Tears of Steel: A Biography of the Almighty and Eccentric Carmen Balcells

One of the substantial differences between biography and novel —both based on stories of human lives— is that the first is subject to the existential characteristics offered by his character, while the novelist is free to subject his characters to the tension of the style that you want to confer to the text.

By this I mean that the narrative of a biography depends on the subject to be biographed and the questions that may be asked about his life.

The writer and academic Carme Riera has just published the biography of the literary agent par excellence of the Hispanic world,

.

With Balcells (1930-2015) Riera maintained a 40-year friendship (since the first took charge of her representation, after the enormous success obtained by Riera with

in 1975).

Forty years, it is said soon.

However, this is not an optimal, even favorable, condition for writing a biography.

How far can friendship go in a story that presumes objectivity and rigor?

To what extent can the contrary requirements of discretion (due to friendship) and sincerity (due to gender) be combined?

Carme Riera has successfully managed to deal with the dangers of the sweetened story, of worshiping the personality of her biography, to deliver an exciting story whose narrative structure is at the service of what may interest us as readers.

The author herself refers to the danger that she has just pointed out on a couple of occasions: she was a close friend of the agent, but she has no intention of surrendering to the hagiography of the character, mythologized over the years,

And the truth is that it does not give in to the myth, staging a woman with an overflowing personality whose knowledge catches the reading from the first moment.

An insecure, anxious, authoritarian woman, detached to the point of folly, with a born instinct for power, a lover of absolute control of her environment, easily emotional, intuitive, practical, intelligent, ambitious, disconcerting, superstitious, vehement, very hard-working, jealous that her employees could outshine her and with an enormous desire to fascinate (dominate?) others with her multiple organizational talents, a circumstance that over time would become her main flaw when it comes to maintaining healthy management friends and benefits.

Riera builds a choral biography,

It was capable of flooding any space with yellow roses, no matter how large it was;

or to send a helicopter to Nélida Piñon to get her out of a traffic jam

This is the most striking aspect of the biography, because it is hard to even imagine a personality as baroque as that of Carmen Balcells, organizer of majestic parties;

capable of flooding any space with yellow roses, however large it may be;

of sending a helicopter to Nélida Piñon to get her out of a traffic jam or conscientiously decorating the apartments that she rented for her authors according to her particular tastes.

She wrote down what liked whom and attended to it according to their preferences: she could send José Luis Sampedro a desk bought at an antique dealer as a birthday present (but she also easily clipped the wings of anyone who wanted to go too smart with her).

Who can go to all this without neglecting what is important, the representation of the authors that you have in your portfolio?

Balcells attended to everything in a way that is hardly unparalleled and leaves a feeling of amazement that is what I would like to convey.

I myself, very young, received a call from him urging me to change the plane ticket that he had bought from Adolfo Bioy Casares to take him to Barcelona: “You have invited him, fine, but he will travel first class and with KLM, and he should pick you up at the airport with an appropriate car.

Or he… he will not come.”

I will never forget that order from a person I did not know and had nothing to do with our invitation to the Argentine writer to give a lecture at the University of Barcelona: neither good morning nor hello,

How are you?

Half the world has anecdotes with her —not to mention journalists who treated her in some depth (Juan Cruz, Xavi Ayén, Sergio Vila-Sanjuán or Carles Geli)—.

The anecdote is prodigious and was decisive in the gestation of the myth.

Carme Riera makes an effort to put it together for the immense pleasure of the readers of the book.

However, this would not be enough and it is not in the case of a biography.

Because beyond the curiosity that Balcells arouses due to his character, forged from a large number of dissimilar ingredients (hence his baroque style), lies his true professional relevance, on two levels: his almost Promethean determination to break with servitude that authors maintained with respect to publishers, endowing them with the condition of free writers who deserve to be and feel well paid if their work demands it.

Until the arrival of Balcells to literary life, writers received agonizing liquidations, signed life contracts and their work was at the mercy of mercantile agreements

Until the arrival of Balcells to literary life, writers received agonizing liquidations, signed life contracts and their work was left at the mercy of commercial agreements that in many cases were not even fulfilled.

The agent fought against all this legal and economic lack of protection, transforming the legal and editorial landscape.

Riera also does not hide the crazy excesses to which that turn of the rudder driven and strongly supported by her has led over the years, but, as always happens, what will have to be asked is to what extent the demands and pretensions of one and the other can be balanced. to arrive at reasonable solutions.

In any case, its role did not remain solely in the defense of authorial rights, but rather it resolutely opted for authors, works and literary trajectories until setting up its own policy, and this aspect, once again well reconstructed, sheds a new light on the history of the Latin American

, here treated from a very human nuance by a biographer who meets —helas— all the conditions to move, with the security with which she does so, in the midst of what was an unstoppable whirlwind.

