GINGERLY REMOVING THE VEIL

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00552R000302660004-2
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: July 21, 2010
• Sequence Number: 4
• Publication Date: September 3, 1984
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/07/21 : CIA-RDP90-00552R000302660004-2 STAT
ARTICLE APPIekRED
ON PAGE
Books-
TINE
3 September 1984
Gingerly Removing the Veil
JOSEPHINE HERBST by Elinor Langer; Atlantic-Little, Brown; 374 pages; $19.95
grislier effects of the mass starvation that
cost 6 million peasant lives, she could not
have failed to see what other travelers
were reporting: hordes of hollow-eyed
families begging at every railway station.
The only work Herbst published at
the time about her experience was a
piece in the New Republic. The de-
scription of a writers' conference did
not mention a shortage of food, only
a plenitude of books.
Thirty-eight years later Herbst
published a brief reminiscence of the
Former S. C. Girl Is Leader of Delegation
Demanding Lifting of Spain Arms Embargo
Josephine Herbst, Novel--ANIMMMU
ist, in Fight Against
U. S. Rule
Amerto%n Women, rumbaed by po-
lee at 1300. mulled on the 6tate
department Monday to demand that
the embargo aplrnt the Shipment
of arms to Spain be lifted.
71M marcher; Were Stopped to the
part ),K South of the State de'
partment and adJazent to the South
Is.n of the white House. rh.,
turfed banners ealWK for speed)
action to thh government.
lic. Her biographer asks: "What could
be a more vivid embodiment of a life lived
according to principle?"
A more pertinent question posed by
Langer's book might be: How well did
Herbst's friends and admirers really know
her? Apparently. not well enough. The
misunderstanding is rooted in Herbst's in-
volvement in the Communist Party after
1930. As Langer regretfully relates, when
party interests were at stake Herbst was an
accomplished liar. On occasion she could
deceive herself. In 1930 the writer and her
husband John Herrmann journeyed to the
U.S.S.R. at the invitation of a party official.
When they came home, Herbst plunged
into party activities. just short of member-
ship. Herrmann joined up and became a
courier of stolen federal documents.
Langer's one-page account of the cou-
ple's decisive journey to the U.S.S.R.
blandly echoes the letters Herbst was
writing home at the time. Russians in the
street look "vital and alert." The workers'
kitchens are "so shining." This was the
year of the great famine. a direct result of
Stalin's enforced collectivization. Though
Herbst may have been shielded from the
ler. In Spain in 1937, she witnessed
the death throes of the Spanish Repub-
new Batista dictatorship. The
same year she was in Nazi Germa-
ny reporting on opposition to Hit-
Cuba in 1935, she chronicled
the hopeless resistance to the
western farmers. On a visit to
been moved by the Depres-
sion-era plight of the Mid-
leftist journals and in nov-
els like Rope of Gold.
The Iowa girl had first
A&J osie, I'd love you whether you
wrote or not," said Saul Bellow
in a letter to Josephine Herbst. He
had plenty of company. During her
long literary life Herbst attracted
such disparate admirers as Maxwell
Anderson, Katherine Anne Porter,
Ernest Hemingway. James T. Farrell
and John Cheever. When she died in
1969 at the age of 76, Critic Alfred
Kazin, who had once dismissed her
work as "desperate pedestrianism,"
wrote that he had never known any
other writer who was "so solid, so joy-
ous, so giving."
Elinor Langer's evocative, infat-
uated biography has brought the
novelist to life with her quirky charm
intact. Much of the book shows her as
she appeared to her friends: more
spontaneous and independent than
any woman of her generation had a
right to be. For more than 30 years
Excerpt.
~L -`.l would like to be able to
=someone. accuse me of disloyalty,'
she :wrote to Granville Hicks at the
:`. New Masses . , . This letter [and one
ences to the Soviet purges in Josie's
fetters... Josie was at Yaddo during
the announcement of the Nazi-Sovi-
et pact. A group photo taken the day
before the invasion of Poland shows
her face dark with worry. Why
-didn't she 'break' publicly with the
-Communist Party when she was so
'disillusioned' with it privately? 'If
you bum your immediate past there
is nothing left but ashes which are
all very well for those heads that ' ,
like nothing better than to be sprin-
kled with ashes,' she wrote in the
middle of the McCarthy era,She felt'
far too keenly the stir of the revolu-
tionary idea to be able to
abandon it now.
trip that should have prodded Lang-
er, usually an indefatigable research-
er, into inquiring about conditions in
the U.S.S.R. at the time of the visit.
Herbst wrote that she bad failed to
ask about the collectivization that
had uprooted "flocks of human be-
ings, to starve or die." Instead, not a
word about the famine appears in
Langer's book.
Herbst's behavior in connection
with the Hiss-Chambers case further
demonstrates her growing inability
to discern truth. In 1948 Whittaker
Chambers accused Alger Hiss of
having been a fellow spy in the
was privy to information
that partly substantiat-
ed Chambers' claim. In
fact, as this book discloses,
Herbst's husband, in his
role as aide to the party's
chief recruiter of agents in
Washington, first introduced
Chambers and Hiss.
Yet she repeatedly lied to FBI
investigators. At the same time, she
solicited a meeting with attorneys for
Hiss in the hope of giving aid and sup-
port. The encounter was a disaster. The
lawyers were appalled by Herbst's off-
hand attitude about espionage. In their
notes they observed that she had "no real
concern about people working for the
Government. taking papers and supply-
ing information surreptitiously to the
Communist Party." Later Herbst confid-
ed to a friend. "The Hiss case was handled
wrongly ... as indeed I suggested to his
lawyers all along. He should have been
more frank ... Admitting smaller things
would have validated major denials. Any
novelist could have told them that."
A novelist who offers advice on how to
lie as effectively in life as in fiction is likely
to have trouble writing anything honest,
especially memoirs. For the last 15 years of
her life, Herbst vainly attempted to com-
pose hers. But as Langer notes. to be
straight with herself and others, the writer
"would have had to remove the veil over
some very sorrowful private and political
moments." Langer has gingerly removed
that veil. In the process. she has exposed
more than she wanted to and more than
Herbst's loving friends could ever have
supposed. -By Patricia Blake
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/07/21 : CIA-RDP90-00552R000302660004-2