Book Reviews - Review 432

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:

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:

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.