the last book I ever read (Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, excerpt two)

from Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Philip Gefter:

The absence of affection at home would weigh on his performance at school. “I was pathologically shy when I was a child,” Albee said. “Really, I didn’t talk much.” He was disaffected enough to refuse to do his schoolwork or even to abide by the rules. “No sooner would my well-intentioned family get me into one boarding school—Lawrenceville, for example, in Princeton, New Jersey—when I would get myself thrown out,” Albee explained. “I think it was nothing more complex than my desire to be at home and my family’s desire to have me away.” By the time he was fourteen, his parents had enrolled him at Valley Forge Military Academy. J. D. Salinger, who predated him there by six years, later modeled Holden Caulfield’s school, Pencey Prep, after what Albee referred to as “Valley Forge Concentration Camp.” “I did not write Catcher in the Rye,” Albee said, recognizing some of Holden’s qualities in his own petulant teenage years. “I lived it.”

the last book I ever read (Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, excerpt one)

from Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Philip Gefter:

By day Albee would work on his poetry and try to make progress on his novel. When they went out at night, he drank for pleasure, but eventually it became his “writer’s habit,” as he referred to it. “Flanagan and Albee shared a weakness for alcohol and melancholy,” writes Christopher Bram in Eminent Outlaws. “They were known in the downtown gay bar circuit as the ‘Sisters Grimm.’ The Sisters Grimm were regulars at the San Remo, at Julius’s, and at The College of Complexes.” At one hangout, Lenny’s Hideaway, Albee and Flanagan were known as “the two owls, because they stared straight out,” said Heide. “When I think of Flanagan and Edward, I think of all that anger and rage.” While Heide believed that the tension was due, in part, to jealousy on both sides as a result of the promiscuity, Albee maintained that the reason he never smiled in those years was because he had such bad teeth. Nevertheless, Rorem agreed that the element of anger between the boyfriends created “a feeling of danger” for the people around them.

Albee was lucky to have friends like Auden and Howard, who read his poetry and gave him comments. Once, he and Flanagan met with the playwright Thornton Wilder, by then the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth. After a tepid critique of Albee’s poems, Wilder suggested that he write plays instead, changing the course of the younger man’s life.

the last book I ever read (The Vegetarian: A Novel by Han Kang, excerpt nine)

from The Vegetarian: A Novel by Han Kang:

This pain and insomnia that, unbeknownst to others, now has In-hye in its grip—might Yeong-hye have passed through this same phase herself, a long time ago and more quickly than most people? Might Yeong-hye’s current condition be the natural progression from what her sister has recently been experiencing? Perhaps, at some point, Yeong-hye had simply let fall the slender thread that had kept her connected with everyday life. During the past insomniac months, In-hye had sometimes felt as though she were living in a state of total chaos. If it hadn’t been for Ji-woo—if it hadn’t been for the sense of responsibility she felt toward him—perhaps she too might have relinquished her grip on that thread.

The only times when the pain simply, miraculously ceases, are those moments just after she laughs. Something Ji-woo says or does makes her laugh, and then immediately afterward she is left blank, empty even of pain. At such times, the sheer fact of her having laughed seems unbelievable, and makes her laugh again. Admittedly, this laughter always seems more manic than happy, but Ji-woo loves to see it all the same.

the last book I ever read (The Vegetarian: A Novel by Han Kang, excerpt eight)

from The Vegetarian: A Novel by Han Kang:

On the morning when she’d finally mustered the courage to go to the obstetrics and gynecology department, the one where Ji-woo had been born, she’d stood on the open-air platform at Wangsimni Station and waited for the train, which was taking an unusually long time to arrive. Opposite the platform was a row of temporary buildings, their steel structures now decaying, and wild grasses straggling up between the sleepers on the edges over which no trains passed. The feeling that she had never really lived in this world caught her by surprise. It was a fact. She had never lived. Even as a child, as far back as she could remember, she had done nothing but endure. She had believed in her own inherent goodness, her humanity, and lived accordingly, never causing anyone harm. Her devotion to doing things the right way had been unflagging, all her success had depended on it, and she would have gone on like that indefinitely. She didn’t understand why, but faced with those decaying buildings and straggling grasses, she was nothing but a child who had never lived.

