BOOKS

The happy wanderer

Hugh Cecil

THE INTERIOR CASTLE: A LIFE OF GERALD BRENAN by Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy

Sinclair-Stevenson, f25, pp.660

In 1990, when Cambridge University Press reprinted Gerald Brenan's master- piece The Spanish Labyrinth, on the back- ground to Spain's civil war, all that they could find to say about its author on the blurb was: `A literary figure on the fringes of the Bloomsbury group.' For shame! Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy's marvellous new biography will certainly rescue Brenan from his marginal position.

Major British historians, including Raymond Can, Hugh Thomas and Paul Preston have praised Brenan's vivid, idiosyncratic Spanish Labyrinth for its `genius', its sympathetic 'feel' and authen- ticity and its clear and attractive prose; but it is the Spanish who have been its most passionate admirers, especially in the Franco period, when it was banned, and read illicitly; for Brenan, with his far- sighted, humorous liberal outlook and intense love of their country, dared to say what they could not themselves say about their politics and national character. So strongly did they feel, that on hearing that Brenan was living in an old folks home in Pinner, in his 91st year, the Spanish government snatched him from his forlorn suburban seclusion and brought him back to Spain — which had been his home on and off since 1919.

Brenan's other outstanding work, his Literature of the Spanish People (1951), has the same vital, fresh approach as the Labyrinth. The product of 30 years of the deepest immersion in Spanish writing, it brings to life many largely discounted early authors in a way that few other scholars have achieved. The books for which he drew on personal memory, such as South From Granada (1957), A Life of One's Own (1962) and Personal Record (1974) are equally fascinating, but it appears that here he adjusted the record to fit the way he wished to see himself.

Herein lies part of the mystery of the man. He was a thorough-going romanti,, and an early developed defence mechanism caused him to lock up his true self in an interior fortress of the subconscious which even he could not penetrate. Unreconciled to his nature, he wove fantasies about him- self, and in particular his love life. To the readers of his books this may have appeared as a rich succession of joyous acts. In fact he was impotent for much of the time — though even after Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy has stripped a lot of these boasted conquests to their bare and unfulfilled reality (one 'affair' consisted of sharing a bed with a waitress, both of them fully clothed), it is clear that Brenan still managed to pack enough fairly satisfactory sexual experience into his long life to be the envy of less adventurous souls. Gathorne-Hardy's chief source has been the gigantic body of letters Brenan left far exceeding his published output; he kept few diaries, but was a brilliant correspon- dent, his prose often bettering his more polished efforts in print.

Brenan's connection with Bloomsbury was strong. Since first world war cycling corps days, he was an intimate friend of Ralph Partridge, the handsome, generous- hearted war hero, later pacifist, and husband of the painter Dora Carrington with whom Brenan himself had an intense and agonised affair. But Brenan's relation- ship with that world was qualified by his dislike of belonging to any one group; though sociable, he was a loner. His later twenties were spent, by choice, on his own, in Spain. Virginia Woolf, initially attracted by his intellectual vitality, lost interest after reading his early books (his first, Jack Robinson, was a lyrical, tedious, picaresque novel, owing much to Proust and Richard Jefferies).

Far from being a mere fringe figure, he was a man of singularly strong and eccen- tric personality, part dreamer, part ascetic. A rebel against the conventional values of his background (his father was a testy retired soldier) he was (under a charming, rather vague exterior) well organised and something of a martinet. His will-power was almost demonic; at 28, he managed to persuade an older friend, John Hope- Johnstone, to accompany him on an insane attempt to walk all the way to the Pamirs, with little more than a case full of his favourite books and a bag of obscure drugs. When he later married the poet Gamel Woolsey she proved a perfect companion because she not only loved the gigantic walks which gave him such happiness, but also was always ready to agree with him, no matter what she privately felt. When he introduced young girls to the household (not, in practice, for sex, but as a focus of emotional attention) she was extraordinari- ly patient. Perhaps this was only fair, for Brenan had to put up, for years, with the prolonged efforts of her former lover, Llewellyn Powys, to regain her heart; once, on her honeymoon, she wrote to Powys dis- paraging her life, and when Brenan found her letter, excused herself on the grounds that Powys, 'a consumptive, would die of a haemorrhage if she told him anything that would displease him.

It was a desire to cut loose from his family and find freedom on the open road that took Brenan eventually to Spain when he was 25. For years he had harboured fantasies of vagabondage and of settling down with a primitive tribe in some moun- tainous Asian region. Spain, it turned out, was primitive enough; the standard of liv- ing and the outlook of the peasantry in Yegen, where he first lived, had altered little since the 18th century. There he stayed, for a year and a half, a rich man by his neighbours' standards, but nonetheless in conditions of great austerity, reading, practising his chosen craft of writing, and walking vast distances in the Alpujarra, the loot-mountains' of the Sierra Nevada.

