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Andalusia: The Land of the Blessed Virgin
Book by Maugham, W. Somerset
238 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1905
15 people are currently reading
103 people want to read
About the author
W. Somerset Maugham
2,130 books6,112 followersWilliam Somerset Maugham was born in Paris in 1874. He spoke French even before he spoke a word of English, a fact to which some critics attribute the purity of his style.
His parents died early and, after an unhappy boyhood, which he recorded poignantly in Of Human Bondage, Maugham became a qualified physician. But writing was his true vocation. For ten years before his first success, he almost literally starved while pouring out novels and plays.
Maugham wrote at a time when experimental modernist literature such as that of William Faulkner, Thomas Mann, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf was gaining increasing popularity and winning critical acclaim. In this context, his plain prose style was criticized as 'such a tissue of clichés' that one's wonder is finally aroused at the writer's ability to assemble so many and at his unfailing inability to put anything in an individual way.
During World War I, Maugham worked for the British Secret Service . He travelled all over the world, and made many visits to America. After World War II, Maugham made his home in south of France and continued to move between England and Nice till his death in 1965.
At the time of Maugham's birth, French law was such that all foreign boys born in France became liable for conscription. Thus, Maugham was born within the Embassy, legally recognized as UK territory.
His parents died early and, after an unhappy boyhood, which he recorded poignantly in Of Human Bondage, Maugham became a qualified physician. But writing was his true vocation. For ten years before his first success, he almost literally starved while pouring out novels and plays.
Maugham wrote at a time when experimental modernist literature such as that of William Faulkner, Thomas Mann, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf was gaining increasing popularity and winning critical acclaim. In this context, his plain prose style was criticized as 'such a tissue of clichés' that one's wonder is finally aroused at the writer's ability to assemble so many and at his unfailing inability to put anything in an individual way.
During World War I, Maugham worked for the British Secret Service . He travelled all over the world, and made many visits to America. After World War II, Maugham made his home in south of France and continued to move between England and Nice till his death in 1965.
At the time of Maugham's birth, French law was such that all foreign boys born in France became liable for conscription. Thus, Maugham was born within the Embassy, legally recognized as UK territory.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
December 26, 2024
If I could give my loving envoi today and send this book off with a lucky THIRTEEN-star rating (for I have set the book down today, the 13th of June) I WOULD.
You see, Maugham, when he wrote it, had been around the block quite a few times. In point of fact, miraculously, he never lost the pristine, magical sentiment of the inherent beauty of Catholicism.
You see, for us Catholics the Blessed Virgin is unattainable perfect purity. But for Maugham, and Spain, she is as well the SORROWFUL Virgin - the icon whose purity was Convicted and Brought to Deep Shame - by the pig-headed Pharisees who murdered her Son.
If the beauty of cruel logic is reason for believing, well, Maugham was (aesthetically, at least) also a believer.
(Whether one can still innocently believe after so many sullied trips around the block is a moot point!)
On our street, we have a young (read early middle-aged) neighbour who walks the circuit of our meandering block MANY repeated times, morning and afternoon...
Though at first a tad judgemental, she has now settled, with us, into the happy habit of exchanging small pleasantries about our garden.
She’s now checked her judgement before commencing her stress-busting daily double reiterations.
I think that’s a good sign, don’t you? For that’s how (cautious and polite) social friendships are formed.
Maugham, as well, has checked any worldly IRREVERENCE at HIS door. Something so many of us wish the restive rest of us could do!
And if you’ve read his superlatively good late tale, Catalina (for which see my review) you’ll be similarly enchanted by this beautifully ruminative travelogue, so similar in its trenchant aperçus to the thoughts of many an old worn-out codger - like yours truly.
Even though I never manage to inscribe them as pointedly, for which truism I constantly - like my Spanish GR buddy, Fonch - envy the tactful way in which Maugham pulls it off.
He is a true Master.
Oh - and I forgot to tell you - this understated masterwork is about Spain and its people.
That’s all.
But, you know what?
It bears my loving nihil obstat -
And my friend Fonch’s grateful Imprimatur!
