I Owe it to Bobby Fischer

by

Kathryn A. Kopple

        

Some years ago, I quit smoking. It wasn't the first time, or even the fifth time. It could have been the hundredth time. I’ve lost track, though recently I found a Styrofoam cup of smoked cigarette butts in my basement. I must have snuck into the cellar when no one was looking—or smelling. Cigarette stench gives a relapsed smoker away every time. Experts call this stubborn odor “third-hand smoke,’ which is the noxious chemical residue left by cigarettes. In terms of heavy-duty bad smells, only Gingko trees can compete. Given that a single cigarette contains some seven thousand chemicals—that’s a lot of residue--you would think that smokers would be repulsed by the very smell of themselves. We smokers, though, have no sense of smell. We rely on the disgust and disapproval of non-smokers to let us know that we smell like an ashtray. And yet I did try very hard to quit—and failed. Worse each time. After my last great relapse (triggered by rise of Trumpism and the 2016 election results), I decided I had to stop for real. And that was when I discovered Bobby Fischer.

Robert James Fischer was born in 1943 in Chicago, Illinois. At the age of twenty-nine, Fischer was already a chess legend. Like all legends, Fischer was good and bad in unequal and disturbing parts. Fischer became World Chess Champion in 1972 after beating the Russian grandmaster Boris Spassky—and, in the eyes of the world, striking a blow for democracy against the Soviet Union. He returned to the U.S. to frenzied adulation, which over the years turned to dismay as he became more unpredictable and finally disappeared from public life. Still, he cast a long shadow and many would decide that, by the time he died of kidney disease in 2008, he’d become a pathetic-tragic figure—one of the world’s great chess masters turned vile anti-American Jew hater.

I’d never heard of that Bobby Fischer. Growing up in the wood lots of Connecticut, I scarcely heard of him at all. I had my own life/issues. At the earliest opportunity, I picked up smoking and drugging, and some drinking on the side. These extra-curriculars came my way via friends and neighbors. I remember the young mother next door who hired me to sit her three-year-old and tried to get away without paying me by inviting me to stick around after she got back from waitressing to get high with her. I guess she thought of pot as some sort of currency. I mean, what thirteen-year-old wouldn’t want a cool, suburban mom as a pot buddy? She could be quite philosophical when stoned, sharing life advice. Your trouble is you think too much, she would say, passing me a joint, a reference to the fact that pot had a sledge-hammer effect on me. She’d gossip about the neighbors—my parents included—while I would slip farther and farther down the rabbit hole. Sooner or later, I’d pass out. A total buzzkill for my employer who eventually terminated me. Around that time, I smoked my first cigarette from a pack my best friend stole from her mother. I remember getting caught too. My parents issued stern warnings, but it was too late. I was hooked.

To me, cigarettes were the perfect drug. Smoking took my mind off things without rendering me unconscious. They stimulated without interfering with cognition. I smoked a lot in college. My smoking doubled in graduate school, where I majored in Latin American literature. The way I smoked changed in grad school. It wasn’t a social thing. It was a tool. I used cigarettes to focus. I used them to stay awake. And I used them to settle my nerves. I lived entirely in my head by that point, as people do when parsing texts and configuring abstract puzzles.

Paul Klee      

In retrospect, a lot of my reading involved chess. Jorge Luis Borges excelled at creating infinite games of chess. The narratives of Julio Cortázar—who played chess with Marcel Duchamp—are filled with chess moves. Silvina Ocampo, Felisberto Hernández, Witold Gombrowicz and many others found inspiration in the game. Agustín Alejandro Schulz Solari, who went by the name Xul Solar, famously invented a “pan-chess board,” along with a language to go with it. To keep up with these literary chess masters, I chain smoked from one end of the Cono Sur to the other.

Smoking and literature are like conjoined twins. Grombrowicz smoked until his teeth were black. Cortázar was regularly photographed with a cigarette hanging from his lips. I imagine Ocampo reclining on a velvet couch with a long cigarette holder. As for my own smoking, I had no excuse, but I did have a pretext (many of them).

In 1995, I graduated. Smoking had all but been outlawed across the country, so I went underground. I became a secret smoker. There were periods of tobacco sobriety, but I always fell back into old habits to work. And then, one evening, I tried swallowing a pill. Instead of going down my throat, the pill became trapped in my esophagus and would stay trapped while I sat on a hospital bed in the middle of the night gagging for hours. A nurse would peep her head through the door and ask if that darn pill had dissolved yet. She gave me soda to drink when I couldn’t swallow. Everyone shook their heads. They suggested it was all in my head. When the G.I. specialist finally showed up, I told him that, if he didn’t get the pill out of my throat, I wanted him to kill me. Just put me down, like a dog. He patted me on the shoulder and said something like, Well, well, dear, let’s just take a look. I’m sure it’s nothing. And with that, he had his team knock me out. I woke to bad news: I had stricture of the esophagus. I would need surgery. I would also need to quit smoking. It wouldn’t be easy. In fact, it would take years to finally quit smoking.

In the meantime, Bobby Fischer was suddenly back in the news. During the Bush years, he’d gone on the lam for violating U.S. sanctions when, in 1992, he traveled to an island off the coast of Montenegro for a re-match with Boris Spassky. As with most matches involving Fischer, the negotiations were a delicate affair that required certain demands of a technical nature be met or all bets were off. Draws were for Fischer a non-negotiable sticking point. He complained vociferously about “draw death,” or stalemates in which players neither lost nor won. For Fischer, drawing was cheating. Critics insisted that his objections came from his fear of losing. It was a constant theme in the press throughout his career. A sore loser. A bad loser. A hateful loser. The consensus: Fischer was a spoiled brat. If only Fischer could be more like, say, the charming boy chess prodigy of Searching for Bobby Fischer, the 1993 movie in which the protagonist, knowing he is going to humiliate his opponent, offers a draw before going on to wipe the board with him. It’s clear who the Fischer of the movie is, and it’s not the charming boy: it’s the obnoxious loser, the one who refuses to share the prize. Never particularly good at explaining his position—Fischer could be shockingly undiplomatic—his crusade against drawing became a morality tale about what it meant to be a decent human being. Oh, Bobby! Why not just accept a two-way split? Because Fischer—who became famous for, among other things, a twenty-game winning streak—understood that players used the draw as a way out, a pre-emptive strike against losing to a better player. Either you entered a match in good faith, or you didn’t. In the 1992 match, Fischer finally got his way. With five million dollars on the line, the player to win ten games with draws discounted would be declared the champion. That was how chess matches used to be played back in the old days—and Bobby Fischer was very much old-school when it came to chess.

