7: The Residencia de Estudiantes

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    In the nineteenth century, the Inquisition was dead, but the Roman Catholic Church still exercised great power, even in universities. The Index of Prohibited Books carried on the work of the Inquisition. “Nihil obstat” indicated that a book was not viewed as heretical. Without it, an author would not be burned, but, if he taught in a university he could lose his job. Many did when they refused to sign an oath accepting the doctrine of the virginity of Saint Anne, mother of the Virgin Mary. Many illustrious professors were ousted. It is against this historical background that liberals started an educational movement which was to gain importance in the twentieth century.

    The Residencia de Estudiantes was founded in 1910, with Don Alberto Jiménez Fraud as its director. It moved into its present buildings at Pinar 21 in 1915, although other buildings, including the laboratories and the Auditorium, were added later. For twenty years, until 1936, it was a lively intellectual center as well as a dormitory. It was the creation of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza, a group of professors whose insistence on free speech led to their leaving the Universidad Central. Founded in 1876 under Francisco Giner de los Ríos, it was originally concerned mostly with improving secondary education throughout Spain.

    It entered higher education with the creation in 1907 of the Junta para Ampliación de Estudios e Investigaciones Científicas and the Centro de Estudios Históricos, with which I was affiliated. The Residencia was occupied mostly by students in medicine and engineering, because it was close to the Residencia laboratories and to the School of Engineering. However, it had an active cultural program of lectures, recitals. and publications, but,apart from visiting foreigners, there were in the Residencia virtually no students of the humanities or the social sciences. The cultural program stressed avant-garde writers and artists, and there was a lack of the professional attitude toward public affairs which might have saved the republic.

    Beginning in 1912 there were summer sessions for foreigners, who took over most of the Residencia during Madrid’s “three months of hell.”. Both King Alfonso XIII and the dictator Primo de Rivera took an interest in the Residencia, which received them coolly. The Residencia was in the northeast of Madrid, so it was some distance from the University City which Alfonso XIII founded in the northwestern part of the capital. The Fundación del Amo was established there with a residence which attracted more affluent and conservative students than those at the Residencia. Despite official relations, there was therefore a cordial antipathy between the two residences.

    Most Spanish intellectuals were oriented toward either France or Germany, but the Residencia was unique in that it looked to England, and especially to Oxford and Cambridge. A Comité Hispano-Inglés was established. Don Alberto summarizes its history in Residentes : Semblanzas y recuerdos (pp.14-15). Its most influential founders were the Duke of Alba (its president) and the British Ambassador Sir Esme Howard, in whose honor the Esme Howard Scholarship was established, by which each year a graduate student from Oxford or Cambridge was invited and a library of English books was established. It was as such a scholar that I went to live at the Residencia in 1934.When the Auditorium was built, it was installed in an adjacent building. I became its director in 1935.

    Although the political slant of the Residencia was leftist, it enjoyed the protection of some Anglophile liberal aristocrats. The most important was the Duke of Alba and Berwick (born 1878), whose Scottish ancestry helped him to circulate in the top layer of British society, which in turn encouraged the British government to support the Comité Hispano-Inglés and the Residencia. In the Civil War the Duke of Alba sided with Franco, who sent him London when Britain and the Burgos junta exchanged agents. When leading British figures protested against the bombing by Franco of innocent civilians, he called the victims “rabble.” When Britain recognized Franco, he took over the Spanish Embassy and fired all the servants, some of whom had served since the monarchy. He died in 1953, unlamented by liberals.

    Meanwhile, when the Civil War broke out in July 1936, the Residencia was evacuated; the staff revolted against the “bourgeois intellectuals” there, and most of them left for Valencia. Many later emigrated to Mexico, where they established the Casa de España, out of which grew the Colegio de Mexico. The Residencia became a military hospital until the end of the Civil War. Under Franco it was taken over by the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, controlled by the Opus Dei. The Auditorium was transformed into the Church of the Holy Spirit. After the death of Franco, the Opus Dei lost control of the Consejo, and the Residencia became a residence for Consejo investigators.

