A Country Such As This, by James Webb

...He made sick men with broken weapons into the second guerrilla force in the Sierra...

...Latin America can regain the socialism of the Incas...

...The original was, one would have thought, ideal raw material for a novelist...

...A Country Such As This tells of one generation in the life of a country James Webb loves...

...That is a possibility that the West simply cannot afford to dismiss, for fate may tarry...

...He is also a writer disinclined to parade his own valor up and down the main street of his readers' imaginations, a man taken up with the lives of others--of the young troops he led in Vietnam, of the _9 veterans he has championed as a lawyer and congressional aide, of his family and friends, and of the characters in his novels...

...There are flashbacks within flashbacks, reworking of entries from Guevara's own writings with " r e a l " quotations cunningly threaded in, segments of shooting scripts and movie treatments, playlets featuring characters named Scum Mouth, Big Ass, Shit Head, Dog's Breath plus quick takes of a half century of recent political history...

...Webb is popular, all right--but how could the critics fault his shrewd perception and his near flawless craftsmanship...

...None of which qualities, alas, applies to Cantor's "diaries...

...They don't need North American barbarism, North American industry...

...That's quite a haul, even for 534 pages, and even for James Webb, who--true to form after Fields o f Fire and A Sense of Honor--misses little detail yet wastes few words...

...Cantor's Indians are pseudo-mythic presences, owing more to Carlos Castenada than to any direct observation of the Indians of the altiplano...

...With his gnarled look and his mousy, gray-tinged hair, he could have been anywhere from thirty to sixty years old...

...The villagers, once they have conquered their bodies, can live in voluntary simplicity...

...My chest shook...

...qui's two books, Diary of the Cuban Revolution (1977) and above all in the recent Family Portrait with FideL Franqui, archivist of the Cuban Revolution, comrade-in-arms of Castro and Guevara in the revolution's heyday, went o f f in 1968 into permanent exile in Italy, having decided that Fidel had betrayed Cuba, the Revolution, and Franqui...

...A lone sentence dropped in Webb's offhand description of that minor incident sums up what James Webb stands against and what his novelist's eye can see that too much of America, a country such as this, has let itself become: "The driver of the other car was walking around holding his neck, feigning whiplash...

...labored "You go Korea soon...

...Cantor primarily appears concerned with all that is failure in Guevara's life...

...Webb himself is a certified American hero, graduate of Annapolis (class of 1968, a year which he says in Country "went through America like a chainsaw out of control"), Marine Corps company commander in Vietnam, twice wounded: Navy Cross, Silver Star Medal, two Bronze Stars, two Purple Hearts, National Achievement Medal--the works...

...Thus, in Country, Judd Smith stumbles from Marine Corps hero to FBI agent to podunk preacher, wounded more by a troubled marriage than by Chinese bullets in Korea or by a gun blast from a fugitive criminal...

...The asthmatic childhood, the traveling about Latin America (a lark according to Guevara's letters to friends and family, but treated by Cantor as veritable Stations of the Cross--a long ordeal of asthma attacks, dirt, stench, vomit, bile, and misery), the Granma expedition, and the early days of the Cuban adventure culminating in the 2Franqui's Family Portrait with Fidel is well worth reading for the one scene alone in which he describes Castro at the outset of the Cuban Missile Crisis punching a control button in the Soviet electronic station in Cuba to shoot down an American U-2 plane with a ground-to-air missile...

...That's the Webb touch, whether he's nailing your attention to a combat scene, or just evoking your wonder at the quiet heroism of normal human endurance...

...Adventurer, d o c t o r , apocalyptic visionary, would-be poet, a mystic who had no God (dixit Regis Debray), viscerally hostile to the United States, intensely political, personally engaging, witty, attractive-the intellectual who died as a man of Cynthia Grenier, a movie producer, maintains an ongoing interest in matters Latin American...

...But they would then kill us all indifferently...

...He is almost ruthless in his depiction of human foibles, yet never gives in to an easy cynicism, for he knows what humans are made of...

...One might cavil at portions of Webb's third novel, A Country Such As This...

...A man of great ingenuity as well as splendid character, Webb displays in his fiction a keen sense of human motivation...

...not the affirmative directness of the achiever who must win, but the simple tenacity of a man who has never won and thus does not really even think about winning, but rather sees life as a daily refusal to be beaten...

...But we already know from the short prologue, set in 1976, that only one of them will be at the Old Town Tavern (formerly Mario's Bar) 25 years after the promise, sipping the Scotch alone, scarred by those 25 years, and quietly missing his two friends...

...No, you said, you must not tremble...

...By cutting directly from failure preHavana to the impending failure in Bolivia, Cantor deprives the reader of any perspective on the Bolivian venture or on the man himself...

...Webb soeures a tight pace by channeling the sprawl of his narrative through the tributaries of three principal characters, classmates at the Naval Academy...

...Cantor lengthens the entries with many stage directions: Guerrillas are constantly screaming, crying, yelping when they're not whimpering or wailing...

...Joe Dingenfelder gives up his own happiness in a hopeless attempt to bring happiness to his wife Dorothy, herself caught up in the shrill demands of her THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1984 41 temperament and the flaky insistence of her New Age politics...

