Herbert R. Southworth

Abstract

On the day after Christmas in 1937, the Washington Post’s editorial page carried a curious vignette on the Spanish Civil War featuring a famous Spanish professor who happened to be entirely fictional. The 1,100-word “Post Impressionist” column, seemingly more appropriate for the New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town” than for the serious Post, opens in medias res: “She had come in without making any noise and when he first saw her she was at the side of the chair on which he was standing putting colored pins in the large relief map of Spain.”¹ The man on the chair is St. George Paunceforth, “the foremost American authority on Spanish literature, possibly the world’s greatest.” The woman is his former wife Irene, a socialite who accumulates marriages like a child collects stamps. Irene and her circle are concerned about George’s obsession with Spain. Although he has not stopped teaching his classes at Butler University, he spends every waking moment working for the Republic. “Do you know what they’re saying?” Irene asks him. “They say you’re trying to escape from life, to bury yourself in the Spanish war.” She reminds him that he is a literature professor, not a politician; and yet “you go around collecting funds for Spanish relief, introducing Congressmen at the Garden. And you once wrote 13 volumes on Los Amantes de Teruel.”

[T]he best way to love a country is to try to understand its history.

—Pierre Vilar, Foreword to Guernica! Guernica!