Overview
Mary Stanley Low (14 May 1912 – 9 January 2007) was a British and Cuban political activist, Trotskyist, surrealist poet, artist and Latin teacher. She is most known for the book Red Spanish Notebook: the first six months of revolution and the civil war.
Early life
Low was born in 1912 in London, England, to Australian parents. She was educated in France and Switzerland, spoke English, French and Spanish, and travelled with her parents in Europe as a child. In her early career, Low worked as a Latin teacher, wrote for English magazines and edited Classics Chronicles, a biannual magazine dedicated to the Latin language and the history of Rome.
Activism in Europe
Low met the Cuban surrealist poet Juan Ramón Breá (1905–1941) in 1933 in Paris. Low and Breá travelled to Barcelona, in August 1936, Low had won a considerable sum in a Monaco casino just before travelling to Spain, and put some of it towards the publication of Spanish Revolution. Low enrolled as a militiawoman in the female regiment "Lenin's Column", later known as the 29th Division. She worked as an English-language announcer for the POUM radio station in Barcelona, They both fled back to France when they were threatened with death by Stalinists. In England, Low and Breá co-wrote the Red Spanish Notebook: the first six months of revolution and the civil war, published by Secker and Warburg, which was the first English language written testimony and political analysis of the 1936 Spanish revolution.
Mary wrote her chapters and translated chapters written by Breá into English, and was praised by the author and journalist George Orwell in a review for Time and Tide magazine. It was reissued in 1979 by City Lights Books, with a new introduction written by Eugenio Fernandez Granell. In the book, Low disputed claims that milicianas were mostly concerned with their appearance, recounted the burial of the anarchist leader Buenaventura Durruti after his death in November 1936, and lived in Prague from 1938 to early 1940. Here, they befriended Czech surrealists including Toyen, Bohuslav Brouk and Jindřich Heisler. Low and Breá witnessed the occupation of the streets of Prague by Nazi German troops in the early period of World War II.
In February 1940, Low and Breá emigrated to Cuba from Europe, after obtaining safe-conduct papers through their acquaintance with a German cultural attaché who was a member of the nobility. Not long after the couple settled in Cuba, Breá died in 1941, aged 35.
Life in Cuba
After her husband’s death, Low remained in Cuba for almost 25 years. Low gave talks at the Havana Institute of Marxist Culture, and taught English at the Community House. Armando Machado died from lung cancer in 1982. In 1954, Low won the Rubén Martínez Villena Prize. Her husband was arrested, although he was quickly released.
Life in America
In 1964, Low moved to live in Australia for ten years, before settling in Florida, United States, where she contributed to the growing American surrealist movement. Low published several works of poetry in America, including Alive in Spite Of (1981), A voice in Three Mirrors (1984) and Where the Wolf Sings (1994). She also wrote the historical novel In Caesar’s Shadow (1975) and produced surrealist collages which were exhibited in Paris, Chicago and Montreal. Low also taught Latin at the private school Gulliver Academy. She retired from teaching in 2000. Low remained politically active to the end of her life. In July 1999, she was a signatory of the Manifesto “Combat for History”. In October 2002 she was one of the signatories to the Surrealist-sponsored declaration Poetry Matters: On the Media Persecution of Amiri Baraka. She died of congestive heart failure in 2007 in Miami, Florida.
Her body was cremated and her ashes were scattered in Paris and Santiago de Cuba.
Selected works
* Red Spanish Notebook: the first six months of revolution and the civil war (1937) * La Saison des flûtes (1939) * La Verdad Contemporanea (1943, editor) * Tres voces – Three Voices – Trois Vois (1957) * Alive in Spite Of (1981) * A voice in Three Mirrors (1984) * Where the Wolf Sings (1994)