Blood of Spain
Woodcock, George
her own involvement with the Cursillo movement, where she became associated with these people. The Cursillo emerged via Europe to the U.S.A. in the 1960's as an effort of the Roman Catholic...
...Twenty-two authors of good repute present a vast amount of information about the texts of our rites, generally following this division of time: Jewish and New Testament, patristic, medieval, Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and contemporary...
...He proceeds by loose association, tautology and the setting up of pseudo-profound opposites...
...The special ingredient he added, and which Ronald Fraser has denied himself, is that of inventive reconstruction...
...But at these points oral history doubtless suffers from the lack of survivors or the difficulty of finding them...
...it is appropriate that the recollections of these mostly uncelebrated militiamen and workers and peasants and professionals should be recorded informally and put together into an oral history that becomes a kind of grassroots biography of the Spanish people during the most crucial era of their recent past...
...Instead the reader is forced into an ordeal of endless facts, peppered with "I don't know...
...In the life stories here the impression is that each sought out the Cursillo as a peripheral aspect of wide sweeping re-assessments already begun in their relationships to authority, to their spouses, work etc., and also the church...
...And while there is a good account of the collapse of the Basque front, there is surprisingly little about the collapse of the C-,talonian front...
...The writing is, for the most part, clear and lean...
...Kraft reaches a typical crisis of conundrum in the following sentence: "In a sense, celibates who want to get married should not get married until they are already married...
...This is virtually absent and therefore remains mysterious...
...even the egregious Queipo de Llano, in the accounts of those who knew him, reveals more traces of humanity...
...Due to his inadequate grasp of the psychoanalytic concepts of defense mechanisms of the ego, he makes the common error of the pop psychologist in inferring that defenses are bad, and that by an act of will a person can avoid "repressions" that lead to unhealthy sexuality...
...At the moment, as in this example, Dr...
...An essay on the "theology of worship" precedes the historical sketches Fraser had the patience and good fortune to gather such a rich harvest of oral material so far away in time from the events...
...At the same time of which they speak most of the men and women from all classes and both sides of the conflict whom Fraser interviewed were relatively young--many of them in their teens, but this has worked to the advantage of his purpose, since his informants were at an impressionable and perceptive age when they took part in the events they describe, and, with few exceptions, they saw those events from the heart of the population rather than from positions of authority...
...But if Blood of Spain has a real model in literature it lies in the realm of fiction rather than conventional history: it is War and Peace, in which the religious anarchist Leo Tolstoy decided to depart from the view of history as a parade of great men's deeds, and+ to consider it as a pattern of actions and interactions within the lives of many people, ordinary and extraordinary, living at the time of a decisive historical event, in Tolstoy's case the French invasion of Russia in 1812, culminating in Napoleon's disastrous retreat from Moscow...
...From the I BLOOD OF SPAIN Ronaid Fraser Pantheon Books, $15.95, 608 pp...
...The titles of her chapters rival "The Canterbury Tales," e.g...
...The military history is sketched in lightly, and this is appropriate, since it has been well-documented elsewhere, and the same is true of political history, except in so far as this affected ordinary people in terms of economic policies or of conflicts and relationships between political groups at the popular level...
...Personally, I finished Blood of Spain with the feeling that another book might now be written, about the extraordinary search which Mr...
...The affect and liveliness of either a face-to-face encounter or a good description are lacking...
...A decade ahead would have been too late for such a rich and many-sided compilation...
...The writing therefore deteriorates into a vague celebration ofunhappy people who in mid-life took steps towards actively determining the course of their own lives...
...We need all the history that we can get, if only to correct our relentless current efforts to fulfill the prophecy that Jaroslav Commonweal: 602...
...Yet, in spite of.the different methods which Fraser has used, there emanates from Blood of Spain something of the epic feeling that envelops War and Peace, something of the same pristine and Homeric actuality...
