OF ALL THE FOREIGN eyewitness accounts of the Spanish Civil War, Gamel Woolsey’s Death’s Other Kingdom is one of the most moving and unusual. It is one of the few records of the war that is fuelled more by a love of Spain and its people than by any firm ideological standpoint. Woolsey was someone whose political position ran contrary to the Left Review’s famous assertion of 1937 that it was impossible for authors not to take sides on the issue of being for or against Franco and Fascism. But then, to her contemporaries, she would barely have been considered an author at all. By the time of her death in 1968, she seemed destined to go down in history merely as the wife of the writer and Hispanist Gerald Brenan.
In view of the sadness, frustrations and sheer bad luck that dogged her for much of her life, it is unsurprising that Woolsey looked back nostalgically to what she perceived as her idyllic early childhood spent on a plantation in South Carolina. Born there probably in 1895 (a fear of ageing apparently made her put forward this date to 1899), she was descended on her mother’s side from an old and distinguished South Carolina family. Her mother had been a celebrated beauty who, when only nineteen, had married a New York widower over twice her age. Woolsey had an elder sister with whom she was never close, and three half-brothers who thought of her as a strange child whom they could never fully understand. A dreamer, as well as a precocious reader, she immersed herself in fairytales and ancient myths, and even abandoned her real name of Elizabeth in favour of the more poetic Gamel, after the Norwegian word for ‘old’.
Melancholy and guilt became integral to her personality when she was still in her teens. When she was fifteen her father died, and, two years later, she fell in love with a childhood friend who committed suicide on discovering his homosexuality. Shortly afterwards her mother started drinking heavily, so much so that the horrified Gamel would not touch a drop of alcohol for many years afterwards. On top of all this, aged twenty, she was diagnosed with tuberculosis, and had to spend a year in a Charleston sanatorium, where she had half a lung removed. On leaving, she ran away to New York, married a womanising New Zealand journalist, and entertained vague hopes of becoming an actress or a writer.
By 1926 she had separated from her husband after miscarrying (or perhaps even aborting) the child she had been expecting by him. As with the protagonist of her romantic novel based on her New York years and their aftermath, One Way of Love, she was ‘waiting for her knight on horseback to appear’. In 1927 such a person materialised in the unlikely figure of Llewelyn Powys, the youngest of that precious literary trio, the Powys brothers. A forty-three-year-old fellow tuberculosis sufferer, Llewelyn was married to his literary editor Alyse Gregory, a woman who believed strongly in feminine and personal independence. Alyse’s beliefs would be put firmly to the test after her husband fell passionately in love with Gamel, who obsessed him with her dreamy, enigmatic personality, not to mention her ‘large lovely breasts with the exquisite hazelnut nipples’. In the late spring of 1928 Llewelyn received the news, delightful to him, but devastating to Alyse, that he had made Gamel pregnant. But, once again, Gamel was to lose her child. Following an accident in a taxi, and in the light of her tubercular history, her doctor insisted on her having an abortion.
Miraculously, Llewlyn’s marriage to Alyse survived all this, as did his relationship with Gamel, and Gamel’s close friendship with the lesbian-inclined Alyse. When, in May 1928, Llewelyn and Alyse moved back to England and to the Powys heartland of the Dorset hills, Gamel followed suit, and took up lodgings twelve minutes’ walk away from her lover. She was pregnant again by July, though once again she was impelled to have an abortion. Alyse, meanwhile, contemplated suicide.
Gamel at Yegen in 1933
By July 1930, Gamel was desperately trying to find a way out of this emotional impasse. It was now that an aspiring writer turned up in Dorset, no less desperate to find himself a wife, and armed with a letter of introduction to one of the Powyses.
This man, Gerald Brenan, had been living on his own for much of the previous decade in the remote Andalucian village of Yegen. There he had immersed himself in the study of Spanish history and culture, while battling with the sexual hang-ups induced by a repressive English middle-class background. As open in his discussion of his intimate life as Woolsey was closed, Brenan had little inhibitions about telling his friends (and later his readers) the minutest details of his affairs. His great passion during the Yegen years was with Lytton Strachey’s partner Dora Carrington, with whom Brenan had a long, masochistic and largely epistolary relationship. In the two years immediately prior to his meeting with Gamel, Brenan had attempted a definitive break with Carrington and had returned to Spain to carry out an affair with fifteen-year-old Juliana, a Yegen girl with a healthy appetite for sex.
