The Spanish Civil War in Literature

At Issue

In 1931, thousands of Spaniards danced in the streets celebrating the abdication of the king, Alfonso XIII, and the establishment of a republic. This euphoria was short-lived, however. The new government, besieged on all sides by bitter partisanship and impossible demands, began to flounder as unrest grew into violence in the streets. The 1936 assassination of the Monarchist leader José Calvo Sotelo provided the spark that would lead to three years of brutal civil war, culminating in the victory of the Nationalist forces under the command of General Francisco Franco over the Loyalist/Republican faction. The Spanish Civil War was a foreshadowing of what was to come in Europe and around the world. The Soviet Union on the Loyalist side, and the Axis powers on the Nationalist side, used Spain as a training ground for troops and weapons.

The prelude to the great armies marching through Europe at the end of the decade was ideological warfare whose battles were fought not only in the political arena but also in the literary. Many leading writers of the 1930s did not feel free to isolate themselves in any type of ivory tower. Not merely content to have their works mirror society, they wanted, by means of their art, to influence society, preferably to guide it in the direction of greater social commitment and responsibility. Before 1936, however, the political affiliations of various writers were diffused. Many would have simply defined themselves as liberal, though some directly involved themselves in leftist, even anarchist, movements to some degree. The war in Spain changed this condition, forcing them to choose a side even as most foreign governments officially declared neutrality in the war. In overwhelming numbers, writers, artists, and other intellectuals chose the Loyalist cause. Aligning their own dreams and fears with those of the Republic, they viewed the Spanish Civil War as a morality play, with good versus evil, capitalists versus peasants and workers, and Fascism versus freedom.

Many American writers were determined to force Spain and the Loyalist cause into the forefront of American consciousness. Rallies were held, petitions were signed, and marches were organized against American nonintervention. Literary journals were flooded with reviews of Spanish literature, and translations such as And Spain Sings (1937) by poets John Peale Bishop and Edna St. Vincent Millay, among others, became the rage. For some, participation was more than empathic, as writers joined medical services or even enlisted in the famous International Brigades, the non-Spanish volunteer soldiers fighting for the Republic.

The War as Literary Symbol

Some writers, such as Upton Sinclair in No Pasarán! (1937), saw in the causes of the war a vindication of their own ideologies. No Pasarán! (The title refers to the famous Republican response to the siege of Madrid—"They shall not enter!") is a diatribe against the corruption of international capitalism, whose vast coffers financed the uprising of Franco. In this scenario, the war is seen as the ultimate worker-oppressor class struggle. Helen Nicholson, the Baroness de Zglinitzki, on the other hand, in her one-act play Shelter for the Night (1937) and novel The Painted Bed (1938), described the war as a holy crusade against what she perceived as the godless tyranny of Communism. Nicholson is almost unique in her open support of Franco. Other Nationalist sympathizers, such as Ezra Pound, who yearned for an aristocratic, monarchist return in Spain, largely kept silent during the war.

Although Nicholson's politics may have differed from the majority of her fellow writers, she was not alone in perceiving the war as a symbol of the impending annihilation of another world war. Spain, in this context, is seen as the helpless victim of mechanistic, brute forces. This view of the war is common in the literature. A symbol of this devastation, an airplane raining death from the skies, was given horrible historical realization with the destruction of the small Basque town of Guernica by the German Luftwaffe on April 26, 1937. Norman Corwin's play They Fly Through the Air with the Greatest of Ease (1942) was written in direct response to the bombing as were Archibald MacLeish's drama in verse Air Raid (1938) and William Merrick's one-act play Forgot in the Rains (1939). Edwin Rolfe, Langston Hughes, Norman Rosten, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, Aaron Kramer, and Muriel Rukeyser were among those who used the airplane in their poetry as the central, haunting image of blind fate and destruction.

