One Man's Story

A LIFE OF ONE'S OWN (244 pp.)--Gerald Brenan--Farrar, Straus ($4.95).

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 spent in well-meant public mischief; he is not the survivor of unprecedented surgery or the sole eyewitness of some notable assassination or natural disaster; and he was never sentenced to 99 years in jail for something he did or did not do.

The 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's vocation in a world that has no use for those who have no use for it.

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, most gifted of all those who have opted out of civilization. Brenan wrote pieces in the manner of Rimbaud's Illuminations, and when other boys were crunching candy, he, with no more fuss or sense of sin, munched hashish. With characteristic simplicity, he had written for the stuff to a London chemist, who obligingly supplied the young collector of herbs.

Like many of his literary predecessors, he ran away from school. The disguise he chose for his flight to Paris could hardly have been more bizarre. Modeled on that of a contemporary gas fitter, the costume consisted of a tall hat, long black overcoat, false mustache, a bag of bogus tools and a copy of The Gas World. But Paris looked at him with an indifference to match his own, and (less conspicuously dressed) he took off for points east with a donkey and a rather nutty companion who was a much more usual type of rebel, a romantic poseur who was doing what Brenan was incapable of--making a gesture. Of course, the romantic cracked first. Brenan trudged on alone (barefoot through snow when his boots gave out in the Balkans) and only turned back when it dawned on him that he was not enjoying himself.

Private Eye. He was back in England when war came. Brenan was an uncommon man in the first of the wars of the common man. He survived the mass martyrdom with his nerves and his singularity unshaken, and records the carnage with so sharp an eye that the man killed next to him lives again amid the obliteration of so many statistical millions. Once his private vision nearly betrayed him to death, when, in a sudden spasm of insight into the sanctity of all creation, he hesitated to shoot a sitting duck of a German--who promptly shot him.

At war's end, Brenan was not alone in wanting to say goodbye to all that and go somewhere quiet. There is nothing strange or special about this, except that when Brenan said goodbye to society, he meant it. He took his officer's "blood money" and retired at 25 (when his book ends) to a remote village in Spain to go it mostly alone for most of a lifetime.

Self-love in writers is common enough, but there is no exhibitionism in the steadfast egotism of Gerald Brenan. This has the paradoxical effect of giving his superb autobiography the quality of authenticity that belongs only to the highest kind of fiction--it is his work, take it or leave it.

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