Harrowing. Stalin’s stupidity with regard to the Siege of Leningrad is mind boggling. First, there was his inability to acknowledge that the Nazis werHarrowing. Stalin’s stupidity with regard to the Siege of Leningrad is mind boggling. First, there was his inability to acknowledge that the Nazis were mobilizing on his borders in their teeming thousands. But, no, to suggest that war was imminent was a “provocation,” it was treachery, because of Stalin’s iron-clad belief in the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, signed August 23, 1939. Therefore, when the attack attack began on June 22, 1941, reports of it were not believed in the Kremlin! Even as they commenced denial was rife throughout the Soviet leadership. The so-called intelligence was disbelieved. (Sound like anyone we know?) Eventually the truth came to be known, even to Stalin. He went into a 6-week depression. He took no part in government or wartime decisions. This may have been for the best had he stayed away, but of course he did not. He emerged from his bed eventually to begin to countermand those few remaining officers he had, thereby making the siege worse than in would have been without him. Author Salisbury goes methodically over these fuckups one by one.
The important thing to keep in mind is that Stalin murdered many of his army officers during The Great Terror of 1936-37. He purged them by the thousands so no one could challenge his authority. So there was no one to fight when war came. Not surprisingly, his leadership in the war had been criticized unremittingly. It saddened me when reading poet Pablo Neruda's excellent memoirs how staunchly he believed in Stalin. But then little was known about Stalin’s incompetence in the 1960s when Neruda was writing. Nothing was known about the impact of Lend-Lease. This book wasn’t published until 1969....more
1. Along the Volga, apparently, there is an abundance of watermelon cultivation. However, the watermelons are said to have diureNotes on first reading
1. Along the Volga, apparently, there is an abundance of watermelon cultivation. However, the watermelons are said to have diuretic effects if too many are eaten at one sitting.
2. Vasily Grossman wants to match or excel Tolstoy’s War and Peace. He certainly did so in Life and Fate. Let’s see if he achieves it here, in what is essentially volume one of L&F. Unfortunately the novels were published in reverse order in English translation, volume 2 (Life & Fate) then volume 1 (Stalingrad).
3. Halfway through now and it’s apparent that this novel doesn’t achieve Tolstoyan heights. If you’re going to read one Vasily Grossman book then I suggest it be Life & Fate. Written after Stalin’s death, under Kruschev, Life & Fate’s much more critical of the USSR and the characters are much more satisfyingly complex. A lot of the material in this earlier novel was edited by censors. There’s one well written hagiographic portrait after another about this or that worker or soldier. The result is a Stakhanovian sunniness. Between these passages, however, are some exquisite pages; that’s what I’m reading for now.
4. These less overtly political pages include, for example, a high level of detail about the waging of the war. Author Grossman himself spent the duraton of the conflict as a front line reporter for Red Star and he knows his particulars. Though it’s true, as one commentator remarks, that he does not portray the war with complete historical exactitude. That I think can be chalked up to the fact that he’s a novelist and not an academician.
5. I love how he populates Stalingrad just as the Germans are closing in. Say they’re 200 km away. We drop in on a Shaposhnikov family party and then we follow the surgeon, Vera, through her routine at the local hospital. We follow the family matriarch, Alexandra Vladimirovna, as she goes about her work of testing pollution at industrial sites. Everyone is waiting.
I am waiting to see if Grossman writes of the “Not One Step Back” campaign in which Stalin agreed to shoot his own front line soldiers with second line soldiers (NKVD) should the first line start to retreat.
At Chernigov—“There were mornings when men turned out to have gone missing. Only their rifles remained, lying on the bottom of trenches. (p. 271)
6. Suspiciously lacking in lust. Couples fight but they never seem to betray. Nina and Viktor are, in an editor’s note (p. 150), said to be having an affair. But you’d never know it from the text. Everyone is so ambitious and forthright; there are no slackers. It’s just not believable.
For instance: “More than anything, he remembered the sense of togetherness that came into being between his men. Everyone had spoken openly about their whole lives, from the earliest childhood, and everyone’s path through life it seemed clearly marked out; people’s characters, their strengths and weaknesses — everything about them became manifest, in word and deed." (p. 275)
The third person point of view here is Krylov. He’s an NKVD (later KGB) commissar. He is a snake. One of his jobs would’ve been to arrest or execute those not adhering to the Not One Step Back program. He is part of a layer of politicization above the Red Army officers which ensured the war was policed with correct revolutionary thought. And here he is sweetly recalling about his comrades? Moreover, let’s not forget that captured and subsequently repatriated Red Army soldiers were often shot as spies. Not One Step Back, and Krylov’s involvement in it—he was likely one of its executioners or a rubber stamper of executions—is only fleetingly touched upon. The Red Army and the political commissars were frequently at each other‘s throats; no mention of that here.
