Behind the Lace Mantilla

THE BROKEN ROOT (308 pp.)--Arturo Barea--Harcourf, Brace ($3.50).

One of the finest autobiographies of the '40s was Spaniard Arturo Barea's The Forging of a Rebel (TIME, Dec. 30, 1946).

Better than any book before or after, it created a believable social backdrop for the Spanish civil war, described the barbarous excesses of both sides with uncommon realism and candor.

Barea, a businessman and a Loyalist, got out of Spain in 1938. He now lives and writes in England, where, since 1940 and under the name of Juan de Catilla, he has been BBC's Latin American commentator. In The Broken Root, his first novel, a man very much like Arturo Barea goes back to Spain for a visit after a ten-year absence in England.

Refugee's Question. Hero Antolin was never a revolutionary. He had worked in a bank, aiming for a decent and simple life. Then he had fought for the Loyalists. Afterward, when he fled to England, Antolin left a wife and three children. The best he could do in London was to become a waiter, send occasional small amounts to his family and learn to be at ease in a new country. He admired English life and especially English regard for individual liberty. He became a British subject, found himself an English girl. But like many a refugee, he thought frequently of the sights & sounds of home. Antolin at 50 was an honest and troubled man. His visit to Madrid, under the Franco amnesty, was to help him decide once for all if he could roll back ten years, give up England and return to Spain and his family.

Antolin finds Madrid a city swamped in extremes of poverty and black-market corruption, ruled by ubiquitous police, in & out of uniform. His own family drives him to alternating spells of despair and disgust. Senora Luisa, his wife, has become a stranger, ugly, shrewish, and a convert to the rage for spiritualism in which many of the poor seek a solace they cannot find in the church. Juan, the younger son, is an underpaid factory worker and a Communist. Daughter Amelia, frightened, hypocritical and ill, wants only enough money to buy her way into a convent and escape from the terrors of life. Only Pedro, the elder son, has learned to cope with life in Spain. A pimp, a Falangist and a black-marketeer, he keeps the family alive even as they insult him for his crimes and venalities.

Refugee's Answer. Before Antolin's visit is over, Juan has been killed by Falangists, Senora Luisa is on the verge of insanity, and Pedro deeper than ever in criminality. Overwhelmed by what he has seen in so short a time, Antolin buys Amelia into her convent and prepares to return to England. Perplexed and saddened, he is sure of one thing: he cannot live in Spain.

Arturo Barea is not continuing his own story this time; he has never returned to Spain. He collected material for his novel from others who did. Perhaps for this reason, The Broken Root is more effective as a report than as a novel. Like many another intellectual turned novelist, Author Barea becomes so intent on making his point that he pushes his people around until coincidence swamps art and life together. But he does make his point, and a grim one it is.

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