Iberia: Spanish Travels And Reflections – James A. Michener, 1968 ★★★★½

Stuffing an Entire Nation into One Big Book

James Michener was known for producing doorstopper tomes, phone-book sized novels that spanned decades and generations while taxing reader attention spans to the limit. But sometimes bigness is a virtue, as with this memoir of his travels around Spain.

Spain may get ignored by many, including me, when considering the sweep of Western civilization. Then I think on this: In 1966, while Michener was in Spain gathering material for this delightful book, Sergio Leone was there directing The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly and John Lennon was there writing “Strawberry Fields Forever.”

The fact Spain has been at the center of many cultural events even while it is so often overlooked is a point Michener makes over and over. In his introduction he explains:

What I’m saying is that Spain is a very special country and one must approach it with respect and with his eyes open. He must be fully aware that once he has penetrated the borders he runs the risk of being made prisoner.

One place Michener visits is the Great Mosque of Córdoba, converted into a church but retaining its Islamic design: "I found myself in an architectural fairy tale, surrounded by so many pillars and arches that I could not believe they were real."
Photo by Emilio Parra Doiztua from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/30/travel/spain-travel-moorish-arab.html 

In 13 epic chapters, Michener attempts something of that effect on readers, exploring in detail sections of Spain and aspects of its culture, relating choice excerpts of history and folklore and explaining his own personal connection, began back in the early 1930s and continued after the bitter interruption of the Spanish Civil War, in which Michener had favored the losing side.

By the 1960s, Michener had made his peace with the war’s aftermath, and was ready to resume his love affair with the art, the language, and everything else that was Spain, including its bullfighting. This, he acknowledges, is a brutal sport, but a source of passion:

What have I found in the Spanish bullfight? A flash of beauty, a swift development of the unexpected, a somber recollection of primitive days when men face bulls as an act of religious faith. In the bulls I have found a symbol of power and grandeur; in the men I’ve seen a professionalism which is usually honorable if not always triumphant.

Michener spends a lot of time on the bulls, more maybe than is beneficial. But subjectivity is one of Iberia’s great strengths, how the author lights on particular aspects or locales at varying length. One can enjoy Iberia either as a cover-to-cover read or as something to dip into again and again like tapas on a hot Andalucían night.

That impression of a coffee-table book is magnified by the work of Michener’s collaborator, Robert Vavra, a photographer whose arresting images sometimes fill entire pages of the book.

Michener explains Vavra’s commission when he started the book: “Shoot a hundred of the very finest pictures he can find and make them his interpretation of Spain. If he can succeed in this, the pictures will fit properly into any text.”

"They are an undigested element in Spanish life, beyond control of state and Church alike," Michener writes of the Romani. This portrait of a young Romani (or Gypsy) couple is one of dozens of Robert Vavra portraits and landscapes adding life and texture to Iberia.
Image from https://www.flickr.com/photos/billstrain/242449453

For me, the most arresting page of this very gripping series of Spanish impressions wasn’t one with text on in at all; it was a photograph of a wrinkled old woman staring at us through a screen of metal mesh. Her eyes alight, her lips pursed, she has a singularly engaged expression on her age-coarsened face. Is she smiling? Is she scowling? I don’t know, but I keep looking at her trying to figure it out.

Michener’s Spain presents a similar image for the reader. Even in the happiest moments there is a toughness that commands respect, while episodes of profound tragedy co-exist with wisps of whimsy.

Michener explains such uniquely Spanish concepts as duende and pundonor, terms that might be taken as synonymous with “macho” but are more subtle. His criticism of Spain often centers on another term, viva yo, a mentality of extreme indifference to others which can be traced back to before the conquistadors and which was still a recognized part of Spanish society in the 1960s.

But in the main Michener writes as a man in love who wants you to know it, whether it be the language:

Spanish words are easy to pronounce, are often self-explanatory and do have an attractive power of suggesting to the reader that he is listening to castanets.

…the landscape:

It hangs like a drying ox hide outside the southern door of Europe proper… I see Spain as a kaleidoscope of high, sun-baked plateaus, snow-crowned mountains and swamps of the Guadalquivir.

Of the desert landscape of Extremadura, Michener writes: "When dust rose, it hung in the motionless air and required minutes to fall back to the caked and burning earth."
Image of the Roman ruin of Merida by Tomás Fano from https://www.totallyspaintravel.com/2014/02/21/love-spain-adore-extremadura-in-2014/

…or the hospitality:

Of all the countries in which to travel, I find that today the American is judged more honestly in Spain than elsewhere. He is not loved, but neither is he abused.

