by Jimmy Burns
As Burns admitted, such omission was not due to a lack of witnesses. During the 1930s, he met and befriended Italian, German and Russian Catholics, all of whom had managed to escape from the political repression of their countries, and come to London as refugees. They included Don Luigi Sturzo, the founder of the Partito Popolare which Mussolini had banned, members of the German centre party whom Hitler had forced out of power, and the Russian Christian philosopher Berdyaev, who had fled Stalin. ‘These solitary prophets and witnesses were welcomed with sympathy as if they had escaped from an earthquake, but an earthquake far removed from our island.’
And yet the Spanish Civil War brought the earthquake much nearer than Burns had believed possible at the time. It was a conflict that transcended ordinary politics, inflaming and dividing British public opinion as few other foreign questions had done since the Russian Revolution.
2
Authors Take Sides
The radicalisation of Spanish politics during the 1930s fuelled a growing alienation between some English Catholics and the secularist ascendancy in British literature represented by the Bloomsbury Group. ‘There’s something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God,’ the Bloomsbury icon Virginia Woolf had commented in 1928 on learning of T.S. Eliot’s deepening involvement with the Christian faith. Seven years later Woolf was no less horrified on hearing that the South African-born poet Roy Campbell and his wife Mary had converted to Catholicism.
The Campbells had drifted into the Bloomsbury set during the late 1920s, she rather more wittingly than he. Campbell, who had studied at Oxford two years ahead of Evelyn Waugh, was taken on as a contributor to the New Statesman thanks in part to various leading Bloomsbury figures giving their seal of approval to his early poetry. But his deeply ingrained male chauvinism, political conservatism and religious devotion placed him at odds with the avowed socialism of Bloomsbury.
In 1928 Campbell left England for Provence after discovering his wife Mary’s lesbian affair with Virginia Woolf’s lover, Vita Sackville-West. For a while he lived among fishermen, and became a huge enthusiast of bullfighting, finding in the simplicity of the local people and the traditions of their culture a soothing contrast to the world of Bloomsbury.
After being reunited, the Campbells crossed into Spain in 1933, to avoid being sued by their neighbours. A goat they owned had escaped and gone on the rampage, destroying a number of young peach trees in the process. They stayed for a while in Barcelona where they witnessed an abortive revolution by a group of anarchists, one of several preludes to the civil war. They eventually settled in Toledo.
Surrounded by thick ancient walls, and perched on a hill overlooking the Tagus River, Toledo’s surviving battlements served as a reminder of Spain’s glorious past when the city had been the imperial capital and bastion of Christianity under the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. It was filled still with convents, churches and seminaries.
When the left-wing Popular Front won the Spanish elections in February 1936, an ugly campaign of anticlericalism shattered the Campbells’ cultural idyll. In Toledo, which Campbell described as the ‘whole embodiment of the crusade for Christianity against Communism’, churches were burnt and nuns and priests attacked in the streets. To Campbell such deeds were the acts of barbarians bent on destroying the social fabric and soul of Spain. He reacted by staging a somewhat eccentric act of ‘anti-Red defiance’, a month before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. It took place in the local bullring, for the passionate loyalty Campbell felt for the Catholic faith was surpassed only by his love of wine and bulls. Campbell got his wife to help him plait red and yellow, the colours of the old Monarchist flag, later usurped by Franco, (as opposed to the red, yellow, and purple of the Republican standard) into the manes and tails of a couple of horses and then got his young daughters, Teresa and Anna, to ride them across the ring before the start of the bullfight.
Four weeks later, Campbell was watering one of his horses when the peace of the day was shattered by the rattle of rifle fire, a signal that the civil war had begun. Within a month the Campbell family had fled Spain, having witnessed at first hand the horror of the looting and summary executions initially carried out in Toledo by the left-wing militias. It was at this point that Campbell began to see the conflict in Spain as something that transcended politics. In the words of his biographer Joseph Pearce, ‘It was deeper than the struggle for temporary power. It was not a fight between fascism and communism, but between Christ and the anti-Christ – a fight to the death between good and evil, God and the Devil.’
