The first thing I ever knew about the poet, journalist, and activist Nancy Cunard was a commanding broadsheet she dispatched in the summer of 1937, containing the challenge that, decades later, would spark the questions that prompted my book, Tomorrow Perhaps the Future. She addressed it to many of the most important writers of Britain and Ireland, sometimes sending multiple copies with the idea that they’d pass them on. It made its way to George Bernard Shaw and Evelyn Waugh; to T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett; to Rebecca West, Rose Macaulay and the Woolfs; to Cecil Day-Lewis, Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice and W. H. Auden. It reached Aldous Huxley and George Orwell; Vita Sackville-West and Sylvia Pankhurst. It went to Vera Brittain and H. G. Wells; to Rosamond Lehmann and her brother, John; to Sylvia Townsend Warner and her partner, Valentine Ackland.
Sometimes
Writers Have to Take Sides. By Sarah Watling. Time, July 13, 2023.
The Spanish war began in July 1936 when a group of disaffected generals—including Francisco Franco, who would emerge as their leader— attempted to launch a coup against their country’s elected government. The reaction of foreign powers was significant from the start.
In early 1935, the novelist Josephine Herbst arrived in Cuba under false pretenses, traveling with accreditation from moderate magazines like the American Mercury that she wouldn’t be writing for, intending to reach the resistance. But the whole point of an underground resistance is that it isn’t easy to find.
The pose was lady journalist researching the island’s sugar industry. The reality was a commission from the Marxist-aligned New Masses to report on dissent against the harsh regime overseen by Fulgencio Batista. At the time, Herbst was a fearless short story writer and novelist of growing reputation, a woman who compulsively fictionalized the traumas and grievances of her life and background in novels such as Pity Is Not Enough and The Executioner Waits, and who had just begun to distinguish herself as an intrepid, politically committed, as-far-left-as-you-can-go journalist. If only the world weren’t so clamorous, Herbst could have gotten back to the novels she was meant to be writing. But she also believed that, without the clamor of the world, there would be no novels.
It took her weeks to gain the trust of the Cuban underground in 1935, weeks she spent interviewing local politicians and American businessmen, compiling a portrait of a country at the mercy of the United States’ business interests. All the while, she was seeking a way up into the mountains, where peasant rebels in a region called Realengo 18 were said to be holding out against sugar companies’ attempts to seize their land. At first, her contacts would only take her as far as Santiago, where the scarred bodies of the activists she met were explanation enough for their caution. Then, finally, there was a five-day journey on horseback up to what she described as “the secret mountainsides of ‘Realengo 18.’”
The area was so remote that she was the first foreign journalist ever to meet the people there, yet, armed and friendly, they expressed no sense of their isolation: Instead, she believed, they saw their struggle as part of a worldwide movement for change. “The district of Realengo is small in comparison to Cuba, and Cuba is only a tiny island,” she wrote in one of her articles, “but no one in Realengo feels alone in the fight for freedom. They talk too much of what is going on in the world. They know too much to be alone.”
This knowledge and these connections were important to Herbst. Over the previous few years, while covering the Great Depression-era radical organizing of American farmers, she had remarked on surprising collaborations. What made a white man from an old farming family find common cause with an impoverished Black sharecropper from Alabama? “Nothing except the conviction that their struggle against mass ruin is the same,” she once declared. Within the right kinds of alliances, Herbst believed, and with the willingness to struggle, was a solution not just to economic inequality but to imperialism and racial prejudice, too.
By the time Herbst got back to Havana from the mountains, everything had escalated. A general strike called in opposition to Batista’s repression triggered a violent clampdown. She was in a theater when a bomb went off outside. Most people stayed where they were; Herbst dashed out to find pools of blood on the pavement. She wrote up her articles while gunfire spat in the streets, then had them smuggled out of the country when the authorities restricted the mail. She soon followed, unable to do anything more while her contacts were being hunted down and disappearing.
Fortunately, it was not far from Cuba to an old friend’s bolthole in Key West, Florida. She spent a few days recuperating with Ernest Hemingway, then it was onward to New York, where she was due to speak at a writers’ conference in April.
Onstage at the Mecca Temple, she knew why she’d been asked—last-minute panic. The event was a great gathering of progressive American writers, and they’d forgotten to arrange a female speaker for the opening night. This was typical of the various communist productions she’d appeared at; they wanted her for her profile more than for her opinions. In 1935, she was, in the words of biographer Elinor Langer, “a leading lady” of the country’s radical left. That was partly due to her own work and reputation, and partly because her estranged husband, John Herrmann, had shifted his focus from literature to communist organizing.
As the fascist threat in Europe, and Joseph Stalin’s wary eye on it, prompted a new mood of broad leftist cooperation—often heralded as a “popular front”—Herbst’s political connections were bringing her to larger audiences. Yet she hated the “smuggies” of the left’s “New York political elite,” who went around giving stirring speeches to strikers on lives they knew nothing about. “Don’t get me wrong,” she would write years later, when such things were dangerous to admit, “I went as far left as you can go,” but she never counted herself among those she called “the Faithful” (and there’s no evidence that she ever actually joined the Communist Party). Perhaps her skepticism showed: A sketch of the conference speakers has the 43-year-old grim-faced beneath a wide, unlovely hat.
