Ramon Perez de Ayala
Ramón Pérez de Ayala y Fernández (Oviedo, August 9, 1880-Madrid, August 5, 1962) was a Spanish writer, columnist, politician and ambassador.
Biography
Ramón Pérez de Ayala y Fernández was born in Oviedo and was baptized in the church of San Isidoro. His father, Cirilo, a native of Tierra de Campos -Valdenebro de los Valles, province of Valladolid —in his novels he refers to this area and the way of life that the locals led at that time— was a textile merchant who in his youth resided in Cuba. In his early childhood he lost his Asturian mother, Carmen Fernández Viña or Luisa Fernández del Portal. He always resented this orphanhood, suffering loneliness and affective miseries derived, in addition, from spending most of his youth in boarding schools of the Society of Jesus, San Zoilo in Carrión de los Condes and Inmaculada in Gijón. Thus he achieved a great wealth of humanistic knowledge, due in part to the only professor with whom he sympathized, the scholar Julio Cejador y Frauca, at the time an uncomfortable guest in an order that he would soon abandon. The anticlericalism that his Jesuit education inspired in him is reflected in his autobiographical novel A.M.D.G., whose title alludes to the motto Ad maiorem Dei gloriam, typical of the Society of Jesus.
He studied Law in Oviedo under the protection of Leopoldo Alas, Clarín. There he came into contact with the thinkers of Krausism, among them Rafael Altamira, Adolfo Posada and others. He had the excellent library of the Marquis de Valero de Urría. By then he grows long hair and dresses in a vest and monocle like a dandy and exhibits a Voltairean and liberal personality. He is attracted to both the regenerationism of his mentors and the aesthetic decadence of pre-war Europe. He hates the bourgeois conservatism of the city of Oviedo, which appears in his work under the name of "Pillars." Other denominations conceal real places and characters in his literary work: "Noreña" is Cenciella; "Novillo" is the president of the Corbera council in Belarmino y Apolonio and "Pía Octava Cioretti" in La pata de la raposa is Natalia Perotti, widow of Martín Escalera.
Pedro González Blanco, from Oviedo, put him in contact with the modernists of Madrid: Jacinto Benavente, Francisco Villaespesa, Mariano Miguel de Val, Gregorio Martínez Sierra, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Ramón María del Valle-Inclán and José Martínez Ruiz «Azorín». In 1902 El Progreso de Asturias printed his first novel in installments, Thirteen Gods. Fragments of the memories of Florencio Flórez, very much in the decadent orbit of the Valle-Inclán of the Sonatas. In 1903 he founded with the Martínez Sierra, Gregorio Martínez Sierra and María Lejárraga, Helios. Magazine of Modernism. Starting in 1904, he began to collaborate with El Imparcial and ABC, and went to London in 1907 to escape the provincial scandal that erupted when his novel Darkness in Darkness was published. Las Cumbres, started two years earlier under another title, Eclipse of the sun; there he supports himself with the help of his father and a journalistic correspondent. In 1908 he learns of the ruin and suicide of his father.
He shares radical ideas with his friend Azorín, whom he served as a "black", like López Pinillos, when the latter plunged into a depressive crisis. He traveled through France, Italy, England, Germany and the United States, and was a war correspondent during the 14th war for La Prensa in Buenos Aires. His visit to the battlefields gave rise to his work Hermann in Chains (1917). In 1927 he obtained the National Prize for Literature. In 1928 he is elected a member of the Royal Spanish Academy.
In 1931, with José Ortega y Gasset and Gregorio Marañón, he signed the manifesto «In the service of the Republic», an anti-monarchist manifesto that had an extraordinary influence on public opinion and earned all three the nickname of «spiritual fathers of the Republic» ». The Government of the Republic appointed him director of the Prado Museum and in 1932, ambassador in London. There are numerous, rather mocking, allusions to this period of his life in the Memorias of Manuel Azaña. Dissatisfied with the pre-revolutionary political direction that the Popular Front was imposing in Spain, he resigned from his position in June 1936 and at the beginning of the Spanish civil war he went into exile in France. Two of his sons enlisted as volunteers in the National Army and Pérez de Ayala explained and defended his position in an "open letter" published on June 10, 1938 in the London newspaper The Times .
Pérez de Ayala blamed Manuel Azaña for the Civil War to a great extent, against whom he lashes out furiously, as shown in the following fragment of one of his writings, in which he describes what he described as "base and effeminate memories" What Azaña wrote when he was arrested in Barcelona and imprisoned on a warship for allegedly being involved in the 1934 Revolution, an accusation that was finally dismissed by the Supreme Court:
How much is said of the desalmated minds that were born and then nourished the breasts our great tragedy, everything will seem to me little... What I could never conceive is that they would have been capable of so much crime, cowardice and inferiority. I make an exception. I noticed a time that Azaña was of different texture and noblest tissue... In October of 34 I had the first premonition of what was truly Azaña. Reading his memories of the warship—so ruins and shaves—I confirmed. When I saw him and spoke as president of the Republic, I became a chill of terror by observing his horrific mental degeneration, in the short space of two years, and I said that everything was lost to Spain.Palaces, Jesus. Totalitarian Spain, Planet, 1999, p. 83
He lived successively in Paris and in Biarritz and later in Buenos Aires, where he was appointed honorary attaché to the Spanish Embassy. He provisionally returned to Spain in 1949 to resolve some personal issues, returning later to Argentina. Various family and social setbacks plunged him into an acute depression. More and more distant from the "dead", his books, he collaborated less and less in the newspapers, where his signature was no longer required with the urgency of yesteryear.
