Manuel Chaves Nogales

Biography

Chaves's father was himself a journalist and he began working in the newspaper El Liberal in Seville whilst he was still very young.

In 1922 he moved with his wife and daughter to Madrid and there he worked in the El Heraldo de Madrid with other young promising journalists.

In 1927 he won the most prestigious journalist prize in Spain, Mariano de Cavia with a feature article on Ruth Elder, the first woman who flew across the Atlantic on her own. Because he was very enthusiastic about the future he embarked on many risky flights including an adventurous flight to the new USSR, which gave him material for three new books: Around the world in an aircraft; A bourgeois in red Russia and A Bolshevik in love.

In 1931 he was appointed editor in chef of the influential newspaper, Ahora, ideologically related to the Republic and to Manuel Azaña, and he became one of the most incisive and unbiased political analyst in Spain.

The following years he travelled through Europe constantly and the result was two more books on the Russian revolution, What is left of the Empire of Tzars, published in 1931, and Juan Martinez who was there, published in 1934 which tells the story of a Spanish dancer who was caught in Russia during the 1917 revolution.

In 1935 he published one of the best ever written books on bullfighting, Juan Belmonte, matador de toros, su vida y sus hazañas, which was translated into English (as Juan Belmonte, killer of bulls) and French.

When the Spanish civil war broke out in July 1936 Chaves supported the cause of the Republic and stayed in Madrid even if Ahora was seized by a revolutionary committee; but when the republican government abandoned Madrid and fled to Valencia he, like many other Spanish intellectuals, feel forced to leave Spain, horrified by the political repression practiced by the socialist, communist and anarchist militias.

In exile in 1936 in Paris he worked for Cooperation Paris Service which sent articles to various South American news papers. In Paris he also collaborated with the L’Europe Nouvelle and Candide.

In 1937 he published a new book Heroes, Beasts and Martyrs of Spain, considered one of the best book based on stories that illustrate the suffering supported by both sides of the civil war, the book was reedited in 2001. In its prologue Manuel Chaves writes brutality and stupidity reigned in Spain fed equally by the fever of communism and the blandness of fascism.

Due to his many articles denouncing the advance of German fascism he was on the Gestapo list and was once again forced to abandon Paris when the German army approached the French capital. He by then expressed his most profound disappointment and even outrage in front of the behavior of the French politicians, from right to left, and most of the Parisian people.

In 1940 he arrived in London and between 1941 and 1942 he directed The Atlantic Pacific Press Agency, worked at the Evening Standard where he had his own column, and collaborated with BBC Overseas Broadcasts.

His wife and four children had returned to the south of Spain in 1940 fleeing from the German invasion of France and so Manuel Chaves Nogales lived on his own in London for four years whilst he continued his work as a journalist fighting against extreme right and extreme left positions. He died in 1944, when he was only 46 years old, and is buried in London.

Works

Reprinted: Alianza Editorial, Madrid 1992.

W.W. Norton company inc. New York 1939. (English edition edited and translated by Leslie Charteris)

Reedited Espasa Editorial, Madrid. 2001.

Second edition, Colección Castillejo Narrativa, Sevilla 1992. Reedited: Libros del Asteroide, Barcelona 2006.

Libros Clan A. Gráficas S.L. 1994.

C.I.A.P., Madrid 1929.