José María Gironella

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José María Gironella
Born José María Gironella Pous
(1917-12-31)December 31, 1917
Darnius, Province of Girona
Died Script error: The function "death_date_and_age" does not exist.
Province of Barcelona
Occupation Novelist, essayist, journalist, literary critic, poet, travel writer
Nationality Spanish
Notable awards Premio Nadal (1946), Premio Planeta de Novela (1971)

José María Gironella Pous (31 December 1917 – 3 January 2003) was a Spanish writer, considered to be one of the greatest names of the Generation of '50. Gironella is known in particular for a series of panoramic novels that depict the Spanish Civil War.

Biography

José María Gironella was born in Darnius,[1] Girona into a humble family of artisans (his grandfather was a shoemaker). His father was a manufacturer of cork stoppers who suffered from intermittent depression, and his mother was a devoted Catholic; he had four siblings. Pressured by his mother, he studied in a seminary between the ages of ten and twelve,[1] but left because of the extreme repression he suffered and his lack of vocation. He then worked in different trades (as a child he was an apprentice, then a drugstore clerk, then a worker in a liquor factory and finally he was employed at the Arnús bank as a bellboy),[1] so his education was mainly self-directed.

Giovanni Papini's The Story of Christ had a notable influence on Gironella, instilling in him a vision of Christian humanism that permeates all his works; he was also a great admirer of Dostoevsky. At the beginning of the civil war he fled from the republican territory to France, to later enter the national zone and join Franco's army. He managed to reach San Sebastián and enlisted as a volunteer in a Company of Skiers of the Terç de Requetès de la Mare de Déu de Montserrat that had been formed in Zaragoza to cover the Aragonese Pyrenees.

Gironella believed that when the war ended, someone should write about why it took place, what it had consisted of and what its consequences would be. He had already written from the front, with great success, an article in the weekly Domingo and a lost novel about his experiences in the Pyrenees (Caballeros en la niebla, 1938), and conceived a trilogy, which would later be extended to a tetralogy, while he spent the war in the mountains; he spent nine months at 2800 meters in a tent with five companions. In 1940 he began to collaborate in the Girona press and in 1942 he was appointed correspondent of the newspaper Informaciones in Rome. His girlfriend Magdalena Castañer ("the only close friend of my life", he would say) was employed at the telephone exchange in Girona and had voluntarily asked to work the night shift because at that time there was little work and that allowed him to read without a break. Gironella, with borrowed money, set up a bookstore in Girona and they married two years later, in 1946; a year earlier he had published his first book of poems, Ha llegado el invierno y tú no estás aquí (1945).

They spent their honeymoon in Cadaqués: his resources were too limited. And as he had not been able to give any gift to his wife (only the novel Nada, by Carmen Laforet, winner of the 1944 Nadal Prize), he set out to win the same prize, which his wife, a great reader, encouraged him to do. The title was A Man, because that was what Gironella wanted to be, and he wrote it in a month and a half. On January 6, 1946, the telegram arrived from Rafael Vázquez Zamora informing him that he had been awarded the prize; but the book hardly sold.

Thanks to the award, he had the opportunity to meet the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, who recommended that in order to continue his writing career he should travel a lot. He realized then that he lacked training, experience and human maturity to continue his career as a writer; he closed the bookstore and moved with his wife to Palma de Mallorca. Gironella then published La marea (1948), about defeat of Germany and its consequences. Encouraged by Magda, they went to Paris when Gironella was thirty years old. There he would learn what he needed. And he could write the first part of his trilogy on the civil war, starring a family from Girona, the Alvears; the first work would deal with the pre-war period, the second with the war and the third with the post-war period. Magda worked at night in the luxury hotels as a nanny, to guard the children of American millionaires who wanted to go to the Lido and the Folies Bergère. Gironella got as far as a thousand pages of the original, to which he had already given the title Los cipreses creen en Dios; four publishing houses rejected it, but once published in 1953 by José Manuel Lara, founder of Editorial Planeta, it was his first success and sold two million copies, five million worldwide according to Joaquín Soler Serrano. Lara was his publisher for thirty years, until they fell out with each other.

