Читать книгу The Neglected Poetry - Maria Luisa González Biosca - Страница 13

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First Clues

1.1. The Beginning

The study and analysis of the International Brigadists’ poetry was born as a project which had to follow some principles and a specific methodology to become an academic investigation. The first phase, which I never imagined would be so arduous, consisted of collecting all the material and, at the same time, following the objectives of the investigation; I studied and approached the historical causes which gave rise to the formation of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War.

The investigation began with two fundamental books. The first one is Los brigadistas de habla inglesa en la Guerra Civil Española written by Rodríguez Celada, González de la Aleja and Pastor García (2006). The book, as its title indicates, reviews the literature written in English during the Spanish Civil War. What was most interesting for our research are the bibliographic sources which are used and which helped us to find poets and poems written during the period of the conflict on Spanish soil. The second book is a bilingual anthology edited in 1986 by Álvarez Rodríguez and López Ortega, Poesia Anglo-Norteamericana de la Guerra Civil Española. This book did not have a bibliography. Therefore, I could not find the origin of the untitled poem written by the American brigadist, Joseph Selligman. My interest in this poem was personal since the first time I read it, because I noticed that its refrain and the narration echoed the poem written by Alfred Lord Tennyson, The Charge of the Light Brigade (1854). I only found this information in The Last Great Cause, a book written by Stanley Weintraub in 1968, a study about the literature written by the Americans involved in the Spanish war.

The next steps were the searches for more data, personal memoirs and photographs through anthologies, literary magazines published by brigadists, internet sources and websites, biographies, catalogues, libraries, battlefields and museum websites, as for example, the Imperial War Museum, among others.

I contacted the Asociación de Amigos de las Brigadas Internaciones in Madrid by telephone and Severiano Montero, the president of the association at that time, answered my questions about a topic which was new for me. I wondered where they had fought, and if they had been in the trenches for long periods of time. Severiano Montero, a scholar of history and professor, suggested that I participate in the guided marches to the battlefields where the brigadists had fought. He also told me to visit the Conde Duque Newspaper Library in Madrid, where microfilmed diaries of The Volunteer for Liberty, published from February 1937 until February 1938, are preserved on microfilm.

Reading those old periodicals published at that time in English in a country, where the majority of the population was illiterate, was an emotional moment of the research. Then, my field work continued when I rang the newspaper library of the Pavellón de la República which belongs to the University of Barcelona and, fortunately, the archivist confirmed there were some issues of the The Volunteer for Liberty. However, the archivist told me I needed a letter of presentation from the dean of the University of Valencia to have access to the newspapers. Other places, such as the Humanities Library at the Valencia University, the newspaper library in Valencia, the newspaper library of the Ateneo Mercantil and the Institute Française of Valencia, were very useful. One of the most interesting archives that I worked with through the Internet is the Abraham Lincoln Brigades Archive in New York, where there is a great deal of official and personal data about the American brigadists.

Other valuable sources of first-hand information were the diaries, biographies or novels written by brigadists, where they relate their memories, and the ones written by war correspondents that tell a great deal about their experiences and implications with the “causa.” Many war correspondents, such as Martha Gelhorn, Virginia Cowles, Sefton Delmer, Josephine Herbst, Ernest Hemmingway, Langston Hughes, Charly Buckley, Herbert Mathews and John Whitaker spoke clearly about the facts of the war where they lived close to the fighting. Their vision of the personal tragedies of the brigadists, the popular army and the Spanish civilians reflected the professionalism of the good journalists who wrote what they saw without being afraid of the threat of censorship and its consequences because they were observers, journalists and protagonists all at the same time.

Even though I found books in the archives they were not sufficient enough for the investigation. Therefore, it was necessary to look for and buy all the anthologies, and most of the personal memoirs, essays, criticisms, biographies and history books on the Internet and from abroad. Sometimes there were handicaps because some books did not arrive on time, others were out of print and I had to look for them in other places. I had to reorder books and cancel other orders. Finally, I was able to compile a great deal of information to be able to carry out the research.

Another helpful source of information has been Ray Hoff, the son of Harold Hoff, an American brigadist of the XV Brigade. Ray sent me a facsimile of all the issues of The Volunteer of Liberty. He also sent other documents about the brigades, poems, pictures, and letters and has always been willing to help in any way possible.

1.2. Development of the Research

Taking into account that this chapter also deals with the necessary field work for the qualitative research, the methodology depended to a large extent on the knowledge of the historical context to which the brigadists belonged, and the consequences that the Spanish war had on their lives. The normal day-to-day routine of millions of citizens was interrupted by the coup d’état led by a group of rebel generals against the legality of the Spanish Republic government. The experience of the war is reflected in their poetry; they were involved in events that would change their lives forever. The worldwide scenario was changing dramatically during the Spanish Civil War, so, the intellectuals from abroad, who supported the Spanish Republic, answered the tragic appeal of Spain with their poetry.