In Ernest Hemingway's "The Old Man at the Bridge," a peasant tries to flee from Fascist planes, but stops, exhausted, unable to continue. Facing death, his main worry is still his household animals that he has had to leave behind. They are what really matter, not ideologies. The old man's perspective is also Hemingway's. Although considered the prototypical Loyalist, and certainly his sympathies were with the Republicans, Hemingway wanted, above all, to describe exactly and graphically what was happening to his beloved Spain. Spain, the real protagonist of his works that deal with the civil war, is seen as the victim of violence and betrayal.

Hemingway, a correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance, wrote during the war The Fifth Column (1940). The play's title is a reference to the Nationalist collaborators in Madrid during the siege of that city. The play was not a success; the superficiality of the principal characters, two foreign correspondents, obscures any theme or message the drama might have. Yet Hemingway received the most criticism not for the defects of the play but for the fact that he portrayed some Loyalist characters as the equals in deceit and demagoguery of their Nationalist counterparts. The criticism intensified with the publication of the most famous fictional account of the war, Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940).

The protagonist of the novel is Robert Jordan, who, as a member of a small Loyalist guerrilla band, is emphatically not a member of any regular military organization. A typical Hemingway hero, he maintains his own individual code of ethics in a world torn by fanaticism and the brutality it spawns. For Whom the Bell Tolls was written after the war had ended when the lost cause of the Republic and its supporters was already being mythicized. Hemingway's insistence on describing the atrocities of both sides scandalized and infuriated many. His critics wanted a political statement, but the underlying philosophy of the novel is not any ideological position, but a protest against the horror that was done to Spain in the name of party or church. The interconnection of all people alluded to in the title, a quote from a meditation on the common fate of all by the poet John Donne, is to be found in a shared purpose—concretely, in the context of the novel, in a shared willingness to die. Wounded, Robert Jordan faces death alone, but he helps to facilitate the escape of his friends. He does not surrender himself either physically or intellectually.

The apoliticism of Hemingway's writing is even more striking in his script for the film The Spanish Earth (1938). This documentary was funded by Contemporary Historians, an organization whose members included John Dos Passos, Lillian Hellman, Archibald MacLeish, and Hemingway. Although the published version of the script contains a polemical Loyalist introduction by Jasper Woods, the film does not take sides. It effectively describes the effect of the war on individual peasants. If there is political subtext, it is a condemnation of the escalation of the war due to the interference of international forces.

Another writer who stresses the individual, not the political, consequences of the war is the poet Philip Levine. In The Names of the Lost (1974), for example, he associates freedom and integrity with the names of his own particular heroes who were slain during the conflict. Francisco Acaso, an anarchist, is the subject of "Francisco, I'll Bring You Red Carnations."

Levine eulogizes those who did not compromise their ideals. One tragic outcome of the war for many writers was not simply the defeat of the Loyalist forces but also the bitter realization that their idealism had been wasted in a cause torn apart by political violence. The best-known example of this loss of innocence is British writer George Orwell's autobiographical account Homage to Catalonia (1938). An American counterpart, both in ideology, idealism, and subsequent disillusionment, is Adventures of a Young Man (1939) by Dos Passos. The novel is the story of one individual's fight against a political machine, in this case, the Communist Party. Glen Spotswood, the protagonist, has been drawn to the Party in his concern for workers' rights. He becomes a labor organizer during a miners' strike but vehemently protests when he discovers that the Party was exploiting the situation for its own propagandist ends. He is further horrified when his boss informs him that only Marxist doctrine is important, not the individual; individuals are expendable. Unable to accept this view, he is expelled from the Communist Party. Still idealistic, he travels to Spain to fight for the Republic against Fascism. He joins the International Brigade but soon runs afoul of its Stalinist leaders. Imprisoned and interrogated, he ends up volunteering for a suicide mission rather than compromise his ideals.

