The Wilde Solution is loosely based on the Russian sleeper cell that was uncovered back in June. My story takes place in an academic background, which as we know from newspaper reports, one of the responsibilities the spy Cynthia Murphy had was to recruit when she was studying for her M.B.A.

It’s not too far-fetched for intelligence agencies to send someone an d have them pose as a student and attempt to woo their classmates to come and join them. When I majored in International Relations at my very progressive university, we had one student who was essentially a reactionary. He wasn’t there long–about two semesters–and it was suspected that he was CIA. Now at my school, and certainly the IR Department, the CIA would never have recruited successfully. If we had any other spooks on campus, it would probably have been the KGB, and I’m pretty sure they would have generated more interest.

In The Wilde Solution, Cyprian is not recruiting at all. Her mission is to woo one of the professors in the graduate department and get very close to him because he is the best friend or a former colleague who runs a think tank. Why not cut to the chase and seduce the founder of the think tank? I thought it was too obvious a choice. Plus Tom Powers is a player, not one to settle down with one woman, and the character of Hal Sarf–whose name I really need to change since he is based (very, very, very loosely) on a late professor whom I had a terrible crush on and almost hooked up with, but I backed out after feeling guilty that I would be cheating on a boyfriend. In hindsight I regret not getting involved with Hal. I liked him a lot. He had this his very Jewish intellectual nebbish way, and I thought he was very attractive–think the late Ron Silver–but with a sweater vest and tweeds.  To me,  Hal was very sexy, and there were plenty of nights that the thought of him lecturing about Hegel kept me up and very agitated.

That was a major too much information tangent.  Back to The Wilde Solution.

The easy the part of the story-telling is the wooing between Hal and Cyprian, and getting her completely immersed at the university and as Hal’s lover. It’s the spying part where I’m stumbling about. Apart from what I’ve read in novels, seen on TV or at the movies. I really don’t know anything about being a spook. Zip. That brings me to my favorite activity in the whole world–research. This wasn’t supposed to be a novel that relied very heavily on fact, but how can I justify a story about spying without knowing the very basics? So I’ve started amassing information via the Internet, and bought a couple of books. Once I have a better grasp of this whole spook thing, I think the story will get better (at least I hope so).

Now it’s time to take a writing break and read a book!

Two posts in one day. What’s happening here? Actually, I’m waiting for some people to get back to me with responses to questions for two upcoming articles.

Now that I have this renewed motivation for Julius, I thought it would be fun to list the books I’ve read, currently reading, and used as research. In other words, my novel’s bibliography. Once you go through the titles, you’ll have an idea of the general theme of the story.

Drum roll, please . . . and here they are:

Books:

• Men in Battle, by Alvah Bessie
• Alvah Bessie’s Spanish Civil War Notebooks, edited by Dan Bessie
• Inquisition in Eden, by Alvah Bessie
• Alvah Bessie’s Short Fictions, by Alvah Bessie
• The Un-Americans, by Alvah Bessie
• Spain Again, by Alvah Bessie
• Rare Birds, by Dan Bessie
• The Brother: The Untold Story of the Rosenberg Case, by Sam Roberts
• Ethel Rosenberg: Beyond the Myths, by Ilene Phillipson
• New Masses Anthology, edited by Joseph North
• The Inquisition in Hollywood, by Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund
• Red Scare: Memories of the American Inquisition, by Griffin Fariello
• Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places, by Sharon Zukin
• Dorothy Healey Remembers: A Life in the American Communist Party, by Dorothy Healey and Maurice Isserman
• Legacy of a False Promise: A Daughter’s Reckoning, by Margaret Fuchs Singer
• The Spanish Civil War, by Hugh Thomas
• The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C Tucker
• The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution, and Revenge, by Paul Preston
• The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction, by Helen Graham
• A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York, by Tony Michels
• Reds: McCarthyism in Twentieth Century America, by Ted Morgan
• Many are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America, by Ellen Schrecker
• Naming Names, by Victor S. Navasky
• Thirty Years of Treason: Excerpts of  Hearings before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, 1938-1968, edited by Eric Bentley
• The Roots of American Communism, by Theodore Draper
• The Communist Party of the United States: From the Depression to World War II, by Fraser Ottanelli
• The Politics of Fear: Joseph R. McCarthy and the Senate, by Robert Griffith
• Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell
• Comrades, by Harry Fisher
• Facing Fascism: New York & The Spanish Civil War, by Peter N. Carroll and James D. Fernandez
• The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, by Peter N. Carroll
• The Passionate War: The Narrative History of the Spanish Civil War, by Peter Wyden
• Blood of Spain: An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War, by Ronald Fraser
• The Rise and Fall of Communism, by Archie Brown
• Ten Days That Shook the World, by John Reed
• The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx, edited by Frederic L. Bender
• The Essential Marx, edited by Leon Trotsky
• My Life, by Leon Trotsky
• Lower East Side Tourbook, by Oscar Israelowitz
• New York Jews and the Great Depression, by Beth S. Wenger
• Marxian Economics, edited by John Eatwell, Murray Milgate, and Peter Newman
• The Lower East Side: A Guide to Its Jewish Past in 99 New Photographs, by Ronald Sanders
• The Screenwriter’s Bible, by David Trottier
• Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting, by Robert McKee.
• How to Start A Magazine and Publish it Profitably, by James B. Koback
• Paris Inside Out, by David Applefield

That’s it for books. In a few days, I’ll list all the websites and articles.

I love research. I can spend hours digging up stuff I know at some point I’ll use somewhere. In Julius, a future story, or even in conversation. My latest obsession is Trotsky. That’s right, Leon Trotsky–revolutionary, part of the Bolshevik troika (Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin) and Commander of the Red army.

What’s with the obsession? It appears that I need more conflict between my MC and narrator and her beloved. I made her a very academic Marxist and he’s leaning more towards Trotskyism. Will the two characters knock heads over theory and ideology that it causes a rift in the magazine they plan to publish? That’s my intention. Is Julius a polemic as one person who critiqued the first few chapters accused it to be? Not at all, at least I hope not.

Back to the research . . . because I decided to add this little twist to the story I was curious what my beloved Alvah Bessie thought about Trotsky, and I jotted a quick email to his son Dan Bessie. According to Dan, it wasn’t a topic that was discussed between the two, but he imagined that:

Like most “good” CP members, during the time when the “Trots” were regarded by the USSR (and the American CP) as “wreckers,” that he went along with that. As did I, until I began to associate with some during the 1960s. This was in connection with an attempt we in the L.A. CP (among my generation) made to have joint meetings with them. This was also in connection with the New Left School, a radical educational institution that I helped organize and run for a time. (We had folks of different left persuasions teaching there.). While we didn’t always agree with those in the SWP (Socialist  Worker’s Party), we didn’t regard them as “enemies.”  We also had, in L.A., in the person of Dorothy Healey (read about her online) a great, dynamic leader; much smarter and very very open to ideas. Ben Dobbs, her co-leader in L.A., was just as great. Both eventually quit the CP and joined the Democratic Socialists of America.

Of course when he mentioned that I take a look at Dorothy Healey online I had to Google her, and I found this entry on Dorothy in Wikipedia. It said:

Her story is told in a book she wrote with historian Maurice Isserman, Dorothy Healey Remembers: A Life in the American Communist Party (1990). In the book, Healey revealed “the aspirations, commitment, illusions — and, ultimately, disillusionment — of a generation of young Communists” who joined the movement before and during the Great Depression. She, as they, had to deal with and “the Party [being] reduced to a remnant of its former strength through the battering it received in the McCarthy era and through its own sectarian mistakes.

Book? Uh-oh. I knew after I read that line I was going shopping.  And so off to Amazon I went, and found a reasonably priced copy, and it’s on its way to me.

