Gerald Brenan

biographical notes, memoirs, travel writing

biographical notes, memoirs, travel writing

Gerald Brenan biography

September 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

his life, writings, and adventures

Gerald Brenan (1894-1987) was born in Malta, the son of an English army officer. After spending some of his childhood in South Africa and India, he grew up in an isolated Cotswold village. He studied at Radley College and then the military academy at Sandhurst. Travel and adventure were to be his way of life, and at sixteen he ran away from home. His aim was to reach Central Asia but the outbreak of the Balkan War and shortage of money caused him to return to England. He studied to enter the Indian Police (as did his near-contemporary George Orwell) but on the outbreak of the First World War, he joined the army. He spent over two years on the Western Front, reaching the rank of captain and winning a Military Cross and a Croix de Guerre.

Following the end of the war, his fellow officer and friend Ralph Partridge introduced him to the fabled Bloomsbury Group. It was through Partridge that Brenan met Lytton Strachey, Dora Carrington, and Virginia Woolf. As soon as he was released from military service he packed a rucksack and left England aboard a ship bound for Spain. He was disillusioned with the way of life in England and with the stifling social and sexual hypocrisies of British bourgeois society. He rebelled against becoming part of it and, being a romantic and adventurer, resolved to seek a more breathable atmosphere in which to live.

He also wanted to educate himself and become a writer. As he records in his best known travel memoir, South from Granada, he felt ashamed that his public school upbringing had left him with a very poor education. He shipped 2,000 books out to his chosen destination – an area deep in Andalucia known as ‘La Alpujarra’.

South from Granada is a classic in which Brenan describes setting up home in a remote Spanish village in the 1920s. He has a marvellous grasp of geography; he captures the rugged atmosphere of the region; and he has a particularly detailed knowledge of botany. Local characters and customs are vividly recounted. Bloomsbury enthusiasts will be delighted his by hilarious accounts of visits made by Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf under very difficult conditions, as well as a meeting with Roger Fry in Almeria.

Ralph Partridge and Dora Carrington, recently married, also visited him with Lytton Strachey in 1920, and Carrington’s fondness for Brenan is thought to have started on this trip. She carried on an extensive correspondence with Brenan for the next several years and in 1922 they had a brief affair, which was rapidly discovered by Partridge. There was a year of silence between the three, before reconciliation took place and the often-stormy friendship continued for the remainder of their lives.

In 1930 he married the American poetess Gamel Woolsey. In 1934 the Brenans left Spain and were unable to return until 1953, partly because of the Spanish civil war. During the Second World War he was an Air Raid Warden and a Home Guard. They spent this time in Aldbourne and Brenan expressed his feelings of exile from Spain by completing three major works on Spanish life and literature. On his return to Spain he began a series of autobiographical works, including South from Granada, A Life of One’s Own, and A Personal Record.

The Spanish Labyrinth has become the classic account of the background to the Spanish Civil War. It has all the vividness of Brenan’s personal experiences and intelligent insights. He tries to see the issues in Spanish politics objectively, whilst bearing witness to the deep involvement which is the only possible source of much of this richly detailed account. As a literary figure on the fringe of the Bloomsbury Group, Gerald Brenan lends to this narrative an engaging personal style that has become familiar to many thousands of readers over the decades since it was first published

After the death of his wife in 1968, a young English student of the poetry of the Spanish saint – St. John of the Cross – joined Gerald as his secretary and companion. This young lady Lynda Jane Nicholson Price remained with him for 14 years. In the later part of his life he was confined to an old people’s home in Aldermaston, but a group of his Spanish friends ‘kidnapped’ him and took him back to what they regarded as his spiritual home, just outside Malaga. He died on January 19, 1987 while in the hands of the Spanish Medical Services who had undertaken to care for him. He was acclaimed for his services to Spanish literature, buried in Malaga, and a plaque dedicated to his work was fixed to the house where he had lived in Yegen. It reads:

“In this house for a period of seven years [1920-1934] lived the British Hispanist GERALD BRENAN, who universalised the name of Yegen and the customs and traditions of La Alpujarra. The Town Hall, grateful, dedicates this plaque.” YEGEN, 3 JANUARY, 1982

Bloomsbury Group – web links

Hogarth Press first editions
Annotated gallery of original first edition book jacket covers from the Hogarth Press, featuring designs by Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, and others.

The Omega Workshops
A brief history of Roger Fry’s experimental Omega Workshops, which had a lasting influence on interior design in post First World War Britain.

The Bloomsbury Group and War
An essay on the largely pacifist and internationalist stance taken by Bloomsbury Group members towards the First World War.

