CRUMBLING CASTLE IN SPAIN
Farewell, Spain. By Kate O'Brien. (Heinemann. 7s. 6d.) IN Mary Lavelle Miss O'Brien wrote an admirable, a vivid and sensitive novel, and did justice to its Spanish setting. Both these were unusual achievements which led one to hope, when her book on Spain was announced, that she might succeed where a host of other sentimental travellers had failed. But Farewell, Spain must be judged by far higher standards than the countless third-rate sketches that have followed those "Peninsular gallops" deprecated by Richard Ford a century ago ; though it cannot, of course, be compared to his book, to Havelock Ellis's, or even to the best of Hemingway on Spain. Critically regarded, it is a surprisingly uneven portrait, and from the authoress of Mary Lavelle something of a disap- pointment: less informed and more appreciative than Somerset Maugham's second attempt to express Spain on paper, it is about equal in merit to Don Fernando. It gets off to a bad start and comes to a lame finish—serious defects in a book of only 229 pages. Moreover, it had to be short, because Miss O'Brien was naturally obliged to confine her leave-taking to the parts of the country she knows at all—which means that Navarre, Aragon, Catalonia, Valencia, Murcia and Andalusia are passed over in silence. Spain is at present split in two —or is it four ?—but there have been in the past, as Miss O'Brien hopes there will be in the future, many Spains south of the Pyrenees. Her farewell is to the north coast, Salamanca and Castile.
Yet within the restricted scope of her acquaintance with Spain Miss O'Brien's knowledge is deep and t n Icrstancling. She writes with vision and with feeling. The middle chapters of her little book are delightful ; she adores Spain—and can tell us why. When she has done apologising for writing such a book at such a time, she conveys her enjoyment of things Spanish in terms which all lovers of Spain will recognise as the expression of an authentic devotion, even when they themselves disagree, as many must, with some of her more capricious personal opinions. In dealing with a landscape, architecture and racial genius so stark and sensuous, so formally pronounced and harshly individualised, personal reactions are the only valid and illuminating method of interpretation. Spanish verbs do not require the use of personal pronouns to make meaning clear ; yet the word most often overheard in Spain is yo, the Spaniard's deliberate capital " I." Miss O'Brien describes, with perfect truth, a man who "is in the forefront of every tourist's memory of Spain . . . because, wherever and however one enters the country, he is the first living object that catches the eye : a solid man of fifty, of respectable mien, and wearing his black overcoat slung as if it were a cape." He is usually alone. But Once, on the station at Port-Bou, I came upon him suddenly and heard him speak, to his exact double, the first three primary Castillian
words : "Hombre, yo. . ." Allowing for the suppression
of the oath, Miss O'Brien's account of the Spain she admires, though more elegant, is as eloquent, direct and personal as the half-heard utterance of that man to his friend.
But, necessary as it is, the personal method has its draw- backs. Miss O'Brien's critical values are sometimes so way- ward as to,seem perverse ; she exposes amusingly the reasons for her private likes and dislikes—yet greater detachment would, with equal sincerity, have added truth to her book. The legend of bugs in Spain, of the gloomy Escorial, of bad trains, dies hard, and Miss O'Brien does her downright best to kill it ; but she is less fair to the Civil Guard, Velasquez (" perhaps en masse somewhat boring " !) and Spanish women than to Philip II, the café-anarchist and the priesthood. She is sometimes actually at fault—all her bullfighting facts are wrong—and many things she misses or misrepresents, in comparing the cathedrals of Salamanca and Burgos, for instance, delaying at Santander and Coruna, hastening away from Toledo, shunning the whole of the South and absurdly bilking all that Moorish civilisation produced in Spain. This latter prejudice amounts to a phobia with her : the heroic defence of the Toledo Alcazar she calls "an insult to the spirit of history—Spaniards holding a Moorish fortress against Spaniards for the advancing, returning Moor : for anyone who has loved the long history of Castile—unbearable." Not long enough apparently, that history, to recall the Roman castellum, the Visigothic citadel, the ad's headquarters and Alfonso the Learned's palace on this site; too short to remember that the eagles of Carlos Quinto adorned this Spanish military acadeiny before his street in Toledo was renamed Carlos Marx, or that Herrera, Covarrubias and Spanish workmen built—on Moorish foundations—a monument for Varela, Castejon and Spanish infantry to save—with the support of Moorish regulars —from complete destruction.
Miss O'Brien states her political views on the Spanish con- flict clearly, a trifle glibly ; but one of her chapters is entitled "No pasaran," another " Arriba, Espana ! "—and the reader cannot help suspecting that the tragedy of the civil war dis- tresses her too deeply for full conviction in her chosen cause. She is happier when hazarding a guess at the Peninsula's even- tual future . . . While the holocaust continues, with all lovers of Spain she suffers at the thought of it. Yet she need not have wasted precious space making excuses for this record of her delight in the comparatively tranquil Spain on the eve of disaster. Now, more than at any other time, the memory of her sentimental journeys was worth sharing.
JOHN MARKS.
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