Korea 106 Koselleck, Richard 171 Kosinski, Jerzy 173 Kumamoto 131 Kurosawa, Akira 107, 140 Kyoto 104, 110, 133–4 Kyushu University, College of General Education of 112–15, 120–3, 126–7 Last Emperor, The (Bertolucci, Bernardo) 163 Last Tango in Paris (Bertolucci, Bernardo) 163 Lawson, John Howard 95 Le Carré, John 55, 59 Lee Gold archive at the Institute of Marxism-Leninism 81, 82, 93 Lenin, Vladimir 61, 64–5, 73 Smolny Institute and 75–7 Lenin Library 83–4 Leningrad 63–9, 72, 79–80, 83, 97 Battleship Aurora 66, 69–70, 71–2 Hermitage Museum 88–9 Palace of Marriages 72 Peter and Paul Fortress 70 Smolny Institute see Smolny Institute Leonard (cousin) 20, 151 Life (magazine) 11 life writing see autobiography; biography Lincoln Battalion 9–10 Linguistic Turn 171 literary form 96 Lives of Others, The (Donnersmarck, Florian Henckel von) 183 London, Jack 13 Lost Generation 12, 14 love 118–19, 127–8

Lucia (Alea, Tomas Gutierrez) 155 McCabe and Mrs. Miller (Altman, Robert) 146, 160 McGann, Jerome 172 McLeod, Dave 157 Madrid 13, 31, 39–40 Malcolm X 52 Malraux, André: Espoir 155 Man Who Swam Into History: The (Mostly) True Stories of My Jewish Family, The (Rosenstone, Robert A.) 54, 188–9, 192 Mandelstam, Ovsip 53 Marx, Karl: Communist Manifesto 155 MASH (Altman, Robert) 146 Masses, The (magazine) 50 Matisse, Henri 88–9 Matsue 100, 131, 137–8 Meet John Doe (Capra, Frank) 128 Melville, Herman 13 Merriman, Robert 35–6 Metropolitan Magazine 50 Midnight Cowboy (Schlesinger, John) 146 Millay, Edna St. Vincent 147 Miller, Henry 159 Sexus 73 Mirror in the Shrine (Rosenstone, Robert A.) 109, 135–7, 139–42, 156, 172, 188 Mishima, Yukio 108 Mitchell, Guy 150 Mizoguchi, Masahiro Kenji: Ugetsu Monogatari 106–7 Modern Times (Chaplin, Charlie) 155 Mohammed V University 176 Mola, Emilio 39 Molders of Troy, The (Ofield, Jack/ Abrash, Barbara/Walkowitz, Daniel) 166 Monroe, Marilyn 11 Moorsoldaten, Die (song) 16

206 Index Morrison, Jim 97 Morse, Edward Sylvester 130, 131, 133, 140, 162 Moscow 80, 83–5 American History Section of the Soviet Academy of Sciences 81–2, 93 Lenin Library 83–4 Mowry, George 21 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Capra, Frank) 148 multiculturism 105 myth 180 Nagasaki 118 Nakasu 117 Nana (Nahid, wife) 181–5 National Endowment for the Humanities 166 Nelson, Steve 46 New Republic, The (magazine) 52 New York Times Book Review 181 New Yorker (magazine) 108 Nicholson, Jack 165–6 Nixon, Richard 93, 104 No (Larrain, Pablo) 182–3 Nora, Pierre: Essais d’ego-histoire 4, 193 North, Sheree 153–4 objectivity 130 October (Eisenstein, Sergei) 70, 75, 155, 175 Ohara, Professor 120 Old Japan 119–20, 137 Olmos, Edward James 174 On the Waterfront (Kazan, Elia) 153 O’Neill, Eugene 164 Open City (Rossellini, Roberto) 106, 152–3 Oracle, The (magazine) 52 Other, the 105 Ozu, Yasujiro 153

Page, Patty 150 Paget, Debra 152 Palace of Marriages 72 Palacky University 176 Pamplona 113–15 Penn, Arthur: Alice’s Restaurant 155 Peter and Paul Fortress 70 Picasso, Pablo 89 Guernica 11, 163 Pigeon, Walter 154 Pikser, Jeremy 157 Place in the Sun, A (Stevens, George) 153 Poetry (magazine) 52 politics 20, 39, 42, 104–5, 142 see also counter-culture; revolution Reed, John and 51–2 Pontecorvo, Gillo: Battle of Algiers, The 155 post-structuralism 171 postmodernism 11, 142, 149, 171 Power, Tyrone 14 Presley, Elvis 154 Provincetown Players 50 Quartermaster’s Store, The (song) 17 Quince Brigada (song) 17 Quatro Generales, Los (song) 17 Quinto Regimiento (song) 17 Radek, Karl 64 radicalism 105 Ramparts (magazine) 52 Reagan, Ronald 104 Rebel Without a Cause (Ray, Nicholas) 153 Red Cavalry (Babel, Isaac) 189 Red Star, Crescent Moon (Rosenstone, Robert A.) 190–1, 192 Reds (Beatty, Warren) 149, 156–66, 167–8, 177 Reed, John 13, 49–53, 57, 64, 95–8 see also Reds

