The website of JEFFERSON FLANDERS

Jack London's "To Build a Fire"

March 2008

It’s been a colder than usual winter in New England, with heavy snowfall and low temperatures well into March, but then again, cold is a relative matter.

I was reminded of that relativity when I re-read Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” this winter, a short story set in the bitterly cold Yukon wilderness, a harsh environment that London knew well from his days as a miner and adventurer during the Klondike Gold Rush of the late 1890s. Bitter cold meant temperatures that could reach 75 degrees below zero, and according to London the "Yukon Code" cautioned against traveling alone "after the frost has dropped below zero fifty degrees or more."

My father introduced me to Jack London when I was young, and I devoured “The Call of the Wild” and “Burning Daylight” and many of London's other adventure stories. Today I wonder if my father gravitated to London because he identified with him: both were voracious readers, self-educated men who became writers, and both lost their fathers (to desertion for London, to divorce for my father) as they became teen-agers.

London's stories are long on description and plot, and short on character development. He set out to write page-turners because, like Dickens, much of his fiction appeared serially in newspapers and magazines. London first published "To Build a Fire" in Youth's Companion in 1902 and a second, revised version (the one you will find in anthologies) in The Century Magazine in 1908. (The complete story is here.)

What makes London's stories powerful is their authenticity. He gives us the insider's view of life in the Yukon in "To Build a Fire," which lends a matter-of-fact, journalistic quality to story. (London prided himself on getting the details right, tartly explaining to the copy editor at Youth's Companion who had the temerity to question the story's factuality that fires couldn't be built with mittened hands.)

A killing cold

The cold takes on a personality of its own in "To Build a Fire": relentless, unforgiving, a merciless force that kills the unexposed human in just minutes. The protagonist in the story is overmatched, "a newcomer in the land, a chechaquo, and this was his first winter." London faults this novice for both his ignorance and his arrogance; the only creature with any sense is the man's "big native husky, the proper wolf dog" who instinctively knows that it is too cold to travel.

The man plans to follow the trail back to camp and his fellow miners, where he eagerly anticipates a hot supper waiting. He ignores the advice given by old-timers, not to travel alone in such extreme conditions. And since he has not formed any emotional bond with his husky, London tells us "the dog made no effort to communicate its apprehension to the man."

When the man blunders into a branch of the Henderson river---a dangerous misstep as it drenches his feet and legs---he reacts promptly, starting a small fire and gradually and carefully feeding it. Belatedly he recognizes the danger:

...He knew there must be no failure. When it is seventy-five below zero, a man must not fail in his first attempt to build a fire--that is, if his feet are wet. If his feet are dry, and he fails, he can run along the trail for half a mile and restore his circulation. But the circulation of wet and freezing feet cannot be restored by running when it is seventy-five below. No matter how fast he runs, the wet feet will freeze the harder.

But the man makes another---disastrous---rookie mistake: he has built his fire under a snow-laden birch tree. When the snow capsizes onto the fire, extinguishing it, he is shocked "as though he just heard his own sentence of death."

From this point "To Build a Fire" moves inexorably, grimly, towards its end. The man's frantic efforts to build another fire fail---his bare hands are crippled by the cold, and he realizes why the old-timers insisted that "after fifty below, a man should travel with a partner."

The newcomer thinks of killing the dog and warming his hands in its carcass, but he no longer has the strength to hold the dog, draw his knife and finish him off. "A certain fear of death, dull and oppressive, came to him," London writes, adding, "This fear quickly became poignant as he realized that it was no longer a mere matter of freezing his fingers and toes, or of losing his hands and feet, but that it was a matter of life and death with the chances against him."

Re-reading the story after many years, I was most struck by London's dispassion in recounting the last few hours of this chechaquo's life. (London never mentions the man's name in The Century Magazine version of the story). There is no sense of tragedy, for London portrays the man as a victim of his own foolhardiness, an amateur who has lost this Darwinian contest.

London finishes the story quickly. We are told: "Freezing was not so bad as people thought. There were lots worse ways to die." (I was reminded of Robert Frost's poem "Fire and Ice" in which he muses that for the destruction of world ice "Is also great/" And would suffice.") In the last paragraph of the story, we learn that the man "drowsed off into what seemed to him the most comfortable and satisfying sleep he had ever known." His husky confirms that this is indeed, the end, as he crawls close to the man "and caught the scent of death."

