Word: brenan
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...LIFE OF ONE'S OWN (244 pp.)-Gerald Brenan-Farrar, Straus...
...Gerald Brenan, a 69-year-old Englishman who has lived for most of the past 44 years in Spain, has none of the usual credentials of the autobiographer. He has not pushed a pirogue to the headwaters of the Orinoco or crossed Kurdistan on yakback; he is not a weight lifter, a defector from or to Communism; he never became the white god of some overcredulous tribe of aborigines; he does not have the lives of 10,000 better men lost in battle to explain away; he is not a busybody determined to pad the record of a long life...
...Gasman Goeth. Brenan lives in Spain-not because it is romantic but "because it is cheap"-surrounded by a 2,000-book library, writing distinguished books about Spain (South from Granada, The Spanish Labyrinth], and glumly accepting visits from old Bloomsbury friends like Lytton Strachey. What makes Brenan's story unique and the telling of it a rare pleasure is the one quality that distinguishes him from the ordinary run of men-his indifference to the opinions of others. In the cozy modern commonwealth of man, he never learned to snuggle up to his fellows. He had a hermit...
Despite his Irish patronymic, Brenan is at pains to make clear that he came from a long, dull line of clodheaded north-of-England squires and manufacturers. His father was a professional soldier of limited mind, his mother a vague sort. Neither wasted affection on their solitary son, whose sole oddity consisted in his early-formed will to remain solitary. On the surface he was dutiful and won a scholarship to Radley, where he learned the natural eccentric's trick of fitting himself to the prescribed philistine middle-class mold while preserving his essence intact. His hero was Rimbaud...