Alvaro Retana

Álvaro Retana Ramírez de Arellano (Batangas, Philippines, August 26, 1890 - Torrejón de Ardoz, Madrid, February 10, 1970) was a writer, journalist, cartoonist, fashion designer, musician, libertine and lyricist of Spanish cuplés.

Biography

Retana, who often recounted that he had been born on the high seas off the coast of Ceylon when his parents traveled to the Philippines on their honeymoon to provoke the bienpensantes, was of a noble family and son of the politician and writer Wenceslao Retana, who was governor of Huesca and Teruel. Hiddenly homosexual and libertine, a good boy from Madrid and precocious author of lyrics for famous cuplés, he proclaimed himself "the most handsome novelist in the world"; and he had himself photographed in a rose-embroidered kimono, with his eyebrows plucked and his eyes and lips painted.He wrote novels that became popular, following the sicaliptic taste of the time, about the gallant and frivolous society of the most decadent Madrid.

Her first chronicles, full of humor, appeared in 1911 in Heraldo de Madrid under the pseudonym Claudina Regnier. Rosas de juventud (1913), within the aesthetics of decadence and with very brilliant prose. He later collaborated in El Diario de Huesca under the pseudonym "César de Maroto", in La Mañana, El Liberal, La Tribuna, Varietés Magazine, La Esfera, New World, The Short Story, Graphic World, Prints, Today's Novel, Informations and Black and White (1928-1936). She was also in the magazine Élite of Caracas (1951). She also used the pseudonyms Carlos Fortuny and El Petronio español del siglo XX .

He stood out as a novelist, lyricist and journalist, although he was also a musician (he introduced jazz music to Madrid), cartoonist and couturier (in the twenties, thirties and forties he created costumes and costumes for cabaret and music-hall, genres that in Spain they were called “revista”, so their imaginative designs for dancers and vedettes represent one of the pinnacles of art applied to the light genre). He was also a scholar of popular genres: he composed a History of frivolous art and a History of the Spanish song , in addition to some sixty short novels and other longer ones. And he collaborated in comic magazines such as La Vida and Flirt .

He was the best writer of erotic novels of his time, almost all of them written between 1917 and 1922 in the collections La Novela Corta and La Novela de Hoy. Casual and frivolous, he was far from the seriousness of his great competitor Antonio de Hoyos y Vinent. In his novels, characterized by great irony, bisexuality appears. The novelist Joaquín Belda also said of him: "He did not embark on his author's ships any passenger who was not adorned with at least one sin, mortal of necessity."

He is also the author of the lyrics of well-known tonadillas, couplets, such as the Come and come sung by Aurora Jufret and "La Goya", or Blanquita, the fado that he wrote to Blanquita Suárez and the extremely popular Las tardes del Ritz. Retana is responsible for the takeoff of this genre since 1911, the year in which the Trianon Palace was inaugurated. A regular at the magazine, he was easy to find in jazz clubs, music that had come to be associated in the public imagination with sexual experimentation. He was a close friend of Tórtola Valencia, La Goya, Ofelia de Aragón, Lina Valery, Nena Rubens or Tina de Jarque, claiming to have been a lover of one of them. In fact, he testified in favor of an illegitimate son that he had with the artist Luisa de Lerma.He gave asylum in Madrid to American jazz singers, who described him as a kind of very popular Noel Coward.

During the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera, and as a result of the publication in the collections of Artemio Precioso of gallant little novels, and among them a piece by Valle-Inclán in which he wanted to see himself portrayed, the dictator prosecuted him and likewise Ramón María del Valle-Inclán and his entire court, the top brass of Spanish decadence, Joaquín Belda, Antonio de Hoyos y Vinent and Álvaro Retana, who had to go to Paris. Before, Retana had himself been imprisoned for printing crimes.

