Spanish fly, Bloomsbury pie

Diana Holman-Hunt

South From Granada Gerald Brenan (Hamish Hamilton E2.75)

This is a re-issue of an absorbing book on Spain, first published in 1957, when it won much praise from distinguished critics as a travel book. Perhaps seventeen years of luxury development, followed by package tours, have so changed the scene that the book now rates as ethnographical history.

In these days of austerity, one cannot expect a re-issue to provide additional illustrations. But there are two which I would have been happy to see included, perhaps at the expense of the photographs of Augustus John and the Bertrand Russells characters who have only marginal relevance in this story. My preference would have been for Dora Carrington's portrait of the author and a photograph she took of Lytton Strachey, another of Gerald Brenan's visitors in Spain, "showing him sitting side-saddle on a mule,. bearded, spectacled, very long and thin, with his coarse red nose, holding an open sunshade above him."

Few people had heard of Carrington when South from Granada was published, but since David Gaimett's edition of her letters, the London exhibition of her paintings and Michael Holroyd's mammoth biography of Lytton Strachey, many must now be aware that, when in his twenties, Gerald Brenan fell passionately in love with his best friend's wife. It seems inexplicable that she could have preferred the homosexual Strachey to both Gerald Brenan and her husband, especially as throughout this autobiographical work the author appears in so attractive a light.

Like Carrington, he was among ,the talented young invited to Bloomsbury parties, but even this privilege was tainted by the suspicion that, with few exceptions, most of this clique of intellectual or artistic elders "lived not singly

. . . but collectively in an ivory tower . .

prisoners in their close web of mutual•friendships." Despite his instinctive fear of this web and his early deternination to escape its mesh, he was caught; I for one do not regret this, as otherwise I doubt that this excellent book would have been republished. Presumably, it is the chapter entitled 'Virginia Woolf's Visit' which has served as a valid reason. These days, no detail about Virginia Woolf seems too trivial to be seized upon, avidly discussed and written about. In America there is a Virginia Woolf Society which publishes a quarterly magazine devoted to its heroine. With this universal cult of Bloomsbury, why should not Gerald Brenan cash in? Others have, do and will, some justifiably, others ad nausam.

In retrospect, Gerald Brenan judged that the Bloomsburys' weakness lay in their being so closely attached to a class and life style that were already dying in 1930. Its members were too smug, too secure in the certainty of their "Parnassian philosophy to be able to draw fresh energies from the new and disturbing era that was coming in." They had avoided much personal upheaval during the 1914718 war, either by being unfit for military service or by joining the circle of pacifists around the Morrells and Lytton Strachey. They seemed unaware that the comfortable world in which they lived would change drastically, though they certainly left their mark on it by initiating the permissive society. In 1919, Gerald Brenan set off for Spain hoping to get away from them and eventually settled south of Granada in the primitive village of Yegen, where he rented a house for half-a-crown a week. His material assets were £160 in capital, and capricious annual income of E25 and two thousand books, bought with savings from his army pay.

Carrington, her husband and Lytton Strachey all stayed with Gerald Brenan in Spain about three years before the Woolf's visit. Strachey "advised them strongly against attempting it, declaring in his high-pitched voice that 'it was death'." He had been suffering from some emotional and intestinal malaise presumably constipation and piles.

This sepulchral warning might have served his nephew Dick Strachey better. While away, Gerald Brenan lent his house to Dick and his bride for their honeymoon; it was not a success. The slight, shrill, fair-haired bridegroom, who did not speak a word of Spanish, was enjoying a harmless ramble in the wilds above the village, when he was surrounded by a ferocious band of gypsies brandishing their knives intent on killing him. They had mistaken him for a Mantequero, a mystical creature which disguises itself as a pale emaciated man with a squeaky voice and haunts deserted places in search of human fat. The blood of the Mantequero, they believed, was useful in concocting a magic paste to cure warts and promote fertility. This book relates how poor Dick survived.

The principle part of South from Granada is devoted to relating Gerald Brenan's adventures in the village of Yegen and describing its religious beliefs, folklore, pagan rituals, festivals, feuds, superstitions and its customs of courtship in a most readable way. There are chapters on such varied subjects as the brothels of Almeria, aphrodisiacs, Spanish fauna and flora, arts and crafts, archaeology and architecture, cooking and dancing there is not a dull chapter.

The last date mentioned in the final chapter entitled 'Postscript' is 1955. Personally, 1 would wish for a PPS, even a few pages, to satisfy my curiosity about this part of the world today.

To be sure, we are told that since the Civil War, the girls of Andulasia are no longer courted through barred windows; nor are their suitors obliged to lie on dusty cobbles for hours wooing them through cat holes cut in street doors.

Despite this emancipation, do these Carmens still preserve an "iron chastity"? Do the women in primitive villages still wash their faces in aniseed spirit which makes them look like hags before they are thirty? Are the symbols of a witch's magic, pestle and mortar, still handed down from six-fingered mother to daughter?

When the men visit brothels, do they still talk only to each other, ignoring the bored sulky women yawning away the time until they can get down to work and send their customers home, scarcely able to stand, to their tolerant, usually frigid, or pregnant wives? Are the apparently virile Spaniards still at heart domesticated family men?

Are camels still eaten and donkeys made into sausages, stray cats and dogs stewed with rice in the pot on Sundays? When they grow too old to be serviceable, are favourite animals still tied to posts until they starve to death, or thrown into a ravine with broken legs for vultures to eat alive, because their devoted owners would think it cruel to kill them outright? The are just a few of my questions: my curiosity about Gerald Brenan's Spain is endless.

Diana Holman-Hunt's latest book, on the Chilean painter Alvaro Guevara, is entitled .Latin Among Lions and will be published by Michael Joseph later this year