A FAREWELL TO ARMS: It is time for Hollywood to do a version finally worthy of Hemingway’s great masterpiece and worthy of the far more sophisticated movie audiences of today. 

 

Given the rousing success of The War Horse and Downton Abbey, it is time, perhaps past time, for a new film version of Ernest Hemingway’s A FAREWELL TO ARMS (AFTA).  And with the Academy Awards fast approaching, there can be no better time for me to make my plea.  I must confess here that AFTA is my favorite of all of Hemingway’s fiction, both novels and short stories, and I would love to see a modern film version. A version that can finally do justice to this most tragic love story ever told set to a backdrop of perhaps the greatest modern war story ever written.  A story that is central to the dominant theme of Hemingway’s life and works: A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

Two earlier versions of AFTA were filmed long ago: the first in 1932 and starring a very young Gary Cooper and the Broadway stage star Helen Hayes; the 1957 remake starred Rock Hudson and Jennifer Jones.  Both of these versions were constrained by then current social mores and attitudes toward war, as well as cinematic limitations.  All of these problems should now be easily overcome.

The 1932 version was produced entirely on Hollywood back lots instead of on location in Italy as the 1957 version was, which along with the rudimentary production techniques of eighty-years-ago, rendered the battle scenes, as well as the disastrous retreat by the Italian Army from Caporetto, and the rowing up Lake Maggiore to Switzerland and freedom in the driving rain, somewhat ineffective then and very dated now.  Interestingly, while this version was nominated in 1943 for Best Picture, it actually won Oscars for Best Cinematography and Best Sound Recording, stark evidence of how far cinema technology has progressed from then to now.

What the first version did have was the lack of enforcement of the Hollywood Code which allowed a more realistic and adult treatment of the love scenes between the American ambulance driver Frederic Henry and the Scottish nurse Catherine Barkley.   Also more explicit in that version was the discussion of the bordellos visited by Henry and Major Rinaldi, played by Adolphe Menjou.  Moreover, there was an upfront and frank presentation of an out-of-wedlock pregnancy by Catherine, while not quite as true as portrayed on the pages of Hem’s novel, was far more explicit than in the 1957 version which waited until the last thirty minutes to bring it to the viewers’ attention.

The 1957 version, however, was longer by some forty minutes and able to stay more true to the novel, portraying the horrific retreat from Caporetto with all its ugliness, horror and shame (or lack of it) with an honesty that did reasonable justice to the writer and his work.  It is this sequence, which comprises Part III of the novel, that Vittorio di Sica, who earned a nomination for Best Supporting Actor, brought more depth and realism to the character of Major Rinaldi. A depth created by the screenwriter taking liberty and giving him an ugly death that was not in the novel.  Yet I suspect that it was a kind of death that Hem would have written about.  In any event, Hem would have no say about any of that, of course, as years before he had foolishly sold away the film rights without reading the fine print.

In addition, the cinematography was a vast improvement, not only because it was in color, but because it could take advantage of the locations in the Italian Alps and Lake Maggiore.   Furthermore, the length of the remake allowed for the continual interplay of beauty and happiness and horror and sadness that Hem was a master of creating on the written page, an interplay that culminates in the tragedy of a stillbirth by Catherine and her subsequent hemorrhaging to death.

So okay, Hollywood, let’s get on it and see what you can do today.   A new production is in order and would be a smash hit.  Right now I picture Matt Damon’s sagging shouders in the last scene of THE GOOD SHEPHERD and I visualize him as Frederic’s tragic figure, as well as Robert De Niro as Major Rinaldi.  For the tragic Catherine, I leave that choice up to someone else.

FIGHT FICTION: BATTLING BOXING STORIES!
THRILLING TALES OF PUGILISTIC PUISSANCE    

FEATURING STAN TRYBULSKI’S JUST A LITTLE TOO MUCH HEART

      

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Excerpt from Stan’s “A Little Too Much Heart.”

The three of us, Bobby Colon, Mike McCarthy, and I were in McSorley’s.  There was a trio of tourists sitting at the next table to us.  They had been drinking long before we got there and their table top was filled with empty ale mugs.  They were two men and a blonde woman.  The woman was sitting closest to Bobby.

“You a fighter?” she said, leaning towards him.  Her words were slightly slurred from the ale.

He ignored her.

“You don’t look like a fighter.”  She tapped him on the shoulder.

“Ease up, lady,” I said.  “We’re just here to relax, so why don’t you do the same.”

“Fighter,” she continued.  “He’s no fighter.”

One of the men at the table looked over at me.  “What kind of fighter trains on ale?”

Bobby still said nothing.

Battling Boxing Stories presents 15 of the most intense and hard-hitting stories about the pugilistic arts collected in one place and written by some of the best of today’s new crop of exciting writers. The stories in this book highlight all types of boxers and all aspects of the sport, from amateur bouts and illegal street fights, to heavyweight championship events.

These are wonderful stories with unforgettable characters that are full of passion and emotion, action and rage–heartfelt tales about real people fighting for their lives, their honor, and sometimes their very souls.

Each story captures that rare magic–the combination of violence and majesty that takes place in the boxing ring. Your ears will still be ringing with the sting of these battles long after you finish this book!

Edited by Gary Lovisi

The authors are: Stan Trybulski, Wayne D. Dundee, Ron Fortier, Robert S. P. Lee, G. D. McFetridge, Arlette Lees, Terence Butler, Marc Spitzer, C. J. Henderson, Gary Lovisi, Garnett Elliott, Penelope Stanhope, Michael A. Black, Lonni Lees, and William Boyle.

