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Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” and the world of work

November 18, 2008 / admin

Herman Melville knew not only how to tell a straightforward story, but also how to slyly include enough different elements, literary references, and symbols to add several layers of meaning to his tales; this ability to fuse narrative and symbolism is on full display in “Bartleby The Scrivener,” a longish short story first published in 1853.

Melville understood the value of ambiguity. By making the character of Bartleby, a legal scrivener (or copyist), so strange, so opaque, and so memorable, Melville insured the story’s lasting appeal. We never learn why Bartleby “prefers not” to tackle his office duties, and the underlying reasons for his stubborn resistance remain unexplained. As “Bartleby the Scrivener” begins, its narrator, the Wall Street lawyer who employs Bartleby, emphasizes the man’s mysteriousness:

Bartleby was one of those beings of whom nothing is ascertainable, except from the original sources, and in his case those are very small. What my own astonished eyes saw of Bartleby, that is all I know of him…

Brown University’s Arnold Weinstein has noted that this “blank Bartleby” has encouraged multiple readings of the character. Who is Bartleby? Who is he meant to represent? Some critics have viewed Bartleby as a stand-in for many of Melville’s sometimes difficult contemporaries (Edgar Allen Poe, Henry Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne) or for Melville himself. Was Bartleby a response to the negative reviews and flagging sales of Melville’s novels Moby-Dick (1851) and Pierre: or, The Ambiguities (1852), a suggestion that Melville “preferred not” to produce more accessible and less metaphorical fiction, even if readers preferred it? A different interpretation casts Bartleby as a Christ-like figure, misunderstood and persecuted by the world; those of a Marxist bent see him as the archetype of the office worker resisting the mind-numbing demands of exploitative capitalism.

Not every reader of Melville appreciates his fondness for the baroque and not all critics have delighted in his literary tricks. The English novelist D.H. Lawrence, in a critique of Moby-Dick, disapproved of what he called Melville’s attempt to “square himself with the intellectual world by dragging in deliberate transcendentalism, deliberate symbols and ‘deeper meanings.’ All this is insufferably clumsy and in clownish bad taste: self-conscious and amateurish to a degree, the worst side of American behavior.” In contrast, Lawrence writes, when Melville “renders us his sheer apprehension of the world…” then “he is wonderful” and his writing commands “a stillness in the soul, an awe.”

“Bartleby the Scrivener” does give us more “sheer apprehension of the world” and it can be read in simpler terms, as a story highlighting the tensions and contradictions in relationships at work. Melville caught some of the absurdity and alienation of office work at a time when most Americans made their living on farms. Bartleby’s eccentric office-mates—Nipper, Turkey, Ginger Boy—would fit right into the hijinks at the Dunder Mifflin Paper Company of the television sit-com “The Office.”

A prudent narrator

One entry point for the story is the narrator, Bartleby’s boss, whose dealings with his strange employee provide Melville’s narrative arc. The narrator/lawyer decribes himself as “rather elderly man,” one who is “eminently safe,” and he is sure to note that he has been praised by the famous financier John Jacob Aster as prudent and methodical. Yet the narrator has been living an “unexamined life” (to borrow a phrase from the transcendentalists). Proud of his commercial success and prudence, with a “natural expectancy of instant compliance” from his employees, he is totally unprepared for Bartleby’s resistance (“I would prefer not to”) and rejection of convention. Bartleby’s response puts the narrator strangely on the defensive. The lawyer regards himself as a decent, Christian man and we sense that he is not completely comfortable with wielding authority over his “pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn” employee. He cannot bring himself to confront Bartleby directly, and becomes profoundly linked to this strange employee:

Gradually I slid into the persuasion that these troubles of mine touching the scrivener, had been all predestinated from eternity, and Bartleby was billeted upon me for some mysterious purpose of an all-wise Providence, which it was not for a mere mortal like me to fathom.

The lawyer tries to cope with the situation rationally: he attempts to reason with Bartleby, to negotiate with him, and, finally, to pay him to go away. He finds that he cannot alter Bartleby’s insistence on withdrawing from work and from life. It is only the fear that “the strange creature I kept at my office” will damage his reputation, and hurt his law practice, that leads him to end their relationship, but even then he cannot do it directly, instead moving his office to escape Bartleby, this “intolerable incubus.”

Yet the narrator remains haunted by Bartleby. What does he owe him? Where does his responsibility end? All of his attempts to help Bartleby are rebuffed, but the lawyer still feels guilty when Bartleby’s stubborn rejection of the conventional costs him his life.

