Brenan Gerald - The Face of Spain

THIS BOOK IS AN ACCOUNT of a journey which my wife and I made in the centre and south of Spain . The ground we covered was not entirely new to either of us. In my youth I had spent some six or seven years in Andalusia . When I married we bought a house near Mlaga and from it we watched the confusion and horror of the opening phases of the civil war. Then, on our return to England , my wife wrote an account of our experiences, while I produced two large books one on Spanish history and politics and the other (now in the press) on Spanish literature. But thirteen years is a long time enough to make one wonder if one knows or remembers anything and when we returned last year my mind was full of questions. What was Spain really like? What was the character of Spanish culture and civilisation? How did it compare with the French and the English? To answer these questions I decided to keep a diary in which I would record every day my experiences and impressions. I did so, and it is out of this diary that the present book has been made.

But Franco Spain , it will be said, has a special interest. We have been calling it names in Parliament and in the press for many years, but few English people have any idea what it feels like to live in it. To throw some light on that might be valuable. However it was by no means part of my original plan to do this. I was tired of politics especially of the hopeless politics of the peninsula and wished to give my attention to the more permanent and characteristic features of the country. Regimes, I said to myself, come and go, but what is really important in Spain never changes. It was with a certain dismay therefore that I was to find that such an attitude was impossible.

For this is what happened: from the moment of our arrival in Spain to the moment of our leaving it we were besieged by people who wished to talk to us about the political situation. Never have I been in a country whose citizens were so anxious to express their views on their government. And since many of those conversations got into my diary, I have passed on a selection of them to the reader a sufficient number, I think, to give him a fair idea of how ordinary Spaniards feel and think at the present time.

The picture that emerges is a depressing one. Spaniards of all classes and of all political ideologies are discouraged and exasperated. Those who let their fanaticism get the better of them during the civil war are often obsessed by feelings of guilt, for no hangover is worse than that which follows a civil war and a reign of terror. The widespread corruption causes shame and dismay, the system of government controls is the despair of businessmen, while the severe inflation has reduced the middle and lower middle classes to great straits and the agricultural labourers to starvation. The feeling given out by Spain today is that of a country whose road to I do not say prosperity but simply to any humanly tolerable conditions is blocked. This raises a question for me. In the course of this book I have described what I have seen and reported what was said to me, but have made little comment. Am I to leave the matter there, or are some general remarks of a political sort called for? I fear that they are, and yet I am in some doubt how to put them. Let me all the same make the attempt.

The Franco regime a few years ago was a harsh and oppressive dictatorship of a Fascist kind. But its dominating clique, the Falange, had an idealism which in its own way was perfectly genuine. The bulk of its supporters belonged to the middle class, and it aimed at raising the level both of that class and of the working classes as a necessary step in the realisation of its more ambitious aims. But, opposed by the passive forces of the Church and of the landowners, as well as by the more or less liberal professional class and the businessmen and, it must be added, betrayed by its own leaders it was never in a position to carry through any of the measures which might in the end have given it a working-class following. Then came the shock of Hitlers defeat, the irresistible growth of the black market and the postwar inflation. Cynicism spread rapidly through the party and most of the higher ranks, who had been greatly diluted by place hunters during the war, allowed themselves to be corrupted by the rewards which participation in the black market offered. Today the Falange is a body of men who cling to power because they fear to lose their jobs, but who are ashamed of themselves. Their shame, and the Allied victory, have made the regime much milder.

The inflation, the lack of foreign exchange and the black market are the causes of three-quarters of the terrible poverty and misery one sees in Spain today. Everyone blames the regime for them, though in fact such blame is only partly justified. These things are to a great extent the result of Spain s political isolation, of two years of drought and of the civil war. The only cure lies in a substantial injection of Marshall Aid. Without that no government, however admirable, could restore the worn-down Spanish economy or break the black market. But how give money to a regime of this sort? Apart from the undesirability of propping up General Francos dictatorship and the serious effect that this would have on world opinion, there is the question whether such aid would be of any use in restoring the country. A British observer, by no means on the Left, with whom I discussed this was of the opinion that foreign loans would be as wasted on the present Spanish government as they have been on that of Chiang Kai-shek. But surely, it will be said, conditions could be imposed which would make it certain that the aid provided would go where it was needed? Apparently the Americans have already offered small loans on such conditions, and they have been refused.