Lineages of the Literary Left: Essays in Honor of Alan M. Wald

Trajectory of the Partisan Intelligence

Appel’s early experiences brought him into contact with multiethnic constituencies. From 1935 to 1941, he was an active member of the left-wing League of American Writers, whose black members included Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, and many others. The league also provided opportunities for delegates from other countries to participate in its meetings. Appel might have encountered the left-wing Filipino delegates who attended the league’s third congress in June 1939, when anti-imperialist speeches inspired the committed audience.[5] Later as an officer of the league, he signed the 1942 “Call to the Writers Win-the-War Congress,” which was intended to “articulate the will and desires of the people” and to remember and avenge the victims of Pearl Harbor, Lidice, and Stalingrad; using “words as weapons,” league members advocated “the democratic integration in this people’s war of the total energies of the Negro people, by fighting with them against discrimination in any form whether in civil life or in the armed forces.”[6] Appel’s radical-democratic stance was rooted in his conviction—like that of the critic Kenneth Burke—that the people as a whole (rather than a narrowly defined, proletarian class in itself) provided the transitional vehicle for moving beyond a class-divided polity toward a larger inclusive, egalitarian order.[7] In humanist-populist terms such as these, Appel would identify with Hukbalahap (People’s Army against the Japanese), often called the Huks, the Communist-led peasant insurgency in the Philippines that continued after the defeat of Japan. For him, the Huks were an organic popular ensemble uniting all under the banner of grassroots democracy, popular justice, and socialist-internationalist solidarity.

In the last months of the war, Appel had worked in Washington, D.C., for the Office of War Mobilization and Conversion. Thereafter he was made a special assistant to the US high commissioner to the Philippines Paul V. McNutt. In the Philippines from November 1945 to March 1946, Appel conducted field investigations of the social, political, and cultural conditions of the islands. His unusual insider’s vantage point enabled him to scrutinize firsthand those crucial months of negotiations that followed the liberation of the country from Japanese occupation and led to formal independence. He described the painful, dangerous process of restoring normalcy to a society wracked with centuries of peonage, violent pauperization of millions, rampant injustice, and ferocious class antagonisms. Those deep-rooted social maladies emerged from a legacy of three hundred years of Spanish domination, four years of ruthless Japanese oppression, and over forty years of US white-supremacist ascendancy. In the brief, pivotal interregnum between the end of the war and Philippine independence (which in large part was a delusory cover for US neocolonialism), Appel directly encountered all the issues of wartime collaboration, agrarian conflict, military insubordination, diplomatic chicanery, and political opportunism that dominated the headlines of that period.

Appel’s rich, data-filled letters to his family, collected in an unpublished “Manila Diary,” provided the raw material for his two novels set in the Philippines. One of them, Plunder (1952), carried over some of the traits of his earlier work: it was a racially calibrated exposé of underworld racketeering in the war-ravaged Philippines, an interethnic drama involving American soldiers colluding with Filipinos, Chinese, and others to enrich themselves in piracy. Fortress in the Rice was more of a departure: by charting the vicissitudes of the Huk rebellion, it offered one of the most trenchant critiques of a racialized colonial ideology as it operated in the psyches of both masters and subalterns.

Appel described the education he gained in the Philippines in several letters to prospective publishers:

Thus, Appel aimed to build his novel Fortress in the Rice on the “theme of the Asiatic peasant’s struggle for rice and land” and added, in rhetoric still resonating with Popular Front ideals, that “my hero in this novel are the billion Asiatics, the common man across the Pacific who for all his differences is not too dissimilar from the common man of the big American cities.”[9] This commonality was to be embodied in the two central and typical characters of the novel, the American David MacVey and the Filipino Manuel Careo. US colonial power and Filipino resistance to it would be fleshed out in these complicated personalities. In Appel’s ethico-political imagination, their lives acquired meaning because they reacted to changing historical circumstances and the moral challenges posed by the pressures of their times.