7. The Soviet retreat from Kiev early in the war is heartbreaking to read about. With exhausted Ukrainians young and old marching east in an attempt to cross the Dnieper. The unmoving Red Army stand around hanging their heads as the populace flees…
“Old men stared at them glassily, as if hoping for some miracle. Nothing in the world, it seemed, could be more terrible than the wrinkled, yet childishly helpless faces of these old men, each alone in the crowd. ¶ The Red Army soldiers were all gripped by a tight silence. ¶ They knew, with an absolute, physical clarity, that every step they took to the east brought the still unseen Germans closer." (p. 273)
8. The women of the Shaposhnikov family—including two terrifying ululators named Vera and Zhenya—each manage to pursue tenuous love affairs as the Germans close in. As the tension builds family squabbles occur with a fervor reminiscent of characters in Elena Ferrante‘s dazzling Neapolitan novels.
9. I wrote of Yasunari Kawabata’s The Old Capital about how he can drone on about cherry blossoms and camphor trees and local Kyoto festivals and yet keep one reading. That same capacity is evident in Grossman. At one point we join a meeting of high-quality steel manufacturers while they rhapsodize about production quotas, machine tools, and raw materials. It seems on the surface the most boring subject matter conceivable, yet Grossman keeps us reading. How does he do it?
10. The scene set in Albert Speer’s new Reichs Chancellory, in which Hitler discusses his Stalingrad strategy with an officer straight from the front, will set your hair on fire. . . In its terseness and rigor some passages reminded me of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal.
11. The official mindset of the residents of Stalingrad is expected to be one of complete self-sacrifice. Yet Vera initially runs away when the bombing starts. In time she collects herself, returns to the hospital, and saves two sick men from a burning floor. Heroic figures can be fascinating. But those not capable of such valor — I'm thinking of Céline's wretches — have been written out of the novel. This makes for a too absurdly do-goody cast. There’s no one on the Russian side motivated solely by self interest. Verisimilitude is thereby compromised.
11. The mining scenes feel inspired by Emile Zola‘s Germinal. I guess that’s inevitable. The book’s sunniness dims somewhat here. There’s the usual veneer of rhetoric about the indominability of labor, but the physical well-being of the miners runs counter to that. The miners rations won’t permit an increase in productivity. Yet because of the war that’s what is demanded of them. For one miner it’s either the pit or the front.
12. Astonishing, elephantine powers of literary delay and withholding, i.e. suspense.
13. Ah, the sheer misery of war. Did Tolstoy do a better job with War and Peace? Well, you can argue, that writing 50 years after the fact, he did not; though he had much personal experience from the Crimean War and elsewhere. Vasily Grossman however reported from the Soviet front line. He was there.
14. The fighting. When Grossman settles down to the war, that to me constitutes the best of his writing. Just men in movement through a cityscape trying to kill each other. Moreover, his technique seems effortless. He zooms in for detail and dialogue, zooms out for the big picture, hops with alacrity from consciousness to consciousness, flits to Moscow, Leningrad, Siberia and back. All deftly, impressively....more
How far could Chinese patriarchy go in the early twentieth century to make the lives of women sheer humiliation and misery? Here in Wild Swans we haveHow far could Chinese patriarchy go in the early twentieth century to make the lives of women sheer humiliation and misery? Here in Wild Swans we have that question tidily answered. This is a tale of the lives of three generations of Chinese women: the author, her mother and her grandmother. Author Jung Chang's grandmother had her feet bound—a hideously painful process undertaken solely so that some man might one day find her lustworthy enough to take as a concubine. The years-long process of foot binding—of smashing the toes with a rock and binding them under the sole of the foot—is thoroughly explained.
Author Chang's grandmother was thus encrippled and eventually traded off to a general of one of the factions vying for control of the country in 1920. All this so her wretch of a great-grandfather—Yang—could raise his own material status, buy land and accumulate concubines. I have read of stories purdah, the seraglio and Morman four-wiving, but never have I come across such a harrowing description of the degradation of women that I have found here.
