Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

a piece when I returned. I thought, with excessive anticipation, that it ‘broke that crust of passivity and attentisme which (with the lack of effective illegal organisations) is Franco’s greatest asset today…’ ⁶ This was an overoptimistic assessment, although the first cracks in the regime appeared in the second half of that decade. The anti-Franco exiles I came to know then were not only from Republican backgrounds, such as the historian (and eventual head of the post-Franco Spanish cultural services) Nicolas Sanchez Albornoz, son of the man still recognized by the emigres as the nominal president of a ghost- republic, but children from the families that made up the Franco establishment. One of them, my dear friend Vicente Girbau Leon, had gone to a Franco jail directly from a post in the general’s foreign service. He later shared my flat in Bloomsbury, before helping to establish the publishing house Ruedo Iberico in Paris, whose contraband titles, including Hugh Thomas’s pioneering book on the Civil War, were to be influential inside Spain in the sixties among the rapidly growing movement of young dissidents. It was he who later put me in touch with the anarchists.

At all events in 1951 I had my first experience of a Barcelona still filled with ‘the field-grey teams of the armed police, with rifles and sub-machine guns sticking out like bristles, every hundred-odd yards in the town-centre, and by the factory gates’ and guarding the characteristically palatial banks, symbol of the downtown street scene of Franco Spain, like fortresses of the rulers who dominated a hungry people. After a few days in Barcelona I made my way by a mixture of trains and hitchhiking down the coast to Valencia, then to Murcia, Madrid, Guadalajara, Zaragoza and back to Barcelona.

Spain was poor and hungry in the early 1950s, perhaps hungrier than at any time in living memory. People seemed to live on potatoes, cauliflower and oranges. Had Tarragona ever been so badly off in its entire history, I asked myself as I looked at that wonderful gold-blond cathedral among the ruins of the Roman Empire. Spain had no public voices. The news from Barcelona reached the rest of Spain through rumour, travellers such as myself, hawkers, truck-drivers, occasional listeners to foreign radio. There were only obscure allusions in the press. Intellectually, the country, most of its talent in emigration, seemed strangled (‘few Spanish works in the ‘‘serious’’ bookshop’ – translations and even Spanish classics mainly in Latin American editions).

Spain was unhappy. Time and again, in cafes, in the cabs of trucks, or on the unspeakably awful correos, the slow but cheap trains stopping at all stations, people would say things like: ‘This is the worst country in the world’ or ‘People in this country are poorer than anywhere else.’ ‘Everything in this country has gone to pot since Primo de Rivera [1923–30],’ said the matriarch of a family of cheapjack traders from Madrid who took me under their wing. Spain had not forgotten the Civil War and the vanquished, though powerless and hopeless, had not changed their mind about it. And yet, time and again, when the subject came up, someone would say: ‘Civil War – nothing is worse. Father against son, brother against brother.’ Franco Spain in the early 1950s was a regime sustained by the argument of Thomas Hobbes that any effective political order is better than no order. The regime survived, in spite of its perceived injustice and massive unpopularity – at all events in the eastern parts of the country, where I travelled – not so much because of its power and readiness to terrorize, but because nobody wanted another Civil War. Perhaps Franco might not have survived if, at the end of the Second World War, the Americans and British had decided that he should not, and allowed the armed resistance units from southern France, largely composed of Spanish Republicans, to invade the country. But they did not.

Above all, Spain was isolated. Its blood-soaked regime was still enclosed in the carapace of anti-modernity, traditionalist Catholicism and self-contained autarchy. The extraordinary industrialization of the country, which was to make it unrecognizable, and even to change the very physical appearance of Spaniards in the next thirty or forty years, had hardly begun. Where else in Europe, except the equally self-sealed Portugal, could one still have found a place like Murcia, indistinguishable from a Habsburg provincial city before 1914: nannies in black-and-white uniforms by the dozen supervising their children along the river promenade, eyed by soldiers from the local barracks; middle-class young women with chaperones; farmers and pig-dealers settling bargains in market cafes? Tourists were counted in hundreds, not in tens of millions. The Mediterranean coasts were still empty. When I recall the costas of Andalusia in the early 1950s, what comes into my mind is a dusty, white-hot, empty road between stones and sea with a view of vultures descending from all parts of the sky to join the mob already eviscerating the cadaver of a mule or donkey. Perhaps it was the absence of that great corrupter of morals, the mass tourism of the rich in the territories of the poor, which allowed the Spaniards of the time to keep their traditional pride. Nothing struck me more in those days than the insistence of poor men and women on maintaining relations of reciprocity: not accepting a cigarette without offering one in return, or refusing a brandy from an evidently better-off Englishman, which was not compatible with equivalence, but accepting a coffee, which was. In my experience foreigners had not yet become essentially sources of income for poor natives, not even when – as in 1952 – they arrived in Seville, as I did with some student friends, in an evidently British yacht and moored in town, just opposite the as yet ungentrified bars of Triana.

Because Spain seemed to be, and likely to remain, frozen in its history, it was unusually dangerous ground for outside observers and analysts. The overpowering presence of an apparently unchanging past – including the recent past – concealed the forces, internal and external, that were about to transform the country more dramatically and irreversibly than almost any other in Europe within the next few decades. I tried to understand its history, but apart from recognizing that Francoism would not last, I clearly had no clue where it was going. As late as 1966 I found myself writing: ‘capitalism has persistently failed in that country and so has social revolution, in spite of its constant imminence and occasional eruption’. It was not yet obvious to me how anachronistic that sentence had by then become. Would closer contact with the anti-Franco opposition or Spanish intellectuals in the 1950s have given me a greater sense of realities? I doubt it, for the only effective opposition party, the Communist Party, was then still resisting the information brought out of the country by its illegal cadres, that there was no prospect of a sudden overthrow of the regime. The anarchists, once so powerful in the Spanish labour movement, had not survived the Civil War as a serious force. Nevertheless, on looking back, I am astonished at how little contact I had in the 1950s with intellectual and politically hip persons in Spain, or, before the 1960s, with the new generation of younger Spanish students and ex-students who came to me in London as someone they had heard of on the left, or as readers of my books, which began to be issued by publishers unknown to me, sometimes in rather bad translations, from 1964 on – a symptom of the slow weakening of the regime faced with the massive cultural and political dissidence of its educated young. The 1960s in Spain were the first of several historic moments when the fading of authoritarian regimes proved beneficial to this author.

II

My discovery of Italy in 1952 differed from that of Spain in almost every respect. For one thing, Italy was neither hungry nor stagnant. Even getting around cheaply – and in the 1950s I usually budgeted for the equivalent of ?1 a day all in – I would not expect to find, as in Spain, would-be middle-class travellers with patched clothes. Though the days of the economic miracle did not transform the lives of ordinary Italians until the 1960s, even in the north, the early signs of dynamism were already visible: colourful modern roadside-stations, already more than mere dispensers of petrol, the universal high-tech espresso machines which were about to conquer the world, the crowds of motor-scooters anticipating the eruption of cheap cars. Not that Italy was entirely on the way to western ‘modernity’, especially not in the south and the islands. Indeed, if Primitive Rebels has any single origin it lies in a dinner in the house of Professor Ambrogio Donini in Rome in 1952, or rather conversations after dinner, since, by the egalitarian convictions of the Doninis, family, servants and guests took their meals together. My host ‘told me something about the Tuscan Lazzarettists and the sectarians of Southern Italy’.⁷ For he was both a member of the Italian Communist Party’s Central Committee – indeed a rather hard-line Stalinist – and an expert in the history of religions. He therefore noted with approval that the followers of a Tuscan rural Messiah killed in 1878 had quietly survived to have another try at the millennium by rising in 1948 after the attempted assassination of the Italian CP leader, Palmiro Togliatti. He also told me about the problems arising for the Party leadership from the insistence of several rural Party branches – 1949–50 was a great era of radicalization in the south – on electing as branch secretaries members of the Seventh Day Adventists or similar sects, who would not normally have been regarded as obvious material for the cadres of a Marxist party. Who were these people, who brought ways of thinking which would have been quite usual in the Middle Ages into mid-twentieth-century political movements? Who treated the era of Lenin