—An Unauthorized Biography—
By Emily Hahn. Doubleday and Company,
New York, 1955. 365 pages
Reviewed by Geraldine Fitch
The author, known to many as "Mickey" Hahn, is also known to her friends as, a frank and forthright person. Some authors would have given the impression that President Chiang furnished most of the biographical material for the book, and would have hoped thus to give it an air of authenticity. Emily Hahn is too honest a person for such deceptive tactics.
So the sub-title is: "An Unauthorized Biography", and the fly-leaf carries the following author's note: "Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek did not cooperate on this book; on the contrary, he doesn't want anything published about himself as long as he is kept off the mainland. He feels that in these circumstances he is not worth attention. The author does not agree."
The reader must not conclude from the author's frankness that her book is therefore largely guesswork. She has been meticulous in her efforts to secure authentic and accurate material. While she does not always quote her sources in the text and has no footnotes at all, her bibliography is impressive, and—to her credit—contains a fair percentage of pro-Communist books, so that she is in a position to compare the claims of both sides. Most often she quotes Dr. Hollington K. Tong's official biography of President Chiang. Moreover, she apparently had access to an English translation of Chiang's biography which has been published (up to 1926, I believe) in Chinese.
The book opens with atmosphere and local color worthy of a novel: a dinner-party in a restaurant of Takata, Japan; uniformed men with shaved heads and stocking-feet sitting cross-legged on the tatami, toasting each other in farewell to three Chinese students leaving the Tokyo Military Academy. One of these was Chiang Kai-shek, who drank in water a Japanese toast, meaning "The soldier will not return alive." In the West, perhaps it would be "To the death for my country!"(but not in water.) The accidental outbreak of the 1911 revolution called the young officers home to China.
The same chapter flashes back to 1887 when Chiang was born; his father a salt-merchant and shopkeeper, his mother a devout Buddhist of strong character. Chiang was a grave youth, according to early photographs and the recollections of those who knew him as a youth; one who believed in self-discipline and restraint of one's emotions. His mother married him off to a Miss Mao when he was fourteen, but she lived in the Chiang household, and at that age he was off at school.
Chiang's mother wished him to study law, but he was secretly set on a military career. He had been impressed by the Japanese ousting of the Chinese forces from their protectorate of Korea. At thirteen he heard of the Boxer Uprising, and all through his youth he was reading or hearing tales of the heroes of old, who had freed the country of tyrants. At this time, too, Sun Yat-sen was his living idol, as of all patriotic Chinese youth.
After his military training in Japan, he was useful in a number of emergencies to Dr. Sun, for after all few in China had the modern military training that Chiang had received in Japan.
These were stormy days for the new republic, what with Yuan Shih-kai wanting to restore the monarchy with himself as emperor; and with General Chen Chiung-ming in the south, distrusted by Chiang, making trouble for Sun Yat-sen.
During these early days, Dr. Sun tried to get backing and aid from Western countries, but only Russia seemed interested. The Soviets, to be sure, played both ends (Peking and Canton) against the middle, but began to favor Sun and the southern set-up, and sent advisors-Maring (a Dutchman whose real name was Sneevliet) and Adolf Joffe (who signed the Manifesto of friendship with Dr. Sun). Later came Galen and Borodin.
Chiang Kai-shek had a four-months' observation tour in Russia, and on his return wrote to a friend: "The Russian party is lacking in sincerity .... Regarding their respect for Mr. Sun personally, they are international partisans. As for those of our country who are in Russia, they have nothing but slander and suspicion for Mr. Sun."
From this point on, the book becomes more the story of the rise and fall of the Republic of China on the mainland than a biography of Chiang. Of course Chiang's life has been inseparably a part of all the vicissitudes. However, there is little about his devotional life as a Christian, including his habit of rising early these thirty years for Bible reading and prayer. Nor does the reader have the opportunity of following him through the program of an average day: what he does for exercise; what he eats; his abstemious habits; his humility, patience, tolerance and magnanimity, contrasting with his impetuous youth, and which-if well-documented-would go far toward refuting the malicious slander mooted abroad about this leader of the Chinese people.
Emily Hahn takes the reader through the stormy years when warlords were struggling for power (1923-26); when the advisors were Russian as well as most of the teaching staff of the military academy in Canton. Chinese Communists, by agreement between Chiang and Joffe, had been permitted to join the Kuomintang, promising to obey party regulations. This was the first United Front in China, the first attempt at "peaceful co-existence" with Communists.
By 1924 when Lenin died, Chiang and other KMT leaders had reason to doubt the loyalty of the Communists in the party. They were taking orders from the Communist party's Central Committee. They proved to be Communists first, and Chinese after.