A heroic contrast

It would be a mistake to conclude from "To Build a Fire" that London viewed Man vs. Nature as a necessarily unequal contest. As an outdoorsman he admired those men whose physical and mental strength allowed them to prevail despite the harshest of circumstances. In his novel "Burning Daylight," his hero Eliam Harmish (who is nicknamed Burning Daylight) represents the Omega of the Alaskan outdoorsman---virile, a canny veteran, and yet with a test-pilot's appetite for risk.

But Harmish knows the rules, knows the danger, and in the first chapters of the novel his initial mythic battle with the harsh Northern elements---through a two-thousand-mile dog-sled trip on a dare---represents a deliberate and conscious test of manhood. He makes the epic journey carrying the mail from Circle City to Dyea and back in sixty days, in frigid weather, nearly killing one Indian companion and wearing down another. By accomplishing the near-impossible "[h]e had performed one more exploit that would make the Yukon ring with his name--he, Burning Daylight, the king of travelers and dog-mushers."

Even as Eliam Harmish celebrates his victory, London sounds a warning note: "At the sharpest hazards of trail and river and famine, the message was that other men might die, but that he would pull through triumphant. It was the old, old lie of Life fooling itself, believing itself--immortal and indestructible, bound to achieve over other lives and win to its heart's desire." And later in the novel Burning Daylight will learn that he, too, can fail.

Yet London, a student of Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche and a socialist and materialist, balanced his fatalism with a romantic insistence that only by confronting life head-on and taking great risks could we become fully human. The reward is worth the risk. "I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet," London's "Credo" proclaims, adding, "The function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them. I shall use my time."

Journalists and history: Milton Wolff's "Good Fight"?

January 2008

Milton Wolff, the last commander of what is popularly (and inaccurately) known as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade---those American volunteers who fought against the forces of General Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War---died Jan. 14th at the age of 92. Three major American newspapers---the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and San Francisco Chronicle---reported Wolff's death with lengthy, and admiring, by-lined obituaries. Unfortunately these obits were flawed: they offered scant historical context, ignored the scholarship of the past few decades illuminating Communist control over the Lincolns (as the volunteers were known), and, most curiously, chose to remain silent about Wolff’s Stalinist past.

Instead, all three obituaries presented Wolff in a romantic, if not heroic, light. Peter Fimrite of the Chronicle quoted extensively from Peter N. Carroll, author of The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, Wolff’s friend and hagiographer:

"He was famous for his personal courage. He was famous for his leadership and morality," said Carroll. "Women fell in love with him and men really respected him."

In Fimrite’s story Wolff was “a legendary figure," whose friends described him as “a worldly, chivalrous man” with “a gritty charm.” Wolff, it is suggested, had a “special charisma, a spark in the eye, that comes with dodging mortar rounds and machine gun bullets.”

In her summation of Wolff's life and times, Jocelyn Y. Stewart of the Los Angeles Times noted Ernest Hemingway's 1938 comparison of Wolff with Abraham Lincoln, quoted Carroll as describing Wolff as "a man of action," and informed readers that Wolff "spent much of his life engaged in the struggles of the world." Stewart also quoted Wolff on his motives for joining the International Brigades: "I went to Spain sincerely believing that in fighting for Spanish democracy I was helping preserve American democracy."

While Douglas Martin of the New York Times offered the most restrained of the obituaries, he did characterize Wolff as an "Anti-Franco leader" who "never stopped defying authority," "battl[ing] fiercely for civil rights and against the Vietnam War." Martin closed his piece with this flattering anecdote about Wolff:

One of his battles after the civil war was leading his veterans to urge the Brooklyn Dodgers to integrate. “The guys were all Dodgers fans,” he said. “It was a way to carry on the struggle.”

All three journalists more or less adopted the narrative publicly advanced by Carroll, the academic "keeper of the flame" for the Lincolns. That’s troubling, because Carroll’s sanitized version of history perpetuates Old Left myths about American involvement in Spain.