During the Spanish Civil War, he attended workers' demonstrations dressed in silk overalls. After the Spanish conflict, due to his fame as red and ladybug , he was denounced and arrested at the house of Ángel Pedrero and sentenced to death for possessing objects of liturgical worship used sacrilegiously. He requested, and obtained, the intervention of Pope Pius XII on his behalf and his death sentence was commuted to thirty years in prison, of which he served nine, in the Porlier prison, in Madrid, being released in 1948. although without his position as an official in the Court of Accounts.

He died in Torrejón de Ardoz on February 10, 1970. He was seventy-nine years old and left a son named Alfonso Retana Tejeiro.

The angel of frivolity

His biography has been reconstructed by Luis Antonio de Villena in The angel of frivolity and his dark mask (Life, literature and time of Álvaro Retana) , 1999, but Álvaro Retana himself played to the autobiography in My naked soul (1923). Other authors who have written about the author are Pilar Pérez Sanz and Carmen Bru Ripoll in a biographical study in the Revista de sexología (1989) and Javier Barreiro in Cruces de bohemia (2001). Villena has prefaced the reissue (Editorial Odisea) of two short novels by Retana, among them Las locas de postín —original edition from 1919—, one of the most daring.

Retana is a true master of ambiguous literature and his ironic novels, chronicles of the most feathery society of the early 20th century, describe the most decadent and superficial fauna of the early 20th century XX. He is one of the referents of homosexual literature in Spain.

Literature

Among his more than one hundred short novels, Carne de tablado (1918) and El crepúsculo de las diosas (1919) stand out for recreating the minimal genre atmosphere in Madrid and Barcelona; The eighth deadly sin (1920) and Raquel, ingenuous and libertine (1923) as an overcoming of the erotic novel of French origin; in The Green Wave (1931) she writes an essay on the generation of erotic novel writers between the wars; Beauty and the Mandrake (1953) is a genuine political satire on totalitarianism; In Las locas” de postín (1919), Rafaelito Hinojosa de Cebreros, vicious son of marquises, feels fascinated by a mysterious Argentine with whom his friends have arranged a date just to get the hang of him. money. Characters of all kinds will parade through its pages, from crazy aristocratic women like Juanito Sí-sí, called that way for never having said no to an indecent proposition, to well-known circus performers, frivolous aristocrats and notorious writers. It is a story of decadent parties, of gallant gentlemen, maintained cocottes, bad manners cuppletists, and affairs in high-rise mansions. To Sodom on the Botijo Train (1933), narrates the Madrid adventures of Nemesio Fuentepino, a boy so beautiful that he is the pride of Almería. Convinced by a friend, he travels to the capital, where he will discover the depraved world of the perverse Marquis de Pijo Infante's parties, attended by aristocrats fond of cross-dressing, cocottes and the most carefree queers. illustrious of the city Other novels in which he deals with the subject of homosexuality are The Ambiguous (1922) and My Girlfriend and My Boyfriend (1923), to mention just a few. History of Frivolous Art (1964) is an authentic visual and commented encyclopedia of all variety artists from 1900 to 1964. According to Vicenç Vernet Pons,

Alvaro Retana is a writer who incarnates “modernity”, understood as an ideological struggle that questions the stereotyped bourgeois values of the Restoration era, which satirizes a society still anchored in the nineteenth century and closes to the cultural advances of Europe because of the narrowness of views of institutions such as the Church, medicine, law or politics. A humorist and a creator of finished novels, heir to the literary strategies of the picaresque, Rabelais, Cervantes, of the French finiscular novel or Galdós, and constantly concerned to give the human being a freedom-based identity as understood by the democratic society of our day. It is an obvious precedent to take into account within the so-called Spanish artistic homocity, among which stands out Terenci Moix, Luis Antonio de Villena, Eduardo Mendicutti or Pedro Almodóvar.