During his first days back in England, Campbell’s bullfighting exploits, as well as his seemingly miraculous escape from the anarchist firing squads, were all over the British newspapers, drawing sympathy from fellow Catholics, among them Burns, whose own interest in Spain was developing into his primary concern as a publisher. As Burns later recalled, the civil war placed a barrier between him and the left-wing poets Wystan Auden and Stephen Spender, to whom he had been introduced when they were undergraduates at Oxford and who mixed in similar intellectual circles in London. By contrast, Roy Campbell now spoke ‘more for my sympathies’.
The Catholic weekly the Tablet, which Burns now partly owned and managed, unhesitatingly took Franco’s side in the civil war. It offered Campbell as much support as Burns could muster, beginning with a letter of accreditation as a war correspondent. Campbell spent much of what was left of the Spanish Civil War wielding the propagandist’s cudgel, writing shrill poems, most of which were characterised by the kind of jingoistic triumphalism with which Franco personally stamped his military campaign.
Campbell later developed these into a five-thousand-word would-be epic, The Spanish Civil War, whose publication Burns oversaw at Longman, in 1939, the year after George Orwell published his Homage to Catalonia. While Orwell’s book was a courageously objective essay on the hopes and shattered dreams of those who fought for the Spanish Republic, Campbell’s poem, ‘The Flowering Rifle’, was an uncontrolled anti-communist and occasionally racist diatribe which even his sympathetic biographer found politically offensive and artistically flawed. ‘It plods along with leaden boots firing scorn-blinded blanks at “bolshies”, anarchists and Jews, offering only an occasional glimpse of the genius which its author possesses,’ comments Pearce.
While in Spain, Campbell followed Burns’s instructions and travelled by train to the Francoist-controlled university city of Salamanca. There he obtained a safe conduct from the chief of the Nationalist Press Office, Merry del Val, to the Madrid front, along with further letters of introduction to some of Franco’s commanders. Campbell offered to enlist as a soldier with the anti-Republican monarchist requetés rather than with the Franco regulars, but he was told that it was as a writer and poet that he could best serve the Franco cause.
The regiment had weeks earlier happily accepted into its ranks another English Catholic friend of Burns’s, the young Cambridge graduate Peter Kemp. Kemp’s views as a student had been so right-wing that he had formed a splinter union of his own as a rival to the Conservative Association. He later claimed that his reasons for going to Spain were not entirely political – he had no idea what career he wanted to pursue and thought that he would spend a few months getting to know a ‘strange country’ and learn something about modern warfare. However, his politics determined the side he chose.
‘Priests and nuns were shot simply because they were priests or nuns, ordinary people murdered just because they had a little money or property. It’s to fight against that sort of thing that I am going to Spain,’ Kemp told his friends.
Kemp’s enlistment on Franco’s side proved a rarity in contrast to the hundreds of his fellow countrymen who, with the encouragement of the Communist Party, joined the pro-Republic International Brigades. With the military assistance being offered by the Italians and the Germans, the Nationalist cause found it unnecessary to actively recruit further in Britain, particularly since to have done so would have
further undermined the British government’s policy of non-intervention.
Instead, Franco set up an agency in London to boost his propaganda efforts, enlisting the support of sectors of the media, and lobbying politicians and government officials. The agency, operating out of a suite in the Dorchester Hotel, was headed up by two Spanish aristocrats, the Marqués del Moral and the Duke of Alba, both of whom had been educated at Jesuit public schools in England, and had strong ties at the highest levels of London society.
Of the two, Alba was the most pivotal in terms of Anglo-Spanish relations. Spain’s leading nobleman was descended from one of the oldest aristocratic lines in Europe. His full title was Jacobo María del Pilar Carlos Manuel Fitz-James Stuart y Falcó, the 17th Duke of Alba and 10th Duke of Berwick. As a descendant of an illegitimate son of King James II by Arabella Churchill, he was a cousin of Winston’s, a tie that would give ‘Jimmy’ Alba a key diplomatic role as Franco’s ambassador in London during the Second World War.