As with other British writers, Spain had a liberating effect on Brenan. His intensive love-making with Juliana, though inducing long periods of physical lethargy and wreaking havoc with a projected biography of Saint Teresa of Avila, made him finally overcome his habitual impotence. Unfortunately, this breakthrough also had the effect of making Juliana pregnant. Responding to this situation like some benevolent feudal landlord of old, Brenan placated Juliana with the offer of money and the promise of eventually looking after the child.
Faced now with the imminent prospect of becoming a single father, Brenan’s search for someone with whom he could truly share his life became more urgent than ever. Within a month he had set eyes on a woman whom he immediately sensed would fulfil such a role. Brenan first saw Gamel standing ‘mysteriously’ beside a haystack. He was reminded of a grandmother of his, and was also forcibly struck by her beauty, which he would later try and convey in his at times disarmingly honest autobiography Personal Record. Among his first impressions of her were of someone with a ‘fine bone structure’, a transparent complexion of a kind ‘that one sometimes finds in consumptive people’, and ‘calm grey eyes’ that looked out ‘gravely’ from behind thick, ‘blue black hair’. Several months later, when Brenan nervously introduced her to his parents, she surprised Brenan’s father by displaying a degree of refinement he did not associate with ‘a new, raw country like America’. ‘Centuries of breeding,’ the father openly declared in front of her, ‘must have gone to the making of that mouth and chin’. It is unlikely that he would have made such a comment about the dumpy and frizzy-haired Juliana.
Yet for all Gamel’s apparent suitability as a wife, it soon became obvious that there were enormous differences between them. There was, as Brenan realised, an almost schizophrenic quality to Gamel’s personality. The ironic wit and lively intelligence she displayed one moment could be replaced the next by the apathy and silence that announced her withdrawal into her own private world. What was worse, she was still very much in love with Llewelyn.
On becoming engaged to Brenan, after knowing him only a few weeks, Gamel told Llewelyn that this new development would in no way effect their own relationship. ‘I am very fond of Gerald,’ she later wrote to him, ‘but it has nothing to do with what I feel for you. We meet in some part of the mind where other people never come.’ To the understandably jealous Brenan she announced that the love between her and the selfishly and childishly possessive Llewelyn ‘transcended all other loves’ and that it had ‘something supernatural about it’.
Gamel and Brenan, in the course of the nine-month ‘honeymoon’ on which they embarked in the autumn of 1930 (they would not officially marry until 1947), succeeded in overcoming numerous traumas, ranging from Gamel’s spell in a Norfolk sanatorium to a return of Gerald’s impotence. Brenan discovered in Gamel ‘the perfect travelling companion’, and also assumed with relish a new role as her protector, finding in her a need to be protected greater than in anyone he had ever known. None the less their marriage was clearly not going to be one based on passion (‘Llewelyn had seen to that’). ‘There was always something wanting in our deeper feelings for one another,’ confided Brenan in Personal Record. Woolsey, in a letter to Llewelyn of 1936, put the same sentiment across rather more strongly: ‘Gerald has never got in touch with most of my mind at all, or even wanted to, or would be interested if he did. And I’m sure large tracts of his mind are equally sealed to me.’
For Gamel in particular the post-honeymoon return to England in the summer of 1931 must have been especially difficult. Quite apart from having to cope with renewed proximity to the emotionally manipulative Llewelyn, she must have been painfully conscious of the comments made about her by Brenan’s hypercritical Blooms-bury friends. Everyone, for instance, found her clothes sense to be disastrous, while Carrington and Strachey ascribed to her the ultimate Bloomsbury sin of being a bore.
Compensations and frustrations were provided by her first taste of English literary life. Brenan, who had yet to bring out a single book, and had been struggling for ages with a novel of his own, must have become secretly envious when, in 1931, a volume of Gamel’s poems (of which he had never thought much) was published under the title Middle Earth, and a deal was arranged with Gollancz to publish One Way of Love. However, as was so typical of Gamel’s thwarted life, Gollancz, after having set the book in print, relented on the deal in February of the following year. They were worried about being prosecuted for obscenity, which was ironic given that one of Gamel’s half-brothers was a judge famous for defending first Marie Stopes and then James Joyce against such charges.