While English-language authors produced some of the most widely known works on the Spanish Civil War, helping to spread awareness of the conflict both during the war and in its immediate aftermath, other literary traditions also grappled with the subject. Of course, Spanish writers were heavily influenced by the violence that wracked the country, although relatively little literary output occurred during the war as many intellectuals went into exile. Poet and playwright Federico García Lorca is often associated with the war due to his death under mysterious circumstances—presumably at the hands of Nationalist forces—soon after the conflict broke out, although for the same reason his work does not overlap with the war itself. Poet Miguel Hernández was active in the Loyalist cause during the war and often used his poetry to advocate for republicanism; imprisoned by Franco's regime after the war, he continued to write up to his death in 1942. A major post-war figure to write about the Spanish Civil War was Max Aub, whose extensive cycle of novels and short stories known as El laberinto mágico (The Magic Labyrinth), was published from 1943 to 1967. These interconnected works blend fiction and nonfiction in exploring various elements of the war.

Implications for Identity

The Spanish Civil War, the great cause of a generation, was the turning point for many writers. Not only did it serve as a focus and symbol upon which to base their literary works, but it forced them to confront, and sometimes question, the political and philosophic assumptions of their professional and personal lives. They came to be identified with certain ideological positions, and the war was their challenge to act. Some did, and went to Spain to fight or to serve in medical or other service organizations. Others wrote or were politically active to espouse their cause. A few writers' works were open propaganda, but in most cases, no matter what the political bent, writing on the Spanish Civil War became inextricably mingled with reflections on social commitment and individual action. The war triggered an identity crisis for a generation and, for many writers, the tragedy of Spain became a personal defeat. Nine years after the fall of the Republic, Albert Camus would write that his generation carried Spain within their hearts like an "evil wound," because it was there that "men learned that one can be right and yet be beaten."

Twenty-First Century Literature

Although the Spanish Civil War was most influential on those who experienced it firsthand, it continued to influence literature long after it officially ended. Indeed, the passage of time led to a flourishing of works examining the conflict with the benefit of hindsight in a variety of genres. Nonfiction studies such as Helen Graham's The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction (2005) and revised editions of Hugh Thomas's The Spanish Civil War (2001, originally published in 1961) and Antony Beevor's The Battle for Spain (2006, originally published in 1982) received acclaim for taking into account newly available material to shed further light on the complex war. Historical fiction also provided a wealth of narratives involving Spain in and around the civil war. Well-reviewed and popular examples include the best-selling La sombra del viento (2001; The Shadow of the Wind, 2004) by Carlos Ruiz Zafón and its sequels; the spy thriller Winter in Madrid (2006) by C. J. Sansom; journalist Dave Boling's debut novel, Guernica (2008); and The Muse (2016) by Jessie Burton.

Bibliography

"The 14 Best Books About the Spanish Civil War." The Local, 18 July 2018, www.thelocal.es/20180718/spanish-civil-war-books-must-read-best. Accessed 27 Aug. 2019.

Benson, Frederick R. Writers in Arms. New York: New York University Press, 1967. Discussion of how the Spanish Civil War galvanized the literary world of the 1930s. Contains a good chronology of the war and an extensive bibliography.

Brenan, Gerald. The Spanish Labyrinth. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1943. Invaluable for its insights into the causes and consequences of the war.

French, Warren. The Social Novel at the End of an Era. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1966. Places writers such as Hemingway and Dos Passos in the political and social context of their time.

Gibon, Ian. The Assassination of Federico García Lorca. London: W. H. Allen, 1979. Historical research into the senseless murder by Nationalists of the famous dramatist and poet.

Guttman, Allen. The Wound in the Heart: America and the Spanish Civil War. New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1962. Excellent introduction to the literary and political debate in the United States about the war.

Thomas, Hugh. The Spanish Civil War. New York: Harper & Row, 1961. The definitive and most readable account of the war. Indispensable for an understanding of the politics behind the literature.

Waldhorn, Arthur. A Reader's Guide to Ernest Hemingway. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1972. An analysis of the writings of the American most closely associated with the war.