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JEAN WATTS AND THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR: WRITING, POLITICS, AND CONTEXT

Emily Christina Murphy

Jean Watts and the Spanish Civil War: Writing, Politics, and Contexts by Emily Christina Murphy is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

CC BY-NC 4.0 2016.

This collection is published with the Canada and the Spanish Civil War project (spanishcivilwar.ca).

Peer Review: Dr. Emily Robins Sharpe and Dr. Bart Vautour

Copy-Editing and Project Management: Kaarina Mikalson

Cover Design: Emily Christina Murphy

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Case Study One: Jean Watts and the Canadian Press in the Spanish Civil War

The Canadian Leftist Press

Canadians as Foreign Correspondents

Conclusion

Case Study Two: Jean Watts, Ted Allan, and the Daily Clarion in Spain

Watts and Allan: Two Candidates

Getting to Spain

Journalists' Mobility in Spain

Conclusion

Case Study Three: Jean Watts and the Daily Clarion

Watts as "Public Relations Person"

Watts as Anti-Fascist

An Asset to the Paper

Conclusion

Case Study Four: Jean Watts and Women's Spanish Civil War Journalism

Watts's and Gellhorn's Journalism: A Means of Access to Politics

Writerly Self-Fashioning

Watts's and Gellhorn's Style

Conclusion

Conclusion

Works Cited

Foreword

This collection of case studies is the result of my time as a doctoral fellow with Canada and the Spanish Civil War (CSCW), an online archival recovery project. Jean Watts is their subject. She was a Canadian theatre artist, journalist, and activist in the early twentieth-century, and her cultural impact has been vastly under studied. The work represented here is only a small fraction of the broader research and recovery that the project has achieved. All of Watts’s work that I refer to is digitized and featured at http://www.spanishcivilwar.ca, in addition to an impressive body of digitized materials on Canada’s involvement in the Spanish Civil War, and other case studies produced by students and researchers across Canada. Broader still, Dr. Emily Robins Sharpe and Dr. Bart Vautour have envisioned an ambitious and systemic excavation of this portion of Canadian history, one that has resulted in critical editions of out-of-print literary texts and groundbreaking collections of Canadian literature in addition to the CSCW website. They have built student mentoring into their research, and I cannot begin to express my gratitude for their patience and support.

As the CSCW website introduction notes, “[t]he Spanish Civil War was a crucial moment in developing Canada’s political identity on the world stage” (spanishcivilwar.ca, “Introduction”). Estimates of Canadian military participation in the war sit at approximately 1600 combatants—a considerable chunk of the estimated 30,000 total combatants and 10,000 non-combatants with the International Brigades. Participating in a military role in the war was made illegal by the Non-Intervention Agreement. The major political powers in Europe and North America, still reeling from the First World War, refused to provide material support and prohibited volunteer troops from going to Spain under pain of losing their passports. This decision on the part of major powers was tantamount to a betrayal of the new, legally and democratically elected Spanish government. While Britain, France, the USA, and the Dominion of Canada adhered to the pact, fascist countries Germany and Italy (and to a certain extent, Communist Russia) did not. Germany and Italy would provide sophisticated military assistance and resources to Generalissimo Franco, and some have argued that Spain thus became a testing ground for Adolf Hitler’s more vicious military tactics in the Second World War. Many of the Canadians who volunteered were new immigrants, who had only freshly acquired the passport that they risked by volunteering. The scale on which anti-fascist men and women risked themselves and their political protections is difficult to comprehend.

Military participation in the Spanish Civil War was illegal. As a result, the history of that participation is particularly difficult to study. Many of the most compelling historical accounts of the Spanish Civil War have relied on oral histories and diaries; John Gerassi, Michael Petrou, Jim Fyrth, and Sally Alexander are some examples of historians whose books feature first-hand recollections of the conflict. Memoirs on the war proliferate, and it has become a central event in the formation of a Canadian literary canon. My research on Jean Watts fits into this context: I am interested in her writing. Her eye-witness journalism of matters both military and human interest is a kindred genre to the oral history, the memoir, and the semi-autobiographical fictions on the conflict that emerge frequently in twentieth-century Canadian writing. Watts would participate both as a journalist—a legal mode of participation—and as a driver with the International Brigades—an illegal one. Her story straddles multiple roles and perspectives on an already complex war.

Ted Bishop, a Canadian academic and motorcycle enthusiast, coined the term “archival jolt” (33). It is the shock of an object placed in front of you that both contains and is history. It is the moment of discovery after weeks or months of dead ends. In my research on Watts, I, too, have felt that jolt. I have sat in the archives listening to an interview on a staticky cassette tape, straining to hear her voice: she is frank and matter-of-fact; she exaggerates little, if at all; she is not afraid to contradict her interviewer or attempt to steer the conversation elsewhere. Outside of the archive, I have chanced on her image flipping through out-of-print books. I have stumbled upon her in memoirs where I did not expect to find her. And I have walked up Spadina Avenue in Toronto, imagining her as poet Dorothy Livesay describes her—in a green suit, walking a poodle. My case studies can only begin to account for some of these discoveries. I present only the recovery of her writing and the contexts in which she fits. The work of arguing for Watts’s place in Canadian history and culture is yet to be done.

Introduction

Myrtle Eugenia “Jean” Watts haunts the record of Canadian modernism but rarely does either memory or scholarship turn its attention to her alone. The record of her life is likewise dispersed: she shows up in Dorothy Livesay’s and Toby Gordon Ryan’s memoirs, and her letters surface in Livesay’s writing and in Livesay’s papers at the University of Manitoba. In addition to this dispersed archive, what records exist of Watts’s own voice are in the service of other figures in the period. For example, an interview with Watts from the late-1960s has the goal of gleaning information about Dr. Norman Bethune and other Canadian doctors; what evidence surfaces about Watts’s own involvement in the Spanish Civil War is largely incidental (“Interview,” Watts). Even the more famous anecdotes about Watts’s life may be fabrications. The historical record of Jean Watts is dispersed, secondary to other historical figures, or erroneous.

Reconstructing the history of Jean Watts is an exercise in gathering these multiple sources, sifting through the various fabrications and anecdotes that seem to be the only records of her involvement in 1930s Canadian culture. Although there have been some attempts to restore an account of Watts’s role in Canadian history generally (Butler), and the Spanish Civil War specifically (Hannant), these attempts are largely historical rather than literary. They either bypass or denigrate Watts’s journalistic and textual production during the war (Hannant), or acknowledge its importance but subordinate it to her role as cultural and political actor in leftist Canada over the course of her life (Butler). By turning my attention to the context and content of Watts’s textual production, I hope to restore her centrality to Canadian writing on the Spanish Civil War.

As a historical figure, the Jean Watts of both contemporary and retrospective accounts is multifaceted, if not protean. Even her names and nicknames proliferate, as though she were multiple, changing with each context: she was known as Eugenia to her teachers, Gina to her lifelong friend Dorothy Livesay,[1] Jean in her professional circles, and Jim to her fellow Spanish Civil War ambulance drivers and the members of the Toronto theatre scene. Watts seems to have led her life in defiance of expectations and of traditionally feminine roles, and in turn she has defied easy categorization. Accounts of her life and involvement in 1930s Canadian politics and arts have alternately ignored her, dismissed her, or glorified her. Alan Filewod dismisses Watts’s involvement in the Workers’ Theatre and Theatre of Action, politically aware, leftist theatre movements centered in Toronto in the 1930s, as that of the “one refugee from bourgeois wealth” financially subsidizing the operations of the theatre (68). To Filewod, Watts is simply a wealthy benefactor rather than a true participant in a movement he wishes to cast as exclusively working-class. He obscures the depth of her involvement in 1930s theatre, the prominent role she plays in her contemporaries’ memoirs, and the complex class relations in 1930s leftist artistic movements.

In contrast to Filewod’s characterization of Watts as an intruder in a working-class Toronto theatre community, critics like Larry Hannant depict a bombastic Jean Watts demanding to be admitted to the International Brigades, a heroic crusader for the cause of the Spanish Civil War and a woman insistent on her equal and rightful participation in the social issues of her day. In Hannant’s work, Watts becomes a fantastical figure who broke the rules at every turn. Similarly, Candida Rifkind laments how Watts has been relegated to a tragic footnote to Dorothy Livesay’s life, playing a supporting role to Livesay’s genius, and has been “dismissed as a mere enabler of greater talents” (226n9) across theatrical, journalistic, and literary spheres. For her part, Livesay constructs this subordination in her writing. According to Livesay, Watts was purportedly in love with her, and Watts’s great tragedy was that she longed to, but could not, write, that she was doomed to support others’ artistry, but not to effect her own. Even Watts’s untimely death by suicide is not off-limits for Livesay, as she implies that the death was brought about by Watts’s own nature: “it was ironic that your fighting spirit and aggressiveness hardened—all in the cause of peace! You were hard to live with, Gina, and hard on your own heart. You died too soon” (Journey With My Selves, 85).

But if, from Livesay’s perspective, Watts’s destiny was to be subordinate to Livesay and eventually to be destroyed by her own passions, political or otherwise, Livesay’s motivations in subordinating her friend cannot hide how brightly Watts burned. Livesay herself describes Watts—a lifelong friend with whom she would eagerly consume British modernist literature—as the modern-day New Woman, a fellow ‘bluestocking’ (Journey With My Selves, 64) labels that speak to the independence and feminist politics that the young women espoused. But in Livesay’s and Ryan’s descriptions, Watts was also a woman remarkable for ineffable and innate qualities; for Livesay, a beautiful body, and an iconoclastic personality; for Ryan, an attractiveness intertwined with generosity and political commitment. In her work for the Spanish Civil War, her production of leftist theatre, and her committed political involvement, Watts’s talents as journalist, theatre artist, and activist shine through. I wish to take a cue from Rifkind and restore Watts’s place in the 1930s Canadian Left, both on Canadian soil and in an international context. The Spanish Civil War offers one particularly fruitful context for this restoration.

Much of the biographical information that survives about Watts has been filtered through memoirs, including those of Livesay, Ryan, and Mackenzie-Papineau combatant Ronald Liversedge. In contrast to her commitment to leftist politics and Canadian leftist culture in her adulthood, Watts’s early life was comfortable and conservative.[2] She was born to an upper middle-class family in Streetsville, Ontario in 1909. In the spring of 1921, she and Livesay, both twelve years old at the time, met in Clarkson, Ontario (Livesay, Right Hand Left Hand 59). Livesay would grow up to be among the most prominent Canadian modernist poets, and the lifelong friendship she forged with Watts would feature in much of her prose writing. When Livesay moved to Toronto in 1923, she and Watts ended up in the same class at all-girls Glen Mawr School in Toronto’s Annex neighbourhood. While, in Livesay’s words, their upper-middle-class peers from old Toronto families were “‘coming out’ and going abroad and getting married” (66), Livesay and Watts transitioned from their schooldays to young women who attended lectures by Emma Goldman, read modernist works of literature, and went to university. Watts attended two years of pre-medical school at the University of Toronto, and her time there ended with what Livesay calls a “breakdown,” relaying a letter from Watts’s mother that “[t]he medical work is far too heavy to be undertaken, unless one had a body of (practically) cast iron” (qtd. in Livesay 71). Watts eventually completed a degree in psychology from the University of Toronto in 1933 (Butler 227).

During and after her time at the University of Toronto, Watts’s work in establishing the cultural infrastructure of the 1930s Left was profound. She helped found Toronto’s Theatre of Action and was instrumental to the staging of performances for which the theatre movement would become famous, including Eight Men Speak (1933), about the arrest of Canadian Communist Party leader, Tim Buck. With her husband Lon Lawson, she also founded the monthly leftist literary journal New Frontier (1936-1938), “intended to rally middle-class intellectuals in Canada, as did the Left Book Club in England and New Masses in the United States” (Livesay, Right Hand Left Hand 83), both explicitly Marxist publications, fundamental to politically committed artistic production in England and America. Rifkind notes that without the financial support and energy that Watts brought to the Canadian Left in the 1930s, “the Workers’ Experimental Theatre, Masses, the Toronto Theatre of Action, and New Frontier would have struggled to survive” (226n9). Rifkind’s list of the cultural projects that Watts supported reads like a list of the primary cultural achievements of the Third Period cultural front in Canada. Furthermore, by the 1930s, when the Canadian political left was particularly active, Watts had made a significant enough impact on 1930s leftist culture that her involvement was noticed outside of that community. Watts “had become the object of attention by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for distributing communist literature” (Hannant 156). Protean and multi-faceted Jean Watts was involved in some capacity across multiple contexts in cultural and political activities of the 1930s Canadian Left, and the Canadian government was well aware of her involvement.

By the time Watts left for Spain in February of 1937, she had already made a considerable contribution to Canadian leftist cultural production. Her writings from Spain are a unique first-hand perspective on the Spanish Civil War, especially since she was one of the only Canadian foreign correspondents in Spain. Thus, assessing her contribution to Canadian journalism in the 1930s restores her singular impact on the writing about the conflict. Furthermore, while most of the experiences of women in the Spanish Civil War consist of humanitarian and medical aid (Fyrth and Alexander), Jean Watts’s experience is more akin to the international and politically aware journalistic interventions of such contemporaries as British socialite and editor Nancy Cunard, and American poet and activist Muriel Rukeyser, both of whom undertook major projects related to the Spanish Civil War. Further still, the intensity of her participation in non-literary aspects of the Spanish Civil War—as an ambulance driver and mechanic in the International Brigades—dispels the common criticism that writers on the Spanish Civil War had no true experience of the struggles of volunteer combatants (Jump, Cunningham). Watts’s participation in the Spanish Civil War can shed new light on the experiences of Canadians across multiple contexts of the war. She illuminates Canadian and international journalism, the operations of Norman Bethune’s Blood Transfusion Unit, the International Brigades, and Canadian Communist Party (CPC) efforts to support war refugees back in Canada.

In the case studies that follow, Watts’s historical, cultural, and literary impact on Canadian modernism emerges across varied contexts. Case Study One explores Watts’s broad context—Canadian press and Canadian foreign correspondents in comparison to international journalism. It accounts for the uniqueness of the Daily Clarion within the Canadian newspaper industry, a small-scale, CPC-backed paper to which Watts contributed most of her journalism. At a time when Canadian papers were dominated by material from British and American news agencies, the Daily Clarion featured work by Watts as their primary perspective on the Spanish Civil War, a Canadian woman in a role that we have now come to call an ‘embedded reporter.’ Case Study Two compares Watts’s experiences in the Spanish Civil War to those of fellow Canadian foreign correspondents in Spain, Ted Allan and Henning Sorensen. An analysis of the means of transportation and sources of support for foreign journalists in Spain provides a lens through which to understand the singular experiences of Canadian foreign correspondents during the conflict. Case Study Three analyses Watts’s writing style in comparison to canonical accounts of Spain such as George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (1938), assesses how Watts’s writing aligns with and departs from the Communist politics of the Daily Clarion, and seeks to understand how the newspaper depended upon and created a celebrity status around Watts’s writerly persona. This analysis challenges scholarly assumptions that Watts’s journalism held little literary or cultural merit and that the newspaper published only writing that aligned with Communist Party of Canada politics. Case Study Four expands the scope of Watts’s Canadian context in order to analyze her political motivations and writing in tandem with a broader community of female correspondents in the Spanish Civil War. Martha Gellhorn, an American journalist for Collier’s Magazine, represents a close parallel to Watts in terms of her career and oeuvre. By comparing the two women, this case study identifies an important precedent for the communities of female journalists that emerged during the Second World War; it establishes the emergence of the modernist female celebrity journalist squarely in the Spanish Civil War. The Conclusion to these case studies discusses some of the work that remains to be done on the Watts’s contributions to the Spanish Civil War beyond her literary contributions. Much of the literary and archival evidence available about Watts contradicts the anecdotes that survive about her, and foundational scholarly accounts of her historical, non-literary involvement in the conflict deserve to be revisited in light of this new evidence.

Watts is an enigmatic figure in Canadian cultural history, and these case studies concentrate only on the immediate contexts of her writing. Her cultural impact, however, expands beyond her short-lived journalistic career. Her work as a theatre artist, as an editor, as an activist, and as a patron of the arts all deserve equally close scholarly attention. I offer starting points for future research. Watts’s writing and cultural impact alike are ripe for recovery.

Case Study One: Jean Watts and the Canadian Press in the Spanish Civil War

Jean Watts’s most significant contribution to writing on the Spanish Civil War was to the Daily Clarion (1936-39), the Communist Party of Canada (CPC) newspaper, for which she and fellow writer, Ted Allan, would work as foreign correspondents during the war. This case study describes the context of Watts’s and Allan’s contributions to the newspaper. First, I describe the field of Canadian journalism during the Spanish Civil War and contrast mainstream papers with smaller, politically committed papers. This description situates the Daily Clarion within Canadian journalism and the print environment in which Watts’s work would appear. Second, this study compares the role of individual foreign correspondents in mainstream political papers to that of correspondents in small politically radical papers from Canada like New Commonwealth and the Daily Clarion. Canadian foreign reportage in this period was in some ways paradoxical: larger, mainstream newspapers depended on newly formed news conglomerates for foreign news while smaller newspapers were more likely to source their foreign news material from correspondents hired for specific reporting roles. Watts and Allan emerge as journalists in this context. Their precedents and cognates in the journalistic field also become visible through this analysis: fellow Canadian Henning Sorensen’s work with New Commonwealth sets an immediate Canadian precedent; famous American journalists like Martha Gellhorn and Herbert Matthews are cognates in the American news industry.

Canadian journalists who were assigned to cover the Spanish Civil War rarely immersed themselves in the action in the way that Watts and Allan were able to do. By situating Watts’s work in both the context of international journalism, alongside Allan’s work, and the context of the practices of other Canadian journalists, Watts’s reporting aligns with an international journalistic practice even as it was unique in a Canadian context. The context of Canadian journalists and Canadian journalism during the war frames Watts’s journalistic intervention.

The Canadian Leftist Press

The relationship between the Canadian press and the international press provides the backdrop for Watts’s and Allan’s participation in Spanish Civil War journalism. When Watts and Allan arrived in Spain in 1937, the Canadian press had recently and rapidly developed a dependence on foreign news agencies, and the domestic Canadian journalistic sphere was dominated by middle-class, centrist to left-leaning publications. In contrast, the Daily Clarion published largely domestically produced content and espoused an explicit Communist politics, not least in its direct connection to the CPC. Even amongst other leftist Canadian publications, the paper demonstrated a remarkably close proximity to and overt concern with the Spanish Civil War.

What studies exist of Canadian journalism concentrate on mainstream newspapers. As a result, they paint Canadian news media as largely dependent on foreign sources. Mary Biggar Peck’s study, In Red Moon Over Spain (1988), a landmark account of the responses of the Canadian press to the Spanish Civil War, concentrates on domestically produced Canadian context. Peck depicts the Canadian news media as a profession that mirrored international concerns with the war in a domestic space. In this depiction, Canadian news media drew much of its content from large international news sources like Associated Press (AP) and Reuters. Domestic production featured the political opinions of predominantly leftist and centrist Republican sympathizers in English-speaking Canada, or of conservative Fascist sympathizers concentrated in French-speaking, Catholic Canada.

Carlton McNaught’s 1940 study finds that in 1937 English-language Canadian papers published between twenty-one percent and forty-eight percent foreign content, which was distributed between American news (thirty-two percent to sixty-eight percent), British news (fifteen percent to forty-six percent), and global news (McNaught 39). The Canadian press’s relationship with the AP was the most robust, as McNaught notes that “Canada is a North American nation whose social and economic structure is closely related to that of the United States” (36), and that the cost of sourcing news from the United States was considerably cheaper than relying on overseas sources that would have been sent by mail or by wire. While the AP had a reputation for accuracy and impartiality in Canada, Canadian papers and readers complained that AP foreign news was selected and written for American readers, and passed on to Canadian papers as an afterthought (Peck 11). This dissatisfaction drove Canadian papers to begin obtaining news from European and British sources in 1936. In McNaught’s account, this dependence upon foreign news stems from Canada’s cultural ties to Great Britain and economic ties to the United States: “Because of Canada’s political and sentimental ties with Great Britain and the other members of the Commonwealth, news from these countries is less foreign to her than it would be to a country like the United States” (36). The trend in Canadian journalism of the 1920s and 1930s towards increasing dependence on newly established news agencies held true worldwide. News agencies would quickly come to dominate the newspaper industry in Britain, Europe, the United States, and Canada. However, while newspapers outside Canada would draw upon powerful news agencies, those news agencies operated from their own national perspectives. Canadian newspapers did not have a comparable domestic agency from which to draw.[3]

In combination with this dependence on foreign news, mainstream Canadian newspapers in English-speaking 1930s Canada fell along a primarily middle class and left of centre political spectrum. McNaught describes the Globe and Mail, for example, created in the merger of the Globe (Independent Liberal) and the Mail and Empire (Independent Conservative) in 1936, as centrist in politics, and Peck describes the Globe and Mail to be conservative in comparison to other Toronto publications (10). The Toronto Star was pro-Republican during the Spanish Civil War, although it was sometimes praised for its supposed neutrality (Peck 43), as were the Winnipeg Free Press, Vancouver Province, and the British Columbia Federationist. Mainstream newspapers were generally pro-Republican or neutral.

