Book Review : A Loyal Friendship Travels a Long and Winding Road

Comrades by Paul Leaf (New American Library: $14.95)

The parade of Hollywood witnesses before the infamous House Committee on Un-American Activities in the early 1950s is the opening backdrop to Paul Leaf’s novel “Comrades.” The two heroes of the book, the comrades of the title, famous director of stage and screen Mike Rossano, and famous Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Robert Thompson, have been subpoenaed to appear before the committee; the drama of the moment comes down to this: Will the one friend rat on the other? This is, after all, a novel about friendship and loyalty and truth and justice and love and morality and pain and courage and suffering, as well as the joys of hearing the opening-night audience chant “Author! Author!” and the like.

More Than Friends

Rossano and Thompson are more than friends. They are comrades with lives seamlessly welded together on the field of battle, first in Spain and then in the OSS during World War II. The theater is their common ground, Rossano as the actor/director and Thompson as the writer. The book moves from Spain to the theater world of Greenwich Village to war-torn North Africa, Dachau and Paris, then back to New York and Hollywood in postwar America.

Just about everyone imaginable makes some sort of an appearance along the way: Hemingway, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, Will Geer, Clifford Odets, Paul Robeson, Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Mann, the Hollywood Ten, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and more. Only the atom bomb is left out save for a quick reference to one of the characters reading “Hiroshima.”

In Spain, Robert instantly falls in love with Katherine Loesser, a Lincoln Brigade nurse who becomes a psychiatrist. She too is a comrade of sorts, but always the wedge between Mike and Robert. Or so the reader is encouraged to believe for the sake of some sort of unresolved tension.

Life in Greenwich Village

The three live together in a Greenwich Village railroad flat both before and after the war. Robert marries Katherine; they have a son named Bobby; Katherine gets too involved in her work; Robert tangles with a Hollywood sexpot in retaliation, and then comes crawling home. Mike just has affairs. They all become successful and famous, and then their leftist past catches them up short.

“Comrades” is galling for being more a long-winded outline of a novel than a work of fiction, a book proposal rather than a book. Leaf has produced a thick stack of 3x5-inch cards filled with transparent characters and scenes that line up one after another, eventually leading to the end of the book.

This is the kind of cathartic book a first-time novelist writes to rid himself of all his cliches and jabberings. Normally the finished manuscript is then put in a drawer and forgotten, while the novelist, freed of his burden, sits down to produce something worthwhile. The most remarkable thing about “Comrades” is that it managed to crawl out of the drawer and into print.