threats and curses on my family, past, present, and future.
This encounter changes the feeling between Benjamin and I, though we do get around to my film and the festival and he seems interested in both. I let him walk me back to the hotel and just before we part he surprises me by explaining that he too is in Spain because of a film, not exactly his film, or only partly his, for it’s based on a book he wrote about some Americans who fought in a Spanish Civil War. Imagine that! Americans seem to fight everywhere but in America. It’s a big Hollywood production and the most exciting thing is that the director is that heart throb TJ, whose image is drooled over not just by my sisters and cousins but by most of the women in the world. I have already invited Benjamin to the screening of Far From Afghanistan the next night, and as we approach the hotel my mind is already on the evening’s reception and what I will wear. Outside the door he comes close to me, and I fear that he may try to kiss me, the way sophisticated Americans and Europeans always do, but instead he shakes my hand and says he’ll see me at the screening. Inshallah, I say. Suerte, he replies, then adds that it means Good Luck. I have two hours to get ready to look better than my best. My smashing black dress, jewels in my hair, a native lapis necklace, gold bracelets, and a French scarf passing for a chadour draped around my shoulders. It’s important to do the whole bit. I know that already. The image of the director these days is as important as the images she creates on the screen. Maybe more.
3
Benjamin
I hope you don’t mind reading a memoir told in more than one voice. Alternate his and her chapters may make for some redundancy, but as we all learned from Rashomon decades ago, people participating in the same event never see precisely the same thing. Even moments shared with those closest to us, lovers, family, friends, are different once put into words. It’s important to recognize that we’re long past the time when a man can get away telling a story from a male point of view without having not just militant feminist scholars but all the women he knows and loves—mother, sisters, girl friends, daughters, wives—complain about how one sided, incomplete, and false is his vision, a product of the dread male gaze. That’s only one of many reasons I’ve asked Aisha to give you her version of what happened in Spain. Together we made the decision to ask some of the other participants to have their say as well, though it’s not clear how many will answer our invitation. So it’s best to think of this work as one suited to the age we call postmodern, a period when we no longer, as critics tell us, believe in a narrator whose words we can trust, nor in a single point of view. We have all become as large as Walt Whitman: each of us contains multitudes.
My first self, the one I wanted to be, was a novelist, not a historian. Nobody really wants to be a historian, do they? It’s just something that happens when other things don’t work out. In a 10th grade English class I fell in love with the overwrought novels of Thomas Wolfe and decided to devote my life to producing similar enormously long works full of the mournful sound of railroad horns in the great and lonely American night. That I knew nothing about railroads and damn little about the American night did not deter me for an instant, but a C plus from my freshman English teacher on an essay arguing Wolfe was the greatest writer who ever lived helped to turn me in a new direction. A note in the margin saying it was time to begin reading Hemingway was my wakeup call. It helped that Hem, as we were told his friends called him, had recently made the cover of Life after breaking a few bones in the crash of a small airplane somewhere in Central Africa. There he was on the cover, bearded and grizzled, standing in the bush with a bunch of bananas in one hand, a monkey on his 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
