When we think about writing about Spain’s civil war, we go first to Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia or Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. Why were Spanish authors mistrusted?
by Jeremy Treglown Published
An English speaker asked to name countries colonised by the Americans and British in the 20th century would be unlikely to think of Spain, yet if someone asks you where you learned what you know about the Spanish civil war the answer is likely to be Homage to Catalonia or For Whom the Bell Tolls – or a history by Hugh Thomas, Stanley Payne or, more recently, Paul Preston, Antony Beevor or Helen Graham. Another prime source, out of print now but used by students for a couple of decades, was the 1980 Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse, which, as the poet and editor Michael Schmidt pointed out in a review for the New Statesman at the time, included next to no Spanish writing.
Nationalists in Mérida, 1936. Some Spaniards felt foreign “adventurers” treated their war as sport. Getty Image (Source: New Statesman)
One of the reasons for this Anglocentric view of the war was that, for decades, Spanish authors were mistrusted. Mario Vargas Llosa confessed that as a young man in Peru in the 1950s he read nothing by Spanish writers living on the Iberian Peninsula, “because of a prejudice as widespread in the Latin America of those years as it was unjust: everything published over there reeked of fustiness, sacristy and Francoism”… MORE