Some of the lasting appeal of the story is that it reflects, in exaggerated form, the natural workplace tension between boss and employee. How does the manager exercise his or her authority? By command and control or through gentle persuasion? And who ends up with the real power in the relationship? After all, the worker is not without leverage—sabotage or deliberately shoddy work is always an option, or (as with Bartleby) passive-aggressive resistance.

The puzzle of Bartleby

The close to “Bartleby the Scrivener” (what the narrator calls a sequel), fails to solve the puzzle of Bartleby. We learn that Bartleby served as a clerk in the Dead Letter Office in Washington and had lost his job with a change in administration. (Some critics have argued that the Dead Letters represent Melville’s failed novels, and that Bartleby’s despair reflects Melville’s despondency over what he thought was a dead-end for his writing.) The narrator draws a connection between Bartleby’s prior occupation and his eventual breakdown: “Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness, can any business seem more fitted to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters and assorting them for the flames? For by the cart-load they are annually burned.”

But somehow Bartleby’s tacked-on past doesn’t seem enough to explain his bizarre behavior, his deadened affect, his anhedonia. His alienation and separation must have deeper and hidden psychic roots, but Melville deliberately leaves the mystery of this strange, ghostly scrivener unsolved.

Jefferson Flanders is author of the Cold War thriller Herald Square.

Morton Sobell, Soviet espionage, and Cold War mysteries

September 15, 2008 / admin

For those interested in Cold War history, one of the more surprising stories of 2008 was the admission by Morton Sobell that he and Julius Rosenberg had been Soviet agents during the 1940s.

Why did Sobell, now 91 years old, a former spy in the winter of his life, decide to tell the truth to Sam Roberts of the New York Times, after having proclaimed his innocence since his trial and conviction on espionage charges in 1951? Was he tired of lying on behalf of a discredited Marxist-Leninist ideology? (“Now, I know it was an illusion,” Sobell told Roberts. “I was taken in.”)

Did he no longer care about any embarrassment and pain he might cause for that dwindling legion of defenders who had proclaimed his innocence, and that of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, for more than half a century? (His stepdaughter told Roberts that Sobell’s confession “complicated history and the personal histories of the many millions of people, all over the world, who gave time, energy, money and heart to the struggle to support his claims of innocence.”) Did he want to set the historical record straight while he still could? Or did Sobell hope to preempt embarrassing disclosures in Rosenberg case grand jury testimony about to be released? (Ron Radosh, the leading historian of the Rosenberg case, believes Sobell broke his silence because, contrary to his public statements, the released testimony would make it “clear that Mr. Sobell had access to important classified military data, and was in a position to hand it over to the Soviets.”)

In the fullest account of the Roberts-Sobell conversation, it’s clear that Sobell remains conflicted about his dealings with the Soviets:

“I haven’t considered myself a spy,” he said. “Isn’t that funny? You use that word ‘spy,’ it has connotations.”

Was Julius Rosenberg a spy?

“He was a spy, but no more than I was,” Sobell replied. “He gave nothing, in the end it was nothing. The sketch was negligible and the government lied in presenting it as the secret to the atomic bomb. They never harmed this country, because what they transmitted was wrong.”

Further, Sobell argued he had passed information to a World War II ally, the Soviet Union, not then an American adversary—an excuse used by many on the Old Left to defend the Communist spies of the period. This, of course, ignores the fact that (as Radosh has tartly noted) the Rosenberg network commenced spying during the period of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, prior to Germany’s 1941 invasion of Russia.

Yet Sobell’s attempts to downplay his and Julius Rosenberg’s culpability can be seen as signs of deep psychic conflict. Some of the Soviet atomic spies have been less repentant. Ted Hall, the Harvard-trained physicist perhaps most responsible for passing the design of the atomic bomb to the Russians, expressed little regret for his actions. (Hall deserves a special place in Harvard’s 20th century Hall of Shame alongside Nazi publicist Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl). After his death, Hall’s wife published a brief memoir in 2003 which included the following passage:

He [Hall] said that if he had then understood the real nature of Stalin’s dictatorship, he would not have had the stomach to share information about the atomic bomb with the USSR. However, looking back, he concluded that though he had been mistaken about some important things, ultimately his decision had proved right. In the early postwar period the risk that the US would use the bomb, for example against China or North Korea, was really serious. Hawks in the government seemingly had no comprehension of the danger this would involve for the whole world, and certainly no concern for the human lives they would have destroyed. If they had not been made cautious by the Soviets’ retaliatory power, enhanced to an unknown extent by the contributions of Ted and (far more importantly) [Klaus] Fuchs, there is no telling what they might have been capable of.

