A Moment of War: A Memoir of the Spanish Civil War (review)

MR Lost Classic A Moment of War: A Memoir of the Spanish Civil War by Laurie Lee The New Press, 1991, 178 pp. Laurie Lee was an accomplished poet as weU as prose writer, and it is apparent on every page of his memoir of the Spanish CivU War, a book that for some mysterious reason was not pubUshed in the United States until 1991, in a modest edition that was never reaUy discovered by American readers. It's too bad, because this book is a sleeping classic. When he was nineteen years old, Lee was an out-ofwork poet who walked across Spain playinghis violinformoney. Helater escaped the Spanish CivU War on a British destroyer but returned via France to take part in the struggle against Spanish Fascism. The so-caUed International Brigade that Lee joined was a morose commingling of fugitives from justice, hungry wanderers, earnest university students and fellow travelers—Dutchmen, Germans, Poles, Frenchmen, Welsh, Catalans, Canadians, Czechs and Americans— camping in fetid squalor for weeks that stretched into months, standing around greasy campfires trying to get warm and to communicate through the babble of different languages. The Spanish Republicans, according to Lee, were not happy with aU these foreigners coming to rescue Spain from itsetf. They felt that they should be able to solve their own problems were both suspicious and contemptuous of the International Brigade. MUitary training consisted of occasional activities such as crawling up a hUl toward men who were beating on oU drums to "capture" a machine gun nest or throwing bottles at a pram being pushed around a square for an "antitank exercise." Moods alternated between bravado, bewUderment and despair. The men were mostly unoccupied and always hungry Lee writes with such clear rhythm and rhetoric and compeUing imagery that he performs the smaU miracle of rendering this forlorn subject into a delectable book. Almost every paragraph has some morsel of phrasing or metaphor that makes the experience of reading it Uke having a fine meal. The only question that I have about An Incident ofWar is whether at times its strong writing doesn't carry it too far from reaUty. But this is a memoir, not a history or a diary, and a certain latitude in remembering and reconstructing experience should be aUowed. Laurie Lee is one of those British authors from the quiet midcentury who barely made the leap across the Atlantic. AU of his books are currently out of print here, including this one, although used and rare book shops everywhere seU another of his memoirs—of a boyhood in West England. British schoolchUdren of the 1960s remember with conspicuous pleasure a coming-of-age tale by Lee caUed Cider with Roste. But this author, whose writing is to me inherentlyricher than, say, a KingsleyAmis, has been largely missed stateside. I beUeve that it is time for someone Uke Penguin to consider reissuing selected work by him. Speer Morgan The Missouri Review · 203 ...