Index 207 archive 81, 82, 93 Beatty, Warren and 146–9, 156–8 Bryant, Louise and 78, 79, 147, 164 Drabkina, Elizaveta and 147 as emblem 192 Insurgent Mexico 164 Millay, Edna St. Vincent and 147 Russian Revolution and 77–9, 95, 97–8 Smolny Institute and 77–9 So Short a Time and 164 Ten Days That Shook the World 50–1, 53, 73, 95, 164 Reischauer, Edwin O. 108, 141–2 Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 181, 188 Return of Martin Guerre, The (Vigne, Daniel) 166, 175, 183 Reviews in American History (journal) 167 revolution 49, 97 see also Reed, John; Russian Revolution Richie, Donald 108 Riesman, David 160 Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, The (Quintero, José) 146 Romantic Revolutionary: A Biography of John Reed (Rosenstone, Robert A.) 94–7, 98, 104–5, 145, 156, 164–5, 169 Ropponmatsu 112 Rosenstone, Robert A. xiv, 186 Abraham Lincoln Battalion dissertation 21–2, 23–6, 28, 37–46 academic career 4, 21–2, 42–3, 154–5, 156, 174–7 see also College of General Education of Kyushu University Al Andalus and 184 American Historical Review and 193 Another Generation 18–19, 20–1 appearance 69, 70, 108 Ato, Sengai and 116–17

Babel, Isaac and 189–90 Beatty, Warren and 146–9, 155–61, 162–5 Bertram (cousin) and 81, 82, 83, 89, 90 biography and 51, 130–2, 141, 189–90, 192 career of 19–21, 33, 106, 154–5, 192–3 Crusade of the Left see Crusade of the Left dancing and 116 Darrow and 146 Dean, James and 153 education 20 emblems and 192 fame and 178, 181 family 4–5, 20, 54, 73, 150–1, 152, 188–9 FBI and 56–9 fiction and 189–92 film and 106–7, 140, 146–55, 160–3, 166–71, 173–7 film festivals and 177–9 Gen, Kozeru and 117 Good Fight, The and 166–7 Hawaii International Film Festival and 178–9 as historian 44, 149, 192 history films and 168–71, 173–6, 183, 193 “History through Film” course 155 Hollywood and 149–54, 155–9 Hondo, Med and 174 Italy and 108 Japan and 101–4, 108–18, 119–20, 123–5, 128–35, 137–8, 139–41 see also College of General Education of Kyushu University journalism and 19–20, 106 Journey East, The 109 King of Odessa 189–90, 192 Kyushu and 112–17

208 Index Leonard (cousin) and 20, 151 literature and 5 love and 118–20, 127–8, 181 Man Who Swam Into History: The (Mostly) True Stories of My Jewish Family, The 54, 188–9, 192 military career 21, 33 Mirror in the Shrine 109, 135–7, 139–42, 156, 172, 188 narrative forms and 131 Old Japan and 119–20 Olmos, Edward James and 154 police and 36 political activism and 20, 42–3, 57 politics and 20, 23–4, 105, 142, 150–1 publishing and 21, 105, 141, 164, 168–9 “Radicalism and Revolution” class 154 Red Star, Crescent Moon 190–1, 192 Reds and 156–65, 167–8, 177 Reed, John and 51–5, 58, 73, 92, 94–6, 98, 145–8, 156–8 religion and 107–8 Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 181, 188 Romantic Revolutionary: A Biography of John Reed 94–7, 98, 104–5, 145, 156, 164–5, 169 screenplays and 189–90 Second World War 105 Soviet Union and 60–2, 64, 94, 96–7, 145 see also Leningrad; Moscow Spain and 13–16, 25–35, 161–4, 183–4 Stone, Oliver and 173–4 as storyteller 184–5, 188–91, 194 technology and 176–7 theory and 171–3 US Postal Service job and 154–5 Visions of the Past 180, 182 Walker and 169–70