***
Ok, ok, folks... FIVE stars.
You see, Maugham, when he wrote it, had been around the block quite a few times. In point of fact, miraculously, he never lost the pristine, magical sentiment of the inherent beauty of Catholicism.
You see, for us Catholics the Blessed Virgin is unattainable perfect purity. But for Maugham, and Spain, she is as well the SORROWFUL Virgin - the icon whose purity was Convicted and Brought to Deep Shame - by the pig-headed Pharisees who murdered her Son.
If the beauty of cruel logic is reason for believing, well, Maugham was (aesthetically, at least) also a believer.
(Whether one can still innocently believe after so many sullied trips around the block is a moot point!)
On our street, we have a young (read early middle-aged) neighbour who walks the circuit of our meandering block MANY repeated times, morning and afternoon...
Though at first a tad judgemental, she has now settled, with us, into the happy habit of exchanging small pleasantries about our garden.
She’s now checked her judgement before commencing her stress-busting daily double reiterations.
I think that’s a good sign, don’t you? For that’s how (cautious and polite) social friendships are formed.
Maugham, as well, has checked any worldly IRREVERENCE at HIS door. Something so many of us wish the restive rest of us could do!
And if you’ve read his superlatively good late tale, Catalina (for which see my review) you’ll be similarly enchanted by this beautifully ruminative travelogue, so similar in its trenchant aperçus to the thoughts of many an old worn-out codger - like yours truly.
Even though I never manage to inscribe them as pointedly, for which truism I constantly - like my Spanish GR buddy, Fonch - envy the tactful way in which Maugham pulls it off.
He is a true Master.
Oh - and I forgot to tell you - this understated masterwork is about Spain and its people.
That’s all.
But, you know what?
It bears my loving nihil obstat -
And my friend Fonch’s grateful Imprimatur!
***
Ok, ok, folks... FIVE stars.
October 8, 2022
The landscape and culture of Andalusia have always held a special attraction for travellers, even within the rich context of Spain generally. Andalusia’s power to fascinate no doubt has to do, in part, with the country’s intriguing cultural mix: Andalusia, at the southern end of the Iberian Peninsula, was the first part of Catholic Spain to fall under the rule of Moorish invaders (in 711 A.D.), and it was the last part of Spain from which the Moors were expelled (in the momentous year of 1492).
The 800 years of Moorish presence in Andalusia had a powerful influence on the region’s art, architecture, cuisine, literature, folklore, and music. And Andalusia is strongly associated with two of Spain’s best-known cultural practices – flamenco and bullfighting. For all of these reasons, Andalusia seems to have been a favourite place of British novelist William Somerset Maugham, as he made clear in his 1905 travel book The Land of the Blessed Virgin: Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia.
Somerset Maugham was one of the most popular British novelists of the early 20th century, and his novels often depicted characters who crossed some sort of cultural boundary. In Of Human Bondage (1915), a middle-class English doctor embarks upon a doomed love relationship with a working-class woman whose outlook is quite different from his own. The Moon and Sixpence (1919) takes its inspiration from the life story of Paul Gauguin, a European artist who found his source of artistic inspiration in faraway Polynesia. And The Razor’s Edge (1944) chronicles the odyssey of a World War I veteran who rejects the grasping postwar materialism that he sees around him, and sets forth on a spiritual quest for meaning – a quest that ultimately takes him to a Buddhist monastery in India. The Land of the Blessed Virgin, from earlier in Maugham’s career, similarly focuses on the perspective of an Anglo traveller crossing a cultural border, as Maugham marvels at what he finds interesting and different about Andalusia.
