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Literary Festival 2016: Fact versus Fiction? The Spanish Civil War in the Literary Imagination
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Welcome, everybody, to the lse, to this event, which is part of the LSE Literary Festival and is the bit provided by the LSE's Spanish Studies Centre, which is basically me and the lady in the front row. Actually, I could walk around while I'm doing that. Right, so what we're going to do is. Well, let me introduce everybody. Basically, what you've got here is a historian who knows nothing about literature. That's me. A novelist who knows nothing about history. That's Eduardo Mendoza. And in the middle, a historian who knows all about history and literature. That's how he. Now, you all know who Eduardo Mendolta is. He is one of Spain's greatest novelists and has written a couple of very important, I suppose one could call historical novels La Verdasso Real Casa Xavolta and La Ciudad de los Prodigios, and most more recently, actually on the Civil War, Cat Fight, Aurinha de Gatos. Helen, of course, is the author of A very short Introduction to the Spanish Civil War, which is a massive bestseller with Oxford University Press, and most recently a book called the War and Its Shadow. Now, jesting aside, it is actually the case that this event is for you, it's for the audience. There are novelists and publishers in the audience, but everyone, every one of you, will have a view on what we're talking about. So the bit that we're looking forward to is the colloquium after we've all said a bit, which will come at the end. Now, of course, most wars produce great literature. Some of you may have even seen Tolstoy's recent TV program, the War of Peace. We all know about Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front from the First World War, Vasily Grossman Life and Fate from the Second World War and the Spanish Civil War, certainly in terms of history and literature, has produced a wildly disproportionate amount of writing. Works of history on the Spanish Civil War are now well over 30,000. I have no idea how many novels are being published about the Spanish Civil War, but it would not surprise me if it was going on for more than a thousand. Spanish Civil War is often called the Poets War, and of course, Poems for Spain, the anthology edited by Steven Spender and John Lehman, and W.H. jordan's Spain are some of the most famous poetic publications in the English language. There have been dozens of films. Many of you will have seen Pan's Labyrinth or the Spirit of the Beehive. And of course, some of the films are adaptations of novels like the film of For Whom the Bell Tolls, or more recently, Butterfly's Tongue. There's even been a musical about the Spanish Civil War, Goodbye Barcelona by Karl Levkovitz. But tonight we're going to be looking at the most popular literary category, the novel, and largely those in English and the languages of Spain, particularly those that have been translated. Now, as I just said, the Spanish Civil War is the background to hundreds of novels that range across various genres, from the factual via spy stories such as those of Alan Forst or detective stories like Jose Luis y Banez, to magical realism. One of the really wonderful novels about the Spanish awards is not very well known, is by Antonio Soler, El Nombre Chiaradigo. Now, speaking as a historian, one of the problems that historians face when reading novels is that of course, far more people read fiction than read history, and therefore far more people are likely to be swayed by the errors with which fiction abounds. Now, crudely speaking, where the Spanish Civil War is concerned, there are two categories of novelists, those who actually live the war and those who imagined it afterwards, using research, interviews, family, memories, whatever. Within both categories, I would argue as a historian that the key elements in a good novel about the Spanish Civil War have to be historical truth and authenticity, whether dealing with those who experienced the war or imagined it. There are again two categories, those who give life to imagined characters and situations, and those who play with real historical figures and situations, which in my view can be a very dangerous thing to do. Now, it would be easy to spend the next hour and a half simply reciting lists of names of authors of novels about the Spanish Civil War. So I'll be pretty brief, trying to make some very brief comments about a number of writers before saying, or going into a little bit more detail about probably the most famous, that's to say, Ernest Hemingway, and in my view the best, which was Arturo Barrea. Now, writers who experienced the war, of course, the well known foreigners, Hemingway, Orwell, Andre Malraux wrote l'. Espoir. John Dos Passos, who when I was a lad was considered the world's greatest novelist and now no one could even remember him. He wrote a book called Centuries Ebb about the Civil War of Spanish writers. We've got, I mean, just centering on the really great ones who live the war. Max aub, who wrote his multi volume Magic Labyrinth, Ramon Jota Sender, who wrote Requiemporum Campesino and the multi volume Chronica del Alba. Manuel Chavez Nogales, who wrote the wonderful La Sangre y Fuego, Juan Eduardo Funiga, who wrote a terrific trilogy about the siege of Madrid. What they all have in common is they do something that is virtually impossible for the historian. They recreate the living experience of what it was like to be there again of those who actually lived the war. There are two Catalan novels that do this to an extraordinary degree. Joan Sala's Incerta Gloria, which I think Helen will be talking about later, evokes unbelievably the absurdity as well as the madness and the hunger of war. Merce Rodoreda, La Plaza del Di Aman, an account of life in Barcelona as recounted by an extremely simple woman. So what is extraordinary is how this highly sophisticated novelist, Rodoreda, recounts so much historical detail, social and political, by recreating the voice of this very simple woman. Gabriel Garcia Marquez described this as the most beautiful novel published in Spain since the Civil War. We have Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, that's interesting. Not really about the Spanish Civil War, but based entirely on Koestler's experiences during the Spanish Civil War when he was imprisoned by the Francoists. Then we've got George Orwell. I don't know whether George Orwell counts as a novelist. He certainly counts as the most read writer.