    After Franco died in 1975 an attempt was made to heal the old wounds. A 1978 decree of the Ministry of Culture declared the Residencia to be a historical-artistic monument of national interest. In 1998, on the occasion of the centennial of the birth of Garcia Lorca, conservative Prime Minister José María Aznar addressed a meeting at the Residencia, paying tribute to it and announcing the government’s plan to restore the complex. There was not a controversial word.

    Now the fame of the Residencia exhales an odor of secular sanctity, partly because of the writings of former residents in exile (mostly in Mexico), writing in self-justification and even self-congratulation. These writings were used by John Crispin in his monograph Oxford y Cambridge en Madrid. La Residencia de Estudiantes 1910-1936 y su entorno cultural (Santander: La Isla de los Ratones, 1981, pp.171). He was writing some fifty years after the period described, and he did not know the Residencia or its residents before the Civil War. I will here describe them as I knew them, leaving for another chapter those intellectuals who at one time or another had simply been associated with it. The Republic gave all of them the triumphant feeling that their day had come, but after the Civil War they realized sadly that it was passed.

    The director, Alberto Jiménez Fraud, was by far the most attractive of the senior residents. His interest in the whole question of higher education in Spain found its expression in a his book Historia de la Universidad Española (Madrid: Alianza, 1971), written while in exile in England. Born in Malaga in 1883, he went to Madrid with a group of friends from that town and became the favorite disciple of Giner de los Ríos. He was only 28 when in 1910 he took charge of the original Residencia, a small building on Fortuny street. The subsequent development of the Residencia was due to his enlightened efforts. He married Natalia, the daughter of the famous art historian Manuel Bartolomé Cossío. They were an extraordinarily attractive couple, and, at their official residence at the entry to the Residencia grounds, they were models of hospitality. He was always diplomatic and discreet, and he bore stoically the stupid pranks played on him by Residencia students. His sympathies were liberal, and, as the Civil War approached, he expressed to me his deep regret that the right would not make concessions. When the Residencia was occupied, he went to Cambridge and then to Oxford, where my own mentor, Professor William J. Entwistle, appointed him lecturer. I invited him to my Oxford digs when he first arrived in England. He was desperate, and seems to have contemplated suicide. In 1939, when my wife and I visited Oxford, don Alberto and Natalia received us with their ancient graciousness. They were clearly happy in Oxford. Presumably they suffered deprivations after World War II broke out, but they were nothing compared to the sufferings of Spain during the Civil War. Don Alberto died in 1964.

    While at Oxford, he had time to write, showing that he was a scholar as well as an administrator. His major work was the Historia de la Universidad Española (Madrid: Alianza, 1971, pp.522). The copyright was taken out by Natalia, who presumably played an important role in the preparation of the work. Published in pocket-book format, it was originally a series of three monographs, which form the three parts into which the complete work was divided, The first two dealt with the history of Spanish universities from medieval times. The last is the most interesting for our purpose, since it covers the period of Don Alberto’s life. While it gives valuable information, it is an exercise in self-justification. The Residents were all described in glowing terms, with no reference to their shortcomings and disagreements. As a “lyric appendix”, there are fulsome eulogies of the Residencia by well-known Spaniards and by foreign visitors who echoed the claims he made for it.

    Only in a few places does a negative note appear. When Don Alberto arrived in Madrid from Malaga to study law with Giner de los Ríos, founder of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza, whom de greatly admired, he was shocked to find that the “Institutionists” were the target of bitter attacks by Catholic conservatives like the great literary historian Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo. They were depicted as a subversive, secretive group, like the Free Masons (with whom they had some links). The liberal Catholic writer Emilia Pardo Bazán, probably the only active Catholic having good relations with the Institutionists, explained to him that they were viewed as Krausistas, disciples of an obscure disciple of Kant who had an extraordinary influence in Spain. The Krausistas had been expelled from Spanish universities in 1875. Don Alberto was bewildered: he knew Kant, but had no idea who Karl Friedrich Krause (1781-1832) was.

