Tag Archives: Spanish Civil War

Ukrainian bees, Finland and Barcelona

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My recent run of fiction reading that didn’t entirely satisfy continued this month – with one exception:

Andrey Kurkov, Grey Bees. MacLehose Press, translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk, 2021; first published in Russia, 2018 – this paperback edition provided by my local library. This was recommended to me by a friend; I wanted to add to my knowledge of literature about Ukraine.

Kurkov was born in Leningrad in 1961 but his family moved to Kyiv when he was two. Apart from being a prolific novelist, he has become a noted commentator on events in Ukraine. The novel tells the story of Sergey, a beekeeper who lives in the ‘grey zone’ in the Donbas – the area fought over by the Ukrainian army and the invading Russians (who also annexed Crimea in 2014) and pro-Russian separatist militias after the Euromaidan protest movement in 2013-14. Everyone in his village has fled the war except for his ‘frenemy’, Pashka, with whom he maintains a love-hate relationship. Their existence is frugal: there’s no power or mains services, food is scarce, and they live in constant danger of being shot by snipers or blown to pieces by random artillery fire. They hear the booms of explosions in the distance all the time.

In this dystopian setting a slightly surreal sequence of events unfolds. Sergey crawls across a dangerously exposed field to cover the corpse of a dead soldier. He doesn’t even know on whose side he fought, but can’t bear the thought of him lying unburied. This reveals his innate decency. He’s a low-key, self-deprecating example of sanity and humanity in a world that’s gone mad.

He lives almost entirely for his bees. His wife has left him, taking their daughter with her. He has an affair with a neighbouring village shopkeeper, but is reluctant to commit to another human being. His bees fulfil his emotional needs. They become a sort of symbol of the order – working for the common good of the hive – and normality that people in Ukraine have had taken from them.

Partly to avoid having to settle down and compromise his eremitic life, he heads south to the Crimea to look up an acquaintance he hasn’t seen in years. This expedition only leads to the discovery that things are just as bad, if not worse, in this peninsula on the Black Sea. The local Muslim population is oppressed by their aggressive invaders, and they are understandably suspicious of this outsider.

The novel’s title refers not just to Sergey’s bees in the battle-torn grey zone, but to the hive that he suspects has been tampered with by the Russian secret police when he comes to their attention in the Crimea. He believes this interference has somehow turned these bees grey – a metaphor perhaps for the pernicious, tainting effect of Putin’s invasion on everything Ukrainian with which they come into contact.

It’s a poignant, bittersweet narrative, told in subdued, undramatic prose that fits the unheroic Sergey’s stoical nature and the bizarre solitary life he favours. Sergey’s experience is related, as it were, in shades of grey in a world where most of the colour has been erased. It’s one of the most unusual and affecting novels about war (and, more particularly, the people caught up in it) that I’ve ever read.

I didn’t relish Tove Jansson, The Summer Book, Sort Of Books, 2022, first published in Swedish 1972 (TJ was a Swedish-speaking Finnish author), translated by Thomas Teal. I don’t know why: it’s quite charming in a way, and quirkily philosophical. A six-year-old girl lives on a tiny island in the Finnish archipelago with her family, spending most of her time with her rather grumpy but loving grandmother. In a loosely linked series of short stories, we hear about the girl’s hopes and fears, her tantrums and passions. I’ve read several accounts of this largely autobiographical novel that went into raptures, but I’m afraid I found it rather tedious.

The same goes for Mercè Rodoreda, In Diamond Square, Virago 2014, first published in Catalan 1962. As I’ve got to know Barcelona quite well in recent years since my stepson moved there with his family, I was drawn to this novel, set in that city, by one of the most revered Catalan authors of recent years. I was again disappointed. The first third tells of the marriage of Natalia to a coercively controlling, self-absorbed bully of a husband. When the civil war breaks out in 1936, he goes off to fight, and Natalia is left to struggle to earn enough to feed her young family.

The narrative should be compelling: Natalia learns resilience and finds she isn’t such a pushover after all. But I found this transformation unconvincing, and the mannered prose left me cold. It’s influenced, Rodoreda says in the prologue, by Dante, Kafka, Joyce and Homer – a claim justified by some of the breathless syntax, style and apparently inconsequential detail. I found all this intrusive, though, and Natalia’s simple innocence, reminiscent of Candide’s, didn’t make me want to see her overcome her difficulties.

I’m turning to some non-fiction to try and break this sequence of novels that I haven’t enjoyed as much as I’d have hoped. But I did warm to those harmonious, soothing bees.

