Iberia (95 page)

 

Actually, I doubt that the tag “Fascist lackey” applies to me. At
home I’m accused of being a dangerous liberal. I believe the fact
is that I have described the war pretty much as it occurred, and
to do this would enrage norteamericanos who saw it otherwise
and Spaniards who had their own version.’

 

Gironella, who in appearance reminded me of Arthur Miller,
had traveled widely throughout Europe. ‘Almost all the countries.
Communist too. I understand you’ve been to Asia. I found it
wildly exciting. Japan, India, Egypt. This year I want to see Israel.
I don’t understand how a serious writer these days can judge his
own terrain if he knows no other.’

 

I asked him why he continued to live in Cataluña, and he
grinned. ‘I grew up in a town near Gerona [Catalan, Girona]. I
suppose that’s where my family got its name. Gironella. The Girl
from Girona. It’s a grand region. The other day this fellow heard
a lecture on the glories of Castilian literature, and which writers
did the speaker refer to? Valle Inclán, a Galician. Pardo Bazán,
another Galician. Ibáñez, a Valencian. Pío Baroja, a Basque.
Unamuno, a Basque. Lorca, an Andalusian. Jiménez, another
Andulusian. And at the end of the list he referred to me, a Catalan.
I love the regions of Spain.’

 

I asked whether he thought the influx of Andalusians would
modify Cataluña. ‘For the better. In my little town they’ve opened
a night club. Stiff, suspicious Catalans go there, listen to the guitars
till midnight, then raise their right forefinger, whisper one reserved
“Ole” and go home satisfied that they’ve participated in the glories
of Old Spain.’

 

I saw a good deal of the book business in Spain and constantly
had the feeling that it stood about where it had in the United
States fifty years ago. There was much peddling of illustrated
Bibles on street corners, where fast-talking men in overcoats
spread their big volumes on collapsible tables and buttonholed
people as they climbed out of the subway or left the cinema. The
Bibles seemed poorly put together and were far below the quality
of similar ventures in Italy or Germany.

 

What to me was wholly incomprehensible was the hawking of
complete sets of authors like Honoré de Balzac and Victor Hugo
in poor translation encased in cheap impermanent binding. Some
of these sets, whose authors I cannot now remember, were truly
grotesque; the average Spanish family had no conceivable need
for the collected works of Bret Harte, for such books could not
possibly relate to their needs. There seemed to be two reasons for
this phenomenon. Spain did not encourage or at times even allow
honest discussion of contemporary problems, so it was
understandable that publishers would look to foreign literatures
for sets of books which might sell because of clandestine
reputations. Certainly the ideas of Balzac and Hugo were at odds
with those of Generalísimo Franco’s Spain, but they were French
ideas and therefore to be discounted. For example, one could not
possibly publish in Spain the kind of book attacking Franco that
one publishes in the United States attacking whoever is President
at the time, nor would one publish a novel on any significant
contemporary issue, so for first-rate treatment of the human
condition one must look abroad. The second reason we have
already uncovered. Spanish families love to buy sets of books,
whether they read them or not, and since Balzac wrote many
books, he produces an impressive set.

 

This accounts, too, for the sale of encyclopedias, often wretched
in scholarship. One finds sets of volumes on almost anything, not
as banal perhaps as the comparable volumes now being peddled
in the United States on our history, the nature of science or great
moments of discovery, but still pretty bad. From time to time I
consulted these miserable works in search of rudimentary data
and they had nothing to offer, yet they appear proudly in many
homes, gathering a dust of respectability that is rarely disturbed
and never with profit.

