Beatniks and the Rock

...the quixotry, the defiance of reality, summed up in such words as "Commonwealth" and "Hispanidad...

...the belief in immeasurable national potentials that somehow remain inaccessibly bottled up...

...Similarly, most of the "beatniks" flushed out of Balearic and other resorts recently were catalogued by the public as "English...

...While the British are by no means the biggest foreign contingent in Spain, priests and police officers alike credit them with contributing a disproportionate share of the scroungers, petty crooks, prostitutes and perverts encountered in the main tourist resorts...

...European socialists wondered whether the British were engaging in another exercise of this kind and preparing a deal with Franco...

...A few "British Institutes" exist, but they are obliged, for lack of funds and directives, to concentrate on elementary languageteaching...

...I have met Britons here who go around speaking to one another in schoolboy French to conceal their nationality, and Scotsmen frequently contract out of the happy breed by labeling their cars "Ecosse"-unaware, apparently, that this is not the Spanish for "Scotland...

...British diplomacy seemed to be as feckless as British economic management...

...British and Spanish papers are again snapping at each other...

...A normally well-informed Catholic daily has explained Britain's economic mess in approximately these terms: "Until recently, the British lived off their colonies, but with the decline of their empire they must now work for their living...

...An influential ecclesiastical publicist can proclaim that "the Spanish Inquisition committed fewer excesses in its entire history than English protestantism in one year...

...Meanwhile, British and Spanish officials are models of politeness and formality when face to face, but not above releasing trial balloons and snide remarks at the tradesmen's entrance...

...Like the British, Spaniards gamble massively on "football pools" and take their pleasures solemnly...

...Each people is inclined to believe that the other is proud, lazy, caste-ridden, snobbish, insular, ignorant, callous, stoic, reactionary, formal and chivalrous-though not to be trusted with one's womenfolk...

...This aroused memories of the late 1940's, when some of the more reactionary Arab governments then favored by the Foreign Office crushed Democratic Socialist opposition parties with the blessing of the British Labor government of the day and British propaganda media helped cover the operation by boosting a hodgepodge of demagogic Fascist-inspired groups as the true Socialist movements of the Near East...

...Spanish restrictions have again reduced to a trickle the flow of tourists across the Gibraltar border...

...The dirtiest and most obnoxious participants in the last Pamplona fiesta were English-speaking...

...Both sides are angling for U.S...

...Just now they are in a curious tangle...

...Both Spaniards and Britons are apt to believe that shadow is more important than substance, and that the robe makes the monk...

...There is even talk, at lofty U.S.-Spanish altitudes, of bringing Spain into NATO and of extending the U.S.built C??diz-Zaragoza fuel pipeline to Barcelona: General Franco's asking price for these extras is effective U.S...

...the sense of mission, but also of decline, of decades wasted and buses missed...

...This fact, at least, holds promise...

...One Basque priest who had spent more than a year touring Catholic parishes in Britain told me that most of the Anglo-Irish audiences he addressed were shocked when he criticized the Franco dictatorship...

...and if I did I'd want to tell them how awful British institutions are...

...but mistrust of Britain lingered in Spanish opposition circles...

...First, four of five Catholic Labor members of parliament naively-or cynically-allowed themselves to be wined and dined by the Franco dictatorship...

...Ray Alan is a British correspondent who has reported on Europe, Africa and the Middle East for many years...

...In short, Anglo-Spanish attitudes usually reduce fairly easily to a common denominator...

...and Washington will soon be negotiating the renewal of the agreement allowing it to maintain its own bases on Spanish territory...

...Spaniards and Britons both talk of "special relationships" with "their" half of America...

...Then the daily Guardian reported on its front page that a Labor party official had been in touch with a handful of extremist groups in Barcelona (mostly regionalist or Trotskyist in outlook) whom he considered more representative of Spanish Socialism than the moderate PSOE, and that the Labor party might therefore urge the Socialist International to give them its support in preference to the PSOE...

...The Spanish authorities have helped shore up sterling while declaring that the weakness of sterling is one of the factors they are relying on to force Britain to abandon Gibraltar...

...Even more striking are the reflexes, and complexes, they have in common: the ex-imperial patterns of thought and, occasionally, nostalgias...

...the government-controlled Spanish trade union has organized a strike in Gibraltar...

...A Castilian or Aragonese peasant will go into debt to give his daughter a lavish wedding, or spend his last few pesetas ostentatiously in a village bar, so as to keep up appearances and impress his neighbors...

...Political repression has, of course, played a part in influencing Spanish attitudes to these abuses...

...The explanation for all this appears to be that each side is eager to impress international opinion, and especially the United States, with its reasonableness while talking tough for domestic purposes...

...In social and economic matters, "face" is as important to Spaniards and Britons as to the Arabs and Chinese...

...Relations between the British Labor party and the underground Spanish Socialist Labor party (PSOE), both of which are members of the Socialist International, have been strained during the last few months...

...Nevertheless, in spite of tramps, noxious generalizations and official fecklessness, in spite of Gibraltar and a hinterland of religious and historical phobias, personal relations between Spaniards and Britons are generally good...

...Julio Guillen can still write of "the sempiternal anti-Spanish schemes of England," and a professor of English-in personal matters, a kind and generous man-can declare that "most of Spain's misfortunes in modern times were provoked by England...

...support over Gibraltar...

...and at the main airports and Pyrenean frontier posts Spanish officials are gravely requesting British visitors to produce evidence that they have been vaccinated against smallpox...

...but both realize, deep down, that this pretense of being one up on the European Joneses is founded on insecurity and a desire for acceptance by the Joneses...

...The other day, five British citizens-one of them a girl-were arrested in Malaga because of their "filthy appearance and disgusting habits...

...Prime Minister Harold Wilson has denied reports of a secret British compromise plan for Gibraltar which his own officials had leaked to the press...

...This may be an exaggeration, but objectivity requires me to record that the only beggars I have seen in Spain recently were two young Scotsmen...

...As a result of confusion between English and English-speaking, and of the proliferation of mop-topped English pop-singers, anything with long hair that smells and looks as if it sleeps in a ditch is now assumed in Spain to be English...

...A British prime minister will fritter away his nation's gold reserves, borrow wildly, and plunge an already sluggish economy into a slump, so as to delay the "humiliation" of devaluing a disastrously over-valued pound and reducing dangerously untenable military pretensions...

...We can't afford them.' At another, asked if he ever lectured in Spanish on Parliamentary democracy and British institutions in general, a British member of the staff replied: "I don't speak Spanish...

...Both peoples mistrust egalitarianism, meritocracy and the 20th century, and appear more willing than other Western nations to tolerate, for example, flagrant caste privileges, nepotism in education and industrial management, and the compulsory religious indoctrination of children...

...The librarian of one, asked for the current British weekly reviews, told me: "We don't receive them...

...This mishmash of irritation and misconception is symptomatic of Anglo Spanish misunderstanding over a wider moral and cultural plane...

...Anglo-Spanish relations must bear the additional burden of Gibraltar, the British Labor movement's dislike of General Francisco Franco, and General Franco's dislike of British Parliamentary democracy...

...The images Spaniards and Britons have of each other are surprisingly similar...

...he in turn was shocked by the "blinkers and bias" of his British coreligionists, and the "blarney and equivocation" characterizing most British Catholic writing about Spain...

...British tourists who are clean and well-behaved -the majority-are apt to be taken for Germans or Frenchmen...

...The Spaniards' aim is simply to discourage the many long-haired weirdies and malodorous "beatniks"-most of whom admit they don't even know what the word means-attracted to Spain by its sun and cheap wine...

...Just as the swashbuckling old Anglo-Spanish rivalry in colonial America resolved itself in such selfparody as the War of Jenkin's Ear, the struggle for Gibraltar is now becoming the War for Johnson's Ear...

...At the moment, the British fear they may be losing: Most American diplomats and officers in Spain are firmly pro-Spanish on the Gibraltar issue...

...Neither religious nor political ties are a guarantee of harmony...

...Unlike the French, who publish a magazine dedicated to French-Spanish understanding and run a network of schools (the best in Spain), the British seem too deeply sunk in apathy even to bother about promoting interest in their culture and institutions...

...For example, liberal Catholics in Spain, and especially in the Basque country and Catalonia, are appalled by the gullibility of the many Catholic churchman and publicists in Britain who have allowed themselves to be harnessed to General Franco's propaganda machine during the last 30 years...

...As the London Economist observed, under the headline losing both ways, while the United States and France were maintaining good relations with both the Franco regime and its likeliest successors, Britain was alienating both government and opposition in Spain...

...Spanish and British tastes converge along a broad spectrum that ranges from mussels to muddling through...

...The Scandinavian and West-German Social Democrats loyally declared that they would continue supporting the PSOE, and finally, after some dithering, the Labor party official in question went to France to meet PSOE representatives and assure them that it was all a false alarm...

...Some sensitive Britons have discerned an anti-British slight in the decision of the Spanish authorities to instruct their frontier officials to deny entry to any foreigner who fails to satisfy them that he possesses enough money to live on and has had a bath and a haircut within the last few months...

...Relations between Britain, Spain and France are still bedevilled by the obsessions of backwoods clerics and chauvinistic history teachers...

...support...

...But a high proportion of these are thought, in Spain, to be British...

...General Franco's propagandists no longer present Britain as the epitome of democratic-protestant-capitalist evil...

...The authorities described them collectively as "English," though in fact some spoke with American or Irish accents...

...Don Quijote is a splendidly English character, too...

...But historians like Sr...