Spanish Lesson for Writers

In 1952, when Sen. Joseph McCarthy began accusing prominent Americans in all walks of life of being Communists, schoolroom wall maps in many parts of America showed the Communist nations of the world in red, each nation bearing the date of its fall. Russia, 1917; Ukraine, 1922. And then, after World War II, the fearful acceleration: Lithuania, 1944; Albania, 1946; Poland, 1947; Czechoslovakia and North Korea, 1948; China, 1949. Who was next? There were Communist guerrillas in Greece and powerful Communist parties in France and Italy.

But 50 years ago, at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, the color that seemed to be spreading across the face of the Earth was not Communist red but Fascist brown and black. Italy, 1922; Japan, 1931 (the invasion of Manchuria); Germany, 1933; Austria, 1934 (the Nazi assassination of Chancellor Dolfuss). When a Fascist coup threatened the democratically elected government of Spain in 1936, the questions that anti-Fascists around the world began asking were just the questions that anti-Communists would ask in 1952: Where will it all end? Could it happen here? To which the response was not declarative but hortatory: We’ve got to draw the line somewhere!

This may explain, at least in part, why so many good writers produced so much bad writing on behalf of the Spanish Republic. I mean to suggest that--like McCarthy in this if in nothing else--they thought they were drawing a historic line beyond which, as the defenders of Madrid cried, “They shall not pass!” But, like McCarthy again, they were blinded by their own imagined importance.

Two collections of Spanish Civil War writing have been published in this anniversary month: “Spanish Front: Writers on the Civil War” (Oxford University: $17.95, hardcover; $7.95, paperback; 416 pp.), edited by Valentine Cunningham, and “Voices Against Tyranny: Writing of the Spanish Civil War” (Scribner’s: $16.95, hardcover; $7.95, paperback; 227 pp.), edited by John Miller, with an introduction by Stephen Spender.

The collecting and editing of these writings and recollections is a laudable enterprise. The writers collected are unquestionably distinguished: W. H. Auden, Andre Malraux, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Thomas Mann, John Dos Passos, George Orwell, Cyril Connolly, Arthur Koestler, Claude Simon, and many others of almost equal repute. And the event should have been important enough to call forth their best efforts.

The fact is, however, that often it was not. The further from the event, the better the writings here collected seem to become. The nearer to the event, by contrast, the more they become prey to a hallucinatory persuasion that the writer himself is standing at the very hinge of history. And as in all hallucinations, details--a cigarette, the sound of street noise rising to a hotel room, random place names, snatches of song--take on a kind of revelatory importance. But this is the kind of importance that, once down from the trip, quickly sours into boredom.

In the Miller/Spender collection--shorter, more literary than the Cunningham one--John Dos Passos writes: “I wake up suddenly with my throat stiff. It’s not quite day. I am lying in a comfortable bed, in a clean well-arranged hotel room staring at the light indigo oblong of the window opposite. I sit up in bed. Again, there’s the hasty loudening shriek, the crackening roar, the rattle of tiles and a tinkling shatter of glass and granite fragments. Must have been near because the hotel shook. My room is seven or eight stories up. The hotel is on a hill.”

Plod, plod, plod.

Perhaps some of this is simply the literary fashion of the 1930s. In his review of Ernest Hemingway’s “The Garden of Eden,” John Updike recently wrote of that writer’s “betranced descriptions of the weather, the meals, the landscape, the chronic recreations . . . everything they do described with that liturgical gravity which Hemingway invented.”

Hemingway may have invented the liturgical entrancement of the everyday, but in these collections, many others seem to be practicing it. The trouble is that in 1986, it is nearly impossible not to awaken from the trance. Hemingway’s own contribution to the Spender collection opens: “On this evening I was walking home from the censorship office to the Florida Hotel and it was raining. So about halfway home I got sick of the rain and stopped into Chicote’s for a quick one. It was the second winter of shelling in the siege of Madrid and everything was short including tobacco and people’s tempers and you were a little hungry all the time and would become suddenly and unreasonably irritated at things you could do nothing about such as the weather.”

Did you say the censorship office, Mr. Hemingway? Let’s have a little more about that and a little less about the tobacco shortage. The telling detail is a part of all good journalism, but in the journalism (and much of the other writing) collected here, what the details tell us about is too often the journalist himself. Cunningham acknowledges this in his introduction, speaking of “the compulsion to bear some kind of firsthand witness to events in Spain (a compulsion felt strongly on the Right as well as on the Left: but then being an I-witness in that era of fraught selfhood and compulsive testimony, that time when almost every other book had a title beginning I . . . did come rather naturally to writers).”

The writers who rushed to the defense of the Spanish Republic would have been prophetic had they not been mistaken. But mistaken is what they were. They were mistaken about the decisiveness of the Spanish Civil War itself, for after winning in Spain, fascism proceeded to lose disastrously in the larger conflict that was World War II. And they were mistaken as well about communism, which would become far more oppressive in the 1950s and after than fascism had been in the 1930s.

As for the writers who wrote against the Communists for the Fascists (or, less polemically, against the Republicans for the Nationalists), the tone changes somewhat, but Cunningham is surely right that the self-hypnosis of the I-witness is common to both sides. Hilaire Belloc, in perhaps the single most extraordinary contribution to the Cunningham collection, recalls--in a kind of apocalyptic delirium--his brief appointment with Francisco Franco: “When I entered Franco’s presence I entered the presence of one who had fought that same battle which Roland in the legend died fighting and which the Godfrey in sober history had won when the battered remnant, the mere surviving tenths of the first Crusaders, entered Jerusalem--on foot, refusing to ride where the Lord of Christendom had offered Himself up in Sacrifice.”

Neither Miller/Spender nor Cunningham intends to offer an anniversary history of the Spanish Civil War. No, these two books offer themselves, first and last, as writing; and it seems reasonable then, setting political judgments aside, to draw from them only a small literary lesson; namely, that the more certain a writer is that he has joined--on the right side--a great and historic conflict, the less likely he is to write well. For to a writer in that state of mind, nothing seems unimportant, nobody seems ordinary. So long as the great struggle lasts, he never tires of himself. All, for him, every detail, is bathed in collective, narcissistic meaningfulness.

A writer in this condition, a writer who finds everything interesting, is doomed to make almost everything boring, and alas, too many of the famous writers who wrote on the Spanish Civil War did exactly that. They lingered lovingly over the trivial. They talked too much about themselves. They lost their heads; and it is impossible, 50 years later, to find in that act even a literary virtue.