Paying Attention in Polarized Times: Sarah Watling on the Spanish Civil War
“I was interested in what happened when people did decide to “take sides”, or to act where their governments wouldn’t. What are the costs of that approach? What are the possibilities?”
Sarah Watling’s Tomorrow Perhaps The Future: Writers, Outsiders, and the Spanish Civil War, provides an energizing account of several women —artists, writers, activists— who engaged directly with the Spanish Civil War. Some of her subjects, such as Virginia Woolf, Martha Gellhorn, and Nancy Cunard, are well-known. Others less so, including the German-Jewish photographer Gerda Taro, who documented bravery and atrocities on the ground, and Salaria Kea, a nurse from Harlem who saw the Spanish conflict as a means through which to fight racial prejudice at home. All are fascinating, and all share the distinction of having understood earlier than most that what happened in Spain would have global repercussions, and that this was a dangerous moment that needed to be met head-on.
Octavian Report: Tomorrow Perhaps The Future is such a beguiling title. Could you tell me where it’s from and how it relates to the book’s themes?
Sarah Watling: It comes from W.H. Auden’s poem “Spain” (1937), which leads from “to-morrow perhaps the future,” ultimately to, “but today, the struggle.”
My starting point for this book was Nancy Cunard’s famous 1937 pamphlet, “Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War,” which collected responses to her questionnaire to the authors of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, asking them to choose a side in the Spanish Civil War. In it, she told them, “it is impossible any longer to take no side.” And that really struck me, this idea that history could have reached a point where neutrality was a privilege that one could no longer claim. And so Auden’s poem, and those particular words, got to the heart of how people were responding to the situation that history had created for them, their sense that history was demanding something of them that perhaps it doesn't ask of every generation.
And when reading some of the people who wrote about the Spanish Civil War I kept getting the sense that they were writing for posterity; that they wanted to record the struggle for to-morrow as much as for their contemporaries.
OR: I’d assume many English-language readers might share my experience in having something like the Auden poem, or Orwell’s writing, or Hemingway’s be their first literary encounter, or their first encounter, full stop, with the Spanish Civil War. You’ve focused on a different group of people who engaged in their own ways with this moment. Why explore the Spanish Civil War through this polyphonic group of voices?
Watling: There is such romance around the Spanish Civil War, which is something that is inherited in some ways from the writers you mention, but is also derived from the fact that, for so many people, the conflict seemed incredibly clear-cut: it was good against bad, an elected democracy defending itself against a military dictatorship in the making, and the outcome (the loss of the Republic) was a tragedy. I’m curious about why it's so tempting to see things that way, why we feel the need for causes to be easy and clear-cut in order for us to really commit ourselves to them, when actually it makes more sense that something as important and horrific as a civil war should be complicated, perhaps require some deeper intellectual work to know where we stand, and yet still be worth taking a position on.
The authors you mention really dominate the cultural memory of the Spanish Civil War, and when I first started to read around the topic seriously I was astonished by how many people – and what a variety of people – had been mobilized by the Republican cause, had seen the conflict as the great issue of their era, and also for whom the war had influenced their writing. There is so much literature to discover beyond For Whom the Bell Tolls and Homage to Catalonia. It wasn’t just a generation of young male poets from Cambridge who were mobilized. It wasn’t just Communists, or middle-class people, or white people. There was an incredibly diverse range of people, some of whom I’d never heard of before. But I was also surprised to come across writers I’d long admired, whose work I felt familiar with but whom I’d never connected with the Spanish Civil War, in this terrain. A good example is Virginia Woolf, whose life was actually deeply touched by the war, both personally [Woolf’s nephew, Julian Bell, enlisted as an ambulance driver and was killed near Madrid aged 29] and intellectually.
I think in general we have a far richer understanding of history the more voices we hear from, and, when it comes to the Spanish Civil War, following the individuals I did and shifting the focus from the “big names” in Anglophone literature whom we associate with the war offered a much clearer sense of just how significant and galvanizing an issue the war was for this generation internationally and how widely it resonated. I should say that, because I was interested particularly in their position as outsiders, I followed only writers who were not Spanish, but any literary record of the war that excludes Spanish authors is of course incomplete. I’m interested in the ways that the activism of certain people tends to get diminished or overshadowed, both at the time and in the memorializing that happens afterwards. Cunard’s questionnaire, for example has, I think, 12 signatories, who are all men apart from her, but she was the moving spirit behind it, and the only one who did any kind of tangible work to bring it to fruition.
The book is also deeply concerned with the idea of solidarity and how it is, or can be, enacted meaningfully. As I delved into the histories and biographies of the people I follow and read the testimony of people who had volunteered in support of the Republic in Spain, I was struck by the comparisons they made and motivations they voiced for coming to Spain, and how much they brought their own agendas and causes and personal legacies of activism with them.