Mind-numbing are the cruel stratagems of the concubines back at the family home to degrade Yang's first wife (Chang's great-grandmother) and freeze her out of her own home. I was aware of this social structure before through works by the writers Jonathan Spence, Anchee Min, Nien Cheng, Harry Wu and others, but never have I had such a vivid picture of how the first wife/concubine pecking order played out in the daily life of a Chinese family as I've had here. It is beyond belief.
Then in 1930, released from her bond of concubinage on the death of the general, the grandmother—whose name Yu fang translates as jade fragrant flowers—falls in love with a Manchu doctor, who is determined to marry her as his wife. This sends his large family into conniptions since it means Jade will have to be accorded reverence in line with the doctor 's strict Manchu standards of filial respect. And at 65 he is almost three times her age. Perhaps if it weren't for his wealth there would be less of a fuss, but a new wife has implications for the eventual distribution of his estate's assets. In protest one of his sons shoots himself dead. This act of greed—for the family is worried only about its own dispossession, nothing more—drives Dr Xia to divide his possessions among his sons and move to a shack on the outskirts of Jinzhou which is a cholera epidemic waiting to happen. Yet there, he and Jade and the author's mother find some happiness despite the fact that the doctor is penniless and must start at the bottom. And all of the above in the book's first 44 pages!
Next we learn of the horrors committed during the Second Sino-Japanese War—the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, in which Jinzhou is located. Dr & Mrs Xia are able to save a friend from the Japanese by befriending the prison garroter, Dong, who promises them not to strangle the man fatally, only partially, so he'll look dead enough to be transported to the foul-smelling communal grave at the end of town. There, the Xias extract him from a tangle of bodies—he's still breathing—take him home and nurse him back to health. This man, Han-Chen, later goes to work for Kuomintang intelligence where he procures a membership ID for Mrs Xia's son which allows him to avoid military service and keep working in the doctor's medicine shop where he's most needed. He even gets Dong a job. After the war there were so many saved by Dong from the Japanese reaper in this way that survivors pooled their monies and bought the former executioner a little house for his retirement. Heroism takes strange forms.
The Japanese were defeated in 1945 and the second and concluding portion of the Chinese Civil War resumed. The author's mother now turns out to be this capable community organizer on the Communist side. She distributes propaganda. The Nationalist bigwigs are seen as corrupt and lacking discipline. The Communists were promising the populace things they would never deliver on, such as the retention of personal property. In Jinzhou, the author says, the Communists were perceived as innovators who would make the lives of the people better. Another sneaky thing the Communists did, while the Nationalists were busy fighting the Japanese, they intensified their propaganda and brought the people over to their side. Anyway, as you may know, neither side comes out smelling like a rose.
The Captive Mind was first published in English translation by Secker and Warburg in 1953. The work was written soon after the author's defection fromThe Captive Mind was first published in English translation by Secker and Warburg in 1953. The work was written soon after the author's defection from Stalinist Poland in 1951. While writing The Captive Mind Milosz drew upon his experiences as an illegal author during the Nazi Occupation and of being a member of the ruling class of the postwar People's Republic of Poland. The book attempts to explain the allure of Stalinism to intellectuals, the thought processes of those who believe in it, and the existence of both dissent and collaboration within the post-war Soviet Bloc. Miłosz describes the book as having been written "under great inner conflict." —excerpt from Wikipedia.
Like Orlando Figes’s The Whisperers: Private Life In Stalin’s Russia, this book gives an insiders’ view of Stalinism as it was lived in post-World War II Poland. I also find it a useful work to read after Richard Pipes’s 970 page The Russian Revolution. The book’s another stake of truth driven into the heart of Stalinism. As stated, much of it is an explication of the mindset of Eastern intellectuals of the mid-20th century and their voracious appetite for contradictory rationalization.
