With one hand they held the pen; with the other the weapon. They were writers, but they dreamed of being warriors; or better yet: heroes. Because they did not fear death. They were the last romantics. And now, almost a century later, the Italian writer Maurizio Serra has brought them all together in The armed aesthete (Forcola), an essay that seems like an unrepeatable album of stickers of the poet-warriors who fought in Europe in the 1930s. They were spiritual children of D’Annunzio, Kipling, Marinetti, Junger, Croce, Lawrence of Arabia and other exalted literati. They lived fascinated by utopias. Attracted by the epic of tragedy. Due to their age, they had been left without fighting in the trenches of the Great War. They felt nostalgia for what had not been experienced. Of an idealized adventure in times of patriotic exaltation, an era of ideological overdose and fascination with banners and flags. That is why they began to poetize fascism, communism and war. Many came to the front. Especially to Spain.
Maurizio Serra, biographer of Marinetti, Malaparte and Svevo, says that the Spanish Civil War constitutes an essential milestone to understand the profound dimension reached by those armed aesthetes. To understand the French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, already in his forties and tired of not being able to lend his support for his country, flying with the French aviation until he died. To understand the poems intoxicated with honor by the British writer WH Auden. To get into the mind of the Italian poet Lauro de Bosis, the anti-fascist Icarus capable of writing a text titled Story of my death shortly before fulfilling the mystical call of sacrifice. To penetrate the communist soul of the English novelist Christopher Caudwell and his early death on the Jarama front with the International Brigades. To explain why the Parisian Simone Weil paraded ―so intellectual with her glasses, so committed to her value― with the Durruti column in Spain. Or why the German writer Klaus Mann, frightened by Nazism, joined the Anti-Fascist Front in the Spanish War and then enlisted as a sergeant in the US Army in the Liberation of Italy.
The embryo of all his stories – and those of other intellectuals such as René Crevel, Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender, Stefan George, Ralph Fox, Iliá Ehrenburg, Davide Lajolo and many more legends – must be found in the Civil War. First, says Maurizio Serra, because it was probably the last romantic conflict in Europe. Then, because that romanticism gave a prominent role to intellectuals, to the point of baptizing it as the war of the intellectuals. And, finally, because the Spanish conflict revealed the need for many writers to take action. To leave the libraries, the newsrooms and the cafes. To go to inflame squares with their rhetoric or to fight on the front lines. To abandon ambiguity and critical positions, more typical of intellectuals and reason. “Spain,” the author of the book explains to EL PAÍS, “represented a fundamental crossroads. A phenomenon with no equivalent in the 20th century, neither before nor after. “This shows that Spain, alien to the two world wars, was nevertheless a protagonist in the history and sensitivity of our time.”
![The French writer and aviator Antoine de Saint Exupéry (left) in 1929.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/y7e9bqWO8MCApwZfa-rkqvnbhVQ=/414x0/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/XEA4MKX2C5HZHJQZTOTXEGFCJQ.jpg)
It is impossible to summarize a 500-page book whose name index compiles more than 800 names. Echoes of novels, fragments of poems, political connections, human stories; all the threads of an intellectual spider web where many intellectuals were becoming trapped: deaths, suicides, exile, lives cut short; the bullet in the temple, self-destruction. This cultural sticker album is the choral portrait of a lost generation that inflamed Europe. Some young people who added fuel to a voracious cultural bonfire, never innocent and even less so in the 1930s. Maurizio Serra explains that, in that maximalist Europe, “culture aroused passions that were, in turn, a reflection of its power to disrupt. The culture did not reconcile. He didn’t reconcile. It provoked reflections from some and counter-reflections from others. But he ended up doing it by inappropriate means and with disastrous results.”
The 2,300 British combatants who fought in the Spanish War wrote and published, between them, 730 literary works.
The catastrophe was not only for an increasingly torn and mortified Europe. It was calamitous, too, for them. For the condottiero-poets. All of them shared the rejection of a sedentary and bourgeois life. Their mystical vein was inflamed. The sense of honor is very pronounced. They wanted to show that they also knew how to fight. That they could sacrifice themselves like the common people. All very romantic. However, reality contradicted them time and time again.
The English writer Frank Jellinek told how “Barcelona was packed with thoughtful intellectuals who had no idea what was happening and no qualifications at all with either a machine gun or a typewriter.” The author of The armed aesthete a similar question is asked: “Did Spain, the Republic, freedom, the revolution, really need his blood, his often weak muscles, his often uncertain aim, his enthusiasm and his spirit of sacrifice, rarely compensated for his poor aptitude?” for military discipline and combat?”
Perhaps his greatest contribution to the war was not in the trenches, but in the legacy of his testimony. An investigation has calculated that the 2,300 British combatants who fought in the Spanish War They wrote and published, between them, 730 literary works, mostly war diaries. One book for every three combatants. Remember it yourself and remind others, in a romantic version. Other times, in a cruder version. More authentic. Less ecstatic. Without that rapture that clouds reason.
That realistic feeling was condensed in a phrase that summarized the destiny of that generation of young poets with rifles on their shoulders. The phrase was: “Where are the War poets? Killed in Spain” (Where are the war poets? Murdered in Spain). That recapitulates the failure of the armed aesthetes. On the spot he was picked up by Esmond Romilly, an anti-fascist journalist and Churchill’s nephew. “I came here,” Romilly wrote, “because they told me there was a revolution and, instead, I found a full-blown war! “I came here to fight against the fascist executioners, not to be turned into an idiot dressed as a military man.” Esmond survived the battle of Boadilla del Monte and its dense and dangerous fog. Instead, a few years later he died in World War II. He was 23 years old. His uncle won the war.
In the opinion of Maurizio Serra – member of the French Academy and winner of the Goncourt for Biography – it is impossible to compare the role of intellectuals in that feverish time with the current one, also marked by wars and ideological ardor. “Comparisons are always difficult and incomplete. They belong more to sociology than to the history of ideas, which is my field. I don’t think it makes much sense to talk about armed aesthetes today.”
![The writer George Orwell (background left) with the International Brigades in 1936.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/T1job5CcCDVAIbuo6f_VpzcISj4=/414x0/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/TTSUDHYMURA4XBRQHJKW66B3MQ.jpg)
What made them do it? Virginia Woolf, who lost her favorite nephew—the poet and critic Julian Bell—in the Spanish War, attempted to answer that question. Why did so many intellectuals risk and lose their lives in that decade? “I think it’s a fever in the blood of the younger ones that we can’t understand,” Ella Woolf said.
It wasn’t in the blood. She flowed, rather, in ideas and emotion. In the longing for a regenerated humanity – the new man – and his absolute dedication to a goal that would give meaning to life. There were no rights or lefts in that. It was not a question of Malapartes or Malraux. There was shared messianism. Culture did not inoculate those feathers from abyssal horrors. There was poetry after Auschwitz. There was also poetry before Auschwitz to inflame the horrors that preceded it. There were poets, in the 1930s, who believed that these were no longer times for printed paper. Who succumbed in the mud of the most prosaic trench. They were looking for the absolute and they lost everything. Its bitter final verse.
All the culture that goes with you awaits you here.
Subscribe
Babelia
The literary news analyzed by the best critics in our weekly newsletter
RECEIVE IT
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
_
#verse #trench #poets #rifles #died #ideal