In late 1936, the expatriate American writer Henry Miller famously declared to the English novelist George Orwell, who was passing through Paris en route to the battlefront, that he “felt no interest in the Spanish war whatever.”Footnote ¹ Miller was surely in the minority of a minority. The vast majority of the noted literati of his generation were partisans of the “Good Fight” against the Fascist aggression that followed the early 1936 election victory of the Popular Front government of the fledgling Spanish Republic. By comparison, only a ragtag few (Hilaire Belloc, Roy Campbell) expressed sympathy for the monarchist general Francisco Franco and his backers, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. And even fewer embraced the quietism of Miller.

Peter Carroll, long associated with the publications and archive of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the collective rubric for military as well as nonmilitary pro-Republican volunteers from the United States, is concerned primarily with describing the motives, background, and experiences of the ordinary citizens drawn to the battlefields of the “Last Great Cause.” But writers, especially Ernest Hemingway, and others who achieved notoriety (the composer Conlon Nancarrow, the artist Ralph Fasanella, the wine connoisseur Hank Rubin) pepper the narrative, and sometimes serve as chapter subjects, usually to underscore the talent and quality of the anti-Fascist partisans and also to dramatize the postwar persecution that stalked their lives. Other sections are devoted to broader topics, such as “American Women in the Spanish Civil War,” “Psychology and Ideology in the Spanish Civil War,” and The Myth of the Moscow Archives.”

What is attractive about this volume is Carroll's effort, also evidenced in his earlier award-winning The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Americans in the Spanish Civil War (1994), to see the actors in the framework of the intellectual and political contexts in which they struggled. Yet there is an acknowledged constraint. Carroll explains that to some extent he was forced to approach his material from a particular angle due to the predominant Cold War narrative that shaped perceptions after the late 1940s. Originally, the Spanish conflict was thought to be a prelude to World War II, setting partisans of democracy against the far right; later, it was depicted as a near parallel struggle of Communist dupes against Fascism. Thus Carroll's book is justified as part of a corrective

He acknowledges that the approach with which he is aligned “plays down the role of the Communists or the sectarian splits among leftists groups” (14).

This is all to the good when it results in a more precise comprehension of the experience, which occurs principally when Carroll stays away from the politics of the left. In contrast, the more problematic intricacies are not pursued in depth but handled almost flippantly, as when he commends Alvah Bessie's 1939 Men in Battle, an excellent memoir of the war experience, as the outstanding aid to “clarifying the issues” in the “confusing ideological struggles” (146). Readers of either Carroll or Bessie will surely wonder about some missing pieces.

Inasmuch as the controversy over Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) is so central, who, exactly, was André Marty? Why was Hemingway's depiction of him so controversial? And what do we know today about the accuracy or inaccuracy of this depiction? Was Dolores Ibárruri (“La Pasionaria”) the one-sidedly saintly figure the authors depict? Is there some merit in the substantial Marxist and anarchist scholarship insisting that an authentic social revolution was under way after 1936 in Catalonia and elsewhere, spearheaded by a dissident communist organization (the Workers Party of Marxist Unification, never mentioned) that began as larger than the official Communists? Carroll is also cavalier in treating political antagonists. Are Cold War anticommunist liberals like Lionel Trilling to be dismissed by the epithet “Trotskyite” (5, 127)? The repetition of some of the glibber points in the book is irritating, although not a crime.

Where the book suffers, then, is not from the author's conviction that the volunteers were on the better side of history, deserving a place of honor in textbooks and memorials. Rather, it is from a belief that this legacy is so fragile that it would be destroyed if one started turning over all the rocks, bringing serious complexity to a topic too often caught up in polarized perspectives. At the time of the Spanish Civil War, as now, the left was far from monolithic, and a failure to see the controversies from different sides of the intellectual street may do more to assist the longevity of the conservative Cold War narrative than to refute it.