True Tale Conquers A Fiction

June 24, 1986|By Reviewed by John Blades, Literary critic.

According to literary folklore, Robert Hale Merriman served as the inspiration for Robert Jordan in Ernest Hemingway`s ``For Whom the Bell Tolls.`` If so, Hemingway modeled his character very loosely on Merriman, an American economist who commanded the International Brigade of volunteers during the Spanish Civil War.

Not that it truly matters, but Merriman`s biography, co-written by his widow and published 50 years after the war`s onset, tells a story that is substantially different from Hemingway`s. A Berkeley graduate student with distinctly proletarian sympathies, Merriman, accompanied by his wife, Marion, went to Russia in 1935 to study the Soviet economic system. From there, Merriman, then in his mid-20s, was almost inevitably drawn to Spain, where Francisco Franco`s Fascist rebels were threatening to overthrow the elected Republican government.

Merriman, with so many others at the time, saw the hostilities as something larger than civil war. As anticipated, the confrontation turned into a bloody dress rehearsal for World War II, with Franco`s rebels backed by German and Italian forces in their fight against the Spanish Loyalists, whose cause was taken up by the Soviet Union as well as by volunteers from America and 53 other countries that made up the International Brigade.

Like many Americans who joined the fight, the charismatic Merriman was an ideologue and intellectual who had no combat experience. But he quickly distinguished himself on the battlefield, becoming the leader of America`s Abraham Lincoln Brigade, then assuming command of all the international troops in Spain.

With the assistance of Warren Lerude, a teacher and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Marion Merriman, who was herself a Loyalist volunteer in Spain, has told her husband`s story (as well as her own) with great economy and skill. Based not simply on her recollections but on their letters and diaries, her book is as dramatically constructed as a novel or film. Agonizingly personal, it also clearly sets forth the political and military issues, while thrusting readers into the conflict with a frontline immediacy. From what little is known, Merriman did not die quite so heroically as Robert Jordan, who, at the end of Hemingway`s novel, was preparing to hold off Franco troops so his Loyalist comrades could escape. Merriman, trying to reach safety after his forces were decimated, evidently walked into a Fascist ambush.

But if Merriman`s fate remains uncertain even today, his courage has never been in question. During his brief time in Spain, he led a hero`s life, died a martyr`s death. And, as his widow`s affecting testimony makes clear, he did not need Hemingway`s fiction to assure his immortality.