Arturo Barea

Arturo Barea
Born Arturo Barea Ogazón
(1897-09-20)20 September 1897
Badajoz, Spain
Died 24 December 1957(1957-12-24) (aged 60)
Faringdon, Oxfordshire, England
Resting place All Saints Church, Faringdon
51°39′34.46″N 1°35′0.53″W / 51.6595722°N 1.5834806°W / 51.6595722; -1.5834806Coordinates: 51°39′34.46″N 1°35′0.53″W / 51.6595722°N 1.5834806°W / 51.6595722; -1.5834806
Nationality Spanish
Citizenship  Spain
 United Kingdom (from 1948)
Occupation Writer, journalist, broadcaster
Spouse(s) Aurelia Rimaldos (1924-1937)
Ilse Pollak (1938-1957) (his death)
This name uses Spanish naming customs: the first or paternal family name is Barea and the second or maternal family name is Ogazón.

Arturo Barea Ogazón (20 September 1897 – 24 December 1957[1]) was a Spanish journalist, broadcaster and writer. After the Spanish Civil War, Barea lived in exile in the United Kingdom until his death.

Biography

Barea was born in Badajoz, of humble origins.[2] His father died when he was four months old, so his mother, with four young children to support, worked as a laundress, washing clothes in the River Manzanares, while the family lived in a garret in the poor Lavapiés district of Madrid. Barea was semi-adopted by his aunt and uncle who were prosperous enough to send him to school. This resulted in his first experience of the class divisions that riddled Spanish society, when his own sister accused him of "acting the gentleman" while she worked as a servant. He left school aged 13 and got a job at a bank as an office boy and copyist, though did not become a fully paid employee for another year. He later quit after being fined for breaking a glass-plate desk cover.

Barea served his compulsory military service in Ceuta and Morocco, rising to the rank of sergeant in an Engineers regiment of the Spanish Army and seeing action in the Rif War. He began writing and published some poems. He then worked in an office registering patents (he had originally wanted to be an engineer), and in 1924, he married for the first time. He was a member of the Socialist UGT (Unión General de Trabajadores) and helped found the Clerical Workers Union at the start of the Second Spanish Republic in 1931.

On the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in mid-1936 he organized a volunteer militia unit La Pluma ("The Pen") of office workers fighting under the UGT. Later, thanks to his knowledge of English and French, he worked as a censor at the Foreign Ministry's Press Office where he came to know Ernest Hemingway and many other foreign journalists covering the conflict. John Dos Passos, in a 1938 article published in Esquire, referred to Barea as "underslept and underfed".[3] During the Siege of Madrid he joined the Radio Service broadcasting to Latin America, where he became known as An Unknown Voice of Madrid, every night telling stories about daily life in the besieged city. He also met the Austrian journalist Ilse Kulcsar (née Pollak),[4] whom he would marry in 1938.

As defeat for the Spanish Government loomed, this, allied to difficulties with the Communist party (he was not a member and therefore suspect), and a breakdown in his health, meant that he and his wife had to leave Spain. They went into exile to France in the middle of 1938, and then to England in 1939. From then until his death, Barea worked for the BBC's World Service Spanish section, while contributing articles and reviews to various literary publications, as well as writing books.

Barea spent the last ten years of his life living at Middle Lodge in Eaton Hastings, a house rented from Gavin Henderson, 2nd Baron Faringdon, of nearby Buscot Park.[5] Barea's ashes were scattered in his garden at Middle Lodge, and a memorial to Barea and his wife was erected behind her parents' grave in the churchyard annexe of All Saints Church, Faringdon, Oxfordshire.[6]

Barea has three Spanish streets named in his honour, in Badajoz, Mérida and Novés.

He is a central figure in Amanda Vaill's non-fiction Hotel Florida published in 2014.

Publications

Maxim Lieber was Barea's literary agent in 1947 and 1950.

The Forging of a Rebel

His best-known work is his autobiography La Forja de un Rebelde ("The Forging of a Rebel"), published in three volumes:

The books were translated into English by Ilsa Barea and first published between 1941 and 1946. Orwell, in his review of the trilogy said: "An excellent book … Señor Barea is one of the most valuable of the literary acquisitions that England has made as a result of Fascist persecution”.[10] The first Spanish language edition was published in Argentina in 1951, and not published in Spain until 1978. La Forja de un Rebelde was dramatised on TVE in 1990, directed and with screenplay by Mario Camus.[11] Gabriel García Márquez considered it one of the "ten best books written in Spain following the Spanish Civil War." (los diez mejores libros escritos en España después de la Guerra Civil),[12] and "One of the best novels written in Spanish".[10]

Short stories

Biographies

Novels

References

Notes
  1. ↑ "Arturo Barea". University of Birmingham, Centre for the Study of Hispanic Exile. 2012. Retrieved 11 May 2012.
  2. ↑ Devlin, J. Arturo (May 1958). "Barea and José María Gironella - Two Interpreters of the Spanish Labyrinth". Hispania 41 (2): 143–148. ISSN 0018-2133. JSTOR 335439. OCLC 1200188.
  3. ↑ Preston, Paul. We Saw Spain Die: Foreign Correspondents in the Spanish Civil War, p. 46. Constable. 2008
  4. ↑ Cahill, Rowan (2007). "Rupert Lockwood abroad, 1935-38: Genesis of a Cold War journalist". Conference Proceedings, Australian Society for the Study of Labour History. Retrieved 11 May 2012.
  5. ↑ Murphy, Martin (September 2004). "The Exiles of Eaton Hastings" (PDF). Basque Children of ’37 Association Newsletter (2): 4–5.
  6. ↑ Bell, Adrian (April 2006). "In a Country Churchyard Annexe" (PDF). Basque Children of ’37 Association Newsletter (5): 5–6.
  7. ↑ Orwell, George (September 1941). "Reviews: Arturo Barea, The Forge". Horizon (London) 4 (21): 214–217.
  8. ↑ Barea, Arturo. The Track. p. 8. ISBN 0-00-654091-0.
  9. ↑ Orwell, George (May 2001). Davison, Peter, ed. Orwell in Spain: The Full Text of Homage to Catalonia, with Associated Articles, Reviews and Letters from the Complete Works of George Orwell. Penguin Books. p. 372. ISBN 978-0141185163. — Review first printed in The Observer, 24 March 1946.
  10. 1 2 Eaude, Michael (2011). "Triumph at Midnight of the Century". Sussex Academic Press. Retrieved 8 August 2013.
  11. ↑ "'La forja de un rebelde' (1990)". imdb.com. 2012. Retrieved 11 May 2012.
  12. ↑ Cabezas Granado, Felipe (18 December 2012). "La forja de Arturo Barea". Hoy (in Spanish). Retrieved 8 August 2013.
Bibliography

Further reading

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