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About the Spanish Civil War.
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Now, I said earlier that I thought that books need to be either. Need to be both true and authentic. Well, in a sense, that's true about Orwell, but I would argue that, and obviously I haven't really got time to go into it in detail. Orwell's contribution to the literature of the Spanish Civil War is roughly on a par with Spike Milligan's Hitler My Part in His Downfall. And I don't mean that to diminish either. Spike Milligan's Hitler My Part in His Downfall is an extremely important book about what it was like to be a foot soldier during the Second World War. What Orwell writes about in homage to Catalonia is his experiences, which are perfectly valid and authentic and true. But unfortunately, he draws the wildest and most inaccurate conclusions from them. And therefore, going back to what I was saying about the fear that the historian has about novels giving the wrong idea to too many people, Orwell would be the extreme case. Now, subsequent after those who actually lived the war, many of Spain's greatest novelists have used the Spanish Civil War. Juan Marseille, who I think Helen will also be talking about, is someone who none of whose novels are about the Spanish Civil War as such, and yet all of whose novels are completely imbued with The Spanish Civil War. Numerous prominent novelists of the day, Almudena Grandes, Antonio Munoz Molina, Eduardo Mendoza, have written, have started to write about the Civil War. Other great novelist, Jorge Semprun, at least two of his books are specifically about the war. La Segunda Muerte de Amon Mercade and Vente Agnosi Undia. And then we have one of the writers who to me seems to be most extraordinary, the Gallego, Manuel Rivas, whose short story Al lingua das Bolburetas, the Butterflies Tongues, is one of the most extraordinary. And also his novel Ulapis du Carpintero, of which Gunter Grass said, I've learned more about the Spanish Civil War reading the Carpenter's Pencil by Manuel Rivas. Every book written by a historian, so I'll be leaving you now. But the writings of Manuel Rivas are utterly moving and I think they quite right. They do tell us so much more about the Civil War than any historian that I know, and certainly me, could do. Now, I said also that I think what's important, what a novelist can do that a historian can't, is to evoke the sense of being there. Now this we find in quite a lot of novels by people who literally, absolutely, we're not there. I'm thinking of Victoria Hislop's the Return, which there are parts of that book which I've spoken to her about it. How could you have been there? Do you have a time machine? How did you get back? How were you able to recreate what it was like to be in Granada during the Francoist terror? Or what it was like to be on the road between Malaga and Almeria with all the refugees. Similarly, another book, a wonderful Catalan novel by Antonio Vives, Al Somni, the Farringdon Road, the Dream of Farringdon Road, which creates what it was like to be in Barcelona during the anarchist atrocities in a quite remarkable way. Now, I know Tony Vives, I know how much research he did. What he actually produced was far disproportionate, that research. I could spend 20 years doing research on it, and I wouldn't come up with something as penetrating and precise and as moving as Tony did in that novel. Now, another issue. I mean, we also have actually here, she's here somewhere, Elena Moya, who wrote the Olive Groves of Belchiti and La Maestra Republicana, which again, have that ability to recreate what it was like to be there. Now, an area I don't suspect that I have time to go into.
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Is.
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The whole sordid story of Javier Therka Soldiers of Salaminas.
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Which.
