Few books on the Spanish Civil War of 1936–39 and its origins have been as acclaimed as The Forging of a Rebel by Arturo Barea. The first volume of this autobiographical trilogy, The Forge, published in June 1941, was lauded by Stephen Spender for its “great artistic merits” and “rare poetic feeling”, while The Times declared that “it is doubtful if there has yet appeared a more convincing picture of the anvil on which a rebel was forged”. The second book, The Track, which appeared in July 1943, was eulogized for its “great beauty and vivid detail”. Cyril Connolly singled out the author for being “something rarely found these days”, as he “thinks and feels clearly and honestly”. Published in February 1946, the third tome, The Clash, was declared by George Orwell “an exceptional book” of “considerable historical interest”. Altogether, as one critic summed up, the trilogy was “as essential to an understanding of twentieth-century Spain as the reading of Tolstoy is indispensable to the comprehension of nineteenth-century Russia”.
Such success notwithstanding, Arturo Barea had come late to writing. The Forge, his first novel, was published when he was forty-three years of age, The Clash at forty-eight. Indeed, had it not been for the Civil War, Barea would probably not have become a writer at all. However, this was not due to a lack of motivation. During his early life he was torn between his artistic aspirations and the exigencies of earning a living. He was born on 20 September 1897 into a lower-class family in the Extremaduran town of Badajoz, near the Portuguese border. The sudden death of his father, an army recruiting agent, caused the family to move to Madrid just two months later. There, his mother worked as a maid in her brother’s household and as a washerwoman on the banks of the river Manzanares. Unlike his two brothers and sister, Arturo lived with his well-to-do uncle and aunt. At the weekend, he would rejoin the family in the working-class district of El Avapiés. Thus the young Barea was caught between two worlds: an unresolved tension that would contribute to his sense of being an outsider and ultimately shape his work as a writer.
Following the sudden death of his uncle, Arturo had to start work at the age of thirteen. He undertook a succession of poorly paid jobs before making some money as a commercial traveller for a diamond dealer during the First World War—the outbreak of which marks the end of The Forge. By this stage, he had become afflicted, he recounts in his autobiographical notes, by “the literary microbe”, attending literary peñas, or discussion groups, at the cafés in the centre of Madrid. More time, he discovered to his horror, had to be dedicated to “praising and ‘sucking up’ to the chosen master” than to writing. This “vileness and endless mental torture” might lead to the publication of an unremunerated article, but the process would then continue for months and even years until one managed to join a newspaper on a mere pittance. Such a drawn-out and humiliating route to literary success clashed violently with Barea’s prickly pride. He thereupon abandoned the literary scene, his ambitions buried. In short, he could not earn a living as a writer, especially as he was determined to support his mother, to whom he was devoted. This contradiction is manifest in The Forging of a Rebel, but is crystallized in the short story “The Centre of the Ring”, which takes place between 1914 and 1920, the period which falls between the first and second volumes of the trilogy.
In 1920, Barea, now fully grown, of a lithe, tallish build, was called up for military service in Spanish Morocco, the country’s one remaining colony, an experience that constitutes the core of The Track. Here, he was a witness to the ubiquitous cupidity and incompetence of the Spanish army, of the wretchedness of the rank-and-file, and of the degradations of the Moroccan population. He also came to know personally many of the generals who later headed the insurgency of July 1936 against the democratic Republic. While in Morocco, Barea did not entirely abandon his literary aspirations. He wrote some poetry along with the occasional short story, though only a single story, “La Medalla” (“The Medal”) of 1922, has come to light. Nonetheless, on leaving the army in 1923, Barea did not attempt to pursue a career as a writer. On the contrary, he followed a highly conventional path: he married, became a father, and secured a steady job in the patents business. By the end of the 1920s, he had become the technical director of a leading firm, thereby allowing him to provide for both his immediate family and his mother, now in old age. The marriage to Aurelia Grimaldos, however, was, in his own words, a “depressing failure” that led him to take ever greater refuge in his work.
The eruption of mass politics with the establishment in 1931 of Spain’s first democratic regime, the Second Republic, partly assuaged Barea’s restless spirit. He became involved, as in the 1910s, with the Socialist trade union movement. Still, his union activities represented, he later noted, “a constant and bitter contradiction” in relation to his work at the Patent Office, where he dealt on a quotidian basis with big businesses.