While the Bush administration was bombing the hell out of Afghanistan and Iraq—setting the United States up for endless wars—the State Department was pursuing its own line of attack on Fischer. In December 1992, an indictment against Fischer was handed down for his defiance of a U.S. presidential ban against doing commercial business in Yugoslavia. Fischer had been warned. In a well-publicized refusal to comply with the Bush administration, which included a press conference in which he spat on a copy of the order, Fischer set himself up to be “checkmated in Yugoslavia,” as Attorney General Jay B. Stephens put it. Fischer risked a maximum ten-year sentence and $250,000.00 in fines, along with other penalties if convicted. But first, the State Department would need to have him extradited to the U.S. to stand trial.

Remarkably, Fischer managed to escape extradition. He died in exile in Reykjavik. Damning articles appeared, though always tempered with vignettes of a brilliant chess master cursed with a difficult past and mental illness. With respect to histories of family troubles and mental illness, we were not so different. I came from a brilliant and troubled family. My father was also Jewish, as was Fischer’s. And, like Fischer’s father, he also disappeared from my life for a time. He had a psychotic break. Even at his worst, Fischer didn’t strike me as psychotic. He struck me as angry and genuinely terrified. He might have escaped extradition to the United States but not before he was arrested and detained in 2004 by Japanese Immigration. He spent six months fighting the Bush deportation order. Considering what the Bush administration was capable of—these were the same people who justified waterboarding—he lashed out. He put the United States on trial. He put the world on trial. No one was beyond reach of his ire and disgust.

In 2017, after several surgeries, I had two choices: risk rupturing my esophagus or quit smoking for good. Unlike previous attempts, in which I stepped down only to step right back up when the going without cigarettes got tough, I went cold turkey. A terrible depression followed. Maybe death wouldn’t be so bad? Smokers play these games of Russian Roulette with themselves; maybe the chamber is loaded, maybe not. Maybe the gun will go off and the misery will end. I woke every morning thinking I couldn’t go on, not without smoking. It sounds absurd but it was deadly serious.

To put myself out of my suffering, I needed something to avoid triggers; and in my case those triggers were anything to do with books, words, letters, punctuation. I couldn’t go near my desk. I could scarcely hold a conversation. It occurred to me that I should teach myself to play chess. I pulled apart closets and rifled through cabinets to see if we owned a chess set. We did. A wooden set in a cedar box with a sticker that read “made in the USSR.” It was strange and wonderful, and really just so weird. Where had this Soviet chess set come from? I examined the pieces, each one carved out of wood and painted in nesting-doll colors. The opposing camps were red and orange. The Orange Queen had lost most of her hair. Her Pawns were badly chipped. The Red King looked like a forlorn version of Nicolas II, with drooping brows and bushy mustache. The Knights were the most comical of the bunch, ears like two horns sticking out of their heads and googly eyes. I felt a tremendous affection for each battered piece. They became my world. Three years of trial and error; and moves so wrong that my opponents (my husband and children) suggested I might want to forget about chess. I didn’t care. Persistence and stubbornness began to pay off. I improved. I went from seeing the board not as a confusing arrangement of dark and light squares but as lines, forks, sacrifices, and mates. I played not to win but to learn. Every day, something new, something to look forward to—and a kind of redemption. A release from destructive habits and ways of thinking.

At thirteen, Fischer traveled from his home in Brooklyn, New York to Philadelphia. He was the youngest player at the Franklin-Mercantile Chess Club, where he won the U.S. Chess Federation Junior Championship. Franklin-Mercantile, founded in 1885, was the second oldest chess club in the country. It’s about a fifteen-minute train ride from where I live. The club has fallen on hard times; it’s rumored that it has closed its doors forever. All around me are Fischer people, like Ed Trice, the inventor of Gothic Chess (who has taken a number of hard falls). Fischer enjoyed inventing new forms of chess, one of which involved setting up the back rank according to the whims of the players. I haven’t reached out to the local chess community except once online to see if I could find a teacher. We met at a Starbucks, where he unrolled his chess mat, laid out the pieces, and said, Play. I’d move a piece and he’d say, You sure you want to do that? or You’re in trouble now. I wasn’t ready for a teacher, and after three sessions I stopped. I began playing chess against the computer. About a year ago, I started playing my sister, who is a pianist and has a genius-level IQ. We are currently in a match in which playing for a draw is my only hope of survival, but I won’t. I owe it to Bobby.

Marie Ponsot, Poet of Love, Divorce and Family

by

Tess Taylor

After a promising start as a published poet in the 1950s, Marie Ponsot put her career aside. She was a single mother in New York City, with seven children to raise. But she did not stop writing. She filled notebooks with her poems — and then stashed much of her work in a drawer, showing it strictly to friends.

It would be almost a quarter-century before her poetry began to re-emerge, and when it did, she found wide acclaim.

By the end of her long life — she died on Friday [July 6, 2019] at 98 — Ms. Ponsot had translated dozens of books, published seven volumes of poetry, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, taught at Queens College and served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2010 to 2014. She died at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell hospital in Manhattan, her daughter, Monique Ponsot, said.

