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Rafael Alberti’s De un momento a otro: The Matter of Poetry, Politics and War ROBERT G. HAVARD University of Wales, Aberystwyth
La politique au milieu des intérêts d’imagination, c’est un coup de pistolet au milieu d’un concert.1 Yo me defino como un poeta de mi tiempo, de un tiempo terrible.2
The quality of Alberti’s 1930s poetry is a matter of some debate. Many critics take the view that after the peak of Sobre los ángeles in 1929 the poet went into sharp decline when he adopted the role of political agitator and that, essentially, in this period, he sacrificed his art for the sake of voicing trite communist propaganda.3 The purpose of this article is to put the opposite view and to highlight the virtues of De un momento a otro which, I shall argue, is not only a major volume in its own right but one that develops organically from the poet’s earlier work. Leaving aside for a moment the issue of whether or not poetry is the proper genre for political commitment, we begin by noting the obvious: that the dismissive attitude towards Alberti’s 1930s poetry was fostered in part by factors outside the poetry, notably Franco’s long dictatorship which 1 Stendhal, Le Rouge et le noir (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1964), 380. 2 Rafael Alberti; see José Luis Tejada, ‘Una entrevista con Rafael Alberti’, Gades. Revista del Colegio Universitario de Filosofía y Letras de Cádiz, XII (1984), 19. 3 Pieter Wesseling comments on negative critical responses to Alberti’s political poetry in Revolution and Tradition: The Poetry of Rafael Alberti (Valencia/Chapel Hill: Albatros, 1981), 47. In addition to the outright opposition of critics such as Ricardo Gullón and C. B. Morris, a dismissive attitude is implicit in Solita Salinas de Marichal, El mundo poético de Rafael Alberti (Madrid: Gredos, 1975), which goes no further than Sobre los ángeles; in Geoffrey Connell, a committed albertista who looks no further than Sermones y moradas; and again in Salvador Jiménez Fajardo who comments on just one Civil-War poem in Multiple Spaces: The Poetry of Rafael Alberti (London: Tamesis, 1984), 143-44. Besides Wesseling, recent admirers who comment in depth on Alberti’s political poetry include Judith Nantell, Rafael Alberti’s Poetry of the Thirties: The Poet’s Public Voice (Athens, Georgia: Univ. of Georgia, 1986) and Antonio Jiménez Millán, La poesía de Rafael Alberti (1930-39) (Cadiz: Diputación Provincial de Cádiz, 1984).
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precluded favourable criticism in Spain, and the waning esteem of communism which prompted many a change of heart, most famously in Auden who omitted as fine a poem as ‘Spain, 1937’ from his collected works. Not to be underestimated are the political prejudices of bourgeois critics on whom a prickly Alberti was quick to turn the tables: Bueno, yo creo que sobre mí ha habido mucho partidismo, y lo sigue habiendo, enorme. Yo creo que si yo no hubiera sido lo que soy y lo que puedo pensar civilmente y políticamente, como quiera, pues yo hubiera tenido seguramente ... libros críticos a patadas, como se hacen sobre Guillén y sobre Aleixandre. Yo siempre encuentro algún hijo de puta crítico que me tira a matar, sea como sea, y esas cosas proceden de fondos oscuros, no son cosas claras, y esas cosas sí que son comprometidas.4 An Auden-like renunciation was not possible for Alberti, while Guillén’s response of turning his head away towards the positive things in life had never been a legitimate option: Yo creo que soy un hijo de mi tiempo, que yo quisiera, lo he dicho muchas veces, ser un poeta de la paz, un poeta de lo bello, de la bahía, del agua, de las cosas eternas que siempre dan a la poesía cosas nuevas. Pero es que yo no puedo prescindir de que he llevado una vida angustiosa, de que el destino mío me ha lanzado a cosas que quizás otros poetas no las hayan sufrido como yo, ¿verdad? Y que yo siento profundamente lo que pasa en mi época: las muertes, las guerras, las sombras tan llenas de muertos ...5 Alberti scarcely need apologize for being the first major Spanish poet of his generation to treat politics in his poetry. What is surprising is that so few of his contemporaries grasped that nettle. Having put himself in the front line, both as poet and soldier who fought against fascism, he is entitled to resent sniping criticism. Yet, poetically, there is much to fault in his first extensive political work, El poeta en la calle: ‘Un fantasma recorre Europa’ simply—or slavishly—quotes the Communist Manifesto; crude sloganism appears in ‘S.O.S’, childish satire in ‘El Gil Gil’, transparent irony in ‘Romance de los campesinos de Zorita’, Se les prometen las tierras y en tierra van a dejarles. Promesa pagada en sangre. (341) 6
4 Tejada, art. cit., 19. 5 Ibid., 20. 6 Numbers in parenthesis indicate the page of reference in Rafael Alberti, Poesías completas (Buenos Aires: Losada, 1961).
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and, arguably, little more than exploitative sentimentality in: Los niños de Extremadura van descalzos. ¿Quién los robó los zapatos? (339) Indeed, excepting the powerful ‘La lucha por la tierra’, this volume tends to illustrate the pitfalls of political poetry, notably in its lack of any real sense of the poet himself. Wesseling makes the point that Alberti wrote different types of political poems.7 Some were purely propagandist, virtual wallposters designed to further the cause, which applies to much of the material he published as editor of the communist literary magazine, Octubre.8 Others were more considered, especially as Alberti grew into his political role, giving the lie to the notion that dogma meant doggerel. To assess his achievement we might begin by accepting that for Alberti the writing of poems on politics and war was not so much a choice of theme as an inevitable consequence of his life and circumstance, in the Guillén-Ortega sense of circumstance. We should also resist letting his overtly propagandist work prejudice our response to De un momento a otro (poesía e historia) [1934-1938], which is ultimately the work by which his reputation as a poeta comprometido stands or fails. That De un momento a otro develops organically from Alberti’s earlier work applies both in conceptual and subjunctive terms. By the late 1920s Alberti had ‘evolved a highly intellectual Surrealism’, as Bowra observed.9 This essentially consists in going beyond psychic automatism—the Freudian abreaction of the unconscious—advocated by Breton in his first manifesto of 1924 and evident in Sobre los ángeles from its second poem, ‘Desahucio’, with its paradigmatic theme of eviction, onwards.10 By the end of this volume Alberti has turned his paranoia to more constructive—as opposed to merely therapeutic—purpose and in ‘Los ángeles muertos’ he addresses his readers on the subject of his new faith, a form of materio-mysticism.11 He 7 Op. cit., 48. 8 See Octubre, escritores y artistas revolucionarios [reimpresión anastática de la edición de Madrid, junio-julio 1933—abril 1934, 6 números] (Liechtenstein: Vaduz, 1977), with its thorough introduction by Enrique Montero. Examples of Alberti’s propagandist poetry are ‘Documentos: Los desastres de la guerra, Goya 1808’, in which his anticlerical poem, ‘La iglesia marcha sobre la cuerda floja’ is set alongside Goya’s illustration of a priest walking the tightrope, ‘Que se rompe la cuerda’, 34; the equally anticlerical ‘Farsa de los Reyes Magos (fragmento), El Espantapájaros’, 157-59, and ‘Himno de las bibliotecas proletarias’, 68. 9 C. M. Bowra, Poetry and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1966), 125. 10 Breton’s famous definition of 1924 reads: ‘SURRÉALISME, n. m. Automatisme psychique pur par lequel on se propose d’exprimer, soit verbalement, soit par écrit, soit de toute autre manière, le fonctionnement réel de la pensée. Dictée de la pensée, en l’absence de toute contrôle exercé par la raison, en dehors de toute préoccupation esthétique ou morale’, Oeuvres complètes, I (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 328. 11 Materio-mysticism and related issues are considered in the chapter on Alberti in
