Spain

The Vista Hooks are a series of guide books. The one entitled Spain is a miscellany of photographs, literary criticism, familiar essays (for example, “The Difficulty of being Spanish”), art criticism, appendices of useful information, and telescoped history. Although the authors are a man and a woman, the pronoun “I” is prevalent, and the reader is invited on page 5 to interpret this enigma in terms of Vonjuanism. The authors have written some of the chapters with brilliance, out of love for Spain, out of compassion for its suffering born of a turbulent history; but they lost their outline somewhere around page 49 and their sense of unity crumbled away. Like all Spaniards, they interpret bullfighting as an art, but they use the brand of mystic bull talk made so aggressively popular in the United States by Hemingway. And they fall into a number of errors of fact; e.g., Federico García Lorca “spent his whole life on Spanish soil and refused to go beyond the frontier.” At Columbia University in 1929 Lorca used to visit my roommate and me frequently to talk or sing folksongs. Out of this year in the New World (he also lectured in Latin America) he wrote Poeta en Nueva York and other things. Spain is written for the tourist trade, not for the historian.