She’d fought down her feeling of shame and managed to stop trembling before getting up onto the bed. The middle-aged male doctor then pushed a cold abdominal scope deep into her vagina and removed a tongue-like polyp that had been stuck to the vaginal wall. Her body flinched away from the sharp pain.

the last book I ever read (The Vegetarian: A Novel by Han Kang, excerpt seven)

from The Vegetarian: A Novel by Han Kang:

Left alone with Yeong-hye, In-hye squatted down and tried to look her sister in the eye. Anyone’s face will look different when they’re upside down. Yeong-hye’s face certainly looked odd, with what little flesh she had on her cheeks pushed down toward her eyes. Those eyes were glittering and sharp as Yeong-hye stared into space. She seemed unaware of her sister’s presence.

the last book I ever read (The Vegetarian: A Novel by Han Kang, excerpt six)

from The Vegetarian: A Novel by Han Kang:

When she returns to the long bench in front of the reception desk, a flashily dressed middle-aged woman is just coming in through the front door, on the arm of a similarly aged man. Have they come to visit a patient? The next instant, an unbroken stream of invective starts pouring forth from the woman’s mouth. Seemingly well accustomed to her cursing, the man pays no attention as he gets the medical insurance certificate out of his wallet and slides it under the window at the reception desk.

“Wicked little shits! I won’t be satisfied even when I’ve sucked your insides dry! I’m going to emigrate. I can’t spend another day with shits like you!”

If the process of admittance is completed in time, the woman will probably end up spending the night in the secure room. More than likely, her limbs will be bound and a tranquilizer will be administered. In-hye stares at the garish flower-patterned hat worn by this shrieking woman. All of a sudden, she realizes how blasé she’s become when it comes to the mentally ill. In fact, after all these visits to the hospital, sometimes it’s the tranquil streets filled with so-called “normal” people that end up seeming strange.

the last book I ever read (The Vegetarian: A Novel by Han Kang, excerpt five)

from The Vegetarian: A Novel by Han Kang:

Had she ever really understood her husband’s true nature, bound up as it was with that seemingly impenetrable silence? She’d thought, at one time, that it might be revealed in his work, in his video art. In fact, before she met him, she hadn’t even been aware that such a field of art existed. Despite her best efforts, though, his works proved incomprehensible to her. Nothing was revealed.

She remembers the late afternoon when they first met. He’d come into her shop, skinny as a sorghum stalk and with several days’ worth of stubble on his face, a camcorder bag slung over one shoulder that was clearly weighing him down. He searched out some shaving lotion, brought it to the counter and rested both arms on the glass, looking utterly worn out. He looked like he might collapse, and take the counter with him. It was faintly miraculous the way she, having had practically no romantic experiences up until then, came out with a friendly “Have you had lunch?” As if surprised, but lacking the energy required to express that surprise, he had merely fixed her face with his exhausted gaze. Something in his defenseless state had drawn her to him. What she’d wanted, from that afternoon, had been to use her own strength to allow him to rest. But despite devoting herself wholeheartedly to this goal, even after they were married he still looked perpetually worn out. He was always busy with his own things, and during what little time he did spend at home he looked more like a traveler putting up there for a night than a man in his own home. His silence had the heavy mass of rock and the tenacious resistance of rubber, particularly when his art wasn’t going well.

the last book I ever read (The Vegetarian: A Novel by Han Kang, excerpt four)

from The Vegetarian: A Novel by Han Kang:

This time he painted huge clusters of flowers in yellow and white, covering the skin from her collarbone to her breasts. If the flowers on her back were the flowers of the night, these were the brilliant flowers of the day. Orange day lilies bloomed on her concave stomach, and golden petals were scattered pell-mell over her thighs.

the last book I ever read (The Vegetarian: A Novel by Han Kang, excerpt three)

from The Vegetarian: A Novel by Han Kang:

He had to wait a while for a train, it being a Sunday afternoon, and when he got on he stood near the carriage door, holding a program with the photograph from the posters printed on its cover. His wife and five-year-old son were waiting at home. His wife, he knew, would have liked for them to spend weekends together as a family, but all the same he’d set aside a half day to see the performance. Would he get anything out of it? He’d known that, more than likely, he would only end up disillusioned yet again—that in the end, it was the only possible outcome. And now that was exactly what had happened. How on earth could a complete stranger be expected to tease out the inner logic of something he himself had dreamed up, to find a way to make it come alive? The bitterness that suddenly welled up inside him was exactly the same as the feeling he’d experienced a long time ago, on watching a video work by the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. The work had been filled with scenes of promiscuous sexual practices, featuring around ten men and women, each of them daubed all over with colored paint, their greed for each other’s bodies playing out against a background of psychedelic music. They never stopped moving the whole time, flailing and floundering like fish out of water. Not that his own thirst was any less strong, of course—only he didn’t want to express it like that. Anything but that.

After a while, the train went past the apartment complex where he lived. He’d never had any intention of getting off there. He stuffed the program into his backpack, rammed both fists into the pockets of his sweater, and studied the interior of the carriage as it was reflected in the window. He had to force himself to accept that the middle-aged man, who had a baseball cap concealing his receding hairline and a baggy sweater at least attempting to do the same for his paunch, was himself.

the last book I ever read (The Vegetarian: A Novel by Han Kang, excerpt two)

from The Vegetarian: A Novel by Han Kang:

I don’t know why that woman is crying. I don’t know why she keeps staring at my face, either, as though she wants to swallow it. Or why she strokes the bandage on my wrist with her trembling hands.

My wrist is okay. It doesn’t bother me. The thing that hurts is my chest. Something is stuck in my solar plexus. I don’t know what it might be. It’s lodged there permanently these days. Even though I’ve stopped wearing a bra, I can feel this lump all the time. No matter how deeply I inhale, it doesn’t go away.

the last book I ever read (The Vegetarian: A Novel by Han Kang, excerpt one)

from The Vegetarian: A Novel by Han Kang:

“Why are you standing there like that? What’s going on?”

When I put my hand on her shoulder I was surprised by her complete lack of reaction. Rather than having been out of her mind, she’d been aware of everything—me coming out of the bedroom, my question, coming over to her. She’d simply ignored me. It was like those rare occasions when, absorbed in a late-night TV drama, she’d failed to notice me arriving home. But what could there be to absorb her attention in the pale gleam of the fridge’s white door, in the pitch-black kitchen at four in the morning?

the last book I ever read (Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939, excerpt fourteen)

from Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 by Adam Hochschild:

Francisco Franco ruled all of Spain for more than 36 years, until he died, amid signs of senility, at the age of eighty-two, a reign longer than that of Hitler, Mussolini, or Stalin. Eventually he adopted some of the trappings of Spanish royalty: entering and leaving church under a canopy, receiving ambassadors on a raised dais, and having coins struck with his image. To some of his favorites, including generals from the war, Franco passed out titles in royal fashion, creating a string of counts, marquises, and dukes. A few of these new noblemen, in a bizarre twist reminiscent of Catholic sainthood, received their titles posthumously.

His rule was, as George Orwell had observed early on, “an attempt not so much to impose Fascism as to restore feudalism.” The Catholic Church remained immensely powerful, and the position of women was far worse than in Hitler’s Germany. Women were legally considered dependents of their fathers or husbands, whose permission they needed to open a bank account, own property, file a lawsuit, apply for a job, or take a trip away from home. A husband had the right to kill his wife if he caught her committing adultery. Franco’s rule became less murderous and repressive in its later decades; Spain eventually enjoyed an economic rise and eased some of the restrictions on women and cultural expression. But torture was routine, the regime remained a police state, and until 1974, a year before the dictator’s death, it continued to execute prisoners with the garrote.