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argues, in provocatively delusional terms, that salvation is to be found in junk objects or base matter: ‘en el insomnio de las cañerías olvidadas, / en los cauces interrumpidas por el silencio de las basuras ...’ (290-91). This message of a liberating and paradoxically transcendental materialism is preached with ironic evangelism in ‘Sermón de las cuatro verdades’ where, subverting Christianity’s ascensionism, Alberti takes us down to the cellar of his mind, an Espronceda-like descent which parallels the Jesuit emphasis on hell, and down to the level of simple organisms which provide a fitting context for accepting life’s finiteness: ‘Bien poco importa a la acidez de los mostos descompuestos que mi alegría se consuma a lo largo de las maderas’ (299). This marked object-orientation, which is the antithesis of religion’s otherworldliness, conforms to the metaphysical theme of Breton’s second manifesto of 1930 that the higher plane of surreality consists in the union of objective and subjective realities.12 The aggregate of two dimensions transcends their value separately, hence the mystic tone: — Mi alma es sólo un cuerpo que fallece por fundirse y rozarse con los objetos vivos y difuntos. (297) The unitive way corresponds to the concept of ‘the surrealist object’, more often found in the visual arts.13 It is the guiding principle throughout Sermones y moradas, for instance in ‘Elegías’, where the images typically transfer to objects, 1. —La pena de los jarros sin agua caídos en el destierro de los objetos difuntos. —or they purposefully confuse matter, primitive life and the human realm: 4. —La venda rota de una herida, arrastrada por las hormigas de las tres de la tarde. (312)
Robert G. Havard, From Romanticism to Surrealism, Seven Spanish Poets (Cardiff: Univ. of Wales, 1988), 242-79. See also my essay, ‘Christ, the Paranoiac, the Surrealist, the Communist, and Rafael Alberti’, in Changing Times in Hispanic Culture, ed. Derek Harris (Univ. of Aberdeen, forthcoming 1996). 12 The idea of the union of opposites was mooted in the first manifesto: ‘Je crois à la résolution future de ces deux états, en apparence si contradictoires, que sont le rêve et la réalité, en une sorte de réalité absolue, de surréalité’ (op. cit., 319). This became an allembracing metaphysic in the second manifesto which concluded on the thematic note, ‘elles doivent se confondre’, where elles refers to the perceived opposites ‘certaines choses [qui] sont’ and others ‘[qui] ne sont pas’ (ibid., 828). See also the introduction, ‘Tout porte à croire ...’ (ibid., 781) and the discussion of the ‘système hégélien’ (793). 13 For discussion of this topic see, for instance, Anna Balakian’s chapter on the Surrealist Object in Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute (London: Allen & Unwin, 1972) and H. N. Finkelstein, Surrealism and the Crisis of the Object, University Studies in the Fine Arts, Avant-garde, 3 (Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1979).
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This compositeness is clear in two striking images, the rubbish-dump and the scarecrow, both of which Alberti borrowed from the painter Maruja Mallo, his one-time lover.14 The basurero, a cemetery-like wasteland, offers an inventory of the human past in its random clutter of junk. The scarecrow, an effigy constructed out of discarded man-made objects, is similarly an icon of death, standing, in ‘Espantapájaros’, with its arms spread wide, Christ-like and burdened with the cares of the world.15 A reciprocal image is that of ‘blood’, found in ‘Sermón de la sangre’ and ‘Adiós a la sangre’, where the physical property so closely associated with the emotions and life itself is, in the end, no more than liquid matter: mientras me humilla, me levanta, me inunda, me desquicia, me seca, me abandona, me hace correr de nuevo, y yo no sé llamarla de otro modo: Mi sangre. (304) Very likely Alberti’s periods of ill health reinforced the notion that he was the sum of his bodily parts, with all their vicissitudes. But these images, whose conceptual value lies in the interplay of objectivity and subjectivity, point unmistakably towards materialism, or the primacy of matter, the notion underlying Marx’s analysis of history—historical materialism—wherein materialism is deemed to be liberating since acceptance of the finiteness of the human condition is the first step by which man frees himself from the error and subjugation of religion. The surrealists, having changed man’s way of looking at reality, wished to change his view of society. For many, Communism’s revolutionary thesis, embracing materialism and atheism, showed the way.16 For Alberti, the same issues took substantive form in the political events of the 1930s. In his first political poem, Con los zapatos puestos tengo que morir (Elegía cívica) [1º de enero de 1930], the object-orientation and oracular tone continue as he describes the barricades on which he stood with students in protest against Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship: 14 For details on his liaison with Maruja Mallo see R. Alberti, La arboleda perdida (libros III y IV de memorias) (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1987), 26-32. On the artist’s work see Maruja Mallo, 59 grabados en negro y 9 láminas en color, 1928-1942, introduction by Ramón Gómez de la Serna (Buenos Aires: Losada, 1942). 15 These images are considered more closely in Havard, art. cit., while John Crispin makes an interesting comparison between Alberti’s scarecrow and Grünewald’s Gothic crucifixions, ‘La generación de 1927 y las artes plásticas’, in Nuevas perspectivas sobre la generación del 27 (ensayos literarios), ed. Hector Romero (Miami: Ediciones Universal, 1983), 37. 16 Other surrealists, it must be said, notably Salvador Dalí, rejected materialism. For them, the primacy of matter was abhorrent since it downgraded the creative faculty of the unconscious; neither could they accept communism, which they saw as a restriction rather than a liberation. The issues involved, together with Breton’s sustained but ultimately forlorn attempt to harmonize the movement, are discussed in Alan Rose, Surrealism and Communism. The Early Years (New York: Peter Lang, 1991).