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Paperback: 254 pages

Publisher: Borgo Press (January 29, 2012)

The release of the richly made remake of John LeCarré’s TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER SPY is a cinematic reminder of how Soviet espionage in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in the West provided the grist for a generation of international spy novels.

The novel and the movie highlight Russian penetration of the British intelligence service by the KGB.   Ironically, LeCarré’s spy nemesis Karla was not modeled after a Russian, but rather after the great* East German spymaster Markus Wolf. 

More importantly, Le Carré, as well as other international thriller and espionage writers, also ignored the intelligence efforts of the East Germans.  Efforts deemed by some intelligence analysts in the West to have been far more successful in obtaining military, technological and scientific data than their more heavy-handed and obvious Russian counterparts directed by Moscow Centre.  One theory has it that Moscow Centre, well aware of the massive surveillance by MI5 and the Metropolitan Police of their spies in Britain, allowed them to blunder about, thereby taking time and effort away from the smaller but highly effective East German Stasi and military espionage units in London.  Whether true or not, the obvious stumbling about of the Moscow directed betonkopfs or cementheads allowed Wolf and the Stasi to employ the technique of “shadow and light” to a degree unseen before in the history of espionage.

Ironically, LeCarré, who had been posted at one time in Bonn, West Germany, presciently described the Stasi methods in his earlier novel THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD in which George Smiley was first introduced and which was also made into a film starring Richard Burton and Claire Bloom.  Smiley was played by the British actor Rupert Davies and the earlier prototype for Karla, called Fiedler, was played by Oskar Werner. Another, more evil Stasi nemesis, Hans Dieter Mundt was portrayed by Peter van Eyck.

 Both the novel and the film were acclaimed in the UK and the US, receiving the Dagger Award from the British Crime Writers Association, and two Edgars from the Mystery Writers of America, one for the novel and for the film script. Despite this success, both the novel and the film were obviously ignored by MI5, the British service charged with home security and counter-intelligence, allowing the Stasi almost free rein (a cynic might use “reign” instead) for years in Britain.   Indeed, much of the Stasi’s hostile activities on British soil occurred after 1979 when the East Germans formally opened up an embassy in London at tony 34 Belgrave Square and the same year that TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY with its Russian Karla was serialized by the BBC.

How Markus Wolf back in the Berlin Zentrum and his protégés inside the 34 Belgrave Square Kewa or cell must have laughed over martinis or tumblers of single-malt whiskey as they watched Alec Guinness as Smiley conduct his mole hunt, treading in out of the Circus, with his crews of ferrets, housekeepers and janitors, lamplighters and mothers, babysitters and shoemakers, and the pavement artists, all of whom never seemed to have known their way to 34 Belgrave Square. 

And how much more they must have been entertained when three years later the BBC serialized SMILEY’S PEOPLE, the third novel of Le Carré’s Karla trilogy (the middle novel in the trilogy, THE HONOURABLE SCHOOLBOY was never made into a television series or movie.  So Hollywood, do your stuff!).

Even today, much mystery remains about Stasi activities in Great Britain but what little is known provides small comfort for counter-intelligence services in the West.  And yet it provides a primer for possible ongoing hostile activities in the UK as well as the US and Germany.

Directed by the Stasi, officially called the East German Ministry for State Security (MfS), the espionage task was approached with Teutonic thoroughness, utilizing a double penetration of the “sceptered isle”, by both the Stasi’s HVA section and an East German military intelligence unit.

Aside from the Berlin Zentrum with its over 15,000 employees housed in a complex that made CIA headquarters in Langley look like a college dormitory, the Stasi utilized their Leipzig Outpost to specifically target the UK.  Ironically, Leipzig is the home of Auerbach’s Keller, the tavern, where in Goethe’s tragedy, Mephistopheles brought Faust as part of his attempt to corrupt and ruin the scholar.  And diabolically, the Stasi would also take unsuspecting British students and scholars there in similar attempts to corrupt.  Attempts that would too often be as successful as that of Mephistopheles.  For the Stasi corrupters knew, having done so themselves, that there were always others ready to make a deal with the devil.  

The double-pronged Stasi operation in London  with units of the HVA and military intelligence operating side by side at 34 Belgrave Square, targeted British politicians, journalists, academics, scientists, members of the peace movement and fellow travelers who could be co-opted into intelligence assets, act as propaganda vehicles and spread timely disinformation.  Intrepid as well as skillful, these operatives were not afraid to traverse “the dark side of the moon” and go after hard targets in political and intelligence circles, as well as handle assets from the British Rhine Army who had been posted back in the home country.**  And fifty per cent of what they mined from their legal and illegal British assets was turned over to Moscow Centre for further analysis and distribution.  It is in this context that the size and, strength and direction of the Stasi’s hostile activities on British soil should be considered.

Moreover, these activities were supplemented by “illegals,” Stasi agents sent into Britain under West German “cover.” It would have been these agents that would have acted as local handlers and go-betweens for any British spies in highly sensitive areas of the government or intelligence services, not the Belgrave Square Kewa.

