Blueshirts in Spain

Dr. John Flynn

In May 1969 Emil Cioran considered writing a book on the Irish, having met an Irishman “qui n’avait que “Almighty God” à la bouche” in conversation. He was normally more interested in the religious preoccupations of other countries, such Russia and Spain. As it happens, a piece of the latter’s history is instructive on the difference between Ireland and the Romania of Cioran’s pre-war dreams.

Early in 1937 the prominent Iron Guard members Ion Moța and Vasile Marin were killed by a shell after volunteering to fight for Franco. Their bodies were transported across Europe by train and greeted in Bucharest by thousands of Greenshirts, as the Iron Guard liked to dress up. They were interred in Bucharest on 13 February, in a mausoleum newly erected by their leader Codreanu. The ceremony was overseen by hundreds of Orthodox priests.

Later in the year the Iron Guard did well…

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Shamrock F***ing Rovers

Adelaide Road Vigil II

August is the cruellest month for patients. It’s a time when even basic cop-on is away on holidays. I got a call from Adelaide Road while on the long road from the country. It was a failed attempt to turn us back (not an option). I could hear the words “Shamrock Rovers” mentioned after I passed the phone to my passenger (‘Shamrock Rovers?’) but then we were asked to get to the hospital as soon as possible. We wondered was this something about match traffic but later it turned out the Rovers were playing in Albania. But the match was on Rovers TV.

After an absolute deluge in the Pale, I still dropped my passenger at the gate half an hour early. Then I got a parking spot around the corner on Harcourt Terrace. Security let her in by prior instruction but then some incompetent beauty from a different admin section told her she had no need to check in as normal. Eight or nine other patients arrived and got seen and sometime in all that my passenger got another call from the first beauty asking had she reached the hospital yet. When she said she was in the hospital, the first one hung up.

After an hour and a half of this codology, some nurse finally twigged she was a loose end without a number. She was the last person seen and didn’t get out until six. Shamrock F*cking Rovers.

I had to wait then until half past for the traffic to ease, along the canal. By then a fox had appeared from one of the prosperous gardens on the west side of the street. He crossed to enter the abandoned cop shop that lies in the shade of the tall trees and grasses at the canal end.

Hrabal’s Trains

The screen version of Bohumil Hrabal’s Ostře sledované vlaky (1965) won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 1968. The book is a short, melodramatic and ultimately unconvincing mishmash of half-baked plot lurches, between which the morbidly self-absorbed young narrator somehow speaks like a cynical old hand to the cartoon characters that are his railway superiors. Then again, he does have a mean streak and likes to prank passengers by luring them out of the waiting room on cold nights, when they form the sadly mistaken view that their train is due.

Nevertheless, there are flashes of what this story might have been, given the setting. Regarding the Germans passing through the snows of Bohemia in early 1945, the usual English title, Closely Observed Trains, is just the railway jargon for military transports.

In praising it in parts, I’m thinking of elements like the plane wing waltzing down over the town square at the start before it crashes into the deanery garden. There is also the underdeveloped side theme that the nearby nobility remains untouched.

The telegraph table stood beneath a window from which you could see five kilometres of a long field road bordered with old apple trees, and at the end of the road glittered Prince Kinský’s castle, which I’d seen this morning at sunrise standing one storey deep in the mist…

Noteworthy too is the one long, controlled passage of dramatic tension. Jittery about any delay on the line, given the risk of partisan attacks, the SS take the narrator aboard at gunpoint.

In a ditch lay three dead horses, just as the Germans had thrown them out of the wagons in the night. They simply opened the doors and threw out the corpses. Now they lay in the ditch… legs stretched stiffly towards the sky like columns…

Thanks to a chance occurrence, though, an SS officer lets him get off the still slowly moving locomotive.

‘Go,’ said the captain.

‘Thank you,’ I whispered.

And all the time I didn’t know whether this was a joke or not.

Finding his feet again, he stands by the track counting the open wagons of Tiger tanks and soldiers passing his shoulder and naturally wondering if any of the unpredictable Germans will just shoot him in the back.

To illustrate the point that “nobody can ever be sure what they will do” the narrator tells us about a woman neighbour who was imprisoned in 1940 and spent four years mopping up the blood after Gestapo executions. The butcher in charge was otherwise unfailingly kind and polite to her and, after her sudden release, she got a letter of apology. The very black comedy works, the cartoon stuff is neither here nor there.

Whatever about any deep concern for the woes of strangers, Hrabal does seem to have had a particular morbid fixation on the trials of animals. I wouldn’t fault anyone for recording what he sees of their misery on some of the trains that pass through but the inclusion of hearsay of extra suffering is gratuitous and dilutes the effect. Anyhow, as the plot gets carried away, I underlined very little in the final third.

