Looking For Orwell and Finding Gaudí
by Samuel Hux (January 2016)
Passing through Barcelona years ago, during the waning time of the Franco regime, and knowing I would have twelve hours in my favorite of all cities, I decided that instead of merely revisiting I would make a special itinerary, a kind of historical visit to a moment I had read of more than once: revolutionary Barcelona, 3rd of May, 1937.
George Orwell, more famous for 1984, may have written a better book in Homage to Catalonia, his memoir of several months’ involvement in the Civil War as a volunteer for the defense of the short-lived Republic. While Orwell was recuperating from battle that spring of 1937, a mini-civil-war broke out in Catalonia expressing the labyrinthine politics joining and separating, in about equal measures, the left-wing members of the Republican coalition. The most powerful members, communists and socialists (in Catalonia, unlike the rest of Spain, they were officially united as—in Catalan—the Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya: PSUC), had no great trust in their anarchist colleagues, who returned the suspicions, and had even less sympathy for the militants of the POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista), with whom foreign volunteer Orwell was loosely associated, and which as an unofficially “Trotskyist” party obviously had little use for the communists hewing a Stalinist line and dominating the PSUC and much of the regional government through their access to rubles.
At any rate—cutting through a great deal of internecine complexity—the communists with the aid of the regional government’s Assault Guards made war that May against their anarchist and POUMist “allies.” Within days the POUM was no more, and the anarchists, too numerous and ubiquitous to be wiped out, were more distrustful of the Republic than before. Orwell returned to England, not without some difficulty, to write his great exposé of Stalinist duplicity and a moving celebration of Spanish character.
It was hard to imagine fighting on the gay and extroverted Ramblas, that beautiful promenade with its kiosks, famed aviaries, and outdoor cafés. Nonetheless, I walked from its midpoint where Orwell had first heard gunfire that May 3rd toward the bottom, to assure myself that the Hotel Falcón, which had been in ’37 a POUM boarding house for militants across the street from the Comité Local, no longer existed. Still, I was a little disappointed at finding no trace of the Falcón even if decades after the event, although no surprise naturally at the absence of the Comité Local. My historical ardor cooled: a foolish venture. And what was I after, anyway? Bullet holes? Ghosts? An old figure lurking nearby like Coleridge’s ancient Mariner to fix me with a mad eye and “Señor, señor. . . hay una historia. . .”—someone as obsessed with the past as I often am?
I turned the corner and came upon the Hotel Continental, where Orwell stayed with his wife, and which he described as a kind of neutral ground in May 1937. Comfortable old place, generous leather chairs, expansive windows commanding the Ramblas, the charm of an establishment you feel must have been past its prime even during it, and the better for it.
I took a seat in the Moka, and thought. . . . The name of an establishment which no longer exists appears as the name of another: nothing rare. But: the name of an old, long-outlawed party’s boarding house from decades ago appears on the building next to where that party’s executive offices used to be, across from where some of that party’s militants held off attackers, and above where the attackers were themselves holed-up. So? The size of my excitement was absurd, all out of proportion to the historical significance (none really) of this antiquarian irony. But. . . what was it doing there? Sheer coincidence? The private joke, or personal solace, of some citizen harboring old political sympathies in Franco’s Spain? Not really likely. Coincidence more likely.
Many visits to La Sagrada Familia have not tired me of it. I climb the dark spiral stairways, losing sense of direction as I pass the deep-set windows—a view of buildings in the distance, then sky, then the façade of the adjoining tower, then the green mosaic growing beneath the cross—and unsettled in a way only partially related to sharp heights. Up one tower, grasping parapets to cross to the next, repeating the movement clear across the five as if describing a drunken, spiraling graph. Then several minutes standing before the whole, muttering, inappropriately, “Goddamn, goddamn”—as I did my first visit there at any rate.
In the basement beneath the transept—what should be the nave was a storage yard of construction material—was a large model of Gaudí’s impossible conception. It could never have been completed in his lifetime: even if he had not been run down by trolley car in 1926, a senseless and tragic death cutting short forty-three years of work on his magnum opus which saw him at the end literally move on to the grounds so as not to lose a minute. In another basement to the rear there was an exhibition in photograph and miniature of this and other buildings. Moving from one to the next I knew I would have to see the originals. And then, partially because they were all around me in reproduction, partly because I was inside one, but mostly because of the accumulated tension of two hours of feasting on Gaudí, I was overtaxed and emotionally exhausted, stifling tears. This unpredictable sadness, not depression, was something I would have to think about a long time.
