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JOSEPHINE HERBST by Elinor Langer; Atlantic-Little, Brown; 374 pages...
...Josie, I'd love you whether you wrote or not," said Saul Bellow in a letter to Josephine Herbst. He had plenty of company. During her long literary life Herbst attracted such disparate admirers as Maxwell Anderson, Katherine Anne Porter, Ernest Hemingway, James T. Farrell and John Cheever. When she died in 1969 at the age of 76, Critic Alfred Kazin, who had once dismissed her work as "desperate pedestrianism," wrote that he had never known any other writer who was "so solid, so joyous, so giving...
...more pertinent question posed by Langer's book might be: How well did Herbst's friends and admirers really know her? Apparently, not well enough. The misunderstanding is rooted in Herbst's involvement in the Communist Party after 1930. As Langer regretfully relates, when party interests were at stake Herbst was an accomplished liar. On occasion she could deceive herself. In 1930 the writer and her husband John Herrmann journeyed to the U.S.S.R. at the invitation of a party official. When they came home, Herbst plunged into party activities, just short of membership. Herrmann joined...
Langer's one-page account of the couple's decisive journey to the U.S.S.R. blandly echoes the letters Herbst was writing home at the time. Russians in the street look "vital and alert." The workers' kitchens are "so shining." This was the year of the great famine, a direct result of Stalin's enforced collectivization. Though Herbst may have been shielded from the grislier effects of the mass starvation that cost 6 million peasant lives, she could not have failed to see what other travelers were reporting: hordes of hollow-eyed families begging at every railway...
Thirty-eight years later Herbst published a brief reminiscence of the trip that should have prodded Langer, usually an indefatigable researcher, into inquiring about conditions in the U.S.S.R. at the time of the visit. Herbst wrote that she had failed to ask about the collectivization that had uprooted "flocks of human beings, to starve or die." Instead, not a word about the famine appears in Langer's book...