Hrabal reminds us that of all the definitions of an intellectual, it is the one by André Malraux that seems the most sensible. This is the same Malraux who told Bruce Chatwin that most of his intellectual compatriots were incapable of opening an umbrella. At any rate he defined the category as anyone who tries to live by the use of reason but, then again, experience relentlessly demonstrates the surrealism of life, i.e. how so often it resembles a bad or weird dream. Most of the writers I admire have an underlying, unwritten thread in common. I cannot believe this is really happening. It is a mix of horror and amusement that enables some detachment in the face of the fact that everything, as Mario Puzo pointed out, is personal. 

Hrabal had a hard life in which he survived many mundane, ‘un-intellectual’ jobs, including (spending the war on) the railways, selling insurance, becoming a travelling salesman, labouring in a steelworks, and getting badly hurt in an accident while a paper packer. He didn’t become a professional writer until he was nearly fifty but even that didn’t last long, as he was out on his ear in 1968. A Seventies partial rehabilitation by the regime didn’t work out too well as it was dissidents who burned his books, leading Hrabal to conclude he was condemned for speaking up and condemned for staying silent. Nevertheless, 1989 came eventually and his status by then was secure. He spent much of his latter years in the Golden Tiger pub and died in February 1997 after falling or jumping from a window on the fifth floor of a hospital in Prague. 

P.S. there are sloppy mistakes in this 1968 translation for which one doesn’t need a word of Czech in order to spot them.

Krleža … A Stoppage in Zagreb

Miroslav Krleža (1893-1981) may be the first writer I’ve found to stress, really stress, the idea that taste is a form of morality; that vulgarity and immorality are often the same thing.

Set in Zagreb, his 1938 novel Na rubu pameti (‘On the Edge of Reason’) is a fantasy about a legal pillar of society who, of a pleasant September evening, listens to a rich client bragging on and on about the time in 1918 he defended his wine cellar by shooting, in the back, four trespassing peasants.

Something finally snaps as the listener turns the stem of his wine glass. The unfulfilled and unnamed narrator, in an almost out-of-body experience, suddenly decides to

(a) stop playing the game;

(b) speak his mind on the sordid and even murderous crooks who are his peers;

(c) smack the face off some of the agenda-riddled pests who will stick an oar in.

Nevertheless, he is not quite suicidal. This first expression of dissent (“it was all a crime, a bloody thing, moral insanity”) does not go down well at all with his host, the one he already knows has form, on home ground.

As soon as I noticed a revolver glittering in his hand, I overturned the table, jumped over all the bowls, lamps and glassware, and disappeared into the night.

The scandal then becomes a matter for the courts. Here the narrator uses the opportunity to turn over more rocks. He ridicules a prosecutor by unveiling further early gems from the plaintiff’s real CV (“a common embezzler” and “a Sarajevo police informer”). He also exposes a biased judge as a failed, despised suitor to one of the defendant’s daughters.

The occasional poetic flights over the interior tend not to go on too long and the story and dialogue are usually tight but the novel pulls up with the narrator twiddling a radio knob after hearing unwelcome news of Jadviga (a tragic, Alma Schindler-like figure) from Vienna.

Jadviga and the narrator hook up when he moves out of his home to the hotel where she lives. This liaison lasts until he first gets locked up. In that time, they have a mob of respectable rubber necks following them around Zagreb cafes and bars like paparazzi. Long an expert in the receipt of anonymous letters, she tells him the ones he is getting are from his wife and her pals.

Jadviga is an outcast from respectability, like his cellmate Valent Polenta, a poor man who defended himself by winging a forester while poaching. Polenta is kind to him and in return is grateful to learn that an individual may be a human being despite being a man of learning.

By the end we know that the hero – expelled from Italy after smacking another malevolent bore, in the Sistine Chapel – will face many more court cases but it’s clear too that he’s never been short of money. Maybe that helps explain the touches of nineteenth-century melodrama, like the reminiscence of his lost wartime romance.

Loved up or not, Krleža’s own military CV in the Austro-Hungarian Empire reads more as bloody farce than romance. Having attended two officer cadet schools in Hungary, he kindly offered his services to the Kingdom of Serbia (twice) but was rejected by the Serbs as a possible spy. On his return to Croatia, his original army took him back but demoted him to a grunt for going missing, twice. When the Great War kicked off, they packed him off, like Švejk, to Galicia on the Eastern Front. Poor health limited his time in the trenches and he spent most of the war in hospitals and spas.

In the late Thirties he was expelled from the Communist Party for unorthodox views on a range of matters. Krleža himself seems to have rarely backed down from a political or artistic row. During the second war he remained in Zagreb. Though he turned down the jobs and honours offered by the fascist regime, his refusal to join the Partisans still left him in grave danger in 1945. Only his pre-war friendship with Tito saved him but he was fully rehabilitated once Yugoslavia left the Soviet embrace. The building where he lived is home to a well-known Zagreb pub called MK Krolo, in his honour.

PS

Hitting the Right Pitch