Josep Pla

Josep Pla i Casadevall, also cited as José Pla (Palafrugell, Gerona, Spain, March 8, 1897 - Llufríu, Palafrugell, Gerona, Spain, March 23, April 1981), was a Spanish writer and journalist in Catalan and Spanish languages.

His original and extensive literary work, which uninterruptedly spans six decades and more than 30,000 pages, was essential in the modernization of the Catalan language and in the dissemination of local customs and traditions. His opinion articles, his journalistic chronicles and his social reports from numerous countries also constitute a singular testimony of the history of the XX century . All of this has unanimously consecrated him as the most important prose writer in contemporary Catalan literature.

Biography

Childhood and adolescence

Home of Josep Pla, New Street (carrer Nou) from Palafrugell.

The son of a family of modest rural owners, the eldest of four siblings, he studied high school in the city of Gerona, where he was admitted since 1909 at the Colegio de los Maristas. The last course (1912-13) was examined by free because he was expelled from the boarding school. In 1913 he enrolled in Science at the University of Barcelona and began to study Medicine, but in the middle of the year he changed his mind and enrolled in Law without much enthusiasm, with the idea of becoming a notary.

Installed in pensions and passionate about reading and observation from a very young age, the emptiness he perceived in university life did not prevent him from adapting to another environment that would channel his youthful intellectual disorientation: the Peña del Ateneo Barcelona, with the library and above all the daily gatherings that took place there with characters such as Josep M. de Sagarra, Eugenio d'Ors or Francesc Pujols. From this youthful period comes his admiration for Pío Baroja —a constant reference for his generation— and the influence of Alexandre Plana, a friend and teacher from his youth, to whom he attributed nothing less than his decision to distance himself from the noucentista and definitively bet on a literature for everyone based on "intelligibility, clarity and simplicity", ideas that would be his stylistic motto throughout his literary career.

Youth and early writings

In 1919 he graduated in Law and began to work professionally in journalism, first in the newspaper founded by Rafael Roldós, Las Noticias, and soon after in the nightly edition of La Advertising. He begins his journey as a correspondent in different destinations (Paris, Madrid, Portugal, Italy, Berlin). A moderate Catalanist, in 1921 he was elected deputy of the Commonwealth of Catalonia for the Regionalist League in his native region.

In 1924, due to an article critical of the military policy in the Spanish Protectorate of Morocco, he suffered a military process that prevented him from returning to Spain in the following years. During his exile in Paris, he dealt—and conspired—with some of the main Catalan opponents of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, such as Francesc Macià. He continued to travel around Europe (Soviet Union, United Kingdom) and in 1925 he published his first book, Coses Vistes —a compilation of landscape descriptions, short stories, literary portraits and autobiographical evocations— with which he obtained a great critical and popular success, and sold out in a week. It was a good preview of his aesthetic: "write about the things I've seen." At the end of 1925, his second work was published — Rússia —, written after a six-week trip to the USSR in the company of Eugeni Xammar and hosted by Andreu Nin. In 1927 he was able to return to Spain, left La Publicitat , a progressive line close to Acció Catalana, and signed for La Veu de Catalunya , the Lliga newspaper, a trend liberal-conservative. He then began a patronage relationship with Francesc Cambó —leader of moderate Catalanism—, whose famous gatherings he attended assiduously and of whom he published a very favorable political biography shortly after the character, at that time in conflict with the republican and leftist sectors.

Republic and civil war

In April 1931, the same morning the Republic was proclaimed, he was sent to Madrid by Cambó as a parliamentary correspondent for La Veu and became a direct observer of the first days of the new regime. The Madrid diary of those months, of great historical value, is included in his work Madrid. The advent of the Republic. He remained in the capital of Spain during almost the entire republican period (1931-1936), acting as a parliamentary chronicler, which allowed him to interact with the Spanish political and cultural elites. Pla, who was neither anti-republican nor anti-monarchist, but rather a pragmatist who sought to modernize the State, initially expressed some sympathy for the Republic: he believes that the new political system can take hold in Spain if it is consolidated following the model of the Republic French, although little by little she becomes disenchanted with the course that events are taking until she considers it a complete "frantic and destructive madness".

Calling health reasons, he left a convulsed and very dangerous Madrid a few months before the start of the Spanish Civil War. Barcelona does not seem safe either, and he fled by boat from Republican Catalonia towards Marseilles in September 1936, in the company of Adi Enberg, a Norwegian citizen born in Barcelona with whom he had a formal relationship for years (they even introduced themselves as a married couple). for some years). Adi Enberg worked for SIFNE, the Northeast Border Information Service, a Francoist espionage service financed by Francesc Cambó, tasks with which some sources claim that Pla also collaborated (for example during his stay in Marseille). He was in exile in Rome, where he wrote a large part of the monumental History of the Second Spanish Republic, commissioned by Francesc Cambó, published in 1939 and which Pla refused to republish and include in his Complete Works. In the autumn of 1938, Adi Enberg and Pla moved to Biarritz and from there they managed to reach San Sebastián and join Franco's Spain. In January 1939 he entered Barcelona as part of Franco's troops, together with Manuel Aznar and other journalists. Between February and April 1939, when the war ended, he became deputy director of La Vanguardia , under the direction of Aznar.