Ms. Ponsot was first published in the 1950s by Lawrence Ferlinghetti — the Yonkers-born poet who championed the Beat poets from his celebrated San Francisco bookstore, City Lights — in the same series as Allen Ginsberg.

The two had become friends in Paris, where Ms. Ponsot met her future husband, Claude Ponsot, a painter, while she was studying at the Sorbonne.

Though Ms. Ponsot (pronounced pon-SO) came under Mr. Ferlinghetti’s wing, she hardly wrote in the freewheeling personal style of Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and other Beats.

“Ponsot is a love poet, a metaphysician and formalist,” David Orr wrote in The New York Times in 2002 in a review of “Springing,” a volume of her collected poems. “But she is neither sappy nor tedious nor predictable.”

Her first book, “True Minds,” was studded with love poems to her husband. Its title echoed the first line of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116: “Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments.”

It would be her only book for nearly 25 years.

Ms. Ponsot harked back to “True Minds” when she resumed publishing in 1981: For the title of her second collection, she again drew from Sonnet 116’s opening line, calling the volume “Admit Impediment.” By then she, and her poetry, had been tempered by divorce and years of single motherhood.

The collection’s opening poem, “For a Divorce,” announces what had befallen those “true minds” of 1956. Addressing Mr. Ponsot, it begins:

Death is the price of life.

Lives change places.

Asked why

we ever married, I smile

and mention the arbitrary fierce

glance of the working artist

that blazed sometimes in your face

but can’t picture it.

“Admit Impediment” had come together with the help of a friend and professor, Marilyn Hacker, who took the manuscript in a battered interoffice envelope to the Knopf offices in Manhattan, where it found its way to the poetry editor Alice Quinn. She immediately accepted it for publication.

“Admit Impediment” earned praise for its clean but raw lines and its elegance and intimacy in revealing family life. In one poem, “As Is,” Ms. Ponsot writes of a woman cleaning her house after the death of her mother:

The house of my mother is empty.

I have emptied it of all her things.

The house of my mother is sold with

All its trees and their usual tall music.

I have sold it to a stranger,

The architect with three young children.

Things of the house of my mother,

You are many. My house is

poor compared to yours and hers.

My poor house welcomes you.

Come to rest here. Be at home. Please

Do not be frantic do not

Fly whistling up out of your places.

“Admit Impediment” was followed in 1988 by a third collection, “The Green Dark,” and in 1998 by another, “The Bird Catcher,” which brought her national attention and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

“Marie is a classic writer,” Ms. Quinn said in an interview in 2012. “When you read her, you feel the strain of Donne and Hopkins, of someone truly immersed in the English tradition. But here were poems about her mother, about marriage and divorce, about motherhood. She was reckoning with a full life of responsibility. Her work showed kinship with others under stress.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins was one of Ms. Ponsot’s heroes. She often spoke of her Roman Catholic faith and in verse paid homage to Hopkins, a Victorian-era Jesuit priest. Writing in The New York Times Book Review, the Harvard professor and critic Stephanie Burt compared Ms. Ponsot to Hopkins in her endeavoring “to see in each plant, each animal, each sort of weather, a unique instance of Providence.”

In one poem she tells Hopkins, referring to God, “Loft him Halo him / Prize him high, pen in hand.”

New and decades-old work continued to emerge. When Deborah Garrison, who replaced Ms. Quinn at Knopf, began planning a collected works in the late 1990s, she said, she was overwhelmed by Ms. Ponsot’s unpublished stash.

“They’d been in a drawer,” Ms. Garrison said, “but were sparklingly fresh.”

Ms. Ponsot had written in obscurity but indefatigably, Ms. Quinn said, recalling Ms. Ponsot’s maxim: “There is always time to write one line of poetry.”

Marie Birmingham was born on April 6, 1921, in Brooklyn to William and Marie Candee Birmingham. Her mother was a New York City public-school teacher, her father an importer, first of wine and Champagne, then of olive oil and cigars during Prohibition.

Marie attended Richmond Hill High School, in Queens, and St. Joseph’s College for Women, in Brooklyn, before earning a master’s degree in 17th-century literature at Columbia University in 1941.

During World War II she lived in the West Village in Manhattan and worked at a Doubleday bookstore until a car hit her and fractured her femur. After recuperating, Ms. Ponsot and a friend — who became her sister-in-law — sailed for postwar Paris, where she worked as an archivist for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, known as Unesco, and studied at the Sorbonne.

Mr. Ferlinghetti, too, was studying there, and the two lent each other books and shared poems. In Paris she also met the modernist writer Djuna Barnes as well as Julia Child, who was becoming enthralled with French cuisine. She met Claude Ponsot, who was studying painting with Fernand Léger, in a bar.

After marrying and having a child, a girl, the Ponsots, with a second child on the way, returned to the United States in 1950 and moved in with Ms. Ponsot’s parents in Queens. Mr. Ponsot did not speak English and worked only sporadically. Ms. Ponsot supported the family through freelance translating and writing for radio.

She also pursued poetry, publishing work in Poetry and Commonweal magazines. By the mid-1950s, Mr. Ferlinghetti had established the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco and begun publishing a series of poetry books. He accepted Ms. Ponsot’s “True Minds” as the fifth in the series, after Ginsberg’s revolutionary “Howl and Other Poems.”

By 1961 Ms. Ponsot was raising seven children while teaching at Queens College, and her marriage was dissolving. The divorce was finalized in 1970. With her parents’ help, she acquired a Victorian house in Jamaica Hills, Queens, and developed a writing regimen.

“I wrote 10 minutes a day,” she said. “I did it as if it were Commandment No. 1.”

In addition to her daughter, Monique, she is survived by six other children, Denis, Antoine, William, Christopher, Matthew and Gregory; 16 grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.

Despite her interrupted career and personal struggles, Ms. Ponsot expressed no regrets, except for the loss of some memories — “stones at the bottom of the river,” she called them — after having a stroke in 2010. She had for many years taught classes in memorization techniques.

