Sta,—Allow me to protest against the unfair and inaccurate review
of my book Spanish Mercy, which appeared in your columns; your reviewer has fol- lowed the simple plan of tearing phrases from their context, and perverting many of them grotesquely. 'Arland Ussher travelled to escape,' he says. This is his polite paraphrase of my harmless remark that I had bolted from Dublin fogs (that is, I was travelling for reasons of health). 'Spain forces us to examine the assumptions of our so-called Northern progress,' he quotes me. The smear-word 'so-called' is an interpola- tion of his own. 'His pages tumble with references to . . . Hemingway, de Montherlant and Unamuno.' Actually, I mention Hemingway and de Montherlant only to criticise them. (The noble Unamuno cannot be assimilated to the cult of brutality.) 'He tries to argue that a society with limbless beggars on its streets is healthier than one which hides them in hygienic (ugh) sanatoria.' Let him read again my passages about the crippled children in Malaga. The argument he refers to was put forward speculatively, only to have it ably countered by a friend and Spanish resident. Lastly (for it would take too long to correct all his falsifica- tions) he completely distorts my account of the bull- running at Tordesillas. (It was distasteful enough, as I showed, without any need for exaggeration.)
Evidently there are still people who cannot keep their heads whenever Spain is mentioned. If Mr. Bryden wants to represent me as a fascist, he must get over my assertion, on page 168, that 'the classless community is, since the Industrial Revolution, the only rational aim of man.'—Yours faithfully,
ARI AND USSHER
18 Green Road, Black-rock. Dublin
I Ronald Bryden writes: 'I apologise to Mr. Ussher for misquoting from memory the sentence from his preface. It read, in full : "Spain forces us to examine the assumptions of our Northern 'progress'—that progress which seems to have led us near to an abyss." I do not think my other quotations misrepresented his general thesis that the rest of the West (where "we believe only in Demos, dollars and divorce") has much to learn from Spain, whose isolation from two centuries of industrial and egalitarian revolution has preserved a more "natural" order ("In Spain, man is still physical and whole") which provides for "natural" violence and inequality. But he must excuse me if I cannot take this thesis wholly seriously.'— Editor, Spectator.]
Previous page