It is important to remember, when reading The Land of the Blessed Virgin, that the expectations for travel writing have changed considerably since 1905. Nowadays, in a time when travel among all parts of the world is generally much easier than it used to be (present COVID-19 circumstances excepted), an unspoken expectation for travel writers – and sometimes a spoken one – is that the writer will go out of their way to treat with respect a culture that is different from their own, and to emphasize human commonality among different and diverse cultures. In the 19th century, by contrast, readers of travel literature wanted to enjoy, if only vicariously, a touch of the “exotic.” Such audience expectations may have influenced Maugham’s composition of passages like this one regarding the women of Andalusia:
The women…have no gaiety. If Spanish girls have frequently a beautiful youth, their age too often is atrocious: it is inconceivable that a handsome woman should become so fearful a hag; the luxuriant hair is lost, and she takes no pains to conceal her grey baldness, the eye loses its light, the enchanting down of the upper lip turns to a bristly moustache; the features harden, grow coarse and vulgar; and the countenance assumes a rapacious expression, so that she appears a bird of prey; and her strident voice is like the shriek of vultures. (p. 7)
There is plenty of cultural essentialism on display here, and more than a bit of misogyny as well. In this formulation, the Andalusian woman hardly even gets a chance to emerge as a human being; instead, she goes as mythic archetype from nymph to harpy, in a manner that recalls Maugham’s classical education at The King’s School in Canterbury, and at Heidelberg University.
That tendency to engage in more than a bit of “othering” toward the Andalusians also comes through in passages like this one:
Below the superficial similarity with the rest of Europe which of late [the Andalusians] have acquired, there is a difference which makes it impossible to get at the bottom of their hearts. They have no openness as have the French and the Italians, with whom a good deal of intimacy is possible even to an Englishman, but on the contrary an Eastern reserve which continually baffles me. I cannot realise their thoughts nor their outlook. I feel always below the grace of their behaviour the instinctive, primeval hatred of the stranger. (pp. 58-59)
In fairness, however, it must be pointed out that Maugham can be equally critical of his own British culture, as when he remarks that part of the reason why he so enjoys Andalusia is that “The English have still much of that ancient puritanism which finds a vague sinfulness in the uncostly delights of sunshine, and colour, and ease of mind” (p. 14). He likewise tweaks the noses of those British readers who might tend to see their moral system as being somehow “better” or “purer” than that of regions like Andalusia when he writes that any system of moral reasoning holding “that moral qualities make pleasant companions, is quite false; on the contrary, it is rigid principles and unbending character, strength of will, and a decided sense of right and wrong, which make intercourse difficult” (p. 28).
Maugham betrays a fondness for the bon mot when he suggests that Andalusians have a flexible relationship with the truth – a “Mendacity is a thing so perfectly understood that no one is abashed by detection” (p. 17) – and when he comments on the romantic complications that he finds to be common in the literature read within the region: “It is a significant fact that in Spanish novels if the hero is left for two minutes alone with the heroine there are invariably asterisks and some hundred pages later a baby” (p. 19).
Recalling an earlier visit to Seville, Maugham considers the depth of the emotions that he once felt on beholding the old historic city of Ferdinand and Isabella, with its romantic associations: “Looking back, I cannot dismiss the suspicion that my passionate emotions were somewhat ridiculous, but at twenty-three one can afford to lack a sense of humour” (p. 21). Revisiting Andalusia at a later point in his life, by contrast, Maugham seems to find that he can maintain more of a sense of critical distance, as when he writes that “I have always found the Andalusians abstemious eaters; nor have I wondered at this, as Spanish food is abominable” (p. 28).
Yet Maugham – sometimes, seemingly in spite of himself – reveals the aspects of Andalusian culture that he finds entrancing, as when he expresses his admiration for Andalusian musical forms like the malagueña, “the particular complaint of the maid sorrowing for an absent lover”. Of the malagueña, with its deep Moorish influence, Maugham writes that “There is nothing European in that quavering lament, in those long-drawn and monotonous notes, in those weird trills” (pp. 77-78) – and he appreciatively quotes some particularly haunting malagueña lyrics.
Toward the end of The Land of the Blessed Virgin, Maugham writes that “It is much better to read books of travel than to travel oneself; he really enjoys foreign lands who never goes abroad; and the man who stays at home, preserving his illusions, has certainly the best of it” (pp. 87-88). But I think he may be having us on when he says so. His unflinching description of a bullfight at the great bullring in Seville is the work of a writer who believes in the importance of observing and recording his experiences. So are his moving reflections on seeing sick and wounded veterans of Spain’s then-current war in Cuba; he sees, and wants his readers to see, how sad it is that a failing colonial power is sending its young men thousands of miles away, to fight an unwinnable war, and is then ignoring these young soldiers' plight when they return home ruined by battle wounds or ravaged by tropical disease. The Land of the Blessed Virgin is a thoughtful and interesting work of travel literature.
