Observer, 24 March 1946
The third and final volume of Arturo Barea’s autobiography covers the period 1935–9, and is therefore largely a story of civil war. His private struggle and the failure of his first marriage cannot be separated from the general social tension of which the war was a result; and in his second marriage, which took place about the end of 1937, personal and political motives are even more closely intermingled. The book starts off in a Castilian village and ends up in Paris, but its essential subject is the siege of Madrid.
Mr. Barea was in Madrid from the very start of the war, and remained there almost continuously until vague but irresistible political pressures drove him out of the country in the summer of 1938. He saw the wild enthusiasm and chaos of the early period, the expropriations, the massacres, the bombing and shelling of the almost helpless city, the gradual restoration of order, the three-sided struggle for power between the common people, the bureaucracy, and the foreign Communists. For about two years he held an important post in the Foreign Press Censorship, and for a while he delivered the ‘Voice of Madrid’ broadcasts, which scored a considerable success in Latin America. Before the war he had been an engineer employed in the Patent Office, a would-be writer who had not actually written anything, a believing Catholic disgusted by the Spanish Church, and a temperamental Anarchist with no close political affiliations. But it is most of all his peasant origin that fits him to describe the war from a specifically Spanish point of view.
At the beginning fearful things happened. Mr. Barea describes the storming of the Madrid barracks, the flinging of live people out of upper windows, the revolutionary tribunals, the execution ground where the corpses lay about for days. Earlier, in describing the condition of the peasants and the behaviour of the landlords in the little village where he used to spend his week-ends, he has indicated part of the reason for these barbarities. His work in the Censorship Department, although he realised it to be useful and necessary, was a struggle first against red tape and then against backstairs intrigues. The censorship was never watertight, because most of the embassies were hostile to the Republic, and the journalists, irked by stupid restrictions – Mr. Barea’s first orders were not to let through ‘anything which did not indicate a Government victory’ – sabotaged in every way they could. Later, when the Republic’s prospects temporarily improved, there was further sabotage of the news at the editorial end, Italian prisoners being tactfully described as ‘Nationalists’ in order to keep up the fiction of non-intervention. Still later the Russians tightened their grip on the Republic, the bureaucrats who had fled when Madrid was in danger came back, and the position of Mr. Barea and his wife was gradually made impossible.
At this period of the war there was a general elbowing-out of those who had borne the brunt in the early months, but there was the added trouble that Mr. Barea’s wife was a Trotskyist. That is to say, she was not a Trotskyist, but she was an Austrian Socialist who had quarrelled with the Communists, which, from the point of view of the political police, came to much the same thing. There were the usual episodes: sudden incursions by the police in the middle of the night, arrest, reinstatement, further arrest – all the peculiar, nightmare atmosphere of a country under divided control, where it is never quite certain who is responsible for what, and even the heads of the Government cannot protect their own subordinates against the secret police.
One thing that this book brings home is how little we have heard about the Spanish civil war from Spaniards. To the Spaniards the war was not a game, as it was to the ‘Anti-Fascist Writers’ who held their congress in Madrid and ate banquets against a background of starvation. Mr. Barea had to look on helplessly at the intrigues of the foreign Communists, the antics of the English visitors and the sufferings of the Madrid populace, and to do so with a gradually growing certainty that the war was bound to be lost. As he says, the abandonment of Spain by France and Britain meant in practice that Nationalist Spain was dominated by Germany and Republican Spain by the U.S.S.R.: and as the Russians could not then afford to provoke open war with Germany, the Spanish people had to be slowly bombed, shelled and starved into a surrender which could be foreseen as early as the middle of 1937.
Mr. Barea escaped into a France where foreigners got black looks and the man in the street heaved a sigh of relief at the Munich settlement; finally he left France for Britain on the eve of the larger war. This is an exceptional book, and the middle section of it must be of considerable historical value.
1. See p. 341, n. 1, above.