Richard Rhodes, Hell and Good Company

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Some of my recent reading about the 1936-39 Spanish Civil war was inspired by my recent visit to Catalonia: I’ve posted on Lydie Salvayre’s Cry, Mother Spain; George Orwell: Homage to Catalonia; back in 2014 I wrote about Javier Cercas’ semi-fictional Soldiers of Salamis, in which the lives of real and possibly imagined heroes of that terrible conflict are recounted in the context of the post-Franco ‘pact of forgetting’ – la desmemoria. In 2000 the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory was founded; here’s what they say on their website:

In the spring of 2002, the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances called on the Spanish Government to comply with international law, calling on Spain to: undertake a proper exhumation of the bodies; return the remains to family members; arrange for their proper burial; and undertake a judicial investigation of the facts surrounding the disappearances.

Such developments have enabled the ARHM to campaign for the exhumation of the graves of the estimated 134,000 who disappeared during the war, and in the Franco dictatorship in Spain 1939-75:

It is estimated that 200,000 men and women were killed in extrajudicial executions during the War, and another 20,000 Republicans murdered by the regime in the post-war years. Thousands more died as a result of bombings, and in prisons and concentration camps. [ARHM website]

The recent news of the pending exhumation of Franco’s body from its grandiose tomb at the Valley of the Fallen complex 30 miles from Madrid, where lie buried some 34,000 bodies – most unidentified – from both sides of the conflict has led to calls for a South African-style ‘truth commission’ in Spain. It’s to be hoped that this will end the ‘desmemoria’, and enable exhumation, identification and decent burial of as many of those victims of the fascist era as possible. (I’m reminded as I write this of Javier Marías’s treatment of this theme in many of his novels).

Cover of Richard Rhodes, Hell and Good CompanyPulitzer Prizewinning author Richard Rhodes has produced in Hell and Good Company something rather different from the standard and well-known histories of the war by the likes of Hugh Thomas, Anthony Beevor and Paul Preston. He does give a highly readable, well researched chronological account of the war, from Franco’s shipping over thousands of Moorish mercenaries to support his coup against the democratically elected socialist Republican government, to his ultimate victory, taking Barcelona and finally Valencia, whence the government had decamped from besieged Madrid.

Also well known, and retold here, is the story of the military support provided to Franco by the shambolic but ruthless Italian duce and by Hitler – who cynically held back some of his troops and munitions to ensure the war dragged on as long as possible, to distract the attention of the British and French from his own sinister preparations for world domination.

Rhodes gives us the familiar stories of the big names associated with the war, including writers Orwell, Hemingway, Gellhorn and Dos Passos, and artists Picasso and the Catalan Miró. More interesting are the profiles of less prominent participants, from volunteers in the International Brigade to doctors and nurses (like Patience Darton) who pioneered medical and technological developments such as blood collection systems and the methods for preserving and subsequently using the stored blood in field-hospital transfusions – or simply made huge personal sacrifices in their struggle against the larger, better trained and better equipped fascist Nationalists.

The western democracies and the USSR effectively abandoned the anti-fascist Republic, while fascist states leapt at the chance to crush a leftist regime while establishing a strategically vital political-geographical foothold in preparation for the world war to come:

[French and British] businessmen allowed Franco to order on credit; Germany and Italy supplied him in exchange for shipments of Spanish minerals. The Soviet Union required the Spanish Republic to pay in gold, however, for its strictly commercial transactions. Spain shipped $518 million in gold to the USSR in late 1936, primarily to move it beyond the reach of Franco’s forces.

The Republic’s only major ally and supporter, the Soviet Union, gradually lost what little enthusiasm it had for the anti-fascist cause, and proved to be as cynical in its policies during the war as the Nationalists were murderous. Stalin seemed more anxious to eliminate anti-fascist, pro-Republican fighters like the POUM and the anarchists, as Orwell recorded, than to defeat Franco.

Particularly chilling are the accounts of the growing sophistication and thoroughness of the fascist aerial bombing campaigns that were to become such a feature in WWII; Spain was the testing-ground for Hitler’s infamous blitzkrieg – targeting and near-annihilation of largely civilian urban populations. Most famous, and related in sobering detail by Rhodes, was Guernica. The obliteration of the symbolic heart of the Basque Country by the ruthless German Condor Legion finally persuaded Picasso in Paris to paint his famous mural and openly declare his opposition to the fascist coup.

Despite shelters, Haldane reports that nationwide, up to May 1938, the number of Spanish children known to have been killed by bombing was 10,760…Civilian deaths from Franco’s bombing raids throughout Spain would total around 54.000 men, women and children among more than 100,000 civilian casualties from bombing alone.

The hardships endured by the thousands of Basque women and children evacuees foreshadowed the shameful anti-refugee callousness being witnessed again in Europe and elsewhere today. Near the end of the book Rhodes has this quotation from the Caudillo:

“Our regime”, Franco announced grandly [after his victory parade in Madrid], “is based on bayonets and blood, not on hypocritical elections”.

