Irish Literary Responses to the Spanish Civil War—With Particular Reference to Peadar O'Donnell's Salud! An Irishman in Spain (1937)

Abstract

This paper discusses the reverberations which news of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936 had in the Irish Free State. As a result of the Irish Catholic Church and the conservative press hailing General Franco as the saviour of Catholic Spain from a godless Communist minority, Irish public opinion was overwhelmingly pro-Franco. Against this background, the paper gives a brief overview of the most interesting literary treatments of the Spanish Civil War in different genres by both pro-Nationalist and pro-Republican Irish writers. The rest of the paper focuses on Peadar O'Donnell, Irish novelist and one of the founding figures of the Republican Congress, a radical left-wing movement of the 1930s. His book Salud! An Irishman in Spain (1937) represents an eyewitness account of the mobilization of the Republican defence forces and the workers’ revolution in Catalonia during the first few months of the war. O'Donnell tried to present a seemingly even-handed picture of the Spanish revolutionary anarchists, whose agricultural reforms he clearly admired, but whose violent attacks on the Catholic Church he condemned.

Notes

¹For the coverage of the Spanish Civil War in the Irish press, see Fearghal McGarry, ‘Irish Newspapers and the Spanish Civil War’, Irish Historical Studies, 23:129 (2002), 68–90.

²The public reaction to the Spanish Civil War in Ireland and the military involvement of Irish volunteers on both sides in the conflict have been discussed at length in the following publications: Fearghal McGarry, Irish Politics and the Spanish Civil War (Cork: Cork U. P., 1999); Robert Stradling, The Irish and the Spanish Civil War. 1936–39. Crusades in Conflict (Manchester: Mandolin, 1999); J. Bowyer Bell, ‘Ireland and the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939’, Studia Hibernica, 9 (1969), 137–63; Álvaro Jaspe, ‘Blarney and Belief: Ireland and the Spanish Civil War’, International Journal of Iberian Studies, 9:3 (1996), 133–42; Dermot Keogh, Twentieth-Century Ireland. Nation and State (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1994).

³The Irish Democrat was an eight-page weekly jointly issued by the Communist Party of Ireland, the Northern Irish Socialist Party, and the Republican Congress from March to December 1937. See Bowyer Bell, ‘Ireland and the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939’, 156.

⁴Aodh de Blacam, For God and Spain. The Truth About the Spanish War (Dublin: Office of the ‘Irish Messenger’, 1936).

⁵Eoin O'Duffy, Crusade in Spain. On the Part Played by the Irish Brigade in the Civil War in Spain (Dublin: Browne & Nolan, 1938).

⁶Francis McCullagh, In Franco's Spain: Being the Experiences of an Irish War-Correspondent during the Great Civil War Which Began in 1936 (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1937).

¹⁰Diarmuid Fitzpatrick (‘Somhairle McAlastair’), ‘Battle Song of “Irish Christian Front: Off to Salamanca”’ (unsigned), The Worker, 10 (12 September 1936), 3.

⁷H. Gustav Klaus, ‘The Authorship of Somhairle Macalastair’, Irish University Review, 26:2 (1996), 107–17 (p. 107).

⁸Michael McInerney, Peadar O'Donnell (Dublin: O'Brien Press, 1974), 116–40; Richard English, Radicals and the Republic. Socialist Republicanism in the Irish Free State 1925–1937 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 126–85.

⁹Manus O'Riordan, ‘Communism in Dublin in the 1930s. The Struggle against Fascism’, in Strong Words, Brave Deeds: The Poetry, Life and Times of Thomas O'Brien: Volunteer in the Spanish Civil War, ed. H. G. Klaus (Dublin: O'Brien Press, 1994), 218–36 (pp. 218–21); English, Radicals and the Republic, 247; Patrick Murray, The Roman Catholic Church and Irish Politics, 1922–37 (Dublin: Univ. College Dublin Press, 2000), 350–53.

¹¹Various opinion polls conducted between 1937 and 1939 showed that the sympathies of the British people were predominantly pro-Republican. Over the course of the conflict, numerous pro-Republican ‘Aid Spain’ committees were founded all over Britain. Katherine Hoskins, Today the Struggle. Literature and Politics in England during the Spanish Civil War (Austin/London: Univ. of Texas Press, 1969), 7–14; Tom Buchanan, Britain and the Spanish Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1997), 93. While ‘not more than a dozen’ Britons, of whom most were ‘at least half Irish’ (Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, 4^th ed. [London: Penguin, 2003], 635), joined the Nationalist troops, the International Brigades attracted 2,762 British volunteers, ‘of whom 1,762 were wounded and 542 were killed’ (Hoskins, Today the Struggle, 13).

