The Spanish Temper Read online

  THE SPANISH TEMPER

  By

  V. S. PRITCHETT

  Contents

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Preface

  This is a personal book and not primarily a work of information. It assumes the reader has at any rate read his Guide. I write because, of all the foreign countries I have known, Spain is the one that has made the strongest impression on me. I went there first in the 1920’s as a very young man and lived there for nearly two years; the effects of the experience were drastic and permanent. I might almost say, without being guilty of rhetoric, that the sight of the landscape of Castile changed my life. It is not difficult to see why this should be so: I read Unamuno’s Del Sentimiento Trágico de la Vida. But even had I not done so I would still have seen that Spain is the old and necessary enemy of the West. There we learn our history upside down and see life exposed to the skin. Neither in France nor in Italy can one be so frankly frightened. All the hungers of life are blankly stated there. We see the primitive hungers we live by and yet, by a curious feat of stoicism, fatalism, and lethargy, the passions of human nature are sceptically contained.

  In variety, strangeness, and grandeur the Spanish landscape is unequalled in Europe. I went to live in Madrid in 1924, and in the next two years travelled in most parts of the country. I walked in the mountains of the Asturias, in the Gredos and the Guadarrama. Two years later I walked from Badajoz through Extremadura to Vigo, staying mainly in the villages of that region. The journey is described in a juvenile book, Marching Spain, now happily out of print and it took place in the happy period of Primo de Rivera. I went again several times until 1935, and by then the rising in the Asturias had occurred and the prisons were full; fanaticism on the Right and the Left was rapidly taking Spain into the Civil War. This war brought horror down upon the Spaniards and, for the foreigner, its deceptions and shames. Few of my Spanish friends took the simple view of Spanish history and society which was offered to them by the early stages of the anti-fascist struggle in Europe; quickly they were divided, many were murdered by one side or the other. While, on the one hand, the disgraceful swindle of Non-intervention was being managed by the powers, and the British government abandoned their traditional Spanish policy and betrayed their friends, it also became clear, on the other hand, that Western ideologies were instinctively rejected by the Spaniards. Woe to the foreigner of any party who gets involved in the Spanish quarrel and who believes Spain is an extension of Europe.

  I did not expect ever to go to Spain again after 1935, but the force of the original attraction was permanent. Curiosity was too strong and I went in 1951 and 1952 to find a country often greatly changed on the surface, overrun by tourists in the show places, poor in body, stunned in mind, but not, as it seems to me, fundamentally changed. These two journeys are the immediate basis of the present book. It contains many generalizations and observations which will be disputed, for Spaniards rarely agree about anything that is said about their country; but in so far as general statements can be made by a traveller, they will be found, I think, to have plenty of sources in Spanish literature and life. I owe many debts which are recorded in the text. I would especially draw the attention of those who are interested in the background of the Civil War to read Franz Borkenau’s The Spanish Cockpit. I owe a great deal of the material relating to the economic background to my friend Gerald Brenan’s two books: The Spanish Labyrinth and The Face of Spain. No one knows the country better than he does; no one is wiser and more illuminating about it.

  V. S. PRITCHETT

  Chapter I

  I make these notes during those two hours of impatience which begin in the early morning when the electric train clatters out of Biarritz Ville. One is hungry and queasy, one has slept badly and begins smoking nervously and too soon. In the corridor no one wants to talk after this night. Women are patching up their faces, combing their hair, men stand outside rubbing the night’s growth of beard. The lavatory smells. One watches the long shadows of the rising sun in the pines; one sees the dust, the dewy greenness, the dry, heavily tiled houses, the fruitful green of a kind climate, a candid sky, and the sedate life. Yesterday’s sun is still warm in these villa towns of terra-cotta. Here one would be glad to have a doll’s house and count one’s pension and rentes thirty times a day like a Frenchman and rest one’s nervous northern mind in conversation consisting largely of abstract nouns, to parcel out one’s sous, one’s pleasures and permissions.

