ARTURO AND ILSA BAREA

The Forging of a Rebel

1972

STRICTLY SPEAKING, I’m stretching a point, since the copy I have of this book is a French edition published by Gallimard in 1948, and he and Ilsa both signed it for my mother, “For Poppy with our love.” They had married in 1938 when Arturo was press officer and censor for the Republicans in Madrid under attack from General Franco and the Falangists. Both of them were socialists but never Communists. John Dos Passos, one of the writers Arturo handled, described him in the siege as “underslept and underfed.” Arturo also knew Hemingway well and had the integrity to say in a review of For Whom the Bell Tolls that, “as a novel about Spaniards and their war, it is unreal and, in the last analysis, deeply untruthful.”

Arturo and Ilsa escaped to England and lived as freelance writers. She translated his books. In a review in September 1941 George Orwell paid him a compliment, for once rather awkwardly phrased: “One of the most valuable of the literary acquisitions that England has made as a result of Fascist persecution.”

In the Sixties when I came to know Ilsa, I was a literary editor and she was a publisher scouting for manuscripts. She had survived too much hardship to be sentimental, and it showed in the tough set of her face. Poppy was already dead by then, yet Ilsa used to make something of the fact that she, Poppy and I had all three been born in Vienna. Her own book baldly titled Vienna and subtitled Legend and Reality is the last word on the history and inhabitants of that equivocal city. At the age of sixteen, in 1918, she took part in a political demonstration just as the Habsburg monarchy was falling. Troops opened fire, some students in the front line fell and the young man marching next to her immediately ran away down a side street, continuing to run until at last he reached the safety of New Zealand, and he would have run still farther if he could have. That was Karl Popper, she said, who’d been so traumatized by this ordeal that his great book The Open Society was intended to ensure there’d be no repeat.