Issue 139, Summer 1996
Born in 1916 in Iria Flavia, a hamlet located in La Coruña, Galicia, Spain, into a wealthy family descended from Italian and English immigrants, Camilo José Cela later moved with his family to Madrid in 1925. In 1936, the year the Spanish civil war broke out, the twenty-year-old Cela completed his first work, Treading the Dubious Daylight, a book of poems. After being wounded in service, Cela spent a brief period of time during his convalescence as an official censor. Then in 1942, within the panorama of despair and chaos of postwar Spanish life, he secretly printed his first novel, The Family of Pascual Duarte, in a garage in Burgos. The novel sold out before the authorities were able to confiscate it, and met with immediate acclaim both by readers and critics alike. The event was so spectacular that today it is accepted as the starting point of Spanish postwar literary history. Cela consolidated his reputation as a novelist and writer by producing a few other works of great merit—including Those Passing Clouds, The Galician and His Crew, Rest Home, New Wanderings and Misfortunes of Lazarillo de Tormes, and his first travel book, Journey to the Alcarria. He also proved himself to be a multitalented artist, producing a series of paintings and drawings and appearing in a few movies.
Throughout these years, Cela earned his keep primarily through journalistic collaborations in various newspapers and magazines. 1951 proved to be a crucial year in his literary trajectory, being the year he published—in Argentina because it had been prohibited in Spain—his literary masterpiece The Hive. The official censors, angered by their inability to derail Cela’s brilliant and influential literary career, expelled him from the Press Association, which meant that his name could no longer appear in the printed media. But Cela unflinchingly continued and produced two more novels, Mrs. Caldwell Speaks to Her Son and The Blonde. He then considered it advisable to remove himself from the heated atmosphere of Madrid, perhaps remembering the fate of other intransigent Spanish writers such as Federico García Lorca. He left the Iberian Peninsula and installed himself and his family—his first wife, Rosario, and his son, Camilo José—on the island of Majorca, choosing against the exile to which many other Spanish writers of the period had resorted, and founded the literary magazine Papers from Son Armadans (Armadans being the neighborhood in which Cela lived). For however heated the climate, it was not able to impede Cela’s investiture into the Royal Spanish Academy in 1957. The years he spent in Majorca were fertile and saw the production of such works as The Rose, Slide for the Hungry, Secret Dictionary, St. Camillus 1936, and Officiating Tenebrae 5.
After serving king and country in 1977, the year he spent as a royal senator, Cela decided to take full advantage of having won his own war against Franco’s regime and its pesky censors. Not wishing to alter the image of the mischievous enfant terrible that he had had so much fun acquiring, he wrote a daring book full of scandalous language titled Chronicle of the Extraordinary Event of Archidona’s Dick. This was followed by another book along the same lines—an irreverent version of the classic La Celestina. After gleefully thumbing his nose at the ancien régime, Cela turned serious once again and in 1983 he produced Mazurka for Two Dead People, a structurally complicated and masterful story of love and death set in Galicia during the time of the civil war, which earned him the Premio Nacional de Literatura in 1984. In 1986 he returned to the region of La Alcarria to write New Journey to the Alcarria. However this second trip was not made with a backpack and on foot, but instead in a Rolls-Royce complete with a sculptor’s model as chauffeur.
Cela went on to receive every prize of merit in Spanish letters; in 1987 he received the Premio Príncipe de Asturias de las Letras for his overall literary work, and in 1994, the Premio Planeta for a new novel, Saint Andrew’s Cross, and in 1989 he was awarded the Nobel Prize. Yet it wasn’t until 1996 that Cela finally won Spain’s most prestigious literary award, the Premio Cervantes, due in part to a penchant for ruffling feathers and his indefatigable insistence on being the indomitable and singular Cela.
INTERVIEWER
You have said that often literature is “a deception, yet another fraud in the long series of frauds to which human lives are made subject.” Was your attempt to write “without subterfuge” the reason for such stark novels as The Hive and The Family of Pascual Duarte?
CAMILO JOSÉ CELA
Well, I don’t know if that was the reason, but I don’t think a writer can permit himself subterfuges, or tricks, or camouflage, or masks.
INTERVIEWER
You have won a host of literary awards, including the Premio Nacional de Literatura in 1985, the Premio Príncipe de Asturias in 1987, and the Premio Planeta in 1994, among others. I would imagine that winning the Nobel Prize in 1989 was the one that has given you the greatest satisfaction.
CELA
Actually, I have won very few prizes. I am one of the least awarded Spanish writers; it just so happens that the prizes I have won are the important ones. But yes, of course, winning the Nobel was a great honor.
INTERVIEWER
Your Nobel speech was dedicated to the literary work of the painter José Gutíerrez-Solana. He is an illustrious painter and although his literary work is not very well known, you seem to find it of considerable merit.
CELA
Yes, that’s right. I admire both his pictorial and literary work. I have always said that every page Solana has written has its corresponding reflection in his painting or every painting corresponds with a reflection in his literature. If you don’t immediately find the reflection, just keep looking and you will find it eventually. Solana was an extraordinary writer who created six books—magnificent pages. But unfortunately Spain is such a poor country that it doesn’t lend itself to having two ideas issuing from one single person. If a person is a good writer, then he can’t play bridge well also. Or be a magnificent golfer. No, it just isn’t done. It is obvious that in the case of Solana this is an absolute lie because he was a great painter as well as a great writer. But as a writer no one paid any attention to him, which is a pity because his work is truly remarkable.
INTERVIEWER
Saul Bellow once wrote that you put yourself in a paradoxical position by attacking literature and then writing novels. What is your opinion?
CELA
Well, perhaps he is correct; I don’t really know. I believe that literature is always a subterfuge. Truman Capote, who was a friend of mine, once interviewed me for a weekly that was published in Tangier called España. He told me that he would have liked to have written Mrs. Caldwell Speaks to Her Son. But it cannot matter to a writer what others say of him. Bellow may be right, but I don’t really know.
INTERVIEWER
Many critics claim to have found an existentialist backdrop to your work; man is in the end responsible for his actions. However, Bellow considers there to be little theory in your work, that you are not trying to convey existential, sexual, or political messages.
CELA
And he’s right, without a doubt.
INTERVIEWER
Do you feel then that a writer has a social responsibility toward his readers?
CELA
No, he has a responsibility before himself and his own conscience. He must have a very great sense of his own conscience, be very aware of himself.
INTERVIEWER
Would you agree with Bellow that in your frankness and lack of squeamishness in detailing the harshest of human landscapes your work can be compared to that of Jean-Paul Sartre or Alberto Moravia?
CELA
I’m not sure. Well, yes, they both were friends of mine, above all Moravia. It’s a pity that Moravia was never given the Nobel because he certainly deserved it. I think the things we writers say about each other are simply an extension of what we would like to be true, but that perhaps are not completely accurate. Also, there exists a certain responsibility—the commitment I just mentioned—to your own conscience. There is nothing more grievous than a writer who is at the service of a master. It’s really a horrible affair. Because afterwards, the writer has no choice but to swallow his own work. Look what has happened to the work of the artists who were under Stalin’s charge. Under Stalin’s or under anyone else’s for that matter. The other day someone called a piece of information to my attention that had been taken from The Guinness Book of Records. The human being to whom the greatest number of statues has been raised in the entire world is Stalin. He would give the order, Make me a statue! and they had to continue making them. Only to find that later they all came crashing obstreperously to the ground! It’s sheer nonsense and one shouldn’t allow it to happen.