“Still, he [the intellectual thinks] is not altogether sure whether He [Stalin] is necessary or not. Perhaps in extraordinary periods the appearance of a tyrant must be considered desirable. Mass purges in which so many good communists died, the lowering of the living standard of the citizens, the reduction of artists and scholars to the status of yes-men, the extermination of entire national groups—what other man would undertake such measures? After all, Russia stood firm against Hitler; the Revolution weathered the attack of enemy armies. In this perspective, His acts seem effective and even justified, perhaps, by an exceptional historical situation. If He had not instituted an exceptional terror in the year 1937, wouldn’t there have been more people willing to help Hitler than there actually were? For example, doesn’t the present day line in scholarship and art, no matter how at odds it may be at times with common sense, effectively raise Russian morale in the face of the war that threatens? He is an infamous blot on the bright New Faith, but a blemish we must tolerate for the moment. And indeed we must even support Him. The “sacred fire” has not gone out. When victory [world Revolution] is achieved, it will burst forth again with its old strength, the bonds He imposed will fall away, and relations between nations will operate on new and better principles.” (p. 64)
After this general introduction to the mental challenges of Stalinism for intellectuals, Milosz begins to write of specific college friends who were twisted by its exigencies. Chapter IV, “Alpha, the Moralist,” provides the poet’s assessment of Polish novelist and friend Jerzy Andrzejewski’s career—especially his major post-war book Ashes and Diamonds—his esthetic concerns, stylistic strengths, and accommodation of the USSR’s communist takeover of Poland.
Chapter V, “Beta, The Disappointed Lover,” is about Tadeusz Borowski, author of This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. Milosz reminds us here of something too easily forgotten: “For Beta, as for many of his companions, the reign of Hitler was the culmination of the capitalist era in Europe.” Now, I am in no sense a great fan of capitalism, but I think this view is narrow-minded. For it was American capitalism that won the war. It was Lend-Lease which made the Soviet advance into Eastern Europe possible. Yet this was not a moment for an expansive view of global capitalism. Borowski had suffered hideously in the war. Like Primo Levi he had survived Auschwitz. Naturally, with the old order in ruins, “Beta was receptive. The more he read of Leninist-Stalinist theory, the more he convinced himself that this was exactly what he was looking for. His hatred was like a torrential river uselessly rushing ahead. What could be simpler than to set it to turning the Party’s gristmills. What a relief: useful hatred, hatred put to the service of society!” (p. 126-127)
He eventually gave up art for journalism. “His articles were so dull and one dimensional that this debasement of a gifted prose writer stirred my curiosity. . . . I asked why such measures were being applied to him. Surely the interests of the Party did not require it to reduce him to a rag. He was certainly more useful as a writer of stories and novels; to force him to write articles meant bad management of available artistic resources. ‘No one makes him write articles,’ came the reply. ‘That’s the whole misfortune. . . . He himself insists on writing them. He thinks there is no time, today, for art, that you have to act on the masses more directly and elementally. He wants to be as useful as possible.’ This was a somewhat hypocritical answer. The Party constantly stresses its desire for good literature; at the same time, it creates such a tense atmosphere of propaganda that writers feel compelled to resort to the most primitive and oversimplified literary techniques. Yet it was true that Beta himself wanted to devote all his time to journalism; although he was a highly qualified specialist, he seized upon work that was easy for the most ordinary drudge. His mind, like that of so many Eastern intellectuals, was impelled toward self annihilation.” (p. 130)
Several months after Milosz wrote the profile excerpted here, Beta killed himself. “He was found one morning in his home in Warsaw. The gas jet was turned on. Those who observed him in the last months of his feverish activity were of the opinion that the discrepancy between what he said in his public statements and what his quick mind could perceive was increasing daily. He behaved too nervously for them not to suspect that he was acutely aware of this contrast. Moreover, he frequently spoke of the ‘Mayakovski case.’ [The poet Mayakovski committed suicide at age 30.] Numerous articles appeared in the press written by his friends, writers of Poland and Eastern Germany. His coffin, draped with a red flag, was lowered into the grave to the sound of the ‘International’ as the Party bid farewell to its most promising young writer.” (p. 134)