The ARHM website reminds us of Spanish-born philosopher Santayana’s famous statement, ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’. As one contemplates the anti-democratic behaviour of some of the western world’s leaders, and the disturbing rise of the forces of reactionary nationalist chauvinism, these are salutary words.

Hell and Good Company: the Spanish Civil War and the World it Made is a Simon and Schuster paperback, published 2016. Unfortunately the black-and-white photo glossy plates numbered 15-26 in my edition are given twice; numbers 1-14 therefore are missing – annoying.

Orwell’s Catalonia

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George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

Having just been to Mallorca and read Lydie Salvayre’s Cry, Mother Spain, a novel about the impact of the Spanish Civil War on rural families in Catalonia (and parallel descriptions by Bernanos of atrocities perpetrated in Mallorca by fascist Francoists), about which I posted last week, I needed to reread George Orwell’s contemporary account of his experiences as a militia volunteer in Homage to Catalonia. It’s decades since I first read it, but it remained pretty clear in my memory as a searing, sad, highly personal story.

Salvayre Orwell covers First published in 1938, it describes his experiences in Spain from December 1936, soon after the war broke out, to June 1937. He’d served at the Aragón front, where to his frustration ‘little or nothing happened’, having spent the first weeks in desultory training in the Lenin Barracks, Barcelona, then recuperating in horribly ill-equipped and inexpertly staffed medical facilities after being shot in the throat.

On leave in Barcelona in May ’37 he found that bourgeois class distinctions had returned and the revolutionary idyll had ended. He also found himself caught up in internecine street fighting instigated by the communist assault on the trade-union controlled Telephone Exchange, which resulted not surprisingly in an armed response from the non-Stalinist leftists. The loosely Trotskyist POUM militia (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista), to which Orwell had been assigned, naively unaware of the significance of its political allegiance, was anathematised by Moscow’s Comintern as traitors in the pay of the fascists, and hence a divisive and fatally distracting crisis ensued, probably enabling Franco’s forces to prevail while his opponents fought each other. It was an only too familiar leftist splintering and infighting that produced his enduring hatred of the Stalinist hard line with its intolerance of anything other than one-nation revolution and unwavering party loyalty, that he later satirised in 1984 and Animal Farm, and was to criticise in much of his non-fiction.

In his 1989 introduction to this PMC paperback edition Julian Symons rather harshly suggests that Orwell combined a ‘capacity for subtle and complex thought and argument with a sometimes tactless ardour and simplicity.’

Orwell got to Spain under the auspices of the British Independent Labour Party, (and, as he later learned to his cost, links with the largely Trotskyist POUM militia), whose recommendation took him to the revolutionary hotbed of Barcelona (setting of the key testing ground for the anarchist fervour of the two idealistic siblings in Salvayre’s novel), which was still under the control of the anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists, rather than to Madrid, where the struggle against the fascists was led by the Soviet-supported communists.

Orwell was surprised and ingenuously delighted to find ‘one breathed the air of equality’ in a classless Catalonian capital, ‘where the working class was in the saddle.’ Symons isn’t far wrong when he describes the ‘romantic puritan’ Orwell’s reaction as ‘childlike wonder’. Who can blame him. Salvayre’s José was also delirious with excitement at what seemed the Spanish utopia: a truly classless society.

But the euphoria was partial and short-lived. Orwell quickly realised there was something ‘pathetic in the literalness with which these idealistic Spaniards took the hackneyed phrases of revolution.’ Like José, he became disillusioned with the endemic lack of organisation , urgency or discipline in the militia (the ‘mañana’ mentality), largely peasant and urban trade unionist men with little military aptitude, and an average age of about twenty, with many as young as fifteen: ‘we were not real soldiers’.

Life at the front, and his experience of war, was far from romantic or heroic; weapons were scarce, antiquated and more dangerous to the users than to the enemy. He rarely got to fire his decrepit rifle. ‘Above all it meant mud, lice, hunger and cold.’ He caustically lists, in decreasing order of importance, the five key things in the warfare he experienced: ‘firewood, food, tobacco, candles and the enemy.’ He notes the things only a person who’d been there could know, like the fact that ‘At the front, everyone stole’. So much for class solidarity. Even idealistic revolutionaries, he implies, are ultimately venal, materialistic and corrupt.

The story of the communist purge of ‘undesirable elements’, meaning those who’d fought so bravely with Orwell at the front, including his own brave and selfless commander, and the POUM leader Andreu Nin, who disappeared, were tortured to death or allowed to die from neglect in prison by the communists, disgusted him. Yet I think he’s honest when he insists this book is not ‘a book of propaganda’ and that he does not intend to ‘idealize the POUM militia.’