He seems very much of his period. His voyeuristic side (he often carried a tele- scope to spy on naked bathers), his fascina- tion with low life and working-class morals remind one of Brassai, Edward Burra or Henry Green. He also shared traits with certain noble-minded egoists who were drawn to the wanderviigel, solitary writer's way of life at that time — figures such as Henry Williamson and Eric Muspratt (whose description of consuming a worm sandwich when in extremities is, one of the most poignant in all travel literature). Yet one is reminded also of wanderers in other centuries. He had more than a little in common with Don Quixote and the young Oliver Goldsmith.

Unlike Goldsmith, however, he seldom drank heavily; he was ebullient enough not to need alcohol. In later life he continually believed himself on the brink of death and enjoyed a few minor operations, but he had a constitution of iron. He rarely fell ill except during emotional crises, thus rendering himself an object of sympathy. Fundamentally a happy man, he believed that physical and emotional pain gave life greater intensity — something which his vital nature constantly required. His public school, Radley, where the boys were constantly lectured on the fatal effects of masturbation, may have been a root cause, Gathorne-Hardy suggests, of his lack of sexual confidence. Whatever the reason his potency was intermittent and he expected too much of himself sexually. Though he attracted many women he seems to have remained a virgin until he was 25. Ralph Partridge, having none of these difficulties, teased him a little about his timidity, when they were soldiers together in the war, though never again. Brenan, whose mishaps, unknown to Ralph, continued throughout his life, went on matching himself against him and imag- ined that he was always the object of his devoted friend's scorn. This hidden resent- ment finally emerged in the insensitive por- trait of Ralph he drew after his death, in his memoirs. He had been obsessively involved with Dora Carrington, Ralph's wife, with whom he claimed to have fallen half in love before either he or Ralph had met her.

The secret of Carrington's fascination was apparently her letters, imaginative, high-spirited and eloquent, which had the Power to draw Gerald back to her after she had repeatedly rebuffed him. She symbol- ised for him the modern woman, free from the stuffy inhibitions of the Victorian peri- od; but it was the neurotic nature of their relationship that exercised such a power over him. Though they had long ceased to be lovers, and he had married, her suicide, following her friend Lytton Strachey's death, left Brenan devastated.

Before his marriage, much of his love life had been with working-class girls, jolly part-time prostitutes, whom he took to bed, not so much for sex as to watch them wash and dress unselfconsciously in front of him. Sex in the imagination was probably, he once told a friend, the most agreeable kind there was. Nonetheless, it does appear that during his second stay in Spain, in 1929, he had what was to be his one and only truly satisfying sexual relationship, with Juliana, a volcanic 16-year-old Spanish peasant girl. They had a daughter, whom he subsequent- ly adopted.

A late developer, his career as a pub- lished author began when he was nearly 40, and went on into his eighties. The walks diminished and the giant energy was divert- ed to books, great and small. His emotional life, however, was far from tranquil. For a while he was gripped with an incestuous passion for his teenage daughter, the result, it appears, of bathing naked with her when she was well into her teens, in order to save her from Victorian prudery. For the last 15 years of his life he was looked after by a beautiful girl, in her mid twenties when he met her, whom he loved with all the unfulfillable passion of the elderly and for whom he was tutor and father-figure, even after her marriage. Brenan's adven- turous way of life, his determination to live as he wished, his fearlessness and his power to charm and animate drew many people to him, particularly the very young. Wherever he chose to settle, he ruled, a powerful Prospero-like spirit, over the enchanted island he could always create.

Gathorne-Hardy has avoided the mistake of including large and intrusive chunks of literary criticism in the story, but has wisely consigned most of them to an appendix. The book is wittily written and compulsive reading, which is more than can be said for many biographical blockbusters of recent vintage. The author is admirably suited to his subject for he, like Brenan, has wide interests: sexual behaviour is clearly one, but so too are health, natural history, liter- ature, history, geology, money, travel (he has followed on foot some of Gerald's own treks) and Spain itself. Gerald Brenan had a habit which I share, of reading and re- reading his favourite books. This biography is one I shall come back to again and again.

Why Climb a Mountain?

Increasingly skew-whiff with each returning year, the apple-tree boughs grope upwards, grow and sprout southwards and eastwards out in order to evade, to north and west, the Goliath of a lime's huge life-denying shade.

Crabwise, inch by inch, the Bramley climbs its invisible cliff-face crag of light and air. My tree, slow mountaineer, goes on, because it's there.

Simon Curtis

Barrow

Our brittle bones were chilled to envy Even of the bones in Stoney Littleton Long Barrow, where I had tapped At a tubercular farmhouse to beg And stood awaiting something at the entrance To a chamber, sealed and on the list For surgery. But there was no key.

And since our torch was not charged up, we Gazed down a narrow beam of darkness Imagining ourselves through there, to turn And find this glow, as — looking back One might spot brilliance in a dark age.

Across the valley, the sun quite lost In a serge-grey labyrinth, a whole field Once filled with hay is landfill now: Yellow skips, black plastic, keening White gulls, and us — powerless Above our age's burial mound.

John Greening