Gerald Brenan and the Face of Spain

Gerald Brenan is, as far as I know, in a unique position. Many commentators visited Spain during the Civil War and left accounts of the political and social situation. But Brenan went one further: he went back, after the War was over. He was living in Spain when the Civil War broke out. He left Spain in 1936, and then his book The Face of Spain, published 1950,  describes his return 13 years later, in 1949. He revisits his house, near Malaga, and meets his former housekeeper. As the author of two highly regarded books on Spain (The Spanish Labyrinth and The Literature of the Spanish People), he appears to have an unrivalled position for commenting on the political and social situation in Spain.

What emerges from his account is not just the sufferinf and poverty of Spain in 1949; it is the remarkable fact that the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath seems to have been completely forgotten by subsequent generations outside Spain. I remember going on holiday to Ibiza when I was around 12 or 13. This will have been while Franco was still alive, and there was no mention of the means by which he had come to power, or the lack of democracy and free speech in Spain. Franco was just the face on the stamps; holiday making came first. The achievement of Spain, which Brenan points out very clearly, is that the country made everyone outside it forget what had happened.

Compared to more recent, more academic historians, such as Paul Preston or Helen Graham, Brenan has an admirable ability to talk to people and to capture their views. This gives an immediacy to the book that no academic account can match. Nonetheless, I’m not entirely happy with the book. Perhaps the most dated parts of the book are Brenan’s comments on art and literature. Perhaps these are minor points to quibble at, but for me they represent some rather questionable attitudes of his:

·         French is at the top of the cultural pecking order. Brenan writes about Spanish writers and describes them in terms of their nearest French equivalent: Perez Galdos as almost as good as Balzac, but (let’s be clear) not as good as Balzac.

·         Similarly, Spanish Baroque is compared with and found clearly inferior to the Italian Baroque: “Spanish Baroque has a power of stirring the emotions and putting the mind into a state of confused exaltation and astonishment that is not given by the more intellectual and classically rooted Baroque of Italy.” [p54] That word “confused” intrigues me – I don’t find Spanish Baroque any more or less confused than Italian Baroque, and certainly no less intellectual. I think such a comparison reveals more about Mr Brenan’s preconceptions than about his evaluation of specific artworks.

·         “Spanish cooking, it must be admitted, has no claims to compete with French… but an Englishman will find absolutely no cause for grumbling till he has been living in a Spanish hotel for at least a month.” I would be grumbling if I lived in any hotel for a month. 

In any case, the attempt to define national characteristics is itself questionable. Behind all the above judgements is the idea that there is such a thing as the Spanish character, the Italians character, and so on. And just as not every “Englishman” would only be impatient after a month in a Spanish hotel, not every Spanish bus is fit for the scrap heap [p83].

Behind all this can be detected a certain early 20th-century British  aristocratic snobbishness, a feeling of cultural superiority. It’s as if Brenan says, yes, I have lived in Spain, but don’t worry, I understand you are an English reader and you will have your standards. I will tell you quite frankly where the Spanish are simply not up to scratch. That kind of attitude as displayed by Brenan has not worn well.