the last book I ever read (Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939, excerpt thirteen)

from Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 by Adam Hochschild:

Two weeks after La Pasionaria’s farewell to the International Brigades, Franco’s German allies offered a sign of what Europe would face under Nazi domination. On the night of November 9, throughout Germany, Austria, and the parts of Czechoslovakia Hitler now controlled, Nazi storm troopers attacked more than 1,000 synagogues and 7,000 Jewish-owned businesses, setting fires, smashing windows with axes and sledgehammers, and killing more than 90 Jews. Homes, schools, and hospitals were vandalized and tombstones in Jewish cemeteries smashed or uprooted. Laughing Nazis threw prayer books and Torah scrolls on bonfires. During Kristallnacht, as it was called because of all the broken glass, including stained-glass windows from centuries-old synagogues, fire departments were ordered to let buildings burn, and to douse the flames only if nearby “Aryan” property was threatened. A few days later, all Jewish children were barred from German schools, and some 30,000 Jewish men were taken off to Dachau, Buchenwald, and other concentration camps.

On a snowy morning six weeks later, Franco launched his last offensive. His armies were flush with new German weaponry, and his air force was bolstered by 400 German-trained pilots to whom the Condor Legion began to hand over some of its Messerschmitt fighters. In a desperate secret trip to Paris Negrín pleaded with the French foreign minister and the British and American ambassadors for help, but in vain. He had also been seeking a compromise peace through the Vatican and other channels, but Franco was not interested. Nor was he interested in attempts to mitigate the war’s toll. When the British sent a special envoy to encourage both sides in Spain to suspend executions, the Republic readily agreed, and halted all of them for some four months. Nationalist Spain, where the number of political prisoners facing the death sentence ran into the thousands, refused to do likewise.

the last book I ever read (Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939, excerpt twelve)

from Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 by Adam Hochschild:

The Czech crisis escalated throughout the month. On September 12, Hitler gave a fiery speech demanding self-determination for Czechoslovakia’s ethnic Germans. Three days later, Chamberlain rushed to confer with the Führer at his Alpine retreat of Berchtesgaden. A week later, the British prime minister paid a second visit to Hitler, whose demands only escalated. Finally, on September 29 came the Munich conference, in which the leaders of Europe’s major nations, sitting in a semicircle of armchairs around a large fireplace in the city’s palatial new Nazi Party headquarters, essentially dismembered Czechoslovakia. The others gave Hitler all he wanted—10,000 square miles of Czech territory containing some 3.5 million people, some of whom were not even ethnic Germans.

Although Chamberlain returned to London in his striped trousers and starched wing collar to claim that he had achieved “peace in our time,” it was an enormous, cost-free victory for Hitler. Czechoslovakia’s fate was all the more poignant because, almost alone among the states of Eastern Europe, it had been a thriving democracy. Franco promptly sent Chamberlain his “warmest congratulations” for his “magnificent efforts for the preservation of peace in Europe.”

the last book I ever read (Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939, excerpt eleven)

from Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 by Adam Hochschild:

Herbert Matthews was getting a shave in the barbershop of the Hotel Majestic, the base for foreign correspondents in Barcelona, when an unending series of explosions made him realize that a more deadly stage of the war was under way. The Republic’s government had recently moved to that city from Valencia. “By March, 1938,” he wrote, “we thought we knew all about bombing and shelling, but we were innocents. It took eighteen raids in forty-four hours on Barcelona to show us.”

