From Alan K G PATERSON, Emeritus Professor, University of StAndrews
Dear Gitta,
I have been thinking about Nigel’s research and achievement. My own
reminder of what was Nigel’s mission in his work was given me when another Nigel
died quite recently, Nigel Glendinning, who was my boss at Queen Mary College, a
good friend and mentor and one whose work on Spanish art, Goya particularly, I
followed closely. What brings the two men, very different in age and circumstance,
together in my mind is that their work was determined by the Spanish civil war. It was
that event that brought about an intellectual diaspora from Spain, leaving an
impoverished culture in their place, as well as leaving intelligent individuals stranded
in an all-powerful and philistine dictatorship. There were among British hispanists
those who brought a particular form of support and encouragement through their
writing and research to those who were left behind; Nigel Glendinning was one, as art
historian and student of the Enlightenment, and I would have to say, in the area of
theatre research, John Varey. Among historians, John Elliot provided a fundamental
leadership for Spanish historians caught in the regime’s educational and quasi
ideological web. At first sight, Nigel (your Nigel)’s role was different. He was not of
their generation, in the first place. But he too responded to the Civil War and its
impact over many years after Franco’s victory and even demise. Nigel understood
how the exiled Spaniards, a lost generation at least, needed to be restored to Spain and
made it his task to promote just that. His work was not only to return individuals to a
rightful place, but to pursue another, albeit material, diaspora, the writings , the
papers, dispersed into the New World, subject to bickering and greed, obfuscations,
oblivions. It was his pursuit of these wanderering souls of writers that put editing texts
at the centre of his project. His strategy was central to his purpose as I understood it:
to restore what had been lost, lost no doubt in great part through the dictatorship’s
efficient barrage of propaganda that persuaded the world to see them as the cause of
their own failure. If I had a notion of the scale and significance of Nigel’s project it
was due in part to seeing, in my own field, the importance that attached to redeeming
Spanish literature through operating on a level of scholarship that aimed to restore a
degree of credibility to texts that had been themselves the victims of war and post-war
state indifference, if not contempt.
I cannot claim to have worked on the scale that Nigel did, but enough to
understand what I have put down above. Principal Arnott understood that as well,
perhaps through his long experience of working in the States and having an intuitive
knowledge of its Hispanic world. At an early stage of his strong interest in
”repatriating” Nigel it was he who proved highly sympathetic to promoting the
publishing enterprise and was adamant that Nigel should not come here to repeat
administrative successes like those in Canada, but to get on with the task he had
initiated. I don’t think Nigel fully understood how keen Arnott was to get him on
board.
I have also been thinking about how Nigel had made contingency plans, and it
was in that light that I saw the teamwork he had set up in Spain and France, a way of
sharing out and perpetuating the labour.
Alan