The Last Good Land

The critical label “transatlantic studies” can adopt a myriad of meanings. In fact, such a polysemy is also found outside academia, as the example of Turkey's membership in NATO suggests. Which begs the question, where does the Atlantic as a political or cultural concept begin and end? Scholars in departments of Spanish or Latin American studies have the tendency to draw a linguistic line that excludes non-Spanish-speaking countries. This perspective has resulted in a rich understanding of cultural exchanges, such as the introduction of Hispanic modernism in Spain in the late nineteenth century, the Spanish exile in Mexico or Argentina after the Spanish Civil War, or the Latin American novelistic “boom” during the 1960s and 1970s. However, this language-based interpretation also precludes a comparative analysis of the relationship between Spain and the United States, a critical void that this book by Suárez-Galbán aims to fill.The main goals of Suárez-Galbán's analysis are twofold. From a cultural, almost anthropological standpoint, the author embarks on a “pursuit of American views on Spain that may in turn be revealing of how and what Americans think and feel of themselves” (86–87). That is, the images of Spain crafted by a series of American writers can be viewed as a negative in which an image of their own country was imprinted, either consciously or not. Second, on an individual level that includes both psychological and artistic development, Suárez-Galbán attempts to “record how an author may transcend simple subject matter and reveal his personal, national and literary personality through the theme of Spain” (179).As outlined respectively in the preface and the introductory chapter that follows, there are two basic premises grounding the critical framework of this book. The first, more objective one is the lack of comprehensive studies on the representation of Spain in U.S. literature. While there is no shortage of criticism on individual authors who have written about Spain—particularly the most celebrated ones such as Hemingway or Dos Passos—more general works are so scarce that they can actually be reduced to a single title: Stanley T. William's The Spanish Background of American Literature (published in 1955 and reprinted in 1968, this two-volume study does not include any examples beyond 1913). With respect to the second, more subjective critical premise, Suárez-Galbán declares himself a disciple of Américo Castro's school of thought and goes on to use Castro's historical theories as the backdrop against which he assesses the validity, accuracy, or relevance of the literary representations of Spain by American authors. In fact, an explanation of Castro's theory of the three castes (Christians, Jews, and Muslims) and their role in the creation of Spanish national identity takes up a good deal of the first chapter. Later on throughout the book, those writers who seem to foreshadow or share Castro's views receive high praise (like James R. Lowell or Waldo Frank), even when the similarities are so striking that they might be interpreted as unacknowledged influences (as in the case of Barbara Probst Solomon). The same sense of validation can be observed in relation to other Spanish writers and intellectuals such as Ganivet, Unamuno, or Ortega y Gasset.Works by twenty-one American authors are studied in The Last Good Land. They are arranged in a loosely chronological order, which helps underscore the importance of intertextual relationships among them—for example, Washington Irving's legacy is almost a constant presence either as a model to follow or as a source of stereotypes in need of rebuttal. This set of authors can be distributed in five historical periods: the romantic era (Irving and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow); the second half of the nineteenth century, marked by the American Civil War and the Spanish–American War (Herman Melville, James Russell Lowell, William Dean Howells, Stephen Crane, and William Cullen Bryant); the early twentieth century, time of the Lost Generation, the Spanish Republic, and the Spanish Civil War (George Santayana, Gertrude Stein, John Dos Passos, Waldo Frank, Ernst Hemingway, Lillian Hellman, Josephine Herbst, Claude McKay, and Langston Hughes); the Franco dictatorship (Saul Bellow, William Gaddis, Chester Himes, Nelson Algren); and finally, democratic Spain (Barbara Probst Solomon).The selection of authors may raise some considerations, but Suárez-Galbán appropriately explains his guiding criteria. First of all, the label “American author” is applied to George Santayana (who never renounced to his Spanish citizenship) on the grounds that he received an American education and wrote the bulk of his oeuvre in English. Moreover, Suárez-Galbán rightly points out the balanced distribution of authors in terms of gender and race, as his study includes “four women writers, four African-American ones, four Jewish-American authors” (10). The Spanish experience of each of these writers is also an important factor, for it determines the themes and style of their works: some of them enjoyed vacations in Spain, others moved there temporarily for professional reasons (journalistic for the most part), and there are also those who chose Spain as an adoptive land while fleeing political or racial oppression.Regarding the selection of works, the author reveals his “decision to concentrate on works and figures from American belles letters” (85). As a result, journalistic writings are largely excluded form the book, which might seem problematic if we consider the blurry lines distinguishing that genre from fictional literature in some historical periods. In addition to some poems, short stories, and novels, the majority of the texts studied can be classified as either travel literature or autobiography (if not a combination of both). In his analysis, the author focuses on the particularities of these two genres from a broad, theoretical point of view while also offering insightful characterizations of each writer's individual style (as in the cases of Stein's third-person autobiography or Frank's unorthodox travelogue).Even before opening this book, the reader might guess that the attention devoted to Spain by some American authors is mainly a symptom, a means to channel other thoughts on their own country or even on themselves. Indeed, this seems to be the case. The merit of The Last Good Land is to turn that hypothesis into factual evidence by uncovering specific anxieties, prejudices, or utopias hidden under several “impressions of Spain” (to name a title by Lowell). It could be said that the focus on the writers’ unintended disclosure of inner conflicts or interests through their writing (particularly in travel accounts and memoirs) leads in some instances to a resumption of the intentional fallacy. Nevertheless, Suárez-Galbán shows remarkable interpretive skills in many of the chapters (most notably in those on Dos Passos and Bellow).As for conclusions reached, and leaving aside idiosyncratic differences among writers—like Santayana's Catholicism, Wright's Puritanism, or the racial angst felt by African-American authors—an underlying assumption can be found in most of the texts examined. This idea is already summarized by the book's title: Spain as “the last good land.” More specifically, the author explains, “Spain was an antidote to American progress, work habits, industrialization, technological advancement and a series of attitudes basically inherited from what Europe defined as the standards and goals of its civilization” (368). In a cyclical fashion, Spain's alleged backwardness and exoticism drew the attention of these writers, whose works contributed in turn to perpetuate such a stereotypical view. However, the very concept of Spain needs to be qualified, as Suárez-Galbán notes. The same way that France is typically reduced to Paris in the American imaginary, Spain only evokes Madrid or Andalusia to many of the authors included in this study, as those were the regions that best embodied the lasting idea of Spain created by the romantics.Indeed, cultural stereotypes are hard to avoid: on two occasions, the author expresses his amusement at the Spanish custom of “two- and even three-hour lunch breaks” (24), a tradition that most Spaniards no longer enjoy. Suárez-Galbán himself acknowledges that the forces of progress might explain the lesser appeal of contemporary Spain to American writers. As the country's political stability and economic prosperity (euro crisis notwithstanding) dissipate any notion of exoticism, recent American novels depicting Spain do so in historical terms. This is the case of Abrams's 2007 The Lost Diary of Don Juan or Sayles's 2011 A Moment in the Sun. When future scholars analyze texts like these, Suárez-Galbán's book will be a most valuable reference. Not only does it provide an intriguing interpretation of the development of an American national identity during the last two centuries as revealed in its literature on Spanish topics; it also broadens the critical framework in which Spanish culture and letters can be construed. In sum, it opens many doors to a fruitful expansion of transatlantic studies

History · Spanish Literature and Culture Studies