Author John Catalinotto and I have a lot in common: For one thing, we’re both big fans of the fictional writing of Álvaro Cunhal, the late Portuguese Communist Party leader who wrote under the pen name Manuel Tiago. In fact, Cunhal is a fleeting character in Catalinotto’s own first fictional writing, Cold War: A Love Story. And in many ways, the novel captures some of the same spirit as Tiago’s fiction, and came about in a manner that rhymes with Cunhal’s own history.
“Catalinotto never dreamed of writing a novel,” reads his author bio, “until persistent memories of youthful trauma led to the realization that the best route to truth is often through fiction.” Cunhal himself could hardly have said it better.
We met over Manuel Tiago. Not only a longtime teacher of higher mathematics, Catalinotto also loves learning languages. It turns out that his peregrinations through the 1960s and ’70s led him to some of the same places I also inhabited—the anti-war movement, Paris in 1968, Portugal, New York. He learned the local languages at least competently, approaching fluency. And he was on the verge of translating Tiago’s masterpiece Until Tomorrow, Comrades, which he first got to know in Portugal shortly after the Carnation Revolution of 1974, when he found out a translation (mine) had already been published. We share the vision of a fiction skillful and powerful enough to convey the essence of a time and place for younger readers and those of the future who seek to grasp the intense emotions we lived through.
In a not so subtle homage to Cunhal’s fictional work, Catalinotto places him at a Communist gathering on the eve of May Day 1975 in Lisbon. Cunhal excuses himself early, saying, “There is still much to do,” closing with the words, “Until tomorrow, comrades!”
The story starts out at City College of New York, where Joe is a budding mathematics star, but much of the novel takes place in Europe. Scenes in Germany and France recall the resistance movement among American G.I.’s either stationed there or who had deserted the armed forces during the Vietnam War and traveled there for refuge. Their opposition to the war mirrored the movement at home, and also resonated with both students and workers in Europe who not only hated American imperialism but also were fighting for social and political change at home. Joe Cozzo, the protagonist, clearly a stand-in for the author, is politically formed during this period, and remains in Europe serving his party back home.
That party, unnamed as such, would be the Workers World Party, which has been Catalinotto’s life for 60-odd years. Born in 1940, he is still an active journalist, public speaker, and for more than 40 years, managing editor of Workers World. He has acted also as spokesperson for the International Action Center. One of the strengths of his fiction—again, a tip of the hat to his fictional mentor Manuel Tiago—is to underscore the principle of party discipline, the acceptance of collective wisdom even as it affects where a member might live and what tasks they are assigned.
In the recounting of Cozzo’s involvement with the G.I.’s, he learns great lessons about the relationship of a political party to a movement: To support the movement’s activists as they make their own decisions, and not attempt to impose a strategic approach that is not asked for. Many of the G.I. resisters were people of color, so a white party member would be especially cautious not to be overbearing and chauvinistic.
All the while, Joe encounters a fascinating collection of characters of different nationalities, from radical deserters to student organizers, to Parisian sewer workers, to fellow American ex-pats. Fausto, Mirabelle, Tomi, Calvin, Danny, Dick, Manuel, Urbano and more. One especially, Diane, a journalist who becomes friends with Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre in the antiwar movement, eventually becomes his lover. She comes from a troubled marriage to an American intelligence officer who, after they divorce, turns into a pursuing Javert bent on revenge. The political history of the era is spiced up with a thrilling life-and-death adventure that traverses the decades, almost out of Les Misérables, referenced earlier as one book that Joe had read while serving a prison sentence for his antiwar work.
Catalinotto puts Joe in Berlin in 1961 as a math graduate student, just in time to witness the Berlin Wall going up. He understands the wall not so much as an imprisonment, but more as a guarantee that all the education and training young East Germans received for free would not be wasted if they were easily lured to the West in pursuit of higher wages and access to consumer goods. Joe was there in Paris at the student and worker uprising of 1968 and, drawn to revolutionary events as he was, he goes to Lisbon to work with the editors at Avante, the PCP newspaper after the military revolt that overthrew fascism. (The parallel between the 1960s social justice movement from within the U.S. armed forces and the Portuguese Revolution is obvious and telling.)
I was reminded of Forrest Gump, the Everyman who just happens to be present at a remarkable series of momentous times and events. In Dickensian fashion, Diane, too, seems to follow Joe wherever he goes, allowing their love affair to emerge fitfully, slowly, but finally in full flower as their lives become ineluctably joined.
As with any political fiction, readers will relate to the passions and struggles of the times they lived through, and soak up its lessons as they confront today’s issues. Helpful in assessing people and events from a variety of perspectives is the author’s choice to include straight expository narrative, internal voices, excerpts of letters back and forth from the U.S. to Europe, journal entries, translation, and first drafts of articles for publication. Part of Joe and Diane’s attraction to one another involves their different writing styles and the way each, by example, helps to improve the other’s writing. References to Émile Zola, Victor Hugo, Goethe, Brecht, Sartre, de Beauvoir, James Baldwin and others indicate a well-read writer who identifies with progressive thinkers of the past and of his own time.
The author is especially effective in communicating the nature of his growing political commitment. Arrested for trespassing at Fort Sill during the Vietnam War, he contemplates why he did it:
“Joe knew why he was there, under arrest. He hated the world’s injustice, looking at it, realizing the pain of it, was unbearable without action. In the beginning was the deed. But action alone was little better, and could do more harm than good. Action in a group, now that was comforting, but also action with thought behind it, a worldview, an international movement. That was why he was in the party, ready for action, part of a worldwide movement to end injustice, and that was why he was now arrested. He would stay strong, and his comrades would help him.”
Activists in other lands felt the same way. The author quotes a Portuguese woman now enjoying the first fruits of liberation after almost 50 years of fascism: “Without the party we’d be lost. Under the fascists, life was terrible for us workers. We often went hungry. Even worse was being afraid all the time. The party taught us how to stick together, how to fight, how to win.”
Catalinotto has also authored a non-fiction work, Turn the Guns Around: Mutinies, Soldier Revolts and Revolution, based in part on his own experiences with the American Servicemen’s Union in the 1960s. I intend to read that soon.
John Catalinotto
Cold War: A Love Story
FourPiRsquared Books, 2022
346 pp., $24.90
ISBN: 9798987217610
Also available in a Kindle edition
We hope you appreciated this article. At People’s World, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading People’s World and the stories we bring you, please support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today. Thank you!
CONTRIBUTOR
Comments