A comparison between the legacy of the poetry written by the three groups will helped to single out what issues and aesthetic currents influenced these poets. Visiting natural scenarios, such as Belchite, Benicàssim, Brunete or Jarama, where the brigadists fought and that inspired most of the poetry they wrote, a part of the global process of the qualitative research of how things took place and how they progressed. Therefore, I visited some of the battlefields and places where events occurred. I also had the opportunity to listen to the experiences of some brigadists through the testimony of their children, Raymond Hoff and James Neugass, the sons of Harold Hoff and James Neugass, both of them members of the XV Brigade.

One of the most touching moments of the research was during the homage in November 2012 to the International Brigades at the Complutense University in Madrid, one of the first places where the brigadists defended the city from the attacks of the rebels. There I introduced myself to one of the last British brigadists who was still alive, David Lomon. I thanked him for what he had done for my country, Spain. Then he held my hand, put it against his chest and said, “You do not have to thank me. I did it because it came from my heart.” After the homage, I interviewed him, and I also asked about Clive Branson, another brigadist who had been captured with him by the Italian fascist infantry during the retreats in March, 1938, after the fall of Belchite. Both of them had been sent to the concentration camp of San Pedro de Cardeña in Burgos, where Branson had written poems and made sketches of the brigadist prisoners. Then David remembered that Branson had made a charcoal portrait of him. This picture is presently at the Max Memorial Library in London. David Lomon died a few weeks later.

1.3. Selection of the Poets from the XV International Brigade

Traditionally, poetry has been used as propaganda of war with the intention to gain support of the people, and that was what the Spanish Republic needed in order to collect funds for the refugees, food, medicines and other supplies for the Spanish people. Thanks to the initiative by Nancy Cunard to publish the survey “Are you for or against the war?” in 1937, many poems from Canada, England, Ireland, and also from the United States were published in favour of the Spanish Republic. This made the Spanish “causa” very popular around the world. It also helped the citizens to be aware of what really was happening with the agreement of non-intervention. The questionnaire explained that the agreement was a farce, because two of the nations that had already signed it, Germany and Italy, had invaded Spain and supported the rebel General Francisco Franco.

The corpus of poets chosen is based on the experience the brigadists went through while serving on the Loyalist side. Poems written by the nurses and journalists, as for example, Langston Hughes, who had spent three months with the XV Brigade, were also included.

The continuous references to the land were crucial: the trenches, the anguish, the fear of death, the blitzed cities, the hospital, the ambulance, etc. This poetry, mainly based on personal experience of the war, did not idealize it, although the poets defended the fight for their ideals.

1.4. Selection of the Retrospective Poets

The first selection of poetry written by brigadists, nurses and journalists who were involved in the war, has been extended with the poems written by those who wrote them after the end of the war. As mentioned before, I have called this group Retrospective Poets.

Therefore, I decided to separate this group from the one of the brigadists, because their poems were written after they had returned to their countries. These poems echo their remembrances of the war. Some were written while the war was still in progress and others were written many years later.

1.5. Selection of the Poets who supported the Spanish Republic from Abroad

As I have already mentioned in the introduction, this third group of poets, who for different reasons supported the loyalist side of the Spanish struggle with their poetry, left an important legacy. There were poets both from Europe and from America and Canada. The selection of these poets has been made from different newspapers and anthologies of poetry from the Spanish Civil War, some from the 1930s and some published more recently, as for example, the Anthology of American Poetry by Oxford University Press, published in 2006. Some authors were already canonical at that time; others were not recognized until a few years later.

As this anthology indicates, the poetry written by the Brigadist and Retrospective groups and the Abroad group that supported the Spanish Republic paid special attention to imagery and symbols, even though it was realistic poetry. The poets who wrote from abroad depicted the striking crudeness of war by combining simple vocabulary and, in some cases, complex diction. It was a poetry which focused on propaganda, as it wanted citizens of other countries to open their eyes to the advance of fascism. On the other hand, the poetry of the Brigadists and Retrospective groups conveyed the reality of a shock-force soldier with his own fears, feelings and hopes; thus, they also used plain diction to describe specific moments and situations. They did not use extra words, just the necessary ones to reflect their emotions and the intensity of war. By contrast, even though the supporters used simple language as well, we can extract from the reading of the poems, that their language was more rhetorical and enveloping; sentences were complex and longer.

Reading the poems aloud again and again, recording, listening and reading them again was the technique I used to grasp the iambs, rhyme and the intensity of the poems. Many poems were written in free verse; however, classical types also abound, as the sonnet, elegy, apostrophe and classical stanza, like the heroic quatrain. A classic device of Georgian and Pastoral poetry profusely used by these poets is the capital letter at the beginning of each line of the poem.

The interpretation is another step where I entered the creation of the poem to discover its message through the understanding of the elements of the lyric, such as, lyrical object, theme, tone, attitude and speaker or persona, who sometimes acts as the voice of the poet, but other times is the voice of the protagonist.

Spiegelman explains how to listen to the poems; the rhythm, rhyme and the words all create an effect on the meaning of the poem and, since this is war poetry, the reader can hear the sounds of war: the bombs, the explosions, the shouting, the confusion. In “Lecture Five” the author deals with metaphor and metonymy, which are poetic devices used extensively in figurative language to enhance what the poets are saying in order to give the reader more impact.