Dogsticks logo  
    Home        Book Reviews        Music        Photos        Kayaking Videos        Videos with Music        oBlog        Links        Contact    


Book Reviews - Laurie Lee

Choose a category for a list of reviews. Notes | Books I Couldn't Finish | Random Review

Latest | Fiction | Science | Biography / Memoir | History | Music | Miscellaneous | All

Search Reviews: Whole Words Author/Title Only Include Unfinished Books

Laurie Lee


A Rose for Winter

Category: Biography | Published: 1955 | Review Added: 30-09-2024

Rating: 3 - Worth reading

In the winter of 1951-1952, Laurie Lee spent four months touring southern Spain with his wife. The trip was financed by a Society of Authors Travelling Scholarship grant, and its literary fruit, A Rose for Winter, was published in 1955.

This is one of Lee's earlier prose works, predating Cider with Rosie by four years. It is a succinct, straightforward travelogue, split into chapters that describe each town where the couple stayed in Andalucía: Algeciras (the sister town of Gibraltar), Seville, Ecija, Granada, and Almuñécar.

Lee was familiar with Andalucía from a spell living there in the mid-1930s, during the tumultuous winter before the Spanish Civil War. He would describe that dramatic time later in As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. He alludes to it here in the chapter on Almuñécar, which he gives the fictitious name "Castillo", presumably to avoid identification of individuals by Franco's military regime.

Lee's writing is less polished than in his later books. There are some continuity problems - for example, he doesn't mention that he was with his wife until thirty pages in. The poetic description is often overwrought, and not always effective. We know what he means by "palm trees exploded darkly overhead", but palm trees don't feel like explosions - or not to me, anyway. There are overripe passages in this vein:

As the sun sank, the bright paper landscape crumpled and contorted with savage shadows. The bare furrowed foothills of the the Sierras writhed and dimpled like brains. And the snows, from the vivid incandescence of daylight, turned pink, mauve, purple, cold as slate, like the face of a dying man slowly drained of his blood.

If you say so, Laurie. What this example does illustrate is Lee's responsiveness to the raw and brutal atmosphere of Spain - conditioned by the harshness of its climate and its violent history. The corollary of the precariousness of Spanish life is hot-blooded sensuality, the impulsion to live for the moment being valued over reflection, reason or philosophy. Lee clearly felt that Spain brought out the poet in him, and as a young man he very much saw poetry as his vocation. If he is a poet, it is of the senses rather than the soul. The ubiquitous poverty he generally finds picturesque rather than tragic, and his descriptions of bullfights convey only the excitement of violence, without compassion for the animals that are taunted into battles they can't win. Lee writes anthropomorphically of the animals' "nobility, treachery and excruciating cowardice", and describes a pitiful scene in which a placid bull "put up no fight at all and was killed at last without grace or honour, to the loud derision of the crowd."

Only in the later chapter on Almuñécar ("Castillo") does Lee's writing assume the sober, mature tone of somebody aware that suffering is not just a spectator sport. Having risen in support of the Republican government at the start of the Civil War, the peasants of Almuñécar were briskly punished once Franco gained the upper hand. Most of Lee's former acquaintances are nowhere to be seen, having been forced out, imprisoned or murdered:

Everything now was as it had been before - though perhaps a little more ignoble, more ground in dust. As I walked through the town time past hung heavy on my feet. The face of a generation had disappeared completely.

The town has been brutalised by chronic suffering. When a drunken fisherman drowns, the locals find only amusement in his fate: "It was the biggest joke of the year in Castillo." The psychological atmosphere recalls that of the oppressed village in Kafka's The Castle, whose people are shamed and dehumanised by their guilty submission to an obscure, degenerate elite.

A Rose in Winter is a competent travel volume, but not everyone will warm to its writer, or have the patience to persevere with its more florid descriptive passages. Also striking is Lee's lack of interest in others' inner lives (he does not speculate on why his former landlord in Granada committed suicide - to him it's just an example of the distinct Spanish Weltschmerz). For most of this volume, Lee sees Spain as a kind of romantic magical spectacle whose allure is destroyed by analysis. His writing would later mature to be more reflective and restrained. Meanwhile, A Rose in Winter, despite being published when he was in his late 30s, is perhaps best regarded as an article of interesting juvenilia.

[Return to top]

As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

Category: Biography | Published: 1969 | Review Added: 12-09-2024

Rating: 4 - A top read

In June 1934, the nineteen-year-old Laurie Lee left his childhood home in rural Gloucestershire to seek his fortune. He walked a meandering route towards London, without any goal in mind except to escape the stifling cosiness of the Cotswold Hills:

I was propelled, of course, by the traditional forces that had sent many generations along this road - by the small tight valley closing in around one, stifling the breath with its mossy mouth, the cottage walls narrowing like the arms of an iron maiden, the local girls whispering, "Marry, and settle down."

With him he carried his violin, which he would to use to make ends meet busking when on the move.