...All that is success, power, glory is rigorously scrubbed from the novel, which means effacing a lot of interesting not to say essential political history...

...No excuses, unless you're dead...

...He had clear blue eyes and a certain set in his square, creased face, a posture to it, the thin mouth wide and firm, unyielding, the hollows of his cheeks and the slight tilt of his head a promise that he meant exactly what he said, and the world be damned all to hell...

...His Guevara through all of these 578 pages is a whiny, father-dominated, asthmatic, meanspirited, humorless wimp whose god is Mahatma Gandhi, of all people...

...Robert Anderson, the American pilot, would be the only fatality in that war...

...Ignoring a modern preference for literary sludge, both novels nonetheless drew kudos from critics...

...Just the three of us...

...He was ungovernable...

...He raised the level of the w a r . . . Fidel, ever the pragmatist, later used Che's innovations...

...He would defend the Soviet Union and the Cuban Communist Party, while I attacked them...

...We don't yet know who returns--Webb drops enough hints in the prologue to suggest, in retrospect, any one of the three--but we aren't too far into the rest of the novel before Webb makes it matter, deeply, that not all these three young men are going to reach age 47...

...Karl Marx, Vladimir I. Lenin, and Fidel Castro are, well, almost incidental...

...In short, the perfect paradigm for the decade of which he literally became the symbol...

...For him, they were synonymous with socialism . . . . Fidel would say that soon enough I would see Che arguing with and fighting against the Communists in the same way he disagreed with me...

...Red and Sophia Lesczynski both have, above all, each other, their children, and a close-knit Polish-American community in Pennsylvania, a place to come to amid the frequent displacements of Red's military career, but a hometown threatened by labor troubles and bewildering social change...

...or the anachronism that butts into the raw diction of a Korean War serviceman (in the early 1950s, American males didn't yet speak with ironic passivity of "getting laid...

...A true artist, Webb "lets g o " his characters, content to watch in fascination as they work out their destinies under the burden of their weaknesses and the fickleness o f events...

...and Joseph Dingenfelder, Jewish and vaguely intellectual, is the sensitive one, ready for a Navysponsored stint at M1T...

...Cantor's creative writing: Anyway you look at it, Che made himself into a guerrilla leader through force of will;~ talent, and sheer audacity...

...THE DEATH OF CHE GUEVARA Jay Cantor/Alfred A. Knopf/$17.95 FAMILY PORTRAIT WITH FIDEL Carlos Franqui/Random House/S17.95 Cynthia Grenier Any man who writes a 578-page post-modernist novel with the eponymous hero one of the icons of our age certainly desires to be taken seriously...

...With noncooperation the imperialists will evaporate like specters...

...All this is compressed into those years in Guevara's life already extensively documented by Guevara himself, by biographer Daniel James, and Guevara's first wife Hildea Gadea...

...A COUNTRY SUCH AS THIS James Webb/Doubleday/$17.95 John R. Dunlap "Why is everyone lying around like co wed puppies, peeing on their own tummies...

...The Russians were flabbergasted, but Fidel simply said, 'Well, now we'll see if there's a war or not.' " near disaster at Algeria di Pio, and, of course, the final Bolivian campaign...

...The Latin American Revolution does not require violence, only noncooperation with the Imperialists, with their panderings to our lusts...

...The cultural detail, though lush and resonant, clunks now and then with some off-key dialogue: e.g., the accent of a Japanese whose English is inconsistently broken (advancing within six pages from the preposterous "You are surprise 1 speak your ranguage" to the perfect "General MacArthur came to Yokohama after he landed at Atsugi" back to the John R. Dunlap teaches English at the University of Santa Clara...

...How did Guevara and his fellow-committed Communist friend Raul Castro jockey for power against the Cuban Communist party with whom they had virtually warred during the whole time in the Sierra Maestra (Franqui's Diary of the Cuban Revolution richly documents the struggle...

...And what a curious Guevara we have...

...rather, they were related to Che's independence of spirit...

...Jay Cantor, who was 17 when a Bolivian Army Sergeant killed Ernesto Che Guevara with a burst from an M-2 carbine, ambitiously pulls out every literary stop he can...

...Jamds Webb is such an author--a popular novelist whom critics can't ignore, despite his penchant for coherent plots, genuine heroes, and the celebration of virtues which, in the root sense of the word virtue, are manly as well as admirable...

...What of his economic policies, his concept of non-material incentives, his losing jousts with economist Charles Bettleheim, his theorizing about the creation of the New Man, his travels abroad, his meetings with Chou en Lai, Khrushchev, Ben Bella, his relations--all important--with Fidel...

...action...

...2 One of Guevara's cameo appearances in Franqui's book gives more material, raises more questions, intrigues far more than all the many pages of Mr...

...a sprawling, boisterous, tender, violent, sad, funny, agonizing tale of the good and the bad, the lovely and the ugly, the great and the small in a nation of grand ideals and grandiose uncertainties...

...Che and I had many arguments during that period...

...Latin American country people don't need manufactured goods...

...A view which gives rise to such passages as: The truth is in the villages...

