Brenan - South From Granada

Ille terrarum mihi praeter omnis
angulus ridet, ubi non Hymetto
mella decedunt viridique certat
baca Venafro,

ver ubi longum tepidasque praebet
Iuppiter brumas

Horace, Odes II, 6

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First published by Hamish Hamilton 1957
Published in Penguin Books 1963
Published with an Introduction in Penguin Classics 2008
1

Introduction copyright Chris Stewart, 2008
All rights reserved

The moral right of the author and the introducer has been asserted.

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers
prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

978-0-14-191803-7

There comes to every bibliophile a time when the weight of his books becomes untenable, and he is forced to start culling them to make room for new arrivals. As I move along my shelves and amongst my heaps in search of victims, I glimpse my two battered editions of Gerald Brenans South from Granada and sigh with relief, for I know that they at least will never end up at the Alpujarran Womens Association monthly bring-and-buy sale.

There are not many books you read more than four times, but in order to bone up for the purposes of this introduction, and to remind myself of the pleasures that it holds, I have just embarked on my fifth reading of South from Granada and that doesnt include the countless dippings and leafings-through in search of references, quotes and allusions. With each new reading I am again astonished and delighted at the quality of the book and its author.

For me it has been a seminal book to the extent of affecting the direction of my life. When I first read it I was so intrigued by the descriptions of the Alpujarras that I was drawn to see the place for myself, and subsequently decided to settle and spend the rest of my days here, not fifteen miles as the crow flies from Yegen, the village that is the subject of the book.

It has been over fifty years now since South from Granada was published (1957), and if in the course of those years Europe has changed in spectacular fashion, then Spain, bursting from the bonds of dictatorship, and even more so Yegen itself, have changed beyond all recognition. In 1919, when the twenty-five-year-old Gerald Brenan first arrived in the village, there was only the most rudimentary road, and certainly not a hint of electricity, telephone or domestic plumbing. Today Yegen is reached by an easily navigable asphalted road, the more modern-minded inhabitants enjoy the benefit of broadband internet access, and there cannot be a house in the village that has not made a modest start in the direction of modern sanitation with the introduction of the water-operated porcelain u-bend. And thus one of several reasons for a new introduction: the book is the same; its subject has all but vanished.

The old village, whose architecture suggested to Brenan something that had been made out of the earth by insects, is barely discernible today beneath the pebble-dash rendering and modern aberrations in reinforced concrete. You know youre in the right place though, for what has not changed is the vast view across to the Contraviesa and the sea a feeling of air surrounding one, of fields of air washing one that I have never come across anywhere else.

South from Granada has remained the classic idiosyncratic portrait of Spanish village life, and is unlikely to be superseded, not only on account of its own excellence, but because the villages themselves have become less worthy of observation and comment. The general homogenisation that the western world is undergoing the ubiquity of the baseball cap, the logo of the Coca Cola company and the mind-numbing pap from Hollywood have made of our modern villages and their villagers something so uniform and banal as to be quite unremarkable. If then we still feel the need to wonder at and delight in singularity and beauty, something other than the uniform dullness or touristy prettification which seem to be all that is left to us, the only course that remains is to steep ourselves in books written before this lamentable state of affairs came to be.

For the general reader like myself, Gerald Brenans book is more roundly satisfying than the more objective anthropological portraits of Spanish village life say Julian Pitt-Rivers classic Peoples of the Sierra or Ronald Frazers The Pueblo because it is filled with the personality of the writer, which of course a work of serious anthropology ought not to be. Gerald Brenan never claimed, though, to be a serious anthropologist: I would further like to say that I am very conscious of my inadequacy to deal with some of the subjects which are included in this miscellany. [ Thoughts in a Dry Season ] I was never at a university and can claim no special knowledge of anything. All my life I have been a learner rather than a knower, a dabbler in matters that were often beyond my natural range or capacity, so that when I treat of these I can only excuse myself with the hope that in an age of specialists the approach of an amateur may have some interest.