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‘Spain is a very special country and one must approach it with respect and with his eyes and ears open,’ wrote James A Michener in his introduction to Iberia. ‘He must be fully aware that once he has penetrated the borders he runs the risk of being made prisoner.’ Over the centuries Spain has made ‘prisoners’ of many foreign writers who have come to travel here, to call it home (Washington Irving, Gerald Brenan, Michener, George Sands, Somerset Maugham et al) and in several cases to fight for it (Laurie Lee, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, William Herrick).

Any country that can claim a book that is as vividly alive and entertaining after four centuries as is Don Quixote must be considered one of the great literary nations in its own right. However, it is particularly interesting to try to understand what it was about this beautiful, diverse and romantic land that captivated such a celebrated ‘literary international brigade.’

Such classics as For Whom the Bell Tolls, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, South from Granada and Homage to Catalonia are still relevant today: attracting new visitors with their timeless portrayals of what VS Pritchett called ‘the Spanish temper’; and charming confirmed lovers of Spain with visions of a way of life that is slowly disappearing.

Ernest Hemingway’s Pamplona:
Ernest Hemingway first visited Pamplona in 1923 and, even apart from the conception of The Sun Also Rises, the Fiesta of San Fermin was to have a long and powerful hold over him.

Every year an estimated four million people follow the ghost of Hemingway through the crowded, medieval streets of Pamplona and thousands of sangria-soaked desperadoes run with the bulls up the thundering canyon of Santo Domingo. Don Ernesto’s bust outside the bullring on Paseo Hemingway is still decked with a red bandanna by devotees and his old room at Hotel La Perla has been booked for every fiesta until the year 2040 by a Swedish publisher who, with laudable optimism, fully expects to celebrate his hundredth birthday there.

The writer was first attracted to Spain by the bulls. ‘The only place where you could see life and death, ie violent death now that the wars were over, was in the bull ring,’ he explained in Death in the Afternoon, ‘and I wanted very much to go to Spain where I could study it.’

‘Pamplona is the toughest bullfight town in the world,’ he reported to The Toronto Star during that first visit. ‘The amateur fight that comes immediately after the bulls have entered the pens proves that.’ There has never been any evidence to suggest that Hemingway himself ever ran with the bulls but he has been the inspiration for thousands of people from all over the world who have become confirmed addicts of a fiesta that is as delightfully irresponsible today as it ever was. As the great hell-raiser admitted in 1932 ‘Pamplona is changed, of course, but not as much as we are older. I found that if you took a drink that it got very much the same as it was always.’

Laurie Lee’s Granada:
In 1935 Laurie Lee tramped his way through Spain and As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning still seduces readers with its descriptions of Cadiz (‘a scribble of white on a sheet of blue glass’), Seville (‘a creamy crustation of flower-banked houses’) and even the Valladolid that he hated (‘a dark square city hard as its syllables’).

He returned during the civil war to fight with the International Brigade and then again fifteen years later when he visited Granada for the first time and, in A Rose for Winter, called it ‘probably the most beautiful and haunting of all Spanish cities; an African paradise set under the Sierras like a rose preserved in snow.’

The Alhambra Palace is less decaying and decadent than it was then but its myrtle-fringed fountains still conjure images of ‘pastoral kings, trousered girls and poet shepherds’ and from across the valley it still appears to ride ‘on green waves like a ship of fantasy.’ The narrow alleyways and high walls of the Albaicín (the old Moorish medina) - also richer and better-preserved – give the impression that the townspeople barricaded themselves in against the immensity of the Andalusian landscape, like a besieged camel-train.

‘Half the country is mountain and wilderness,’ Lee wrote in an article on Spain for Mademoiselle magazine, ‘it knows a savage climate, vast aching skies, interminable landscapes of distance and silence. But within the bright walls of its towns and villages it has developed a gregarious and extrovert ritual of life in which there are few outsiders and little loneliness.’

Old Granada seemed to appeal to Laurie Lee’s sense of tough country living: ‘The climate is as ready with death as with birth,’ he says in A Rose for Winter. ‘And in Granada, in the burnished, bright, but evil air one is never surprised to find dead in the morning the friend with whom one walked and drank the previous night.’ The city still echoes with the passion of the days when Moors and Christians battled for ‘The Land of Light’ but times have changed and the people of Granada count themselves among the most blessed in Spain…at least you can now be fairly optimistic that the person who shared your evening tapas will still be around to keep that breakfast appointment.

James A Michener’s Madrid:
James A Michener described Iberia as ‘a testament to a land I loved’ and ‘the book of mine that will probably live the longest.’ Rather than the usual Michener-style blockbuster novel this textbook/ guidebook is still, three decades after publication, one of the best introductions to the country.

‘If, as I once heard an Englishman say, “to be a tourist is to stand gape-eyed with love,” I have been one, and never more than in my first days in Puerta del Sol,’ Michener wrote of his first visits to Madrid. Almost a dozen of Iberia’s thousand densely typed pages were devoted to comparing the changes that had been wrought on ‘one of the most delightful world capitals’ during the two decades that the writer had known it.


