Camilo Jose Cela

Camilo José Cela y Trulock (Iria Flavia, May 11, 1916 - Madrid, January 17, 2002) was a Spanish writer. A prolific author and representative of postwar literature, he worked as a novelist, journalist, essayist, editor of literary magazines, and lecturer. He was a member of the Royal Spanish Academy and was awarded, among others, the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature in 1987, the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1989 and the Cervantes Prize in 1995.

For his literary merits, in 1996 King Juan Carlos I granted him the Marquisate of Iria Flavia, created expressly. In the year 2000, Cela laid the first stone, together with Felipe Segovia Olmo, of the Camilo José Cela University, of which he was honorary rector.

Biography

Camilo José Cela with his maternal grandfather, John Trulock (1916).

Commemorative plaque in Vigo.

Camilo José Cela was born in the parish of Iria Flavia, belonging to the municipality of Padrón, in the province of La Coruña, on May 11, 1916. His father (Camilo Crisanto Cela y Fernández) was Galician and his mother was Galician of English and Italian descent (Camila Emanuela Trulock and Bertorini); his sixth surname is Belgian, Lafayette. He was the firstborn of the Cela Trulock family (he had a younger brother named Jorge, later an editor and writer) and was baptized with the names of "Camilo José María Manuel Juan Ramón Francisco Javier de Jerome" in the Collegiate Church of Santa María la Mayor. During the years 1921 to 1925 the family lived in Vigo, settling in Madrid in 1925, where Camilo studied at the Escolapios school on General Díaz Porlier street until he was expelled for throwing a compass at a teacher; then he ended up with the Chamberí Marists, with whom he spent four years before they expelled him, this time for organizing a strike.

In 1931, he had to be admitted to the Guadarrama anti-tuberculosis sanatorium, an experience that he would later recreate in his novel Repose Pavilion. According to what he later recounted, Cela used the periods of inaction that his illness imposed on him in intense readings of Ortega y Gasset and Rivadeneyra's collection of classic Spanish authors. In 1934, with the help of private instructors, he managed to pass the secondary school exams at the San Isidro Institute in Madrid, and began his medical career. It has been documented during that university period that Cela used to audit Pedro Salinas' Contemporary Spanish Literature classes at the new Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, where he became friends with the writer and philologist Alonso Zamora Vicente. He also treated Miguel Hernández and María Zambrano, in whose house in the Plaza del Conde de Barajas he met Max Aub and other writers and intellectuals in gatherings.

The Civil War broke out while he was in Madrid, twenty years old and recently convalescing from tuberculosis. Cela, of conservative ideas, managed to escape to the rebel zone and enlisted as a soldier, was wounded and hospitalized in Logroño.

Three margaritas visited room No. 5, in a basket they had the gifts.

—Soldate, I will condecorate you with a scapular of the Sacred Heart to preserve you from all evil, see what it says: “Stop, bullet, the Heart of Jesus is with me.”

The artillery Camilo got pale, he escaped all the color of his face.

"No, no, thank you very much, I beg you to tell someone else, I beg you, I beg you, I was wearing one with an impermissible in the warrior and not yet a month ago I was taken out of my back, I tell you with all respect, miss, but for me the Sacred Heart is a gafe.

Mazurca for two deadp. 183.

At the end of the war, he decided not to continue his university studies and went to work in a Textile Industries Office, where he began to write what would become his novel The Family of Pascual Duarte. "I began to add action on action and blood on blood and that left me like a firecracker" Cela has said about it.

He was admitted again for his lung ailments, in the summer of 1942, this time at the Nuevo Sanatorio de Hoyo de Manzanares. During his stay, he wrote the aforementioned novel Repose Pavilion and became friends with Felisa Ibáñez de Aldecoa, who introduced him to his brother Rafael, who ran the family publishing house. Cela sent him the manuscript of The Family of Pascual Duarte and Rafael published it that same year.

In 1954, Cela moved to Mallorca, settling in Palma permanently. At the age of fifty, Cela began writing his memoirs and then drew up a large project that he called La cucaña. From that plan he edited a first book, entitled The rose, which ends in his childhood memories; Volume II, subtitled Memories, understandings and wills, was published in 1993 and covers part of the author's childhood, adolescence and youth.