The failure to publish One Way of Love was overshadowed by other crises that year, beginning with the suicide of Carrington in January, and proceeding in August to a severe cancer scare involving Gamel having a lump removed from her breast. Brenan, who had still not seen his illegitimate child by Juliana (a daughter called Miranda), thought that the moment had now come to introduce Gamel to Spain and to Yegen.
Gamel was instantly overwhelmed by the beauty of Andalucia, and appears to have been unaware of rumours that Juliana was trying to win Brenan back with the use of love philtres. Gamel’s enthusiasm for Spain increased further when they went back to the country early in 1935, to set up home with Miranda in the rambling old house near Malaga that is the setting for Death’s Other Kingdom. Memories came back to her of her childhood, and she wrote to Llewelyn that the place ‘was beautiful and abandoned and romantic like an old plantation house where ruined people have been living for generations.’ She would never fully master the Spanish language, and she had particular difficulties at first understanding even the Andalucian utterances of Miranda. But she had somehow discovered in Spain her spiritual home.
It was not the best time to have done so. Intimations of some impending national tragedy were felt by Brenan as early as the spring of 1935. But Brenan and Gamel, like so many other expatriates in southern Spain, pretended to themselves that nothing serious would really happen. An excellent portrayal of the Malaga they knew immediately before and during the Civil War was given by their acquaintance Chalmers Mitchell in his book My House in Malaga (1937). Chalmers Mitchell, a former director of London Zoo, was described by Gamel in a letter to Llewellyn as a ‘delightful old man’, and features in both Death’s Other Kingdom and Personal Record as an eccentric dandy risking the wrath of the Republicans by dressing, in Brenan’s words, ‘in an immaculate white alpaca suit, complete with a bow tie’. He had come to Malaga in the 1930s in the expectation of a peaceful retirement, and, right up to the very outbreak of the war, had little inkling that this was not going to be possible.
The months leading up to the Civil War appear from Chalmers Mitchell’s description to have been an almost blissful period in Malaga, blessed by a ‘particularly beautiful Spring’, and with the burgeoning British community entertaining itself with ‘much bridge at the club; golf on a rather inefficient but beautiful course recently opened, motoring into the neighbourhood, walks, and mutual visits for luncheons or dinners or teas.’ More visitors than ever were contemplating buying or building villas in the area, and the British Club in Malaga, soon to be deserted, was planning an enormous extension for the summer.
When, on the hot and sunny afternoon of 18 July, gun shots rang out and the horizon became obscured by fires, there was almost a sense of disbelief among the hundreds of British residents and visitors, most of whom (including the young Laurie Lee at nearby Almuñecar) soon left the country. The anger and indignation that so many of them displayed on their departure shocked Brenan and Gamel and might have strengthened their own resolve to stay on in Spain as long as possible. Brenan later admitted that he had felt completely ashamed at being British. Both he and Gamel, faced with a national crisis, became aware of how petty their own problems were in comparison with the fate of the Spaniards. And, like Chalmers Mitchell, who also remained in Malaga, they showed a concern for people that transcended their political sympathies. All three of them, though broadly supporting the besieged Republican government, were willing to compromise themselves by sheltering in their houses prominent right-wing families.
Gerald Brenan at Churriana in 1936
Gamel, in a letter to Llewelyn describing the chaotic situation of this time, noted that ‘Gerald, I need hardly say, is enjoying himself hugely.’ She herself had an abhorrence of war, and memorably coined the phrase ‘pornography of violence’ to describe the relish and exaggeration with which atrocities were often reported. Yet she herself was candidly to admit to the thrill of living life at such a heightened intensity. War certainly brought out the best of her, not just as a person, but also as a writer. It released her from her morbid and self-indulgent introspection, and gave her a much-needed sense of purpose as well as the concern for common humanity that is so striking a characteristic of Death’s Other Kingdom.
Death’s Other Kingdom was written after their eventual return to Britain, at the same time as Brenan was maniacally working on his brilliantly lucid exposition of the war, The Spanish Labyrinth. While Brenan grappled with the big issues, Gamel dwelt on the domestic minutiae, such as in her book’s funny and touching last page, when a couple of impoverished fisherwomen heatedly debate which colour handkerchief they should buy.
