Man v. Windmills

ABEL SANCHEZ & OTHER STORIES (216 pp.) -- Miguel de Unamuno -- Henry Regnery ($1.25).

One of the doughtiest soldiers of the modern world of ideological civil war is too obscurely defined in the U.S. ken. He is--or was--Don Miguel de Unamuno, twice rector of and twice expelled from the University of Salamanca,* who brought to recent letters a Spanish taste for macabre conundrums about death: "One day we shall all die, even the dead."

Basque-born Unamuno had a Spanish flair for paradox--he insisted that the fictional Don Quixote was a greater and a realer man than Don Quixote's creator, Cervantes. This kind of jugglery between the balloons of fiction and the cannonballs of fact made Unamuno an enigmatic figure--and in Catholic, reactionary Spain, a suspect and controversial one. In 1891, when he was 27, he became professor of Greek at Salamanca, and was appointed rector ten years later. He stoutly rejected any obligation to impose coherence on his thought and backed up his stand by the consistent inconsistency of his life. He translated Marxist books, tilted at the windmills of Spanish society, and at the same time, in his books engaged in what was essentially theological speculation.

Critics sometimes point to his Tragic Sense of Life as one of the works that inspired the existentialist movement in Paris after World War II. Influenced by the moral austerity of Ibsen and the mystical ruminations of Danish Theologian-Existentialist Soeren Kierkegaard, the book argued the toss between faith and reason in a way that could not fail to cause offense to the Spanish hierarchy. In Unamuno's picture of man, man's worst friend was his dogma. He argued: flesh-and-blood man must assert his identity in the face of death. This seemed to leave God out of the picture, so in 1914, with an assist from a touchy government, he was forced out of his rectorship.

Self-Exiled. Unamuno continued to teach at the university, and politically he worked for the Republicans against the monarchy, but when Primo de Rivera's dictatorship took over in 1923, he attacked the new militarists, and the dictator forced him into exile in the Canary Islands. Although amnesty was granted a few months later, he exiled himself to Paris. By this time, his was the greatest literary name in the Hispanic world, and after Primo de Rivera's death, he returned to Salamanca with national acclaim. But Don Miguel was really a Don Quixote, and his Quixote's genius for glory and self-destruction led him to gibe constantly at the liberal republic, to salute the Francoist rebels in 1936, and, characteristically, to live just long enough to regret it. "He alone is truly wise who is conscious of his madness," he said in a lecture at Oxford. "I am conscious of my madness; therefore I am truly wise." Thus he lived and performed, an honored enigma. At one time, his work and his person seemed to have the embroidered smile of a saint on a religious banner; at another, the proud sneer of a Spanish beggar.

Unamuno's stories, like his life, are oddly wonderful. For the first time in a readily obtainable U.S. printing, three of his puzzling parables have been translated for the U.S. public by young (36) ex-Chicago Critic Anthony Kerrigan (now living in Majorca), whose introduction is a model of what such things should be. The title story is the oldest in the Judaeo-Christian record--that of Cain and Abel.

Unamuno weaves the apparently simple theme, the crime of Cain (Joaquin), into a lifelong story that reaches beyond life. The antagonists for the love of a bitchy girl are Abel Sanchez, a free, talented and beloved artist to whom everything comes easily, and Joaquin, a doctor, who, for all his virtues, his intensity, his willingness to struggle, cannot beat out Abel for the girl's affections or life's rewards. Unamuno places guilt as deftly as a picador against whose fearful horse's flank the blundering bull of social judgment charges. Abel, the murdered man, admires his murderer "just as Milton admired Satan," and Slayer Joaquin's doom is to know his own fate: "The tragic Cain, the roving husbandman, the first to found cities, the father of industry, envy and community life!"

In Unamuno's story it is Painter Abel's masterpiece to depict the face of Cain, and Doctor Cain's fate to envy and destroy Abel. One of Unamuno's points, made with the subtlety befitting the rector of a university once famed for its theology, seems to be that Abel--bountifully rewarded by God with the world's gifts, was responsible for Cain's envy and thus his own death. Yet the story's outcome is simply Christian--and universal. As he lies dying, Cain says: "An old man is a child who knows he will die ... enough ... I could have loved you, I should have loved you, it would have been my salvation, but I did not."

Biographical Tale. There are only three stories in this collection. The second, The Madness of Doctor Montarco, is a simpler and perhaps more autobiographical tale. It records the difficulties of a devoted doctor whose patients desert him, and by community pressure drive him mad. Dr. Montarco's "crime"--like that of Unamuno himself--was that he liked to publish somewhat fantastic tales. "Poor Montarco," says one of his friends. "Poor Spain," corrects another.

The last story, Saint Emmanuel the Good, Martyr, once caused embarrassment to ceremonies set in motion at Salamanca in 1953 to celebrate the fame of the old rector who had died 17 years before. The story: Emmanuel, a parish priest, seemed fit for sanctification, yet he had not the faith he preached to others. Although Unamuno had died with a crucifix on his chest, imploring God to take him in, the story Saint Emmanuel had caused scandal, and Unamuno's name was forbidden to be mentioned, and the ceremonies planned in his honor at Salamanca were canceled.

In his stories Unamuno represents a tragic irony in Spanish life and letters; his words are a disquieting passage in the old Spanish debate between life and death. He is one of those who broke his lance on the side of the foolish knight who tilted at the windmills of capricious fate.

* Among its notable students: Hernan Cortes, conqueror of, and New York's ex-Mayor William O'Dwyer, present resident of, Mexico.

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