In 1944, he married María del Rosario Conde Picavea (1914-2003), a teacher, with whom, two years later, he had his only son, Camilo José. He would get divorced in 1990 to marry Marina Castaño López in 1991, a journalist with whom he shared his last twelve years. He died on January 17, 2002 at eighty-five years of age. His last words were: Long live Iria Flavia! After his death, he was buried in the Santa María de Adina cemetery, in his hometown.

Oriented towards literature and ambitious, he set in motion in full autarky a mechanism that the Falangist poet Dionisio Ridruejo defined as a «strategy of fame, the cult of personality and the imperative will».

Political Strategy

Cela made a bad life of collaborating with the press in the postwar period. He obtained the essential journalist's card with the support of Juan Aparicio in 1943. The journalist Eugenio Suárez, a confessed censor, refers to these difficult first years of Cela. He opted for and held a position in the Investigation and Surveillance Police Corps of the Ministry of Government of the Franco regime where he worked as a censor (see box) during 1943 and 1944. His first two literary works were censored, which raised reader expectations.

Literally conquered Madrid, he moved to Palma de Mallorca (1954-1989), where he entered the publishing business creating in 1956, with Caballero Bonald as editorial secretary, a literary magazine called Papeles de Son Armadans (1956-1979) that Cela knew how to guide beyond the sectarianism typical of those times, supporting the participation of relevant writers from exile. In 1964 he founded the Alfaguara publishing house together with his brother Jorge Cela, where his works were published and those of many other authors of the moment. Despite his greater economic stability, Cela demonstrated his mercantilist spirit and his collusion with the political power of late Francoism.

Professor Ysàs revealed in 2004 with documents how renowned people in Spanish literature, such as Camilo José Cela, offered to collaborate with the Ministry of Information in the years of the Transition in order to redirect, or better Said to curb the dissent of other comrades. Cela suggested that some intellectuals, apparently dissidents, could be bribed, "tamed" or made loyal to the system. He even went so far as to join a group of mock skeptics and mavericks in order to spy on their activities. Knowing the difficulties of the trade, among other tricks, Cela proposed buying books from certain authors to favor them, or making publishing contracts for them in a publishing house that collaborated with Francoism, and if it was necessary to create one for that purpose, increasing the percentage to be received to earn them.

He chaired the Spain-Israel Friendship Society, established in the 1970s with the aim of helping to establish diplomatic relations between the two countries and fostering cultural relations, under the idea of the Jewish elements constituting Spanish culture.

Cela was appointed senator in the first Cortes Generales of the democratic transition and took an active part in the revision that the Senate carried out of the constitutional text elaborated in the Congress of Deputies. His amendment consisted in denominating the official language of the State as "Castilian or Spanish" and that the color "gualda" (an almost exclusive term in the lexicon of heraldry) of the Spanish flag be designated as "yellow". With the beginning of the year 1979 and with the call for new general elections, Cela concluded his term as senator by royal designation.

Literary work

In 1938, he finished Treading on the doubtful light of day, a surrealist collection of poems, when the Spanish civil war had already broken out and Madrid was under siege (the book would later be published in 1945). In 1942, Editorial Aldecoa, located on Diego de Siloé street, in Burgos, published his first novel. The Family of Pascual Duarte, a novel that takes place in rural Extremadura before the War Civil and during it and in which its protagonist tells the story of his life, in which the crudest violence is presented as the only response he knows to the troubles of his existence. This book inaugurated a new style in Spanish narrative, known by the term "tremendismo". It was made into a film with the title of Pascual Duarte in 1975, directed by Ricardo Franco, and was presented in official competition at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival, where the leading actor, José Luis Gómez, received the Award for Best Male Performance.

From here Cela conceived the novel as a genre in freedom: the writer should not submit to any rule, hence his experimental will that makes each of his works different and that in each one he tries a different technique. Wisely mixing the narrative resources of the avant-garde of the XX century, he became a "groundbreaking" artist. He discovered the infallible literary formula that he will use from now on: a balanced blend of humor, tenderness, horror, verbal ease and scatological vocabulary. Unlike other authors, Cela explains in detail or announces, in prologues, paratexts and interviews, everything he writes and why that makes.