In reallife tradecraft that trumps fiction, the code names given the Stasi officers and their UK agents are far more colorful than most fiction writers could dream up.  Four names that quickly come to mind are “BARBER,” IVO,” “BALDUR” and “ISAK.”  Four British agents recruited by the East Germans and whose real identities have never been revealed, although BARBER is known to have been a British spy inside the anti nuclear organization, the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

The secret intelligence reports provided by the Stasi in the 1980’s to the East German hierarchy provide clues as to where their British assets were placed. To name a few: 1986, the situation inside the British Conservative Party; British attitudes towards the arms-control process; 1987, British relations with the USA; British Relations with the GDR.  Even in the final days leading up to the collapse of the East German regime, Wolf’s two greatest protégés, Jörg Döring, code named “Harke” and Friedbert Krebs, code named “Hammer” were operating full force out of 34 Belgrave Square.

And while many of those assets may have outlived their usefulness as direct providers of secret intelligence, they may very well have continued on as talent-spotters, recruiters and go-betweens for their former Stasi handlers who are now in the employ of other organizations around the globe.*** In fact, one such incident occurred when the so-called Rosenholz Files containing the names of all the HVA’s agents operating in foreign countries was sold to the CIA.  Copies of the files containing the names of those agents that operated in West Germany was eventually turned over to the Federal German government and over a thousand were eventually exposed and a few moles in sensitive positions were prosecuted.  The Germans did not prosecute, however, any Stasi agents who operated in West Germany against the UK, the US, France or other NATO countries.  In addition, there is a belief that the Rosenholz Files also contained the names of all the Stasi agents who operated in the UK, the US and the other NATO countries.  It is not believed those portions were given back to the German government, and there is some question as to the degree the US has shared their contents with other friendly services, including MI5 and MI6, and the French DST.

Recently, the Guardian newspaper reported that MI5 did have sections of the files pertaining to the UK and was refusing to return them to Germany, where they would be archived and made available to the public. thus “outing” those Brits who spied for the East Germans.  Curiously, unlike Germany, the UK has never prosecuted anyone for spying for the Stasi, and is now accused of going out of its way to protect them. 

This begs the question of who comprises this new generation of British assets and what, if anything, “the Security Mob,” at MI5 is currently doing about them.  And it should also be an “anchors up” to my international thriller writers and spy novelists.  To paraphrase Churchill, TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY and its real-life Stasi mirror are not the end, nor are they even the beginning of the end, they merely the end of the beginning.   There is a treasure trove of future plots and characters to be developed.  For in the spy trade, plus ça change, plus ça la même chose.  All it takes is a pen and some paper.  Of course, a dry martini might help. Plymouth gin only.

*The superlative “great” is used here only to describe Markus Wolf’s operational and management skills and should not be construed as describing him as “good.”  It should be pointed out that Wolf’s career as a high Stasi official and head of the HVA helped that nefarious organization maintain a power over its East German subjects that not only included coercing friends, lovers and even close relatives to spy on one another, but to secretly dose political prisoners with x-rays until they contracted leukemia and even went as far as to have the friend of a political dissident feed the dissident hamburgers laced with thallium.  Under no circumstances can Wolf be considered a “good” person.

** Stasi efforts against the US were similar in nature, along with special emphasis in West Germany on the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Service, Defense Intelligence Agency, the U.S. Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps, and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

***At the end, Döring was reported to have been seen burning files in an inner courtyard of 34 Belgrave Square.  It is believed those files contained the code names, real names and activities of British spies run by the London Stasi, although no one can be sure that they were, in fact, all of the files, or even the files, or that Döring did not keep copies for his future use. Both Döring and Krebs, although highly skilled intelligence officers, did not have the imprimatur of Wolf who later would write his memoirs and even be awarded a contract by the George W. Bush administration to advise the Department of Homeland Security.  Thus, the pair would be left to their own devices to make a living and one could surmise that they did not plan to drive a taxi in Berlin or tend bar in Dresden for the rest of their lives.  More likely, they sold their talents and their assets to another service such as the CIA, or even worse in the eyes of Whitehall, to the French.

A Short Useful Lexicon:

Co-opted Worker: A foreign national in the pay of the Stasi. See also IM, below.

HVA( Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung): Main Directorate Intelligence, the East German Intelligence Service within the MfS (see below).  Often interchanged with Stasi.

Ermittler: A cut-out or go-between the East German officers and their Western agents and contacts.

IM (Informelle Mitarbeiter): An agent or co-opted official, scientist or other intellectual, military or intelligence officer or politician in the West.  The Stasi described all IM’s by their cover names (in reports) and their real names (in Berlin Zentrum files).  For the UK, IM’s were all given code names that began with A or B, with a handful of exceptions who are believed to have held highly sensitive positions.  The master list of these IM was publicly claimed to have been shredded by the HVA when the East German government collapsed.  There are other indications, however, that the list, along with massive pages of files covering the activities of the IM’s and their Stasis handlers, fell into the hands of the CIA, MI6, and the French SDCE.  Reportedly, these files were pointedly not shared with the BfV, the Federal German security service, leaving that service to struggle on its own to rid itself of whatever tainted officers were within its ranks.

Kewa: A Stasi intelligence cell. The Kewa in the East German embassy at 34 Belgrave Square was comprised of two units; the regular Stasis HVA and military intelligence.

Kundschaften: Seekers of knowledge; the rather benign term by which the East German spies referred to themselves, rather than the more blunt “spy.”

MfS(Ministerium fürStaatssicherheit): Stasi

Quelle: A source in a foreign country undergoing East German intelligence penetration.

Rosenholz (Rosewood) Files: Files either purchased by the CIA for $75,000 according to some reports or seized by the CIA Berlin Station in 1999 during the looting of the Stasi HQ in Berlin, according to others.  

Selbststeller: Walk-in, or foreign national that makes a voluntary approach to the East Germans, either because of ideological, or most often, monetary reasons.

