Deaths Other Kingdom by Gamel Woolsey: Book Review

2/3/2014

The Outbreak of the Civil War From The Wife of Gerald Brenan

Gamel Woolsey

Death´s Other Kindom by Gamel Woolsey was not - as popular myth speculates - referring to living in Spain under the leadership of the Partido Popular - but rather the Spain of 1936 during the immediate aftermath of the July Military Uprising.

Written from the relative safety of their Churriana Cortijo (In Malaga) Woolsey relates how she and her husband - Hispanist Gerald Brenan (of South of Granada fame) - lived those first few tumultuous months of the civil war, before the invasion by Nationalist forces and the infamous exodus of the city of Malaga.

What gives the book its unique perspective for anyone interested in this revolutionary period of Spanish history, is that unlike other tales of the civil war by foreigners (Orwell, Lee, Bethune) Woolsey treads what she believes is a fine line between the Republicans and Nationalists. She exhibits both sympathy and outrage with her village - her 'pueblo' - as she wobbles precariously on the shaky fence of impartiality.

One unexpected outcome of this posturing, is her lucid depiction of the sadness, frustration and futility of wars as it affects all men irrespective of sides, perhaps referencing her chosen title here - taken as it is from T.S. Eliots poem: The Hollow Men.

As her 'pueblo' attempts to protect, defend, and finally bring to trial their own people, her humanity and compassion guides her though the successive waves of violence and vengeance in each chapter. Whilst the forces of rebellion made ground, allegiances become more fluid, or - as often the case as pressure mounts - set in stone as the war stumbles blindly forward.

It is a moving and intimate portrayal of those crucial few months of 1936, and unlike almost any other account of the war in English, it is told perceptively from someone who not only saw the scars opening on the horizon in front of her, but engaged with those who lives she was connected to, and whose lives were thrown so dramatically into turmoil by such events.

Gamel Woolsey returned again to Spain after the Civil War with Gerald Brenan, but her life as a writer and spiritual Hispanist would be forever eclipsed by the success of her husbands more analytical writings on the origins of conflict and his time living in the Alpujarras. (The Spanish Labyrinth and South of Granada).

Like Brenan, Woolsey was buried in the English Cemetery in Malaga.