Interviewing other historians of the period, such as Ron Radosh (the lead editor of Spain Betrayed) or NYU's Tony Judt, or consulting, for example, Cecil D. Eby's recently published Comrades and Commissars: The Lincoln Battalion in the Spanish Civil War, would have given readers a more informed and balanced historical perspective. The Times' Martin could have turned to his own newspaper and Edward Rothstein's discerning March 2007 piece on the exhibition "Facing Fascism: New York and the Spanish Civil War", a review which captured some of the historical ambiguities surrounding the Lincolns and the war in Spain.

Consulting a broader range of historians would have improved accuracy, as well. Stewart of the Los Angeles Times wouldn’t have referred to the “Abraham Lincoln Brigade” ---for no such military unit ever existed (as Eby explains in the first few pages of his 2007 book); Communist Party propagandists in the U.S. created the name to refer to the Lincoln and Washington Battalions in the XVth International Brigade, in an effort to inflate the extent of American involvement in Spain. She might also have learned that Wolff's story of being labeled a "premature anti-fascist" by the U.S. military during World War II had been sharply questioned by scholars Harvey Klehr and John E. Haynes. Further digging might have made Fimrite more wary of Carroll's description of the Civil Rights Congress (for which Wolff worked) as simply "a left-wing organization that defended African Americans dubiously accused of capital crimes," when in fact it had been declared a Communist front and was often in conflict with civil rights and civil liberties groups like the NAACP and ACLU.

This incomplete picture of Wolff (and consequently of American volunteers in the Spanish Civil War), is typical of recent mainstream media coverage of Cold War historical controversies. Case in the point: the inadequate reporting of attempts to rewrite the history of Alger Hiss’ involvement with Soviet espionage in the 1930s and 1940s. This shallow coverage may very well be the result of historical ignorance on the part of time-pressed reporters and editors; the result is that slanted and inadequate stories become part of the public record and end up residing on the Internet and in library databases. While the Weekly Standard published Stephen Schwartz' critical view of Wolff ("Wolff in Wolf's Clothing"), a Google news search for "Milton Wolff" doesn't turn up this article.

Contingent anti-Fascism

None of the mainstream obituaries challenged the notion that Wolff's "Good Fight" in Spain was to defend democracy against fascism, that (in Fimrite's words) Wolff was a leftist “who despised fascism.” The truth was quite different: Wolff was an “anti-Fascist” fighter only when that stance matched established Soviet policy. Wolff’s zeal for battling Fascists disappeared when Stalin allied with Hitler’s Nazi Germany in August 1939; Wolff gave a shameful speech attacking "Franklin Demagogue Roosevelt" and vowing to "stubbornly oppose every move of Roosevelt and the war-mongers" and "the involvement of our country in an imperialist war." Only after Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union did Wolff once again began "despising fascism."

Any notion that Wolff was truly interested in preserving liberal democracy in Spain, or elsewhere, is laughable. He spent much of his adult life as an unapologetic Stalinist, leading the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (VALB) in support of the Party-approved cause du jour, backing North Korea, Cuba, and North Vietnam against the “American warmongers.” More troubling, Wolff remained silent about the crimes committed in the pursuit of a Marxist utopia---the show trials, purges, executions, slave labor camps, and the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe through “people’s democracies.”

This silence calls into question Carroll’s depiction of Wolff as being “famous for his morality”: it is a strange morality that excuses Stalin’s crimes in the name of anti-fascism. And then, more personally, there is the “Orwell question”: did Wolff and other leaders of the Lincolns have any complicity in the deadly purge of the non-Stalinist Left in Spain carried out by elements of the International Brigade? Did they turn a blind eye to the torture and killing by the dreaded Servicio de Investigation Militar (SIM) and Soviet assassins? While we may never know the truth, the question remains. In his research on the Lincoln battalion, Cecil D. Eby found that the VALB leadership stuck to "a rigidly canonical version of Lincoln history." Eby noted that "[c]ertain subjects were taboo---rumors of wholesale desertions, prison terms for political deviants, jagged relationships with other Internationals, executions of volunteers." This, of course, conforms to the Stalinist belief that historical "truth" should be shaped to serve political ends.