But one thing that did convince her was the fascist threat in Europe, and her mind quickly turned to the next subject for her foreign reporting. She had lived in Berlin briefly in the 1920s, ashamed of the affluence her American dollars brought her in the inflation-stricken city, and she knew that much had changed in the hungry, unsettled capital she had known.
Since Adolf Hitler had come to power in Germany in 1933, voices of domestic opposition had been falling ominously silent. By 1935, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party was the only party allowed by law; Dachau, the Nazis’ first concentration camp for political prisoners, was already two years old. The Nuremberg Laws would be instituted that September, stripping German Jews of basic rights. It was said that the Nazis had wiped out their opponents entirely, and if there was no one standing up to Hitler at home, there seemed to be little appetite for confronting him internationally, either. Herbst negotiated an assignment from the New York Post and headed for Berlin.
Berlin was a risk. It could be dangerous to go there, and there was no guarantee she’d find anything to report. Exiles had furnished her with contacts, but these came with warnings attached: People might have disappeared, or her drawing attention could cause them to.
In Germany, it was summertime, and everything was now as neat and orderly as the world had been led to believe. Yet Herbst sensed “a changed and sick country,” a smothered one. Describing attributes that supposedly give dictatorships their appeal, she also confronted the costs at which they are achieved. “On the surface, things appear cheerful,” she reported. “Boys bicycle on country roads. Who sees a concentration camp? Yet silence is over the very countryside. … Talk does not bubble up anymore.”
Fear stalked her in Berlin, just as it had done in Cuba and would, for a time, in Spain, where she traveled the following year to witness the country being bombed by German and Italian planes during its civil war. The courage it took to find these stories came not from the absence of fear but the unceasing struggle with it. From Germany, she sent a letter to her old friend Katherine Anne Porter, knowing it was risky to write too freely, trying to psych herself into courage: “Everything very quiet, muzzled in fact, but no more of that until I see you again. I felt dreadfully depressed at first, did even this morning with a kind of horror of being alone that goes to the very bone. I’m not sure I can pull off the business here and am not going to be frightened if I don’t. I am not going to be terrified of failing for the moment.”
Herbst had gone to Germany intending to lay her ear to the ground and listen for the sound of resistance; eventually, at a whisper, she heard it. She set up secret meetings and was told about suppressed strikes and workers who defiantly attended the funerals of murdered comrades; she began to pick up jokes that expressed discontent with the regime and learned of opposition leaflets cascading from waterspouts into the street with the rain. She managed to uncover a hidden reality of opposition to the Nazis—not from the conservative aristocrats who would be commemorated for their belated intervention against Hitler, but from housewives on buses, industrial workers, brave leaflet circulators and slogan painters. She wrote a report that ran over five consecutive days on the New York Post front page, called “Behind the Swastika.” Long before many others realized the danger, she urged her readers to look behind the facade and question the image the dictatorship wanted the world to see, producing an outsider’s portrait of Germany under the Nazis that now stands as a warning against the dismantling of democracy.
Disillusionment, poverty and the hostilities of the McCarthy era would later do much to silence Herbst, but to the end of her life in 1969, she remained proud of her work before World War II. In 1942, she was removed from her job on the German desk of the war propaganda agency in Washington. Two investigators took her through a long list of accusations. (She was cleared of wrongdoing but never got her job back.) “There were a good many of these charges, linked to the events of the ’30s and the role I had played in connection with each,” she would later recall, “and given them in bulk, I was impressed by the record.”
Adapted from Tomorrow Perhaps the Future: Writers, Outsiders and the Spanish Civil War by Sarah Watling. Published by Knopf, 2023.
How Josephine Herbst, ‘Leading Lady’ of the Left, Chronicled the Rise of Fascism. By Sarah Watling. Smithsonian Magazine, May 8, 2023.
There is
a photograph taken by Gerda Taro in August 1936 that shows a woman kneeling on
the sand of a beach outside Barcelona, holding a handgun. She is leaning
forward, aiming directly out of the square frame of the shot, the barrel of the
gun in a line with her mouth. The overalls she is wearing are baggy and a
little rumpled, but the lines and angles her form creates are bold. The photo
is taken from low down – I imagine Taro lying flat on the sand, facing her
subject from the side – so that small stones by the woman’s bent leg stand out
more sharply than the buildings smudged into the distance. The overcast sky and
its gathering clouds, gives the picture a momentous feeling.
The photograph was first published in the French magazine Vu and it represents something of what felt, to contemporary observers, most revolutionary and most worth fighting for in the embattled Spanish Republic. Only a few weeks before it was taken, a group of military generals had attempted a coup to overthrow Spain’s elected government. Sufficient forces rallied to the defence of the government to prevent the coup from succeeding immediately, despite the fact that the rebels soon had substantial support from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Instead, a civil war erupted, unleashing, in Catalonia, a simultaneous social revolution – one of the features of which was new liberties for women. The woman aiming a gun on the beach was a recruit for the militias being formed to defend the Republic. For the rest of the world, this was something shocking – something newsworthy – which is no doubt why Taro chose to capture the scene on her first wartime visit to Spain.