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Is sort of based on a real experience, but actually takes as real experience that was lied about by the person in question, by the historical figure. Probably I oughtn't to go into that. Maybe if people want to talk about it, we can do that later. Now, I said earlier on that having done a quick run through, I'd then talk about the two rises who I think are the best and of course the most famous, that is to say the best for me, is Arturo Barrea, who in his book, in the third volume of his trilogy, the Forging of a Rebel, produces one of the most true books about the Civil War. And it's based entirely on personal experience. It is an honest and a painfully honest book. Now, interestingly, Barrea felt very, very uncomfortable about Hemingway. In a famous article in Horizon, he wrote of Hemingway, he falsifies most plausibly the causes and the actual form of violence of my people. And he questions the authenticity of Hemingway. And he says even the genuine characters are curiously detached from their background. One never quite knows why they fight for the Republic. This is of course absolutely true of Hemingway's play the Fifth Column, which bizarrely is about to have its second only ever production in Britain in about three weeks time. Now, in the Fifth Column, the central character, the weary, cynical yet romantic Philip Rawlings, is a projection of Hemingway himself. The clues are plentiful. Rawlings has big shoulders and walks like a gorilla. He likes raw onions, corned beef, neat whiskey and Chopin records. He drinks at Chicote's bar. All of that's absolutely true about Hemingway. But the lack of authenticity comes out, for instance, in Hemingway's comic presentation of Spanish characters through his crude rendering of what he thinks sounds like how Spaniards speak in English. There are also, and of course we find in For Whom the Bell Tolls unnecessary distortions of fact, such as his depiction of the pitiless repression carried out by the anarchist in Ronda, in the province of Malaga. In the book, Hemingway claims that large numbers of right wing prisoners were murdered by being thrown into the Tacho, the deep gorge which I'm sure most of you know runs through Ronda. Absolutely untrue. There were of course many right wing prisoners killed in Ronda, but not in that way. They were lined up and shot in the cemetery. And for me, one of the worst things with this I'll end comes in chapter 13 of For Whom the Bell Toll, where Hemingway puts into the mouth of the hero after having sex. He says to his partner, but did thee feel the earth Move. Of course, as you know, Hemingway used thee and other artificial speech forms supposedly as a way of translating what was being said in Spanish when the novel was published. The phrase feel the earth movement was not a common euphemism for the orgasm, but thanks to Hemingway, it now is. And it became so much so that it gave the singer songwriter Carole King the title of her major hit, I Feel the Earth Move. And with that I'll now pass on.
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Speak Loud. And I'm not even going to try and make a link between that and that last sentence, that is to say, and Hemingway's idiom and what I'm going to talk about. But anyway, here we are, Paul and I, two historians speaking at a literary festival. Fact versus fiction. And of course, I suppose at one level it's true, for us as historians, there is no contest. The entry level qualification for what we do is to deal in empirically verifiable quantities. And that's a requirement that can be quite frustrating at times in our own work because we have imaginative insights that we know are right from our own sort of saturated inhabiting of a particular past, but we simply can't substantiate it according to the tools of the empirical trade as a historian. So you effectively have to kind of leave it to one side, but at the same time, not sure I entirely agree with Paul. You know, I think a historian has. Is only as good as his or her ability to evoke for the reader the full complexity and all the multi layeredness of the past that they work on so that it doesn't remain lost in translation. I suppose it is a bit of a problem for historians that a lot of our colleagues feel that they've made such a huge effort to get to the starting line to dig all of this stuff up, that the actual writing is kind of, kind of second fiddle. So a lot of stuff sometimes perhaps does get lost in translation. But I think historians can, if they want to, sort of to achieve that end of it not being lost in translation, they can use literary techniques and structures to help them. And we must never make things up, of course. That of course goes without saying, but I think we can use literary techniques in what is our supremely difficult task of telling a true story. True story is the kind of paradox of actual history writing, I suppose. And I suppose this is also where kind of good, that is to say, honest novels come into their own too. And perhaps above all, novels about wars, all wars tend to produce reductive mythologies, while good novels, like, I hope good history, offer A more complicated, non binary way of telling. So they myth bust, they vaporize myths. Good novels can do that, even though they are inventing situations or people or whatever, and certainly good history must do that. And I think, let's face it, when we're talking about wars, and particularly the war in Spain, the Spanish Civil War, we need to do that myth busting ever more urgently. It's almost a form of public service or an act of civic duty in the light of what are ever more reductive tellings about the war in Spain, which are re emerging both inside Spain but also across Europe in these fear ridden days of ascendant populist nationalism. The whole kind of Pandora's box, which opened up post 1989 after what you might call the eclipse of the post second World War anti fascist consensus, which of course was another myth in itself, of course, but perhaps a more useful one. But what's now come out from under the carpet is a lot of 24 carat nastiness really. So myth busting is quite important. So for my own brief contribution tonight, what I wanted to do was, as Paul has already mentioned, I want to counterpoint to what I think are outstanding novels of the Spanish Civil War in this regard. First Joan Salas Uncertain Glory in Certa Gloria, published first of all in 1956, and then in ever expanding versions in Spain in Catalan, but only translated into English in 2014 by Quercus. Now this is a book, Uncertain Glory, which is set in Barcelona in the northeast of Spain, in Aragon, during the actual years of the battlefield war, 1936-39. So that's one thing I'm going to talk about. And the other one is to counterpoint it with, as Paul has also mentioned, Juan Marseille's extraordinary novel of the searing afterlife of the Civil War, which is set at the end of the 1950s in Barcelona and which is told in the classic form of detective, of noir, of detective fiction, which is, it's called Undia Valverei, of which a literal translation would be One Day I Will Return was published in 1982 in Spain and it's never been published. There is no English translation available. So these two novels, what links them is myth busting. It is also the fact that they both have protagonists who don't fit the brutal binaries which war has imposed upon them and which has then been maintained by Francoism. These are protagonists whose human complexities, if you like, blur the false clarities that war violently enforces on everyone involved. And these are people, these protagonists, who, in order to live authentically, have in some way to cross the lines.
