Purpose, Blame, and Fire

Donald Hall

Donald Hall (1928- ) was born in New Haven. Connecticut, and educated at Harvard and at Oxford University. Influenced by such undergraduate classmates as Robert Bly and Adrienne Rich, he turned his attention almost exclusively to poetry, and in 1955 he produced Exiles and Marriages, a book that won the prestigious Lamont award for that year. He became a professor of English at the University of Michigan in 1957, and continued to publish a steady stream of excellent poems. In 1975 he quit teaching, took up residence on a New Hampshire farm once owned by his grandparents. and devoted himself to writing full time. Since then he has published several more volumes of award-winning poetry, as well as biographies, children's literature, textbooks, and essays. His essays are collected in To Keep Moving: Essays 1959-1969 (1980) and in Poetry and Ambition: Essays 1980-88 (1988). "Purpose, Blame, and Fire, written for the anthology The Movie That Changed My Life. was published in Harper's in May 1991.

 

My father was too young for the Great War, not fifteen when it ended, and both of my grandfathers were too old. Their fathers fought in the Civil War-archaic blue figures, stiff-bearded in photographs- but in 1937, when I was eight, Gettysburg might have been Agincourt or Marathon.' As a second world war came closer, I understood that my father felt guilty about missing the Great War; but I understood that he wanted to miss the new one as well.

Everyone was nervous, the Depression hanging on and war approaching.  I was an only child, alert to my parents’ anxiety.  My mother was thin and attentive.  She had come to Connecticut from a remote farm in New Hampshire, and as I grew up I became aware that she felt lonely in the suburbs; she paid more attention to her child, in her displacement, than she would have done if she had stayed up north with her sisters.

Sometimes she took me on excursions to New Haven—Saturdays during the school year, weekdays in summer.  We walked up Ardmore Street to Whitney Avenue and waited for the bus that came every ten minutes to roll us four miles down Whitney and drop us at Church and Chapel outside Liggett’s across from the New Haven Green.  While I tagged along, she shopped at Shartenberg’s and Malley’s.  When we had done shopping, we ate lunch at a place where I ordered franks and beans—two grilled hot dogs and a tiny crock of pea beans dark with molasses; dessert was Jell-O with real whipped cream or dry yellow cake with white frosting.  Lunch cost thirty-nine cents.

Then we went to the movies.  At the theater we would see a first-run film, a B-movie, one or two shorts, previews of coming attractions, and a newsreel.  In the year 1937 I am almost sure that I watched Spencer Tracy in Captains Courageous; maybe Paul Muni in The Life of Emile Zola, probably Lost Horizon and A Star Is Born.  But the only movie I remember seeing for certain, some fifty-four years later, is The Last Train from Madrid.  After we took the bus home to Ardmore Street, I burned my collection of war cards and put away my toy soldiers forever.

 

In 1937 we boys wore long woolen stockings pulled up over the bottoms of corduroy knickers as we walked to Spring Glen Grammar School. There were no school buses. Children from my neighborhood took several different routes to school-for variety or to avoid a bully- but always passed the Glendower Drug Store, only two short blocks from the school.

If we had change in our pockets, we spent it there. For a nickel, we bought big candy bars or flat pieces of gum creased into five sticks and pink as a dog's tongue. With the gum came cards that illustrated our different obsessions: Of course there were baseball cards, and I seem to recall cards for football as well; I remember G-man cards, each of which illustrated a triumph of law and order such as I. Edgar Hoover's agents flushing out Dillinger-shooting him in the lobby of a movie theater-or Pretty Boy Floyd. Although G-man cards were violent, they might have been the Society of Friends alongside another series that we bought and collected. We called them war cards, and they thrived in the bellicose air of 1937.

It was a time when the war in Spain² shrieked from the front pages of newspapers, along with the Japanese invasion of China. In 1937 Stalin kept discovering to his astonishment that old colleagues had betrayed him; he shot seven of his best generals that year, doubtless a great advantage when Hitler invaded. In 1937 Trotsky found his way to Mexico,³ the UAW⁴ invented the sit-down strike, Neville Chamberlain⁵ asked Hitler for his cooperation in the interest of peace, the Hindenburg exploded and burned in New Jersey, and thousands of American progressives joined the Lincoln Brigade to fight fascism in Spain.