...Fraser's most notable achievement that in the mosaic of oral histories which forms'the fabric of Blood of Spain he has not only given us an invaluable insight int9 the concrete texture of daily living in many parts of Spain during the civil war, but has also--with the very active collaboration of his informants--recaptured the spirit of that distant time (almost as far away to us as 1812 was to Tolstoy when he wrote War and Peace) with a l~reshness that survivors of the Thirties will find poignant and authentic in its revival not merely of the events but also of the very atmosphere of that time whose generosities of spirit balanced the betrayals that led Auden to dismiss it as "a low, dishonest decade...
...in the 1960's as an effort of the Roman Catholic church to "convert the individual by providing a profound experience of both community and marginality...
...Groups of recollections, united by Fraser's own narratives, cluster around localities, issues, aspects of the war and of economic and social life...
...There are a number of notable lacunae...
...From the first he attempts to widen the usual definition of celibacy to those who have no commitment to live with another human being...
...liturgy which comprise the bulk of the volume...
...William Kraft's book on the sexual dimensions of the celibate life could have been fascinating...
...In between, the contributors are clearly experts...
...A documentary account of the Spanish Civil War seems particularly appropriate when one remembers the emphasis on the reportage as history which developed during the Thirties under the influence of left-populist fashions of thought, and Blood of Spain is a good example of the genre as it has been developed in our own day...
...Separate (but unequal) sections on the "Setting" (terrible word...
...It seems to me that the two ends of the chronological spectrum are fhe least satisfactory, considering the book as a whole (some sections are exceptions)our Jewish roots, on the one hand, and contemporary developments, on the other...
...In spite of Dr...
...The trouble about these direct transcripts also is that the people sound flat in spite of the interesting facts of their lives...
...I think we can...
...He wants to convey that celibates are in no way asexual, that there is a place for sexual abstinence within mar, riage and that constant sexual activity is no guarantee of flourishing mental health...
...It shows very strikingly how slight the popular support was for the military rising even in the more conservative regions (with the single exception of Carlist Navarre) as compared with the passionate mass support for the republic in cities like Madrid and Barcelona and in much of the southern and eastern countryside...
...Oxford, $19.95, 547 pps...
...Tolstoy achieved his marvelous historical effects partly by research into documents, and to a great extent by elaborating what he knew of the experience of his own and other Russian noble families at the time of the Napoleonic wars, which were half a century in the past when he was writing...
...Among other features, Blood of Spain contains more elaborate information than most historians have usually given on the experiments in industrial and agrarian collectivization and co-operation in regions like Catalonia and Aragon where the anarcho-syndicalists were strong...
...By the end we know that they changed externally many facets of their lives, and we know that they became disenchanted with things as they were, but we are not much wiser about the inner impetus towards the changes...
...Even this degree of formal arrangement is broken by a series of brief interludes, eighteen of them called "Militancies" and giving brief histories of activist careers, and fifteen of them called "Episodes" and showing the kind of adventures and accidents of fate that happened to people during the Spanish civil war...
...McDowell's introduction and suggestion that the Cursillo was central as a "setting for change," the individuals would have had to expand the accounts of their feeling experiences in the group to show the reader the place of the movement in their assessment of their various changes...
...Fraser must have made to find such a wide range of informants, and about what has happened to these typical participants in the civil war during the forty years since 1939...
...buts" or a bland meaningless psychological jargon, curiously common to most of them: "negative response," "my deep and honest response," "being a growing thing," "so-and-so was freeing," "not phony," "the goodness of a decision...
...Kraft's use of language throughout seems designed to obscure thought...
...George Woodcock heart of the population B lood of Spain begins with epigraphs by Engels and Brecht, and the Engels quotation is especially apposite, opening with the remark that: "History proceeds in such a way that the final result always arises from conflicts between many individual wills, and every one of them is in turn made into what it is by a host of particular conditions of life...
...Come back, pastoral THE STUDY OF LITUR~'Y Edited by Cheslyn Jones, GeolTrey Wainwright, Edward Yarnold, S.J...
...Blood of Spain is based on statements Ronald Fraser collected from such survivors during two years at the end of the Franco era (between June 1973 and May 1975...
...And it is perhaps Mr...
...Despite the bitter disillusionments it eventually brought, the Spanish Civil War was perhaps the last conflict in which both sides could Commonweal: 600regime--when Spain stood detached from the past among the surviving participants with an extraordinary vividness...