To his credit, Sobell appears ashamed of his “contributions,” and has refrained from claiming the moral high ground for his treachery. Instead, he has tried to minimize whatever damage he and Julius Rosenberg may have caused by passing classified military information, although the details they provided the Russians about American radar may have been used against U.S. planes in Korea and Vietnam.

Other repercussions

Sobell’s confession was jarring to many Rosenberg defenders, as Roberts of the Times chronicled in his piece “A Spy Confesses, and Still Some Weep for the Rosenbergs.” It also prompted the Rosenberg’s sons, Michael and Robert Meeropol, to acknowledge that their father, Julius, had been involved in espionage, although, they maintained, of a non-atomic sort. They continued to argue for their mother’s innocence and for prosecutorial misconduct in the case. (Certainly the executions of the Rosenbergs represented a failure of justice, as the death sentence was grossly disproportionate.)

Sobell’s admission also had to represent a chilling development for those last-ditch defenders of Alger Hiss, another Cold War figure accused of spying for the Soviets and convicted of perjury on a related charge in 1950. Hiss steadfastly maintained his innocence until his death at the age of 92 in 1996. Sobell’s confession suggested that decades-long protestations of innocence might not be indicative of anything.

There was some gloating, as well, by those who were proved right about the Rosenberg spy ring, and some attempted score-settling. In the New Republic, Martin Peretz went after Victor Navasky, former editor and publisher of The Nation, calling him “the cheerleader of the ‘everybody was innocent’ school in American sentimental thought about communism and its fellow-travelers” and challenging the Columbia University journalism professor to acknowledge that “innocence of the Rosenbergs is now exposed as false.” (Navasky on Sobell and Rosenberg: “these guys thought they were helping our ally in wartime, and yes, they broke the law, shouldn’t have done what they did, and should have been proportionally punished for it; but the greater betrayal was by the state.”)

Cold War mysteries

While Morton Sobell confirmed what most Cold War scholars had already accepted—the existence of the Rosenberg spy network—there are still questions about the extent of Soviet espionage in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s, and how deeply the American military/scientific establishment was penetrated.

For example, nearly 350 Americans had some sort of covert relationship with Soviet intelligence in the 1940s, according to Venona Project decrypted Russian cables. Historians John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr have matched roughly half of the Venona code names with individuals. What more might we learn if more identifications could be made? How might that alter our understanding of U.S.-Soviet relations during the period?

Western scholars had some access to KGB and GRU archives after the fall of the Soviet Union, and much was learned about the clandestine links between the American Communist Party and Soviet intelligence. The rise to power of Vladimir Putin curtailed much of that research, although there have still been surprise revelations, such as the naming in 2007 of George Koval, “the spy who came in from the cornfields,” as a GRU agent who infiltrated the Manhattan Project.

And Thomas C. Reed and Danny B. Stillman’s just published “The Nuclear Express: A Political History of the Bomb and Its Proliferation” makes the claim that an American scientist at the Los Alamos weapons lab betrayed the secrets of the hydrogen bomb to the Soviets in the 1950s. The authors do not name the alleged spy, but say that the FBI bungled its investigation of the security breach. (Nuclear weapons expert Robert S. Norris has suggested that the alleged spy was Darol Froman, a long-time Los Alamos scientist.)

No doubt the Russians could clear up more of these Cold War mysteries, but a Kremlin dominated by former KGB officials has resisted further transparency. It may take a recrudescence of glasnot, and the reopening of the Soviet-era archives, for the full historical story to be told.

Confronting reality: Occam’s Razor and the 9/11 “Truth Movement”

September 15, 2008 / admin

When I walked across Cooper Square last Thursday just after dark, I found two columns of bluish light rising into the Manhattan night sky, an illuminated reminder of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. The “Tribute in Light” was a sight that stirred memories of that tragic day in New York seven years ago, and all that has followed.

It is a changed country now: innocence lost; American soldiers and marines in combat in Afghanistan and Iraq; and many Americans deeply conflicted about the “War on Terror” and what focusing on homeland security means for civil liberties in a democratic society. And, after the terrorist bombings in Madrid and London, and numerous foiled plots, there is a deep unease about our continued vulnerability to terrorism.