¹²Robert Canary, ‘Louis MacNeice’, in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 20: British Poets, 1914–1945, ed. Donald E. Stanford (Detroit: Gale Research, 1983), 225–40.

¹³Louis MacNeice, Autumn Journal (London: Faber & Faber, 1939).

¹⁴Charles Ewart Milne, ‘Medley in Spain’, ‘Escape’, ‘The Statue’, ‘Drums Without End’, ‘Tomorrow’, ‘Gun Runner’, ‘They Lay With the Moon’, ‘This Spanish Ale’, in Charles Ewart Milne, Drums Without End. Short Stories Mainly about the Spanish Civil War (Portree, Isle of Skye: Aquila, 1985); Charles Ewart Milne, ‘Song of the Night Market’, in Charlie Donnelly. The Life and Poems, ed. Joseph Donnelly (Dublin: Dedalus, 1987), 83; Charles Ewart Milne, ‘Thinking of Artolas’, ‘Salutation for Some Poets’, ‘Sierran Vigil’, ‘The Hour Glass’, ‘Sierran Aftermath’, ‘Lines for a European Drama’, ‘Ecce Homo’, ‘Song for a Great Multitude’, in Charles Ewart Milne, Letter from Ireland (Dublin: The Gayfield Press, 1940).

¹⁵Charles Ewart Milne, ‘A Memory of Charles Donnelly’, Iron, 30 (October–December 1980), 3–5 (p. 4). See also Charles Ewart Milne, ‘Foreword’ to his short-story collection Drums Without End, 9; Charles Ewart Milne, ‘Gun Runner. An Accident in the Spanish Civil War’, Ulster Tatler (May 1982), 97–99; Yann Lovelock, ‘Ewart Milne: A Biographical Framework’, in Ewart Milne. For His 80 ^th Birthday: A Festschrift, ed. J. C. R. Green (Portree: Aquila, 1983), 18–22.

¹⁶Thomas O'Brien, The Last Hill, ‘Dinny Coady’, ‘Beauty Is Found to Be Ugly’, ‘On Guard for Liberty’, ‘International Brigade Dead’, ‘The Doomed’, Untitled Poem, in Strong Words, Brave Deeds, ed. Klaus.

¹⁷Thomas O'Brien's biography and his poetic and dramatic output form the subject of H. G. Klaus's edition, Strong Words, Brave Deeds.

¹⁸Charles Donnelly, ‘Heroic Heart’, ‘The Tolerance of Crows’, ‘Poem’, in The Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse, ed. Valentine Cunningham (London: Penguin Books, 1996).

¹⁹Michael Smith, ‘Charles Donnelly: 1914–1937’, The Lace Curtain, 4 (1971), 64–69.

²⁰Kate O'Brien, Farewell Spain (London: House of Stratus, 2001 [1^st ed. 1937]). Various critics have suggested that O'Brien's fierce criticism of Franco in Farewell Spain led to her being banned from entering Spain until 1957 (see Lorna Reynolds, Kate O'Brien. A Literary Portrait [Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1987], 97; María Isabel Butler de Foley, ‘Each Other's Country: Some Twentieth Century Irish and Spanish Writers’, in With Warmest Love. Lectures for Kate O'Brien. 1984–1993, ed. John Logan [Limerick: Mellick Press, 1994], 15–31 [p. 24]; Eibhear Walshe, Kate O'Brien. A Writing Life [Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2006], 76). However, as Morales Ladrón has stated in her paper on O'Brien's encounters with Spanish censorship, there is no documentary evidence of the author ever having been denied entry into Franco's Spain. Nor is there any record of Farewell Spain having been censored in Spain or of any requests for permission to publish a Spanish translation having been submitted to the authorities. See Marisol Morales Ladrón, ‘Banned in Spain? Truths, Lies and Censorship in Kate O'Brien's Novels’, Atlantis, 32:6 (2010), 57–72.

²¹Mairin Mitchell, Storm over Spain (London: Secker & Warburg, 1937).

²²For more detailed discussions of Irish literary engagements with the conflict in Spain, see Kathleen Devine, ‘Roads to Spain: Irish Writers and the Spanish Civil War’, in Modern Irish Writers and the Wars, ed. Kathleen Devine (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1999), 147–64; H. Gustav Klaus, ‘ “The Sore Frailty of This Lasting Cause” ’: Some Celtic Versions of Spanish Civil War Poetry’, Irish University Review, 21 (1991–92), 268–84; William Tierney, ‘Irish Writers and the Spanish Civil War’, Eire Ireland, 7:3 (1972), 37–55.

