Spain by Jan Morris

The original 1964 edition of this classic of postwar travel writing was published by James Humphrey Morris. A successful journalist for the Times, Morris was at that time undergoing hormone therapy and would later undergo a sex change. By the time the book was republished in the late 1970s, there was a new name on the cover. Not a word of this is mentioned in the 2008 reissue, but with writing of this quality the author’s gender matters not.

Morris has a reputation as one of the finest British travel writers of her generation; before Winchester or Chatwin she was the epitome of the cosmopolitan traveler, someone who had been everywhere, seen everything and knew how to set it down in cracking prose. She came to prominence as a journalist, famously reporting on Hillary’s ascent of Everest in 1953, but later turned to travel writing.

Place is protagonist in Spain, there is no extended narrative, no chronological account of Morris’s journey, no talk of lining up for bus and train tickets, and very little explicit mention of the writer’s presence at all. The famous travel writer’s “I” is replaced by the inclusive first person plural: ‘We are in the Spanish south,’ and by the second person “you.” Morris often writes as though she were physically leading her reader by the hand, pointing out sights along the way. ‘There lies the first of her villages…with a fine old bridge to take you there…In you go, down the whitewash cobbled streets’ (68-69). But although the author is a peripheral physical presence, her intellectual interests are everywhere: architecture, painting, music, history, religion, contemporary politics, literature, bridge building. There is very little that Morris is not interested in, and she seems to command specialist language across all of these disciplines, whether it be the “turrets, conical towers and troubadour windows,” of medieval Spanish architecture or the “birretta,” “pederasts,” and “preceptors,” of Catholic ritual. She is particularly fond of musical metaphors, and the book itself is structured rather like a piece of music, broken into a series of movements with motifs that reoccur throughout, allowing for trills and flurries around familiar themes. Morris will observe some characteristic of the culture, say Spain’s ‘fatal weakness for the past’ and pursue its implications across a variety of field. In architecture: ‘When the French were building in the Gothic style, she was still building Romanesque. When they moved into the Renaissance, she was still building Gothic’ (26); in music ‘no Beethoven symphony was performed in Madrid until 1866; and in observation of social norms ‘a Victorian propriety and formality, too makes the stranger feel that his passage through the mountains has been a passage in time.’

The old-fashionedness of Spain is particularly appealing to Morris because, with her courtly British manners and enthusiasms, she’s an anachronistic figure herself. For the most part she is quick to acknowledge diversity and complexity. Spain, we are told, is ‘the kingdom of exceptions.’ Occasionally, however, she falls back into the objectionable imperial custom of making generalizations in the singular: ‘The Spaniard likes to be sure,’ ‘The Spaniard revels in the minutiae’ (48). If this mode of travel writing has a weakness, it is that we encounter a limited spread of local voices. Cervantes, Phillip II and Franco speak to us from beyond the grave, but the “simple people of the thatched huts” are never heard. Specific conversations or encounters never make it into the text, perhaps because Morris is so concerned with minimising her own presence. This determination means she privileges habitual detail, (what Spain is usually like), over dynamic detail (what Spain was like the day I was there) and, while this makes for stylish prose the price is a certain aloofness, a sense that she writes of human beings in the same way she might describe a canvass by Goya.

This isn’t to say Morris has no interest in the Spanish people or their politics. As the new introduction points out, this is a book about “a particular Spanish time,” the transition to democracy after Franco. If Morris is particularly drawn to pre-modern Spain: the country’s old sayings and folk traditions, its cathedrals and relics, the traces of Paganism in many of its religious practices, it is only because she realises that it is all going to disappear. Morris was writing at the end of Spain’s long isolation from the rest of Europe and was acutely aware that rapid change was at hand, not all of it positive. ‘Already as pastoral Spain retreats before the assaults of our material civilization, you may see the corrosion set in.’ Given that the original text has been supplemented several times, perhaps Faber and Faber, should have dated the new introduction, the prologue and afterword in this version, to make the chronology clear.

A great deal has changed in Spain since this book was written, with the nation now a stable democracy and a member of the European Union. Morris’s misgivings about the future of Spanish civilian government have proved unfounded. These doubts never dampened Morris’s enthusiasm for the country much. She writes of its idiosyncrasies with clear-sightedness and compression, noting ‘the small humped bridges of Spain,’ and its many ‘huge and awful figures of Christ.’ She has a taste for precise enumeration of people and things, the ‘84 benedictine monks of the establishment,’ and the ‘seven arrows in a yoke that formed the crest of Isabel and Ferdinand’ (38). She also has a gift for illustrative anecdote, for finding the perfect case to back up a general observation. The prologue is virtuoso stuff, a whirlwind tour through Spanish history that could have sounded like a textbook, but in Morris’ hands is utterly compelling. Spanish cathedrals, we learn, are built around a coro, ‘a dark, carved boxlike structure that…provides an intellectual focus for the whole building.’ If the nation’s fortune were mapped on an elevation graph, she tells us, they would form an upside down U shape: a long ascent until the 16th century and then a steady decline. At the peak of the curve would be the Escorial; for Morris, this church and palace, built by Phillip II in the Guadarrama Mountains at the height of Spain’s imperial power, is the coro in ‘the great cathedral that is Spain herself’ (9). The building stands for the nation’s ‘taste for the grandiose’ its ‘tragedy’ and ‘lack of fulfillment.’ This intricate opening maneuver, superbly executed, provides us with an image and an atmosphere, so that we do not realise until afterwards that we have just had a history lesson.

Jan Morris teaches as she entertains, giving a masterclass not just on Spain, but on travelling and writing well. Nearly all travel writers espouse the virtues of learning languages, reading voraciously while travelling, and of sharp but sympathetic observation; few are able to focus on the character of a place without ultimately writing about their own ego and idiosyncracies. James/Jan Morris can. We emerge from her book competely unenlightened about the author's sexually ambiguity, but we learn a great deal about Spain.