Tate Gallery Archive Journeys: Bloomsbury
Mini web site featuring photos, paintings, a timeline, sub-sections on the Omega Workshops, Roger Fry, and Duncan Grant, and biographical notes.

Bloomsbury: Books, Art and Design
Exhibition of paintings, designs, and ceramics at Toronto University featuring Hogarth Press, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, Quentin Bell, and Stephen Tomlin.

Blogging Woolf
A rich enthusiast site featuring news of events, exhibitions, new book reviews, relevant links, study resources, and anything related to Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf

Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search the texts of all Woolf’s major works, and track down phrases, quotes, and even individual words in their original context.

A Mrs Dalloway Walk in London
An annotated description of Clarissa Dalloway’s walk from Westminster to Regent’s Park, with historical updates and a bibliography.

Women’s History Walk in Bloomsbury
Annotated tour of literary and political homes in Bloomsbury, including Gordon Square, University College, Bedford Square, Doughty Street, and Tavistock Square.

Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
News of events, regular bulletins, study materials, publications, and related links. Largely the work of Virginia Woolf specialist Stuart N. Clarke.

BBC Audio Essay – A Eulogy to Words
A charming sound recording of a BBC radio talk broadcast in 1937 – accompanied by a slideshow of photographs of Virginia Woolf.

A Family Photograph Albumn
Leslie Stephens’ collection of family photographs which became known as the Mausoleum Book, collected at Smith College – Massachusetts.

Bloomsbury at Duke University
A collection of book jacket covers, Fry’s Twelve Woodcuts, Strachey’s ‘Elizabeth and Essex’.

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Gerald Brenan: A Personal Record

May 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

second volume of autobiography 1920-1972

This is the second volume of Gerald Brenan’s autobiographical writings. The first, A Life of One’s Own covers the period 1894 to 1920, and deals with his childhood and education, up to the point of his emergence from (honourable) service during the first world war. This volume starts with an account of his arrival in Spain as a young man of twenty-six – a subject he treats in a more general and less personal terms in his classic travel book South from Granada.

Although it purports to cover five decades, most of the book is devoted to his bohemian wanderings in the 1920s, which he spent oscillating between Spain and the Bloomsbury Group – of which he is not uncritical. Much of his narrative is dominated by an emotionally turbulent affair with Dora Carrington, who just happened to be married to his best friend Ralph Partridge. It also includes his dabblings with shop girls and prostitutes, and his attempts to secure allowances and inheritances so that he didn’t have to work.

He decided he was going to become a writer, but it was to be more than two decades before he got round to anything substantial. Having established a home in southern Spain, he returned to London to continue his on-off affair with Carrington and started to write a biography of Saint Teresa. In this period of his life he also mixed with various bohemians of whom he gives vivid character sketches – Arthur Whaley, Boris Anrep, Beryl de Zoete – almost all of whom had personal relations as tangled as his own.

The anguish of his affair with Carrington continued for years and is spelled out in quite intimate detail. She was married to Ralph Partridge but in love with Lytton Strachey, who was also in love with Partridge – and they all lived together. This is the Bloomsbury Group writ large. But as soon a long-awaited inheritance from an aunt arrived, Brenan got married to almost the first girl he met.

He is amazingly frank about this marriage, the first part of which was passed knowing that his wife was still in love with Llewelyn Powys, with whom she had been conducting an affair. He sticks at it and makes the marriage work, but the pages devoted to it are outnumbered by those on Carrington by ten to one.

There’s a vivid first-hand account of the Civil War in Malaga, following the military revolt which had started in the Spanish protectorates of Ceuta and Melilla in Morocco. He stuck it out as long as possible, then retreated to England to serve as an air-raid warden during the war.

The strange thing is that once he reaches 1940, the last three decades of his life are written off in no more than a few pages. However, I was mindful of the fact that he wrote these memoirs in the late 1960s, and there might have been an element of recapturing his lost youth in the enterprise.

In the post-war years he was spending his time doing nothing more demanding than writing letters to the newspapers. His social life included such heterogeneous folk as Dylan Thomas and Diana Dors. He inherited yet again following death of his father – though not as much as he felt he was entitled to.

In 1953 he and his wife returned to Spain, to the house which had been vacated during the Civil War. Before long he was engaged in an amorous adventure with Dora Carrington’s young niece, and couldn’t wait to tell his wife all about it.

His wife died in 1967, but Brenan had already started a relationship with a girl forty years younger than him. He sold his house and built a new one further inland, from which point he composed this memoir.

I must say that my regard for him as a human being went down quite a few notches reading this account, but he is undoubtedly a good writer, with a good eye for character and an interesting line in anecdotes. His reflections on the Bloomsbury Group are valuable, and South from Granada and The Spanish Labyrinth remain well established as classics.

