UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN QUEENSLAND ‘DEATH CHARGED MISSIVES’: AUSTRALIAN LITERARY RESPONSES TO THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR Brian Beasley, BA (Hons) A Dissertation submitted for the award of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Southern Queensland 2006 ABSTRACT ‘Spanish Civil War’ is an important, absent signifier in Australian history, letters, writing and cultural politics of the 1930s. I argue that despite the glossing over of the importance of Spain’s war in the period, events in Spain had a pervasive influence on Australian society, and writers in particular – on their political re-alignments, on their nationalist and internationalist cultural outlooks, and on their common acceptance that they lived in an essentially tragic age. Consequently, the critical neglect of Spain and its impact on Australian cultural affairs in the 30s is unwarranted. My thesis research has covered a very wide range of texts: the ephemeral pamphlet, the small circulation journal, poetry, agitprop, the mainstream novel, the ‘mass declamation’ and the associated ‘new media’ of the 30s – photography and film. It has also looked at different groups or cultural networks in the period, all of which (despite their disparate politics) saw Spain as a central cause: the Catholic Church, the Communist Party, anti-fascist and peace movements amongst others. The theoretical dimension of my work is driven by Raymond Williams’ concept of ‘structure of feeling’, first formulated in his study The Long Revolution then developed in a series of subsequent works. The generous range of texts I study conforms to Williams’ theory of ‘structure of feeling’, arguing that to understand the ‘field’ of a period, one should survey the interconnectivity of all its texts. Also drawing on Williams’ theory, I read the structured feeling of the 30s as essentially tragic: revealing exactly how Spain focalised fears and apparently symbolised the impasse of ‘modernity’ itself – Spain was a spectacle that graphically demonstrated how the inner destructiveness of technological modernity had tragically cancelled the possibility of progress and the arrival of variously imagined utopias. CERTIFICATION OF DISSERTATION I certify that the ideas, experimental work, results, analyses, software and conclusions reported in this dissertation are entirely my own effort, except where otherwise acknowledged. I also certify that the work is original and has not been previously submitted for any other award, except where otherwise acknowledged. _________________________ ________ Signature of Candidate Date ENDORSEMENT ________________________ ________ Signature of Primary Supervisor Date _______________________ ________ Signature of Associate Supervisor Date ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my supervisors, Dr Brian Musgrove and Associate Professor Chris Lee, for their dedication to this thesis. In particular, I would like to acknowledge the wise council, generous and steadfast support provided by my primary supervisor, Brian Musgrove. I also wish to thank the University of Southern Queensland for providing a University Scholarship for two years of my candidature, and the on-going support from the Office of Research and Higher Degrees in seeing this thesis to completion. I am grateful for the assistance from the staff of the Noel Butlin Archive Centre, the Fryer Library, the National Library of Australia and Melbourne University Archives. Their interest and initiative in relation to this project have made the research an enjoyable experience. CONTENTS Introduction: The Spanish Tragedy 1 Chapter One: Spain’s War and Australian Responses 32 Chapter Two: Australian Stalinism and the Problem of Spanish Tragedy 65 Chapter Three: Spain and the Rhetoric of Peace 110 Chapter Four: Australian Catholics and the Spanish War 143 Chapter Five: The Australian Literati in Spain 181 Chapter Six: Modernism in the Streets 240 Chapter Seven: The Technologies of Modern Tragedy 293 Conclusion: Spain Weeps in the Gutters of Footscray 337 Works Consulted 348 1 Introduction: The Spanish Tragedy The lexicon of the Spanish Civil War era has had a political renaissance in recent years. During the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, the second Bush presidency redeployed terms such as ‘united front’, ‘axis’, ‘appeasement’, ‘terrorism’, ‘insurgency’ and ‘fifth columnist’. Likewise, the Iraqi resistance claimed to possess an Islamic ‘International Brigade’. The monster ‘Totalitarianism’, first named by Franz Borkenau in The Totalitarian Enemy (1940) after his experiences of the Spanish war, formed a foundational concept in Cold War aggression, and has been resurrected by the Bush administration. As US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said in the prelude to the Iraq invasion, ‘Saddam Hussein is now taking his rightful place… in the pantheon of failed brutal dictators’ (qtd Rampton and Stauber 2). As the first modern technological exercise in targeting civilians, the Spanish Civil War haunts White House claims to have removed tragedy from warfare – only ‘bad guys’ will suffer. The terror bombing of Guernica, a process now known as ‘shock and awe’, remains a memorial to the fascist powers’ major military innovation in Spain. American bad conscience was no better exemplified than when the tapestry reproduction of Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica (1937), hanging in the foyer of the United Nations Security Council, was hidden behind a blue screen as US Secretary of State Colin Powell made announcements concerning impending ‘military action’ on Iraq (Sydney Morning Herald 8-9 February 2003); as if obscuring the painting served to erase an historical memory or a 2 continuity between the Spanish war and contemporary events. Likewise, revisionist historians have diminished the importance of the Spanish war, arguing that it mattered only to Left-wing, middle-class elites. Adrian Caesar, for example, claims the war was merely ‘a crucial event for some intellectuals’ (14). It is as if pronouncements on Spain such as that by Christopher Isherwood – ‘We had a greater need of going to Spain than the Spanish Republic had need of us’ (qtd Carpenter 206) – were read as proof that the experience was more about narcissistic self-fashioning than politics. In an Australian context, historians broadly concur with Diane Menghetti’s declaration that the Spanish Civil War ‘had little impact on most Australians who were uninterested in and ill-informed about foreign affairs’ (1982: 64). After assessing the comparatively small number of volunteers and sums of money donated, Amirah Inglis similarly concludes that despite the magnificent example of a few, the conflict was too far away for most Australians to care (1987: 215). E.M. Andrews also believes that in Australia ‘the common reaction was indifference and the desire not to be involved’ (Andrews 94-5). Again, it is as if writers and commentators of the time, such as Nettie Palmer, have been simplistically taken at their word: ‘Those of us who knew the desperate urgency of the situation were few and not powerful: we seemed to be shouting against the wind: we were choked by the disbelief and mockery of those around us’ (1948: 3). This thesis argues against the critical orthodoxy that the Spanish Civil War was a minority intellectual concern and a marginal consideration in Australian political consciousness in the 1930s. It attempts to survey Australian culture in the period as a complex totality; and to read the body of Australian writing on Spain as a ‘field’, rather 3 than a series of individually produced texts. It argues that this textual field reveals the Spanish war as the locus of a structure of feeling: a material condition, marked by a sense of tragic modernity. The thesis also attempts to redress the scholarly imbalance between the international and the Australian remembrances of the Spanish Civil War. By the 1980s, in countries other than Australia, the Spanish war was the subject of over 20,000 publications; in the 1990s, films like Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom (1995) and television documentaries also proliferated. In Australia, however, where 74 men and women volunteered to serve the Republic, the topic has been relatively neglected by academics, as has the later 1930s as a whole. Only Amirah Inglis’s Australians in Spain (1987) and Judith Keene’s introduction to Agnes Hodgson’s diary in Last Mile to Huesca (1988) have directly addressed Australian responses to the Spanish Civil War. The primary concern of both, however, was the activities of the International Brigades and the volunteer support of the Spanish Relief Committees. Carolyn Rasmussen’s The Lesser Evil (1992) addressed the position of the late 30s Peace Movement on the question of Spain; Stuart Macintyre’s The Reds (1998) and Diane Menghetti’s The Red North (1981) briefly covered communist responses to Spain; and E.M. Andrews’ Isolation and Appeasement in Australia (1970) summarised Australian community reactions to European crises of 1935–9, including Spain. Beside the critical diminishment of Spain’s generational importance, a ‘Thirties myth’ has arisen in literary studies, cued by early assessments of the decade: particularly Malcolm Muggeridge’s satirical assault The Thirties (1939) and, in a tone of Tory distemper, Virginia Woolf’s essay The Leaning Tower (1940). Frank Kermode has 4 summarised this literary myth: the best writers of the time were induced by ‘unfamiliar political pressures to write against their own bents.’ Having ‘professed a fatal interest in unemployment, the Spanish Civil War [and]