A mystery called Carmen Laforet

Again, Carmen Laforet.

This is the centenary year of his birth, which occurred on September 6, in Barcelona, ​​in an apartment on Aribau street to which he would return as a young man fleeing an uncomfortable family experience and that would become famous after

Nada

.

His father, Eduardo Laforet, an attractive and seductive architect, married a few months after he became the widower of Teodora Díaz, mother of the three children of the marriage, and the uproar in Las Palmas, where the family had lived since 1923, was remarkable because he was a well-known man in the city.

However, the jealousy and tension between the new wife and Teodora's still very young children made this new marital adventure a difficult experience.

Sartre wrote about Flaubert's lack of love in his childhood: "When love is present, the mass of the spirit rises, and when it is absent it sinks."

This was the case, at least in part, in the Laforet family, and the first-born of the three siblings set out at age 18 - she met them during the trip - to Barcelona, ​​where the paternal family lived.

He did so in part following a young love, Ricardo Lezcano, whom he had met in Las Palmas, and, in part, with the aim of leaving behind the emptiness in which he was growing up and that he would harshly recreate in his second novel,

La isla. and the demons

(1952).

A work that, at the time, disappointed as everyone expected the continuation of Andrea's story.

It gave shape to the moral discouragement that existed in Spain after the Civil War without the fanfare of Camilo José Cela

We can imagine the hopes, the rebellion, the desire for freedom with which that dreamer who was Carmen Laforet arrived in the Catalan capital.

His grandparents still lived there, of whom he kept a very pleasant childhood memory, and the young Ricardo had arrived in the city a few days before to continue his studies at the industrial school.

So the future writer landed expecting to live the happiest days, but "nothing" would turn out as expected.

"Nothing" to see that city half destroyed by bombings and misery after three years of war with the sweet memories that it treasured from its childhood.

The impact must have been considerable if we think that in the Canary Islands the years of the war were only a slight echo of what was happening in the Peninsula.

The relationship with Ricardo did not prosper either and the studies to which he had committed with his father did not prosper.

In fact, the novel, already written in Madrid between 1942 and 1944 (although with earlier sketches), perfectly sums up his real experience in Barcelona.

That didn't go well.

Or if.

Because the writer would know how to project her strange spirit in a literary way (strange because it is seductively distant and content) and thousands of young people who like her wanted to think about their lives amid the rubble would melt into it.

Ultimately, Laforet would shape the moral discouragement that could be felt in 1940 without the stridency of a Pascual Duarte, for example.

Nothing

is a phenomenological novel, and I say it even being aware that the writer could not know this philosophical current that prevailed at the beginning of the century, but that is her intuition and the nature of her gaze, so that instead of offering us a narration with extensive descriptions of the city, the action and the characters, the author focuses on telling us how the young Andrea is doing from the moment she arrives in Barcelona until she flees to Madrid following her friend Ena - Linka Babecka, a fundamental friend in his life.

Between arrival and departure, his illusions collapse.

That was also what happened in the author's mind, although in the future she would deny again and again the undoubted autobiographical character of the novel.

Reasonably, since that autobiography, more than logical in a new author, would have severe family consequences.

In any case, the illusions that fell in Barcelona were followed by new ones that flourished in Madrid.

The author settles there, in the apartment of her aunt Carmen Díaz, who would act as the second mother of the Laforet brothers in the following years.

The correspondence to which I was able to access when he wrote the biography

A woman in flight

, in collaboration with Israel Rolón, gives an idea of ​​the two hectic years he has lived in the capital.

He enrolled in Law, expanded his circle of friends with Linka —Juan Eduardo Zúñiga remembered it very well— and turned to “hard work” that could only be the writing of Nada.

It will be Linka who proposes to offer his manuscript to a young editor and man of letters, Manuel Cerezales, then director of Pace, a publishing house founded together with Ricardo Páez (hence the acronym) and which would soon die.

Cerezales was captivated by the story of that young woman who was in the clouds and was able to immerse the reader in the adventures of a teenager who lives the experience of her freedom in a difficult environment for the first time.