    Later, when Don Alberto was in exile in Oxford, a former Resident who visited him exclaimed “ ”The aim of the Residencia was to create a class of leaders. And it failed in this attempt.” Don Alberto was shocked. Clearly the Residencia could not create a whole class, but the truth is that the majority of the people associated with the Residencia had no idea of the problems of running a country.

    While at Oxford, Don Alberto visited Florence and on his return wrote a charming little book strangely entitled Visita a Maquiavelo and published in Madrid after his death (Trieste, 1983, pp.  298). It is mostly a guide to Florence, showing his appreciation of art and understanding of history. However, in one chapter he describes a nightmare in which he relived his last days at the Residencia when the Civil War broke out, the memory of which he could not forget. The title is explained, oddly, by a eulogy of Machiavelli, who counseled kings and princes in the art of self-preservation by thwarting enemies and plotters. With this eulogy there is a tirade against the Jesuits, who attacked Machiavelli, burned him in effigy and had his works put on the Index at the Council of Trent. Coming from Don Alberto , this eulogy of Machiavelli is strange. He seemed to lament that the Spanish Republic did not have a Machiavelli who could have thwarted its enemies. The Republicans were too naively good!

    While the intellectuals associated with the Residencia and the majority of the students were leftist (some like the poet Rafael Alberti were Communists), the board included a number of aristocrats, beginning with the Duke of Alba. As director of the library of the Comité Hispano-Inglés, I came into contact with two active members of the board, both with noble titles:

    The first was Antonio Vinent, Marqués de Palomares de Duero, a sweet old man who every day paid a visit to Don Alberto. He and his pleasant wife invited me to tea in their apartment and we had a pleasant conversation. Then came an explosion I could not understand. I was a good friend of Paul Guinard, the director of the Institut Français of Madrid and a great authority on the painter Zurbarán. He once asked if the Institut could use the Auditorium of the Residencia, so I consulted the Marqués de Palomares. He simply said no. I mentioned this to the chairman of the board, Jorge Silvela y Loring, Marqués de Silvela., a more open and friendly individual, with whom I had excellent relations. He reversed the decision of the Marqués de Palomares, who exploded when he next saw me. He blocked the use of the Auditorium by the Institut Français. I seemed to have gone over his head, but there was more to his reaction. Either for some reason he hated France or he resented the Marqués de Silvela, possibly regarding him as an upstart, since his father, a commoner, had been given the title for his contributions to Spanish industry. His common origin did not help him. When, at the end of the first siege of Madrid in the Civil War, I was ordered to leave Madrid, I called on him at his home and asked if there was anything I could do for him. He laughed bravely and said “Put me in your trunk and take me out of this country.” We embraced and said farewell. That word, farewell, was hollow, since, just after I left, left-wing militias invaded his house, took him out and shot him. I still remember him with affection.

    The other member of the board with whom I came in contact was the noted educator, José Castillejo, whose contributions to Spanish higher education deserve a detailed study. I seldom saw him at the Residencia, but every Sunday afternoon he held open house at his home in Chamartín de la Rosa, north of the Residencia. We would go there by streetcar and enjoy a pleasant tea-party with his English wife, her mother, and other academic colleagues. When the Civil Was broke out, he and his family went to London, where he died bitterly disappointed at the destruction of his life work.

    There were three old bachelors who lived at the Residencia in some official capacity. They were not good company. Dr. Paulino Suárez was a physician who served as general administrator and medical adviser to the students. He was the son of a basket maker from Old Castile, and obviously had a lot of class resentment. He was cold and anything but simpático. He may well have been a crypto-communist. In the Civil War he went to Moscow as Spanish Ambassador.