Nevertheless the challenge del Moral and Alba faced in winning over British intellectuals who felt ideologically stirred by the Spanish Civil War was underlined by a survey of British writers carried out in the spring of 1937. Of those questioned, 127 were in favour of the Republican government, while only five declared themselves against it. Campbell did not participate in the poll. He was already in Spain, feeling himself liberated from the Anglo-Saxon literary intrigues he found so claustrophobic and politically unconvincing.
Graham Greene could have participated but chose not to. Evelyn Waugh was the only Catholic to cast his vote, and he was one of the five who in effect voted in support of the military-led uprising. By now Burns had emerged as the common thread linking Campbell, Greene and Waugh – the three best-known Catholic authors at the time – for he had befriended each one of them separately, and managed to influence all of them in a way that benefited the Francoist cause.
Burns’s takeover of the Tablet allowed him to extend his influence in the wider literary world. Into its pages he drew Greene in 1936 in what was to become an enduring relationship between the author and the international Catholic weekly. Greene was taken on as a regular reviewer, with the freedom to choose whatever book he liked for criticism. His Tablet journalism scorned the communism he had flirted with at university while holding back from the overtly pro-Francoist stance adopted by other contributors, led by the editor Douglas Woodruff.
When the pamphlet Authors Take Sides on the Spanish Civil War, based on the survey, was published in June 1937, Greene used the pages of the Spectator to mock the earnestness of those on the left, like Auden and Spender, who had engaged with the war in Spain initially with a self-consciously serious ideological intent. Greene contrasted the political rantings of the 1930s with the more easy-going attitudes of the Cambridge Apostles, among them Tennyson and his friend Henry Hallam, who in 1830 had undertaken secret missions in Spain in support of rebel activity, primarily for the thrill of it.
Years later, Greene told his official biographer Norman Sherry that one of the reasons he did not contribute to the Authors Take Sides survey was that, while he shared some sympathy for the Republican cause, he was horrified by the brutality sectors of the Spanish left had shown towards the religious orders and the clergy. The sympathy he felt for the Republic was principally focused on the Basque country, where a significant sector of the local population was both fervently Catholic and anti-Franco, fighting not for communism but for greater autonomy from the rest of Spain.
Greene’s interest in the Basque country intensified in the light of what occurred in the region in a town called Gernika, where in medieval times the Catholic Kings of Spain had sworn before a totemic oak tree forever to respect the rights of the local people. It was there that on the afternoon of 26 April 1937 a force of Luftwaffe bombers and fighter planes carried out an attack of terrible destruction and human carnage – a scene Picasso later immortalised in one of the most famous of war paintings. From a military perspective, the bombing of Gernika was a brilliant success for the pilots of the Condor Legion. Estimates of fatalities among the 7,000 then inhabitants of the town have varied widely over the years. The Republican government estimated that at least 1,600 had been killed while Franco put the number of dead, somewhat absurdly, at twelve. More recently Basque investigators have opted for a figure of between 120 and 250 after studying the town records, and on the grounds that many of the children had been previously evacuated while adults managed to protect themselves in bomb shelters.
However, the physical devastation of Gernika caused by the German bombers provoked panic as well as impotent outrage throughout much of the Basque region at the time. The razing to the ground of much of the town with incendiary bombs signalled a new and terrifying development in modern warfare, targeting the civilian population in order to smash its morale. Only the arrival on the scene of a group of independently minded journalists, led by Christopher Home of Reuters news agency and George Steer, of The Times, made it a public relations disaster for Franco’s side. Both men filed vivid reports of what they found, pointing the finger of blame for a callous act of inhumanity at the Germans and the Spanish general who had called on their assistance.
