With his hours numbered, and sacrificed to the intellectual mission to which he was going to devote his life, Américo Castro was no longer a man interested in novels.
In the mid-sixties he wrote to Cela from American exile: “I have no breath except to be interested in the creative work of a very few leading men.”
When, in his early seventies, Don Américo returned to Spain, his end would be one of intense suffering: widowed, misunderstood by his peers and exiled—as he felt—from his library.
In this circumstance comes
Story of an Autumn,
the first novel by José Jiménez Lozano (1930-2020), a narrative about the resistance of the nuns of Port-Royal, in obedience to their conscience, against the absolute power of the Crown in the Great French Century.
The historian was excited.
One of Don Américo's praises, in the correspondence edited by Guadalupe Arbona and Santiago López-Ríos, opens up an angle from which to contemplate Jiménez Lozano: Castro, who “considered it inconceivable (…) that no Spaniard would be seriously interested for foreign literature and history, values the merit of an intellectual who, from a town in Valladolid, has written about an episode in the history of France with so much knowledge of the facts, using sources such as Sainte-Beuve, Saint-Simon or Pascal.”
Destined to pose before the world with a name of “Castilian and religious writer”, of inaccuracy only inferior to his contemporary absence of
sex appeal,
the first Jiménez Lozano already surprises with the openness of his vision and the international reach of the library. of the.
All topics
The novel, at the insistence of Delibes, had been submitted to Nadal - it came second - and the editor Vergés, an admirer of Jiménez Lozano's articles in
Destino,
did not hesitate to publish it.
They were also going to have him as one of those “very few front-row men.”
Delibes, Vergés, Don Américo: the catalog of qualified people who later admired Jiménez Lozano never ceases to surprise, from Rafael Conte to José Carlos Llop, from Anna Caballé to Valentí Puig or Andrés Trapiello.
More guarantors could be cited, but—four years after his death—it is more worth highlighting the other academic and editorial attention that he continues to receive: far from spending a season in purgatory, his chronicles of the council and the post-council have just been rescued and the cosmological whim of
Gentlemen Birds,
while the Jorge Guillén Foundation is already printing its complete works with as much speed as merit.
They are years of abundance for a man who was always going to turn the other cheek to the cliché: a writer from the countryside if not from the town, a curious conservative but ultimately right-wing, awarded with the Cervantes under Aznar, specialized in uncurrent topics and hidden - the Bible, the Moriscos - and capable at the same time of translating from Greek and of leaving laisms and leisms in his texts.
It didn't help him either to start “late to write out of fear, because he had read a lot and compared.”
Of course, Jiménez Lozano was not nor did he want to be nor did he care about not being
cool
for a single minute of his life, and his world was going to be much further from New York than from Arévalo (although he read, and how much and how, at the American people).
In any case, the smug look towards his work seems only frequent among those who have not frequented him, beyond the fact that "Castilian and religious writer" is a shocking insult if one thinks of Santa Teresa or Unamuno, or that the appreciation of anti-modernism is still a contemporary propensity.
We could still mention that, back in the sixties and seventies, Jiménez Lozano, as advanced as he was, was almost considered a heretic.
Anyway, he knew—the quote is from Popper—that “the role of the philosopher, like that of the artist, is not to be fashionable.”
And he joked, knowing that “asking about the meaning is just a sign of provincialism.”
He was going to make friends with Castro since his first book,
Spanish Meditation on Religious Freedom,
which he published in 1966, according to his confession to Guillén, with “infinite fears of the different holy offices.”
Don Américo had sought to “dive to the bottom of the reason why the secular life of the Spanish people had been radically unconvivable,” and Jiménez Lozano would argue that “the unity of Spain is not done for political, rational reasons, like the unity of other countries.” , but for religious reasons and vital impulse for survival and triumph of the Christian caste over the Moorish and Jewish castes.”
Hence his criticism of Spanish "Catholic chasticism", which he sees as "political and bellicose", and which in History, "instead of being something experienced existentially and spiritually", has been able to become (Arbona) "a form of oppression".