Although mainstream news espoused centrist politics and the virtues of neutrality about the Spanish Civil War, more explicitly leftist publications took a stronger pro-Republican stance. These publications were far less homogenous that the monolithic mainstream newspapers: numerous leftist publications were trade union papers or literary magazines. The political leanings of Canadian Forum (1920-2000), for example, have been variously characterized. According to Peck, the publication was “literary and non-partisan, intended for the professional and businessman,” praised for its neutrality during the Spanish Civil War (11); James Doyle, by contrast, identifies Canadian Forum as the ideological inspiration for explicitly pro-Communist publications like the magazine Masses (1932-34), the mouthpiece of the Progressive Arts Club (91), a socialist artistic collective based in Toronto, whose editors were largely moderate socialist (99). Doyle further identifies New Frontier (1936-37), a magazine established by Watts and her husband, Lon Lawson, as a primary outlet for leftist creative work, particularly socialist realism that aligned itself with Leninist principles of art (106). The field of Anglophone Canadian periodicals, then, was made up of mainstream, centrist to left-leaning newspapers, trade union papers, and, further to the left, literary magazines.

Distinct from Canadian Forum, Masses, and New Frontier, however, the Daily Clarion positioned itself as a newspaper, rather than a magazine, maintaining strong ties to the radical leftist literary community. In 1936, the Daily Clarion replaced the Toronto Worker as the mouthpiece of the CPC (Doyle 103), and would reach a circulation of approximately 7,600 across Canada by the time that Watts and Allan were employed by the paper. The Clarion continued the precedent set by such publications as the Toronto Labour Advocate (1890-91), the “first free-standing newspaper that was primarily socialist in content” (McKay 148), and “well-circulated newspapers” (McKay 129) like Quebec Eastern Township socialist newspaper Cotton’s Weekly (1907-13) (McKay 106), and British Columbia newspaper the Western Clarion (1903-25), all newspapers that combined news items with socialist strategy and theoretical treatises on the rights of the worker.

According to Ian McKay, in 1920s and particularly 1930s Canada, Leninist-Marxist political allegiances came close to becoming the dominant leftist political identity. In the Clarion’s role as the official publication of the CPC, the paper would have represented a considerable proportion of Canadian leftists. The Clarion positioned itself, in format and content (with comics pages and sports sections), in order to “compete with the bourgeois papers” (Doyle 103) that dominated Canadian journalism. As the newspaper emerged from a history of politically explicit newspaper publications in Canada and aligned itself in its visual language and contents with the mainstream Canadian press, it also provided a platform for literary publication, a practice common to trade and labour union papers throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Doyle 8), becoming the “main outlet for radical literary works” (Doyle 107), particularly after the closure of New Frontier in 1938. The Daily Clarion existed in tension amongst the radical political commitments of its literary contributors, its role as the mouthpiece for one of the dominant leftist political identities of the era, and its attempt to compete in the Canadian mainstream journalistic industry.

Despite the Clarion’s self-fashioning as mainstream competitor, the operations of the newspaper distinguish it from the mainstream in two important ways. The first of these is the paper’s connections to the CPC, which may have ensured its longevity. Unlike financially independent newspapers, the Clarion enjoyed remarkable endurance during the Great Depression. While McNaught’s study notes that other newspapers experienced profound financial challenges and closures during the 1930s, the implicit contrast that McNaught draws is one of the Clarion’s continued strength, despite its more specialized target market. The Clarion’s overt politicization and connection to an international political body like the Commuist International seem to have kept the paper afloat. The paper would only close in late 1939, in the wake of increasing Canadian government suppression of Canadian Communist activity, and would be quickly reincarnated as the Canadian Tribune, a more politically neutral title, in January 1940.

A second important difference between mainstream papers and the Clarion is the Clarion’s practice of drawing much of its domestic content from submissions by CPC members, and, in at least one case, employing Party members as staff writers (Doyle).[4] Articles do frequently appear in the paper without a byline, which may at first suggest that these articles may be sourced from large news agencies, similarly to larger, mainstream Canadian papers. However, the content of these anonymous articles in the Clarion is by and large explicit in its alignment with the Communist politics of the newspaper, suggesting that the anonymous columns were written by Daily Clarion staff writers. Likewise, in an international context, Watts and Allan’s roles as foreign correspondents in Spain provide a very different economic model to mainstream Canadian foreign news sources. Allan’s bylines in the Daily Clarion indicate that he wrote for both the Federated Press and for the Daily Clarion, moving to reporting exclusively for the Clarion later in his tenure in Spain, while Watts wrote almost exclusively for the Clarion. Both writers would contribute a handful of articles to New Frontier in addition to their Clarion contributions. Among these news outlets, the Clarion seems to be the only Canadian newspaper to have sent correspondents with the express purpose of covering the Spanish Civil War.[5] As the CPC had a vested interest in the war, and recruited Canadians for the International Brigades, a mandate to provide dedicated coverage on the war would fulfill a public relations role of an organization heavily invested in the conflict. Indeed, Watts explicitly understood her post to fulfill the role of a “public relations person” (Watts 0:46). While mainstream papers would have had to choose the most cost-effective news source and would be beholden to the support of their subscribers, the financial support and backing of the CPC may have allowed the Clarion to engage in this alternate mode of production. Dedicated foreign correspondents may also have fulfilled an ideological goal. The clear line of participation of leftist and Communist political affiliates, in what was for many a leftist war, may have likewise made the paper’s decision to send dedicated Spanish Civil War correspondents to be an extension of the role the CPC already played in the conflict.

If the Daily Clarion was unusual in Canada for its commitment to sending correspondents to Spain specifically to cover the Spanish Civil War, such a commitment was not unique on an international scale. Peter Monteath notes that the war was “more widely reported than any previous war” and cites correspondents who were sent from such major papers as the New York Times, the Daily Express, the Chicago Tribune, Pravda, Paris-Soir, Völkischer Beobachter, the London Times, and the News Chronicle (125). Further, literary writers seemed to go to Spain with the expectation that writing for newspapers was an option available to them: George Orwell had “some notion of writing newspaper articles” (qtd. in Monteath 125), and Hemingway acted as correspondent to the North American Newspaper Alliance. Career journalists built their reputations as correspondents to the Spanish Civil War, Martha Gellhorn reporting for Collier’s and Herbert Matthews for the New York Times.[6] The paradoxical role of the Daily Clarion in the context of Canadian journalism attests to its alignment with international journalistic practice; both literary writers and journalists acted as dedicated foreign correspondents to Spain, mirroring the Clarion’s decision to send Watts and Allan as correspondents to the conflict, and further mirroring its strong ties to literary writers in Canada.

The Daily Clarion, often dismissed in historical accounts as merely a propagandistic organ with limited appeal, was in fact aligned with a leftist politics that represented a strong proportion of Canadian leftists. It drew on a history of radical leftist publications providing a platform for radical literary production, but through its visual and textual content positioned itself as a competitor with mainstream newspapers that did not espouse explicit or radically leftist political partisanships. By further contrast, it seems to have enjoyed an economic security due to its alignment with the CPC that other newspapers were not able to depend on. This economic security may have supported its dispatch of foreign correspondents rather than the reliance on foreign news agencies that dominated other Canadian publications. The multiple contradictions of the Clarion’s role in Canadian journalism frame Watts’s and Allan’s journalistic activities. These contradictions contexualize the operations of Canadian journalism on the Spanish Civil War. This context will be invaluable as I now turn to parse the nature of the Canadian journalistic presence in Spain.

Canadians as Foreign Correspondents

The mainstream Canadian press’s heavy dependence on foreign news agencies obscures the extent of Canadian press reporting by Canadians stationed in Spain. While mainstream Canadian papers would often feature Canadian foreign correspondents, the relationship of those correspondents to mainstream papers varied widely. In fact, correspondents whom mainstream papers would bill as Canadian reporters stationed in Spain would often not be Canadian,[7] would work for foreign news agencies instead of Canadian papers, or would be stationed outside of Spain. There seem to exist only three examples of Canadians reporting directly for Canadian papers from Spain: Henning Sorensen, Watts, and Allan. An analysis of the roles of foreign correspondents billed as Canadian for mainstream papers and of Sorensen’s experiences provides the context and precedent for Watts’s and Allan’s work in Spain, and offers the historical framework for some of Watts’s oral accounts of the press presence in Spain.

In an interview from the late 1960s,[8] Watts describes the press presence in Spain, testifying to both her singular perspective from her station near Madrid and more broadly to the dominance of foreign news agencies and relative absence of Canadian news presence. Watts recalls the nature of the foreign press presence in Spain:

Interviewer: Were there press core of sorts?

Watts: Oh, yes indeed there was. The AP, and UP, and Reuters, and the French Agency, and of course people like [Herbert] Matthews from the New York Times.…The bigger papers had all their own people there, as well as the agencies. And at one time the Canadian press sent a man who spent the night in Madrid, and then sent the following cable: “[tape difficult to hear] food, shelling, etc. Leaving.” And then left. Which embarrassed me very much because he was the only Canadian press man, I think, who was there at all. But most of the correspondents were quite good, you know. (Watts 8:20)

According to Watts, while the large European and American news organizations and newspapers were well represented in Spain, the Canadian press presence consisted of one man on a short visit, and individual Canadian newspapers may not have sent representatives at all. While domestic Canadian news media certainly had a vibrant response to the Spanish Civil War, the nature of the Canadian press presence in Spain is little more obscure.

In contrast to Watts’s account, Peck notes that in 1936 the Toronto Star ran a “special series from their reporters on the scene, such as Matthew Halton, Pierre van Paassen and Frank Pitcairn” (43). This suggests that the Canadian Press presence in Spain was relatively robust, and that Watts’s account of a lone, unimpressive journalist may have been inaccurate. But a closer look even at Peck’s own account of these three “on the scene” members of the Canadian press—Pitcairn, van Paassen, and Halton—reveals that they either may not have been employed directly by a Canadian press outlet or may not have been that close to the action in Spain. Frank Pitcairn was not a Canadian journalist, but an English member of the militia and correspondent for the British publication, the Daily Worker. Pitcairn’s eye witness account of his experiences near Madrid ran in the Toronto Star on 12 November 1936, but Peck’s characterization of him as a reporter for the Star seems tenuous. Instead, Pitcairn’s role in the Canadian media aligns more closely with the trend in mainstream Canadian newspapers to rely on foreign news agencies and correspondents. Pierre van Paassen, who the Star described as its “European correspondent,” alongside Coralie van Paassen “his talented wife” (25 August 1936 qtd. in Peck 44), were based in France near the Spanish border and contributed stories to major news agencies. Coralie had mailed eighteen of Pierre’s articles from Paris and produced some reporting on the conditions on the French-Spanish border. Pierre at the very least visited Barcelona, as he reported on atrocities that he witnessed there, even claiming to see Fascists set a church on fire (Peck 43). As Peck does not present any evidence that either of the van Paassens reported near Madrid, it is possible that Watts would never have met them nor known them to be part of the Canadian press presence.

Matthew Halton may be the strongest candidate to have been the Canadian “press man” who Watts recalls. Halton’s best known dispatch about the Spanish conflict, an interview with Spanish Socialist Party leader Francisco Largo Caballero (28 July 1936), was conducted in London at an international trade unionist conference. By the end of 1936, Peck locates Halton near Madrid, as in November he “sent back a series of articles from the area around Madrid and the [Star] carried many photos of devastation in the city” (Peck 44). Halton, then, who was in Spain at the end of 1936, may have stayed in Madrid long enough to cross paths with Watts in the early months of 1937, even though the publication dates of his articles do not overlap with Watts’s presence in Spain. Both Pitcairn’s and Halton’s time in Spain may have overlapped with the time that Watts spent there, but only Halton was both Canadian (not just supplying the occasional article to a Canadian paper) and in Spain solely as a correspondent.

While Halton is likely the only reporter who qualifies as the fly-by-night “press man” who so embarrassed Watts, Watts would also have relatively close contact with another person initially sent to Spain as a reporter: Copenhagen-born Canadian and reporter for the New Commonwealth, Henning Sorensen. The New Commonwealth was a small weekly paper run by the Co-operative Commonwealth Foundation of Canada, which sent Sorensen in part to research the medical needs of the Republic and primarily as foreign correspondent (Petrou 158-9). By Sorensen’s account, he easily secured a visa as a journalist, was given a car and chauffeur by a press office located in Spain, and “just went around writing stories about what [he] saw” around Madrid (qtd. in Gerassi 104). When Sorensen met Canadian Blood Transfusion doctor Norman Bethune and toured visiting hospitals with the doctor, he “became disgusted with [his] regular profession of foreign correspondent” (qtd. in Gerassi 104). He compared the nobility and utility of Bethune’s work to the character of his fellow foreign correspondents, including “such giants” as Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos, who Sorensen saw as lazy, drunkards, cynics, liars, and cowards, who would frequently send false dispatches and whose role in the war has been overstated by history (Gerassi 104). By the time Watts arrived at the Blood Transfusion Unit in early 1937, Sorensen had already “gladly abandoned journalism” (qtd. in Gerassi 105).

Sorensen’s contribution to Canadian journalism deserves further study. Although it was short-lived, his reportage on the early months of the conflict and the establishment of the Blood Transfusion Unit may provide a particular Canadian voice on the early optimism of the war. His journalism may offer a telling point of contrast with that of Watts and Allan, who did not arrive in Spain until after Bethune’s relationship with Spanish doctors had begun to sour and after the major Republican victory at the Battle of Jarama. Far from Watts’s ambiguous reference to the uncommitted Canadian press man, Sorensen’s work in Spain provides a precedent for Watts’s and Allan’s journalism. Canadian domestic newspapers were certainly invested in publishing Canadian voices on the conflict, as their publication of Halton’s and the van Paassens’ journalism indicates, and scholarship has proved eager to claim non-Canadians like Pitcairn as examples of a Canadian press presence in Spain. Only Watts, Allan, and Sorensen, however, are at once Canadian and stationed in Spain, and only small-scale leftist publications like the Daily Clarion and the New Commonwealth sent dedicated foreign correspondents to the conflict. A closer look at this group of journalists sheds light on the broader field of Canadian foreign correspondents. It helps to contextualize Watts’s accounts of the communities of journalists around Madrid.

Conclusion

Canadian reportage on the Spanish Civil War drew from multiple sources, but rarely did individual papers depend on dedicated foreign correspondents. Mainstream papers relied heavily on foreign news agencies through the 1920s and 1930s, and Canadian-produced content on the Spanish Civil War was more likely to be editorial in nature. Furthermore, the Canadian international journalistic presence in the Spanish Civil War, a field that historians like Peck begin to give us a glimpse into, consisted of a mix of journalists supplying pieces to Canadian papers, some of whom were Canadian, few of whom were stationed in Spain, and many of whom may have been employed primarily by the foreign news agencies that mainstream Canadian papers already relied on.

However, beginning with Sorensen, and continuing with Watts and Allan, a small number of Canadian foreign correspondents offer an alternative model of Canadian journalistic production that works against the dominant, foreign-sourced model of mainstream Canadian papers. In contrast to Pitcairn, the van Paassens, and Halton, Watts and Allan were sent to the Blood Transfusion Unit run by Dr. Norman Bethune just outside of Madrid, with Watts’s role as a “kind of public relations person” with a broad range of coverage (Watts 0:46) approaching what we would now call an “embedded journalist.”

Watts would remain in or around Madrid for almost a year from February 1937 to early January 1938. From there she produced over fifty articles for the Clarion, wrote at least one article for New Frontier, a journal she helped found, and conceived of and ran a radio broadcast with Allan and Herbert Kline. Allan’s regular column “Salud Nortamericanos!” consisted of over thirty-five articles in the Daily Clarion published from October to December 1937. Allan also produced two articles for New Frontier, and eventually published a novel, This Time A Better Earth (1939) based on his experiences in the war.[9] Watts’s and Allan’s journalistic oeuvres together constitute a body of journalism that focused exclusively on the Spanish Civil War, and was produced by Canadians stationed in Spain.

In the next case study, I will compare the experiences of Watts and Allan during their time with the Daily Clarion. I will argue that the newspaper prioritized Watts’s journalism—both in appointing her as correspondent and in prominently marketing her writing on the war as a feature of the paper—over Allan’s. As Watts’s and Allan’s writings are subject to ongoing recovery and evaluation, and as unofficial biographies of Allan attempt to establish his journalism and literary writings on the war as central to Canadian letters, Watts’s experiences offer an important corrective and counterpoint. By evaluating Watts’s writing, a leftist, female, predominantly journalistic Canadian writer regains her importance to the writings on the Spanish Civil War, contrasting a history that has so often concentrated on the contributions of male literary writers and bolstering the achievements of an international network of female war journalists starting with the Spanish Civil War.

Case Study Two: Jean Watts, Ted Allan, and the Daily Clarion in Spain

In an interview from the late 1960s, Jean Watts says that she was “dying to go [to Spain] and [she] knew quite well that the Brigade wouldn’t take [her]” (Watts 0:40). Instead of signing up with the Brigades, Watts was officially sent to Spain by the Daily Clarion, the newspaper for the Communist Party of Canada (CPC), in February of 1937 at the age of 27. She was “assigned to the Blood Transfusion Institute as a kind of public relations person” (Watts 0:46). The International Brigades were looking for a representative “to report on the Blood Transfusion Unit because of all the stories circulating” (Allan qtd. in Allan, Chap 1), many of which concerned the reputation of the unit’s founder, Canadian physician Norman Bethune. For Watts, the assignment with the Daily Clarion afforded legitimacy to her journalism, as the assignment was “really [her] only pretense at being a writer” (0:16), as Watts claims that she was not employed by the Daily Clarion before the paper sent her to Spain.[10] From February 1937 to May 1938, Watts was on assignment as Spanish correspondent with the Daily Clarion. Watts’s writing as a foreign correspondent is in line with international journalistic practices to embed dedicated reporters in situ to cover major world events. She and, by extension, the Daily Clarion offer a counter-narrative to the increasing domination of domestic Canadian news media by foreign news agencies like Associated Press (AP) and Reuters (See Case Study One).

This case study focuses on the logistics of appointment, travel, and resources that frame Watts’s experiences as a journalist in Spain. It compares each of these aspects of her time in Spain with those of Ted Allan, her fellow journalist for the Daily Clarion, and Henning Sorensen, journalist for the New Commonwealth. Watts’s experiences of the Spanish Civil War were unique, but an ostensibly typical experience for Canadian journalists is difficult to identify. An analysis of the ways in which Canadian journalists were able to access resources at various stages of their tenure in Spain begins to uncover the politics of Canadian leftist journalism during the Spanish Civil War, how those journalists were chosen, supported, and published across Canadian, Spanish, and international contexts. Such an analysis provides nuance to the ongoing recovery of Canadian involvement in the Spanish Civil War.

This case study takes as its starting point Allan’s account of his appointment as foreign correspondent to the Daily Clarion; this anecdote offers clues as to the circumstances of Watts’s appointment and suggests that, in contrast to the account in Allan’s biography, Watts was the best qualified and preferred candidate for the role. Next, the case study contrasts Watts’s and Allan’s experiences travelling to Spain, shedding light on the various challenges Canadian correspondents and combatants encountered, and providing further evidence of the Canadian newspaper’s strong preference for Watts as foreign correspondent over Allan. Finally, the case study draws upon the various means by which Watts, Allan, Sorensen, and American journalists and authors Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway travelled around Spain. On one hand, it shows that levels of access to transportation varied widely for foreign correspondents. On the other, it demonstrates that, despite the initial support of the Canadian editorial apparatus, Watts would not necessarily have access to the same level of support trying to function as a correspondent in Spain. These aspects of the varied experience of Canadian foreign correspondents—their appointment as correspondents, their travel to Spain, and their navigation in Spain—together elucidate the complex logistics of supporting embedded foreign correspondents. As Case Study One indicates, the Daily Clarion operated independently of the large British and American news agencies that had come to dominate Canadian newspapers, and its role as the mouthpiece of the Communist Party of Canada (CPC) tied it to a committed leftist politics. The Clarion’s own administrative structures were complex, and the logistics of appointing, sending, and supporting its foreign correspondents contextualizes Watts’s contribution to the newspaper in an increasingly convoluted network of news agencies, journalists, combatants, and political organizations.