As I noted in my post on Salvayre’s semi-fictional account of the war in Catalonia, there are timely references to the use of media and other propagandist modes of manipulation of opinion; in Orwell’s case this includes his scathing criticism of the blatantly biased reporting in the European press, either pro-Franco from such right-wing papers as the British Daily Mail (which continues to produce xenophobic, counterfactual ‘news’, in a manner encouraged and endorsed by the so-called alt right), or pro-Moscow in the leftist press.

This is not a dry, political or even socio-historical treatise, though it doesn’t flinch from exploring such aspects of the complexities of this terrible war – that ‘appalling disaster’ he calls it near the end. There are numerous touches that reveal the flawed and only too human personality of the writer, who ruefully acknowledges that he played ‘so ineffectual a part’ in the war. He admits that when he was frightened in combat he didn’t function well as a soldier, or became so infuriated at the factionalism that, like José, he lost patience with those around him, revealing perhaps unwittingly his upper-class, Eton-educated origins, which he rejected but couldn’t entirely transcend.

But it’s that bitterness about what could have been that lingers: those heady days in ‘equalitarian’, classless Barcelona, that so quickly reverted to the normal hierarchies of rich and poor. We still endure that legacy of power wielded by the power elites, who increasingly denounce, as the commissars did in Spain, any deviation from their truth, as fake news and, most cynical of all, unpatriotic.

Ken Loach’s 1995 film ‘Land and Freedom’ depicts the experiences of a young working-class Liverpudlian man fighting in a POUM unit and undergoing a similar process to Orwell’s of elation followed by disillusionment.

My thanks to Jacqui for her comment to my post on Salvayre, pointing out this piece on the novel by Naomi at The Writes of Woman blog.

Lydie Salvayre: Cry, Mother Spain

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#WIT Women in Translation month I don’t know why but I’ve been unable to upload my photo of the book’s cover; here’s a link to the Maclehose Press website which has a blurb and fine picture of it.

I returned yesterday from a holiday in north Mallorca – more on that maybe another time. It seemed appropriate to read there this novel by Lydie Salvayre: Cry, Mother Spain, translated by Ben Faccini and published by Maclehose Press, Quercus London. It was first published in French in 2014 (when it won the Prix Goncourt) with the title Pas pleurer (Don’t cry). In an interview at the World Literature Today site Faccini explained that he wanted to avoid using a negative term. The author told him she wanted to highlight, with that French phrase, the protagonist Salvayre’s mother Montse’s determination not to cry in the face of humiliations, political and personal disasters arising from the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Faccini himself wanted to accentuate the central theme of mothers and daughters, of interrogating the past in the context of one’s mother country from a place of exile. There’s maybe an echo of the title of Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country.

It’s a deeply moving, powerful account of that bloody conflict, fusing elements of autobiography, political history and literary allusion – threaded through the narrative are references to the account by the monarchist Catholic writer Georges Bernanos, Les Grands Cimetières de la lune. In an author’s preface Salvayre says she read that book in 2012 and was ‘shocked by it’. Bernanos describes in it the Francoist atrocities he witnessed in the opening months of the Civil War in Mallorca in 1936 – crimes carried out in many cases with the complicity of the Catholic clergy (‘that despicable institution’ is how the narrator describes the church, when it showed its ‘true and terrifying face’) who dominated Spain’s life – spiritual, social and political – at the time, as the opening words of the novel starkly show:

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. A ceremonial ring on his venerable hand, the Most Reverend Archbishop of Palma pointed at the chests of the “guilty poor”, singling them out to the vigilante firing squads…[these victims] were those who dared to open their mouths, and on July 18, 1936, my mother opened her mouth for the first time. She was fifteen. She lived up in the hills, cut off from the world, in a village where wealthy landowners had kept families like hers in the most abject poverty for centuries.

Montserrat, known to her intimates as Montse, is a name Salvayre is ‘happy to appropriate and revive for a short while, rescuing it from the oblivion to which it has been consigned’:

For the time being I don’t want to introduce any invented characters into my account…She’s ninety years old as she sits and remembers her youth in the crossbred, trans-Pyrenean language she has adopted since Fate hurled her into a village  somewhere in the south-west of France more than seventy years ago.

That language Salvayre describes in another interview at Music and Literature as ‘Fragnol’ – a hybrid of French and Spanish. Montse was raised speaking Catalan, but her Andalusian husband insisted on Castilian been spoken in his household. It’s a novel as much about the struggle of women in the face of patriarchal social oppression as it is about the class struggle and the insurrection against the stifling Catholicism of early 20C Spain.

When the main local landowner considers Montse for a job as a maid – about the only work available to a girl of her class outside of peasant toil in the fields – she’s deeply insulted and outraged at his assessment of her as seeming ‘quite humble’. When the war breaks out next day she feels liberated from that destiny of drudgery in that month when she ‘discovered life’: she never worked as a maid for him or anyone else. She’d found her voice.