Michener even finds himself making a peace of sorts with the ruling junta, the government of Generalíssimo Francisco Franco, then in power for some 30 years. They slaughtered their political opponents and enforced a conservatism Michener found strangling the country in many ways, yet they were proving a force for peace and moderation in a nation that needed both, and presented above all a firm hand.

“You must start, Michener, with the fact that Spaniards are utter bastards to govern,” a man in Badajoz says. “We are Texans cubed.”

The judgements given in the text are often sweeping and doubtless not that accurate (when Michener writes: “To a Spaniard a crucifix is a reminder of the central emotional event of his life,” it is as unlikely then as it is today), but the absence of qualifiers is a point in Iberia’s favor. It makes no sense to be anything less than bullish when writing of Spain.

It looks more deadly than it is. Michener writes: "Four-fifths of bullfight deaths in times past came because horns infected with animal manure produced instant gangrene; most of these men would have lived had penicillin existed in their day."
Image by https://www.americamagazine.org/arts-culture/2017/09/21/what-i-learned-about-my-catholic-faith-watching-bullfight 

The book may be most enjoyable because it is so much of a moment in time, the 1960s. Certainly the black-and-white Vavra photographs have a vibrant yet pre-modern quality to them. When Michener quotes a Spaniard’s view on Spanish women tending to fatness after marriage because there is no divorce law for them to worry about, it’s no doubt too sweeping a generalization but it is amusing.

Michener quotes a lot of Spaniards, but maybe just over half of them by name, and few at any length. Compared to another travel book of similar construction I just read, William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways, this is not as intimate nor as moving. But I found it even more enjoyable.

Michener’s takes on Spanish life may not be argument-proof, but that is part of the charm. This is a book that takes you along, but never pushes you in any particular direction. He presents everything in a way that might be called “objective impressionism,” communicating his sources of passion for the country but leaving final judgments to the reader.

I was beguiled by his descriptions of Spain’s vast artistic wealth, which Michener writes of with both grace and gusto. The towers of Barcelona’s famous Sagrada Família cathedral are like “pretzel sticks studded with salt crystals, except that at the upper end they narrowed down to points of rock candy, brilliantly colored.”

The Temple Expiatori de la Segrada Familia in Barcelona, closer to completion than when Michener visited, but still not quite done.
Image from https://www.archdaily.com/797419/trouble-hits-the-final-stages-of-gaudis-la-sagrada-familia

An El Greco painting of “flaming red... leads the eye to colors no other artist would dare place in juxtaposition, just as no sensible man laying out the history of a nation would dare give one country the contradictory experiences that Spain has known.”

History was Michener’s métier, and it is in retelling Spain’s many centuries of war and conquest where the narrative soars most often:

The New World was won for Spain not by gentlemen from Toledo and Sevilla but by a group of uneducated village louts who, realizing that they had no future in their hard homeland, had volunteered for service overseas, where their Extremaduran courage proved the most valuable commodity carried westward by the Spanish galleons.

Michener goes on to note how the gold these conquistadores brought home made Spain for a time the greatest nation on earth, the first true world power, reflected by the great art on display, yet at the same time brought it low by creating a flow of wealth that could not be sustained.

There are many detours. For a chapter on Las Marismas, a swampy land near the Mediterranean coast, the book goes into an extended inventory of migratory bird life on display. Another on Pamplona details the legacy of Ernest Hemingway, who put the region on the map for many of his fellow Americans (though Michener himself harbors some skepticism at Papa’s outsized reputation.)

Michener visits the prehistoric paintings of Altamira, near the French border. "On these humps the ancient artists...drew sleeping animals, wonderfully curled, with their feet tucked under them and their heads resting on their forelegs. The sense of reality thus created is magical; the bulls look as if at any moment they might rise from their slumber."
Image from https://www.ice-age-europe.eu/visit-us/network-members/museum-of-altamira.html

You get caught up in some of the book’s side quests. Will he find a decent bowl of gazpacho, or someone who can dance a flamenco properly? Will that matador Curro Romero ever live up to the praise Michener hears from his friends?

Michener never tries to present himself as anything but an outsider, writing: In Spain I have always been a tourist and have been rather proud of that fact. This is the book of a tourist and experiences described herein are those which are open to any intelligent traveler.

Iberia is not a book about the entire Iberian peninsula; it just feels like one when you pick it up. Michener does offer some thoughts on Portugal, though nothing on little Andorra, Iberia’s third nation. But it does cover nearly all of Spain, and what you do get is satisfying.