...While considerations of movement, gesture, environment and the arts do receive a little bit of attention in at least some parts of the historical material, Hugh Wybrew unintentionally underscores a serious defect of the whole when he writes: "The rite, understood as a form of words . . . . " It is this sad fact, that our rites are still understood by most Christians as forms of words, that constitutes a major obstacle to the realization of the promise of our conciliar times, namely, of a dynamically experiential common prayer...
...One Chicano woman is different...
...Five percent of the statements were collected among refugees still living in France, but an astonishing 95 percent of them were recorded in Spain itself, and their frankness shows how far the dictatorship had loosened before the dictator himself departed from the scene...
...To avoid the image of a formal history, Ronald Fraser gives Blood of Spain the subtitle "Episodes from the Spanish Civil War...
...However, I think that her hermeneutic rationale for letting the text speak for itself in the interest of preserving the immediacy of experience fails, and becomes an excuse for disorganization and a lack of any attempt to integrate the data or provide bridges between her underlying theoretical ideas/ from Erickson, Perry and others, and the live material...
...For example, while we learn a great deal of life in Oviedo when it was besieged by the republicans, we are told almost nothing about what happened in the great anarchist stronghold of Saragossa after it was seized with surprisingly little resistance by the insurgents...
...The Radical Nun," "The Dissenting Pilgrim," and the description of what we are about to hear from them fills one with anticipation...
...The generosities and the betrayals-they were there in abundance during the appalling years of the Spanish Civil War, and the glacial decades of the Franco 26 October 1979:601The chronological form of the book tends to be loose, since it begins with an account of the actual military uprising of July, 1936, as it was seen and experienced by ordinary Spaniards in various regions, goes back to a panorama of the months of unrest that preceded the insurrection, and then clusters memories around the most significant factors in the civil war, including the geographical sectors, the social forces, the economic experiments, the conflicts behind the fronts...
...I admire her humanistic approach to the individual, and I share her wariness about the limitations of psychodynamic extrapolations and generalities...
...architecture, vesture), on "pastoral orientation," and indexes of subjects and of persons conclude the book...
...Unfortunately his thinking is woolly, confused, and overlapping...
...of liturgical action (subsections on ceremony, music, language...
...feel, in the beginning at least, that they were involved in a heroic confrontation...
...In fact there is a good deal more continuity than this description suggests...
...To follow up from Dr...
...She then transcribes long verbatim accounts from each...
...Extensive bibliographies prefacing every section and subsection make it more helpful to students than the dense compression of its ambitious scope would suggest...
...Robert W. Hovda T HIS IS a resourceful and useful work, the m-ain purpose of which is to briefly sketch historical origins and developments in Christian liturgical practice in five major public worship areas: initiation, eucharist, ordination, divine office and calendar...
...She herself has very interesting thoughts but they remain isolated from the central material...
...She happens to be brilliantly, verbally talented...
...It will be as useful to historians as it is fascinating to readers interested in the period, and we must be grateful that Mr...
...McDowell's defense that "there is no such thing as 'raw' data.., that life history is construction," 1 feel that this work is still too close to virtually unprocessed data to warrant a book...
...I do not mean to say that people like me, whose primary worship interest is not in the tracing of historical evolution and disintegration, ups and downs, but i rather in the living worship of today and the mission it makes possible, cannot benefit from this book...
...It is an excellent idea and title...
...His absence of logic then shows immediately when he tries to talk about the" "married celibate," a contradiction in his own terms...
...And it presents a many-sided portrait of Franco whiCh reveals the essential and virtually unrelieved coldness of spirit that made him so able a soldier, so cruel and methodical a represser, and so durable a tyrant...
...A format with divisions of this sort seems to me to perpetuate many of the problems that such a book should help to solve--a bit of "theology" at the beginning, and, at the end, a little sop to the "externals" and to"pastoral" concerns...
...Many of the more famous participants in the Spanish civil war have already recorded their memories in formal memoirs...
Vol. 106 • October 1979 • No. 19
