shoulder, and bandages covering his face and arms. Hem’s books didn’t so much evoke fantasies for me as help to create new ones. Reading his tales of war, disillusionment, and heroism made me want to face danger at the front lines or on the white sands of a bull ring, calmly report on great battles and death in the afternoon. Some such notion took me into a master’s degree program in journalism to prepare for a life as world traveler, correspondent, novelist, witness to wars and revolutions. But two years on the Los Angeles Times helped to squelch any romance in that notion. Too many cigarettes and martinis each day, too many interviews with stunned liquor store owners who have just been robbed, too many speeches by City Council members at supermarket openings, too many stories cut from six paragraphs to two by editors incapable of recognizing my great literary genius. And far too many of my short stories, written and rewritten in early morning hours, returned with neatly printed rejection slips explaining that however skilled was my writing, what I wrote about didn’t suit the mission of the publication.
What to do? Follow the example of a good friend who had loped through grad school like a hungry greyhound, taking a PhD in history at Princeton and a job as an assistant professor at USC. His experience made academia look cushy. A place where you could have the leisure to write books that unlike newspapers would last more than a day. It wasn’t too difficult to convince myself that works of history and novels were not all that different, but it took two decades for me to understand this insight was essentially correct. As if fearing academia would make for a dull life far from battlefields and world shaking events, I found myself seeking topics that dealt with outsiders, artists and radicals, people who helped to change the world and usually destroyed themselves in the process. Never was I much interested in the rich, the famous, the powerful. Even revolutionaries like Lenin or Marx seemed too establishment, too well known, too tame. My taste ran towards men like Leon Trotsky, who could write a history of the Russian Revolution while living it, Emiliano Zapata, who walked away from the president’s chair in Mexico City to return to his campesinos in Morelos, one-eyed Big Bill Haywood of the Industrial Workers of the World, who enjoyed a brawl as much as a strike and didn’t much distinguish between the two.
I had, in short, a serious case of over identification with the underdog. That’s what led me to the dissertation on the Americans who fought in the Spanish Civil War, the Lincoln Battalion or Brigade as it was called by both supporters and opponents to make it seem larger than it was. If you’ve seen Red Star Over Madrid—and who hasn’t after our eight Oscars and two hundred fifty million plus take at the box office?, not much better than an opening weekend today but a fine total in the nineties—you know that a certain idealism compelled some three thousand Americans to volunteer for this foreign civil war, and that close to half of them lost their lives in Spain. The film is, as you might expect, all Hollywood—the men too heroic, the nurses too sexy, the battles too well organized, the dialogue too clever, the ending too full of hope. But some of the commitments, hardships, struggles, and betrayals of the left make it to the screen, and this includes depicting some Communists as leaders and heroes. TJ pulled fewer punches than you might imagine. Plenty of details were invented, as in any history film, but Red Star does catch some of the spirit of men who were moved to fight the spread of Hitlerism long before it became fashionable. Before the film, the Lincolns had long been an obscure footnote to the history of the thirties. For a few months in the late nineties TJ made them well-known, the subject of countless blogs, op ed pieces, Sunday supplement spreads, and TV talk shows, but a decade later they’re a footnote once again. History, as we all should know by now, is not linear but circular.
Crusade in Spain, my first book, an expanded version of my doctoral dissertation, started my rise in the profession. I will spare you the details of what followed. A historian’s life is not interesting. You sit in archives. You spend months staring at sheets in a typewriter or, more recently, at a computer screen. You deliver papers at academic meetings to small groups of people who yawn a lot. You publish books which get reviewed in journals read only by others who publish in them. Each book leads to a promotion and soon enough you are a full professor. Then one afternoon when you are at the computer trying to start writing the first chapter of a history of the American left for an editor who has a series on that fashionable new approach, History From Below, the phone rings and a voice on the line says: Professor Redstone. This is TJ. I’m about to make a film on the Lincoln Battalion. You wrote the best book on the topic. We need to talk. Let me take you to dinner. We can meet in an hour at the Aware Inn. Do you know where it is?
I do, but that’s not the issue. My old lady (her term), Cheyenne, is currently in an Earth Mother phase. She has a fourteen grain bread cooking in the oven and a stew comprised of an untold number of vegetables on the stove. When we met three years earlier, her name was Sheryl, but that changed after some stoned freak, seeing a photo of her Nevada goat farmer grandfather, insisted he had the face of a plains Indian warrior. Cheyenne is a painter—a Surrealist one month, an Expressionist the next, a Minimalist the third. Not that the art world cares. She hasn’t had a solo exhibition in a decade because when only three of forty paintings sold at her first opening, she stormed into the gallery the next day, pulled her works off the wall, and took them home. Since then no one will exhibit her works, but this hasn’t stopped Cheyenne. Every few months she finishes a series of new paintings, carts the canvases to the parking lot at the nearby Ralph’s market, puts up a sign that says free works of art, and spends the next two days interrogating anyone who shows an interest. Those which don’t find suitable owners are stuffed into the dumpster behind the market. Then she comes home, goes to bed, and refuses to speak for a week or two.
I check about dinner.
Ask him over, she says. He can use a home cooked meal.
An hour later TJ is lounging on my couch. He is much bigger than I imagined, inches over six feet and with such a large and startlingly handsome face that it’s difficult to look directly at him.
Let’s trade fuck stories. Those are his first words. Who did the Lincolns fuck? In Madrid, in Tarazona, in Jarama? Did you interview any Spanish girls who slept with Americans? One thing I know for sure: these guys didn’t just poke it up each other’s ass.
I confess: it never occurred to me to look for girls who knew the Lincolns. They wouldn’t have still been girls.
Fuck no, he says, they’re women. Women never forget their lovers. I went up to Palo Alto to interview Robert Merriman’s wife. In her memoir she claims she was raped by an officer at brigade headquarters. But c’mon, don’t they always say that? I took her to dinner, poured her a lot of wine, moved close, put my arm around her. She’s almost eighty now, but shit, she’s still a woman. She likes being close to a man. So eventually I get around to asking was it really rape? Didn’t she consent? Her husband had been away at the front for months. Wasn’t she horny? And what happened after he disappeared and she stayed on alone? No Spanish lovers? Remember, she was pretty damn wild in college, and soon she was crying softly and half admitting it. Didn’t deny it anyway. Fuck, these guys were heroes but they weren’t exactly priests.
Probably you remember Merriman from the film. The first commander of the Lincoln Battalion. A tall, handsome, all-American type. Football star at the University of Nevada, lumberjack during summer vacations, grad student in economics at Berkeley, organizer for the longshoreman during the San Francisco general strike of 1934. Twice he was wounded while leading his men and both times he returned to action. He’s a genuine hero, the guy who has the girl but loses his life. Without a character like Merriman there couldn’t have been a film. Even then I suspected that TJ would play him like Gary Cooper, shrug his shoulders, set his jaw, mumble his lines. Some critics thought his performance more a parody than an homage. TJ was furious he didn’t get the award for Best Actor. Best Director wasn’t good enough for him.
At the first use of the word fuck, Cheyenne charges in from the kitchen, and soon we are treated to plenty more along with a few sucks as she recounts her own adventures. This is standard behavior. My old lady is ready to brag to anyone—people at the next machine in a Laundromat, at jazz clubs like the Parisian Room, even at departmental parties—that she has slept with over two hundred men. Give her half a chance and she is likely to go on to age, profession, race, height, weight, shape, and personal proclivities. Over the thick stew, a salad overloaded with jicama and carrots, and the home baked bread,