And turn it into an intelligent and balanced story.

However, the result gives a lot to think about.

The thought of an editor.

By Carmen Riera

Friendship or business:

"The night of Three Kings' Day in 1994 when Rosa Regás won the Nadal Prize for her novel

and I won the Josep Pla for

, Enric, Carmen's little brother, called her on the phone to congratulate her: 'They have I won two friends of yours,' he told her, and she corrected him: 'Friends, no, you'll say clients,' as she told me the next day, dying of laughter".

A "pig" for Zoe Valdés:

"Carmen Balcells, with other people and not only with the editors, whose relationships deserve a separate chapter, but with some of the applicants to be represented by her agency, behaved in a disaffected manner. Zoe Valdés, apparently not admitted to the Balcells stable , wrote with resentment: "Carmen Balcells behaved quite badly with me, like a pig. She did not even want to know about me, claiming that she did not represent women. She did not tell me, she told my publisher at the time " .

Sampedro's

Sun

"When in December 1983 Balcells underwent surgery on his knee for the second time, Sampedro, mimicking the lyrics of the famous Falange anthem,

, wrote another:

: 'Face the sun with the new knee / that you operated on me yesterday, / they will find the books that they bring me / and I have to read. / I will put them next to their companions / who stand guard in my storage room. / If they say I read you, / well yes, / I finished it today. / But I will not edit you / because / you are very

. / Victorious novels will return / to the happy pace of Barral / and they will bring Six lit prologues / Jesus what a Carnival! / Another novel will come out / that by heaven, earth and sea it is expected. / Up, Carmen, to win / that in Spain they begin to read!"

Head astrologer:

"Lisa Morpurgo, with whom I shared a table at Lluís Miquel Palomares's wedding party in September 1991, and who seemed to me to be an astrologer with a large dose of rationality and common sense, has guided life and business of Carmen Balcells, who even had her on the payroll. Every week she sent the agent her predictions by fax and later by email, according to the astral consultations made and someone very close to Balcells passed them on to some files that are kept Thus, for example, in the one corresponding to the week of March 14 to 21, 1991, we can read: 'It is necessary to moderate the preceding aggressiveness a little and give in to some compromise. all other requirements.’ Thus, it seems,Carmen knew what direction to take in a negotiation, and likewise, if it was convenient or not to sign a contract on an agreed day or, depending on the planetary conjunction, it was better to postpone it to another more promising one".

Licensed to Kill:

“The son of Vázquez Montalbán, Daniel Vázquez Sallés, an employee of the agency for three years and the author of the book dedicated to and addressed to his father,

, draws a ruthless portrait of the agent and assures that the writers were the first responsible for the mythologizing of Balcells: 'You created the character.

You made him immune to pain.

You gave him impunity.

You turned her into a goddess with the power to turn her employees into servants.

You made her messianism a malicious virtue.

She had, in your need to achieve the first place of her attentions, an insane and childish competitiveness.

The pampered writers who were part of the Carmen Balcells Literary Agency competed not only to win Carmen's heart, but also to achieve the title of her favorite in a kingdom built at will.

You great ones functioned like worker ants around the queen mother, showering her with gifts,

pending that he had you in his prayers.

I'm not trying to question Carmen's genius.

She would be a fool.

Carmen is a great woman, without a doubt, but terrible.

To the great Balcells, to whom you said that she was the only agent with a license to kill, it is better to have her as her friend than as her enemy, and with her, the condition of her friend is earned with homage”.

The abandonment of Goytisolo:

“Luis Goytisolo feels very proud to be the first author of the Balcells stable mentioned by her, whom he remembers with affection, despite the fact that their relationship went through notable ups and downs.

So much so that Goytisolo left the agency in 1994, although he returned after Carmen's death, after some reconciliation attempts that the agent frustrated, because the fact that Goytisolo left and also ended up in Antonia Kerrigan's agency it made him feel very bad.

Kerrigan had been in his employ once, and their relations weren't exactly the best then.

The reason why he left the agency was given to me by Goytisolo himself: he couldn't stand Carmen organizing his life: 'I told you everything you had to do: go to New York to flirt with a Kennedy', he assures me that advised.

'Divorce yourself from María Antonia, it doesn't suit you...'.

'She didn't like Elvira Huelbes [her current wife] either, he didn't think much of her, despite the fact that, as a journalist, she directed the cultural supplement of

.'

However, he confesses to me that the agent made him earn a lot of money when he negotiated with TVE the series

, which he began directing in 1988 and whose six chapters were broadcast from 1991. Despite not having experience with series contracts at that time on television, Balcells did very well”.

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