The heaviest the world had yet seen, these raids were executed mainly by Mussolini’s bombers based on Majorca. With a port and three airfields, that Spanish island had in effect become an Italian military base, conveniently within 15 minutes’ flying time of Barcelona and Valencia. German aircraft joined the raids as well, and some of the bombs they dropped may have been manufactured in Delaware by DuPont. Starting in January, the American chemical behemoth sold at least 40,000 bombs to Germany. Since that country was not officially at war with anyone, the sale was not considered a violation of the porous US neutrality law.

the last book I ever read (Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939, excerpt ten)

from Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 by Adam Hochschild:

Begun in mid-December 1937, the battle was a damaging blow to the Nationalists, distracting Franco from his prolonged attempt to encircle and capture Madrid. In high mountain country, surrounded by bleak rocky peaks and ravines, the ancient walled city of Teruel lay at the end of the Nationalist salient whose railway line Hemingway had helped sabotage. The city itself had been the site of the kind of atrocities that took place whenever the Nationalists captured new territory and flaunted their power. In one case, 13 people judged subversive, including a twenty-year-old woman and the director of a teacher training college—teachers were always suspect—were shot in Teruel’s central square, after which people danced to band music in the victims’ blood.

The local bishop, Anselmo Polanco, objected—but only to the dancing. Otherwise, he was a fierce backer of the Nationalist cause and apparently gave permission for Franco’s troops to shoot two of his priests considered too friendly to the Republic. In August, from the balcony of his palace he had reviewed a parade by a battalion of Foreign Legionnaires who passed by carrying the noses, ears, and other body parts of murdered Republican prisoners speared on their bayonets. As an object of public humiliation, one prisoner had been left alive and forced to parade carrying a heavy load and wearing an ox’s yoke, as if he were a pack animal.

the last book I ever read (Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939, excerpt nine)

from Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 by Adam Hochschild:

Before long, the war reached a small inland city, less than ten miles from the front lines and filled with refugees fleeing the Nationalists, their belongings piled in ox carts. Guernica (today usually called by its Basque name, Gernika) had long had a special place in the history of the independent-minded Basques. Legend has it that Ferdinand and Isabella, the monarchs who helped to unify Spain, came to Guernica in 1476 and, standing beneath an oak tree, pledged to preserve ancient Basque privileges. A poet wrote a famous song dedicated to the tree. Two trees later but in the same spot, delegates had assembled in 1936 to swear in the president of an autonomous Basque territory allied with the Republic.

Late on the afternoon of April 26, 1937, a church bell tolled an air-raid warning. Some people rushed to their cellars; others, including farmers who had brought their cattle and sheep to Guernica for market day, fled to the fields outside of town. A single Nazi plane flew overhead, dropping its load of bombs on the city, and when nothing more happened, people again emerged onto the streets. At just that moment—now that the lack of fire on the first flight had revealed that Guernica had little in the way of antiaircraft defenses—the real attack came. Twenty-three Ju-52 bombers from the Condor Legion, accompanied by some two dozen other aircraft, flying in relays from bases close by, began dropping antipersonnel bombs, high explosives, and incendiaries in aluminum tubes designed to set exposed wood in smashed buildings on fire. German pilots nicknamed this mixture Generalstabsmischung, or General Staff’s Blend, and they dropped more than 30 tons of it over some three hours.

Families were buried in their houses; clouds of smoke and dust rose into the air; sheep and cattle, covered in flaming chemicals from the incendiaries, stampeded in terror through streets filled with shattered masonry. At the Santa María church, the priest managed to use communion wine to put out an incendiary, but it was a rare piece of luck on a day of destruction. As people realized that cellars would not save them from collapsing buildings and began to flee, waves of Heinkel He-51 fighter planes zoomed in low, strafing every human or animal in sight. Some 200 people were killed and many more wounded. The greater part of the city was reduced to charred, smoldering ruins. As night fell, an eerie orange glow filled the sky.

the last book I ever read (Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939, excerpt eight)

from Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 by Adam Hochschild:

Something also not legally considered armaments were trucks. Those used by Franco’s army were largely American—some 12,000 of them, purchased from General Motors, Studebaker, and Ford. (GM did Franco a huge favor by taking its payment in Nationalist pesetas, which could not be exported from Spain during the war and would have value only if Franco won.) Firestone Tires similarly sold its products to the Generalissimo’s military. An advertisement in Spain declared, “Victory smiles on the best. The glorious Nationalist army always wins on the field of battle. Firestone Tires has had its nineteenth consecutive victory in the Indianapolis 500.”