Her brother José returns from Lérida full of utopian ideas and slogans of the Anarchists, and he fuels her incipient feelings of mutiny against the oppressive social norms for women by instilling in her those same idealistic political dreams. Sadly for him and his country they come to nothing, defeated by the forces of Fascism, aided by the Germans and Italians, and with the growing support of an ignorant, timid, ultra-conservative peasantry, and self-interested bourgeoisie.

After an initial period of euphoria when the remote, backward village, ‘where things repeated themselves, identically and endlessly’, where ‘the rich had their prosperity, the poor their burdens’, and ‘nothing new ever came along to add hope’, becomes elated by those naively optimistic ideas of José’s, the peasants gradually shift to adopt the cynical and manipulative ideologies of the Stalinists. The lukewarm support of Soviet Russia – the only nation prepared to provide  political and financial aid to the Republican, anti-fascist cause (the foreign volunteers of the International Brigade were eager but mostly ill-equipped and poorly led and trained) – evolved inevitably into an anti-revolutionary, anti-Trotskyist purge as vicious and treacherous as that of the Francoists – as Orwell has starkly described in Homage to Catalonia.

This novel is more affecting than his account, because it has at its heart the true story of a Catalan family caught up in the internecine turmoil and factional viciousness, denunciation, betrayal, retribution and shameful slaughter. More importantly, it’s told from a woman’s perspective, filtered through the modern sensibility of her novelist daughter, who perceives, and subtly weaves into the narrative, the parallels with events today in which cynical media manipulation and shameless courting of ultra-nationalist bigotry have become too familiar; here’s an example, where she considers the fascist supporters’ fervent advocacy of ‘nation’ and ‘nationalist’: this ‘thrusting’ of those terms about ‘like a banner’ is done

to mask their true aim of separating nationals from non-nationals. In other words they are creating a system that differentiates and categorises humans. This is, I suppose, just another form of xenophobia, and the objective is to go on and discredit the non-nationals, to marginalise them, and finally to get rid of them like parasites.

 

Former Prime Minister Cameron comes to mind, likening migrants to ‘swarms’. Orwell said in ‘Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War’, talking of atrocities committed by both sides, that they are ‘believed in or disbelieved in solely on grounds of political predilection. Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence.’ And on fake news:

Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as ‘the truth’ exists.

Elsewhere Salvayre quotes Bernanos:

‘The wealthy despise those that serve them, either through conviction or foolishness, as ultimately they only believe themselves to be defended by the corrupt; they only put their trust in the corrupt.’

José and Montse leave their stultifying village for the heady revolutionary hub of Barcelona, but the brother quickly becomes disillusioned by the ‘interminable squabbles’ between the communists and anarchists, ‘one blinding and the other self-deceiving’. Disgusted by the hatred and casual murders perpetrated by his fellow militiamen, he returns, sickened, to the village to face its increasing hostility which leads to inevitable catastrophe for him – and them. Instrumental in José’s fate is the character of Diego, an interesting character whose sad past has embittered him and encouraged him to adopt a communist stance for opportunistic reasons. Their two lives play out with the sombre inevitability – like the civil war and the lives of those caught up in it – of Greek tragedy.

Montse has a more uplifting experience in Barcelona which, though short-lived, transforms her life – to the chagrin of the daughter to whom she tells her story. For she insists that she remembers or cares for nothing that happened after 1937 and that love affair – not the terrifying flight across the border with other refugees from the fascist regime; the struggle to settle in a foreign land which viewed her with suspicion.  All that matters in her fading memory is the brief moments of exhilaration and love in the Catalan capital in that dazzling summer of liberty and hope, never entirely erased by the horrors that followed.

There’s an excellent post on Cry, Mother Spain at Grant’s blog 1st Reading

 

No cure for marriage: Javier Marías, Thus Bad Begins

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Javier Marías, Thus Bad Begins (Hamish Hamilton hardback, 2016) 503pp

When I started this blog back in 2013, Javier Marías was one of the first novelists I posted about. He’s surely one of the most important and gifted writers of fiction alive today.

Two years ago I wrote about his 2013 novel The Infatuations (link HERE, with further links there to my several posts on his superb ‘Your Face Tomorrow’ trilogy).

If you’ve ever read Marías you’ll be aware that he tends to work over the same themes, tropes and motifs in most of his work: love and death, fidelity, memory and treachery – in the domestic sphere, especially in a marriage, and the public – justice, truth and lies. Sex features prominently, and Shakespeare. Perhaps most important of all: what we do when we tell stories about these things, or listen to such stories – is it possible to represent reality? Do stories represent reality, like novels?

