Gerald Brenan - South from Grenada

This is an extraordinary book which tells about the culture of southern Spain in the early 19th century, just after World War 1. The writer goes to live in Spain because it is cheap and he wants to be a writer. I think, after the horror of the war (he went through the Somme, Ypres and Passchendaele) , he feels that the world owes him a living, and is quite frank about writing hopefully to various uncles and asking them for money. Sometimes he gets money, not always.

Carrington painted him

Carrington painted him more than once. This should be in the NPG.

He plays host to Lytton Strachey and Carrington, and he narrates their visit amusingly - he was in love with Carrington for a very long time. Later Virginia and Leonard Woolf also pay a visit and are very struck with this part of Spain - which has a character like something from the Middle Ages. The Spanish are great at keeping their festivals and culture alive today but they are nothing like they were, simply because the belief in the efficacy of the rites has been lost. Here is an account of a village Easter.

The Easter ceremonies had a peculiar vividness. From the morning of Palm Sunday a silence fell on the village and lasted till the end of the week. During this time no one shouted or sang, and the sound of the pestle and mortar, that gay prelude to every Andalusian meal, ceased to be heard. Then on the night of Holy Thursday the figure of the Crucified Christ was borne in slow procession with torches and candles as far as the stone Calvary that stands among the olive trees a little below the village. At every halt a low, sad copla was sung. On the following evening there was a yet more lugubrious procession, when his dead body was carried in silence in a glass coffin to the same place and then brought back to the church to be interred....

The fast was now ended, but the final scene of the drama had yet to be played. At daybreak on Easter Sunday the young men got the church key from the sacristan, took out the figure of the Risen Christ, and carried it to the square at the lower end of the village, He was represented as a young man in a green dress and, as if to associate him with Adonis and Osiris and all the man-gods who had died in order that the corn might spring again and the sap rise yet once more in the stems, he was crowned with leaves; a bunch of flowers was placed in his right hand and a sheaf of barley in his left. He was set up on a platform in the humble square with its low unplastered houses, and the villagers - especially the poorer families - collected round with cries of Viva, viva el Senor

.

I have chosen a picture of Easter in a Colombian village because
the pictures I can find of Easter in Spain are so stagey, grand and impressive
and show people dressed up like the Ku Klux Klan, which Brenan
never mentioned.

.... at nine o'clock when the Virgin was carried out in her green, star-spangled dress they fell into line behind her and formed a procession. This was the dramatic moment of the Easter ceremonies, which even the simplest of the shepherd boys understood, for the Virgin had found the grave open and missed her son, and was sallying out to seek for him. ... As soon as the figure of the Virgin arrived in front of that of the Christ, she curtsied to him three times: the priest stepped forward to sprinkle him with holy water and incense him, and she was brought up tottering to the edge of the platform on which he stood. Then, when she was only a couple of feet away, his arms, which moved on strings, were raised in a jerky movement to touch her shoulders. This was the signal for the silence to break.

This is from the introduction (by Chris Stewart) to the Penguin Modern Classic edition:

"And it is precisely in this amateur and eclectic approach, embellished with meticulously crafted discourses on subjects as diverse as toxicology and Sufism, Mediterranean agriculture and prehistoric archaeology, that the pleasure of South from Granada lies."

"There are those who would criticise the book for a certain lack of organisation, and it is true that there is an element of rambling to it, but for me rambling is in the very nature of a discursive book; it is redeemed though, and its sometimes tangled threads given cohesion, by the illuminating and all-pervading presence of it author. This is achieved by the wit and warmth as well as the penetrating intelligence he brings to bear on any subject he approaches, and its couching in what seems like effortlessly graceful prose, although in fact he spared no pains in honing and polishing his writing - two and a half years in the case of this book."

"He read French, German and Spanish, as well as Latin and Greek, and during the writing of The Literature of the Spanish People read no fewer than two hundred and fifty books in two and a half years... He was as happy, or perhaps happier, striding high in the mountains with shepherds as he was in earnest discussion with the luminaries of Bloomsbury. He was also a brilliant and generous conversationalist."

(I don't think I have ever met a brilliant and generous conversationalist.)

The extract below is translated by Google and copied from a webpage on Gerald Brenan Spanish course here- this is the kind of English I correct. Sometimes the misuse of words is quite funny. My Spanish students actually write better English than this so it is easy to tell when they try to cheat by using Google translate.

The April 23 was chosen by UNESCO as World Book Day, since it coincides with the death of Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare. On this day we remember Gerald Brenan, specialist writer on issues of Spain.

Gerald Brenan (1894) was the eldest son of a British soldier who was destined to continue the family tradition by desire of his father, when he began to have use of reason, he discovered he did not like the games in which he had to show his strength but he preferred the quiet of reading a book. Brenan studied up to 18 years in England to enter the military academy. At this age, he realized that he was being prepared for a profession that was not attractive way of life as to what he rebelled and fled with a friend. The First World War forced him to fight and was decorated. He got a pension with the help of his family, allowed him to find a place in Spain (Yegen) where he could devote himself to what he liked: study of literature, botany, philosophy, arts in general, etc .. since did not go to college like most of his friends (Circle Bloomsbory). his passion was poetry, but he knew he could not make a living as a poet. His father demanded to live a useful profession. For this reason, he decided to write novels and married an American novelist Gamel Woolsey; she corrected and typed his works. They had no children, Brenan adopted a daughter who was the result of a love affair with a young Spanish. Brenan realized that the dwelling place was idyllic but was held incommunicado to continue his career. They moved to a place of great beauty, strategically located. Churriana (Málaga), next to the airport and relatively close to Gibraltar This is where your dream comes true. Brenan is on site and at the right time when exploding Spanish civil war. England was very interested in this confrontation, he would report through their stories about what happened and later wrote a book about the causes of the Spanish war. Brenan that had gone unnoticed, began to be heard and recognized internationally, especially in Spain where his book "The Spanish Labyrinth" was banned, becoming a symbol of freedom for dissidents dictator Franco.Tras this book, wrote others about Spain:  "the History of Spanish Literature" and "the Face of Spain", the result of a trip in 1950. the war had given him the epithet of specialist Spain writer but he was forced to leave his house with a lovely garden in Churriana, where he left the service staff (cook, gardener). on his return to Malaga (1953), he returned to his beloved Brenan lifestyle in which he wrote for the morning and walking in the evenings; he enjoyed the climate, diet and people. He wore an intense social life, made ​​contact with writers like Hemingway or Caro Baroja, etc. Here wrote one of his most famous stories "South of Granada" A Life of one's Own (autobiography) and The Lighthouse Always Says Yes they came to light in 1962 and in 1966. in 1968, killed his wife and collaborator, though he was shocked, he joined his fate to a young woman (Linda Nicholson-Price) that helped to continue its vital objective: writing. They felt they had to start in a new place within the province so they decided to sell the house and fire service. At this stage he published Personal Memory, John of the Cross, The Best Moments: Poems; Thoughts in a Dry Season. Aphorisms In 1987, died at 92 years old. His body was donated to the Faculty of Medicine, some nerve cells were taken for the study of longevity. In 2001 he was cremated and buried in the English Cemetery in Malaga with his wife.