New revelations in the biography of Arturo Barea, the great chronicler of the Civil War: "He began to write to cope with his fear of going crazy"

Writing to avoid going crazy, to exorcise the horror of dying from a howitzer, from the panic that the last day had arrived while the heartbeat beat beat your neck. The writer Arturo Barea (Badajoz, 1897-Faringdon, England, 1957) lived almost day and night for a year in the Telefónica building on the Gran Vía in Madrid, a street known during the Civil War with the bitter nickname of "avenue of the howitzers". The skyscraper was a favorite target of the rebel artillery and Barea, who worked at the top as a censor of foreign press at the service of the Republican Government, suffered several crises that shattered his nerves.

Londoner Michael Eaude, author of Triumph at Midnight of the Century (Renaissance), a "critical biography" of the creator of the trilogy The Forge of a Rebel that has just been republished, tells by telephone that "the talks that Barea began to give on the radio and the book of stories Courage and fear [his first work, of the spring of 1938, which he himself described as "propaganda stories"] helped him cope with that great fear of going crazy." "He started writing seriously when he was 40 years old because of his mental breakdowns." In the graphic appendix of Eaude's book we see a man almost always wearing a shirt and tie and a cigarette between his fingers (Barea smoked more than fifty a day and without filter). Before, he had been a very humble boy from the Madrid neighborhood of Lavapiés, who thanks to an uncle with money was able to go to a school for young men until he was 13 years old. A training that facilitated several jobs and earn money: banker, representative of a diamond merchant, co-owner of a toy factory ... He even wanted to be a circus clown.

More information

'Recovering Arturo Barea', by William Chislett

In the war he suffered not only for himself, but also as a witness who saw people bleeding in the streets of Madrid; It was his second encounter with death. The first was as a soldier in the war in Morocco, during military service, when he had to collect, between flies and the stench of rotting human flesh, the corpses in the sun of the Spaniards who had fallen in the disaster of Annual. "With his books he tried to tell what had happened to his generation. I wrote about the things I had seen, smelled, felt and touched," adds Eaude, a translator based in Spain.

Arturo Barea, before starting one of his radio talks for the BBC, in a photograph provided by the publisher Renacimiento.Uli Rushby-Smith

Another British expatriate on Spanish soil is William Chislett, journalist and essayist, architect of the fact that finally have been published in Spanish "the only two explicitly political writings of Barea, originally published in English," he responds by email. These are Lucha por el alma española, from July 1941, and España en el mundo de la posguerra, from 1945, brought together by the Espasa publishing house under the title Contra el fascismo. They are two works that he wrote already exiled in England, where he had arrived in February 1939 with his second wife, the Austrian Ilsa Kulcsar, "surrendered of body and spirit", in his own words. "He left Spain quite disappointed politically. He was never a communist, he was active in the UGT and then in England in the Labour Party," adds Chislett.

"I thought that political action did not lead to anything," continues Eaude, who maintains that "over time Barea softened his positions; this combined with their pessimism, almost nihilism." "He started supporting the Communist Party, but then he hated how they manipulated, and they also threw him out of his position as censor." Eaude affirms, regarding the vision that has been had of Barea, that "as in the Transition there was the desire to turn the page, of him and other writers of exile the most revolutionary part was omitted". "I think the end of bipartisanship and the arrival of Podemos influenced to some extent a change. He said that a socialist revolution had to be made, but understood in the context of fighting to the death against fascism. It is a voice that can continue to speak to current generations."

Chislett, curator of the 2018 exhibition on Barea at the Cervantes Institute in Madrid, explains that Fight for the Spanish Soul was written in the aftermath or "just after the Battle of Britain," the Nazi air offensive that finally failed in October 1940. "It is a text that explores the ideological roots of Francoism, it was aimed at a leftist reader and not very sophisticated."

Arturo Barea and Ilsa Kulcsar, his second wife, in image courtesy of Renacimiento.Uli Rushby-Smith

To do this, he drew on press reports, official sources, testimonies and his own experience. The chapter dedicated to Franco and his training in Morocco stands out. "It's a story in which his equanimity is surprising," says Chislett. "[Franco] belongs to the category of the man who has never felt fear and for whom courage is a natural condition"; "A man of cold military intelligence, but lacking the qualities of a statesman," he wrote.

Other sections of this text, of just over 130 pages, which did not have much commercial success, deal with issues such as "the caste" that ran the country or "the Spanish left". Barea regrets, above all, "that democracies such as the British or the French had left the Spanish alone against fascism in the Civil War under the excuse of non-intervention," Chislett stresses.

When it was published, Barea was contributing to a weekly talk on the BBC in the service for Latin America (there were 856, each about 15 minutes). "He couldn't do it for the Spanish section because he was considered too politically committed. They were reflections on English life as seen by an outsider sympathetic to his host country. In 1948 he obtained citizenship," explains Chislett. He did not live in London, but in small towns. "He drank a lot and was seen in pubs telling anecdotes to workers and farmers," adds Eaude.

However, in this happiness there was a tear that blackens his biography: he left in Spain his first wife, Aurelia, from whom he had divorced in 1937, and the four children he had with her, who ended up in Brazil, living in poverty. Barea wrote to his daughter Adolfina three years later: "In this story there is the disaster of your lives; But most of the blame has been alien to me."

Studio portrait of Arturo Barea, courtesy of Renacimiento.MARGARET WEEDEN

The other publication, Spain in the Post-War World, written in tandem with Ilsa, who was also his English translator, is much less attractive. It is a plea for the British government, Labour, "to take some action against Franco, but it did not take long to align itself with the foreign policy of the United States in the Cold War," adds Chislett. Did Barea really believe that Franco would fall like ripe fruit after the end of Hitler? "You don't know, but it was the hope of many exiles and when it didn't happen it was a big disappointment for him."

Barea died of a heart attack on Christmas Eve 1957. Ilsa told it in an overwhelming letter: "He died clinging to me, in my arms, of coronary thrombosis, which is a quick end, thank God." It was the farewell of a rebel who lived almost twenty years with the pain of not being able to return to his homeland. As he said in an interview, "A sharp pain that I can't get used to."

Subscribe to continue reading

Read without limits

Read more

I'm already a subscriber