Shortly after, he proposed to present it to the first edition of the award organized by Destino and probably collaborated in its final writing, giving him valuable advice.

The writer and another great friend of Laforet's those years Lola de la Fe recalled that, a few days before the deadline was closed, the typed pages occupied all the free spaces in Aunt Carmen's house.

They were scattered around the dining room and pinned to the upholstery of chairs and armchairs.

That was a hard test for a young woman who would not make order her main virtue, as she herself admits in some of her articles.

The religious conversion promoted by tennis player Lilí Álvarez, her friend and secret love, explains the mystical turn of her third novel, 'La mujer nueva'

It is almost difficult to write that she won the first Nadal Prize on January 6, 1945, at the age of 23: it is the most worn description in the history of Spanish literature —the other is to describe her as a “strange girl”, as if there were no more ideas in the world.

The jury, encouraged by its main defender, the critic Rafael Vázquez Zamora, barely doubted between César González Ruano -who presented a half-finished novel-, the Galician José María Álvarez Blázquez and Laforet, although this was finally imposed by only three votes over five.

Josep Vergés voted in the fifth round for

In the town there are new faces

, by Blázquez —to avoid a humiliating five to zero, but Juan Ramón Masoliver unexpectedly changed his mind and they were three to two—.

It is an important fact because it would not fail to bring consequences in the Vergés-Laforet relationship: both would be aware in the future of the distance that the "original sin" had imposed between them, that is, that the editor had not supported it in the last vote.

Over the years, a paradoxical situation would occur, as well as exciting, and that recalls the one lived in 1951 by Salinger as a result of the publication of

The Catcher in the Rye

.

And it is that both writers would do the impossible to disassociate themselves from the success obtained with their first novels, although they never managed to regain their vital freedom.

Laforet would henceforth be forced to publish everything he wrote because commitments were raining down on him.

The fact of being treated, from one day to the next, like a professional writer, with all her demands - when what she wanted, given her youth, was to grow as a person, see the world, have experiences and find herself - it would be traumatic and Nothing would become a nightmare, an existential mortgage, a very heavy burden to carry because it lacked closure.

Juan Ramón Masoliver, resentful of Laforet, compared his work with that of Álvarez Blázquez writing: “Carmen Laforet's is a bombshell book, a novel that greatly compromises its author for further outings.

Because after Nothing there are no easy lyricisms, or unhappy loves and other young girl stories ”.

This was the critical context.

What could Laforet do?

It would take seven years to publicize a second novel, The Island and the Demons, conceived with all the pressure imaginable.

In it he took a step back in time, returning to the spaces of his childhood and adolescence in Las Palmas, with the logical disappointment of his readers.

Because, without wishing to do so, he had become, together with Camilo José Cela, the axis of Spanish literary life, an indisputable reference when it came to the narrative written after the Civil War, the best demonstration that not everything had been lost with the exile of so many valuable intellectuals.

But while the author of

La familia de Pascual Duarte

displayed an amazing activity - between 1942 and 1945 he published five works - to affirm his literary leadership, Laforet recommended Cela's books in Destino magazine and all he wanted was to take a train and escape .

So he told Elena Fortún, to whom he would also confess his fears, his precipitous marriage to Manuel Cerezales.

"May you be happy for many years and accept the responsibility of living a life that was not destined for you," the author of

Celia

responds at first

, who would later change her mind.

"It is more urgent to discover our hidden face than the hidden face of the Moon," she wrote about the silence of women.

The truth is that from

Nada

each novel would be an ordeal for the writer, stunned by marriage, motherhood —five children—, editorial pressures, the expectations of her readers, regular collaborations, financial needs and intimate desires. of freedom and wandering.

In 1951 he would meet tennis player Lilí Álvarez, who had returned to Spain after the war, abandoning sport and turning to the gestation of a secular Catholic thought that would stop the empire of the Church in the relationship of believers with God.

The writer was fascinated by such an overwhelming personality that she seemed to have answers for everything — an article in

Destiny

dedicated to her marks the beginning of their friendship.

The religious conversion brought about by her friend and secret love explains the mystical turn taken by her third novel,

La mujer nueva

(1955)

, apparently

so distant from

Nada

.

A work that deals with the sublimation of female desire, exploring, faced with the dilemma of desiring or inhibiting, a third way, and that is the encounter with oneself through God.

Was your proposal an emancipatory option?

In any case, that book was the preamble to the flight that the writer would soon adopt in real life.

But it was not yet his last word,

La insolación

(1963) had it, with its courageous defense of homosexual dignity and the denunciation of the obscurantism in which they lived then.

A novel that would confront her, wrongly, with the Catalan publishing world for her break with Destino.

It was published by Planeta, the fruit of the new and more substantial contract signed with José Manuel Lara.

In the adventurous prologue he promised a trilogy,

Three steps out of time,

but it could no longer be.

The writer was about to break down.

When she traveled to the United States in 1965, invited by her government in fantastic conditions, Graciela Palau de Nemes noticed the physical change experienced: “In 1965 I was not the same person.

He gave me the impression that he had aged prematurely ”.

From that trip would come the book

Parallel 35

, written with a tragic descriptive simplicity.

Until her death, which occurred on February 28, 2004, almost 40 years later, the author tried to rebuild her life alone.

In an article in

La Actualidad Española

—August 1966— she bravely faced the problem that disturbed her: “To the masculine 'you, shut up', said in public, there has been the slow, powerful, terrible response of the feminine power in silence.

The feminine mystery is true.

It exists and should not exist ”.

She had the idea to address it in a book called

The Gynoecium

.

It did not come out, as the second installment of

Three Steps Out of Time did not

, but there is documentary evidence of his intimate need to be honest: "It is more urgent to discover our hidden face than the hidden face of the Moon."

Laforet saw the problem he faced as a novelist in Spain with great clarity.

But he was one step away from the literary blockade.

And the dark stage arrived.

Anna Caballé is the author, together with Israel Rolón, of the biography

'Carmen Laforet.

A woman on the run '

(RBA, 2010).

Stories, children and articles

Carmen Laforet collaborates in the magazine 'Destino' between 1948 and 1953, a little over four years, and does so in parallel to her collaborations in the newspaper Informaciones de Madrid, the writing of her Chekhovian and wonderful stories and the heavy weight that writing meant his second novel.

It is his period of greatest literary activity, between the ages of 27 and 32, he has his first three children and there is no interview where he is not asked about Andrea's literary future (read the article entitled 'The continuation', where he makes it clear let no one wait for her because Andrea has died with the book).

The most surprising thing about those regular collaborations is that not once does he mention his novel.

Neither 'Nada' nor the experience that created it exist in his articles, hired however under the impact that the work had on Spanish society.

Vergés had proposed a weekly article written with Andrea's feminine view of the world.

And Laforet strives to develop an attractive yet epochal feminine point of view.

It does so based on a sui generis actuality from which reflections and interrelationships appear that seem casual but that are offered to the reading experience as a plot full of meaning and intention.

Her articles are light as wisps of smoke, but they open a clue to the role of women in the world.

Prudently and firmly at the same time.

The vivid relationship of the writer with the landscape and the climate - the cold air of a morning, the great loneliness of the afternoon ... - occupy an important space in her writing and she has yet to study.

Now, those interesting articles of 'Destino' are published collected in 'Points of view of a woman', a volume of whose edition I will not comment.

It is enough to take a look at the brief bibliography to connect the dots and understand the sectarianism with which it has been prepared: the most complete edition of 'Nada' - that of Domingo Ródenas for Criticism - is not cited and the biography of the writer is limited to the old booklet of his son, Agustín Cerezales.

As the publishers do not resort to the biographical context, the volume lacks an essential contextualization.

Some articles written regularly in a certain period of time are not comparable to a novel that perhaps can be considered without knowing anything else.

Let us hope that this sectarianism is not the dominant trend of the Laforetian year.

Views of a woman

Carmen Laforet.

Editing by Ana Cabello and Blanca Ripoll.

Foreword by Inés Martín Rodrigo.

Destination, 2021. 414 pages.

20 euros.

Look for it in your bookstore