I can’t discover who the college friend is in Chapter VI, “Gamma, the Slave of History,” who would later become a top Polish Party official in charge of corrupting artists for propaganda purposes, but “Delta, the Troubadour” in Chapter VII is Konstanty Ildefons Galczynski, a poet of genius. Galczynski was enormously popular. His poems were “unlike anything written in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. No literary school influenced him. He dwelt in the aura of the Italo-Latin civilization whose mark was still deeply graven on our country. The accessories he borrowed from the poetry of the past he then put together in a manner reminiscent of his drunken fantasies. His poetry was a kaleidoscope of chubby baroque angels, magicians carried off through the window by some unknown power, (they are retained, at the last moment by a wifely bite on the ear), falconry, astrologers prophesying the end of the world. Interspersed in it were phonograph records playing the music of Bach and Mozart, potatoes in the soil dreaming of the vodka that would be made of them, planets in the shape of young women dressed in blue pants, and folk dances in the suburbs.” (p. 177)
It was the brilliant Galczynski who, as Polish nationalism gained steam, began writing anti-Semitic screeds. “Why did he write them? ... He had many Jewish friends, and on the very day he published his racist statements, he would come to these friends (naturally he was drunk by then) and, falling on his knees, would declare his love for them and beg their forgiveness.” (p. 181) The war began. He was sent to the Reich as slave labor, agricultural work. He survived. On returning to Poland 5-1/2 years later, and after a brief period of faux-liberalism, he was crushed by the stupidity of Soviet Realism. He continued to write the required dreck. Slowly, inexorably, the great gift of spontaneity was squeezed out of him until, yes, he began to write copy indiscernible from that of his hack brethren....more
Excellent biography. Herr Marx was a nasty motherfucker. If you did not agree with him, he vilified you. The man was no scholar. He was a polemicist. Excellent biography. Herr Marx was a nasty motherfucker. If you did not agree with him, he vilified you. The man was no scholar. He was a polemicist. He was an economic determinist, a crackpot with dubious math skills. The book is terrific. It is not a critical biography. Author Sperber has his hands full simply taking Marx's fragmented and jumbled oeuvre and making some sense of it. The reader in many instances becomes more enlightened than Lenin ever could have been, not to mention Kropotkin or Trotsky. Their view of the great man's thought was grossly distorted in comparison to the sharp overview before us here. Marx belonged to the very bourgeois class that he theorized must be violently eliminated in order to bring about the dictatorship of the proletariat. The book is full of such breathtaking paradoxes. Essential reading if one wants to uncloak the mystery of Marx, who was nothing is not enigmatic, not to mention (often) self-confuting....more
Author Tina Rosenberg never simplifies the immense complexity of the issues which inform her story. If anything, she dives right in, fully immersing hAuthor Tina Rosenberg never simplifies the immense complexity of the issues which inform her story. If anything, she dives right in, fully immersing her reader in the formidable challenges the three states— Czechoslovakia, Poland, and East Germany—faced in their rocky transition from communism to democracy just after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The question the book raises is who is to blame for the crimes of the communist era and who should be punished? Scenes of great political or legal or social complexity are described until the reader begins to feel the earth shifting underfoot, the tale is so dense, but then comes a gradually dawning clarity. In this sense the book reminds me—not in its diction or style so much as in its relentless intellectual rigor—of V.S. Naipaul at his best. This is the highest praise I can offer any writer. I particularly want to cite Naipaul's two Islam books and the three books on India. The Haunted Land is solid throughout but the penultimate chapter, "The Conversation," in which Stasi personnel and collaborators try to justify their spying on friends and associates, will set your hair on fire. These are absolutely astounding flights of Trumpian thinking. Good grief. Winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1995 and the Pulitzer Prize in 1996....more
There's something appealing to me about the bleak and austere. I suppose it is my basically Stoic-Buddhist mindset and its emphasis on daily acknowledThere's something appealing to me about the bleak and austere. I suppose it is my basically Stoic-Buddhist mindset and its emphasis on daily acknowledgement of life's fleetingness—memento mori. I've been a keen reader of Holocaust histories and memoirs for some time: Primo Levi of course but also Robert Jay Lifton's The Nazi Doctors and Christopher R. Browning's Ordinary Men, which is about the lethal Einsaatsgruppen. In time I moved on to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the Russian Gulag. Now I'm in China in the political reeducation camps. My first excursion here was by way of Nien Cheng's incomparable Life and Death in Shanghai. That book starts in 1966, at the outset of the Mao's notorious Cultural Revolution.
Harry Wu's Bitter Winds starts earlier, during Mao's "Great Leap Forward." Mao was a megalomaniac whose ideological boorishness convulsed his nation causing the deaths of tens of million (Seventy million according to June Chang and Jon Halliday in Mao: The Untold Story.)
The Great Leap Forward was the Soviet-style collectivization of China's agricultural sector which produced the famine of 1958-61. Marxist/Leninist theory always had the profound undergirding of an absolute ignorance of market mechanisms. Of course, these mechanisms function whether one ignores them or not. When Mao and his henchmen ignored them he starved to death, just in this 3-year period, roughly (the figure is real but inexact) 40 million of his own countrymen and women.
