I first read Gerald Brenan’s Personal Record 1920-1972, the second volume of his autobiography, more than 30 years ago when I was in limbo, unhappily working as an advertising copywriter and desperate to leave London and somehow reinvent myself. Brenan was the most sensible member of the Bloomsbury group. Not quite a member, though, but an outsider, a steadier voice, a more or less reliable witness. He admired Virginia and Leonard Woolf and was a great friend of Ralph Partridge, but might not have been as involved with the famous set were it not that he was besotted with Partridge’s wife, the painter Dora Carrington, with her “corn-coloured hair”, her “sweet, honeyed smile” and “bright blue, restless eyes”.
But it was not Bloomsbury intrigue that captivated me at 23, it was that Brenan turned out to have his own brand of recklessness. He decided to make a life-changing journey, to give London, convention and his parents’ expectations the slip and head off to Spain with almost no money (just the small allowance he had after fighting in the first world war). He decided to do the thing I would never have dreamed of doing (this book gave me permission to imagine it). He found a house in Yegen, Andalucia where the rent was £6 a year. There was a garden with two terraces, a bitter-orange tree, a persimmon, several apples, a sweet bay tree and roses. His plan? To read. On his own. It sounded like bliss.
Brenan’s parents were not best pleased. Initially, his father cut him off. Gerald took no notice. He filled a travelling chest with books: a great, literary escape. The daring of it! If he could do it … Some of his friends must have felt the same. Carrington wrote to him: “Do you know, I sometimes feel like flying out with my paintboxes and leaving all these complications and simply changing my life and living at Yegen.”
Personal Record was published in 1974 and Brenan is undeceived about his younger self. Re-reading now, I have to reluctantly entertain the possibility that he might have been a pig-headed romantic. But his love affair with Andalucia was not frivolous. It lasted, although he made many happy unhappy returns to England. The journey to Yegen involved mules or a 30-mile uphill slog on foot. Brenan was precariously poor, rescued at the last minute by a tiny bequest from an aunt and whatever he could make from his writing.
He explains: “I have never been able to believe that anything had really and thoroughly happened to me until I had written it down.” It is this that makes him a marvellous memoirist. He catches the elation of travelling alone, battling with nature and invisibility: “Sometimes on arriving at dusk at a small town I would feel that I had been transported into another world. The crowds of people strolling aimlessly about, the swallows flying faster and faster overhead, the church bell clanging, the sense of being unknown to everyone and perhaps invisible would make me walk as if I was treading on air.” Another version of escape.
Yet he acknowledges that his travelling is not straightforwardly luxurious, that it is “in large part a masochistic activity, offering flashes of vision as a reward for fatigues and privations, everyone who has tried it will know what I got from these experiences and how wonderful it was to be 26, free and alone in a south Mediterranean country.”
The love affair with Carrington, he knew, depended upon absence. Many sweet love letters arrived on his rough Spanish doorstep. But life does not allow lasting idylls. Three-quarters of the way through, we arrive at the unnervingly withheld chapter describing Lytton Strachey’s death and Carrington’s suicide.
A year after reading this book, in 1982, I left London to teach in Zimbabwe for three years – one of the best decisions of my life – with as many books as my suitcases could hold and a grateful nod to Gerald Brenan.
