Books: Portrait of a Hero

Portrait of a Hero THE BIRTH OF A WORLD (432 pp.) —Waldo Frank— Houghton Mlfflin ($5).

“If Nature is against us, we shall fight Nature, and make it obey.” The speaker is Simon Bolivar, the South American liberator; the time, 1812; the occasion, an earthquake which, by some terrible stroke of malice, has shattered the cities controlled by Venezuela’s rebellious republicans but left untouched the cities loyal to the Spanish king. A royalist monk shouts to the dazed people of Caracas that the cause of their misfortune stands before them: Bolivar. The crowd begins to seethe menacingly. Without a word, Bolivar strides up to the monk and strikes him down with the flat of his sword. The crowd melts away.

Such was Simon Bolivar, as Waldo Frank writes, and frequently overwrites, about him. The Birth of a World is in the grand, Frank-incensed style: dramatic accounts of battles, perceptive essays on Latin-American landscape and character, lingering portraits of Bolivar and his aides, pretentious speculations on the “wholeness” of Bolivar’s personality.

“Genteel Revolt.” The book begins as biographies are supposed to, with Bolivar’s background. His land-owning family was rich and fashionably enlightened. Simon, born in Caracas in 1783, grew up in a “genteel atmosphere of revolt” and got an education based on Rousseau. He spent much of his boyhood in the country, leading a life of camping and hunting. A visit to Europe helped to make him a patriot: a Spanish officer sneered at the colonies, and young Bolivar flared up in such a hot retort that he was “advised” to leave Madrid. Back home, he joined the radicals, and when fighting broke out, threw himself into the cause of the republic.

At this point, The Birth of a World becomes a pell-mell yarn. Time & again, Revolutionist Bolivar’s army was reduced to a handful of men. With despairing patience he wrote articles and letters urging military discipline, an end to jealousy and anarchy among the patriot leaders. “Our army,” he wrote, “is a sack with a hole at the bottom”—words that might have come from Valley Forge. Through sheer necessity, he became a brilliant guerrilla campaigner, making up in mobility and surprise what he lacked in numbers. Before he was through, he and his followers had routed the Spaniards from Panama to Peru, laid the foundation of other free republics in Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador.

“It Will Be Said . . .” In the end, he won only a partial victory. The Spaniards were gone, but Venezuela remained riven by petty local interests and provincial narrowness. Bolivar’s dream of a Latin-American federation came to nothing.

Though he had been hailed as the Liberator, he found himself deep in debt, abused by his compatriots, branded by his country’s Congress as “an enemy of Venezuela.” He died feeling that he was a failure. Writes Author Frank: “Bolivar strove to be Moses, Madison and Jefferson to a people not yet mature enough to produce them: this was his greatness and his tragedy.” Part of this greatness was his clearheaded realization of how he had failed. Wrote Bolivar: “It will be said that I freed the New World, but it will not be said that I achieved the stability of welfare of any of the nations.”