By the outbreak of the Civil War in July 1936, Barea had published nothing except a little poetry, a few short stories, and the occasional political piece. The war—the cornerstone of The Clash—was to change all that. First, having joined the Office of Foreign Press Censorship at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in August 1936, he came into contact with journalists and writers, including figures such as Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos—both of whom would strongly shape Barea’s later literary work. He was also influenced by a short, plump Austrian with a mass of curly hair by the name of Ilsa Kulcsar. She, like many other foreigners, had gone to Spain to defend the Republican cause, having been an activist in the Austrian Social Democratic Party. Appointed as Barea’s assistant, when, upon the departure of the government for Valencia in November 1936, he had been made head of the censorship office, she was not only of inestimable help to him in his work as a censor—she spoke five languages extraordinarily well, albeit with a Viennese accent—but also encouraged him to write. Within weeks, moreover, they had become lovers. The fact that for much of 1937 Barea, as the “Unknown Voice of Madrid”, had to give daily radio talks of a literary and propagandistic nature was a further stimulus. The catalyst, however, was the nervous breakdown which he suffered in the summer of 1937. This was a result of the sixteen-hour days, the unremitting bombardments, the collapse of his marriage, and the increasingly ugly battle with the Communist-dominated bureaucracy in Valencia. Barea strove to transcend this all-enveloping crisis through writing. On 17 August 1937, he published a story in the Daily Express under the headline “This was written under shell fire”—a curious coincidence given that the great bulk of what he produced thereafter, as a republican exile in England, would appear first in English. In 1938, he published his first book, a collection of slight, propagandistic short stories—many of which drew on his radio talks and which concerned the everyday struggle of the common people against “fascism”—entitled Valor y Miedo (Courage and Fear). According to Barea, it was the last tome to be printed in Barcelona before Franco’s troops entered the Catalan capital.
By the end of 1937, the Communists had effectively forced Barea to abandon not only the censorship office and his radio work, but, worse still, in February 1938, Spain itself. Once in Paris, he started work on the first draft of The Forge in an effort to alleviate the hunger, the dire living conditions, and the pain of the Republic’s protracted defeat. Shocked by France’s “inner decay” and convinced of the “coming catastrophe”, Arturo and Ilsa—who had married just a week before leaving Spain—fled to England. They reached their destination the month that the Republic fell to the Nationalists: March 1939. The Civil War had transformed Arturo Barea’s life: he had left his wife for another woman, gone into exile, and finally committed himself to writing.
“More than I expected”, Arturo underlines in the autobiographical notes, “and more than seemed likely in a Spaniard, I took to English life at once, and fell in love with the English countryside”. Thus it was in “the peace of the country” that he achieved his first literary triumph in England—the short story “A Spaniard in Hertfordshire”, which appeared in the Spectator in June 1939. The following year, he began work for the Latin American section of the BBC’s World Service. He wrote and presented a fifteen-minute talk on an aspect of British life, under the pseudonym of “Juan de Castilla”, virtually every week up until his death; that is to say, over 850 programmes. These reflective monologues proved extremely popular, “Juan de Castilla” coming top of the listeners’ annual poll on numerous occasions, and became his principal source of income. Accordingly, Arturo Barea’s work at the BBC not only provided him with a certain measure of material security but also added to his renown as a writer—albeit in countries other than his own.
In 1941, Barea enjoyed his first critical success with the essay “Not Spain but Hemingway”, a searing indictment of the American novelist’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. The same year, he published Struggle for the Spanish Soul, a dissection of the ideas and forces that underpinned the Franco dictatorship, which appeared alongside George Orwell’s The Lion and the Unicorn in the “Searchlight” series at Secker & Warburg. Editor Tosco Fyvel assured Barea in a letter that the book would make him “a famous man”. Arturo, he predicted, would be known as “the Spanish writer in the country before the end of the summer”.
Barea did indeed become famous in 1941, but not as a result of Struggle for the Spanish Soul. That year, The Forge was published. Edited by T.S. Eliot at Faber & Faber, the book was translated by Sir Peter Chalmers-Mitchell, the former British consul in Malaga and a republican sympathizer, who had helped get the novel published. His rendering of The Forge, as Stephen Spender discreetly put it, was “not all that could be desired”. As a result, the next two volumes, The Track and The Clash, made available in 1943 and 1946 respectively, were translated by Ilsa. “Any English writer,” author Gerald Brenan observed in a letter to Arturo, “would be pleased to write as well”, while The Times commented approvingly that The Track “is so well translated that it reads as though it had been written in English and were in fact the product of an English mind”. Not surprisingly, Ilsa also produced a new version of The Forge, in 1946. That same year the three novels went on sale in the USA in a one-volume edition entitled The Forging of a Rebel. Acclaimed as a “masterpiece” and as “an invaluable contribution to our knowledge of modern Spain, as well as a work of high literary distinction”, the trilogy, Bertram Wolfe pronounced ringingly, was “one of the great autobiographies of the twentieth century”. The book sold 4,000 copies in the first month.
Barea had two, interrelated aims in writing The Forging of a Rebel. First, he endeavoured to expose, as he explains in the English introduction to The Track, “the dark psychological and social undercurrents of the Spanish War”. Second, he sought to do so by giving “voice” to the “common people”, having been “one of them”. He therefore rejected the first draft of the book as too abstract and ideologically led, preferring instead to focus on the concrete lives of individual people. “I can talk of what I’ve seen, of what I’ve lived”, as he put it in a letter. “Living beings”, he emphasised, “interest me much more than theory and analysis”. Characterized by its spare style, the photographic quality of its descriptions, its close attention to local detail and the corresponding colloquialism of the language, and by its uncompromising emotional honesty as well as by a remarkable absence of bitterness, The Forging of a Rebel is, as the Guardian observed, “a Spanish masterpiece which illuminates an entire historical epoch”.