Harry Wu was a kid in Catholic school in Shanghai in 1949 when the People's Liberation Army defeated Chang Kai Shek and the Nationalists. Harry's father, a rational person, a banker, who could not imagine the reign of wooden-headed ideologues that were about to descend on his nation, decided to stay when Mao took power. Big mistake. Harry's Catholic teachers, seeing the writing on the wall, fled.
In the interregnum, as the Communists took hold of the reins of power, Harry, a smart kid, read in the Party newspaper about his country's need for geologists to discover the raw materials for China's new industrialist future. He was accepted into a five-year program at a new Beijing institute. But academic work, which Harry was very good at, wasn't what was valued at school. What was valued was mindless reiterations of the Party line.
Harry became caught up in Mao's period of Party self-criticism known to us in the West as the "Hundred Flowers Campaign." ("Let a hundred flowers bloom," wrote the Great Helmsman, "and let a hundred schools of thought contend.") This was a trap to get people to incriminate themselves. Millions were so caught and Harry Wu was among them. He was jailed as a counter-revolutionary rightest. No, I'm not sure what that means either. To the Communists in power however it meant that Harry wasn't ideologically acceptable. It meant he had been born into a banker's family and as such was irrevocably tainted.
We in the West have a hard time understanding the Chinese reverence for family. Suffice it to say that millenia of Confucian familial culture, of ancestor worship, and strict adherence to paternal rule had now given way to an ideology in which family was to be jettisoned. Under Soviet-style Communism, which China was busily adopting, breaking from one's family in order to become a true socialist was encouraged. But even In the Soviet Union—see Orlando Figes's The Whisperers—the strides made in this direction were piecemeal. In China the neural-cultural hardwiring was too great. It was almost impossible for the average Chinese to discard family connections. Thus, individual "crimes" became family crimes. In Harry Wu's case--as in the cases of millions of other unfortunates--his family, his brothers, his sisters, his father, his step-mother-- suffered for Harry's crimes, which we in fact a reaction to his father's "crimes."
Poor Harry had come to adulthood in a setting, religious though it might be, which was based on reason. The Communist Party was not based on reason, and being so young in this new atmosphere of bootlicking ideologues, Harry could not learn to lie quickly enough. Sad to say, but his innocence, his inability to dissemble—Harry had been raised to speak the truth—doomed him. He spent the next 19 years undergoing an utterly stupid program of corrective labor. He almost starved to death a number of times. There are scenes of prisoners dropping like flies from starvation that are almost unbearably moving.
The book is a harrowing read. It was co-written with American Carolyn Wakeman after Harry was released and managed to get away to the U.S. Later he went back with Ed Bradley of CBS's 60 Minutes in order to gather footage for an exposé on China's use of prison labor in the manufacture of export products. What we in the West know today about China's long term use of slave labor we owe to Harry Wu, this book, and his groundbreaking television journalism.
Highly recommended, but grim, not for the faint of heart or those living sheltered lives.
The Spanish Civil War was the proving ground for much of the technology (tanks, aviation, artillery, etc.) used in World War II. This alone makes an aThe Spanish Civil War was the proving ground for much of the technology (tanks, aviation, artillery, etc.) used in World War II. This alone makes an account of it essential reading. The only one-volume history of war that I can compare Mr. Thomas's book to is Neil Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and American in Vietnam. The books are structurally different. Sheehan uses the central figure of Vann as a kind of biographical spine on which to build his history. The Spanish Civil War has no such core narrative thread. The story, in fact, is much more heterogeneous, since Thomas is interested in bringing the quantitative specifics of the war into the English language: planes, artillery, personnel, Italian, German and Russian contributions, etc. It is, in fact, extraordinarily detailed. Even actors of marginal significance, it seems, are named and their roles described. Sheehan, on the other hand, writing about an American war which played out on television in many private living rooms, has less such quantification to do. I think the saddest part of Thomas's book is the story it tells of the murderous dissension among the anarchists, communists, non-Stalinist Marxists (POUM) and socialists of the Republic.