Watts and Allan: Two Candidates

Both Watts and Allan are the subjects of ongoing recovery for their textual contributions to the Spanish Civil War, and both acted as foreign correspondents in Spain for the Daily Clarion. Allan, the eventual author of the novel This Time a Better Earth (1939) and the biography of physician Norman Bethune The Scalpel, The Sword (1952), has had the benefit of personal and literary relationships with such figures as Hemingway and Bethune and a successful career as a screenwriter. Merrily Weisbord’s documentary film, Ted Allan: Minstrel Boy of the 20th Century, hails Allan as the “missing man of Canadian letters” (Weisbord qtd. in Kelly). The claims of Weisbord’s film lend authority to Allan’s own claims (filtered through his son, Norman Allan in his unpublished biography of Ted) that he was the obvious candidate when it came time for the CPC to send a correspondent to Spain. While Allan’s contribution to Canadian and international letters over the course of his career was substantial, the contrasts between Watts’s and Allan’s respective treatment by the Clarion suggest that in the moment of the Spanish Civil War the paper regarded Watts’s contribution to be more valuable, or at least more marketable, than Allan’s.

A central contrast between Allan and Watts lies in their personal accounts of why they chose to go to Spain as foreign correspondents. On one hand, Watts simply declares in her interview that she “knew quite well the Brigades wouldn’t take [her]” (0:40). Her declaration suggests a gendered bias on the part of the Brigades that is borne out by the gendered work that women tended to take on during the Spanish Civil War: women tended to be nurses and humanitarian workers (Fyrth and Alexander), roles that have been largely, and often erroneously, cast as non-political, meliorist contributions to an international conflict. Watts may have perceived the Brigades’ reluctance to take her as a combatant to be an undue bias against her gender. Watts’s reputation as a “bluestocking” (Livesay, Journey With My Selves, 64), an educated feminist archetype, has fuelled anecdotes about her later insistence on being admitted to the Brigades once in Spain (See Conclusion). This reputation provides some context and explanation for her desire to seek out a politically committed form of participation in the war—journalism for the newspaper of the CPC—when the combatant role was not available to her. From Watts’s perspective, journalism may simply have offered her a politically motivated way of participating in the conflict; in her account of her decision to go to Spain, her appointment seems relatively straightforward.

On the other hand, Allan’s account of his decision to go to Spain is complex and contradictory; Allan seems to have had more numerous politically explicit modes of involvement in the war available to him, but his appointment as foreign correspondent was frequently obstructed. Norman Allan’s unpublished biography of his father quotes from Allan’s autobiographical notes in which he asserts that his previous work with the Daily Clarion made him the obvious choice. However, some of the contradictions in his unofficial biography throw that claim into question.

Allan had worked for some years as Montreal correspondent for the Daily Clarion and was a member of the CPC. Norman Allan quotes from his father’s notes:

The Canadian Party, in the persons of Fred Rose had agreed to send me to Spain as correspondent for the party newspaper, the Daily Clarion….I traveled first to Toronto to meet with Leslie Morris, the editor of the paper. The Montreal comrades had forgotten to check with Leslie Morris, and in the meanwhile Leslie had made arrangements for Jean Watts to act as the paper’s correspondent. Watts had come into their office just the day before I got to Toronto. Embarrassment and apologies all round, but I was screwed. (Allan qtd. in Allan, Chap 1)

In this account, Allan asserts that, despite promises from the CPC, the fact that the editor of the Daily Clarion promised the correspondent role to Watts by mistake meant that he was “screwed,” and that he would not be able to go to Spain. Allan goes on to threaten that he would join the International Brigades if he was not appointed as correspondent, contravening the orders of the CPC and risking expulsion. According to this biography, the Clarion acquiesced and sent Allan as a correspondent to Spain. From Allan’s perspective, Watts should not have been sent as correspondent by the paper. The CPC had chosen him as correspondent in Spain, but the CPC had not relayed the message to the Clarion editorship.

It is not clear in Allan’s narrative why the CPC did not want him to go to Spain, or why the threat of his enlistment would have contravened CPC orders. In fact, there are multiple puzzling contradictions both in the archival record of Allan’s participation in the war and within Norman Allan’s biography of his father. In his introduction to the pamphlet Hello Canada, Allan is explicit that Watts was the appointed correspondent for the Clarion:[11]

When Jean Watts, the Clarion correspondent, had to leave for a short while, I pinch-hit of her as well as writing for the Federated Press. Writing distinctly for a Canadian paper of my own countrymen made me prouder than I had ever been in my life. (“Introduction,” 5)

In this account, Allan characterizes his time writing for the Clarion as “pinch-hitting”—filling in when Watts was suddenly unable to fill the role for a short time.[12] For Allan, this ad hoc, temporary writing is still a source of pride. His pride at the opportunity to write for a Canadian paper suggests that these opportunities were hard to come by, a suggestion that supports the argument in Case Study One that there were few Canadian journalists producing dedicated material for Canadian publications. For Allan, writing for the Clarion was a rare opportunity to write for a Canadian publication that he took over temporarily from Watts.

Despite this account of the temporary nature of Allan’s involvement with the Clarion, Allan’s biography claims that the CPC granted him an official appointment as correspondent to the Daily Clarion. However, as this case study goes on to mention, Allan’s behaviour once in Spain suggests that he was not granted this appointment at all and in fact went to Spain expecting to volunteer as part of the Brigades. Allan was reluctant to leave his combatant comrades once he actually reached Spain; he seems to have made his way to Spain with other combatants instead of other journalists; Colonel Peter Kerrigan, Political Commissar of the British Battalion in the International Brigades, sent Allan to the Mobile Blood Transfusion Unit despite Allan’s protests; and Dr. Norman Bethune appointed Allan political commissar of the Mobile Blood Transfusion Unit upon his arrival. Despite the fact that Allan felt he was “screwed” in the confusion over his appointment, his desire “to do some good work broadcasting from Madrid and writing freelance for newspapers and magazines” was strong enough that he and Watts ended up on the same boat across to France, with “[t]wenty odd American volunteers and seven Canadians on our way to Spain” (Allan qtd. in Allan, Chap 1).[13] Watts and Allan seem to have gotten along well, and were pleased to see each other when they met again in Spain at the Blood Transfusion Unit. No account exists of Watts’s perspectives on this apparent glitch. The contrast between the two correspondents’ accounts allows for some speculation about the actual circumstances of their respective appointments.

There are at least two possible explanations for Allan’s account of this confusion. In one explanation, Watts had impeccable timing. She walked into the office of a newspaper to which she had only contributed occasional articles seeking to go to Spain, and she coincidentally filled a need for the newspaper’s leadership, superseding the long-standing Montreal correspondent, Allan, to whom Party leadership had promised a foreign correspondent position. Allan then made his way to Spain confused as to his role once he arrived. Or, a second possibility: Allan’s accounts overstate the depth of his connection to the Daily Clarion and the promises the Party made to him. In counterpoint to Allan, some of Watts’s biographical details could, in fact, have made her the more obvious and suitable candidate: Watts’s previous contributions to the newspapers were a series of articles on the 1935 Moscow Theatre Festival (Butler 374), and Watts had been very active in both direction and performance with leftist theatre group, Worker’s Theatre. The CPC sought a correspondent to respond to rumours of friction amongst the staff and physicians at Bethune’s Mobile Blood Transfusion Unit. This posting, which Watts herself describes as that of a “kind of public relations person” (0:41), may have required the finesse of a cultural reporter and the political commitment of a leftist artist. Watts’s artistic work in the leftist theatre community and her journalistic history with the paper may have fit the bill perfectly.

Furthermore, the contradictions in Allan’s account of his appointment to Spain and subsequent experiences in Spain elicit multiple potential explanations. In one explanation, Allan may have convinced the Clarion to appoint him as foreign correspondent, and may simply have changed his mind on the way to Spain, preferring to stay with his comrades in arms than participate in the conflict in the individual and singular role of journalist. In another, Allan did not convince the Clarion to appoint him. In this explanation, his threat to join the Brigades and risk expulsion rings hollow, and his subsequent appointment as Political Commissar to the Mobile Blood Transfusion Unit is merely fluke. In this case, it may be the simpler and more straightforward story that Watts offers that is the more accurate one. The convoluted circumstances of Allan’s appointment may be a mischaracterization of his relationship to the Daily Clarion and the CPC.

Even the initial appointment of Watts and Allan as foreign correspondents reveals the singular experiences of Canadian journalists in the Spanish Civil War and the complex politics by which either candidate could choose to go to the conflict as a journalist, could assume that he or she were an obvious candidate for the role, or could later chose to narrativize their relationship to the newspaper. Scholarship and biography on Allan has maintained that he was the Clarion correspondent, but a close look at Allan’s own accounts of his time in Spain reveals that he had a more complex—if not tenuous—relationship to the newspaper. In the recovery of both writers’ legacies, the likelihood that Watts was sent to Spain as the preferred candidate adds nuance to Allan’s experiences as foreign correspondent and suggests that contemporaneous journalistic outlets may have perceived a female writer to be the most qualified and obvious candidate for reporting on the Spanish Civil War.

Getting to Spain

Watts’s and Allan’s respective experiences travelling to Spain offer a particular point of contrast between the two writers. Although they were both ostensibly appointed as foreign correspondents, their passages to Spain were remarkably different. This contrast in experience bolsters my claim that Watts may have been the preferred candidate to be correspondent.

Watts had a much easier journey to Spain than many of her colleagues, including Allan. This difference is most readily attributable to the contrast between how the passage of combatants and journalists were differently facilitated in the conflict. Watts notes that, even though she spent all of the social aspects of the voyage to Spain with the “a group of Americans, mostly” (2:15), “for some reason [she] went tourist and they went third” (2:15). Watts does not mention whether this group was made up of journalists or combatants, but Allan’s notes corroborate the difference between how the majority of the group travelled and how Watts travelled. Allan writes that he and the other passengers “travel[led] third-class, bunked four to a cabin without a porthole, next to the kitchens, deep in the hold, all of us seasick, but still on fire with our cause. We spent as much time as we could on deck, day and night, singing songs, because our cabins were ill-smelling, sick-making” (Allan qtd. in Allan, Chap. 1). If Watts found her passage to Spain more comfortable than Allan found his, this difference may also bolster the possibility that Allan was not sent as a correspondent at all.

When Watts and Allan arrived in France, Watts entered Spain with the assistance of the small French news agency, Agence Espagne,[14] and went directly to her posting at the Mobile Blood Transfusion Unit. By contrast, Allan and his comrades would make their way over the Pyrenees and report to the International Brigades in Madrid. Allan describes how the party “took a train to Marseilles, and a truck to Perpignan and over the Pyrenees,” one of the last groups of volunteers who did not have to “climb through the mountainous border on foot in secret in the dead of night” due to the “Non-Intervention Committee” (Allan qtd. in Allan, Chap. 1).[15] Watts acknowledges that they went over the Pyrenees (2:16), and seems to have assumed that she, too, would have to enter Spain the same way. Instead, Otto Katz at the Agence Espagne in Paris informed Watts that she could fly into Valencia. While Allan and his male travelling companions took more difficult routes into Spain—first seasick in third class, and then a series of trucks and trains across France and the Pyrenees—Watts seems surprised that her passage was so comfortably facilitated—first in a tourist class cabin to cross the Atlantic, and then a flight directly from Paris to Valencia. Watts may have been surprised due to the contrast of her treatment with that of her fellow travellers. However, neither Watts nor Allan mentions any of the other travellers departing from the group to visit a news agency. If Watts was the only journalistic appointee on the journey over, as her immediate visit to Agence Espagne suggests, then the difference between journalist and combatant roles may account for the relative ease by which Watts travelled to Spain.

This differential treatment does not seem to be based on either Watts’s gender or her privileged class background. Watts had gone on a “hiking tour through Spain shortly after the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic in April 1931” (Butler 337) with fellow Canadian leftists Otto Van der Sprenkel and Stanley Ryerson. Watts notes that this hiking tour included going over the Pyrenees (Watts 1:32), so she was demonstrably physically capable of making the trip. Neither does Watts’s wealthy background seem to have facilitated her more comfortable travels: Watts seems mystified that “for some reason” (2:15) she was able to travel tourist class while Allan and his travelling companions travelled third class. Unlike her later experiences attempting to leave Spain via France, during which time she had no money and had to ask her family to wire funds, Watts does not mention having to pay for this trip. It seems that the Clarion paid for her passage. Once Watts arrived in France, she seems to have followed Otto Katz’s lead in deciding to fly into Valencia, guided by those in an official capacity to facilitate the travel of journalists. Allan likewise took others’ lead in his journey to Spain, albeit in a different direction. As Allan’s retrospective account of the war displays an unwillingness to be separated from his comrades, and as he was travelling with volunteers who were not journalists, he may have chosen to cross over to Spain from France through the Pyrenees rather than seek out other travel options or those options may not have been available to him as a Brigadier.

Although Watts did not have to travel over the Pyrenees, her flight into Valencia and her subsequent travel down to Madrid were not luxurious. Her entry into Spain was legal but still dangerous: Watts recalls that “[she] flew over [to Valencia] the day after the plane the day before had been shot down. And so it was quite an interesting flight” (3:45). Once Watts arrived in Spain, travelling down to Madrid was difficult, as Watts described the city as “almost surrounded” (3:49). It seems to have been normal practice for correspondents to find their own transportation through Spain: Colonel Kerrigan told Ted Allan to find his own transportation down to Madrid (Allan, Chap. 1, n.p.), and American journalists like Hemingway would bring private cars for their personal transportation, while fellow journalists Herbert Matthews and Gellhorn would depend on this private form of transportation. Watts did eventually find transportation with the Scottish ambulance unit thanks to a correspondent from the Daily Worker. Although correspondents had support from news agencies like Agence Espagne, navigating around Spain was difficult and dangerous.

Among the central contradictions of Allan’s account of his appointment to Spain are the orders he received from Colonel Kerrigan of the International Brigades upon arriving in Spain to write about the Blood Transfusion Unit. If Allan had already been appointed as foreign correspondent, his orders to travel to Madrid are redundant. While Watts seems to have known that she would be sent directly to the Blood Transfusion Unit, Allan, despite his deep admiration for Bethune, does not seem to have known that he would work with the physician until he reached the International Brigade staging post in Albacete. Upon his arrival in Albacete, Kerrigan discovered that Allan, like Bethune, was from Montreal. Allan relays his conversation with Kerrigan: “‘Fine. I want you to see Bethune in Madrid. Place yourself at his disposal. You’re to investigate what's going on in the Blood Transfusion Unit and report back to the Brigade” (Allan qtd. in Allan n.p.). According to Allan, he was initially reluctant to leave his comrades, but eventually conceded to travel down to Madrid to the Mobile Blood Transfusion Unit. Although Allan was able to argue for his appointment as a foreign correspondent, he traveled in a different class to Watts and seems both surprised to be posted to the Blood Transfusion Unit and reluctant to take up that post once he arrived in Spain. Allan’s interactions with Kerrigan again suggest that Watts was the more obvious candidate for the foreign correspondent role, and that Allan may not have been appointed at all (See Case Study One). Allan may have been sent down to the Blood Transfusion Unit by Party leadership once he arrived in Spain, in a decision seemingly divorced from the considerations of the Daily Clarion leadership or the appointments made by Party leadership still in Canada.

Watts’s and Allan’s journeys to Spain together demonstrate two aspects of the Spanish Civil War and the experiences of its Canadian participants. First, the experiences travelling to Spain could be vastly heterogeneous, even for participants ostensibly sent with the same organization. Second, there may have been a disjuncture in the perceived needs of the Brigades, whether needs for combatants or for journalists, amongst leadership in Canada, leadership in Spain, and leadership of the Daily Clarion as Party publication. Allan’s account of being posted to Spain may echo some of these disjunctures. His experience evinces, at the very least, a miscommunication over Watts’s and Allan’s simultaneous appointment as foreign correspondent for the Daily Clarion. It may further evince conflicting desires and priorities of leadership in Canada, Spain, and in the Daily Clarion.

Journalists' Mobility in Spain

The journalistic output of Canadians in the Spanish Civil War depended on complex causal factors including transportation, personal and political conviction, and length of tenure with a given journal. In the accounts that survive of these journalists’ experiences in Spain, their access to transportation coloured how they would describe their ability to act as journalists during the conflict. Watts, Allan, and Sorensen, the Danish-Canadian journalist for New Commonwealth and eventual operator of the Mobile Blood Transfusion Unit, offer perhaps the only three accounts of Canadian journalists’ mobility in Spain (See Case Study One). Sorensen seems to have had access to support from a professional “Press Office” in Spain, but left his posting for personal and political reasons. Watts, by contrast, cites her lack of transportation in Spain as the factor that would make it “impossible…to really function as a correspondent” (12:55), prompting her to leave her journalistic posting, first for the Censorship Bureau, and then to work as an ambulance driver with the International Brigades (See Conclusion). In further contrast to Watts and Sorensen, Allan’s account concentrates on his relationship to Hemingway instead of any mobility problems he may have faced. His experience was likely comparable to that of Martha Gellhorn, American journalist for Collier’s, and Herbert Matthews, both of whom depended to different extents on Hemingway’s generosity in order to travel in Spain.

Each of these journalists’ accounts communicates the stark differences in their experiences in Spain. Paradoxically, the ease by which they accessed transportation did not necessarily correlate with increased journalistic output. Sorensen, who seems to have easily accessed professional support in the form of transportation had the shortest tenure with New Commonwealth and therefore the lowest journalistic output. Watts, who explicitly cites her lack of mobility as a deciding factor when she gave up journalism, worked with a newspaper for longer than both Allan and Sorensen, and produced the largest body of journalistic work. Allan concentrates the least on the barriers to his journalistic output, but had a shorter tenure and smaller body of work with the Clarion than Watts; instead, Allan’s account concentrates on the quasi-mythical status of writers like Hemingway with whom he was able to socialize. For Allan, his interaction with a literary network takes precedent over the logistics of travel and journalistic output.

Sorensen seems to have had the easiest access to professional resources, including transportation, of any Canadian journalist working for an independent Canadian newspaper. When Sorensen arrived in Spain, having seemingly had no trouble securing a visa as a journalist for the New Commonwealth, he went directly to a “Press Office” where he was given a car, a chauffeur, and an armed guard (Gerassi 104). Sorensen “just went around writing stories about what [he] saw” around Madrid (qtd. in Gerassi 104). In fact Sorensen had so much freedom that upon receiving the car he was told “Go wherever you want” (qtd. in Gerassi 104). Following a suggestion from Montreal, he would eventually act as a chauffeur to Bethune, whom he picked up from the Madrid airport and drove around the surrounding area to visit hospitals. Contrasting the humanitarian work he observed Bethune undertaking with the perceived dishonesty of his fellow journalists, Sorensen would leave journalism to work with Bethune (See Case Study One). Despite the fact that he was well supported as a journalist, his personal politics prompted him to take up work he perceived to be more honest and noble.

Sorensen is not specific about what “Press Office” assigned him a car, and the source of such support is difficult to identify. As Watts visited an Agence Espagne office in Paris on her way to Spain, it is possible that the organization may also have had an office in Madrid. Agence Espagne was a small Spanish Republican news agency established in Paris in October 1936 (Pike 299). Alternately, Allan refers at one point to a request from Constancia de la Mora, director of the Foreign Press Office of the Spanish Republic, that he share a car from Valencia to Madrid with a fellow foreign correspondent. Sorensen’s general “Press Office” may have either been an office of Agence Espagne, the organization that facilitated Watts’s passage to Spain, or of the internal Foreign Press Office, which was aware of Allan’s movements between Spanish cities. It is unlikely that Sorensen would have had access to any of the resources provided by large news agencies like AP or Reuters: New Commonwealth, like the Daily Clarion, did not source stories from large news agencies the way that mainstream Canadian papers did (See Case Study One), and neither Sorensen, Watts, or Allan worked for AP or Reuters, although Allan did have some affiliation with the Federated Press.[16] Similarly, Sorensen probably does not refer to a dedicated press office of the newspaper he worked for, as New Commonwealth was a mouthpiece of the Co-operative Commonwealth Foundation of Canada (CCF), a political party that would later become the New Democratic Party. This domestic Canadian organization is unlikely to have dedicated personnel in Spain to support journalists. The Agence Espagne seems the most likely candidate to have provided this support to Sorensen, and the Spanish Republican news agency’s possible remit to support journalists and newspapers sympathetic to the Republican cause is a fruitful area of future research.

