Highly regarded in the 1930s for his stark evocations of Spanish peasant life in Catalonia during a period of rapid and violent political change, he disappeared from view after World War Two, discontinuing his writing for almost forty years. Recent reappraisals by, among others, the Oxford don Valentine Cunningham and the reissue of his most celebrated novel, The Olive Field, in 1986 have brought his name back before the reading public. After several uneventful years (by his previous standards) as Professor of Literature at New York University, enlivened only by an unavailing McCarthyite persecution in the 1950s because of his communist past, Bates started writing again some four years ago. In our conversation his trenchant opinions and incisive turns of phrase gave promise of prose no less zestful than in his earlier work.

The range of Bates's activities is remarkable: novelist, soldier, musician and musicologist, journalist, linguist, academic, mountaineer, orator, poet, screenwriter and, in the last ten years, builder of telescopes. It may be doubted whether the Great Western Railways' engineering shop in Swindon produced ten other men whose combined achievements match his.

If Bates's name lives on, it will be as a powerful chronicler of working-class life in rural and urban Spain between the wars. After World War One, Bates lived and worked as a fisherman on the Catalan coast, as well as working in other parts of Spain.

He saw at first hand harsh peasant lives lived in a cruel and unyielding terrain. He took the raw material and kept it raw. In his spare and pungent sentences, the words seem to burst about the reader's head like shrapnel. Bates's best-known novel, The Olive Field (1936), is set in an Andalusian village during a period of violent unrest before the civil war began. The areas of conflict are powerfully drawn: between the peasants themselves as lusty and passionate individuals; between different strands of radical thought among the mutinous workers; and between the workers and the forces of reaction as personified by the effete bibliophile landowner and the ferocious estate-manager who detests leftists and bleeds his employer dry.

When Bates first settled in a Spanish fishing village, he was involved neither in politics nor in writing: he was simply a working fisherman. His attempt to persuade fiercely individualistic Spanish fishermen to form a co-operative was a failure. Later, after he began writing, he was christened 'El Fantastico,' a nickname he suspected was "slightly derisive." Bates fished all night, wrote during the day, and wrestled and swam during his free time. He lived at one stage in the house of a paralysed man who needed a worker. There were two marriageable daughters in the house, and an (untrue) rumour that he had seduced both of them led to his disappearing to Barcelona for three months, which time he spent studying Catalan mediaeval architecture. Spanish peasants, he found, were no respecters of persons. If you want to be respected, you don't live in a Spanish village; if you want to be loved you can, but you must expect scandals."

Ralph Bates started to write as a result of unemployment. He had been involved in a rising of anarchists and miners in Asturias, experiences he was to draw upon for the later chapters of The Olive Field. When the revolt was suppressed he had to leave Spain hastily. He found a job in London working a warehouseman, but characteristically initiated agitation for better conditions and was sacked. Refusing to draw dole because he was "too arrogant or independent," Bates passed the time writing short stories, not intended for publication. He made a gift of them to a friend, who showed them to a publisher. An offer was made to publish them but he knew nothing his until a contract was put in front of him to sign. Two more books were then commissioned. Writing came easily to Bates. "All my early books were written at immense speed, without any self-consciousness. I didn't agonise over my writing, though I do nowadays." The first book, Sierra, was published in 1933.

The genesis of Bates's second book was equally haphazard. A fatuous remark about Franz Schubert made by a fellow guest at a dinner party set him on a ten-minute tirade. His publisher commissioned a book about Schubert the spot. Bates wrote sixty thousand words in three weeks. The book was enormously successful, especially in the United States, which stood him in good stead when he later settled there.

The first novel was Lean Men (1934). The saga of an English revolutionary in Spain trying to build a disciplined communist party among emotional, self-indulgent and often savage workers, it reflected his own frustrations in Asturias when he had been in a similar position to that of his protagonist.

War

The outbreak of the war in 1935 found Bates, an enthusiastic mountaineer, camping in the Enchanted Range of the Catalonian Pyrenees. The goatherd who brought up his food every week told him there was a war down on the plain. Bates was told that the war was "between the bishops and the princes the people."

Bates's decision to fight for the Republicans was not based primarily on idealistic anti-fascism. He had to fight because 'his' people were involved. There was no Orwellian crisis of conscience.

Bates offered his services to the Republican government in Madrid, and was asked to make propaganda broadcasts in English, which didn't satisfy his energetic nature for long. He then enlisted in one of the militias which leftist parties and trade unions were setting up, serving on the Aragonese front. When international battalions - sometimes mistakenly called the International Brigades - were formed and added to Spanish Brigades, he joined an international battalion of the 15th Spanish Brigade as a Commissar, a rank equivalent to Colonel.

The first task Bates undertook was to found an English language weekly newspaper. Called Volunteer for Liberty, it was wholly written and distributed by its editor. He also spent three days a week at the front, lecturing volunteers on the recent history of Spain and the political background of the war. Bates's fluency in French, Catalan, Spanish and Italian made him an ideal choice for such work.