But what about the Old Man aka Trotsky? Ah, that’s another story down the meandering research path. In this month’s Internet Review of Books, Robert Sinsheimer reviewed Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary, by Bertrand M. Patenaude. In his review Sinsheimer wrote:

Perhaps the inconsistencies are less the fault of the author than of his subject. Trotsky was a complex, moody man. At times paranoid, he met his death because he let his guard down. An ideological purebred, he was nonetheless “a practiced philanderer.” More than willing to accept donations to the cause, the anti-capitalist was nonetheless forced to write to earn a living. Having penned Literature and Revolution and The History of the Russian Revolution, he was respected as a writer and his books were in some demand. Patenaude notes that Trotsky was pleased that the passport issued upon his exile listed his profession as writer. His powerful turn of a phrase drew the attention of George Bernard Shaw, who once wrote that “when Trotsky cuts off an opponent’s head, he holds it up to show there are no brains in it.” Trotsky was well along in the process of a Stalin biography at the time of his assassination.

The fact that he was a writer drew me even more to Trotsky; however, this book is about Trotsky in Mexico. I was more interested in a good biography so I Googled and saw that a spanking new book, Trotsky, by Robert Service was recently published. This time I restrained myself from buying it because the reviews were mixed (not that I put much faith in some of the Amazon reviews). So I started to Google more and came across a series of interviews by Peter Robinson of  The Hoover Institute’s “Uncommon Knowledge” program with Christopher Hitchens and Robert Service. It’s a five part interview and the one thing that stood out for me was that mention on Trotsky’s autobiography My Life. I put off buying Service’s biography for the time being and downloaded  My Life for free.

In My Life’s forward, Trotsky writes:

This is a book of polemics. It reflects the dynamics of that social life which is built

entirely on contradictions. The impertinence of the schoolboy toward his master; the pinpricks

of envy in the drawing-room, veiled by courtesies; the constant competition of commerce;

the frenzied rivalry in all branches of pure and applied science, of art, and sport; the

parliamentary clashes that reveal the deep opposition of interests; the furious struggle that

goes on every day in the newspapers; the strikes of the workers; the shooting down of participants in demonstrations; the packages of explosives that civilized neighbors send each

other through the air; the fiery tongues of civil war, almost never extinguished on our planet

– all these are the forms of social “polemics,” ranging from those that are usual, constant

and normal, almost unnoticed despite their intensity, to those of war and revolution that are

extraordinary, explosive and volcanic. Such is our epoch. We have all grown up with it.

We breathe it and live by it. How can we help being polemical if we want to be true to our

period in the mode of the day?

For almost three years, I’ve been working on a novel that I’ve titled Julius. It started with the NANOWRIMO (National Novel Writing Month ) challenge to complete a 50,000 word draft in one month. After I completed the task, I saw that the silly and spoofy story I had imagined had become something much more substantial.  Now, two and one-half years after the fact, I’m still researching, rewriting and revising. It’s an endless process.

How did  the story begin and what is it today? For starters, it all had to with Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a car drive through the town of Ossining and my father’s comment about prison towns and the electric chair.

How did the novel change? Here’s an example of one sentence I wrote in the very first draft:

Too bad it’s not 1936, we could have run off to Spain with the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, fight the fascists along with Alvah Bessie and George Orwell and feel like we accomplished something worthwhile.

What was a passing mention of Alvah Bessie, the Abraham Lincoln Brigades, and the Spanish Civil War became a quest to know everything about the war, Bessie and ALBA (Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archive), and the CPUSA, and with that, the research became an all-consuming obsession.

When do you stop researching and start writing? For me, they go hand-in-hand. I may find something and discover it might be a good fit–so in it goes. Does it make the final cut? Maybe, maybe not. Research,like revisions, can be an endless task. If you’re like me, a notorious procrastinator, they can be impediments to writing and finishing your novel.

And on that note, it’s time to do some writing. . . .