Taro was an antifascist and a refugee from Nazi Germany; the Republican cause mattered to her on a personal level. I think the subject of this picture would have excited her too. She was far from the only female press person to travel to Spain to cover the war (among photographers, the Hungarian-born Kati Horna springs to mind) and some of them – Taro perhaps most of all – took enormous risks to cover the conflict. One of the notable characteristics of the Spanish Civil War was the new way in which it was covered: technological advances gave photojournalists smaller, lighter cameras that could get them closer to the frontlines. Taro took the beachfront photo using a Rolleiflex with film that could be changed quickly and that focused quickly; she later switched to a Leica.
The photograph was first published in the French magazine Vu and it represents something of what felt, to contemporary observers, most revolutionary and most worth fighting for in the embattled Spanish Republic. Only a few weeks before it was taken, a group of military generals had attempted a coup to overthrow Spain’s elected government. Sufficient forces rallied to the defence of the government to prevent the coup from succeeding immediately, despite the fact that the rebels soon had substantial support from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Instead, a civil war erupted, unleashing, in Catalonia, a simultaneous social revolution – one of the features of which was new liberties for women. The woman aiming a gun on the beach was a recruit for the militias being formed to defend the Republic. For the rest of the world, this was something shocking – something newsworthy – which is no doubt why Taro chose to capture the scene on her first wartime visit to Spain.
Taro was an antifascist and a refugee from Nazi Germany; the Republican cause mattered to her on a personal level. I think the subject of this picture would have excited her too. She was far from the only female press person to travel to Spain to cover the war (among photographers, the Hungarian-born Kati Horna springs to mind) and some of them – Taro perhaps most of all – took enormous risks to cover the conflict. One of the notable characteristics of the Spanish Civil War was the new way in which it was covered: technological advances gave photojournalists smaller, lighter cameras that could get them closer to the frontlines. Taro took the beachfront photo using a Rolleiflex with film that could be changed quickly and that focused quickly; she later switched to a Leica.
A photograph taken by Robert Capa in 1936 gives us a glimpse of the conditions. Capa and Taro had met in Paris, where they had both gone into exile, and soon lived and worked together. (It was in Paris that they put aside their birthnames of Gerta Pohorylle and Endre Friedmann for the new professional identities of Capa and Taro.) Capa’s photograph shows that not all of Taro’s pictures were taken from the safety of training sessions. This is an action shot. It shows Taro taking cover on the Cordoba front, crouching behind a Republican soldier. She looks up, eyes wide with anticipation – perhaps even fear – alert for danger overhead, her throat bared to the camera like an expression of her vulnerability. It’s all the more haunting when you know what followed: her mortal injury the following year, as she covered the chaotic Republican retreat from Brunete. She is thought to be the first female war photographer to have died in the field.
The romanticism of Taro’s picture of the militiawoman is, to me, powerful, but also troubling. War is not beautiful, yet the photograph is. There is something unseemly about viewing, for example, Taro’s photographs of refugees in Almería in a gallery setting – in admiring the excellence of the composition. This was never Taro’s intention. She saw herself as a journalist rather than an artist, calling on France, Britain and the United States to recognise what was being done to Spanish people by Franco and his allies, and to protest against it.
Taro’s reputation diminished after the war, at least partly because she was overshadowed by Capa’s fame, but a number of discoveries in recent years have helped to revise the picture. Taro’s biographer Irme Schaber has done much to illuminate the facts of her life, and when collections of Capa and Taro’s negatives from Spain emerged in the 2000s, many photographs that had been previously attributed to Capa were found to have been taken by Taro, helping to secure her reputation as one of the most interesting photographers to cover the conflict. The pictures she took in Spain chronicle moments of exhilarating possibility and of appalling tragedy – which also makes them a fitting chronicle of Taro’s life.
Tomorrow Perhaps the Future: Following Writers and Rebels in the Spanish Civil War by Sarah Watling will be published by Jonathan Cape in February.
The unflinching gaze of Gerda Taro. By Sarah Watland. Apollo Magazine, January 26, 2023.
The most
famous chroniclers of the Spanish Civil War may have been male writers such as
George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway. But a new book reveals the contributions
made by a band of brave and brilliant women. These include everyone from the
maverick poet and activist Nancy Cunard to journalist Martha Gellhorn and the
young Jewish photographer Gerda Taro.
Guest:
Sarah Watling - journalist and author of of ‘Tomorrow Perhaps The Future:
Following Writers and Rebels in the Spanish Civil War’ (Penguin)
Women
writers and rebels in the Spanish Civil War. Credits:
Sarah Dingle, Presenter; Julie Street, Producer
Australian Broadcasting Corporation, May 18, 2023.