There is something inescapably “literary” about Spain. As there is about many places, no doubt, but there’s this difference: Spain seems less a subject of art than itself an enormous collective artist, shaping its experience in a moving form. The bull fight, that five-act drama—which I would like to be the first not to talk about, although I love it very much—is a clear instance of this. (Well. . . I will talk about it, but only to note Salvador de Madariaga’s remark to those who sentimentally object to it: “the bull has a far better chance of killing his opponent than a salmon.”) El fútbol (soccer to us) may now surpass la corrida as the national sport, and baloncesto (basketball) grows ever more popular. But they are exceptionally balletic games, and the more slowly deliberate American football will never thrive Spanishly.
Spain has long been a kind of poet to the western world: “your music is delightful.” By which we mean no song, book, painting, building in particular—for the average educated westerner probably knows more about English, American, French, German, Italian, Greek culture than Spanish—but the perceived ambiance of the nation itself. And when we complain of changes in Spain—authentic flamenco is hard to find, there are Chinese restaurants in Madrid, etc.—we often mean, though perish the conscious thought, “would that new sufferings,” or the old ones really, “tormented your soul.” But if we sometimes patronize Spain, like rich burghers at an opera some composer bled for them, it is just as true to say that we respond to a truth about the country. It is a kind of Kierkegaardian poet. It is not simply that we have assigned to Spain a romantic function that we insist be fulfilled. For Spain has over the centuries insisted on its difference, claimed profounder depths of joy and anguish—la leyenda negra—like a kind of Russia of the west, often assuming a moral and aesthetic superiority to the rest of Europe similar to what a poet might assume toward an audience.
These words, while not this application, should ring familiar to Americans, for long before Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis about “the significance of the frontier in American history” our cultural mythology had pre-empted such a notion, and American literary criticism has done much to refine it since. But perhaps we have much less claim to having been “Adams” taming a frontier than have Spaniards, or no more at least. For while we did found a new nation in a new world and had our violent symbolic rite de passage with the Revolution, we yet were “British” to the core when we did both, the Revolution itself our insistence on our rights as “free born Englishmen.” We inherited an elaborate culture to transform to our needs, and we were always a part of Europe, no matter the distance, even when we least thought we were. The Spaniards, although situated physically in the old world, also had their violent birth as a nation, not by revolution exactly, but by three acts of expulsion. And with those expulsions of Islamic Moors, Jews, and Christianized Moors, they hurled themselves backwards for centuries, and then made themselves even more parochial by fighting the intellectual currents from faithless Europe.
Ortega’s words contain exaggeration: I have not the least doubt about that. But that comes, I think, from his partially polemical intention: to convince his compatriots that their insistence on Spain’s difference, their claims to profounder depths of joy and anguish, were leading Spain nowhere, and that it was time to learn to think instead of merely to feel. I don’t think Ortega would disagree, polemical purposes set aside, that it’s the “perpetual struggle with elementary forces” that gives Spanish culture its fragmentary quality, its acceptance of a kind of incompleteness.
. . . As an aesthetic faith, I was saying, it is a moving commitment to visions a human being has no realistic, realizable right to possess.
AN AFTERWORD
These thoughts, although edited, were composed some time ago as a part of a project not quite abandoned but certainly set aside. Revisiting them, I find I am still moved, but now saddened. Saddened because I suspect or fear that the Spain that so moved me may no longer exist: “the passage into the future” with which I ended may not be the passage I expected, and the future a kind of betrayal.
This is in part because the principle scene of the memories, Barcelona, is the capital of the region of Catalonia, and the Catalans seem head-strongly dead-set on severing their historic connection with Spain. I pray their dreams of secession suffer the fate of the Scottish Nationalists: lucky failure.
But the sadness is also in part (and the larger part) because the Spain which inspired my thoughts—and my love—is on its way to vanishing, or perhaps already has, leaving only images attached to very little contemporary reality. What was so attractive about Spain—let us face the fact—was its conservative to reactionary bondage to the past (to put it a way most people would probably find offensive or politically incorrect) or (cleaning my thoughts to make them less offensive if not quite acceptable) what was so attractive was its resistance to the superficialities of the trendy present. But the fact is that Spain since the death of Franco and the triumph of democracy has become the trendiest nation in Europe.