Since Watts did not have the same level of support as Sorensen when in Spain, it is likely that resources for journalists dwindled as the war went on. Sorensen arrived in Spain significantly earlier than Watts, Allan, Gellhorn, or Hemingway; by the time Watts and Allan arrived in February of 1937, Sorensen had already left journalism to work with the Mobile Blood Transfusion Unit. There may simply have been more resources available to the international press earlier in the war. Agence Espagne did employ its own writers, Hungarian-British journalist Arthur Koestler and American journalist William Forrest were some of the first among them and both writers would become famous for their reportage (Pike 299). The agency’s alignment with Republican Spain may have prompted it to provide support for journalists more generally. Future study of the nature and availability of support for foreign correspondents in Spain, particularly how it changed over time, may shed new light on the wide variety of experiences of journalists in the Spanish Civil War.

Similarly to Sorensen and in contrast to Allan, Watts found it relatively easy to travel to Spain. Once in Spain, however, her mobility seems significantly more limited than that of her counterparts. It is this limited mobility that Watts cites as the causal factor in the end of her journalistic career. In the interview from the late 1960s, Watts explains to her interviewer that she eventually had to leave the Blood Transfusion Unit:

Well I moved out, you see, as the war removed itself further from Madrid, it was impossible for me to really function as a correspondent. And I very much wanted to stay. So I moved out to find myself a job in the censorship bureau. I was actually working with the ministry. (13:00)

Watts could not follow the war once it moved further away from Madrid. She did not have access to a car the way that Sorensen did. Given that Watts immediately visited Agence Espagne when she arrived in France, she was clearly willing to seek out support for her work. Likewise, her eventual employment as an ambulance driver demonstrates that she was capable of driving a vehicle in Spain. It seems, then, that the resources to allow her to continue as a journalist, and resources that were granted to Sorensen earlier in the war, were no longer available, or perhaps not available to Watts.

Watts would eventually find her lack of mobility frustrating enough that she would give up journalism, working instead for the censorship bureau where she held a “9 to 5 or longer job censoring the correspondents’ material in English, and also in French” (13:39). Although this position seems at odds with Watts’s history of political commitment and strong desire to go to Spain, the fact that it was “impossible for [her] to really function as a correspondent” communicates that she may have had little other option than to find what employment was available to her. She gives no account of why she then chose to become an ambulance driver, but it may have signified a return to political commitment in her participation in the war. Watts made her initial decision to work as a correspondent for the Daily Clarion in light of her knowledge that the Brigades would not allow her to enlist while still in Canada. By contrast, she may have perceived that the Brigades in Spain were more likely to be receptive to women enlisting. At this point, the International Brigades may have offered for Watts a mode of participation true to her original purposes as correspondent. When Watts left Spain in 1938, she had no funds of her own on which to depend, finding herself stranded in Paris and calling her family to wire emergency funds. It seems, then, that when Watts left in 1938 there may not have been resources to repatriate International Brigadiers.[17] If resources for journalists dwindled as the war progressed, resources for Brigadiers may have dwindled as well.

In contrast to Sorensen’s and Watts’s narratives, Allan’s account of Spain concentrates less on the logistics of his work there, and more on his interactions with famous figures like Bethune and Hemingway. Determining how Allan managed to navigate in Spain, then, requires some speculation. Allan does not express a comparable frustration to Watts about his ability to navigate in Spain, despite the fact that his contributions to the Daily Clarion and New Frontier would all be published within a two-month timeframe, the latest of which appeared in December 1937. Allan had a significantly shorter tenure with the Clarion than Watts’s term of almost one year. At first glance, this shortened tenure suggests that Allan may have experienced some barriers to his journalistic output. However, he may have had alternate sources of support: either private transportation through the community of writers built up around Hemingway, or support offered through the International Brigades.

It seems that Allan, much like journalists Gellhorn and Matthews, sometimes made use of the private transportation offered by Hemingway. Privately owned vehicles offered a consistent source of transportation, and fuelled the careers of Gellhorn, Matthew, and Hemingway. All three were part of a coterie of writers that reached a legendary status. Hemingway and the group of writers he would gather around him became famous in Spain, and Hemingway was particularly well known for his collegiality; Allan would be one of the writers who benefitted from Hemingway’s generosity. Sorensen describes Hemingway’s collegiality in negative terms:

I found my journalist colleagues, frankly, to be bastards. They would sit drinking whiskey during the day, playing poker at night, then visiting the press office at four o’clock to get their handout, from which they would cook up a story, most of it false, and send it off….[They], by and large, were cynical and liars, and that goes for such giants as Hemingway and Dos Passos who were basically cowards and whose experience and history in Spain has been falsified by history. (qtd. in Gerassi 104)

What Sorensen viewed as the negative qualities of the journalist community that developed around Hemingway—drunkenness that accompanied laziness, falsification, and, implicitly, a political and moral failure on the part of these journalists—contrasts with the narratives of those journalists who enjoyed Hemingway’s company and generosity. For example, James Benet, an American combatant and occasional contributor to the New Republic, describes the reputation that Hemingway gained for generosity and camaraderie with other writers. Benet notes that he and other writers “used to visit Hemingway fairly regularly” (qtd. in Gerassi 175) at the Hotel Florida on Hemingway’s invitation, where Hemingway would provide alcohol for his visitors. Benet recalls,

I liked Hemingway. I thought he was a genuine fellow. But perhaps, looking back, I liked him more because I felt he liked us, the American volunteers.…Anyway, it was perhaps because I was a journalist myself that my affinity with Hemingway was better than most. (qtd. in Gerassi 175)

In contrast to Sorensen’s disdain, Benet provides a perspective from within that community: Benet responds positively to Hemingway’s fame, generosity, and collegiality in Spain, feeling a particular “affinity” with the famous writer as one journalist to another.

Like Benet, Allan would spend considerable amount of time in Hemingway’s company and hospitality. Norman Allan’s account of Allan’s experience as foreign correspondent alludes to a “who’s who” of literary personalities associated with the Spanish Civil War. According to Norman Allan, his father “split his time between working with Bethune at the Blood Transfusion Unit, and living the life of a war correspondent in the besieged city. Madrid, the centre of the world. Rubbing shoulders with Hemingway, Dos Passos: ‘everyone but Shakespeare’” (Allan, Chap. 1). Sorensen’s, Benet’s, and Allan’s narratives corroborate on some major points: that Hemingway was particularly generous with other writers, and that his generosity built a community of journalists near Madrid. Allan’s unofficial biography does not mention how he travelled between the Blood Transfusion Unit and Madrid, but it is possible that Allan may either have benefitted from his acquaintance with Hemingway or may have built up a community of other writers upon whom he could depend.

Allan’s interactions with Gellhorn give some clues as to some of his other means of transportation in Spain. Gellhorn, one of only a handful of female journalists reporting on the conflict in Spain (See Case Study Four), provides an example of a journalist whose developing career depended in part on Hemingway’s willingness to drive her around Spain.[18] In their accounts of Gellhorn’s time in Spain, neither Gellhorn nor her biographer, Caroline Moorehead, mention any material support from Collier’s, the magazine to which she contributed, but Moorehead does relate that Gellhorn would drive around Spain with such other journalists as Hemingway and Matthews. In late March 1937, Allan was travelling from Valencia to Madrid in a car, which Constancia de la Mora, who was “in charge of the government press bureau” (Allan, Chap 1), requested that Allan share with Gellhorn and famed American bull fighter Sidney Franklin. According to Allan, de la Mora told him that Gellhorn “had just arrived and didn’t know too much about the war, so Constancia asked [him] to brief her on policy matters” (Allan qtd. in Allan, Chap. 1). When Allan, Gellhorn, and Franklin arrived in Madrid, Allan would meet Hemingway for the first time, and would rarely see Hemingway without Gellhorn. Allan’s interactions with Gellhorn, his journey with her in a shared car that may have been organized by the Foreign Press Office, and her constant presence during his interactions with Hemingway and the community of writers built up around him suggest that, like Gellhorn, Allan may have sometimes depended on Hemingway’s private transportation. A model of access to transportation and support emerges here: journalists without means are transported, and possibly materially supported, by literary writers or journalists who did have resources. Further, journalists may have had to cobble together their resources. This model of access could expose some of the underlying economics of journalism in Spain.

In addition to this ad hoc, private access to support, Allan may have had access to further resources through the Brigades; as the contradictions in his unofficial biography indicate that he may have been a Brigadier, this connection may have provided additional support. The car that de la Mora requested that Allan share with Gellhorn is the only allusion to the logistics of travel that Allan makes and there is very little evidence in Allan’s biography of how he accessed resources. Furthermore, it is unclear whether the Foreign Press Office organized the car or whether de la Mora was simply aware that it might carry an extra passenger. What support he may have expected from the International Brigades is also unclear: there are enough contradictions in his narrative to suggest that he may or may not have been a Brigadier, and there is little evidence of the kind of support that the Brigades may have offered its foreign correspondents. However, de la Mora’s awareness of transportation resources suggests that there may have been resource sharing amongst organizations during the war, and, as a result, that Allan may have drawn from multiple sources to navigate in Spain.

Allan’s, Sorensens’s and Watts’s accounts of their mobility in Spain differ greatly. But the relationship between that mobility and any of the writers’ journalistic output and tenure with their respective newspapers was far from straightforward. In fact, the journalist with the most institutional support, Sorensen, would have the smallest output and the shortest tenure. Ted Allan, the journalist with some institutional support and some private support would have moderate output and equally middling tenure, but would seem to care little in retrospect for the details and logistics of his time in Spain; the camaraderie of writers in Hemingway’s coterie would be an impetus in Allan’s recollections of the war to romanticize that literary community, while Sorensen would be disdainful of the community’s cliquishness and political irresponsibility. Watts, the most concerned and constrained by a lack of resources, would have the greatest journalistic output and the longest tenure with her newspaper. With the fewest resources, Watts’s accomplished the greatest journalistic contribution.

Conclusion

The variety of experiences amongst Hemingway, Gellhorn, Allan, Sorensen, and Watts speaks to the wide range of resources upon which writers of the Spanish Civil War drew, and the uneven and fluctuating access to those resources. Watts and Allan both had short tenures with the Daily Clarion, Allan more so than Watts. However, no record exists of whether Allan felt restricted in Spain and whether he felt his writing suffered. When Watts was able to access resources, it seems to have been in order to travel to Spain, and then to work or volunteer in non-journalistic capacities. Sorensen, who seems to have received the most support from press organizations of all three writers, would leave journalism in favour of a form of participation he perceived to be more honestly committed to the Spanish Republican cause. The three Canadian journalists had very different experiences navigating in Spain, and narrated their experiences differently. Sorensen’s account concentrates on his observations in Spain and his decisions based on moral commitment; Watts’s account concentrates on her work, citing transportation primarily as a barrier; Allan narrates his interactions with famous journalists and writers rather than his journalistic output, an approach that obscures the source of material support upon which he drew in Spain.

Watts’s narrativization of her experience provides another paradox. In her interview, she does not concentrate on the celebrity reputations of other writers she interacted with, nor does she cultivate a romantic journalistic persona, unlike Allan’s notes and biography that are actively invested in establishing a journalistic and literary persona for him. Watts instead concentrates on the logistics of her experience. However, as Case Study Three demonstrates, Watts was no stranger to a literary celebrity discourse; the Daily Clarion depended on the mechanisms of celebrity in order to advertise and describe her work as a foreign correspondent for the newspaper. There are multiple possible explanations for the paradox that Watts’s account offers us. Watts may, on one hand, have simply been responding to the needs of her interviewer, who was looking for factual information about Bethune. On the other hand, Watts in her later years may not have been as invested in the dynamics of celebrity that framed her short writing career. Further still, Watts may not have perceived a place for herself within a discourse of literary and journalistic celebrity, despite how the newspaper may have figured her. In conversation with her interviewer, Watts expressed embarrassment about her writing, “sure they’d be most embarrassingly inept reading” (33:50). Watts’s retrospective account of her journalism hints at the underlying gendered networks of memory, celebrity, and journalism that she may have felt most painfully in her limited access to material support, transportation, and other resources.

Even if Watts does not see a place for herself within the framework of journalistic celebrity, recent scholarship has demonstrated that women’s journalism and engagement in journalistic celebrity was a distinct cultural force in the twentieth century. Models for female journalistic celebrity exist as early as the nineteenth century “girl-reporter,” Nellie Bly, and the First World War saw several examples of highly public female journalistic voices (See Case Study Three). However, scholars locate a golden age of female war correspondence in the Second World War, after Watts’s active writing career. However, as the next case study shows, women writers in the Spanish Civil War were an important cultural precedent to this golden age. If Watts did not find a community of female journalists comparable to the journalistic and literary boy’s club that grew up around Hemingway, she was still engaged in the groundbreaking work of becoming one of the first women to occupy the role of war correspondent. And, perhaps more importantly, she was one of the first women to become famous for it in her own time.

Case Study Three: Jean Watts and the Daily Clarion

As the confusion in Jean Watts’s and Ted Allan’s convoluted appointments as foreign correspondents demonstrates, communication amongst Communist Party of Canada (CPC) leadership, Brigades leadership in Spain, and editorial leadership in the Daily Clarion was not always clear. Neither were the goals of these various offices aligned while they fought and publicized the war in Spain (See Case Study Two). Watts’s frustration at her lack of mobility in Spain is a symptom of this underlying confusion. As I demonstrated in the previous case study, however, Watts still produced the largest body of journalistic work of any Canadian foreign correspondent employed directly by a leftist Canadian news outlet. Contemporary criticism has, by and large, dismissed Watts’s writing, even when those critics are sympathetic to Watts’s place in history. Close analysis of Watts’s work for the Daily Clarion gives clear evidence against the premises of this dismissal, demanding that critics evaluate the richness of her contribution to Spanish Civil War journalism and the seriousness with which the Daily Clarion treated her contributions.

Watts’s journalistic work is significant both for its stylistic achievements and for its marketable utility to the Daily Clarion. In this case study, I analyze the relationship between the stylistic aspects of Watts’s journalism and the prominent position her writing occupied on the page of the Clarion. First, Watts’s writing at times conforms to the stylistics of “public relations” (Watts 0:46), but it also breaks away from that role. She developed a style of reportage that combines the discomfort of wartime Spain with the unifying struggle against fascism. In comparison with canonical perspectives on the Spanish Civil War such as that of George Orwell, Watts’s journalism adeptly navigates the coexistence of hope and despair in Spain. Second, Watts’s perspectives became a readily marketable feature of the newspaper, warranting prominent placement both within the pages of the newspaper and in its advertisements and features on newspaper staff. The Canadian editorial apparatus perceived Watts’s writing as an important and marketable perspective on the conflict.

A primary criticism of Watts’s writing and of the Daily Clarion in general has been that these cultural products are propagandistic, simply mouthpieces for the political interests of the CPC. What this case study suggests, however, is that these propagandistic functions do not exclude potential literary journalistic merit. Instead, they expose the fact that all publication and engagement in a literary and journalistic marketplace is structured by implicit political stances. The politically intense environment of 1930s Canada is no exception. In addition, it demonstrates that literary journalism can be a literature of commitment. In Canadian literary criticism, examples of literature of commitment like Dorothy Livesay’s political prose and poetry have been cast aside as holding little merit and less literary because she makes no attempt to hide her politics. To take a literature of commitment seriously is therefore an important critical move within the study of Canadian literary history.

Watts as "Public Relations Person"

In an interview in the late 1960s, Watts describes her role at the Daily Clarion as one of a “public relations person” (Watts 0:46). Watts’s description of this role seems to a certain extent accurate. The Clarion did, indeed, look to send a journalist in a public relations role to Spain. Around the time Watts went to Spain, Dr. Norman Bethune, the founder of the Canadian Blood Transfusion Unit and innovator of mobile technology for blood transfusion,[19] had alienated many Spanish doctors and would soon do so to fellow Canadian volunteers and International Brigadiers like Allan and Henning Sorensen.[20] Bethune was still the face of international Canadian leftism, and he was frequently and prominently featured in the Clarion. Maintaining his positive reputation was imperative for public relations and, by extension, funding drives for the Communist Party of Canada.

Watts’s writing at times conforms to this public relations role. Her articles frequently concentrate on the positive achievements of the Blood Transfusion Unit, and she attributes those achievements to international collaboration and the financial generosity of the Daily Clarion readership and the members of the CPC.[21] The public relations goal of much of Watts’s writing is most evident when she reports directly on the activities of the Blood Transfusion Unit and Bethune’s achievements within it. However, Watts also states in an interview from the late 1960s that her “scope was as wide as [she] wanted” (Watts 0:56)—presumably referring to the range of topics she could cover, rather than a geographical range—and much of her writing develops a style of reportage that integrates blunt detail and narrativized perspectives on civilian and military life. The apparent contradiction between the breadth of Watts’s scope in reporting and her role as a public relations writer is reflected in a body of work that addresses multiple goals. Her writing promotes a positive public image for the Blood Transfusion Unit, but it also develops a distinct style of reportage.

A portion of Watts’s writing conforms to a public relations function. In a front-page article entitled “Doctor Bethune’s Unit Reorganized Covers All Fronts: Project Given Official Stamp of Ministry of War” written shortly after Watts’s arrival in Spain (3 March 1937), Watts communicates positive achievements on the part of the Mobile Blood Transfusion Unit. This article represents a clear example of public relations writing in several ways. It attributes the unit’s achievements to the financial generosity of the Canadian people, asserts that the need for further generosity is ongoing, and suggests that financial generosity unites Canadian citizens, labour for leftist causes, and the Spanish struggle. Her writing also masks the growing tensions between Bethune and his Spanish colleagues by concentrating on forward-looking collaboration and cooperation between Bethune and the Spanish doctors. It aligns the achievements of the Blood Transfusion Unit with the unity amongst military volunteers. It equates the medical and the military for a CPC readership that would likely have understood militarism as part of its political identity.

I will take up these aspects of Watts’s public relations role in turn, starting with the way in which this article attributes the achievements of the Blood Transfusion Unit to the financial generosity of the Canadian people. The article describes the reorganization and expansion of the Blood Transfusion Unit with particular attention to how the support of the Canadian people has enabled these changes:

Valencia, Spain, March 2.—The Canadian blood transfusion service headed by Dr. Norman Bethune was reorganized today to extend to all fronts of the Spanish war with a control board of two Spanish doctors and the Canadian medical man.

The project, bearing the official stamp of the war ministry, represents a positive achievement in international cooperation. It followed Doctor Bethune’s return from Paris and renewed activity in the blood transfusion work.

With equipment bought in Paris, a new development in blood transfusion is now predicted. Hospitals are now installing frigidaires in all main centres—15 on the Madrid front, 17 on the Aragon front—with the objective of installing 50 in the near future.

Canada’s Work

The reorganization is the direct result of the generosity of the Canadian workers, whose contribution is greatly appreciated here. Each dollar from Canada is saving the life of one anti-fascist fighter.

Leave For Front

The Bethune unit now has six cars operating on the Madrid front and the government is undertaking additions. More Canadian money is needed, however, for technical equipment and food. (3 Mar. 1937)

Watts’s article structures the relationship amongst financial donation, the anti-fascist struggle, and international politics as the context into which Canadian philanthropy fits. The success of the Mobile Blood Transfusion Unit results from the financial generosity of working-class Canadians. In the article, financial donation does not simply equate to support. Instead it is equivalent to “Canada’s Work.” By referring to financial generosity as work, the article evokes the labour-based values of the CPC, for which the Daily Clarion acted as a mouthpiece. It suggests that the donations of the Canadian people to the Spanish cause are not charity, but a labour in the service of leftist politics on an international scale. Indeed, for many Marxist-identified members of the CPC, charity would have gone against a more radical belief in equal distribution of wealth. The temporary and discretionary nature of charitable giving contradicts the classical Marxist goal of eventual, total societal change.

Although the article does not explicitly mention the communist values that many of the volunteers would have held—and that the subscribers to the Daily Clarion presumably also held—the article’s reference to “anti-fascist” fighters targets a common fascist opponent. Anti-fascism was a unifying force amongst supporters of the fledgling Spanish democracy across the political spectrum. The article’s appeal to the Canadian working class, then, positions Canadian financial donation as a particularly important labour in the defeat of fascism, a labour that would unite Canadian communist politics with international and Spanish leftism, both communist and democratic.