Marías, Thus Bad Begins Once read, novels are ‘soon forgotten’, Marías wrote in The Infatuations. In his 2016 novel Thus Bad Begins it’s people’s lives that are said to be transitory and forgettable. Most of all of these themes are rehearsed in the opening three pages of the novel. It begins:

This story didn’t happen so very long ago – less time than the average life, and how brief a life is once it’s over and can be summed up in a few sentences, leaving only ashes in the memory…

Except of course Marías is going to devote 500 more pages to this story, not ‘a few sentences’. One of his better jokes; oddly, for such a dark, disturbing novel, there’s a lot of humour.

He introduces his two central characters, Eduardo Muriel, a director of B-movies, and his wife, several years his junior, Beatriz Noguera. The events our narrator, Juan de Vere or Vera (ie ‘truth’) relates took place in 1980 when he was just 23, and the Muriels some 20 years older than that. Spain was still reinventing itself after that long, estranging dictatorship of Franco, and divorce was still illegal.

Marriage was, then, ‘for life’ in those days, and ‘an escape route’ hard to find: hence the need for deceit, secrets; harder for women, who, if they’d had an extramarital ‘escapade’,  would have to live the life of an ‘impostor’, ‘disguise a new being before it even had a face to show the world’ (one of many resonances from Marías’ previous novels; the Oxford Hispanist Peter Wheeler, a central character in ‘Your Face Tomorrow’, pops up in a bit part). But these bitter thoughts are those of de Vere, who finds it hard to understand why anyone would ‘contract’ a marriage; only disease and death share that verb, as if all ‘augured ill or presaged doom or were, at the very least, painful’:

…but, unlike them, there was definitely no cure, no remedy for marriage, no resolution. Or only through the death of one of the spouses, a death sometimes silently longed for, and, less often, sought or induced or prompted, usually even more silently or in deepest secrecy.

All that would then remain of them would be ‘a brief memory. Or, on occasions, a story. A tenuous, rarely told story, since people tend not to tell stories about their personal life’…

The style is instantly recognisable as that of Marías: that convoluted syntax with its accumulating parallel or subordinate clauses (he habitually deploys ‘or perhaps’, ‘and yet’, ‘I suppose’, ‘or so it seems’ – all of these appear on the first page), which delay resolution and pile on alternative possibilities and modalities. The truth is as elusive or evasive as syntactic closure in a Marías novel.

Therein lies his appeal. He teasingly, with endless circumlocution, spins his thrilling plot from such multiple, beautiful threads – for his plots are comparable to those of great thriller-noir film auteurs like Hitchcock, who’s namechecked prominently in the narrative (there’s a trace of ‘Vertigo’ and ‘Rear Window’ in this one, with its unsettling sense of voyeurism and obsessive, secretive observation of characters, men and women, unaware of the male gaze upon them), or novelists like Hardy, Conrad and Stevenson, all of whom he translated into Spanish (sexual deception and coercion in Tess, perhaps, and a prominent plot device involving a crucial letter; spies, secret agents and skulduggery from the other two authors).

But he does it with a highly original, knowing, postmodern flourish, relishing the telling (and withholding) of his story and his manipulative, entrancing magician’s craft as much as Faulkner, Nabokov and that arch spinner of shaggy dog stories, Laurence Sterne (and yes, he translated all of them, too.)

So this is a gripping, heartbreaking novel of love and betrayal in a marriage, and the shame and remorse of traitors, and desire for vengeance and retribution in the betrayed. Forgiveness is withheld too long; love festers. A tragic marital secret revealed lies at its heart, and its disclosure to the reader, long delayed, is devastating.

The plot of Hamlet provides a kind of template (although Rumour’s Prologue to Henry IV.2 is also a running thread). De Vere is recruited by the wronged husband to act as his spy. Not on the treacherous wife, but on the husband’s lecherous old friend, who he suspects committed ‘vile acts’ against women.

De Vere portrays himself from the outset as a modern Polonius – ‘there’s nothing original about me’ he says, twice (although on the second occasion he adds, ‘nor, I suppose, about any of the others’). He gains the confidence of a man ‘in order to betray him’, a deception that causes him frequent spasms of guilt. Instead of an arras, de Vere spies on his target, engaged in a sordid tryst inside a Catholic sanctuary, from the top of a tree. When he’s challenged by a nun when he descends, the scene is like a comic take on Hamlet’s ‘get thee to a nunnery’ speech.

There are the usual lengthy monologues on all of these key themes. Their presence in this domestic tragedy is linked overtly to their counterparts in the bloodstained, labyrinthine Spanish political past: the stories, crimes, denunciations, blackmail, revenge and brutal atrocities perpetrated during the Civil War, and then worse that followed during the aftermath, then again after Franco’s death.

