HISTORY: CIARÁN COSGROVEreviews a recounting of the trials and tribulations of the journalists who covered the Spanish civil war.
EARLIER THIS year, that wonderful centre of film viewing in Madrid, the Filmoteca Española, hosted a series of films on the Spanish civil war. The highlight had to be, and was, the 1965 documentary film To Die in Madrid, by the French director Frédéric Rossif. The harrowing footage, the human dramas of violence, suffering and loss yielded an unforgettable sequel in the café-foyer immediately afterwards with hushed and near-tearful responses visibly etched on the faces of so many of the older members of the audience. It is a scene I shall not forget.
In the book under review here, Paul Preston quotes from that marvellous 1991 memoir, The Starched Blue Sky of Spain,by American correspondent and friend of Ernest Hemingway in that Spain of 1936, Josephine Herbst, who recalls her reaction to seeing Rossif's film in 1966: "I wouldn't have wanted anyone I knew to be seated near me, not unless they too had gone through the same experience. I not only felt as if I were dying, but that I had died. And afterward, I sat in the lobby for a good while, trying to pull myself together, smoking, and the whole scene outside seemed completely unreal . . . It was as if I had entered into a nightmare where the "real" world had suddenly been wiped off with a sponge and vanished forever . . . And, sitting in the lobby, smoking, it came to me that in the most real sense my most vital life did indeed end with Spain".
Preston is undoubtedly one of the most impressive writers on contemporary Spain. His masterful biographies of Franco and King Juan Carlos exact a riveting response. The quiddity of those two men is examined in all their contradictoriness. In this book, which recounts the trials and tribulations of the war correspondents who covered one of the most momentous of 20th-century wars, "the last great cause", as Stanley Weintraub memorably called it, Preston draws on an impressive array of source material: diaries, letters, dispatches and memoirs from British and American, but also Russian and French sources.
A theme underlying the book is the premonition felt by these "narrators" of the war's vicissitudes, that if fascism was not stopped in Spain, there could be catastrophic consequences for the rest of the world. Again and again, these correspondents wrote and campaigned for the lifting of Non-Intervention, berating and condemning the pusillanimity of British, French and US governments.
The Spanish civil war was, perhaps more than any other war in contemporary history, a war in which artists and literary figures played significant roles. Hemingway, dos Passos, Gelhorn, Auden, Spender, Orwell, Malraux, Neruda and countless more were witness to, and wrote about, their experiences of the war. Perhaps the most noteworthy single episode of the war, which was immortalised on canvas by Picasso, was the bombing of Guernica - the first time that aerial bombardment wiped out an undefended civilian target in Europe.
The finest chapter in Preston's book is the one on the Timescorrespondent, George Steer. Preston writes that "his account of the bombing of Guernica perhaps had more political impact than any single article written by any correspondent during the Spanish Civil War". Preston here re-presents in full Steer's article of April 28th, 1937, which recounts the horrors of the bombardment.
There are intriguing chapters in Preston's book on other highly significant, though relatively unknown, correspondents such as the Russian journalist Mikhail Koltsov, whose mysterious fall from grace and subsequent execution in Stalin's Russia, at the end of the 1930s, have never been elucidated. Koltsov had been the first Soviet newspaper correspondent to reach Spain, and quickly became a political adviser to the Republican authorities.
Other chapters of interest in this book are those dealing with the American, Louis Fischer, the son of Russian immigrants, and correspondent of the New York left-wing weekly the Nation, and another American, Jay Allen, whose Spanish Civil War articles, Preston maintains, constitute "some of the most important, and frequently quoted, articles written during the war".
These were to include an exclusive interview with Franco in Tetuán on July 27th 1936, just before the uprising, and his account of the aftermath of the Nationalist capture of Badajoz. In an interesting aside, Preston implicitly criticises his fellow historian Hugh Thomas, (whose 1961 book was the first comprehensive history of the war) for not consulting Jay Allen on the activities of the African columns as they occupied Badajoz.
But, Preston's book has its deficiencies, alas, especially in the first third. We are provided at times with somewhat verbose accounts of somewhat unexceptional correspondents and hangers-on, doing unexceptional things, as though the mere fact of being in Spain during this turbulent time was worth memorialising.
The recounting of love affairs and betrayals amongst the correspondents thrown together in Spain, whilst mildly interesting, is not helped by the descriptive idiom Preston adopts. Such as when we are introduced to "the beautiful, fresh-faced, brown-eyed young Norwegian journalist, Gerda Grepp", who, on hearing of the fall of Málaga, "plunged into the darkest of Scandinavian depressions", or to the wealthy American "Miss Cowles, an attractive woman who looked a little like Lauren Bacall".
There are too many irksome details such as these, whose excision would have made for a more tautly written book. However, episodes such as the celebrated break-up of a literary friendship, that of Hemingway and dos Passos, and the related disappearance of dos Passos's translator, José Robles, is rightly given substantial prominence.
IN MANY WAYS, PRESTON'S book comes across as a kind of oral history of the Spanish Civil War, to be placed alongside Ronald Fraser's 1979 classic oral history, Blood of Spain. Preston's mentor, Herbert Southworth, to whose memory this book is dedicated, is clearly a subliminal presence in Preston's work.
Southworth's collection of books The Southworth Collection,housed at the University of California at San Diego, remains, as Preston reminds us, "the world's single most important library on the Spanish Civil War".
With the controversial passing last year in the Spanish parliament of the "Law of Historical Memory", in which restitution to the victims of the Franco dictatorship was the cornerstone, the Spanish Civil War is once again a live issue in Spanish politics.
• We Saw Spain Die: Foreign Correspondents in the Spanish Civil War, by Paul Preston, Constable, 436pp, £20
• Ciarán Cosgrove is head of Hispanic studies at Trinity College, Dublin