Against the backdrop of this call for Canadian financial support as a labour integral to the success of the Spanish cause, the article’s core argument is that Norman Bethune is engaging in peaceful collaboration with Spanish doctors and the Spanish government. In contrast to this representation, at this point in the civil war Bethune’s relationships with Spanish doctors were largely sour. Watts accomplished quite a bit of public relations ‘spin’. The article’s focus on a “positive achievement in international cooperation” corroborates Watts’s description of herself as a “public relations person,” providing a positive valence to forward-looking collaboration between Bethune and the anonymous Spanish doctors. The title and article indicate that the expansion is approved by the Spanish “Ministry of War.” Canadian medical efforts appear to be aligned with the Spanish government’s desires: the article states that official governing bodies of the Spanish Republic approve of and, implicitly, rely upon Canadian humanitarian interventions in Spain. The article omits the considerable tensions that had developed between Bethune and the Spanish doctors, and instead asserts that now that Bethune has returned from Paris, the unit will forge ahead with a renewed collaborative expansion.

One of the primary mechanisms by which Watts’s writing achieves its public relations goals is through the elision of the specific politics and allegiances of the soldiers and medical volunteers it features. In this vein, the article’s theme of collaboration between Canada and Spain takes on a militaristic valence that aligns with the values of the CPC. It suggests that the successes of the Canadian people through the medical and humanitarian apparatus of the Blood Transfusion Unit are part and parcel with the militaristic nature of communist political identity. The article concludes with a section describing the “splendid unity” of the new volunteers for the Spanish cause:

Splendid Unity

The recruiting and training of fighters is going well under a unified command. The splendid unity was clearly demonstrated this week in Barcelona when 5,000 new troops marched behind the republican flag without a single party banner.

With good equipment and uniforms now being supplied, the young-worker officers being trained behind the lines have a fine soldierly appearance and will strengthen the government forces tremendously.

(3 Mar. 1937)

This segment of the article does not mention medical equipment or expansion of blood transfusion facilities across Spain. Instead, it refers to “good equipment and uniforms now being supplied” (3 Mar. 1937). These uniforms were likewise possible, it implies, because of Canadian financial generosity. By appending this section to the rest of the article, the text elides any distinction there may be in the funding streams for medical and military intervention. It equates the support of military and medical ventures.

In an additional elision, the segment erases the marks of identity that would align soldiers with any political interests that would give clues to their national origins or identities: the “5,000 new troops [march] behind the republican flag without a single party banner.” The new recruits are unified in the military support of the Spanish Republic, and such unification allows them to shed other political and national affiliations. Given that the article sets out to depict a positive collaboration between Canadian and Spanish representatives, working against the underlying unrest between the two parties, these elisions—of the financial distinction between the medical and the military and of the national and political identities of the new troops—expand the definition of unity across the spectrum of participants in the Spanish Civil War.

This segment seems at first to locate the unifying cause for Spanish Civil War volunteers to be the defence of the Spanish Republic, a democratically elected body. But its underlying argument is that Canadians in Canada are to thank for this unity. That is, the successful integration of new troops in addition to the expansion of the medical facilities in Spain is due to communist political intervention on the part of individual, working-class Canadians. As “[e]ach dollar from Canada is saving the life of one anti-fascist fighter” (3 Mar. 1937), and the unity of marching under the flag of the Spanish Republic depend on the generosity of communists in Canada. In her public relations role, Watts aligns Canadian generosity with the goals of the mouthpiece of the CPC, claiming the success of the Spanish war efforts for workers in Canada.

Watts’s articles frequently conclude with an appeal for further funds from Canadian readers. This appeal echoes the newspaper’s general tendency to undertake funding drives for causes chosen by the CPC. For example, in “Says Science Must Aid Spain: Dr. Mueller Joins Bethune Medical Unit; Great Service Rendered” (22 Mar 1937), Watts reports on renowned geneticist Dr. Herman J. Mueller’s decision to join the Canadian Mobile Blood Transfusion Unit. The article argues that the advances of science may be best spent in order to aid the preservation of civilization. The article appends a section entitled “Canadian Support” that appeals for continued financial support for the Canadian medical intervention in Spain: “Adequate apparatus is guaranteed by the continued support of the Canadian people. Dr. Bethune is confident that great credit will accrue to Canadians” (22 Mar 1937). The section further echoes the argument that financial generosity is tantamount to labour in the international militaristic cause, as the installation of such equipment as “a blood refrigerator that Canadian dollars supplied” across front-line hospitals in Spain constitutes a “magnificent demonstration of international working class unity” (22 Mar. 1937).

Another front-page article contains no direct appeals for the Spanish cause. However, what literary critic George Bornstein calls the “bibliographic code”—the way that the “iconicity of the page [communicates] important aspects of a text’s meaning” (Bornstein 6)—relates Watts’s articles to appeals for funding outside of her own writing. Attending to the arrangement of the page, the “semantic features of its material instantiations [or] (its bibliographic code)” (Bornstein 6), results in a reading practice that attends to the “features of page layout, book design, ink and paper, and typeface as well as… ‘the sociology of texts’” (Bornstein 7). For example, the Daily Clarion’s bibliographic code places Watts’s article, “Fascist Shells Slay Civilians of Madrid” (21 May 1937), in very close proximity to two articles that announce future and past funding events for the newspaper, “Communist Party Issues 5-Point Program for Spanish Aid Week, May 30—June 9” and “Who Did What In the Clarion Drive.” Watts’s section titles “Always Blood” and “Slaughter of Innocents” are printed in bold typeface (See Figure One). They directly abut a list, also in bold typeface, of five objectives for the Spanish cause, “the main objective the raising of $2,500 to provide an ambulance of the Canadian Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion now fighting with the International Brigade on the Madrid front.” Immediately next to these objectives is the list of monies donated, organized by province, city and such organizations as “Hungarian Worker’s Club,” the “Young Communist League” and the “Milk Drivers’ Union.” These organizations are largely unions, demonstrating the leftist syndicalist readership on which the Daily Clarion counted for monetary support. Although Watts’s article does not contain an explicit appeal to the Clarion readership, the bibliographic code of the newspaper page aligns Watts’s journalism with the goals of the Spanish Aid Week and the general funding drives of the newspaper. The layout of the page subsumes Watts’s writing to the motivations of the newspaper.

[Figure One: Front page and bibliographic code of Daily Clarion, 21 May 1937.]

There is plenty of evidence in the Daily Clarion to support Watts’s description of herself as a public relations person. Watts’s stylistic choice to elide the individual political identities of medical and militaristic Spanish Civil War volunteers supports her depiction of a “splendid unity” (3 Mar. 1937) amongst the Spanish and international participants. This elision implicitly casts these unified participants as unified in their communist politics, even though the political reality may have been much more complicated. In turn, this political unity allows Watts to argue that Canadian financial support to the Daily Clarion (and the Communist International by extension) plays a major role in the success of the Spanish war effort—whether that success is military or medical. Even at times when Watts does not explicitly write copy that may be used for public relations purposes, it is difficult to escape the explicit political leanings of the newspaper. The placement of Watts’s writing within the bibliographic code of a Communist newspaper argues for the alignment of her writing with the paper’s politics, potentially in contradiction to the content of her articles. If scholars have tended to dismiss Watts’s journalism as propagandistic writing, the mechanisms of the bibliographic code may have fuelled this dismissal. While some of Watts’s writing certainly does read as promotional public relations work, I will now demonstrate how her body of work was, in fact, more complex.

Watts as Anti-Fascist

The content of Watts’s articles at times stands apart from her public relations role. I bring this nuance to light by comparing Watts to more canonical literary authors like George Orwell. In an article describing Watts’s arrival in Spain, “Clarion Correspondent Sees Spain Rebuilding In Midst of Warfare” (3 Mar. 1937), Watts’s descriptions are vivid and multisensory. She describes the hopefulness of Valencia in similar terms to those that Orwell would describe the atmosphere of Barcelona early in the war. Watts was in Spain shortly after Orwell, and their descriptions of Valencia and Madrid represent similar moments in the conflict. As I compare these two writers, it becomes clear that each uses similar stylistic strategies in order to reach divergent goals. Orwell wishes to set up Barcelona as a straw-man. The city may seem to be an ideal instance of a fledgling Communism, but Orwell uses this optimism as a foil to his own disillusionment with the politics of the Spanish Civil War. By contrast, Watts does not entertain idealism for the sake of framing any political or historical lessons. Instead, it communicates the ambiguities and unpleasantness of war.

The imagery of war-time iconography is a primarily stylistic means by which Watts and Orwell accomplish the vivid descriptions that characterize their writing. In Homage to Catalonia (1938),[22] Orwell describes his arrival in Barcelona in December 1936, a mere two months before Watts’s arrival in Madrid by way of Valencia, as though he landed in a “startling and overwhelming” communist idyll. “It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle,” he writes:

Practically every building of any size had been seized by workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties… Every shop and café had an inscription saying that it had been collectivised; even the bootblacks had been collectivised and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said ‘Señor’ or ‘Don’ or even ‘Usted’; everyone called everyone else ‘Comrade’ and ‘Thou’, and said ‘Salud’ instead of ‘Buenos días’. (32)

Part of what Orwell finds startling and overwhelming about this newly collectivized Barcelona is the visual impact of political iconography. The “hammer and sickle” and the various flags of communist and anarchist parties indicate the ideological takeover of Barcelona. The visual economy of the city declares the communist values of equality and collectivism to be the values on which daily life operates. Further, Orwell’s description allows for a variety of visible political commitments. The anarchist black and red flies alongside the communist red. The coffee shop workers, shop-walkers, and bootblacks have collectivized of their own accord. The existence of anarchist groups and syndicalist organizations seems, in fact, to be a marker of this brand of communist idealism: a multiplicity of political allegiances are possible, so long as they fit under the umbrella of communist-informed, classless egalitarianism. Orwell’s Barcelona communicates an ideal leftist and anarchist politics through the visual language of political iconography, the egalitarian spoken language of its citizens, and the uniting communist ethos that underlies these displays of political allegiance.

Watts’s writing treats the working-class neighbourhoods and subjects of Valencia as fascinating topics equal to Orwell’s exploration of the ostensibly egalitarian and communist Barcelona. She similarly draws upon political iconography. Anti-fascist posters line the streets of Valencia: “Yet every wall and fence is plastered with great posters. Here is a picture of a worker stabbing an enormous serpent with a swastika on its side. Here is a black-robed figure scattering swastikas in a field covered with graves of the dead” (3 Mar. 1937). While Orwell draws upon iconography of an instated communist society, Watts’s use of imagery communicates that the fight against a common fascist enemy is the unifying factor, rather than any communist new world order. The iconography in Watts’s Valencia employs its vivid iconography in the service of depicting and warning against the Fascist enemy.

In addition, Watts’s Valencia teems with human activity, as she describes “[h]otels [that] are crowded to overflowing. One after another explain that there is no room, that even the bathrooms have been used to put beds into… Crammed into six or seven rooms live more than a dozen people” (3 Mar. 1937). Orwell’s Barcelona is similarly full of people, but for Orwell these individuals seem to exist primarily in order to demonstrate the takeover of egalitarian language and attitudes. For Watts, this concentration of individuals communicates the hardships of a war effort that has displaced people from their comfortable, isolated homes. For both Orwell and Watts, vibrant imagery of political posters and ephemera in addition to depictions of urban centres overflowing with people characterize their first impressions of Spanish cities. Watts, however, uses these representations and images in order to lay bare the discomforts and dangers of civil war.

Orwell’s descriptions portray a hopeful, perhaps unrealistically so, Barcelona. Watts’s Valencia, by contrast, is tempered by the realist portrayals of lived realities of wartime. Watts describes the blackouts in effect in Valencia:

Promptly at nine o’clock at night all lights are extinguished. The streets are deserted except for a few stray pedestrians armed with flashlights. Occasionally official cars rush by with their lights dimmed. Tramcars run with only a dim green light inside. Shutters are down everywhere, the city is dead. Such precautions are necessary, since only a few nights ago fascist planes paid a visit, dropping a few bombs and killing a dozen people. Yesterday their funeral procession passed quietly through the streets. (3 Mar. 1937)

While Watts’s Valencia in the daylight is colourful and crowded, offering plenty of bustle and distraction from the war effort at hand, Valencia at night has no human activity or political ephemera to mask the exigencies of war. Instead, the city is dark except for “stray pedestrians” presumably on their way to shelter, and the lights only of official cars and dimmed trams. The blackout is not simply a precaution; the funeral processions during the day attest to the necessity of blackouts to preserve human life against fascist bomb campaigns. Watts’s Valencia is keenly aware of the darker aspects of civil war, even during the heady, optimistic days of the conflict.

It is this awareness of loss that distinguishes Watts’s writing. To draw again on Orwell as a point of contrast, Orwell’s Barcelona is hopeful to a fault. The city provides a backdrop for the later betrayals of the Soviet Union against international leftist movements that looked to the Soviets as an example of non-capitalist, anti-fascist political life. The duplicitous actions of the International Brigades leadership, particularly against political units like Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM) provide historical context for the keenly felt betrayal that Orwell describes. He depends on an idealistic portrayal of an equally idealistic international cooperation in the service of the Spanish Republic. That idealism renders all the more cutting the Soviet Union’s targeted ostracization of perceived political dissidents, and bolsters Orwell’s disillusionment with Soviet politics.

Watts’s journalistic perspectives forego Orwell’s Manichean approach. Her depiction of Valencia is so visceral in part due to the fact that the iconography of propaganda posters and the proximity of human bodies are unpleasant. To return to her description of the makeshift hotels, “crowded to overflowing,” she finds that “even the bathrooms have been used to put beds into” and that “[p]rivacy is impossible” (3 Mar. 1937). Her description communicates her own difficulty finding somewhere to sleep for the night, as only “[a]fter hours of search, [she] found a room, four feet by eight without a window.” Watts comments that the young children preparing their geography lessons will be “undoubtedly disturbing” to her even though they may find their lessons “stimulating.” Similarly, the “great posters” that provide imagery in Watts’s description are violent, relying on the threat of death for their visual impact: the “enormous serpent with a swastika on its side” represents an insidious political threat, acknowledging the Nazi support underlying the Spanish rebel forces. The “black-robed figure scattering swastikas in a field covered with graves of the dead” reinforces the descriptions of funeral processions of bombing victims that have marched through Valencia that very day.[23] Reminders of death and unpleasant crowding and proximity are part and parcel with the imagery and vibrancy of Watts’s Valencia.

Watts’s descriptions neither set up an idealistic, united Valencia for rhetorical purposes, nor do they restrict themselves to describing hopeful and positive developments for a communist readership. In fact, what hope exists in her articles may be read as futile. For instance, Watts describes the new buildings being constructed in Valencia, asserting that “[t]he Spanish people are not waiting till the war is over before rebuilding their country. Construction goes on hand in hand with fascist destruction” (3 Mar. 1937). Her description of construction avoids facile assertions that the Spanish efforts will be successful, allowing for doubt to stand alongside hope in the indeterminate outcome “when the war is over.” Similarly, the phrase “fascist destruction” on one hand conveys that the fascists are the object of destruction. On the other, “fascist destruction” may mean the destruction that fascist bombing campaigns wreak on Spanish cities. In this second reading, the construction that comes “hand in hand” with fascist destruction requires that destruction to occur. It is as though fascist destruction could act as a regenerative force, a necessary evil to unify leftists against a common enemy. Watts’s use of the phrase “fascist destruction” communicates a deep ambivalence about the approaching end of the civil war. The paradoxical nature of wartime hope emerges in the nuance and ambivalence of Watts’s journalism.

This comparison between Watts and Orwell is only one small example of the literary value of Watts’s journalism. Despite the public relations role she describes as her remit with the Daily Clarion, Watts frequently employed similar rhetorical strategies to participants like George Orwell. Orwell understood his role in the conflict to be political critic and literary eye witness. Watts’s contribution to the Daily Clarion simultaneously occupied the role of public relations person and literary journalistic eye witness.

An Asset to the Paper

Watts acted both as literary journalist and as public relations person, and these roles may seem at first to contradict one another. However, literary journalistic writing does not exist independently of the politics and market interests of its publication venues. Watts’s writing is no exception, and the Daily Clarion editorial apparatus regarded Watts’s correspondence as a central feature of the newspaper. The newspaper communicates the political and economic utility of Watts’s writing and journalistic persona in two primary ways. First, in the day-to-day bibliographic code of the newspaper, the framing and formatting of Watts’s articles and announcements for her radio broadcasts set up her articles as a prominent and highly anticipated feature of the newspaper. Second, the newspaper featured Watts in occasional advertisments and profiles of the newspaper staff, demonstrating the marketing utility that Watts offered to the paper. For the Daily Clarion, Watts’s writing and image were use features for marketing purposes, as marketable as other contributors to the paper such as J.S. Wallace and Upton Sinclair. As Watts’s writing has been dismissed as propagandistic, it is important to elucidate the way that the paper did, indeed, draw upon Watts’s journalism as political material. Watts’s writing could serve the interests of the newspaper at the same time that it could claim literary journalistic merit in its own right.

The Clarion featured Watts’s writing prominently on a daily basis, arranging the bibliographic code in order to frame her articles and image as central features of the newspaper. Similarly to the way that the bibliographic code could align Watts’s writing with the larger political concerns of the Daily Clarion and its drives for donations from its readership, the bibliographic code can communicate how central the newspaper may have thought Watts’s image and reputation was to its readership. Such features as article headers, author images, and bylines construct a bibliographic code in which Watts figures as young, appealing, serious, close to the action, and an exclusive feature of the newspaper.

The small, framing paratextual details of Watts’s articles are examples of the bibliographic code of the newspaper form. For example, the headers of Watts’s articles indicate whether they were sent by wire or by mail.[24] Watts sent the majority of her articles by mail, particularly those that offer a more human-interest perspective on the conflict. Occasional articles, by contrast, were sent by wire, a faster and more costly mode of sending copy to the newspaper office. The article “Bethune Escapes Death: Deadly Fascist Machine-Gun Barrage Trained on Canadian Ambulance Unit at Guadalajara” (12 Mar. 1937) was sent by wire. This costly method of submitting stories to newspapers communicates a certain urgency to the story’s subject matter, and the diction of the story’s title corroborates this urgency: Bethune “Escapes Death” by a “Deadly Fascist Machine-Gun Barrage.” The title refers to the imminence of death twice. The article’s means of transmission also communicates that its content is time-sensitive; Watts’s eye-witness account of the incident must be relayed immediately to Canadian audiences. While Watts frequently provided human-interest stories sent by mail—a characteristic that may have prompted scholars to characterize Watts’s contribution as “what Canadian newspapers at the time would have described as the ‘women’s beat’” (Hannant 159)—her stories sent by wire figure her as a hard-hitting, on the scene reporter.

In addition to these small textual details that frame Watts’s articles, the newspaper prominently displayed Watts’s image with the majority of her articles. From late-March 1937 onwards, a headshot accompanies almost every article that Watts contributed to the Daily Clarion, most of which were featured within the first three pages of the newspaper (see Figure Two). Watts’s photograph portrayed her with short-cropped hair, a collar that evokes a soldier’s uniform, and a frank, forward-looking gaze. This photograph reflected much of the reputation that Watts cultivated as a journalist. Her dress was militaristic and androgynous, communicating her proximity to the conflict, and perhaps echoing her work in Theatre of Action,[25] in which she would play with gender binaries in avant-garde, socialist theatre productions. In a similarly militaristic style, her hair was slicked back, but it was still blonde, and its brightness contrasted with the dark, crowded page of newsprint. Watts’s image echoes the seriousness of the subject matter of her articles, acting as shorthand for the content of the pieces, cultivating a recognizable image that stands out across the serial publication of the newspaper.

[Figure Two: Jean Watts’s author image in the Daily Clarion.]

While Watts’s photograph communicates her seriousness and political commitment, it also portrays her as young and physically beautiful. As the Clarion would call her in advertisements, Watts was a “girl reporter.” This “girl reporter” role is not without precedent—journalists like American Nellie Bly would cultivate that role as early as the late-nineteenth century, and Watts had contemporary young female journalistic counterparts in American reporters like Martha Gellhorn and Virginia Cowles (See Case Study Three). What this youthful image may communicate is a kind of political idealism. Watts’s reportage was serious and distinct from the more overtly feminine images of women in the dedicated women’s pages.[26] Her frank gaze communicates energy and earnestness that may become worn away with age. Youth may also be key to excusing her unconventional choice to participate in the war. Specifically, as a young woman, she was not yet subject to the duties of motherhood. As a Mackenzie Papineau newsletter from 1948 notes, “Jean ‘Jim’ Watts Lawson[,] Spanish Veteran[,] drives a baby pram now instead of an ambulance” (qtd. in Hannant 162); motherhood would prevent any respectable woman from participating in the war. Furthermore, even though Watts was married to Lon Lawson, she travelled to Spain and published under her maiden name, eschewing the role as wife that could equally have prevented her from participating in the conflict.[27] Youthfulness, then, is an important part of Watts’s journalistic persona. It both excused her participation and provided a legible cultural role for Watts to play.