The 800 years of Moorish presence in Andalusia had a powerful influence on the region’s art, architecture, cuisine, literature, folklore, and music. And Andalusia is strongly associated with two of Spain’s best-known cultural practices – flamenco and bullfighting. For all of these reasons, Andalusia seems to have been a favourite place of British novelist William Somerset Maugham, as he made clear in his 1905 travel book The Land of the Blessed Virgin: Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia.
Somerset Maugham was one of the most popular British novelists of the early 20th century, and his novels often depicted characters who crossed some sort of cultural boundary. In Of Human Bondage (1915), a middle-class English doctor embarks upon a doomed love relationship with a working-class woman whose outlook is quite different from his own. The Moon and Sixpence (1919) takes its inspiration from the life story of Paul Gauguin, a European artist who found his source of artistic inspiration in faraway Polynesia. And The Razor’s Edge (1944) chronicles the odyssey of a World War I veteran who rejects the grasping postwar materialism that he sees around him, and sets forth on a spiritual quest for meaning – a quest that ultimately takes him to a Buddhist monastery in India. The Land of the Blessed Virgin, from earlier in Maugham’s career, similarly focuses on the perspective of an Anglo traveller crossing a cultural border, as Maugham marvels at what he finds interesting and different about Andalusia.
It is important to remember, when reading The Land of the Blessed Virgin, that the expectations for travel writing have changed considerably since 1905. Nowadays, in a time when travel among all parts of the world is generally much easier than it used to be (present COVID-19 circumstances excepted), an unspoken expectation for travel writers – and sometimes a spoken one – is that the writer will go out of their way to treat with respect a culture that is different from their own, and to emphasize human commonality among different and diverse cultures. In the 19th century, by contrast, readers of travel literature wanted to enjoy, if only vicariously, a touch of the “exotic.” Such audience expectations may have influenced Maugham’s composition of passages like this one regarding the women of Andalusia:
The women…have no gaiety. If Spanish girls have frequently a beautiful youth, their age too often is atrocious: it is inconceivable that a handsome woman should become so fearful a hag; the luxuriant hair is lost, and she takes no pains to conceal her grey baldness, the eye loses its light, the enchanting down of the upper lip turns to a bristly moustache; the features harden, grow coarse and vulgar; and the countenance assumes a rapacious expression, so that she appears a bird of prey; and her strident voice is like the shriek of vultures. (p. 7)
There is plenty of cultural essentialism on display here, and more than a bit of misogyny as well. In this formulation, the Andalusian woman hardly even gets a chance to emerge as a human being; instead, she goes as mythic archetype from nymph to harpy, in a manner that recalls Maugham’s classical education at The King’s School in Canterbury, and at Heidelberg University.
That tendency to engage in more than a bit of “othering” toward the Andalusians also comes through in passages like this one:
Below the superficial similarity with the rest of Europe which of late [the Andalusians] have acquired, there is a difference which makes it impossible to get at the bottom of their hearts. They have no openness as have the French and the Italians, with whom a good deal of intimacy is possible even to an Englishman, but on the contrary an Eastern reserve which continually baffles me. I cannot realise their thoughts nor their outlook. I feel always below the grace of their behaviour the instinctive, primeval hatred of the stranger. (pp. 58-59)
In fairness, however, it must be pointed out that Maugham can be equally critical of his own British culture, as when he remarks that part of the reason why he so enjoys Andalusia is that “The English have still much of that ancient puritanism which finds a vague sinfulness in the uncostly delights of sunshine, and colour, and ease of mind” (p. 14). He likewise tweaks the noses of those British readers who might tend to see their moral system as being somehow “better” or “purer” than that of regions like Andalusia when he writes that any system of moral reasoning holding “that moral qualities make pleasant companions, is quite false; on the contrary, it is rigid principles and unbending character, strength of will, and a decided sense of right and wrong, which make intercourse difficult” (p. 28).
