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gish middle class in disintegration, a cohering proletariat scenting the
western winds o,f Marxism and in part responding with an indigenous
anarchism, the product of its position as a militant class in a primitive
country. The inns; the gutters; the washwomen at the rivers; the static
peasants, bearing in themselves the richness of an old civilization; the
impatient counterpoint of Madrileiios hemmed in by a dying past and
a stillborn future--all of this, the actual tpaterial and substance of life
unthinned by theory and unsorted by perspective, filters through his
recollections.
The course of Barea's life coincided with the central events of
modern Spain. As a youth, he served in the colonial army, in Morocco
and his account of the disastrous expeditions against the Moors (as im–
pressively dry and bare as the desert in which these expeditions took
place) is an addition to the literature of anti-imperialism. The Spanish
army lives in his book as a remarkably corrupt institution; a pure chain
of pilfering from general to batman. One senses in this long section on
Morocco, the best in the book, all the decay and putrefaction which
was to reach its tragic head in 1936. (And one cannot help wondering
how a man like Barea, with his first-hand knowledge of colonial im–
perialism, could accept the policy of his party, the Spanish Social
Democracy, which when
in
the loyalist popular front coalition did
nothing to grant freedom to Morocco. But
that
is the tragedy of
Spain ... ) .
Reading this massive work, one is reminded of an Elder Breughel
with its movement of differentiated but not thoroughly individualized
figures in which no attempt is made to accentuate but in which the
action is so inviting and warm that the spectator finds himself merged
with its context. Much the same sympathetic inclusion is effected by
Barea's book, which lacks only that sense of purposeful control that
gives a Breughel its unity. And that is where Barea pays for his greatest
weakness: his lack of concern with ideas. Absence of self-consciousness
permits a rich recollection, but the selectivity essential to form demands
a highly trained intelligence as well.
If
Spain is vivid in the book, Barea is dim. Between his personal
history and the movement of the book there is a disturbing lack of
harmony. At each crucial juncture of his life, the book blacks out. At
one moment a child, the next a man; at one moment apolitical, the
next a socialist. The personal biography is like a series of jerky slides
from which the decisive ones have been omitted. But the book is re–
deemed by its vision of Spain's tragedy, by now a symbol of our age.
I cannot leave it, however, without saying a few words about Barea's
politics. He nowhere attempts an ordered discussion of Spanish politics
and since his few political remarks are commonplace, they might be