The first Spanish edition was published in 1951 by Losada of Buenos Aires. Since Arturo had lost most, if not all, of the original manuscript, he and Ilsa had to re-translate the English version back into Spanish. This was evidently done with a certain haste as the text is plagued by grammatical errors and anglicisms. In Spain itself, Barea’s republican past, his self-proclaimed socialism, and The Forging of a Rebel’s unflinching critique of the ancien régime ensured that only clandestine copies circulated under the Franco regime. Once the transition to democracy got under way, the trilogy was at last published in Spain in 1978; that is to say, thirty-seven years after The Forge first appeared. Although new editions were brought out in 1980 and 1985–86, it was not until the Debate edition of 2000 that the Losada text was finally corrected.
Arguably, The Forging of a Rebel’s English version, despite being produced by a non-native speaker, is more polished and fluent than the re-translated Spanish one. What is more, this was the basis for the trilogy’s translation, as Ilsa explains in a letter, into “nearly all” other languages as “virtually no translator” was familiar enough with Arturo’s “very un-academic, direct and colloquial vocabulary”. Altogether, the book has been published in ten languages. For the translation, as for so much else, Arturo had Ilsa to thank. She was, as Arturo recognized, “my collaborator in everything… my companion in the most ample sense of the word”.
Recognition of Barea’s worth as a writer was reflected in the tour which he undertook of Denmark in 1946. The following year, he was put forward for the Nobel prize, and, according to Ilsa, was shortlisted for the award. In 1952, he was invited to lecture at the State University of Pennsylvania on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spanish literature—quite an achievement for an autodidact. Moreover, such was the popularity of the BBC talks that the Corporation sent him in 1956 on a 48-day tour of Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, where he gave numerous lectures and interviews and attended a host of banquets and multitudinous book signings. He was feted not just for his broadcasting work but also because of The Forging of a Rebel. The Losada edition, for example, had sold 10,000 copies in a matter of months. Despite the malevolent efforts of the Francoist embassies to smear him as “Arturo Beria”—a reference to Stalin’s brutal security chief which hinted at Arturo’s allegedly Communist past—the tour was an unqualified triumph.
Barea’s interest as a writer is far from restricted to the trilogy alone. Often portrayed as a down-to-earth, working-class writer without literary or intellectual pretensions, his work as a critic has been unjustly neglected. In 1944, he published Lorca, the Poet and His People, a path-breaking analysis of the Andalusian poet that is still of value today. Admittedly, the later study of Miguel de Unamuno, the irascible Basque polymath—undertaken in collaboration with Ilsa—is of much less interest. Nonetheless, Arturo wrote some extremely stimulating literary criticism, characterized by its accessibility, by the sheer soundness of its judgement, and by a determination to place the novels within their social and historical context. In short, Barea was an independently minded and thought-provoking critic.
Only one novel was completed by Arturo following The Forging of a Rebel. Published in English in 1951 and in Spanish four years later, the revealingly titled The Broken Root can be regarded as a sequel to the trilogy insofar as it concerns a Spaniard, who, like Barea, is exiled in England, but who, unlike Barea, returns home; in other words, the book concerns the aftermath of the Civil War. While replicating many of the virtues of The Forging of a Rebel, the novel lacks the structural coherence and narrative impact of the trilogy’s first-hand testimony. In the meantime, Arturo continued to write short stories right up until his death. A posthumous collection, El Centro de la Pista (The Centre of the Ring), was published in Spain in 1960, but it was not until 2001 that the Cuentos Completos (Complete Short Stories), finally appeared. Many of the stories complement The Forging of a Rebel. Virtually all, moreover, concern Spain, despite the fact that the author spent the last half of his adult life in England. Yet this is true of all Arturo Barea’s work—the literary criticism, the historical accounts, the political commentaries, the novels, and the short stories—with the exception of his journalistic assignments.
The pain of exile, for a writer whose work was centred almost exclusively on his home country, is more than evident in The Broken Root. Yet it was in England, and in the company of Ilsa, that Arturo Barea encountered the peace and stability necessary to become a writer. Furthermore, he wrote, “I do not intend ever to return permanently to Spain, even after the overthrow of the Fascist regime, but hope to live ‘somewhere in England’”. He died during the night of 24 December 1957 from a heart attack. He left behind an unfinished novel, His Brother’s Keeper, which, like all his previous novels, was set in Spain.
Undoubtedly, the variety and quality of Arturo Barea’s output as a writer, ranging from his literary criticism and political analyses to his short stories and journalism, has not been fully appreciated. Still, his greatest work remains The Forging of a Rebel. In part, this is because the trilogy tackles the origins and course of the conflict of 1936–39. What distinguishes The Forging of a Rebel, however, is its first-hand testimony, its emotional integrity, and its effort to relate the untold story of the mass of ordinary Spaniards. If, to this, one adds the graphic descriptions, the penetrating observations, and the compelling narrative, it is evident why The Forging of a Rebel remains one of the greatest accounts of twentieth-century Spain’s greatest tragedy: the Civil War.
NIGEL TOWNSON