There was a ‘pact of forgetting’ after Franco, when Spaniards collectively showed ‘open distaste for and aversion to revenge and betrayal’, and ‘fallacious tales’ and brazen, ‘barefaced lies’, ‘secrecy and concealment’ proliferated. They erased or embellished memories, all traces of these earlier crimes and cruelties — a central factor in this novel, echoed in the domestic tragedy enacted in the Muriel household. Private talk mirrors the public discourse; ‘concealment and disguise’ became the order of the day.

De Vere comes to learn the expediency of ‘giving up trying to know what we cannot know, of removing ourselves from the hubbub of what others tell us throughout our life, so much so that even what we experience and witness seems more like a story told to us…’ And:

Households are full of rejections and slights and mortifications and insults, especially behind closed doors (and sometimes one gets shut inside with them by accident).

Once we learn the ‘facts’ of what happened,

Perhaps it’s best to shrug one’s shoulders and nod and ignore them, to accept that this is the way of the world.

Only then does ‘worse remain behind, because at least it is over. And thus bad only begins, the bad that has not yet happened.’

I’m not sure I get that. It seems to be a philosophy of stoical resignation – Hamlet’s lesson. Readiness is all (an axiom quoted in the narrative).

I didn’t find this ‘public/private’ structure is robust enough to sustain such a lengthy narrative. For the first time in my reading of Marías I found myself wanting to skip yet another meandering, portentous discourse on a philosophical topic that teetered on the edge of banality (so death is final, is it?).

In this post-truth world, however, there’s a sad contemporary relevance to a novel that, despite these longueurs, is still a stirring read.

Apologies that this post has become so long. It’s a long, richly complex novel, and I found it difficult to be brief.

 

‘The evil in the air was corrupting everybody’: Gamel Woolsey, ‘Death’s Other Kingdom’

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When I was studying Spanish at school back in the late 60s, my teacher, who then seemed to me an old man, but who was probably younger than I am now, used to beguile us all with his misty-eyed reminiscences of his youthful days in 30s Spain, which seemed to be spent bathing in icy mountain pools and eating delicious peasant food in country inns. Gamel Woolsey’s autobiographical account of her experiences of the outbreak of Civil War in Andalucía in 1936, and in particular the beginning of the attacks on Malaga, belongs to that same era, when the pastoral tranquillity of the country was shattered irrevocably.

My copy is in the Virago Travellers series

My copy is in the Virago Travellers series

Published in 1939, Death’s Other Kingdom is a lyrical and deeply personal record of her feelings and perceptions as the rugged but idyllic village life she shared in Churriana, just outside Malaga (now absorbed into its post-tourist-resort urban sprawl) with her husband, the Hispanist author Gerald Brenan, turned into a nightmare the morning she woke to the news of Malaga burning ‘under a pall of smoke’.

The opening chapter beautifully evokes that pre-war idyll:

It was the most beautiful day of the summer…The sky at dawn was cloudless and the ‘pink band’ of the tropics, the band of rosy light which ascends the sky from the horizon at twilight, rose to the zenith and faded into the growing light. Then the sun rose suddenly with a leap into the air: the long hot southern day had begun.

 It’s a world of placid serenity, when the Brenans did little more, in the summer heat, than ‘bask in the day like lizards, in the shade of the high white garden wall’ which surrounded their big old house with its walls ‘four feet thick’, and its huge garden, ‘gay with bright flowers, immaculate and cool in any weather.’

She describes the place with sensual, poetic fervor:

I always loved waking in Spain. The sun fell in stripes from the slatted shutters on the red and white diamonded tiles of the floor. Noises from the street below floated up; the pattering feet of the milk goats sounded like rain drops…

 More sounds rise up: the ‘melancholy call’ of the fish sellers ‘their hampers full of fresh fish just coming up from the sea on their lean donkeys’ — Sardinas and boqueronis – ‘the food of the poor, the cheapest of fishes.’ Then come the cries of the vendors of ‘grapes fresh and plump’, tomatoes and ‘pimientos gordos’, ‘melons, lettuces and plums, squashes, peaches and pumpkins were passing, a perfect harvest festival going by on donkeys.’

This is the dominant tone of the book: Woolsey’s profound sympathy for village life and the desperately poor rural inhabitants of these remote mountain and coastal pueblos. There are affectionately vivid portraits throughout the book of the Brenans’ domestic staff: Enrique, ‘a gentle, charming young man’, their passionate gardener, and his mother María the ‘severe’ and crotchety but ‘devoted’ cook-housekeeper and her daughter, a ‘melancholy widow’ called Pilar, whose brief experience of romance is cruelly and violently ended, leaving her in sad solitude again.

Woolsey evokes a now largely vanished rural Andalucia:

For a village in Spain is a unity; its inhabitants are like members of a clan, they have a close and indissoluble bond. ‘My village’ is constantly in the mouth of a Spanish countryman. It is more than ‘my country’.