But every effort was made by Chiang Kai-shek to "get along" with the Russian advisors, especially with Borodin, until the Northern Expedition could be successfully carried through. To ensure success, Communists holding high posts in the army were removed; civilian Communists, who seemed to be getting too important, were shifted including one in the propaganda department by the name of Mao Tse-tung.
During the northern campaign to unify the country, the Nanking incident of Communist soldiers attacking mission property, killing some foreigners, firing on American official property, caused American and British gunboats in the river to lay a smoke barrage to cover the escape of those huddled in the American Consulate. Chiang Kai-shek handled the affair well. He apologized to the governments whose nationals were involved, ordered an investigation, and promised to be personally responsible for the future safety of foreigners in China.
While Chiang was with the troops, Borodin moved the government to Hankow, where it voted Chiang out, giving his post to Wang Ching-wei. The plan was to use this government to build up Communist strength and then take it over.
Chiang has been blamed by many foreigners for what happened next: his ruthless rounding-up of Chinese Communists, strikers and agitators in Shanghai, and deportation of the Russian advisors, along with closing the Russian Embassy and consulates. But he simply outwitted them. Ample evidence was found in a truckload of documents taken from the Russian Consulate in Shanghai of the plot to overthrow Chiang's government.
Even after the successful Northern Expedition broke the power of the warlords (the military governors with independent armies), some of them south or north—gave trouble to the newly unified country and its government in Nanking. The author recounts much more of the civil war with such dissidents as Feng Yu-hsiang, Wu Pei-fu, Pai Chung-hsi and Li Tsung-jen than of the constructive achievements of the new government in the fields of public works, education, public heal the building of roads and railroads, development of aviation, social welfare, agricultural and industrial progress. For a decade before the Japanese invasion, this progress was phenomenal.
The record is accurate historically as the Japanese moved into Manchuria (and the League of Nations proved incompetent to cope with an aggressor), on through the long years of the Japanese invasion, Chiang's "defense in depth" and "scorched earth" policy; keeping China in the fight even while the British lost Burma and Malaya, the Dutch lost the East Indies, the French lost Indochina, and the USA lost the Philippines. All of these powers were stronger from a military standpoint than China. But China held on doggedly.
Excerpts from Stilwell's diary reveal his crass disrespect for nearly everyone he had to work with: Roosevelt, Somervell, Chiang; but his admiration for the Russians and the Chinese Communists. The young pro-Communists in the US Embassy influenced him, just as they worked behind Ambassador Hurley to influence the US State Department with the theory that the Chinese Communists were "different from Russian Communists."
In the stampede to "get the GI's home" after the war, the author fails to point out that the pressure was Communist-inspired, a clever tactic because every son's mother in America, of course, was anxious to have her boy come home.
Factual errors in the book are few. But, 'for the record, Madame Sun Yat-sen did not stay away from her husband's funeral in Nanking. She was there with her sisters (as this reviewer can witness). Madame Chiang may indeed have visited Ramgarh, India, where Stilwell was training Chinese troops, but hardly by "dropping in on her way from Singkiang to Chungking". (It would be a lot farther.)
These are inconsequentials. The omission of factors which would strengthen Chiang's case is more serious. It might have been pointed out, for instance, that at the very time the United States was pressing "coalition government" on him, it was urging European nations to get rid of their Communist officials. When Chiang could concede no more-could not give the Communists key positions or permit retention of their independent army-Marshall clapped the embargo on against sale of arms and ammunition to China, which lasted ten months, crippling the nationalists at a crucial time and giving the Communists military superiority for the first time. The pitiable amount of aid to China during World War II and in the postwar period, as compared to that given other allies, should have been put into the record. The United States saved Britain from bankruptcy after the war; it let China go. A great many other failures on the part of the U.S. ally, such as offering a US$500-million loan conditioned on "coalition" and withdrawing it when the Marshall Mission failed to achieve that end, might be mentioned. China was placed at the bottom of the priority list for buying surplus war supplies; essential supplies ordered with China's own funds were held back until the government forces collapsed. Perhaps this part of the story was too tragic to be included.
DOCTOR ZHIVAGO
By Boris Pasternak
Pantheon Books, Inc., New York, 1958
559 pp., US$5.00
Reviewed by Miron A. Morrill
When the Swedish Academy of Literature decided to award the Nobel Prize for Literature to Boris Pasternak, Russian poet and novelist, for his novel Doctor Zhivago. it guaranteed a World-wide reading for this excellent work of art and precipitated a major crisis for Communist Russia.
The press has been full of the Pasternak controversy. "Boris Pasternak has accepted the Nobel Prize in an enthusiastically worded telegram .... Boris Pasternak has rejected the Nobel Prize .... Boris Pasternak has confessed to 'errors and mistakes' in a letter to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev .... "
Copies of the English version of this is novel, translated from the Russian by Max Hayward and Manya Harari, have been received in Taipei and so it is possible for English-reading persons here to gain firsthand impressions. In all the din of controversy, it is a little hard to take up the novel in a mood of objectivity.