In contrast to Wolff’s reticence, some Lincolns---like Louis Fischer, William Herrick, and John Gates---confronted the past without evasion. A novelist and self-described radical, Herrick once wrote: "The truth was that the International Brigades were organized, dominated, controlled and massacred by the Comintern, a tool of Stalin." He added, "over the years there have been Americans who have boasted about their work as apparatchiks in Spain, work which included executions." Former Lincoln commissar Gates broke with the Communist Party in the late 1950s, denouncing the hijacking of the Republican cause by the Russians, and voiced the heretical notion that "there was more liberty under Franco's fascism than there is in any communist country."

A complicated history

Making sense out of the Spanish Civil War isn't the easiest task: as Tony Judt has pointed out, it is possible to see the Republican cause in the most idealistic terms---and to acknowledge there was a vibrant anti-Stalinist Left in Spain defending the Republic---and yet also recognize that Soviet deception, duplicity and manipulation contributed to Franco's victory. It is, in short, a complicated history and it is easy to get lost in the competing claims and the internecine conflicts of the Left in Spain. Yet journalists who write about this past shouldn't settle for simplistic or comfortable narratives. The best obituary writers confront both the ambiguities of history and the flaws and contradictions of their subjects in a way that informs the reader.

Journalists can report, in a balanced way, the past inconsistencies and contradictions in the lives of those engaged in political controversies. For example, Paul Goldberger's 2005 New York Times obituary of Philip Johnson unflinchingly explored the American architect's Fascist past. Michael Taylor's San Francisco Chronicle obit of former Black Panther and 1960s radical Eldridge Cleaver offered context to the life of a deeply troubled man. And Elaine Woo of the Los Angeles Times properly noted French philosopher Jacques Derrida's defense of Paul de Man's fascist connections in Derrida's obituary. Thus, a more complete accounting of Milton Wolff's life and "Good Fight" would have included his support of the ugly excesses of Stalinism, and would have touched upon the Communist manipulation of the Lincolns. That would have represented better journalism, and better history.

Belonging and betrayal

December 2007

More evidence surfaced recently to support the truism that one country’s traitor can become another country’s hero.

In October, Queen Elizabeth honored Oleg Gordievsky, formerly a senior KGB officer and double agent for the British who defected to the West in 1985, naming him Companion of the Most Distinguished Order of St. Michael and St. George. After the ceremony Gordievsky was photographed with Baroness Margaret Thatcher, and the Cold War's Iron Maiden managed a smile for the camera.

In November, in what The Times of London called "tit-for-tat," Vladimir Putin's Russia awarded the Order of Friendship to George Blake, a former MI6 agent who had spied for the Soviet Union. Blake was honored at his 85th birthday celebration in Moscow. (Tony Halpin of The Times described Blake as a "notorious traitor" in the lead sentence of his story, displaying an uncharacteristic lack of Anglo reserve.) "It is hard to overrate the importance of the information received through Blake," explained Sergei Ivanov, a spokesman for the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service.

Blake, who betrayed numerous MI6 operatives to the KGB before his 1961 detection and apprehension, escaped from prison and fled to the Soviet Union in 1966. He is apparently unrepentant about his role as a double agent, telling the English-language Russia Today cable television network:

I could have left the service, and I could have joined the Communist Party, and I could have sold the Daily Worker at a street corner, and many people would say that would have been a more honorable cause. But I felt that I could do more for the cause, make a far greater contribution if I set aside my scruples.

Also in November Putin saw fit to posthumously honor a previously obscure American double agent, George Koval, awarding him the Hero of Russia medal for his role in penetrating the Manhattan Project, which developed America's atomic bomb. Koval, dubbed the "spy who came in from the cornfields," had what William J. Broad of the New York Times called "an all-American cover": born in Iowa, educated in New York, and by all accounts a decent baseball player (a sport also beloved by Fidel Castro).

Whether Koval's spying actually "helped speed up considerably the time it took for the Soviet Union to develop an atomic bomb of its own," as the Russians claimed, is unknowable, given that the KGB and GRU archives have been closed to Western scholars. Putin's intelligence agencies are fully capable of trying to rewrite history to shield other double agents, even those long gone, or to obscure the true outlines of the conspiracy.