‘We
English,’ the prime minister Stanley Baldwin allegedly remarked following the
outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936, ‘hate fascism, but we loathe
bolshevism as much. So if there is somewhere where fascists and bolsheviks can
kill each other off, so much the better.’
Initially, many in Britain probably agreed with Baldwin, seeing no reason to be drawn into another country’s civil war. But a sizeable minority thought very differently, believing that the conflict was not just a civil war but part of an ongoing struggle between democracy and fascism. To them, Spain became a rallying cry, and over the course of the war many thousands from around the world volunteered to join it. Most fought in the communist-controlled International Brigades, but others went to report on the conflict as part of ‘fact-finding missions’, or simply to show their support for the Spanish government’s cause.
The experiences of a number of these visitors, witnesses and reporters are described in Tomorrow Perhaps the Future (the title taken from W.H. Auden’s poem ‘Spain’), by Sarah Watling, the author of Noble Savages, the prize-winning biography of the bohemian Olivier sisters. Its characters are not the familiar ones of Auden, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos and George Orwell. Instead, Watling’s study marks her determination to write women into the history books.
This is not to say, of course, that women have been invisible in the literature of the Spanish Civil War, particularly not this celebrity cohort, which includes the heiress to the Cunard shipping empire, the daughter of a baron, and a number of prominent writers. Nevertheless, as Virginia Woolf (one of the book’s subjects) remarked, war is generally a male affair, and women’s roles often get downplayed or glossed over. Watling points out that the German photojournalist Gerda Taro and the American war correspondent Martha Gellhorn were for many years overshadowed by Robert Capa and Hemingway, their more famous partners; and I suspect that few are aware that the first British volunteer to be killed in Spain was Felicia Browne, a sculptor from Slade School of Art.
Like almost all of those who went to Spain in the 1930s, the women portrayed in this book ‘had a choice not to involve themselves, and decided otherwise’. While Woolf’s inclination was to ‘fight intellectually’ (she tried unsuccessfully to dissuade her nephew Julian Bell from volunteering), others became more emotionally and practically immersed in the Spanish Republic’s struggle. They included Gellhorn, every bit as determined a supporter of the cause as Hemingway. Just as strong-minded was the eccentric Nancy Cunard, who, like Gellhorn, personally witnessed the war’s appalling realities. She frantically tried to spur others into feeling the same outrage, sending out an infamous questionnaire to 200 writers, demanding that they take sides. The overwhelming majority did, even if Orwell, scarred by his experiences of fighting in Spain and irritated by what he saw as Cunard’s simplistic, presumptuous questions, responded: ‘Will you please stop sending me this bloody rubbish.’
Given Orwell’s outrage over the partisan nature of the foreign media’s coverage of the war, it’s not surprising that many believed strongly that no one could really understand what was happening in Spain if they hadn’t been there. Watling quotes Josephine Herbst, an American novelist turned campaigning left-wing journalist, who explained: ‘I didn’t even want to go to Spain. I had to. Because.’ The radical lesbian and devout communist Sylvia Townsend Warner felt the same way, attending a congress of writers in Republican Spain alongside her partner Valentine Ackland. The couple discovered in revolutionary Barcelona the liberty to live their lives together in a way denied them at home.
Yet if going to Spain allowed some women freedoms and opportunities formerly forbidden them, it also presented familiar problems. There was not only a constant risk of unwelcome sexual attention, but also the fact that ‘closed doors could be found in the most open male minds’. The British communist Nan Green followed her husband George to the war, having reluctantly taken the heart-rending decision to leave their two children behind. Her sacrifice was rewarded by a vicious campaign against her by one of the most senior British communists in Spain, who falsely accused her of Trotskyism. Similarly depressing is the account of Salaria Kea, ‘the only female African-American nurse to volunteer in Spain’. The prejudice she suffered before, during and after her time there was shocking – though, as Watling dryly notes, ‘probably not very shocking to a black woman living in 1930s America’.
These are interesting and colourful characters, and Watling seems to have chosen them because they were all outsiders – individuals who ‘resisted in some way the lives they had been offered’ (though this could be said about most who volunteered.) She readily admits to ‘a weakness for people with an instinct for rebellion’; but while her portrayals are sympathetic, they are not uncritical.
She has researched her subjects carefully, and this is a serious, scholarly work, which also brings her group of writers, poets and activists vividly to life. As she explains: ‘I wanted to know what it had meant to take a side, and how it had been done, and I wanted to know what writing had to do with it.’ Many – and not just writers – will feel that these are questions well worth asking.
The women who rallied to the Republican cause in Spain. By Richard Baxell. The Spectator, February 25, 2023.
Initially, many in Britain probably agreed with Baldwin, seeing no reason to be drawn into another country’s civil war. But a sizeable minority thought very differently, believing that the conflict was not just a civil war but part of an ongoing struggle between democracy and fascism. To them, Spain became a rallying cry, and over the course of the war many thousands from around the world volunteered to join it. Most fought in the communist-controlled International Brigades, but others went to report on the conflict as part of ‘fact-finding missions’, or simply to show their support for the Spanish government’s cause.