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Será en ese momento cuando los caballos sin ojos se desgarren las tibias contra los hierros en punta de una valla de sillas indignadas junto a los adoquines de cualquier calle recién absorta en la locura. Insistence on objects is no mere poetic trope of synecdoche; rather, it renders society’s hierarchical structure in starkly materialist terms: Ira desde la aguja de los pararrayos hasta las uñas más rencorosas de las patas traseras de cualquier piojo agonizante entre las púas de un peine hallado al atardecer en un basurero. (333) Anger is vented on the bastions of the iniquitous society: the king, ‘los hombres más ilustres’, the clergy, ‘los curas sifilíticos’, and even God, ‘así se escupe a Dios en las nubes’. By ‘La lucha por la tierra’ God is seen more clearly as an ‘aliado de los terratenientes’: Y como cualquier propietario o explotador de hombres, exigía además que le llamásemos Señor. Esto nos enseñaron desde niño los curas. (352) The religious theme has come full circle: from Sobre los ángeles, where angels articulate the elements in a neurosis which is itself attributable in large part to a repressive Jesuit education; to Sermones y moradas, where the paranoiac poet messianically proclaims the surrealist message of a transcendent materialism; to the political poems of the 1930s, in which the Church and its totem are seen unequivocally as oppressors of the people. The circle ends in De un momento a otro where Alberti depicts religion as an agent of political oppression by reference to his own childhood. Thus the sustained antagonism between religion and materialism provides a remarkable degree of coherence in Alberti’s trajectory from surrealist to poeta comprometido. The same coherence is apparent in subjective terms throughout De un momento a otro which, in its four parts, takes us from Alberti’s embryonic political awareness in El Puerto de Santa María to the culmination of the conflict in a Madrid racked by civil war. The first part of De un momento a otro, ‘La familia (Poema dramático)’, deals with Alberti’s conditioning at the hands of ‘la familia burguesa y clase media españolas, de donde involuntariamente arranco y procedo’.17 In ‘Colegio (S.J.)’ the school which had once induced fears of hell and feelings of sexual guilt is seen by the clear-minded adult as an inculcator of classconsciousness. His family having fallen on hard times, Alberti was fated to be an externo rather than one of the privileged boarders, ‘todos hijos con tierras y ganados’ (371). He had to suffer the Jesuits’ asphyxiating charity and the stigma of an inferior uniform: 17 See Rafael Alberti, Poesía (1924-1937) (Madrid: Signo, 1938), 341, which is quoted in Rafael Alberti, De un momento a otro (poesía e historia), ed. J. M. Balcells (Barcelona: Promociones y Publicaciones Universitarias, 1993), 103.
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Eramos los externos, los colegiales de familias burguesas ya en declive. La caridad cristiana nos daba sin dinero su cultura, la piedad nos abría los libros y las puertas de las clases. Ya éramos de esas gentes que algún día se las entierra de balde. No sabíamos bien por qué un galón de oro no le daba la vuelta a nuestra gorra ni por qué causa luego no descendía directo por nuestros pantalones. (369-70) The externos were never praised by their teachers, ‘Así tú no tenías buena voz ... ni yo una débil rendija de talento’, but were instructed in the virtues of gratitude and submissiveness: ‘quien obedezca al que firmó la rosa, / a Aquel que nos concede el desayuno, / ... ese verá que le abren paso las estrellas’. Alberti, with his underprivileged peers, rebelled: tanta ira, tanto odio contenidos sin llanto, nos llevaban al mar que nunca se preocupa de las raíces cuadradas, ... a las dunas calientes, donde nos orinábamos en fila mirando hacia el colegio. (370) This gesture of defiance marks the poet’s initiation in class solidarity, a new concept of allegiance which contrasts with the traditional one to family. His own kin, in fact, are seen as the enemy in ‘Hermana’, ‘Balada de los dos hermanos’ and ‘Índice de la familia burguesa’,18 for they uphold such reactionary values as piety, property ownership and military-based nationhood, while in ‘Siervos’, by contrast, Alberti holds out an olive branch to the extended family of abused servants, ‘yo os envío un saludo, / y os llamo camaradas’ (375). Thus the first section traces the roots of Alberti’s egalitarian thinking and, in keeping with the prophetic vein of the volume’s title, suggests that the collapse of paternalistic structures is at hand. The second section is remarkable for its analysis of the explosive theme of revolution in the tight form of the sonnet, five of the six poems being sonnets, and for its evocation of seditious rage in the shocking image of a rabid dog. In the first of a pair of sonnets entitled ‘El perro rabioso’ the madness, fury and sub-human atavism recall earlier poems, but the ferocity is unprecedented: Muero porque las pulgas me inoculen la sangre de los perros más rabiosos, me vuelvan los colmillos venenosos y el hombre que hay en mí lo estrangulen. 18 ‘Índice de la familia burguesa’ is not included in Rafael Alberti, Poesías completas, but it appears in De un momento a otro (poesía e historia), 119-20.
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Que ni el odio ni la furia disimulen cuanto de hirientes, graves, peligrosos son mis serios arranques rencorosos, sin pulsos que los frenen y regulen. (380) This candidly unsympathetic depiction of revolutionary zeal, far from being propagandist, suggests the dehumanized mentality of those who commit unspeakable atrocities. At the same time, the violence is consonant with the policy of Contra-Attaque, the ‘Union de lutte des intellectuels révolucionnaires’ founded by Breton in 1935, the year in which the poem was written. Concerned at the tendency of the masses to resign themselves to fascist servitude, Contra-Attaque advocated ‘fanatisme’: ‘Sans aucune réserve, la Révolution doit être tout entière agressive, ne peut être que tout entière agressive’.19 Alberti, caught up in the feverish momentum, classes himself as one who longs only to be rid of his last traces of humanity—the ultimate subversion of San Juan’s ‘Muero porque no muero’—and totally absorbed in a mindless canine urge to bite: Época es de morder a dentelladas, de hincar hundiendo enteras las encías, contagiando mi rabia hasta en la muerte. Revolcándose, mira inoculadas aullar las horas de los malos días, por morderlas, ¡oh Tiempo!, y por morderte. (380) That the political theme could be reduced to a blind rage to infect and destroy suggests pessimism on the poet’s part, which deepens by analogy with Quevedo who is clearly echoed in the tercets. The sonnet’s classical aura is enhanced by archaic syntax in the last tercet with its vocative exclamation and indeterminate verb subject, and by deft stylistic touches, notably the repeated ‘r’ and especially ‘rr’ phonemes (‘perros’, ‘rabiosos’, ‘arranques rencorosos’, ‘regulen’, ‘rabia’, ‘revolcándose’) which evoke the growling dog motif. In short, Alberti exploits the formal virtues of the sonnet as a counterpoint to the poem’s anarchism, enhancing the thematic tension between the old and the new, tradition and revolution. The other sonnets similarly gain from his accomplished technique: the second on the dog motif sets the destruction of bourgeois values between the image pair and mandibular parenthesis of ‘Mordido en el talón ... un pie mordido’ (38081), while the fifth sonnet concludes on a neat conceptista paradox, ‘¡Revolución!, para matar la guerra’ (381), compressing the idea that the class war can only be ended by breaking down present structures. 19 See Contre-attaque in André Breton, Position politique du surréalisme (Paris: Pauvert, 1962), 176. For a discussion of this and related issues see the chapter on ‘Surrealist Politics’ in Maurice Nadeau, The History of Surrealism, trans. from the French by R. Howard (London: Plaintin, 1987).
