Ricardo Leon and Roman

Ricardo Francisco León y Román (Barcelona, October 15, 1877-Galapagar, December 6, 1943) was a Spanish novelist and poet. Important novels by this author include El amor de los amores, written in 1907, winner of the Fastenrath Prize of the Royal Spanish Academy; Casta de hidalgos, from 1908; Alcalá de los Zegríes, from 1909; The School of the Sophists, from 1910; Humos de rey, from 1923, and Cristo en los infiernos, from 1941. Also noteworthy are his chronicles Tragic Europe, as well as two books of poetry lyrical: Bronze lyre, from 1901, and Alivio de caminantes, from 1911. He was elected a member of the Royal Spanish Academy in 1912 and became a member of it in 1915, occupying chair B.

Biography

Although he was born in Barcelona on October 15, 1877, Ricardo Francisco León y Román always stated that he was born in the city of Malaga because he spent a large part of his childhood and youth there. He started high school in Badajoz, but finished it in Malaga. He was the son of Francisco León y Jaramago from Badajoz, and Carolina Román y Guraya from Madrid. Influenced by his father's example, he became fond of a career in arms, joining the Army, which he had to leave due to health problems. He lost his father as a teenager.

He began writing simple verses in 1893, some of which were published in the newspaper Unión Mercantil de Málaga. In that same newspaper he published, in 1905, the poem entitled The combats of life . His first book was the extensive poem Las Chimeras de la vida. Oriental Fantasy (1898). He collaborated with various Andalusian newspapers and magazines, being editor of the Unión Conservadora since 1897 and director in 1899. He also founded La Información with other writers. In May 1901, he entered the Bank of Spain by competitive examination and published another book of poems in Málaga within the modernist aesthetics, La lira de bronce, a collection of verses written when he was a teenager and which he will correct. and will rewrite in different subsequent editions. He collaborated in Modern Malaga (1901-1902) when, in October 1901, he had started working at the Bank of Spain and was transferred to Santander; there he was part of the editorial staff of El Cantábrico , where he published more than a hundred articles.

The trip to Santander was important for his literary training, since he met and became friends with different writers who forged his education in terms of literature; but it was in particular the town of Santillana del Mar that marked him to the point of inspiring his novel The soul of the ruins. Casta de hidalgos in which he faithfully describes the place and the social state in which its inhabitants were, the framework of the story told. He finished it back in Malaga in the spring of 1906, and published it in 1908. He then printed Sentimental Comedy (1909) and, before being transferred to the Bank of Spain in Madrid in January 1910 (thanks to the influence of one of his godfathers, José Echegaray), directed the Malacitan magazine Gibralfaro. Already in Madrid he published Alcalá de los zegríes (1910). At that time, he had social and regenerationist concerns that, like other members of his promotion, that of the noventayochistas, he gradually abandoned and suppressed in subsequent reissues of his works from this period; Like Azorín, he joined the party of Antonio Maura, who also directed the Royal Spanish Academy, and was named a full member of the same in 1912. "According to a critic," wrote Sainz de Robles, "since then he has been consecrated as the novelist officer of the old-fashioned mesocracy and pseudo-aristocracy".

Retreated around 1917 by Joaquín Sorolla

In the second half of the 1900s he devoted himself completely to literature, except for the time necessary for his trade as a banker.. He also published most of the dialogues of The School of the Sophists (1910) and a large number of verses, collaborative articles, literary studies, critical essays, theater chronicles and society magazines, but he gave la campanada also publishing in 1910 El amor de los amores, which was awarded in 1911 with the Fastenrath prize by the Royal Spanish Academy and was its greatest success: it managed to sell no less than a million copies narrating the story of a supposedly repentant anarchist who seeks refuge and redemption on the farm of a pious landowner, whom he had known since he was a child, but betrays him and flees with his wife and money. It was made into a movie on two occasions: in Mexico, in 1944, and in Spain, by Juan de Orduña, in 1962. His famous "Canto a Castilla" is contained in this novel, which exemplifies his rhetorical style well., classical and academic:

Holy land of Castile, grave and solemn like the sea, austere like the desert, adusts like the semblant of the ancient heroes; mother and mother of peoples, nurse of nations, lady of cities, field of crusades, theater of epopeyas, bear of bizarre; forum and hall, temple and castle, cradle and gravel, cradle and barn, table and altar; firm seat of the cross You were a university and a school in the world; you had your arm, like a bridge, over the seas; you stuck the plant on the tops to be closer to the sky; you made a spear of the plowed corve and held on your shoulders, without fatigue, the weight of glory. Your motherly womb gave so much fruit, that, unless the planet widens its limits, your whole race would not fit into it. You are poor, and yet you nourished the flow of others; you are old, but you still have bowels and goats with which to bear male recites; you are loaded for centuries and dengaños, and you still move the sceptre and rulerships the inheritance: you look like the generous branches of your vines, dry and knots, but filled with sap and crowned with clusters. A long land of Castile! How the horizons are dilated under the harsh silence of the corceles, under the air of the chimeras, in the eyes of your captains! He sweated the heroic flesh within the strong armor, and the heart, like a arrow, tearing the armor, was to nail into the crystal of heaven. Don't you still listen to the varonil language of those rude mesnaderos of the glorious cycle, Álvar Fáñez, Martín Antolínez, But Bermúdez, singing the old fable of the Champion with all his barbaric majesty? Do you not feel the clash of the walls of flesh that fight “small against chest”, nor the crusade of the cots, nor the ruffle of the throats, nor the joyous relinquish of the horses?

In 1910 he also wrote Relief of Walkers and, in 1912, The Centaurs. Thanks to the success of his works, he was able to buy a granite house in the Escurial style surrounded by large gardens in Galapagar, the Quinta de Santa Teresa. Thus, he coined a narrative formula that ensured him many returns: melodramatic and Manichaean arguments, ideological misoneism and archaic style and rhetoric.

Monument to Ricardo León in Torrelodones

As has already been said, Ricardo León was unanimously elected as a number academic by the Royal Spanish Academy in May 1912, proposed by its director Antonio Maura, José Echegaray and Francisco Rodríguez Marín. He joined it in 1915 with the speech The classical language and the modern spirit and occupied the chair B . In fact, Antonio Maura was also his political godfather, since he was a member of his party and came to appear on one of his electoral lists, although without obtaining a deputy certificate. During World War I he was a correspondent for La Vanguardia in the trenches of France and Germany. After that experience he wrote the tales of Tragic Europe . In 1919 his mother died. He was named favorite son of Malaga and maintainer of the Floral Games of Seville. Later he lived in Santillana del Mar and, finally, in Madrid, where he married María del Carmen Garrido and had eight children. He occasionally collaborated with ABC since 1921. He was a jury member for literary prizes such as the National Literature Prize and the Mariano de Cavia Prize and belonged to the Hispanic Society of America; there is a portrait that Joaquín Sorolla made of him. He had an important correspondence with Ramón Menéndez Pidal, Azorín, the Quintero brothers, Armando Palacio Valdés, Gabriel Miró, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, Salvador Rueda, etc. He spent his last days in his house in Galapagar, near Torrelodones. When the Civil War broke out, he refused to join the Republic and took refuge in the Haitian embassy until the end of the war; In addition, he joined the Spanish Falange. An angina attack ended his life on December 6, 1943 in Galapagar, and there he is buried next to Jacinto Benavente.

His style was described by Juan Carlos Ara Torralba as "castizo modernismo" because he replaced the cosmopolitanism of this movement with costumbrismo and Christian and Catholic traditionalism at all costs. He was "the official novelist of an old-fashioned pseudo-aristocracy", as the poet and essayist Eugenio de Nora and for Eugenio D'Ors, who prefaced his Complete Works, said of him, «he poured the quintessence of Hispanicism into Renán-like cadences, and he knew how to bring dignities of the Golden Age the speech of the living in the nineteenth century". His models were, apart from the mystics and ascetics of the 16th century and Cervantes, the Catholic realist novelists José María de Pereda and Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, but their narrative skills were insurmountably hampered by their oratorical emphasis and their archaizing academic and mannered rhetoric; that is why his work is perhaps quite forgotten today. For José Domingo, for example, his adept public was "well-thinking and fasting on concerns" and "the falsity of the types and situations, and the swollen rhetoricism of his prose they have made him forget as quickly as he was extolled."

Works

• Complete works Madrid, New Library, 1944-1945, 2 vols.

Poems

• The Chimeras of Life. Oriental Fantasy1898.
• Bronze lira1901; rewritten and corrected in 1920.
• Traveller relief1911.

Narrative

• Casta de hidalgos (1908) His third edition was notably "corrected" by the author (1912)
• sentimental comedy (1909)
• Alcalá de los Zegríes (1909)
• Love of charity (1909)
• Love of love (1911)
• The centaurus (1912)
• The Knights of the Cross (1915)
• The Seven Lives of Thomas Portolés (1920)
• The voice of blood (1921)
• The new man (1925)
• Death workers (1927)
• Boy of desires (1929)
• Under the yoke of the barbarians (1932)
• Christ of Hell (1940)
• The girls in my eyes (1941)
• Red and Gualda, Days of the Spanish Revolution (1952)
• Tragic Europe (1917-1919), stories about World War I.

Essays

• The School of Sophists (1910, dialogues)
• The student's layer (1921).