Caught between Two Worlds

Knowledge of the Philippines as the only direct Southeast Asian colony of the United States has been, for the most part, obtuse and sparse. The Reader’s Companion to American History, for example, makes quick work of it: citing the US defeat of Spain in 1898 and subsequent annexation of the Philippines, the book notes that “anti-imperialists opposed to taking over a foreign people without their consent and holding them in a colonial condition objected bitterly.” Thereafter, we are told, the United States poured aid into the islands to pacify dissident groups and communities and in 1946 “granted the Philippines their independence, though still maintaining bases and political influence there.”[10] Other historians, however, such as Howard Zinn, Stuart Creighton Miller, and Gabriel Kolko, have gone further, describing the unconscionable violence exercised by US forces in suppressing Filipino insurgents after 1899 by means of pacification campaigns running through the first three decades of the twentieth century. The US colonial administration granted concessions to win over the vacillating middle strata and petty bourgeois intelligentsia, but the majority of Filipinos did not benefit: over 80 percent of the toiling masses consisted of peasants and workers chained to peonage in the fields and mines, subjected to degrading conditions.[11]

US tutelage resulted in pauperization of the peasantry and immiseration of the working-class and indigenous communities, due chiefly to the polarization of land ownership. Historian Jonathan Fast found that “in 1903 [when the US administration claimed that the insurgency had been defeated] an estimated 81 per cent of all land holdings were worked on directly by their owners; by 1938 this figure had fallen to 49 per cent and in the post-war decade the rate of polarization increased further . . . [until] two thirds of all the rural population were landless.”[12] On the eve of the Pacific War, deteriorating socioeconomic conditions, the increasing rate of land tenancy, heavy rural indebtedness, and massive pauperization spawned a movement of militant unions demanding land redistribution and the end of landlord control of the courts and the bureaucratic apparatus. Nonetheless, private landlord armies and vigilante groups controlled by the elite suppressed any agitation, however peaceful and legal.

World War II caused a rupture in the system of unequal relations between colonized subalterns and imperial lords together with their native overseers. The war released popular energies catalyzed by the people’s stubborn resistance to Japanese brutality. The anti-Japanese Huk insurgency was composed of Socialists, Communists, and other nationalist forces. They fought not only the Japanese invaders but also their Filipino collaborators—the puppet government and its constabulary police and soldiers—who defended landlord property and oligarchic entitlements, those pillars of the iniquitous prewar status quo. The Huk insurgency was ultimately what Appel called “a battle for the land,”[13] for the radical transformation of the economic and political structures that entrenched a privileged propertied minority.[14] After establishing local governments, the armed peasantry organized by the Huks implemented land redistribution, uncompromising punishment (often by assassination) of collaborators, and the denial of rice supplies to the Japanese occupiers (the unique strategy of the Huks’ “harvest struggles”).

And so the struggle for land and freedom would arrive at a critical turning point. The Popular Front policies of the Huk movement saw the US-backed anti-Japanese guerrillas—known as United States Armed Forces in the Far East (USAFFE)—as allies. When the US colonial officials and their army returned in 1944, the Huks welcomed them as fellow comrades in the antifascist struggle. The Huk commanders carried out an initial voluntary demobilization in their regional and local guerrilla infrastructures. But instead of being recognized for their contribution to the destruction of Japanese forces in the major provinces of Luzon (the largest island), the Huks were disarmed. Huk leaders were hounded and persecuted. USAFFE guerrillas accused the Huks of all kinds of crimes and persuaded the US Counter-Intelligence Corps to arrest well-known Huk leaders such as Luis Taruc, Casto Alejandrino, and Silvestre Liwanag. Under the Commonwealth regime of Manuel Roxas, installed by General MacArthur, landlord-controlled military police kidnapped and murdered Huk leader Juan Feleo and labor militant Jose Joven. In a historic atrocity of February 5, 1945, Appel would find the episode he later rendered as the climax to his novel. That day, Huk Squadron 77 was waylaid by a Filipino colonel, Adonais Maclang. Maclang then killed 130 unarmed Huk guerrillas with the knowledge of the US Military Police and civilian administrators. Only one American official, Air Corps colonel Gwen Atkinson, protested the outrage. This event was also described in the Huk leader Luis Taruc’s autobiography Born of the People (1953), which came out two years after the publication of Appel’s Fortress in the Rice.[15] Here was incontrovertible evidence of the dominance of landlord-reactionary politicians and military chiefs who were then supported by Roxas and, by extension, his backer General MacArthur.[16]