Once in London, he found work on a building site, and settled in the city for nearly a year. He became acquainted with members of the lower rungs of society, and participated in a strike that epitomised "the punitive, rasping air of the Thirties".

When the building project was complete, Lee felt it time to move on to Europe. He knew a few words of Spanish, so bought a one-way boat ticket to Vigo in Galicia.

The central portion of book covers Lee's slow travels through the baking hot countryside and impoverished towns and of northern and central Spain. Life for the inhabitants of these places was hard and often brutal. If Lee's upbringing had been parochial, it was nothing compared to the archaic pattern of rural Spanish life, "which could have been that of England two centuries earlier."

Lee made his way south through Madrid, Toledo (where he stayed with eccentric South African poet Roy Campbell) and Málaga, finally reaching the coastal town of Almuñécar in December 1935. Here he decided to spend the winter. He received board and lodging from a Swiss hotelier in return for doing odd jobs and performing in the bar with his violin.

At this time, Spain was in political and social turmoil. In February 1936, a left-wing coalition narrowly won the General Election, and the peasants of Almuñécar, while dimly encouraged by promises of change from the weak government, were more receptive to incitements to violence from local Republican activists. The bloody disturbances that had been erupting across Spain for several years - the foreshocks of the Spanish Civil War - reached Almuñécar during Lee's stay. Then, just as things were starting to look really dangerous, a British warship from Gibraltar pulled into the harbour, unexpectedly, to take Lee home.

As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning forms a stark contrast with Lee's earlier Cider with Rosie, which described his childhood in the peaceful depths of the English countryside. The poetic description is equally rich, but the scenes it represents here are often chastening and grim. This is the account of a young man's encounter with the harshness of the wider world - but also with its excitement. Lee portrays himself as a tough and self-confident individual, never unduly upset by what he saw around him, but rather observing with the unbiased fascination of a natural journalist.

Lee paces his narrative expertly, so that only at the end does one perceive its subtle arc. He saw the first signs of troubles to come on the quiet lanes of southern England, where he passed men tramping from town to town despondently seeking work:

They were like a broken army walking away from a war, cheeks sunken, eyes dead with fatigue [...] Among them were carpenters, clerks, engineers, from the Midlands; many had been on the road for months, walking up and down the country in a maze of jobless refusals, the treadmill of the mid-Thirties...

The sense of the weariness and tension of pre-war Europe accumulates slowly; Lee's arrival in each destination in both England and Spain adds a layer to the picture, until events accelerate in the dramatic climax in Almuñécar - as inevitable is it is, initially, unexpected. The writer's journey from peaceful Gloucestershire to disrupted southern Spain is artistically impressive as a metaphor for the journey from adolescence to manhood.

How much of Lee's account is strictly accurate I don't know. He published As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning over thirty years after the journey, without access to his diaries. He is well-known for taking liberties with fact (the real Rosie says he never drank cider with her; there is strong circumstantial evidence that he never fought in the Spanish Civil War, as he claimed elsewhere). But if the result of artistic licence is such an evocative and gripping work, one can excuse it.

[Return to top]

I Can't Stay Long

Category: Biography | Published: 1975 | Review Added: 17-04-2019

Rating: 4 - A top read

Laurie Lee acquired fame with his first volume of autobiography, Cider with Rosie, in 1959 - an evocative account of his childhood and youth in the idyllic Gloucestershire hills. I was one of thousands of late-twentieth-century English schoolchildren forced to read it at too young an age. My taste at fifteen was for sweeping drama, abstract ideas, and a hint of tragedy. I couldn't readily identify with Lee's portrayal of his cosy natal home, and of his own self-confident and apparently untroubled persona.

Still, even as a teenager, I could see that Lee was an original writer with a distinctive voice, and when my eye was recently caught in a bookshop by I Can't Stay Long, a collection of Lee's journalistic pieces, I thought I'd give him another try.

I was not disappointed. The volume spans most of Lee's literary career, and runs from lushly sensuous accounts of his childhood, through philosophical musings on themes such as "Love", "Charm" and "Paradise", to thoughtful and perceptive narratives of his travels around the world. One traces clearly the maturation of Lee's voice from carefree, youthful self-absorption to a worldly interest in other people and other lives. The later pieces are enriched by occasional hints of melancholy and the regret of youth's passing. Lee was, one might say, born to be a young man. He was blessed, and cursed, with an irresistable attractiveness to the opposite sex. His travel writing incorporates much expert analysis of the charms of local womanhood, and one wonders if his own charms prevented him - although his marriage lasted, and although he returned to live in his natal village in the Cotswolds - from truly settling down. The overriding impression is of a complex personality that struggled to reconcile the archetypes of nostalgic homebody and eternal wanderer.

Yet this tension is to the good of the writing. I Can't Stay Long reveals an intellectual range that was a pleasant surprise to me. Lee writes with perspicuity on his own life, abstract themes, and the atmospheres of Spain, Mexico, the Caribbean, Ireland and Beirut.

