Galdós's letters to Pardo Bazán: from passion to mystery

Agustín González de Amezúa y Mayo, member of the Royal Academy of Language from 1929 until his death in 1956, owner of one of the most important libraries in Spain (with a large number of documents from Lope de Vega, Menéndez Pelayo and the Inquisition) He guarded the letters that Benito Pérez Galdós sent to Emilia Pardo Bazán, as confirmed by sources familiar with this correspondence to EL PAÍS.

A part of the enigma has been revealed, but the unknown remains about the whereabouts of documents that until now were believed to have been destroyed by the wife of the dictator Francisco Franco, Carmen Polo, or in the fire of the Meirás pazo in 1978 .

Clara María González de Amezúa, the only living child of the academic, confirms to EL PAÍS by phone that she saw the letters.

At the time, says the 91-year-old chef, winner of the National Gastronomy Award in 2015, she was not aware of the importance of these documents.

He does not remember the moment precisely, but believes that this correspondence was stolen from his father's library.

He relates that it must have been an oversight: "Maybe he left them on a table and someone came in and took them away."

Another of the people consulted for this report knew the version of the robbery that the academic's daughter tells.

But it adds a little more mystery.

"In the division of the inheritance many documents were misplaced," says this source.

For her part, Clara María González de Amezúa assures that her father always "carried out with great rigor" the order and care of his collection.

The academic and literary critic (1881-1956) was a great collector of books and manuscripts, a legacy that he completed with the inheritance of the library from his uncle, the writer and journalist Ramón Nocedal Romea.

This first version of the letters coincides, only in part, with that of Guillermo Blázquez, a bookseller from Madrid's Cuesta de Moyano, who revived the exchange of letters between the authors last Friday, December 11.

Blázquez, according to EL PAÍS, was able to see 30 years ago “a box with the letters, I estimate there would be between 70 and 80” in one of the houses of González de Amezúa's heirs.

The bookseller did not want to specify in which home or who showed him the documents to preserve the identity of his customers.

In the space of a few minutes he briefly read a couple.

"I have a vague memory, they were somewhat risque for that moment," he confessed to this newspaper.

A Madrid bookseller accesses Pérez Galdós's passionate letters to Pardo Bazán

Agustín González de Amezúa, the academic who protected Galdós's letters to Pardo Bazán

González de Amezúa, as described by his daughter, was "a very studious and rigorous, tender and hard-working man" who built his house - near the San Jerónimo race in Madrid - around his library.

This house was sold to the Xunta de Galicia in the early nineties.

In 1992, Manuel Fraga traveled to Madrid to inaugurate the Casa de Galicia in the capital.

"The library was where the assembly hall is now," they explain at the Casa de Galicia.

They never saw the books.

At the time of the sale, the building was already empty, they explain in this entity.

After González de Amezúa's death, the estate was divided into three parts, each one going to one of the three children who still lived.

Two of the family members who have guarded the part that Clara María González de Amezúa and her sister María del Buen Consejo González de Amezúa, Maruja, received as an inheritance claim that neither received the letters from Benito Pérez Galdós.

"I have been working for two years with the material that corresponded to Maruja who died this year and I have not found those letters," says one of these people who prefers not to reveal her identity.

He did find some letters from Isabel II and a large number of books on the Spanish Inquisition.

The third part of the inheritance was received by the heirs of Ramón González de Amezúa, who was director of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in 1991, who died in 2015. In this part of the legacy there are no letters, says one person who has had access to this documentation.

This source has always believed that Galdós's letters were part of the historical and literary material that the academic donated to the RAE in 1953. According to the information that appears on the institution's website, among all the documentation there are 38 letters that Pardo Bazán sent to Pérez Galdós under the title:

Amorous correspondence of “a famous writer with another famous novelist”.

This collection would later be disseminated in books such as

Miquiño Mine

and biographical essays on the writer.

"It has a certain logic that, if he had the correspondence of Pardo Bazán, he also had that of Galdós in his hands," say sources from the RAE.

With the death of the academic, the family tried to donate and sell the heritage to Spanish institutions.

They did not succeed.

"They put a lot of problems on us, nobody wanted it," says one of the people contacted.

They had an offer from a university in the United States, but the family did not agree on the sale.

Academic of the letter Z, in addition to being a collaborator in media such as

ABC

and

La Vanguardia

, González de Amezúa, also delivered to the RAE before dying his memoirs,

Sentimental Epistolary

, which will not be able to be read until 2026, when 70 years of his death, as established in his will. A document that will give more clues about the correspondence between Pérez Galdós and Bazán.