Postwar

Josep Pla (right) next to the Catalan writer Manuel Brunet.

Overwhelmed by the course of events in the immediate aftermath of the war and faced with the unforeseen failure of his project in La Vanguardia, he withdrew to the Empordà in a sort of internal exile and separates from Adi Enberg. In September 1939, he published his first article in Destino, the weekly that his Catalan friends created in Burgos and in which he began to write weekly a few months later, from February 1940. These are the years in which he travels Through his native region, he rediscovers its landscapes and its people, its small towns and the sea. He also assumes his personal status as hereu (firstborn heir) and small rural owner, by inheriting the family farmhouse in usufruct, and will never again reside in Barcelona.

Thanks to his regular collaboration with Destino magazine, of which he would end up being one of its main promoters, he once again traveled the world, no longer as a correspondent, but as an observant journalist, which allows you to make magnificent reports: visit France, Israel, Cuba, New York, the Middle East, South America and the Soviet Union. Of Israel, for example, he left a unique testimony of its first years of existence as a State: he visited it in 1957, arriving in Tel Aviv on one of the ships from Marseilles, which were loaded with excited Jews from the Diaspora. He arrived during the enthusiastic construction of the cities and amazing Hebrew infrastructures in the middle of the desert.

As a curiosity, Pla had a predilection for traveling in very slow oil tankers, which allowed him to write his works calmly and dispense with the distractions derived from contact with tourists.

Elaboration of the Complete Work

Starting in the second half of the 1950s, he continued to travel and began preparing his Complete Works, a task to which he would also dedicate himself fully during the following decade. It is a crucial stage in his career since it involves an almost total rewriting of his work and the construction of the planian stylistic program, with which he will transcend journalism and consolidate his style. Meanwhile, culture in the Catalan language reappears little by little, while nationalist anti-Francoism is marginalizing him, despite being by then the most widely read writer in the Catalan language: they do not forgive him for his support for the Francoists during the civil war, nor his apparently non-conflicting coexistence with the regime (Pla trusts a peaceful and orderly evolution towards democracy), does not even forgive his disdain towards fictional literary forms. However, as Xavier Pericay, a translator and specialist in Pla's work, has observed, his correspondence with his publisher Cruzet demonstrates the relevant role that Pla played in the cultural resistance against the regime.

However, his contemptuous attitude towards the political left and towards some Catalan political and cultural figures meant that, as happened with Dalí, progressive culture denied him bread and salt in the form of prizes (the refusal was controversial to grant him the Catalan Literature Honor Award, the highest political distinction awarded to writers in Catalonia), they took him away from his lifelong magazine (Vergés sold Destino to Jordi Pujol's Banca Catalana, which censored an article critical of revolutionary Portugal, and Pla left the magazine in 1976, after 36 years of uninterrupted weekly collaboration) and his worth was not fully recognized until several years later.

However, despite the emptiness that many made of him, and at the age of 80, he did not stop expressing his opinion, in those first years of the Transition: «The left has always done the same: its aberration of the reality of the country keeps her, as always, in her antediluvian ignorance. They talk a lot, but they don't say anything. [...] Above all they want to win the elections and, once seated in their armchairs, do the complete opposite of what they have promised». (Notes of capvesprol, 1979)

Last years

Pla tomb in the cemetery of Llufríu.

Even so, in 1980, already in the final stretch of his life, Josep Tarradellas awarded him the Gold Medal of the Generalitat of Catalonia. It is worth noting that, in the speech of thanks for the gold medal that he also received from the Generalitat, Joan Coromines made a claim to the writer from Empordà (who, in turn, had on several occasions dedicated great admiring praise to the monumental work of the philologist).

Pla died in 1981, in his native Bajo Ampurdán, leaving 38 volumes of the Complete Works published and many unpublished papers, which have been published progressively after his death. The year of the centenary of his birth, in 1997, produced an endless number of tributes and institutional acts, definitively making him an indisputable figure.

Twenty-five years after his death, studies and even controversies continue around various literary and biographical aspects, some still unresolved, which have increased his figure and multiplied interest in his work.

