Death's Other Kingdom

by Woolsey, Gamel; Jacobs, Michael;

  Not long before our time in Granada a saint lived there. He was a priest who worked among the poorest of the city. And I have often had the great pleasure of listening to stories about that exquisite character, lost to the world in love of God and devotion to men, from members of his own family, who told half laughing, half in wonder, these family legends of the saint, to whom money was something to give to the poor and food something to divide among the hungry.

  And where but in Spain has there ever been a legal opinion like that of Father Francisco de Vittoria ‘the father of International Law’ and his colleagues at Salamanca, which made Dr Johnson say long afterwards ‘with great emotion’ as Boswell tells us: ‘“I love the University of Salamanca, for when the question arose as to whether it were lawful to conquer the Indians the University of Salamanca gave it as their opinion that it was not lawful.”’

  But I must not begin to talk about the saints and the remarkable men of Spain or where would I stop!

  It amused us to find that the only thing that really made people in Gibraltar feel that the Spanish War might have serious consequences after all was the possibility that the Calpe Hounds might not be able to hunt on the coast opposite Gibraltar that winter if the war kept up! – But General Franco was a gentleman, we were seriously told, and would no doubt manage to arrange it. I suppose he was expected to keep the war away from Algeçiras lest it inconvenience them. What General Franco and the other Spanish officers who found that this was the only preoccupation of most of the English officers and officials in connection with the war in Spain, can possibly have thought of English heads (not to mention English hearts) it is difficult to imagine.

  But Gibraltar with its ignorant depreciation of the Spaniards, its empty fulminations, and its embarrassingly erotic lust for atrocities was really a most unpleasant place during the Civil War. And we left it with relief when our affairs at home called us back to England. We were on the boat going home when our ship stopped for half a day at Lisbon, and that is why I say that the scene of my Epilogue is laid there.

  We had gone ashore to do some shopping and visit friends and Gerald had hurried off to see someone while I went to the office of Aero-Portuguesa to make some enquiries for a friend who was coming aboard. But it seemed that I had arrived at an awkward moment, and there was no one in the office who could speak more than a few words of anything but Portuguese which is the most incomprehensible of languages unless you speak it yourself, very rich and musical, but spoken, I always think, with a strangely Germanic accent, sounding rather like a Visigoth speaking late Latin.

  I was waiting and had been waiting for some time when in my boredom I picked up a Portuguese journal, though I cannot read Portuguese very well either. It turned out to be a number glorifying the Portuguese forces, and was full of the sort of pictures we are always seeing in the news reels at the cinema, of sailors grouped on the decks of warships, naval guns being turned into position, soldiers playing games, or receiving their stew from camp kitchens and so forth. I was looking at the pictures without much interest and had in fact come to the advertisements of military tailors and naval outfitters, and was about to lay the paper down, when I turned over the last page, and saw something, which as George Fox says, ‘struck at my life’.

  It was a picture of a machine-gun, and under it were these words or others like them:

  M— ARMS ARE THE BEST.

  The M— Machine-Gun was chosen in open competition

  in 1928 for the use of the Portuguese Army.

  Enquiries of our Portuguese Agent Senhor —.

  M— Arms Company.

  It happened that I had never seen an advertisement of munitions manufacturers before. Coming fresh from the Civil War with my mind still overshadowed by its horrors I was affected by it in a way which perhaps it would be difficult for people still quiet and safe in England (for the present at any rate) to understand. In fact it would be hard for me to exaggerate the shock which that advertisement gave me. What is this world we live in? I thought. It seemed to me that I might well find on some other page of that sinister magazine another advertisement.

  THE M— PISTOL.

  The best weapon for

  murder and assassination. Well tested.

  Or (why not?):

  NEW PREPARATION OF ARSENIC.

  Impossible to detect.

  Successfully used recent Brighton Murders.

  For that would be the logical sequel to that advertisement of the M— Machine-Gun. It was selected after all for its efficiency and economy in killing people too. It is that well-tested machine-gun guaranteed to cut flesh and break bone better than any other, manufactured and sold to make a profit for certain factory owners and shareholders in foreign and neutral countries, who were here offering the pain and death of their fellow men for sale.

  I put down the paper and pushed it away as if it were stinging me. I would not wait any longer for my thoughts troubled me and I felt unable to stay still, so I got up and went out. The day outside was radiant, the sunlight fell so brightly on bricks and stones that Lisbon might have been newly gilt for some golden festival: but I went sombrely through the bright streets. My mind was full of horrors, and I saw the mild faces around me as murderers – First Murderer: Second Murderer: Third Murderer: – like the cast in some Shakespearian Tragedy – and I myself as Fourth Murderer: a small but necessary part in the world’s crime.

  I walked down the bright street and the dark cloud went with me. But before I had gone very far I met something which I had liked so long that the sight of it pierced through the cloud and made me see how bright the world outside me was that day. What I saw was two of the tall fisherwomen who are so magnificent in Lisbon, great amazons with big baskets of fish on their heads striding splendidly along.

  The Dictator had recently made a law that these women were to wear shoes, since their barefoot state both shocked propriety, and made visitors think that Portugal was a poor country. And the two women I met were observing the law and had bought some wretched cheap slippers, which they were however carrying in their hands to save wear and to be more comfortable. Just as they came up to me they happened to catch sight of a policeman in the distance and hurriedly stooped down to put on their slippers and observe the law as long as he was in sight. I could not help smiling at them, and they answered my smile with a half smile of complicity as they strode grandly on in spite of the shuffling slippers, their heads proudly holding up the heavy baskets of silver fish, like magnificent caryatids.

  The cloud about my mind began to lighten. These were not Shakespearian murderers, but characters out of Dekker or Thomas Deloney. People are not always engaged in making war after all – they also cheat dictators and tease policemen. There are ‘olives of endless age’. People dance and fly kites – I could see them sailing above the roofs of Lisbon. Even the Civil War, I thought, some day will be over: even its inevitable aftermath of terror and suffering will be forgotten at last. Perhaps one day it will please us to remember even these things when generations have passed away and the Civil War is a dim half-forgotten story of old tragedy – as legendary and far away and as shadowy and faint in its power to evoke pain as the War of the Seven against Thebes or the wars of Clusium and Rome.

  As I stood looking after the tall striding fisherwomen I noticed the woollen head handkerchiefs they were wearing tied around their dark heads, and remembered that I had wanted to get one for a present for a friend, and perhaps one for myself as well; so I left the fashionable shopping streets and threaded my way through squares and alleys until I came to the poor quarter, the part of any city that I like best. There is a street of little drapers’ shops I know, their cheap goods overflowing on to the sidewalks, and I walked along it until I came to the one which for some reason I liked the look of best, and went in. There were two fisherwomen inside already turning over the handkerchiefs: one of them was choosing one, but she could not make up her mind between the green one and the yellow. It is obviously a most serious cho
ice when you have saved for months, even skimping yourself of the most necessary food to be able to buy one. It would be a tragedy to get the wrong one after all, to choose the yellow and be always regretting the green.

  They were handsome women, tall and erect with fine heads; but with that gaunt austere look of the woman worker who has always worked too hard and never had quite enough to eat – it is a look I know so well in Spain and Portugal. At last the buyer chose her handkerchief, still hardly able to leave behind the rejected one: and with a sigh unwillingly put down the escudos to pay for it, and they went out. I watched them as they went and saw them stop in the doorway silhouetted against the sunlight in the street, the one who had bought the handkerchief (it was the yellow one) took it out of its wrapping to look at it once more and make sure before it was too late that she had not really preferred the green one after all. Then apparently satisfied, she wrapped it up again, and talking animatedly they hurried on.

  I looked after them as they went away, and I knew that unless the Lord hardened my heart like Jonah’s I could not be angry any more. It was impossible not to be reconciled to mankind for their sake – for the sake of these creature who starve themselves to buy a patch no bigger than a handkerchief of that beauty and colour the world denies them. Impossible not to love creatures who set their hearts on such little and innocent things. And I felt suddenly reconciled to the whole world – and even to myself, as I too began to turn over the soft handkerchiefs and could not decide between the red one and the grey.

  Afterword

  OF ALL THE FOREIGN eyewitness accounts of the Spanish Civil War, Gamel Woolsey’s Death’s Other Kingdom is one of the most moving and unusual. It is one of the few records of the war that is fuelled more by a love of Spain and its people than by any firm ideological standpoint. Woolsey was someone whose political position ran contrary to the Left Review’s famous assertion of 1937 that it was impossible for authors not to take sides on the issue of being for or against Franco and Fascism. But then, to her contemporaries, she would barely have been considered an author at all. By the time of her death in 1968, she seemed destined to go down in history merely as the wife of the writer and Hispanist Gerald Brenan.

  In view of the sadness, frustrations and sheer bad luck that dogged her for much of her life, it is unsurprising that Woolsey looked back nostalgically to what she perceived as her idyllic early childhood spent on a plantation in South Carolina. Born there probably in 1895 (a fear of ageing apparently made her put forward this date to 1899), she was descended on her mother’s side from an old and distinguished South Carolina family. Her mother had been a celebrated beauty who, when only nineteen, had married a New York widower over twice her age. Woolsey had an elder sister with whom she was never close, and three half-brothers who thought of her as a strange child whom they could never fully understand. A dreamer, as well as a precocious reader, she immersed herself in fairytales and ancient myths, and even abandoned her real name of Elizabeth in favour of the more poetic Gamel, after the Norwegian word for ‘old’.

  Melancholy and guilt became integral to her personality when she was still in her teens. When she was fifteen her father died, and, two years later, she fell in love with a childhood friend who committed suicide on discovering his homosexuality. Shortly afterwards her mother started drinking heavily, so much so that the horrified Gamel would not touch a drop of alcohol for many years afterwards. On top of all this, aged twenty, she was diagnosed with tuberculosis, and had to spend a year in a Charleston sanatorium, where she had half a lung removed. On leaving, she ran away to New York, married a womanising New Zealand journalist, and entertained vague hopes of becoming an actress or a writer.

  By 1926 she had separated from her husband after miscarrying (or perhaps even aborting) the child she had been expecting by him. As with the protagonist of her romantic novel based on her New York years and their aftermath, One Way of Love, she was ‘waiting for her knight on horseback to appear’. In 1927 such a person materialised in the unlikely figure of Llewelyn Powys, the youngest of that precious literary trio, the Powys brothers. A forty-three-year-old fellow tuberculosis sufferer, Llewelyn was married to his literary editor Alyse Gregory, a woman who believed strongly in feminine and personal independence. Alyse’s beliefs would be put firmly to the test after her husband fell passionately in love with Gamel, who obsessed him with her dreamy, enigmatic personality, not to mention her ‘large lovely breasts with the exquisite hazelnut nipples’. In the late spring of 1928 Llewelyn received the news, delightful to him, but devastating to Alyse, that he had made Gamel pregnant. But, once again, Gamel was to lose her child. Following an accident in a taxi, and in the light of her tubercular history, her doctor insisted on her having an abortion.

  Miraculously, Llewlyn’s marriage to Alyse survived all this, as did his relationship with Gamel, and Gamel’s close friendship with the lesbian-inclined Alyse. When, in May 1928, Llewelyn and Alyse moved back to England and to the Powys heartland of the Dorset hills, Gamel followed suit, and took up lodgings twelve minutes’ walk away from her lover. She was pregnant again by July, though once again she was impelled to have an abortion. Alyse, meanwhile, contemplated suicide.

  Gamel at Yegen in 1933

  By July 1930, Gamel was desperately trying to find a way out of this emotional impasse. It was now that an aspiring writer turned up in Dorset, no less desperate to find himself a wife, and armed with a letter of introduction to one of the Powyses.

  This man, Gerald Brenan, had been living on his own for much of the previous decade in the remote Andalucian village of Yegen. There he had immersed himself in the study of Spanish history and culture, while battling with the sexual hang-ups induced by a repressive English middle-class background. As open in his discussion of his intimate life as Woolsey was closed, Brenan had little inhibitions about telling his friends (and later his readers) the minutest details of his affairs. His great passion during the Yegen years was with Lytton Strachey’s partner Dora Carrington, with whom Brenan had a long, masochistic and largely epistolary relationship. In the two years immediately prior to his meeting with Gamel, Brenan had attempted a definitive break with Carrington and had returned to Spain to carry out an affair with fifteen-year-old Juliana, a Yegen girl with a healthy appetite for sex.

  As with other British writers, Spain had a liberating effect on Brenan. His intensive love-making with Juliana, though inducing long periods of physical lethargy and wreaking havoc with a projected biography of Saint Teresa of Avila, made him finally overcome his habitual impotence. Unfortunately, this breakthrough also had the effect of making Juliana pregnant. Responding to this situation like some benevolent feudal landlord of old, Brenan placated Juliana with the offer of money and the promise of eventually looking after the child.

  Faced now with the imminent prospect of becoming a single father, Brenan’s search for someone with whom he could truly share his life became more urgent than ever. Within a month he had set eyes on a woman whom he immediately sensed would fulfil such a role. Brenan first saw Gamel standing ‘mysteriously’ beside a haystack. He was reminded of a grandmother of his, and was also forcibly struck by her beauty, which he would later try and convey in his at times disarmingly honest autobiography Personal Record. Among his first impressions of her were of someone with a ‘fine bone structure’, a transparent complexion of a kind ‘that one sometimes finds in consumptive people’, and ‘calm grey eyes’ that looked out ‘gravely’ from behind thick, ‘blue black hair’. Several months later, when Brenan nervously introduced her to his parents, she surprised Brenan’s father by displaying a degree of refinement he did not associate with ‘a new, raw country like America’. ‘Centuries of breeding,’ the father openly declared in front of her, ‘must have gone to the making of that mouth and chin’. It is unlikely that he would have made such a comment about the dumpy and frizzy-haired Juliana.

  Yet for all Gamel’s apparent suitability as a wife, it soon became obvious that there were enor
mous differences between them. There was, as Brenan realised, an almost schizophrenic quality to Gamel’s personality. The ironic wit and lively intelligence she displayed one moment could be replaced the next by the apathy and silence that announced her withdrawal into her own private world. What was worse, she was still very much in love with Llewelyn.

  On becoming engaged to Brenan, after knowing him only a few weeks, Gamel told Llewelyn that this new development would in no way effect their own relationship. ‘I am very fond of Gerald,’ she later wrote to him, ‘but it has nothing to do with what I feel for you. We meet in some part of the mind where other people never come.’ To the understandably jealous Brenan she announced that the love between her and the selfishly and childishly possessive Llewelyn ‘transcended all other loves’ and that it had ‘something supernatural about it’.

  Gamel and Brenan, in the course of the nine-month ‘honeymoon’ on which they embarked in the autumn of 1930 (they would not officially marry until 1947), succeeded in overcoming numerous traumas, ranging from Gamel’s spell in a Norfolk sanatorium to a return of Gerald’s impotence. Brenan discovered in Gamel ‘the perfect travelling companion’, and also assumed with relish a new role as her protector, finding in her a need to be protected greater than in anyone he had ever known. None the less their marriage was clearly not going to be one based on passion (‘Llewelyn had seen to that’). ‘There was always something wanting in our deeper feelings for one another,’ confided Brenan in Personal Record. Woolsey, in a letter to Llewelyn of 1936, put the same sentiment across rather more strongly: ‘Gerald has never got in touch with most of my mind at all, or even wanted to, or would be interested if he did. And I’m sure large tracts of his mind are equally sealed to me.’