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Right.
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So I'm going to do it chronologically, first of all, to talk about Salas uncertain glory, and then not to say so. Sallas's book is, as Paul said, a virtuoso depiction of the messy, devastating literality of war, how war makes everything grotesque and in the case of the Spanish War, how it utterly consumes the uncertain glory. The title, which is a reference to the dream of political renewal such as Spain's might have. Spain's republican Democracy in the 1930s might have been able to become in other circumstances. So put that way, you might expect this book to be an unbearable read, but in Sulla's immensely humane telling, it's enthralling from beginning to end. I mean, how can I conjure it for you, who probably most people haven't read it. I suppose it's a kind of mixture of Rabelais, sort of life force meets Shakespearean tragicomedy meets Balzac. It's a book that kind of. It's a long book, it's 400 pages, and it holds off tragedy by the sheer sort of narrative drive and its sheer energy throughout that whole length. At the novel's heart is a group, more or less a trio of young voices who are rendered really quite brilliantly as they kind of rage to live. I mean, Salas is very good at conveying through his characters that intense feeling of being alive that wars often very paradoxically produce. His protagonists have to confront not only the huge contradictions of the Spanish Civil War, but also, this is the clever bit, its deepest call, contradictions in themselves. Each of his characters is actually torn between the old and the new, between the comfort or the sanctity of something they acknowledge as a kind of claustrophobic old, and then the exhilaration of the new, but that they're also frightened. They're also frightened of it. Solaras Salas, almost anti hero, has a kind of restless, protean energy. There's another character called Trini, who's the activist daughter of shabbily genteel Barcelona intellectuals, who is. She's at the same time yearning for some kind of transcendent meaning, finding comfort in the old city in her geology studies, which kind of gives her this sense of permanence in the midst of flux, but yet she also hates the idea of the past, the past that she says weighs like an abyss. So here is Salas actually conjuring the fact that the contradictions and the divisions aren't just between people, but they're actually within people. And the war, which all of these characters believed would be short, changes them all utterly in spite of themselves, as they take cognizance of the civilian on civilian violence, which spreads like wildfire in the wake of the military coup which has triggered the war for Sallars himself, even though he was a Republican soldier. So the novel is to some extent semi autobiographical. For him, the war's meaning lay not on the battlefield, which always is off novel for the whole 400 pages. Nor for Sallust did the meaning of the war lie in the tangle of high party politics or partisan politics with which the civil war and particularly the Republican zone was replete. No, for Sallust the meaning of the war lay in the radically changed texture of everyday life. And that's what a novel can do. A novel can show that. And it was that radically changed texture of everyday life which really made the change indelible forever. But of course not in ways meant by any of the, you know, by or intended or thought by any of those protagonists. So history's little ironies. And in the last analysis, analysis of this book, I think Sellers is writing against a terminal lack of imagination that actually provoked the coup, the military rebels to make their coup, which they proposed as I suppose, a kind of solution to the messiness of social change. But of course who only succeeded in reducing people in Spain to impossible binary choices, Right? So the right Salas writing is itself a war defying act because the novel reminds us on every page how life over always overflows theory and dogma. Sola Ras, the protean protagonist, quips about the tendency of foreigners to bury the war beneath a welter of the heroic and the folkloric. But Salazar's main target in this novel is much, much closer to home. His most compelling voices and portraits of people belong to some of the many ordinary Catholics who stood for forever at odds to the military rebellion, but who have since been rendered permanently invisible in western imagination. I think along with whole entire other Catholic worlds across modern Spain have been rendered invisible by the ensuing Franco dictatorship's socializing and seemingly perennial myth of the Catholic Crusade. Salas own deep Catholic sensibility, because he was a practicing Catholic, also recognized the violent anti clericalism of republican Spain for the religious phenomenon that it was, while also quite usefully reminding us, and this is useful as a kind of historical tool reminding us how before Franco, before the many decades of Franco, the divide between believers and non believers in Spain was dwarfed by the divide between urban and rural culture. That's A really big truth and a historical truth. And it's the there at the center of Salas book. Anyway, understandably, Salas novel had trouble with the Franco census. A fully comprehensive version would only be published in 71. And of course, as the political twilight descended on the dictatorship. But although the twilight descended on the dictatorship, it hasn't really descended on most of its most flagrant myths, which are still alive and kicking in 21st century Spain. So for that reason as well, Salas book is also a kind of active public service and usefully available in English now. Okay, so the second one, quickly. Myth vaporization is also central to Marche's One Day I Will Return, which is an absolutely, spectacularly wonderful piece of writing which can be read in various ways. It can be read simply at its very compelling face value as this very suspenseful noir thriller. Even if you read it at that level, it's full of multiple perspectives, rumors, half or implicit hidden knowledge. What can I say? Think about the delivery of David Simon's the Wire and you have what Marseille does in One Day I Will Return. That's the gist of it. So the very sort of surface, although not superficial, but at the surface level of a thriller. It's the story of the return from a Francois jail to his working class Barcelona neighborhood in the late 1950s of a political prisoner with a history of armed anarchist activism behind him. But subtly and devastatingly, Marseille uses the multiple narratives that he weaves across and through each other to expose the myths and stereotypes of other people. That is to say, the protagonist, neighbors, friends, family, all of the myths and the stereotypes through which they imprison him or the other imprisons us, and also sometimes in very deadly fashion. And en route to the inevitably tragic denouement of this novel, Marseille deconstructs a certain sort of masculine heroism of the pistolero, along with pretty much the entire mythology of republic and heroic defeat. But at the same time, Marseille also shatters Francois certainties as well, and exposes the whole pathologies of victory. All the while he's doing all of these huge historically important things. He never breaks the texture or unity of the noir novel as a genre, which is an amazing feat. Absolutely amazing, of course, because this is a noir suspenseful thriller. Unlike when I was talking about Salas. I can't really tell you what the storyline is in this because that would be an exercise in sustained spoileridge.
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Right.
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So I will leave it at saying a few thematic things to try and pique your interest. Udi of is profoundly a novel about love. That's clear. But it's just as importantly a novel about models of memory in which Marseille weaves deep into his narrative a thematic reflection on the value and personal perils of remembrance. In the novel, you get memory presented variously as a prison, as a liberation, and almost everything in between. And in the course of doing this, he poses a question that's pretty much pivotal in very many contexts across the world today. How does one establish a relationship with the past which allows one to forget in the sense of being able to survive or to live in the present, yet without negating or betraying past commitments or memories? It's a big question. The novel begins with someone. The novel begins and ends with someone quite literally pissing on the past. And in between those two, the beginning and end, he offers us a kind of consummate but never didactic exploration of the very unstraightforward relationship between memory and repression, memory and redemption, memory and justice. Both Marseille himself and his charismatic former anarchist protagonist, whose name is Jean Julie Verte, are highly ambivalent about the relationship between memory and redemption, and memory and justice. And yet the novel's at the same time, the novel's constant reminder to the reader is that, well, at the end of the day we have to keep our finger on the trigger of memory, just in case. I mean, the actual quote runs something like forgetting is a way of being able to live, but even so, for some of us, we keep our finger on the trigger of memory, just in case. And this weapon is literally embedded in the story by way of a buried gun. So the gun being buried is almost symbolically freighted as revenge, abandoned. Right. There's no future in revenge, but it's there. Right? And there's a lot of playing throughout the novel of let with layers of consciousness and with different temporal frames. Of course, as you'd expect in a novel about memory, he's got in a novel which, you know, read at the surface, it can be just read very literally, it has an awful lot to say about the non linearity and elusiveness of human memory, and particularly perhaps of the fragmented encounter mythic memories of the those Barcelona working class constituencies who were the socially and political defeated in the civil war, and whose scribe, and indeed whose poet, Marseille most famously is. So in this novel, in Dear Boulevard, memory is constructed around a protagonist who basically subverts the conventional heroic fighter figure. It's also built around a love story from the the Civil War, which was then in the 1930s, unrealizable, and which remains in the 50s present of the Novel unrepresentable. Right. So in order to, in a sense, the character, in order to live authentically, one must cross the lines. One, whether it's the lines of politics, class, gender, one must abandon fossilized forms of identity, no matter what the risk. Every time I read it, and I've read it a lot of times, I find it now, I find it a very remarkable 21st century novel in its irony and its ironic questioning of so many things that really increasingly need questioning, starting with the notion of nationalism itself. It would make an epic film. I'm amazed nobody's really thought about that, given the story. But in a sense, we're awash with, you know, given we're awash with often not very good realistic films about historical memory, I think this would be one which would be worth investing some time and effort in. But first of all, of course, we need a translation into English of the book itself. It's quite amazing we don't have one. Given this is a book which is noir. It is a book where, you know, an Anglo American, as I understand it, an Anglo American public is avid for noir in all its shape and forms. So I'm surprised that this hasn't yet been picked up. But as noir. Just a final remark. The book is. Obviously transcends the genre, or perhaps that's the wrong way of putting it these days. Perhaps. What I mean to say is that all genres can transcend themselves and become literature with a capital L. Probably not, but certainly something which all. Something which all literature, you know, the canon is no part of this discussion, but certainly they can. All good novels, all authentic, all honest novels, Honest novel, sorts of.
