GERALD BRENAN
Frances Partridge remembers
the complex interpreter of Spain who died last week
IN 1927 Virginia Woolf contemplated writ- ing 'a sketch of Gerald Brenan'. If only she had done so, I should not now be wrestling with so complex a subject! She had visited him in his cottage at Yegen in remotest Spain, where they 'discussed literature 12 hours a day' in conversations it would have been fascinating to overhear. He interested her, and at the risk of making outrageous claims I maintain that there were some things in common between the two. At their best both could send up brilliant, fantastic and illuminating Roman candles of talk; each was a great reader, a writer of copious letters saturated in reading; each possessed a highly nervous disposition taut as a fiddle-string on the point of breaking.
Genetically speaking, Gerald was a sport. The son of conventional Anglo-Irish parents without a trace of intellectual orientation, he grew up to become a true original — an English eccentric in the tradition of those of past centuries. His character seemed to be compounded of opposites. His physical and moral courage were witnessed in the first war, and (after that long and gruelling experience) by his taking himself off alone and almost penni- less to a village in the Spanish mountains where 2,000 volumes of classics in several languages were sent him, and he set about acquiring the education his public school had failed to provide.
At the other extreme he would wilt before a whiff of logic, and might well leave the room if an abstract argument grew too lively. A scholarly and retentive reader, his accuracy could not always be relied on in personal matters; he was in fact not greatly interested in other people, except insofar as they acted as sounding- boards for his own ideas or material for fantasy. In youth he was tough enough to live for years alone on a pittance, walking immense distances and climbing the moun- tains like a chamois; whereas in later life he used to take to bed with what he called "flu' almost every week. A lover of nature and wild flowers, he would walk unseeingly beside a spectacular view if the gears of his mental processes were thoroughly en- gaged. And though as a rule he had charming manners, and would spend his last penny on a bunch of flowers for a friend, he might at times fly off the handle and behave with wounding hostility. Final- ly, there was the contradiction contained in an aura of tragi-comedy which beset his later life.
But the really important fact about Gerald Brenan is, of course, that he wrote English of rare and consistently high quali- ty. His most serious works — The Spanish Labyrinth, The Literature of the Spanish People, and St John of the Cross, have been greatly admired, and not only by academics, all over the world. (There is a passage of inspired clarity in his Spanish Literature which should be a model for the proper approach to criticism.) His auto- biographies, South from Granada, A Life of One's Own and Personal Record, prob- ably appeal to a wider audience, while his novels are generally rated failures, with the exception of the first, Jack Robinson, published under a pseudonym and hailed by that acute critic Cyril Connolly as a work of genius. This respectable output was augmented by streams of letters, many pages long -- letters which their recipients have usually hoarded, feeling they are not going to see their like again.
I first got to know Gerald in the London of the Twenties, before he had published anything, though he had his sights fixed on a life of Saint Teresa and a picaresque novel. Some of the former found its way onto paper, while the picaresque element began to enter his personality. He was a delightful companion — amusing, original, constantly surprising — with whom to spend an evening of laughter and talk about everything from Hume's philosophy to the home life of prostitutes. Fairly tall and spare, with light hair and small dark eyes, his laugh was an infectious chortle on a rising scale. A few Brenanisms from among those noted in my diary may suggest the flavour of his talk: 'Wives are like air. You can't breathe without them but when they are there you don't notice them.' I never can write what I want to say. I write what my pen wants or some- thing. The signalman seems to be at fault and gets me on to the wrong line.' Oh no, no, I can't talk to people. It makes me too aware of my own existence.' Coughing is the artillery of the home.'
Subsequently I visited Gerald in Spain with my husband Ralph, first in the thrill- ing mountain scenery of Yegen, and later (as a married man) near the Costa del Sol, where he could satisfy his taste for low life by dropping in to Torremolinos. Yegen was a magic place. There was no hot water, the food was simple and the butter tinned and rancid, but the view from the roof was magnificent and everything the eye fell upon indoors showed exquisite taste. Two of Gerald's remarkable characteristics were his perfect visual taste and his utter indifference to wealth. Many years later, after his wife's death, he moved to Alhaurin, a small town spread like a white tablecloth over the hillside. His neighbours began to take note that 'Don Geraldo' was a distinguished man, visited by eminent foreigners. He became a cult figure.
His 90th birthday was celebrated by a banquet given by the mayor to 2,000 guests, with speeches, flowers, toasts, while old friends from the mountains came to kiss the hero of the day with tears in their eyes. From that moment Don Geral- do was front-page news in the Spanish press. But tragi-comedy prevailed at the end. Persuaded that it was for everyone's good, Gerald let himself be taken to an old people's home, at Pinner of all places. His Spanish admirers were appalled. 'Surely he wants to end his days with us?' a Spanish journalist asked me. 'We want our Don Geraldo back again. He has taught us things about ourselves that we never knew before!' And then came the amazing news that the Mayor of Alhaurin was sending a deputation to snatch Gerald from among his terrified old companions, and bring him back to his own house, his books and treasures, to be looked after lovingly until he died. Nor should it cost him a single peseta.
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