Son of a poor Madrid washerwoman whose husband had died, Arturo Barea was born in 1897 in Madrid. He was brought up by a relatively well-to-do uncle and a bigoted catholic aunt. A scholarship took him to a catholic school for the rich in Madrid, while both sides of his family had peasant relatives living in Castile whom he visited on his holidays. One group lived in the poor village of Brunete, later to become famous as a battlefield in the civil war; the other in a more prosperous wine-growing village where his grandmother, an outspoken atheist, was the dominant member. In Madrid, the boy was the washerwoman’s son living on the charity of relatives; in the villages he was the sailor-suited, rich little Madrileño. Split between irreconcilable alternatives, his life was that of a ‘bastard’ in the Sartrean sense. The courage of the boy was not to give in to the easier of the options, never to yield to the temptation to deny his roots in the working class; but at the same time always to be able to view the class from which he sprang with a certain objectivity. It was this strength that allowed him to write one of the few masterpieces of contemporary Spain.
The Forging of a Rebel, published in English in the 1940s and now republished in one volume, is a trilogy of selective autobiographical novels.footnote1 Barea set down his objectives and adhered to them rigorously. ‘In taking and exploring my past self as a member of the Spanish generation which was the core of the Civil War, I hoped to expose some of the roots of that war. I wanted to describe the shocks which had scarred my mind, because I am convinced that these shocks, in different individual forms but from the same collective causes, scarred and shaped the minds of other Spaniards too.’
The first of the novels, The Forge, describes his childhood, the second, The Track, his experiences as a sergeant in the Spanish army waging colonial war in Morocco in the 1920s. Both are works of great literary merit and acute observation of pre Civil War Spain. Poverty/wealth, town/country, religion/atheism are the major polarities of his youth which ends with him rebelling against a promising priest-formed school career and becoming a bank clerk. Then he rebelled again, under the extreme exploitation of Spanish capitalism and joined the socialistled ugt, one of the first white-collar workers to do so.