I will let VSP describe his first book, Marching Spain, published in 1928.
”The thing to do was to write an original book of travel. I had just read D. H. Lawrence’s Sea and Sardinia with despairing admiration – despairing because why was he so ‘inside’ his subject and I so brittle, cold and ‘outside’ what I was writing about? Through what defect of character and especially of feeling, was I so shut in upon myself? But there was a lesson I could follow: the short, compact subject made personal. I got maps and decided to walk from some spot in the south of Spain to the north, and to write of nothing but the walk. On the money – and to save some for my return – I had to shorten the journey. I decided to take ship to Lisbon for economy’s sake and walk from Badajoz to Vigo, through a part of Spain that was little known and, in patches, was notorious for poverty. It was also the route of Wellington’s armies, though that historical interest was not mine. So, taking Tristram Shandy with me, and fortified on the way by thrillers by E. Phillips Oppenheim which I found in Catholic bookshops, I walked across Spain.”
“I have described it all in Marching Spain – note the deliberately ungrammatical, protesting, affected title. Though I have a tenderness for the book and think some pages rather good, I am glad it has been out of print for forty years. The few people who have read it give me a kindly but knowing grin now. I don’t blame them. It has a touching but shocking first chapter of exhibitionist prose; but despite the baroque writing of the rest, the mistakes of fact, and the declamations, it is original and has vigour. It is the work of a young man worried almost to illness by lack of money and by the future for a lot of the time. As he tramped along he was doing accounts and stamping out his anxieties with his heavy boots. I posed as a photographer working in the picture postcard trade. In the book I was purposely silent about knowing Spain already, because I wanted to preserve an instantaneous impression; and indeed in the stories and criticism I was to write later on in my life, the instantaneous and ‘first sight’ of the object has been my infatuation. Critics have noted a preoccupation with religious cranks, thinking that because of my upbringing I must have sought them out. This is not so: I had little religion left. My first encounter, simply as I walked down a street in Badajoz, was with a group of Spanish evangelicals.
The weather was good. The sun burned. The nights were cold. I did my twenty miles a day, slept in simple ventas on the stone floor after I had sat round a stick fire with the family and ate what the women fried there. The poor were more interesting than the well-off and the Spanish poor were not dull and whining. They were whole in their manliness and womanliness. I once shared a pigsty with their very clean piglets. Food was very scarce. I lived on ‘pairs of eggs’ and bread, except in the towns where I made up for it. I found a dirty inn only once. It was in a large village, used by commercial travellers – who peddle from village to village – where the pillows were soaked in years of their old hair oil and the sheets sour with sweat. I got to the Tagus, deep and golden in its gorge, one evening and there I was badly poisoned after eating a powerful garlic stew with some railway workers at a hut on the line. I recovered after a terrible time in Palencia where, in the middle of the night, I saw the cook asleep in his cotton ‘combinations’ snoring on the kitchen table. I crossed the Gredos mountains and sat on the roadside talking to the travelling shepherds of the Mesta and listening to the sheep bells; then farther north the weather broke, the rain washed the road away, and I got one of my spectacular bronchial attacks. I gave up at the last stretch to Vigo, for I had grown weak; and in Vigo I had just enough money left to get a comfortable bed for a few days. The guests in the dining room were startled by the graveyard cough which has been my pride since I was a child, and I sat all day staring at the superb bay of the seaport, waiting for the boat, counting my money over and over again and down to one glass of beer a day.” (Midnight Oil, V S Pritchett, 1971)
Now I know enough not to have to read the book but it will embellish my collection of books about Spain. I wonder if it sold well?
”The book sold 600 copies and was soon remaindered. Another innocent publisher issued it in a pocket edition in 1933; it was remaindered once more. Still, I was an author.” (Midnight Oil, V S Pritchett, 1971)