 The villagers view with deep suspicion anyone from a different village, no matter how close; as for the nearby town of Malaga – it’s seen as the abode of evil people.

But when Malaga is set on fire and the air-raids begin, the peace is shattered. Lorries thunder by constantly:

The young men wave their pistols and throw up their clenched fists in a gesture of triumph.

 All is confusion. The ‘Revolution from the Right’ is countered by a ‘Revolution of the Left’. Rumours fly rapidly. Everyone is fearful, most especially of ‘El Tercio’ – the seasoned Foreign Legion ‘worthy of Lucifer’, and its most feared contingent, the Moors, the expectation of whose arrival ‘ran like a cold wave of horror through the countryside’. Patrols enter the house and the countryside looking for enemies. Arrests and imprisonments are commonplace, and summary executions and brutal reprisals from both sides terrify the people. Former friends become mistrustful enemies. Irreparable fissions form in the village’s life. The Brenans are protected from the worst atrocities by their foreignness – Gerald flies a Union Jack over the house and this acts like a lucky charm. But many of their neighbours and friends are less fortunate.

There are vivid descriptions of their visits to Malaga to see for themselves the terrible destruction wrought by the newly erupted Civil War. There are rueful touches of humour: they meet an Englishman in Malaga who regales them with tales of the night the houses around him were torched:

But I suppose it seems worse for British subjects to lose their luggage than lesser races their lives.

 

Most of the narrative relates with grim impartiality the catastrophic impact of the war on the people. A kind of madness grips the civilians, who indulge their ‘uglier instincts’ and take malicious pleasure in spreading stories of atrocities. It’s the ‘pornography of violence’ as she memorably puts it. ‘Hate is the other side of fear’, she suggests, ‘and it was horrible to see and feel this hate-fear rising around us like a menacing sea.’ The people are gripped by the ‘suspicion and bitterness’ that ‘thrive on fear’; ‘the distrust of Spaniards for other Spaniards is bottomless’.

The strangest section of the book is devoted to the Brenans’ providing refuge in their house to the aristocratic family from whom they’d bought it. Well-known supporters of the Falangists, they were in mortal danger if they stayed on in their own estate near the airport, so they accept the offer of a hiding place for their entire family and retinue. It’s an extraordinarily dangerous gesture of generosity, and would have cost the Brenans their lives, foreigners or not, if their guests had been found by the vengeful workers who searched for them and any other Franco supporters. Our sympathies are hardly engaged when Don Carlos, the head of the family, dances with glee on the Brenans’ rooftop as he watches Malaga burn in a fascist air-raid.

Gamel Woolsey (1895-1968) was an interesting character. Born Elizabeth Gammell (her mother’s maiden name; she later shortened it to Gamel and dropped her first name) Woolsey to a wealthy South Carolina plantation owning family, she was brought up with a sense of morality and virtue that are so apparent in this memoir. Her aunt was the author of the Katy books, Susan Coolidge, whose real name was Sarah Chauncey Woolsey.

She had an affair with a member of the literary Powys family, Llewelyn, whom she followed  to England in 1929, settling in Dorset to be near him. There she met Brenan (1894-1987), and left for Spain with him where they settled as man and wife. He had been a member of the Bloomsbury group, and had been romantically involved with Dora Carrington; Gamel was pursued by the philosopher Bertrand Russell. Leftist in politics, Brenan had served as one of the youngest British officers in WWI. His terrible experiences there explain some of his responses to the brutal behaviour of some of their Spanish neighbours when the Civil War broke out, and his determination to help the oppressed, whatever their politics or religion.

In Spain they were visited by a stream of eminent artists, including Virginia Woolf, the Partridges (Frances wrote the Introduction to my Virago edition of DOK), Hemingway and V.S. Pritchett.

The book’s title is taken from T.S. Eliot’s Dante-influenced poem ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925):

Those who have crossed

With direct eyes, to death’s other kingdom

Remember us – if at all – not as lost

Violent souls, but only

As the hollow men

The stuffed men…

 ‘Death’s other kingdom’ is one of three of death’s kingdoms in the poem, and it relates to that heavenly zone entered by those who have left behind a state of spiritual nothingness (in hell or purgatory) and entered into an enlightened state of knowledge where they are capable of seeing the inner truth. The hollow men are those who fail to reach such heights. Eliot was one of Gamel’s favourite poets (she was primarily a poet herself, though she published very little verse or prose in her lifetime), and the line’s significance for her memoir is apt: it could signify the higher truth to which she felt those who experienced war should aspire, rather than the hypocrisy, lies and deception that so many around her (the hollow men) wallowed in when hostilities broke out, who lost sight of their morals and values.