Jose Diaz Fernandez

José Díaz Fernández (Aldea del Obispo, Salamanca, 1898-Toulouse, February 18, 1941) was a Spanish writer who practiced journalism and participated actively in politics, against the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera and in favor of the Republic. At the end of the Spanish civil war he went into exile in France.

Biography

Born in 1898 in the town of Aldea del Obispo in Salamanca, where his father was a police officer, he spent most of his childhood in Castropol (Asturias), the town of his maternal family. He later moved to Oviedo, where he enrolled in the Faculty of Law and founded —with the writer Mª Luisa Castellanos— the magazine Alma Astur and began to collaborate as a chronicler in the newspaper El Noroeste of Gijon.

Called up in 1921, his regiment was soon assigned to a Morocco in the midst of an insurrection, where he would remain until his discharge in 1922. The experiences of this colonial war would give rise to his book of stories El blocao.

Journalistic activity

Back in Gijón, on January 12, 1923, he began in Freemasonry, in the Jovellanos Lodge, belonging to the Federation of the Spanish Great Orient; he adopted the symbolic name of "Wagner." In Gijón he was appointed correspondent for the Ortegan newspaper El Sol until in 1925 he moved to Madrid to join the editorial staff of the newspaper, entering the circle of Revista de Occidente . At the same time, he collaborated in the magazine Post-war during the brief life of the publication (1927-1928).

A collaborator of the Grupo de Acción Republicana in that final period of the Primorriverista dictatorship, he spent three months in the Modelo Prison in Madrid and was forced into exile for as many months in Lisbon (1929).

Back in Madrid, he founded and directed with Antonio Espina and Adolfo Salazar (who would later be replaced by Joaquín Arderíus) the left-wing magazine Nueva España, published on January 30, 1930, nothing more the fall of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, until his disappearance in 1931.

When José Ortega y Gasset and Nicolás María de Urgoiti were separated —on the eve of the proclamation of the Second Republic— from the ideological control of the newspaper El Sol, Díaz Fernández left the newspaper and began to collaborate in the recently founded Crisol and Luz.

Parliamentarian

In the 1931 Constituent Cortes elections, he was elected deputy for Oviedo in the ranks of the Socialist Radical Republican Party. That same year he was appointed political secretary of the Minister of Public Instruction, Francisco Barnés Salinas. He was a co-founder on February 11, 1933 of the Association of Friends of the Soviet Union.

After the elections of November 1933, which gave rise to the Black Biennio, he returned to the journalistic profession at El Liberal. In the February 1936 elections he was again elected deputy, this time for Murcia and in the ranks of the Izquierda Republicana (IR), Manuel Azaña's party.

Civil war, exile and death

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he was appointed press officer in Barcelona. After the fall of the Catalan capital he went to France, with his wife and his daughter. He was temporarily interned in a concentration camp, from where he went to settle in Toulouse, hoping to obtain a ticket to Cuba, a hope that was thwarted by his death on February 18, 1941. According to his daughter's testimony: "The friends had to take up a collection for his funeral. He carried on top of the coffin a ribbon with the republican colors, which my mother had sewn during the night ».

"Advanced" Literature

Spanish soldiers building a blocao in Benisicar (Morocco).

His first novel, El blocao (1928), with a social intention, narrates in seven episodes «the effects that take place in the Spanish youth engaged in the war in Morocco. These episodes, although they seem unconnected, are interrelated by the atmosphere of the war, as the author himself clarifies in the "Note for the second edition":

I wanted to make a novel without another unit than the atmosphere that sustains the episodes. The classic argument is replaced by the dramatic trajectory of the war, as well as the character, for his own impersonality, wants to be the Spanish soldier, call that Villabona or Carlos Arnedo. In this way I intend to interest the reader in a way other than the known; that is, by putting it into an opaque and tragic world, without heroes, without great individualities, just as I felt Morocco at that time.

A social and political content exposed through a mixture of avant-garde and realistic techniques is also perceived in the novel La Venus mecánica (1929), an overview of Madrid during the Primo de Rivera dictatorship.

Díaz Fernández also wrote the stories «La largueza», included in the collective volume Las siete virtudes (1931), and «Cruce de caminos» (1931). In 1923 he had published the short novel The broken idol in the collection «La novela Asturiana».

In the essay The new romanticism (1930), subtitled «Polemics of art, politics and literature», he defended the need for a «re-humanisation» of art.

In collaboration with Joaquín Arderíus he composed Life of Fermín Galán (1931). Under the pseudonym “José Canel” he published in 1935 the book Red October in Asturias , “a curious mixture of reporting, critical reflection and imaginative recreation” about the Asturian revolution of 1934.