Work

Pla is one of the most outstanding Catalan-language writers of the XX century. His work offers a complete vision of the society of his time. He wrote most of it in Catalan, the language in which he felt most comfortable, and only occasionally did he do so in Spanish (for reasons of censorship or purely food), also brilliantly, almost always in collaborations with press, such as the Italian, Balkan and Nordic chronicles of the twenties in El Sol. During the first years of the Franco regime, and due to the almost total limitation for publishing in Catalan, it published the following works in Spanish: Guide to the Costa Brava (1941), Las ciudades del mar (1942), Travel by bus (1942) —considered one of his great works, and which proves his brilliant command of Spanish—, Rusiñol and his time (1942), The painter Joaquín Mir (1944), A man from Barcelona (1945) and The flight from time (1945). In 1946 he republished with Destino (updating them) his first two works in Catalan after the civil war ( Cartes de lluny and Viatge a Catalunya ).

In 1947, as soon as censorship allowed it, he resumed his publications in Catalan with Cadaqués, one of his most successful books, published by Editorial Juventud. In 1949 and throughout the following decade he began a fundamental period of collaboration with Josep Maria Cruzet's Editorial Selecta, during which he published some of his best-known works such as El vent de garbí, El vent de garbí, El vent de garbí, carrer estret (today considered one of the most important novels in post-war Catalan literature), Girona (un llibre de records), Els pagesos (of which prologue comes the self-constructed myth of the «Pla payés») and Cartes d'Itàlia.

The 47 volumes of the Complete Work, exhibited at the Josep Pla de Palafrugell Foundation.

Pla lived completely dedicated to writing. The magnitude of his Complete Works (47 volumes and more than thirty thousand pages), which includes all his diaries, reports, articles, essays, biographies, novels and some poems, all from some 120 different books, gives an idea of his formidable capacity for work while making it difficult to classify them chronologically. Many of these pages are the result of a continuous process of rewriting unpublished originals from his youth and the reworking, translation and cut-paste of the weekly articles that he published in Spanish in the Destino magazine for almost forty years. i>, in addition to hundreds of articles published in scattered newspapers and abundant correspondence.

Classification

Thematic classification is not easy either, since many articles appear in different places with some variants, his thematic repertoire is very extensive and, above all, the borders between the genres he cultivated are not always clear. However, an attempt can be made to sort them according to genres (the years indicated correspond to the original publication, not to the translation or to the reissue in the Complete Work):

• Narrative: Coses dresses (1925) Magical cord (1926), Related (1927) are books in which narration predominates but which prefigure and outline other genres that will later be essential in their work. The Rear Estret (premio Joanot Martorell 1951), Spring Nocturn (1953) and L'herència (1972) are very novels, despite the little consideration that Pla had for the genre of fiction.

• Dietaries: the diet is probably the most critically valued planan format. It is an uncultivated literary form in the Castilian or Catalan literature, constituted by daily or periodic annotations, observations and reflections. Dietaryism gives Pla great freedom in the combined use of different genres: the personal journal, the description, the narrative, the dialogue, the personal reflections, the advice to the reader, the portrait and analysis of the customs of people and peoples. The grey quadernIt's the diet that consecrated him. It is not an authentic journal, but a "literary" diet, written later. The central themes of the diet are the landscape and the geography of Ampurdan, the description of everyday life and the obsession by the writing of the narrator-author. Autobiographical elements, if they appear, are usually recreated and unreliable. He published four other diets: Notes disperses, Notes per a Sílvia, Notes of the capvesprol (Barcelona Ciutat Award 1979) and Notes per diari (posthumously published).

• The anthropological and costumbrist essay: Els pagesos (1952), The pagès i el seu món and Les hores (1953). Some of the most beautiful pages written by Pla refer to the people of Cadaqués (Alto Ampurdan). Pla was a singer of marine life, but in his writings about Cadaqués the certero recognizes the rural landscape and the dry stone architectures that dominate the place.

• The biography: Life of Manolo (1928), Santiago Rusiñol i el seu temps (1955), Francesc Cambó (1928-1930), Homenots, Retrats de passaport and Three senyors.

• Travel: Les illes, Viatge a la Catalunya Vella, Itàlia i el Mediterrani, Les Amèriques, About Paris i França, Lluny Cartes (1947) e Israel, 1957 (1958).

• Political reports: Polemic. Cròniques parlamentàries (1929-1932), Madrid. L'adveniment de la República (1933) and Cròniques parlamentàries (1933-1934) and (1934-1936).

In total, 21 volumes, almost half of his Complete Works, are journalistic articles published in Destino, in La Publicitat and in La Veu de Catalunya .

