The Poets' War

Thoughts on Spain

José Maria Gironella, 1917-2003.

I’m halfway through a sprawling book, The Cypresses Believe in God by José Maria Gironella (in Catalan, Josep Maria Gironella i Pous), considered to be the greatest novel about the period leading up to the Spanish Civil War. Gironella set out to write an objective chronicle of the social and political conflicts of the time, and he tells his story in minute detail, with a mix of sympathy and wit, through the eyes of an upwardly-mobile working-class family of mixed political leanings in the Catalonian city of Gerona. The novel conveys an atmosphere of impending tragedy through the interior thoughts of people of a variety of political leanings, acted upon by forces outside their control. Here, Gironella describes the shock and dread of a tobacco shop manager who discovers that his law-student son is a Falangist:

Don Emilio Santos dropped motionless into one of the five chairs [set up by his son for a Falangist meeting in their apartment]. His eyes, always slightly moist, his affable smile, and his graying mustache grew motionless with him . . . He loved Spain with all his heart . . . [the Falangists’] leader, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, was active in Parliament, employing a strange, incisive manner of speech, and . . . it was said [that] they all imitated Mussolini and Hitler. Above all, that they assassinated workingmen on street corners. . . the manager of the Tabacalera felt all his dreams of peace and quiet crash to the ground.

His son attempts to reassure him: “Don’t worry, Father. The Falange is a sound, noble movement . . . Spain needs it,” and goes on to explain that:

As for harassing the workers — the Falange was a revolutionary organization! Far more revolutionary than any of the unions, which had only economic objectives. The Falange’s aim was, first, to convince the workers that they were not proletarians, but men, persons. Second, to persuade them that the economic aspect is not the only one, and that once their material needs were taken care of, there were a thousand spiritual roads open to them. . . love of family and work . . . the meaning of Country . . . “Individual, family, municipality, fatherland, God” — those were its five points, or, as José Antonio [Primo de Rivera] had said, its five roses . . . Above all, the Falange believed in sacrifice, and was a mystique, a total concept of life.

Don Emilio Santos could not see all this clearly. He realized that there was something poetic to the language [but the] idea that a group of young men between twenty and thirty should have worked out a total concept of life struck him at first blush as being well-nigh impossible, barring a miracle. . . Mateo answered that he did not want to hurt him, but he did want to make it clear, from the start, that he had consecrated his life to that movement, that he had taken an oath . . . And that in the event of a disagreement, which he hoped would not happen, he would have no choice but to disobey him.

Cover of the first edition of Homage to Catalonia, 1938.

When I was fourteen, my father gave me George Orwell’s great memoir of the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia, to read. The only thing I knew about the conflict up to that point was The Clash’s song “Spanish Bombs,” Picasso’s Guernica, at the Museum of Modern Art, and a legend my mother told of how, when her mother, Josephine Nordstrand, was tucking her into bed as a toddler, she had asked precociously: “Why are they bombing those little children in Spain?”

I was well into my thirties before I understood that the Spanish Civil War had not been the simple, tragically-fated conflict of good (Loyalists) vs. evil (Falangists), and learned to my chagrin that appalling atrocities had been committed by the Left as well the Right. This was a sobering coda to Paul Robeson’s rousing tribute to the “Four Insurgent Generals” — Francisco Franco, Emilio Mola, José Sanjurjo and Gonzalo Queipo de Llano, who joined together in an attempt to overthrow the democratically-elected Republican government in 1936, thus sparking the already parched social tinder that would start the Spanish Civil War — which I used to listen to on his album Songs of Free Men.

Perhaps not incidentally, my grandmother seems to have known Robeson personally, and it’s been rumored for years that there’s a picture of the two of them together, though no one has ever seen it. Robeson gave a series of concerts in support of the Civil Rights Congress, the alleged Communist front organization in which Josephine held a leadership position, in 1949, one of which occasioned the infamous Peekskill Riot, after which it was said that no Jew would ever buy a house in Peekskill. Josephine was also a signatory to We Charge Genocide, a petition Robeson presented to the United Nations in 1951 on behalf of the Civil Rights Congress.

Paul Robeson presenting We Charge Genocide to the General Assembly of the United Nations, 1951 (photo by Edward Schwartz).

It was later still, after I had gotten a copy of my grandmother’s FBI file through a FOIA request, when I learned that Josephine had been in Spain herself.

Page from Josephine Nordstrand’s approximately 1,500-page FBI file. The file is heavily redacted. I appealed the redactions to the Justice Department on the grounds that everyone named was by now dead, but my appeal was denied.

The child referred to in the file would have been my mother, Josephine’s third and youngest child, born at the end of 1935 (Josephine and her husband had two older children, a son who died in infancy and a daughter born in 1931). According to the file, 1935 was also the year that Josephine joined the Communist Party, presumably while she was pregnant with my mother. Josephine was often away on party business, and my mother told me that at one point she was gone for such a long time that upon her return, my toddler mother turned to the housekeeper who’d been looking after her and her sister, pointed at Josephine, and asked, “Who’s that lady?”

Page from Josephine Nordstrand’s approximately 1,500-page FBI file.

The timeline of Josephine’s trip to Spain in 1938 or 1939 coincides with the period of my mother’s recollection. This page above suggests that my grandmother may have recruited volunteers to the Abraham Lincoln Battalion of the International Brigades, the foreign fighters described by Joe Strummer of The Clash in “Spanish Bombs” as “trenches full of poets, the ragged army.”

It’s been said that the winners of a war write the history, but the losers write the poetry. There is indeed poetry in the reminiscences of the Lincoln Battalion and other foreign volunteer units that fought fascism in Spain; there is poetry in the great cellist Pablo Casals’s courageous self-exile and subsequent refusal to play in any country whose government recognized the Francoist regime. There is poetry in Picasso’s great canvas Guernica, the wordless cry against the indefensible bombing of an ancient Basque village by the Nazis and Italian Fascists at the behest of Franco.

Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937 (fair use).

Scottish poet William Soutar’s poem about the bombing, “The Children,” was set to great effect by Sir James Macmillan in the 1990s as part of his cycle Three Scottish Songs; the long, chilling silences and the piano, evocative by turns of children’s games and the thunder of explosives, hammer home the atmosphere of horror with paradoxical lyricism.

But one of the failures of Communism — not only in Spain, where it was brutally vanquished, but even in the countries where it was itself the vanquisher — is its eliding of poetry. The tobacconist’s son in The Cypresses Believe in God offers Spain’s particular breed of fascism as the answer to this glaring lack of poetry: “The workers . . . were not proletarians, but men, persons [and] once their material needs were taken care of, there were a thousand spiritual roads open to them.”

Any movement that turns its eyes from the human need for beauty, for transcendence, for more than the flattening and homogenizing of human experience to a purely economic interpretation of it, is doomed to fail, however long it may take.

The Song of the United Front, sung by the Spanish Loyalists, was written by Hanns Eisler, brother of my grandmother’s close friend Gerhart, and Bertolt Brecht. To me, it is echt Eisler/Brecht, arch, pointed, with even its marching rhythm shot through with irony:

On the other hand, the stirring Falangist anthem, “Cara al Sol,” calls upon the deep need for heroism, for a full life, even if it means self-sacrifice for ideas that are inchoate at best.

As the old song goes: “Hearts starve as well as bodies: give us bread but give us roses.” The “five roses” proposed by José Antonio Primo de Rivera — the individual, the family, the municipality, the country, God — are unimpeachable in and of themselves. We need to be absolutely certain that we don’t cultivate our roses in toxic ground.