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Gerald Brenan, Personal Record 1920-1972, New York: Knopf, 1975, pp.381, ISBN: 0394495829

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South from Granada

May 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

life, art, culture, and food of 1920s Spain

Gerald Brenan was a Bloomsbury Group fringe figure who spent much of his adult life living in and writing about Spain. This is his much-loved travel memoir which recounts setting up home in the Alpujarras in the 1920s – a beautiful but fairly remote area of the south between Granada and the coast. It’s a joy to read for all sorts of reasons – partly because of his amazing fortitude and resourcefulness, and partly because of the empathy he shows towards everything with which he comes into contact.

At first he lived on next to nothing, with no water, gas, or electricity, settling in a village miles from anywhere. His idea was to spend his time reading, catching up on an education which he had not received at public school. His food came virtually straight off the land – for this area is rich in fruit, vegetables, and the olive oil for which it is famous. He integrates completely with the locals, and gives wonderfully sympathetic accounts of their customs and behaviour. Anything he wants to buy is miles away in Almeria, Orgiva, or Malaga, and his account includes expeditions we would now consider positively heroic:

I set out therefore on foot by the still-unfinished coast road, buying as I went bread, cheese, and oranges, and sleeping on the beaches. Since I was in poor walking condition, I took five days to do the hundred a fifty miles.

He is amazingly at one with nature. I imagine a keen botanist would find double pleasure in his description of excursions into the Sierra Nevada. And literary fans will be amused at his accounts of visits from Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington, then Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf. His portrait of Strachey’s calvary on the outing to Lanjaron, riding over mountains side-saddle on a mule, carrying a parasol, and complaining of piles – is pricelessly funny.

There are chapters on the calendar of village life, of festivals and religious beliefs, and in particular the powerful local superstitions; a whole section on local food – paella, bacalao, and gazpacho – all quite common now, but at the time, like food off another planet.

There’s a chapter which creates en passant a whole analysis of the Bloomsbury Group and most of its major figures, plus why he felt that by 1930 it had outlived itself as a cultural force. His description of the pleasures and riches of walking in the mountains would take you several holidays just to re-trace his steps.

He offers a history of the region which starts at the Mesolithic Age and traces its development in terms of agriculture, architecture, politics, and land cultivation. He even throws in a chapter describing a guided tour to the brothels of Almeria.

It’s no wonder why this book has remained a popular classic which never goes out of print. Read it if you are interested in Spain, Bloomsbury, or just an account of life, art, and culture from a sensitive and intelligent human being. He went on to write one of the definitive accounts of the Spanish Civil War – but it’s this book which you will want to keep on your shelf.

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Gerald Brenan, South from Granada, London: Penguin, 2008, pp.336, ISBN 0141189320

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The Face of Spain

June 29, 2011 by Roy Johnson

Revisiting central Spain and Andalucia in 1949

Gerald Brenan is best known for his travel classic, South from Granada, which details his early bohemian existence in Andalusia where he entertained visiting members of the Bloomsbury Group. On the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, he went back to England and never returned until 1949. The Face of Spain book is a diary and travel journal of the visit he made to assess the state of the nation more than a decade after the war, travelling from Madrid down to the area west of Malaga where he had once lived.

Franco is in power, and all the hopes of the republican movement and the International brigades have been crushed. (It should be remembered that Franco succeeded partly because of Stalin’s treacherous policy of using the civil war as an excuse to exterminate his rivals and his enemies – even though they were fighting on the same side.)

It’s not surprising that this book is not so well known as South of Granada, because all the freshness and optimism of his Spanish experience in 1919-1934 has been tempered by the terrible events of the civil war and its aftermath. But one thing that does link this book with its predecessor is his love of plants. Everywhere he goes he records the vegetation, producing something like like a botanist’s field notes.

The situation is beautiful. Ilexes and lotus trees stand around in solemn dignity and under them grow daises, asphodels, and that flower of piercing blue – the dwarf iris.

What makes his account more than a surface travelogue is that Brenan is steeped in a knowledge of Spanish history and culture. He points out for instance that the Spanish Inquisition was so brutal and prolonged for a simple economic reason. The property of heretics was seized by the torturers and paid over to the State.

Every visit to a church turns into a mini lecture on Baroque architecture, or a trip to yet another white hill town becomes a lesson in the history of the Moors in Andalucia. But everywhere he travels the human story is the same – grinding poverty, hunger, and unemployment. It’s also a ghastly reminder of what it’s like to live under a repressive regime – widespread bureaucracy and red tape, a black market, political corruption and inertia, permission required to travel.