Gabriel Marcel, eminent philosopher and advisor to the Foreign Collection of the publishing house Plon, made a favorable report on the signing of the contract for worldwide rights, except in Spain, where Los cipreses creen en Dios faced the refusal of publication by the censor on duty, who finally changed his mind when he learned that in other languages the statement "Censored in Spain" would appear. But the author was psychically exhausted. After the success, the Gironella couple went to Florence, where José María wished to greet Papini to tell him that he considered him his master; but he was not home, although they saw his garden and, through the window, his small office, where, wrapped in smoke — his stove was working — he had written The Story of Christ.

While writing the second volume of the trilogy, Un millón de muertos (1961), Gironella was beginning to overcome a serious depression, first manifested on Christmas Eve 1952 in the cathedral of Girona during mass, which he overcame when Ha estallado la paz (1966) went to press. After the tetralogy he wrote other novels and many books about his travels around the world. He collaborated with periodicals and later traveled to the United States, Mexico, Germany, Denmark, Switzerland and Finland, taking the opportunity to treat his illness and spending some time in Vienna and Helsinki. Gironella described the depression he suffered in his book Los fantasmas de mi cerebro, written in fragments after his electroshock therapy sessions.[2] Later he returned to Spain, where he continued with his literary work, in what is perhaps his most outstanding work, the novel Condenados a vivir (1971), a presumed generational manifesto. In 1973 he traveled to the Soviet Union, as an amateur chess player, where he made friends with the great master David Bronstein. In Los hombres lloran solos (1986) he offered his particular point of view on the Spanish political transition. He then traveled to the Holy Land, Egypt, Ceylon, India, Japan, China, writing subsequent travel books; after seven years of total disbelief, his discovery of Eastern spirituality after his trips to the East gave him back a certain faith; his last novel, The Apocalypse — six hundred pages — he finished writing at the age of 83, after having overcome a hemiplegia.

José María Gironella died of a cerebral embolism three days after his 85th birthday.[3] He was posthumously awarded the Grand Cross of Alfonso X the Wise.

Works

Gironella is best known for his fictional work The Cypresses Believe in God (Los cipreses creen en Dios), which was published in Spain in 1953 and translated into English by Harriet de Onís in 1955. The book is the first part of a four-novel series on the Spanish Civil War, written from a Roman Catholic viewpoint — but whose approach is notable for its even-handedness and fair assessment of the many nuances and subtleties among all factions on the eve of war.[4] The story is set in Girona, a city in eastern Catalonia, and follows the life of a family, from 1931 until the Civil War breaks out in 1936. The protagonist is the son of an atheist from Madrid, who is married to a devout Basque woman, and has a younger brother and sister also caught up in the conflict. In a sequel to Cypresses, One Million Dead (Un millón de muertos), translated by Joan MacLean, Gironella follows the Alvear family through the war. The third part is Peace after War, published in English in 1969, also translated by MacLean. The fourth novel, Los hombres lloren solos, has not been translated into English. Gironella tetralogy was called "the most ambitious treatment of the war" in Spain.[5]

"All the books written about the Civil War have been tendentious," Gironella remarked, "this is just as true of Man's Hope by André Malraux as of Hemingway's For Whom the Bells Toll, Koestler's A Spanish Testament, Bernanos' The Great Cemeteries under the Moon and Arturo Barea's The Flame (the third section of The Forging of a Rebel). Aside from any literary merit which these works may possess, they can not withstand profound analysis. Frequently they subdivide the drama of our country, their works are overloaded with folklore, and at the moment when they should resolutely confront their principal theme they lose their nerve. They are apt to be unjust and arbitrary, and they provoke in the informed reader a feeling of extreme discomfort."[6]