Each international battalion had its own political affiliation. The communists and the socialists had their own battalions, although anarchists were not recruited nor armed and had to form their own militia. Officers were elected in the army until the introduction of conscription in 1937.

Bates moved on from journalism and lecturing to being a staff officer, organising whatever was needed at the front: "I was a Poo-Bah, doing everything." When a camp kitchen blew up, he arranged for its replacement. When it blew up again, he forged a general's signature to get another one.

Ralph Bates was not impressed with his compatriot George Orwell. An unflattering reference to Bates in Homage to Catalonia may have coloured his view. Of course, each came to the war with a wholly different perspective. Orwell was a conscience-stricken, middle-class romantic; "a man who could never, never give assent for long to any practical course of action. A 'qualifier'." Bates, a practical man more than an idealist, deplored the emotional self-indulgence of so many revolutionaries, whether Spanish workers or English romantics. Orwell was "a natural anarchist."

These two very different men agreed on one subject. Both deplored the fact that while the people wanted to use the war as a springboard to revolution, the Communist Party, to which Bates belonged, acted in league with a government dominated by right-wing socialists to prevent that happening. Every other consideration was to be subordinated to the task of beating the fascists. That, at least, was the official line.

But the reality was that the communists weren't going to allow a popular revolution they couldn't control. Bates deplored the failure of the leadership to draw the masses sufficiently into the war. The communists wanted an alliance with Britain, France and the USSR to defeat fascism. Bates felt this was an ''impossible dream,'' and made himself unpopular saying so.

Bates also regretted that insufficient attempts were made to fraternise with working-class fascist troops and to encourage them to recognise their true class interests. He spoke of an officer, a Czech opera singer of distinction, who would come to the front to sing to the troops. Fighting would stop while both sides listened, and the enemy would shout "More! More!" Conditions for enouraging desertions clearly existed.

In his book, World within World, [London, Hammish Hamilton, 1953, at p. 243] Stephen Spender describes meeting "an English communist novelist, who had some connection (sic) with the Republican army," at a conference of international writers in Spain. In the context of time and place this could only have been Ralph Bates. The patrician Spender patronises Bates - "a nice, simple and genuinely cultivated man, interesting when describing his working-class youth, or when speaking of the craftsmanship in Catalan ironwork." Spender then launches a spiteful attack on Bates, accusing him of boasting that he had deliberately sent a member of the Brigades who was a coward to his death. Spender then goes on to say that he did believe Bates had the authority to make such decisions. That, of course, would take some of the sting out of the allegation, but it is introduced in order to justify a charge of "hysterical conceitedness." He is then able to put firmly in his place with a slashing sentence: "His telling was the showing a literary man who had tasted a little power."

This picture of Bates is absurd. The phrase "literary man, conjuring up as it does images of a desiccated figure in pinz-nez or a reflective pipe-smoker in a jacket, is wholly inaccurate. Bates had been a man of action and of authority long before he became a writer. To portray him as a pen-pusher intoxicated by power is a travesty. Bates was probably perfectly capable of morally difficult decisions and carrying them through with a ruthless single-mindedness. But it is unimaginable that he would boast about ruthless decisions he never made.

Spender also accuses Bates of boasting that he was a general. When asked (not a propos of Spender's accusation) what his rank was, he was vague. In the early days of the war, the British Communist Party, for propaganda purposes, described him as a general. The front-line troops, for convenience, called him 'captain.' Officially, he was a Commissar of the Brigade Staff. He thought that might have made him the equivalent of a colonel. Bates certainly wasn't (and isn't) the kind of man who needs a rank to make his presence felt. The absence, for example, of a university degree, doesn't seem to have interfered with a distinguished academic career at New York University.

A more positive and certainly more accurate image of Ralph Bates appears in the letters of the American Joe Dallett, published posthumously by his wife. Dallett was a volunteer in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who was later killed inbattle. He wrote to his wife Kitty of a small band of volunteers who were met on French side and guided illicitly into Spain. During the gruelling climb to the summit, one man collapsed, whereupon the guide, who was of course Bates, slung the man over his shoulder and carried him across into Spain.

Diplomat

In 1937, the Republican government took advantage of Bates's formidable presentational skills to send him on a diplomatic mission-cum-propaganda the United States and Mexico. Dynamic in love as in every aspect of his life, took his present wife, Eve, with him to Mexico just one week after met her.

The defeat of the Republicans and the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939 were bitter blows. Bates stayed in the United States. Sadly, he made no attempt to write the great Spanish Civil War novel. His war fiction comprises one hundred and fifty pages of short stories, published only in the United States in a volume called Sirocco in 1939. Bates's writing tailed off in the Forties. "I continued but it became impossible. I couldn't organise my thought; I couldn't find a myth."