More Writers of the Spanish Civil War

Celia M. Wallhead (ed.)

More Writers of the Spanish Civil War

Experience Put to Use

PETER LANG

Bern · Berlin · Bruxelles · New York · Oxford · Wien

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About the author

Celia M. Wallhead taught Spanish at Auckland University, New Zealand, and is currently Senior Lecturer in English Literature, University of Granada. Author of books and articles on contemporary writers A.S.Byatt, Salman Rushdie and Thomas Pynchon, she is responsible for the research group HUM 424 «Studies in Narrative in English» and edited the group’s first book on the Spanish Civil War.

About the book

Further to the first book, Writers of the Spanish Civil War: The Testimony of Their Auto/Biographies (2011), which featured the writings on the war (1936–39) of six key British and American authors: Gerald Brenan, Robert Graves, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, Stephen Spender and Laurie Lee, this new work studies the actions in the war of those physically involved and writings focused on the war, either at the time or later, by eight more foreign authors: Virginia Woolf, John Dos Passos, Franz Borkenau, V. S. Pritchett, André Malraux, Arthur Koestler, Martha Gellhorn and Peter Kemp. In addition to comparing their autobiographies with what their biographers said, in order to show up any discrepancies, as had been done in the first book, here, the texts are scrutinized to detect use of stereotypes or adaptation of the material to other purposes in the writing. New perspectives are introduced now in that two of the authors are women, one writing from a distance but deeply affected by the war (Virginia Woolf) and one active in journalism on the spot (Martha Gellhorn), and our final author, Peter Kemp, went to Spain to fight on the side of the Nationalists under Franco as opposed to the Republicans.

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JUAN ANTONIO DÍAZ LÓPEZ

Chapter 1.  Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
The Death of Julian Bell and Three Guineas

Brief biography

Autobiography and biography

Most of Virginia Woolf’s writing is intensely autobiographical, even if she changes the names of the people involved before transforming them into characters, yet there is no autobiography. She was preparing to write her autobiography in the last years of her life, but she never finished it. As her most thorough biographer, Hermione Lee, asserts:

The sense of apprehension which filled her writings from 1939 onwards, applied to Europe, but also to herself. Just as civilisation (Freud told her) could not get rid of its aggression, so the individual may not be able to avoid regression into mental illness or self-destruction. It may have been this fear which made her stop writing her autobiography shortly before her suicide. (Lee 1997, 726)

Virginia Woolf was obsessed by the idea of having multiple selves and under the influence of Freud (whom she met in London after his ‘rescue’ from Vienna, but with whom she often disagreed) writes this into her fiction. As Lee continues:

Freud was one of many insistent voices which troubled and challenged her now. In her mind, as she wrote her autobiography, she heard the inner voices of her past and latent selves, voices she had described in The Waves as ‘those old half-articulate ghosts who keep up their hauntings by day and night; who turn over in their sleep, who utter their confused cries, who put out their phantom fingers and clutch at me as I try to escape –shadows of people one might have been; unborn selves’. (Lee, 726, quotation from The Waves, 222)

After her death, her husband Leonard arranged for her unpublished works to be brought out as if in leisurely installments by the Hogarth Press. Her political and critical thinking contained in her essays was published in the six volumes of The Essays of Virginia Woolf between 1986 and 2011, while her more intimate and autobiographical material in the form of her letters and her diary was published respectively as The Letters of Virginia Woolf, edited by Vita Sackville-West’s son Nigel Nicholson from 1975 to 1980 and The Diary of Virginia Woolf, edited by Anne Olivier Bell, the wife of her nephew Quentin Bell, between 1977 and 1984. ← 23 | 24 →

Biographies

The first studies dedicated to Virginia Woolf did not appear in England. First there was ‘a long personal study’ by Jacques-Émile Blanche in 1927 and two books on her in France and Germany in 1932 (Lee, 623). The first biographical and critical study to appear in Britain was done by Winifred Holtby, again in 1932. This young feminist journalist consulted Virginia and her family and friends but Virginia herself had ‘mixed feelings’ about the book and made conflicting comments about it to different people. As Lee defines the problem: ‘Her point, as usual, was that the “tombstone” of critical or biographical writing was utterly remote from the true interior self –or selves– of the writer’ (Lee, 623–4).