    Ricardo de Orueta was one of the Malaga group to which Alberto Jiménez belonged and which played a key role in the establishment of the Residencia. His father and his brother were famous geologists. Don Ricardo was an art historian, and for a short time he was Spain’s Director General of Fine Arts. He lost the job and was bitter about it. He was rather pompous and self-important.

    José Moreno Villa was very different. He was likeable, but quiet and reserved. He wrote some poetry but he was primarily a painter, and he spent most of his time in his room painting. He seemed to have no official job at the Residencia. He wrote a lyric account of the Residencia for the first issue (1926) of the review Residencia.

    The bulk of the residents were students, and they unfortunately set the tone, not the famous intellectuals. I must say that I was disillusioned. Given the reputation of the Residencia I had assumed that it was inhabited by serious research scholars. One or two became well-known later, but otherwise they were a very ordinary crowd, much like the students in a fraternity. I must admit that I was somewhat out of place. When I went to Madrid in 1931 it was a beautiful spring and the republic was greeted with euphoria. In 1932 I had been received by a gracious Catalan family who treated me with great hospitality. Now in Madrid in 1944 the atmosphere was quite different. I had never seen a revolution, but one was in the making, and I was to see chaos and bloodshed, expressions of the hatred which poisoned Spain and Spaniards.

    The students generally were full of fun, but few had much substance, admittedly a criticism which can be made of most students around the globe. To avoid the relative rigor of Madrid examinations, students would take the train to Murcia, which had made quite a business of allowing students from universities with higher standards to pass their exams in Murcia. Not that the university of Madrid was rigorous. There were student strikes for petty reasons. Every morning at breakfast the students would ask each other if there was a strike that day, The answer was frequently yes, so the students took the day off. One favorite pastime was sunbathing on the flat roof of the dormitory. I tried it twice, but found it boring and a waste of time.

    The cruelty which the Civil War brought out was already evident in the students in a variety of ways. A news item from England reported that a man had been fined because he had gone on a trip, leaving his pet birds, who starved to death. To the students it seemed grotesque that a man should be prosecuted for cruelty to animals. They were proud of their sex exploits—one boasted how he had seduced a maid— and they hounded one poor student, supposedly a homosexual; they demanded that he leave the Residencia, and he went. They would go to brothels as a matter of course, and venereal diseases were regarded as an inevitable hazard.

    Although Federico García Lorca was a homosexual he was idolized by the left, but the ordinary homosexual was despised. The term maricón was about the worst insult in Spanish. Once, when I was strolling down the Castellana, I saw a large crowd assembled around two cars. Assuming that there had been a terrible accident, I approached. Two men were arguing violently. One shouted to the other “You called me a maricón!” That was much worse than a bloody accident.

    I was physically exhausted and tense when I arrived at the Residencia. Unfortunately I was given the noisiest bedroom at the head of the stairs in the main pavilion. Students would return from their nightly exploits at about three in the morning and kick my door to wake me up. His was their idea of a joke. I complained and was later given a pleasant, quiet room in another pavilion.

    The attitude toward foreigners was a mixture of respect, envy, and dislike. Spain was generally looked down on in Europe, and, since my primary field had been French, I had been infected with the French supercilious attitude toward other cultures. My love of Spain and the Spaniards had overcome that, but the behavior of the students in the Residencia sorely tested it.

    It was fashionable in England to despise journalists. Oxford students who went to fight in the Civil War boasted that they never read a newspaper. Only slowly did I realize the importance of the press and the relative insignificance of the arty people, including famous literary figures. In Spanish, the word “literatura” means nonsense or bunk. More about that later. At the Residencia I began to read the best-known papers, notably the liberal El Sol, the monarchical A.B.C., and the Catholic El Debate. Certainly the majority of the International Brigades did not, since they did not know Spanish. Later, in the Hispanic American program at Stanford, I stressed the importance of newspapers, and we assembled an impressive archive of them, now in the Hoover Institution.