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Their ideological imperatives seemed far more important to them than the fascist threat. "The carnival of treachery and rotteness," Ernest Hemingway had called it. Add to that the fragmentation of Republican Spain into Basque Country, Catalonia and an elected government which moved from Madrid to Valencia and then to autonomous Catalonia -- where it was perceived as a virtual coup d'etat -- and one wonders how those on the Republican side ever hoped to win. The Russians, for whom everything was political, were the worst. Their persecutions of the POUM were horrible. They thought they could run the war through collectivist committees. The anarchists (no angels themselves; they burnt churches and killed ecclesiastics by the hundreds) were often shot at the front because they refused to take communist orders. Lastly, the hypocritical pretense known as the Non-Intervention Committee must be mentioned. Germany and Italy were supplying the nationalists with war material, as were the Russians the Republic, while at the same time sitting on the committee! Everyone seemed to know this but it allowed the British to turn a blind eye. How convenient. Chamberlain and Daladier's appeasement of Hitler at Munich was just around the corner....more
I can recommend three excellent books on the late 20th-century Chinese experience. The first is Nien Cheng's Life and Death in Shanghai. This memoir bI can recommend three excellent books on the late 20th-century Chinese experience. The first is Nien Cheng's Life and Death in Shanghai. This memoir begins with Cheng’s victimization by the state at the onset of the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" in 1966. Harry Wu's Bitter Winds: A Memoir of My Years in China's Gulag starts earlier, just after the Communist victory and takeover of 1949. Wu’s book is very good, but it does not rise to the literary level of Cheng’s. Wu’s mission was to expose the horrendous policy of slave labor as a means of increasing China’s foreign exchange, and his book succeeds admirably in that respect while giving us his own story of near-death starvation and political persecution.
I’d always thought Cheng's book unassailable. But now I’m going to raise Red Azalea to a level equal with it. Red Azalea takes apart the Chinese Communist experience with much the same rigorous assurance shown by Cheng, but its approach, its style, is quite different.
Red Azalea is a hypnotic book. It was written by a native-Chinese speaker who decided to use the writing of her memoir as her means of learning English. She studied English independently on coming to America, too, which was said to have included regular viewings of "Sesame Street." Yet when I think of how hard the task of writing is in any language, when I think of how far Min has had to come, her achievement bowls me over. How did she do It? As we read we begin to sense how. Min possesses a powerful mind, and this was both her ball and chain, as well as the reason for her survival.
Naturally, no quasi-rational thinker could possibly live contentedly under such tyranny. Mao — insidiously — used children to carry out the national calamity known as the "Cultural Revolution." No one else in his and Madame Mao's view was ideologically pure enough. At the time Min was an impressionable young girl. Her formative years outside the home were filled by ranting, wooden-headed ideologues who would soon set her — and millions of youngsters like her — loose on the “revisionist elements” and “capitalist sprouts” of Chinese society.
The memoir's first in-depth scene shows a Party secretary by the name of Chain, a mindless political cog, leading a "struggle meeting" against Min's beloved teacher, Autumn Leaves. Min can't be 12 here. Autumn Leaves's crime? Why, being born in the U.S. and teaching the subversive texts of Hans Christen Andersen. The teacher, an innocent of Chinese-American parentage, whose father loved China so much that he sent his only daughter back to the old country to be part of the great national resurgence, is manhandled by goons for being a "foreign spy" and forced to admit crimes which are nothing more than the calumnies of idiotic apparatchiks like Party Secretary Chain. One senses that the Autumn Leaves incident was in some sense the author's intellectual awakening. After this event, in which she was made to vociferously condemn her favorite teacher, she turns against the system.
Next we leap to age 18 or so, when Min was sent to Red Fire Farm, a collective farm on the Soviet model, near the East China Sea. Among those she meets there is Little Green, a beautiful, young woman who loves many of the things young women often love: makeup, nail polish, clothing, etc. The hours at Red Fire Farm are brutal: 5 am to 9 pm. The Party secretary is Yan, a woman with a massive physique who is legendary for her ability to haul great loads all day like an ox. Late in the wee hours one night Min and her barracks-mates are awakened and told to get their weapons and gear. Yan then leads her “soldiers” on a belly-crawl to a nearby stand of bamboo. Here sounds of sexual gratification fill the air. "Now," Yan shouts, and at that instant all the young women snap on flashlights. There we see the bare-assed Little Green inflagrante delicto with a local man. "Rapist," shouts Yan, "rapist." Little Green, the victim, is whisked away. In short order the man is executed. In the coming weeks, Little Green goes insane. Her hygiene declines radically. When she returns to the farm from the asylum she is as "big as a bear," presumably from medication, her great beauty destroyed.