While Gironella hated the polarization that led to Civil War, he supported the Spanish Nationalists who rallied around Franco[7] and himself joined the Carlist unit, Terç de Requetès de la Mare de Déu de Montserrat. In a review in The New York Times Book Review, Gerald Brenan, an expert on Spanish literature, called the work absorbing and remarkably objective. In its pages, he said, "The sane and the moderate, caught helplessly in a dilemma they did not ask for, must throw in their lot with one violent party or another till mercifully the passions of the war submerge them and confirm their decision. It is this tragic unfolding of events which concerns this novel." Pedro Blás Gonzáles described Gironella's work as "the most insightful novelistic treatment of the Spanish Civil War."[8]

Major publications

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  • Ha llegado el invierno y tú no estás aquí (poetry, 1946)
  • Un hombre (1946; awarded the Nadal Prize)[9]
  • La marea (1948)
  • Los cipreses creen en Dios (1953; awarded the National Prize in Literature)
  • El Novelista ante el Mundo (1954)
  • Los fantasmas de mi cerebro (1958)
  • Un millón de muertos (1961)
  • Mujer, levántate y anda (1962)
  • Personas, ideas, mares (1963)
  • El Japón y su duende (1964)
  • Todos somos fugitivos (essays, 1965)
  • China, lágrima innumerable (1965)
  • Ha estallado la paz (1966)
  • Gritos del mar (articles, 1967)
  • En Asia se muere bajo las estrellas (1968)
  • 100 españoles y Dios (1969)
  • Gritos de la tierra (1970)
  • Condenados a vivir (1971; awarded the Planeta Prize)
  • El Mediterráneo es un hombre disfrazado de mar (1974)
  • El escándalo de Tierra Santa (1978)
  • Carta a mi padre muerto (1978)
  • 100 españoles y Franco (1979)
  • Mundo tierno, mundo cruel (1981)
  • El escándalo del Islam (1982)
  • Cita en el cementerio (1983)
  • Los hombres lloran solos (1986)
  • La duda inquietante (1988; awarded the Ateneo de Sevilla Prize)
  • Jerusalén de los evangelios (1989)
  • A la sombra de Chopin (1990)
  • Yo, Mahoma (1992)
  • Carta a mi madre muerta (1992)
  • Nuevos 100 españoles y Dios (1994)
  • El corazón alberga muchas sombras (1995)
  • Se hace camino al andar (1997)
  • Las pequeñas cosas de Dios (1999)
  • El apocalipsis (2001)
  • Por amor a la verdad (2003)

Translated into English

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Notes

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Grupp, William J. (1957). "José María Gironella, Spanish Novelist," Kentucky Foreign Language Quarterly, Vol. IV, No. 3, p. 129.
  2. ↑ Martínez Jambrina, Juanjo (2019). "Alguien voló sobre el nido del cuco. La controversia entre Ken Kesey y José María Gironella," Eidon: Revista de la Fundación de Ciencias de la Salud, No. 51, pp. 174–80.
  3. ↑ Torres Nebrera, Gregorio (2011). "José María Gironella Pous," Diccionario Biográfico Español.
  4. ↑ Andrews, Helen (2016). "Heroism Was Still Possible," The University Bookman. Retrieved 22 June 2017.
  5. ↑ Donahue, Francis (1978). "Gray Age of Spanish Letters," Southwest Review, Vol. LXIII, No. 4, p. 405.
  6. ↑ Iberica, Vol. IX (July-August 1961).
  7. ↑ Pace, Eric (2003). "José Gironella, 85, Author and Franco Backer", The New York Times. Retrieved 22 June 2017.
  8. ↑ Blas Gonzáles, Pedro (2016). "Passos and Century’s End," The University Bookman. Retrieved 22 June 2017.
  9. ↑ Sánchez, José (1957). "Literary Awards in Present-Day Spain," Books Abroad, Vol. XXXI, No. 4, pp. 365–67.

References

External links

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