    There were linguistic traps. The students despised the President of the Republic, the conservative Alcalá Zamora, whom they nicknamed “botas” because he wore boots, not shoes. One day Don Alberto scolded me because he had heard that I had referred to Alcalá Zamora as “botas.” I countered that all the students in the group were doing that, to which he replied “Spaniards can do that, but not foreigners.” In another conversation, he seemed to be wandering off the subject, so I said “No estamos discutiendo eso.” He replied with surprised annoyance “No estamos discutiendo.” He explained later that he now realized that I was using “discutir” in the English meaning of “discuss”; in Spanish it means “to argue.” On another occasion, a student dropped by my room while I was exercising with my expanders. He asked me what exercises I usually did. I replied: “Los que me da la gana,” meaning “Any I feel like,” but to him it implied that it was none of his business. Little slips like this can lead to unpleasant misunderstandings.This problem is complicated further by different shades of meaning in the various Spanish-speaking countries.

    For Spanish Anglophiles, English universities meant Oxford, and the first Esme Howard Scholarship was for Oxford graduates like me. However, the great friend of the Residencia, J. B. Trend, was a professor at Cambridge. Trend, born in 1887 was appreciated by liberal Spaniards for his books on Spain, such as The Origins of Modern Spain, but I found him unpleasantly doctrinaire. Allison Peers (1890-1952) was an Anglo-Catholic especially interested in the Catalan mystic Ramon Llull. He made Liverpool University an important center of Hispanic Studies, founding there the Bulletin of Spanish Studies. I never met him, but we corresponded and I respected him. During the Civil War he was one of the few foreign Hispanists who told the truth about the atrocities of which Catholic priests, nuns and laics were victims. Trend hated him as a conservative, and when I mentioned him favorably Trend retorted with a hostile comment. Nor was I especially attracted to Edward Wilson (born 1906), whom I met at the Residencia and who later succeeded Trend at Cambridge. He had won recognition by his English translation (1931) of the Soledades of Góngora, and he was the epitome of the strange mixture of baroque and liberalism which was fashionable at that time. Cambridge was given a Residencia scholarship for a graduate student.  When I was there, it was Albert Sloman, a pleasant individual who later taught at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada. I taught French there, and then accepted an invitation to come to Stanford to teach Spanish and start the Latin American program. Thereupon UBC started Spanish, and on my recommendation Sloman was appointed. He made a name by his books on :Portuguese history. The problem was Antonio Pastor, who headed Spanish studies at the University of London. He came from a banking family, and his scholarly contribution was slight. Since his university had no scholarship at the Residencia, he was very resentful. One was established, but the appointment was unfortunate. I found Pastor’s intellectual baggage light. Our conversations were not pleasant. Once, I was talking about the change of meaning of words designating color (blue once meant yellow). He simply and ignorantly cut me off, saying I did not know what I was talking about. I believe that during the Civil War, he was pro-Franco, but remained quietly in London.

    While most of the students were leftists, my best friend, Jaime Buigas, was a well-mannered moderate, the son of a Spanish diplomat. Many of the other students resented this and referred to him scornfully as a “señorito,” a young toff.  Class differences came out in odd ways. Once when we were in downtown Madrid I bought a shirt. When I put the package under my arm, he said in a shocked way “You can’t carry a parcel! Have them deliver it!” “What?” I replied “Have someone go two miles to deliver a shirt!” “Of course, “ he replied, so I bowed to his class mores. A messenger came with the shirt next day.

    The rooms at the Residencia were sparsely furnished, so I went to a marker known as El Rastro to buy furniture. I acquired several large pieces. The salesman said they would be delivered next afternoon,. So next day, about 3 p.m. I sat in my window waiting for the furniture to arrive. I saw it moving up the hill in a pile tied together by ropes. It would advance a few yards and then stop. Finally it reached the door and collapsed. Out came a little man; he must have set out from the Rastro early in the morning, serving as a beast of burden.