²³See Anon., ‘Peadar O'Donnell’, in Field Day Anthology, General Editor, Seamus Deane, 5 vols (Derry: Field Day/Cork: Cork U. P., 1991–2002), II (1991), 1221; Paul A. Doyle, ‘Peadar O'Donnell’, in Dictionary of Irish Literature, ed. Robert Hogan (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1996), 943–45; biographical entry on Peadar O'Donnell on the database ‘Ricorso’, edited by Bruce Stewart, <http://www.ricorso.net/rx/az-data/authors/o/ODonnell_P3/life.htm> (accessed 20/11/2011). By 1936 O'Donnell had published the novels Storm, Islanders, The Way It Was with Them, Adrigoole, The Knife, There Will Be Fighting, On the Edge of the Stream, the play Wrack, and the autobiographical book The Gates Flew Open.

²⁴Donal Ó Drisceoil, Peadar O'Donnell (Cork: Cork U. P., 2001), 60–94.

²⁵Peadar O'Donnell, Salud! An Irishman in Spain (London: Methuen, 1937), 8. Further references to this work are given in the text.

²⁶Grattan Freyer, Peadar O'Donnell (Lewisburg: Bucknell U. P., 1973), 96; Alexander G. González, Peadar O'Donnell (Chester Springs: Dufour Editions, 1997), 97.

²⁷E. Allison Peers, review of Salud! An Irishman in Spain by Peadar O'Donnell, The Siege of Alcázar by H. R. Knickerbocker, and Death in the Morning by Helen Nicholson, BSS XIV:55 (1937), 158–60 (p. 160).

²⁸Donal Ó Drisceoil, ‘Peadar O'Donnell and the Spanish Revolution’, Red & Black Revolution, 5 (2001), 8–10 (p. 8).

²⁹Ó Drisceoil, Peadar O'Donnell, 2.

³⁰O'Donnell, quoted in Ó Drisceoil, Peadar O'Donnell, 2.

³¹1 Ó Drisceoil, ‘Peadar O'Donnell and the Spanish Revolution’, 8.

³²McInerney, Peadar O'Donnell, 25.

³³Ó Drisceoil, Peadar O'Donnell, 96.

³⁴In his journalistic writing and public speeches on the Spanish Civil War, O'Donnell was a shade less scrupulous about using the same lurid and provocative language as the pro-Francoist war commentators and offering similarly simplistic and one-sided explanations for the turmoil in Spain. In his article ‘What I Saw in Spain’, published in Ireland To-day in September 1936, for example, he made much of the alleged over-representation of foreigners and Moors in the Nationalist army and tried to claim the label of ‘crusaders for Christianity’ for the defenders of the Spanish Republic: ‘It is one of those exquisite ironies, which now and then become over-tones of excited moments in Ireland, that I should find myself as practically the sole voice of Green Republicanism in Ireland supporting bourgeois democracy in Spain. And the irony is not lessened by the fact that Sean Murray, Harry Midgley, Sam Hazlett, Jack Dorricott and Peadar O'Donnell alone here so far acclaim Catholic Spain against the Moors and the Spanish Foreign Legion. In that picture of Badajos [sic] with its Catholic 2,000 lined up for execution by the Moors and Legionaries, some of our principal Irish newspapers are publicists for the heathen, while this group of ours is for the Catholic masses to whose liberty these 2,000 sacrificed themselves in full gaze of the world’ (Peadar O'Donnell, ‘What I Saw in Spain’, Ireland To-day 1:4 [1936], 17–20 [p. 17]). In a speech given in Belfast in mid August 1937, O'Donnell attributed the anti-clerical attacks in Republican Spain, which according to him only started after the Fascist rising in July 1936, to the circumstance that the Spanish priests ‘appeared to be acting as the spokesmen of the Fascists’ and suggested that ‘[t]he lesson to the people of Ireland […] was to urge their clergy to keep clear of political movements’ (Anon., Irish Independent, 15 August 1936, p. 12). See also Peadar O'Donnell's letters to the Irish Independent of 20 August 1936, p. 6 and to the Irish Times of 22 August 1936, p. 5 and 25 August 1936, p. 8, as well as the anonymous article ‘The Outbreak in Spain. Irish Visitor's Impressions. Scenes in Barcelona and Elsewhere’, Irish Times, 3 August 1936, p. 2, which reproduces O'Donnell's account of his impressions of the mobilization of Republican resistance to the military rising in Catalonia.

