Galdós, day by day

The biographies of writers went through a purgatory of discredit from which fortunately they have emerged. They may have once disrespected the autonomy of creation, or encouraged what, as early as the 1940s, two American critics stigmatized as intentional fallacy : identifying work and creator. But it is convenient that, when it comes to understanding the complexity of a text, the literal is not enough for us. And even less when we talk about a genre like the novel that was born by engulfing all the forms of writing that surrounded it ...

In this extensive and suggestive biography of Galdós, Yolanda Arencibia reminds us that it was Clarín - critic, colleague and friend - who wanted to write the first of all, although the interested party resisted the effort that ended in a short sketch published in 1889. Still in The life of the author, two day laborers of the printed letter, Luis Antón del Olmet and Arturo García Caraffa, wrote a more extensive and diffuse one in their series The Great Spaniards . But it was a Lithuanian Hispanicist, Hyman Chonon Berkowitz, emigrated to the United States, of whom the one that has been a reference to the later ones was published posthumously: Galdós. Spanish Liberal Crusader (1948). The closest of the very few memorable ones was that of the mourned Pedro Ortiz-Armengol, a diplomat by trade and a seasoned investigator: Life of Galdós (nineteen ninety six).

The one that Yolanda Arencibia, professor at the University of Las Palmas, recent editor of the complete narrative work and organizer of the Galdosian International Congresses, has now written can be compared in length and detail. Galdós is present almost day by day of his existence, always faithful to his stimuli: seeing life and filling lines. And, at the same time, inhabiting -like all- their contradictions. Some are made more explicit in these pages: Galdós' devotion to his family and having always lived surrounded by close beings who sometimes paid for his expenses or organized their homes in Madrid or Santander, do you not have something in search of a home comfort without marriage commitments? And that persistent parade of submissive lovers (the rebellious Concha-Ruth Morell is a striking exception; Emilia Pardo Bazán, too, although in a different way ...), does it not reveal the bad conscience she had of her selfishness and, therefore, the reason of your magnanimity when you created Amparo, Fortunata and Tristana? He was never a man of active gathering, nor did he like massive tributes, although some accepted him with pleasure because he was satisfied with the recognition ... To patent it. He was always surrounded by attentive and helpful friends: doctors with literary hobbies, journalists, colleagues, actors and actresses, politicians ... That universe of admirers served him to find out what he did not know, to have occasional companions on a long trip and to be witness of the life of a country that he loved and that he came to know as the rooms of his own house.

"Copying from reality" is a phrase that will scandalize literary analysts but that explains a lot of a fictional world where the search for a perspective or plot is subordinated to the preeminence of observed reality: the fun and significant anthroponym, the idiom (or the hose) caught in the flight of a conversation, the picturesque and revealing scene. Looking for them was his life… At one point, he was a riot to manage his money. He was not the victim of a publisher, as he once believed, and he failed in his crazy and ruinous attempt to emancipate himself as an entrepreneur, until he was saved by the providential fold of the Hernando Bookshop. He was generous with those around him, and spent a lot on maintaining a life that was worthy of a great international writer of the 19th century: his Quinta del Sardinero Santander, baptized San Quintín, was a very expensive whim ...

All this -the taste for life and a certain dose of selfishness- served him to write novels and his biographer has not stopped talking about all of them and the vital framework that makes them closer. Of course, the magisterial ones - La desheredada , Fortunata and Jacinta , El amigo Manso , Misericordia - and also the essentially significant ones - such as Doña Perfecta or La familia de León Roch - are analyzed extensively , but we often appreciate Arencibia's emphasis on some less frequented novel: The forbidden , due to its coherence and impassivity; The campaign of the Maestrazgo and Aita Tettauen , for being the jewels of the national episodes of the third and fourth series, respectively; The unknown and Reality , because they illuminated a thematic and aesthetic crossroads - between the theater and the novel - on which the last Galdós pivoted. The author's book has given ample space to the Galdosian theater, which is rarely read today, which gave it so many tantrums and in which, however, it trusted a lot. There are certain notes on his cursed works - Los condenados - and on his successes - San Quintín , Electra , El abuelo , Casandra - but also on the most innovative and daring, such as Alma y vida or Alceste . And when speaking of theater, one also speaks of the musical, key to the author's ambitious stage conception: what is still a wake-up call about the absence of a monograph dealing with Galdós and music ...

Meanwhile, reading this biography, where everything is well-founded and without emphasis, punctuated with quotes from the writer, always very well-sought, is a pleasant necessity for its regulars and, hopefully, an inciting discovery for those who are not yet.

Galdós. A biography (XXIII Comillas Prize for History, Biography and Memories). Yolanda Arencibia.Tusquets, 2020. 862 pages. 26 euros.