The experiences of a number of these visitors, witnesses and reporters are described in Tomorrow Perhaps the Future (the title taken from W.H. Auden’s poem ‘Spain’), by Sarah Watling, the author of Noble Savages, the prize-winning biography of the bohemian Olivier sisters. Its characters are not the familiar ones of Auden, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos and George Orwell. Instead, Watling’s study marks her determination to write women into the history books.
This is not to say, of course, that women have been invisible in the literature of the Spanish Civil War, particularly not this celebrity cohort, which includes the heiress to the Cunard shipping empire, the daughter of a baron, and a number of prominent writers. Nevertheless, as Virginia Woolf (one of the book’s subjects) remarked, war is generally a male affair, and women’s roles often get downplayed or glossed over. Watling points out that the German photojournalist Gerda Taro and the American war correspondent Martha Gellhorn were for many years overshadowed by Robert Capa and Hemingway, their more famous partners; and I suspect that few are aware that the first British volunteer to be killed in Spain was Felicia Browne, a sculptor from Slade School of Art.
Like almost all of those who went to Spain in the 1930s, the women portrayed in this book ‘had a choice not to involve themselves, and decided otherwise’. While Woolf’s inclination was to ‘fight intellectually’ (she tried unsuccessfully to dissuade her nephew Julian Bell from volunteering), others became more emotionally and practically immersed in the Spanish Republic’s struggle. They included Gellhorn, every bit as determined a supporter of the cause as Hemingway. Just as strong-minded was the eccentric Nancy Cunard, who, like Gellhorn, personally witnessed the war’s appalling realities. She frantically tried to spur others into feeling the same outrage, sending out an infamous questionnaire to 200 writers, demanding that they take sides. The overwhelming majority did, even if Orwell, scarred by his experiences of fighting in Spain and irritated by what he saw as Cunard’s simplistic, presumptuous questions, responded: ‘Will you please stop sending me this bloody rubbish.’
Given Orwell’s outrage over the partisan nature of the foreign media’s coverage of the war, it’s not surprising that many believed strongly that no one could really understand what was happening in Spain if they hadn’t been there. Watling quotes Josephine Herbst, an American novelist turned campaigning left-wing journalist, who explained: ‘I didn’t even want to go to Spain. I had to. Because.’ The radical lesbian and devout communist Sylvia Townsend Warner felt the same way, attending a congress of writers in Republican Spain alongside her partner Valentine Ackland. The couple discovered in revolutionary Barcelona the liberty to live their lives together in a way denied them at home.
Yet if going to Spain allowed some women freedoms and opportunities formerly forbidden them, it also presented familiar problems. There was not only a constant risk of unwelcome sexual attention, but also the fact that ‘closed doors could be found in the most open male minds’. The British communist Nan Green followed her husband George to the war, having reluctantly taken the heart-rending decision to leave their two children behind. Her sacrifice was rewarded by a vicious campaign against her by one of the most senior British communists in Spain, who falsely accused her of Trotskyism. Similarly depressing is the account of Salaria Kea, ‘the only female African-American nurse to volunteer in Spain’. The prejudice she suffered before, during and after her time there was shocking – though, as Watling dryly notes, ‘probably not very shocking to a black woman living in 1930s America’.
These are interesting and colourful characters, and Watling seems to have chosen them because they were all outsiders – individuals who ‘resisted in some way the lives they had been offered’ (though this could be said about most who volunteered.) She readily admits to ‘a weakness for people with an instinct for rebellion’; but while her portrayals are sympathetic, they are not uncritical.
She has researched her subjects carefully, and this is a serious, scholarly work, which also brings her group of writers, poets and activists vividly to life. As she explains: ‘I wanted to know what it had meant to take a side, and how it had been done, and I wanted to know what writing had to do with it.’ Many – and not just writers – will feel that these are questions well worth asking.
The women who rallied to the Republican cause in Spain. By Richard Baxell. The Spectator, February 25, 2023.
‘Me, I
am going to Spain with the boys,’ Martha Gellhorn famously told a friend in
1937 as she boarded a ship sailing from New York to France. ‘I don’t know who
the boys are, but I am going with them.’ She knew perfectly well with whom she
was going: Ernest Hemingway, who was on the point of abandoning his second wife
for her. They were off to cover the Spanish Civil War, where Franco’s
Nationalists were making steady gains against the army of the legitimate
republic. But it is the women, not the boys, about whom Sarah Watling writes
here: the reporters, photographers and authors for whom the Spanish conflict
became, in the later words of the American novelist Josephine Herbst, the most
important event ‘in the life of the world’, a ghastly, menacing foreshadowing
of the war to come.
