“And so Puss-in-Boots made the miller’s son into a marquis and he married the Princess Violet Ink, the daughter of the king of that country who was called Saxofon XIII. Soon afterward the king died from having eaten a rice pudding made of pearls instead of rice and the miller’s son inherited the crown. But he kept his promise to Puss-in-Boots and published a royal decree handing over the country to the workers. Then the workers of all classes formed a council and elected a president of the republic. And they gave the crown to the dentists to make gold fillings for the poor people who had lost their teeth.”
So runs the Madrid, 1937, version of the old fairy tale. Little Red Riding Hood, too, has suffered a war change. She has become a worker in a chocolate factory. After her tragic end her fellow workers get together and kill the wolf and chase all his rich and powerful friends out of the country forever. But Madrid’s literature has become Marxist only in spots. The Army, which through the efforts of the Cultural Militia is learning to read as fast as it is learning to fight, has an extraordinarily eclectic literary taste. At the Escorial, where the 3rd Division is in training, the soldiers’ library contains a collection of works ranging from Homer to Elinor Glyn, the latter, it should be added, represented by La Filosofía del Amor. Among the authors in between are Plato, Sophocles, St. Augustine, Spinoza, Francis Bacon, Descartes, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Rousseau, Kant, Victor Hugo, Dostoevski, Marx, Henry George, Freud, Jules Verne, Lenin, Galsworthy, Ortega y Gasset, Dos Passos, Garcia Lorca, and Sinclair Lewis.
At the rear, the effect of the war on the printed word is apparent everywhere. It is dark inside the big bookstore on the Gran Via because all the windows have been blocked up with sandbags. But it is not too dark to see the blaze of civil-war literature spread out on the front tables. Because prices must meet hard times, most of it is in the form of paperbacks and pamphlets with covers that are vivid and striking: raised fists, broken chains, and bombs bursting. Guernica in flames proclaims “the torch of fascism”; Marx’s beard flows over innumerable volumes; the sandaled foot of the Spanish worker crushes the swastika; Stalin’s profile is uplifted to a fleet of conquering airplanes; Lenin’s fist pounds the table; Durutti, the fallen Anarchist hero, summons Spanish comrades to victory. Soldiers, for the most part, are buying these books, for the trenches have been fertile soil for the growth of political curiosity.
But behind the front tables the regular stock is still displayed and still sought. You can find El Mundo de Guermantes of Proust, La Montaña Mágica of Thomas Mann, Contrapunta of Aldous Huxley, and the collected works of H. G. Wells, Pierre Loti, Oscar Wilde, Jack London, the last a tremendous favorite.
Secondhand books are sold in stalls and from pushcarts in the streets. As the war literature has not had time to simmer down to the secondhand stage, the civil war is ignored here as completely as if the bookstalls were in Fourth Avenue or 59th Street. You find chiefly dime novels, detective stories, and Mexican “Westerns.” Edgar Wallace, E. Phillips Oppenheim, S. S. Van Dine, and James Oliver Curwood lead the field in translation. I did see two books on Russia, but they could hardly be said to indicate a trend. One, with a picture of Lenin on the cover, was Santa Rusia by Jacinto Benavente. The other was Esplendor y Ocaso de los Romanof (Glory and Decadence of the Romanoffs) by Ana Wyrubova, “la favorita de la Zarina.”
Newsstand dealers have found it necessary to move so often because of the shelling that they no longer have permanent stalls. Newspapers and magazines are spread out on the sidewalks or on soapboxes. At first you are surprised to find the smooth-paper movie, fashion, theater, and art magazines still displayed. Looking closer, you find they are pre-war issues, and the news dealer tells you that all the smooth paper was imported and is no longer obtainable. Katharine Hepburn’s portrait adorns the July 1936 issue ofCinelandia, the last movie magazine to be published in Spain.
In the place of the luxury reviews a number of thin but lively weeklies have sprung up, each dealing in its own fashion with some aspect of the war. Some are political, some satiric, some pictorial, some literary. The paper is sleazy, the ink smells, the print comes through on the wrong side, but the writing is vigorous. A favorite subject of the caricaturists is Queipo de Llano with his Kaiser Wilhelm mustache and his bottle. Known as the “Lion of the Subway” because of his preference for the rear guard, he is generally shown swaying uncertainly before the microphone. Parodies of his nightly broadcasts from Seville accompany the sketches.
For photographers the war is a golden opportunity. Life would envy the series in the rotogravure weekly Crónico on “Blood and Fire in the Mediterranean,” dealing with the torpedoing of the British oil tanker Woodford. Even the comic strips have become war-minded. Weekly the terrible tale is unrolled, in rhymed couplets and color, of “Don Tadeo Bergante, Un fascista repugnante.”
But if the war has permeated ninety percent of the newsprint, some pages still remain untouched by it. In one of the new weeklies, between two articles on “The Magnificent Discipline of the Republican Army” and “The New Workers’ Institute in Valencia,” appears a fiction serial entitled “Marion: Neither Maid, Wife, nor Widow.” Marion is a pure anachronism. She hails taxis and wears evening dresses, two things that might belong to the Stone Age, so vanished are they from the Madrid of today. Even the daily papers leave a corner open to matters outside the war. The siege of Gijon, the speeches of Dr. Negrin in Geneva, the problems of evacuation and food, the machinations of the “Fifth Column,” the disputes of the CNT and the UGT occupy the news and editorial columns. But you can still turn to the back page of El Liberal and find an agony column overflowing with ardor. “Single lady, serious, would like to become acquainted with gentleman of position and education.” “Gentleman, thirty-eight, cultivated, well-employed, would like to become acquainted, object matrimony, with lady thirty to thirty-five, not tall, good-natured.” That is the quality of Madrid. A year of siege and shells has shattered the surface of life, but underneath the old wheels are still turning. Life conforms to civil war where it must and clings to the old ways where it can.
The Nation, November 6, 1937.