In effect, American liberation of the islands spelled the return of the old order of mestizo elite exploitation of the majority of peasants and workers. The immediate postwar period of collaboration and MacArthur’s subversion of principles proclaimed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and other American leaders (i.e., affirmation of national self-determination, human rights, and democratic liberties) were summed up by Filipino journalist Hernando Abaya in his 1947 commentary, Betrayal in the Philippines.[17] For Appel, that treachery was shocking; exposing it became the moral burden he bore in writing the novel. The betrayal was in fact completed, in the wake of formal independence, when the Bell Trade Act and the Military Bases Agreement of 1947 converted the territory into a neocolony. These and other measures preserved feudal landlord structures and the client-patron nexus of oligarchic power while carrying on the three hundred–year heritage of colonial subjugation under a new name.[18]

Lineaments of the Narrative Structure

The historical events covered by Fortress in the Rice begin with the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the Philippines on December 7, 1941, and span the subsequent defeats of American and Filipino defenders of Bataan and Corregidor as well as the guerrilla resistance mounted by the Huks and surviving USAFFE fighters, to conclude with the return in 1945 of General MacArthur’s troops and his anticommunist agents. The novel’s protagonist is an American bank clerk named David MacVey who joined USAFFE and was marooned in the countryside when the Japanese took the islands. Plunged into a complex social panorama of class and national conflicts, MacVey must work out his own salvation in what becomes a long narrative of learning and discovery. The novel describes MacVey’s apprenticeship as witness and bearer of testimony amid the ironic unfolding of history.

Four blocs of character types fill the stage. First, the Filipino hacienderos and oligarchs, with whom American business on the islands was historically linked, are represented by Narciso Ferrer, who flees his country home for Manila and becomes the minister of justice in the puppet regime established by the Japanese occupation. The American MacVey had found haven at Ferrer’s estate, becoming the sweetheart of Ferrer’s daughter Teresita. The second group consists of American USAFFE officials and the villainous soldier Joe Trent, a kind of double—or diabolic shadow emanation—of MacVey. The third group consists of the Filipino Huk guerrillas represented chiefly by Major Manuel Careo. Finally, situated between the Huks and the Japanese, we find an outlaw group led by a woman named Sisa, leader of the bandit group who retreats to a wilderness hideout in Dingalan Bay, and an opportunist USAFFE band led by Major Ortala and supported by landlords and fascist elements.

At the outset, we see the young, naive MacVey befriended by the hacienda overseer, Jacinto, who was left behind in charge of the estate when Ferrer fled to Manila. The first lesson in MacVey’s education comes as peasants take their revenge for centuries-old humiliation by slaying Jacinto. With psychological acuity, Appel renders the impact of the oppressed’s newly found power on the anguished white man, whose only refuge is to assert his national/racial identity:

MacVey’s second lesson in self-examination comes from his association with Joe Trent as both of them journey toward the Huk headquarters at Lawang Kupang. Witnessing Trent’s rape of a helpless native woman, MacVey vows to bear witness to this epitome of colonial/racial/sexist terrorism: “He could have wept for her and for himself. He could have wept for this evil thing Joe had done to her and to all Americans. But what was the use? In this hut who would care or understand? ‘Joe,’ he said, ‘when we get to Lawang Kupang I’m turning you in, Joe. I’m telling Careo.'”[20] On reaching the camp of Huk leader Careo, MacVey is reunited with Teresita, who has broken with her father by joining the Huk rebels. MacVey’s report of Trent’s crime has no effect; both the Americans, MacVey and Trent, are dispatched to a USAFFE group commanded by Colonel Ryker. They also spend an interlude together with Sisa’s bandits at the remote Dingalan Bay. Further steps in MacVey’s moral education emerge from the sojourn at Dingalan Bay, leading to the novel’s denouement, when MacVey fully assumes his role as testimony-bearer and witness.