Walker, William and 169–70 Rossellini, Roberto 106, 153 Open City 106, 152–3 Roy, Satyajit 153 Russia 53 see also Leningrad; Russian Revolution; Soviet Union Kiev 91 Moscow 80–5, 88, 93 Russian Revolution 53, 61, 72, 78–9, 97–8 Battleship Aurora and 69–70, 71–2 Smolny Institute and 75–9 Ryoanji temple 104 Saigo, Takamori 124 Saint Petersburg see Leningrad Sanger, Margaret 50 Santayana, George 187 Sarraounia (Hondo, Med) 174, 183 Savio, Mario 39 Seacord, Douglas 36 Second World War 105, 111, 117–18, 124 Seeger, Pete 10–11 Seidensticker, Edward 108 Selma (DuVernay, Ava) 182 Seven Arts 52 Seville 144, 161 Sexus (Miller, Henry) 63 Shampoo (Ashby, Hal) 160 Shannon, David 22 Shatov, Bill 78 She Wears Short Shorts (song) 14 Shimoda 138–9 Shinoda, Masahiro 107, 153 Sica, Vittorio de 106 Simon, Carly 160 You’re So Vain 160 Smolny Institute 48, 71, 72–6, 77–9, 86–7 Lenin, Vladimir and 75–7 Reed, John and 77–9 Smothers Brothers 147

Index 209 Snyder, Gary 107 So Short a Time (Gelb, Barbara) 164 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander 53 Sorbonne (University of Paris) 176 Southern, Ann 154 Soviet Embassy 55–6, 58–9 Soviet Union 63–4 grain shortages and 93 Kiev 91 Leningrad see Leningrad Moscow 80–5, 89 officials’ disappearance and 92–3 tourism and 54, 59–62, 85–92 see also Intourist Vyborg 64 Spain 13–16 Al Andalus 184 Alcazar 161 Alhambra 32, 34–5 Andalucia 31–2, 184 Another Generation and 18–19 Barcelona 27–8 Belchite 8, 12, 30–1 Cordoba 184 Figueras 26–7 Granada 32 Madrid 13, 31, 39–40 Pamplona 13–15 Seville 144, 161 Spanish Civil War 10–12, 15, 39–40, 46–7 see also Abraham Lincoln Battalion Another Generation and 18 art and 32 Belchite and 12, 30–1 Hemingway, Ernest and 17 history and 16 Jarama Valley 17–18, 33–4, 35–7 songs of 16–17, 29, 33 Spectre de la Rose (Hecht, Ben) 152 Splendor in the Grass (Kazan, Elia) 146 Spravka 61, 84–5

Stalin, Joseph 76, 77 Startsev, Vitaly Ivanovich 93 Stein, Gertrude 12 Stewart, James 148, 150 Stone, Oliver 173–4, 182 JFK 174 Storaro, Vittorio 163 Strauss, Harold 52 Streetcar named Desire, A (Kazan, Elia) 153 Subversive Activities Control Board 23 Suenaga, Toshiki 111–12 Sun Also Rises, The (Hemingway, Ernest) 13–14, 18 Sun Also Rises, The (King, Henry) 14 Surname Viet Given Name Nam (Trinh Minh Ha) 173 Suzuki, D. T. 107 Sydney Technical University 176 Takuwa-sensei, Shinji 112–14, 115, 120–2 Tale of Genji, The (Shikibu, Murasaki) 124 Tanizaki, Junichiro 108 Tawaraya hotel 103–4 technology 176–7 temptation 135–7 Ten Days That Shook the World (Reed, John) 50–1, 53, 73, 95, 164 Tetsugen, Roshi 191 The Movement 104 Thomas, Hugh 43 Time (magazine) 44 toilets 14, 26, 150 Tojin Okichi 139 Tokyo 102–3, 132 Tolima, University of 176 Tomlin, Lily 147 Toyo University 176–7 Tres moriscos de Jaen (song) 32 Trinh Minh Ha: Surname Viet Given Name Nam 173

210 Index Trotsky, Leon 5, 64, 76, 78 Truffaut, François 153 Turkey 96 UCLA 15 Ueno, Seiichi 114, 115, 122–3 Ugetsu Monogatari (Mizoguchi, Masahiro Kenji) 106–7 Valley in Spain Called Jarama, A (song) 16, 33 Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (VALB) 23–5, 44–6, 57 Villa, Pancho 62 Visconti, Luchino 106, 153 Visions of the Past (Rosenstone, Robert A.) 180, 182 visual media see film Viva Zapata (Kazan, Elia) 5–6 Vyborg 64 Walker (Cox, Alex) 169–70 Walker, William 169–70 Walkowitz, Daniel 166 Wallace, Henry 150–1 Warner, Langdon 108, 133

Watergate 104 Wayne, John 139 Wesson, Neil 35 White, Hayden 38, 171 “Burden of History, The” 171–2 Wilbur, Richard 125 Wolfe, Thomas 12 writing, historical 37–8, 40–1, 44, 131–2, 140–1, 171–3, 192 see also Rosenstone, Robert A., Abraham Lincoln Battalion dissertation examples 196 n.2 Yang, Caroline 103 Yasujiro, Ozu 107 Yogi, Maharishi Mahesh 107–8 Yokohama 101, 132–3 You’re So Vain (Simon, Carly) 160 Zap Comix 52 Zapata, Emiliano 5, 52, 124 Zaragoza 30 Zen 191–2 Zen and the Art of Archery (Herrigel, Eugen) 107 Zinoviev, Grigori 64