By Stuart Mitchner

I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for. — George Orwell, from Homage to Catalonia

A friend who went to Antioch College tells of arriving as a freshman to find himself confronted on a dormitory stairway by a stunningly lovely girl holding a pail of water, shouting, “Would you have fought in Spain?” Taking into account the water, the stairway, and the girl, he answered in the affirmative and was allowed to pass.

George Orwell, who fought in Spain and wrote about it in Homage to Catalonia (1938), found something more rewarding than the chance to fight fascism: “Up here in Aragon one was among tens of thousands of people…all living at the same level and mingling on terms of equality. In theory it was perfect equality, and even in practice it was not far from it…Many of the normal motives of civilized life—snobbishness, money-grubbing, fear of the boss, etc.—had simply ceased to exist. The ordinary class-division of society had disappeared to an extent that is almost unthinkable in the money-tainted air of England.”

Living in the Subject

The title of Roger Yates’s The Beautiful Season: A Story of the Spanish Revolution (Bloomdido paper $7.68) comes by way of Robert Desnos’s poem, “Song for the Beautiful Season,” which is spoken in the epilogue by a homosexual anarchist who learned it by heart after hearing Desnos recite “strange poems” all through the night at Auschwitz. “Robert pitted poetry against Auschwitz,” says the anarchist, “and poetry triumphed!” This instance of poetry’s transcendent power proclaimed on the 60th anniversary of the Revolution, July 20, 1996, haunts Yates’s reimagining of the idyll of equality described by Orwell. No wonder: Yates is a poet who has been posting his rich and various work online for almost four years. His adventure in narrative followed a pair of poems, “Orwell in Catalonia” (“This bristling man/His head above the parapet/Stands at the centre of an explosion”), and his own “Beautiful Season” (“When we find our hearts/When we find our reckless hearts/When we peel away the layers/And find the void/And sow it with our love/And plant it with our liberty”). Knowing that no poem could satisfy the passion to “be there,” to inhabit the period, he brought the essence of what he knew of the subject into the action, the act of writing a “personal revolution,” as he puts it, “an under-gunned and evanescent” reflection of the reality, a dream hovering between fiction and history that took him just under a month and 200 pages to complete.

According to the author’s note, 79 years ago this month “as many as eight million people cooperated to build a society without hierarchy, with no government, state, police, army, church, financial institutions…. Within a few weeks agriculture and industry were collectivised and run by the workers through their trade unions,” and women “achieved a level of equality not seen to this day.” For Yates, his is “the story of a short-lived experiment in freedom.”

Enlightened Nostalgia

There’s a common strain of enlightened nostalgia at work in Yates’s unadorned, evocative reimagining of the “state of affairs” George Orwell thought “worth fighting for” and the brilliantly rendered portrait of the brightest and darkest extremes of life on the British home front in Anthony Horowitz’s series, Foyle’s War, which began on ITV and PBS in 2002 and ran until January of this year. In the show’s dynamic, the “money-tainted air” and snobbish class-divided English society Orwell contrasted to “perfect equality” becomes a foil to set off the courage and pluck of a people unified by a life-or-death crisis in which perpetrators at the lowest and more often highest levels keep Detective Chief Superintendent Christopher Foyle (Michael Kitchen) occupied. The pluck and courage are present in radiant abundance in the person of his comely driver, Samantha Stewart (Honeysuckle Weeks) of the MTC (Mechanized Transport Corps), better known as Sam. While the series revolves around the ingenious low-key sleuthing of Foyle, Sam is its shining light, its British rose, steadfast and fearless, the clearest personification of all the good, “the best and brightest,” that’s at stake, whether she’s in uniform (as she usually is) or out dancing or standing up to a drunken pistol-waving soldier in a pub or working in the fields with the Land Girls. That Sam is DCS Foyle’s driver makes sense since it’s she who keeps the series headed in the right direction. Horowitz says her character is based on a governess who had been a driver in the Woman’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF), but the spirit she brings to the story reminded me of another famously companionable Sam — the one whose jaunty entrance into Dickens’s Pickwick Papers lifted sales to unheardof heights and made Sam Weller a housebold name.

