Mary Low; Co-author of 'Red Spanish Notebook' - an eyewitness account of Barcelona at the start of the civil war
Hyfler/Rosner
The Independent
30 January 2007
Jim Jump
Mary Stanley Low, political activist, poet, linguist and
classics teacher: born London 14 May 1912; married 1937 Juan
Breá (died 1941), 1944 Armando Machado (died 1981; three
daughters); died Miami 9 January 2007.
Mary Low was a poet, linguist and classics teacher who, as a
24-year-old Trotskyist, vividly described the revolutionary
fever that gripped Barcelona in the months following the
military uprising against the Spanish Republic in July 1936.
The era ended in May 1937 when the Republican authorities
suppressed the city's anarchist and dissident Communist
movements.
Low's Red Spanish Notebook: the first six months of
revolution and the civil war (1937) was jointly written with
her Cuban husband, the Surrealist poet Juan Breá, with a
foreword by the Marxist historian and critic C.L.R. James.
Her contribution consisted of 11 snapshots of mostly
everyday life in those extraordinary times - when, as she
reported, street barrel-organs played the "Internationale",
shoeshine boys carried an anarchist union card, waiters
refused tips and notices were hung in brothels urging the
clientele: "You are requested to treat the women as
comrades - The Committee (by order)".
George Orwell praised the book in a review for Time and Tide
on 9 October 1937: "For several months large blocks of
people believed that all men are equal and were able to act
on their belief. The result was a feeling of liberation and
hope that is difficult to conceive in our money-tainted
atmosphere. It is here that Red Spanish Notebook is valuable
. . . it shows you what human beings are like when they are
trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the
capitalist machine."
This was the scene that Low found in Barcelona's central
thoroughfare of Las Ramblas:
"Housefronts were alive with waving flags in a long avenue
of dazzling red. Splashes of black or white cut through the
colour from place to place. The air was filled with an
intense din of loudspeakers and people were gathered in
groups here and there under the trees, their faces raised
towards the round discs from which the words were coming."
She brought a perceptive outsider's - and Anglo-Saxon - eye
to convey the quirks of life in "red" Barcelona, avoiding
the heavy-handed heroics of some of her contemporaries. She
notes, for example, the bureaucratic culture of the
politicians and functionaries of the Catalan government in
contrast to the egalitarian mood on the street. She visits
the deserted suburb of San Gervasio, its fountains still
playing in the gardens of the locked villas where the city's
rich families once lived.
There is no pomposity or romanticisation in her account of
the burial of the anarchist leader Buenaventura Durruti,
killed in November 1936 leading his militia in the defence
of Madrid. His funeral, attended by tens of thousands of
supporters, was delayed because alterations had to be made
after it was discovered that the tomb for his coffin was too
small, as was the pane of glass for viewing his embalmed
corpse.
Newly arrived in the Catalan capital, she was horrified to
find that the siesta was still being practised. "Do you mean
to say that you shut up everything and go to sleep from one
till four during the revolution and civil war?" she and Breá
asked one inhabitant incredulously, only to note: "He stared
at us from large languid eyes as if the sun had struck us."
Equally dispiriting for her was the continuing enthusiasm of
the locals for the lottery - "the eternal lottery, like a
veil of illusion still preserved for Catalan eyes".
Born in London in 1912 to Australian parents - her father
was a mining engineer and her mother a former actress - Low
was educated in France and Switzerland. She mixed in circles
frequented by left-wing political activists and avant-garde
artists in Paris, where she met Breá in 1933. Among their
friends were André Breton, Paul Eluard, René Magritte and
Yves Tanguy. They travelled around Europe and to Cuba,
eventually making their way to Barcelona in August 1936,
where General Francisco Franco's revolt had been crushed by
workers' militias and elements of the armed services loyal
to the Republic.
Like Orwell, Low and Breá joined the quasi-Trotskyist POUM
(Workers' Party of Marxist Unity). Low worked on the
English-language broadcasts for the party's radio station
and helped finance, co-edit and translate its fortnightly
English newsletter, The Spanish Revolution. She was also the
POUM's representative in the press office of the Catalan
government. But by the end of December - shortly after
Orwell's arrival in the city - she and Breá fled to France
amid rising tensions between parties on the left and with
Breá saying that he feared for his life after he had nearly
been run over by a car on leaving a POUM meeting earlier in
the month.
Low and Breá were married in London in September 1937,
shortly before the publication of Red Spanish Notebook, for
which Low translated Breá's seven chapters from Spanish into
English. Following interludes in Cuba and Paris, from early
1938 the couple lived in Prague, where they had several
Surrealist friends, until July 1939 when they were forced to
leave in the wake of the Nazi invasion.
Low's poetry first appeared in a joint compilation with
Breá, La Saison des flûtes, published in Paris in 1939.
Again displaying her skills as a linguist, the poems were
written in French and, in "La Chauve-souris visite
Marseille" ("The Bat Visits Marseilles"), contain the
apparently self-referential lines:
Type standard de l'aventurière internationale
cheveux roux
regard fatale, longue
robe blanche, accent onomatopé
aux surprenantes ambiguïtés harmoniques.
In 1940, Low and Breá boarded a transatlantic liner in
Liverpool and made their way to Cuba, where she would remain
for the next 25 years. Breá, however, was already ill and
died just over a year later. In 1943 in Havana Low published
a selection of essays, La verdad contemporánea, on political
and cultural themes which featured a foreword by the French
poet Benjamin Péret, whom she had known in Paris and
Barcelona. The essays were edited versions of talks which
she and her late husband had given at the city's Institute
of Marxist Culture in 1936 under titles such as "The
Economic Roots of Surrealism" and "Women and Love from the
Perspective of Private Property".
In 1944 Low married Armando Machado, a Trotskyist Cuban
trade-union leader, with whom she would have three
daughters. At the same time she acquired Cuban citizenship,
keeping her dual British-Cuban nationality for the rest of
her life.
More poetry collections followed: Alquimia del recuerdo
("Alchemy of Memory") in 1946, illustrated by the Cuban-born
Surrealist Wilfredo Lam, and Tres voces - Three Voices -
Trois voix in Spanish, English and French in 1957, for which
the Cuban artist José Mijares provided illustrations. In
1948 she also translated El rey y la reina, as The King and
the Queen, by the exiled Spanish novelist Ramón Sender.
Low and Machado welcomed the 1959 Cuban revolution. She
taught English and Latin at the University of Havana and
both of them became leading members of the re-formed
Trotskyist POR (Revolutionary Workers' Party). However, the
party soon fell out of favour with the new regime. Indeed
Machado was on one occasion arrested and only freed
following the personal intervention of Che Guevara. Low
moved to Sydney in 1965 and in 1967 she and Machado settled
in Miami. She taught Latin and classical history at some of
Florida's élite private schools, having been barred from any
public-sector teaching posts on account of her background in
left-wing politics. She continued her writing and poetry,
which were published in In Caesar's Shadow (1975), Alive In
Spite Of - El triunfo de la vida (1981), A Voice in Three
Mirrors (1984) and Where the Wolf Sings (1994).
She retired from teaching in 2000 and, until
wheelchair-bound in her final year, continued to travel,
regularly visiting and making new friends in Europe, with
whom she enjoyed telling anecdotes from her eventful life.
She also retained an interest in the politics of the Spanish
Civil War and in 1999 was a signatory of a manifesto drafted
by a group of historians and political activists from Spain
and other countries which complained that the war was now
seen largely as a struggle between Fascists and
anti-Fascists and not as a war between classes.