Books: Travels with a Donkey

SOUTH TO CADIZ—H.M. Tomlinson—Harper ($2).

When it came to a choice between reporting the London Economic Conference last year and going to Spain with three boon companions, Journalist Henry Major Tomlinson did not hesitate long. He went to Spain, with a backward skeptical sniff at the Conference’s selfimportance. South to Cadiz is the record of his Spanish holiday, written in his familiar brow-wrinkled style, as if he had puffed it thoughtfully out of an old pipe stuffed with a shaggy mixture of Lamb, Stevenson and Conrad. A journalist to littérateurs, a littérateur to journalists, Author Tomlinson is pleasant company for plain readers who like to browse quietly by the side of the road.

The modernity of Madrid was a disappointment to Traveler Tomlinson, but in a newspaper office there (El Sol) he saw some satirical murals by Artist Bagaria that made him think of Goya. By motorbus he went to Toledo, La Mancha, Cordova, Seville, Cadiz, Malaga, Granada. Traveler Tomlinson noted all the proper sights but it was the least thing that set him philosophizing. In Toledo’s Escorial he pondered the English novel; at Ubeda a dusty image of Christ in purple silk pants struck a chill into his warm feeling that Spain was more nearly in the right path than her more progressive neighbors. At Jerez de la Frontera he sipped sherry in cool warehouses, thought of Falstaff. whose favorite tipple was sherris sack. A tavern-keeper in Cadiz seemed to Traveler Tomlinson to speak for the nation when he said, with a shrug: “That revolution was nothing. It was not bloody. It was only like an orange, which falls when it is very ripe. No trouble, no trouble at all. The people of Cadiz, sir, are always reformers. They had been waiting for it how long? and then the day came. Then they went into the streets. People must go into the streets when there is a revolution, a fiesta. Certainly there was a little burning, but the people were polite.”