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SOUTH FROM GRANADA, by Gerald Brenan (282 pp.; Farrar, Straus & Cudahy; $4), turns back the time machine to 1920 to record the life of a remote Spanish town before its privacy and traditions were invaded by the automobile. Fresh from World War I and a British captain's uniform, Author Brenan hiked south from Granada seeking a kind of scholarly retreat. He found Yegen (pop. 1,000) perched on a windless plateau 4,000 ft. up in the Sierra Nevada and surrounded by olive trees, vineyards and an intangible air of timelessness. Author Brenan sent for his 2,000-volume library, but Yegen kept taking his eye off the printed page. His maid, he discovered, was the daughter of the town's leading witch, who was reputed to frequent the tops of poplar trees and fly about the town on moonlit nights. Among other articles of superstitious faith in the village: that the ninth consecutive son is especially blessed and possessed of healing powers; that a girl can discern the features of her husband-to-be if she breaks an egg in water and looks at the resulting mess through a silk handkerchief; that Protestants have tails.
The men of the village tilled their fields with plows pictured on classical Greek vases, their wheat-threshing boards were described in the Bible, and the sickles they used were fashioned identically to those found in Spain's Bronze Age tombs. Coping with reality through ancient ritual, the villagers made of life a kind of ennobling drama and brought to the simplest pleasures a touch of piety. Bread, for example, was not only good, but somehow holy. When Brenan jabbed his knife into a loaf one day, he was told that he was "stabbing the face of Christ."
To the Spaniard, who is fascinated by death as life's last experience, the cemetery is known as the tierra de la verdad, the place of truth. In a philosophical mood, he is given to brooding that "life is an illusion because it ends." Author Brenan (The Face of Spain, The Literature of the Spanish People), now lives in Malaga with his wife, is regarded by many critics as the finest living interpreter in English of Spanish life and letters. For him, the Iberian idyl has never ended. But the Yegen chapter was closed in the early '30s. On a nostalgic return visit in 1955, Brenan found the friends of his youth dead or aged "like pressed ferns in an album." The town had sampled the accessories of progress and was lusting after that U.S. holy of holies—modern plumbing.