He returns to his old home in Malaga (in a village now almost swallowed up by the airport) having left it in the care of his gardener thirteen years before. To his surprise he finds that despite the civil war, the second world war, and the era of post-war austerity, it is completely intact – books stored, rooms undisturbed, and the garden flourishing.

Everwhere he goes people complain of the official corruption and incompetence which kept most Spanish working people shackled to misery well into the second half of the twentieth century. It’s no wonder that the country exploded with relief on the death of Franco in 1975.

Amidst much generalizing about the Spanish national character, Brenan suddenly expresses a pan-European vision that reflects exactly why his opinions and impressions are to be taken seriously:

In the Federal Europe of the future we shall find it quite natural to have a second patria in some other European country – a patria of our ideals, of our super-ego. We shall each of us marry a foreign nation and those marriages, whether platonic or otherwise, will be the bond which will keep our federation of diverse speeches and races together.

To read all this at a time when the modern cities of Malaga, Cordoba, and Seville have (despite current unemployment) come into a twenty-first century as contemporary urban centres just as sophisticated as Manchester, Bruges, and Milan, is to realise how enormous a leap forward Spain has made in the last fifty years. Yet Gerald Brenan’s insight into the historical depth of what he views reminds us that much of Spain’s character comes from events that happened not decades but centuries ago,

So it might lack the youthful optimism and the amusing anecdotes of his earlier travel book, but this journal provides a fascinating insight into a modern European democracy at a time when it was a dictatorship, almost a forgotten country, and certainly a pariah state.

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Gerald Brenan, The Face of Spain, London: Serif Books, 2010, pp.248, ISBN: 189795963X

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The New Spaniards

June 27, 2009 by Roy Johnson

culture and society in post-Franco Spain

It’s easy to forget that only a few decades ago Spain was an under-developed country with a fascist dictator. Tourists were arrested for wearing shorts, and outside major cities many villages didn’t have electricity or street lighting. Today, Spain is one of the biggest, the most democratic, and technologically advanced countries in Europe. John Hooper’s book The New Spaniards is all about the social, political, and cultural consequences of this very rapid development during the last four decades.

As he observes, it’s possible to see this reflected in a typical family gathering of three generations. The grandparents, reflecting a poorer agricultural past, will be short and dark; their children, beneficiaries of the post-Franco boom, and raised on a Mediterranean diet, will be tall and slim; but the grandchildren, victims of current prosperity, might well be overweight.

The first part of the book is a detailed political history of Spain following the death of Franco. His rule had held Spain in a fossilized state since the end of the Civil War in 1940. The aftermath was, unsurprisingly, a sweeping away of the old, corrupt, and backward-looking practices – to be replaced by an essentially socialist government dominated by one party.

Equally unsurprising was the fact that people who had been excluded from public life for a generation, when they came back in contact with it, feathered their own nests. Post 1980 Spain has a long history of local graft, corruption, kick-backs, and ‘influence’ which make it seem closer to the world of Italian Mafiosi than the rest of Europe. And I have to say that this sort of thing still continues in the part of Andalucia where I live part of the time.

He deals with all the features of Spanish society which outsiders find surprising and puzzling – such as the church, for instance. It’s been disestablished since 1986, yet the state supports it with public funding. Its membership has decreased since the advent of democracy, yet many Spaniards consider themselves Christians, and the slightly dubious Opus Dei organisation has its greatest numbers and influence there.

On sexual mores, the country has passed from being against topless sunbathing in the 1970s to accepting gay marriages thirty years later. The birth rate is declining, more women are working, and adult children are living at home as the family unit, which is seen as the bulwark against unemployment and the harsh economic climate of the 2000s.

John Hooper explains the astonishingly murky finances of the National lottery, and throws in the amazing fact that the Spaniards spend/lose more on gambling each week than they do on fresh milk, fruit, and vegetables.

That’s one of his strengths – bringing sociological data to life with striking examples. Against this, he has a slightly annoying habit of looping back historically into the nineteenth century. The idea is to show how certain political conditions have originated, which is understandable, but it produces the unfortunate effect of a book in which the narrative is going backwards.

He’s much more lively and interesting when he deals with contemporary life, such as why Basques, Catalan, and Galicians feel so keen on independence, why bullfighting is still tolerated in a country with strong support for animal rights (not dissimilar from fox-hunting in the UK) and how the Spaniards feel about the influx of second home owners who bring mixed blessings to the country.

There’s plenty of detail on the Spanish royal family which I could have done without, but his chapters on the press and the extraordinary explosion of modern art and architecture really bring alive the sense of renewal and positive exploration of new ideas which anyone who visits the country regularly cannot fail to register.