Another aspect of the bibliographic code, Watts’s byline, communicates the newspaper’s ownership of Watts’s writing. Watts’s byline read “Jean Watts, Our Madrid Correspondent,” and by April, her third month with the paper and only the second month in which her articles appear, the Clarion began publishing her image alongside her articles. The combination of the possessive “our” with the striking image of Watts’s face claimed the feature as particular to the newspaper.[28] As such, the newspaper leveraged the visual economy of the page and the possession of Watts’s writing to place itself in an international context. Unlike writers like Allan, whose articles the Clarion billed as a “Special to the Daily Clarion and the Federated Press” (26 Apr. 1937), communicating that his writing would appear in multiple venues, Watts’s writing was an international perspective exclusive to the newspaper.[29] In such small details as the byline, the Clarion presented Watts as their primary contact in Spain, treats her descriptions of the war as consequential first-hand accounts, and regarded her articles and her journalistic image to be central features of the newspaper.

Recognizability and exclusivity are linchpins of Watts’s value to the paper. The details of Watts’s byline and the image that accompanies her articles together establish Watts as a complex and versatile journalist. She writes both human interest stories and hard-hitting, urgent journalism. She is young, idealistic, serious, and energetic. She is a woman, but her youth allows her to participate in a dangerous conflict, and to access a sphere of public discourse off limits to many other, older women. She reports exclusively to the Clarion. The newspaper relies on the repetition of Watts’s image to act as shorthand for this reputation. And this shorthand then becomes central to the way that the newspaper markets itself to its current and prospective readership.

For example, a full-page advertisement from the Clarion on 1 April 1937 billed Watts among the six major selling points of the paper (see Figure Three). The advertisement lists six features of the newspaper that they anticipate will appeal to readers: 1) reports from “Around Union Halls”; 2) the “Sport Page”; 3) a serial publication of Upton Sinclair’s No Pasaran!; 4) reports from Pat Forkin, “the only Canadian resident correspondent in the Soviet Union”; 5) reports from Jean Watts; and 6) “Current Trends,” reports on international and national news from various sources.

[Figure Three: Advertisement in the Daily Clarion, 1 April 1937.]

The advertisers of the Clarion deemed Watts’s contribution to be among the top six selling points of the newspaper within only a couple months of her tenure with the paper. In this case, Watts’s name is placed on equal footing to Upton Sinclair, an internationally famous writer, and Pat Forkin, a journalist of significantly more experience. By the same token, these recognizable literary and journalistic monikers stand alongside the populist aspects of the paper. The entertainment of the “Sport Page” and the quotidian, community-based reportage of “Around Union Halls,” set up an expectation that the literary, the journalistic, and the populist will all be of interest to the Daily Clarion readership (See Case Study One). The advertisement supplements the presumed recognizability of Watts’s name with an animated description of her contributions to the paper. The description reads, “Clarion correspondent with the Loyalist forces on the battlefields of Spain. Here are the stark details of democracy writing free from the grasps of the fascist snake; stories of the International Brigade; the Bethune Medical Unit and the United Front of Spanish freedom” (1 April 1937). Watts’s reporting was expected to deliver on accounts of such wide-ranging aspects of the war as the “battlefields,” the International Brigades, and the Blood Transfusion Unit. When Jean Watts went to Spain as a foreign correspondent for the Daily Clarion, the paper regarded her as a marketable journalistic voice, one whose work allowed the paper to participate in an international journalistic field, and one whose perspectives on the Spanish Civil War could be leveraged in order to gain more subscribers.

In addition to advertisements for Daily Clarion subscriptions, the editorial apparatus also featured Watts as one of two women on staff, the only woman writing for the newspaper,[30] and a central member of the editorial team. One particular example is the fourteen-page 1937 May Day special issue.[31] Among those pages was a biographical feature on each of the newspaper’s primary staff writers and correspondents. Watts’s feature is entitled “Madrid Is Calling!” It emphasizes the communities of readers and listeners built up around Watts’s reporting:

Jean Watts is the girl who went to Spain several months ago as the Clarion’s correspondent, to supply first-hand information on the heroic fight of Spain’s people against fascist invasion. ‘That’s Jean Watts,’ people say as they listen in on shortwave radio to Madrid and hear the announcer’s voice, or are told the latest developments or hear an appeal for Doctor Bethune’s blood-transfusion organization…. One day she’s in Madrid; the next she may be in Valencia or at the front. She is probably the only Canadian girl gathering news in Spain. (1 May 1937)

Watts is “probably the only Canadian girl gathering news in Spain,” and, as communicated in the byline for her articles, this supposedly unique role is exclusive to the Daily Clarion. Uniqueness is an important aspect of Watts’s public image. She is, of course, not unique—she fits into a broader cultural category of the “girl reporter.” But the newspaper trades on a paradoxical perception that she is both unique and culturally recognizable. The feature reinforces Watts’s recognizability in its allusions to her radio broadcasts, describing a buzzing public response to Watts’s work. The supposed refrain, “That’s Jean Watts” and the description of Canadians gathering to tune into the same radio program represents a community of individuals and families invested in the activities of Canadians abroad and in the politics of Canadian and international communism. Watts’s writing and radio broadcasts are their point of entry to Canadian international politics. In its advertisements for the radio broadcast, the Clarion encouraged listeners to write in to Watts. Watts did, indeed, receive letters from her listeners, so the community imagined by these advertisements has some grounding in reality. Watts’s public image, constituted by her work in the Clarion and claimed by that paper, fostered a readership interested in her perspectives on the Spanish Civil War.

The small details of Watts’s byline, the inclusion of Watts alongside the other marketable aspects of the newspaper, the feature of Watts as a member of the writing staff, and the imaginative descriptions of her role in Spain work together to create a bibliographic code in which Watts’s writing and image are central features of the newspaper. If Watts is so centrally important to the newspaper, this centrality communicates some of the possible motivations of the paper’s editorial apparatus: the editorial apparatus saw Watts’s reporting to be an important draw. It anticipated that Watts would be appealing to its readership. The paper’s readership, then, may have been particularly receptive to gleaning news of a foreign conflict from a young, serious, politically committed woman, whose image would become recognizable shorthand for the content of her writing.

Conclusion

Watts’s contributions to the Clarion have been dismissed as unimportant. Watts herself was among the first to do this, characterizing her journalism as “colour stories” (Watts 4:45) and protesting that they must now be “most embarrassingly inept reading” (33:50). Fellow journalist Ted Allan claims that Watts’s appointment as journalist was merely a miscommunication. Historian Larry Hannant is sympathetic to Watts’s involvement in the war, but describes her as reporting on what may have been perceived as the “women’s beat” at the time (159). However, the prominence, content, and framing of her writing speak to the contemporaneous importance of her journalistic perspectives for both the Daily Clarion and for a community of Canadians who read her reports and tuned into her radio program. The visual and advertorial apparatus of the paper tells a story of Watts as well-billed, visually prominent foreign correspondent to the Spanish Civil War. Her work was filtered through her gendered role as the “only Canadian girl gathering news in Spain” (1 May 1937), but was also billed alongside the ostensibly serious male writers and contributors to the newspaper.

Watts occupied both the role of public relations person and of literary journalist. The ambivalence of her journalistic contributions emerges within the framework of her centrality and marketability to the newspaper. Within the bibliographic code of the newspaper, Watts is serious, young, politically motivated, and idealistic. It follows, then, that her double role as hard-hitting journalist and public relations person would match this journalistic persona. Her journalistic style also traded in this ambivalence. Watts’s reportage leveraged vivid, often uncomfortable imagery of human proximity and iconographic propaganda in order to develop a style that dwelled in the ambiguities of wartime Spain. This style of reportage could provide more nuanced depictions of the conflict than some of the more canonical perspectives on the war. If Watts’s writing sometimes conformed to the “public relations” role, it also needed to navigate the complexities of political allegiance in a highly fraught and fractious conflict. Duality and ambivalence characterize Watts’s writing and portrayal in the Daily Clarion. Watts’s would at times toe the Party line. But her writing was also steeped in the complex allegiances of war. The Daily Clarion’s portrayal of Watts in the paper lauded her as unique and claimed her for its own. It also traded on her recognizability in order to build a community of listeners and readers around her writing. Watts’s cultural impact as reporter and as recognizable public image must be the continued subjects of recovery—even this initial reading demonstrates her impact upon leftist Canadian textual production and news readership of the 1930s.

Watts may seem remarkable in a Canadian context. However, in the next case study I look for cognates in an international context. I will demonstrate that the constellation of youth, gender, and recognizability in journalism applies to such American writers as Martha Gellhorn and Virginia Cowles during the Spanish Civil War, and to multiple other female war correspondents in the first and second World Wars. Case Study Four takes up the work of situating Watts in this context and comparing her to Martha Gellhorn. The two women’s careers offer compelling parallels. Through this comparison, I move from understanding Watts in relation to other Canadian writers, in relation to male writers during the conflict, and within the context of the Daily Clarion and its navigation of a domestic Canadian readership. I begin to situate her work as part of an emerging trend: female war correspondents who developed a series of journalistic and self-fashioning strategies to navigate their surroundings during the conflict. Watts is remarkable, but this comparative work demonstrates that she is not an anomaly. Rather, her work is significant for how it is structured by and responds to the demands of her political moment.

Case Study Four: Jean Watts and Women's Spanish Civil War Journalism

Jean Watts’s contributions to Canadian journalism on the Spanish Civil War find cognates across the field of war journalism. I explore the Canadian context in the previous case study: Watts and fellow Canadian journalists Ted Allan and Henning Sorensen produced politically motivated journalism for small newspapers. Their work as journalists offers a counterpoint to a larger Canadian journalistic field in which large, mainstream newspapers increasingly depended on British and American news agencies like Reuters and Associated Press. By contrast, as I demonstrate in Case Study One, small newspapers like the Daily Clarion and the New Commonwealth, for which Watts, Allan, and Sorensen wrote, employed dedicated foreign correspondents to cover the war in Spain.

I now turn from the Canadian contexts of the previous case studies towards a broader international context. Watts shares striking similarities with female journalists and war correspondents, many of whose careers flourished during the Second World War, a conflict that broke out less than six months after the end of the Spanish Civil War. Other female journalists included Americans Helen Kirkpatrick who wrote for the New York Daily Herald and British papers the Manchester Guardian and the Daily Telegraph, Ruth Cowan who wrote for the Associated Press and the United Press, and Virginia Cowles[32] who wrote for the North American Newspaper Alliance and the Sunday Times of London. These women were engaged in the writing that would establish them as key journalistic figures of the twentieth century. In an obituary, British newspaper The Independent eulogizes Kirkpatrick as “one of the first and best American war correspondents in the Second World War” (8 Jan. 1988), the New York Times draws on contemporary journalist-historian, Julia Edwards, to praise Cowan as “one of the few women covering the really big stories” (qtd in New York Times 6 Feb. 1993), and the New York Times describes Cowles as “an American debutante who became a noted foreign correspondent and author” (20 Sept 1983). Female journalists became prominent historical figures, and such studies as Julia Edwards’s Women of the World: The Great Foreign Correspondents (1988) attest to the rich network of female foreign correspondents that emerged during the two world wars of the twentieth century.

Scholarship has identified the female journalists of the Second World War as a community of writers who made significant cultural impact on the history of both war correspondence and women’s public writing. Expanding this scholarly project, I take a closer look at the journalism of the Spanish Civil War in order to reveal that the work of female journalists like Watts sets a precedent for the Second World War female journalists. In other words, communities of female journalists have a more sustained and long-standing history in modern war reporting, and Watts is a key figure in the Canadian context of this history.

The early journalism of one woman in particular has some striking parallels to Watts’s own contributions: Martha Gellhorn, whose first experience as a war correspondents was for the Spanish Civil War, and who would eventually become “one of the finest war correspondents of the 20th century” according to her obituary in The Independent (17 Feb. 1998). Both Gellhorn and Watts viewed journalism as a ticket to Spain at a time when there were fewer other avenues for women to join the conflict, and they both developed a narrative, eye-witness style of reportage. Much of the criticism Watts’s journalism has received from scholars—that it was relegated to what, at the time, might have been considered the “women’s beat” (Hannant), and that it did not concern itself with the more serious business of reporting from the front—find echoes in contemporaneous criticism of the fictionalized style of Gellhorn’s reporting. Watts’s and Gellhorn’s careers have parallel origins in the Spanish Civil War. But the later trajectories of their careers diverged. Although the Spanish Civil War offered, for Gellhorn, a first taste of the war reporting career for which she would soon become famous, Watts would not continue her journalistic or volunteer work for much longer after the war. As the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion newsletter would describe it in 1948, “Jean ‘Jim’ Watts Lawson[,] Spanish Veteran[,] drives a baby pram now instead of an ambulance, but is always ready to do the Lions [sic] share, if there is any work to be done” (qtd. in Hannant 162). Regardless, both women’s activities during the Spanish Civil War constitute a significant contribution to the journalism of the 1930s.

This case study attends, first, to the motivations that brought Watts and Gellhorn to Spain. For both, journalism offered access to the conflict and a means of travelling to Spain. However, Gellhorn’s initial motivations seem to have had little to do with the work of producing journalism while Watts’s initial investment in writing seems to have been more deeply rooted in performing politically motivated work. Next, the case study turns to how both women retrospectively perceive their careers as journalists. Both women obscure or dismiss their previous experiences that would have qualified them better than many men to act as correspondents in the war in Spain. These concealments perhaps paradoxically expose some of the resistance that women of the time might have encountered to their participation in international conflict. Finally, the case study analyzes two exemplary articles, one by Gellhorn and one by Watts, in order to demonstrate how each woman drew from similar content but developed distinct styles of reportage. Watts and Gellhorn fit into an emerging community of female writers during the Spanish Civil War, one that has received very little critical attention, and one that paves the way for the journalistic activities of women during the Second World War. Their experiences and writing are relatively unusual; they still contain, however, striking commonalities that allow me to begin to piece together the lived experiences of women as journalists for the Spanish Civil War.

Watts's and Gellhorn's Journalism: A Means of Access to Politics

The circumstances and motivations by which Watts and Gellhorn were able to travel to Spain shaped their experiences in sometimes unexpected ways. Neither perceived enrolling in the International Brigades to be an option open to them. And neither considered nursing or other medical work as a means of joining the conflict. Instead, they both turned to journalism in order to gain access to the conflict. Journalism facilitated a politics of commitment—it provided relatively safe passage to Spain, in some cases provided material support and transportation to writers (See Case Study Two), and was a legible, non-combative and non-medical role that women could fill. Gellhorn and Watts both detail their pragmatic approaches to becoming journalists: for Gellhorn, journalism justified her presence in Spain in order to protect her from legal authorities; for Watts, journalism was a means of work and participation available to her when others were not. For each, journalism served a greater goal of support and participation in the conflict.

Gellhorn indicates that producing journalistic writing was an afterthought to the access that a journalistic role provided to the conflict. In her memoir, The Face of War (1959),[33] she describes how she viewed her assignment from the American publication, Collier’s Magazine as merely a formality that would get her to Spain:

In New York a friendly and spirited man, then an editor of Collier’s, had given me a letter. The letter said, to whom it might concern, that the bearer, Martha Gellhorn, was a special correspondent for Collier’s in Spain. This letter was intended to help me with any authorities who wondered what I was doing in Spain, or why I was trying to get there; otherwise it meant nothing. I had no connection with a newspaper or magazine… (Face of War, “The War in Spain,” n.p.)

Gellhorn did not consider herself connected to Collier’s, a publication in which much of her early journalism on the Spanish Civil War would appear. Instead, her letter from Collier’s rests on the tacit understanding that her “journalist” status was merely a cover. It would excuse her presence to any authorities and offer her protection and legal immunity from the Non-Intervention Agreement. Journalism was a legible and legally permitted role in the conflict. Gellhorn depended on that legibility for access to Spain.

While Gellhorn looked to journalism as her first port of call in order to access the conflict in Spain, Watts considered more militaristic avenues before deciding that those avenues would block her passage to Spain. In an interview from the late 1960s, Watts says that she was “dying to go [to the Spanish Civil War] and [she] knew quite well that the Brigade wouldn’t take [her]” (Watts 0:46). Watts was aware that participation in the Brigades would not allow her to join the conflict. Instead, she took up a position with the Daily Clarion, a posting to Dr. Norman Bethune’s Blood Transfusion Unit that provided her “only pretense at being a writer” (Watts 0:16). Watts variously describes her role with the Clarion as a “kind of public relations person” (Watts 0:46) and as having a “scope was as wide as [she] wanted” (Watts 0:56).[34] Where Gellhorn viewed journalism as a means to excuse her presence in Spain, whether or not she was actually a journalist, Watts pursued the work of journalism in the face of other forms of participation that were blocked to her.

In The Face of War, Gellhorn’s early perspectives on the Spanish conflict further illustrate her use of journalism as an incidental cover for her presence in Spain. The young Gellhorn “believed that all one did about a war was go to it, as a gesture of solidarity, and get killed, or survive if lucky until the war was over” (Face of War, “The War in Spain,” n.p.). For Gellhorn, her presence was a “gesture of solidarity”—it expressed a largely non-verbal form of support for the cause of the Spanish people. Gellhorn’s early perspectives seem to conflate militaristic means of participation with an observational one: she expected that her presence in wartime might result in her death, and that her survival to the end of the war would be “lucky.” However, this death would not come about through combat, but simply from her presence as a “gesture of solidarity.” Gellhorn understood her presence in and observation of a war to be inherently risky, in much the same way that a combatant would be at risk in the war. If Gellhorn understood her presence and gestures of solidarity to be her primary goal in going to Spain, she figured her eventual publication with Collier’s to be merely incidental. She would not produce any writing for Collier’s until “a journalist friend observed that [she] should write” (Face of War, “The War in Spain,” n.p.).[35] Once Gellhorn did send material to Collier’s for publication, she was surprised at how easily her work was accepted and published:

I mailed my first Madrid article to Collier’s, not expecting them to publish it; but I did have that letter, so I knew Collier’s address. Collier’s accepted the piece and after my next article put my name on the masthead. I learned this by accident. Once on the masthead, I was evidently a war correspondent. It began like that. (Face of War, “The War in Spain,” n.p.)

While war correspondence would become the work for which Gellhorn has become known and celebrated, she accounts for her presence in Spain as a result of her political rather than journalistic commitments. For Gellhorn, those two interests would become more and more entwined over the course of her life, as she developed a journalism that bore witness to the experiences of people in a war.

While the work of journalism would become a by-product of Gellhorn’s presence and political solidarity, the logistics of a journalistic role would restrict Watts’s goal of political commitment to the extent that she would eventually seek out other modes of participation. Once Watts was in Madrid, she found her mobility limited, telling her interviewer that “[she] had no money, as other correspondents had, so [she] couldn’t employ a leg-man or lay on transportation” (Watts 0:56). As the war moved further away from Madrid, Watts would find it “impossible…to really function as a correspondent” (12:53) (See Case Study Two). Watts, however, wished to stay in Spain, and so took up work in the censorship bureau while simultaneously organizing an English-language radio transmission with Ted Allan from the Blood Transfusion Unit in Madrid to North America.[36] This role seems at odds with her political commitment, but it would prove short-lived. She would then join the International Brigades as an ambulance driver. While Watts “knew quite well the Brigades wouldn’t take [her]” (Watts 0:46) while she was in Canada, she managed to join the Brigades in Spain. In fact, she seems relatively nonchalant about being able to join the Brigades once already in Spain: Watts “simply asked whether they would take a driver, and sort of sent messages down from Madrid. And was told, alright, come down and have the driver’s test…And so I was in” (15:41). Despite stories about Watts’s bombastic insistence upon being admitted to the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion (See Conclusion), her acceptance to the Brigades once in Spain seems relatively straightforward.[37] There are several possible reasons for her acceptance in Spain and not Canada: individual members of the Canadian leadership in Spain may have observed the participation of the Spanish milicianas or had another reason to put greater faith in the participation of female participants in the Brigades. Alternatively, Watts’s drive to engage in meaningful, politically motivated work, frustrated in her journalistic role, may have emboldened her to insist upon her inclusion in a role previously blocked to her. Watts’s move away from journalism and towards a militaristic role further evinces the political commitment that motivated her participation in Spain—a commitment that she sought to express in the forms of work she took on in Spain.