³⁵The academic critic, E. Allison Peers, who reviewed Salud! An Irishman in Spain together with pro-Francoist books from as objective a viewpoint as possible, commended the book for its ‘being mainly descriptive and relegating discussion of the rights and wrongs of the quarrel to a secondary place’. He found that O'Donnell's book ‘leaves no sting, for […] he reveals the stark, terrible tragedy of [the war], the uselessness, the hopelessness—and all of it in virile, gripping language and with an entire absence of affectation or rhetoric’ (Peers, review, 158 [for details see footnote 27]).

³⁶Ó Drisceoil, Peadar O'Donnell, 83–94. O'Donnell had wanted the Republican Congress to take ‘the “united front” approach, whereby Congress would be a “rallying centre for mass struggles” by anti-imperialists of all parties and none, pledged to the realization of a “Republic”, behind a working-class leadership’ (Ó Drisceoil, Peadar O'Donnell, 87). In an article in the April 1936 issue of the British left-wing magazine Left Review, O'Donnell deplored the refusal by the IRA to participate in the establishment of a united front of all the independence forces in Ireland wanting to ‘free the republican masses from the ball and chain formula of Fianna Fail’ and stated that ‘the most urgent task [was] to rescue the I.R.A. leaders from their policy of isolation’ (Peadar O'Donnell, ‘The Irish Struggle To-day’, Left Review, 2:7 [1936], 297–300). The main objective of the Republican Congress, as outlined in the organization's paper of the same name, was ‘the maintenance of a united front through the struggle against fascism’ (quoted in Ó Drisceoil, Peadar O'Donnell, 84).

³⁷Whereas O'Donnell rather insinuated than laboured the point that both during the Irish and the Spanish Civil Wars the progressive Republican forces were confronted with an alliance between the Catholic Church and the representatives of the anti-revolutionary forces in both countries, the reviewer of the book for the pro-Republican periodical the Irish Democrat argued that O'Donnell was especially qualified to write on the war in Spain thanks to his ‘inside experience of the Irish Civil War, in which the Republic set up by a Catholic democracy was, with the blessing of the Irish Hierarchy, destroyed by military coup d'etat’. He did not consider it unlikely that the same conflict between the Church and the rich on the one hand and the workers on the other hand might also break out in Ireland, if the Church did not give up its defence of the interests of the rich: ‘The choice is arising here as it arose in Spain: the Irish Hierarchy will have to choose between God and Mammon. There can be no question that it would be more in the interests of the Church for the Irish clergy to be the loved and trusted spiritual guides of their people in a happy, free and prosperous workers’ state than for those clergy to outrage the Catholic masses in their deepest feelings by giving ecclesiastical sanction to the continuance of the misery of the many that the few may live in luxury; to slums, squalor, unemployment, starvation’ (Anon., Irish Democrat, 5 June 1937, p. 2).

³⁸It is arguably not least on account of his/her familiarity with O'Donnell's much more overtly polemical letters to the Irish press (see footnote 34) and public speeches about Spain as well as with his firmly entrenched reputation in Ireland as a Socialist agitator that the reviewer of Salud! for the Irish Times was more sensitive to the political messages hidden in the book, particularly in the passages dealing with Ireland, and less convinced by the author's guise as a fair and sober, albeit openly pro-Republican, war commentator than the British reviewer E. A. Peers (see footnote 27). Although ‘[i]t would be unfair to accuse Mr. O'Donnell of propaganda’, the critic argues, ‘this book is the work of a pamphleteer rather than of the artist that its author undoubtedly is’. S/he supposes that ‘Salud! will not do much either to interpret the real inwardness of the Spanish Civil War to the Irish public or to clarify the author's own attitude in the matter. ‘Throughout the book he seems to be striving on the one hand to convince his readers of his sympathy with the popular cause in Spain, and, on the other, to prove to them that he is no more a Communist than Mr. de Blacam. Actually, he has made neither case to the reader's satisfaction’ (Anon. Irish Times, 3 May 1937, p. 7).

³⁹Tierney, ‘Irish Writers and the Spanish Civil War’, 50.

⁴⁰O'Donnell neither mentions the training camps of the International Brigades organized by the Comintern as the destination of the Irish Republican volunteers, nor does he refer to his own involvement in the recruitment of Irish volunteers for the International Brigades in cooperation with the Communist Party of Ireland. Given the widespread anti-Red paranoia in Ireland, he seems to have consciously avoided any references to his contacts with the Communist Party.

⁴¹Peter Hegarty, Peadar O'Donnell (Cork: Mercier Press, 1999), 7; Freyer, Peadar O'Donnell, 231–32.

⁴²Ó Drisceoil, Peadar O'Donnell, 98.

⁴³Ó Drisceoil, Peadar O'Donnell, 1.