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John Hooper, The New Spaniards, London: Penguin, second revised edition, 2006, pp.480, ISBN 0141016094

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The Spanish Labyrinth

September 10, 2011 by Roy Johnson

political and historical origins of the Spanish Civil War

The Spanish Labyrinth is an important historical study in which a liberal humanist tries to understand why a catastrophic civil war took place in Spain between 1936 and 1939. Gerald Brenan was an auto-didactic but a very passionate historian with an enduring love for the country in which he made his home from 1919 until the war broke out – and to which he returned, living just outside Malaga from 1953 until his death in Alhaurín el Grande in 1987. He is buried in the English cemetery in Malaga.

This account was written whilst the war was taking place, first published in 1943 then revised in 1950 with no changes to its central conclusion that the civil war had set Spain back fifty years. The end of the Franco regime didn’t come about until the mid 1970s, so that was not a bad analysis and prediction. The Spanish Labyrinth is not a history of the war but an account of its origins. Brenan explains complex issues such as the Catalonian separatist movement which resulted in a repository of political radicalism focussed in Barcelona – the principal centre of Spain’s manufacturing industry and one of the most important cities during the war.

The first part of his account looks at the complex history of the relation between the Church and the Liberals. He sees the Catholic Church’s principal mistake as its failure to understand the French revolution and its antipathy to education. The church had historically been a supporter of the underdog against the state, but it was gradually poisoned by its proximity to power and became a force of reaction. Hence the anti-clerical violence during the war.

Brenan’s narrative trajectory is then interrupted by a detailed examination of the ‘Agrarian question’ in each of the main regions of Spain. This is followed by an in-depth account of the political philosophy of Mikhail Bukharin in order to explain why anarchism took such a powerful hold in Spain.

The central portion of the book is his analysis of Anarcho-Syndicalism in Spain – how it differed from other varieties in Europe, how it was a form of Utopian desire to return to a golden age of communal life in the pueblo, and why it ultimately failed.

Sometimes his historical narrative actually seems to be going backwards. No sooner do we arrive at the birth of the new Republic in 1931 than there is a historical detour going back to land divisions and sheep rearing in the thirteenth century.

The story really gets under way with strikes, bomb outrages, police informers, agents provocateurs, and military repression in the post 1918 period. King Alfonso XIII perpetrated reactionary disasters, and the net result of this was a seizure of power in 1923 by Primo de Rivera. His eccentric dictatorship lasted six years.

Elections in 1931 produced a Constituent Cortes which was composed of Anarch-Syndicalists, Socialists, and Republicans. Its first tasks were the establishment of a constitution, a solution to the agrarian question and Catalonian separatism, and the separation of Church and State. All of these issues proved too difficult to implement properly.

This was partly due to the fact that these were turbulent years There were military uprisings, strikes, the burning of churches, and a period of Dictatorship had left the economy in ruins. The more vigorously the government cracked down on disruptions, the more it fuelled the wrath of the anti-Republicans. And all these events were taking place against the backdrop of a World economic crisis. When new elections were held in 1933, all parties of the left suffered heavy defeats.

It is a very sad story of political squabbling, especially in retrospect with the knowledge what it all led to. Elections were still being rigged and votes bought; parties were being formed, split, and re-constituted like amoebas; and all the time the forces of reaction were growing stronger.

Brenan ends with an overview of political developments during the war. (For a comprehensive account of the war, see Anthony Beevor’s The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939, George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, and Sir Raymond Carr’s The Spanish Tragedy). Brenan’s argument is that the war was won by Franco because of foreign intervention from his fellow fascists in Germany and Italy.

But it was also lost by the Republicans because of duplicity by Stalin, who was supposed to be offering support, but who used the war as a means of settling political scores with the Trotskyists and myriad opponents he saw from his paranoid hold on power. It might also be noted that within five months of the war’s ending, he had signed the Hitler-Stalin pact with his former ‘enemy’ as his entree to the Second World War. It is no wonder that Victor Serge, in his wonderful novel documenting this period, called these Unforgiving Years.

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Gerald Brenan, The Spanish Labyrinth, New York: Cambridge University Press, new edition 1990, pp.404, ISBN: 0521398274

More on Gerald Brenan
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Gerald Brenan

biographical notes, memoirs, travel writing

his life, writings, and adventures

Bloomsbury Group – web links

second volume of autobiography 1920-1972

life, art, culture, and food of 1920s Spain

Revisiting central Spain and Andalucia in 1949

culture and society in post-Franco Spain

political and historical origins of the Spanish Civil War

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