Doctor Zhivago is an excellent work of art. It has the historic sweep of Tolstoy with no little of Dostoievski's power to analyze and portray character.
Yurii Andreievich Zhivago is the central figure of this story-a medical man and a poet. The reader traces his life story from his boyhood during the "Revolution of 1905," through the period of Russian defeat in World War I, the Kerensky regime, the successive Bolshevik revolutions and the period of the New Economic Policy or the NEP-men.
A not-very-necessary epilogue takes us to the Russian victory at the end of World War II, mostly so that we may learn the fate of Zhivago's illegitimate daughter by Larisa Feodorovna Guishar, also called Lara.
Mostly we see the panorama of history through. Zhivago's eyes, his mind and heart. We start in Moscow and return to it again at the real end of the story. Meanwhile we see life in various Russian villages as it disintegrates under the force of attack by the Germans and later by the anti-Communist White Russian armies of Kolchak in Siberia.
Labels are a dangerous short-cut but we might call Zhivago a "liberal." He has been much influenced by the theoretical radicalism of an uncle, Uncle Kolia. But he has also read the gospels and absorbed much of their spirit.
As an army doctor during the Russian defeat of World War I, Zhivago works in a behind-the-lines hospital in a typical Russian village.
The doctor is married to Antonina Alexandrovna Gromeko (Tonia) and loves her sincerely, also the baby son whom he has barely seen. Returning from his army service, he lifts the little son into his arms but is rewarded by a sharp slap in the face-one of the many symbols in Pasternak's story.
The doctor is a witness to the Communist reorganization of life in postwar Moscow. We see and hear the interminable discussions which center in a meeting of the tenants in "an old barrack like stone building," a meeting convened by the people's delegate, Demina. One tenant has just broken out with typhus.
Perhaps the most vivid long passage in the novel depicts a journey taken Zhivago and his family in a freight car into Siberia. Once there, we move with him into a village and then a tiny hamlet which lie on the borderline between the swaying forces of Kolchak and the "partisans." The horrors of this fighting with its attendant atrocities on both sides are vividly written down.
Larisa Feodorovna Guishar, or Lara, is the woman of the story. She has been seduced in middle-adolescence by Victor Ippolitpvich Komarovsky and never thereafter escapes from his evil power over her, partly because the fortunes of war put him in a position to be helpful to her. But other men love her. Her husband is Pavel Pavolich Antipov (Pasha, or Pashenka), a non-party military genius who serves the Communist cause but has to commit suicide in order to escape arrest and execution by his former Communist masters.
Above all Zhivago loves Lara—apparently at the same time abating nothing of his love for his wife Tonia, and their children. Lara's feminine magnetism is something at once primitive and orgiastic, but also ethereal, in tune with the annually returning life of spring. Mostly, Pasternak's picture of Lara is done by indirection, by her' effect upon the men in her life, particularly upon Zhivago. We never get a full length portrait of her, but details which we fit in one by one-her form, the beauty of her face, above all the munificence of her hair.
Well, it would take many pages to give a more detailed impression of Doctor Zhivago—the name has some connection with the Russian term for "vitality." It is a "Russian" novel. The American reader is at first perplexed by the multitude of persons each, according to the Russian fashion, called by two or three names. We stop for sharply etched analyses of the characters of even minor persons-at once a strength and a weakness. But then the reader discovers that the many actors on this fictional stage are unusually well integrated; again and again the plot brings them together in significant relationships.
Why do the Communists object? Because of the honest picture of disintegrating Russian society during the revolution? Because the Communist soldiers and commanders of 1917-20 are less than heroes? Probably not.
Probably the real Communist objections are based upon Pasternak's estimate of human nature, the importance of human personality. It is Christian!
A minor but interesting woman in the story expresses it, speaking of the birth of Christ: "Something in the world had changed. Rome was at an end. The reign of numbers was at an end. The duty, imposed by armed force, to live unanimously as a people, as a whole nation, was abolished. Leaders and nations were relegated to the past .... They were replaced by the doctrine of individuality and freedom. Individual human life became the life story of God, and its contents filled the vast' expanses of the universe ....
Komarovsky, who had seduced Lara, gets back into the story with an offer of escape for her. Zhivago tricks her into accepting it. Komarovsky sums up Zhivago: "There exists a certain Communist style, Yurii Andreivich," (one of Zhivago's several names). Few people measure up to it. But no one flouts that way of life and thought as openly as you do .... You are a living mockery of that whole world, an in suit to it .... "
This sums it up. This is probably why the Communist scent in this novel a most formidable challenge to their system. Zhivago is a man who believes in personality, in human freedom and dignity. It will never do for his creator to be rewarded with the Nobel Prize.