Even in the fourth grade we knew about Hitler, whose troops and planes fought alongside Franco against the Loyalists, who were aided by Stalin's troops and planes. Germany was again the enemy, less than twenty years after the Armistice of 1918. We were good, brave, loyal, outnumbered, and victorious against all odds; they were evil, cruel, cowardly, vicious, dumb, shrewd, and doomed. We knew who was right and who was wrong. (My father's mother's family had emigrated from Germany to New Haven in the 1880s, which was confusing.) In 1937 all of us-parents, teachers, children-understood that there would be another war and that America would join this war sooner than it had the Great War. Isolationists and pacifists campaigned against the war, but everyone knew that war was inevitable-whether it was or wasn't. A phenomenon like war cards makes it now seem as if we were being prepared, as if the adults were making sure that we grew up expecting to become soldiers, accepting the guns and the bombing and the death.

At least no one-so soon after the Great War-had the temerity to present war as a Cub Scout expedition. When we went to the movies, we saw a newsreel and sometimes even The March of Time. The late l930s were endless parades in black and white, soldiers marching, weapons rolling past reviewing stands. I remember the bombing and strafing of refugees. I remember Hitler addressing rallies.

War cards used a lot of red ink. On the back of each card a short text described a notorious incident, and on the front an artist illustrated what had happened. I remember one card that showed a Japanese bomb hitting a crowded Chinese bus, maybe in Shanghai: Bodies being torn apart hurtled through the air, intestines stretched and tangled, headless bodies littering the ground. I don't believe these cards were particularly ideological; as I recollect, the cards claimed to be educational, illustrating the Horrors of War. Blood was the whole matter.

We cherished our war cards, chewing gum as we walked home to add a new one to our collections: Blood of war was the food on which we nurtured our boyish death-love. If you' got a duplicate you could swap, maybe the exploded bus for a card that showed the shelling of a boat. We collected war cards as we collected ourselves for war.

Surely, at eight, my imagination was filled by war. I loved airplanes and read pulp stories about dogfights over the trenches. I loved the pilot heroes of the era-Wiley Post, Amelia Earhart, later Wrong-Way Corrigan. When I imagined myself going to war it was to join the Lafayette Escadrille,⁶ fly Spads, and shoot down Fokker triplanes.

Then I saw The Last Train From Madrid. Did it really change my life? As I commit it to paper, the phrase sounds exaggerated, melodramatic. I never registered as a C.O. (Nor did I serve in the military.) Although I worked in Ann Arbor with the movement against the Vietnam War, I was never a leader. Neither did I spell the country Amerika. It was war horror that filled my chest, not political commitment: A horror is not an idea, as a shudder is not a conviction. Certain horrors of war retain the power to burst me into tears, especially the random slaughter of civilians. And my first experience of such horrors, I now believe, must have occurred on the day in 1937 when I saw The Last Train From Madrid.

 

In September of 1990-as another war approached-I saw The Last Train From Madrid again. Over the years I had thought of the film often and assumed that it was antifascist, popular front. It is no such thing; the film is astonishingly without political ideology. The plot is derivative, built of romantic clichés and stereotypes, and is impossible to take seriously: a Grand Hotel on wheels. The writing is ghastly, from clumsy exposition to flat dialogue. Its single import is the randomness of war horror.

The film opens with the hurtling image of a locomotive and train. A radio newscast tells us that tonight the last train will leave Madrid, after which-we understand-the city will be overrun by the nameless army that is besieging it. The army lacks not only name but idea, and its only purpose is death. As characters speak of the train's terminus in Valencia, Valencia becomes pure symbol: The destination is Arcadian peace in a countryside antithetical to the city's panic, chaos, and violent death. Naturally, everyone wants a seat on the train. The plot of the movie turns on separate and intermingled stories of people seeking passage on the train-their stratagems, their failures and successes. At the end of the movie the train steams out of Madrid carrying some of the people we've been introduced to and leaving others behind-not only behind but dead.

