Excerpts from selected Inez Haynes Irwin texts

By Sara Prieto García-Cañedo

We landed Sunday morning at Cadiz. That was the twenty-fifth. Oh Cadiz. Billy got me up fairly early to see the city as we approached. It's a pure white city -many Spanish cities seem to be pure white. The effect very Moorish, what with walls and towards. I have never seen anything more romantic than that pure-white pile of buildings stretched straight out on its flat site and then the blue sea and the blue sky. It gave me an extraordinary sensation, different from any I have ever had. Of course being a seaport town, Cádiz would be interesting anyway -but being Spain Oh such a jumble of beautiful Andalusian-Spanish women in their mantilla. [...] Nevertheless Cadiz is beautiful and picturesque -very difficult from Italy- more like Havanna than anything I have ever seen. It's curious how much alike the three Latin countries Spain, France and Italy can be and yet how thoroughly different.

Source: «Letter to Phyllis, March 27, 1917», in Will Irwin and Inez Haynes Gillmore Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

The trip out of Cadix [her typo] toward Madrid –as much as I could see of it until it got dark– was one of the most beautiful of my experience. For a long while we could get the sea –blue, blue, blue as- blue on one side with every once and a while white Spanish villages standing straight up against all that blueness of sky out of another blueness of sea [...]. For long stretches they were making salt from the sea-water and that salt was piled up at intervals in pure-white perfectly shaped pyramids –it might have been Egypt except that it was marsh instead of sand and except that the pyramids were not high enough and that there were so many of them. And presently the bits of water that ran by the car began to be covered with a tiny exquisite white flower, ultimately we were smothered under mats of these flowers. And there came eucalyptus trees, and goats with frisking young kids and sheep and cows and even bulls–but always blue blue sea and those white cities and the white lateen souls. Phyllis I have never had such a wonderful experience. I felt that I was living in Cabiria -that part where they sail across the Meditterranean [her typo] to northern Africa. History seemed to be rolling back on me.

Source: «Letter to Phyllis, March 27, 1917», in Will Irwin and Inez Haynes Gillmore Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

On Holy Thursday, however, by a kind of public consent, there is a promenade in the afternoon, along to Alcala, (the principal street) of the women of the city in their mantillas. Of course society does not mingle in this –it never mingles in anything so charming anywhere. Nevertheless, of course, many women do promenade who are very charmingly dressed and who are, apparently, women of means. Well we chased up and down the Alcala all Thursday afternoon looking at them. I have never seen any beauty show so fascinating. They came along often in groups of five and six. Sometimes they would all be wearing black mantillas, sometimes all the creamy white -can't tell you what a romantic aspect those groups of peaked-lace covered heads had as they came floating down the street.

Source: «Letter to Phyllis and Maud, April 21, 1917 (sent from Paris)», in Will Irwin and Inez Haynes Gillmore Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.