Post siesta, while sleep still blurs my eyes and fogs my brain, I find myself sort of reading about a famous American and her famous partner in Benidorm before it was Benidorm. I wake up.
The article is by a Spanish journalist in a digital magazine. In other words, it is very of the moment.
While that moment right now is one where I want some caffeine though the light is fading. Soon the skies will darken. We lost Summer Time and kicked the clocks one hour back yesterday morning. Still, a whole bunch of day, if not light, remains.
In this moment I see more and more American couples on the streets, in the cafes, and the grocery store of Alicante.
They look like retirees and look like they have come to stay. Here, instead of in some retirement development in Florida or Costa Rica.
They, along with the digital nomads and the nightly renters of rooms online are controversial for maybe worsening Spain’s housing crisis.
I am one of those American retirees who is staying, though I came before the Trumpets blew, so to speak.I speak Spanish and I am making my life in Spain now.
Thus, as a personal part of the moment, a small group of writers and I meet in a local Hookah bar-cafe every other Thursday to talk about poetry and share our writing in English, although I would also enjoy it in Spanish. Sometimes, I wonder what it means to be Anglophone poets and writers in this Spain, today.
A short tram ride from Alicante and not far from its urban sprawl, Benidorm’s glitter and high rises shine bright in the mediterranean sun. As a result, it is hard to know its past beyond official facts and return to the time in the fifties when it, even then exaggeratedly, is described as a sleepy fishing village. So different from the beer-and-drugs-party town of prawn-red, overweight Europeans near the beach it has become.
By the sixties it was becoming become the Benidorm we know—the so called New York of the Mediterranean although perhaps the Las Vegas sin-city of Spain’s Mediterranean is more appropriate with its Manhattanesque skyline.
I think it sad when a skyline becomes the ruling image of a place, though I guess “fishing village” is probably just as reductive and absurd in a very of this moment marketing way.
Benidorm became Benidorm once officials created the possibility and tour operators began putting packages together; they started bringing in groups who would only stay for a short time as their schedule required them to depart for the next exciting spot in the new dizzying world of Elvis, the Twist, and the hyperreal., all the while dropping lots of money.
The American, a poet, Silvia Plath and her new husband, a Yorkshire poet, Ted Hughes, came on their honeymoon to this place transforming as backdrop for their intensifying romance. Their visit has been the subject of a library of texts mostly as part of interest in Plath.
The two saw it as a romantic site of Mediterranean and Spanish charm, perhaps influenced by Hughes’ study of Garcia Lorca and his poems even though Benidorm was on the cusp of becoming a place that dwarfs itself regularly with people who come to stay for a few days away enjoying of sun, fun, and drink.
The poets stayed for a bit more than a month. The article notes that locals as a result did not have a word to describe this couple other than as veraneantes, someone who comes to summer there.
I do not know, but it is possible they may have seen themselves more in the Romantic tradition of poets abroad, such as the writers who came to Spain to support the ill-fated Spanish Republic, or who moved to Paris’ left bank. In honesty, I am just starting into the literature on Plath and Hughes in Spain but there are things I can already say by looking at the two as part of a world in change.
One still finds groups of romantic, literary souls traveling through European, Latin American, and Asian cities. They settle for a while while populating coffee houses and open mics. Some of them openly describe themselves as writers and as nomads, sometimes as digital nomads. They emphasize impermanence as a hallmark in their self identity.
The locals here in Spain did not know of that twentieth century literary fashion. They just knew the onset of outsiders was composed of people who wanted to spend some summer away time.
This fishing village had already been receiving travelers from Madrid who were probably coming to the beach escape stifling summers. At the same people started coming from other places to do the same thing. They were seasonal visitors who wanted to spend a part of their summer in the waves.
Plath and Hughes they stayed for more than a month, a relatively long time. They rented a local house where they lived. They shopped at the local market and drank in local establishments. In any case, they left some traces in some people in Benidorm.
In these, they distinguished themselves from the veraneantes who stayed in hotels and ate in restaurants near the beach rather than cooking for themselves or taking advantage of local bars, especially those a bit away from the beach.
Whether they meant to or not, Plath and Hughs were distinctive as briefly resident foreign poets. They stayed, got to get pissed off and argue with their first landlady, the amazing widow who also wrote poetry, bargained in the market, and became local color people gossiped about and some remembered.
To be fair, people might well have forgotten them if they had not become famous and if books and magazine articles with their names and pictures had not started to appear in local news stands.
As tourism has grown, tourist has become a meaningful label. Travel and going there, wherever there is, has become a big deal and people pay fortunes to go places and visit things on the check-off-able list of what you must see.
Tourists are transitory, they come and go over a relatively short time. As some come, others leave. As a result, they feel to locals and analysts as a solid reality in places, like Benidorm, and to a lesser extent the city of Alicante, where there are always tourists, just different ones; sometimes more of them and sometimes less.
Tourists, digital nomads, Non Lucrative Visa holders, immigrants, we are all woven into the new fabric of Spain and this at a time of a nascent political movement of reaction. The question of the real Spaniard and of real Spanish culture is now in the air as are still fringe proposals to begin massive deportations of those who cannot display those credentials of the real.
I’m excited to read more about Hughes and Plath’s time here and to ask what it means to write poetry and essays while living in the land of Matadors and communist widows who return from exile to take in people like Plath and Hughes. These people rent them rooms, become openings for foreigners to know Spain. and for them to know more about the outside world.
Here are a few words by Silvia Plath about Alicante.
Alicante Lullaby by Silvia Plath
In Alicante they bowl the barrels
Bumblingly over the nubs of the cobbles
Past the yellow-paella eateries,
Below the ramshackle back-alley balconies,
While the cocks and hens
In the roofgardens
Scuttle repose with crowns and cackles…
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