Songs

A devotee of Spanish song and cuplé, he wrote the lyrics to numerous songs, including some as well-known as the Madrid cuplés Rufina la peinadora (1915) and ¡Sarasa! (1959), the latter in collaboration with José Juan Cadenas, the pasodoble Batallón de modistillas (1959), the Argentine tango Las delicias del tango (1914) and the fado My love is in Portugal (1960), to name just a few. He dedicated two books to one of his great myths, Chelito: Chelito, his life, his art and his songs (1930) and La reina del cuplé: el Madrid de la Chelito (1963). To these should be added texts such as Estrella del cuplé (his life of him and his songs) (1963) and Historia de la canción española (1967).

Theater

He was famous for his comic zarzuela in one act Travesuras de amor, written in collaboration with Mariano Muzas and with music by Teodoro San José; with Luis Olivé he created the comedy in four acts El maniquí (1919).

Works

• On the edge of sin. Barcelona, 1916
• Carmina, flower of loveby Carlos Fortuny (Álvaro Retana), 1929
• Carnival, 1924
• The Rossa abyss1925
• The charm of the round bed, 1922
• The Scapular, 1922
• The ghost of Don Pingoberto. Estampas de la vida madrileña en 1935
• The man with pretty hands
• The Hell of Ice, 1921
• Mercedes' most beautiful love1925
• The poor Barba-Azul, 1928
• The moonlight, 1921
• The Treasure of the Nibelungos, 1922
• The fool. Madrid: Suc. Rivadeneyra, 1925
• Flower of evil. Madrid: The novel today. 1924
• History of the Spanish Song. Photographs, drawings by Jano and José Zamora Madrid: Tesoro 1967
• History of a vedette told by his dog. Good-looking girl. Theatrical life of Madrid. 1954
• History of Fryvolo Art. Spain, 1900-1964. Madrid, Editorial Tesoro, 1964.
• The beautiful and the mandragora. 1953
• The meat on the boarding. Artistic scenes of Madrid at night. Madrid: Bibl. Hispania, s/a. (Ca. 192...)
• The confession of the duchess. Madrid, 1923
• The conquest of the blue bird. Madrid, 1925
• The Lady of Luxembourg. Madrid: Suc. Rivadeneyra, 1925
• The Lady of the Mornant Lounge, Madrid, 1918
• The Flower of Turia. Novel. Prologue of Artemio Precioso. Madrid, La Novela de Hoy, 1925
• The hour of sin. Madrid, La Novela de Hoy, 1923
• The bronze mask. Madrid: La Novela de Hoy, 1926
• The queen of the couple. Madrid de la Chelito. Madrid: Editorial Tesoro, 1963
• Couple stars. Madrid: Editorial Tesoro, 1963 (Collection Jirafa)
• The rose of fire. Portico de Julio Cejador. M., 1950
• The virtue in sin. Madrid: Suc. Rivadeneyra, 1924
• The naive libertines. Madrid: 1919
• The madmen of Postin (Novela of aristocratic evil customs). Followed A Sodom on a botijo train. Introduction by Luis Antonio de Villena. Madrid, 2004
• The women of Retana, Madrid, 1922
• The vendors of caresses. Prologue of Artemio Precioso. Madrid, La Novela de Hoy, 1923
• Lolita, seeker of emotions. Madrid: Ed. Rivadeneyra, 1923
• The Ambiguous. Madrid: Suc. Rivadeneyra, 1922
• My naked soul, 1923
• Paulina Bonaparte. The imperial venus Madrid: Treasure 1963
• Poor girl who has to serve! (Confessions of a decent lady)1955
• Get the lamb out.. Madrid, 1926
• Yeah, I loved you, but...
• All pink, frivolities for honorable ladies. Madrid: Atlantis 1923
• A Carnival Night in Nice. Madrid: La Novela Corta, 1922
• Tony's missing1919
• Matilde Muñoz and Alvaro Retana, History of theatre in Spain1965
• Alvaro Retana and others, Erotic tales of the mad twenty years2004
• Felipe Trigo, Alvaro Retana, Antonio de Hoyos and others, Diabolical counts, selection and prologue Alberto Sánchez Álvarez-Insúa, 2005