One of his masterpieces, La colmena, was first published in 1951 in Buenos Aires, since censorship had prohibited its publication in Spain because of its erotic passages. Later, during the Franco regime, Manuel Fraga, as Minister of the Interior, personally authorized the first Spanish edition. The novel tells snippets of the stories of multiple characters that take place in Madrid in the early years of Francoism. Many critics consider that this work incorporates Spanish literature into modern novels. The same author defined this work as "this bitter chronicle of a bitter time" in which the main protagonist is "fear." It is considered by specialized critics as one of the best Spanish novels of the second third of the XX century. It was made into a film under the direction of Mario Camus in 1982, in a film where Cela himself participated as a scriptwriter and actor.

He had agreed with the regime of the Venezuelan dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez, at the price of gold and for the next ten years, a series of five or six propaganda novels (Historias de Venezuela) in favor of that dictatorship. La catira was the first, published in 1955. Cela wanted to re-found Venezuela literary; he even applied himself to create a new language, the llanera, which was an absolute imposture. It resembled rustic Spanish, a barbaric language that cut off words at the end. Cela charged for La catira a fairly high sum for the time: about three million pesetas, according to the testimony of his son in his biography Cela, my father .

Cela's case was special. His commission was inserted into a diplomatic offensive to promote Perezjimenismo and its immigration programs abroad, but also to sell Francoism culturally. We must not forget that 160,000 Spaniards settled in Venezuela at that time. But La catira caused such a scandal in the cultural circles of the country that the collaboration between the dictatorship of Colonel Pérez Jiménez and the Spanish writer was liquidated and there were no more Historias de Venezuela .

San Camilo, 1936 (1969), a work set, as its title indicates («Vespers, festivity and eighth of San Camilo 1936 in Madrid»), in the week preceding the outbreak of the war Spanish civil, is written in a continuous internal monologue. A similar style is found in his work Christ versus Arizona (1988), one of his most enigmatic novels, based on the events of 1881 in the OK Corral, which is written in a single long sentence with the use of a single point (the end). They are chaotic narratives, with the appearance of hundreds of characters and the use of cubist fragmentation and collage techniques.

He was a tireless traveler who walked with his backpack on his shoulder through the lands of Spain. The writer expressed his desire to visit only Spanish lands, he was not interested in the exotic or the distant. His travel books, which include Voyage to the Alcarria (1948), the most famous, and From Miño to Bidasoa, which tells the story of a vagabond who goes from the Miño river to the Bidasoa and connects it with Asturias, the autonomous community where he was awarded the Prince of Asturias award (1952), They gave a certain fame as a wandering man, fornicator and swallower.

The unusual and glorious feat of the Archidona dick (1977), not well known to the general public, is undoubtedly one of his funniest works, standing out that it narrates a true event. Literally it belongs to the epistolary genre: it brings together the delusional correspondence between Cela and his friend and academic Alfonso Canales. Basically, they commented on all extraordinary events and normally related to ordinary people and their customs and sexual or bizarre habits in general. It was made into a film with great success.

Maria Sabina. Oratory divided into 1 proclamation (which is repeated) and 5 melopeas. Script inspired by the celebrated Mazateca woman of knowledge. The first edition of this work was published in the magazine Papeles de Son Armadans, in December 1967. It premiered, with music by the composer Leonardo Balada, at Carnegie Hall in New York, on April 17. of 1970. A month later, the Teatro de la Zarzuela received with manifest hostility from critics and public this opera inscribed in a line of rupture that at that time reached another significant novelistic expression. A work by the poet Cela, restricted to musical theater, in which sequences of very diverse amplitude alternate where all forms of language, from the simplest to the most sophisticated, allow the author to translate all kinds of lyrical nuances, feelings and sensations, to the the same as in his poem Almost a hundred acrostics. An emotional poem written in the last days of the writer's life and brought to the staff in the form of a lied romance for soprano and piano by the professor and composer Miguel Brotóns. Piece performed as a tribute to the Nobel Prize winner in May 2018 in the Auditorium of the Fundación Pública Gallega "Camilo José Cela" by Iria Flavia.