The Artist’s Vocation: Historian and People’s Tribune

MacVey’s role as witness, of course, mirrored Appel’s own status as an observer-cum-partisan, someone (as aide to McNutt) affiliated with the colonizer who discovers the US betrayal not only of the Philippines but also of the democratic ideals that Appel’s Popular Front politics had identified with a genuine New Deal for the world. Appel saw himself as a historian-educator capable of conveying knowledge of a multidimensional sociohistorical totality in the form of a novel. His method followed Georg Lukács’s understanding of the novel as a venture in interiority as well as Lukács’s definition of realism as the invention of typical characters representing social categories, such as MacVey, Narciso Ferrer, Careo, etc.

Appel had no intention of achieving a kind of documentary pastiche that one associates today with Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood or with the raw if now banal naturalism of Émile Zola and Frank Norris. Appel disclaimed being a political reporter or foreign correspondent. In a letter to the editor of Macmillan, Appel confessed that the novel is the “story of one American’s education in the Far East—an education begun so long ago in an American schoolroom—and what he learned of the new colonialism so ominous for all the peoples of the world. It is the story of sixty days, a moment of history, that lost all Asia.”[21] Later, Appel wrote that in 1945–46, he felt he was “living at the center of a typhoon”; it was “a year of momentous decisions when all Asia held its breath, waiting for the United States, the world’s supreme power to point the way to the future. . . . And weren’t the 1950s and the 1960s decades of wars and civil wars in Asia? And wasn’t the United States itself torn apart by violent dissension?” Appel assumed a self-conscious, transnational perspective: “No sensitive person could have been in the Far East in 1945–46 without being aware that the American alternatives in Asia were limited. It was a choice between the mailed fist, a restoration of the pre-war status quo, or a recognition of the ‘rice bowl’ revolution. And my novel reflected what was to come.”[22]

He wanted to report faithfully but also judge and evaluate what was happening. It is clear that he had been deeply moved by the epic struggle of the Filipino masses for genuine democracy and equality, encapsulated in his phrase “the rice bowl revolution of landless peasants,” an epic struggle to which American “leadership at all levels is pathetically blind. . . . All colonialism is doomed but our leadership remains blind.”[23] Appel’s urgent task was to awaken not only the leaders but also the broad audience of his work about this ethico-political blindness, this willful ignorance, bred from a long history of colonial hauteur. His advantage over previous historians was that he happened to be a witness-participant at a turning point when the main contradiction between Japanese fascism and the Allied cause of free-enterprise democracy clashed head-on with the revolutionary tide in the Philippines. “To know, to understand and to act in the democratic tradition” was Appel’s ethico-political motive, a duty as witness to testify to the truth and an obligation to incite the audience to action in order to prevent what was to come—the disasters and misfortunes of humanity, born from the reality of the unexamined benighted past.

As a socially responsible artist, Appel conceived his task as the traditional one of rendering into concrete dramatic scenes the meaning of what he witnessed, investing acts of misery and despair with pity, compassion, and love. The burden of artistic representation would center on constructing a narrative that would flesh out the manifold contradictions of that historic conjuncture. The artist would immerse himself in a specific milieu in which the conflicts of classes, races, and nations would assume an imaginative unity that would attain timelessness in and through the ephemeral circumstances of everyday life. He extracted from the Philippine geopolitical milieu a contrived plot of one young American’s education (MacVey’s experience) about the deceptive nature of the new colonialism, shown in the strife between the Huks and USAFFE right after the end of the war with the Japanese.

Apart from fidelity to a multifaceted actuality, the novel’s realism is complicated by a need to profit from the hazardous journey of discovering the truth behind illusions both official and psychological, illusions about white supremacy and American “benevolent assimilation” (first proclaimed by President William McKinley upon annexing the islands in 1898). The sublimation of romantic ideals embedded in tradition and social conventions proceeds through love scenes, fantasies, and experiences of disappointment, anger, joy, and longing. What results is the ironic revelation of the limits of metaphysical hopes and idealist promises vis-à-vis the unyielding facticity of real life: Appel reroutes the classic burden of the bildungsroman, self-realization as an educational process of disillusion and learning, through syncopation with social satire and lyrical episodes of adventure beyond the humdrum routine of quotidian life. Appel’s perspective—one of hindsight based on his Philippine experience turned into foresight about the disasters of US postwar policy in Southeast Asia—informs the novel’s prophetic charge.

As Appel strove to reconcile his self-appointed roles as novelist, historian, and partisan, he sought to portray MacVey as a typical white middle-class American whose education involves a moral journey beyond racism, possessive individualism, and fatalism—all in the process of recognizing the humanistic aspirations of the Asian revolution. Even in passages describing MacVey’s rapturous reunion with Teresita near the camp of Huk leader Careo that critics have faulted for purple prose, Appel’s real aim was a suggestive invocation of moral development. Lyrical passages celebrate the loss of that narrow ego-centered mentality that underlays class, racial, and national divisions among humans. Losing ego in that sense harmonized with the transcendent cosmic rhythm of nature:

That last slangy phrase borrows the language and tone of Appel’s early tough-guy writing in order to defuse unduly romantic transports.

In the Huk camp, Major Careo marries MacVey and Teresita, and thus Careo becomes a father figure and teacher to the American. MacVey’s inherited racism is evident as he willfully fantasizes that Teresita is Spanish, not Filipino; he admits his unease at the prospect of being the father of a “brown kid,” a fatality “too remote for him to grasp.”[25] Careo drives home the cathartic value of the process of self-examination as he tells MacVey, “You are ashamed of the prejudice. That is the first step, my friend. To admit your life as it has been, to understand your own past. Only then can a man begin to understand the lives of others different from him. Once we understand, we will have no use for prejudice.” Complementing this self-enlightenment is a view that the past is not immutable, proof of which is the wedding of two persons representing seeming opposites, disparities, incommensurables: “You will open other doors, all the doors of your past, this prison that holds us and keeps us from being brothers.”[26]

Learning and Teaching

That memorable exhortation rests on the trope of liberation from enclosing mind-sets and fixations. In the chapter that Appel titled “The First Liberation,” the morality of decision is sharply enunciated as the antithesis of what is and what ought to be, a choice between resignation to the static actuality of everyday life and defiance in attempting to change the drift of things: “The way things are, Dave thought. . . . But what about the way things ought to be? Lifting against the chorus of the way things are, he seemed to hear voice after voice . . . for always there came a time of decision. Always a man has to raise his own voice or be still against the steady, repeated everlasting chorus of the way things are.”[27] This classic philosophical contradiction between is and ought, what is dead (the past) and what ought to be vibrant (the future as present), axiomatically expresses the theme of the novel.

Yet MacVey has not yet fully embraced this lesson. Separated once again from Teresita—whom he learns later abandoned him for an opportunist USSAFE officer—MacVey indulges his sexual desires with the bandit leader Sisa, lover of Joe Trent as well. This triangular affair brings MacVey to a point of almost complete corruption before he resumes his emancipatory education. Imagining Dingalan Bay and Sisa’s way of life as nearly idyllic, he is almost prepared to surrender all previous ties, obligations, and remorse. It is a moment of liberation from self-centered concerns, even an anarchistic moment of self-dissolution—of the wrong kind. After being assured that he has equal claims to Sisa in competition with Trent, MacVey begins to admire Sisa as a free agent, “a perverted female Robin Hood, loyal to her wine-stealing, raping bunch of tulisans [bandits].” Even “Caveman Joe Trent,” as a man with no ties, has nearly been redeemed for MacVey. When, however, Sisa proves her utter indifference to the murder of a former lover by Trent, MacVey recoils. Sisa comes to represent amoral fatalism, and Joe represents the acquiescence to beastly impulses. At this point, MacVey’s internal divisions can no longer be disguised or ignored. Fearing that he had been lulled into becoming his double, he “was tormented most by the feeling that he was Joe.”[28] This epiphanic moment for MacVey ushers in his return to the role as witness and truth-bearer.

As MacVey breaks with the bandit camp and begins a long perilous trek back to USAFFE headquarters, he finds himself truly dispossessed. Having escaped the illusions of pleasurable abandon, he also comes to terms with the loss of Teresita, no longer claiming rights of ownership over her or anyone else. He reaches a stage, that is, when “need and enjoyment have lost their egoistic nature” (as Marx once envisaged)—his need for sexual enjoyment, for example—and when the complete emancipation of all the human senses and attributes occurs with “the supersession of private property,” in this case, one woman’s body treated as the husband’s private possession.[29] In terms of the larger theme of imperial domination of other lands, the colony and its people can no longer be treated as possessions—the Filipinos and their natural resources are no longer the private property of American capitalist investors and businessmen. Not only has MacVey taken a step beyond petit bourgeois egoism; he has also assumed an anticolonial vocation. Appel sought to combine the techniques of the bildungsroman with the political critique of the neocolonial situation in Southeast Asia. He would resolve the contradiction between New Deal/Popular Front democratic ideals and authoritarian neocolonial reality by forcing the hero (David MacVey) to shift his concern from his romantic-personal misfortune to the moral obligation to defend human dignity, social justice, and civic responsibility for the victims of class wealth and racist power. The climax of MacVey’s education—his graduation into becoming a reliable, full-fledged witness of the brutalities and self-deceptions of war—leads to the novel’s denouement in the fate of the Huk rebellion.

In his fictionalized version of the massacre of Huk Squadron 77, Appel depicts the capture of Major Careo by pro-American guerrilla forces who accuse Careo and his men of opposing landlords as Communists and execute them on the spot. Ironically, the colony was freed from the Japanese by American liberators, only to be surrendered to the yoke of quislings, criminal opportunists, and the private armies of landlords and rich politicians and bureaucrats who had pandered to the Japanese and were now eager to prove their subservience to the returning US masters. MacVey comes upon the scene at the end of his long journey from Dingalan Bay. After seeing the corpses of Careo and his other erstwhile Huk comrades, MacVey is seized with “a paroxysm of grief and rage.” Prying open Careo’s knotted fist, MacVey finds a handful of palay (unhusked rice grains), symbolic of the noble ideals of the peasant resistance. He shouts at Major Ortala, the opportunist officer who carried out the execution to please the reactionary landlord-oligarchs:

Thus, MacVey accepts responsibility for America’s failures and hypocrisies.

Appel’s metaphoric index of the hungry masses—the palay—is meant to overshadow MacVey’s bitter disenchantment at the end with its dreadful aura of futility. The imagery and rhythm of the following passage exemplifies Appel’s finely controlled rhetoric. His prose style here is neither overly optimistic nor cautiously genteel. The narrator inventories the polarized forces confronting each other in an imagined portrait of the coming future:

In this spirit, Appel’s concluding pages produce mixed feelings of subdued hope, vigilance, and anger. Optimism and melancholy coalesce. Ultimately, MacVey takes up the challenge of broadcasting to the world the truth of colonialism and its deceptive masks. Although aware of human limitations and the inertia of institutions, Appel ardently believed in progress by stages. He reaffirmed his commitment to a Popular Front vision of the (betrayed) promise of a New Deal for the world. Thus, he reinvented his novelistic vocation by syncopating his usual realist method with a subtly allegorical, quasi-Brechtian pedagogical maneuver. Fortress in the Rice is the product of this process of renewal. Parallel to MacVey’s passage from shock to understanding and engagement, the novelist’s process of giving pleasure by resolving crises coincides with his pedagogical task. Although the accumulation of events overwhelms practically all the major characters, MacVey as well as Careo and others derive insight and wisdom from the difficulties of their individual predicaments. Appel’s ethico-political objective of depicting the emergence of US neocolonial hegemony in the Philippines fuses with his artistic goal of mobilizing the novel form to serve both aesthetic and political ends.

Appel’s narrative strategy of weaving individual fates within the fabric of international-local relations succeeded in synthesizing the complex motives of humans caught in a turbulent crisis. We are engaged here with the historic crisis of a system—monopoly capitalism in its highest stage, imperialism before World War II, and neocolonialism after it—that is inevitably dying, while the egalitarian future nourished in its womb, like the palay grains in the bloodied ground, is still struggling to be born. Careo’s death and MacVey’s new voice emblematize those moments. This ambitious task of historical clarification and complex symbolic representation is the message of Fortress in the Rice, a powerful artistic creation by this forgotten American chronicler of the ongoing Filipino revolution.