Ms. Ponsot was 88 when a collection, titled “Easy,” was published in 2009.

One sonnet from the book, “We Own the Alternative,” is in the voice of a woman who acknowledges age but refuses to lament. “Old’s our game,” she says, “mere failure to be young is not interesting.”

A final collection of her poetry, “Collected Poems,” was published in 2016.

Ms. Ponsot remained a believer in poetry as something that needed only nurturing to flower.

“A mother teaches language by encouragement,” she said in an interview. “I think we learn anything worth learning in much the same way.”

She added: “Anyone can write a line of poetry. Try. That’s my word: try.”

Credits:  This article was published in 2012 under the title Marie Ponsot, Poet of Love, Divorce, Family, Dies at 98 in The New York Times.

Great Lake

By

Oliverio Girondo 

(translation by

Kathryn A. Kopple) 

 

When asking for a ticket it’s a must to speak in a resounding voice.

ISOLA BELLA!  ISOLA BELLA!

Isola Bella, befitting the grandeur of the tapestries painted

by the English femmes.

Isola Bella, with her palace and even that coat of arms on the 

porphyritic doors.

HUMYLITAS

Salons!  Salons of stormy, coffered ceilings

where four-hundred caryatids give each other the fist amid

a throng of cherubs.

HUMYLITAS

Alcoves with beds made of topaz that insist

whomsoever lies down there at the very least wear one “aigrette” from a bird-of-paradise

in their rump.

HUMYLITAS

Gardens that spill into the lake in a cascade of

terraces, and where peacocks open their white parasols

of lace to shade themselves from the sun, or sweep

with their brooms incrusted with sapphires and rubies paths bloodied

with poppies.

HUMYLITAS

Gardens where the staff polish the leaves of trees 

so that upon entering we adjust our neckties, and so that --before the nudity of the Venuses 

that populate the woods-- they toast us with

a camphor bough. 

ISOLA BELLA!  

Isola Bella, without a doubt, she is the very landscape that goes so well 

with the tapestries painted by the English femmes.

Isola Bella, with her palace and even that coat of arms on its

porphyritic doors.

HUMYLITAS

****

Lago mayor

Al pedir el boleto hay que impostar la voz.

¡ISOLA BELLA! ¡ISOLA BELLA!

Isola Bella, tiene justo el grandor que queda bien, en la tela que

pintan las inglesas.

Isola Bella, con su palacio y hasta con el lema del escudo de sus 

puertas de pórfido:

HUMILITAS

¡Salones! Salones! de artesonados tormentosos donde

 cuatrocientas cariátides se hacen cortes de manga entre

 una bandada de angelitos.

HUMILITAS

Alcobas con lechos de topacio que exigen que quien se acueste 

en ellos se ponga por lo menos una aigrette de ave de paraíso

en el trasero.

HUMILITAS

Jardines que se derraman en el lago en una cascada de

terrazas, y donde los pavos reales abren sus blancas sombrillas 

de encaje, para taparse el sol o barren, con sus escobas 

incrustadas de zafiros y de rubíes, los caminos ensangrentados 

de amapolas.

HUMILITAS

Jardines donde los guardianes lustran las hojas de los árboles

para que al pasar, nos arreglemos la corbata, y que -- ante la

desnudez de las Venus que pueblan los boscajes-- nos brindan 

una rama de alcanfor...

¡ISOLA BELLA!...

Isola Bella, sin duda, es el paisaje que queda bien, en la tela que pintan 

las inglesas.

Isola Bella, con su palacio y hasta con el lema del escudo de sus

 puertas de pórfido:

HUMILITAS

NOTES:  In 1922, the Argentine poet Oliverio Girondo published Veinte poems para ser leídos en el tranvía (Twenty poems to be read on a streetcar).  The above translation of "Lago Mayor" (Great Lake) is not the first, and certainly not the last.  The "great lake" of the poem refers to Lake Maggiore in Italy.  Isola Bella is an island where, in 1632, Carlo III began construction of a palace for his wife, Isabella D'Adda.  The palace and gardens were not completed until 1671. 

The "coat of arms" in the poem refers to of the House of Borromeo, which includes a "stylized version of word "humylitas" (written with gothic-script "minims"), the Visconti snake swallowing a child, and a small version of the famous Borromean rings."

Much has been written about Veinte poemas.  As concerns the above translation, I am indebted to Shira Rubestien, who translated the entire collection for her undergraduate dissertation under the direction of Olga Broumas.  My version is a bit earthier for reasons that reflect not a bit on the excellent work done by Rubenstein. 

The Spanish version of the poem can be found at Poeticous.

To learn more about Girondo's life and work, please see Oliverio Girondo's Absurd Cosmopolitan World.

The City's Love

by

Claude McKay

For one brief golden moment rare like wine, 

The gracious city swept across the line; 

Oblivious of the color of my skin, 

Forgetting that I was an alien guest, 

She bent to me, my hostile heart to win, 

Caught me in passion to her pillowy breast; 

The great, proud city, seized with a strange love, 

Bowed down for one flame hour my pride to prove.

Credits:  Claude McKay was a prominent figure in the Harlem Renaissance.  A prolific writer, McKay published five novels, among them Home to Harlem.  The above poem can be found at Poets.Org.  For a more extensive biography, go to Poetry Foundation.

On Being Emo

by

Kathryn A. Kopple 

 

Henri Matisse

Emo hangs a long green wig in the closet

And other cosplay apparel: blue and white
Sailor dress, bobby socks, sparkly shoes,
Emo bathes in scents and oils,
Paints every other fingernail a different color,
Collects bead bracelets and drop earrings,

Emo is sensitive, prone to rashes and outbreaks,
Which is why women’s lingerie feels best--
More like wearing lotion than underwear,
Emo orders panties and bras online,
It’s just safer that way,

Emo purchases swag—t-shirts, bookbags,
Knitted hats—at concerts held in church basements,
Post-punk-indie-pop-hardcore-rap-rock—
Emo loves this music, these bands and their
We’re all dying to live ethos,

Emo is also dying to live and love,
Fearless as waves rolled over by the wind,
Emerge from the water unscathed,
Emo wants all of these things for herself,
this light, that touch.

 

The Spanish Prisoner

by

George Packer

Guernica by Pablo Picasso

There was a moment, in April of 1937, when the Lost Generation of nineteen-twenties Paris reunited in Madrid. The occasion was the Spanish Civil War, already in its ninth month, but the regular shelling of the Hotel Florida and other privations of the Fascist siege didn’t prevent Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Josephine Herbst, and Hemingway’s latest distraction from the thought of suicide, Martha Gellhorn, from living well. Though the Hotel Florida wasn’t the Café des Amateurs, Hemingway managed to procure, thanks in part to impeccable connections with the Spanish government and the Russian general staff, the best food and brandy in the city. Every morning, the other guests woke up to the smell of eggs, bacon, and coffee being prepared by a Hemingway flunky in Room 108, courtesy of the Communist International. The moveable feast had crashed the Red decade.

Hemingway was an unlikely recruit to the Spanish cause. He had long since made his separate peace with the war of his youth and focussed his talent on the terse eloquence of the nobly wounded, the faithfully adrift, the stoically defeated; the Hemingway antihero, withdrawn from all causes, became a type of such popular influence that a whole crop of movies, novels, and actual lives grew laconic in imitation. But, in the nineteen-thirties, the literary infatuation with Communism returned to American prose the kind of lofty, romantic language that Hemingway had condemned at the end of “A Farewell to Arms”: “There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.” For Hemingway, the nineteen-thirties had nothing to do with coal strikes and the Scottsboro trial, and everything to do with bullfighting, marlin fishing, big-game hunting, and staving off the decline of his literary powers. By 1936, a decade past being very poor and very happy, he had become his own chief imitator—an international celebrity without a published novel in seven years and with a bad one (“To Have and Have Not”) in manuscript. He had grown bored with his second marriage, to the wealthy, adoring, and shallow Pauline—ruthlessly portrayed in one of his last great stories, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” as the desperately cheerful wife of a writer dying of gangrene and soul rot on an East African game reserve. With an animal instinct of impending doom, Hemingway, at the age of thirty-seven, sought out two familiar escape routes: violence and sex.

In February of 1936, Spanish voters elected by a narrow plurality a center-left coalition government of Anarchists, Socialists, Communists, and Republicans. It was the third democratic election in five years in a country that had not yet shed its feudal and clerical past. Some factions in the elected government had revolutionary goals, with those on the far left calling for “democracy of a new type,” meaning a prelude to the dictatorship of the proletariat; after five months of chaos, two of the Spanish institutions that had long exercised repressive power under the old monarchy—the military and the Church—were ready to overthrow the Republic. The civil war began on July 17th, when General Francisco Franco launched a rebellion from Spanish Morocco that quickly cut Spain in half. The Western democracies imposed an arms embargo on both sides, but Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy began giving troops and matériel to Franco’s rebels almost immediately, even as the Soviet Union advised and armed the Republic.

In late September, Hemingway wrote his editor at Scribners, Maxwell Perkins, “I hate to have missed the Spanish thing worse than anything in the world but have to have this book finished first.” The civil war, which most people assumed would last a few months, accommodated Hemingway’s writing schedule; it would go on for another two and a half years. He finished a draft of “To Have and Have Not” and immediately contracted to write a series of newspaper dispatches from the Madrid front. In short order, he also fell in love with Gellhorn, a beautiful and well-connected younger journalist who sailed into his marooned life on Key West just before she was scheduled to depart for Spain herself, on assignment for Collier’s. In Madrid, he offered literary advice and patronage; she educated him in Popular Front propaganda while accommodating him sexually to the extent, according to one biographer, of undergoing a widening procedure known as vaginoplasty.


John Dos Passos was travelling to Spain as well. He was Hemingway’s friend from their days in Paris, and he had met his wife through him. Hemingway, near the end of his life, portrayed Dos Passos in the nasty last pages of “A Moveable Feast” as a treacherous little “pilot fish” who had led Pauline and her rich friends into Hemingway’s youthful domestic bliss in the twenties and lured him into breaking up his first marriage. But Hemingway’s friendship with Dos Passos was already strained by the publication, in 1936, of “The Big Money,” the third novel of Dos Passos’s “U.S.A.” trilogy, to general acclaim and a Time cover story the week that fighting began in Spain. For a brief moment, Dos Passos was as big as the big man of American letters. It’s hard now to remember that, several generations ago, the trio of great novelists born around the turn of the century—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner—was a quartet, with the fourth chair occupied by Dos Passos. “U.S.A.,” which tells an alternative, submerged history of the first three decades of the American century, has become one of the great neglected achievements of literary modernism, with its nervy, jarring formal juxtapositions—newspaper headlines, popular songs, autobiographical fragments, short biographies of the famous—punctuating deceptively flat sagas of ordinary fictional types on the margins of great events, driven by the blind force of history across blighted human landscapes.

Dos Passos was, to the core, a political writer, whose radical vision was crystallized the night of Sacco and Vanzetti’s electrocution, in 1927. “America our nation has been beaten by strangers who have turned our language inside out who have taken the clean words our fathers spoke and made them slimy and foul . . . all right we are two nations,” he declaimed in a prose poem about the incident near the end of “The Big Money.” Though Dos Passos’s characters had some resemblance to the downtrodden figures of the proletarian novel of the thirties, his technical brio belonged to the defiant, avant-garde twenties, when radicalism had more to do with art than with politics. Dos Passos never managed or even tried to depict a fully realized inner life, and his experimentalism, his technique of narrating characters externally in the vernacular of their own voices, prevented him from achieving the tragic effects of Dreiser’s clumsier, more earthbound realism, though the picture of American dreaming is just as dark. “You yourself seem to enjoy life more than most people and are by way of being a brilliant talker; but you tend to make your characters talk clichés, and they always get a bad egg for breakfast,” Edmund Wilson—who was also made by the twenties but took a keen interest in the revolutionary movements of the thirties—observed in a letter to him. “I sometimes think you consider this a duty of some kind.” A writer whose single greatest burst of prose describes the burial of the Unknown Soldier after the First World War, culminating in the words “Woodrow Wilson brought a bouquet of poppies,” will always have a tenuous hold on popularity.


Dos Passos went to Spain in order to work on a documentary about the war, “The Spanish Earth,” to be shot by a brilliant young Dutch filmmaker named Joris Ivens, under the auspices of a group of New York writers led by Archibald MacLeish. The project’s purpose was to galvanize American support for the beleaguered Spanish government and to encourage President Roosevelt to lift the arms embargo. Dos Passos, already growing disenchanted with the American left, was encumbered with all the luggage of his embattled political ideals. There was a lot he didn’t know about what he had signed on for: Ivens was a hireling of the Comintern; the whole undertaking was a piece of propaganda controlled by Moscow; and Dos Passos himself, always an independent radical, was officially out of favor with the Communist Party, having been denounced at the 1934 Soviet Writers Congress, where the Party line on art turned from modernism to socialist realism. Moscow meant to use Dos Passos to lure the biggest fish of all to lend his name to the film. Hemingway, indifferent to left-wing politics until he met Martha Gellhorn, was happy to oblige.

What happened between Hemingway and Dos Passos in Spain is the subject of Stephen Koch’s new book, “The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the Murder of José Robles” (Counterpoint; $24.95). Koch’s story illustrates, among other things, the danger of writers plunging into politics and war, and it offers an unlovely portrait of the engagé artist as useful idiot. Its small drama leads directly to all the big questions about the nature of the Spanish Civil War which have recently generated controversy among historians. The Spaniard of Koch’s subtitle was Dos Passos’s close friend from youthful wanderings in Spain. José Robles was a left-wing aristocrat, a political exile and a professor at Johns Hopkins during the rule of the Spanish monarchy, who was vacationing in Spain at the time of Franco’s rebellion. But Robles maintained enough independence of mind to raise an alarm among pro-Communist Spanish authorities and the Soviet intelligence agents who, by early 1937, were bringing the government increasingly under Stalin’s control. Dos Passos was counting on Robles to serve as his main Spanish contact on the film; but by the time the two American novelists reached Madrid, separately, Robles had disappeared. It was Hemingway who learned first—from the Greenwich Village journalist Josephine Herbst, herself on a tour of the war zone very likely sponsored by the Comintern—that Robles had been arrested and shot as a Fascist spy. To this day, the manner and motive of Robles’s death remain a mystery; he was almost certainly a victim of the Stalinist purges that began around the same time in Spain.

Dos Passos, concerned for his friend’s wife and children, made the rounds of Spanish officials, only to encounter an unctuous series of bureaucratic lies and brushoffs—now that they had Hemingway, they didn’t even need to be polite to Dos Passos. Still, Dos Passos’s response to his friend’s disappearance reflected his sense that progressive politics without human decency is a sham. Hemingway, in a thinly disguised magazine article about the episode published in a short-lived Esquire spinoff called Ken, described these scruples as “the good hearted naiveté of a typical American liberal attitude.” Bookish, balding, tall and ungainly, sunny in temperament, too trusting of others’ good will: Dos Passos was the sort of man who aroused Hemingway’s sadistic appetite. “White as the under half of an unsold flounder at 11 o’clock in the morning just before the fish market shuts” was one of Hemingway’s fictionalized descriptions of his old friend. Hemingway seems to have needed to destroy a friendship or a marriage every few years just to keep functioning. In Madrid he did both.

He and Gellhorn received Dos Passos coldly when he arrived empty-handed at their well-provisioned suite; they were embarrassed by all the questions he was asking around town. “If it’s your professor bloke’s disappearance, think nothing of it,” Hemingway sneers, in Stephen Koch’s retelling. “People disappear every day.” This was war, and there was a way to behave during a war, and Dos Passos was failing the code. “Dos was not good in war, Hem claimed, because he was not a hunter,” Koch writes, paraphrasing Herbst’s own observations in her book “Spanish Journal.” “He didn’t know how to take care of himself in the wild. That’s what made him show up with no food. Dos had no balls; Dos had no understanding of war.” At one key moment in “The Breaking Point,” Dos Passos tells Hemingway, “The question I keep putting to myself is what’s the use of fighting a war for civil liberties, if you destroy civil liberties in the process?” Hemingway shoots back, “Civil liberties, shit. Are you with us or are you against us?”

Hemingway never embraced the ideological dogma of the Communists, though he admired their hardboiled stance, and he regarded the revolutionary fervor of the Anarchists as a joke. If chance had placed him in the Fascist sector, he would have been attracted to the steely nerve of Franco’s lieutenants. The reasons for Hemingway’s partisanship were entirely personal and literary. The imperative to hold the purity of his line through the maximum of exposure, which in 1931 made him an aficionado of bullfighting and in 1934 a crack shot in Kenya, in 1937 turned Hemingway into a willing tool of Stalin’s secret police. It was a rough brand of radical chic that also created a new type: the war correspondent as habitué of a particularly exclusive night club, who knows how and how not to act under shelling, where to get the best whiskey, what tone to use when drinking with killers. He’s drawn to violence and power for their own sake; war and the politics of war simply provide the stage for his own display of sang-froid. The influence of this type helped to mar the work of successive generations of war writers up to our own.

The falseness of Hemingway’s period in Spain can be felt in the novel that he eventually got out of the civil war. “For Whom the Bell Tolls” was a wild success with the American left and with Hollywood (as was the film “The Spanish Earth,” a masterly piece of cinematic propaganda narrated by Hemingway, who also toured with it around the country; Dos Passos was entirely cut out). Hemingway’s hero Robert Jordan, an American volunteer in the International Brigade, carries himself through revolution and war with all the stylized, self-conscious poise of a lonely matador in the ring. The Spanish critic Arturo Barea, himself a target of the secret police, wrote after the novel’s publication, in 1940, “I find myself awkwardly alone in the conviction that, as a novel about Spaniards and their war, it is unreal and, in the last analysis, deeply untruthful.”

As for Dos Passos, Spain seems to have killed something in him. He had gone there to see what he had given up on seeing in America—workers and peasants struggling to create a more just society—not to drink anis with Russian commissars in range of enemy artillery. The betrayals he experienced in Spain, personal and political, were so devastating that he could not bring himself to write an account of what happened to his murdered friend José Robles and his former friend Ernest Hemingway. (Hemingway, meanwhile, was spreading the news back home, in person and in print, that Dos Passos was a coward and a traitor to la causa.) But, in 1938, when Dos Passos was still trying to sort out the meaning of Robles’s death, he published a novel (lambasted by fellow-travelling critics such as Malcolm Cowley) about a disillusioned young radical who goes to fight in Spain and dies there. No one today has heard of “Adventures of a Young Man,” while “For Whom the Bell Tolls” is still taught in high schools. Hemingway’s romantic fable is in almost every way more compelling. But Dos Passos, in his dispirited and unblinking realism, was the one to convey what it meant to be alive in the nineteen-thirties.

Koch, who is also the author of “Double Lives,” a study of the Comintern’s exploitation of intellectuals in the thirties, as well as two novels, has structured his book as a series of vividly rendered scenes connected by intelligent commentary, with the extensive dialogue largely drawn from the many pieces and books—some fictional—that his main characters devoted to Spain. In the trade-off between the pleasurable and the verifiable, though, Koch has a bias toward the former, and not all of the dramatic specificity of “The Breaking Point” can be sustained by its sources. (The rude welcome given by Hemingway and Gellhorn to Dos Passos on his arrival at the Hotel Florida is drawn entirely from a scene in “Century’s Ebb,” a novel written by Dos Passos almost forty years later, at the end of his life.) Without these liberties, of course, the book would be far less readable. But some flourishes aren’t necessary: when Koch tries to amplify a tale that requires none with his own one-sentence-paragraph interjections (“Hadn’t noticed him?”), he puts his thumb on the scales. We already know where the author’s sympathies lie.

What are we now to think about the Spanish Civil War? Though Koch focusses on the theme of friendship and betrayal, the larger historical question hovers over all the action of “The Breaking Point.” Spain was where the twentieth century’s great lie, the totalitarian lie, flowered. And yet for decades the Popular Front line that the war was a simple black-and-white struggle between democracy and fascism remained one of the century’s most stubborn myths. In 1984, when I was in my early twenties, I saw a documentary, narrated by Studs Terkel, called “The Good Fight,” a direct descendant of “The Spanish Earth”; and the heroic testimony of those aging survivors of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, sitting on neatly made cots in narrow furnished rooms, overwhelmed me. I knew that most of them were Communists, under Party discipline, and I knew (having read “Homage to Catalonia” earlier that year) that Moscow-backed agents had engineered the violent betrayal of the independent worker movement in Barcelona in May of 1937, just after Dos Passos left the country. Somehow none of this mattered in the face of a struggle in which neutrality seemed impossible. The whole point of Spain to several generations of left-wing intellectuals was the need for people ordinarily disposed toward equivocation to take sides. Auden, who contributed a statement to a pamphlet on Spain called “Authors Take Sides,” expressed the reluctant longing in “Spain,” the poem that he wrote just before the street fighting broke out in Barcelona, and later repudiated: “What’s your proposal? To build the Just City? I will, / I agree. Or is it the suicide pact, the romantic / Death? Very well, I accept, for / I am your choice, your decision: yes, I am Spain.”

Since the fall of the Soviet Union and the opening of state archives in Moscow, scholarship has considerably darkened the view of the Communist role in Republican Spain. Moscow’s subversion of the Spanish government, especially after May, 1937, when the pro-Communist Juan Negrín became Prime Minister, turns out to have been more extensive than most of the Republic’s defenders ever knew, and more Machiavellian. The historian Stanley G. Payne’s “The Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union, and Communism,” published last year, portrays a Spanish government that was in no serious sense democratic: though elected by a small plurality, it was composed largely of revolutionary parties that showed no willingness to allow the right wing a political future in Spain, and it was extremely brutal in its treatment of clerics, landowners, and suspected Fascists. In other words, Payne suggests, the elected Spanish government was probably headed toward Soviet-style totalitarianism before Franco ever launched his rebellion. Nor, according to recent scholarship, was the Republic forced to turn to the dubious embrace of the Soviet Union only after the Western democracies imposed their embargo; Stalin was among the Spanish government’s first arms suppliers of choice. Such discoveries have been enough to persuade some writers on Spain that the right side won.

In military and political terms, the civil war didn’t resemble the coming world war; from the start, it was an internal struggle between revolutionary and counter-revolutionary forces. But many revisionists have replaced one set of simplifications with another. The failure of the democracies to defend the Spanish Republic convinced Hitler and Mussolini that Fascist takeovers elsewhere in Europe would go unchecked; Soviet interference was inevitable given the weakness of the Republic and the maneuverings of Germany and Italy. If it was acceptable for Winston Churchill, now the darling of the anti-appeasement lobby in Washington, to enter into an alliance with Stalin (“If Hitler invaded hell,” Churchill explained, “I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons”), it’s difficult to see why the same calculation, when made by Spaniards in 1936 in circumstances at least as desperate as Britain’s in 1941, should disqualify the entire struggle. When Heinrich Himmler visited Spain in 1940, the year after Franco’s protracted victory, he was shocked by the brutality of the Falangist repression. Whether or not democracy was on one side, fascism was clearly on the other.

Intellectuals can hardly keep away from politics any more than other citizens, and probably less, especially in decades like the nineteen-thirties (or this one, for that matter). But, because they typically bring to it an unstable mix of abstraction and narcissism, their judgments tend to be absolute, when nothing in politics ever is. This is why a writer as devoted to the visible, concrete world as Hemingway could nonetheless stumble so badly during his time in Spain: he lacked a sense of politics. The writer forever in search of one true sentence ended up accepting a whole raft of lies. Dos Passos, for his part, lacked the inner toughness to recover from the blow his idealism was dealt by José Robles’s murder and Hemingway’s betrayal. Dos Passos, of course, never wrote another book that came anywhere near the brilliance of “U.S.A.” At the same time, as if his literary flame required the fuel of radical politics to keep burning, after Spain he began a rightward drift, which by the 1964 election had become so extreme that Edmund Wilson wrote him, “I feel obliged to tell you that your article about the San Francisco convention sounded like a teenager squealing over the Beatles. What on earth has happened to you? How can you take Goldwater seriously?” (Even during his Goldwater phase, though, Dos Passos never repudiated his belief in the Spanish Republican cause.) When war, politics, and writers mix, the results are seldom inspiring.

Toward the end of “The Breaking Point,” Dos Passos, reeling from these revelations and on his way out of the country, walks into a Barcelona hotel lobby and is accosted by a lanky, battered-looking Englishman who is on leave after months at the front and has been waiting to meet him. “Things I’ve heard lead me to believe that you are one of the few who understand what’s going on,” George Orwell tells John Dos Passos. His appearance in the story amounts to a cameo, but, because he was better cut out for Spain and politics than either Hemingway or Dos Passos, Orwell kept his bearings, neither turning the war into a stage for his own psychodrama nor wilting under the pressure of ambiguous reality. Almost seventy years after its publication, his “Homage to Catalonia” holds up against all the recent revelations and controversies about the Spanish Civil War. Orwell was always able to sustain two ideas about it: one of betrayal, the other of hope. His encounter with reality in Spain was steady enough that these didn’t have to cancel each other out. “What I saw in Spain did not make me cynical,” he wrote to a friend just after returning to England, “but it does make me think that the future is pretty grim.” Summing up the war several years after it ended, Orwell still hadn’t followed Dos Passos to the right. “In essence it was a class war,” he wrote. “That was the real issue; all else was froth on its surface.”

Because we live in the age after the age of class war, when no idea has taken the place of socialism to carry the human aspiration for equality, the historiographical debate over the nature of the Spanish Civil War has a blind spot when it comes to the human heart of the matter. The files of the Soviet secret police have exploded forever the fiction of good versus evil in Spain. But in the early scenes of “Homage to Catalonia,” and in the photographs of Robert Capa from Barcelona and Madrid, and in Arturo Barea’s memoir, one keeps encountering a certain expression on the human face. Octavio Paz, who, though he fought in Spain, was not a writer given to illusion, described it years later in “The Labyrinth of Solitude”: “In those faces—obtuse and obstinate, gross and brutal, like those the great Spanish painters, without the least touch of complacency and with an almost flesh-and-blood realism, have left us—there was something like a desperate hopefulness, something very concrete and at the same time universal. Since then I have never seen the same expression on any face. . . . The memory will never leave me. Anyone who has looked Hope in the face will never forget it. He will search for it everywhere he goes.” 

Credit:  This article originally appeared in The New Yorker in 2005.

Poetry by Peter Cowlam

Cultivations

Things over here are only intimations,
Flickers, non-lucent, light as obfuscation,
Detail vanishing in air.

The gardens do not deserve the fate we have
Designated, emptied of the beings who made
Them. They have gone. Their flora I cannot name,
And no one is called back, not from the two-lane
Rutted tracks repeating into the distance.

Strange ornamentation signals it is night.
A black moon rises, of a type I have not
Seen before, its sky washed with vermilion,
And flown all round with bits of robotic
Detritus. That must have meant an industry.



Cold Conjuration

The one trick gone fatally wrong
shows as a drunk, demurring moon
in a pall of crimson smoke.

The magician – a mistake,
yes – intended humble peoples,
temples, oblations, and got only murmurs,
however much he waved a silk handkerchief.

We stumbled for the exits, demanding
our admission fee, and found nothing
but eternities, a frenzy of wild horses
on a thunderous waste of ice.




NDE

Clues to the near-death country
I was in. Odd colours the rock
Was veined in, and what kind of tree
Roots, and the road bending out of there,
And the way inanimate things reacted.
There were flaws in the terrain
Where I had fallen through the cracks,
Lit with electricity, the thing I almost died
From. Smoke, cloud, dust. A leaf bending.
Blossom across a stream. Life, a pivot back,
As it returned.

About the poet

Peter Cowlam studied Performance Writing at Dartington College of Arts. He has had plays performed at the Barbican Theatre, Plymouth, and by the Dartington Playgoers, and has had readings at the State University of New York and for the Theatre West 100 Plays project in Bristol, England.

As a novelist, he has won the Quagga Prize for Literary Fiction twice, most recently in 2018 for his novel New King Palmers, which is at the intersection of old, crumbling empires and new, digital agglomerates. The Quagga Prize is awarded for independently published works of fiction. In total he has had three novels and four novellas published independently.

He has had four collections of haikuesque poems published (one in collaboration with Kathryn Kopple), also independently, and as poet and writer of fiction his work has appeared in The Battersea Review, The San Francisco Review of Books, The Blue Nib, The Galway Review, Easy Street, Literary Matters, Eunoia Review, The Brown Boat, Valparaiso Fiction Review, The Four Quarters Magazine, Ink, Sweat & Tears, The Liberal, the Criterion, and others.