Camilo José Cela was elected, in February 1957, a member of the Royal Spanish Academy, where he held the Q chair. His presentation speech took place on May 27 of the same year. In his speech, to which Gregorio Marañón responded, he dealt with the literary work of the painter José Gutiérrez Solana (1886-1945).

In 2022, it was announced that the first author's original manuscript had been located, a collection of poems from 1936.[1]

The image

Cela (on the right) and his secretary, Gaspar Sánchez Salas.

He had great acting skills, among them a powerful voice, an exceptional parodic capacity, a wise dosage of expectation and surprise, empathy with the audience and a great sense of showmanship. His first foray as a scriptwriter and actor was in the feature film El basement directed in 1949 by the filmmaker Jaime de Mayora, in which he plays one of the leading roles. Cela always remained independent and against the grain of many tendencies even acknowledging a "serious lack of interest for the intellectual adventure. He maintained his right-wing political ideas, and the fact of having fought and worked in favor of the nationalist camp, earned him the enmity of the "progressive" literary establishment; and that of the socialist governments of the time.Cela answered this with his humor dedicating some of his books "to my enemies who have helped me so much in my career."

Considered a «great fake», due to the constant antinomy that he maintained throughout his life between what he said and what he did, Cela fostered a kind of public relations in reverse. He was quick to curse and outburst He was representative of postwar literature.

In October 1989 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature according to the Swedish Academy itself: «...for the richness and intensity of his prose, which with restrained compassion embodies a provocative vision of the helplessness of every human being».

In 1994 he received the Planet Award. Cela's winning work, entitled The Cross of San Andrés, gave rise to a lawsuit for alleged plagiarism that has been reopened, having been denounced by one of the participants who sent manuscripts to the aforementioned contest, although the judicial experts who intervened ruled out the existence of plagiarism.

In 1995 he received the Cervantes Prize, the most prestigious literary award in Spanish-speaking countries.

As a literary character

The character of Octavio in Juan Manuel de Prada's novel White blackbird, black swan is partly inspired by Camilo José Cela.

Awards

Shield of the I Marquis of Iria Flavia.

• Premio de la Crítica de narrativa castellana (1956)
• Great Cross of the Order of Isabella the Catholic (1980)
• National Narrative Prize (1984)
• Sant Jordi de las Letras Award (1986)
• Ramón de Carranza Award (1986)
• Prince of Asturias Award for Letters (1987)
• Nobel Prize in Literature (1989)
• Great Cross of the Order of Charles III

(1992)

• Cavia Journalism Award (1992)
• Planeta Prize (1994)
• Cervantes Award (1995)

Works

Novel

• The family of Pascual Duarte (1942)
• Rest Pavilion (1943)
• New adventures and inventions of Lazarillo de Tormes (1944)
• The hive (1951)
• Mrs Caldwell talks to your son (1953)
• The catira, Historias de Venezuela (1955). Premio de la Critica de narrativa castellana
• Hungry slide (1962)
• San Camilo, 1936 (1969)
• Dark trade 5 (1973)
• Mazurca for two dead (1983). National Narrative Award
• Christ versus Arizona (1988)
• The murder of the loser (1994)
• The Cross of Saint Andrew (1994). Planeta Award
• Boj wood (1999)

Short novel, stories, fables and notes from the carpetovetónicos

• Those clouds that pass (1945)
• The beautiful crime of the carabinero and other inventions (1947)
• The Galician and its quad and other carpetovetonic notes (1949)
• Santa Balbina 37, gas on each floor (1951)
• Timothy the incompretent (1952)
• Coffee of artists and other stories (1953)
• Ship of inventions (1953)
• Dreams and figures (1954)
• The windmill (1955)
• Windmill and other short novels (1956)
• New altarpiece of Christendom. Inventions, figures and hallucinations (1957)
• Stories from Spain. The blind. The fools (1958)
• Old friends (1960)
• Wonder of fables without love (1962)
• The Lonely and Quesada Dreams (1963)
• Ballroom. Farsa with accompaniment of clamor and murga (1963)
• Eleven soccer stories (1963)
• Izas, rabizas and colipoterras. Drama with clumsy accompaniment and heart pain (1964)
• The family of the hero (1964)
• New Matritense scenes (1965)
• Citizen Iscariot Reclus (1965)
• The pigeon band (1970)
• The stain on the heart and eyes (1971)
• Five glorious and many other truths of the silhouette that a man brought from himself (1971)
• Unlucky tramp ballad (1973)
• The rusty tacata. Florilegio de carpetovetonismos y otras lindezas (1974)
• Counts for after bath (1974)
• Rol of cornudos (1976)
• The unique and glorious exploit of Archidona's cipote (1977)
• The mirror and other stories (1981)
• The ears of the child Raul (1985)
• Vocacion de repartidor (1985)
• The Caprichos de Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1989)
• The man and the sea (1990)
• Tortories (1991)
• Horny, scarves and other men (1993)
• Sima of the penultimate innocence (1993)
• The lady bird and other stories (1994)
• Family stories (1999)
• El Espinar's notebook. Twelve women with flowers in the head (2002)