Along with Herbst, fresh from writing about Batista in Cuba, and Gellhorn, now twenty-eight and the author of a much-praised book about the Depression, The Trouble I’ve Seen, there was Nancy Cunard, the daughter of an American heiress and an English peer; thin-lipped, with a small head, cropped hair and outlandish clothes, she went to Spain as correspondent for the Associated Negro Press. There were also a 22-year-old black American nurse, Salaria Kea, who had been working in a hospital in Harlem and fighting her own battles with racism; the bestselling novelist Sylvia Townsend Warner, ‘quick, dark and lean; bespectacled and frizzy of hair’, a lesbian and a communist with a ‘flair for heckling’, who travelled with her partner, Valentine; and Nan Green, who had run a second-hand bookshop in the Caledonian Market in London and whose husband was serving as an ambulance driver. And, in this war in which the picture was as important as the word, with magazines on both sides of the Atlantic giving considerable space to illustrations, there was the tiny – barely five foot – photographer Gerda Taro, who looked like a boy and had red-blonde hair. Taro, who had spent time in a prison in Leipzig for distributing anti-Nazi leaflets, travelled to Spain as the companion of the more famous Robert Capa. All of them, Watling writes, ‘saw history coming and went out to meet it’.
What drew Watling to these women was that they chose not to be dispassionate but to take sides, rejecting what Gellhorn dismissed as ‘all this objectivity shit’ in their support for the Republicans. Only Virginia Cowles, a secondary character here, whose book Looking for Trouble is one of the best memoirs of war reporting ever written, tried to cover both sides, which made her universally suspect. The rest of them filed stories and pictures about horrors and atrocities perpetrated by the Nationalists, of which there were many, and turned a blind eye to the cruelty of the Republicans, whose deep divisions (and many acronyms) left them confused. All extolled participation, along with the need to take note of and not run from what was happening in Spain.
In 1937, Cunard, who believed passionately in the power of the arts, sent a message to over two hundred well-known writers with a question: were they for or against the legal Republican government of Spain? Their answers, published as a pamphlet, Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War, were as positive as she had expected: only five of the 148 whose responses were printed declared themselves against it. ‘Every man to his battle,’ she wrote. ‘This is yours.’
Another of Watling’s characters is Virginia Woolf, not long back from driving with her pet marmoset through Germany, where she had become caught up in a deeply alarming rally welcoming Hermann Göring. Woolf did not go to Spain but thought about it obsessively. She filled her notebooks with clippings relating to the war, while mourning her nephew Julian Bell, killed driving an ambulance for the Republicans, and railing against the brutal, masculine culture that had nurtured war.
The women Watling has chosen to describe were brave. They made heroic efforts to get themselves to the front and sent back anguished reports of refugees strafed by Nazi bombers, small children killed as they played in the streets and liberated prisons where they had discovered evidence of torture. Herbst had trouble finding a niche for herself among the cliquish foreign reporters who gathered around Hemingway in the Hotel Florida in Madrid, where celebrities were revered and animosities simmered. When she finally reached the front line she found the earth often ‘streaked with the slime of dead things’. The intrepid, reckless Taro was killed when a tank collided with the car to which she was clinging. She was a remarkable photographer, though her true talent did not come to light until the 1990s, when a cache of her negatives was discovered.
Group biographies are notoriously hard to write. But Watling knits together with considerable skill the details of her characters’ lives and adventures in Spain, bringing them alongside each other in set pieces, then following them individually as they move through the war, file their stories, leave and return. She also intersperses her narrative with perceptive commentary. Each of these women, as she shows, battled with her own demons. Gellhorn fretted about getting old and not being able to write; Nan Green struggled with the loss of her husband, killed on the last day of the war; the extraordinary Cunard constantly feared that she might not be able to ‘tell the truth’ and wondered how to raise money for the defeated Republicans, many of whom crossed over the border into an unwelcoming France and later died in concentration camps.
Each of these women, too, in her own way, was sustained by a desire, in the words of Gellhorn, to make ‘an angry sound against injustice’. As Josephine Herbst would write, with wry hindsight, ‘People cared. It was a decade when people believed in the possibility of their own powers.’
Along with Herbst, fresh from writing about Batista in Cuba, and Gellhorn, now twenty-eight and the author of a much-praised book about the Depression, The Trouble I’ve Seen, there was Nancy Cunard, the daughter of an American heiress and an English peer; thin-lipped, with a small head, cropped hair and outlandish clothes, she went to Spain as correspondent for the Associated Negro Press. There were also a 22-year-old black American nurse, Salaria Kea, who had been working in a hospital in Harlem and fighting her own battles with racism; the bestselling novelist Sylvia Townsend Warner, ‘quick, dark and lean; bespectacled and frizzy of hair’, a lesbian and a communist with a ‘flair for heckling’, who travelled with her partner, Valentine; and Nan Green, who had run a second-hand bookshop in the Caledonian Market in London and whose husband was serving as an ambulance driver. And, in this war in which the picture was as important as the word, with magazines on both sides of the Atlantic giving considerable space to illustrations, there was the tiny – barely five foot – photographer Gerda Taro, who looked like a boy and had red-blonde hair. Taro, who had spent time in a prison in Leipzig for distributing anti-Nazi leaflets, travelled to Spain as the companion of the more famous Robert Capa. All of them, Watling writes, ‘saw history coming and went out to meet it’.
