SPAIN: Cela, Literature’s Irreverent ‘Señor’, Dies at 85

By Tito Drago Reprint | | Print |

Tito Drago

MADRID, Jan 18 2002 (IPS) - Camilo José Cela, Spain’s outspoken writer of the 20th century and winner of the Nobel and Cervantes prizes for literature, died of heart failure Thursday in Madrid, where he had been hospitalised for the last week due to cardio-respiratory problems. He was 85.

Cela was “a capital figure of Spanish culture… a poet, novelist, lexicographer, essayist, linguist, a man representing the totality of the art,” said Víctor García de la Concha, director of the ‘Real Academia Española’, pillar of Spanish language and letters.

The Swedish Academy awarded Cela the Nobel prize in 1989, citing his “rich and intensive prose” and underscored the fact, after “Don Quijote”, the immortal work by Miguel de Cervantes, written four centuries ago, Cela’s “La familia de Pascual Duarte” (The Family of Pascual Duarte), was the most-read novel in Spanish literature.

News of the author’s death was received with deep regret by most, though there were some minor exceptions.

King Juan Carlos, the royal family, Prime Minister José María Aznar, political leaders from across the spectrum, academics, journalists, fellow authors, and the Catholic Church expressed their sadness at Cela’s death and their admiration for his literary works.

But Francisco Rodríguez, parliamentary spokesman for the Galicia Nationalist Bloc, a leftist party that seeks the independence of the northwest region of the same name, lamented the author’s death, but then went on to criticise his “mercantilist disposition and his consorting with political power for personal gain.”

Cela was born in 1916 in the Galician village of Iria Flavia and was propelled to international fame with “La familia de Pascual Duarte”.

He fought in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) with Francisco Franco’s forces and, in 1943, under the by-then consolidated Franco regime (1939-1975), at his own request he began work as a censor of two religious publications.

These precedents, as well as his disdain for leftist politicians, made him a target for a great deal of criticism. It came to a head in 2001, when he was accused of plagiarising a book and of using unknown writers-for-hire, then signing his own name to their work, in an attempt to boost his literary output.

Nevertheless, the news of Cela’s death prompted even the more “politically correct” in the literary world to recognise him as one of the greats of Spanish literature.

Leftist Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, respected author and journalist, stated that Cela was “a notable stylist” and “an extraordinary storehouse of language.”

Fellow writer José Manuel Caballero Bonald said Cela will continue to be a great master of the language but that he was the last of a literary tradition that began with Francisco de Quevedo and included Ramón del Valle-Inclán and Pío Baroja. “His oeuvre is as rich as his changes of character,” he added.

Cela, who said he had “a golden childhood”, was expelled from four schools and dropped out of three universities. He produced more than 40 novels and wrote regular newspaper columns.

It took a great deal of effort to find a publisher for his first novel, “La familia de Pascual Duarte”, in 1942. Its second edition, in 1943, was withdrawn from bookshops under the order of government censors due to its brutal portrayal of the post-civil war situation in Spain.

He later wrote “La Colmena” (The Beehive, 1951), and had to travel to Argentina to find a publisher because the book was banned in Spain.

In the later years of his life, controversy and his provocative attitudes continued. Shortly after being accused before justice of plagiarism – charges that were dismissed – he gave the inaugural presentation at the Second International Congress of the Spanish Language, held in Valladolid last October.

In his address he denied the validity of the Spanish terms for “Latin America” and “Latin American”, calling them a “misleading and ascientific aberration.” In his opinion, the correct terms in Spanish would be ‘hispanos’ or ‘ibéricos’ (the latter referring to the Iberian peninsula) because they would include the Brazilians and the Portuguese.

At that same congress, he prompted another controversy by reading a speech that he had given on several previous occasions. Many of the participants in the event considered it a show of disrespect and the incident was the subject of debate in the Spanish media for several days. Cela never offered an excuse or an apology.

Meanwhile, the Catholic bishops, who this week are engaged in spiritual exercises at a centre in the outskirts of Madrid, are praying for the soul of a writer who they recognise as “one of the great writers of the 20th century”.

Cela is to be buried Friday in his hometown in Galicia.