Horizon, September 19413
If some Russian writer were at this moment to produce a book of reminiscences of his childhood in 1900, it would be difficult to review it without mentioning the fact that Soviet Russia is now our ally against Germany, and in the same way it is impossible to read The Forge without thinking at almost every page of the Spanish Civil War. In fact there is no direct connection, for the book deals only with Señor Barea’s early youth and ends in 1914. But the civil war made a deep and painful impression on the English intelligentsia, deeper, I should say, than has yet been made by the war now raging. The man in the street, misled by frivolous newspapers, ignored the whole business, the rich mechanically sided with the enemies of the working class, but to all thinking and decent people the war was a terrible tragedy that has made the word ‘Spain’ inseparable from the thought of burnt bodies and starving children. One seems to hear the thunder of future battles somewhere behind Señor Barea’s pages, and it is as a sort of prologue to the civil war, a picture of the society that made it possible, that his book is most likely to be valued.
He was born into a very poor family, the son actually of a washerwoman, but with uncles and aunts who were slightly richer than his mother. In Catholic countries the clever boy of a peasant family finds his easiest escape from manual labour in the priesthood, but Señor Barea, who had anticlerical relatives and was an early unbeliever himself, after winning a scholarship at a Church school, went to work at thirteen in a draper’s shop, and afterwards in a bank. All his good memories are of country places, especially of the forge belonging to his uncle in Mentrida, a magnificent independent peasant of the type now extinct in the industrialized countries. On the other hand his memories of Madrid are low and squalid, a tale of poverty and overwork far more extreme than anything to be found in England. And here, perhaps, in his descriptions of the Madrid slums, of hordes of naked children with their heads full of lice and lecherous priests playing cards for the contents of the poor-boxes, he gives half-consciously the clue to the Spanish Civil War: it is that Spain is a country too poor to have ever known the meaning of decent government. In England we could not have a civil war, not because tyranny and injustice do not exist, but because they are not obvious enough to stir the common people to action. Everything is toned down, padded, as it were, by ancient habits of compromise, by representative institutions, by liberal aristocrats and incorruptible officials, by a ‘superstructure’ that has existed so long that it is only partly a sham. There are no half-tones in the Spain that Señor Barea is describing. Everything is happening in the open, in the ferocious Spanish sunlight. It is the straightforward corruption of a primitive country, where the capitalist is openly a sweater, the official always a crook, the priest an ignorant bigot or a comic rascal, the brothel a necessary pillar of society. The nature of all problems is obvious, even to a boy of fifteen. Sex, for example:
My cousin is taking advantage of my being a boy. But she is right. She would be a whore if she were to go to bed with anyone… I’d like to go to bed with the girls, and they would like to come with me, but it is impossible. Men have whores for that; women have to wait until the priest marries them, or they become whores themselves. And, naturally, meantime they get excited. Those who get too excited have to become whores.
Or politics:
They were always fighting in Parliament, Maura, Pablo Iglesias, and Lerroux, and they painted on the walls slogans such as ‘Down with Maura’. Sometimes they would write in red, ‘Maura, up!’ The workers were those who wrote ‘Down with Maura!’ Those who wrote ‘up’ were the gentry… At nightfall, when Alcalá Street is crowded, a group of young gentlemen will appear shouting ‘Maura, up!’ Then a group of workers and students is formed at once, and begins to shout ‘Maura, down!’… The civil guards charge, but they never attack the gentry.
When I read that last phrase, ‘the civil guards never attack the gentry’, there came back to me a memory which is perhaps out of place in a review, but which illustrates the difference of social atmosphere in a country like England and a country like Spain. I am six years old, and I am walking along a street in our little town with my mother and a wealthy local brewer, who is also a magistrate. The tarred fence is covered with chalk drawings, some of which I have made myself. The magistrate stops, points disapprovingly with his stick and says, ‘We are going to catch the boys who draw on these walls, and we are going to order them six STROKES OF THE BIRCH ROD.’ (It was all in capitals in my mind.) My knees knock together, my tongue cleaves to the roof of my mouth, and at the earliest possible moment I sneak away to spread the dreadful intelligence. In a little while, all the way down the fence, there is a long line of terror-stricken children, all spitting on their handkerchiefs and trying to rub out the drawings. But the interesting thing is that not till many years later, perhaps twenty years, did it occur to me that my fears had been groundless. No magistrate would have condemned me to six STROKES OF THE BIRCH ROD, even if I had been caught drawing on the wall. Such punishments were reserved for the Lower Orders. The Civil Guards charge, but they never attack the gentry. In England it was and still is possible to be unaware of this, but not in the Spain that Señor Barea writes of. There, injustice was unmistakable, politics was a struggle between black and white, every extremist doctrine from Carlism to Anarchism could be held with lunatic clarity. ‘Class war’ was not merely a phrase, as it has come to be in the Western democracies. But which state of affairs is better is a different question.
This is not primarily a political book, however. It is a fragment of autobiography, and we may hope that others will follow it, for Señor Barea has had a varied and adventurous life. He has travelled widely, he has been both worker and capitalist, he took part in the civil war and he served in the Riff War4 under General Franco. If the Fascist powers have done no other good, they have at least enriched the English-speaking world by exiling all their best writers. Sir Peter Chalmers Mitchell’s translation is vivid and colloquial, but it was a pity to stick all the way through to the ‘dramatic present’, which seems all right in a Latin language but rapidly becomes tiresome in English.
1. Arturo Barea (1897-1957) had been Head of Foreign Press Censorship and Controller for Broadcasts, Madrid, in 1937. Orwell knew him personally. See Orwell’s review of The Clash, below.
2. Sir Peter Chalmers Mitchell (1864–1945; Kt., 1929) was an eminent zoologist. He was responsible for rebuilding much of London Zoo and for the creation of the ‘open’ zoological garden at Whipsnade. He retired to Malaga but the civil war forced his return to England.
3. Orwell also reviewed this book in Time and Tide, 28 June 1941 (see 821).
4. The Riff (or Rif) is an area of north-eastern Morocco occupied by Berber tribes. Under Abd-el-Krim they maintained their independence against the Spanish until 1926 when they were defeated by a combined French and Spanish army. Franco served with distinction in the Rif War. The tribesmen are noted warriors and have served in the French and Spanish armies.