Biography
Barea was born in Badajoz, of humble origins.[2] His father died when he was four months old, so his mother, with four young children to support, worked as a laundress, washing clothes in the River Manzanares, while the family lived in a garret in the poor Lavapiés district of Madrid. Barea was semi-adopted by his aunt and uncle who were prosperous enough to send him to school. This resulted in his first experience of the class divisions that riddled Spanish society, when his own sister accused him of "acting the gentleman" while she worked as a servant. He left school aged 13 and got a job at a bank as an office boy and copyist, though did not become a fully paid employee for another year. He later quit after being fined for breaking a glass-plate desk cover.
Barea served his compulsory military service in Ceuta and Morocco. Reenlisting as a regular soldier he rose to the rank of sergeant in an Engineers regiment of the Spanish Army and saw action in the Rif War. He began writing and published some poems. He then worked in an office registering patents (he had originally wanted to be an engineer), and in 1924, he married for the first time. He was a member of the Socialist UGT (Unión General de Trabajadores) and helped found the Clerical Workers Union at the start of the Second Spanish Republic in 1931.
On the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in mid-1936 he organized a volunteer militia unit La Pluma (The Pen) of office workers fighting under the UGT. Later, thanks to his knowledge of English and French, he worked as a censor at the Foreign Ministry's Press Office where he came to know Ernest Hemingway and many other foreign journalists covering the conflict. John Dos Passos, in a 1938 article published in Esquire, referred to Barea as "underslept and underfed".[3] During the Siege of Madrid he joined the Radio Service broadcasting to Latin America, where he became known as An Unknown Voice of Madrid, every night telling stories about daily life in the besieged city. He also met the Austrian journalist Ilse Kulcsar (née Pollak)[4] (Ilsa Barea-Kulscar) whom he married in 1938.
As defeat for the Spanish Government loomed, this, allied to difficulties with the Communist party (he was not a member and therefore suspect), and a breakdown in his health, meant that he and his wife had to leave Spain. They went into exile to France in the middle of 1938, and then to England in 1939. From then until his death, Barea worked for the BBC's World Service Spanish section while contributing articles and reviews to various literary publications, as well as writing books. At that time, also, Ilsa Barrea was working for the BBC Monitoring Service, translated books into English, and lectured and broadcast in several languages.[5]
Barea spent the last ten years of his life living at Middle Lodge in Eaton Hastings, a house rented from Gavin Henderson, 2nd Baron Faringdon, of nearby Buscot Park.[6]
He died on 24 December 1957 in his wife Ilsa’s arms from a heart attack. Shortly after his death, Barea's ashes were scattered in his garden at Middle Lodge, and a memorial to Barea and his wife was erected behind her parents' grave (Valentin Pollak and Alice von Zieglmayer) in the churchyard annexe of All Saints Church, Faringdon, Oxfordshire.[7] Ilsa Barea returned to Vienna; in 1966 publishing Vienna: legend and reality and died there while working on her autobiography.[8]
Barea has three Spanish streets named in his honour, in Badajoz, Mérida and Novés; and a square – Plaza de Arturo Barea – in Madrid.[9]
He is a central figure in Amanda Vaill's non-fiction book Hotel Florida, published in 2014.[10]
