SPANISH RAGGLE-TAGGLE [To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.] SIR,-Will you
allow me to make a timid appeal to your good nature ? Ever since I read the review of my book Spanish Raggle-Taggle in The Spectator of November 30th, I have been greatly disturbed in mind. Before the paper containing the review arrived, I had lived a happy, normal life as sure of my actions as one can reasonably be in this everchanging world. But as soon as that majestic, resounding name came into my ken, my fair world crumbled in ruins. Ramiro Salinas y Santos-the name fascinated me as though it had been a magic formula. He must be a noble reviewer, thought I, when he writes out in full all his appellatives- had he been Lord Mayor he would come down to We a tae breakfast with the Lady Mayoress, wearing knee-breeches, gold chain and all his decorations. But there is a sinister magic about Sefior Ramiro Salinas y Santos which makes me suspect that he is in league with the Infernal Spirits, for he practised upon me what the Gypsies call the " hokano baro " or " Great Trick."
A Gypsy when he practises the Great Trick upon his victim only filches his money, which is trash, and yet the poor fellow when caught by the police has to cool his heels for six months. If someone filches my good name I have at once the opportunity for redress, and in Spain there is a long-established code in such matters governing the honour of men. But what am I to do when a Spaniard, who by his name is evidently an " hidalgo " filches away my sense of reality and logic ? What redress can I find against one who has turned my universe upside down ? What can I do but proclaim myself a modern puny Don Quixote whose brains have been dried up by reading too many romances of " Picaroonery " ? For Don Ramiro Salinas y Santos says that my life is bogus- that my journey through Spain was one I should have liked to have taken rather than the one I took. Furthermore, being omniscient, he states that not only my Spanish but my Hungarian and Roumanian journey was bogus. Alas, woe is me ! Must I spend my life in agonized soliloquy like the hero of Calderon's play, Life is a Dream ? Did I dream of those days and nights in Transylvania and Castile : were those grimy taverns, posadas, bugs, fleas, beggars, tramps, thugs, but figments of my imagination ? The letters and postcards I wrote home, the photographs I took, the notes I have continually received from many of the characters in my books must all have been creations of my disordered imagination. Since that fatal copy of your paper arrived, Mr. Editor, my wife and children have given me no peace. They say with monotonous frequency-" What were you doing then if all those notes you wrote' from Spain, Hungary and Roumania are bogus ? Where were you, and who forged those letters, photographs, notes, folksongs ? " To which I would answer sadly : " perhaps I was lying asleep in my easy- chair in the library dreaming." My wife, being an Italian realist replied sharply-" Stuff and nonsense-you are turning the whole of your life into a Pirandello play." Such is my hideous nightmare of a life ever since I read your reviewer's account of my book. For this reason it is useless for me even to protest mildly against the misrepresentations and errors of fact contained in the review for the simple reason that I no longer have even an approximate idea of truth or fact. As it is, I now begin- to wonder whether the review was bogus-a dream existing in my imagination, and whether even Don Ramiro Salinas y Santos was a bogus Spaniard weaned in some suburban Bloomsbury.-Yours truly, The Athenaeum, Pall Mall, S.W.1. WALTER STARRIE.
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