Thus, his own “spirit of defense of personal autonomy” is united with the conviction that “religious freedom” emanates “ultimately, from the Christian creed,” and he will even insist that it was a characteristic of Spain to guess “that a man, If he was not free, he was not a man, and that all men were equal.”
And the discontinuity of that “stifled freedom” in Spanish and European history will lead him to read and write countless pages: “There lay his inclination to study the Hispanic coexistence of the 'three nations' until its painful truncation, ( …) there were his investigations into civil cemeteries as a bloody example of intolerance, and there was his empathy towards the 'agnostics of conscience' of the 19th century” (Bernardo and Boneva).
Make suffering speak
Far from being an
erudite whim,
Jiménez Lozano was going to address this issue, as Castro also tells him, “from the privacy of the mourner.”
The writer from Avila once told how, as children, they took a few dry chrysanthemums from the graves to put them on the empty graves of those destined for the “corralillo” of the civil cemetery.
“In the midst of that postwar period, full of hatred and violence, with solemn poverty and oppression,” one lived “between stories: those of the defeated and those of the victors” and one could learn “mercy for those who suffered.”
Perhaps then he also learned that “triumph is always achieved with other people's blood,” and that “in every revolution (…) beautiful things are broken and kicked.”
Hence, in his writing he seeks – these are Adorno's words – “to make suffering speak”, with the basso continuo of a piety that “counts as a category of mere knowing reality.”
And hence, quite naturally, a good part of his work deals with the persecuted and forgotten, with the heterodox, with “beings of misfortune,” with resisters against totalitarianisms, with those who live outside the powers of society. History.
Always, in the desire that “injustice is not the last word.”
And in the hope that “someday, weakness will reverberate through time.”
Perhaps with these foundations of moral depth, what was expected would have been some type of philosophy that is impure because it is human, but the literary magma of Jiménez Lozano will substantiate it in diverse, singular—let's say it: rare—forms, always very own.
There are essays such as
Civil Cemeteries and Spanish Heterodoxy,
a key book in his history of tolerance and in what Aranguren called “another history of Spain.”
Also, dialogues - a form very dear to the author - such as
On Jews, Moriscos and Conversos
or the Jansenist conversations, of overwhelming quality, in
Portraits and Still Lifes.
And that same source will still fuel a good part of his narrative, whether from “the humble veracity of the small biblical stories” (Sara de Ur), the mastery of short stories in books like
The Red Corn Grain
or the recreation of the world of Saint John of the Cross in
El mudejarillo
.
There is a certain consequence that his ethical approach to literature brought with it an aesthetic.
And perhaps it is there—along with some essays, diaries and poems—where we find the purest Jiménez Lozano.
For example, in
The Eyes of the Icon,
daughter of the exhibition cycle
The Ages of Man
that he himself promoted.
Or in a
Spiritual Guide to Castilla,
which leaves behind any Unamunian essentialist remnants to enter a border land, in an eastern part of Europe whose beauty is marked by detachment and nudity, but also by “an aesthetic of the small, the joyful and free and pure.”
And if attachment to the land will be the guide of his prose, “forcing the hand of naturalness (…) to protest against the falsehoods that polish inevitably carries,” that nudity—not exempt from mutedness—will also be characteristic of a work poetic almost of old age.
His character is revealed by combining two of his titles:
So Much Devastation
and
Praise and Celebration
.
Deployment and redeployment
At the end of the sixties, Jiménez Lozano, a journalist in that mythical
El Norte de Castilla
of Delibes and Umbral, wrote: “I have the possibility of going to Madrid.”
He fears, however, that he will end up becoming politicized, becoming sterilized in this journalistic and capital struggle.
It is also an ethical and aesthetic option: he will stay in Alcazarén, at a distance from the world and “with many but learned books together”: a wide intellectual family that ranges from the major prophets to Russian, Japanese or Nordic writers;
Saint Augustine, Cervantes, Kierkegaard, Eliot, the Brontë or Spinoza.
All their names are filtered naturally in the long conversation of half a century that is his diary, from
The Three Red Notebooks
to
Evocations and Presences,
a most honest canvas where, between readings, apprehensions, beauties of the world and laughter at the follies of his time , Jiménez Lozano portrays life and portrays himself before it.
