This Europe: When Bloomsbury met Andalusia, a 1920s romance
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Your support makes all the difference.The life and loves of Gerald Brenan, one of Britain's most important modern writers on Spain, who fled his repressive upper-class background for a hamlet in the Alpujarras in the 1920s, is being brought to the screen by a Spanish director.
Filming starts this week of a biopic of the man who inspired a string of British writers to spend their lives studying Spain, and who anticipated by decades the fad for seeking the simple life in the sunny south.
"I saw this fleeting figure on the fringes of the Bloomsbury group in the film Carrington," said the director Fernando Colomo. "Brenan is the British writer who best knew Spain, and I thought it was a shame he's almost forgotten."
Brenan's civil war study, The Spanish Labyrinth, and his memoirs, South of Granada (the film's title), are literary classics, unfairly overshadowed by recent potboilers celebrating the rustic delights of the Mediterranean.
And his tale – that of a romantic intellectual who finds love, sexual liberation and a new life in an unknown land – is not only compelling but true. "He wanted to escape his repressive education and his memories of the horrors of the First World War. He came to Spain because it was cheap and he wanted to write poetry," said Colomo.
Brenan took with him 2,000 books, and fell in love with a servant girl who swept away his sexual inhibitions. He was visited by his Bloomsbury Group friends, such as Dora Carrington and Lytton Strachey, who complicated his life with intrigues and crossed loyalties.
Scripted by Brenan's friend and biographer, Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, Colomo's bilingual film dramatises the confrontation between two worlds: the inter-war English upper class and semi-feudal Andalusian labourers.
The actor Matthew Goode, who plays the young Brenan, said: "Brenan must have felt like a visitor to 17th-century Afghanistan ... a complete outsider. He couldn't speak a word of Spanish. He was confronted with customs and conditions worlds away from his privileged upbringing."
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