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C.J. Sansom's
Winter in Madrid and the literary lure of the "Good Fight"
July 2008
Both American presidential candidates, John McCain and Barack Obama, named Ernest Hemingway's
For Whom the Bell Tolls when asked recently by journalists to cite their favorite novel. McCain has said that during his captivity in North Vietnam as a POW he recited portions of the book to himself. It's intriguing that both
McCain and Obama chose a novel set not in the United States, but in Spain during its fratricidal Civil War in the late 1930s.
The protagonist of For Whom the Bell Tolls is an American, however, Robert Jordan, a leftist college professor and
International Brigades volunteer who embarks on a dangerous mission to blow up a strategic bridge in the Iberian hill country.
At least one conservative writer, Michael Knox Beran, has tartly suggested that McCain should find a different favorite, one
that isn’t "a maudlin lament for a socialist bridge-bomber." There is some irony in Beran's critique of the politics of Hemingway's novel, because the hard Left
in the United States, including some of the American Communists who served in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion (part of the International
Brigades), ferociously attacked the book (and its author) after its publication in 1940. These critics, among them former
Lincoln commander Milton Wolff, objected to Hemingway's negative portrayal of Soviet motives and tactics in Spain and to his unsparing and harsh portraits
of political commissar André Marty (known as the "Butcher of Albacete" for his purge of non-Communists in
the International Brigades) and the Communist leader Dolores Ibárruri, the Leftist icon also known as La Passionara.
(Hemingway, never one to duck a fight, responded directly and profanely to those he called the "ideology boys.")
Hemingway made a distinction between supporting the Loyalist cause, as did his fictional character Robert Jordan,
and endorsing the Soviet strategy of deception and manipulation in dealing with the Republican government. Such an approach
was anathema to the hardliners. There's an amusing anecdote (recounted in Peter Carroll's The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln
Brigade: Americans in the Spanish Civil War) involving the actor Gary Cooper, Hemingway's choice to play Robert Jordan
in the film of For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Alvah Bessie, a Lincoln veteran and screenwriter. During the filming,
Bessie lectured Cooper about how the Spanish conflict hadn't been a civil war, as Cooper believed, but instead was a German
and Italian invasion designed to overthrow the legal government of Spain. Cooper's laconic, and classic, response: "That
so? That's what so great about this country...a guy like you can fight in a war that's none of his business." Art and the "Good
Fight" It's not hard to see why the "Good Fight" (as the Spanish struggle was dubbed) inspired
artists, poets, playwrights, novelists and short story writers from the start. The conflict was rich with dramatic, and tragic,
elements. Writers have been drawn by the idealism of many of the defenders of the Republic, and by the idea that the Spanish
hostilities represented a dress rehearsal for World War II. Some of the best works about the conflict, such as George Orwell's
Homage to Catalonia and Hemingway's novel, have explored the tensions within the ranks of the Loyalists. This artistic
and literary fascination with the “Good Fight” has continued into the 21st century as evidenced by a continuing
stream of books (fiction and non-fiction) about the Spanish Civil War and the International Brigades, including English author
C.J. Sansom's Winter in Madrid, a best-seller in Britain. Sansom has set his fictional story in 1940 Madrid, a year after General Francisco Franco's
victory over the Loyalists, and Winter in Madrid shines brightest in its evocative portrayal of the grim life in
Spain's capital city: the compromises, and sacrifices, required for survival. The novel's protagonist, Harry Brett, a veteran
of Dunkirk, is recruited by British Intelligence to spy on a former schoolmate, Sandy Forsyth, who is involved in shady business
dealings with the Spanish government. Brett's mission exposes him to the corruption and venality of the Nationalist victors,
and to the growing rivalry between the Royalist and Falange wings of Franco's regime. Sansom's characters reflect the range
of British attitudes toward the Spanish conflict. Harry Brett is a self-described liberal Tory ("As far as I am concerned,
Spain before the Civil War was rotten with chaos, and the Fascists and Communists both took advantage"). The crypto-Fascist
Forsyth is balanced by a British Communist, Bernie Piper, an internationalist who embraces the Republican cause as part of
a broader struggle against Fascism. And there is an English Red Cross nurse, Barbara Clare, an idealistic, but fragile, fellow
traveler who becomes romantically involved with both Piper and Forsyth. The three men---Brett, Piper and Forsyth---have all
attended Rookwood, a traditional British public school, and Sansom intersperses flashbacks of their school days throughout
the pages of Winter in Madrid, linking past and present friendships and rivalries. That's a lot of baggage for any
novel to carry, and Sansom struggles to pull off the dual narratives. He also misses the mark in his characterization
of Forsyth, a straight-from-Central-Casting sadist, exactly the sort of predictable Fascist bad guy found in innumerable World
War II thrillers. Franco's Spanish supporters are also uniformly portrayed by Sansom as grasping, or evil, or both. Yet, it
is possible for a novelist to write about the complex human dimensions of those loyal to a twisted ideology. For example,
Alan Furst has created a number of fully-rounded characters drawn to totalitarian creeds in novels like The World at Night,
Kingdom of Shadows, and Dark Star, and David Downing's Zoo Station and Silesian Station
give us flesh-and-blood Germans struggling to retain their decency in Nazi Germany. Winter in Madrid would have been
better served by grays instead of black-and-white, and it would have been a much better novel if Sansom had risked more by
creating less predictable, and less cliched, villains. To his credit, Sansom gets his history right. There's no whitewashing of Comintern
treachery during the Civil War, and also no shying away from the post-war reality of Nationalist brutality. At one level,
Winter in Madrid can be read as an indictment of Britain's accomodationist policy toward Franco and the Spanish Right
in the 1930s and 1940s, and yet Sansom acknowledges that by the time of the Battle of Britain, Whitehall's options had narrowed.
No matter how distasteful the Franco regime might have been, keeping Spain out of an alliance with the Germans had to shape
British policy. Sansom's imaginative leap in setting Winter in Madrid after the end of the civil war deserves
praise as well. We see Spain confronting not only the human costs of its ideological death struggle---the shattered veterans,
the orphans, the despairing widows---but also the grim prospects of life under a dictatorship. It is a fascinating, and haunting,
story and Winter in Madrid tells it well.
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