Top 10 neglected books about the Spanish civil war | Books

Sometimes a cause arises that seems so clearcut – so right-or-wrong – that we can seize our position with something like relief, because we have found something good and true to believe in, and to fight for. The Spanish civil war, or rather the democratic Republic that was ended by it, is sometimes described as “the last great cause”. Because Hitler and Mussolini supported the military rebels attacking Spain’s elected leftwing government, the war has often been seen as a missed opportunity to face down Europe’s fascist dictators. It became a rallying cry around the world, bringing politics alive for a young generation in the 1930s.

The war famously inspired writers, some of them very famous – George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway dominate the anglophone field. I wrote my book Tomorrow Perhaps the Future in pursuit of individuals who – though not always as male, or white, or famous – turned out to be just as politicised by their times. I wanted to think about the imperative they’d identified of taking sides – a position that felt more relevant than ever over the last few years – but I was also curious about how writers, who surely need seclusion to do their best work, negotiated the clamour of such polarised, crisis-riven times.

In following women who showed their solidarity by going to Spain during the war, I came to wonder, too, how outsiders can offer themselves as allies without drowning out the very people they want to support. No cause is ever as straightforward as we might like to think, and perhaps that is why the Spanish civil war has proved an apparently inexhaustible source of literary inspiration. Here I’ve picked out some fiction and memoir that comes at the war from an unexpected tangent, or explores its legacy, or provides a reminder of just what an incredible range of people had their lives affected by this last great cause.

1. Savage Coast and Mediterranean by Muriel Rukeyser
The 22-year-old American Rukeyser was in Spain for only a few days after the outbreak of war before being evacuated, yet Spain, she later wrote, was the place where “I began to say what I believed”. The results included the modernist novel Savage Coast and an epic poem, Mediterranean. Rukeyser was haunted by the memory of Otto Bloch, an exile from Nazi Germany who joined the Republic’s foreign volunteer force, the International Brigades, and was killed. In Mediterranean, Rukeyser tells of a man who “kept his life straight as a single issue”, which, for me, sums up the dedication (and reduced options) of such people.

2. Soldiers of Salamis by Javier Cercas
This magnificent “true tale” follows a stalled novelist who becomes obsessed in the 1990s with the story of the falangist writer Rafael Sánchez Mazas and his escape from a Republican firing squad, thanks to a Republican soldier who spared his life. It’s a quest through archival scraps and oral history, one that demonstrates how our histories and legends are an accumulation of stories. It may start with Mazas, but the narrator’s encounter with Miralles, a forgotten Republican militiaman who went on to fight fascism in the second world war, forms the heart of the novel – and reminds us that injustices live on in the way different individuals and accounts are memorialised.

3. A Death in Zamora by Ramón Sender Barayón
When the war broke out, the acclaimed writer Ramón Sender left his family to join the Republicans. His wife, Amparo Barayón, headed for her home town of Zamora, expecting to find a refuge there despite the fact that it was in rebel hands. Instead, she was imprisoned and executed. A Death in Zamora narrates Sender Barayón’s attempts to piece together the story of his mother’s fate. Incredibly moving, it deals sensitively with the difficulties of seeking out the truth in communities where victims and perpetrators have long lived side by side and is a powerful reminder that trauma can last for generations.

4. A Stricken Field by Martha Gellhorn
When Ernest Hemingway settled down to write For Whom the Bells Tolls there was another writer in the house with him, also trying to write a novel about Spain. Except that, for Gellhorn, everything about her experiences there was still “too close” to translate into fiction. Instead, using “the emotions of Spain”, she wrote this bleak, protesting novel about an American journalist unable to save refugees in Czechoslovakia as the German army moves in.

5. Mississippi to Madrid: Memoir of a Black American in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade by James Yates
Yates was born in Mississippi and was active in radical politics in Chicago and New York before volunteering for the International Brigades. He crossed the Pyrenees on foot in early 1937 and drove a truck for the Republican forces during some of its bloodiest battles, often coming under fire himself. His hugely readable memoir provides an example of the psychological significance that fighting in Spain could have for people with disempowering experiences of prejudice at home. Volunteering there was, he writes, “the chance to fight back for once in my life”.

6. Nada by Carmen Laforet
Published in 1945, Nada (Nothing) follows 18-year-old Andrea after she moves to her grandmother’s apartment in Barcelona to pursue a university degree. The family has fallen on hard times and the apartment is crammed with relatives who are routinely cruel to each other. Around the edges of everything that goes unsaid in the novel’s pages, the terrible legacy of the war simmers. This is a Spain in which rage and despair have been driven underground, erupting in the only possible place: within the home. Unable to sleep after a family disaster, Andrea lies in bed, “collecting all the griefs that swarmed, as alive as worms, in the entrails of the house”.

