Mary Low: A Trotskyist with the POUM in Barcelona

Abstract

This article steps into the earliest ‘behind the lines’ days of the Spanish Civil War as seen through the idealist eyes of young Mary Low, who arrived to join the revolution in Barcelona together with the Cuban Juan Breá, her fellow Trotskyist and surrealist poet. Intrahistory (to use Unamuno’s term) cannot be fully told without such accounts, personal testimonies to the ideals which inspired and provoked the Civil War in Spain, and which were so often to end in disillusion and death, in one of the most destructive conflicts of the twentieth century. To follow Mary Low’s account and experiences is to understand something of why this was so.

Key words:

• 20^th-century Spanish History
• Spanish Civil War
• Mary Low
• Juan Breá
• Red Spanish Notebook
• Revolutionary Barcelona
• Anarchists
• POUM
• PSUC
• Communists

Notes

1 Mary Low & Juan Breá, Red Spanish Notebook (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1979 [1^st ed. London: Martin Secker and Warburg Ltd, 1937]). In-text references are to the 1979 edition. For biographical backgrounds on Low and Breá, see Franklin Rosemont, ‘Afterword’, in Mary Low, Where the Wolf Sings: New Poems and Collages (Chicago: Black Swan Press, 1994), 53–60; Agustín Guillamón, ‘Introducción’, in Cuaderno rojo de Barcelona (Barcelona: AliKornio Ediciones, 2001), 7–24, his ‘Poema y biografía del cubano Juan Breá’, Balance. Cuadernos de Historia, 34 (2009), 1–4, and his ‘Mary Low, poeta, trotskista y revolucionaria’, La Bataille Socialiste, 5 April 2009, n.p., <https://bataillesocialiste.wordpress.com/2009/04/05/mary-low-poeta-trotskista-y-revolucionaria/> (accessed 19 July 2018); Georgiana M. M. Colvile, Scandaleusement d’elles: trente-quatre femmes surréalistes (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1999), 172–77; Gladys Amador, ‘Writer loved “to read, to learn and to teach” ’, The Miami Herald, 13 January 2007, n.p.; Gérard Roche, ‘Mary Low (1912–2007)’, Association des Amis de Benjamin Péret, <http://www.benjamin-peret.org/bibliotheque/articles/96-gerard-roche-mary-low-1912-2007.html> (accessed 19 July 2018).

2 For the accounts of other women, see the following: Mika Etchebéhère, Mi guerra en España (Barcelona: AliKornio Ediciones, 2003). Etchebéhère, a Trotskyist like Low, presents a remarkable narrative from the perspective of someone who fought at the front and commanded a POUM column until May 1937. See also Lois Orr, Letters from Barcelona: An American Woman in Revolution and Civil War, ed. Gerd-Rainer Horn, with some materials by Charles Orr (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Orr (née Cusick) worked with Low and wrote numerous letters to her family which contain a wealth of information about daily life in Barcelona and the various political factions there. In The Last Mile to Huesca: An Australian Nurse in the Spanish Civil War (Kensington, NSW: Univ. of New South Wales Press, 1988), Agnes Hodgson, an Australian nurse, records the medical services from an apolitical perspective. Virginia Cowles, a non-Communist sympathizer, visited both sides, and in four chapters on the Nationalists, in Looking for Trouble (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1941), she conveys the deep aversion she felt to what she observed there.

3 Joaquín Maurín of the Catalan Bloc Obrer i Camperol (BOC) and Andreu Nin of the Izquierda Communista (IC) joined their parties together to form the POUM in September 1935. Both leaders believed that the working class had to become ‘el heraldo verdadero de las conquistas democráticas. Ha de ser el gran libertador que aporte la solución ansiada a los problemas de la revolución democrática: tierra, nacionalidades, estructuración del Estado, liberación de la mujer, destrucción del Poder de la Iglesia, aniquilamiento de las castas parasitarias, mejoramiento moral y material de la situación de los trabajadores’ (from a pamphlet published by the POUM Executive Committee in February 1936).

4 Antony Beevor, The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 (London: Phoenix, 2007), 177.

5 A French translation by Guy Flandre with an introduction by Gérard Roche came out in 1997 (Paris: Éditions Verticales) and in 2002 it appeared in German, translated by Jürgen Schneider (Hamburg: Edition Nautilus). On 17 July 2009, the documentary No s’accepten propines, based on Low’s chapters, was premiered in Barcelona. Subsequently, it was presented at the Barcelona ‘18 Mostra International de Films de Dones’ on 16 June 2010; at the ‘24 Muestra de Cine y Mujeres de Pamplona’, the documentary obtained first place in the category of commendation by the public.