Maugham betrays a fondness for the bon mot when he suggests that Andalusians have a flexible relationship with the truth – a “Mendacity is a thing so perfectly understood that no one is abashed by detection” (p. 17) – and when he comments on the romantic complications that he finds to be common in the literature read within the region: “It is a significant fact that in Spanish novels if the hero is left for two minutes alone with the heroine there are invariably asterisks and some hundred pages later a baby” (p. 19).
Recalling an earlier visit to Seville, Maugham considers the depth of the emotions that he once felt on beholding the old historic city of Ferdinand and Isabella, with its romantic associations: “Looking back, I cannot dismiss the suspicion that my passionate emotions were somewhat ridiculous, but at twenty-three one can afford to lack a sense of humour” (p. 21). Revisiting Andalusia at a later point in his life, by contrast, Maugham seems to find that he can maintain more of a sense of critical distance, as when he writes that “I have always found the Andalusians abstemious eaters; nor have I wondered at this, as Spanish food is abominable” (p. 28).
Yet Maugham – sometimes, seemingly in spite of himself – reveals the aspects of Andalusian culture that he finds entrancing, as when he expresses his admiration for Andalusian musical forms like the malagueña, “the particular complaint of the maid sorrowing for an absent lover”. Of the malagueña, with its deep Moorish influence, Maugham writes that “There is nothing European in that quavering lament, in those long-drawn and monotonous notes, in those weird trills” (pp. 77-78) – and he appreciatively quotes some particularly haunting malagueña lyrics.
Toward the end of The Land of the Blessed Virgin, Maugham writes that “It is much better to read books of travel than to travel oneself; he really enjoys foreign lands who never goes abroad; and the man who stays at home, preserving his illusions, has certainly the best of it” (pp. 87-88). But I think he may be having us on when he says so. His unflinching description of a bullfight at the great bullring in Seville is the work of a writer who believes in the importance of observing and recording his experiences. So are his moving reflections on seeing sick and wounded veterans of Spain’s then-current war in Cuba; he sees, and wants his readers to see, how sad it is that a failing colonial power is sending its young men thousands of miles away, to fight an unwinnable war, and is then ignoring these young soldiers' plight when they return home ruined by battle wounds or ravaged by tropical disease. The Land of the Blessed Virgin is a thoughtful and interesting work of travel literature.
April 23, 2020
The subtitle says it. We get Sketches and Impressions. That information I did not have in my edition. So I started reading it expecting a novel. And it starts beautifully. Maugham writes about Spain and Spaniards and sets the mood. This goes on for 40, 50 pages and I do not mind at all. But now, I thought, a story should be told.
But there never is one. It is okay. It is still a wonderful book. And we learn about his views on architecture (apparently he is in favor of Capital punishment for architectural crimes.) I enjoyed the sketch about Pedro the Cruel. I like the descriptions of bullfighting. I can read his prose forever.
And yet, I do so very much like him to tell me a story.
But there never is one. It is okay. It is still a wonderful book. And we learn about his views on architecture (apparently he is in favor of Capital punishment for architectural crimes.) I enjoyed the sketch about Pedro the Cruel. I like the descriptions of bullfighting. I can read his prose forever.
And yet, I do so very much like him to tell me a story.
November 16, 2011
Interesting read. You can definitely tell it's early Maugham; the narrator here is wide-eyed and ingenuous, and the narrative voice rather breathless, compared to the stark feel of his later work. Maugham's frequent misspellings and mis-hearings of Spanish phrases can only be termed as cute.
In general, the anecdotes here breezed by without making much of an impression, but special note must be given to the fantastically well-described bullfight chapter, which was exhilarating and stomach-churning at the same time - much like Maugham himself must have felt as he watched.
In general, the anecdotes here breezed by without making much of an impression, but special note must be given to the fantastically well-described bullfight chapter, which was exhilarating and stomach-churning at the same time - much like Maugham himself must have felt as he watched.