There is some irony here, of course; Gordievsky, Blake, and Koval all earned these national decorations for their treachery, for behavior (lying, double dealing, revealing secrets, betraying trust) that is normally considered beyond the pale in any other circumstances by all civilized communities.

Their betrayals are not completely symmetrical, however, for they betrayed different societies: Blake and Koval conspired against the tolerant liberal Western democracies of Great Britain and the United States, while Gordiesvsky's covert work was directed against a totalitarian police state. Certainly we can judge Gordiesvky’s treason differently; an argument can be made that he chose the lesser of two evils in spying on his colleagues, even if we don't fully endorse the 17th century dramatist Pierre Corneille's belief that "treachery is noble when aimed at tyranny." And history suggests that Gordiesvky chose correctly, in the broadest sense.

The complexity of betrayal

This may all be true, and yet "honoring" a double agent, even a Gordiesvsky, can be tricky, an exercise fraught with ambiguity. What is being honored? Motives or results? Many of these agents became spies for reasons more personal than political. If their treachery was spurred by circumstance, rather than conviction or principle, should it be judged differently? (Which brings to mind the words of Archbishop Thomas Becket in T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral: "The last temptation is the worst treason/ To do the right thing for the wrong reason.")

Blake's comments to Russia Today raised another complication for those who may be tempted to admire the "courage" of the double agent: Soviet moles in the West consciously chose to support the Communist cause covertly, instead of openly espousing their Marxist-Leninist beliefs. They could have opposed Western political systems directly and openly. Instead, they chose to "set aside their scruples," as Blake did, and abandon those decadent bourgeois notions of patriotism, integrity, trust, and honor.

It is ironic, then, that some revisionist historians still try to find something honorable in the actions of those American Communists who spied for Stalin, arguing, as has Ellen Schrecker, that these men and women "did not subscribe to traditional forms of patriotism." Gordiesvsky and other Iron Curtain spies, on the other hand, did not have the option of open political activism, unless they hankered for the Gulag or execution.

In considering the decisions made in the 1930s and 1940s, we should remember that many Americans and Britons opposed the rise of Hitler and Mussolini without volunteering to spy on their friends and colleagues. While the archival research of historians John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr has convincingly demonstrated the close connection between the American Communist Party leadership and Soviet-directed espionage, those who decided to spy for the KGB nevertheless had to elect to do so. The historical record shows that some refused to take that step; others agreed to disloyalty.

The mind of the traitor

What, then, compels people to betray their country? Historians, psychiatrists, and intelligence experts offer explanations which can be broadly grouped into three categories: betrayal for money; betrayal for ideological or political reasons; and betrayal linked to a spy's personality. All of these factors can come into play in the making of a traitor.

The mercenary strain of double agent was prevalent during the last few decades of the Cold War: Aldrich H. Ames, Robert P. Hanssen, Earl Edwin Pitts, and John Anthony Walker, Jr., all accepted payment from the Soviets in exchange for classified information. These cases represented a break from the more ideologically-prompted espionage of the past.

Indeed, until the mid-1960s ideological commitment was the most common reason for spying against the U.S. or its Western allies. For example, historian Maurice Isserman, in his essay "Disloyalty As a Principle: Why Communists Spied" (published in 2000) argued that American Communists who doubled for the Soviets in the 1930s and 1940s did so because they felt they were "serving a greater cause," what Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev called "romantic anti-fascism." While Isserman conceded that some of this spying resulted from "the same complicated mixtures of reasons that almost always motivate people to break with accepted patterns of behavior and belief," he nonetheless saw principle as a primary motivation.

Yet the more we learn about the psychology of the double agent, the less ideology alone appears to be a deciding factor. The narcissistic excitement of wielding secret power, of revenging imagined or actual slights, of converting alienation into action, at some level seems more vital to the traitor than does “serving the cause.” Jerrold M. Post, a psychiatrist and psychological profiler for the CIA, wrote in his now de-classified 1975 paper “Anatomy of Treason,” that narcissism, or extreme self-absorption, was a characteristic quality found in many double agents; further, Post noted, these figures "… feel they are destined to play a special role, have an insatiable appetite for recognition and success.” Thus being passed over for promotion often triggered the spying, as it did with GRU mole Oleg Penkovsky, whose career was blocked because of his father's past as a White Russian officer. (Penkovsky was discovered, convicted after a show trial, and executed by the Soviets in 1963).