Someone like Langston Hughes, for example, said once that if you gave Franco a hood, he would be a member of the Ku Klux Klan. I had the sense that for these thousands of people coming to Spain from around the world, they were seeing their actions not only as a way to help the Spanish people, but also in connection with their existing causes and experiences of prejudice. And this is in one sense the incredible potential of solidarity: it energizes people, it encourages people to take a transnational view, to see the dangers of certain ideologies as they span the world and to work together in the common interest – to see how broad the common interest generally is. But it also introduces this risk, connected to the fact that many of the people who went there in truth knew very little about Spain or about the real challenges faced by the people of Spain and its specific political context; that these people who went to try and draw attention to the plight of the Spanish people actually risked drowning out the very voices that they were trying to amplify. Those were tensions that I was really interested in exploring.
OR: You write in your introduction about having “a weakness for people with an instinct for rebellion.” And the “outsiders” whose lives you look at include Nancy Cunard, Martha Gellhorn, Josephine Herbst, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Virginia Woolf, as well as perhaps more obscure figures such as the Communist organizer Nan Green; and Salaria Kea, a nurse form Harlem; and the Jewish photographer Gerda Taro, among many others. Aside from rebellious natures, were there other intersections at play here?
Watling: There is always an element of serendipity in landing on subjects and, especially in a book that is so driven by individual biographies, I wanted to find people in whose company I was willing to spend several years! What was most exciting from a research point of view was when I discovered unexpected points of intersection, as between Nancy Cunard and Salaria Kea, for example. But actually it was helpful to me that all of these people were not in Spain at the same time, because it meant I could cover the full temporal span of the war through their experiences. There are a number of points of intersection though. The two poles of the book, in a way, are Nancy Cunard and Virginia Woolf, and they moved in very similar circles, particularly in London, and they knew a lot of the same people, and yet it was intriguing to me that they had so many chances to coincide in a meaningful way, but instead seemed to glance off one and other instead, as if they subconsciously kept each other at a distance. They had very different approaches to life and to politics, but I came to think that they were more similar than this suggested – and that perhaps that was partly behind Woolf’s wariness.
As for what might unite my subjects: the people in Tomorrow Perhaps the Future were all paying attention to the developments of their era, which is something I admire. And because they were paying attention – because they could see the aggression of fascist Italy and Germany as a threat to world peace, for example – they were afraid. There were moments when being in Spain did feel euphoric for some of them, but they didn’t go there with any great optimism, but instead because of their dread and fear about the future. They didn't let that fear or pre-emptive grief overcome them. Rather it made them decide to act in a way that they hoped would be meaningful. It's so easy to let despair paralyze us when we're seeing horrendous things happen in the world. But despair is really a privilege only open to some and the people in the book tried to respond to their fear more purposefully.
OR: Of these many people who were paying attention and whom we could discuss in detail, I was hoping you could tell me more about Gerda Taro, whose striking photograph graces the book’s cover.
Watling: Gerda Taro was in her mid-twenties when the Spanish war broke out and had been living in Paris since fleeing Germany in 1933, after she was imprisoned for her involvement in distributing anti-Nazi leaflets. She actually hadn’t been a photographer for long by 1936, but she went to Barcelona early in the war to photograph and took some extraordinary pictures, like the one on the cover. For many years she has been best known for her partnership with Robert Capa, whom she originally worked alongside in Spain, and her work has long been overshadowed by his. It has only been in recent years that photos attributed to Capa have been shown to have been taken by Taro.
The photo on the cover is of a woman training on a beach outside of Barcelona to fight in a militia. I love it because I find it beautiful, of course, and because it does capture a bit of that romantic aura I mentioned earlier. To me, it encapsulates some of what was so seductive about the Spanish Republic, especially for people seeing Barcelona in this early moment, when law and order and the status quo had been blown away by the crisis of the coup attempt, and it seemed as though a new type of society might emerge from the chaos. One of the examples of the radical potential of this moment was the fact that there were female combatants in Republican militias. The Republic had already ushered in reforms that granted women more rights, but the idea of women taking part in a war as combatants was truly newsworthy. So this image is evidence of Gerda Taro being canny about what kinds of pictures would appeal to international editors, but it also encapsulates the idea of this as a moment of possibility and of people from abroad wanting to support and be part of it. To me, the photo shows us something of the promise that Spain held for someone like Gerda, who not only opposed Franco and his fascist allies as a Jewish woman and an anti-Nazi, but who was also a woman trying to establish her independence and her career in a patriarchal world.
And I am interested in the way in which moments of political crisis can be liberating, and can open up new opportunities for people, particularly those, like women, who were expected to live more circumscribed lives, and how that in itself can be fraught when the conditions that offer that liberation are themselves so awful.
OR: And with Taro it’s worth noting that you’re looking at a photographer rather than a writer. Was it beneficial to bring in that visual aspect of the press coverage of this event?
Watling: I think one of the reasons why I focused on writers was because in any conflict it so often comes down to a battle between two competing narratives. But the Spanish Civil War was really the first international conflict covered as much by photographers as it was by writers - partly because there had been various technological developments, like smaller and lighter cameras, that could get them closer to the action - and so photography was part of that story, too.