Hermione Lee’s biography is the one we shall look at in more detail about the role of Spain in Virginia Woolf’s life. Indeed, it was this biography that inspired a later biographer, Alexandra Harris, to want to write on the same subject. Speaking of it, she says: ‘It was the book that showed me what literature can do and sent me off to study English. Lee shaped my responses to Woolf very early on and continues to do so, which means that this short study is indebted to her Virginia Woolf in too many ways to number’ (Harris 2011, 9). In her ‘concise’ contribution (170 pages compared with Lee’s 700-odd), Harris reviews previous (authorised) biographies (Harris, 182), pointing out their leanings and the disagreements that they prompted. Of Woolf’s nephew Quentin Bell’s account, published by the family press, the Hogarth Press, in 1972, she has this to say:

The first was her nephew Quentin Bell, who was invited by Leonard to write an authorized biography. (That this was thirty years after Woolf’s death suggests how anxious Leonard had been to wait for the right person and the right moment.) Bell’s two-volume life, published in 1972, represented a sustained feat of sensitive judgment. Biographies by family members are not always known for their objectivity, but this one made candour a badge of honour, dealing openly with Woolf’s illness, the question of abuse, the marriage, Vita, suicide. Bell’s chronologically arranged narrative revealed very strikingly a pattern of alternating crisis and recovery. Almost every chapter brought a family death or a period of illness, but there was no lingering in the gloom. A resilient Woolf emerged from one thing after the next, full of new ideas for starting life afresh. ← 24 | 25 →
        There were things that Bell purposely did not try to cover. He felt he should not set himself up as a literary critic, so the fine interplay between life and work was left to later interpreters. More controversially he did not see Woolf as a political thinker and left Three Guineas as a mistake best forgotten. This made the image of the mad aunt more discernible in Bell’s account: she is repeatedly ‘odd’ in contrast to Leonard’s practical commonsense. (Harris, 164)

The biographers and scholars who took most objection to the nephew’s belittling of his aunt’s political role were feminist academics like Jane Marcus and Louise DeSalvo. Hermione Lee wanted, in Harris’s words, ‘to get away from the idea of Woolf as a mad genius and as the doomed victim of early abuse’ (Harris, 166). But before we turn to Lee’s accounts of Woolf and Spain, let us look for one moment at Quentin Bell’s own words upon his aunt.

Quentin Bell Virginia Woolf: A Biography (London: Pimlico, 1996) (First published by The Hogarth Press, 1972)

In his ‘Foreword to the Pimlico Edition’, Quentin Bell stresses, as Harris said, the advantages and disadvantages of a biography being written by a close member of the family:

Being closely related to one’s subject was in some ways an advantage; the great mass of evidence with which I had to deal was more easily understood because I knew most of the people and many of the situations referred to. But at the same time I was very much attached to my aunt and had continually to beware of an affection which could easily result in a loss of objectivity. A biography which is also a filial or indeed a nepotal offering tends to become the most tiresome kind of hagiography. This was a real danger because Virginia Woolf’s character has frequently been attacked, and at that time many people thought of her as a wealthy, precious, difficult and malicious snob. As a biographer it was my task to determine as honestly as possible how much truth and how much falsehood there was in that description […]. (xiii)

Bell rose to the challenge and his critics obviously approved of his efforts as the work was awarded the Duff Cooper Prize and the James ← 25 | 26 → Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography in 1972. He was Professor of Fine Art in several English universities, including Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford, so he does not pretend to be a literary critic and states from the outset that in his biography of his aunt, a critical analysis of her books –‘her children as one may say’ (xiv) – is not to be found. In any case, he feels that critics who are partial tend to read what they want into her writings or those of any other author. What is of interest to us is his disavowal concerning any perennial feminist assertions: ‘I do not even think that Virginia’s concern with the liberation of her sex, important and deeply felt as it certainly was, actually informed every single work that she ever wrote’ (xiv). This may be true, but we are interested to see if the work she was engaged in at the time of her nephew’s death reveals the impact of that death in any way, and if it also has stronger feminist persuasions as a result of the political situation in Europe.