Then [1950] - ‘Getting about the city was not only easy but positively pleasant for Madrid had the characteristics of an overgrown country town, with unexpected nooks at the end of each trolley ride.’
Now [1968] – ‘the trolleys have largely vanished and I have to go by subway or cab, and no other city has so miserable a taxi system.’
Now [Third millennium] – the trolleys have totally vanished but the efficiency, value and cleanliness of the Metro system puts the London Underground or the New York Subway to shame…and there are apparently more taxis per inhabitant than any other city apart from Cairo!
Then [1950] – ‘Madrid was a fairytale city in which one rarely dined before eleven at night and could go to the theatre for the second show at one.’
Now [1968] – ‘Although the eleven o’clock dinner is still popular, one can eat at nine or even earlier, and the theatre begins at ten.’
Now [Third millennium] – You can eat at eight but there are restaurants where you can reserve a table for 2am; you can catch a movie at midnight or listen to live music at 4am; there are even nightclubs that open their doors at 6am to cater for those for whom the night is not long enough.
Then [1950] – ‘the proudest boast of a Madrid dandy used to be “I know a bullfighter.”’
Now [1968] – ‘it’s “I have a Sueca [Swedish mistress] down at Torremolinos.”’
Now [Third millennium] – “I have a friend who’s competing on Operación Triunfo [Pop Idols].”

George Orwell’s Barcelona:
When George Orwell first arrived in Barcelona in 1936, in the early days of the civil war, he was struck by a workers’ metropolis, swathed in red banners, ‘where waiters and flower-women and bootblacks looked you in the eye and called you comrade.’ For a short period it was considered the spot where the hammer struck the anvil.

He saw most of his action further west on the Aragon front but got to know Barcelona well at various times…including a three-day period of political rioting spent on the roof of a cinema guarding a building in which his wife, a secretary, had taken refuge. The concepts of ‘doublethink’ and ‘the thought-police’ that he would use to such terrifying effect in Nineteen Eighty-Four occurred to him during these days of manipulative propaganda.

James A Michener summed up the feeling of a journey up through Spain to Barcelona as ‘like drinking a respectable red wine and finishing up with a bottle of champagne.’

Today Barcelona is the most cosmopolitan city in Spain and, still stoically Catalan, tends to look more for its lead towards northern Europe than to Madrid, and to strive more towards cool-and-chic than fiesta-and-siesta.

Homage to Catalonia relates Orwell’s wartime experiences and gives an insight into the Catalan capital that you are not likely to get from other travelogues: ‘the worst of being wanted by the police in a town like Barcelona is that everything opens so late.’ The old town still harbours the eclectic mix of rundown portside taverns and bourgeois salons and the main boulevard of La Rambla still flows with sightseers and buscavidas (hustlers). And the terraces where, in Orwell’s time, off-duty militiamen and Communist spies sipped overpriced wartime coffee…still serve overpriced coffee.

Gerald Brenan’s Cordoba:
Gerald Brenan was driven from his home in the Alpujarras region by the civil war and it was not until after WWII that he was able to return to travel in the country that he loved and to research The Face of Spain.

He found Cordoba particularly powerful and his descriptions of its beauty – ‘the water was a dim glassy blue, the line of houses low and white…opened like a flower in the sunlight’ – are interspersed with particularly harrowing insights into privation and hunger in a poor Andalusian town. ‘One sees children of ten with wizened faces, women of thirty who are already hags, wearing that frown of anxiety which perpetual hunger and uncertainty about the future give.’

Inexplicably it seems that the famous patios of Cordoba were not allowed to fall into disrepair even in the working-class quarters at this time: ‘…every house has its interior court or patio, and I was struck by the fact that these patios of the popular districts, with their flower pots and lemon trees and thick coats of whitewash, are more beautiful than those of the Baroque palaces with their azulejo wainscots and marble columns.’

The writer who was probably the most widely travelled and well-studied ‘literary immigrant’ of his era described the Mosque of Cordoba as ‘the first building in Spain – the most original and the most beautiful.’ There is certainly a hypnotic fascination about the Mezquita – ‘the forest of columns…double-horseshoe arches, striped buff-white and brick-rose…the great court planted with orange trees…the great marble cistern for ablutions’ – that never dims no matter how many times you see it. As Brenan said, ‘One has to visit the building several times to allow the magic to sink in.’

Overview:
After decades of observant wanderings Laurie Lee concluded, in his essay Spain: The Gold Syllable, that ‘Spain is not Europe, it is not even Africa-in-Europe. It is an island cut off by pride and geography.’ Gerald Brenan, in his introduction to The Face of Spain, explained that ‘Spain today gives off a note which is unlike any other. A sharp, penetrating agridulce strain, both harsh and nostalgic like that of its guitar music, which no one who has once heard will ever forget.’

‘I would rather be a foreigner in Spain than in most countries,’ George Orwell wrote of his first reactions to the country. ‘How easy it is to make friends in Spain!’ Words that were written half a century ago still hold true. Spain will never be short of willing prisoners.

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