The agony of Spain’s Civil War

Press, 13 July 1985, Page 20

The agony of Spain’s Civil War

The Forging of a Rebel. By Arturo Barea. Flamingo, 1985. Book I, The Forge, 284 pp. $12.95 (paperback). Book //, The Track. 237 pp. $12.95. Book 111, The Clash. 296 pp. $14.95.

(Reviewed by

Ralf Unger)

Forty-six years after the end of the last of these three remarkable books is a good time to take an objective view of the development of Spain, leading to and including its Civil War of 1936-39. It is, therefore, appropriate for a paperback re-publication of Barea’s history of his own development through the era, first published in England in the 19405. It is not a careful, academically tabulated history; many of the important events become confusing when they are not placed in a wider context. This is history as experienced by one person in an isolated situation. The books do, however, convey with passion the emotional defeat of a life that collapsed with the fall of Madrid, even

though the author continued in exile for another 19 years. Barea was brought up by a widowed washer-woman in a suburb of Madrid, clearly he was the carrier of family ambitions, receiving more schooling and job opportunity than did the other members. As a lively lad and a bank clerk, he registered all the activity in the streets of the capital, the backalleys and courtyards, the gossip and the eccentrics. Although steadily moving towards the middle-class, he also felt the pain of the poor from whom he had sprung and the injustice of employers extracting labour and converting it into fortunes by taking away the dignity bf workers. He gradually became more aware of his socialist philosophy, identifying and feeling more comfortable with the labourer than the bourgeois. In the second book Barea is a sergeant in Spanish Morocco, with that country “a battlefield, a brothel, and

an immense tavern.” He describes the sordid life the soldiers led, and the daily cruelty and lack of regard for human feeling inflicted by both sides in an attempt by Spain to suppress its colonial rebels. During this period the various political forces, as well as the military, flexed their muscles and by the end a certain Colonel Franco, admired as a brave and capable soldier, emerges as an important administrative force when Barea returns to Madrid in 1925. The “track” of the title he helped to build in Morocco was one soaked in blood and finally quite a pointless construction. “The Clash” takes us through the complex beginnings of the Spanish Civil War and ends with Barea’s departure forever from Spain in 1938. Working as a censor and translator for the Republican side he met with the country’s doomed heroes as well as the constant procession of foreign journalists — like Hemingway viewing the war as a happening of gladiatorial contest without being bounded by an arena. Disillusioned and defeated, Barea and his second wife escape to France while he tries to overcome years of constant anxiety and vomit at the sound of every dropping bomb during his years in beleaguered Madrid. Barea is not a great writer in the traditional sense. His sentences are sparse and inclined to peter out without any real resolution, and his observational descriptions conveying the atmosphere are all too infrequent. Yet he is a chronicler who is painfully sincere, without apology for either side in the conflict or attempts to convince the reader of the rightness of a cause. He is a socialist who reiterates his comfort with the common man, but obviously yearns for at least some luxuries of life and culture. He mentions casually, in passing, the courage he displayed in various encounters and yet hates war, conflict and revenge, and finally collapses mentally into a severe anxiety state. These three volumes deserve to be viewed as a classic study of an unwilling rebel in a confused cause that now appears as simply the cold manipulation of a rehearsal for the more major powers in the Second World War. With Barea’s job as a censor continually having to down-play this international aspect and emphasise the Spanish fight for liberty, it led finally to a broken exile who had deeply loved his land and peoples and watched it disappear.