Last night I finished The Olive Field. It’s true, as Valentine Cunningham states in his 1986 introduction to the book (which was originally published in 1936), that “Bates…got inside of the character of Spanishness,” and took “the measure of the curiosities of Spanish political life and style,” that “he knew Spanish life as only a few British writers…have done.”
Upon opening this book I noted immediately Bates’ thorough knowledge of those things that would occupy his rural characters’ thought and feeling, and his ability to present all of these largely technical agricultural details naturally and fluently, with no intrusion whatsoever on the part of the narrator (Cunningham refers to this achievement as “a kind of seedsman’s or grower’s catalogue of technical terminology…that is as engrossing as it is informative”).
According to Cunningham, “Bates fiction plunges its reader into the barbaric oddness, the exotic difference of Spain,” which includes its “extreme weather.” He knows no other novel that “describes parching heat better than The Olive Field.”
And I agree as well that Bates seems far more familiar and knowledgeable when it comes to the political differences that fragmented Spanish society during the chaotic years that preceded the outbreak of the civil war. Whereas Orwell (who went to Spain for the first time to fight in 1936, while Bates had been living there continuously since 1923) admits to his ignorance of “the kaleidoscope of political parties and trade unions, with their tiresome names—P.S.U.C., P.O.U.M., F.A.I, C.N.T, U.G.T, J.C.I, J.S.U., A.I.T—[which] merely exasperated”[1] him, Cunningham attributes to Bates’ novels (Lean Men as well as The Olive Field) a “patient” illustration of just “how much the great gulf dividing the Spanish Anarchists (the F.A.I) and their allies in the syndicalist trade union (the C.N.T.) from the Spanish Communist Party…interfered with simple revolutionary pastoralism, and generated unhealable rifts in Spanish agricultural (and urban) daily life.”
Indeed, less than two years after Bates’ documentary novel concludes (with the right-wing government’s quashing of the Asturian miners’ strike of 1934) these irreconcilable rifts would severely compromise and eventually undermine the Second Republic’s ability to fend off and defeat the military uprising that began on the 18th of July, 1936, when Franco—among others—instigated the coup d’etat that resulted in almost three years of total and fratricidal war.
And I agree, too, that “reality in The Olive Field is intensely symbolic.” But it is precisely this aspect of the novel which presents certain problems for a modern reader intimately familiar with Spain and Spanish life. “This intensifying, even overdetermination, of meaning, the persistent effort of the writing to perceive, arrest and squeeze out significance,” might “register with great power Bates’s sense of the historical importance of Spain’s Thirties’ crises.” But at the same time it converts the characters, individual as they might be, into stick men and women, lacking real psychological depth and distinction from one another.
By the time we get to the end of the story, where the failure of the Revolución de Asturias de 1934 provides a climactic funeral pyre for both Anarchist and Communist dreams and lives, we have been so often frustrated by Bates’ unwillingness to plumb the psychology of his characters beyond the stereotypical levels that are common currency outside of the country that they don’t mean much to us, and we don’t really care who dies, and who survives.
This, in my opinion, is the only shortcoming in an otherwise complete and remarkable novel. I can’t think of any other novel I’ve read that was written by someone who wasn’t Spanish and demonstrates so much accurate and almost rare knowledge of the nature and reality of Spanish life and its people. Of course the life presented in this novel is a life that, as far as many of its details are concerned, has little to do with the life we lead here today. The overwhelming power of the Church and its control of education, for example, the forced respect for its ceremonies, rituals and superstitions, is a relic of the past now, even though this isn’t quite a lay society (the Catholic Church in Spain is supported in part by government funds, i.e., tax Euros[2]).
But literary treatments of Spain—even by writers as worldly and accomplished and familiar with the country as Hemingway or Somerset Maugham—often flounder precisely in terms of this sort of accuracy, and therefore remain clichéd. Bates knew the land and its people like no other non-Spanish writer I’ve come across, but for some reason (it might have been ideological: he was an envoy of the Comintern, sent to Spain to stir up revolutionary fervor among Catalan dockers and fishermen) he felt compelled to sacrifice the complete individuality of his characters and their emotional autonomy for their representative capacities. As Cunningham points out, writers in the Thirties were “obsessed by utopia,” and this might explain Bates’ shortcoming.
Seventy-five years after the ‘facts’ portrayed in this excellent work of fiction we are all relatively jaded, and no longer believe that there is such a thing as utopia. What’s more, we are better equipped emotionally to accept and deal with this absence and we need in place of idealistic abstractions realistic men and women we can actually identify with and relate to, instead of two-dimensional puppets manipulated by an ideologue, no matter how noble his cause.