What drew Watling to these women was that they chose not to be dispassionate but to take sides, rejecting what Gellhorn dismissed as ‘all this objectivity shit’ in their support for the Republicans. Only Virginia Cowles, a secondary character here, whose book Looking for Trouble is one of the best memoirs of war reporting ever written, tried to cover both sides, which made her universally suspect. The rest of them filed stories and pictures about horrors and atrocities perpetrated by the Nationalists, of which there were many, and turned a blind eye to the cruelty of the Republicans, whose deep divisions (and many acronyms) left them confused. All extolled participation, along with the need to take note of and not run from what was happening in Spain.
In 1937, Cunard, who believed passionately in the power of the arts, sent a message to over two hundred well-known writers with a question: were they for or against the legal Republican government of Spain? Their answers, published as a pamphlet, Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War, were as positive as she had expected: only five of the 148 whose responses were printed declared themselves against it. ‘Every man to his battle,’ she wrote. ‘This is yours.’
Another of Watling’s characters is Virginia Woolf, not long back from driving with her pet marmoset through Germany, where she had become caught up in a deeply alarming rally welcoming Hermann Göring. Woolf did not go to Spain but thought about it obsessively. She filled her notebooks with clippings relating to the war, while mourning her nephew Julian Bell, killed driving an ambulance for the Republicans, and railing against the brutal, masculine culture that had nurtured war.
The women Watling has chosen to describe were brave. They made heroic efforts to get themselves to the front and sent back anguished reports of refugees strafed by Nazi bombers, small children killed as they played in the streets and liberated prisons where they had discovered evidence of torture. Herbst had trouble finding a niche for herself among the cliquish foreign reporters who gathered around Hemingway in the Hotel Florida in Madrid, where celebrities were revered and animosities simmered. When she finally reached the front line she found the earth often ‘streaked with the slime of dead things’. The intrepid, reckless Taro was killed when a tank collided with the car to which she was clinging. She was a remarkable photographer, though her true talent did not come to light until the 1990s, when a cache of her negatives was discovered.
Group biographies are notoriously hard to write. But Watling knits together with considerable skill the details of her characters’ lives and adventures in Spain, bringing them alongside each other in set pieces, then following them individually as they move through the war, file their stories, leave and return. She also intersperses her narrative with perceptive commentary. Each of these women, as she shows, battled with her own demons. Gellhorn fretted about getting old and not being able to write; Nan Green struggled with the loss of her husband, killed on the last day of the war; the extraordinary Cunard constantly feared that she might not be able to ‘tell the truth’ and wondered how to raise money for the defeated Republicans, many of whom crossed over the border into an unwelcoming France and later died in concentration camps.
Each of these women, too, in her own way, was sustained by a desire, in the words of Gellhorn, to make ‘an angry sound against injustice’. As Josephine Herbst would write, with wry hindsight, ‘People cared. It was a decade when people believed in the possibility of their own powers.’
Welcome
to the Hotel Florida. By Caroline Moorehead. Literary Review, February 2023.
Nigel Townson’s history of modern Spain begins with disaster – or, more specifically, with the Disaster. When an ignominious defeat in the 1898 Spanish-American war lost the country its last major colonies, a crisis of confidence followed, and the ‘Generation of 1898’ set about trying to diagnose Spain’s problem. Since the scope of Townson’s book runs from that year to ‘the present’ (roughly the spring of 2022), there are plenty of crises to cover.
Spain has been unfortunate in its governments. The Penguin History of Modern Spain is a chronicle of ineffectiveness and corruption at the highest levels, and of failures to implement reform. As such, it sometimes reads like a history of missed opportunities. The monarchical Restoration regime proved unable to rise to the challenges of the years after 1898 and was overthrown by General Miguel Primo de Rivera’s coup of 1923, returning the army to its position of ‘political protagonism’.
Authoritarianism gave way to the Second Republic and a ‘wave of euphoria’ in 1931 (sending Alfonso XIII into exile), only for those great hopes to degenerate into civil war five years later. Decades of the repressive Franco regime followed the Republic’s defeat in 1939, ending only with the dictator’s death in 1975. Even the triumphant return of democracy has been marked by economic turmoil, political scandal and violence (the rise of ETA is covered in detail).
But as Townson, who teaches at Complutense University of Madrid, is at pains to point out, this hardly sets Spain apart from the rest of Europe. Violence, political chaos, corruption and economic suffering may have been features of the country’s 20th century, but they were not uniquely Spanish. Townson diagnoses a widespread tendency to view the country as an anomaly within Europe. As he puts it: ‘Spaniards’ long-standing sense of failure was the product not only of comparisons with other nations but also of an awareness of the way in which foreigners viewed them.’ He takes foreign historians to task for their obsession with the Spanish Civil War (this reviewer may be implicated as the author of a recent book about people obsessed with it), and aims to provide instead a synthesis of the ground breaking work done by Spanish historians since Francoist censorship came to an end – much of which has yet to be translated into English. These historians are, it seems, less burdened by a conviction of national failure.