Quentin Bell deals with the problems of her youth, for example, the suggested sexual molestation by her half-brother George Duckworth, and her early mental problems, upon which he will not pronounce, as he says: ‘I do not know enough about Virginia’s mental illnesses […]’ (44). He records her successes and failures as regards her publications, particularly because of their influence on her state of mind: an early rejection did not affect her so much as later negative criticism of her novels. The rejection in question is of a review solicited by The Times Literary Supplement, for whom she had started to do work in 1905. It coincided with her first trip to Spain:

In April Virginia and Adrian made a short trip to the Peninsula. They visited Oporto, Lisbon, Granada, Seville, saw the usual sights and had the usual experience of dirty inns, goat’s milk, natural beauty and dilatory railways; the week-long journey out by sea in fine weather, the ship with its odd temporary life, its laziness, its bores, its places of refuge, made, I think, a more permanent impression upon the authoress of The Voyage Out. But it was clearly a satisfactory trip; they were glad to return but glad also to have made the journey. Back in London, Virginia found that Bruce Richmond had rejected her review of the ‘great fat book’ –Edith Sichel’s Catherine de’ Medici & The French Reformation –on the grounds that it was not serious criticism from an historical point of view; but to make up for it he sent her three books about Spain. ‘You will be surprised to hear that I am an authority upon Spain,’ she wrote to Violet Dickinson, ‘but so it is’. (104) ← 26 | 27 →

Logically, she was not hurt by criticism of writing where she did not feel an expert, and ironically, this rejection indirectly caused a greater involvement with Spain, though of course, she was by no means an expert on Spain, not at the age of twenty-three and with the experience of but one visit to the country. Nearly twenty years later, she made another visit to Spain, this time with her husband Leonard, and instead of having an impact upon one of her novels, it resulted in a piece of non-fictional writing, as Quentin Bell says: ‘It was many years since they had crossed the Channel; the experience was exhilarating and therapeutic and I think that something of Virginia’s delight in that holiday is preserved in a contribution (it is not easy to know whether one should describe it as a story or an article) to the refurbished Nation entitled To Spain’ (93). This visit included a fortnight’s stay with Gerald Brenan in the Alpujarra mountains in southern Spain. Brenan described their passionate discussions on literature in chapter 13 of his South from Granada (1957). He recorded their agreements and disagreements –he admired Ulysses, for example, while Virginia found it ‘vulgar and lower class’ (Brenan 1974, 157). Her favourite subject was ‘the difference between the younger and the older generations’, Gerald belonging, like her nephews, to the former and therefore being, in Virginia’s words: ‘less subtle, less sensitive, but more downright and more intelligent’ (Brenan 1974, 79).

These discussions were also held with Quentin’s brother Julian, especially after he went as Professor of English to Wuhan University in China. Quentin comments that his aunt ‘distrusted academic criticism altogether’ and cites an extract from a letter from Virginia to Julian in 1935, in which she scolds him and belittles his profession: ‘“But why teach English?… all one can do is to herd books into groups, and then these submissive young, who are far too frightened and callow to have a bone in their backs, swallow it down; and tie it up; and thus we get English Literature into A B C; one, two, three; and lose all sense of what its [sic] about” VW to Julian Bell, 1 December 1935’ (173). Quentin records that Julian once ‘came blundering in’ to a dinner party where many of the Bloomsbury set were gathered and this prompted Maynard Keynes to say that the younger generation ‘had no religion save Communism and this was worse than nothing’ (177). Quentin’s reply would be: ‘But it is true that during these years the temper of literature was changing, or at all events that a large and important contingent of ← 27 | 28 → young poets and novelists were calling for a literature that would lead to effective political action’ (185–6). Virginia’s pacifism required her to separate literature from politics, and her nephew offers, in quite strong language, an objective view of the pros and cons of her type of writing at that particular political juncture: