10,00 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Eland Publishing
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In 1934, Norman Lewis and his brother-in-law Eugene Corvaja travelled across the breadth of Spain on what turned out to be the eve of the murderous civil war. Commissioned by his Sicilian father-in-law to locate the tomb of the last Spanish Corvaja in the cathedral of Seville, when public transport came to a standstill, the two walked more than a hundred miles to Madrid, and were then forced via Portugal to Seville. Lewis makes light of being caught in the crossfire of a fractious country, sometimes literally, and glories in the beauty of nature and the common humanity of the Spaniards he meets on the way. What is entirely in keeping with the mischievous character of Norman Lewis is that this, his very last book, is also his first. For the extraordinary set of misadventures distilled and honed by the nonagenerian writer in The Tomb of Seville were first described in Lewis's apprentice work, Spanish Adventure.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
Ähnliche
The Tomb in Seville
NORMAN LEWIS
Contents
Introduction
WRITERS ALIVE TO Spain’s appeal in the Twenties and Thirties – that appeal that tragically mutated into a cry of pain – travelled there because Spain was Europe’s antithesis: a fantastic landscape of hallucinations and extremes, of heat, human incongruity and implacable vitality. For Norman Lewis, it also represented escape from his own distinct version of northern European neurosis. In his first volume of autobiography, Jackdaw Cake, he describes his lower middle-class suburban background in Enfield, north London, as ‘an endless, low-quality dream … nothing, with chips’, and his struggle to wake up from that dream has an escapologist’s wild vigour – motor racing, get-rich-quick business schemes (plagiarising foreign newspapers, selling umbrellas), a rash marriage to the daughter of a Sicilian man of honour. But Spain, significantly, is more than the place of his first flight: in a life compelled by the pull of the world, it is the place he returned to more often than any other, the temper with which he most identified. When, after 1945, he lived for three summers in a fishing village on what is now the Costa Brava, the happiness he experienced became his touchstone for the next half-century. Whenever his writing turns to Spain, as it does here again, something about his relationship with the country – not just his familiarity with it – seems to produce a distillation of his prose. That is saying a lot for a writer whose reputation rests extensively on his stylistic genius.
Lewis first travelled to Spain in the autumn of 1934. Spanish Adventure, the first book he published, relates a journey one hardly associates with the author of A Dragon Apparent and Naples ’44: a planned voyage by canoe through the waterways of southern Europe.
‘From the very first my attitude towards the canoe,’ he writes, ‘was tinged with distrust and condescension.’
This first sentence, straight from Peter Fleming or Robert Byron, gives the game away. Spanish Adventure is a derivative of the high-jinks or Wodehousian school of travel writing; Lewis himself quickly became conscious of its faults, suppressing mention of it when his first serious success, A Dragon Apparent, appeared in 1952, and ever after – although once when I stayed at his house in Finchingfield he lent me a copy, guaranteeing I would find paragraphs of hysterical prose on almost every page. Yet Spanish Adventure has plenty of felicities, like this description of the Navarran landscape: ‘a boundless plain of billowing rock, from which all colour has been purged by the sun, leaving a panorama empty of everything but whiteness of cloud and rock and the blue of the sky. Against such terrestrial purity one is demoted to the status of a stain.’*
Most importantly, it relates a journey that stamped the future indelibly upon him. It touched, in Robert Louis Stevenson’s phrase, ‘a virginity of sense’, and by its end he knew that he was not interested in doing anything but travelling and writing.
Norman Lewis’s place today as the father of modern travel writing is unassailable. It is so because, among other things, he changed the category. Until the Second World War, British travel writers often blatantly did two jobs at once. The passes, deserts and rivers they conquered could be a personal triumph today, an imperial army’s supply route tomorrow. The Royal Geographical Society in Kensington Gore boasted more colonels than a junta. But he was one of the first writers to travel in a spirit of pure fascination, spurred on by his belief that ‘the next valley would always be wilder’. He taught many other writers their craft, though none achieved his degree of self-erasure. To read him – his sensuous and civilised descriptions, his poker-faced wit, his anecdotal genius for painting the world’s beauty and humanity’s routine disarray – is to fall under the spell of a prose whose magic is embedded in his youthful reading: the King James Bible, Herodotus, Suetonius, and the Russian novels in Enfield Library. ‘As I never had the chance to read rubbish,’ he said once, ‘I couldn’t absorb the rubbish which went with the style of the popular writers.’
Though he is conventionally called a travel writer, Norman Lewis’s books are not travel books in what I think of as the ‘orientalist’ sense – in which successive cults for representing the exotic dominate what we know of the world. Lewis was no orientalist (although in the other sense of that word, he knew South-East Asia like no other writer I have read); he was more accurately a witness, a reconstructor. Eric Hobsbawm, almost Lewis’s contemporary, has remarked that our accelerated culture is destroying the mechanism of historical memory that links each generation’s experience to that of earlier generations. Lewis was one of the greatest of those links. Though the world is more global than it was in the eighteenth century, it is not incongruous to see him as Defoe’s heir, or Fielding’s or Cobbett’s.
Norman Lewis was ninety-five when he died in July 2003. In his last decade he published a string of books which would have been prolific for a writer half his age: An Empire of the East, about his travels through Indonesia; The World, The World, a second volume of autobiography; In Sicily, about his return to that haunted island; and two collections of articles, The Happy Ant-Heap and A Voyage by Dhow. He had also had it in mind for some time, for personal reasons – including his children’s desire to read the story – to revisit the Spain of that first adventure. The Tomb in Seville, his last book, is the result.
The bones of the story are the same as Spanish Adventure: a journey that takes Lewis and his brother-in-law first to Madrid and the bloody insurrection of October 1934, and then, via the length of Portugal, to Seville. There are two superficial differences, one in the method – no canoes – the other in the chronology. In Spanish Adventure Lewis goes on to north Africa; where the earlier book wanders from France and into Spain and out again, often submerged in hedonistic escapism, in The Tomb in Seville a quest has been identified, to be revealed, finally, and with due bathos, in the marvellous city of Seville.
That quest is also part of the deeper difference between the two books, embodied in a huge contrast of experience and language, in which the events of the journey, with their dramatic midpoint in the Madrid uprising, are reviewed and restored here. The Tomb in Seville is therefore really a double reconstruction: of a journey, and of a memory of a journey – a journey twice-distilled, in which the reader sees the purest version of that antithetical Spain I mentioned, the Spain of Lorca and Albéniz and the politician Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, who said of his people, ‘Tododecae con frecuencia en España, menos laraza’ – ‘Everything decays in Spain, except the race.’
In The Tomb in Seville Lewis’s family connection with Spain is restored, too. His father-in-law, Ernesto Corvaja, was Sicilian, but of Andalusian stock, and it is in the pursuit of the Corvaja family’s traces in Seville that Norman and his brother-in-law set out. Various states of alarm, announced by the government to aid their suppression of Communist unrest, prevent the travellers’ smooth advance: at one point they are forced to walk the 110 miles to Zaragoza. As they arrive on the outskirts of the city, leaving the country behind, they get an inkling of another clash, not between government and Reds, but between the two Spains, past and future. ‘[We] set out on the last miles of the long trudge with the towers of Zaragoza, strangely Muscovite at that distance, finally jutting out of the horizon. Slowly the last of the hamlets fell behind and shrank in the distance. They had remained in their isolation here part of the Spain of the past, dignified in their poverty and uneasy with progress.’
It is here that he shows his preference, not just for Spain but for a Spain that precurses the twentieth century. ‘Old Spain was a country of white cities, but Zaragoza’s outline was dark.’ What Lewis instinctively prefers is Moorish Spain, pre-industrial Spain, the Spain on the edge of Africa. In Zaragoza he alights on the rich, visible in quantity in their Rolls-Royces, with a certain distaste; Madrid under fire he describes as ‘a weird and complicated child’s toy’. You sense his reluctance towards cities, though Madrid’s gun battles draw him like a magnet and he takes a terrific pleasure in details like the remark of a Cuban bar owner in Atocha, veteran of half a dozen revolutions, who approvingly explains that the police ‘made a point of doing their best not to shoot a man in the cobblers’. Once out of the capital, his taste for the spectacular emptiness of plains and mountains immediately revives. This partiality for landscape is specific: the lushness of Portugal through which he and Eugene are forced to divert elicits a kind of scorn, ‘the first vines and cabbages’ unable to match the magnificence of ‘the golden steppes’ they have left, and produces a mild depression that only dissipates as they approach Seville and their goal.
The Tomb in Seville is a story of Spain come full circle. It is a feat not only of remembrance, but of reliving. Spain provides for Lewis, as it has done before, a perfect subject – and it occurs to me that it may be because he carried this extraordinary first journey in his memory for so long that his love of the country remained so strong. So Spain is not merely a subject here. It is a pole, a magnetic South to which the writer has been drawn, again, this time to produce both a work of restoration to delight in, and a fundamental explanation of why it draws him. The result is a story as distant as elegy, and more immediate than the news. That it comes from a writer in his tenth decade only increases the poignancy of his returning to the same ground (almost) as his first book, published nearly seventy years ago. As if, in going back to the roots of his writing career, he was setting out again in search of that irrecoverable beginning, when his impressions of the world had all the intoxicant vitality of newness.
Julian Evans
August 2003
* Tiring of the canoe, Lewis and his companion Eugene – his Sicilian wife’s brother – had rapidly abandoned it before entering Spain from France.
Chapter 1
MY FATHER-IN-LAW, Ernesto Corvaja, although Sicilian by birth, was obsessively concerned with all matters pertaining to Spain. His family originally came from there, which was evident from their name, and there was said to be evidence to prove that an ancestor had been included in the suite of the viceroy Caracciolo, sent from Spain to Sicily following its conquest.
In his London house Ernesto still nourished the ghost of a Spanish environment with a housekeeper recruited from some sad Andalusian village who glided silently from room to room wearing a skirt reaching to her ankles, and kept the house saturated with the odour of frying saffron. Despite Ernesto’s agnosticism, a Spanish priest in exile was called in to bless the table on the days of religious feasts, and although Ernesto’s son Eugene resisted his father’s efforts to send him to Spain to complete his studies, his daughter, Ernestina, briefly to be my wife, had agreed to spend a year in a college in Seville.
Visits to Spain had taken on the nature of quasi-religious pilgrimages in this household, and Eugene’s resistance was finally overcome by his father’s offer to pay the expenses of both my brother-in-law and myself for a visit of two months to Seville. Here we could inspect the remains of the old so-called Corvaja Palace, pay our respects at the family tomb in the cathedral, and discover if any memory, however faint, had survived of the Corvajas in the ancient capital of Andalusia.
Our Spanish travels, it was decided, would begin at San Sebastián, just across the country’s north-western frontier with France, thereafter following a slightly more circuitous approach to Seville, through the less developed and, to us, more interesting areas, including in the west, for example, the towns of Salamanca and Valladolid.
On Sunday 23 September 1934 we attempted to book seats on the train for San Sebastián, only to be told at the London ticket office that bookings could be made only as far as Irun on the French frontier with Spain. Here a temporary interruption of the traffic was expected to be rectified next day.
At Irun some twenty hours later, we found the frontier closed and the air buzzing with rumours; several Spanish passengers showed signs of alarm. Nevertheless those with tickets for Salamanca were given accommodation in a small but excellent local hotel, and a guide was provided to show us round a somewhat unexciting town. In the morning, entry into Spain had been restored and we boarded a train which carried us through to San Sebastián in just over a half-hour.
In a way the hold-up at the frontier had been interesting for us, providing an instant and striking demonstration of the contrasts in style and character of the two peoples involved. Irun was full of alert and energetic Frenchmen and women who made no concession to the southern climate, rose early to plunge into their daily tasks, ate and drank sparingly at midday and in the early evening, foregathered socially thereafter for an hour or two before retiring to a splendid coffee-scented bar. This, we were to discover, was the diametric opposite of the Spanish way of life. The French lived in a kind of nervous activity. They hastened from one engagement to another with an eye kept on their enormous clocks.
To arrive in San Sebastián, a few miles across the frontier, was to be plunged into a different world. This was a town of white walls guarding the privacy of its citizens, all such surfaces being covered with huge political graffiti. No one was in a hurry, or carried a parcel, and here there were no clocks. Irun’s restaurants filled for the midday meal at 12.30 p.m. and emptied one hour later, when their patrons returned to their offices or shops. Those of San Sebastián admitted their first customers at 2 p.m., and these would have spent an absolute minimum of an hour and a half over the meal before vacating their tables. The majority then returned home for a siesta of an hour or so before tackling their afternoon’s work.
‘How long do you suppose we’ll be staying?’ Eugene asked.
‘Well, two or three days, I’d say. What do you think? It’s more interesting than I expected. I was talking to the chap who does the rooms. San Sebastián is famous for its paseos apparently. You know what a paseo is?’
‘Well, more or less.’
‘Most old-fashioned towns have one. Here they have two – a popular version for the working class in the early evening and a select one, as they call it, for the better people later on. I read somewhere they haven’t scrapped the piropo here.’
‘The what?’
‘The piropo. The habit of shouting sexually offensive remarks at good-looking women in the paseo – or even in the street. The dictator Primo de Rivera put a stop to it, but it’s crept back into favour again in places like this.’
‘Right then,’ said Eugene, ‘let’s make it three days.’
The Royalty Hotel seemed to reflect the old style of life, and was full of what Eugene described as bowing and scraping.
‘What comes after this?’ he wanted to know.
‘Well, Burgos I suppose. Nice comfortable distance. About seventy or eighty miles. With a good car we could do it in the morning, or carry on to Valladolid which sounds more interesting. Pity nothing’s said about the state of the roads.’
‘They’ll be able to tell us at the hotel, I’m sure.’
The four-course dinner took us by surprise, but we did our best with the huge portions. Eugene went off to give Ernesto a surprise phone call, but came back shaking his head. ‘No lines through to England at the moment,’ he said. The people in the hotel all seemed surprised.
Later that day Eugene received a surprise request from the woman who had waited on us at table, and had received our compliments in the matters of service and food with obvious pleasure. Her request was that one or the other of us would escort her in the first paseo that evening. Such was the prestige in San Sebastián, she explained, of foreign visitors from the north, that to appear in public with one infallibly enhanced a local girl’s status. Dorotea was both pretty and exceedingly charming, so her request was immediately granted. Eugene provided a splendid bouquet and we then spent the hour and a half of the paseo strolling girl in arm in the company of several hundred local citizens in the formal gardens by the sea.
The paseo was accepted as health-giving, rejuvenating exercise. More importantly, for the traveller out of his depth in foreign surroundings and reduced to constant apology and confusion imposed by the loss of language, it was a godsend. Whether merchant, soldier or minister of religion, the paseo smoothed out all the problems. The mere act of walking in the company of beaming strangers provoked a change of mood. Within minutes of joining a paseo’s ranks the beginner had shaken hands with everyone in sight – a cordial gripping of fists sometimes strong enough to produce a moistening of the eyes. The leaflet we collected as new members of the ‘friendly walk’ advised us that one should ‘always smile, but laugh with caution’. A number of actions came under its ban: ‘At all times refrain from shouting or whistling. Gestures with the fingers are to be avoided. Do not wink, do not turn your back on a bore in an ostentatious manner, and, above all, never spit.’