Tipper: A Stasi talent spotter in the West.

“Death comes each morning to the people of this town.”  Ernest Hemingway wrote that sentence about Madrid during the Spanish Civil War, the most prolific period of his literary career.   If Paris in the 1920’s was Hemingway’s moveable feast, then the war-torn Spain of 1937-38 was his well-stocked wine cellar, his cave from which he endlessly drank magnums of grand cru scenes and dialogue, all topped off with belts of Fundador brandy from the ever-present silver hip flask.

Best known of his work about that tragic conflict is his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls.  He also wrote a play and five solid short stories—stark, cynical in their descriptions –as well as over thirty bylined journalistic dispatches.  But that simple sentence “Death comes each morning to this town” was written in none of those.

It appears in the 1937 documentary The Spanish Earth.  The black and white film is only fifty-two minutes long but filled with commentary by Hemingway and narrated by Orson Welles.  Commentary that is chilling in its simplicity, spoken the way Hemingway wrote it.  The way he always wrote about war.

Produced by an outfit called Contemporary Historians under the nominal auspices of Archibald MacLeish, Lillian Hellman, John Dos Passos and Hemingway, the film’s intent was to rally American support for the Spanish Loyalist (Republican) government which was under siege by Generalissimo Franco’s Nationalist army of monarchists, fascists and Moroccan mercenaries. 

Hemingway had spent much of 1936 bouncing from Key West to Havana to Wyoming and back, struggling with the first draft of To Have and Have Not while battling severe depression and bouts of paranoia.  When he finally finished the first draft, although not happy with it, he set it aside and angled a lucrative contract with the North American News Agency to cover the Spanish conflict.  Participation with other writers in filming the documentary would become a valuable bonus.

He traveled to Spain for his own purposes, not the least of which was earning money, and met up with Dos and some the other writers for the project, which Dos later described as “so typical of the blundering of well-intentioned American liberals trying to make themselves useful in the world.”  I will not discuss them here as it is a digression from my topic but for those interested, the best work is We Saw Spain Die: Foreign Correspondents in the Spanish Civil War by Professor Paul Preston of the London School of Economics.[i]

Some critics, notably Stephen Koch and George Packer, have accused Hemingway, by participating in the production of The Spanish Earth, of being overly-sympathetic to the Marxist-dominated Loyalist government in Madrid and acting as a pawn of the Comintern and Moscow.   Nothing could have been further from the truth.  In fact, in April of 1936 he was complaining about the “chickenshit communists” who were urging him to write about American labor strife; in November, he refused to vote for Roosevelt, despising FDR for his “socialist tendencies,” and in December he was busy planning his new trophy room and swimming pool.[ii] 

Hemngway was never really sympathetic to anything or anyone; his dominant emotion was empathy, the capacity to experience and understand the thoughts, feelings and experiences of others; the essential quality of any great fiction writer.  It is his empathy that you see and feel in The Spanish Earth, as well as in his reportage and fiction.  There can be no doubt that the civil war and the battles and suffering of the Spanish people had an emotional effect on him.  An effect that he was able directly translate into the written word.  He arrived in Spain having completed a mediocre first draft of To Have and Have Not; when he left, his mind was filled with golden kernels of For Whom The Bell Tolls gestating in his brain.

 

When queried for this blog, international thriller writer David Morrell, who knows more than a thing or two about Hem, said:  “Hemingway, both as a reporter and a fiction writer, always went where the action was. His For Whom The Bell Tolls isn’t only a definitive novel about the Spanish Civil War–it is one of the finest war novels ever written. In it, he abandoned his famed short-simple-sentence style and went in the opposite direction, with long compound-complex sentences that dramatized the complexity of his theme.”

Indeed, Hemingway had originally wanted to use many of the same themes in To Have and Have Not, struggling with its first draft in Wyoming and Key West, never really quite working it out the way he wanted.  What he really wanted was to be in Spain, to be there before the fighting stopped, as he told his editor Maxwell Perkins.[iii]  For that was what really interested him about the war.  Not which side ultimately won or what political or economic programs were finally put into place.  

What Hemingway wanted above all was to observe battle with all the raw emotions that he could absorb.  To create an internal sturm und drang that would chase away the ghosts haunting him.  To commune on equal terms with the shadowy angel whose beating wings would hover over him throughout his life.  And The Spanish Earth was the perfect vehicle to accomplish this as it gave him journalistic permission from a desperate Loyalist government to prowl the battlefront to find fodder not only for his wire-service dispatches but for his fiction.

No, it was not the Comintern with its documentary directed by the Communist Joris Ivens that used Hemingway as a dupe; rather it was Hem using them.  Going places with Ivens and watching blunders, failed assaults, retreating forces, talking to soldiers and officers, seeing the callousness and stupidity of war, things that were never put in the documentary, making notes for his later use.[iv]

                          

For those of us who have absorbed our visual war news through television, this documentary, despite its propagandist slant, provides a reminder of what war has always been about.  Death.  While spending a month on the battlefront with Ivens and cameraman John Ferno who filmed the sequences, Hemingway, with all the bravado of a man with something to prove, faced artillery, rifle fire, and strafing from the German and Italian “volunteer” pilots on loan to the Nationalist side.  Back in his room in the Hotel Florida he filed news dispatches for the North American News Agency (NANA) while sketching out short stories and writing a play that would be called The Fifth Column.

