Delibes a Umbral: "I don't want to be a nagging mother"

Miguel Delibes, Francisco Umbral and Manu Leguineche (from left to right), in Madrid.

“When one is a premature orphan and also an only child, it is fatal to spend his life looking for spiritual parents and older siblings.

I have had several.

I have taken them and left them.

Some parents have come out gulfs for me —and not just the meat one—;

some godbrothers have been dumb to me.

Time passes and there remains, over the years, an older brother in my life: Miguel Delibes ”.

Francisco Umbral, who was not an orphan but the son of a single mother, referred to his great mentor in the biography that he dedicated to him in 1970. “He has been my almost only kinship with the goodness of man, with honesty […] Valladolid was the oldest and most distant boy, from a better family and the smartest, who was never found on the street ”.

Delibes was born in 1920;

Threshold, in 1932. Their paths crossed when in 1958 the first occupied the direction of

and it was proposed to rejuvenate the writing of the Valladolid rotating centenary.

• Next station: Delibes

• Umbral and his father, real novel

Thus began a relationship that would last a lifetime and that, with the young journalist's departure to Madrid in 1961, was prolonged in a long correspondence that will be released next year at the Destino publishing house.

Prepared by Luciano López and Araceli Godino, who are still working on it, the work will serve as the culmination of the centenary of the author of

, to which the National Library dedicates a large exhibition postponed in March due to the state of alarm and that this Thursday, for Finally, Kings Felipe and Letizia inaugurate.

Written between 1960 and 2007 - the year of Umbral's death, which his teacher survived for three years - the almost 300 letters are the faithful portrait of two almost opposite personalities.

"His bonhomie, his castellany, his seven children, his good sense, his realism and other things are a respectful distance from me," wrote Threshold, who, despite the differences, thanked Delibes "for his good sense of Castilian literary teacher, professor of provinces and a realist writer, always correcting the aesthetic and suicidal baroque of my doing and my living ”.

If the two volumes of correspondence with Josep Vergés (2002) and with Gonzalo Sobejano (2014) show the relationship of the author of

with the editor and critic with whom he was best understood, the volume of letters with Umbral will show their relationship with a colleague who he encourages, rebukes and protects.

Sometimes weekly and sometimes, as Umbral recalls, "on a daily basis."

The master at hand;

the disciple, typed.

“Very good your Literary Madrid, but a warning.

Try to avoid gossip or excessively harsh comments —the one from Castellet today— because along this path, readers will ask you more and more and my wish that this sympathetic section 'gets' in Madrid, and with it

, will not be able to be fulfilled, ”Delibes wrote on April 18, 1961 to the young man whom he had sent as a cultural correspondent to the capital and whom he still calls by his real name: Francisco Pérez.

At the height of 1967, the relationship is much more equal: “Dear Paco: Okay.

Your opinion and mine about what the novel should be do not coincide.

I think it does not matter at all for me to tell you once again that in style and quality you have achieved unsurpassed mastery.

On the other hand, I am very afraid that readers will keep putting Camus and Bellow before Kerouac and Grillet for a long time.

We are nineteenth-century, we can't help it ”.

A little later he reminds him that he is “an important man” but warns him: “I admire your fertility.

I think, however, that you should not work so hard and, specifically, books, you should rest more ”.

Three years later, Umbral will remember the days of his youth when he and his mother "lost tuberculosis" dedicated themselves to reading

, published in 1950. She did not like it at all: "It is not worth the paper on which it is written" .

To him, very much.

In his opinion, Delibes "desnoventayochiza" Castilla and the aforementioned thanks him for his clairvoyance.

“I have always said that you are an awakened man”, he wrote to him in 1968. “Your theory regarding the intention of my work - return to the state of nature to meet again - is an intelligent theory and, furthermore, it is true.

If the man wants to break his nose against the technique, there him.

I comply with advising you of this risk ”.

It has taken half a century for the ecological reading of a work that for a long time was dismissed as capriciously contrary to progress to settle.

Sometimes, the teacher shares with the disciple doubts about his own work, his “relative literary confusion, not because he has reached any peak, but because one thinks, sometimes, that the little he had to say has already been said.

Other times, of course, you think you are still full of things, so full that you will not have time to say them all, but these are the usual hours of depression and exaltation that take turns in me like day and night " .

At times, the doubts are professional.

When, in January 1975, José Ortega Spottorno offers to direct EL PAÍS, which is preparing to leave, Delibes consults "intelligent friends involved in the trade."

Among them, Manuel Leguineche, César Alonso de los Ríos and Umbral: “I, the truth, do not see anything positive in all this (money, vanity, power, social projection are not, as you know, stimuli for me) if it is not a possibility of leaving before the hole in which I am stuck.

I am old and discouraged ”.

The hole was the untimely death of his wife, Ángeles de Castro, a few months ago.

Finally, he did not move from his house on Paseo Zorrilla.

As he repeated later, he did not want to also remain a widower of

and Real Valladolid.

“I admire your fertility.

I believe, however, that you should not work so hard and, specifically, books, you should rest them more ”, Delibes writes to Umbral

In the years of greatest complicity between the two writers — the sixties and seventies — the letters arrive, as Delibes says, “from bed to bed”.

The two friends tell each other about their ailments and illnesses and recommend doctors and medications.

While Umbral is still on

payroll

, his boss makes sure that he gets paid during each leave and that the newspaper pays the bill for the treatments.

It also offers you its own holiday home, in the moor of Burgos.

“Yours does not surprise me.

I don't want to be a nagging mother, but I think I had warned you […] But, well, now the point is that you rest.

It occurs to me that maybe it would be good for you to change the environment, go to the country.

For this I offer you my cabin in Sedano.

There is air, sun, veal trout and immense peace.

You will also find good people, the kind that Rousseau believed in, that is, not corrupted by civilization ”.

When the health problems of the parents subside, those of the children appear.

In 1964, Miguel Delibes' younger children — Adolfo and Camino, four and two years old — were badly burned by boiling oil.

Two years later, the father will still take advantage of a trip to Barcelona to visit a plastic surgeon while attending an assignment: to supervise the dialogues of

, the David Lean film.

In 1973, the joy at the Delibes' home over the birth of the first granddaughter, Elisa, contrasts with the concern at the Umbral home.

His only son —Francisco, whom they call

— is five years old, suffering from leukemia and Ángeles de Castro writes to his old friend: “The granddaughter makes me very excited — perhaps too much.

Miguel often repeats to me: 'But don't think it's yours!'

How is the precious Pincho?

Very often I think of Spain [Suárez] and you, and I want to call you ... But I think it's better not to overwhelm you with questions.

We love you.

Yours affects us ”.

Pincho and Ángeles died a few months later.

Francisco Umbral took a year to dedicate to his son

.

Miguel Delibes waited 17 to write

.

Two masterpieces of mourning literature.

Two characters.