Ah, Spain. Her very name calls up the images: the swirl of skirts and hard white teeth and dark eyes of the women; the men with lined faces, quick eyes, calloused hands; all of them passing on dirt roads in the raw brown hills, with the tough masculine Sierras climbing away to the South Quaint trains, storks in the chimneys, mule carts and Hemingway. Those Spaniards are not like milk-veined Americans. They know about pride. They know about honor. They are not afraid to face up to death. They have bullfights there—not baseball. Bullfights. Only bullfighters live life all the way up.

In Spain, or at least, in this literary Spain, there is no sitting around drinking martinis in cocktail lounges with plastic-topped tables. Why, if you can't take your Fundador straight at a wooden table, you won't take it all. There are no gas stations in this Spain, nor deodorants, nor Wall Street Journals, nor PTAs, nor ranch houses with two-car garages, nor hamburgers, nor neon lights. Just clean, well-lighted places with grave waiters who know you are simpatico and call you Don. Que tal, Don Ernesto? Que tal, hombre, que tal. The only problem is the tourists. They're lousing up the country.

It is not Spain's fault, of course, that she has inspired some of the most arrant nonsense ever to reach the printed page. But somehow, this has always been true. Writers disintegrate before her; their prose smothers under a kind of purple rhetorical gas, made of one part naivete, and one part dishonesty. Setting off to write A Book on Spain, they make the country an article of belief; and believing in belief, they believe in nothing else. If they are like Robert Ruark, they make even the hated Guardia Civil into charming, polite human beings; if they are great writers like Hemingway, they turn out silly self-parodies like The Dangerous Summer, or chant their way through self-indulgent elegies like the last chapter of Death in the Afternoon. A moratorium on Books on Spain would probably advance the English language 25 years.

But the books continue to roll off the printing presses. Some are guide books, some are impressionistic love letters, some are fuzzy political tracts. Of these four books on Spain, all contain the best and the worst of the genre.

Strangely, the least satisfying is written by Spain's best novelist, Camilo Jose Cela (who also edits Papeles de Son Armadans, the most distinguished literary magazine in that censor-ridden country). Essentially a notebook based on a trip by foot through the country northeast of Madrid, Cela's book has none of the ferocious anger or bitter clarity of purpose that marked his novels, such as The Hive or The Family of Pascual Duarte. Instead, he has given us a neat bonbon of a book, reminding one in most ways of the lacy calligraphy on cigar boxes. The calligraphy is rather nice, but it does, after all, adorn a cigar box.

"The traveler," Cela writers early in the book," is full of good intentions; he intends to lay open the heart of the wayfarer, to look into the souls of other travelers, peering into their eyes as one peers over the edge of a well. He has a good memory, and he wants to rid himself of every evil thought as he leaves the city."

What follows, in careful, precise prose, is a kind of Spanish Travels With Charley. No hearts are laid open, no souls penetrated. Instead, we discover that once one leaves the evil city, and embraces the wide open spaces, there are no bad people in Spain. One meets, over and over again, the same people; helpful honest women washing clothes, charming children, an occasional idiot (who is of course anointed by God), and wise old men in berets. At the conclusion of the book we have learned no more about Spain, or Camelo Jose Cela, than we knew when we opened it, and we haven't been entertained much either.