Selection of titles

Complete Works

Starting in 1956, he began with the Cruzet publishing house the first series of his Complete Works, which reached twenty-nine volumes and in which he began to publish his extraordinary portraits entitled Homenots («Great Guys »). In 1962 the publication with Selecta was cut short due to Cruzet's suicide that paralyzed the publishing house and, after a few years without a publisher, in 1966 he resumed the project of the Complete Works this time with Ediciones Destino, which was directed by his countryman and friend Josep Vergés, and in which he was already collaborating as a journalist long before.

Original manuscript of a page The grey quadern.

The first volume of this new definitive edition of his Complete Works was an unpublished work, El quadern gris, a diary started when he was just over twenty years old, although subsequently rewritten and substantially expanded, translated into Spanish under the title El cuaderno gris by Dionisio Ridruejo. The famous Planiano diary marked a before and after in the literary consideration of Pla, who has since come to be considered the best narrator of contemporary Catalan literature. The publication of the Complete Works continued in the following years and reached volume 38 during the author's lifetime. After his death in 1981, the editor of Destino continued to prepare more volumes until he reached 47, including unpublished manuscripts that were not without controversy (such as his Notes for a newspaper, written in the mid-sixties)., due to the amendments, censorship and manipulations to which Vergés himself subjected them (apparently, to suppress certain obscene passages). The numerous manuscripts and letters that remained unpublished (partly in the hands of the publisher Vergés and partly divided between the two branches of heirs) have been the subject of an endless dispute —still open— to make them available to the Josep Pla de Palafrugell Foundation, and therefore accessible to researchers. These letters, published little by little (such as the correspondence with his brother Pere de él or with his publisher Cruzet), are being crucial in clarifying numerous passages in the writer's biography.

Pla-inspired theater

Although he did not write theater, his life and work inspired several significant works after his death, among which are: Ara que els ametllers ja están batuts, premiered in 1990, in which Josep Maria Flotats he produced a portrait of Pla through a collage of his texts.

In The incredible story of Dr. Floït & Mr. Pla, a production by Els Joglars released in 1997, which recreates Stevenson's characters, where the individuals Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are, respectively, a perfectly recognizable Catalan industrialist obsessed with wealth who, by ingesting the Floid shaving lotion, he becomes a cultured, sensitive and intelligent writer, which is Josep Pla and who embodies the opposite values of the businessman.

Literary style

The most important characteristics of the planian style are simplicity, irony and clarity. Extremely modest and sensitive to ridicule, he detested artifice and empty rhetoric. Throughout her literary life, she remained faithful to his style: "the need for clear, precise, and sober writing" and his disinterest in literary fiction, cultivating a dry, apparently simple style., pragmatic and attached to reality. He was an acute observer of reality and its smallest details and gave faithful witness to the society of his time. His works show a subjective and colloquial vision, "anti-literary", in which, however, an enormous stylistic work stands out for calling things by their name and "finding the right adjective", one of the most persistent literary obsessions of he.

Character and singularity of Pla

Pla had to live for a large part of her life under censorship: during the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, then in Italy and Germany (where she worked as a correspondent at the time of the rise of European fascism) and, of course, during the long censorship of Francisco Franco. Although he initially sympathized with the Franco dictatorship (he wrote in 1940 that it coincided " with the general interest "), it only lasted a few months. He quickly became skeptical, especially due to the impossibility of continuing to publish in Catalan. Although he was always installed in a kind of possibilism that allowed him to publish, he was deeply uncomfortable with Franco's tireless censorship (he wrote in one of his diaries that it was "the worst he had ever known", exercised by "officials of the fanaticism"). He detested the authoritarian regime's contempt for the Catalan language and culture and its stubborn inability to become a democracy, even if it were tutelage. He did not consider himself a Catalan nationalist, he was a man of the world who believed in territorial singularities but also in the need for a more general Spanish identity. His regionalism, of a conservative nature, can be detected in works about his excursions through the province of Gerona, where he sometimes recalls the episodes of the Carlist Wars with a manifest sympathy for Girona Carlism, very active in those years and very popular among the locals. farmers.

A tireless writer, a man of order although with a liberal disposition, in his view life is chaotic, irrational, unfair, and the desire for equality and revolutions are a delusion that causes worse evils than those it intends to tackle. Conservative and rational, he does not feel the action, although he does feel the voluptuousness and sensuality. A good conversationalist, a good eater and a better drinker (in his old age, whiskey still made up a large part of his diet), an inveterate smoker of ideals, headdress as a young man with a bowler hat and later with his inseparable beret of As a countryman, he detested banality, cultural affectation (he rarely includes quotes in his works, despite being a great reader of the classics) and "those who speak by listening to themselves ". That is why he wrote: "It is more difficult to describe than to give an opinion, infinitely more: in view of which everyone has an opinion."

25 years after his death, his books have not stopped being republished and both Castilian and Catalan critics have unanimously recognized him as one of the great Spanish writers of the century XX.