In August 1928 Spanish journalist Manuel Chaves Nogales set off on a journey around Europe by aeroplane with a view to writing a series of travelogues (as we might call them today) for the Heraldo de Madrid newspaper, of which he was chief reporter. The result is an extraordinary series of reflections on the countries he visited - collected as La Vuelta a Europa en Avión (Around Europe by Aeroplane) - and such is Chaves’ journalistic skill that reading his reports is like visiting France, Switzerland, Germany, Russia, Austria and Venice in 1928 real time.
Recall that Orville and Wilbur Wright only made the first sustained flight in a heavier-than-air aircraft in December 1903. So the first remarkable thing about Chaves’ long distance journeys around Europe is that he made them in an aeroplane fewer than 25 years later. His reflections on flying and the effect it would have on us (particularly on aesthetics) are fascinating - and often idiosyncratic. For instance he points out that up to now humans have only ever seen the world horizontally, and once you’re in the air that you realise that the world we have created (horizontally) is ‘ugly and mean-spirited’. Seen from the air, he says, old Madrid is a monstrosity.
But for things to change (improve?), he argues, many more people need to fly. When they have he is sure our sensibilities will change. When seen from the air, for example, he’s surprised to see that the wake of a ship seems fixed and immovable, while when viewed at sea level it’s dynamic and changeable. (This is true and I’m still not sure I understand why). He speculates that only when lovers say that their love is as constant and indestructible as a ship’s wake will we know that the ‘flyer’s eye-view’ will have properly and significantly affected human sensibility.
To some degree flying has indeed been democratised in the last 100 years (though less than we might think - 80% of the world’s population have never flown), but has this produced a qualitiative change in the sensibilities of those who have seen the world from five miles high? I’d like to stick Chaves on a Ryan Air Stansted-Alicante bucket shop flight and see his reaction.
(Chaves’ observation has its contemporary analogue. Astronaut after astronaut has returned to earth saying that they’ll never see the world in the same way again, that its vulnerability and lack of the frontiers we fight over are only apparent when seen from space. If only we could all be astronauts, they say, the world we return to would be a better place.)
He notices how empty the world seems from the air, how small the aeroplane makes it, and how - in his opinion - humans can at last feel they've taken possession of the world. Before aircraft the world was too big for us to grasp and we were ‘like mice, lost in some room of a vast palace’. Now we can think of ourselves as masters of planet Earth. This is all of a piece with the modernist-futurist fantasy that the era of the machine would make real Francis Bacon’s dream of bringing nature fully under human control. Some will say it hasn’t quite worked out like that.
And anyway there’s another side to the coin, says Chaves. Flying disenchants the world by humanising it. Flying near Mont Blanc he reflects that we feared and respected the mountain when it was inaccessible to all but a handful of heroic mountaineers. Now it’s been humiliated, its height no longer a challenge. Now it’s no more than a ‘merengue, of inferior quality to those made by journeyman confectioners’.
For those of us who fly today the ultimate nightmare is a crash, even a crash landing. Another remarkable feature of Chaves’ flying adventure is that he regards accidents as an occupational hazard, even a likelihood. And he has at least two of them. He writes about groaning engines, the smell of burning rubber and a forced landing in a French cornfield much as I might recount a bike puncture - a temporary annoyance rather than a threat to life.
Indeed once he gets round to describing the countries he visits, he’s much more shocked by what he sees as the rampant homosexuality on display in 1920s Berlin than the threat of crash landings in the European countryside. He puts male homosexuality in Germany down to wartime militarisation when the whole country was a single-sex barracks. Women too, he says, have succumbed to this ‘aberration’ (his word not mine), this ‘sexual abnormality’ (ditto).
It’s all because of the war he says, rapidly forgotten (in his view) amid a frenzy of work and hedonism. It’s like Chaves is watching Otto Dix at work, and he doesn’t like what he sees. He’s also convinced that there’s no danger of Germany starting another war: ‘Today,’ he writes, ‘there’s a republican Germany that will always resist a relapse into war.’ Just four years later Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany.