Characteristically for Gamel, circumstances conspired to prevent the book from enjoying the degree of success it deserved. After finally signing a contract with Longmans in April 1939, Gamel was told that publication would be delayed until the autumn of that year, by which time, as she wrote to Llewelyn, ‘I think we may all be in Death’s Other Kingdom.’ Another matter of concern was the choice of author to write the introduction. The publishers approached the poet Edward Blunden (the only author apart from Evelyn Waugh to have taken Franco’s side in the Left Review’s symposium on the war). Fortunately he declined the offer, much to the relief of Gamel, who thought him ‘a very bad writer’. She herself favoured Bertrand Russell, an ardent male admirer of hers; but he was rejected by the publishers on the grounds of being ‘too political’. There was talk for a while of Siegfried Sassoon; but finally the task fell to Llewelyn’s brother John Cowper Powys. Gamel expressed her approval, though it is difficult to imagine that she would have liked the pompous and patronising text he ended up writing. His fitting praise for her personal and intimate way of looking at the war was completely diminished by his saying that hers were qualities ‘permitted only to women – that is to women when they’re not maddened by the hysteria of sex.’ Furthermore his conclusion that the book was essentially ‘a tender and wistful threnody over “Old Spain” by a daughter of the “Old South”’ would have misled readers into thinking that the work was yet another contribution to the gushing, romantic literature on the country.
The book received a handful of enthusiastic notices, and was praised by the Times Literary Supplement as ‘moving and beautiful’. But any satisfaction she might have derived from this would have been muted by the almost simultaneous death of Llewelyn and arrival of another and far greater war, in the course of which her subtle and understated book would soon be forgotten. Brenan would be far luckier with the timing and reception of The Spanish Labyrinth, which appeared in 1943, received massive coverage and immediately established its author as the foremost Hispanist of his day.
Gamel and Brenan returned to Spain soon after the Second World War, the latter to research his travelogue The Face of Spain, which portrays the country at the height of its ‘years of hunger’. With nervous anticipation they went back to their house at Churriana, and were relieved to find the place almost as Gamel had so evocatively described it in Death’s Other Kingdom, and with the same memorable cast of characters. The reunion with those whom they had left behind was filled with emotion, as was their renewed contact with their garden, which appeared more luxuriant and exotic than ever. When they set off again on their travels, they felt, according to Brenan, as Adam and Eve must have done on the point of being expelled from paradise. But they would be back for good five years later, this time to witness Churriana being gradually enveloped by the urban sprawl that came to be known as the Costa del Sol. Brenan was unperturbed by this, and indeed relished the new influx to the coast of young and liberated women. To Gamel, however, this spoiling of their surroundings could only have contributed to the growing misery of her last years.
Childless, and insufficiently recognised as a writer, Gamel came to think of her life as a failure. On settling back in Churriana, she moved into a separate bedroom to her husband, dyed her hair black, and became absorbed by the reading of science fiction, finding in it metaphors for her own strange and solitary existence. She also dwelt pathetically on the past. ‘Oh Gamelismus!’ recorded Brenan’s friend Frances Partridge on a visit to Churriana in 1962, ‘I did laugh inwardly yesterday at the way she brought out faded passport photographs of Powyses, or others of houses of no possible significance in Charleston and views in the mystic South, hoping by these totem objects to prove that she too had a significant past among the illustrious.’
Gamel persisted sporadically in her literary activities, and, despite the limitations in her understanding of Spanish, revealed herself as an outstanding translator in The Spendthrifts, which introduced the English-speaking world to Pérez Galdos’s dazzlingly original novel La de Bringas. However, it was as a poet that she wanted above all to be recognised; and this ambition was shattered when T. S. Eliot, whom she greatly admired, rejected her poems for publication. She succumbed to cancer shortly afterwards.
Brenan, overcome with pity at seeing Gamel dying so unfulfilled, made efforts after her death in 1968 to keep her memory alive. He privately printed several volumes of her verse, and tried to persuade publishers to reissue Death’s Other Kingdom. This last task was eventually undertaken by the feminist imprint Virago, who also saw at last to the publication of the novel One Way of Love. Though the novel achieved a modest commercial and critical success, it is only Death’s Other Kingdom that is likely to endure, and not simply as a poignant account of an Andalucian village during the Civil War. Re-reading the book today, one is struck by how pertinent it remains as a commentary on war in general, and on war’s impact on the lives of those ordinary human beings whom the rhetoric of politics and ideology never reaches.
MICHAEL JACOBS
Spain, 2004