Visit 7

In the previous visit I had satisfied myself with Archie Brown and was ready to move on. I think I have a good grasp now of the average experience of an American International Brigadier. I guess at this point I should feel lost as to what direction I should take regarding my project, but my natural interests are pointing me towards something to do with art. Because I have experience already with analyzing the art of propaganda, I'm thinking I might want to shy away from that now and focus on either formal visual art or literature. What intrigues me most about the Spanish Civil War is its impact on the people who lived through it. Impact is expressed through art. This is what I'd like to study--how people expressed the myriad of complicated issues and feelings engendered in this war.

Having more or less decided on this general direction, I started looking up names of creative people who were involved in the American volunteer brigades. I ordered a box of Ralph Fasanella's but upon looking through it, I found that the contents were mostly correspondence from later dates, which I was not interested in right then. The finding aid online says there should be more to the collection but I wasn't to figure out whether I had to order a different box number. I ended up just looking at the James Lardner Papers' finding aid and, seeing it contained 1930's correspondence, just ordered that instead.

Lardner was part of a family of writers. I read that he died in Spain. With the confusion over which box to get, I wasn't able to read very much and I plan on picking it up again next time--but I did notice the recurrence of some themes I've been keeping track of in the other letters.

Optimism: [About Valencia] "...and I don't think it will ever be conquered. there are too many people here who are fighting for things they believe in, and too few on the other side."

Scarce resources: "Four days in Barcelona were enough for me to see that there is not much chance of my getting into the artillery just now. There are too many trained men and not enough guns."

The finding aid said that someone (I forget who now) said of Lardner: he was the las to enlist in Spain and he was the last to die. I think this is a very powerful statement about the nature of the war and I hope to come back to it after I've read more from Lardner's papers.