Before his death in 2002 the great novelist Camilo José Cela—La Familia de Pascual Duarte, La Colmena (The Hive), Mrs. Caldwell hable con su hijo, and others—was the monumental cultural presence of post-Franco Spain (as he was of Francoist Spain). His successor as Spain’s most distinguished literary artist is the film director Pedro Almodóvar. Ingmar Bergman aside, has a film-maker ever been the preeminent artist in a given culture? For all his brilliance, Almodóvar is no Bergman, neither in artistry nor artistic disposition: he is no tragedian. He is however a thoroughly compelling auteur (the Parisian with-it word for director is well advised).
Among his twenty-odd films, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Mujeres al borde de un ataque de “Nervios”), 1988, is a mad-cap joy, a manic farce one would have to be humorless to submit to criticism. With Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (Átame), 1990, Almodóvar was really finding his world, the offbeat romance of a porn star and a veteran of the psychiatric ward. In tone, it was preparation for All About My Mother (Todo sobre mi madre), 1999, a surprisingly charming film about a pregnant nun, transvestites, lesbians, you-name-it, as woman seeks the father of her dead son and finds him inhabiting the transsexual demi-monde—which the film doesn’t seem to make very “demi.” In my judgment Almodóvar’s greatest film was made in 2002 (the year of Cela’s death, a fact of symbolic insignificance I know), Talk to Her (Habla con ella). Some remarks:
It is not hard to think what some old Spaniards I knew in reactionary Spain would think of Almodóvar’s film. Nor do I much wonder what Almodóvar would think of my old friends. No more than I judge he would think of the retrograde, likeable-unlikeable, complicated, compelling, and thoroughly noble patriarch in José Luis Garci’s 1998 film El Abuelo (The Grandfather), based on a Benito Pérez Galdós novel. It is hard to reconcile the fact that Galdós’s nineteenth century Spain and Almodóvar’s are the same real estate.
I make no pretense of objectivity. So I feel free to confess that Almodóvar has become my convenient metaphor for cool and with-it contemporary Spain. And, nursing my subjectivity, I feel free to say I am confident Almodóvar could not easily imagine my old friend Miguel Morell. I am going back now thirty years or more. Miguel was. . . I suppose one could say he was a facilitator: he put people in touch with people, as he put me in touch with a landowner with excessive land when I wanted to buy a piece of property. I cannot remember if I first met Miguel when I rented his casa one summer or through a friend who lived an expatriate existence in Miguel’s pueblo. We (my lady and I) were close friends of Sylven, an early-retired Swedish psychoanalyst, and her husband Mischa, a Latvian-Jewish-Swedish retired publisher-journalist, who lived in Spain as freelance translators, primarily English to Swedish. They are both dead now, she because she could not outrun disease, he because he could not live without her. Nor could Miguel live without her—but in a totally different sense.
I lost contact with Miguel over the years (another story all together) and do not know if he survived Sylven. And I think I might be relieved in a complicated sort of hope for mercy to know that he did not, like Mischa, live to see her die.
Pepe does not speak directly to me, but to my friends whom he knows much better. With sweeping glance from my friends toward me, movements slow-motion but speech unfaltering, he speaks as if through them to me:
The American is a romantic, he says, in Spanish of course as he knows no English. I only wish that I were a torero, a matador, what young Spanish boy has not had that dream?—but such is not, I am sorry to say, the circumstance. My work is hard, my days are long, there is no fulfillment in them. There is little money to be made for most of the year. Which necessitates driving oneself during the richer summer months. But for what, really? Merely to survive?
Pepe concludes, as if the logic is unassailable, “Yo no tengo ninguna mujer. Mi cama está fria.” I have no woman. My bed is cold.
Does anyone in Spain talk that way anymore?
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Samuel Hux is Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at York College of the City University of New York. He has published in Dissent, The New Republic, Saturday Review, Moment, Antioch Review, Commonweal, New Oxford Review, Midstream, Commentary, Modern Age, Worldview, The New Criterion and many others.
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