The documentary opens with scenes of the barren rocky soil around the poverty-stricken village of Fuentidueña del Tajo on the strategic Madrid-Valencia highway.  Hemingway talks about the villagers’ project to irrigate the arid land.  It quickly shifts twenty-five miles away to the capital of Madrid which is under attack by the fascists.  With each bleak scene starkly filmed by Ivens and Ferno, Hemingway provides equally stark commentary:[v]

The words are as haunting and chilling and sad and wonderful as the bleak black and white imagery they describe:

Madrid is bombed by German Luftwaffe pilots flying in support of Franco.  A body lies crumpled on a rubble strewn sidewalk.  “This is a man who had nothing to do with war.  He was a bookkeeper.  So now they take the bookkeeper away.  But not to his office or his home.”

The shelling of the city continues.  Building facades crumble. “The smell of death is high explosive smoke. Acrid.”

A Loyalist soldier in uniform and his wife or girlfriend hold hands, hug and kiss each other.  “The old goodbyes sound the same in any language…they know that when they move you out in trucks, it is to a battle.”

Evacuation of civilians from the besieged city.  Worried faces of the old, the children, the wives.  “Where will we go?  Where will we live?  What will we do for a living?”

The scene pans to a village outside the capital, a bomb-shattered village close to the battle lines along the Jarama River.  “Before, death came when you were old or sick.  Now it comes to all the people of this village…high and shining silver.”

A quartet of tanks goes up a dusty road and then traverses across rocky barren terrain.  Sparse infantry columns follow behind.  Hemingway does not comment on the efficacy of the Republican’s tank warfare but concentrates on the soldiers. “The men in echelon in columns of six…six walk forward across a stretch of land to their deaths; to prove this land is ours.” [vi]

“We took no statement from the dead but the letters we read were very sad.”  That was Hemingway describing the dead Italian soldiers sent by Mussolini to fight on Franco’s side.[vii]

The final scenes pan the fields of Fuentidueña.  Hemingway tries to bring the audience around as the film shows the completed irrigation project, with water flowing into the now-furrowed land.  “Men who were never trained in war; who only wanted work, fight on.” 

Hemingway, never missing a step to self-promote, cut Dos Passos completely out of the final print and went as far as to even narrate some versions himself.  It was propaganda, perhaps.  But wonderful propaganda and magnificent prose. Sparse words filled with empathy for its subjects, not sympathy for any political cause.  To set the Spanish Civil War onto a Left-Right, Marxist-Fascist grid is to commit a disservice to political analysis, history, and most of all to the people of Spain.  And to try and place Hemingway on that grid is to commit an even more egregious fault: Missing the point.  Hemingway wrote and fought as he ate, drank and loved.  Full of gusto for one cause only.  Hemingway.  Perhaps that did not make him a wonderful human being but it made him the greatest writer of the modern era.

---

[i] We Saw Spain Die, Paul Preston, 2009, Skyhorse Publishing, New York

[ii] The “chickenshit communists” statement is from private letters cited in Hemingway, the 1930’s, Michael Reynolds, P. 225.; see also p.239 for Hemingway’s feelings about FDR and the planning of the trophy room and swimming pool.  Despite Koch’s overreaching on Hemingway and Communism, he has done much sertious and valuable research.  See Double Lives, Spies and Writers in the Soviet War of Ideas against the West. The Free Press, NY, 1994; The Breaking Point. Hemingway, Dos Passos and the Murder of  José Robles. Counterpoint, NY, 2005.

[iii] A prime example was Hem’s coverage of the XV International Brigades at the Battles of Quinto and Belchite.  In his dispatches, he barely mentions American history professor Robert Merriman, who was the brigade’s chief of staff and commander of the Abraham Lincioln Battalion, but studied the man carefully at length and used him as the model for his tragic hero Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls, Reynolds, pp277-278; EH-Perkins, Sept. 26, 1936, written at the ranch in Wyoming where Hemingway was writing To Have and Have Not.

[iv] Hemingway may have also taken photos as well as using those made by the famous war photographer Robert Capa.  Capa, while a leftist, was close to the Trotskyist POUM movement in Spain and certainly would not have allowed himself to be used by Moscow or the Comintern.  Capa, who photographed five wars (his most famous work was for Life Magazine on D-Day) and for a time was Ingrid Bergman’s lover, took many photos of Hemingway in Spain.  A collection of the photos can be found in the John F. Kennedy Library at Harvard University.  One of the more graphic scenes, that of the Loyalists executing a woman and two men by hanging, is reproduced in Hemingway in the 1930’s, Michael Reynolds, P.255.  Scenes like that were never part of the documentary, although Ivens may have filmed them for other purposes.

[v] The commentary was originally by both Hemingway and Dos Passos.  Hemingway cut Dos completely out of the documentary before it was released, dramatic evidence of the break between these once close friends and great American writers.

[vi] For longer and brutal descriptions of these battles, read EH’s short stories “Landscape with Figures,” “Night Before Battle” and “Under the Bridge.”

[vii] On March 22, 1937, Hemingway filed a dispatch to the North American News Agency in which he described the scene involving the dead Italian soldiers and comparing them to “curiously broken toys.” A fuller description can be found in  Reynolds, Page 265.  While Hemingway was writing this dispatch in his room in the Hotel Florida, an artillery round crashed into an abandoned floor above him.

“My own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and dumping ground by a superior civilization, to get rid of the undesirable and unfit. I can’t prove it, but you can’t disprove it either.” Christopher Hitchens (13 April 1949-15 December, 2011). A great journalist and independent thinker passed from us last night. Those of us who frequently read him, even though we sometimes disagreed, will always remember him. May the God you couldn’t come to recognize bless and keep you.

