Uncivil Wars: Elena Garro, Octavio Paz, and the Battle for Cultural Memory

4. Love and War Don’t Mix: Garro and Paz in the Spanish Civil War

4 ELECTION RESULTS LEADING TO ARMED fighting and the dissolution of law and order, conflicts over the ownership and use of land, bloody warfare, hunger in the streets, and international crises marked the period of the Mexican Revolution but also characterized the years of the Spanish Civil War. Comparisons between the two have proven fruitful for a number of reasons. Although each was brought about by different historical, social, and cultural circumstances , the Mexican Revolution (circa 1910–1920) and the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) are both considered major upheavals in the twentieth century. According to Octavio Paz, the Mexican Revolution was not associated with a specific ideology (Fell, 339). In contrast, the opponents in the Spanish Civil War were more clearly divided between the Nationalists or Falangists (fascists of Spain) and the Republicans, mostly socialists and Communists.1 Throughout Europe and the Americas, the war in Spain was viewed as the battle between the forces of democracy and fascism, or communism versus fascism. Frankly, this would not seem the venue to choose as the place to bring your new bride, except for an aspiring young poet driven by the romance of mingling with the members of the intellectual leadership in the arts and perhaps naïve about the risks. Despite having lived through the traumas of the Mexican Revolution, Paz and Garro, who married in May 1937, immediately LOVE AND WAR DON’T MIX GARRO AND PAZ IN THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR “Politics is a great enemy of love.” PAZ The Double Flame UNCIVIL WARS 80 set off to a Spain beset by a civil war whose outcome was far from certain. In this chapter I review the international, national, and personal contexts of this momentous war and how Paz and Garro assimilated their wartime experiences not only into their written work but also into their future political and esthetic perspectives. Being in Spain was liberating for Paz and led to progressively more important career choices, while Garro’s encounters with the major international literary icons provided disconcerting evidence of the subordinate status of women. Her personal experiences would later be expressed in narrative , where she challenged patriarchal principles and women’s inferior status. She elected to subvert the established cultural memory of the war and its participants by writing about her own observations on major political events and individuals that affected her personal and artistic life. The Spanish Civil War has been called “the last romantic war of contemporary history” (Camino, 92). Paz and Garro were among the many young people who hastened to Spain to support the Republican cause in any way possible. They arrived during one of the bloodiest and most harrowing years of the Civil War. The year 1937 marked the terror bombing of Guernica on April 27 by the German Condor Legion as well as two major intense battles in the immediate area around Madrid: at Jarama (January to February) and Brunete (July, preceding the arrival of the young couple). They joined other intellectuals and writers who had also been invited to attend the Segundo Congreso Internacional de Escritores Antifascistas para la Defensa de la Cultura (Second International Congress of Antifascist Writers for the Defense of Culture) and were eager to join like-minded thinkers. As incongruous as the idea of holding a conference in defense of culture during a war may sound, the meeting did take place and influenced the lives of Paz and Garro personally and professionally. Paz established lifelong friendships and developed his enduring attitude about Communist injustices, while Garro’s struggles with patriarchal gender relations during her Spanish journey became one of the several themes that pervade her work. The theme of war often exaggerates the differences between the genders, as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar remind us: “not only did the apocalyptic events of this war [World War I] have very different meanings for men and women, such events were in fact different for men and women” (No Man’s Land, 262). The experiences of Garro and Paz in the Spanish Civil War bear this out. Paz considered the Mexican Revolution (which the two young people had already experienced) to be the first major civil war of the twentieth century LOVE AND WAR DON’T MIX 81 (Labyrinth, 175).2 The Spanish Civil War is usually viewed as the opening chapter of World War II, because it involved the first major military contest between leftist forces and...