Di Mario, Anna Maria (2013) What Remains and the Failure of Idealism in the Spanish Civil War

Di Mario, Anna Maria (2013) What Remains and The failure of idealism in the Spanish civil War. PhD thesis. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/4344/ Copyright and moral rights for this thesis are retained by the author A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Glasgow Theses Service http://theses.gla.ac.uk/ [email protected] What Remains and The Failure of Idealism in the Spanish Civil War Volumes 1 & 2 Volume 1 What Remains Anna Maria Di Mario Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of PhD School of Critical Studies College of Arts University of Glasgow This thesis consists of two parts: a creative work and a reader’s companion to the novel which reflects on the process of research. The creative work is a novel entitled What Remains. Set during the Spanish civil war, it has a twin narrative structure, and through alternating chapters follows the fortunes of Michael, a Scottish volunteer fighting with the International Brigades, and Ana, a Spanish woman in Nationalist territory whose husband is fighting for the Republicans. At the start of the novel Michael volunteers to fight in the conflict and the narrative follows his progress through a year and eight months of fighting for the Republic and examines how the harsh realities of war affect his political beliefs. Ana discovers her husband has been captured by the Nationalists and makes a Faustian pact with a Nationalist captain to get her husband out of prison and back home. What Remains is an exploration of how war affects the soldier and the civilian, how they are desensitised and ultimately dehumanised by their environment. The reader’s companion is titled Faith and doubt: The failure of idealism in the Spanish civil war and is intended as an illumination of the process of researching and writing a historical novel. It guides the reader through the historical research, the texts utilised by the writer and the broader themes and contradictions of the war as discovered through the reading of nonfiction and creative works. My thesis is comprised of a novel, What Remains, set during the Spanish civil war, and a reader’s companion, entitled Faith and Doubt: The Failure of Idealism in the Spanish Civil War. The novel follows the fictional journey of Michael and Ana, the central characters, through the war. The reader’s companion is an exploration of the history books, memoirs, oral histories, novels and films that formed the central part of my research for What Remains and informed my portrayal of the conflict. When writing What Remains, one of my primary concerns was to make the novel accessible and enjoyable for the average reader. I particularly had in mind a reader with no prior knowledge of the war. The reader’s companion was written in the same inclusive spirit, a decision which was inspired, in part, by the political themes of the novel and the concerns of the time. I have always been compelled by the Spanish civil war and its politics, literature and art, and because of this interest, near the start of my Creative Writing MLitt, I decided to write a novel about the conflict. Six months passed before I even began my research; I was apprehensive of attempting to write historical fiction. In the afterword to Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel comments ‘there’s always the danger with historical fiction that it may fall short as both literature and history’ (Mantel 2010: 9) and in a vague sense I was aware of this, intimidated by the size of the project and the complexities of researching and writing historical fiction. Sebastian Faulks, in his introduction to Birdsong, describes a similar trepidation. ‘The doubt clawed at me, and rightly so, I felt, given the scale of what I proposed and my lack of qualification for the task...’ (Faulks 1994: xiv) I was troubled by the relationship between the history of the war and the story I wanted to write, unsure how to negotiate a balance between the two, and this led me to a preoccupation with the idea of historical truth in fiction. Fiction and history are two distinct forms of truth and my concern was how to merge the two without compromising the integrity of either. This difficulty is highlighted by Rebecca Stott in Ghostwalk. Accused of ‘making up stories’, one of the characters mounts a defence of his fictions: ‘the spirit of my story is true...my oyster-seller ghost works as a historical metaphor. For a tourist, she’s much more eloquent than any dry-as-dust history book...’ (Stott 2008: 151) I wanted my novel to have the same eloquence for a reader unfamiliar with the Spanish civil war, but I also felt it was important to be as historically accurate as possible. In common with other historical novelists, I feel ‘research must be as good as I can possibly make it’ (Mantel 2010: 7). In What Remains the narrative of Michael, the solider, was carefully plotted around real places and events. It is not the story of what did happen, but the story of what would, or could, have happened to someone like him. What Remains evolved from my research on the Spanish civil war. At the beginning of my research I had a naive, idealistic view of the war as a battle between democracy and fascism. This very limited understanding did not prepare me for the complexities I found as my research progressed. Faith and Doubt: The Failure of Idealism in the Spanish Civil War is an account of this research. It is intended to guide the reader through the sources that informed and inspired What Remains, and, in doing so, illustrate the relationship between the fictional novel and the historical research which inspired it. I desired the same clarity and eloquence for the reader’s companion that I hoped to achieve in the novel - for the reader unfamiliar with the Spanish civil war, I wanted to guide them through the history and the literature in order to make explicit the sources for What Remains. However, I also hoped to offer a more informed reader a slightly different perspective, a more complicated view of the conflict. A year into the book, when I had almost finished the first draft, I was talking about the war in the car with my dad one day. Out of nowhere he said, “Did you know that your nonno fought in the Spanish civil war? For the Nationalists.” I was horrified. The shock must have shown on my face. My dad laughed embarrassedly, and then I was ashamed of my expression, pained at his shame. I only have one, very slight memory of my paternal grandfather, Emilio Di Mario, feeding me peaches on a hot day in Rome, when I was about eighteen months old. It is my first memory and apart from that I don’t remember him at all. He died six months later and my dad has never talked about him much. But that day, after my dad’s revelation, I elicited the bare bones of my grandfather’s story. He had signed up for the army in the mid thirties as a teenager and found himself sent to Spain, and then straight on into the second world war, fighting for the Fascists. When Italy was liberated and Mussolini toppled, the Nazis saw their erstwhile allies as traitors. My grandfather spent two years interned in concentration camps, first Dachau then Auschwitz. Many Italian soldiers were executed - my grandfather could be considered lucky that he ended up in a concentration camp and not in front of a firing line. By all accounts he was a stern, emotionally distant man, deeply damaged by his time in Dachau and Auschwitz. It cannot be denied that he fought on the wrong side of history. But I find it difficult to judge him or condemn his choices. He grew up in grinding poverty in a mountain village, with very little access to education and extremely limited opportunities for employment. When he came back to Italy after nine years of war, he opened a bar in Rome with his brother and worked relentlessly to provide for his wife and children. Born into a family that had nothing, when he died he was able to leave some money in his will for me and my brothers. I put this money towards the university fees for my PhD, which has focused, creatively and academically, on the Spanish civil war. In a strange way, I feel that we have come full circle, and my thesis is dedicated to him, a gesture of love and redemption towards the past. What Remains by Maria Di Mario The Ebro Valley, September 1938 He remembered the taste of the air, full of dust and smoke. He remembered the heat of the blood running down his arm and into the dirt of the shaking earth underneath him. He remembered the crack of the rifles and the screaming of the planes. He could still see the grey face of the man beside him and the blue sky above them making a mockery of it all. Michael put his head in his hands.

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