Homage to William Herrick

As late as the 1960s, the Spanish civil war still stirred passionate memory on several continents. Today, it is remembered, if at all, as a rehearsal for World War II. The Axis powers, Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, provided arms, air fleets, and soldiers to assist the right-wing forces of Francisco Franco in their fight against a “democratic” republic, itself aided by Stalin’s Soviet Union, a threadbare collection of “International Brigades” under Russian discipline, and then-leftist Mexico. The Spanish republic lost the war, in large part because Soviet assistance was intended to facilitate the capture of a Western European satellite country, in the soon-to-be mold of East Germany, rather than to help the Spanish left defend itself.

One reason the Spanish conflict roused passions is that it was a writers’ and intellectuals’ war. Ernest Hemingway and André Malraux made stagy appearances for the left; the South African versifier Roy Campbell wrote flamboyant poetry in praise of the Francoists; and, of course, George Orwell produced “Homage to Catalonia,” recounting his experiences as an anti-Franco combatant, as well as his shock and disillusionment to discover that the Soviet “allies” who had come to Spain were mainly intent on suppressing unorthodox revolutionaries and even killing leftists who would not toe the Russian line.

William Herrick was neither a Hemingway, already packing a big-time reputation when he arrived in Madrid, nor a Malraux, with his dramatic poses–nor even an Orwell, who had completed the memoir “Down and Out in Paris and London,” three novels, and the mordant reportage “The Road to Wigan Pier” by the time he went to Spain.

Herrick, born William Horvitz, in Trenton, N.J., was the son of Jewish immigrants from the Tsarist empire. His parents adhered to the Communist ideology that Herrick would eventually describe as “a kind of brainwashing, . . . a religion. The world’s worst.” After graduating from high school in the middle of the Great Depression, he embarked on an odyssey unexceptional for his generation, traveling “on the bum” by riding freight trains; participating in an anarchist communal experiment; and finding work in the New York fur trade, dominated by a violent, gangster-style Communist trade union, the Fur and Leather Workers.

The Spanish civil war began in July 1936. Spain was in turmoil. It was Western Europe’s weakest link, and the revolutionary excitement present across the industrial nations, caused by the seemingly imminent collapse of capitalism, had fostered strikes and insurrections, as well as terrorism by both left and right. For all onlookers, the Spanish clash had epic qualities: The right saw the Spanish officer corps, which had begun the war by rising against the leftist regime, as crusaders protecting the country and its noble traditions from anarchic brutality. Liberals and leftists perceived the working classes of the great cities, Barcelona and Madrid, as holding back the tide of fascist degradation, almost literally bare-handed.

In November 1936 it appeared Madrid might fall to Franco, and Herrick volunteered for a Soviet-run International Brigade. He was assigned to a unit mostly made up of untrained American youths, the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, commonly known as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. The mistitling was not accidental; a Spanish brigade comprised three to four battalions, and the Communists exaggerated their role in the effort.

On February 23, 1937, during fighting near Madrid, Herrick was shot in the neck. The bullet lodged one-sixteenth of an inch from his spinal cord, and could not be removed. He was sent back to the United States, but what he had seen in the ranks of the Communist forces made it impossible for him to remain much longer a loyal supporter of the movement. The Hitler-Stalin pact of August 1939 was the last straw. He protested against Moscow’s new alliance and was blacklisted from the Fur and Leather Workers’ Union.

Herrick resumed his wandering ways, trying various trades and spending time in Hollywood, where he got to know Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth. He married Jeannette, who would be his wife for 54 years and now survives him. At some point, he began working as a court reporter and writing at night, although his first novel, “The Itinerant,” was published only in 1966. His great work was his third novel, “Hermanos!”, which came out in 1969.

“Hermanos!”–Spanish for “brothers”–was one of a very short list of books by Americans that ripped the veil away from the propaganda legend about Communist heroism in the Spanish war. As Herrick recounted, the American volunteers went into battle without sufficient preparation, and died in horrific numbers. They were not even trained to avoid bunching up in groups, an instinctive action for people under fire but one that makes them easier targets. The “Lincoln” heroes were sent to an ignominious death by stone-hearted commissars.

In a later book, an unembellished memoir entitled “Jumping the Line: The Adventures and Misadventures of an American Radical,” he revealed the other terrible secret of the American Communists who went to Spain: that they had been used as executioners of dissenting Spanish leftists. After all, they had none of the local loyalties that made it difficult for the Russians to use Spaniards themselves for such tasks, and the American Communists’ dedication to Stalin could not be doubted.

Herrick was the exception. The ghastly betrayal of leftist promises he had seen in Spain forced him to tell his story, and even led him to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. He was labeled a “snitch” by his ex-Communist associates, who themselves smilingly covered up the atrocities of the Kremlin.

Courageous dedication to truth is seldom adequately rewarded. In publicity put out by the New Directions Publishing Corporation, which issued his later novels, Herrick’s death was overshadowed by the centenary of Pablo Neruda, the Stalinist poet who assisted in the plot to murder Trotsky. The paperback edition of “Jumping the Line” has come out from a San Francisco publisher that, without irony, specializes in books promoting anarchist terrorism. The New York Times devoted 163 words to Herrick’s passing.

Yet Bill Herrick was one of those whose lives, and whose writings, must not be neglected if we are to understand the century from which we have just emerged, as well as the century before us.

Stephen Schwartz, a frequent contributor, coauthored the 1988 study of the Spanish civil war “Spanish Marxism vs. Soviet Communism” with the late Catalan historian Victor Alba.