The English in Spain
How to make it on the Peninsula
Spain has seldom been the country of choice for the lettered Englishman. He has, without much variation, preferred France or Italy, if not some remote corner of his own island. Our mutual friend, Charles Dickens, was so enamoured with France and its peoples that he even took some pains to learn the rudiments of its language. Laurence Sterne, too, was a Francophobe, his travel writings taking him from Calais through Moulins to Lyon. But he never touched even an inch of Iberian soil. He was an Anglican cleric, so they may well have kicked his head in if he did. England’s greatest novelist, Ronald Firbank, had a brief fascination with Spain, writing in his diary that it was “the most glorious country in God's universe." But his love of wine, Catholicism, and homosexual pleasures (I repeat myself) saw him eventually favour Italy, the country in which his body remains to this day.
Spain’s popularity has not seen itself much improved among England’s intelligentsia in modern times. Since Franco’s death and the subsequent re-branding of the country as a holiday resort, it has been the regular stomping-ground of Britain’s fattest, reddest and stupidest citizens. These Guiris, as they are known by the locals, tend to congregate in the southern resorts of the country, making little effort to learn the local language, and build strange little enclaves, pastiches of their homeland, only half resembling it, like a map of the British Isles scribbled on a pub napkin.
I intend to contribute, in my small way, to the rehabilitation of the Englishman in Spain. The status of the Guiri is that which every Englishman is in constant danger of falling into. But there exists another option which is available to him - one which allows him to partake in all the sun, calamari and Estrella beer which his sunburnt compatriot enjoys, while also conserving the semblance of self-respect and intellectual dignity which the Guiri lacks - and that is to become an Hispanist.
An Hispanist is technically defined as “an expert in or student of the language and culture of Spain” but is actually the name for an academic who, finding no success in England, moves to Spain hoping to find better luck. And he usually finds it. Names such as Ian Gibson and Paul Preston are unlikely to be recognisable to anyone born in England, but, to the moderately-read Spaniard, they are the foremost experts on Hispanic culture.
The success of these men comes, not in spite of their foreignness, but because of it. The Spaniards have this strange idea that foreigners are uniquely positioned to pronounce judgement on Spain. According to the Spanish, we are able to see Spain as it really is, without the thousand prejudices which provoke civil wars every hundred years or so, and they tend to favour any chancer from the British Isles or Ireland over the poor, betrodden academics of their own soil.
In order to be a Hispanist, you must first learn the language tolerably well. This is relatively easy and, if my readership is of the calibre which I hope, they will be able to achieve this within a year’s time. You needn’t learn the language to a high academic level; Spaniards, unlike the French, are remarkably uncritical of any foreigner who attempts to speak their language. This is attributable to two principal causes: Firstly, there are very few Englishmen who bother to learn Spanish, or any other language for that matter, and any attempt that he makes to speak Spanish, no matter how poor, will inevitably be received as an impressive novelty, as well as irrefutable proof of his deep interest in Spanish culture. The second reason is that the Spanish tend to have abysmal English, and are very self-conscious of the fact. The relief they feel upon realising that they needn’t embarrass themselves by speaking your language will certainly overwhelm any critical judgement they might have directed toward you.
With a little bit of Spanish — or castellano, as you will irritatingly refer to it at every dinner party you attend from now on — there remains little left for you to do but choose that aspect of Spanish culture which has always fascinated you, and in which you are to be an expert. The Hispanist Ian Gibson (who is actually Irish but may as well be English for all the Spanish care) decided to become an expert in the life and poetry of Federico García Lorca. A true appreciation for the poetry of a language, as we sensibly know, can only really be achieved by a native, the ear of even the dimmest native being unmatched by the most adept and studied foreigner in its capacity for feeling the textures of words, their tastes, and their manifold associations and connotations. But the Spanish seem to be unaware of this, and are quite happy to leave the study of their own literature to men who must read it with a dual-language dictionary at hand. Gibson's linguistic shortcomings are bolstered in any case by the political angle with which he approaches his subject. His subject, Lorca, who was homosexual and had expressed some sympathy toward communism during his lifetime — the sort of whimsical, benign and artistic sympathy that does not require one to read Marx — was murdered and buried in an unmarked grave by Franco's Nationalists during the civil war. Gibson takes the angle that Francoism quashed the creative, libertine spirit of Spain, as represented by Lorca, and kept it suppressed for thirty-six years.
The Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 is a complicated event; one in which the victors would always have found themselves carrying out some pragmatic cruelties, and in which the defeated had the luck of never seeing their idealistic cruelties come to fruition. There were, and were never to be, any emergent heroes in the war, and Franco’s dictatorship, as cruel as it may have been, did some work to unify a country at war with itself. But in your capacity as a Hispanist you needn’t concern yourself with these moral subtleties. As far as you are concerned, Franco’s victory was the worst possible outcome for Spain and, had the Republicans won, all of the problems which Spain faces today would have been eradicated. Indeed, anything which is good in Spain is only so in that it resembles the second republic which preceded the war, or the new republic that never was, and everything that is still wrong with Spain is attributable to the residual ectoplasm of Franco’s ghost which still needs to be mopped up. If there is no easy relation to be drawn between current maladies and the events which occurred during the dictatorship, you will be sure to find one in either the conquest of America, the expulsion of the Jews, or the Inquisition.
You would do well to remember these words, because they are the original and incisive foreign perspective with which you are to become a successful Hispanicist in Spain. You also needn’t believe it all, and there are even some Hispanicists, such as the American Stanley Payne, who make their living simplifying Spanish history from the opposite angle, minimising the crimes of Franco and exaggerating those of the Republic. But whatever your political orientation, I would advise that you stick to the left-wing formula for success. It is what will buy you a chalet in Alicante, with a bodega to boot, or have you drinking one cafe con leche after another in Madrid’s Plaza Mayor as you scribble down some lines for your next book, “España: Un Pueblo Traicionado”. I would like to see myself — perhaps in thirty years, when old age lends me an even greater authority to write — at a terrace table in Cantabria with other English expats, the self denominated Hispanists, who debate the black legend, Francoism and the reasons for why the Republic failed. Some of us will be from the left and others will be from the right, but all of us will be drunk.
POST. NUDES.
So good