Edwin Rolfe

• Name — Edwin Rolfe • Birth Name — Solomon Fishman • Born — September 7, 1909 • Birthplace — Philadelphia, Pennsylvania • Died — 24 May 1954 • Place of death — Hollywood, California • Education — * City College of New York • University of Wisconsin • Occupation — * Poet • journalist • screenwriter

Rolfe was born Solomon Fishman in Philadelphia in 1909, the first of three sons. His parents were Russian Jewish immigrants who met through a marriage broker and wed in 1908. Both parents were politically active, with his mother involved in the suffrage and birth control movements, and his father a labor organizer, union officer, and committed socialist. In 1915, the family moved to New York City. Solomon attended New Utrecht High School and contributed to the school magazine, The Comet. He eventually became its editor, succeeding his close friend Leo Hurwitz. During these formative years, Solomon began to use pseudonyms in his writings, and eventually settled on "Edwin Rolfe".

His first collected poems appeared in an anthology with three other poets. The volume was called We Gather Strength (1933). Other poetry collections of his followed, none of which were conventionally published: To My Contemporaries (1936) was put out by the small Dynamo Press after receiving contributions from Archibald MacLeish and others; First Love, and Other Poems (1951) was sold to subscribers; Permit Me Refuge (1955), with a foreword by poet Thomas McGrath, was published posthumously by California Quarterly. Its editor Philip Stevenson solicited donations from Rolfe's friends (such as blacklisted screenwriter Albert Maltz) to pay for publication costs. Rolfe's poems were inseparable from the historical events swirling around him. His poetry was his intellectual and emotional response to the Great Depression, Spanish Civil War, and Second Red Scare.

While a teenager in 1924, Rolfe joined the Young Communist League. He would later join the Communist Party (CPUSA) in 1933. Between 1927 and 1939, he contributed poems, cartoons, book reviews, and journalistic pieces to the CPUSA-affiliated publications New Masses and The Daily Worker. He reported on the Sacco and Vanzetti case for the latter publication. During the late 1920s and early '30s, Rolfe was mentored by older radical writers such as Mike Gold and Joseph Freeman.

• Illustration — Rolfe c. 1939 In autumn of 1936, Rolfe married his longtime girlfriend Mary Wolfe. In June 1937, he traveled to Spain to fight against the growing threat of European fascism. Upon arrival, he trained as a soldier with the Lincoln Battalion in Tarazona de la Mancha. However, by July he was temporarily assigned to be American political commissar in Madrid. Then, later in July, he was asked to serve as editor of Volunteer for Liberty, the weekly newspaper of the International Brigades. In 1938, he was finally allowed to "quit the desk job" and become a soldier in the Lincoln Battalion, eventually taking part in the Battle of the Ebro in summer of 1938. Prior to the battle, while training at a camp near the Ebro River, the novelist and future screenwriter Alvah Bessie—also a Lincoln Battalion volunteer—met Rolfe unexpectedly: While in Spain, Rolfe befriended Ernest Hemingway and Langston Hughes and maintained lasting correspondences with both men. Upon returning to the U.S. in January 1939, Rolfe was commissioned by Random House to write a factual account of the Spanish Civil War. His book, The Lincoln Battalion: The Story of the Americans Who Fought in Spain in the International Brigades (1939), is considered to be the first such history. The book was praised for its insightful passages about the American volunteers, as illustrated here: In 1940, unable to obtain other work, Rolfe accepted an offer for $45 a week at the New York office of TASS, the Soviet news agency. He was soon running their Latin American desk, using the Spanish language fluency he acquired in Spain. Given the delicate nature of the U.S.-Soviet WWII alliance, TASS required its U.S. employees to be "uncontroversial". That meant Rolfe had to cease all CPUSA activities, and he was prohibited from publishing any of his own writings, a restriction he found onerous since he had been completing new poems about his war experiences.

Following the U.S. entrance into World War II, Rolfe was conscripted into the Army. In February 1943, he reported to Camp Wolters, Texas. Because he had volunteered to fight fascism in Spain, Rolfe was categorized as a politically suspicious "premature anti-fascist". When he arrived at Camp Wolters, he was met by Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents. Like other Spanish Civil War veterans, Rolfe was barred from becoming an officer in the U.S. Armed Forces. He was assigned to an anti-tank gun battalion in the infantry. He found basic training "tough as hell on a 33-yr-old" competing with recruits who were 18-20 years old. He survived the training but a couple months later, while out on maneuvers, he collapsed from amoebic dysentery (the doctor suggested he might have ingested an amoebic cyst in Spain). Rolfe spent a month in the camp hospital, and was medically discharged from the Army before seeing action overseas. After the war, Rolfe resumed his literary work, co-authoring with Lester Fuller the 1946 mystery novel, The Glass Room. He relocated to Hollywood to adapt the novel for the screen. He was excited at the prospect—Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall were set to star in the film—but ultimately the project never came to fruition. It may have been cancelled as a result of political pressure on Warner Bros. since Rolfe and Fuller were both CPUSA members. It turned out that Rolfe's only screenwriting credit would be for the 1951 film noir, The Scarf. As he prepared the poems that would comprise his 1951 First Love volume, Rolfe's mind kept returning to the Spanish Civil War, like in these opening lines of "Elegia" (1948): Although Rolfe and his wife remained in Hollywood, his hopes of earning a living as a screenwriter were thwarted by the blacklist. In 1951, he was named a Communist by two "friendly" witnesses appearing before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). In April 1952, he received an HUAC summons, but was able to avoid testifying thanks to a doctor's letter. Meanwhile, Rolfe's health was failing. After suffering two minor heart attacks in 1944, he suffered his most severe one in July 1950 and was hospitalized until September. In his final years, Rolfe focused his energies on reworking earlier poems and writing new poems in response to the McCarthy Era. He died of a heart attack in May 1954 at age 44.