The Pritchett Century

by V. S. Pritchett

  The civilisation that Seville has inherited is a good deal Arab. Almost all the older things in Seville were built by Arab craftsmen and although modern blocks of flats have gone up, the main domestic part of the city is based on the Arab patio or courtyard. There is a strong white wall, and the rooms open on to a central court. The streets of Santa Cruz wind and tangle. They are built to catch only glancing blows of the terrible Spanish sun, to be channels of cool air, and the names of these streets are set out in the large black classical letters of centuries ago, and are dramatic in their direct and simple evocations. Streets are called, quite plainly: Air, Water, Bread, Straw, the Dead Moor, Glory, Barrabas, Mosque, Jewry and Pepper. No fantastications in that heroic age. The Spaniards of the Reconquest were simple men. In the gypsy quarter of the Triana, the traditional home of bullfighters, dancers and singers, the main street is called Pureza—Purity. It is one of the clues to the character of the Sevillano that even in modern streets he has not changed his lettering. It is superior to that of any city in the world and it emphasises how important place and locality are to the Sevillian temperament. No search for identity here; he is a man and, as Don Juan said when he posted his name on a wall, if anyone wants anything of him, here he is. The streets of Seville are clean; even the poor streets are clean. There is no filth in the Triana. One breathes flower-borne air, as one passes the grilled windows and gates of the houses and looks into the courtyards. From the modest patios to those of the greater houses, the cool ferns stand there on the tiles and the flowers are massed. These patios are really open rooms, often with chairs and tables in them and under the gallery in the house of some well-off lawyer or family who do well out of the olive oil or the sherry trade, one sees the best pictures of the house and the finest furniture standing virtually in the open. Silent always, mysterious and as if entranced by their own flowers, the patios are little stage sets, little peep-shows in themselves. They display the pride of the family as well as its natural pleasure in living in the open air.

  In the Feria, those who can afford it hire or build “casetas,” wooden booths or marquees near the Park. The caseta has a “living room” in the front and a kitchen concealed behind it; the living room is separated from the street by a low rail and there many families move elegant pieces of furniture from their houses—armoires, sideboards, handsome dining tables. Pictures hang on the wall. Publicly, with some air of consequence, the family lives in the open for the Fair and takes enormous family pride in keeping open house, inviting the passing stranger as well as their friends to drink with them. There is no rough-and-ready camping about this. They are here to be seen at their best and in abandoned gaiety, drinking and dancing all through the night. In the Feria, there is the procession of carriages to watch. Remarkable and luxurious equipages go by, drawn by their teams of fine horses. The great families own them; the less great hire them. At this time one sees the parade of riders, formally dressed in the Andalusian style—the low-crowned Cordoba hat, the short jacket that sets off the waist of the rider, the tight trousers with the florid leather facings and, behind the riders, the girls in their long red-and-white dresses, their combs and the roses or carnations in the hair.

  So well known is this, that when the foreigner thinks of Spain, he thinks of this Sevillian scene, hears the castanets and the tambourines and the speed of the tossing music of the Sevillana. Spain is, of course, quite unlike this. It is a purely Sevillian scene and it has spread abroad that legend of romantic Spain which has infuriated so many Spanish writers. There is, one has to say, something very provincial in this city. Its habits and manners are set. The stranger must not get the impression that the gaiety he sees will pass the bounds of formality, even when it appears at its wildest. The very wildness has its rules. Spanish life is profoundly unromantic. Overwhelmingly it is ruled—as the theatre is ruled—by the strict sense of genre and local style. Things change, of course. Seville has become an important river port. The Vespas roar in the streets, the old grinding yellow trams have gone and have been replaced by the trolley bus. Young girls go in for blonde hair dips. And lovers, sitting among the roses in the park, are bolder. It is now permissible for them to hold hands or put an arm round a waist. Many of those lovely houses in Santa Cruz are let out in flats. The bullfights after Holy Week are rarely good, for this spectacle has its terrible periods of boredom, when the bulls are bad or the torero incompetent. There are plenty of people in the crowd coming away from the bull ring complaining of the enormous prices charged, the commercialisation of the show and the decline of its quality. Foreigners who used not often to go now swarm in and there is a good deal more of showiness than the rigour of the game. Foreign writers who have become fans of the bullfight have a lot to answer for.

  But, in defence of the provinciality of Seville and its contented incuriosity towards the outside world, this must be said. Provinciality has preserved the Sevillano and enhances his local genius. He is incurably an actor and a mocker. “Come on, gypsy,” calls out one gypsy, derisively, to another in the street. He loves to shout a compliment to a woman and prides himself on the neatness of it. To a very tall woman a workman shouted, “Come by tomorrow so that we can see the other half.” The piropo, or public compliment, is now supposedly illegal—it annoyed foreigners—but it has not entirely vanished. Wit, the invention of conceits, are irrepressible in the Sevillano; he loves riposte and fantasy. At the height of Holy Week, when the crowds are thickest and the café tables almost filled one little square, I heard two rival shrimp and crab sellers shouting at each other from their stalls on opposite sides of the square. One was making up fantastic eulogies, full of astute local references, of his shrimps that came from Cadiz; his opponent listened, carefully, the crowd was almost silent and then burst into admiring laughter. Then it was the turn of the other, a man from Alicante, who let fly with his own fantasy. The crowd were entranced. The act went on for half an hour, a real battle of comical words between two cities. I wish I had written it down, but it was going too fast for me and both parties were helpless with laughter. Make a light passing remark to any inhabitant of this place and he will outstrip you in a flash. “How are you this morning?” you say to the cab driver expecting a mild little “Very well, thank you” or a conventional “Fine.” That’s too dull for the cabman. Skinnily he stands up and looks down at his skinny horse which is soon for the bull ring, “Stupendous!” he says.

  Seville is theatre. Great theatre, yet with thousands of little turns and scenes going on its stage. Its vanity is to be the city of Don Juan; it is in fact far more the city of Figaro, mocking, playing practical jokes and then dropping off into a self-absorbed yet blank-minded doze, until the next wicked or childish opportunity occurs. A place of dignity—and yet I have seen an old gentleman of the gravest kind pick up a sugar castor and, leaning out of the café window where he was sitting, sprinkle another old gentleman’s hair with it. I suppose people use the telephone there out of simple respect for the instrument; for their real business they send a boy out with a note to the favourite bar or café of the person it is addressed to. It is a paradise of hangers-on, of doorstep characters who know everything, of people who stop to talk; but do not suppose it is happy-go-lucky and unbusiness-like. The slowest action in the blissfully slow life of Andalusia is the action of letting money pass out of one’s hand. Seville put up a considerable struggle to keep the South American gold.

  The regions of Spain and their cities have an extreme independence of temperament and, even in the levelling of modern civilisation, some of this survives in the attacks of ridicule they jealously make upon one another. When one uses this word “theatre” of Seville, the citizens of other cities read it in the pejorative sense of shallowness, showiness, rhetoric and the arts of the mountebank. It must be admitted that modern Seville, beyond the Park, is either pretentious or ugly. It reached the depths of decadence at the time of the Exhibition in the thirties. Seville has no need of rhetoric about its past. In that enormous historical show th
e city put on in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, there were no rhetoricians; it was the time of men of action. All the cities of Europe have great historical claims on our imagination, until we are choked with history. The claim of Seville is truly colossal and world-changing. I do not know whether many people visit the Archives of the Indies, but in that not very interesting building, near the Cathedral, one has the shock of knowing what it must have been like to be discoverers and colonists of America. It meant, above all, the work of men of action: explorers, sailors, soldiers, governors, architects, builders, judges. Here, in thousands of white boxes, are their documents: their plans for cities like Buenos Aires, for the forts at Cartagena, for the avenues of Montevideo and the government houses of Peru; the drawings, the leases, the law suits, the certificates of governorship, the trials, the executions. Here we can read the report of Hernan Cortés, the letters of Columbus. And of a failure, too: the long letter of Cervantes, the imprisoned tax collector, failed author, unwanted soldier, and cathedral brawler—applying vainly for a job overseas. Seville played out the great roles; and now history has passed beyond it, it amuses itself with the little ones, the magic that passes the tedious hours of life.

  THE OFFENSIVE TRAVELLER

  I am an offensive traveller. I do not mean that I arrive in a foreign country in a state of arrogance and start complaining about the beds, the plumbing, the food, the transport, the prices. I do not refuse to drink the water; I do not see bacteria everywhere. I do not say: “The country is wonderful, but you can have the people.” I do not suspect everyone who speaks a foreign language of being a thief. I do not scream that I cannot get a good steak in Morocco—steak travellers are the hypochondriacs of motion—a decent haggis in Naples, or an edible chop suey on Ascension Island. I do not complain of the lack of Night Life in English villages or of the absence of thatch in Ohio. One thing, of course, does annoy me: other tourists. Clear the Americans out of Paris; throw the Germans out of Venice; rid Majorca and the Costa Brava of the British. I say that loudly. If I had lived in Canterbury in the Middle Ages, I would have said the same about those palfrey-loads of pilgrims. To the inhabitants I am as obliging as a Portuguese. By “being offensive” I mean that I travel, therefore I offend. I represent that ancient enemy of all communities: the stranger. Neapolitan girls have crossed themselves to avert the evil eye at the sight of me. (And of you, too, hypocrite lecteur.) And rightly: We are looking on the private life of another people, a life which is entirely their business, with an eye that, however friendly it may be, is alien. We are seeing people as they do not see themselves. I say “we,” but I do worse than this. I not only look. I make notes. I write.

  Forty years ago I wrote my first impressions of a country not my own and began my career as a traveller who causes offence in print. I began to be paid for insulting others. I remember the first occasion. There was—perhaps there still is—a local train that runs from Cork to Blarney (significant destination!) and the country people piled in bringing their chickens with them. I mentioned the fact because the journey was a jolly one in a country then torn apart by Civil War. I was accused of bringing the new Irish nation into ridicule. No Irish man or woman ever brought a chicken into a train. If he or she did, a foreigner ought not to mention it. I was playing up the Victorian charm of a nation determined to be Victorian no longer. I moved on to Spain, where I was accused of saying there would shortly be a vacant throne: there was, but in this my offence was without distinction. Everyone was saying it. Who were my friends? Abominable intellectuals like Unamuno, Ortega y Gasset, Baroja—people who were notorious Europeanizers and objectors to bullfighting and were kindly disposed to education, parliaments, football, and walking in the mountains. I migrated to the United States; my talent developed. One summer evening I was sitting on the jetty of a small New England town listening to the distant voices of some old fellows jawing and whittling away. I could not hear what they said, but on that peaceful evening the sound was like one of the pleasantest sounds in nature: the cawing of returning rooks. I was a fanciful youth. I mentioned the sound in print. Uproar. I had conveyed that New Englanders, among all human animals, had not yet evolved the power of speech, forgetting in my smug British way that English speech has been compared to the hissing of geese.

  With this incident, I realized that I had been born with a remarkable gift. I exploited it. There were the Swiss, for example; I praised them for their domestic contentment. They objected at once: did I not know that their family life was as awful as that of any other people? Was I insinuating that they lacked a capacity to suffer? A young Swiss came to my office in London to assure me that a Swiss could suffer, if he got half a chance, as much as any man on earth. I praised Scandinavian architecture. These Nordics were indignant that I had not mentioned their high suicide rate. In time, the Germans spoke out. When I said that the Germans loved flowers I was clearly insinuating that they were “sissies” and one reader got in a nasty dig at me. “Don’t the British love flowers too?” The mayor of a town in South America said I obviously intended an affront when I said they had just installed traffic lights. My gift was developing fast—so fast that I was invited to a discussion on the Welsh character in a small Welsh town and there I made the sort of mistake that comes from overconfidence. I was asked to insult the Welsh, because the meeting had fallen into the doldrums of self-praise. The meeting took place in a small room; indeed one of the company, a learned shepherd, had to lie on the floor at my feet. He stared expectantly, waiting to spring. My speech was brief, even trivial. All I said was that the Welsh were touchy, hot-tempered, hypocritical, and given to lying. No more. The shepherd sprang—but not at me. He sprang at the audience and in a beautiful lamenting voice, as if he were declaiming from Jeremiah, he shouted: “What this Englishman has just said is true! We are liars, we are hypocrites …”

  You observe my error. I learned the lesson and, as a result, reached the peak of my offensive career. It was during the war. I had written a film script showing that the ordinary Englishman and the ordinary Frenchman were natural allies and friends. I presented a flighty and talkative Englishman, keen on beer and girls, and a silent, industrious, abstemious Frenchman, dignified and scrupulous. You notice my cunning? I had reversed a sacred myth. The film was banned as anti-Allied propaganda and insulting to both parties. I could go no higher.

  As an offender of foreigners, I recognize that my place in a long tradition is a humble one. Unlike Shakespeare, I have not made fun of foreign accents. I have not made fun of Frogs, Taffys, Wops, or Polacks. The nonchalance of Mark Twain and the insinuations of Henry Adams are far beyond me. Mrs. Trollope being rude to Americans, Nathaniel Hawthorne being rude about the British, Bernard Shaw making a laughingstock of both, are far above my level. I could not equal Bemelmans on Ecuador, though I did get a broadside from a politician in that country—the eighty volcanoes of the lovely place have, perhaps, contributed to the sensibility of its public men—and I have not debunked Spain like that brilliant Italian scholar Mario Praz in Unromantic Spain. None of these great offenders can, of course, vie with Tobias Smollett, whose Travels Through France and Italy is the supreme classic of offence. Smollett had the fine art of excusing a vice by substituting a worse one. Of the French he wrote:

  If their acts of generosity are rare, we ought to ascribe that rarity not so much to a deficiency of generous sentiments, as to their vanity and ostentation, which, engrossing all their funds, utterly disable them from exerting the virtues of beneficence.

  Taine’s view of the British seems to have been that they were a kind of brute cattle with addled heads and censorious habits, living in steam. I say nothing of Dr. Johnson and the Scots. He spoke it at a time when half the inns of northern England had “Scots go home” chalked on their walls.

  I must not claim too much for my gift for offence. I could not have been born at a luckier moment. In the eighteenth century it was impossible to offend anyone. Today, more people are offendable than at any other time
in the history of the world. The number increases. There are two reasons for this, one of them practical: the other harder to define precisely. The first is that more people travel and annoy one another. People whose blood boiled only once in a lifetime can now have it brought to the boil every night of their lives in books, on television, or in the cinema. Why are they offended? They are rightly offended by errors of fact. But why are personal descriptions and interpretations offensive to them? I think the tendency of modern society is to make us think there ought to be only one view, that there is a mysterious standard eye or opinion like the standard inch. That very unobjective word called “objective” is constantly used. This is natural: we, the offended, are fed on the single view of propaganda, advertising, and myths.

  But the second reason for the increase in the number of the offended is more important. More people are offended because more are insecure. More people in the world are uprooted and unsure of themselves. There are more chips on more shoulders. It began with the Industrial Revolution, the break-up of long-settled patterns of life in which people felt so settled that they did not care what was said about them, good or bad. In some countries the Industrial Revolution has only just begun. If I want to stir up chauvinism or hysteria and tickle an inferiority complex, I go to the big cities; the countryman or the man of the small town which has no new buildings cannot easily be moved. A fisherman, a Spanish shepherd, a German woodcutter, a man working in the fields, regards the people who write about him or interpret him with amusement, contentment, and even pity. He is strong in his own world and often better educated, in the true sense of being able to draw on stored experience, than those who have merely new knowledge. But in the new countries and new towns it is not so. Doubt is much stronger. “What do you think of our new telegraph poles?” a Japanese student asked an English poet who was teaching him Gray’s “Elegy.” The greatest tact was required in the poet’s reply. It is offensive in such places not to mention the latest thing. The enormously high buildings shooting up in some unlikely parts of the world may be monuments to modern art, hope, and endeavour; they are also monuments to an inferiority complex. The newer the country the more noticeable the chip, the more certain the aggression. Even when the assured do not condescend to the ill-assured, it is resented that the assured do not know that they are assured. If two assured well-rooted peoples meet—the French and the Spaniards, for example—the comedy has the most delicate dryness, though as far as offence is concerned the French easily win. I have found mayors the most ready of all people to take offence, if their towns are small. A new country or regime regards interpretation or criticism—anything except the official view—as anti-social. And some countries are not as old as they think they are. The Germans are an ancient race; their influence on European institutions has been enormous from the time of the Roman Empire. They are pre-eminent in modern science. They have great vitality and often combine an extraordinary precision in work with a powerful, if not always determinable, emotional force. Everyone has observed this. But as a nation, the Germans are very young. They are, like the young, affronted if their estimate of themselves is questioned. And when Germans, or British, or Italians, or any other people become racial minorities in other countries, they become more chauvinist, more resentful of criticism or interpretation, than their relatives in the homeland. The Italians in Buenos Aires, the British in Chile, the Irish in Sydney or New York, are far thinner-skinned than the people they have left behind. Self-criticism is the beginning of maturity. One of the harshest books ever written by a foreigner about another country was George Borrow’s The Bible in Spain. It was translated into Spanish about thirty years ago, and was praised by most of the Spanish critics because they recognized in Borrow a fanatical enemy, a man who, they said, might have been one of themselves and not a Bible-punching heretic. They disagreed with every word he wrote. What they admired was his intolerance.