But it’s when he gets to Russia that the contemporary reader is most drawn into the web of Chaves’ descriptions and observations. I don’t know how many journalists visited Russia in this period, just eleven years after the Revolution, around the time of the New Economic Programme and as Stalin was tightening his grip on power, but Chaves’ reflections should be much more widely known than they are.
What does he notice about Bolshevik rule? Here are a few of his observations. The Bolsheviks love industrial chimneys and machines, they’ve encouraged a cult of sport and hygiene, visitors to Russia are accompanied by a friendly member of the secret service (still true in 1983 to my personal knowledge), no-one in Moscow goes to bed hungry, the political police (the GPU) are as amazingly efficient and omnipotent as the ordinary police are hopeless and powerless, some citizens have more privileges than others (and workers and tourists have more than most but fewer than members of the Party), sites previously occupied by the bourgeoisie are now populated by the working class (spas, for example, paid for the by the state), the Bolsheviks are doing more than the Tsar ever did to civilise the peasantry, and sexual promiscuity is rife among the Communist Party’s Young Pioneers.
In January 1928 Leon Trotksy was exiled by Stalin to Alma-Ata in central Asia. Chaves visited Russia just eight months later, which means that he was one of the first Westerners to encounter the country on the cusp of full-blown Stalinism. Chaves clearly has a soft spot for Trotsky and ‘permanent revolution’, as well as sympathy for his day-to-day plight, but he’s astute enough to see even then that Trotsky was never going to make a comeback. ‘Stalin has the party machine on his side,’ Chaves writes, ‘and above all he can count on the GPU. Stalin’s victory over Trotsky is a triumph for the police state.’ He might have been wrong about Germany and war but he was right about that.
As his month in Russia draws to a close Chaves has one more surprise for us. There’s a chapter called ‘A Spaniard in Russia: Ramón Casanellas’. I had no idea who Casanellas was so I looked him up. It turns out that he, along with two other anarchists, assassinated the Conservative politician Eduardo Dato in 1921 in Madrid. His companions were arrested but Casanellas managed to escape and took refuge in Russia. Which is where Chaves found him and spoke with him for five hours in his room then deep into the early morning in a local bar. They talked about Dato’s assassination, Casanellas’ escape from Spain, his reception in Russia, his enlistment into the Red Army and his role as a pilot in the Civil War, his political education in Moscow, and his hopes for a political role in the Party. Casanallas and Chaves bid farewell just as dawn is breaking. A handful of days later Chaves would be in Barcelona where Casanellas was brought up, while Dato’s anarchist assassin remained in Moscow studying hard in the name of revolution.
The book’s penultimate knockings contain brief reflections on Prague, Vienna and Venice where, in a prescient anticipation of the anti-tourist campaigns swirling around Spain and other Mediterranean countries today, Chaves imagines a conversation with a Venetian in which they agree that tourism should be stopped - for the Venetian because they have nobler ways of making a living, and for the tourist because they’re not authentically interested in the cultural artefacts they have supposedly come to see.
Finally, he spends a few days in Milan ‘among fascist salutes, fascist marches, fascist football matches, fascist conversations and fascist hotel owners’. ‘Time to go’, says Chaves and soon he’s back in Spain, near the end of Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship, only three years away from the Second Republic, and eight away from the Civil War that would eventually see Chaves exiled in London where he died in 1944 of peritonitis.
La Vuelta a Europa en Avión is an unexpected gem, as is most of Chaves’ work. I’m told by Spanish people that he’s suddenly become popular. I’m not sure why, in the midst of probably the most polarised period of Spanish politics since Franco’s death in 1975, and given Chaves' reputation for ‘political balance’.
But maybe that’s the point. Maybe there’s a latent yearning for equilibrium that Chaves speaks to. And his is not a high-minded ‘clean hands’ kind of equilibrium. It’s committed, it’s an equilibrium that takes sides. Here are his final reflections on his time in Russia: ‘After my journey to Russia I understand the counter-revolutionary rage of intelligent people, those who have had the opportunity to see the dictatorship of the proletariat close up. I understand it, but I don’t share it … The big difference between bourgeois dictatorships and the Soviet government can be summed up in one word: the motivation that lies behind it’.