In the international context of the Republic’s fellow democracies like France, Britain and the US refusing to come to its aid (despite the material support for Franco from Hitler and Mussolini), so much of what the Republic’s supporters could offer was really a kind of PR exercise for the Republic, to garner it international support and to undo the harm caused by sensationalist accounts in the conservative press abroad that presented Franco as the defender of the Church and Society against Communist/anarchist hordes, etc. Photography was central to that. Some of Taro’s photos show the civilian victims of nationalist bombing raids, for instance, and some of them show Italian machinery at battlefields: proof that Italy was in breach of the Non-Intervention Agreement.
This also connects to the question of objectivity, which I wanted to unpack, as photography is interesting in that sense because there is (or was) a tendency to see a photograph as straightforward evidence of fact: less corruptible, perhaps, than a written account.
OR: For someone like Martha Gellhorn, the question of objectivity, and one’s position in relation to the story one is covering, seems especially charged and complicated.
Watling: Gellhorn is someone who has a real frustration with the idea of objectivity as a responsibility of the journalist. It's almost like she finds the idea insulting, to say that somebody who has seen civilians being bombed in Madrid, as she did, and will go on to see the liberation of the [German] concentration camps [after the Second World War], should put aside her human responses and her sense of moral outrage in writing about it.
I write in the book about an interview that she gave with John Pilger in the 1980s, in which she talks about reporting what she sees without embellishment and without addition, as if it is that simple, without really addressing the fact that reporting what she sees also raises the question of where she's chosen to look.
Gellhorn felt that being in Spain during the war was a privilege. It’s incredibly fulfilling for her to be in Spain, doing work that she feels is meaningful and valuable, and she knows it's an extraordinary privilege to not only be able to be doing that work, but for that work to also happen to be the one thing that she has a talent for, the thing that makes her life feel meaningful. And because she knows how incredibly rare that is, there is an element of guilt about the fact that she isn't really certain of how much good her writing can do. There's no way to quantify how much of an effect it has, or how much it actually helps the people she's trying to help, yet what she is aware of is how much it means for her.
There is this same kind of tension for any of the foreigners who are sensitive about their positions reporting from Spain, or observing in Spain. They know the stakes are very different for them as outsiders. Gellhorn wrote about the “magic talisman” of an American passport. For all they feel invested in the cause of the Republic, for all that they have acted on their solidarity by making the decision to actually go there, physically be there despite the possible dangers, the fact remains that the individuals the book follows have an escape valve that isn't open to most of the people that they're claiming as allies. So, the question is how do you keep that awareness in mind, how do you enact solidarity while acknowledging the different stakes and avoiding being presumptuous, or insensitive to the differences between your experience and theirs, and yet not use that awareness as an excuse to do nothing, to say, this isn't my fight and so I won't involve myself.
OR: As you were working on the book, did living through your own present moment influence your thinking about this historical event, and vice versa?
Watling: I'm sure that my thinking about the book and the questions that I came to it with were influenced by the polarized atmosphere of recent years, the Brexit referendum, the Trump election and so on. I certainly had a sense after 2016 that there was much more of a public platform for extremist ideas than I had ever recalled before, and that people who had once been considered on the periphery of mainstream politics were emboldened to take to the public stage in a new way, and I think when that happens, we are challenged to think seriously about where we stand, and to consider what efforts we are willing to make to ensure that our principles are reflected in the world around us.
When I came across Nancy Cunard’s questionnaire, saying in 1937 that we’ve reached this point where it’s impossible to take no side, I was probably primed to take notice, for it to resonate with me. We know how dangerous and destructive polarisation can be, for people to slip into these “us and them” ways of thinking, one party against another party politics, and there not being any kind of bridge or space for a shared truth between them. But I was coming to understand the appeal of simply rejecting out of hand a movement, or ideology or whatever, to which you are fundamentally opposed – to not give it the oxygen of engagement. In the 1930s, because of the policy of appeasement, so many people who were following Nazi expansionism and the aggression of Fascist states on an international stage had the sense that their governments were failing to appreciate the urgency of the situation, which compelled them to act as individuals instead. We’ve seen so many huge protest movements over the last few years and I think they contain a similar frustration – you know, that matters that are of life and death importance are not being adequately addressed. So, I was interested in what happened when people did decide to “take sides”, or to act where their governments wouldn’t. What are the costs of that approach? What are the possibilities?
OR: You quote Langston Hughes who asks in 1937: “In time of war, what can writers and artists do that is useful, entertaining, and beautiful in a living, vital way?” Has writing the book made you think differently about the roles of writers and artists in polarized times?
Watling: After the war people supporting the Republican side had to come to terms with the fact that their efforts had essentially been in vain, because Franco was ultimately victorious. They hadn’t managed to alter the course of the war. But someone like Josephine Herbst, for instance, drew comfort from having at least preserved the memory of the resistance against Franco, which meant they had at least preserved something for the Spanish people who had otherwise lost so much. And they had at least preserved some record of the possibility of this resistance – the need for it – for future generations who might find themselves in similar struggles.
Sarah Watling
Photo by Julian Walton
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.