Others have responded to the danger of Islamic terrorism, however, by minimizing the threat, or blaming the victim, or embracing conspiracy theories that obscure the reality of 9/11. I found evidence of that last week when, along with John Ray, a very bright Carnegie-Mellon student who blogs at Conspiracies R Not Us, I appeared on the Toronto-based show “The Agenda with Steve Paikin” to offer the skeptics’ view of the “evidence” behind 9/11 conspiracy theories. Also on the show: two Canadian academics, Graeme MacQueen and Michael Keefer, who argued that the American government deliberately staged the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon to provide a pretext for war in the Middle East. (You can view the program in its entirety here.)

I was somewhat surprised that MacQueen and Keefer proved to be such fervent members of the 9/11 “Made it Happen on Purpose” (MIHOP) school, because it’s a hard position to defend considering its logical gaps and inconsistencies. For starters, MIHOP advocates won’t concede the obvious: that 19 Arab terrorists hijacked four airplanes on 9/11; that Al Qaeda engineered the attacks; that jetliners loaded with fuel made effective weapons; and that the explanations of structural engineers and fire safety experts for why the World Trade Center towers and nearby buildings collapsed make sense. Instead, most in the MIHOP school contend that the Twin Towers and World Trade Center 7 were brought down by controlled demolition; many think the Pentagon was hit not by a plane but by a missile; and few accept what they call the “official story” about the crash of United 93 in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. MIHOP believers see “an inside job” and/or a “false flag operation” behind the events of 9/11 and blame the “neo-cons” in the Bush Administration (and sometimes, with an anti-Semitic twist, the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, as well).

Occam’s Razor and 9/11 conspiracies

As I pointed out on “The Agenda,” these grand conspiracy theories violate Occam’s Razor, the insight of a 14th century Franciscan that the simplest explanation for a phenomenon is the best. These theories also run afoul of basic logic: Why crash airliners into buildings AND bother rigging them beforehand for controlled demolition? Wouldn’t the attacks alone be enough of a provocation? For that matter, why bother with hijacking planes? Wouldn’t a massive truck bomb, or bombs, work just as well and present fewer logistical challenges? Why not replicate the 1993 truck bombing of the World Trade Center (or Oklahoma City)? Why make the conspiracy so elaborate and so complex?

The controlled demolition theory doesn’t make much sense either. To rig a large office building with explosives takes professional demolition firms months to accomplish. How could massive amounts of explosives been placed secretly in three skyscrapers, let alone one, without detection? And as John Ray noted, the larger the conspiracy gets, the greater the number of people involved—to the point where hundreds of thousands must be part of the “cover-up.” Would they all remain silent? Would no one be moved to confess? With all of the media attention following 9/11, wouldn’t the secret have leaked out? Further, there isn’t any evidence of controlled demolition, something that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) noted in its reports on the collapse of WTC 1, 2 and 7: no witnesses, no seismic record, no demolition equipment in the wreckage.

The “Alice in Wonderland” nature of the MIHOP fantasies makes them relatively easy to debunk. The Let It Happen on Purpose (LIHOP) argument, on the other hand, while also flawed, relies on a more subjective approach to the question of 9/11. LIHOP advocates say 9/11 happened because the Bush Administration had advance knowledge of Al Qaeda’s plans and, eager to fight a war for oil, either turned a blind eye to the plot, or worked to facilitate it. There is no “smoking gun” evidence for LIHOP, and the record suggests incompetence, indifference, and ignorance on the part of the authorities, not collusion, but since LIHOP asks us to assume the worst about the U.S. government, it has gained adherents from the far Left and Right, and will continue to attract support.

Confronting the reality of 9/11

My appearance on “The Agenda” provoked further comment in the days that followed: I received several emails from Canadians (including those from a retired pilot and a firefighter) apologizing for what they saw as the anti-Americanism of MacQueen and Keefer, and assuring me that most Canadians accepted the reality of 9/11. I replied that no apologies were necessary, that Canada had supported the U.S. in its pursuit of Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, and that the leaders of the 9/11 “Truth Movement” were Americans. I also received some nasty feedback from foot soldiers in that movement, denouncing me as a CIA media plant and hinting darkly of the fate that awaited such “traitors.”

Despite their nastiness, my sense is that that the 9/11 “Truth Movement” is losing ground. The debunking done by Popular Mechanics, the BBC, and independent bloggers and skeptics, and the recent release of the NIST’s WTC 7 report ruling out controlled demolition as a cause of the building’s collapse, has put the 9/11 deniers on the defensive.

