Andalusia
" South from Granada. By Gerald 'Brenan: (Hamish Hamilton, 21s.) RETIREMENT to a remoter part of the world than one, by nature or education, belongs to involves psychological as well as practical problems—how much of one's past to bring along as well as how to transport the furniture and what to cook. When after the First World War Gerald Brenan went searching in Andalusia till he found a house to shelter himself, 2,000 books, a plan of study and not much else, he managed, it seems to me, to strike an admirable balance between his two highly contrasted lives and even to com- bine the two to the valiant extent of having guests like Lytton Strachey and the Woolfs to stay in a primitive mountain village accessible only by mule. The balance lay in allowing the two selves to overlap; to be complementary, not mutually exclusive; in fact, in being unusually simple and sane about the whole complex business of a divided existence. Mr. Brenan managed to steer clear of the two pitfalls between which our countrymen abroad must tread gingerly—aloof- ness and immolation; or, to put it more con- cretely, the ferocious insularity that so often makes nonsense of their residence in foreign parts and the alternative doffing of nationality as if it were an overcoat in an absurd effort to turn the pale-skinned northern temperament into some- thing more bronzed and exotic.
He joined in, yet remained by choice a foreigner and an intellectual; was accepted, but made no self-conscious efforts to merge into the landscape. His whole purpose in going to live in Andalusia was not to study local life, still less to bury himself in it, but to read and genera167 get into intellectual training before starting (he was only twenty-five) on a more gregarious sort of existence. Spain was only a prelude, a respite, a kind of drawn-out apprenticeship to life. News- papers, letters and guests continued to arrive from England, and he never pretended that the com- pany of the village, stimulating though it could be i9 certain directions, was enough. Nor did he suffer from that peculiar immigrant disease that refuses to see simple people of another race as anything but picturesque, good-hearted and amusing. To him the peasants of his village of Yegen were people, individuals; he paid them the compliment of liking and disliking them, of being bored with some as well as' interested in others, of being exasperated when there was occasion. As they appear in his book they are never, vivid as they are and often (though quite incidentally) eccentric, merely peasant figures against a Spanish background. The folklore is all there, plenty of it, the ancientness of life and custom and a just appreciation of what, compared with modern life elsewhere, such a primitive existence has to offer. But it is all alive and personal, exactly true to the spirit—as I remember it from a village in quite another part of Spain—of Spanish rural life. The beliefs, the social be- haviour, the cycle of the agricultural year are those of the particular village of Yegen that, like every Spanish village, is a unit in itself; but they have a microcosmic importance when viewed so intimately by an outsider who was taken, from friendliness and long acquaintance, into the middle of things there.
Mr. Brenan's book is roughly complementary to Julian Pitt-Rivers's exhaustive study of a small Andalusian hill town, rather larger and less primi- tive than Yegen, The People of the Sierra. But where Dr. Pitt-Rivers went deliberately to collect his information and regarded what he found with a scholarly eye always biased in the one anthropo- logical direction, Mr. Brenan gathered his gradu- ally, by living through it. Dr. Pitt-Rivers may talk about courting customs and the decline of the reja—or talking at the grille—system; but Mr. Brenan can tell what it is like to court an un- known face, made beautiful by mystery and twilight, night after night, and be at last dis- illusioned when it appears. in daylight. Research may provide all the information about feasts, births, marriages, deaths, about belief in magic and witches; but Mr. Brenan's housekeeper was a witch's daughter, which is going one better, he has himself resisted powerful love potions and he can give any number of useful hints on such things as outwitting an unexpected wolf. Spanish folklore is a strange mixture of the local and the far-flung—far back in time, far out in space, it can be traced, yet it seems circular to a degree that makes legend, custom, marriage, loyalty, patronage and everything else that con- ' stitutes the life of a community such as Mr. Brenan describes seem to have risen out of the earth of that one place and to have no con- nection with anywhere else, not even the next village. But the book is not all folklore, there are people—the English guests, delighted or miserable at their situation, and a mad local Scotsman called MacTaggart; the villagers who, like villagers in duller places, keep their sub- terranean passions steaming dangerously; the village priests, a landlord or two, some talkative bores and a self-styled Don Juan who happens to be impotent. And ttiere is a mass of general information, sandwiched between more particu- lar items, about politics and cruelty and the relations between the sexes and the treatment of animals and food and the cost of living, all of it presented with that effortless thoroughness that is Mr. Brenan's best gift; and a rather wel- come scarcity of information about bull fights and cante jondo. In fact, it keeps off the beaten and ecstatic track of hispanophile enthusiasm with great liveliness, originality and truth.
ISABEL QUIGLY
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