  But the prolonged sight of France annoys; one is impatient for the drama of the frontier and for the violent contrasts, the discontent and indifference of Spain. One is anxious to fill out that famous text of Galdós, so often quoted from the Episodios Nacionales: “O Spain, how thou art the same into whatsoever part of thy history one may look! And there is no disguise to cover thee, no mask to hide thy face, no fard to disfigure thee, for wherever thou appearest, thou art recognized at once from a hundred miles away, one half of thy face—fiesta; and the other misery; one hand bearing laurels and the other scratching thy leprous sores.”

  To know what we are up against we ought to go to Spain by aeroplane and fly to the centre of it. Beneath us England is packed with little houses, if the earth is visible at all through the haze; France lies clearly like green linoleum broken into a small busy pattern, a place of thriving little fields; but, cross the dark blot of the Pyrenees, and Spain is reddish brown, yellow, and black, like some dusty bull restive in the rock and the sand and (we would guess) uninhabited. The river-beds are wide and bleached and dry. After Switzerland this is the highest country in Europe. The centre is a tableland torn open by gorges, and on the table the mountain ranges are spaciously disposed. There is little green, except on the seaboard; or rather the green is the dark gloss of ilex, olive, and pine, which from the height at which we are flying appear in lake-like and purple blobs. For the most part we are looking down at steppe which is iced in the long winter and cindery like a furnace floor in the short summer. Fortified desert—and yet the animal image returns again and again in this metalled and rocky scene, for occasionally some peak will give a sudden upward thrust, like the twist of a bull’s horns, at the wings of the plane. Flying over Spain, we wonder at the torture that time had put upon the earth’s crust and how human beings can live there. In Soria, the terrible province, below the wicked mountains of Aragón I remember picking up an old woman who had fallen off her donkey and carrying her to the side of the road and wiping the blood off her nose. She was a figure carved in wood, as light as a husk. It was like having starvation in one’s hands.

  But it is better, I think, to go the slow way to Spain and to feel the break with Europe at the land frontiers. It is true that at Irún one is not in Spain but in the Basque provinces, among people of mysterious race and language who are an anomaly in Europe; and that, at the other end of the Pyrenees, one is in Catalonia, where the people are really Provençal, speak their own tongue, and scornfully alter the Spanish proverb, “Africa begins at the Pyrenees,” into “Africa begins at the Ebro.” But the stamp of Spain is on these provinces and the Spanish stain runs over the frontiers. One finds it in Montpellier; on the Atlantic side it reaches into Biarritz, Saint-Jean-de-Luz, and Bayonne. And in these towns one meets something profoundly and disturbingly Spanish which goes down to the roots of the Spanish nature: one meets the exiles. For long before the Europe of the 1930’s or the Russia of the early nineteenth century, Spain is the great producer of exiles, a country unable to tolerate its own people. The Moors, the Jews, th
e Protestants, the reformers—out with them; and out, at different periods, with the liberals, the atheists, the priests, the kings, the presidents, the generals, the socialists, the anarchists, fascists, and communists; out with the Right, out with the Left, out with every government. The fact recalls that cruel roar of abuse that goes up in the ring when the bullfighter misses a trick; out with him. Hendaye and Bayonne are there to remind us that before the dictatorships and police states and witch-hunters of contemporary history, Spain has been imperial in the trade of producing exiles. And the exiles go out over the bridge at Hendaye into France, the country that has tolerated all, and at the windows of the French hotel the new exile stands, looking across the bight of sea at the gloomy belfries of his native country, hears their harsh bells across the water, and hates the France which has given him sanctuary. He is proud of his hatred, sinks into fatalism, apathy, intrigue, quarrels with all the other exiles, and says with pride: “We are the impossible people.”

  Hendaye: the train dies in the customs. One gets a whiff of Spanish impossibility here. A young Spaniard is at the carriage window talking to a friend who is on the platform. The friend is not allowed on the platform; what mightn’t he be smuggling The gendarme tells him to go. The Spaniard notes this and says what he has to say to his friend. It is a simple matter.