And it is revealing to appreciate how the arc described between his first chronicles and his last installments of the diary points at the same time not only to a personal itinerary, but also to the unfolding and retreating of the intellectual hopes of an era.
The Jiménez Lozano who retires to his village has just returned from chronicling the Second Vatican Council
(A Dazzling Moment),
and will continue his momentum with the
Letters of an Impatient Christian,
very famous in those years, in the magazine
Destino
.
His tone at that time is, in fact, one of bubbling enthusiasm: “The Council has overflowed our hopes,” “no cloud will be able to cloud our joy.”
These are the years in which, as Joseba Louzao relates, Francoism and the Holy See collided: to define itself as a Catholic regime it was necessary to accept the conciliar documents, which forced "to defend religious freedom, human rights or political pluralism."
It is, in short, a victory for his vision of evangelical purity.
The Council is thus shown to him as “an open window (…) behind centuries-old Christian fears and immobility”;
like an embrace with that modern world “left aside” by Christianity.
Writer and Catholic, he—I quote Ridao—will now be able to live his faith without the pain of knowing it has been instrumentalized, reconciling civic conscience and religious conscience.
And in Spain, he trusted, he was going to abandon a “faith more political than faithful to conscience, more social than intimate.”
He is a Jiménez Lozano, yes, in the middle of the progressive
flu
.
“Those clouds finally arrived,” say Bernardo and Boneva, at the Alcazarén window.
The tone of his diaries and articles "in the last years of the 20th century and the first of the 21st" will acquire "an almost eschatological character."
The Council “is not going to be understood (…) in our mental and sentimental structures as old Christians just like that.”
A complete disappointment of the illusions of someone who had abandoned the fundamentalism of his birth after "reading Bernanos, Maritain, the young Mauriac."
Contemporary Catholicism—in the time of Francis—will already seem like “a theologized psychologism in the popular way, capable of degrading everything it touches or going to comic extremes.”
He is not the only Catholic intellectual who evolves in this way: think of Joseph Ratzinger, who had also worn the turtleneck of a progressive cleric for decades.
But how could it not hurt him, Jiménez Lozano who, in the midst of the
aggiornamento fury,
had written: “Please, do not call us heretics yet.
Let's wait for the Council to end.
Then we will know.”
It's not just Christianity.
His own observations about the political situation – here, due to the
process –
are not more flattering: “Perhaps deep down what is happening is too tragic, and what we do not want to see is that we are witnessing the total liquidation of Spain.
At the end of the day, Europe continues to look at us and treat us like underdeveloped poor people.
And with great complacency for a majority that is delighted with that Hamelin flute of progress.”
The withdrawal, in any case, encompasses the civilizational, in a man who seeks to “preserve a sense of the world that comes from the culture of centuries that was given to us as an inheritance” (Herrero) to observe that, in our time, “the person human has been lowered and minimized to a single dimension: that of his citizen condition", which "means that man has nothing but a political nature, and that is why it counts.
(…) Man and person are confiscated and socialized by politics.”
And that, as he has seen and read so many times, is a prelude to totalitarianism.
The only pastoral constitution of Vatican II would be called
gaudium et spes,
“joy and hope.”
He begins his text with the Church's will to share “the joys and hopes, the sadness and anguish of the men of our time.”
In his view of the world, Jiménez Lozano went from the
gaudium et spes
of his beginnings to the
luctus et angor
—The sadness and anguish—of his last writings.
In a passage from
The Eyes of the Icon,
he meditates on those religious images that only “look like masks,” because “they are no longer interrogated by the anguish of the men who lit a candle before them or murmured prayers.”
Luckily, Jiménez Lozano's literature, as Reyes Mate observes, will always be absolved by an irony that is a gesture of intelligence capable of reconciling the reader with the discovery of the truth.
In the end, “Castilian and religious writer,” Jiménez Lozano was not an optimistic man, but he was a hopeful man: he knew that that hope “will still be there because only it is capable of pushing History forward.”
And, above all, because it is “what constitutes us as men.”
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