 

On the other hand, Spain has produced one of the world’s
outstanding encyclopedias, the great
Espasa-Calpe
in some ninety
volumes, publication of which began in the 1920s. It is a reputable
work, unbalanced perhaps in its emphasis on Spanish history and
thought, but with a mature coverage that makes one wonder how
Spain, with so few readers, could have produced such a work,
whereas the United States, with infinitely greater resources, has
not. Of course, the
Espasa-Calpe
is not found in many private
homes, but Señor Porter, the bookseller, had one in his, and I was
surprised in other homes I visited to see the endless rows of this
extraordinary work. It was the exhibition set nonpareil, but it was
also a gold mine of material in which to prospect. For example,
the article on
Don Quijote
covered pages 1117-1214 of Volume
48, and like several other such entries, was a book in itself, for the
pages of
Espasa-Calpe
are quite large. Experts told me that in
coverage of topics the Spanish encyclopedia surpassed Mussolini’s
distinguished
Enciclopedia Italiana
and in thoroughness of treating
those topics, the
Britannica
. It was, however, less distinguished
in scholarship than the famous Eleventh Edition of the
Britannica
,
but not inferior to the later editions.

 

This matter of Spanish scholarship baffled me. Repeatedly I
bought books whose titles led me to expect an orderly
development of an idea, as for example,
History of Spanish
Colonization in Africa
, only to find that the accurate title should
have been
Some Casual Reflections on Random Aspects of a
Gentleman’s Travels in Our African Colonies and Elsewhere
, in
which the first chapter dealt with a trip the author once made to
Kenya, the second with a hippopotamus hunt in the Congo, the
third with a hortatory essay on the need for more Catholic
missions, and the fourth with God knows what. I doubt if there
is another country in the world, except Japan, in which books are
so poorly organized and so dependent upon the personal whims
of the writer. Especially aggravating is the fact that few Spanish
books contain indexes, at least none of the hundreds I have
bought, and some which pretend to scholarly completeness, such
as the history of the zarzuela which I have before me as I write,
lack both index and table of contents, even though they are the
kind of book one consults for particular items rather than reading
seriatim. Can one take seriously the scholarship of a man who
fails to provide even a table of contents?

 

On the other hand, if, as I sometimes think, the measure of a
contemporary society is whether it can support poets, Spain is
far ahead of the United States, for poetry is published in Spain,
as it is in Russia and Israel, and it is not much published, with
honorable exceptions, in the United States. A man in Spain can
build an enviable reputation from a few volumes of poems and
is then held in an esteem which knows no parallel in America, for
poets like Lorca and Jiménez are worshiped in Spain.

 

I met many Spanish writers and studied the lives of more, and
concluded that there is no nation in the world where it is so good
to be a dead writer. Wherever I went I saw placards announcing
grand assemblies of Homenaje a (Homage to) Benito Pérez Galdós
(1843-1920) or Vicente Blasco Ibáñez (1867-1928) or Pío Baroja
(1872-1956). I attended three such homenajes to writers, and they
were moving affairs at which men rose to give orations the like
of which I had not heard for fifty years. All aspects of the life and
writings of the man in question were reviewed and true homage
was paid him as a continuing cultural force. In the parks I found
statues to these writers and in the newspapers a constant series
of essays on their significance. Subjected to such a continuing
barrage, I began to believe that Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, the
author of the story from which Falla’s
El sombrero de tres picos
was adopted, was a much greater writer than Walt Whitman,
because I had never heard of anyone in Camden holding a
Homage to Walt Whitman. He was dead, so forget him because
in life he had been troublesome.

 

The case of Pío Baroja is interesting. This acidulous Basque
wrote strongly anti-clerical novels, as did Blasco Ibáñez, and
during their lifetimes they were anathema, but now that they are
dead they are the subject of frequent homenajes and their
accomplishments are praised as having brought real honor to
Spain. I was present when the tenth anniversary of Baroja’s death
was observed, and the enmity which the state had held against
him as an anticlerical radical was forgiven and he was ushered
into the pantheon with editorials and homenajes that would have
been impossible even five years before. In a way, the same thing
has happened to Hemingway; he was a foe of the Franco
government and while he lived was more or less persona non
grata, but now his greatness is being acknowledged: ‘A few days
before the death of Baroja, he was visited by Hemingway, who
wished to tell the old man that the Nobel Prize for Literature
which the norteamericano had won belonged really to Baroja.
Hemingway, who was a gallant man, spoke only the truth and we
are proud that he had the elegance to proclaim it when others of
less pundonor would have remained silent.’