A noble young officer (noble because he is handsome and stands straight; noble because he is Anthony Quinn) listens at the film's begin- fling to impassioned pleas for passes, and in his dutiful nobility refuses them. We dwell on an old lady, well played, who begs for a pass and is refused. Most of our central figures are in couples, two by two like the ark's animals: the romantic interest, which I doubtless ignored in 1937 and found myself ignoring last fall. Love between two men (Anthony Quinn and Gilbert Roland) who swore blood brotherhood as soldiers in Africa years before Is standard Beau Geste⁷ stuff, but it does provide the strongest human bond in the film-stronger for sure than the bonds each seeks to establish with Dorothy Lamour.

In one of the subplots a slaphappy American journalist (Lew Ayres) picks up a girl (Olympe Bradna) who wants to get to Madrid to see her father before the firing squad kills him. (Naturally, they fall in love; later, this pair makes it onto the Valencia-bound train.) She sees her father, he is shot-and we never receive an inkling, not a notion, of what he did or stood for that led to his cold-blooded execution. The killing feels wholly arbitrary: No motive is supplied or suggested. In this film's eerie political emptiness, execution by firing squad is not a political act (and thus in some way purposeful) but routine, everyday-like sunrise and sunset.

One soldier on the firing squad (Robert Cummings) is tenderhearted and will not fire his gun. For his sensitivity he will be sent to the front. He runs away-and runs into an unbelievable love. We see two people parting, a man and a woman whom we do not know. We understand that they have just made love, and that she is a prostitute. They seem fond of each other, happy, making plans for their next encounter. As the man walks into the street, we suddenly spy his shape down the sight of a rifle-a sniper's rifle. The sniper shoots him dead. Although we may assume that the sniper waited for this particular man, the film provides not one detail to support this assumption. We know nothing of this man or his killer or any motive; we know nothing about the shooting except the brute fact. Like the earlier execution by firing squad, this street killing-idyll destroyed by bullet-presents itself as wholly arbitrary.

It is this young prostitute (Helen Mack) with whom Cummings falls in love-and she with him-immediately. After Mack and Cummings drag her dead lover's body into her flat, they talk; Cummings wants the dead man's pass for the last train. Soon enough, they scheme a double escape. During their brief courtship, the couple construct of their lovers' talk the Arcadian Valencia to which the train will deliver them. Cummings eventually makes it to the train, but alone. Mack dies on the way-again arbitrarily.

By today's standards, of course, there are actually few deaths in The Last Train From Madrid. Channel-surfing the television-happening, say, upon a Chuck Norris movie-you will see more carnage before you can switch channels than you'll observe in eighty-five minutes of this old film. But the deaths I witnessed in 1937 stuck with me as those I see in movies today for the most part do not. One in particular: Near the film's end, before the train leaves the station, guards move through the cars rechecking passes. As they demand papers from everyone, our anxiety mounts because they are approaching a vulnerable protagonist. Suddenly, looking at one man's pass-a stranger to us-the guards ask him to step outside. He looks nervous; he tries to run-and they shoot him down. They kill him on purpose, aiming their guns, yet they kill him for no reason that we will ever understand.

Murderous paradox drives the film: Malignity exists everywhere, yet most of the time it appears motiveless. To an eight-year-old in New Haven, the particular individuals shot and killed in the film suffered deaths as arbitrary as if they had been killed by bombs from the sky. An air raid takes place at the center of the film, a riot of civilian panic, people running and frightened. The sound track plays fear music, camera shots are jumpy and angular, and in one quick shot nervous pigeons scurry.

In Robert Frost's "Design he writes about the malign coincidence of an invisible spider haply arranged to kill a fly; the poet asks what could have caused this coming-together except for "design of darkness to appall. Then he qualifies the question in a further line: "If design govern in a thing so small. In The Last Train From Madrid we are surrounded by fear of imminent death, but, horribly, we lack design. As humans, we wish or perhaps even need to understand the cause or to place blame-on an enemy, on politicians who betrayed us, on the cupidity or moral squalor of a person or a class of people-because blame implies purpose, and purpose, meaning. The Last Train From Madrid suggests that design may not govern in a thing so small as human life and death.