US law did, however, say that such supposedly nonmilitary products going to a country at war could not be shipped on American vessels. And here, it appeared, there was hope of cutting Franco’s oil lifeline from Texaco, for customs agents discovered that Torkild Rieber’s tankers were evading this provision of the law. The Texaco ships would leave the company’s pipeline terminal in Texas with cargo manifests showing them destined for Antwerp, Rotterdam, or Amsterdam. Only at sea would their captains open sealed instructions redirecting them to ports in Nationalist Spain.

In addition to ordering these manifests falsified, Rieber was violating another part of the law: he was extending credit to a government at war. Nominally, that credit was for 90 days from the date the oil was shipped—itself startlingly lenient terms for the oil business. The real terms were more generous yet. As Rieber’s friend the Nationalist oil official Álvarez Alonso later explained, “We paid what we could when we could, and the debt went well over the established limit.” In effect, Rieber was serving as Franco’s banker.

When FBI agents questioned him about the violations in the spring of 1937, Rieber turned on his deep-voiced sea captain’s charm and played the role of a nonpolitical businessman, explaining that he was sure the Nationalists “would be victorious and he did not want to lose the Spaniards’ business which amounted to from $3,000,000 to $5,000,000 per year.” The FBI apparently did not realize that Rieber’s company was also acting as Franco’s purchasing agent, when the Nationalists needed goods not in Texaco’s inventory. Only decades later, as we shall see, would archives reveal other extraordinary favors the oil company did for Franco.

the last book I ever read (Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939, excerpt seven)

from Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 by Adam Hochschild:

Texaco had become Spain’s principal oil supplier the year before the Nationalist coup. When Franco and his fellow conspirators made their grab for power, Rieber decided not to follow his contract with the Republican government’s state oil company, but to make a deal with the new autocrat on the scene. Knowing that military trucks, tanks, and aircraft need not only fuel but a range of engine oils and other lubricants, he quickly ordered a supply of drums and cans of these on hand at the French port of Bordeaux to be loaded into an empty Texaco tanker and shipped to the Nationalists.

As often happens, political feelings were reinforced by a personal tie. The friendship was between Rieber and a much younger man, José Antonio Álvarez Alonso, a twenty-eight-year-old English-speaking official of the Spanish government oil company. When that organization had signed its contract with Texaco in 1935, it bought a Texaco tanker, and the Spaniard traveled to the corporation’s pipeline terminal at Port Arthur, Texas, to mark the occasion and meet Texaco’s new chairman. Álvarez Alonso was an enthusiast of his country’s Fascist movement, the Falange Española, and as Rieber showed him around the ship, the two men hit it off, realizing they saw the world the same way. The Texaco chieftain invited his new friend back to the United States a few months later, to attend an oil industry meeting in Los Angeles. After the Nationalist uprising began in 1936, Republican-held Madrid became a dangerous place for Fascists, and Álvarez Alonso fled to France. He knew the Nationalists would be short of oil, and from Marseille sent a telegram to William M. Brewster, Texaco’s representative in the French capital. Immediately a reply came back: COME TO PARIS. CAPTAIN RIEBER IS HERE AND WOULD LIKE TO SEE YOU.

the last book I ever read (Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939, excerpt six)

from Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 by Adam Hochschild:

“The most controversial of them all,” in Gurney’s words, was “full of hearty and bogus bonhomie. He sat himself down behind the bullet-proof shield of a machine-gun and loosed off a whole belt of ammunition in the general direction of the enemy. This provoked a mortar bombardment for which he did not stay.”

The visitor was Ernest Hemingway, thirty-seven years old and already one of the most celebrated authors alive. Having written his first two novels and classic short stories in the 1920s, his life had become partly taken over by the persona he had developed for himself, as brash and flamboyant as his early work was spare and understated. He was now profiled and photographed big-game hunting, hanging out with bullfighters, machine-gunning sharks, and landing giant marlin. Some of this he-man façade crept into his writing as well. It had been eight years since he had published a novel, two recent nonfiction books had drawn some bad reviews, and critics—and perhaps Hemingway himself—were wondering if he had lost his touch. “He appears,” wrote the poet John Peale Bishop, “to have turned into a composite of all those photographs . . . sunburned from snows, on skis; in fishing get-up, burned dark from the hot Caribbean; the handsome, stalwart hunter crouched smiling over the carcass of some dead beast.”

Although until then one of the least political of American writers—in the midst of the Great Depression he had written a book about safaris in Africa and he had not bothered to vote in the 1936 election—Hemingway had an almost proprietary love for Spain. A trip there had been the basis for The Sun Also Rises, the novel that first made the world notice him, and he had returned often, seeing Spanish friends and gathering material for Death in the Afternoon, his book about bullfighting. He was enraged by the Nationalist coup, which he saw as an act of great violence against a culture he loved. He also identified with the young Americans who had volunteered to fight, just as he had volunteered, less than a year out of high school, as a Red Cross ambulance driver in the First World War.

The Spanish war seemed made for him. “In Spain maybe it’s the big parade starting again,” he wrote to a journalist he knew. He even dressed the part, as if to recapture the days of his youth. When his friend the novelist Josephine Herbst met him in besieged Madrid, she found him wearing “a kind of khaki uniform with high polished boots.” He saved fragments of shells that hit the city’s Hotel Florida, where he stayed, marking on them the numbers of the rooms they had destroyed, and making one dud shell into a lamp.

“He was bigger than life,” wrote the Lincoln physician William Pike, “—generous, scrupulously honest and dedicated to his work but lurking somewhere was a mean-spirited, uncertain, frightened, aggressive child, overly impressed with physical courage, [with] a need to, over and over again, prove himself a ‘man.’ . . . He told me he had no use for psychiatry, others needed it, not he—to go to a psychoanalyst was a confession of weakness.”

the last book I ever read (Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939, excerpt five)

from Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 by Adam Hochschild:

As he took over the training of the Americans, Merriman lectured them on what he could remember from ROTC: scouting, signaling, map reading (though they had no proper maps), throwing grenades, and digging trenches. He showed the recruits how to take apart and reassemble machine guns and some bulletless Canadian rifles, more than 30 years old, they had been given for training.

The unit’s morale was low: endless lectures about politics were no substitute for live ammunition, there were too few blankets for the winter nights, and some men were beginning to feel uneasy because Marty’s staff had confiscated their passports “for safekeeping.” A few weeks earlier, Pat Gurney, more savvy than these newcomers, had managed to hide his own. Eventually, some 580 American volunteers would report “lost” passports to the State Department. The Soviets wanted these for their own purposes. A Canadian volunteer’s passport, for example, would be used by the Soviet agent who assassinated Leon Trotsky in Mexico in 1940.

the last book I ever read (Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939, excerpt four)

from Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 by Adam Hochschild:

“To us he was just Eric . . . one of a small band of foreigners, mostly British, fighting on the Aragon Front.” Talking with Charles and a British colleague in the POUM office, Eric Blair decided to abandon his plan to enlist in the International Brigades—the force being recruited by the world’s Communist parties—and instead join the POUM militia, which was manning the front line against Franco’s troops in nearby Aragon.

“Eric,” Charles wrote, “was tall, lean and gangling, to the point of being awkward. . . . He was tongue-tied, stammered and seemed to be afraid of people.” Tongue-tied the newcomer might be in conversation, but he was not so in print, where he wrote under the name of George Orwell.

