Tomorrow Perhaps the Future: Writers, Outsiders, and the Spanish Civil War
384
Tomorrow Perhaps the Future: Writers, Outsiders, and the Spanish Civil War
384Hardcover
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Overview
“Now, as certainly as never before, we are determined or compelled, to take sides.” —Nancy Cunard
An attempted insurrection, a country divided, a democracy threatened. It was the Spanish Civil War of 1936, surprisingly, that Sarah Watling found herself drawn to when confounded by the tumultuous politics of our present day. This was a conflict that galvanized tens of thousands of volunteers from around the world to join the fight. For them, the choice seemed clear: either you were for fascism or you were against it.
Seeking to understand how they knew that the moment to act had arrived, Watling sifts through archives for lost journals, letters, and manifestos, discovering a trove of work by writers and outsiders who had often been relegated to the shadows of famous men like Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell. She encounters the rookie journalist Martha Gellhorn coming into her own in Spain and the radical writer Josephine Herbst questioning her political allegiances. She finds the novelist Sylvia Townsend Warner embracing a freedom in Barcelona that was impossible for queer women back at home in England and, by contrast, Virginia Woolf struggling to keep the war out of her life, honing her intellectual position as she did so. She tracks down the stories of Gerda Taro, a Jewish photographer whose work had long been misattributed, and Salaria Kea, a nurse from Harlem who saw the war as a chance to combat the prejudice she experienced as a woman of color. Here were individuals seizing an opportunity to oppose the forces that frightened them.
From a variety of backgrounds and beliefs, these women saw history coming, and they went out to meet it. Yet the reality was far from simple. When does tolerance become apathy? Where is the line between solidarity and appropriation? Is writing about the revolution the same as actively participating in it? With profound, personal insight, Watling reveals that their answers are as relevant today as they were then.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780593319666 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 05/09/2023 |
| Pages: | 384 |
| Sales rank: | 660,340 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.60(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.50(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Part One
Beginnings
Nancy Cunard, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Valentine Ackland
Barcelona: summer, autumn 1936
Nancy was on a train to Barcelona three weeks after the rebellion. By the time she got there, on 11 August, there were two Spains: the Republican and Nationalist (rebel) zones. The nationalists held much of the northwest of the country. Except for the surrounded coastal regions of Asturias, Santander and the Basque Country, their territory arched over Madrid and descended some way along the border with Portugal. They also controlled the islands of Mallorca, Ibiza and Formentera, and the southernmost tip of Spain, around Cádiz. On the mainland, they ruled over 11 million people, compared with 14 million remaining in the Republican zone.
One Spain was a military state where strikes were punishable by death, left-wing newspapers were closed, and membership of trade unions or Popular Front parties (and, in some places, merely having voted for them) was grounds for arrest and often execution. Working-class populations were systematically terrorised, while church leaders generally intervened only to insist on offering confession to the murdered before they were killed. ‘There was’, the historian Hugh Thomas later wrote, ‘a silence in Nationalist cities which strongly contrasted with the babel-like conditions in the Republic.’ There, a wavering government had been overtaken by people’s revolutions that brought with them assassinations and vandalism—particularly directed at churches—as well as radical reforms and social and economic experimentation.
Nancy arrived in Barcelona on a press visa that gave her three months to come to grips with what was happening. The weeks that followed were ‘so engrossing’, she said, ‘that I could think of nothing else ... The things of Spain took hold of me entirely.’
To one traveller at the end of the 1920s, Barcelona appeared as ‘a blur of smoke by the edge of the Mediterranean’. Beneath the haze, this industrial heartland had been embellished by the wealth of its bourgeoisie into a showcase of confidence and of art nouveau and modernist flourishing. The Hotel Majestic, which became the haunt of foreign correspondents in the city, stood on the grand boulevard of the Passeig de Gràcia, where wrought-iron streetlamps adorned with leafy arabesques accompanied the undulating stone façades and jewel-like fantasias of homes built by Antoni Gaudí. By 1930, Barcelona had become Spain’s most populous city, a city of millionaires and of shanty housing, of working-class districts where families crammed into ‘beehive’ flats and disease raced through unsanitary spaces, and heat or rain could bring buildings down. Every year between 1900 and 1936, the Barcelona region saw the highest number of industrial accidents in the country—years in which boys typically began work between the ages of eight and ten, and their mothers protested food prices or simply requisitioned what they needed from shops with the protection of armed members of the CNT trade union.