Chris, who wrote most frequently these past few years for Vanity Fair, was an admirer of his earlier British compatriot George Orwell.  Never afraid to adopt unpopular and dangerous positions and argue strenously and cogently in their favor, he was noted for his ferocious defense of Iranian author Salman Rushdie after the Ayotollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against the writer.  He also supported former President Geoirge W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, earning him the enmity of many of his leftist admirers and friends.  He also attacked Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger and Mother Theresa.  In 2008 he supported now-President Obama, earning the enmity of the Neo-cons who had looked upon him as one of their own because of his support of the Iraq invasion..

His religious views wobbled between agnosticism and atheism and he called himself an “antitheist” but he did not hesitate to debate former British Prime Minister Tony Blair last year after Blair converted to Catholicism.

An old boy of Balliol College, Oxford, Christopher became a polemcist early on, famous for the number of taboos he attacked over his career.

He was the author of 17 books, including The Trial of Henry Kissinger (left), How Religion Poisons Everything, and Hitch-22.  A collection of his essays, Arguably, was released earlier this year.

Some of his more memorable quotes are below:

“I became a journalist partly so that I wouldn’t ever have to rely on the press for my information.”  Hitch-22

“The noble title of ‘dissident’ must be earned rather than claimed; it connotes sacrifice and risk rather than disagreement…” Letters to a Young Contraian, 2001

“Mother Teresa was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty.  She said that suffering was a gift from God.  She spent her life opposing the only know cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsort reproduction.”  Slate Magazine, 2003

“The four most overrated things in life are champagne, lobster, anal sex and picnics.” –  The New Yorker Magazine, 2006.

“Cheap booze is a false economy.” Hitch-22.

Graydon Carter, his editor at Vanity Fair, told the BBC that Christopher was someone “of ferocious intellect, who was as vibrant on the page as he was at the bar.”

Chris, wherever you are, have a good single-malt on me. Or better yet, an extra-dry Plymouth martini straight up with a twist. And make it a double.

Every aspiring, struggling, published or famous mystery author knows what The Maguffin is: the stuff that dreams are made of… the Holy Grail at the end of a knight’s quest…or the Lost Dutchman Mine.   Yet it does not have to be jewels or gold; it could be a missing will or confession; microfilm; a deed or a key to a safe deposit box.

In Casablanca, it was so-called “letters of transit” signed by General De Gaulle that would allow refugees to leave that North African city and go to America.  In a J.D. Zeik’s story that was made into the movie Ronin, the Maguffin was a missing attaché case.

Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer mystery Kiss Me Deadly had a box of drugs as its Maguffin, which Spillane tagged as the “great whatsit.”   In the screenplay written by the wonderful A.I. “Buzz” Bezzerides, a damned good hard-boiled novelist himself, the Maguffin or “greatwhatsit” was even more ominous than in print.   Bezzerides, whose screenplay was far better than Spillane’s novel (“I don’t care what you do to me, Mike–just do it fast,” was one of his magic noir lines) decided that instead of narcotics,  the box would contain deadly radioactive isotopes.  Of course, no one knew what was in the box until the nympho Lily opened it up and you saw the glow and heard Lily’s horrible screams.  But sometimes that’s the beauty of a Maguffin, not knowing what it is until it’s too late.

                                                                        

Whatever it is, everyone wants to find it.  Wants it so bad that they will lie, bribe or steal, seduce, even torture and kill for it. 

It could be spelled MacGuffin or McGuffin but I prefer Maguffin as that is the way it would be written or would sound if it was uttered by one of my tough guy characters with a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth or after his fifth shot of Schenleys lifted gently with a battered and bruised hand from the scarred wooden bar in some dive on a back street of noir-fiction Bay City or noir-real Brooklyn.  Magufffinnn…can’t you hear it drawn out with a sneer from a semi-curled lip barely visible under the shadow of the brim of a battered gray fedora?

In Raymond Chandler’s first Philip Marlowe mystery, The Big Sleep, there was no real Maguffin, but in his second Marlowe novel, Farewell, My Lovely, the Maguffin was little Velma Valento, the long-lost love object of Marlowe’s client, the ex-con Moose Malloy.  In the Marlowe novel, Lady in the Lake, the Maguffin was also a missing woman, Chrystal Kingsby, the wife of a mystery magazine publisher.  How delicious!  

I created a runaway fourteen-year-old girl, Michelle Williams, a witness gone conveniently missing, as the Maguffin in my hardboiled Doherty mystery Forty-Deuce, which used the seamy underbelly of New York City as the map to my Maguffin.

Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon is perhaps the most famous maguffin of all time.  Every character wanted that little black bird.  Every reader couldn’t wait to see its description; every moviegoer couldn’t wait to see it revealed on the silver screen, the newspaper covering it being slowly unwrapped by Humphrey Bogart’s Sam Spade.  To the readers, to the movie audience, it was just as much of a Maguffin as to Hammett’s nest of vipers. 

Chandler fans should be familiar with one of the most-sought after Maguffins in detective stories: The Brasher Doubloon, which he used in his 1942 Philip Marlowe mystery The High Window, the third novel in the Marlowe series.  Unlike the fictional Maguffins described above, the Brasher Doubloon is real.  A gold coin minted in 1797, the doubloon was sold at auction a few days ago for $7.4 million and bought by an unnamed investment bank.  Chandler knew a Maguffin when he saw one.  The High Window is one of Chandler most cynical novels and is not only a great read but a must read for mystery writers.   When the novel was filmed in 1947 with George Montgomery as Marlowe, it was retitled The Brasher Doubloon. This was Hollywood’s second stab at filming The High Window.  It was first put on the screen in 1942 under the title Time to Kill.  In that cinematic version, Marlowe was called Michael Shayne and his character was played by Lloyd Nolan.