Articles and essays

• Round table (1945)
• Orange is a winter fruit (1951)
• My favorite pages (1956)
• Remembrance of Don Pio Baroja (1957)
• Trace drawer (1957)
• The literary work of the painter Solana (1957)
• The wheel of leisures (1957)
• Four figures from 98: Unamuno, Valle-Inclán, Baroja and Azorín (1961)
• Garito de hospicianos o guirigay de imposturas o pumpollas (1963)
• Convenient companies and other fakes and blindnesses (1963)
• Ten artists from the school of Mallorca (1963)
• Marañón, the man (1963)
• At the service of something (1969)
• The ball of the world. Daily scenes (1972)
• Photographs per minute (1972)
• Around Spain (1973)
• The vain dreams, the curious angels (1979)
• The communicating vessels (1981)
• Round sheet (1981)
• Reading of Quixote (1981)
• The game of the madmen (1983)
• Buridon's ass (1986)
• Dedicatory (1986)
• Spanish conversations (1987)
• Pages chosen (1991)
• From the Hita Dove (1991)
• The single chameleon (1992)
• The Egg of Judgment (1993)
• A boat soon (1994)
• The color of the morning (1996)

Travel books

• Travel to the Alcarria (1948)
• Avila (1952)
• From Miño to Bidasoa. Notes of a tramp (1952)
• Guadarrama Notebook (1952)
• Vagabundo by Castile (1955)
• Jews, Moors and Christians. Notes of a tramp by Ávila, Segovia and its lands (1956)
• First Andalusian trip. Notes of a tramp by Jaén, Córdoba, Seville, Huelva and its lands (1959)
• Wrong geography pages (1965)
• Travel to the Pyrenees of Lérida (1965)
• Madrid. Street Calidoscope, Maritime and Campestre of Camilo José Cela for the Kingdom and Ultramar (1966)
• Barcelona. Street Calidoscope, Maritime and Campestre of Camilo José Cela for the Kingdom and Ultramar (1970)
• New trip to the Alcarria (1986)
• Galicia (1990)

Poetry, blind man's romances

• Pouring the dubious light of the day. Poems of a cruel adolescence (1945)
• The monastery and the words (1945)
• Cancionero de la Alcarria (1948)
• Three Galician poems (1957)
• The true story of Gumersinda Costulluela, a moza who preferred death to dishonor (1959)
• Incarnation Toledano or the perdition of men (1959)
• Journey to U.S.A. or the one who follows her kills her. (1965)
• Two romances of the blind (1966)
• Sand watch, sun watch, blood clock (1989)
• Complete poetry (1996)

Other genres

• The basement (1949) — cinema
• The wedge, I. Memories of Camilo José Cela. The rose (1959) — memories
• Maria Sabina (1967) — theatre
• Secret dictionary. Take 1 (1968) — lexicography
• Tribute to El Bosco, I. The hay car or the inventor of the guillotine (1969) — theatre
• Secret dictionary. Volume 2 (1971) — lexicography
• Encyclopedia of eroticism (1976) — lexicography
• The wedge, II. Memories of Camilo José Cela. Memories, understandings and wills (1993) — memories
• Popular geographical dictionary of Spain (1998) — lexicography, paremiology
• Tribute to El Bosco, II. The extraction of the stone of madness or the inventor of the claw (1999) — theater.