Briton in Spain

BEHIND THE SPANISH BARRICADES-- John Langdon-Davies--McBride ($2.75).

Historical crises usually bring on an avalanche of hasty interpretations, dim eyewitness accounts that last no longer than the event that gave rise to them. Less perishable than most works of its type, John Langdon-Davies' 275-page Behind the Spanish Barricades is a literary hybrid, partly a work of political journalism, intelligent and humane but offering no sensationally new information, partly a warm and colorful discussion of peaceful Spanish ways which the present tragedy makes poignant and distressing.

There is no question as to whose Spanish barricades Mr. Langdon-Davies is behind. In the course of his 1,000-mi. tour of provinces and towns in loyalist possessions he interviewed Government officials, militiamen, frightened middle-class intellectuals, anarchists, officers and police officials, emerging convinced that stories of Red atrocities have been wildly exaggerated, that the civil war was the result of fascist provocation, that no working-class revolution threatened the Spanish Republic before the attempted coup d'etat of General Franco on July 18. The author writes so much about the wretched reporting of Spanish politics and events that it sometimes is difficult to say whether he is covering the war or writing a critique of British journalism. He ends his book with an account of the siege of the Alcazar, which he witnessed.

If Langdon-Davies' political reporting presents a conventional Leftist picture, his casual digressions on Spanish temperament, Spanish intellectuals, anarchists, dancing, Barcelona slums, are fresh and vivid. Best is his account of a visit, before the revolution, to Barcelona's vice-ridden Fifth District. Although he had "read about everything in Havelock Ellis and Freud," when he encountered the spectacle of perversities for sale he found his imagination could not grasp the social reality. Opposed to this grim description of "the most tragic human cantonment in Europe," are his reminiscences of a great syndicalist convention he attended in Zaragoza before the war, where die-hard syndicalists passed a resolution that "if anyone, male or female, chanced to rouse the sexual feelings of another, it amounted to a gross and palpable interference with the freedom and happiness of that other, unless the guilty person was prepared to relieve the feelings he or she had produced." Since they did not believe in dictatorial control by the state, the syndicalists could only recommend as punishment that the guilty party be sent out of town long enough for all fires to be quenched.

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