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Yeah.
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What they do is they help us to live.
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This is not working, is it? Right, I. I cannot speak very loud, but I hope you can hear me. Well, first of all, I would like to apologize to Paul Preston because I am a novelist and it seems that he thinks that it's not our fault.
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It's not our fault.
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In fact, we don't want to be believed, we want to entertain. But it's very difficult for readers not to believe what they read in novel, mainly because a novel demands identification. And once the reader has identified with the characters or the action, it's part of their life while history is there to be read and understood. Personally, I don't like historical novels unless they are extraordinary novels like Warren Pierre, which is, I think, the best novel ever written. But if it's not a great novel, I prefer history. I am a great reader of history and I think it's much more interesting than having to learn history through the personal things that happen between two people. And a love story that has nothing, no interest whatsoever. When what interests me is history, what really happened then there are other novels, etc. Of course we have to. Novelists have to be true and truthful. The only point is that we only realize that when it is too late. I was born in Barcelona in January 19, exactly four years after the day Franco's troupe entered the city. Almost to a day. It was near the end of the Spanish Civil War. I grew up in an atmosphere of fear and silence, like all Spaniards of that time who lived inside Spain. When I say silence, I don't mean that nobody talked about the war. On the contrary, wherever my family met. And by family I mean the Spanish family. Father, mother, great uncles, nieces, neighbors, cousins, everybody. When the whole bunch of people met in the living room of my parents house, for instance, the conversation was always the same or always ended up with the same subject. The war. What happened in the war. But not really an analysis of the war. Everybody knew there had been a war. They were talking about personal anecdotes, things that everybody knew. So just mentioning of a name or a situation. Just everybody had the whole picture. Do you remember when Francisco came? Oh, yes, yes, yes. That was a story. Do you remember the hotel? Yes, yes, remember. But there were terrible stories of which I only heard part of it. I never had the whole picture. They were always personal stories of fear and hunger. Normally were women stories. Men tended to keep silent. Stories of people banging at the door in the middle of the night to take away somebody. Women going from place to place to trying to find out where the relatives had been taken, or whether the son or the husband was dead or alive. Cooking soup with dry bone and potato peels to feed the whole family. The air raid on Barcelona. The frightful chekas. A name that was enough to give me a great terror. But I never knew what they were. I knew there was something called a cheka. It was a prison, special prison where incredible tortures were applied to people for hiding a priest or something like that. Horror stories. But these horror stories were told by the same people, by the same persons that afterwards told me fairy tales or gave me presents for Christmas. In my family, this chronicle was not a part of a coherent discourse. Nobody ever mentioned history with a capital H. We never tried to explain what had happened. Never an opinion was expressed, just pieces of personal history. I had to wait many years to learn there had been a war between Spaniards. I knew something Terrible had happened. But I never knew there was a war. And many, many more years took me to realize that those conversations had a hidden subject and a hidden message. For me, the subject was the same. What did we do wrong to deserve such a punishment? In a war between different states, reasons are objective. They can be fair or unfair, true or false reasons, but they are objective. In a civil war, reasons are subjective. What? Was it our fault? Did we misplace our vote? With the Popular Front? With the Right? Were we irresponsible? With a few exceptions, members of my family were not significant people in a political sense. They had taken no part in the events that led to the civil war. They did not belong to the one of the two Spains. They belonged to the third Spain. Majority of Spaniard men and women who only wanted to be left alone, but had expressed their opinions on matters of politics, religion, Catalonia or some other general subject, hoping for the best. Now they felt guilty, both winners and losers. This feeling was in sharp contrast with the official rhetoric of triumphalism that the Franco propaganda was present everywhere. Radio, on the cinema, newspapers. I always thought this triumphalism was a form of self justification. And the message was, boy, when you grow up, be careful. Think twice before saying anything, before taking any step. Don't repeat the mistakes we made. I don't think the transicion, the transition, can be fully understood without taking into account the way many people who made it possible were brought up in their childhood. Some of this I tried to more or less present in one of my so called historical novels. Rena de Gatos Madrid Mil Noveciento Strente Essays An American in Madrid in the wonderful translation by Nick Castor. The story takes place, as the Spanish title indicates, In Madrid in 1936, a few months before the beginning of the war. One of the subjects of the novel is the position of several people regarding the future events. A future that obviously they cannot know, that they can reasonably foresee the recklessness and the levity of most of these people. At that time, in my opinion, nobody thought there could be a real war, maybe a coup d', etat, maybe a revolution, but not a three year long war with troops and planes and tanks, and with direct or indirect involvement of several foreign powers, like Hitler's Germany, or Mussolini's Italy, or Stalin's Russia. When I grew up rebuilding the past, this past that I had heard about but didn't know, had become an obsession. I took profit of this obsession by becoming a writer. History was not part of my academic studies, but I was curious And I read a lot. And the recent past. Unfortunately, at that time, history was kidnapped by the rhetoric of the Franco's propaganda and its ludicrous fantasies. In the great empire, where the sun never set, a superior race of conquistadores and saints, El Cid, bullfighters, El Escorial, Cervantes, Velazquez, but not Picasso all together was a sort of mental soup that I disliked profoundly. The non official history, because we were still waiting for the British writers to come, was not very helpful because it was based on the old history. Historians were Marxist or structuralists, and reading them was really rough crossing. I wanted to tell not what happened, but how people lived the events. I thought history, apart from a science, was also a story upon which people. People could build their identity. Not in the sense identity has today, a justification to exclude the others and food for grievance. I wanted it to be a collective psychoanalysis, a protection against the temptation to consider us better than our neighbors. It's obvious that I failed, but I wrote a novel. I investigated not very much. I just wanted to get some facts to make history alive.