The coin is also mentioned in Lawrence Block‘s Bernie Rhodenbarr mystery The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza and John Bellairs‘s The Mansion in the Mist.

The doubloon contains just under an ounce of gold– 26.66 grams of gold, which had a value of only about $15 when it was minted in 1797 by Ephraim Brasher. 

                                                                                                                              

                                                                                          

The Brasher doubloon is considered the first American-minted gold coin denominated in dollars. At the Heritage FUN sale in 2005, a type 1 Brasher in almost uncirculated condition sold for $2.415 million; a Type-2 in extra-fine-45 condition (lower than almost uncirculated) sold for $2.99 million. Nice mark up for a few years wait, huh?
http://news.yahoo.com/ap-exclusive-rare-1787-gold-coin-fetches-7-082110448.html

November 22, 1963.  I don’t remember a lot of things about that year, but I will always remember that date.  For me, it was the day America cried.

Money was tough for me and my dad that year and I worked full-time while going to college part-time.  That summer I had bought a used accounting textbook at the Strand Book Store, paying what I believe was less than a dollar.  I read through it in four weeks, testing myself at the end of each chapter, and then landed a job as a junior accountant with the Phoenix Assurance Company in Manhattan.  The salary was eighty-five dollars a week, good money in those days.  I was renting a furnished studio apartment on West 84^th Street for fifteen bucks a week; a subway ride was fifteen cents, and perhaps most telling of all about the value of the 1963 dollar was that seven of the New York daily newspapers only cost a nickel.  The Daily Mirror, which was in the final rounds of a losing circulation war with the Daily News, only charged three cents.  But it had the best horse racing handicappers in the business, so I always bought it along with the Times, the Daily News and the Journal-American, bringing my daily reading expense to a total of eighteen cents.

The Phoenix was located on the Avenue of Americas which most people at that time called Sixth Avenue, and which I, by habit, still do.  I worked in a large open office that ran from one side of the building to the other.   There were perhaps seventy-five or more employees in that room and on the south side were a group of Cuban exiles, who had worked for Phoenix’s Cuban affiliation in Havana before it was nationalized by the Castro regime.  Now they worked for the company’s Latin American operation in New York.

The day had proceeded like any other work day.  Detail oriented and tedious, as in those days expenses and revenue were first posted by hand into general ledgers from computer runs, instead of vice versa.  Then just before noon came the announcement.  It was by voice, a man’s.  Someone from another floor who stood by the office’s main door and simply announced in a loud voice:  “The President has been shot.”  Everyone stopped what they were doing as the room fell silent.  Then, from the group of Cuban exiles, a woman’s voice broke into a loud anguished wail that was quickly joined by sobs from the others.  Their grief ripped through me as well, as I felt the love that the Cuban exile community had for this man who had tried to give them their country back.  At that moment their love and their pain had also become mine.

As we sat or stood in shock, none of us knew whether JFK had been only wounded or killed. We prayed for the best but feared the worst.  We knew he would be visiting Dallas that day, in the heart of Texas, a state where many hated him, and some had vowed to kill him.

The minutes seemed to pass as if they were days.  Then came the second announcement.  The President was dead.  The crying was more general now, accompanied by the sickening feeling that hits you when you learn that a close friend or relative has suddenly come to a tragic end.  For many of us, ethnic Catholics from the mills of New England or the streets of Brooklyn and Queens, African-Americans fighting for their rights in the deep South, Cuban exiles dreaming only of returning to their island home, white college students imbued with desire to do something good for the nation, JFK wasn’t just the President of the  United States.  He was Our President.  And now he was dead.  Murdered.

We were let out of work early, as were millions of Americans that day.  I did not go to class that night.  When I left work, I took the subway downtown, riding close together with other shocked and grief stricken faces.  I got off at West 4^th Street and walked over to Astor Place and McSorley’s Old Ale House.  It was already packed inside and I couldn’t find a seat at a table so I ordered two mugs of ale at the bar –they were two for thirty cents, then—and stood by the entrance way to the back room and watched the news on the battered black and white television attached to the rear wall.

The faces of the men of the neighborhood, Irish, Polish and Ukrainian, already deeply lined with work and age like the tavern’s scarred wooden tables, had seen horror before.  Pearl Harbor, battles in Europe, the Pacific, Korea, and for some, far worse.  But they knew, as we college students would later discover, that this was different.  That a solitary death on a sunny afternoon in Dallas, in some place called Dealey Plaza that none of us had ever heard of before, could have a far-reaching horror of its own.

Images flashed across the TV screen that afternoon and night:  news film of the shooting, the wounding of Texas Governor John (Big John) Connelly, the sad face of Jackie, filled with a grief that we could never match; the solemn face of LBJ as he took the oath of office, on Air Force One with Jackie standing next to him, her face as brave and filled with determination as her husband’s must have been that night years before as he swam through the darkened waters of the Pacific, pulling a badly-wounded crewman of his PT-Boat to safety.   I can still see Walter Cronkite’s somber face and hear his voice as he reported what little facts were known about the assassination: that a Dallas policeman had been killed, that the assassin had been arrested.