July 31, 2020
Good early Maugham - brilliant evocative descriptions and observations mixed with some very over-baked chapters on a Spaniard Maugham obviously fell deeply in love with.
February 17, 2018
I am a fan of W. Somerset Maugham. I like his prose style and find his stories full of wisdom and insight. As he writes himself into his stories, he is a very sympathetic character who views the world with innocence and fascination. In this early work, he is reflecting on a visit to the Spanish province of Andalusia.
Like Charles Dickens' Notes on America, this is a travelogue. Maugham isn't suggesting places to visit or providing a guide, but rather reflecting on his visit, his impressions and how he internalized and processed the travels and events he enjoyed as well as the beauty of Spain.
Of course, this was a simpler time when the world was much bigger. Maugham writes as though he has visited the most exotic and far away place when today it would be possible to drive via the Channel Tunnel from Maugham's home in England to Andalusia. Never the less, his descriptions of bull fights, Spanish culture, countryside and people are charming and entertaining. I enjoyed this and recommend it as a quick entertaining journey through a Spain that is fading written by an English gentleman on holiday around 1904.
Like Charles Dickens' Notes on America, this is a travelogue. Maugham isn't suggesting places to visit or providing a guide, but rather reflecting on his visit, his impressions and how he internalized and processed the travels and events he enjoyed as well as the beauty of Spain.
Of course, this was a simpler time when the world was much bigger. Maugham writes as though he has visited the most exotic and far away place when today it would be possible to drive via the Channel Tunnel from Maugham's home in England to Andalusia. Never the less, his descriptions of bull fights, Spanish culture, countryside and people are charming and entertaining. I enjoyed this and recommend it as a quick entertaining journey through a Spain that is fading written by an English gentleman on holiday around 1904.
March 24, 2018
One hundred plus years ago, my favorite author went to Spain. Then he wrote about it. Frankly, it's dead boring, and not even Google-imaging the churches and cities described made it much better. There is an interesting depiction of a bullfight, but it's a bullfight, so it's horrifying. I finished it only because it was Maugham.
January 15, 2022
I wished I could share these beautiful stories with my friend, Gustavo Fuentes, but alas! he doesn't read, not even comic books. Still, he thinks too much of himself to listen to a compact disc I sent him by the band KISS, thinking it will afford him a pleasure that is too "juvenile."
February 10, 2014
Not much use as a travelogue in modern Spain but interesting nevertheless. Maugham has the talent of a caricaturist in that he can quickly discover the salient features of a person's character and put it across with a few strokes of his pen. He is also good at letting you feel, breathe and taste the ambient scene. This is an early work and as yet these talents aren't fully developed but they are clearly in evidence. There is little depth in these scenes but I defy the reader not to picture Maugham splashing along the way from Marchena to Seville. His early novels (and plays) can be downloaded free and should not be missed.
October 1, 2015
Maugham describes Andalusia in a series of short pieces of polished writing. Some of them are excellent.
He describes the place and its history and the effect they had on him very well, he is not quite as good at describing the people, which surprised me. I prefered the less polished, literary scrapbook feel of "On a Chinese Screen", which had more immediate impressions. The later reflections seem to have taken some of the life and vibrancy away. He is however extremely good at describing the moral dilemma associated with bullfighting and his stance that we should not condemn another's faults without considering our own resonates throughout.
He describes the place and its history and the effect they had on him very well, he is not quite as good at describing the people, which surprised me. I prefered the less polished, literary scrapbook feel of "On a Chinese Screen", which had more immediate impressions. The later reflections seem to have taken some of the life and vibrancy away. He is however extremely good at describing the moral dilemma associated with bullfighting and his stance that we should not condemn another's faults without considering our own resonates throughout.
January 14, 2013
My first experience with Maugham. As expressed in the title, these are a series of sketches rather than a travelogue. Initially I wasn't quite engaging with the writing, but I ultimately found it full of sharp insights, memorable scenes, and humour that, while subtle, had me laughing out loud on several occasions.
March 23, 2016
A book of short travelogues as he travelled in Spain.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews