From “Es La Guerra”
BY JAMES NEUGASS
Of the bomb-wings that fell
In the hospital courtyard, we made candlesticks;
It was cold at night, colder
Than steel of our surgeon’s instruments.
[. . .]
We had moved that night,
To a new place, just as close to the lines.
BY JAMES NEUGASS
Of the bomb-wings that fell
In the hospital courtyard, we made candlesticks;
It was cold at night, colder
Than steel of our surgeon’s instruments.
[. . .]
We had moved that night,
To a new place, just as close to the lines.
War Is Beautiful
An American Ambulance Driver in the Spanish Civil War
Edited by Peter N. Carroll and Peter Glazer
hardcover
$26.95 / £16.99
The newly discovered journal of an award-winning poet's experience on the front lines as a member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade—All Quiet on the Western Front for the Spanish Civil War
One of the best memoirs I’ve read by an American volunteer—beautifully written, detailed, savvy, funny, and wrenching.
—PETER GLAZER, BOARD MEMBER, ABRAHAM LINCOLN BRIGADE ARCHIVE
—PETER GLAZER, BOARD MEMBER, ABRAHAM LINCOLN BRIGADE ARCHIVE
In 1937, James Neugass, a poet and novelist praised in the New York Times, joined 2,800 other passionate young Americans who traveled to Spain as part of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade—an unlikely mix of artists, journalists, industrial workers, and intellectuals united in their desire to combat European fascism.
Although rumors persisted over the years that Neugass had written a memoir, the manuscript of War Is Beautiful, a nuanced and deeply poetic chronicle of his service as an ambulance driver, did not come to light for sixty years, until a bookseller discovered it among papers in a New England house once occupied by the radical critic and editor Max Eastman. The memoir combines fast-paced accounts of darting onto battlefields to pick up the wounded with elegiac renderings of days spent “on alert” in an ever-changing series of sharply observed Spanish towns, enduring that most difficult of wartime activities: waiting.
Published now for the first time, War Is Beautiful is poised to take its place alongside works by Erich Maria Remarque, Irène Némirovsky, Wilfred Owen, and George Orwell as a transcendent contemporaneous rendering of wartime life. It includes some of Neugass’s own photos taken while in Spain.
Born in New Orleans, James Neugass attended Yale, Harvard, and Oxford and worked as a book reviewer, shoe salesman, social worker, and fencing coach before shipping off to Spain. His novel Rain of Ashes was accepted for publication shortly before his death in 1949 of a heart attack in the Sheridan Square subway station. Peter N. Carroll is the board chair of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives and the author of The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Peter Glazer is an associate professor of theater, dance, and performance studies at UC Berkeley and a member of ALBA’s Board. Both live in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Although rumors persisted over the years that Neugass had written a memoir, the manuscript of War Is Beautiful, a nuanced and deeply poetic chronicle of his service as an ambulance driver, did not come to light for sixty years, until a bookseller discovered it among papers in a New England house once occupied by the radical critic and editor Max Eastman. The memoir combines fast-paced accounts of darting onto battlefields to pick up the wounded with elegiac renderings of days spent “on alert” in an ever-changing series of sharply observed Spanish towns, enduring that most difficult of wartime activities: waiting.
Published now for the first time, War Is Beautiful is poised to take its place alongside works by Erich Maria Remarque, Irène Némirovsky, Wilfred Owen, and George Orwell as a transcendent contemporaneous rendering of wartime life. It includes some of Neugass’s own photos taken while in Spain.
Born in New Orleans, James Neugass attended Yale, Harvard, and Oxford and worked as a book reviewer, shoe salesman, social worker, and fencing coach before shipping off to Spain. His novel Rain of Ashes was accepted for publication shortly before his death in 1949 of a heart attack in the Sheridan Square subway station. Peter N. Carroll is the board chair of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives and the author of The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Peter Glazer is an associate professor of theater, dance, and performance studies at UC Berkeley and a member of ALBA’s Board. Both live in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Fall 2008
hardcover
6 1/8 x 9 1/4, 336 pages
978-1-59558-427-4
hardcover
6 1/8 x 9 1/4, 336 pages
978-1-59558-427-4
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