Gellhorn’s and Watts’s motivations in going to Spain, and their means of entry into journalism, were different. Gellhorn’s political solidarity was her primary motivator while the work that she performed was, at first, an incidental cover and afterthought to her support of a political cause. Journalism, for Gellhorn, was initially a role that provided cover and depended on a legible legitimacy in the face of potentially curious authorities. Watts’s primary motivator was likewise political; however, she pursued work, rather than the excuse that a given role would provide her, as her means of expressing that commitment. Her eventual enrolment with the International Brigades, a decision that would have contravened the Non-Intervention Agreement and removed the legal immunities that journalism offered, evinces an ethic of work as participation. Gellhorn’s journalism, for all its incidental support of her participation the Spanish Civil War, would earn her international renown over the course of a long and prolific career. Watts, by contrast, would not continue in a journalistic career after the war in Spain. These subtle differences in motivation may have facilitated Gellhorn’s continued career while stultifying Watts’s. Despite the differences of initial motivation and eventual longevity, Watts’s and Gellhorn’s desires to participate in the Spanish Civil War emerged from a strong, anti-fascist political stance. Their ability to leverage journalism as their mode of participation suggest that journalism may have begun to offer women a platform for political commitment during the Spanish Civil War. Their politically motivated body of work on this conflict marks an important precedent for the communities of female journalists that would emerge in the Second World War.

Writerly Self-Fashioning

Despite each woman’s modesty in recounting—decades later—her wartime journalism, Gellhorn and Watts’s biographies reveal that both had backgrounds in political activism and journalism that more than qualified them to act as war correspondents. There may be multiple motivations for that modesty. On one hand, either woman might have perceived her previous experience not to be a valuable asset to her career more generally, or may have felt it not to be valuable in the context of war reporting. On the other, either woman may not have perceived a role for herself in the male-dominated journalistic field; both participated in the conflict in relatively unusual roles for women. Scholarship has argued that meliorist, non-political roles characterized women’s participation in the conflict[38]. Watts’s and Gellhorn’s mode of participation contradicts this scholarly perception. They chose a mode of participation that was overwhelmingly populated with men. The ways in which each woman narrativized her qualification for the role of journalist and the kinds of information that each omitted hint at how she perceived her gender in relation to her journalism.

Watts had been an important political and artistic agent in Canadian leftism for the five years preceding the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, a background that she omits in the interview she gave in the late 1960s. Watts figures her time with the Daily Clarion as a unique occurrence for which she had not established a precedent:

Interviewer: “How long had you been with the Clarion?”

Watts: “Oh, I hadn't, actually. I hadn't worked for them at all. It was really my only pretense at being a writer [other than][39] a university education, I guess. (Watts 0:11-0:16)

Watts suggests that her posting with the Daily Clarion at the Blood Transfusion Unit was her only work for the newspaper and, further, was her only claim to being a writer. However, Watts’s contributions to Canadian cultural production were profound and varied. She helped found the Theatre of Action (originally the Workers’ Experimental Theatre) and she funded the establishment of explicitly Marxist literary journal New Frontier (1936-38) (See General Introduction). During her theatre career, she visited a Soviet theatre festival, which she reported on for the Daily Clarion. By the time she was hired by the Daily Clarion as correspondent, she had made considerable impact on the Canadian artistic field, and that impact would have been familiar to the Clarion which had already published her reporting. In complement to her artistic impact, Watts had also proven herself a committed leftist political activist: she had come to the attention of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for “distributing communist literature” (Hannant 156). Watts’s artistic and political careers were closely intertwined. If Watts had little faith that the Communist Party of Canada would admit her to the International Brigades, her key role in the communist cultural landscape of 1930s Canada should have offered adequate testament to her political commitment and suitability both to volunteering with the Brigades and to writing for the Daily Clarion.

In a similar vein, Gellhorn’s The Face of War obscures the considerable experience that she would have amassed reporting on the Great Depression in the United States. Gellhorn narrates her experiences confronting Nazi Youth in Germany and “working with miserable determination on a novel about young pacifists in France” (Face of War, “The War in Spain,” n.p.). She then mentions that she returned to America, “shoved [the novel] forever in a drawer,” and set her sights on Spain. What Gellhorn omits, Caroline Moorehead supplies:[40] Gellhorn had followed in the footsteps of journalists like fellow American Lorena Hickok, and was hired by Harold Hopkins of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration to report on the plight of working-class Americans during the Great Depression. During this time, Moorehead notes, Martha developed a style of reportage that was clear and simple, but nevertheless “barely contained [the] fury and indignation at the injustice of fate and man against the poor, the weak, the dispossessed” (Chapter Four, n.p.), which was to become her signature style. As a result of her reports, Martha developed a close confidence with Eleanor Roosevelt, then First Lady and friend of Gellhorn’s mother, Edna Gellhorn. Between Martha’s encounter with the Nazi Youth in early 1934, and her departure for Spain in 1937, three years and considerable journalistic experience passed. Martha’s motivations for obscuring this experience may be simply to provide a more coherent narrative of her political development from naive, aspiring novelist to anti-fascist participant in the Spanish Civil War. This rhetorical move, however, has the effect of rendering her considerable skills of reportage seem inconsequential to the early moments of her career as a war reporter. Like Watts’s lack of faith that the International Brigades would admit her as a volunteer despite her demonstrative political involvement, Gellhorn does not see fit to mention the depth of her domestic political commitments as a key aspect of her political and journalistic development.

Although each has become known for her bombast and disregard of conventional gender roles, each obscured the previous experience that made her a strong candidate to be employed as a journalist. If this self-effacement is a product of a perceived barrier to political engagement that stemmed from gender, both women had reason to feel that her options were limited. Evelyn Hutchins, an ambulance driver during the conflict, provides a corroborating example of the kinds of barriers to participation that women would have faced. Hutchins recalls the explicit sexism that barred her participation in the Spanish Civil War:

All those people at the American Friends of the Spanish Democracy just couldn’t accept the fact that a woman could be a driver. I started accusing them of chauvinism, one at a time and then collectively. Of course they denied it, but I wasn't getting my shipping orders as a driver. They tried to get me there as a nurse but I did not have a certificate. They tried clerk typist. Why the hell would anybody want to send a clerk typist there? These kind of stupidities kept galling me and I kept arguing and so finally they said, “Well she has to go because of her husband.” I got furious and screamed, “He is there because of me! Not that I want to go because of him!” The chauvinism was just unbelievable, although it was camouflaged at the time, and you had to be very alert to fight it. (qtd. in Gerassi 65-66)

In Hutchins’s account, the American Friends of the Spanish Democracy could conceive easily of certain kinds of roles for women—care work like nursing, office work, or accompaniment as a dutiful wife—but could not bring themselves to send Hutchins as an ambulance driver. Hutchins eventually did join the conflict with papers that identified her as a “nurse’s aide” (66), but would work as a driver. Hutchins fought to be able to participate in the Spanish Civil War on her own terms, in a role she wished to play, not simply in a role that was available to her.

Most importantly in this context, Hutchins experienced barriers despite being fully qualified to undertake the work she wished to do. She had driven trucks while she attended night school and while she was a member of the Works Progress Administration. In her own words, she “had driven probably more than any of the male drivers” (64). Watts and Gellhorn may have come across a similar barrier: despite the fact that they were perfectly qualified for the work at hand, their qualifications may not have overridden their gender. Watts and Gellhorn may have been justified in assuming that their previous experience was largely irrelevant, even as they narrativized their experiences years later.

In addition to the barriers to participation that women like Hutchins experienced, the persistently gendered perspectives of 1930s politics were keenly felt by many women across the burgeoning journalistic field. Dorothy Livesay, celebrated Canadian poet and childhood friend of Jean Watts, famously identified these dynamics: “In theory, we were free and equal as comrades on the left. In practice, our right hand was tied to the kitchen sink!” (Right Hand Left Hand, 115, 124). Despite the promise of female equality that many women pursued in their allegiances to leftist politics, the holdovers of gender roles frequently worked against their achieving that equality. In the Spanish Civil War, Hutchins’s experiences demonstrated the more explicit barriers to her participation in a role for which she was eminently qualified. In journalism, Watts’s and Gellhorn’s downplay of their previous experience may also be an indication of the barriers they expected to encounter, despite the promises of gender equality in the new Spanish Republic and in worldwide leftist politics.

Watts's and Gellhorn's Style

Watts and Gellhorn both reported on a wide range of issues. Watts’s articles covered the Mobile Blood Transfusion Unit, the activities of Spanish civilians undertaking volunteer work, and military victories and defeats. Similarly, Gellhorn’s reportage alternated between reports from the front and vignettes featuring Spanish families adapting to the effects of war in their own homes. Within their reportage, the material that concentrates on the day-to-day activities of Spanish civilians in the extenuating circumstances of the civil war is some of the most emotionally affective. These stories provided the platform for Watts and Gellhorn to develop their distinct narrative styles.

Watts’s and Gellhorn’s writing is most similar in its content. Gellhorn’s article “High Explosive for Everyone” (Face of War, July 1937, n.p.)[41] primarily contains descriptions of quotidian events and necessities for which her narrator acts as observer. Her narrator describes the experience of running errands during an air raid:

So perhaps you went into a store because that was what you had intended doing before all this started. Inside a shoe shop, five women are trying on shoes. Two girls are buying summery sandals, sitting by the front window of the shop. After the third explosion, the salesman says politely: “I think we had better move farther back into the shop. The window might break and cut you.” (n.p.)

Gellhorn’s article concentrates on the everyday experiences of Spanish people. Despite the extreme circumstances of the air raid, “you,” the second person pronoun that represents the American reader, goes into a store she had intended to visit, preserving the normalcy of her daily routine. The description of the store suggests that three explosions occur before the women, girls, and salesman acknowledge the immediate danger that they face near the window. Even when they acknowledge this danger, the politeness of their interactions dampens the strength of their expression. Despite Gellhorn’s statement elsewhere that “you can get killed sitting in your own parlour” (July 1937, n.p.), the salesman identifies only the breaking glass to be a threat to the women’s safety, and the characters seem to silently preserve the assumption that the interior of the shop is safe from the bombings. In Gellhorn’s description, the bombings of Madrid become part of the rhythm of daily life in the city, as the imagined subject moving through the streets goes about her shopping and errands while acknowledging only some of the reality of imminent danger.

Watts’s article, “Fascist Shells Slay Civilians of Madrid” (21 May 1937) likewise concentrates on the day-to-day experiences of the Spanish people. Watts’s focus, however, is on the imminent threat of danger rather than the polite social means of navigating that danger that Gellhorn explores:

Just imagine yourself going about your business every day, walking from your house, riding in street cars, working in factory or office or school, and no matter where you are, knowing that any minute the great roar which means the end of the world to you may sound in your ears. You might never know anything any more, and then again, you might wake up in a hospital minus arms, legs, or part of your skull. (21 May 1937)

In Watts’s writing, the everyday “business” of the Spanish people is overwritten with the threat of the “great roar” of shells and the possibility of death or dismemberment. While Gellhorn depicts an avatar navigating the streets of Madrid, Watts describes the activities of communities. The call to “imagine yourself going about your business everyday” begins specific, as the imagined subject quickly expands to collective existence—“riding in street cars”—and fractures to a host of different possibilities and identities of individuals—“working in factory or office or school.” While Gellhorn’s writing focuses on the individual, Watts’s writing imagines the general population hanging together as a community in which individuals fulfil multiple roles. Watts goes on to make this shared community experience explicit: “That’s how the 80,000 inhabitants of Madrid have been living for the last 18 days” (21 May 1937). Watts and Gellhorn converge in subject matter—the daily lives of the citizens of Madrid. However, as they frame this converging subject matter, Gellhorn’s preserves an individual subject going about the day’s errands, while Watts imagines the collective activities of the citizens of Madrid.

Watts’s use of the second person pronoun—“imagine yourself”—calls explicitly upon her reader to identify with Spanish people, and collapses into an imagined depiction of community. Focalization through pronoun usage frames the way both articles seek to deliver their emotional content. Gellhorn’s article slips easily between the first person pronoun and second person pronoun, and, in turn, the use of second person pronoun slips between a generalizing gesture equivalent to “one,” and a pointed invitation for the reader to imagine herself as “you.” For example, Gellhorn’s narrator describes how accumulating dust during the air raids made the air difficult to breathe using the first person: “I went downstairs into the lobby, practicing on the way how to breathe” (July 1937, n.p., emphasis mine). Here, the pronoun “I” indicates a specific personal experience of the war. The following sentence, however, quickly moves to the generalized second person pronoun: “You couldn’t help breathing strangely, just taking the air into your throat and not being able to inhale it” (July 1937, n.p., emphasis mine). The narrator’s specific embodied experience expands to the general second person pronoun in order to indicate that this experience is a shared one. The second person pronoun, furthermore, acts as a call for the reader to imagine herself walking around the streets of Madrid:

Later, you could see people around Madrid examining the new shell holes with curiosity and wonder. Otherwise they went on with the routine of their lives, as if they had been interrupted by a heavy rainstorm but nothing more….You went to Chicote’s bar at the end of the day, walking up the street which was No Man’s Land, you could hear the shells whistling even when there was silence, and the bar was crowded as always. On the way you had passed a dead horse and a very dead mule, chopped with shell fragments, and you had passed crisscrossing trails of human blood on the pavement. (July 1937, n.p.)

This paragraph begins with a second person pronoun that could be read as general. The construction “you could see” combines the second person pronoun with the conditional mode “could.” This combination allows the observation of new shell holes to be an experience common to all inhabitants of Madrid. Halfway through the paragraph, however, the pronoun becomes specific to the imagined avatar of the American reader. The more specific description of “you” going to Chicote’s bar and passing geographical landmarks like “No Man’s Land” and grisly circumstantial landmarks like dead animals and “trails of human blood” narrows the experience “you” might have from the general to the specific and vividly imagined.

Watts’s article leans less heavily on the second person pronoun. Instead, the article retains Watts’s writerly persona, whereas Gellhorn’s article attempts to efface the writer and allow the reader’s imagined avatar to stand in for the writer and observer. Watts’s article contains only one explicit appeal to its readership—“imagine yourself going about your business every day” (21 May 1937). The use of the second person pronoun remains general and conditional—“If you are in a street car and the shells begin to fall, the conductor simply takes the little handle off his box and retires to the nearest doorway” (21 May 1937, emphasis mine). These are the common and potential experiences of the residents of Madrid.

Watts balanced these imagined possibilities with the insistent presence of her own journalistic persona. She inserts her own journalistic persona into that community. Despite the sole call for the reader to imagine herself in the shoes of the Spanish people, Watts notes that her reader is in fact quite distant from the conflict:

Compressed into neat little black figures on the typewriter these reports can be considered quite coolly; but when you have been living for eighteen days in the midst of people who are not sure whether each day will be their last, they mean a lot more. (21 May 1937)

The article points out the detached attitude that the assumed readers may take, considering the reports compiled of impersonal typed figures “coolly.” The article then aligns Watts’s writerly persona with the experiences of the residents of Madrid; the small typed figures “mean a lot more” to Watts has she has been living “in the midst” of the Madrileños. Watts’s narrator’s emotional investment is keenly felt here, as the work of her writing has become a meaningful record of trauma to both her and to a community engaged in civil war. Watts’s narrative voice aligns herself with the people of Madrid more explicitly still: “I include myself as one of them,” one of the “80,000 inhabitants of Madrid” (21 May 1937). While Gellhorn’s writing includes the journalistic persona only intermittently, effacing the role of the observer in favour of soliciting the reader’s imagined experiences in Madrid, Watts solicits this identification on the part of the reader only occasionally, leaning on the journalistic persona. Watts’s journalistic persona is insistently present, and her implicit and explicit inclusion in the community in Madrid frames her observations, creating the effect of eye-witness reportage.

The roles of journalistic personae in Watts’s and Gellhorn’s articles accounts for each writer’s strategies for creating emotional impact in their work. Gellhorn relies on the strategy to elicit the reader to identify with an imagined subject navigating Madrid, and extends that identification to a specific subject. Gellhorn describes the death of a young boy during an air raid:

So now the square is empty, though people are leaning close against the houses around it, and the shells are falling so fast that there is almost no time between them to hear them coming, only the steady roaring as they land on the granite cobblestones.

Then for a moment it stops. An old woman, with a shawl over her shoulders, holding a terrified thin little boy by the hand, runs out into the square. You know what she is thinking: she is thinking that she must get the child home, you are always safer in your own place, with the things you know. Somehow you do not believe that you can get killed when you are sitting in your own parlour, you never think that. She is in the middle of the square when the next one comes.

A small piece of twisted steel, hot and very sharp, sprays off from the shell; it takes the little boy in the throat. The old woman stands there, holding the hand of the dead child, looking at him stupidly, not saying anything, and men run out toward her to carry the child. At their left, at the side of the square, is a huge brilliant sign which says: GET OUT OF MADRID. (July 1937, n.p.)

The passage begins by describing people huddling together at the edges of a square during a raid. When the old woman and the young boy run across the square, the narration at first remains general and descriptive. However, it quickly switches, relying on the second person pronoun that the article has made liberal use of; in this case, the second person pronoun straddles the general mode—“Somehow you do not believe that you can get killed when you are sitting in your own parlour”—and the reader’s specific imagined subject—“You know what she is thinking.” The description then uses the second person in a third way, to ventriloquize the old woman. Framing the sentence by eliciting the reader’s identification with the imagined subject, moving on to describe the imperative to get the child home, it then switches to state, almost fearfully, “you are always safer in your own place,” as though these thoughts belong to the old woman. The mechanisms that Gellhorn’s writing relies upon in order to ask the reader to imagine herself as a subject in Madrid shift to request that the reader identify with the old woman. At the close of the passage, the narration backs away rapidly, describing the old woman’s stunned reaction, and moves out further still to observe the warning to leave Madrid. These sudden switches in focalization are jarring, the brief identification with the old woman painfully undercut by the image of her uncomprehending shock. Gellhorn’s writing relies on the ability to switch between focalizations and move her reader between general and specific identities, and she does so in a way that weaves an affective frankness into her difficult subject matter.

While Gellhorn’s writing relies on its focalization through the second person pronoun for emotional impact, the mechanisms of emotional impact in Watts’s writing rely more heavily on the presence of her writerly persona and the observational reportage that Watts’s writerly persona delivers. The article accumulates the details of atrocities in Madrid:

Always blood, blood which must be washed from the pavements daily and hourly by the strong current of a hose.

An infant six months old, killed in its grandmother’s arms; a guard with his legs sliced clean off; a newsboy blown to bits, with his papers scattered, all blood-spotted on the street.

Terrible as such sights are, there has never yet been an occasion when the uninjured have not rushed to the aid of the injured, regardless of their own safety. If another shell falls nearby, they will be killed, and they know it. But they go to grab the dead and dying to a doorway until the ambulance arrives. And the ambulance arrives quickly. The telephone numbers of the Socorro Rojo are posted in every shop and office. (21 May 1937)

Watts’s description of the casualties of the bombings is strikingly similar in content to Gellhorn’s descriptions. Small children are frequent victims and, despite the danger, the uninjured run into the way of danger in order to help the injured. Watts, however, does not rely on switching focalizations or on the narration of a specific death. Instead, a series of nominal phrases describe the victims of the bombing, accumulating to communicate the scale of human loss. Watts continues to accumulate further information in nominal phrases: “Two hundred dead in the morgue in a single day. A total of 550 dead for eighteen days, and more than 900 wounded, is the unofficial estimate” (21 May 1937). While she admits that the “casualties during the Great War dwarfed these in number,” she laments the deaths of civilians, largely women and children, “who died with only a shopping bag or toy in their hands,” ridiculing Franco that he could “fear such weapons” (21 May 1937). These short, nominal phrases communicate a terse, contained anger.

Anger aligns Watts as eye-witness closely with the Spanish people that she portrays. Despite the intent of Franco’s forces to demoralize the Republican loyalists by frequent and unpredictable bombing of civilian targets, Watts notes that it is anger, rather than demoralization, that the bombs elicit amongst the people of Madrid. She writes, ‘No one can say by the wildest stretch of the imagination that people are demoralized, but they are certainly angry and certainly cautious” (21 May 1937). Watts again aligns herself with the Madrileños that she has lived amongst during the bombing, echoing their anger and caution in her own barely contained anger.

