Dan Ford's Bookshelf: good reading

Book of the month

Sixty years ago, I devoured Hugh Thomas's The Spanish Civil War, and that early (and excellent!) book still constitutes most of what I know about that sad affair, which preceded and forecast the Second World War. So when my granddaughter discovered and recommended War Is Beautiful, by an American ambulance driver on the losing side, I bought a a copy for myself. It's a terrific book, presented as the diary he kept from the heady days of 1937 to the Great Retreat a year later.

Come to find out, however, we're actually reading an edited version of a typescript discovered in the 21st century in a Vermont bookstore, evidently the version Neugass had shopped around in the 1940s. (There's a good account of this in the online magazine Against the Current.) Alas, the Cold War was already underway in 1949, spelling doom for anything that smacked of the Soviet Union, including the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and those who'd fought for it.

Neugass was Jewish, like a near-majority of the 2,800 Americans who fought for the Spanish Republic. He came from a well-off New Orleans family and studied at the best -- Phillips Exeter, Harvard, Yale, Oxford -- but may have received no degrees. He doesn't seem to have been a Communist, but he was certainly well to the left. As a young poet, he was published in the Atlantic and The Nation; he admired the "Wobblies," the radical Industrial Workers of the World, and himself organized a union and was arrested as a striker. Upon returning from Spain, he gave an interview to the Communist Daily Worker.

He married, worked at odd jobs, and wrote a novel that Harper published in 1949 as Rain of Ashes. Alas, he died the same year, of a heart attack in Greenwich Village, and nothing more was heard of War Is Beautiful until the New Press published it in 2008. The title is an odd one; perhaps Neugass meant it ironically -- supposely it was the motto of the Francoist rebels he was there to fight. The copyright is held by the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives, and the editors were Peter Carroll and Peter Glazer, both on the Archives' board of directors. Their most obvious contribution to the book hundreds of footnotes identifying virtually everyone he mentions in passing, from "the Major" (Dr Barsky, commander and self-described commissar of the mobile American hospital) to "Lieutenant D" (Dr Arnold Donowa, a dental surgeon from Trinidad with whom Neugass doubles up one night on the road to Valencia: "the first time I had shared a room, let alone a bed, with a negro").

What the editors don't include is an index, though I may be the only reader who would use one. Enough! It's a great book. Buy a copy.

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