7. The Forging of a Rebel by Arturo Barea
The romance surrounding the war can obscure the fact that it was, like any war, sometimes absurd, undignified and, most of all, a tragedy for the millions of Spaniards who never had a choice about whether to involve themselves. Barea ran the Republican foreign press and censorship office in Madrid. His mammoth autobiography puts the war into the context of Spanish politics and society over a lifetime, and is a valuable counterbalance to the accounts left by foreign journalists, who did not, as he put it, “suffer the civil war in [their] own flesh as I did”.

8. Only for Three Months by Adrian Bell
In 1937, in the aftermath of the bombing of Guernica, the British government very reluctantly accepted the single largest arrival of refugees to this country so far and the first to consist almost entirely of children. Almost 4,000 from the Basque Country crossed the Bay of Biscay in a storm and found themselves housed in a hastily arranged field of tents near Southampton. Bell’s 1996 history assembles many of their voices. Some remember kind and welcoming strangers; others cold, disarray and unbearable anxiety about their families. “There are some things we have forgotten,” one of Bell’s interviewees told him, “and some things we have deliberately forgotten”.

9. Never More Alive: Inside the Spanish Republic by Kate Mangan
Mangan’s dogged search for her German lover, Jan Kurzke, after he volunteered in the International Brigades slightly overshadows her memoir of working for the Republican press office (which comes with an introduction by the eminent historian Paul Preston), but hers is a refreshingly humorous and unromantic account, which cuts many a literary celebrity down to size. WH Auden, for instance, proves too timid to impress anyone, while the hefty Ernest Hemingway merely looks, to Mangan, “like a successful businessman”.

10. In Diamond Square by Mercè Rodoreda
Rodoreda worked for the Generalitat of Catalonia during the war and later went into exile. A classic of Catalan literature, her extraordinary novel is narrated by Natalia, whose family suffers unthinkable deprivation when her husband leaves for the front and conditions in the Republican zone deteriorate. Natalia’s voice – stark, naive, despairing – speaks for the left-behind and of one mother’s no-choice tenacity. Her matter-of-fact narration does not conceal the horror. “Obviously, they weren’t like they were before the war,” she writes of her starving children, “but they were still beautiful enough.”

Sometimes a cause arises that seems so clearcut – so right-or-wrong – that we can seize our position with something like relief, because we have found something good and true to believe in, and to fight for. The Spanish civil war, or rather the democratic Republic that was ended by it, is sometimes described as “the last great cause”. Because Hitler and Mussolini supported the military rebels attacking Spain’s elected leftwing government, the war has often been seen as a missed opportunity to face down Europe’s fascist dictators. It became a rallying cry around the world, bringing politics alive for a young generation in the 1930s.

The war famously inspired writers, some of them very famous – George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway dominate the anglophone field. I wrote my book Tomorrow Perhaps the Future in pursuit of individuals who – though not always as male, or white, or famous – turned out to be just as politicised by their times. I wanted to think about the imperative they’d identified of taking sides – a position that felt more relevant than ever over the last few years – but I was also curious about how writers, who surely need seclusion to do their best work, negotiated the clamour of such polarised, crisis-riven times.

In following women who showed their solidarity by going to Spain during the war, I came to wonder, too, how outsiders can offer themselves as allies without drowning out the very people they want to support. No cause is ever as straightforward as we might like to think, and perhaps that is why the Spanish civil war has proved an apparently inexhaustible source of literary inspiration. Here I’ve picked out some fiction and memoir that comes at the war from an unexpected tangent, or explores its legacy, or provides a reminder of just what an incredible range of people had their lives affected by this last great cause.

1. Savage Coast and Mediterranean by Muriel Rukeyser
The 22-year-old American Rukeyser was in Spain for only a few days after the outbreak of war before being evacuated, yet Spain, she later wrote, was the place where “I began to say what I believed”. The results included the modernist novel Savage Coast and an epic poem, Mediterranean. Rukeyser was haunted by the memory of Otto Bloch, an exile from Nazi Germany who joined the Republic’s foreign volunteer force, the International Brigades, and was killed. In Mediterranean, Rukeyser tells of a man who “kept his life straight as a single issue”, which, for me, sums up the dedication (and reduced options) of such people.