6 Seamus Heaney, ‘Album 1’, in Human Chain (London: Faber, 2010), 4.

7 Orr, Letters from Barcelona, ed. Horn, 79. For an account of the complex relationship between Surrealism and Trotsky from the mid 1920s, see Robin Adèle Greeley, ‘For an Independent Revolutionary Art: Breton, Trotsky and Cárdenas’s Mexico’, in Surrealism, Politics and Culture, ed. Raymond Spiteri & Donald LaCoss (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2003), 204–25.

8 Agustín Guillamón confirmed to me that Breá travelled first, eager to contact Nin, whom he had befriended in a Barcelona prison in 1932 (my grateful thanks are extended to him for this and other personal communications). On arrival, Breá joined the POUM International Lenin Column, among whose sixty or so foreigners about twenty were Trotskyists. Low tells us that she had already been in Barcelona—it is likely that she and Breá had travelled there after the 1934 Asturias rising.

9 Before crossing into Spain, Low had won a considerable sum in a Monaco casino, and put some of it towards the publication of Spanish Revolution (Guillamón, ‘Introducción’, in Cuaderno rojo de Barcelona, 12).

10 This comment masks the magnitude and ferocity of the terror that followed the defeat of the Nationalist rebellion in Barcelona—despite demands by all factions for the violence to stop. John Langdon-Davies mistakenly doubted what a Catalan acquaintance told him about the fifty or sixty bodies found every day in the morgue (Behind the Spanish Barricades: Reports from the Spanish Barricades, intros by Paul Preston & Nigel Chapman [London: Reportage Press, 2007 (1^st ed. London: Martin Secker & Warburg, 1936)], 102–03).

11 Ronald Fraser, Blood of Spain: An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979), 141.

12 William Krehm, Spain: Revolution and Counter-Revolution (Toronto: League for a Revolutionary Workers’ Party, 1937), 3. Krehm travelled to Barcelona in September 1936. For a biographical account, see Michael Petrou, Renegades: Canadians in the Spanish Civil War (Vancouver: Univ. of British Columbia Press, 2008), 148–59.

13 See, for example, Frank Borkenau, The Spanish Cockpit: An Eyewitness Account of the Spanish Civil War (London: Phoenix Press, 2000 [1^st ed. London: Faber & Faber, 1937]), 70–71; Peter Stansky & William Abrahams, Journey to the Frontier: Two Roads to the Spanish Civil War (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1966), 315; Langdon-Davies, Behind the Spanish Barricades, 116.

14 María Teresa García Banus, Una vida bien vivida, ed. José Gútierrez Álvarez, <http://www.vientosur.info/documentos/unavidabienvivida-mteresagbanus.pdf> (accessed 10 March 2010).

15 Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Barcelonas (Barcelona: Empúries, 1987), 154.

16 Ronald Fraser, ‘The Popular Experience of War and Revolution 1936–9’, in Revolution and War in Spain, 1931–1939, ed. Paul Preston (London: Methuen & Co., 1984), 225–42 (p. 227). Unsympathetic observers saw the revolution from a different perspective. For example, Knoblaugh, highly sceptical, ridicules what he sees: ‘Lounging here and there or speeding through the streets in their requisitioned private cars [ …, ] these Catalonian Anarchists looked fierce enough to startle even the directors of a Hollywood mob scene’ (see H. Edward Knoblaugh, Correspondent in Spain [London/New York: Sheed & Ward, 1937], 33).

17 Víctor Alba & Stephen Schwartz, Spanish Marxism versus Soviet Communism: A History of the POUM in the Spanish Civil War (New Brunswick/London: Transaction Books, 1988), 130. For an account of the advantages of having a union card, see Michael Seidman, ‘Women’s Subversive Individualism in Barcelona during the 1930s’, International Review of Social History, 37:2 (1992), 161–76.

18 Many observers remarked on the fact that in Barcelona beggars had disappeared from the streets, while in Madrid and Valencia they had not.

19 Andreu Nin, La revolución española (1930–1937) (Barcelona: El Viejo Topo, n.d), 242.

20 Robert J. Alexander, The Anarchists in the Spanish Civil War, 2 vols (London: Janus Publishing Company, 1999), I, 480.

