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Barbara
Kingsolver’s books and essays hold a seminal place in the lexicon of
contemporary American literature. Her widely read non-fiction writings,
including her most recent, “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle,” are
rich with commentary on workers’ struggles, our relationship to nature,
and the search for a better world. But while her essays are valuable,
her novels are gems, portraying working-class characters, places, and
historical events in as vivid and enthralling a style as those of any
author alive today. Now Kingsolver has turned her pen to a new subject:
Leon Trotsky.
“The
Lacuna” (HarperCollins,
2009) is not a study of Trotsky per se. Written like a journal, the
story follows a protagonist, Harrison Shepherd, who grows up with his
mother in Mexico after she leaves his American father. The mother is
shown as a debauched opportunist chasing after powerful oil men and
diplomats, allowing herself to be used as a
mistress, to her ultimate ironic detriment and tragedy. Harrison
himself becomes disillusioned early, as the family is first trapped on
an island at the estate of a wealthy tycoon, then
later moved to a tiny flat in Mexico City.
Through
Harrison’s accounts, we witness a
number of important historical events that you won’t find in the
average U.S. high school history
textbook. The first of these occurs while he and his mother are living
on Isla Pixol: the
end of the three-year-long Cristero War. This
was a rebellion initiated by the Catholic Church against secular
reforms enacted by the revolutionary 1917 Constitution, which seized
extensive church landholdings and placed restrictions on education and
clerical activities of the Church. On June
21, 1929, “the church bells rang all day ... calling back the priests
with their gold rings, landholdings, and sovereignty intact.”
After
moving to Mexico City, Harrison sees a servant girl
carrying a bird cage on her back, accompanying a diminutive but fiery
woman: “when she turned, her skirts and silver earrings whirled and her
face was very startling, an Azteca queen with
ferocious black eyes.” This is none other than Frida
Kahlo, artist and wife of “the much-discussed
painter” and communist Diego Rivera. After seeing Rivera’s in-progress
murals in the National Palace, Harrison resolves to work for him.
There
is an interlude in which Harrison is sent to boarding school in Washington, D.C. Aside from picking up some
of the gringo culture he has missed out on, he witnesses the bloody
massacre of World War I veterans by infantry and tanks under General MacArthur in 1932. In one journal entry, we are
treated to a description of the shooting and saber-slicing of
unemployed patriots in view of thousands of civil servants.
Following
this episode, one of Harrison’s journals is missing—ostensibly burned, we
are led to believe, because it contained the details of a sexual affair
with a fellow male student. Thus, the next scenes return us to Mexico when Harrison is 19 and once again
working full-time for Rivera and Kahlo.
It
is here that we meet Lev Davidovich (Leon
Trotsky) along with his wife Natalya,
personal assistant Van (Jean Van Heijenoort),
and several U.S. Trotskyists. From Harrison's
vantage point as a cook for the Riveras, we
are given a window into the daily life of the Trotskys:
their grief as their children and friends are murdered one by one by
agents of Stalin, news of the Moscow show trials, the ravenous
propaganda of the bourgeois press about “the villain in our midst.”
Several journal entries are dedicated to the Commission of Inquiry into
the charges against Trotsky organized by the U.S. Socialist Workers
Party and chaired by John Dewey. There is even treatment of the
surrealist art movement. This is all in the historical record, but
written as richly poetic memoir.
Eventually,
Harrison's penchant for record-keeping
is discovered by Lev, and he is promoted to the position of the
Commissar's personal secretary. But the pressures of life with the Riveras pile up, first in the form of an affair
between Frida and Lev, and eventually
resulting in a split between Lev and Diego that prompts the former to
move six blocks away, to the final Casa Trotsky. Harrison moves too,
continuing to afford us an exciting window into historical characters
and events, culminating in the first nearly-successful attempt on
Trotsky's life by Stalinist agents including Mexican painter David
Alfaro Siqueiros. Finally, there is the vivid
and tragic scene in which Ramon Mercador,
under the alias Jacson Mornard
and unsuspected of ill will by the house residents, buries an ice ax in
Trotsky's skull.
After
Trotsky, the setting transitions abruptly to Asheville, North Carolina, in the author's own neck
of the woods. The link is a shipment of Frida's
paintings that Harrison is sent to steward to New York, along with a lengthy
interjection by the “archivist” Violet Brown, ostensibly the postmortem
editor of Harrison's journals, explaining how he came to reinvent his
life in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
The
book becomes a bit more tedious here, largely composed of letters and
both historical and fictional news articles, woven together to advance
the story through evolving U.S. political culture of the 1940s. The
plot largely hinges around the racist propaganda and rumor-mongering of
the press, a theme being that they hold much responsibility for
approving the civil rights violations that start with Japanese
internment and are to culminate in the 1950s Red scare of McCarthyism.
One can draw parallels to current bourgeois news media.
Unfortunately,
Kingsolver's political misunderstandings show through in a confused
treatment of the Trotskyist position on World
War II. SWP-led antiwar demonstrations are mentioned, but Harrison
ponders of Lev, “he would abhor Roosevelt's friendly partnership with
Marshal Stalin. ... But wouldn't he agree with the president, that sacrifice
must be made toward the ideal?”
The
Fourth International, the worldwide socialist federation that was
Trotsky's lasting legacy, never gave support to the imperialist powers
of the U.S. or Britain in World War II despite their alliance with the
USSR, but rather maintained its position for the overthrow of those
powers by the working class.
Harrison
himself manages to stay out of the war (unfit to serve due to “sexual
deviance”), and after a stint in civilian service, begins his career as
a popular fiction writer. But even through good fortune we see the
inevitable coming, as the noose of post-war anticommunism draws tighter
around him, eventually costing him nearly everything.
A
major importance of Kingsolver’s new work is that it will expose millions
of mainstream readers to a view of history with which few are familiar.
“The Lacuna,” though
a fictional story, succeeds in correcting the dogma equating communism
with Stalinism. Rescuing Lev Davidovich from
anonymity seems to almost happen accidentally, a part of a larger drama
that is life and art.
“The
Lacuna” deserves
prominent consideration in the resurgent discussion around Trotsky’s
life and work currently taking place. It also deserves reading simply
as a beautiful and intimate adventure story.
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