This narcissism is often coupled with feelings of isolation, alienation, and marginalization. As Harold “Kim” Philby, who betrayed both Crown and country during the Cold War, once explained: "To betray, you first have to belong. I never belonged.” A sense of separation, of "not fitting in", can arise from many factors: an awkward childhood; sexual orientation or behavior at odds with societal norms; outsider status (because of religion or class) in a closed community, such as a British public school or an Ivy League college; troubled family relationships; excessive drug and alcohol use; perhaps an innate aversion to authority.

Thus it is possible for even the most privileged members of a society, such as Philby and his fellow Cambridge Spies, Britain's most infamous spy ring, to feel alienated, often for hidden or private reasons. The Cambridge Five were sexually rebellious in a morally conservative time: Philby and John Cairncross were drawn to adultery and sexual adventure; Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess were closeted homosexuals; and Donald Maclean struggled with his bisexuality.

Another example: while George Blake now claims that it was indiscriminate American bombing of villages during the Korean War that turned him towards Moscow, it is more likely that he was reacting to upper class English anti-Semitism. The son of a Spanish Jew, Blake was spurned as a suitor by the family of a proper English girl because of his background. Joel Barr, who was part of the Rosenberg spy ring, cited the eviction of his family from their Brooklyn apartment during the Depression as what spurred him to become a Communist, and later, a spy (Barr's story is recounted in Steve Usdin’s Engineering Communism).

Secret compensation

There are compensations, primarily psychic, for becoming a double agent. Whether spying for the KGB, CIA, or MI6, the betrayer joins a welcoming new community, one that has not injured him and can help him settle old scores. The betrayer finally belongs. (Not surprisingly, intelligence agencies have often awarded secret medals and other honors, including high rank, to the double agent---recognizing that "insatiable appetite for recognition.") In Alan Furst’s historical novel, Night Soldiers, the young Russians and Eastern Europeans recruited into the NKVD find they have joined a family of sorts, one that responds harshly to injustice and punishes its enemies. There is also the added pleasure of hitting back, secretly, at those who have wronged the double agent.

Intelligence agency talent spotters have long recognized the profile of the potential mole. As Ben Macintyre of The Times of London has noted, the KGB’s Pavel Sudoplatov looked for those "…who are hurt by fate or nature ---the ugly, those craving power or influence but defeated by unfavorable circumstances. In co-operation with us, all these find a peculiar compensation. The sense of belonging to an influential, powerful organization will give them a feeling of superiority over the handsome and prosperous people around them."

Macintyre adds: "As a trade, espionage attracts more than its share of the damaged, the lonely and the plain weird. But all spies crave undetected influence, that secret compensation. Espionage may spring from patriotism or treachery, but ultimately it is an act of imagination."

Timeless concerns

If the Cold War drama involving Gordievsky, Blake, and Koval seemed a trifle dated, news reports in November of the discovery of a possible mole in the CIA with ties to the radical group Hezbollah served as a reminder that the dynamics of betrayal are timeless.

Nada Nadim Prouty, a Lebanese national who became an American citizen and had been employed by both the FBI and CIA, pleaded guilty to "charges of conspiracy, naturalization fraud and unauthorized computer access" and, according to court documents "at one point used her security clearance to access restricted files about the terrorist group Hezbollah."

U.S. authorities said there was no evidence that Prouty had passed secrets to Hezbollah, but, as the Washington Post noted, Prouty's "ability to conceal her past from two of the nation's top anti-terrorism agencies raised new concerns about their vulnerability to infiltration."

Whether Prouty's crimes represented a serious security breach or not (and in a reflection of the inter-agency distrust endemic to Washington, the Daily News reported that former FBI and CIA officials disagreed on this question), her case is both disturbing and yet quite predictable. In fact, it's safe to say it will not be the last time Western intelligence agencies confront their "vulnerability to infiltration." Why should the "War on Terror" prove any different when it comes to the matter of betrayal?