- [47:08]
A
I read.
- [47:13]
B
Newspapers apart from history. I read tracts, political tracts. I was surprised that the most interesting thing that I could read about the past were women's magazines, because I discovered how they dressed, how people dress, what they ate, their tastes, their morals, trending topics of that time. I organized all this material with a confused plot of romainois that was fashionable at the time and that gave me a way to organize that material that I had. I finished my novel in 1971. It took me two years to have the manuscript accepted by a publishing house. In 1973, the publishing house sent the manuscript to the censorship, as was mandatory at the time. Many years later, I read the report of the censor. It began like this stupid and chaotic rubbish containing all the law tricks of writers who don't know how to write. An opinion I concur with. But he gave permission to publish the novel because he said nobody would ever read it. Only he said the title had to be changed. And so we did. The original title was Los Soldados de Catalunya, the Soldiers of Catalonia. The new title was La verdad sobrel Casios the Truth about the Case. I still prefer the first one, although the second one is probably better. No matter what the censor thought, the first title, Soldiers of Catalonia, had nothing to do with catalonism or separatism or independentism. On the contrary, the idea was that modern Catalonia had been built on violence, murderous businessmen and their hitmen and no less murderous anarchists fighting in the streets of Barcelona were the real soldiers of Catalonia, their conquering army, because in the process of bombing and killing each other, they had made a nation out of an impoverished and forgotten region in northern Spain. The second title, La verdazzo del cacho Sabolta, underlined the investigation the roman noir aspect of the novel. It was less political and more literary. Two years later Two years later, at the beginning of 1975, the publishing house decided to actually publish the novel and send it to censorship for a second time. According to the files, the sensor was another person. Both the first and the second censor were of course anonymous and designated by a number, preceded by the customary don, in my case, don 6 and don 4. The first one was don 6 and the second one was don 4. Now don 4, the second one gave a rather favorable report of the novel from the literary point of view. Said, this is a rather interesting novel. He was a man of his time and a lot had changed between 1973 and 1975, in matters of literary taste and in other matters too. Franco was in his deadbed and former censors were looking for a new job in the publishing houses. Now the novel came out in the middle of the year, 1975. It was well received by readers and critics and was considered the first novel of the transition. Because in fact, this is what it was like Adam and Eve. No merit of the novel. It was born right at the best, in the first moment of the transition. In the next forty years I published several novels, of which three follow the same pattern of historical, semi historical. Casilda de los Prodigio, City of Marvels in 1986, Na Comedia, a light comedy in 1996, and the already mentioned Rinha de Gatos, an English man in Madrid, into Hannah, then only in the last two. The Spanish Civil War has some incident secondary, but incident one takes place months before the beginning of the war, as I said before, the other a few years after its conclusion. I always refuse to touch directly on the subject of the war. I had heard enough to know that I could not speak in the first person, not even through the safe mask of fiction. It is a problem with us because we felt compelled to talk about the Civil War, but we knew that we had not the right to do so because we had not lived it. I think there are three generations of Spanish writers as far as the Civil War is quite concerned. The first is generation who participated in the war in the front or in the rear, and they could offer a Testimony for firsthand witnesses. The names have already been mentioned. Arturo Barria, Joan Salis, Ramon Sender, Nasser Rodoreda. Then comes my generation, the generation born under the shadow of the war. More timid and more introspect in this sense. Juan, Marseille, Manolo, Basquet, Montalvan, Juan Benit, Francisco Umbral, Rafael Cherves, myself are the first names that come to my mind. But there are many others. And finally there is the third generation, free from the personal attachment to the world, free. Free to choose their emotional involvement in the moral dilemma that was the war. I'm thinking of Javier Therkas, Almoudina Grandes, Antonio Munoz Molina, Ignacio Martinez Trepison, et cetera. In my view, and I know I will be contradicted, it was Javier, Circus and Soldiers of Salamina, published in two hands, the first to open this new way to see the war by mixing history and fiction, maybe more fiction than history, but in any case, changing from history to fiction and creating a narrator who is also a fictional alter ego of Circus himself. He developed a tale of the war from a new point of view, both emotional and detached, respectful, but also humoristic, ironical. When I read it, I thought I was reading for the first time a tale that took place some time ago in not too far galaxy, but that was not the