  “If you go over to see them on Wednesday tell them I have arrived and will come at the end of the week.” But if a bossy French gendarme thinks that is how a Spaniard proceeds, he is wrong. The simple idea comes out in this fashion:

  “Suppose you see them, tell them I am here, but if not, not; you may not actually see them, but talk to them, on the telephone perhaps, or send a message by someone else and if not on Wednesday, well then Tuesday or Monday, if you have the car you could run over and choose your day and say you saw me, you met me on the station, and I said, if you had some means of sending them a message or you saw them, that I might come over, on Friday, say, or Saturday at the end of the week, say Sunday. Or not. If I come there I come, but if not, we shall see, so that supposing you see them …” Two Spaniards can keep up this kind of thing for an hour; one has only to read their newspapers to see they are wrapped in a cocoon of prolixity. The French gendarme repeats that the Spaniard must leave. The Spaniard on the platform turns his whole body, not merely his head, and looks without rancour at the gendarme. The Spaniard is considering a most difficult notion—the existence of a personality other than his own. He turns back, for he has failed to be aware of anything more than a blur of opposition. It is not resented. Simply, he is incapable of doing more than one thing at a time. Turning to the speaker in the train, he goes over the same idea from his point of view, in the same detail, adding personal provisos and subclauses, until a kind of impenetrable web has been woven round both parties. They are aware of nothing but their individual selves, and the very detail of their talk is a method of defeating any awareness of each other. They are lost in the sound of their own humming, monotonous egos and only a bullet could wake them out of it. Spanish prolixity, the passion for self-perpetuating detail, is noticeable even in some of their considerable writers—in the novels of Galdós, for example, in the passage I have quoted there are three images to describe “disguise”—and it creates a soft impermeable world of its own. Yet they have a laconic language, the third-person form of address is abrupt and economical, their poetry even at its most decorative is compressed in its phrases and cut down to the lapidary and proverbial, and they can be as reserved and silent as the English; and yet when, in their habit of going to extremes, they settle down to talk, one feels one is watching someone knitting, so fine is the detail, so repetitious the method. The fact is that they are people of excess: excessive in silence and reserve, excessive in speech when they suddenly fly into it. It is absurd, of course, to generalize about a nation from the sight of two people on a railway platform; but we are travellers—let us correct one generalization by adding a great many more. There will be time to reflect on the variety of human nature, and the sameness of its types, afterwards. Let us consider the other Spaniards on the train.

  It was easy to pick them out from the French when they got on the train in Paris; not quite so easy to pick them out from the Italians. The Spanish men were better dressed than other nationals, and this was true of all classes. Their clothes fitted them at the waist and the shoulders, they carried themselves with reserve and dignity. Their gestures were restrained, their farewells were quiet and manly, they did not talk much and what they said was dry, composed, and indifferent. They behaved with ease as people who live by custom do; and they gave an impression of an aristocratic detachment. This is true of all classes from the rich to the poor, who have the same speech and the same manners. There are no class accents in Spain worth mentioning; there are only the regional variants of speech. This man is an Andalusian, this a Gallego; you can only guess his class from his clothes. One is markedly among gentlemen, and even the “señorito,” the bouncing little mister, falls back on that when he has exhausted his tricks. The word “gentleman” is not altogether complimentary, for it implies a continual conventional restraint on part of the human personality, and it carries a narrow connotation of class. In this narrow sense a Spaniard cannot be a “gentleman,” for though he has a sense of fitness in his quiescent mood, he is unrestrained when he wakes up. His conduct is ruled by his personal pride, not by his category; and it is natural for him to be proud. His pride may be a nuisance, but it fits him and it cannot be removed. He is, he has always been, a hidalgo—a hijo de algo—a person of some consideration. And upon this consideration, however impalpable it may be, the very beggar in the streets reposes. A point not to forget is that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Spaniards were the master-race of the world, the founders of the first great empire to succeed the Roman Empire, more permanent in their conquests and administration than the French, who followed them, successful where the Germans have never yet succeeded, the true predecessors of the British empire-makers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Spaniards in the train had the simplicity of people who had once had the imperial role. One could suppose them to be looking back on it with philosophical resignation. The place of those who have ceased to rule is to teach.

