GERALD BRENAN DID NOT CONSIDER HIMSELF AN HISTORIAN, BUT HIS BOOK ON THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR, THE SPANISH LABYRINTH, BROKE NEW GROUND AND INFLUENCED A WHOLE GENERATION OF BRITISH HISTORIANS.

By Carlos Pranger
In July 1936, Gerald Brenan was living peacefully with his wife Gamel Woolsey in Churriana, a town west of Málaga, when civil war broke out. There they witnessed the rise of the anarchists and the first bombing by nationalist planes. The couple were among the last foreigners to leave Málaga when their situation became untenable.

After his return to England, and deeply upset by what he had seen, Brenan wanted to understand why there was such virulent hatred between the two sides. From a distance, he dealt with the pain by writing a book that would explain the causes that led to civil war. And by examining the country’s social and political background in The Spanish Labyrinth, Brenan started his career as a writer.

The result of five years’ obsessive work, The Spanish Labyrinth was an immediate success in Great Britain.When the book was published in 1943, the Spanish Civil War was still a matter of great interest in itself and was also seen as the preamble to the Second World War. Spaniards, too, wanted a greater insight into the causes of the conflict.

Although Brenan traced the Labyrinth from the restoration of the monarchy in 1874 to the military coup of 1936, he researched more distant periods such as Roman times and the Middle Ages. Brenan’s capacity for linking different historical periods was new and went against the practice of the time among conventional historians, because in his analysis he did not reject the use of other sources and disciplines such as philosophy, geology, geography, or even climatology, in order to draw a general but meticulous sketch of Spanish history.

The Spanish Labyrinth is a book both for experts and casual readers in which the immensity of Spanish history, reinterpreted by Brenan, comes alive. The book was founded on many years dedicated to reading, analysis and observation. Brenan mixed concise information with aphorism and intuition and followed a logical structure, giving order to an historical period noted for its chaos.

From the late 19thcentury and the beginning of the 20th century, Spain had been immersed in a spiritual crisis; people were moving away from the churches and the faith that had once been a pillar of the empire was starting to crumble under the scrutiny of the intellectual class. The old power structure was failing, and new political movements emerged to take its place, while Carlists and Falangists grew stronger in opposition to these two movements and their increasing dominance.

Brenan focused attention on the importance of anarchism before the Spanish Civil War. He examined this social movement in detail because he identified with its ideals, which were very close to his own, particularly when young. Brenan's rebellious character and his own past very much influenced his interpretation of history. The anarchists he met when he lived in Spain were generally poor, fanatical idealists who travelled on foot and slept on the side of the road, and who bore a sort of religious fervour that Brenan thought was close to the mysticism of St John of the Cross.

Brenan went back to the Middle Ages, and found that anarchism as a social movement prospered only in Spain and continued to manifest itself throughout the ages in some form.Later, these ideas were developed and influenced by Mijail Bakunin's Soviet theories which were disseminated through Spain by his disciple Giuseppe Fanelli. Anarchism spread by word of mouth because the majority of the peasants were illiterate and it extended rapidly in certain regions, especially in the south.

Brenan believed that what happened in Spain was a spontaneous social revolution by the workers and peasants in response to Franco’s military coup. The division of Spanish social strata into different and opposing ideologies made the confrontation inevitable.

From his experiences in Yegen, Brenan gave readers another clue for finding the way out of the labyrinth. He said Spain was a country formed by fierce local loyalties to the hometown (patria chica). Brenan held that the essential life of the people was formed round a close nucleus and that people cared little about what happened in other places with which they had almost no contact. This isolation was increased by geographic factors, amongst other things.

Brenan was a pioneer in analysing geographic factors as part of the cause of the agrarian problem and of territorial division in Spain - the eternal struggle among centralists and regionalists.Spain was capable of being self-sufficient, but the main problem was the unfair distribution of land and wealth. This was a heavy load for a country founded on an agricultural economy without any enterprising bourgeoisie and characterised by the extreme poverty of its labourers. Spain was not capable of beginning a coherent economic development because of the poverty of the land, the lack of modern technology and the miserable salaries. These were the perfect conditions for a revolution to break out.

Spain could not be united geographically but it connected at an emotional level over disputes that were similar to tribal quarrels. Feelings of national unity only appeared in moments of furious passion like the defeat of Moors in the 15th century or in the Peninsular War against the French in the 19th century.

According to Brenan, in order for Spaniards to live as they wished, they had to get rid of an adversary first. The same thing happened in the Civil War where the right and the left, two ways of understanding Spain, opposed one another.

“Spain abounds in men who believe that they alone can tap the pure and unadulterated source of Spanish traditions and project it upon the future and that everyone who disagrees with them is necessarily perverse and wicked and must be overridden.”

Spain today is still obsessed by trying to pin down the ethereal national character. It is thought to be the single key that, at the same time, explains so much diversity. Brenan undertook that quest using his sagacity; his ability for observation and intuition, remarking that, “the national Spanish vice had always been overconfidence and optimism”.

Nonetheless, the repercussion of his book in Spain has been strange. Although Brenan was revered as a theorist for socialism, he was very critical of Marxism, and later said of his book: “What I had written was really an indictment of the follies and illusions of the left.”

Brenan's book was a fierce but subtle attack against the Spanish people, who seemed incapable of living together in their diversity without falling into self-destruction.

The Spanish Labyrinth, among its multiple interpretations, was a chapter of Brenan's own autobiography and his personal answers to the causes of Spanish Civil War. In the process of writing the book, he discovered new aspects of Spain - but also of himself. Brenan was, during the 20th century, the great promoter of Spain and Spanish subjects. He witnessed three wars, but the pain of the Spanish Civil War stimulated his most challenging and monumental work.