Printed words at the very start of the film scroll its neutrality: This movie will not uphold or defend either side of the war. When we read of battles in old histories we study the motives of each side, although the cause may mean little to us: We want to make sense. We may not keep with us the ideas behind a conflict-what we tend to remember are stories of heroism, cowardice, and suffering; "The river ran red with blood for seven days, we remember, not "Thus Centerville retained its access to the sea. Yet we make the effort to understand the history and politics, if only to satisfy ourselves that there appeared to be reasons for the blood: a design. By eschewing history and politics, The Last Train From Madrid leeches war of its particular temporal context, providing an eight-year-old with his first glimpse of war as eternal anonymous suffering. The film scrolls war's utter panic and sorrow. Oh, sorrow, sorrow, sorrow-the ripe life cut by hate without purpose, by anger lacking reason, by murder without blame.

How did my mother happen to take an eight-year-old to such a movie? Microfilm of the New Haven Register explains. The newspaper printed paragraphs of studio puffery that wholly misrepresented the film: "With but two pictures to her credit, both of which were outstanding successes, Dorothy Lamour, the glamorous brunette, one of the season's most sensational finds,' moves into the ranks of the screen's charming leading ladies. The event takes place in The Last Train from Madrid,' the romance laid in war-torn Spain. I find it breathtaking to read this notice of the film that horrified me. "In this story Miss Lamour appears as a beautiful patrician girl, who is the beloved of a young lieutenant in the government forces and his best friend. When I read Frank S. Nugent's New York Times review (6/19/37), I am almost as astonished. He notes the lack of politics in this "glib little fiction, but for Nugent also there was no horror. "True, it treats of the Spanish revolution, but merely as Hollywood has, in the past, regarded the melodramatic turmoils of Ruritania and Zenda.”⁸ He calls the film "a pre-tested melodrama which should suit the average palate, and in his conclusion makes a joke: "Its sympathies, neither Loyalist nor Rebel, are clearly on the side of the Ruritanians.”

Frank S. Nugent was not eight years old. Was Nugent's cynicism more appropriate than my horror? At eight, I ignored the silly romance at the film's center and registered only the panic of unmotivated murder. When I returned home after the Saturday matinee, I packed my lead toy soldiers with their flattish Great War helmets into a shoebox and tucked it deep in the long closet of my bedroom. I performed the ritual with so much solemnity that I might have played taps for background music. By this time I felt not panic but a sadness that would not relent, which may have derived from another melancholy that absorbed me that weekend. The film opened in New Haven on Saturday, July 10, 1937, while Amelia Earhart was missing over the Pacific. I remember playing outside the house, keeping the window open and a radio near the window; I remember a report that the Navy had spotted her plane on an atoll; I remember the correction of the report. In my mind's eye, Amelia Earhart circled continually, high in the air, the hum of the Lockheed's engine distant and plaintive, gas almost gone, the pilot in her leather helmet peering for land as she circled .

A day or two later, alone in the house, I carried my war cards down to the coal furnace in the cellar. I was not allowed to open the furnace door, but I opened it anyway and threw the cards onto the red coals. At first they smoldered and turned brown, and I feared that they would not burn-would give me away when my father came home and stoked the furnace. Then one card burst into bright yellow flame, then another, then all together flared briefly in the shadow-and-red hellfire of the furnace on Ardmore Street.

 

1. Agincourt was a decisive victory of the English against the French in AD. 1415; Marathon, a triumph of the Greeks against the Persians in 490 B.C.

2. The Spanish Civil War (1937-1939), which anticipated World War 11 and introduced such horrors as the bombing of civilian targets. The war pitted fascist rebel General Francisco Franco against Spanish Loyalists aided by liberals and leftists from around the world.

3. Leon Trotsky (1879-1940), Russian revolutionary and political leader, was driven into exile by dictator Joseph Stalin (1879-1953).

4. United Auto Workers.

5. British prime minister from May 1937 through May 1940.

6. A unit of U.S. volunteers attached to the French air force in the early years of World War I.

7. A 1937 adventure film starring Gary Cooper as a member of the French Foreign Legion.

8. Fictional kingdoms in The Prisoner of Zenda. a swashbuckling story made into movies in 1913, 1922. and 1937.