  There was no conceit or vanity in these travellers. The nervous pushing bustle of the European was not in them. The quick vanity and sharp-mindedness of the French, their speed in isolating and abstracting a problem, were not there. Nor were there the naïve vivacity and affectibility which electrify the agreeable Italians. These races care to attract or please continuously; the Spaniard cares very little and leaves to us to discover him. He gives us time to breathe by his very negligence, “Nada—nothing,” he says restfully before every subject that is broached.

  They stood in the corridor of the train and they gazed at the fields of France. These fields are richer and better cultivated than a good deal of—though not all—the Spanish land. The Spaniard does not deny this, though he will think of the province of olives in Jaén, the vega of Granada, the vines of Rioja and Valdepeñas, and the long rich cultivations of Valencia and say, with that exaggeration which is natural to local pride, that these are “the richest places in the whole world”; and about Valencia he will be right. But Spain on the whole is a poor country, and he does not deny it. He is simply not interested in what is outside of Spain; because he has no feeling for the foreign thing and even regards its existence as inimical and an affront. He turns his back. His lack of curiosity amounts to a religion.

  When I first crossed the frontier at Irún nearly thirty years ago, I remember listening to a declamation by a Spaniard against his own country. At the time I thought the protest was a sign of some specific political unrest, but I have heard that speech dozens of times since. Again and again: “It is one of the evils of Spain. We are decadent, priest-ridden, backward, barbarous, corrupt, ungovernable,” etc., etc. Spain is either hell or heaven, a place for fury or ecstasy. Like Russians in the n
ineteenth century, the Spaniards are in the habit of breaking into denunciations of their country, and between 1898 and 1936 these denunciations culminated in a puritan renaissance. There had been two savage civil wars in that century and, among intellectuals, these wars presented themselves as a conflict between reactionary Catholicism and liberal Catholicism, between Africa and Europe, tradition and progress. In the writings of Ganivet, in Ortega y Gasset, Unamuno, the early Azorín, in Maeztu, in Ayala and Baroja—a brilliant school which has had no successors and which was contemporary with the effective efforts of Giner de los Ríos to create an educated minority—the examination of the Spanish sickness was made without rhetoric. Wherever one finds a superior mind in Spain it is certain to have been formed by this tragic generation, many of whom died of broken hearts in the Civil War, were executed, or are in exile. Possibly some of these train travellers have been influenced by them, possibly they are hostile or indifferent; if we are to find some common ground on which they stand we shall have to look beyond the accidents of opinion. That common ground is not their nationality.

  For the Spaniards are not Spaniards first, if they are Spaniards in the end. The peninsula is a piece of rocky geography. It is the subject of Spanish rhetoric, the occasion for their talk about Spanishness, for chauvinism and rebellion—and they know from experience in every generation how those things end: they end in nada, nothing, resignation. The ground these travellers rest their lives on is something smaller than Spain. They are rooted in their region, even nowadays, after the Civil War, which has mixed up the population and broken so many ardently maintained barriers. They are Basques, Catalans, Galicians, Castilians, Andalusians, Valencians, Murcians, and so on, before they are Spaniards, and before they are men of these regions they are men of some town or village; and in that place, small or large, they think perfection lies—even the self-castigating people of Murcia, who say of themselves: “Between earth and sky nothing good in Murcia.” One thinks of that little play of the Quintero brothers called The Lady from Alfaqueque: a lady in this lost little Andalusian town, who was so in love with it that she could be cajoled and swindled into any folly by anyone who said he came from that place. I remember a woman in Madrid who had spent the last ten years in political exile saying: “We had a much better life abroad when we were in exile, but I could never forget the water of Madrid and the craving for the taste of it became a torture.”