It is unsurprising that the Orrs were not familiar with his name, for at this point in his life—he was thirty-three—Orwell was little known even in England. He had been supporting himself mostly by working part-time in a bookstore and by running a small grocery shop out of his home. (On his POUM militia enlistment papers, he put down his occupation as “grocer.”) The work that would first bring him wide public notice, The Road to Wigan Pier, a close-up look at poverty in the industrial north of England, he had finished before he left for Spain, but it was not yet published. The book he would write about his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia, would eventually become the most widely read memoir of this conflict in any language.

the last book I ever read (Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939, excerpt three)

from Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 by Adam Hochschild:

Franco promptly dispatched envoys to the two European leaders he was confident would help, Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. The emissaries to Germany were received just after Hitler had attended a performance of Wagner’s Siegfried at the opera festival in Bayreuth. The Führer was wearing his brown storm-trooper’s uniform; the rest of his entourage, in evening dress, were kept waiting for their supper while he met with Franco’s representatives. They gave him a handwritten letter and map from the general. After several hours’ talk—much of it a monologue from Hitler, who was still annoyed that Spain had stayed neutral in the First World War—the dictator agreed to supply whatever Franco needed. He then summoned Air Marshal Hermann Göring and ordered him to send more planes than Franco had asked for.

Within a few days the first of them were on their way to Spanish Morocco, and soon they were ferrying Franco’s troops, and before long the general himself, across the Strait of Gibraltar to Spain. In a bow to the opera the senior Nazis had just watched, in which the fearless Siegfried passes heroically through flames to wake Brünnhilde from a deep sleep, the dispatch of German transport planes would be called Operation Magic Fire. For Hitler, resentful of being disdained by the Western democracies since he had come to power three and a half years earlier, it was a delight to have another country’s military ask for his aid.

the last book I ever read (Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939, excerpt two)

from Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 by Adam Hochschild:

Outside Spain, however, fascism was on the march. In 1935, eager for territory to fit his dreams of a new imperial Rome, Benito Mussolini launched an invasion of Ethiopia. As one of the few parts of Africa that remained uncolonized, the territory appeared ripe for conquest. Backed up by tanks, bombers, and poison gas, nearly half a million Italian soldiers steadily gained ground against an ill-equipped Ethiopian army. Since the victims were Africans, in Europe and North America the reaction was muted, amounting to little more than disapproving newspaper editorials. Black Americans, however, felt strongly: some 3,000 people packed a Harlem church for a protest rally; black communities raised funds and sent bandages and supplies for a 75-bed field hospital. Several thousand men enlisted in a “Black Legion” of volunteers and began training to fight for embattled Ethiopia, although logistics and opposition from the US government would make this impossible. Several American cities saw street fighting between blacks and Italian Americans, and angry crowds in Harlem wrecked or boycotted shops and bars with Italian names.

By mid-1936 the Italian dictator’s black-shirted troops controlled the entire territory, and the war was over. The civilian and military death toll, estimated at 275,000, was so high that it was said Mussolini wanted Ethiopia with or without Ethiopians. Despite an eloquent plea by the bearded, diminutive Emperor Haile Selassie, the major powers did nothing. “It is us today,” the emperor told the Assembly of the League of Nations. “It will be you tomorrow.”

the last book I ever read (Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939, excerpt one)

from Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 by Adam Hochschild:

Even in the United States, proto-Fascist movements were flaunting their presence. Twenty thousand Americans of German descent joined the German-American Bund and went to summer camps for military drill in brown storm-trooper uniforms. The group staged mass rallies at Madison Square Garden and elsewhere modeled on those of the Nazis. The great majority of Italian-American newspapers and organizations were enthusiastic backers of Mussolini, and several hundred young Italian Americans sailed for the home country to volunteer for his army. In Atlanta alone, 20,000 whites joined the Order of the Black Shirts, also known as the American Fascisti, which terrorized people of color. Meanwhile, 16 million Americans, most of them non-Catholics, listened to the “radio priest” Father Charles E. Coughlin, a fist-shaking anti-Semitic orator with a voice of gold. “He could carry an audience, rub their emotions raw and juggle them at will,” wrote one reporter who watched him address a huge crowd ringed by young male followers in uniforms and puttees. “His voice was a clear tenor with an operatic ring, there was a pent-up savagery in each of his sentences which he punctuated with his arm like the downward thrust of a stiletto.” Although Coughlin had started off on the left, as the 1930s went on he found ever more to admire in Hitler and Mussolini, and attacked President Roosevelt for being in thrall to both Jewish Communists and Jewish bankers.