There then ensued a ferocious propaganda campaign, with claims and counter-claims about what exactly had gone on in Gernika. The first round began with a less than convincing denial from the Nationalists that the bombing had even taken place. On 28 April, the day Steer filed his report to The Times and the New York Times, another Times correspondent, James Holburn, filed from Salamanca, the Nationalist headquarters, reporting claims that Gernika had been set on fire by anti-Franco forces. Subsequently Nationalist press officers, under the management of Luis Bolín – the journalist who had helped organise the UK end of the Franco uprising – escorted visitors to Gernika on carefully controlled tours of the bombed town.
As part of a deliberate campaign of misinformation Bolín’s co-conspirator, Captain Hugh Pollard (the Englishman who had flown on the plane that picked up Franco in the Canaries), penned a letter to The Times suggesting that even if the Nationalists had, after all, been responsible for the bombing, it was justified. Pollard alleged anti-Franco forces were supplying small arms to terrorists fighting British colonial interests in India and Egypt. It was a curious argument with an allegation based on flimsy evidence. It was nevertheless a typical exercise in misinformation by an expert in the black arts.
The propaganda pendulum continued to swing from one side to the other, underlining the extent to which Gernika had become much more than just another war story. It had become a symbol of each side’s integrity, or lack of it. Basque Catholic priests were among those who remained at the forefront of denunciation of Nationalist brutality not just against Gernika but other towns bombed and then occupied by Franco forces. Twenty Basque priests, of whom one was an eyewitness of the bombing, and including the vicar-general of the diocese, wrote to Pope Pius XI telling him who had destroyed Gernika. Two of the priests acted as couriers and travelled to the Vatican, where their protests fell on deaf ears.
Meanwhile, Franco’s spin doctor, Bolín, did not remain idle. He flew back to London and with his friends the Marqués del Moral and the Duke of Alba enlisted Burns’s support in building up a body of influential opinion around a fundraising organisation called the Friends of Nationalist Spain. Among its keenest supporters was another of Bolin’s British co-conspirators, the Catholic publisher Douglas Jerrold, who wrote a long article for the Tablet challenging Steer’s version of events. A broader attack on the claims made by Basque Catholic priests and Steer, meanwhile, was contained in a letter that was circulated within the Jesuit community and the Vatican. It was written by Burns’s older brother, George, who as a Jesuit priest had spent time during the Spanish Civil War officiating to Nationalist troops.
By June 1937, the Basque capital, Bilbao, was resisting a major offensive by Franco’s army. The town had been supplied with additional ammunition, including new machine guns fr
om Czechoslovakia, and its command reinforced with some of the best officers communist Russia could muster. But the ‘ring of steel’ – the elaborate system of defence positions which had been set up in the hills surrounding the town – had been undermined by the betrayal of a Basque officer, Major Goicoechea, who had defected to the Franco side, and the besieged town was suffering a pounding by sustained artillery fire supported by aerial bombing.
The dramatic events surrounding the civil war in the Basque country stirred the artistic imaginations of painters, poets and writers, among them Graham Greene. Ten years had passed since Greene had married Vivien, a committed Catholic, having himself converted a year earlier.
It was Franco’s attack on the Republican-held Basque country that moved Greene initially, as he put it, to ‘examine more closely the effect of faith on action’. But it was his continuing refusal to declare his political allegiance unequivocally and openly for one side or the other that probably saved him in literary terms even if it made him enemies on the left and the right. Divided loyalties and shifting political allegiances would come to provide the core tension in Greene’s novels.
Looking back on the 1930s, Greene reflected that it was then that he had begun to see Catholicism as no longer primarily symbolic, ‘a ceremony at an altar with the correct canonical number of candles, with the women in my Chelsea congregation wearing their best hats’. Nor was it a philosophical page in the Jesuit Fr D’Arcy’s Nature of Belief, however much it might have impacted on his friend Burns’s theological formation. It was, as Greene put it, ‘closer now to death in the afternoon’. He went on: ‘A restlessness set in which has never quite been allayed: a desire to be a spectator of history, history in which I found I was concerned myself.’