Watts’s and Gellhorn’s styles of reportage are similar in subject matter and in their sympathies with the Spanish Republic. But the presence of the journalistic persona, the focalization of narrative perspective, and appeals to a readership through the second person pronoun unveil the subtle differences in their approaches to journalism. Gellhorn’s writing stands back from the narrative, preferring to mimetically fictionalize the traumas of the civil war. She casts her reader as the observer and sometimes the subject of the narrative. Watts’s journalistic persona is insistently present, aligned with the people of Madrid as though the experiences of the war. For Watts, any attempt to empathetically imagine these experiences, to engage in the atavistic exercise that Gellhorn asks of her reader, is inadequate. They may only be diagetically listed by one who has lived through them.

Conclusion

This case study situated Watts in relation to Gellhorn. It looked for Watts’s immediate contemporaries in the international field of women’s war reporting. As the case studies have moved from the domestic Canadian context, to the context of Canadian journalism on the Spanish Civil War, to the more general international field of writing on the Spanish Civil War, this comparison with Gellhorn demonstrates that Watts is part of a trend. Women find journalism a particularly available means of politically committed participation in the war. And it is this trend that is of historical importance: it elucidates the freedoms and restrictions placed on women at the time and how those freedoms and restrictions produced certain kinds of writing in certain kinds of contexts. That Watts and Gellhorn did not, or could not, choose to join the conflict as combatants is a significant restriction. Leveraging journalism as a way to access the conflict was the strategy available to them, and a strategy that they navigated adeptly.

There has been little scholarly work on the female journalists of the Spanish Civil War. Giovanna Dell’Orto argues that Gellhorn’s journalism is stylistically similar to the 1960s, male-dominated New Journalism. Dell’Orto implies that Gellhon’s journalistic accomplishments are singular, both in the moment of the Spanish Civil War and as a precedent to New Journalism. However, if we take Watts’s and Gellhorn’s Spanish Civil War journalism together we may begin to see a trend in women’s journalism, whereby war correspondence offers to women a means of politically motivated participation in international politics. As Dell’Orto argues that Gellhorn’s writing is a precedent to the male-dominated New Journalism of the 1960s, so I argue that Gellhorn’s and Watts’s contributions together are a precedent to the communities of female war correspondents that emerge in the Second World War. Furthermore, their contributions emerge alongside many of the journalistic writings of better-known male writers like Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, Ted Allan, and the group of writers frequently associated with poet W. H. Auden, demonstrating that much of the literary journalism by men that has become celebrated finds cognates in women’s writing that are largely forgotten. Watts and Gellhorn are part of multiple genealogies across the development of journalism and of women’s writing, from an early example of the stylistic innovations of New Journalism, to the immediate precedents for the female journalists of the Second World War, to the largely forgotten contemporaries of male writers in the Spanish Civil War.

Conclusion

Over the course of these case studies, I have begun to uncover the impact and context of Jean Watts’s journalistic writing on the Spanish Civil War. I read Watts in the context of the Canadian press’s relationship to international reportage on the Spanish Civil War, and of the way that Canadian foreign correspondents were supported in their journalistic roles while in Spain. The singularity of her experiences emerges in comparison to other Canadian foreign correspondents like Ted Allan and Henning Sorensen. The commonalities between Watts’s journalism and that of other female journalists like American journalist Martha Gellhorn evince the emergence of communities of female war correspondents that predate those that emerged during the Second World War. Situating Watts’s writing within these various contexts contributes to a new understanding of the international field of journalism during the Spanish Civil War.

Watts’s writing is the least studied aspect of her contributions to Canadian culture and I have attempted to provide some corrective to that lacuna here. However, one direction in which future research may lead is towards Watts’s continued resonance across the writing and histories of the participants in the Spanish Civil War. Alongside the recovery of the work of women during the conflict, we must contend with the way that those women are described in the stories about them that survive. For instance, historical accounts of Watts’s cultural contributions generally focus on two aspects of her life: her sexuality and her bombastic, iconoclastic nature. To briefly take up the former, Watts’s bisexuality features prominently in the memoirs of her life-long friend, Dorothy Livesay, and Watts became known for gender-bending performance in her theatrical work. Her fellow journalist Ted Allan frequently speculates in his diaries that Watts’s motivation to dislike Dr. Norman Bethune was due to her jealousy that Bethune did not find her attractive. Allan does not substantiate this claim, nor does he explain its relevance. In fact, he glorifies Bethune’s sexuality where he vilifies Watts’s. Allan’s glorification of Bethune’s sexual exploits parallels biographical treatments of Bethune’s life such as the National Film Board production, Bethune (1964), in which Bethune’s virility is as much a cause for celebration as his political commitments. The gendered dynamics of women’s portrayals in these historical and autobiographical accounts deserve further research. What might we learn about gender in the Spanish Civil War when we consider Watts’s resonance across historical accounts of the Canada and the Spanish Civil War? As discussions of her sexuality and gender performance has been woven into historical and scholarly accounts alike, how is it significant that Watts’s peers would filter their accounts of her through a heteronormative, if not homophobic, lens?

These questions are particularly exigent in light of recent research about the political commitments of female combatants and participants in the war. In contrast to previous scholarship that cast women’s participation as largely apolitical (Fyrth and Alexander), the activities and writings of figures like American nurses Salaria Kea and Thyra Edwards[42] shed new light on the complex motivations and politics of women participating in the Spanish Civil War. Watts is no exception. Ironically in Watts’s case, the political motivations for Watts’s participation, combined with her gender performance, have occasioned one of the most persistent erroneous anecdotes in history and scholarship. In one of Ronald Liversedge’s memoir manuscripts, Watts demanded to be enrolled with the Mackenzie Papineau Battalion as there were at that time no women enrolled with the Battalion. Scholar Larry Hannant, in his foundational historical work on Watts’s involvement in the war repeats this anecdote from the manuscript; he likewise describes Watts “bursting into the Canadian Cadre Service at the International Brigades headquarters” (153) to the amusement of Liversedge, who then worked for the Cadre office. Although Watts has become famous for this particular anecdote, its basis in the historical record is shaky at best.

Specifically, Watts has difficulty either recalling Liversedge or anything remarkable about her induction into the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion. Watts states that she “can’t remember ever having any lovely ceremony, like take one step forward or anything. I know I got my pay book and I guess I signed documents. There wasn’t anything memorable at that time” (Watts, “Interview” 17:22). Watts’s interviewer asks how she “managed” to become an ambulance driver (15:38), as Watts’s time driving an ambulance and fulfilling a typically masculine role in the war is one of the singular aspects of her participation. But Watts saw nothing particularly remarkable about becoming an ambulance driver, as she “simply asked whether they’d take a driver” (15:38), concentrating on the tricky nature of the drivers’ test rather than on her intentions to subvert gender norms. Watts has trouble remembering Liversedge, exclaiming, “Oh, that’s where I must have known Liversedge, because I know his name” (24:06). Whether or not Watts might have been memorable to Liversedge, neither Liversedge nor the manner in which Watts was inducted into the International Brigades were memorable to Watts.

Similarly, the publication history of Liversedge’s memoir indicates that Liversedge did not wish to publish this anecdote about Watts. Two editors worked on Liversedge’s memoir: first, Irene Howard worked with Liversedge in the 1970s, then, David Yorke worked with Liversedge’s estate in the 2000s, many years after Liversedge’s death. According to Yorke, Liversedge rescinded his manuscript from Howard, “somewhat uncomfortable with the extent of Irene Howard’s revisions” (23). The anecdote of Watts’s insistence upon joining the International Brigades was among those that Yorke omitted from the published version of the memoir, and the original interview tape that contains the anecdote has not been found. Yorke makes a particular effort to note that, “while some aspects of it appear accurate, other details seem inconsistent with the record” (196).

If this account has a shaky standing in the historical record, across Watts’s recollections, the publication history of Liversedge’s memoirs, and the historical due diligence of Liversedge’s editor, why has it had such potent resonance amongst researchers? The answer may lie in how the anecdote compellingly depicts Watts as exceptional—the only woman in the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion—and invested in a performance of strong, ‘New Woman’ femininity. If we are to understand how the dynamics of gender shaped the experiences of women in the Spanish Civil War, whether as journalists, nurses, or combatants, we must also account for the ways that narratives about their exceptionality, their sexuality, and their femininity continue to resonate through the voices of their contemporaries. We must also interrogate how we as contemporary researchers may begin to unravel these various aspects of the experiences of women in the Spanish Civil War.

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---. “Clarion Correspondent Sees Spain Rebuilding in Midst of Warfare.” The Daily Clarion 5 Mar. 1937. 2. Microform. The Daily Clarion 2 (1937).

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---. “Says Science Must Aid Spain: Dr. Mueller joins Bethune Medical Unit; great Service rendered.” The Daily Clarion 22 Mar. 1937. 1. Microform. The Daily Clarion 2 (1937)

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Notes

1. Nancy E. Butler notes that Livesay gives Watts this moniker “for legal reasons…but makes no further effort to conceal that it is Jim Watts about whom she is writing” (390).

2. Watts’s grandfather was a capitalist of enough wealth that Watts would receive a substantial inheritance in her twenties. However, no scholarly accounts have presented more detailed records of her family history. Some small pieces of evidence do exist to characterize Watts’s family. For instance, Dorothy Livesay notes that Watts would seek to spend more time in the Livesay household as a child as her parents were very strict (Journey With My Selves). Despite the money that Watts would eventually come into, as a teenager she did not expect to receive any routine inheritance when she turned twenty-one. When Livesay decided to go to Europe for a semester, Watts lamented that she wished to join Livesay, but would not likely be able to: “Really, though, I don’t get any money when I am 21 so that, unless the family would consider it, it would be hopeless” (qtd. in Livesay 72, Journey With My Selves). Whether Watts would not receive inheritance because she was a woman or because the wealth of her family has been overstated is unclear. Similarly, when Watts found a lack of money to be a barrier to her activities in Spain. First, she found it “impossible…to really function as a correspondent” (13:00), unlike privately funded correspondents like Ernest Hemingway, to the extent that she left for work in the censorship bureau and then the International Brigades. She also found herself without money after leaving Spain for France: “And I had no money, and no clothes. It was awful. I had to ring in Paris till someone wired me some money” (27:15). By contrast, Watts would famously fund the establishment of New Frontier and the Worker’s Theatre before she departed for Spain, demonstrating her access to not inconsiderable wealth. Watts seems to have been without funds in Spain, but not out of the reach of emergency support, and it is unclear whether her participation in the Spanish Civil War was the cause of any rift between Watts and her family that may have prompted them to withhold funds. Watts’s family life, then, seems to have been relatively affluent, but not so affluent that Watts could expect the same level of freedom with funds as such contemporaneous socialites, writers, and participants in the Spanish Civil War as Nancy Cunard. The nature of Watts’s family offers a fruitful area for future research.

3. Despite the establishment of the Canadian Press (CP) in 1917, the agency seems to have held little power and does not figure into McNaught’s 1940 study.

4. Party Member Joe Wallace seems to have been able to support himself writing for leftist publications like the Daily Clarion (Doyle 136), indicating that journalism for these outlets was paid work.

5. See Case Study Two.

6. See Case Study Four.

7. Although at this point in history all Canadian citizens would have held a British passport, for the purposes of this case study I define a Canadian as an individual who spent significant time in Canada, identified at least in part as Canadian, and developed at least some of his or her career in the country. Copenhagen-born Henning Sorensen is a prime example of a foreign-born Canadian of this era.

8. The Dorothy Livesay Collection in the British Columbia Archives records this interview to be from 1970. This is likely an acquisition date, as Watts died in 1968. The interview is also attributed to Vancouver leftist radio host Charlie Boylan in the catalogue listing. However, Larry Hannant asserts that the interview was more likely conducted by historian Victor Hoar.

9. See Ryan van den Berg’s Case Study, “Ted Allan: This Time a Better Earth and ‘Salud Nortamericanos!’” on the Canada and the Spanish Civil War website.

10. Although Watts may not have been employed by the Clarion, Nancy E. Butler notes in her unpublished dissertation that Watts “wrote a series of articles on plays she saw [in Moscow], and on the Soviet theatre movement” (374) for the newspaper after she attended the 1935 Moscow Theatre Festival.

11. Many thanks to Kaarina Mikalson for discovering Allan’s account in Hello Canada.

12. In an interview with the Clarion, Watts’s absence from the paper is described as a vacation: “I talked to Jean Watts in Paris. After five month’s hard work in Spain, she has been enjoying a month’s holiday in France and England, and was preparing to return to Madrid within a few days” (30 August 1937). After Watts’s one-month absence, she wrote few articles for the Clarion. The circumstances of her time away from the newspaper and her experiences upon her return are worthy of future study.

13. Within three months, Ted Allan would return from a trip to Jarama and recall the group he travelled with on the boat: “MARCH 5th. 1937. Just came back from Jarama. Photographer Geza Karpathi, and Herbert Kline with me. Can't stand it. John, Dave, Milty and twenty others on the boat with me, dead! All dead. Wiped out in some stupid attack. God” (Allan qtd. in Allan).

14. There is some ambiguity in Watts’s interview whether she was advised to fly into Spain by the International Brigade office in New York or by Otto Katz at the Agence Espagne. Her diction seems to suggest that it was more likely Agence Espagne.

15. Under the Non-Intervention Agreement, many passports of citizens from Western countries were stamped “Not Valid For Travel to Spain” in order to stem newly illegal volunteerism for foreign conflicts. Many combatants would travel to Spain under false passports, but journalists, in addition to humanitarian workers like nurses and ambulance drivers, would have been exempt from this travel ban. Allan and his comrades seem to have travelled to Spain before this travel ban was enforced.

16. In his first articles for the the Daily Clarion, Ted Allan’s by-line indicated that his articles were specials to both the Clarion and the Federated Press.

17. Near the end of the war the International Brigades were repatriated en masse. For this repatriation, the Canadian Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy would have been raising funds for repatriation. Watts may not have qualified for this: she may have left too early, left independently of the mass of volunteers, or may have otherwise chosen not to seek out assistance in leaving. The circumstances of her departure from Spain would be a fruitful area of future research. [Many thanks to Kaarina Mikalson for the content of this footnote.]

18. Although Hemingway’s material support would prove key to Gellhorn’s early career, the pair were sometimes in direct competition for writing jobs.

19. Bethune became famous for developing the apparatus to make blood transfusion resources more easily transported. He is often erroneously credited with inventing the blood preservation technologies that facilitated transfusion. In fact, as Henning Sorensen notes, a Spanish doctor developed the refrigeration techniques. Bethune, as Sorensen further notes, allowed this erroneous attribution to stand, neglecting to correct those who gave him credit for others’ innovations (Gerassi 106).

20. Over the months that Watts was stationed at the Mobile Blood Transfusion Unit, Henning Sorensen and Ted Allan would be instrumental in returning Bethune to Canada to go on fundraising speaking tours—a strategic move to remove Bethune from Spain and utilize his still positive public persona in Canada. See Gerassi’s Premature Antifascists for Sorensen’s account of Bethune’s removal from Spain, and Norman Allan’s unofficial biography of Ted Allan for Allan’s account.

21. The Communist Party of Canada estimated its membership numbers based on subscription to the Daily Clarion (Historical Atlas of Canada, 187).

22. Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia was first published in the UK in 1938, but it was not published in the US until 1952.

23. Bombing in the Spanish Civil War would become particularly associated with Nazi forces: such civilian bombing campaigns as Guernica were a testing ground for Nazi carpet bombing techniques. Watts provides further reportage on civilian bombing campaigns in “Fascist Shells Slay Civilians of Madrid” (21 May 1937).

24. Sending stories by mail, instead of the more expensive cable, seemed to be common practice even amongst correspondents who did not perceive their work to be writing “colour stories.” Pierre van Paassen’s wife Coralie van Paassen, for example, mailed eighteen of Pierre’s articles from Paris to Toronto (Peck 43).

25. The same image of Watts appears alongside newspaper coverage of the Theatre of Action. See Dorothy Livesay’s Right Hand Left Hand (1977) for some examples of this news coverage.

26. For nuanced studies of the cultural importance of middlebrow and women’s magazine and newspaper features, see recent publications by Hannah McGregor, Faye Hammill, and Paul Hjartarson.

27. Evelyn Hutchin’s oral history in John Gerassi’s Premature Antifascists (1986) reveals some of the ways that women’s marital status played into their social mobility.

28. The contrast between how the newspaper featured Allan’s journalism and Watts’s journalism is instructive. While the newspaper framed Allan’s journalism as an anecdotal eye-witness account of the conflict, it framed Watts’s contributions as that of  “our correspondent”—terminology that aligns her column both with famous correspondents reporting on the war (see Case Studies Two and Four) and, in its possessive “our,” claims her work as a particular feature of the newspaper. Allan’s column, “Salud Nortamericanos!” positions itself as an account of interpersonal relationships between Allan, a Brigade volunteer, and the Spanish people. In a case study for the Canada and the Spanish Civil War Project, “Ted Allan: ‘Salud Nortamericanos!’ and This Time a Better Earth,” Ryan van den Berg draws upon Allan’s first article in which Allan explains the column’s title: Allan had named the column “Salud Nortamericanos! [because it] is how the Spanish people, with whom the Brigade is fighting side by side, greet the North American volunteers” (qtd. in van den Berg 4). As van den Berg notes, Allan’s title “highlights the camaraderie between the volunteers and the Spanish people in order to demonstrate the oneness of the international socialist community” (4). See also n33.

29. After Watts stopped reporting for the Daily Clarion, the newspaper eventually started using the same terminology—“Our Madrid Correspondent”—to refer to Allan. A detailed account of Watts’s decision to stop reporting on the conflict and Allan’s replacement of her is worthy of future research.

30. Edna Clark, the administrative worker who organized the “books, magazines, clippings, pictures, newspapers and what-not that pour in a steady stream every day into the Clarion office from New York, Vancouver, Moscow, Paris or Auckland” was the other women included in the May Day staff feature. The section “And A Final Word” briefly credited Alice M. Crooke for contributing “materials for the women’s corner.”

31. The first of May, or ‘May Day,’ has been celebrated as International Worker’s Day since the late-nineteenth century. The holiday is particularly socialist and communist in origin.

32. Virginia Cowles reported extensively during the Spanish Civil War as well as the Second World War, and, along with Martha Gellhorn, authored a play text on the Spanish Civil War. I have chosen not to compare her to Watts as her approach to journalism was to report on both the fascist and anti-fascist perspectives on the war. This political agnosticism contrasts Watts’s overt political commitment.

33. For all of my discussions of The Face of War, I draw on an e-book edition that contains the text published in a 1986 revision of the original 1959 publication. As this is an e-book, there are no paginations, but I have indicated the chapters and articles I quote from. Future researchers should note, however, that multiple editions of the memoir exist and that Gellhorn made substantial changes to those editions.

34. For a closer discussion of Watts’s scope and mobility as foreign correspondent, see Case Study Two.

35. Gellhorn’s biographer, Caroline Moorehead, identifies this “friend” to be an amalgam of Ernest Hemingway, who himself produced journalism on the war, and to whom Gellhorn was not yet married, and Herbert Matthews, an American reporter for the New York Times who would serve as one of the models for Robert Jordan in Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (Moorehead, Chapter 5, n.p.).

36. Allan and Watts would broadcast the transmission at 1:00 in the morning so that it would reach North America in the evening. Watts describes how the transmission, put together on a shoestring, would interview visitors and was well received in North America: “Of course there were always complete lack of anything. And while we got used to it, it was very hard on visiting people and everyone who came, visiting people, were interviewed. And apparently it was heard here. We used to get a lot of fan mail from Canada, some of which we never saw. Apparently it went to the ministry and didn't trickle through to us…” (Watts 14:40).

37. When her interviewer asked whether Watts had been brought into the Brigades “in some formal way” (17:22), Watts responded that there was nothing memorable about her induction: no “lovely ceremony…or anything,” simply that she “got [her] pay book and…signed documents” (17:30).

38. Some examples of women who understood their work to be political in nature exist, particularly women like nurse Salaria Kea and ambulance drivers Thyra Edwards and Evelyn Hutchins.

39. Tape difficult to hear. Bracketed material supplied by author.

40. I cite from an e-reader edition of Moorehead’s biography of Gellhorn, Martha Gellhorn: A Life. As such, my citations indicate sections but not pages.

41. All of Gellhorn’s articles are quoted from The Face of War, her retrospective collection of war reporting. Gellhorn’s introduction indicates that some of the titles of articles have been changed from the original Collier’s publication.

42. See Anne Donlon’s forthcoming chapter, “Thyra Edwards' Spanish Civil War Scrapbook and Black Women's Internationalist Life Writing,” in To Turn this Whole World Over: Black Women’s Internationalism during the Twentieth Century, eds. Tiffany M. Gill and Keisha N. Blain.