This is the book review mentioned by Ken Hiebert. Birney-Trotsky letters a reminder of the perils, challenges of leadership; Books
*Author:* Geddes, Gary *Publication info:* Times - Colonist ; Victoria, B.C. [Victoria, B.C]30 Aug 2020: C.1. Conversations With Trotsky: Earle Birney and the Radical 1930s, University of Ottawa Press, 418 pages. On Aug. 20, 1940, a man who'd brought him an essay to critique plunged the business end of an ice-axe into Trotsky's skull, thinking he would be able to kill his victim without a sound, then make a quick retreat. But Trotsky, emitting a huge bellow and with blood pouring down his face, turned and grappled with his attacker. They struggled in a macabre dance of death until the bodyguards descended on the interloper and started to beat him. Trotsky asked them not to kill his assailant, as he must be made to name his bosses. While Trotsky lay with his head in his wife Natalia's lap, fourteen-year-old Seva showed up, but was whisked away at his beloved grandfather's request: "Don't let the boy see this." Trotsky died of his wounds the next day. And the assassin, a Spanish Stalinist agent named Ramón Mercader, carrying a Canadian passport and using the name Frank Jacson, was convicted of murder and spent twenty years in jail without ever naming his handlers. Being a teacher clearly has its dangers, but being a student can also be a source of worry. If you doubt this, ask Joe Hansen. This is where Canadian poet Earle Birney comes in. During and after his studies at UBC, Birney became an active Trotskyist, writing and organizing cells (or "units"), corresponding with Trotsky and interviewing him in exile in Norway. While teaching English briefly at the University of Utah, Birney recruited one of his students to the cause. Hansen went on to become a secretary-bodyguard for Trotsky in Mexico. While Birney eventually gave up politics, joined the army and became a writer and academic, his student Joe Hansen remained a true believer for life. These are two tidbits from a book full with insight and information called Conversations With Trotsky: Earle Birney and the Radical 1930s, edited by former SFU professor Bruce Nesbitt. The title first caught my attention because I've been working on a full-length stage play called Norwegian Rabbit (conejo de noruega, Spanish for 'lemming') about Trotsky on the morning of his assassination in Mexico City. On a literary exchange to Mexico, I was invited by Emile Martel, a Québécois poet and cultural attaché at the Canadian Embassy, to tour Museo Trotsky, former residence of the exiled genius of the Russian revolution, as well as a crime scene. The second reason for my interest in Nesbitt's book has to do with my student days at UBC, where the maverick poet Birney was busy stirring up a hornet's nest by proposing the creation of a separate Creative Writing Department, which some felt would dismember the English Department. I had not studied with Birney, but had a unexpected and memorable encounter with him during my last week on campus. I was walking down a corridor in the Bucha nan building when I heard shouting. I could see no one, but as I passed an open door a strong hand clamped on my wrist and dragged me into the office. My lanky, bearded captor was surrounded by a dozen liquorstore boxes, some half-empty, some overflowing with books. He pointed to a shelf of unsorted volumes and announced: "I'm finally getting out of this f--ing prison. Take any books you want!" I was in such a shock that I don't remember what I grabbed before escaping back into the hallway. I was not to meet Earle Birney again until four years later, when I was in graduate school at the University of Toronto, where he had a one-year appointment as writerin-residence. By that time, I had studied his work and realized he was a major Canadian poet. It was only then that he became a friend whose work I would soon have the pleasure of including in two of my Oxford anthologies. As Bruce Nesbitt shows in the documents, the young Birney was inspired by Trotsky's vision and intelligence: "It was the feeling of a mind equipped with twice the cylinders a man's mind possesses, and the engine of the mind running silently and smoothwly and with perfect efficiency." Birney's tribute to Trotsky, not long after the assassination, is elegant and generous: "No one in our time, I think, so perfectly blended the gifts of the artist and the man of action into a memorable whole." Yet he broke with the Trotskyists over their tacit support of the invasion of Finland and what he saw as a bureaucratic tendency and "an organizational approach that is quixotic and suicidal." The correspondence suggests that Hansen mentioned Birney to Trotsky in Mexico, but it would have been too early for either to have read Birney's famous poem David, which came to be taught widely in schools and universities. That poem is about the management of grief and guilt, about assisting a mortally injured friend to end it all. I can't help but wonder if Birney's decision to abandon Trotsky and the faith informs that poem at some level; and if his 'disloyalty'might have struck him more than once as a contributing factor to his onetime hero's demise. But this is idle speculation inspired by an engaging, well researched and superbly written account of a time in our history when the Left seemed to so many the only path toward justice and equality. Like Norwegian Rabbit, the Birney-Trotsky conversations are not only a reminder of the challenges and perils of leadership - especially in the age of Trump, Putin, Bolsonaro and their ilk - but also a serious prompt about the plight of political refugees, for whom the doors seem to be closing fast. Gary Geddes's most recent works are Medicine Unbundled: A Journey Through the Minefields of Indigenous Health Care and The Resumption of Play. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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