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Grand tours: A flash of scarlet, a moment of splendour

The literary adventures of the world's great writers. This week, Henry James watches a bullfight in San Sebastian

Sunday 04 August 2002 00:00 BST
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The globally renowned author of 'Washington Square' and 'Portrait of a Lady', Henry James was born in New York in 1843. He is considered one of America's finest writers, and was a contemporary of both Turgenev and Flaubert, whom he met during a grand tour of Europe. James moved to England in 1876 and set up homes in London and Rye, Sussex, where he began an incongruous friendship with H G Wells which lasted until Wells attacked the Jamesian literary ethos in his novel 'Boon'. Despite James's English affiliation (he was awarded the OM shortly after his death), his novels are mainly concerned with the impact of American life on the older European civilisation. The following extract is taken from one of many diaries he kept during his travels, which he published in the form of articles in magazines and newspapers. He died in 1916.

The best thing at Biarritz is your opportunity for driving over into Spain. Coming speedily to a consciousness of this fact, I found a charm in sitting in a landau and rolling away to San Sebastian behind a coachman in a high glazed hat with long streamers, a jacket of scarlet and silver and a pair of yellow breeches and jack-boots. If it has been the desire of one's heart and the dream of one's life to visit the land of Cervantes, even grazing it so lightly as by a day's excursions from Biarritz is a matter to encourage visions. Everything helping – the admirable scenery, the charming day, the operatic coachman, the smooth-rolling carriage – I am afraid I became more visionary than it is decent to tell of. You move toward the magnificent undulations of the Pyrenees, as if you were going to plunge straight into them; but in reality you travel beneath them and beside them, pass between their expiring spurs and the sea. It is on proceeding beyond San Sebastian that you seriously attack them. But they are already extremely vivid – none the less so that in this region they abound in suggestions of the recent Carlist war. Their far away peaks and ridges are crowned with lonely Spanish watch-towers, and their lower slopes are dotted with demolished dwellings.

San Sebastian is a lively watering place, and is set down in the guide books as the Biarritz or the Brighton of Spain. It has of course a new quarter in the provincial-elegant style (fresh stucco cafés, barber shops, and apartments to let), looking out upon a planted promenade and a charming bay, locked in fortified heights, with a narrow portal to the ocean. I walked about for two or three hours and devoted most of my attention to the old quarter, the town proper, which has a great frowning gate upon the harbour, through which you look along a vista of gaudy house-fronts, balconies, awnings, surmounted by a narrow strip of sky.

A few days later I went back to San Sebastian, to be present at a bullfight; but I suppose my right to descant upon this could be measured less by the gratification it afforded me than by the question whether there is room in literature for another chapter on this subject. I incline to think there is not; the national pastime of Spain is the best-described thing in the world. Besides, there are other reasons for not describing it. It is extremely disgusting, and one should not describe disgusting things – except (according to the new school) in novels where they have not really occurred, and are invented on purpose. Description apart, one has taken a certain sort of pleasure in the bull-fight, and yet how is one to state gracefully that one has taken pleasure in a disgusting thing? It is a hard case. If you record your pleasure, you seem to exaggerate it and to calumniate your delicacy; and if you record nothing but your displeasure, you feel as if you were wanting in suppleness. Thus much I can say, at any rate, that as there had been no bull-fights in that part of the country during the Carlist war, the native dilettanti (and every man, woman and child of them comes under this denomination) returned to their precious pastime with peculiar zest. The Spectacle therefore had an unusual splendour. Under these circumstances it is highly effective. The weather was beautiful; the near mountains peeped over the top of the vast open arena as if they too were curious; weary of disembowelled horses and posturing espadas, the spectator (in the boxes) might turn away and look through an unglazed window at the empty town and the cloud-shadowed sea. But few of the native spectators availed themselves of this privilege. Beside me sat a blooming matron, in a white lace mantilla, with three very juvenile daughters; and if these ladies sometimes yawned they never shuddered. For myself, I confess that if I sometimes shuddered I never yawned. A long list of bulls was sacrificed, each of whom had pretensions to originality. The banderillos, in their silk stockings and embroidered satin costumes, skipped about with a great deal of attitude; the espada folded his arms within six inches of the bull's nose and stared him out of countenance; yet I thought the bull, in any case, a finer fellow than any of his tormentors, and I thought his tormentors finer fellows than the spectators. In truth, we were all, for the time, rather sorry fellows together. A bull-fight will, to a certain extent, bear looking at, but it will not bear thinking of. There was a more innocent effect in what I saw afterward, when we all came away, in the late afternoon, as the shadows were at their longest: the bright-coloured southern crowd, spreading itself over the grass, and the women, with mantillas and fans, and the Andalusian gait, strolling up and down before the mountains and the sea.

Follow in the footsteps

A royal retreat

On the Bay of Biscay, at the foot of Mount Urgull, San Sebastian is sheltered by the Bahia de La Concha. The city has seen plenty of action over the years, having been razed to the ground several times, and remains a stronghold of Basque nationalism. But it also has a reputation as a popular retreat for wealthy Spaniards and is blessed with graceful Belle Epoque architecture.

Henry James travelled to San Sebastian in the 1860s, when the port was becoming popular with a new breed of tourists. It first drew well-heeled crowds in the mid-19th century when Isabel II moved her court here in the summer, and later it became a favourite haunt of Queen Regent Maria Cristina.

Getting there

The quickest route from Biarritz to San Sebastian is via the A8 motorway. But for a more scenic drive take the coastal route through the pretty fishing town of Fuenterrabia, with views of the sea and the Pyrenees.

Cresta (0870 238 7711; www.uk.mytravel.com/ cresta) offers seven nights in San Sebastian from £676 per person, based on two sharing, including return flights from London to Bilbao and b&b in a four-star hotel. Hire a car to transfer from Bilbao to San Sebastian. Cresta can arrange car rental from £93 per week.

For further details, contact the Spanish Tourist Office (020-7486 8077; wwwtourspain.co.uk).

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