Now, unaccountably, or so Min feels, she finds her own sexuality asserting itself. It puzzles her. Amid this amorphous desire, she finds herself drawn to the workhorse Yan who is also her superior. She knows Yan is to blame for Little Green's ruin, and she holds this against her, yet she cannot suppress her admiration for the woman. What follows are two beautiful stretches of portraiture. The first is of Comrade Lu, Yan's second in command, and a spewer of Maoist homilies. The other is of Yan herself. Yan lacks Lu's gift of revolutionary gab and suffers for it. Lu, who wants to bump Yan from her post, taunts her until Yan's inarticulateness explodes in curses. Apparatchik Lu sleeps with a skull which she kisses goodnight at lights out. Such are the head games and displays of Marxist-Leninist spunk that some of these revolutionaries adopt.
When Yan confesses her love for Leopard Lee, a young man running a nearby collective, Min writes letters in Yan's name and also serves as go between. But Lee isn't interested and doesn’t reply. Long discussions ensue between Min and Yan as to why this might be. Perhaps he's busy, or, like Yan, simply not gifted with the pen. Their discussions intensify. They pull their sleeping rolls next to each other under the same mosquito net. With their minds bent toward the problem of Leopard Lee, they do not see their own growing physical attraction for each other. This is beautifully done. A mutual affection overcomes them almost unawares, and the reader wonders if he might not also be experiencing something akin to their own delight when they finally discover each other.
I usually dislike sex in literature for the simple reason that it isn't sex but text, a poor approximation of sexual experience. Almost always sex scenes seem grafted on in literature, like an excrescence, interrupting the flow of the story. Min’s great achievement has been to make the lovemaking an integral part of the development of her characters. She produces erotic passages that I have read and reread, and yet I cannot see how they were done. There seems to be no artifice. Min’s writing has the flatness of Wu and his cowriter, Carolyn Wakeman, but Min possesses a lyrical gift as well so her English sings. I wondered if this was not simply what happens when the Chinese pictograph becomes English. For Min’s writing, especially in the early sections, produces a lightly rhythmic, almost percussive effect. I've read many translations from the Chinese, and the works of many speakers like Ha Jin writing in English, and Min's achievement is unlike anything I’ve ever come across. It is either genius or some form of naïve mastery.
At this point in the narrative something fantastic happens. One day a car appears at the farm while Min and Yan and others are slaving in the fields. A retinue of five or six people emerge in crisp uniforms with clipboards. They’re clearly from a higher Party echelon, an elite one. It turns out they are scouts searching for the raw talent who will ultimately play the role of the great Chinese female revolutionary, Red Azalea. At first it feels like a Hollywood story arc has been plunked down in the midst of the wretched collective farm. I confess I worried that the book would now turn into a familiar rags to riches tale, that we would now follow Min on her triumphal progress. (Min was eventually spirited off to America by Joan Chen, a fine actress perhaps best known for her work in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor.) That, thankfully, doesn't happen.
When Min returns to Shanghai, her hometown, where she will complete the competition for the role of Red Azalea at a local film studio, the deceit and political backstabbing reach new lows. Min is viewed as the ideal peasant type to play Red Azalea, the politically correct choice. The others thus fear her “ideological” purity and quickly move to smear her as a “capitalist sprout" and “revisionist element.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Yet marshaled against her is an older actress, Soviet Wong, who studied acting long ago in Moscow, but whose style is now too polished and professional — too Western — and so she is out of favor. Her machinations, her base cruelty and underhandedness astounds the reader and makes the skull-kissing Lu seem a veritable girl scout.
Now we come to the most extraordinary part of the book. I don’t want to say too much about it. This closing section centers on Min’s growing relationship with the man known as the Supervisor. I was dazzled by Min’s interchanges with the Supervisor, who was part of Madame Mao’s — Jiang Qing’s — Beijing circle. Suffice it to say that the language of sexual desire and longing she used so effectively when describing her earlier relationship with Yan becomes, perhaps because of her improved English, almost exponentially more intense. The way their love has to hide itself away here, the way it has to go underground because of the Supervisor’s high political standing, approaches the tragic.
Red Azalea is a masterpiece of emotional honesty. One never sees where it’s going. I will read it again — and perhaps again. For admirers of Nien Cheng’s Life and Death in Shanghai it is essential reading. Prepare yourselves, some of you, the lucky ones, for an extraordinary literary experience....more
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