21 Borkenau, The Spanish Cockpit, 70.

22 Orr, Letters from Barcelona, ed. Horn, 89.

23 Journalists are candidly censured by Low: ‘The average journalist [ … ] had no particular convictions about the war and revolution [ … ]. At a time when to us everything was life or death and black or white [ …, ] they were blasé [ …, ] and all of them could have won the war for us ever so quickly, they said’ (204).

24 The Hatters’ Union had complained that the prohibition of hats and ties threatened their jobs, and argued that these should not be the privilege of a minority but the right of the majority; the leadership concurred. See Langdon-Davies, Behind the Spanish Barricades, 101.

25 Cowles, Looking for Trouble, 81.

26 Disillusioned with the counter-revolutionary changes, which to a certain extent she blames on the CNT-FAI, when the Anarchists re-introduced taxis, she tersely remarks: ‘they seemed altogether to have forgotten the childish ferocity with which they had abolished the taxis in the first place. Now they were just as childishly proud of their new creation’ (213).

27 Low was probably unaware that, as Abel Paz says, ‘no orders were given for expropriation or collectivization—which proved that the unions, which had represented the will of their members until 18 July, had now been overtaken by events. This was proved, once for all, by the actions of the transit workers, who had elected committees of their own. The streetcars left their depots with the letters CNT-FAI painted on them; the expropriation of the means of production had begun’ (see Abel Paz, The Spanish Civil War, trans. David Britt [Paris: Éditions Hazan, 1997], 40). See also Fraser, ‘The Popular Experience of War and Revolution 1936–9’, 226.

28 Andreu Nin, ‘Mitin en el Gran Price en honor de Joaquín Maurín’, La Batalla, 27 de octubre de 1936, Marxists Internet Archive (junio de 2012), digitalized by Martin Fahlgren, <https://www.marxists.org/espanol/nin/1936/mitin_25_octubre.htm> (accessed 17 October 2015).

29 How comprehensively the workers did so is revealed in a study by Antoni Castells Duran, Les coŀlectivitzacions a Barcelona 1936–1939 (Barcelona: Editorial Hacer, 1993).

30 Antoni Castells Duran, ‘Revolution and Collectivization in Civil War Barcelona, 1936–39’, in Red Barcelona: Social Protest and Labour Mobilization in the Twentieth Century, ed. Angel Smith (London/New York: Routledge, 2002), 127–41.

31 When the POUM entered the Catalan government on 26 September 1936 it took over a few major buildings, which Low justifies on the grounds that such requisition ‘was a game that everybody was playing’ (121). One expropriated building, the historical Palacio de la Virreina, was turned into the Institute of Marxist Culture. Low edited the talks given there by her and Breá in her La verdad contemporánea, ed. Mary Low, prólogo de Benjamín Péret (La Habana, Cuba: n.p., 1943).

32 George Orwell, ‘Spilling the Spanish Beans’, New English Weekly, 29 July and 2 September 1937, <http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/scw/orwell2.htm> (accessed 15 October 2017).

33 Low is referring to a poster by the CNT-FAI, in which the outlines of three large male figures are painted in red: a peasant, an industrial worker, and a soldier appear three abreast, and the caption reads: ‘Camarada en el trabajo, en la lucha une tu voluntad a la disciplina’.

34 Nin had also argued in favour of abolishing the Generalitat and establishing a workers’ government as the first stage towards creating a genuine proletarian democracy.

35 The FAI also began to feel disaffected by the growing bureaucracy, and at their Regional Committee of 6 December 1936 agreed to ‘suprimir la burocracia parasitaria, aumentada considerablemente en los actuales momentos en las fábricas, los talleres y en los organismos municipales y del Estado’ (Tierra y Libertad, 12 December 1936, p. 2).

36 Anna Louise Strong, Spain in Arms (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1937), 27.

37 Her elegy to his memory entitled ‘Canción para Andrés Nin’, although undated, was signed after 1944 ‘Mary Low Machado’ (the name of her second husband), and contains the lines: ‘Me contestabas: / “Es cierto que hay cuchillos malvados y sombras, / pero uno debe seguir su camino, / avanzar siempre” ’; it ends with the words: ‘The Revolution and our stunned hearts weep for you’ (Low, Cuaderno rojo, 180).

38 See James Whiston, ‘ “Obligación de opinar”: The Limits of Pluralism in Manuel Azaña’s La velada de Benicarló’, in The Republic Besieged: Civil War in Spain, 1936–1939, ed. Paul Preston & Ann L. Mackenzie (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U. P., 1996), 241–60 (p. 259).

* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.