 

No American writer that I know is going to have in death the
kind of immortality that Spain confers on her authors; I was
present when Dr. Gregorio Marañón died, a kind of Charles Beard
plus André Maurois, and one would have thought that the king
had died. Indeed, it was a kingly role that Marañón played, that
of a great medical man who wrote essays on Spain’s periods of
ascendancy. But when I dug deeper I found again and again that
mournful refrain, ‘Pío Baroja lived poorly on his meager income,’
or, ‘After a life of complete privation he died miserably,’ and when
I began to question not one person in the creative fields but many,
I found that whereas it was wonderful in Spain to be a dead writer,
to be a living one was something else. The Premio Nadal, which
Señor Vergés’ company awards each year, brings the author only
$3,333, and few can logically hope to win it. Most struggle a
lifetime in near-poverty, abused by society and held in contempt
by its rulers. If they write honestly they run the risk of being
thrown into jail; if they do not write constantly they starve; and
their funeral dirge is always: ‘They struggled to make a living and
died filled with bitterness and remorse.’ I went through a period
of acute depression when reviewing the lives of the gifted men
who wrote the zarzuelas; so frequent was the statement ‘With his
four chief works he made millions of pesetas for the managers of
the theater, but himself died in poverty’ that I suspended my
studies. The literary condition in Spain is rather the reverse of
that in the States; American writers earn a good living but play
no significant role in their society; Spanish writers earn almost
nothing, but when dead they are enshrined.

 

One of the aspects of Spanish intellectual life which struck me
repeatedly was the fact, reflected in these pages, that civic
leadership so often rested in the hands of medical men. They
wrote the best books, made the most daring statements and were
revered as the element of society that could be trusted to support
good movements. The doctors of Spain formed the stable, liberal
cadre and I wondered why this was. I therefore asked a
government official if he could arrange for me to meet a typical
Spanish doctor who might care to discuss the matter.

 

I was taken to a huge apartment building, Avenida
Generalísimo Franco, 520, whose rickety basketlike elevator crept
precariously up a good many floors, opening first on one side
then on the other, for it was all doors. It ejected me onto a vast,
gloomy ledge with a central well that dropped straight down to
where the doorman looked like a midget; it could have been
designed by Piranesi. A somber door standing back from the
chasm was marked Dr. Arturo Fernández-Cruz, and when the
maid opened it I was admitted to the richly decorated apartment
of a man of taste. Paintings hung on the walls, which contained
many bookcases. Fine rugs and antiques, including what I took
to be a valuable Chinese ivory of Confucius and a Thai ceramic
of a princess, occupied me until the doctor appeared, and no man
could have been better prepared to explain the dynamism of
Spanish doctors than he.

 

He was a cyclonic talker and a man of wide interests. Of
medium height, with a head of dark hair that reached down
toward his eyes, he wore a mustache which seemed constantly in
motion. His eyes were expressive, and his cheeks puckered in
when he found delight in some idea which he had begun to offer
only tentatively but which had matured into a kind of truth.
Because he sat with his back to a solid wall of medical books in
varied languages, many of them having been printed in the United
States, he gave the impression of being a good medical man, which
my friends assured me he was, but it was his reaction to other
subjects which captivated me, and I think it wisest if I simply
repeat his flood of ideas, for they better than my comments on
them will provide a picture of the Spanish medic.

 

‘I suppose I carry a strong strain of the Visigoth in me. I was
born in Sevilla, of the middle-class type that they describe as “muy
fino y muy frío” [very fine and very cold], but I must have had
Germanic inheritance because of the way my mind works. I was
a professor at the medical school in Santiago de Compostela, in
the heart of Galicia, where a man’s character is all-important. “Of
course Juan’s a good violinist, he comes from such a good family.”
I prefer it here in Cataluña, where performance is what counts.
“Juan claims he’s a violinist. Here’s a fiddle. Let’s hear him play.”