...From his depiction of authentic characters buffeted by real events, Webb achieves a moving commentary on the character of a whole nation...

...His new book is a series of brief, vivid, informal, impressionistic views, a series of "takes" of Fidel in action during his first eight years in power, supplemented by glimpses of some of the other players, like Raul Castro, whom he loathes, and Guevera whom he esteems...

...His second novel, A Sense of Honor (1981 ), chronicles six hectic days in the lives of Annapolis midshipmen and junior officers, during which a wavering plebe must work out an answer to a blunt question proffered by an energetic first classman: "Are you bigger than your goddamn self...

...a military backdrop affording his brushstrokes a canvas whose texture he knows intimately...

...I slammed my foot down on the pavement, smashing one under foot and not blood but milky-white juice ran from it, like sperm...

...I n Country, Webb repeats the technical formula of his two previous novels: a prologue neatly anticipating the novel's mood, mise-en-scene, and consequent action...

...As for any sense of what Cuba, Guatemala Bolivia, or Argentina are like, the reader will look in vain...

...For a sample, try this description of a minor character in Country: He was not a big man but he had a sort of power in him...

...We'll drink the Scotch and count each other's wrinkles and tell lies...

...Stanislaus (Red) Lesczynski, Polish-American and Catholic, is the proper one, due shortly to marry his Sophia before entering Naval flight school...

...They would never limit their greed until we destroyed them utterly, crushed their heads...

...42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1984...

...On Graduation Day in 1951, Judd Smith, Red Lesczynski, and Joe Dingenfelder--inseparable as midshipmen--look forward now to separate choices of assignment...

...Big Red Lesczynski I n modern fiction, popular acclaim and critical acclaim jibe infrequently, so it's exciting when a new author comes along who attracts both...

...And that was a fact, but Che's enlightenment is another story...

...He carried out the first raids into the lowlands . . . . Within the free zone he set up factories, bakeries, hospitals, arms-repair shops, and Radio Rebelde--aU with supplies sent by the urban underground...

...a studied omniscient viewpoint allowing him to set the private doubts of his characters in supple counterpoint to their actions...

...A Persian Gulf crisis--it takes no imagination to imagine one--could send Islam's stock soaring once more, enticing many Muslims down off their fences...

...Each Andean village was an organ whose veins were the Inca roads...

...We are left to suppose that Americans make up a nation worthy of love, intense loyalty, and genuine pride--in a word, patriotism--yet a nation in whose character quite a bit has gone awry...

...A harsh wind took me over and made my body tremble...

...Fidel's problems with Che had nothing to do with communism...

...Juddsonia Smith, a Virginia hillbilly of Celtic-lndian stock, is the wild one, eagerly anticipating his commission in the Marine Corps and a combat tour in Korea...

...It's Daddy and Gandhi all the way, which gives rise to such passages of querulous Gandhi-ridden soul-searching as: We might stop, Father, be nonviolent warriors...

...Remember The Hindu Science of Breath Control!' I t is interesting to contrast this "pathetic little mother . . . . . . , " as Cantor all too accurately characterizes his protagonist at one point, with the real Guevara as perceived in Carlos Fran~This passage regrettably is entirely typical of the prose in which the whole novel is written--vibrating with high-strung emotion and utterly devoid of humor except for that which is clearly involuntary...

...The Bolivian adventure itself takes up more than half the book, and is an extremely free reworking of the actual Bolivian Diaries described by their American editor Daniel James (certainly far from a pro-Guevarist) as "crisp, restrained, highly literate with a dry sense of humor...

...Che had always declared himself to be a Communist, but his brand of communism never convinced Fidel, who recognized Che's independence of character and his sense of morality...

...His body carried the stringy, acquiescent toughness of the mountains...

...Working within that formula is Webb's agile prose, alternately laconic and expansive, matching dry comment to lucid image...

...In A Sense o f Honor, for example, a midshipman AWOL for a compelling personal reason is involved in a fender-bender in Washington, D.C...

...His first novel, Fields o f Fire (1978), tells it as it was in Vietnam, seen through "minds unfogged by academic posturings": i.e., Marine Corps grunts, most of whom learn to be dependable even as they prefer to be anywhere else...

...Cantor, however, sees Guevara quite differently...

...a story of America's great leap, well, sideways: from reluctant world power assuming terrible responsibilities in 1951 to worldweary democracy about to articulate its Weltschmerz with the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976...

...And this has been Webb's consistent theme...

...while racing back to Annapolis during the wee hours of the morning to beat reveille...

...But the few linguistic blemishes quickly fade amid the exuberance of Webb's narrative and the ambitious sweep of his plot...

...At their last meeting at Mario's Bar in downtown 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1984 Annapolis, the three become, literally, "blood brothers.'" With the help of a steak knife and Judd's Indian bravado, a promise is sealed: They will meet again, in exactly 25 years, right there at Mario's...

...The villages formed a single human body, incarnated and imaged in the Inca...

...They are all presented as interchangeable alien lands with no indication that the author is aware of their highly different cultures, histories, and economies...

...What was it like being a Minister of Industry, then Minister of Finance at 32, when one knew nothing about industry, finance, or government...