Barea - The forging of a rebel: the forge, the track and the clash

Few books on the Spanish Civil War of 193639 and its origins have been as acclaimed as The Forging of a Rebel by Arturo Barea. The first volume of this autobiographical trilogy, The Forge, published in June 1941, was lauded by Stephen Spender for its great artistic merits and rare poetic feeling, while The Times declared that it is doubtful if there has yet appeared a more convincing picture of the anvil on which a rebel was forged. The second book, The Track, which appeared in July 1943, was eulogized for its great beauty and vivid detail. Cyril Connolly singled out the author for being something rarely found these days, as he thinks and feels clearly and honestly. Published in February 1946, the third tome, The Clash, was declared by George Orwell an exceptional book of considerable historical interest. Altogether, as one critic summed up, the trilogy was as essential to an understanding of twentieth-century Spain as the reading of Tolstoy is indispensable to the comprehension of nineteenth-century Russia.

Such success notwithstanding, Arturo Barea had come late to writing. The Forge, his first novel, was published when he was forty-three years of age, The Clash at forty-eight. Indeed, had it not been for the Civil War, Barea would probably not have become a writer at all. However, this was not due to a lack of motivation. During his early life he was torn between his artistic aspirations and the exigencies of earning a living. He was born on 20 September 1897 into a lower-class family in the Extremaduran town of Badajoz, near the Portuguese border. The sudden death of his father, an army recruiting agent, caused the family to move to Madrid just two months later. There, his mother worked as a maid in her brothers household and as a washerwoman on the banks of the river Manzanares. Unlike his two brothers and sister, Arturo lived with his well-to-do uncle and aunt. At the weekend, he would rejoin the family in the working-class district of El Avapis. Thus the young Barea was caught between two worlds: an unresolved tension that would contribute to his sense of being an outsider and ultimately shape his work as a writer.

Following the sudden death of his uncle, Arturo had to start work at the age of thirteen. He undertook a succession of poorly paid jobs before making some money as a commercial traveller for a diamond dealer during the First World Warthe outbreak of which marks the end of The Forge. By this stage, he had become afflicted, he recounts in his autobiographical notes, by the literary microbe, attending literary peas, or discussion groups, at the cafs in the centre of Madrid. More time, he discovered to his horror, had to be dedicated to praising and sucking up to the chosen master than to writing. This vileness and endless mental torture might lead to the publication of an unremunerated article, but the process would then continue for months and even years until one managed to join a newspaper on a mere pittance. Such a drawn-out and humiliating route to literary success clashed violently with Bareas prickly pride. He thereupon abandoned the literary scene, his ambitions buried. In short, he could not earn a living as a writer, especially as he was determined to support his mother, to whom he was devoted. This contradiction is manifest in The Forging of a Rebel, but is crystallized in the short story The Centre of the Ring, which takes place between 1914 and 1920, the period which falls between the first and second volumes of the trilogy.

In 1920, Barea, now fully grown, of a lithe, tallish build, was called up for military service in Spanish Morocco, the countrys one remaining colony, an experience that constitutes the core of The Track. Here, he was a witness to the ubiquitous cupidity and incompetence of the Spanish army, of the wretchedness of the rank-and-file, and of the degradations of the Moroccan population. He also came to know personally many of the generals who later headed the insurgency of July 1936 against the democratic Republic. While in Morocco, Barea did not entirely abandon his literary aspirations. He wrote some poetry along with the occasional short story, though only a single story, La Medalla (The Medal) of 1922, has come to light. Nonetheless, on leaving the army in 1923, Barea did not attempt to pursue a career as a writer. On the contrary, he followed a highly conventional path: he married, became a father, and secured a steady job in the patents business. By the end of the 1920s, he had become the technical director of a leading firm, thereby allowing him to provide for both his immediate family and his mother, now in old age. The marriage to Aurelia Grimaldos, however, was, in his own words, a depressing failure that led him to take ever greater refuge in his work.

The eruption of mass politics with the establishment in 1931 of Spains first democratic regime, the Second Republic, partly assuaged Bareas restless spirit. He became involved, as in the 1910s, with the Socialist trade union movement. Still, his union activities represented, he later noted, a constant and bitter contradiction in relation to his work at the Patent Office, where he dealt on a quotidian basis with big businesses.

By the outbreak of the Civil War in July 1936, Barea had published nothing except a little poetry, a few short stories, and the occasional political piece. The warthe cornerstone of The Clashwas to change all that. First, having joined the Office of Foreign Press Censorship at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in August 1936, he came into contact with journalists and writers, including figures such as Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passosboth of whom would strongly shape Bareas later literary work. He was also influenced by a short, plump Austrian with a mass of curly hair by the name of Ilsa Kulcsar. She, like many other foreigners, had gone to Spain to defend the Republican cause, having been an activist in the Austrian Social Democratic Party. Appointed as Bareas assistant, when, upon the departure of the government for Valencia in November 1936, he had been made head of the censorship office, she was not only of inestimable help to him in his work as a censorshe spoke five languages extraordinarily well, albeit with a Viennese accentbut also encouraged him to write. Within weeks, moreover, they had become lovers. The fact that for much of 1937 Barea, as the Unknown Voice of Madrid, had to give daily radio talks of a literary and propagandistic nature was a further stimulus. The catalyst, however, was the nervous breakdown which he suffered in the summer of 1937. This was a result of the sixteen-hour days, the unremitting bombardments, the collapse of his marriage, and the increasingly ugly battle with the Communist-dominated bureaucracy in Valencia. Barea strove to transcend this all-enveloping crisis through writing. On 17 August 1937, he published a story in the Daily Express under the headline This was written under shell firea curious coincidence given that the great bulk of what he produced thereafter, as a republican exile in England, would appear first in English. In 1938, he published his first book, a collection of slight, propagandistic short storiesmany of which drew on his radio talks and which concerned the everyday struggle of the common people against fascismentitled Valor y Miedo (Courage and Fear). According to Barea, it was the last tome to be printed in Barcelona before Francos troops entered the Catalan capital.

By the end of 1937, the Communists had effectively forced Barea to abandon not only the censorship office and his radio work, but, worse still, in February 1938, Spain itself. Once in Paris, he started work on the first draft of The Forge in an effort to alleviate the hunger, the dire living conditions, and the pain of the Republics protracted defeat. Shocked by Frances inner decay and convinced of the coming catastrophe, Arturo and Ilsawho had married just a week before leaving Spainfled to England. They reached their destination the month that the Republic fell to the Nationalists: March 1939. The Civil War had transformed Arturo Bareas life: he had left his wife for another woman, gone into exile, and finally committed himself to writing.