At the same time, it seems that many in the U.S. are slipping back into a pre-9/11 complacency on the question of terrorism. A CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll released last week found only one in 10 Americans who say terrorism is the most important issue in voting for president, and “concerns about an impending terrorist strike are at the lowest point on record” since 9/11.

Also last week the New York Times carried a chilling op-ed piece by Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic (“On Nov. 4, Remember 9/11“) warning of the dangers of nuclear terrorism and noting that “[m]any proliferation experts I have spoken to judge the chance of such a detonation to be as high as 50 percent in the next 10 years. I am an optimist, so I put the chance at 10 percent to 20 percent.” Goldberg doesn’t flinch from confronting the reality of 9/11 seven years later: “The next president must do one thing, and one thing only, if he is to be judged a success: He must prevent Al Qaeda, or a Qaeda imitator, from gaining control of a nuclear device and detonating it in America.” It is advice that we can only hope that Senator Obama or Senator McCain will heed.

Debunking some specific claims made by MacQueen and Keefer on “The Agenda”

John Ray and I tried to refute as many of the outlandish claims made by Professors MacQueen and Keefer during our appearance on “The Agenda.” We didn’t get to deal with all of them, and so, in the interests of setting the record straight, I am offering a more detailed debunking of six of their claims.

1. American air defenses were deliberately weakened by war games on 9/11. FALSE.

While it is true there were a number of military exercises that day, it made no difference in the readiness of the American military to respond to a hijacked jet, and, if anything, might have allowed a quicker response to terror attacks (if there had been more timely communication between civilian air traffic controllers and their military counterparts, which there wasn’t). There were only 14 fighter jets on alert in the contiguous 48 states, none of which were diverted because of the “war games.”

SEE: Popular Mechanics, “Debunking the 9/11 Myths” and the website Debunk 9/11 Myths.

2. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has been politicized by the Bush Administration, and therefore cannot be trusted to investigate the WTC collapses. FALSE.

There is no evidence that NIST has been politicized. The WTC reports were reviewed by professional associations of architects, structural engineers, and fire safety experts (for example, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), the Structural Engineers Association of New York (SEONY), and National Fire Protection Association) without anyone questioning NIST’s objectivity, professionalism or adherence to the scientific method. The one dissenter cited by Professor Keefer, fire safety expert James Quintiere, has differed with NIST over its investigative approach but agreed with NIST’s conclusion that controlled demolition was not involved. In Quintere’s comments on NIST’s WTC 7 report, he dismissed demolition claims, according to Newsday:

Quintiere stressed, however, that he never believed explosives played a role. He said NIST wasted time employing outside experts to consider it.

3. At the Zacarias Moussaoui trial, the FBI testified that conservative commentator Barbara Olson could not have called her husband from the doomed flight (AA 77) that crashed into the Pentagon. FALSE.

The FBI identified one interrupted phone call from Olson, and could not determine who was the source for four other calls from the plane. It is likely that some of these unidentified calls were made by Olson, as reported by her husband. The 9/11 Commission reported:

The records available for the phone calls from American 77 do not allow for a determination of which of four “connected calls to unknown numbers” represent the two between Barbara and Ted Olson, although the FBI and DOJ believe that all four represent communications between Barbara Olson and her husband’s office (all family members of the Flight 77 passengers and crew were canvassed to see if they had received any phone calls from the hijacked flight, and only Renee May’s parents and Ted Olson indicated that they had received such calls).The four calls were at 9:15:34 for 1 minute, 42 seconds; 9:20:15 for 4 minutes, 34 seconds; 9:25:48 for 2 minutes, 34 seconds; and 9:30:56 for 4 minutes, 20 seconds. FBI report, “American Airlines Airphone Usage,” Sept. 20, 2001; FBI report of investigation, interview of Theodore Olson, Sept. 11, 2001; FBI report of investigation, interview of Helen Voss, Sept. 14, 2001; AAL response to the Commission’s supplemental document request, Jan. 20, 2004.

SEE: 9/11 Commission Report, Note 57

4. The WTC 7 fires “died down” and couldn’t have caused the thermal expansion described by NIST and the resulting progressive collapse. FALSE.

Fires raged, unchecked, on many floors of WTC 7 for some seven hours. Firefighters reported this at the time, and FEMA and NIST found photographic evidence of this.

SEE: Photos here from the scene.

5. The steel sample taken from WTC 7 had damage suggesting the impact of thermite or some unexplained chemical. FALSE.

Here’s what the BBC has reported about his claim.

In New England the claims of the mysterious melted steel from Tower Seven has been unravelled at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute near Boston.

Professor Richard Sisson says it did not melt, it eroded. The cause was the very hot fires in the debris after 9/11 that cooked the steel over days and weeks.

Professor Sisson determined that the steel was attacked by a liquid slag which contained iron, sulphur and oxygen.

However, rather than coming from thermite, the metallurgist Professor Sisson thinks the sulphur came from masses of gypsum wallboard that was pulverised and burnt in the fires. He says:

“I don’t find it very mysterious at all, that if I have steel in this sort of a high temperature atmosphere that’s rich in oxygen and sulphur this would be the kind of result I would expect.”

SEE: BBC News, “The Conspiracy Files”

6. WTC 7 is the only steel-framed skyscraper in the world to have collapsed solely because of fire. TRUE.

WTC 7 is also the only steel-framed skyscraper with vulnerable long-span construction subjected to unchecked fires for seven hours (a sprinkler system was disabled when the water main broke). 9/11 “Truth Movement” advocates point to office tower fires in Madrid and Caracas which didn’t bring those structures down, yet fail to note that these buildings had their steels columns encased in cement (unlike WTC 1, 2 and 7).

SEE: Debunking 9/11 Conspiracy Theories

An extended commentary on the 9/11 “Truth Movement” can be found at “Exposing the 9/11 conspiracy fantasies.”

**C.J. Sansom’s Winter in Madrid and the literary lure of the “Good Fight”**

July 21, 2008 / admin

Both American presidential candidates, John McCain and Barack Obama, named Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls when asked recently by journalists to cite their favorite novel. McCain has said that during his captivity in North Vietnam as a POW he recited portions of the book to himself.

It’s intriguing that both McCain and Obama chose a novel set not in the United States, but in Spain during its fratricidal Civil War in the late 1930s.

The protagonist of For Whom the Bell Tolls is an American, however, Robert Jordan, a leftist college professor and International Brigades volunteer who embarks on a dangerous mission to blow up a strategic bridge in the Iberian hill country. At least one conservative writer, Michael Knox Beran, has tartly suggested that McCain should find a different favorite, one that isn’t “a maudlin lament for a socialist bridge-bomber.”

There is some irony in Beran’s critique of the politics of Hemingway’s novel, because the hard Left in the United States, including some of the American Communists who served in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion (part of the International Brigades), ferociously attacked the book (and its author) after its publication in 1940. These critics, among them former Lincoln commander Milton Wolff, objected to Hemingway’s negative portrayal of Soviet motives and tactics in Spain and to his unsparing and harsh portraits of political commissar André Marty (known as the “Butcher of Albacete” for his purge of non-Communists in the International Brigades) and the Communist leader Dolores Ibárruri, the Leftist icon also known as La Passionara. (Hemingway, never one to duck a fight, responded directly and profanely to those he called the “ideology boys.”)

Hemingway made a distinction between supporting the Loyalist cause, as did his fictional character Robert Jordan, and endorsing the Soviet strategy of deception and manipulation in dealing with the Republican government. Such an approach was anathema to the hardliners. There’s an amusing anecdote (recounted in Peter Carroll’s The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Americans in the Spanish Civil War) involving the actor Gary Cooper, Hemingway’s choice to play Robert Jordan in the film of For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Alvah Bessie, a Lincoln veteran and screenwriter. During the filming, Bessie lectured Cooper about how the Spanish conflict hadn’t been a civil war, as Cooper believed, but instead was a German and Italian invasion designed to overthrow the legal government of Spain. Cooper’s laconic, and classic, response: “That so? That’s what so great about this country…a guy like you can fight in a war that’s none of his business.”

Art and the “Good Fight”

It’s not hard to see why the “Good Fight” (as the Spanish struggle was dubbed) inspired artists, poets, playwrights, novelists and short story writers from the start. The conflict was rich with dramatic, and tragic, elements. Writers have been drawn by the idealism of many of the defenders of the Republic, and by the idea that the Spanish hostilities represented a dress rehearsal for World War II. Some of the best works about the conflict, such as George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia and Hemingway’s novel, have explored the tensions within the ranks of the Loyalists. This artistic and literary fascination with the “Good Fight” has continued into the 21st century as evidenced by a continuing stream of books (fiction and non-fiction) about the Spanish Civil War and the International Brigades, including English author C.J. Sansom’s Winter in Madrid, a best-seller in Britain.

Sansom has set his fictional story in 1940 Madrid, a year after General Francisco Franco’s victory over the Loyalists, and Winter in Madrid shines brightest in its evocative portrayal of the grim life in Spain’s capital city: the compromises, and sacrifices, required for survival. The novel’s protagonist, Harry Brett, a veteran of Dunkirk, is recruited by British Intelligence to spy on a former schoolmate, Sandy Forsyth, who is involved in shady business dealings with the Spanish government. Brett’s mission exposes him to the corruption and venality of the Nationalist victors, and to the growing rivalry between the Royalist and Falange wings of Franco’s regime.

Sansom’s characters reflect the range of British attitudes toward the Spanish conflict. Harry Brett is a self-described liberal Tory (“As far as I am concerned, Spain before the Civil War was rotten with chaos, and the Fascists and Communists both took advantage”). The crypto-Fascist Forsyth is balanced by a British Communist, Bernie Piper, an internationalist who embraces the Republican cause as part of a broader struggle against Fascism. And there is an English Red Cross nurse, Barbara Clare, an idealistic, but fragile, fellow traveler who becomes romantically involved with both Piper and Forsyth. The three men—Brett, Piper and Forsyth—have all attended Rookwood, a traditional British public school, and Sansom intersperses flashbacks of their school days throughout the pages of Winter in Madrid, linking past and present friendships and rivalries. That’s a lot of baggage for any novel to carry, and Sansom struggles to pull off the dual narratives.

He also misses the mark in his characterization of Forsyth, a straight-from-Central-Casting sadist, exactly the sort of predictable Fascist bad guy found in innumerable World War II thrillers. Franco’s Spanish supporters are also uniformly portrayed by Sansom as grasping, or evil, or both. Yet, it is possible for a novelist to write about the complex human dimensions of those loyal to a twisted ideology. For example, Alan Furst has created a number of fully-rounded characters drawn to totalitarian creeds in novels like The World at Night, Kingdom of Shadows, and Dark Star, and David Downing’s Zoo Station and Silesian Station give us flesh-and-blood Germans struggling to retain their decency in Nazi Germany. Winter in Madrid would have been better served by grays instead of black-and-white, and it would have been a much better novel if Sansom had risked more by creating less predictable, and less cliched, villains.

To his credit, Sansom gets his history right. There’s no whitewashing of Comintern treachery during the Civil War, and also no shying away from the post-war reality of Nationalist brutality. At one level, Winter in Madrid can be read as an indictment of Britain’s accomodationist policy toward Franco and the Spanish Right in the 1930s and 1940s, and yet Sansom acknowledges that by the time of the Battle of Britain, Whitehall’s options had narrowed. No matter how distasteful the Franco regime might be, keeping Spain out of an alliance with the Germans had to shape British policy.

Sansom’s imaginative leap in setting Winter in Madrid after the end of the civil war deserves praise as well. We see Spain confronting not only the human costs of its ideological death struggle—the shattered veterans, the orphans, the despairing widows—but also the grim prospects of life under a dictatorship. It is a fascinating, and haunting, story and Winter in Madrid tells it well.

McCain’s New Hampshire momentum

December 30, 2007 / admin

Will a victory in New Hampshire’s January primary once again make John McCain the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, as it did in 2000?

If McCain’s enthusiastic reception by an overflow crowd at Londonderry’s Lions Club Hall on Saturday night is any indication, the Arizona Senator may very well defy conventional political wisdom and pull off an upset in the Granite State’s January 8th primary.

That so many potential voters turned out for a town hall meeting just hours before the televised Big Game between the locally-beloved New England Patriots and New York Giants (with the Patriots’ undefeated season on the line), served as further evidence of McCain’s growing appeal. His campaign, it seems, has momentum (or what George H.W. Bush once called “the Big Mo”); McCain’s earlier stops on Saturday also drew large crowds.

Those gathered in Londonderry greeted McCain with a standing ovation; he mounted the stage holding a replica jersey of Patriots’ quarterback Tom Brady, explaining that it had been a gift at an earlier campaign stop. “I know I’m pandering,” he told the cheering crowd, many of whom were wearing Patriots’ sweatshirts and hats, “but not enough to put the shirt on.”

Throughout the meeting, the 71-year-old McCain appeared energized and engaged—even though Londonderry was his final appearance of the day—suggesting that, despite his age, he has the stamina necessary for the demands of the presidency. His “Straight Talk Express” campaign has been on a roll for weeks. As his wife Cindy (who is just now back on the campaign trail after recovering from a knee replacement) noted in her brief comments, the country is beginning to take a hard look at the candidates, a development she thinks favors her husband.

