Books
PERSONAL HISTORY
THE FoRGING
OF A
REBEL.
By Arturo Barea. Reyna!
&
Hitchcock.
$5.00
T
HE TWENTIETH-CENTURY WRITERS hover over their work like nervous
mothers, and if they write about themselves, they hover over their
own personalities. They exert ruthless control over their work, and allow
it little spontaneity or internal development. They are in this respect
radically different from the masters of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries who worked as literary deists: once set in motion, the latter's
situations and characters developed a free movement in which their
creator's personality did not intrude. But most contemporary writers
seem unable to achieve this self-effacement even when they wish to;
they are too self-consciously aware of the relationship between themselves
and their work; and their personalities often serve not as the refractors
of their created image, but as the image itself.
To this contemporary tendency, Arturo Barea is a refreshing ex–
ception. Though he has written an autobiography, in which form one
expects the writer's personality to be central, the
I
of the book is its
least important figure. Things happen to him; his senses register; but
he neither manipulates his past nor attempts to give it retrospective
order. He merely allows his laden memory to flow freely. The center of
the book then becomes a city, Madrid; and since the twentieth-century
history of Madrid reflects the transformations of Spanish civilization–
the never completed transition to modernity so painful in backward
countries--what would otherwise be a mere atomized and indiscriminate
sequence of recollection acquires more general validity.
Even when writing about his private concerns, as in the movingly
scrupulous description of his neurotic paralysis before the issues thrust
upon him by the 1936 civil war, Barea succeeds in making them seem
a symbolic fraction of the tragedy which struck Spain and Europe.
The
re~~ult
is a book fringeing on the first rate, a work of
social
autobiog–
raphy which, if not history itself, contains the ores from which history
is fused, and which bears a palpable, sensuous quality seldom present
in formal historical writings.
Through Barea's unforced recollections of his childhood in Madrid
there appear the gradual social reformations of modern Spain: a slug-