living room of my family. Another novel worth mentioning in this context is El Tiempo entre Costuras, translated by the time in between or the Seamstress has the two titles in English. A mainstream novel by Maria Duenas. The story takes the Civil War as a background for conventional romantic plot. Now the tremendous success of this book and later of the TV series proves, in my opinion, a new interest in the Civil War, something of the past, a feel to be exploited, open to all. I don't know if this is good or bad. In the recent past, both cinema and television have often used the Civil War in a very disgraceful way, with tear rending or funny plots, with simplistic stereotypes, with very bad actors trying to make to prove that they are not the character they are playing. Because it would be. But maybe it means that a new leaf has been turned and that we in Spain feel so safe that we can treat our recent past as freely as we please. Or maybe not. Maybe it means that we have forgotten and we are ready to go back to the same mistakes again and again. In any case, this approach has made possible, among other things, the rediscovery of past writers of the fascist persuasion who had been anathema, like Augustine de Foxhard. Or the same. Raphael, Sanchez, Matthias. And also, I think of a rethinking of the Civil War in a less clear terms. For a time, I thought that the Memoria Historica, historic memory, this movement that took place in Spain, could mean something more than identifying bones in common graves. Essential as it is, I thought it could mean a way to take a more balanced view of what happened without adopting a relativist or a nihilistic attitude, or renouncing principles and judgments. A new step towards reconciliation and the burial of the past. That should start first of all with the recognition that Franco was a war criminal and not a liberator or an accident provoked by other people's mistakes. Unfortunately, the entrenchment of some sectors now in power makes it very difficult to take this step. But I myself personally did some house cleaning When I wrote La verdazzo del Casio Zavolta and also La Cidadros Prodigios. I had a sentimental view of the anarchists. At the beginning of the 20th century, in all Western countries, anarchists were a powerful presence, but also a minority. Usually it were the socialists and the communists who took the social confrontation now in Catalonia. For several reasons. The anarchists were the dominant force, the largest in numbers and the more organized. This fact had an important significance on the making of modern Catalonia. As I already said later on, the civil war exacerbated the traditional confrontation with fatal consequences for everybody. But more unusual is what happened after the war. Of course, during the war and afterwards, Franco had no pity with the anarchist who he could lay hands on. But in the subsequent years, the propaganda machine didn't pay much attention to them. First, the anarchists had not been a great force outside Catalonia, in the rest of Spain. Second, after the war, anarchism had practically disappeared as a political force. As a political force both in Spain and also in the rest of Europe, then communism was the enemy, and Franco was keen on becoming the bulwark against it in the eyes of the world. The result was that the terrible record of death and destruction provoked by the anarchists was erased from the books of history and the collective memory of the Spanish people. Even when democracy came back several decades later, it was unbecoming to speak evil of men and women who had fought so gallantly against fascism and paid dearly for it. Even direct victims of the cruelty and arbitrariness of the anarchist kept silence. So when I wrote my novels, I was misguided. All I knew about the anarchists came from reading books and pamphlets, and above all, the trilogy of my Dear Pio Baroja. La lucha por la vida. THE Fight for LIFE about the anarchists in Madrid in the turn of the century. I was young and easily influenced, and I fell in love with the idea, with the people, and with their deeds. They were my heroes. And the same was true for many writers of my generation. At that time we were all under the umbrella of the Communist Party, the only one that offered practical means to oppose the Franco regime. But the strict discipline and the exhausting theoretical orthodoxy of the Communist Party bore us to death. Anarchies were more attractive, and I painted them as such. Only later I began to hear real life stories from the victims of those deeds. Usually they were old women who as children had seen their fathers taken from home and summarily shot just for being successful businessmen or righteous or practicing Catholics for vengeance or by mistake. As I said before, I was writing novels and didn't feel a strong obligation to be faithful to the fact. But I thought I should be faithful to the truth. Probably I was wrong when I wrote his novels by depicting the anarchist the way I did. If I could write those novels again, I would change my position. Or I may nuance. But this will never happen, because historical studies remake themselves in the course of time. But novels are forever, or at least as long as they are available in bookshops and libraries. So there is nothing I can do except ask for the benevolence of the thank you very much.