A reconsideration

Voters do appear to be reconsidering the Republican presidential field. That’s been a positive development for the candidacy of the former naval aviator and Vietnam war hero. McCain’s reputation for political candor and personal courage has led some to call him “the only great man” in the race. A flood of recent endorsements (from New Hampshire’s largest newspaper, the Manchester Union-Leader; from both Boston dailies; from Red Sox hero Curt Schilling; and from fellow Iraqi war hawk Senator Joe Lieberman, who crossed party lines to back McCain) has helped to refocus attention on a candidate counted out by many political observers and pundits after his campaign faltered over the summer.

The gap in New Hampshire between McCain and current frontrunner Mitt Romney, former governor of neighboring Massachusetts, has narrowed, with some polls showing the race within the margin of error. At the Londonderry town hall meeting, McCain expressed confidence that the New Hampshire political process (“the laboratory of democracy”) would not favor the highest-spending candidate (a clear reference to Romney): “You can’t buy an election in New Hampshire. You can’t.”

Before taking questions, McCain talked about the troubled situation in Pakistan, (arguing for continued American support of President Pervez Musharraf) and what he described as progress in the war in Iraq. Noting that he was the only candidate to back the Bush Administration’s troop surge, McCain said his national security experience made him the best prepared leader to meet the “transcendent challenge of radical Islamist extremism.”

McCain fielded several questions about domestic issues (health care, education, the loss of manufacturing jobs, the need for new sources of energy) and offered traditional mainstream Republican solutions: “choice and competition” in health care and education, a vigorous defense of free trade, and a market-based response to climate change (citing General Electric’s green technology efforts as a model).

His fiscal conservatism—including his promise to veto all bills with earmarks and “pork barrel spending”—played well with the Londonderry crowd, as did his rejection of ethanol subsidies, which, he pointed out, wouldn’t help him politically in Iowa.

That, of course, has always been one of McCain’s strong points: his willingness to take principled positions on issues like farm subsidies, immigration, campaign finance reform, and the war in Iraq, even when it costs him politically.

When one Londonderry questioner asked about the influence of large drug companies in Washington, McCain noted that he had voted against the Medicare prescription drug benefit bill because “it had been written by the drug companies” and didn’t allow for competition. McCain added: “Everyone says they’re against the special interests, but I’m the only one they don’t give any money to.”

McCain’s reputation as a maverick has helped him in New Hampshire, where independents can vote in either the Republican or Democratic primary. Their shift to McCain in the final days in 2000 gave him the primary win. He needs that cross-over support again.

McCain’s own independence has made him less popular with some GOP party regulars. He has earned the enmity of Washington’s K Street lobbyists and opposition from elements of the religious Right. He isn’t seen as politically reliable: which is to say that McCain will think for himself and that isn’t an endearing quality for those within the Beltway whose livelihoods depend on “delivering votes.” (Is it any wonder that McCain’s fund-raising has fallen far short of original expectations?)

No easy road

Even if McCain does win in New Hampshire on January 8th, the road ahead is not an easy one. His campaign is short of cash. McCain trails Republican hopefuls Rudy Giuliani and Mike Huckabee in national polls (although not by much), lags behind Romney and Huckabee in Michigan (Jan. 15), and is third, or fourth, in the polls in South Carolina (Jan. 19). He will need a significant bounce from a Granite State victory to make up this ground.

And yet, based on what might happen in New Hampshire and its impact on the race, McCain could still emerge as the Republican nominee. As a familiar, and admired, figure on the national stage, he fares well in head-to-head polls against potential Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. It’s possible to envision McCain putting some blue states into play in 2008, something harder to imagine with a Huckabee or Romney at the top of the ticket.

Will McCain’s potential general election appeal make him more attractive to Republican conservatives eager to retain the White House? Will party loyalists rally around a maverick? Will McCain’s positions on immigration, campaign finance reform, and global warming prove too hard for some to swallow?

Of course answers to those questions will only matter if John McCain can beat the odds on January 8th and win in New Hampshire. Can he? A sign at the Londonderry Lions Club Hall claimed “Mac is Back!” In a race as volatile as Campaign 2008, don’t bet against it.

Jefferson Flanders

Page 12 of 16

Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” and the world of work

Morton Sobell, Soviet espionage, and Cold War mysteries

Confronting reality: Occam’s Razor and the 9/11 “Truth Movement”

**C.J. Sansom’s Winter in Madrid and the literary lure of the “Good Fight”**

McCain’s New Hampshire momentum

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