If, chapter after chapter, the point begins to feel somewhat laboured, treating Spain ‘in relation to the much broader reality of Europe’ is illuminating. A comparison of the country’s economy with that of other southern European nations reveals ‘the narrative of economic failure’ to be a myth. Setting the arrival of the Second Republic within the context of a Europe in which most of the new republics of the 1920s had already been ‘swept aside by a tsunami of right-wing authoritarianism’ is a useful reminder of just how vast the challenges facing it were both at home and abroad.
Indeed, Townson’s placing of Spain’s history in a wider setting exposes the fact that all too often when we talk about ‘Europe’, what we mean are France, Germany and Great Britain. (At other times, as when comparing the ‘far greater autonomy of the Spanish Church’ under Franco to its counterparts in the communist dictatorships of Eastern Europe, a divergence that is hardly surprising, the comparison feels less relevant.) Townson bludgeons the narrative that ‘Spain is different’ – as the 1960s tourist campaigns put it – so relentlessly that occasionally one feels an urge to whisper, asa mother to a child in a school competition: ‘but you are special!’
The book offers a detailed survey of political, economic and social history, illuminating many of the trends, tensions and power players that have influenced the course of Spain’s modern era. The Catholic Church, Catalan and Basque nationalism, a legacy of clientelism, an endlessly fractured left and frequently embattled middle ground, and the peaks and troughs of working-class activism all receive space. Townson’s attention to economic, political and structural developments means that he sacrifices some of the pleasures of narrative and character: there are too few individual portraits and little scene-setting. This can result in sudden leaps: Primo de Rivera, for instance, who ruled Spain between 1923 and 1930, is gone in a sentence. It’s clear why he was forced to resign, but readers might be interested to know what actually happened.
On the other hand, Townson has made an effort to look for Spanish women – easily disregarded in a patriarchal society – and finds them in observers, protestors and historical actors. He describes, for example, the women in Madrid in 1917 who blocked the city’s tram tracks with telegraph poles (and, where necessary, their own children) during a strike, without, according to a bewildered police agent, ‘letting a single man join their groups’; and the efforts of the nationalist Sección Femenina during the Civil War. He does not assume that the effects of any given phenomenon on Spanish men is the same as their effects on Spanish society, but broadens the picture (if only by sex) on numerous occasions.
Any vestiges of romance lingering over the Spanish Civil War are stripped away. Townson emphasises the Republican government’s failure ‘to uphold law and order or to govern in a democratic manner’ prior to the Nationalist coup (though the generals attacking it could hardly be seen as democracy’s saviours). Franco’s regime did not merely undo the progressive reforms the Republic had accomplished, thus returning the country to the 1920s, but represented ‘a political rupture that was far deeper than that of Primo de Rivera’ in its assault on ‘Spain’s constitutional, parliamentary and electoral traditions’ (not to mention its suppression of civil society itself).
Even so, Townson argues, rather than taking Spain out of step with Europe, this was more a kind of catching up with all the other lost democracies of the late 1930s. By the time the Allied victory in the second world war did make the Francoist repression (and Axis connections) look incompatible with the prevailing mood in western Europe, the Cold War allowed for Franco’s rebranding as a friendly fellow anti-communist, and for a corresponding ‘global integration’ for Spain, crowned by its entry to the UN in 1955.
Even where Spain has been seen as a positive model for the world (as with its swift and relatively peaceful transition to the present democracy), Townson’s conclusion that it ‘fits well into the pattern of European democratisation’ may read a little deflatingly for what most would consider a remarkable achievement – though he is willing to admit that Spain’s transition was ‘sui generis’. In fact, the oversimplified view of an uneven and imperilled process as one of straightforward success, he implies, underplays the victory of Spaniards in preserving a democracy that they had overwhelmingly wanted.
The book’s conclusion is perhaps inevitably sombre, covering the 2008 recession, corruption scandals, 2017’s ‘far-reaching crisis’ in Catalonia, and Covid, not to mention a newly ‘fragmented political landscape’, from which both Podemos and Vox have emerged. That said, there have also been moments when Spaniards have, once again, provided a model of political engagement for outsiders. The ‘15-M’ youth protests of 2011 tapped into a disillusionment and outrage that was widespread internationally; their initiative of occupying sites in major cities was seized upon elsewhere, most famously in the Occupy Wall Street movement.
The ‘new era of hung parliaments and coalition governments’ may be alarming to anyone with an eye on history – Townson points out that Podemos and the PSOE’s coalition government, formed after the November 2019 election, is the first in Spain since the 1930s – but the country’s hard-won democracy is on firmer ground than it has ever been. Townson’s boast for Spain is that it is now a lot ‘like all other European democracies’ – which may not be a dazzling accolade, but is a success surely worth a little conformity.
The Penguin History of Modern Spain: 1898 to the Present/ Nigel Townson. Allen Lane, pp. 400, £30
The Spanish Civil War still dominates our perception of modern Spain. By Sarah Watling. The Spectator, April 8, 2023.
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