Time and Tide, 9 October 1937
Red Spanish Notebook gives a vivid picture of Loyalist Spain, both at the front and in Barcelona and Madrid, in the earlier and more revolutionary period of the war. It is admittedly a partisan book, but probably it is none the worse for that. The joint authors were working for the P.O.U.M., the most extreme of the revolutionary parties, since suppressed by the Government. The P.O.U.M. has been so much vilified in the foreign, and especially the Communist press, that a statement of its case was badly needed.
Up till May of this year the situation in Spain was a very curious one. A mob of mutually hostile political parties were fighting for their lives against a common enemy, and at the same time quarrelling bitterly among themselves as to whether this was or was not a revolution as well as a war. Definitely revolutionary events had taken place – land had been seized by the peasants, industries collectivized, big capitalists killed or driven out, the Church practically abolished – but there had been no fundamental change in the structure of government. It was a situation capable of developing either towards Socialism or back to capitalism; and it is now clear that, given a victory over Franco, some kind of capitalist republic will emerge. But at the same time there was occurring a revolution of ideas that was perhaps more important than the short-lived economic changes. For several months large blocks of people believed that all men are equal and were able to act on their belief. The result was a feeling of liberation and hope that is difficult to conceive in our money-tainted atmosphere. It is here that Red Spanish Notebook is valuable. By a series of intimate day-to-day pictures (generally small things: a bootblack refusing a tip, a notice in the brothels saying, ‘Please treat the women as comrades’) it shows you what human beings are like when they are trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine. No one who was in Spain during the months when people still believed in the revolution will ever forget that strange and moving experience. It has left something behind that no dictatorship, not even Franco’s, will be able to efface.
In every book written by a political partisan one has got to be on the look-out for one or another class of prejudice. The authors of this book are Trotskyists – I gather that they were sometimes an embarrassment to the P.O.U.M., which was not a Trotskyist body, though for a while it had Trotskyists working for it – and, therefore their prejudice is against the official Communist Party, to which they are not always strictly fair. But is the Communist Party always strictly fair to the Trotskyists? Mr. C. L.R. James,1 author of that very able book World Revolution, contributes an introduction.
Heroes of the Alcazar re-tells the story of the siege last autumn, when a garrison mainly of cadets and Civil Guards held out for seventy-two days against terrible odds, until Toledo was relieved by Franco’s troops. There is no need because one’s sympathies are on the other side to pretend that this was not a heroic exploit. And some of the details of siege-life are very interesting; I particularly liked the account of the ingenious way in which a motor-bicycle engine was hitched onto a hand-mill to grind corn for the garrison. But the book is poorly written, in a glutinous style, full of piety and denunciations of the ‘Reds’. There is an introduction by Major Yeats Brown, who generously concedes that not all the‘Red Militia’ were ‘cruel and treacherous’. The photographs of groups of defenders bring home one of the most pathetic aspects of the civil war. They are so like groups of Government militiamen that if they were changed round no one would know the difference.
Finally, Spain of a hundred years ago. Spanish Circus recounts the reign of Carlos IV, Godoy2 (the ‘Prince of Peace’), Napoleon, Trafalgar, palace intrigues, Goya’s portraits – it is that period. At this particular moment I find it rather hard to read such a book. Spain is too much bound up in my mind with flooded trenches, the rattle of machine guns, food-shortage and lies in the newspapers. But if you want to escape from that aspect of Spain, this is probably the book you are looking for. It is written with distinction and, as far as I can judge, it is a piece of accurate historical research. The way in which Mr. Armstrong has not exploited the scandalous story of Godoy and Maria Luisa should be an example to all popular historians.
1. C.L.R. James (1901–89) was born in Trinidad but lived most of his life in England, where he died. A Marxist, but not a member of the Communist Party, he wrote on politics and cricket. He settled in Lancashire in the 1930s and wrote on cricket for the Manchester Guardian leading to the fine book Beyond the Boundary (1963). He worked for a British West Indian Federation (proposed 1947) and lectured in the USA, but fell victim of McCarthyism and was expelled.
2. Manuel de Godoy (1767–1851) was twice Prime Minister of Spain. When a member of the royal bodyguard, he became the lover of Maria Luisa of Parma, wife of future king, Charles IV. He sided with the French in the Napoleonic Wars, and in 1807 agreed to the partition of Portugal. The following year, Charles was forced to abdicate in favour of the heir apparent (later Ferdinand VII), and by a device, Godoy, with Charles and Ferdinand, became a prisoner of Napoleon. Martin Armstrong (1882–1974) was to be one of the contributors to Orwell’s ‘Story by Five Authors’, 30 October 1942 (1623).