Capital of the independently spirited (and, under the Republic, self-governing) region of Catalonia, Barcelona was also an anarchist stronghold. Anarchism was one of the great forces in Spanish political life: almost 2 million workers were affiliated with anarchist unions. Nowhere else in Europe was the movement so significant. Rejecting all forms of centralised power, its leaders had always refused to cooperate with the democratic parties. They represented a ‘huge, self-absorbed and passionate movement, already throbbing with anonymous violence’.
The Barcelona of 1936 was no place for equivocal attitudes. When nationalist officers marched their men through the heart of the city on 19 July, the workers were ready for them. Factory sirens blared and people poured into the streets, bearing weapons that had circulated throughout the night. Those not involved in the fighting threw up barricades to block the soldiers’ way into the centre.
There, the nationalists had been dealt a key defeat. Seizing the initiative with their resistance, the unions found themselves supported by their old enemies in the Civil Guard and the Assault Guard (local paramilitary forces); in the midst of street battles, some soldiers were even persuaded to switch sides to preserve the Republic. Having secured the city, for the first time in their history anarchists agreed to cooperate with the government to defeat a common enemy.
For a time, though, Catalonia’s armed defenders had carte blanche. ‘The government does not exist,’ declared Andreu Nin of the Trotskyist POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista: Workers’ Marxist Unification Party). ‘We collaborate with them, but they can do no more than sanction whatever is done by the masses.’ In the chaos unleashed by the nationalist uprising, law and order disintegrated. To the horror of many leaders of the Left, long-festered scores were settled against police officials, churches and industrialists known for the suppression of unions.
When Nancy arrived in August, the worst of this was already contained; she was impressed by ‘the discipline in this town, the order’. What she saw was a city in which the revolutionary potential of 1936 was made manifest. If war was itself disastrous, the confidence on display in Barcelona explains the paradox of her reaction: why even then—especially then—Spain could seem ‘wonderful’.
With the old structures of authority blasted suddenly away, it seemed possible that a new form of society was being trialled in Barcelona. It was on these streets that visitors like George Orwell— who arrived in December and swiftly volunteered for a POUM militia—were made, for however short a period, to believe: to chance hope in a cause that seemed viable in that very moment and that very place. Factories, shops and banks had been requisitioned and were now run by their employees; the Ritz Hotel became ‘Gastronomic Unit Number One’, a public canteen for anyone who needed it; revolutionary committees took over responsibilities once held by the authorities; and Catalonia was run by a coalition of anti-fascist militias. The people on the street seemed sure of themselves, assertive; unbowed by old oppressions and scornful of old hierarchies, like branches springing up as they shed a winter load.
Nancy, fluent in both Spanish and Catalan, would have noticed that formal forms of address— markers of deference—had been abandoned. Everywhere one was greeted with ‘¡Salud!’ and the clenched-fist salute. Tips and taxi fares were declined. ‘The people are lovely,’ she reported enthusiastically; ‘[they] have been through hell’. She was already the type to stop and talk to strangers—and then to question them about their living conditions and view of local politics. She picked up people wherever she went and she had never restricted her curiosity to her own class: she was at home in Barcelona. At the Hotel Majestic she would form a lasting friendship with Angel Goded, a waiter whose children would one day be taught to bless her name.
Solidarity was expected in Barcelona and visitors welcomed. A revolution needs witnesses and heralds, and the city had a message for the international community. ‘We are going to inherit the earth,’ the anarchist leader Buenaventura Durruti announced to a Canadian journalist. ‘The bourgeoisie may blast and ruin their world before they leave the stage of history. But we carry a new world in our hearts.’