    My friend introduced me to his upper-class friends. After the 1936 elections we drove to the modest country home of one of them. In view of the turmoil in the countryside, with peasants seizing land, we were surprised that his property was still intact and that we were able to sup in peace. The political lines were hardening as many previously moderate people lost their loyalty to the republic. My friend took me to a meeting in an apartment in the well-to-do Salamanca district; presumably all present favored a military intervention. When later General Franco said he had five columns, four besieging Madrid and the fifth inside Madrid, he was clearly referring to the Salamanca district.; this gave rise to the expression “fifth column.” Somehow —I do not know how—my friend survived until Franco’s victory. When Franco called for volunteers to join the Blue Legion fighting with the Germans against the Soviet Union, my friend enlisted and was killed somewhere inside Russia. Another student, a Communist who had the room opposite mine, was killed in the fighting in the University City.

    While most of the students in the Residencia were from central Spain, those from other regions were different. In Bolivar’s time, the Canary Islanders were viewed as a group apart. His decrees refer to “españoles y canarios.” At the Residencia they sat together at meal times. A quiet group, they did not mix much with other students. The Basques came from one of the most prosperous regions of Spain. They were generally assertive, with a hidden streak of violence. This streak was apparent in the Basque novelist Pío Baroja, whom I disliked as a man and as a writer. When I expressed my opinion to a Basque student, he retorted “Pio Baroja is barbarous!” which, in the slang of that day, was the highest compliment; an expression of distorted values, especially as “cafre” (Kaffir) was a term of utter contempt; how the Kaffirs came to be chosen is the sense of utterly barbarian is odd. Using the term “barbarous” in its common meaning, I replied “Yes, he’s barbarous!” The Basque student got the point and retorted “So what!”

    The Valencians were a hot-tempered crowd, very different from the Catalans and the Majorcans, with whom they share the common language, Catalan, although they angrily deny that it is the same. There were virtually no Catalans at the Residencia. One came briefly. The other students taunted him and referred to the Catalan leader Companys as a gunman. It was this common attitude which bred nationalist sentiments among Catalans.

    There was at least one Majorcan. He was a quiet, kind person. After .the Civil War I visited him in Majorca where he had a pharmacy, Together we visited the writer Robert Graves, who lived on a hill near the coast. I have a great admiration for him. Born in 1895, he was educated at Oxford and became a notable classical scholar. His dreams were shattered by his experiences as a soldier in World War I, which he has described in Goodbye to All That. In 1929, he moved to Mallorca, acquiring a simple home on a hill overlooking the coast west of Palma. We had tea with him and his wife. He was busy reading classics, several of which he has translated. His scholarly production is enormous. His rural isolation made this possible. Had he been teaching at a university he would have been much less productive. He was especially interested in myths of all kinds. He was a poet, but his fame came from I Claudius (1934), which was turned into a splendid TV series; it must have improved his financial situation. In a way, however, it gives the wrong idea of Graves and of the Roman empire. He was not a popular TV script writer, and, had the Roman administration been as corrupt as the TV story says, it could not have maintained a great empire for long. Graves died in 1985 at age ninety. He is buried in his garden, under a slab with a simply worded epitaph. While we were with him his son William was playing on the floor. He later wrote an account of his father, Wild Olives. Life in Majorca with Robert Graves (1995). Modern universities produce few broad-gauge and creative scholars like Robert Graves.

    There was in the Residencia one Jewish student from Spanish Morocco. His name was Ezquinazi, indicating that his family was Ashkenazi, (i.e. northern), not Sephardic (i.e. southern), like most Spanish Jews. He kept himself apart from the other students, with whom he had little in common. Since I never chatted with him, I do not know how his nordic family ended up in Spanish Morocco. The Sephardic unconverted Jews had been expelled from Spain in “the miraculous year”, 1492. Undoubtedly some of the people I knew were descended from the marranos (converted Jews), but this never came up in my conversations.

