But unlike paintings and novels, poetry was written quickly and printed immediately, sometimes on scraps of paper, making it a more effective tool during the fighting to inspire the Republican soldiers, raise morale, and bring international attention to the cause. The poets were also desperately seeking to elicit sympathy among world leaders, appealing to their governments to come to the Republic’s aid as Russia did, while Germany, Italy, and Portugal steadily assisted Franco and his Nationalists.
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Ernest Hemingway had fallen in love with Spain the decade before; he returned in 1937 as a correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance. He may have been the most noncommunist writer to become deeply involved in the Republican cause, and yet it could be said that no one’s call for foreign help to stop the Fascists was as determined, loud, and urgent as his.
In one dispatch from the front that was published in January 1938, he reported about members of the International Brigades: “Since I had seen them last spring, they have become soldiers. The romantics have pulled out, the cowards have gone home along with the badly wounded. The dead, of course, aren’t there. Those who are left are tough, with blackened matter-of-fact faces, and, after seven months, they know their trade.” Hemingway’s articles became increasingly propagandistic, many aimed at compelling American support for the Republic.
Hemingway also helped write, narrate, and raise funds for the propaganda film The Spanish Earth. The journalist Martha Gellhorn was also in Spain in 1937, covering the war for Collier’s Weekly. She was friends with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and was able to arrange a screening of the film at the White House for the Roosevelts and several military advisers, with the film’s director, Joris Ivens, and Hemingway also in attendance. FDR had already started out being sympathetic toward the Republic, despite concerns about leftist radicals and anarchists. And he had no illusions about the war’s importance: to him it wasn’t just about Spain, but an international crisis threatening to set off the greater European conflagration; in April 1936, a year before Hemingway and Gellhorn came, he had called Spain his greatest worry. After the screening, he told Ivens that he liked the film and suggested editing it to further emphasize that the “Spaniards are fighting, not merely for the right to their own government,” but in particular for the right to cultivate land that the old order had forcibly left barren. Still, the film failed to budge FDR from his anti-intervention stance. (Hemingway and Gellhorn would marry three years later.)
Hemingway is most closely associated with the war through his tremendous novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, the story of a young American who is already in Spain before the war and joins the International Brigades after it starts. It was based on events that took place in 1936 and 1937. Some have noted that the novel was influenced and inspired by the Alliance of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals, most notably the guerrilla theater directed by Rafael Alberti and María Teresa León, which performed for the soldiers in the field. But as compelling as the book is, Hemingway didn’t start writing it until 1939. He finished it in July 1940, twenty months after the Republic had fallen. Did the bell toll too late? It was published that October.
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Neruda’s most important poem of the period, one of the most outstanding of his life, was triggered by the first major attack by the Fascist forces on Madrid at the end of October 1936. It was relentless. The bombing by Junkers began on the twenty-third. Italian planes dropped leaflets warning citizens to leave the city or “the National aviation will wipe [Madrid] off the earth.” A week later, Russian fighter planes were in the skies around the capital; within three days they forced all the Italian bombers to retreat, a great confidence boost for the Republicans. On November 8, twenty thousand Nationalist troops, along with German panzer tanks, attacked and began to take up positions in the city’s suburbs. Later that day the first International Brigade troops arrived. The fighting continued, without pause, stretching over nearly a month. Still, citizens of Madrid and the Republican resolve continued to resist the offensive.
On November 17, spent of energy and morale, the Nationalists launched a ruthless bombardment bent on destroying the city’s resistance. Two thousand shells an hour pummeled the center of Madrid. But the city held out. Franco finally relented, especially when the siege began to turn world opinion against him. He would not be able to take the city until March 1939.
Spain in the Heart’s most powerful poem is arguably “I Explain Some Things.” It is the second one Neruda published during the war and it builds upon the blunt realism of “Song for the Mothers of Dead Militiamen.” “I Explain Some Things” appeared in Mono azul in January 1937 under the original title “Es así,” or “It’s Like This.”
Neruda had reached a moment from which there was no turning back. In his youth, though he had observed the social injustices of the frontier, been influenced by his anarchist uncle in Temuco, and become involved with the radical politics of the student movement in Santiago, he’d published apolitical love poems and the metaphysical experiment venture of the infinite man. In the Far East, Neruda turned inward, and his poetry disengaged from politics. Now he realized that he could no longer remain focused on his internal experience. Such poetry couldn’t ignore the realities of what was happening in Spain in 1936, or in Italy and Germany, or anywhere in the world.
In “I Explain Some Things,” Neruda uses clear language to convey the profound change he has gone through because of the horrors he has witnessed. The experience has