The amputation of the leg of the youngest of his children, first, and the death, later, of the eldest, were the coups de grace that made his a true "painful feeling" and what decided him to return to Madrid, in December 1954. He had spent twenty years outside of Spain. His books in national Spain did not have free circulation and the Americans were prohibited. After several occasional visits, he ended up returning to Spain permanently in 1954 and has lived there ever since, regularly publishing articles on literary subjects in the newspaper ABC . He died in Madrid in 1962, a few days before his eighty-second birthday.
Work
He cultivated all genres and stood out in all of them except the theater, which he tried in 1905 when he premiered in Oviedo a play written with Antonio de Hoyos y Vinent, the comedy A stop in the wandering life; Sentimental club (burlesque hoax) is an anti-utopia that, although it was published, did not make it to the tables. Hoyos adapted his novel Tigre Juan for the theater in 1928.
In the lyric, the symbolist and culturalist inspiration of modernism can be appreciated; it is ideological and conceptual poetry, but one endowed with human emotion, and it has still been poorly studied. With Miguel de Unamuno he is, then, one of the cultivators of philosophical poetry at that time, but he does not disdain sonority in verse. He wrote three books of poems, La paz del sendero (1904), whose title alludes to the land, where the traces of modernism can be perceived, a modernism that is neither grandiloquent nor recipe, by Gonzalo de Berceo and by Francis Jammes; It is an intimate and Horatian book, and does not disdain musicality. The innumerable path (1915) is his second book, whose title alludes to the sea. El sendero andante (1920), whose title alludes to the river, closes his poetic work with an approximation to the pessimism of the generation of '98, without abandoning his modernist tendency. He was left to edit a fourth book that would be the true closure of the author's poetic work, The Burning Path . In his books themes of Spanish golden poetry are evoked; Other themes are intellectual pride, which appears in a poem about Saint Augustine; ataraxia, the search for balance and peace, etc.
He also stood out in the essay, a dominant genre in him and that also appears in his lyrical poetry and his novel, highly intellectualized. He cultivated especially theatrical and literary criticism. At the first he dedicated the two volumes of The Masks (1917-1919). Politics and bulls (1918) collects his articles on both subjects.
Regarding his narrative production, critics usually distinguish two stages in his novelistic activity.
In the first, corresponding to his youth, he appears as a realistic writer with a pessimistic vision of life, which is revealed through a subtle irony. A series of partly autobiographical novels belong to this stage (the protagonist of the novels, Alberto Díaz de Guzmán, or Bertuco, is the alter ego of the author, who took the surname of some of his relatives from Logroño with whom he lived for a few months) as Darkness in the Summits (1907), a crude history of debauchery, published under the pseudonym Plotino Cuevas, which novelizes the true story of the train trip from Oviedo to the port of the gentlemen and the pupils of the most luxurious brothel in Oviedo, to see an eclipse of the sun; the idea of the artist disenchanted with his castrating and bourgeois upbringing who pursues a regenerative purity also appears; the aesthetic alternates naturalism, decadence and modernism; another character in the novel will reappear later, the seduced little worker, with a son and turned into a hetaira to be able to support him, Rosina; the work ends with an apotheosis of nihilism; The fox's paw (1911), second part of the previous one, an analysis of pure and sensual love; A. M. D. G. (1910), an anti-Jesuit work that caused a certain scandal in its description of life in a boarding school run by Jesuits, from which a boy escapes, and where a priest gives free rein to his tendencies pedophiles; Troteras y danzaderas (1913), description of bohemian life in Madrid. In these novels some narrative experiments are carried out, such as alternating points of view in counterpoint.
The short novels collected in Under the Sign of Artemis (1916), which are Prometheus, Sunday Light, The Fall of the Lemons and The Navel of the World, where there is a very black and sordid vision of the brutality and caciquista violence of rural life.
With Belarmino y Apolonio (1921) he began his second stage, where he abandoned realism in favor of caricatural symbolism and the language was recharged with ideological components typical of the essay. In it he discusses the issue of transcendental doubt in a deeply religious soul. Also belonging to this stage are Luna de miel, luna de hiel (1923) and its second part, The works of Urbano and Simona (1923), later collected in a single work with the title of the second It is the story of two young people educated so strictly that they do not know what sex is and their marriage is arranged; but they do not do anything sexual and decide to take them to the countryside so that in contact with nature they can develop their repressed instincts. There are points of contact with another novel by Miguel de Unamuno, Love and Pedagogy. Tigre Juan (1926) is considered Pérez de Ayala's best novel, and reflects the evolution of an extremely macho man towards a more human understanding through the twister of his wife's infidelity. The second part, El curandero de la honra de él , constitutes a very subtle psychological examination of machismo, which places Pérez de Ayala at the top of the psychological narrative in Spanish.
Ramón Pérez de Ayala's style is characterized by irony and the use of very refined language, where allusions, covert quotations and intertextuality abound, by the abundance of cultisms and Hellenisms and by the occasional use of degrading techniques of the grotesque. Perspectivism and counterpoint are techniques that he sometimes uses, even dividing the page into two columns to contrast points of view. In the first stage of it reproduces in an almost naturalistic way the sounds.
Filmography
In 2007, one of the writer's works premiered in the film Luz de domingo, directed by José Luis Garci.
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