    In the last few years the Spanish government has tried to win the support of world Jewry by apologizing and inviting the Sephardic Jews to return. The success has been limited, and, in the present Israel-Palestinian confrontation, Spain’s sympathies are clearly on the side of the Arabs. Spain would like to be the bridge between Europe and the Arab world, and it is making a great effort to woo Morocco.

    The Sephardic tradition lives on in exile. Once in Istanbul I visited the old Sephardic synagogue on a hilltop in the old city. I was taken around by the person in charge, who spoke to me in the old Spanish which survives there. He was fair and blue-eyed, and could easily have passed for a Spaniard. He complained bitterly about the treatment of his group by the Turkish government and had no desire to emigrate to Israel. I suggested that he go and live in Spain. He angrily rejected the suggestion, saying “I hate Spain”—after all these centuries.

    Memories of Spain still survive among the descendants of the Sephardic Jews, including those in the United States. A colleague of mine had one in his class, who invited him to his home for dinner. After the meal, the mother produced a big key, the key to the house her ancestors had owned in Toledo. She hoped to return one day and claim possession of the house. I doubt if she would have much luck.

    At Christ Church, Oxford when I was there, a famous don was named Daniel Meredith Buena de Mesquita. He was typically English, but his family name seemed odd. He is the great uncle of Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a Fellow of the World Association of International Studies (WAIS). I conduct hour-long TV interviews with WAIS Fellows, and in such an interview Bruce told the story of the name. A Sephardic ancestor escaped persecution by taking refuge in a mosque. He became known as “the good man of the mosque”—Bueno de Mesquita—hence the family name.

    The Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid welcomed foreign scholars during the summer, and I met some interesting people. The Americans I had met in England came from the East Coast. At the Residencia I met two Hispanists from California who were to play a decisive role in my life. One was Rudolph Schevill (1874-1946) of the University of California at Berkeley. A Cervantes specialist interested in classical and foreign influences on the great author, he collaborated with Adolfo Bonilla y San Martín in the preparation of the complete works of Cervantes. It was a masterly project, and contributed to Berkeley’s international fame as a leading center of Hispanic studies. When I was evacuated from Spain in 1936, he invited me to go to Berkeley. A Commonwealth Fund Fellowship made his possible.

    The other Californian was Aurelio Macedonio Espinosa, Jr. His family came from New Mexico, and I stupidly confused it with Mexico, which was in the throes of revolution and had a miserable reputation. My error was quickly corrected; the New Mexicans of that generation were very Catholic and conservative, and they despised the Mexican revolutionaries. The father, Aurelio Macedonio Espinosa, was an incredible success story. Born in a Hispanic village in the borderlands between New Mexico and Colorado, he taught school and studied Romance philology in the summers at the University of Chicago. He was given a fellowship and later came to the Department of Romantic Languages at Stanford, where he built up the Spanish section almost to the level of the Hispanists at Berkeley. He became head of the department, and it was he who invited me to Stanford, where I have spent my life. A specialist in Spanish folklore, he was loyal to old Spain. At the dinners of the Spanish honor society, the room was lit with candles and we swore loyalty to Mother Spain. During the Spanish Civil War, he was bitterly anti-republican, and he was incensed when I invited some Republican leaders to speak at Stanford. Despite these limitations, he was a remarkable example of the rise of a Hispanic from rural poverty to Academic fame. At Stanford I founded a Spanish House, devoted to Spanish culture. Without a word to me, the administration closed it down and later replaced it with Zapata House, pandering to the current chicanos. I protested, saying that Espinosa, not Zapata, should be honored at the university to which he made a great contribution. My proposal was ignored, presumably as politically incorrect.

    Finally I should mention a Polish professor of Italian whom I met at the Residencia. She was a Jewess from Lotz. I had been in Nazi Germany, where Poles and Jews were beneath contempt. I was amazed to find that she was extremely cultured and sensitive, and I became quite attached to her. She was sad when she returned to Poland. She probably had a foreboding of what would happen to the Polish Jews. I lost touch with her. My closest Spanish friend, Jaime Buigas was killed, possibly in Poland, fighting with Franco’s Blue Legion against the Soviet army. Two splendid people lost in an insane war.

    I mentioned earlier Paul Guinard, director of the French Institute in Madrid, whose lectures I attended and who became a friend, as did many members of the Institute staff.   My strange experience with the Marqués de Palomares made me realize that I had opened a Pandora's box. Most Spanish liberal intellectuals were admirers of their French culture, which the Anglophiles of the Residencia rightly regarded as a poor model for Spain.   They were struggling to assert their presence in the face of the overweening French intellectuals. They may have thought I was betraying their cause.

    However, there was more to it than that. I knew   that Guinard's research was focused on the Spanish religious painter Zurbarán, but I knew little about his ideas. When I was evacuated from Spain in 1936, I visited him in his country home in France. He had obviously left Spain before I did, but it did not occur to me that he might have been frightened of the new leftist government.

    When I returned to Spain during the Franco period, I simply heard that he had gone back to direct the Casa Velázquez, the residence of French scholars and artists working in Spain. It is located in the Ciudad Universitaria, which  is bisected by a busy avenue. Guinard had the habit of rushing across the avenue through the traffic. One day he was run over and killed by a German tourist.

    It was only recently that the role of Guinard was told   by Michel Catalá in Les Relations Franco-Espagnoles pendant la deuxième guerre mondiale (Paris: L. Harmattan, 1999).   The relevant passage is La restauration de la présence culturelle de la France en Espagne   (pp. 92ff.). It describes the cultural presence of France; in addition to the Institutes in Madrid and Barcelona and the Casa Velázquez in Madrid, there were lycées and Alliances Françaises in the  principal cities of Spain.

    In April 1939 Guinard, who had actively promoted   the Franco cause during the Civil War, was sent back to Spain   to reopen the French educational establishments. He promoted this cause vigorously and was able to do so even before the Italians could open theirs.   The Germans were allowed to open theirs, but only with restrictions.

    Guinard was joined by Maurice Legendre, who had been deputy director of the Casa Velázquez. In France he had founded the review Occident to promote intellectual relations between France and Franco Spain.   He now returned to Madrid as cultural attaché.

    Guinard and Legendre organized a big program of cultural events, inviting Catholic intellectuals to Spain. However, even the Franco government did not agree to let Charles Maurras as a lecturer; he was judged too anti-German. On the other hand, a choir called “The Little Singers with the Wooden Crosses” was welcomed.   It gave concerts before the tomb of Primo de Rivera in the Escorial and before the cross of the Alcázar of Toledo, which had become a shrine because of its resistance to the Republicans during the Civil War. While, thanks to Guinard, French cultural propaganda was active in Franco Spain, my old friends of the Residencia were living in exile, many of them in England. In retrospect, this relationship explains why the Marqués de Palomares was so angry at my friendship with Guinard.   The French side of the story is told in a fat (670 pp.) Book published by the Casa Velázquez in 1994: Jean-Marc Delaunay, Des palais en Espagne.   L´ Ecole des Hautes d’Etudes Hispaniques et la Casa de Velázquez au coeur des relations franco-espagnoles du XX siècle, 1898-1979. The contrast between the French triumphalism and the sad writings of the Residencia leaders in exile is painful.

    There were a number of German Jewish refugees in Spain while I was there, and I got to know some of them. At the time I was not aware of their importance, but some of them came to the United States and had distinguished careers here.   One of them was Hans Morgenthau, the author of Politics Among Nations (1948), who became a star of the University of Chicago

    I had one sobering experience in Madrid as a violinist. I had taken my violin with me and practiced every day well enough to play in amateur concerts. The Budapest Quartet, had gone into Spanish exile to escape Nazi anti-semitism. They once needed a second violin, and pressed me into service. They were superb and I felt like a clumsy fool. Never again!    

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