Death's Other Kingdom

by Woolsey, Gamel; Jacobs, Michael;

  For Gamel in particular the post-honeymoon return to England in the summer of 1931 must have been especially difficult. Quite apart from having to cope with renewed proximity to the emotionally manipulative Llewelyn, she must have been painfully conscious of the comments made about her by Brenan’s hypercritical Blooms-bury friends. Everyone, for instance, found her clothes sense to be disastrous, while Carrington and Strachey ascribed to her the ultimate Bloomsbury sin of being a bore.

  Compensations and frustrations were provided by her first taste of English literary life. Brenan, who had yet to bring out a single book, and had been struggling for ages with a novel of his own, must have become secretly envious when, in 1931, a volume of Gamel’s poems (of which he had never thought much) was published under the title Middle Earth, and a deal was arranged with Gollancz to publish One Way of Love. However, as was so typical of Gamel’s thwarted life, Gollancz, after having set the book in print, relented on the deal in February of the following year. They were worried about being prosecuted for obscenity, which was ironic given that one of Gamel’s half-brothers was a judge famous for defending first Marie Stopes and then James Joyce against such charges.

  The failure to publish One Way of Love was overshadowed by other crises that year, beginning with the suicide of Carrington in January, and proceeding in August to a severe cancer scare involving Gamel having a lump removed from her breast. Brenan, who had still not seen his illegitimate child by Juliana (a daughter called Miranda), thought that the moment had now come to introduce Gamel to Spain and to Yegen.

  Gamel was instantly overwhelmed by the beauty of Andalucia, and appears to have been unaware of rumours that Juliana was trying to win Brenan back with the use of love philtres. Gamel’s enthusiasm for Spain increased further when they went back to the country early in 1935, to set up home with Miranda in the rambling old house near Malaga that is the setting for Death’s Other Kingdom. Memories came back to her of her childhood, and she wrote to Llewelyn that the place ‘was beautiful and abandoned and romantic like an old plantation house where ruined people have been living for generations.’ She would never fully master the Spanish language, and she had particular difficulties at first understanding even the Andalucian utterances of Miranda. But she had somehow discovered in Spain her spiritual home.

  It was not the best time to have done so. Intimations of some impending national tragedy were felt by Brenan as early as the spring of 1935. But Brenan and Gamel, like so many other expatriates in southern Spain, pretended to themselves that nothing serious would really happen. An excellent portrayal of the Malaga they knew immediately before and during the Civil War was given by their acquaintance Chalmers Mitchell in his book My House in Malaga (1937). Chalmers Mitchell, a former director of London Zoo, was described by Gamel in a letter to Llewellyn as a ‘delightful old man’, and features in both Death’s Other Kingdom and Personal Record as an eccentric dandy risking the wrath of the Republicans by dressing, in Brenan’s words, ‘in an immaculate white alpaca suit, complete with a bow tie’. He had come to Malaga in the 1930s in the expectation of a peaceful retirement, and, right up to the very outbreak of the war, had little inkling that this was not going to be possible.

  The months leading up to the Civil War appear from Chalmers Mitchell’s description to have been an almost blissful period in Malaga, blessed by a ‘particularly beautiful Spring’, and with the burgeoning British community entertaining itself with ‘much bridge at the club; golf on a rather inefficient but beautiful course recently opened, motoring into the neighbourhood, walks, and mutual visits for luncheons or dinners or teas.’ More visitors than ever were contemplating buying or building villas in the area, and the British Club in Malaga, soon to be deserted, was planning an enormous extension for the summer.

  When, on the hot and sunny afternoon of 18 July, gun shots rang out and the horizon became obscured by fires, there was almost a sense of disbelief among the hundreds of British residents and visitors, most of whom (including the young Laurie Lee at nearby Almuñecar) soon left the country. The anger and indignation that so many of them displayed on their departure shocked Brenan and Gamel and might have strengthened their own resolve to stay on in Spain as long as possible. Brenan later admitted that he had felt completely ashamed at being British. Both he and Gamel, faced with a national crisis, became aware of how petty their own problems were in comparison with the fate of the Spaniards. And, like Chalmers Mitchell, who also remained in Malaga, they showed a concern for people that transcended their political sympathies. All three of them, though broadly supporting the besieged Republican government, were willing to compromise themselves by sheltering in their houses prominent right-wing families.

  Gerald Brenan at Churriana in 1936

  Gamel, in a letter to Llewelyn describing the chaotic situation of this time, noted that ‘Gerald, I need hardly say, is enjoying himself hugely.’ She herself had an abhorrence of war, and memorably coined the phrase ‘pornography of violence’ to describe the relish and exaggeration with which atrocities were often reported. Yet she herself was candidly to admit to the thrill of living life at such a heightened intensity. War certainly brought out the best of her, not just as a person, but also as a writer. It released her from her morbid and self-indulgent introspection, and gave her a much-needed sense of purpose as well as the concern for common humanity that is so striking a characteristic of Death’s Other Kingdom.

  Death’s Other Kingdom was written after their eventual return to Britain, at the same time as Brenan was maniacally working on his brilliantly lucid exposition of the war, The Spanish Labyrinth. While Brenan grappled with the big issues, Gamel dwelt on the domestic minutiae, such as in her book’s funny and touching last page, when a couple of impoverished fisherwomen heatedly debate which colour handkerchief they should buy.

  Characteristically for Gamel, circumstances conspired to prevent the book from enjoying the degree of success it deserved. After finally signing a contract with Longmans in April 1939, Gamel was told that publication would be delayed until the autumn of that year, by which time, as she wrote to Llewelyn, ‘I think we may all be in Death’s Other Kingdom.’ Another matter of concern was the choice of author to write the introduction. The publishers approached the poet Edward Blunden (the only author apart from Evelyn Waugh to have taken Franco’s side in the Left Review’s symposium on the war). Fortunately he declined the offer, much to the relief of Gamel, who thought him ‘a very bad writer’. She herself favoured Bertrand Russell, an ardent male admirer of hers; but he was rejected by the publishers on the grounds of being ‘too political’. There was talk for a while of Siegfried Sassoon; but finally the task fell to Llewelyn’s brother John Cowper Powys. Gamel expressed her approval, though it is difficult to imagine that she would have liked the pompous and patronising text he ended up writing. His fitting praise for her personal and intimate way of looking at the war was completely diminished by his saying that hers were qualities ‘permitted only to women – that is to women when they’re not maddened by the hysteria of sex.’ Furthermore his conclusion that the book was essentially ‘a tender and wistful threnody over “Old Spain” by a daughter of the “Old South”’ would have misled readers into thinking that the work was yet another contribution to the gushing, romantic literature on the country.

  The book received a handful of enthusiastic notices, and was praised by the Times Literary Supplement as ‘moving and beautiful’. But any satisfaction she might have derived from this would have been muted by the almost simultaneous death of Llewelyn and arrival of another and far greater war, in the course of which her subtle and understated book would soon be forgotten. Brenan would be far luckier with the timing and reception of The Spanish Labyrinth, which appeared in 1943, received massive coverage and immediately established its author as the foremost Hispanist of his day.

  Gamel and Brenan returned to Spain soon after the Second World War, the latter to research his travelogue The Face of Spain, which portrays t
he country at the height of its ‘years of hunger’. With nervous anticipation they went back to their house at Churriana, and were relieved to find the place almost as Gamel had so evocatively described it in Death’s Other Kingdom, and with the same memorable cast of characters. The reunion with those whom they had left behind was filled with emotion, as was their renewed contact with their garden, which appeared more luxuriant and exotic than ever. When they set off again on their travels, they felt, according to Brenan, as Adam and Eve must have done on the point of being expelled from paradise. But they would be back for good five years later, this time to witness Churriana being gradually enveloped by the urban sprawl that came to be known as the Costa del Sol. Brenan was unperturbed by this, and indeed relished the new influx to the coast of young and liberated women. To Gamel, however, this spoiling of their surroundings could only have contributed to the growing misery of her last years.

  Childless, and insufficiently recognised as a writer, Gamel came to think of her life as a failure. On settling back in Churriana, she moved into a separate bedroom to her husband, dyed her hair black, and became absorbed by the reading of science fiction, finding in it metaphors for her own strange and solitary existence. She also dwelt pathetically on the past. ‘Oh Gamelismus!’ recorded Brenan’s friend Frances Partridge on a visit to Churriana in 1962, ‘I did laugh inwardly yesterday at the way she brought out faded passport photographs of Powyses, or others of houses of no possible significance in Charleston and views in the mystic South, hoping by these totem objects to prove that she too had a significant past among the illustrious.’

  Gamel persisted sporadically in her literary activities, and, despite the limitations in her understanding of Spanish, revealed herself as an outstanding translator in The Spendthrifts, which introduced the English-speaking world to Pérez Galdos’s dazzlingly original novel La de Bringas. However, it was as a poet that she wanted above all to be recognised; and this ambition was shattered when T. S. Eliot, whom she greatly admired, rejected her poems for publication. She succumbed to cancer shortly afterwards.

  Brenan, overcome with pity at seeing Gamel dying so unfulfilled, made efforts after her death in 1968 to keep her memory alive. He privately printed several volumes of her verse, and tried to persuade publishers to reissue Death’s Other Kingdom. This last task was eventually undertaken by the feminist imprint Virago, who also saw at last to the publication of the novel One Way of Love. Though the novel achieved a modest commercial and critical success, it is only Death’s Other Kingdom that is likely to endure, and not simply as a poignant account of an Andalucian village during the Civil War. Re-reading the book today, one is struck by how pertinent it remains as a commentary on war in general, and on war’s impact on the lives of those ordinary human beings whom the rhetoric of politics and ideology never reaches.

  MICHAEL JACOBS

  Spain, 2004

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  Copyright

  First published by Longmans, Green and Co. in 1939

  First published by Eland Publishing Limited

  61 Exmouth Market, London EC1R 4QL in 2004

  This ebook edition first published in 2012

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © Estate of the late Gamel Woolsey 1938

  The right of Gamel Woolsey to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–1–906011–92–5

  Cover Image: Serrania de Ronda, Spain, 1998 (oil on canvas) by Fiona Bell-Currie/Private Collection/The Bridgeman Art Library

  Photographs © Lynda Pranger