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The third section, ‘13 bandas y 48 estrellas (Poema del mar Caribe) 1935’, is a sixteen-poem travelogue which traces Alberti’s visit to the United States, Central America and the Caribbean where he went to raise funds for the relief of Asturian miners. The binding theme is U.S. oil- and dollarbased imperialism, as seen in the plunder of Cuba, ‘Los yankis vienen volando, / urracas azucareras’ (389), acquisitive tourism in Mexico, ‘el gringo que compra en tu retrato / tu parada belleza ya en escombros’ (391), paramilitary rule in Panama and Costa Rica, ‘Yo iba a Costa Rica, / —¡¡Oh, su policía!!—’, racial oppression in Martinique, ‘negros como asnos de apariencia tranquila’ (397), and the ubiquitous counter-current of revolution, be it historical as in Venezuela, or actual as in El Salvador and Nicaragua where General Sandino had been executed one year before: ‘Los yanquis firman la paz ... / pero matando a Sandino’ (392). This section impresses far more than Alberti’s account of his visit to Eastern Europe in El poeta en la calle, for the latter poems suffer from myopic idealism while those on America offer a varied and analytical critique. They benefit too from Alberti’s Hispanic empathy with the oppressed on the basis of the linguistic imperialism announced in the introductory quotation from Rubén Darío: ‘¿Tantos millones de hombres hablaremos inglés?’ (384). Economic imperialism is put in sharp focus in the opening poem, ‘New York (Wall Street en la niebla. Desde el “Bremen”)’, where image and argument interface to great effect. Continuing his surrealist role as poet-seer, Alberti bases the poem on the idea of perspicacity, his ability to see through the shrouded mists of New York to the capitalist structure beneath. His alertness—‘despierto’ as he approaches the city by ship in the early morning— unveils a pattern of motifs: the mist is a ‘vaho de petróleo’; the skyscrapers are ‘inconmovibles cajas’; the men who rule others’ lives are ‘hombres macilentos’, their political bosses ‘gansters’, their acts ‘robos calculados’; the vaunted notion of Liberty is ‘prostituida, mercenaria, inútil’ as the famous statue ‘baja a vender su sombra por los puertos’. Not only does the poet perceive the city’s evil—‘Y era yo entre la niebla quien oía, quien veía mucho más / y todo esto’— his vision encompasses its continental extension: ‘New York. Wall Street, Banca de sangre / ... araña de tentáculos que hilan / fríamente la muerte de otros pueblos’. Exploitation takes the form of ‘la extracción triste de metales ... de cañas dulces ... de café y de tabaco’, and may even result in star wars, says the clairvoyant: ‘Tu diplomacia del horror quisiera / la intervención armada hasta en los astros’ (386). Yet America’s ‘agónicas naciones’ throb with a desire for vengeance that sooner or later, Alberti concludes with irresistible poetic logic, will see the hallowed Stars and Stripes burn ‘en una justa, / libertadora llama de petróleo’. Alberti’s anti-Americanism accords with his rejection of paternalist superstructures in favour of an egalitarian ideal. That his analysis is based on Marxist-materialist principles is again clear in the next poem, ‘Guajiras
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burlescas de los banqueros alegres y desesperados de Wall Street’, where six décimas portray the faceless bankers in terms of the commodities they control: ‘Mi sangre es un yacimiento / de emisiones petroleras’, ‘Por rayos de mi cabeza / yo muevo un cañaveral’. The latter speaker, a magnate who likely made his pile in Cuba, is caricatured as a feudal overlord, having the ridiculous motto ‘Tengo azúcar en la orina’ emblazoned on his shield. Once again we note the interplay between man and objective reality, but, as opposed to the materio-mysticism of Alberti’s metaphysical phase, the implication here is of an omnivorous consumerism and eco-insensitivity. The magnate has no other consideration than profit, which derives from exploitation of raw (or primary) materials. He fears communism, Alberti concludes in the décima’s epigrammatic style, for it threatens to end his degenerate capitalist ways: Materias primas me canta mi cartera de caimán. Los empréstitos se van dragándome la garganta. Si el comunismo me espanta como un insondable abismo, que se lleve el comunismo todo cuanto ahora poseo. Y en un yate de recreo naufrague el imperialismo. (137) 20 Turning now to the Civil-War poems of the volume’s fourth section, ‘Capital de la gloria (1936-1938)’, we find that materialism continues to be a key feature that bears directly on the poet’s themes and on his imagemaking technique. In the opening poem, ‘Madrid-otoño’, the capital is suffering aerial bombardment and the onslaught of Franco’s mercenaries in late 1936. Yet Alberti’s treatment of this affecting topic is remarkable for his almost exclusive focus on the material and fabric of the ravaged city. His stance is anti-sentimental, comparable in its way with Dylan Thomas’ poem on the Blitz, ‘A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London’, a restraint which achieves much impact in the long run. The poet is sensitive to his role in these circumstances, as the first stanza indicates: Ciudad de los más turbios siniestros provocados, ... yo quisiera furiosa, pero impasiblemente arrancarme de cuajo la voz, pero no puedo, para pisarte toda tan silenciosamente, que la sangre tirada mordiera, sin protesta, mi llanto y mi pisada. (401) 20 The PPU, Barcelona edition, gives ‘cantan’ in the first line, p. 137, but this is clearly wrong, as the exigencies of rhyme indicate.
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Alberti wishes to lose his poetic voice, perhaps feeling a sense of inadequacy in the face of momentous events, perhaps reluctant to intrude upon the grief of others. As a poet, he knows the dangers of a bombastic Quintana-like panegyric. As a communist, he knows that mass suffering is not to be appropriated by an individual. Rather, he would be a mouthpiece, ‘haciendo de mi voz pulmón de todo un pueblo’ (416), as the later poem ‘Aniversario’ asserts.21 His vain hope is to merge with the city’s streets that bear testimony to the human agony in the form of spilt blood. Only an impersonal treatment will allow the collective body to listen unoffended, ‘sin protesta’. Only by identification with those who suffer is the poet validated, as Wilfred Owen put it in his ‘Apologia pro Poemate Meo’: ‘except you share / With them in hell the sorrowful dark of hell’.22 In the second stanza we follow Alberti to the suburbs, once the site of rubbish-dumps, now the disfigured front-line of battle: Por tus desnivelados terrenos y arrabales, ciudad, por tus lluviosas y ateridas afueras voy las hojas difuntas pisando entre trincheras, charcos y barrizales. Los árboles acodan, desprovistos, las ramas por bardas y tapiales donde con ojos fijos espían las troneras un cielo temeroso de explosiones y llamas. (401) His imagery is as assured as ever: the autumnal weather—‘hojas difuntas’— parallels the human mortalities; the stark branches with bent arms—in the anthropomorphic ‘acodan’—suggest the pose of snipers behind walls. All the while the personification of the city—which effectively integrates its objects and its living organisms in one whole—keeps the notion of a collective identity and heroic purpose in mind. The thought occurs that precious objects will be lost in the devastation— ‘corre un escalofrío al pensar tus museos’—including the treasures of the Prado which Alberti had been given special responsibility to protect.23 But humble objects attract most attention, notably in the bomb-sites which provide a powerful juxtaposition of war and everyday life: Hay casas cuyos muros humildes, levantados 21 Nantell comments on this theme (op. cit., 4). Alberti later recalled in an interview: ‘cuando vino la República, bueno, yo ya tenía un instinto de que la poesía puramente particular o excesivamente sujectiva ya estaba agotada’ (see Javier Alfaya, Alberti: un poeta en la calle [Madrid: Cuadernos para el Diálogo, No. 81, 1977), 52. Of related interest is Antonio Machado’s piece in Octubre dedicated to Alberti, ‘Sobre una lírica comunista, que pudiera venir de Rusia’ (op. cit., 148). 22 Wilfred Owen, The Complete Poems and Fragments. Vol. I: The Poems, ed. Jon Stallworthy (London: Chatto & Windus, Hogarth/Oxford U. P., 1983), 124. 23 See La arboleda perdida, ed. cit., 78.
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a la escena del aire, representan la escena del mantel y los lechos todavía ordenados, el drama silencioso de los trajes vacíos, sin nadie, en la alacena que los biseles fríos de la menguada luna de los pobres roperos recogen y barajan con los sacos terreros. (401-02) The bombed house stands like a stage set, open on one side and roofless, awaiting the actors’ entrance. There is something surreal, Wesseling noted, in this mixture of horror and normality, in the empty suits that recall ‘El hombre deshabitado’ of Sobre los ángeles.24 Conceptually, the surreal element resides in the fact that the bomb-site, like the basurero and espantapájaros, suggests the interplay of man and material objects, with the human absence more poignant here since it results from violence. The poet’s keen eye is seen in the image of the wardrobe’s bevel-edged mirror, where two angles of reflection shuffle together lines of clothes and sandbags, both of which stack like cards. Thus chance or randomness, in an unexpected juxtaposition, continues to be thematic, as it was in the collage of the basurero; but the additional social comment—in the class indices of ‘muros humildes’ and ‘pobres roperos’—suggests malevolence and unwarranted persecution. The poem’s first part reaches a climax via the sustained personification of the city. Though ravaged on all sides, ‘la frente de tu frente se alza tiroteada, / tus costados de árboles y llanuras, heridos’, the city and its indomitable spirit will not be buried under the ‘montes de escombros’. On the contrary, the poet senses that within the city there gestates ‘el germen más hermoso de tu vida futura’ and, in oracular vein, asserts: Bajo la dinamita de tus cielos, crujiente, se oye el nacer del nuevo hijo de la victoria. (402) Given the spirited resistance of Madrid and the timely arrival of the International Brigaders in November 1936, Alberti cannot be denied his moment of optimism which, poetically, balances the tragedies catalogued.25 24 Wesseling, op. cit., 66. 25 Hugh Thomas writes: ‘The example of the International Brigades fired the populace of the capital with the feeling that they were not alone’ (The Spanish Civil War [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977 (3rd ed.)], 480). Similarly, Vincent Brome: ‘They arrived at the crucial psychological moment in the defence of Madrid and stiffened the morale of the whole population’ (The International Brigades, Spain 1936-1939 [London: Heinemann, 1965], 272). In fact, with the Government having departed to Valencia, fear ruled Madrid on 7 November, the eve of the Nationalist onslaught; but, as Paul Preston recounts: ‘Along with the Communist Party’s Fifth Regiment ... the 1900 men of the Eleventh International Brigade helped Miaja to lead the entire population of Madrid in a desperate and remarkable defence ... Franco’s forces had suffered their first major reverse’ (Franco, A Biography [London:
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Surprisingly, he continues the poem into a second part, his refusal to end on a triumphant note being a measure of his artistic as opposed to propagandist ambitions. The short second part describes the appropriation of one of Madrid’s aristocratic homes by a militant group—the Alianza de Intelectuales Antifascistas—26and their ejection of hoary objects, ‘libros’, ‘sofás desvencijados’ and ‘retratos familiares’, which, piled up outside in the cold, make as pathetic a composition as the chattels of the poor in bombsites. The poet discerns a common feature in the portraits: en donde los varones de la casa, vestidos los más innecesarios jaeces militares, nos contemplan, partidos, sucios, pisoteados, con ese inexpresable gesto fijo y oscuro del que al nacer ya lleva contra su espalda el muro de los ejecutados. (402) The idea of noble forebears staring out from torn canvases with eyes of men facing a firing squad—indeed, that they were born with such terror in their eyes—synthesizes history and the present crisis in a compelling image: the aristocracy, it is suggested, have always feared their days of privilege would end in a bloody proletarian uprising. The image restores a note of violence, or ‘furor’, the unedifying emotion which enables the poet to identify with the masses and which forms a harder basis for a conclusion than that offered in the first part: este cuadro, este libro, este furor que ahora me arranca lo que tienes para mí de elegía son pedazos de sangre de tu terrible aurora. Ciudad quiero ayudarte a dar a luz tu día. (402) In effect, the birth motif is still present in the blood and suffering of these final images. So too is the theme of Alberti’s role as poet, his poem having come out of him only after much agonizing. He can be proud of his achievement. Though poised in its rhymed alexandrines, it is not an overly formal poem, for the sporadic half-lines give a sense of spontaneity in keeping with the uncertainty of war. The imagery is strong in detail, showing a poet who is responding to an actual situation as well as an ideological crisis. Alberti avoids the pitfalls of propaganda and of bourgeois literariness, and comes close to achieving the impossible synthesis of losing his voice in writing his poem. An impersonal voice is most readily achieved in poems that highlight the collective endeavour of war, of which there are several. A fine example is Harper/Collins, 1993], 204-05). 26 See J. M. Balcells, op. cit., 167.
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‘Los campesinos’ where peasant soldiers are described via the objects and implements they know best, that is, in Marxist terms, with regard to the material conditions of their life: they are ‘duros, color de la corteza’ and dark, ‘Como los pedernales’; their cloaks smell of ‘corderos mojados’ and they have an unsavoury aura of ‘estiércoles y fangales’. Yet these plain men— ‘Muchos no saben nada’—selflessly lay down their lives: van los hombres del campo como inmensas simientes a sembrarse en los hondos surcos de las trincheras. (410) The marvellously synthetic simile, surcos-trincheras, simientes-hombres, suggests an epic dimension to their sacrifice, expressing its naturalness and, through displacement, its unnaturalness, with the overriding implication that these braceros, victims of a feudal latifundist system, must have been greatly abused to move voluntarily from field to trench. The image also contains the sense of a procreative purpose, soon explicit in the poem ‘Vosotros no caísteis’: Siembra de cuerpos jóvenes, tan innecesariamente descuajados del triste terrón que los pariera, otra vez y tan pronto y tan naturalmente, semilla de los surcos que la guerra os abriera. (411) The topic is undeniably emotional, but as Wilfred Owen put it, ‘These men are worth / Your tears’, and Alberti cannot fail to record what the Shropshire poet called ‘The pity of war, the pity war distilled’.27 Closely related to ‘Los campesinos’ is the poem ‘Los soldados se duermen’, where the men have ‘un aire de aldea, / de animales tiernísimos’, yet sleep watchfully like ‘perros de ganados’ (415). They have laid down their guns to rest a while from the activity of killing—‘también los fusiles descansan de su oficio’ (416)—but we are made to feel that their exhaustion should have come from the more constructive ‘pacíficas labores de los hombres’ (416) referred to in ‘Aniversario’.28 Perhaps the most selfless sacrifice and highest collective endeavour is that of the motley group honoured in ‘A las Brigadas Internacionales’ who, in far-flung corners, as Auden memorably put it, ‘heard and migrated like gulls or the seeds of a flower ... / They floated over oceans; / They walked the passes: they came to present their lives’.29 Pablo Neruda witnessed their 27 Wilfred Owen, op. cit., 124, 148. 28 ‘Los soldados se duermen’ lacks the force of ‘Los campesinos’. It is also less impressive than Wilfred Owen’s ‘Soldier’s Dream’ which similarly deals with a respite in war brought about by a pitying Jesus who ‘fouled the big-gun gears’. Alberti would have approved of the irreverent conclusion: ‘But God was vexed, and gave all power to Michael; / And when I woke he’d seen to our repairs’ (op. cit., 182). 29 W. H. Auden, ‘Spain, 1937’, in Collected Shorter Poems 1930-1944 (London: Faber and Faber, 1950), 191.
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arrival in Madrid: ‘Camaradas, / ... os he visto ... / venir de lejos y lejos / venir de vuestros rincones, de vuestras patrias perdidas ... / a defender la ciudad española en que la libertad acorralada / pudo caer y morir mordida por las bestias’.30 For Alberti too the point is the volunteers’ internationalism, that they came from many countries but without the narrow sense of patria which Breton denounced for its ‘intérêts egoistes’.31 Venís desde muy lejos ... Mas esta lejanía, ¿qué es para vuestra sangre, que canta sin fronteras? La necesaria muerte os nombra cada día, no importa en qué ciudades, campos o carreteras. De este país, del otro, del grande, del pequeño, del que apenas si al mapa da un color desvaído, con las mismas raíces que tiene un mismo sueño, sencillamente anónimos y hablando habéis venido. (406) This proletarian union, which Alberti poetically homages in cultured alexandrines, is the communist ideal in action, the antithesis of the selfseeking imperialism deplored earlier. The men are anonymous in their selflessness—‘hombres abnegados y generosos’, as Antonio Machado described them—32but their spirit can perhaps only be appreciated in the particular. Typical are the sentiments expressed in the letters of Tom Picton, an untutored Rhondda miner later executed in a Nationalist jail: ‘the poor class of Spain are 500 years behind time, they been kept under like dogs but the people have risen now ... I am bloody proud that I am here whatever the Hell happens and we are bloody sure that we are going to Win, we are not coming back until we drive these _____ Rats out of it ... If I stopes one and dont come back tell all Wales that I was Dead Game and bloody proud to die for the cause’.33 Alberti insinuates the volunteers’ ignorance of 30 Pablo Neruda, ‘Llegada a Madrid de la Brigada Internacional’, Obras completas (Buenos Aires: Losada, 1962 [2nd ed.]), 261. 31 The first resolution of Contre-attaque declares its signatories to be ‘Violemment hostiles à toute tendance, quelque forme qu’elle prenne, captant la Révolution au bénéfice des idées de nation ou de patrie ...’; while its thirteenth and penultimate clause avers: ‘que l’exaltation qui doit être mise au service de l’intérêt universel des hommes doit être infiniment plus grave et plus brisante, d’une grandeur tout autre que celle des nationalistes asservis à la conservation sociale et aux intérêts égoïstes des patries’ (see André Breton, Position politique du surréalisme, ed. cit., 169, 176). 32 Antonio Machado, prologue to Homenaje de despedida a las Brigadas Internacionales (various authors) (Madrid: Editorial Hispamérica, 1978), 5. 33 Picton’s letters, along with those of many other Brigaders, may be read in the South Wales Miners’ Library, Sketty Road, Swansea. Picton’s death is mentioned in Hywel Francis, Miners against Fascism: Wales and the Spanish Civil War (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1984), 240. Having served in the First World War and with limited success as a prize-fighter, Picton was an out-of-work collier, divorced and the wrong side of forty when the Spanish War broke out. He addressed his letters to George Thomas, a communist agent in Treherbert:
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the country they have come to defend: No conocéis siquiera el color de los muros que vuestro infranqueable compromiso amuralla. But he also recognizes the tribute they have paid Spain: La tierra que os entierra la defendéis, seguros, a tiros con la muerte vestida de batalla. Quedad, que así lo quieren los árboles, los llanos, las mínimas partículas de la luz que reanima un solo sentimiento que el mar sacude: ¡Hermanos! Madrid con vuestro nombre se agranda y se ilumina. (406) The last line anticipates Machado’s valedictory comment, ‘el haber merecido vuestro auxilio, vuestra ayuda generosa y desinteresada, es uno de los más altos timbres de gloria que puede ostentar’.34 Highly charged as the notion of a soldier finding rest in foreign soil is, it gains conceptual weight here in the imagery’s unifying materialist force: the ground disputed in battle is the earth the soldier is buried in, which, in turn, is ‘LA TIERRA ’, capitalized in ‘La lucha por la tierra’, the very soil which the impoverished Spanish peasant fights for. The various overlapping groups represent the theme of collective identity: the city, the peasants, the Brigaders—seen again in ‘Al General Kleber’, the leader of the International Brigade—and the communist units, which receive special attention. ‘¡Soy del Quinto Regimento!’ depicts a peasant’s pride in serving in the crack regiment for which La Pasionaria recruited;35 ‘A Hans Beimler, defensor de Madrid’ honours the leader of the German communists, and ‘Aniversario (a los soldados del Ejército Rojo)’ brings a familiar motif to an uplifting conclusion: Siempre os recuerdo, siempre, soldados entrañables, soldados como estos que ahora siento en mi patria brotar de los terrones partidos de la tierra con la misma razón sencilla de los trigos. (416)
I would like to tell you what part we are but you know Comrade it will only be x off so there, you are right George we have got the B_____ on the run now and will keep them going, know the old saying ‘No Pass Around’ ... We had a Hell of a Do George at a place called Brunete, I had a crack in the Neck but am OK ... We are at another Front now, the B_____ are bombing the townes around here like Hell now, its down all the Dam time, but still George we are giving the rotten B_____ beans all the time ... the boy Foulkes is going a little bit crackers but I have warned him if he dont act when in the tight and anyone else that it will be too bad for him, he should be sent from here as he jumps at every bang and theres a lot of banging on times I can tell you. 34 Antonio Machado, op. cit., 6. 35 Hugh Thomas, op. cit., 322.
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Outstanding is ‘Quinto Cuerpo del Ejército (A Modesto su Jefe)’ which links several concepts in a structured whole of four identical stanzas in rhyming alexandrines with a final half-line. The poet begins by evoking the living conditions of the Corps’ combatants, intermixing what they experienced before the war with their current plight to imply that the men have nothing to lose by suffering the privations of war: Los pobres de alpargata, rotos, descamisados, esos que tantas veces tuvieron por abrigo de sus huesos diez húmedos ladrillos desvelados y cuatro mudas, sórdidas paredes por amigo; esos, entre los cardos, las piedras, los calores, miradlos vencedores. (190)36 The second stanza refers to the men’s ‘conducta límpida y fe’, which did not deter the Nationalists from branding them criminals, ‘fe’ doubtless being shorthand for their practical convictions. The third eulogizes three communist leaders: Juan Modesto Guilloto, the Corps’ commander, who had been a woodcutter, ‘Modesto, cuyo nombre en las aserradoras / suena gloriosamente con un son carpintero’; Enrique Líster, an ex-quarryman, located ‘entre los duros picos de un son cantero’, and Valentín González, el Campesino, ‘en las eras y entre las trilladoras’. Modesto and Líster were ‘the two outstanding military successes of the war’, according to Hugh Thomas, though the poet omits to say that they and el Campesino were also bitter rivals.37 Each was as rugged as the background he came from, with el Campesino, ‘notorious for his beard, volubility and physical strength’.38 Their manly forebearance and commitment to the cause suggests that like all common men they will triumph, as the rousing half-line concludes, both over their enemies and their material circumstance, which in the end are one and the same: Ellos, analfabetos, descalzos, cargadores de vida amarga y sacos sólo grandes de penas; ellos, los más difíciles, nuevos libertadores de Madrid y alicates de sus largas cadenas; ellos, entre las balas, los himnos y las flores, miradlos vencedores. Poems that celebrate the collective endeavour of war thus facilitate the poet’s submersion of his identity while they also fulfil the function of inspiring soldiers who heard them recited at the front. To focus attention on 36 This poem is not included in Poesías completas, but is found in the PPU, Barcelona edition, 190. 37 Hugh Thomas, op. cit., 323, 794, 836. 38 Ibid., 324.
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the common purpose was crucial when the Republican effort was split by leftist factions and separatist animosity of the kind Alberti attempts to defuse in ‘Defensa de Madrid, defensa de Cataluña’. This romance was two poems originally and, for all Alberti’s harmonizing intentions, its two separate parts remind us of that fatal lack of cohesion. In the first part the fortitude of the besieged Castilian capital is again evoked via personification, ‘Madrid, corazón de España’, which is complemented by an objectification of humans: Los hombres, como castillos; igual que almenas sus frentes, grandes murallas sus brazos, puertas que nadie penetre. (404) The sub-text, however, is a challenge to Catalans to put aside age-old prejudices and join the struggle. Despite lavish praise of Catalonia, this message is writ large in the poem’s second part where Alberti refers to the province’s renowned economic wealth: La libertad catalana, ¡sabedlo!, en Madrid se juega; fábricas, ciudades, campos, montes, toda la riqueza de vuestro país ... (405) Relations were, in fact, less than ideal in late 1936, as Thomas observes: ‘contact barely existed between Barcelona and Madrid ...; there were accusations that Madrid was starving Catalonia ... Madrid complained of Catalonia’s military inaction’.39 Stephen Spender, a delegate at the Writers’ Conference in 1937, speaks of ‘the rather brutal separatist spirit in Barcelona’ and recalls an informal meeting he attended: ‘the poet Rafael Alberti accompanied me. As soon as we had arrived he launched into a diatribe against the Catalans, criticizing their failure to take sufficient part in the war and ending by asserting roundly that if they did no better the Republic, “after the victory”, would know how to deal with them’.40 Though more circumspect in his poetry, Alberti pointedly places his appeal to Catalans between two poems of selfless commitment, ‘¡Soy del Quinto Regimento!’ and ‘A las Brigadas Internacionales’, while his later poem ‘Madrid por Cataluña’, written in April 1938 when Barcelona was under the hammer of Savoia bombers, unstintingly stresses Madrid’s solidarity with Catalonia. A last feature to consider in De un momento a otro for its bearing on the materialist viewpoint and on Alberti’s role as poet is his treatment of nature. 39 Hugh Thomas, op. cit., 429. 40 Stephen Spender, World within World (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1951), 245.
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This staple of poetry provides a lyrical backdrop to the horror of war as well as many resources for commenting on the war’s progress. As we have seen, the seasons have different implications. Transition from winter to spring typically suggests progress: in ‘Aniversario’, of 14 February 1938, confidence abounds that the ‘nieve inocentísima’ will melt away and new life burgeon; in ‘1º de Mayo en la España Leal de 1938’ a traditional rhythm conveys the joyful spirit of May Day as workers proudly proclaim their contribution to the ‘Primavera del triunfo de los trabajadores’ (420). Autumnal images, on the other hand, suggest fatalities, while the collapse of a tree in the second stanza of ‘18 de julio’ is a graphic emblem of Spain’s convulsion at the outbreak of war, though this is later qualified: ‘Mucho ha caído ... Mas nada inútilmente se ha perdido’ (416). Effective as these polarities are, Alberti is often at his best when breaking the equation. In the nonosyllabic—or appropriately truncated— sonnet, ‘Abril 1938’, the coming of spring and new hope seems ‘más que imposible’ at a time when the Republican cause is faring badly: the Nationalists had reached the sea at Vinaroz in early April, isolating Barcelona to the north and virtually ensuring themselves of victory. Repeating his incredulous question in the tercets, Alberti apostrophizes spring and poignantly negates its positive connotations: ¿Otra vez tú poniendo flores sobre la tumba improvisada, sobre el terrón de la trinchera y esa apariencia de colores en esta patria ensangrentada? Otra vez tú, la Primavera? (417-18) In one of Alberti’s finest poems on the war, ‘El otoño en el Ebro’, the seasonal implication is still more complex. At first the war and the seasons’ rhythm seem out of step: ‘El otoño, otra vez. Sigue la guerra, fría, / insensible al periódico descenso de las hojas’ (421). Then a parallel is developed between the Republican soldier, defenceless under the Nationalist counter-offensive, and the bare trees: Como el hombre del Ebro bajo la artillería, los despoblados troncos junto a las aguas rojas. Resistencia del árbol, tan dura, tan humana, como la del soldado ... Miro las hojas, miro cuán provisionalmente se desnuda la tierra del bosque más querido y de qué modo el hombre de esta España se siente, como los troncos, firme, ya desnudo o vestido. (421-22) The last-ditch Republican offensive of the Ebro began on 24 July 1938, but
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by 2 August it had been contained. From then until the autumn months in which Alberti’s poem is set the Republican soldiers, dug into the hillsides around Gandesa, suffered constant shelling from artillery and bombing from aircraft that enjoyed uncontested domination of the sky. Here, on 22 September, the International Brigade fought for the last time, and it is perhaps with this in mind that Alberti extols the fortitude of the archetypal Spaniard—‘el hombre del Ebro’, ‘el hombre de esta España’—who now stood alone against the fascist powers. The situation was as bleak as the weary rhythms of punctuated alexandrines suggests, while Alberti’s reference to the seasons’ turning is fatalistic, his optimism is less convincing: El otoño, otra vez. Luego, el invierno. Sea. Caiga el traje del árbol, el sol no nos recuerda. Pero como los troncos, el hombre en la pelea, seco, amarillo, frío, más por debajo, verde. (422) Rather than hope for a reversal of fortune in the spring, ‘verde’ suggests the Spaniard’s inner spirit, indomitable even in defeat; indeed, he has triumphed, if only over his own submissiveness, and things will never be the same. This last poem is more realistic about the Republic’s plight than the one that precedes it, ‘Al nuevo coronel Juan Modesto Guilloto, lejano compañero de colegio en la Bahía de Cádiz’, a purely formal commemoration of Modesto’s promotion during the Ebro campaign. Alberti is grandiloquent, ‘recibe mi alabanza, coronel, viejo amigo, / mientras el Ebro justo con su mojada mano / te asciende y de ola en ola ...’ (421), and Gongoresque in his conclusion, ‘también te condecoren con estos versos míos / Madrid, que no te olvida; Cádiz, que ya te espera’, which seems to bear out Spender’s description of ‘the grandiose and rhetorical Rafael Alberti, a kind of Baroque Communist’.41 But while the poet is clearly not at his best here, it is likely that his recollection of ‘aquella rota infancia juntamente vivida’, and the Jesuit school he attended irregularly with Modesto, ‘¡Las perdidas lecciones entre los arenales!’, caused him to flaunt his erudition and Modesto’s status which were both conspicuously lacking when they sat at ‘los gratuitos pupitres colegiales’. To return to the treatment of nature and to a poem many critics have praised,42 ‘Monte de El Pardo’ captures a moment in the midst of battle when the sun suddenly appears, incongruous in winter and oblivious or insensitive in its radiance to the human tragedy: Tanto sol en la guerra, de pronto, tanta lumbre desparramada a carros por valles y colinas; 41 Stephen Spender, World within World, 241. 42 For example, Bowra, Wesseling, Jiménez Fajardo and Nantell.
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tan rabioso silencio, tan fiera mansedumbre bajando como un crimen del cielo a las encinas; este desentenderse de la muerte que intenta, de acuerdo con el campo, tanta luz deslumbrada; la nieve que a lo lejos en éxtasis se ausenta, las horas que pasando no les preocupa nada; (408) The sense of incongruity is heightened by oppositions: ‘rabioso silencio’, ‘fiera mansedumbre’, ‘crimen ... cielo’, sol-nieve, sol-guerra, lumbre/luz-muerte, éxtasis-nada. This mixture of beauty and devastation, of normality and horror, as disturbing in its way as the bombed house in ‘Madrid-otoño’, leaves the poet anguished and confused as the third and final quatrain precisely recounts: todo esto me remuerde, me socava, me quita ligereza a los ojos, me los nubla y me pone la conciencia cargada de llanto y dinamita. La soledad retumba y el sol se descompone. (408) It is a moment when time stands still, when the poet, elemental man now rather than a communist, is perplexed at the unresolved horror of a war starkly divorced from its setting. For a moment his role in the conflict is uncertain, while his inner oppositions—‘la conciencia cargada de llanto y dinamita’—encompass emotional and ethical contradictions that are especially acute in a civil war. As a final irony, he feels a pang of ‘soledad’ amid battle, another elemental insight which recalls captions used by Goya in his gruesome illustrations, Los desastres de la guerra. Doubt is also present in ‘Nocturno’, the last poem we shall consider, where the value of the poet’s role is questioned. Each of three structured stanzas is followed by the emphatic line, ‘Balas. Balas.’, against which uncompromising material the poet’s medium is useless: ‘las palabras no sirven: son palabras’. In the first stanza the poet is driven by ‘la rabia ... el odio ... y la venganza’, which, as in ‘El perro rabioso’, are irresistible bodily urges located respectively in ‘la sangre ... los tuétanos ... y en las médulas’. The second stanza itemizes the literature of war, similarly feeble in this brutal context: Manifiestos, artículos, comentarios, discursos, humaredas perdidas, neblinas estampadas, ¡qué dolor de papeles que ha de barrer el viento, que tristeza de tinta que ha de borrar el agua! (420) The parallelism in the last two lines—syntactical, phonological and semantic—enhances the equation between ‘dolor de papeles’ and ‘tristeza de tinta’, images which transfer sentience to objects in the manner of Sermones
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y moradas. But feeling is of no consequence in the face of the persistent ‘Balas. Balas.’, and in a magnificent concluding stanza Alberti expresses his agony as a poet at being reduced by events to mute impotence: Ahora sufro lo pobre, lo mezquino, lo triste, lo desgraciado y muerto que tiene una garganta cuando desde el abismo de su garganta quisiera gritar lo que no puede por imposible, y calla. Balas. Balas. Siento esta noche heridas de muerte las palabras. (420) His wish, announced in ‘Madrid-otoño’, to lose his voice—‘yo quisiera ... / arrancarme de cuajo la voz ... / para pisarte toda tan silenciosamente’—is granted, ironically, in this poem of late 1938 when the Republic’s plight is desperate and a war-weary poet can muster no lines of encouragement for his comrades or even praise their forlorn efforts. Defeat is numbing and, as Madrid enters its third year of siege, the enduring sound of ‘Balas. Balas.’ silences proletarian optimism as well as Alberti’s muse, though not before he has written one of his finest poems. With some poignancy the war’s tragic outcome, unrecorded in the volume, becomes the last imminent event subsumed in the title, De un momento a otro. The preceding comments suggest three criteria on which to base an assessment of this challenging if uneven work, namely: the volume’s cohesiveness, its place in Alberti’s output, and the quality of its poems. Cohesiveness is not immediately obvious in a volume whose four parts cover such disparate topics as ‘La familia’ and ‘13 bandas y 48 estrellas’. But Alberti’s rejection of the oppressive religious regime he knew as a child in El Puerto is one with his criticism of U.S. imperialism, and both inform his anti-fascist stance that is roused to anger in the sonnets of the second section and then challenged and defeated in the Civil War crisis of the last, ‘Capital de la gloria’, the volume’s centrepiece. Even less obvious at first sight in the conceptual link with Alberti’s earlier work. But we have seen how the pronounced object-orientation of the sacrilegious materio-mystic who wrote Sobre los ángeles and Sermones y moradas continues and finds new purpose in the political activist of the thirties whose atheism is channelled into the Marxist critique of historical materialism. Materialism is the decisive link, and Alberti is one of the few to test the gamut of surrealist theory from Freudian automatism to the fevered pursuit of ‘the surrealist object’ to Marxist solidarity with the worker. As to the quality of the poems, finally, it has to be said that in absolute terms several fall short of the mark, for the poet is sometimes too compromised by the need to encourage or denounce, as in the crude ‘Balada de los cuatro cerdos de la paz’ which expresses disgust at the Munich
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agreement.43 However, poetry is the product of circumstance and Alberti’s circumstance in the war was that of Spain’s most highly regarded poet—‘the recognized successor to Lorca’, as Spender put it—44whose poems were expected to contribute to the Republican effort. Remarkably, he met these expectations while writing poems that largely bear out Spender’s further comment that Alberti ‘felt about the propagandist heroics of war much as I did myself ’ ,45 which is to say, unimpressed. Indeed, the poems of ‘Capital de la gloria’ offer a multifaceted commentary which reflects the fluctuations and contradictions of a war witnessed in turn by a communist, a soldier, a poet and simply a man, with all the agony this entails. At least half a dozen are outstanding war poems, which is no mean proportion, and they invariably bear Alberti’s materialist stamp. In my view, De un momento a otro completes a cycle begun with Sobre los ángeles and Sermones y moradas, and it ranks with these works as Alberti’s finest achievement.46
43 This poem is not included in Poesías completas, but is found in PPU, Barcelona, 202. 44 Stephen Spender, The Thirties and After: Poetry, Politics, People (1933-75) (London: Macmillan, 1978), 78. 45 Spender, The Thirties and After, 78. 46 A number of points and references in this article came to light through a process of collaborative discussion with a postgraduate student, Craig Duggan, to whom I would like to express my sincere thanks.