A month later, a friend of mine came home from college for Christmas.  A red-headed Irish-American kid from Long Island who was on a track scholarship at the University of Southern Mississippi.  A Catholic New York kid in the heart of segregationist Dixie, with its virulent die-hard racists who hated John Kennedy much as they hated any African-American who dared to try and vote.    We talked about JFK and that day in November and my friend told me that he had been in class when the assassination happened and how, when the news was announced, the students—all white—stood and cheered.  Even though I wasn’t there, I will always remember that moment, as well!

That JFK’s killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, would be shot the day after his arrest was of cold comfort at the time.  Over the ensuing years that would change for me and as I made McSorley’s my office away from the office, I would always sit at the table next to the right window, where I could see the photo of Oswald doubling over as a round from Jack Ruby’s pistol ripped through his guts.

There would be other such bloody days for our nation, ugly times when America’s soul would be wracked in anguish long after the tears had dried: Martin, Bobby, 9-11.  I remember each of those horrific days.  But this bloody day of November 22, 1963 had been the first.  At least for me.

Just when one thinks that the quality of political discourse in America cannot sink any lower along comes Republican Party right-winger Herman Cain with a line lifted without shame from the television show The Simpsons: “I’m a leader, not a reader.”   Well, excuse me, Herman, I’m a reader, not a leader, and proud of it.

As an undergraduate at Columbia I majored in history and throughout my adult life I have maintained a strong interest in the subject, utilizing it when and where I can in my novels.   The Gendarme and One-Trick Pony are two such examples.    

As a lover of history, I must point out that the recent antics by Cain and the other GOP presidential nominee candidates bring to mind the comment made by the German Social Democratic legislator and newspaper editor Wilhelm Sollmann in the Weimar Republic’s Reichstag.  On February 5, 1931, after a particularly vituperative speech by Joseph Goebbels which was followed by the storming out of the legislature of the Nazi deputies en masse, Sollmann rose and stated: “After the unrestrained emotional outburst which we have just witnessed, we may well wonder where the boundaries of politics end and those of psychiatry begin.”

After watching and listening to the rounds of televised Republican Party debates in which those who claim they want to lead this nation act as supplicants to the lunatic fringe of our society, I have to second Sollmann’s concern of eighty years ago.

Sollmann was arrested and tortured by the Nazis after they seized power in 1933 but managed to escape and continued to speak out for democracy as he roamed around Europe.  Eventually he made his way to the US where he joined the faculty of the Pendle Hill Quaker Study in Wallingford, PA.  He later became a naturalized citizen and working with the American Friends in post-war West Germany, he helped found the modern University of Cologne in the city he once represented and where he was the chief editor of the Rhenische Zeitung newspaper.

 A true American immigrant success story, he taught at Haverford, Bard and Reed Colleges and worked tirelessly for peaceful resolutions of international disputes until his death in Connecticut in 1951.  If he were alive today, he might well wonder if the famous comment of Yogi Berra that this is “déjà vu all over again” was not à-propos to the present day clown show.  Only this time the clowns wear $2,000 tailor made suits instead of brown shirts.

 I am sitting outside on a beautiful cool and sunny late summer morning, surrounded by leafy trees and silence, having a cup of coffee, and remembering another morning ten years ago.  That morning also started out sunny and cool but quickly turned horrific as I and my colleagues in the Administrative Trials Unit watched as first one passenger plane and then another slammed into the Twin Towers.

We were across the East River then, in downtown Brooklyn in the old NYC Board of Education headquarters on Livingston Street, on a floor high enough to clearly see across the harbor to lower Manhattan.  None of us were prepared for the shock.  And none of us could immediately fathom the extent of the tragedy.  There was mia jefa Patria Frias-Colon, Theresa Europe (the big boss lady), Sue Jalowski, Carl Butler, John Petrak, Maria DePalma, Georgette Jasmin, Kisha (Toure) Michele and some others.  Trials were scheduled for that day known ever since as 9-11 but none would be held.   We stood transfixed, watching as the tops of the towers were garbed in flames and billowing smoke. Then came their sudden collapse and the true horror of the moment sank in.

I walked over to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade and watched the pluming smoke continue its sinister rise in the space where the World Trade Center had once filled our city’s majestic skyline.  I had lived in Brooklyn Heights for decades and for several years I had watched from my apartment on Columbia Heights as the towers were being erected.  And in slightly more than an instant, I had seen them destroyed, along with thousands of my hard-working fellow New Yorkers.

We cried that day, many of us.  New Yorkers don’t cry very often, in fact the last time New York had cried was the day the great race horse Ruffian had to be euthanized.  That day had long been known as The Day New York Cried.  Then on 9-11 it was replaced.  But being New Yorkers, our tears did not last, drying up quickly in vows of perseverance.  Our sorrow continued but was encased deep in the steely knowledge that whatever evil had befallen us, whatever our enemies had handed out, we could take it and give it back a thousand fold.

And so we are still here today, ten years later, sad but unbowed.  In fact, stronger than ever!  New York, New York.  The Big Apple!

Even though the foul stench emanating from the bloated corpse kept me at a distance, I knew immediately that the monster had been killed. Although flies covered his face and swarms of maggots climbed out of his nose and mouth and were nesting in his mustache, the ugly profile of Gaddafi was unmistakable. Yet in death, the long familiar look of hate had been replaced by one of abject fear, seared into every evil crease of his jowls as he heard the screaming of the rockets descending towards his tent. Over to one side of the crater, a pack of wild dogs was fighting over his bloody limbs, dragging them back and forth across the sands in a feral tug of war. I fired up a Churchill; it was that kind of morning.