2. Soldiers of Salamis by Javier Cercas
This magnificent “true tale” follows a stalled novelist who becomes obsessed in the 1990s with the story of the falangist writer Rafael Sánchez Mazas and his escape from a Republican firing squad, thanks to a Republican soldier who spared his life. It’s a quest through archival scraps and oral history, one that demonstrates how our histories and legends are an accumulation of stories. It may start with Mazas, but the narrator’s encounter with Miralles, a forgotten Republican militiaman who went on to fight fascism in the second world war, forms the heart of the novel – and reminds us that injustices live on in the way different individuals and accounts are memorialised.

3. A Death in Zamora by Ramón Sender Barayón
When the war broke out, the acclaimed writer Ramón Sender left his family to join the Republicans. His wife, Amparo Barayón, headed for her home town of Zamora, expecting to find a refuge there despite the fact that it was in rebel hands. Instead, she was imprisoned and executed. A Death in Zamora narrates Sender Barayón’s attempts to piece together the story of his mother’s fate. Incredibly moving, it deals sensitively with the difficulties of seeking out the truth in communities where victims and perpetrators have long lived side by side and is a powerful reminder that trauma can last for generations.

4. A Stricken Field by Martha Gellhorn
When Ernest Hemingway settled down to write For Whom the Bells Tolls there was another writer in the house with him, also trying to write a novel about Spain. Except that, for Gellhorn, everything about her experiences there was still “too close” to translate into fiction. Instead, using “the emotions of Spain”, she wrote this bleak, protesting novel about an American journalist unable to save refugees in Czechoslovakia as the German army moves in.

5. Mississippi to Madrid: Memoir of a Black American in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade by James Yates
Yates was born in Mississippi and was active in radical politics in Chicago and New York before volunteering for the International Brigades. He crossed the Pyrenees on foot in early 1937 and drove a truck for the Republican forces during some of its bloodiest battles, often coming under fire himself. His hugely readable memoir provides an example of the psychological significance that fighting in Spain could have for people with disempowering experiences of prejudice at home. Volunteering there was, he writes, “the chance to fight back for once in my life”.

6. Nada by Carmen Laforet
Published in 1945, Nada (Nothing) follows 18-year-old Andrea after she moves to her grandmother’s apartment in Barcelona to pursue a university degree. The family has fallen on hard times and the apartment is crammed with relatives who are routinely cruel to each other. Around the edges of everything that goes unsaid in the novel’s pages, the terrible legacy of the war simmers. This is a Spain in which rage and despair have been driven underground, erupting in the only possible place: within the home. Unable to sleep after a family disaster, Andrea lies in bed, “collecting all the griefs that swarmed, as alive as worms, in the entrails of the house”.

7. The Forging of a Rebel by Arturo Barea
The romance surrounding the war can obscure the fact that it was, like any war, sometimes absurd, undignified and, most of all, a tragedy for the millions of Spaniards who never had a choice about whether to involve themselves. Barea ran the Republican foreign press and censorship office in Madrid. His mammoth autobiography puts the war into the context of Spanish politics and society over a lifetime, and is a valuable counterbalance to the accounts left by foreign journalists, who did not, as he put it, “suffer the civil war in [their] own flesh as I did”.

8. Only for Three Months by Adrian Bell
In 1937, in the aftermath of the bombing of Guernica, the British government very reluctantly accepted the single largest arrival of refugees to this country so far and the first to consist almost entirely of children. Almost 4,000 from the Basque Country crossed the Bay of Biscay in a storm and found themselves housed in a hastily arranged field of tents near Southampton. Bell’s 1996 history assembles many of their voices. Some remember kind and welcoming strangers; others cold, disarray and unbearable anxiety about their families. “There are some things we have forgotten,” one of Bell’s interviewees told him, “and some things we have deliberately forgotten”.

9. Never More Alive: Inside the Spanish Republic by Kate Mangan
Mangan’s dogged search for her German lover, Jan Kurzke, after he volunteered in the International Brigades slightly overshadows her memoir of working for the Republican press office (which comes with an introduction by the eminent historian Paul Preston), but hers is a refreshingly humorous and unromantic account, which cuts many a literary celebrity down to size. WH Auden, for instance, proves too timid to impress anyone, while the hefty Ernest Hemingway merely looks, to Mangan, “like a successful businessman”.

10. In Diamond Square by Mercè Rodoreda
Rodoreda worked for the Generalitat of Catalonia during the war and later went into exile. A classic of Catalan literature, her extraordinary novel is narrated by Natalia, whose family suffers unthinkable deprivation when her husband leaves for the front and conditions in the Republican zone deteriorate. Natalia’s voice – stark, naive, despairing – speaks for the left-behind and of one mother’s no-choice tenacity. Her matter-of-fact narration does not conceal the horror. “Obviously, they weren’t like they were before the war,” she writes of her starving children, “but they were still beautiful enough.”