El Fantastico

SIROCCO -- Ralph Random House ($2.50).

Ten years ago Ralph Bates was just another energetic, down-and-out, class-conscious workingman, while Ernest Hemingway was an energetic, up-and-coming, self-conscious writing man. Today, Bates's Spanish civil war stories are better than Hemingway's. Bates lived revolution; when it came, he could almost write it with his eyes shut.

Long before the Spanish civil war, in 1923, Bates went from England to Spain, settled among fishermen in a coastal village. The people, whom he loved, called him El Fantastico because of his incredible energy: he slept only four hours a night, and so that his sleep might be deep, went for a long swim or wrestled in the afternoon. He organized the fishermen into unions.

Later, after a return to England, he lived in the Pyrenees. There he worked off excess energy by scaling cliffs, writing novels (The Olive Field, Rainbow Fish) and left-wing pamphlets, tilling steep fields with farmers. When the war began, Bates organized the mountaineers into scouting parties. When volunteers from other countries joined the Loyalists, he helped organize the International Brigade.

The 13 stories in Sirocco follow the pattern of those experiences. With superb characterizations, plenty of dash, touches of sympathy, they add up to something more than Hemingway's bloodlettings. Bates writes as movingly about a Fascist woman doctor as about a Loyalist scout, most movingly about humble, non-partisan farmers and fishermen ten years before the war.

Most skillful is his use of symbols: in a story about the birth of a boy, fishermen launch a boat on the night sea; in a story set in conquered territory, a farmer carefully yokes his oxen; when the sirocco blows, a well-organized phalanx of shore-folk wade into the heavy sea to save men who are washed overboard in landing their boats.

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