Long Ago and Far Away . . . : Friendship: A journalist whose fame was established in Europe’s wars bids farewell to a hero who died after half a century in anonymity.
This cannot be an obituary, since those are reserved for famous successful people, nor can it be In Memoriam, as that sounds pompous about a man who never wasted a minute of his life being pompous. So I think it is a farewell letter to my friend Freddy Keller who died from burns received in a stupid needless everyday accident, a fire in his small house.
I would never have written such a letter to Freddy alive; he would have been embarrassed for us both, thinking I was off my rocker, gone soppy with age. We did not exchange paeans of praise, though there was much love and understanding in our letters. We were mainly telling each other with irony our views of the world. We saw the world from different geographical angles, he from California, I from Britain, but we shared a similar way of looking, though he was funnier and sharper.
Freddy was 80 years old, five years my junior. We belonged to a vanishing breed, people who had in common the experience of two wars. Freddy lived through those wars at the cutting edge, the infantry, while I was a spectator. I now realize that I have known Freddy Keller for 56 years and know almost nothing about his personal life. We saw each other seldom, the last time 20 years ago. We wrote erratically. I needed the certainty that such a man lived; it was a kind of private reassurance about our species. It is not often, it is practically never, that you can put absolute trust in the quality of another human being.
Probably we first met in Madrid in the spring of 1937. I am unsure about this as about all dates. Freddy fought in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion of the International Brigades in the Spanish War. He would have been in Madrid on leave, one of the wonderfully funny Americans who drifted in and out of the lives of reporters there. He had a short, square, tough body, mouse-blond hair, an Irish face, noteworthy because of its liveliness and because of the small bright blue eyes that looked at everything with unfaltering honesty and generally with amusement. Humor is a hallmark of the brave. They do not know they are brave. They downplay whatever happens by joking.
The next time I saw him was in Barcelona, in the summer of 1938, after the terrible retreat from the Ebro, the last big battle of the war. Freddy had swum the Ebro with a machine-gun bullet in his thigh, which was taken as cause for merriment and congratulation. The Ebro is a wide, deep, cold, gray river with a deadly current running to the sea. I have only now learned that Freddy swam the river several times, ferrying wounded comrades across. You would have to be heroic about pain and very strong to manage that. Freddy of course never spoke about it.
Then the war, our war, ended in defeat and none of us ever got over it in our hearts. We loved Spain and believed that it was the place where fascism must be stopped, the last chance. All the foreigners in Spain hated fascism for all their own different reasons. The Spanish people knew exactly what they were fighting and suffering for, and their fears proved true when Franco won. Since the governments of the Western democracies, in their folly, abandoned the duly elected government of the Republic of Spain, we were certain that the big war would follow, as it did five months and two days after Franco’s victory.
The FBI branded everyone who had been in Spain, but above all the Lincoln vets, as dangerous reds, to be monitored with suspicion. (Through the Freedom of Information Act, which ought to be called the Freedom of Partial Information Act, I have seen my own small file with its wildly silly snooping accusations.) Later, when the United States joined the Second World War, the “red†brand was altered to “premature anti-fascist,†though this did not cancel the FBI’s hostile attention.
Surprisingly, Freddy was able to sign up as a private in the 82nd Airborne Division. It was not easy for the Lincoln vets to be allowed to go on fighting fascism. The men of the 82nd were all volunteers, used in the harshest actions in Europe. I had no idea that Freddy was somewhere among those crack troops, though I was often with the 82nd during the war. I did not know until now that Freddy earned the Bronze Star for bravery. In those days and in that division, decorations were rare. To win this distinction as a private, Freddy must have done something of remarkable courage. Of course, he never told me.
In the first winter after the war, the 82nd was the American occupying force in Berlin, a city bombed into a vastness of jagged teeth. We Americans, the few reporters and the troops, were forbidden by the commanding general of the 82nd to cross the dividing Russian-American line into the Alexanderplatz, a huge loot market where cigarettes were the usual money. Two colleagues and I were nervously there, trying to sell a hideous brown tweed suit, sent up by Robert Capa, who was being held captive in the Lincoln Hotel in Paris until he paid his poker debts. In that milling crowd, Freddy suddenly appeared. He was neither buying nor selling; he was risking disciplinary punishment, I am sure, to see the Russian soldiers. The Alexanderplatz was full of them. In my memory, they were big, fair-haired, sloppily uniformed young men, like country hicks for the first time in a city. They were obsessed by watches. They all wanted to buy watches.
Freddy, never a communist, a born though detached Catholic, believed in socialism. Not knowing Russia, as none of us did, he believed or hoped, or both, that socialism existed there, a dream of equality and justice for workers, his kind of people. Freddy was in the Alexanderplatz looking at his heroes. We hugged each other and laughed and I lost track of him again. One of the many features of war is this: Everything changes, everyone meets by chance, everyone disappears to someplace else. I think the mind adapts to the chaos of war by becoming chaotic too.
Freddy’s life after the big war must have been filled with many jobs. I know of only one because he loved it and wrote or spoke of it: He was an engine driver on the trains, what trains or where I do not know. In all these years we did not see each other’s houses; we wrote letters. He never complained of anything, he was always funny, he was always clear and unmuddled in his thinking. He did not bother with accepted versions of politics, he was not touched by the hysterias that afflicted America in the postwar years. He went on sturdily, obscure, hard-up, unsuccessful by the going rates of judging success. He was a tremendous success by the only standards that matter: honesty, loyalty, courage, and a beautiful lack of vanity. He was his own man for 80 years. He was one of the best men I ever knew.