One piece stands out, in tone and subject, from the others in the book; this is The Village that Lost its Children, which describes his visit to the Welsh village of Aberfan a year after a slag heap collapsed, asphyxiating a school full of children. It is an excellent piece of journalism, sympathetic but detached, and encapsulated so astutely thus:

Earthquake, flood, slaughter by the elements - any of these might have been accepted. But the tip that killed was not an act of God, it was put there by ordinary men, and everyone in the valleys feels somehow involved, and nobody can wholly accuse, or forgive.

Is that not a summary of the human condition?

I Can't Stay Long is a consistently thought-provoking volume, celebrating the richness of the world with a touch of wistfulness, and never blind to the sad and dangerous aspects of life.

[Return to top]

A Moment of War

Category: Biography | Published: 1991 | Review Added: 13-10-2024

Rating: 3 - Worth reading

Laurie Lee ended As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning with a description of his covert re-entry into Spain over the Pyrenees in December 1937, in the middle of the Spanish Civil War. A Moment of War tells of what happened - or at least, what may have happened - next.

Lee had crossed into Spain to volunteer for the International Brigade of the Republican Army - a popular pastime back then for young European men with time on their hands. Their motivations were various, but some mix of idealism, the quest for excitement, destitution and flight from the law was usually involved. Lee - never really a political animal - is vague about his own reasons. He wrote in As I Walked Out... of "a private sense of betrayal" at having left Spain on the eve of the Civil War, but he also alludes to a love affair that had become claustrophobic.

The important thing to know about A Moment of War is that a lot of it is probably made up. Lee was certainly received at the volunteers' collecting point of Figueras Castle in northen Catalonia, but doubts have been cast on his movements after that. At the end of the book, Lee describes his participation in the battle of Teruel, but the commander of the British battalion at that battle claimed, "He wasn't at Teruel; he never got beyond Barcelona. That book is mostly pure fantasy.'. In fact, it seems that Lee was rejected for active service owing to his epilepsy[1].

Can it all have been fabricated? We don't know. If it is largely fiction, one must admire Lee's imaginative resources, if not his deployment of them. He describes a train journey across a country in which normal life is on hold:

The normal drive of life had come to a halt, nobody stirred, even the trees looked blighted; one saw no dogs or children, horses or girls, no smoking fires or washing on lines, no one talking in doorways or walking by the river, leaning out of windows or watching the train go by - only a lifeless smear over roof and field, like something cancelled or in a coma; and here and there, at the windswept crossroads, a few soldiers huddled in dripping capes. Worse than a country at war, this was a country at war with itself - an ultimate, more permanent wastage.

For the sake of brevity, I shall write the rest of this review taking Lee's account at face value. The train was carrying volunteers to a clearing house at Albacete in La Mancha. Lee had, upon his arrival in Spain, already been thrown down a hole in the ground, where he spent two weeks unsure whether he was suspected of being a spy, or was having his commitment tested. Now, dropped off at Albecete, he was taken away by guards and kept in a cell, told to expect death as a suspected Fascist agent (he had made a trip to Morocco while Franco was gathering his forces there; strangely, Lee does not narrate what he was actually doing in the country).

Several days later Lee was mysteriously released, and taken by lorry to a training camp in Tarazona de la Mancha. In January he was sent to Madrid to contribute to a radio propaganda broadcast. Finally - and this is the most doubtful part of the narrative - he was driven with one other volunteer to the countryside around Teruel. They were abandoned without orders in a barn, to be found by a group of Rebel soldiers with whom they engaged in brief - and by Lee's account, fatal - hand-to-hand combat.

The battle of Teruel was the turning point of the Civil War: Franco's capture of the town split the Republican-held territory in two. Lee was found by men of his own side and driven back to Tarazona. Upon his arrival, he was told he would be going back to London: "You'd be more use to us there."

Fact, fiction or both, A Moment of War vividly captures the confusion and misery of war. Civilians live in squalor and fear. Soldiers spend most of their time cold, bored and hungry. Excitement and valour are nowhere to be found. The organisation of the International Brigade is presented as amateurish and chaotic, the volunteers "showing none of the fire and spirit I thought they should have." The military exercises resemble schoolboy games, with sticks substituting for guns and beaten oil drums for machine gun fire.

As with the rest of Lee's later writing, the prose of A Moment of War is mostly quickly paced and restrained. There are the usual poetic flourishes, some of them effective ("Only the winter stars moved"), some melodramatic or awkward ("I prised the blade open [...], and the steel flushed red from the fire"; "His eyes were plum-coloured with fear and exhaustion"). Also characteristic are Lee's voluptuous descriptions of women and - being frank - girls, whose charms he never resisted.

The real value of this book is hard to assess. If Lee's account could be relied on, it would be a first-rate piece of reportage, and if presented as a novella, it would be excellent of its kind. But if it is, as several credible voices claim, largely an exercise in self-glamorisation by a man overcompensating for his shame at failing an army medical, it has to be considered with ambivalence.

[1]Simon Courtauld, The Spectator, 3 January 1998: "A Not Very Franco Account"

[Return to top]

(c) Copyright 2002-2024