From Eugene’s viewpoint the experience turned out to be so attractive that he was a little sad when it was at an end. We were to learn next day that even the hotel approved of this adventure on the part of a member of the staff. ‘The manager complimented me,’ Dorotea said. ‘They hope to be able to give me an increase in salary next spring.’
Eugene tried to ring home again, but all international lines were still engaged. The manager seemed to find this as baffling as we did. Purely for a change of scene we hired a car and set off to drive a mile or two along the coast road to France. We didn’t get very far before we were stopped by two Civil Guards who had left their car to stretch white tape across the road. They were typical of their kind, grey of jowl and verging on middle age. These must have been the last survivors in San Sebastián of the old-fashioned military police. Otherwise the municipality had already been able to import several of the smart new Assault Guards. It was made clear to us that the road back to France was closed.
‘Why so many coppers?’ I wondered aloud to Eugene. ‘Surely not another revolution on the way?’
‘You never know,’ he said. ‘After all this is Spain. Anyway, what’ll we do tonight?’
I told him I’d spotted a cabaret at the end of the main street. ‘Probably be a bit of a fake, but it’ll use up some time,’ I said.
We had dinner at the hotel, where Dorotea was full of smiles, and after that we made for the cabaret which, said a notice scrawled in chalk on the door, was shut for that evening, ‘owing to circumstances’. What on earth, we wondered, did they mean by that? You can’t get through on the telephone to a foreign country, the road to France is closed, and now the cabaret’s decided to pack up for the night. Just what is happening? I wondered. ‘Do you think perhaps we shouldn’t have come here after all?’
When we returned to the hotel we found one of the grey, old Civil Guards at the reception desk. He asked us to note down our occupations, our religion, our reason for coming to Spain and how long we proposed to stay. We were finally instructed to present ourselves at nine the next morning at the barracks of the Civil Guard in order for photographs to be taken.
‘I must admit,’ said the hotel manager, ‘that this has been an experience a foreign guest is bound to find alarming. However an explanation from the police is bound to be forthcoming, and I am sure that the rest of your stay with us will be trouble-free in every way.’
We agreed, not least because San Sebastián appeared to us as a town well adjusted to the calmer routine of urban life. That evening Dorotea and a friend joined us on the fashionable paseo. Parting company with them at about ten, we were delighted to discover that the cabaret had opened after all, and so spent an hour there listening to cante flamenco before going to bed.
Next morning, Friday 28 September, an official State of Alarm was declared throughout Spain. The announcement, broadcast on the radio at 6 a.m., and subsequently repeated at half-hour intervals, warned the population of the curtailment of certain civil liberties, the imposition of a curfew at 9 p.m., and of restrictions upon travel. Further local information would be made available at all municipios. After a brief discussion, Eugene and I agreed that our best hope would be to pay our bills and get down to the station as soon as we could in the hope of seats on the morning train to the south. But when we got there we found that the Civil Guards we had seen on the previous day had used their car to close off the entrance to the station. They told us that not only would there be no train to Seville, but that no train at all would be leaving for any destination in the country on this day.
Turning back to make for the centre, we were suddenly both to experience a sensation that the personality of this town had undergone a remarkable change. The people of San Sebastián, as we had agreed, seemed to set great store by matters of personal deportment. They held themselves erect, walked in a dignified manner and with no evidence of haste. This we attributed to some extent to a climate with summer temperatures that could be high. But it was also probably based upon remnants of a cultural inheritance from the Moors. At this moment San Sebastián seemed full of running figures and queues had formed at the doors of food shops with desperate would-be customers struggling to get in. Such was the confusion that even the paseos were abandoned.
As the day wore on the excitement and despair of the early hours were replaced by a growing lethargy as the public became acclimatised to a crisis that had never been explained. But what exactly was a State of Alarm, and why had one been declared? These were the questions the citizens of San Sebastián now demanded more insistently be answered, as indeed did I. Choosing a quiet spot in the gardens along the sea-front Eugene was ready with an explanation.
