Homage to Andalucia

...But he has not distorted known facts about Spain's great modem poet and his mode of death, or the apparent motives for the killing...

...To Rodolfo, born long after the poet's death, Lorca epitomizes the beauty and truth that Franco and his loyal followers like General Alfara did their best to remove from the Spanish earth...

...it is concerned not with energy but with repose...

...The difference tempts one to say that, unlike Goethe, Herrick is not producing, volume by volume, "fragments of a great confession," but one might be wrong about that...

...These would seem to have been ritualistically political, though the novelist also suggests the executioner's repugnance toward Lorca's sexual inversion...

...The Alfaras can be recognized as the kind of father and son who by nature are fanatical adversaries: Each understands the other too well to feel for him any but the most scarifying emotion...

...In his heyday Alfara would have regarded it as doing God's work to obliterate Herrick and his comrades, and yet here is Herrick giving him a fair shake...

...A writer of merit is usually as earnest in one place as in another—a truth that sometimes eludes sentimentalists who review fiction...

...He is, I think, fascinated by moral energy...

...Yet as Herrick reminds us, what such relatives share is at least as substantial as what keeps them apart...

...We are now back in the world of Che: Rodolfo is a Left-wing terrorist who bombs banks and government buildings, and, after assassinating the vice-head of state, takes refuge under an assumed identity in London...

...Which brings us to Herrick's latest novel by what may seem a non sequi-tur, for Shado ws and Wolves is around the other side of the moon from Golcz...

...of 1969, a narrative concerned with the Spanish Civil War...

...The hero of Strayhorn starts out as a burglar and ends up as the lover of a grotesquely obese opera singer named Madeline Dearing, who is mute throughout the book...

...Thus in The Last to Die, his 1971 novel based on the life and death of Che Guevara (so far as I know, utterly ignored by the cocktail-dip Guevarists of the time), he managed to write with a basic human sympathy yet without for a moment condoning terrorism, and to do so in an almost lyrical language...

...Golcz, a near-surrealist creation, features a character who dresses as if for a Sadie-Mae orgy (in black, cap-a-pie, though his cape has a lining of orange silk), but, loping along sidewalks at night, he performs only good deeds, defending old ladies, mugging muggers...

...In a fine piece of characterization that might amaze those who can approve only of protagonists who work for the betterment of society, Herrick presents him as a man of uncompromising principle...

...From Herrick's fairly somber other novels (e.g., his first in 1967, The Itinerant, a more or less autobiographical account of a young man's life in the late 1930s) one would never suspect that he is capable of such extravagances...

...This supports what I said about our author turning away from the clamor of politics at crucial points to hear what is more plangent—in this case, the truth that all men, whatever their stripe, grow old...

...The spirit of Federico Garcia Lorca is frequently invoked in this short, in tense novel, from dedication to epigraph...

...I don't know of a more unusual distinction, in or out of books, in 1980...

...Presumably it hurts only when he laughs (to keep from crying) at the versions of that conflict furnished on demand by inveterate Stalinist hacks (who display an odd immortality, unless they are more examples of the craft of Lenin's embalmer) or young no doubt well-intentioned ignoramuses of the trendy Left...

...bears resemblance to other noted specimens of the modern political novel—the works of Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Andre Mal-raux, Manes Sperber, and Victor Serge come to mind—and above all to George Orwell's nonfictional Homage to Catalonia...

...The young terrorist has become captive of an obsession to seek out and kill the man who executed Lorca, if he is still alive and can be found...

...Although he had considerable traffic with ideology in his early life, in his fiction he uses politics, fittingly in my view, as a pretext for striking deeper...

...Neighbors" William Herrick, who began to write professionally only upon reaching early middle age, has published six novels to date...

...Herrick served in Spain with the International Brigades and was severely wounded on the Madrid front...

...Alfara's daily ritual is now his entire life...

...The General himself was once an admirer of the poet's work and had, moreover, known Federico, a fellow Grana-dine, since childhood...

...But then, except for Hermanos!, all of Herrick's books tend to resist the common definitions...

...Yet I confess that what I like most about his work is that its natural voice seems to be that of a mensch...

...Herrick is not only worthy of a seat amid this august company but, interestingly, it belongs toward the literary end of the table...

...The hero of Shadows and Wolves, the old Falangist General Luis Alfara Fernandez, at 74 has run his race and retired from active life to measure his Sevillean days in caffe con leche, siestas and a fortnightly visit to a patient puta...

...If he is not an ingratiating figure, neither is he a caricature of vileness...

...at his best, he might well inspire...

...But as he butters his breakfast roll, eaten every morning at the same table in the same outdoor cafe, the General is being secretly watched—later on through the sights of a firearm —by another Alfara: his youngest son, Rodolfo, his bitter personal and political enemy...

...Taken at his worst, he defies the forces of degeneration...

...Indeed, the Fascist slug is still embedded in him, these many years after...

...His concerns here as elsewhere are the classic ones of honor, virtue, courage, pity, passion...

...Both novels seethe with a kind of demonic vivacity...

...Probably the best-known among them is the powerful Her-manos...

...Throughout the text Lorca's lines are often quoted or paraphrased, and both Alfaras have a special association with him...

...When Golcz appeared, I lived in a remote region of the land...

...It is a remarkable and valuable book that finally, I think, defies the categories...

...Hermanos...

...His means are always responsible and often eloquent...

...Shadows and Wolves, a study of transgression and redemption, is the sixth reason to call Herrick a novelist of genuine value...

...I remember reading a provincial review of it in which the writer, utterly baffled, wondered whether it might be a hoax—and I was annoyed to think that Herrick might be encroaching on terrain that I regard as exclusive to myself in contemporary letters...

...With his wife dead and his children grown and departed, he is on his own now, while Spain is in that transitory state between what is past and what has not yet come...

...When the General and Rodolfo, after some preliminary skirmishes, at last meet for their moment, and the truth emerges that it was indeed General Alfara who had shot Lorca dead, each must prove his mettle not only to the other, but also to himself...

...While in England he alters his appearance as well, undergoing facial surgery which, with a shaved crown and a great red beard, renders him anonymous to his own father when he returns to Andalu-cia...

...Two of them, Strayhorn (1968) and Golcz (1976), are downright eccentric, aggressively nonpolitical, perhaps even antisocial: It is not always a simple matter to distinguish between their heroes and what you might casually call scoundrels...

...Almost by definition Alfara is austere, and those of us who are not Spanish military aristocrats would surely see him as cruel—but he exercised power to maintain institutions, Conquistador-fashion, and not, like Sade, in pursuit of pleasure...

...Herrick of course has invented these characters to fill a fictional need...

...They are more than gestures with an empty sleeve, however: He's got something up there...

...Golcz, who tells his own story, may be merely retailing his megalomaniacal fantasies (Robin Hoodery, clothes-fetishism, and needless to say the sexual potency of a ram), but at least he is not passive...