Captivated by Marina

Roger Yates came to The Beautiful Season after an obsessive plunge into Orwell’s writings, Murray Bookchin’s The Spanish Anarchists, Burnett Bolloten’s Spanish Civil War, numerous biographies (notably Abel Paz on Buenaventura Durruti) and personal narratives, not to mention documentary films like Living Utopia: The Anarchists & the Spanish Revolution and Jorge Ivens’s The Spanish Earth; amid all this reading and viewing, the online universe gave him instant access to revolutionary movements from Tahrir Square in Cairo to the Zapatistas in Chiapas to Kurdish YPG currently being shelled by the Turkish army in Kobani. What finally set everything into creative motion, however, was the photograph of a seductive-looking 17-year-old woman named Marina Ginestà taken on top of Hotel Colón in Barcelona on 21 July 1936, at the dawn of the Revolution. She seems to be saying, “Here I am, a rifle slung over my shoulder, armed and ready, and where are you, my friend?” Ginestà, who died in January 2014 at 94, recalled the moment in an interview in her late eighties: “They say that in the Colón photo I have a captivating look. It’s possible, because we were immersed both in the mysticism of the proletarian revolution and the images of Hollywood, of Greta Garbo and Gary Cooper.”

Born in France and brought up in Spain, Ginestà joined the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia and was working not as soldier but as a typist and translator for a Soviet journalist. This did not lessen the political charisma of the photo nor its prominence as a symbol of the revolution and the inspiration for Libertad, the heroine of The Beautiful Season. Known throughout the novel as Freedom, Marina’s fictional counterpart is the daughter of a libertarian poacher and has been handy with firearms since she was a child. An Aragonese anarcha feminist and member of the libertarian women’s organization Mujeres Libres, Freedom doesn’t waste time, scoring three kills in the opening chapter. “You hit him,” one of her comrades says and shakes her hand. She asks for a cigarette, feeling “suddenly very tired. She might have just killed a frightened boy. He would have killed her if he could, but it was no consolation.” For a moment she thinks she’s going to cry, and then hears herself say, “We carry a new world in our hearts,” the words of anarchist hero Buenaventura Durruti, whose death and burial form the denouement of The Beautiful Season.

There was, by the way, a real-life Freedom named Libertad Rodenas (1893-1970) who fought at the front, took part in the capture of Pina Del Ebro, and later helped with the evacuation of 600 children from Aragon to Barcelona. Like Freedom in the novel, she joined Mujeres Libres. Besides taking part in literacy campaigns at the House of The Working Women, where hundreds were taught to read and write, she joined in the activities of International Antifascist Solidarity (SIA), in particular the evacuation of children from Madrid.

On the Knife’s Edge

In Foyle’s War, Hastings is very much a city of working women, whether as welders or in classified government projects or on high-risk munitions assembly lines or as drivers like Sam Stewart who excels in high-speed pursuits while doubling as a mechanic and tiller of the soil as well as a reader of comics to a shell-shocked little boy. The stress on female presence and wartime solidarity makes Sam the true protagonist, the Freedom of Horowitz’s story and the object of more than one near-death experience, with nowhere to sleep but at the police station when a German bomb destroys the house she was living in and kills her roommate.

The five days in May 1940 that inspired England’s finest hour are described by Foyles War creator Anthony Horowitz in a PBS interview, as “the five most extraordinary and exceptional days this country has had in its entire history: where we were on the knife’s edge, where domination by the Nazis seemed certain, where the war was practically over….Why are the British so fixated by the Second World War all these years later? I think it’s because we found something in ourselves, and in our character, and in our national resolve that we have never really found again.”

Horowitz’s interest in the war led to the genesis of a new kind of whodunit, which became possible “if one started looking at murder at a time when murder was at its lowest currency, when it was at its least important…. How can you investigate one dead body in a library in Hastings, when on the same day five thousand people are being killed fifty miles away?”

Orwell Sees Freedom

In the epilogue to The Beautiful Season, when Freedom, “tall, upright, and still strikingly beautiful,” tells an old comrade “We never really existed, did we?” the author begs to differ, quoting a passage from Homage to Catalonia in which George Orwell describes an “anarchist patrol car, bristling with weapons” and seated beside the driver “a beautiful dark-haired girl of about eighteen” with “a submachine gun across her knees.”

In case anyone wonders what happened to the boy and girl at Antioch, let’s say he asked her out, she enlightened him as best she could about what he would have been fighting for in Spain, they fell in love, moved to Berkeley in the days of the Free Speech Movement, and split up in the Summer of Love.

 Roger Yates’s poetry is at http://rogeryates.blogspot.co.uk. The novel is available through amazon, lulu, and facebook.