Camilo José Cela, whose new book, "The Hive," is one of the first important literary documents to reach us from inside the fascist state, is suffused with anger and bitterness at society in Madrid. "They lie," he says, "who want to disguise life with the crazy mask of literature. The evil that corrodes the soul, the evil that has as many names as we choose to give it, cannot be fought with poultices of conformism or the plasters of rhetorics and poetics. My novel sets out to be no more—yet no less either—than a slice of life, told step by step, without reticences, without external tragedies, without charity, exactly as life itself rambles on."

Wonderful words—which we have not often heard in this country since the first generation of native realists in the 1900's. It is interesting, too, that our own intellectual return to realism...