ABEL SANCHEZ & OTHER STORIES (216 pp.) — Miguel de Unamuno — Henry Regnery ($1.25).
One of the doughtiest soldiers of the modern world of ideological civil war is too obscurely defined in the U.S. ken. He is—or was—Don Miguel de Unamuno, twice rector of and twice expelled from the University of Salamanca,* who brought to recent letters a Spanish taste for macabre conundrums about death: "One day we shall all die, even the dead."
Basque-born Unamuno had a Spanish flair for paradox—he insisted that the fictional Don Quixote was a greater and a realer man than Don Quixote's creator, Cervantes. This kind of jugglery between the balloons of fiction and the cannonballs of fact made Unamuno an enigmatic figure—and in Catholic, reactionary Spain, a suspect and controversial one. In 1891, when he was 27, he became professor of Greek at Salamanca, and was appointed rector ten years later. He stoutly rejected any obligation to impose coherence on his thought and backed up his stand by the consistent inconsistency of his life. He translated Marxist books, tilted at the windmills of Spanish society, and at the same time, in his books engaged in what was essentially theological speculation.
Critics sometimes point to his Tragic Sense of Life as one of the works that inspired the existentialist movement in Paris after World War II. Influenced by the moral austerity of Ibsen and the mystical ruminations of Danish Theologian-Existentialist Sören Kierkegaard, the book argued the toss between faith and reason in a way that could not fail to cause offense to the Spanish hierarchy. In Unamuno's picture of man, man's worst friend was his dogma. He argued: flesh-and-blood man must assert his identity in the face of death. This seemed to leave God out of the picture, so in 1914, with an assist from a touchy government, he was forced out of his rectorship.
Self-Exiled. Unamuno continued to teach at the university, and politically he worked for the Republicans against the monarchy, but when Primo de Rivera's dictatorship took over in 1923, he attacked the new militarists, and the dictator forced him into exile in the Canary Islands. Although amnesty was granted a few months later, he exiled himself to Paris. By this time, his was the greatest literary name in the Hispanic world, and after Primo de Rivera's death, he returned to Salamanca with national acclaim. But Don Miguel was really a Don Quixote, and his Quixote's genius for glory and self-destruction led him to gibe constantly at the liberal republic, to salute the Francoist rebels in 1936, and, characteristically, to live just long enough to regret it. "He alone is truly wise who is conscious of his madness," he said in a lecture at Oxford. "I am conscious of my madness; therefore I am truly wise." Thus he lived and performed, an honored enigma. At one time, his work and his person seemed to have the embroidered smile of a saint on a religious banner; at another, the proud sneer of a Spanish beggar.