---

One Poet's War

Date: July 25, 1993, Sunday, Late Edition - Final
Byline: By Verlyn Klinkenborg;
Lead:

A MOMENT OF WAR A Memoir of the Spanish Civil War. By Laurie Lee. Illustrated. 178 pp. New York: The New Press.
Text:

FOR some artists and writers -- I think of Goya or Michael Herr -- war is a kind of fugue state, from which they return with a lingering vision in which you feel an expressive haste, a hysteria under flushed skin. These are the artists and writers for whom war retains a kind of esthetic sublimity, immoral to be sure and always undercut by the blatant ironies of combat, but with the mix of fear and beauty that Wordsworth could find in a mountain landscape unmolested by shellfire or that Byron could find in incest. The emotion with which such works are charged is a commentary on war and a gauge of authenticity. But there is another school of artists and writers for whom war obviates all commentary, for whom war, austerely depicted, is itself a commentary on human civilization. That is the school to which the English poet and mem oirist Laurie Lee belongs.

Mr. Lee's new book, "A Moment of War: A Memoir of the Spanish Civil War," is a bleak monument to a conflict that is remembered now mainly as an augury of World War II. But "A Moment of War" is also a reminder that irony, so debased in the ordinary way of speech, is something more than odd coincidence or amusing contradiction. Irony is the grim set of the mouth on a frozen corpse, a violent understatement.

Before crossing the Pyrenees into Spain in December 1937 at the age of 23, Laurie Lee had already walked to London from the Cotswold village in which he was raised. He had also walked across Spain on an earlier visit, supporting himself by playing violin in the streets. The life of Mr. Lee's native village and his foot travels are the subjects of his two earlier memoirs, "Cider With Rosie" (1959) and "As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning" (1969), to which "A Moment of War" is the sequel. These are extraordinary books. Mr. Lee's prose is utterly distinctive, not least of all because one tends to read it as if it were somehow retroactive, a product not of the present age but of the late 1930's. It has Orwell's plainness without his didacticism. It can be called poetic, because its effects depend so much on Mr. Lee's use of metaphor, without ever falling into the kind of indulgence, the adjectival bog, you find in the memoirs of Patrick Leigh Fermor, who also happened to be walking across Europe about the same time as Mr. Lee. In Mr. Lee's prose, you can hear the maturity of the man and the writer, but across his pages there walks a youth whose thoughts are largely silent to the reader, whose footsteps echo in a landscape that in the mind of that independent young man, no one had ever seen before.

It is hardly demeaning to say that when he left home at 19, Mr. Lee was an ignorant boy, a sophisticate only in the customs of rural living. But his ignorance made him adaptable, and it cushioned his sensitivity. When he returned to Spain in 1937 to join the Loyalists (his earlier trip had ended with his being plucked from the southern coast by a British destroyer at the outbreak of the civil war), Mr. Lee was arrested as a spy and imprisoned for two weeks in what was little more than a grave with an iron lid. Still, he writes, "my situation didn't disturb me too much . . . I was at that flush of youth which never doubts self-survival, that idiot belief in luck and a uniquely charmed life, without which illusion few wars would be possible."

Certainly, illusion was the substance on which the Spanish Civil War fed. After being released from the grave (he was twice again imprisoned before leaving Spain), Mr. Lee found himself among a ragged company of volunteers -- Russians, Frenchmen, Czechs, Americans -- who drilled with wooden sticks and assaulted simulated machine guns (men beating rhythmically on oil drums). For anti-tank practice they hurled bottles at a pram. All this while Hitler was arming Franco.

The effect of military discipline is to suppress individuality, but in the preposterously unmilitary International Brigade, the collection of volunteers who flooded into Spain to fight in the Republican cause, individuality was never suppressed. "They were (as I was) part of the skimmed-milk of the middle-30's. You could pick out the British by their nervous jerking heads, native air of suspicion, and constant stream of self-effacing jokes. These, again, could be divided up into the ex-convicts, the alcoholics, the wizened miners, dockers, noisy politicos and dreamy undergraduates busy scribbling manifestos and notes to their boyfriends."

AND in accounts of other wars -- World War I, especially -- you sense that behind the front lines there is an order that frays completely only where the trenches end and the barbed wire begins. You can hear the reflection of that order in, for instance, the rhythms of Sir Osbert Sitwell's memory of Ypres, in his memoir "Laughter in the Next Room": "the broken and deserted city, the very capital of no man's land, extended its smashed streets and avenues of trees, black, angular shapes, sharp and ruthless, such as the contemporary gangs of Futurists would have wished to create had they been able to kidnap the God of Nature."

But in "A Moment of War," you sense that there was no order anywhere in Spain and that a different kind of narrative is required, a story told in "gritty, throwaway lines -- quietly savage, but with no dramatics." In paragraph after paragraph, scene after scene of this book, the reader comes upon terse non sequiturs, because the only pattern in Mr. Lee's experience of the Spanish Civil War was its lack of pattern. Even the climactic moment, the one scene of battle, expires in derangement: "I headed for the old barn where I'd spent my first night. I lay in a state of sick paralysis. I had killed a man, and remembered his shocked, angry eyes . . . I began to have hallucinations and breaks in the brain . . . Was this then what I'd come for, and all my journey had meant -- to smudge out the life of an unknown young man in a blur of panic which in no way could affect victory or defeat?"

Other men, oppressed by what they learn of themselves in war, have also asked this question. Perhaps the greatest surprise in reading "A Moment of War," published so late in this brutal century, is that Laurie Lee can still make us feel that question's implicit shame, first felt by him nearly 60 years ago in a barn outside the ruined city of Teruel. SUCCESS AND ITS DISCONTENTS

For Laurie Lee, the success of his early memoir, "Cider With Rosie," published in 1959, was both a blessing and a curse.

The money he earned from the book allowed him to fulfill a long-held dream: to buy a home in the English countryside where he grew up. He lives there now, in Gloucestershire, with his wife and daughter.

"Unfortunately it made me rather lazy," Mr. Lee, now 79 years old, said in a telephone interview from that home, where he is struggling with an inner-ear infection.

"It isn't easy to write in the country," he said. "Either it's a nice day and you lie in the long grass, or people knock on your door and want you to go to the pub for a chat. And that's that day gone."

Mr. Lee, who has managed nonetheless to publish seven books of prose, three of poetry and a drama, also likes to rewrite. "I hope to find patterns of words that can transmit sensations in the simplest and most direct way, without using highfalutin language," he said.

While that process did not vary with this new volume, he did feel a special urgency: he wanted to finish the book before his failing eyesight made it impossible for him to write it unassisted.

Mr. Lee was a carefree young traveler in Spain when the war began. He left the country when he was told -- incorrectly -- that the war was over and Franco had won. When he learned this was untrue, and the war had actually just begun, he returned by foot over the Pyrenees, as he had promised his friends, and himself, he would.

The war is "a shadow and a scar," he said. "But I think if I hadn't gone, it would have been a deeper scar of a different kind." JON ELSEN