Dedication
Title Page || 1: Early Years: Distant Spain
This book is
dedicated to the memory of Burnett Bolloten (1909-1987)
My long friendship with Burnett
Bolloten began in an odd way. I knew his book about the Spanish Civil War, The Grand
Camouflage: The Communist Conspiracy in the Spanish Civil War, which had appeared
with, on the dust-jacket, a map of Spain painted red, but crossed out with black slashes
symbolizing its defeat by the church-backed forces of Franco. I dismissed it as
propaganda, and thought no more about it or him; I assumed he was living in his native
England. At Stanford, where I had founded the Institute of Hispanic American and
Luso-Brazilian Studies, I had an assistant who disappeared for a while each day. I asked
her if she had another job. She admitted she had. “With whom?” I asked. To my
amazement she replied “Burnett Bolloten.” “Where does he live?” I
asked, even more confused. “Down the highway.” she replied. Still bewildered, I
said I would like to meet him. She told him, and one day he appeared in my office. For a
while we stared at each other suspiciously, but then he told me his story. I later
recorded it on tape just before his death.
He was the restless son of a
Liverpool jeweler, but he had no desire to take over the business, so he began traveling
around the Mediterranean. He had just lined up a job with the Associated Press when, on
vacation in Barcelona, he was shocked by the outbreak of the Civil War. He phoned AP and
asked them if they wanted a correspondent in Barcelona. AP accepted, and thus began his
life devoted to the Spanish Civil War. The outbreak of the Civil War was as bloody in
Barcelona as in Madrid. Factory owners were shot or fled, as did my hosts, the Pujol
family. May 1937 was especially vicious. Officially, there were 400 killed and 1,000
wounded, but observers gave the figures as 900 dead and 2,500 wounded. Burnett’s
account of those days was published the year of his death (1987) by the Freedom Press of
London under the title The May Days: Barcelona, 1937. It was then that Communist
treachery first became evident.
Intellectually very curious, Burnett
had actually read Das Kapital of Marx, and, although never a Marxist, he was
sympathetic to Communist ideals. This led him to follow with extreme care the various
factions on the Republican side, and, when the Republic fell, many of its leaders migrated
to Mexico. Burnett followed them there in order to interview them and to collect
documentation. He came to the conclusion that the Communists had betrayed the Republic,
which did not endear him to them. His life was threatened. It was an exacting, difficult
life; his wife could not stand it, and they had a friendly divorce. He dedicated The
Grand Camouflage “To Gladys, whose unremitting labours and self-sacrifice made
this book possible.”
Burnett was married to Betty
Bolloten when I met him. They had come to California to allow him to write in peace. It
was still a life of sacrifice. He sold encyclopedias from door to door, and later real
estate, to have some income. I have never seen such dedication to scholarship, combined
with such intellectual integrity. At the same time, their home was most hospitable. They
entertained my wife and me, as well as other friends, with graceful hospitality.
Burnett’s account of the Civil
War, which grew from edition to edition, was scrupulous but not exciting, as were other
more journalistic accounts. He had difficulty in finding a publisher. His book was first
published in 1961 in London by Hollis and Carter under the aforementioned title The
Grand Camouflage: The Communist Conspiracy in the Spanish Civil War. The title and the
dust-jacket were the publisher’s idea, and Burnett was unhappy, since it damaged his
reputation for scholarly objectivity. Herbert Southworth led the attacks on the book,
first in El Mito de la cruzada de Franco (1963) and later in “Julián Gorkin,
Burnett Bolloten and the Spanish Civil War,” in The Republic Besieged, edited
by Paul Preston and Ann L. Mackenzie (1996). Burnett was properly obsessed with
this concern, and he even did not want the Hoover Institution Press to publish the book,
since it had the reputation of being hard-line anti-communist. To make matters worse,
Hollis and Carter, without consulting Burnett sold the Spanish translation rights to
Caralt of Barcelona, which published it in 1961 under the title El Gran engaño,
with a foreword by Franco’s propaganda minister, Manuel Fraga Iribarne. Worse still,
words were deliberately mistranslated, for example “the Republicans” was
translated as “the Reds.” Burnett sent a letter of protest to Fraga Iribarne,
who replied haughtily that he should consider himself lucky that his book had been
honored with a foreword by such an important official. Burnett almost went out of his
mind. Since I was about to go to Barcelona, he asked me to do what I could. I did, but I
was simply told that nothing could be done, since it involved the powerful Fraga Iribarne.
When I returned to Stanford, Burnett
was dejected. The situation became intolerable for him when Franco’s Ambassador to
Washington came to Stanford and I was asked to host a luncheon for him. I invited a dozen
colleagues, among them Burnett. They stood in a circle while I went around introducing
them to the Ambassador, who gave each one a protocol handshake. Burnett got one, then
suddenly the Ambassador’s face lit up, he rushed back to Burnett, embraced him and
said in a loud voice “You are the author of that splendid book! We always recommend
it when Americans ask us the truth about the Civil War!” I doubt that Burnett slept
that night.
We agreed that he must find a
publisher for an authorized Spanish translation. With a Spanish team from my institute, a
translation approved by Burnett was prepared. Since Spain was Franco land, Mexico, where
so many Spaniards had taken refuge, seemed the obvious place of publication. One day
Burnett appeared in my office with a radiant face. He said he had found a Mexican
publisher. “The Fondo de Cultura Económica?” I asked, since that prestigious
publisher would have been an excellent choice. “No,” said Burnett, ”Some
publisher called Jus.” I was dismayed, since Jus was known as a Catholic,
conservative publisher. Sure enough, the translation appeared in 1962 with a red and
yellow cover —the colors of old Spain, which Franco had revived, deleting the purple
stripe which symbolized the republic. In the corner was the dome of St. Peter’s. This
was especially inappropriate since Burnett was a secularized Jew, although he died in the
faith and a rabbi officiated at his funeral. The Spanish title read The Spanish
Revolution, but there was a subtitle The Left and the Struggle for Power.
We had to take action to save
Burnett’s sanity, so we imported several hundred copies from Mexico, and replaced the
cover and the title page with ones giving the publisher as Stanford University’s
Institute of Hispanic American and Luso-Brazilian Studies, of which I was director.
Moreover I wrote a special foreword stressing that Burnett was an objective scholar.
At last the sky was blue and the sun
was shining. My intervention in Barcelona bore fruit when in 1967 Caralt published a new,
good translation. In 1968 Frederick A. Praeger reissued the English original with a
foreword by the Oxford Regius Professor of Modern History, Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper,
listed in Who’s Who as Baron Dacre of Glanton. Burnett, who never went
to university (he went to a finishing school in Switzerland) could not have had a more
August blessing. In 1977, Ruedo Ibérico published a French translation entitled La
Révolution espagnole: la gauche et la lutte pour le pouvoir. European leftists were
still suspicious.
Meanwhile, Burnett was busy revising
and enlarging his work. The University of North Carolina Press, which had grown in
stature, published in 1979 the latest version entitled The Spanish Revolution: The Left
and the Struggle for Power during the Civil War. It was prefaced by Raymond Carr, the
distinguished British Hispanist at Oxford University where he served as Director of the
Latin American Centre. His publications include among many others the massive volume Spain,
1808-1939 (1966) in the series “Oxford History of Modern Europe,” and The
Spanish Civil War (1971), His works have been translated into Spanish and other
languages. He is a Fellow of the California Institute of International Studies, now
renamed the World Association of International Studies. He visited Burnett and me in
Stanford.
Barcelona is Spain’s main
publishing center, and, after the death of Franco, Grijalbo published there in 1980 a
translation of the 1979 volume with a foreword by the Hispanist Gabriel Jackson. The
final, expanded edition of Burnett’s book was published in 1991 by the University of
North Carolina Press under the title The Spanish Civil War: Revolution and
Counterrevolution . It had a preface by America’s leading specialist on modern
Spain, Stanley Payne (whose e-mail nickname is spayn!). A Spanish version was published in
1989 by Alianza of Madrid under the title La Guerra Civil Española: Revolución
y Contrarrevolución. It carried the old preface by Trevor Roper as well as the new
one by Stanley Payne. Unfortunately Burnett died in 1987, just after he had finished the
last chapter of the final version, which he dedicated “To Betty and Gregory”
(his son). He did not live to see the publication of the English or the Spanish versions.
In the course of his research, Burnett had assembled an enormous archive on the Spanish
Civil War. Part of it is now in the Hoover Institution Archives, part in Harvard
University Library.
This account of the English
originals and the Spanish translations gives only the basic information, without the
details of the various editions and the changes introduced as time went on. The book grew
like a coral reef. The history of the translations is equally confusing. In addition to
the Spanish translations, there was an Italian translation in 1966 and a Japanese one in
1991.Other translations presumably appeared, but I have been unable to trace them. A
revised French translation had a strange story. Gérard Lebovici, editor of a series
called Champ Libre, a great admirer of Burnett’s book, had a translation prepared,
even the index having been completed when he was mysteriously assassinated in 1984. Then
his publishing enterprise disappeared. His family showed no interest in continuing his
work and did not heed requests to produce the translation, which presumably still exists.
At my invitation, Burnett regularly
gave seminars on the Spanish Civil War at Bolivar House. Since we had no funds for this
purpose, he did it on an honorary basis—another example of his generosity. Among his
students was David Wingeate Pike, who collaborated with him for twenty-five years. David
went to the American College in Paris, which, thanks to his academic leadership, was
transformed into the American University of Paris. He has become a leading scholar on
moder0n Spain, with special reference to the Civil War.
In October 1996 WAIS held at
Stanford a conference on “War Crimes and War Criminals.” Its success was due in
large measure to the work of David as co-chairman. On October 12, a luncheon was held to
mark the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Stanford’s Institute of Hispanic
American and Luso Brazilian Studies and of its home, Bolivar House. I am the only living
survivor of the founding faculty. We honored those no longer with us, among them Burnett
Bolloten. Among the tributes were ones from his friends David Pike and Stanley Payne.
Burnett’s friends were deeply moved. He remains for us the embodiment of the old
ideal of a devoted, disinterested scholar.
Bolloten Bibliography
Bolloten´s study of the Civil War
developed through a series of editions, rewritings, and word changes, some of which were
peculiar to the translations. Here is the skeleton of the corpus:
The Grand Camouflage: The Spanish Civil War and
Revolution, 1936-1939 (London: Pall Mall Press, 1961.)
The Grand Camouflage: The Communist Conspiracy in
the Spanish Civil War. (New York: Praeger, 1961; London, Hollis & Carter, 1961).
El Gran Engaño. (Barcelona: Luis de Caralt,
1961, 1967)
La Revolución Española: las izquierdas y la lucha
por el poder. (Mexico: Editorial Jus, 1962; ; revised ed., Institute of
Hispanic American and Luso-Brazilian Studies, Stanford University, 1964.)
Il Grande Inganno: la cospirazione comunista nella
guerra civile spagnuola (Roma: Volpe, c1966).
El Gran Engaño. (Barcelona: L. de Caralt, 1967;
revised ed., 1975).
The Grand Camouflage: The Spanish Civil War and
Revolution, 1936-39. (New York: Praeger 1968; London: Pall Mall Press, 1968).
La Revolution Espagnole: la gauche et la lutte pour
la pouvoir (Paris: Ruedo Ibérico, c1977).
The Spanish Revolution: The Left and The Struggle
for Power During the Civil War (University of North Carolina, 1979.)
La Revolución Española. Sus orígenes, la
izquierda y la lucha por el poder durante la guerra civil, 1936-1939. (Barcelona:
Ediciones Grijalbo, 1980.)
The May Days. Barcelona, 1937 (London: Freedom
Press, 1987.)
La Guerra Civil Española: Revolución y
contrar-revolución (Madrid: Alianza, c1989.)
The Spanish Civil War: Revolution and
Counterrevolution (University of North Carolina,1991; New York, London: Harvester
Wheatsheaf, 1991)
Supein Kakumei Zen Rekishi (Tokyo: Shobunsha,
1991.)
