Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [55]
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 of Cinelandia, 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.
“Perdicaris Alive or Raisuli Dead”
On a scented Mediterranean May