THE FORGING OF A REBEL—An Autobiography (739 pp.)—Arturo Barea, translated by lisa Barea—Reynal & Hitchcock ($5).
Ten years ago this winter, the siege of Madrid by Franco's army foreshadowed the hell that all Europe was to suffer. Sooner or later, the rest of the world realized that Spain had been victimized, but it was slower in learning how Spain had got herself in for it. The purely Spanish background of the Civil War has never been aired enough, though Spanish historians like Salvador de Madariaga have insisted on its importance. One of the few books to put light on the background is this long autobiography by an exiled Spaniard. It is valuable because it reflects in great detail the peculiar corruption and puzzlement of Spanish life between the Cuban (Spanish-American) and the Civil Wars.
Neither a politician nor a professional man of letters, Arturo Barea has a kind of faith, which neither of those types is likely to have, that he can "get it all down." This miracle—though not prolonged—actually seems to occur when he describes his childhood in Madrid. The first section of his book (originally published in England in 1941 as The Forge) ranks with the most incandescent realism that ever came out of Spain.
Madrid from Below. Barea's evocation of Madrid in the first years of the century has the childhood magic of minute particulars. He communicates not only the look of the city but the feel and smell of it: of sun-warmed horses, of dampened streets, of clean linen spread on balconies, of old furniture sweating beeswax in the heat.
He did not see "poverty"; he saw rills of blood on his mother's hands after a day's work beating laundry in the icy Manzanares River in winter. He did not see "the clergy," but an old priest dozing in a wild garden with a lizard sunning on his knee, or young priests emptying the church's poor box and playing cards for the proceeds. The worn-out monarchy, for him, was a hemophilic prince grinning from a carriage.
The blind violinist in the corner cafe could see with his finger tips which of two identical bow ties Arturo was wearing—the red or the blue. The little boys from the orphanage "all had lice and an eye-sickness called trachoma, which looked as though their eyelids had been smeared with sausage meat." The winding alleys—Street of the Union, Street of the Clock-were lit at night, white and black, by the polished moon of Castile and by gas jets, weak flames shaped like slices of melon. In summer he saw the savage boredom of village life in Brunete on the baked plain, where young men crucified bats whose wings tore as easily as old rags. He saw a starved boy in the ragged tinsel of a matador waiting, with the face of a mystic, for a bull's charge in a drunkenly howling village square.