Josep Pla

Biography

The son of rural business owners of modest means from Baix Empordà, he obtained his high school diploma in Girona, where, beginning in 1909, he was a boarding student at the Colegio de los Maristas (Marist School). In his last academic year (1912–13), he had to take his final exams without having taken the courses because he was expelled from the boarding school. In 1913 he registered to study science at the University of Barcelona and began his studies in medicine, but in the middle of his first course, he changed his mind and registered to study law. The emptiness that he felt in his life at the university did not prevent him from involving himself in another environment that would focus the intellectual disorientation of his youth - the Barcelona Ateneu Club, with its library and above all the daily tertulia (discussion group) led by Dr. Joaquim Borralleras and attended by celebrities such as Josep Maria de Sagarra, Eugeni d'Ors and Francesc Pujols. His admiration for Pío Baroja came from this period – a constant reference for his generation — as well as the influence of Alexandre Plana, a childhood friend and teacher, whom he credits with his decision to distance himself from the pretentious style of the 19th century and to support “a literature for the whole world” based on “intelligibility, clarity, and simplicity”, ideas which would be constant features through his literary career.

In 1919 he graduated with a degree in Law and began to work in journalism, first in Las Noticias (The News) and soon after in night publication of La Publicidad (Publicity). He started his journey as a correspondent in various European cities (Paris, Madrid, Berlin). A modern Catalan nationalist, in 1921 he was elected as a “diputado” (Member of Parliament) of the Commonwealth of Catalonia (Commonwealth of Catalonia) by the “Lliga Regionalista” (Regionalist League)” in his native region, Baix Empordà. En 1924, under the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, he underwent a military proceeding and was condemned to exile because of a critical article about the Spanish military policy in Morocco, published in Majorca’s El Día (The Day).

During the years of his exile, he negotiated with some of the principal Catalan opponents of the dictatorship such as Francesc Macià. He continued traveling though Europe (Paris, Russia, England), and in 1925 he published his first book, Coses Vistes, which was a great success and sold out in a week. It was a good preview of his aesthetic: “to write about the things which one has seen”. In 1927 he returned to Spain, left La Publicidad and began to collaborate with La Veu de Catalunya, the Lliga Regionalista's newspaper, of a liberal-conservative tendency, to the orders of Francesc Cambó –leader of moderate Catalan nationalism, whose famous tertulias he attended regularly.

In April 1931, on the same morning of the proclamation of the Republic of Spain, he was invited to Madrid by Cambó as parliamentary correspondent of La Veu and became a witness to the first days of the Republic. Madrid’s book of the notable events of these months, of great historic value is El advenimiento de la República (The coming of the Republic). He remained in Madrid during nearly all of the Republican period, writing features about Parliament, which allowed him to mix with the Spanish political and cultural elite. Pla, who was neither an anti-republican nor an anti-monarchist but a pragmatist who wanted to see a modernization of the State, at first expressed a certain sympathy for the Republic. He believed that the new political system could get off the ground in Spain if it consolidated itself according to the French Republican model, even though little by little he was becoming disillusioned with the course of events until he eventually considered it “a frantic and destructive madness”.

Claiming health reasons, he abandoned an agitated and dangerous Madrid a few months before the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. Not even Barcelona seemed safe to him, and he fled in a boat from Catalonia towards Marseille, in September 1938, in the company of Adi Enberg, a Norwegian citizen born in Barcelona who worked for the Francoist espionage service. She was the only person from his secretive and often meagre romantic life with whom we can be certain that he was involved. He continued his exile in Rome, where he wrote a good part of the immense Historia de la Segunda República Española (History of the Second Spanish Republic), an assignment for Francesc Cambó–one of the financiers of the military uprising, which Pla would refuse to re-publish during his lifetime, despite its being a historical work of great interest. In the autumn of 1938, Enberg and Pla traveled to Biarritz and from there they managed to reach San Sebastián, where they entered the Francoist controlled portion of Spain. In January 1939 he, Manuel Aznar and other journalists entered Barcelona along with the victorious Francoist troops. Between February and April 1939, when the war ended, he became the assistant manager of the newspaper La Vanguardia under the direction of Aznar. Overwhelmed by the course of events of the immediate post-war period and before the unexpected failure of his project at La Vanguardia, he moved to the Empordà (Girona) and separated from Adi Enberg.

In September 1939 he published his first article in Destino, the weekly publication that his Catalan friends created in Burgos and for which he started to write weekly a few months later, from February 1940. These are the years he spent travelling around his native region, discovering its landscapes and people, small towns and, of course, the sea. Also he finally accepted his role of lower rural bourgeois and never again lived in Barcelona.

Due to his regular work with Destino, although he was no longer one of its principal driving forces, he returned to travelling the world, not as a correspondent, but as a journalistic observer, which allowed him to write magnificent travel reports: he visited France, Israel, Cuba, New York, the Middle East, South America, and Russia. Regarding Israel, for instance, he left a unique testimony of its first years of existence as a State - he visited it in 1957, arriving in Tel Aviv in a boat from Marseille full of displaced Jews. He arrived during the enthusiastic construction of the cities and Hebrew infrastructures in the middle of the desert. As a curiosity, Pla had a fondness for travels in very slow oil tankers, which allowed him to write his works peacefully and without distractions from contact with tourists.

In the 1970s Pla dedicated himself fully to the preparation of his complete works, a crucial stage since it involved an almost total re-writing of his work and the development of his own unique style. In order to publish these works, he counted on invaluable support of his fellow countryman Josep Vergés, editor of Destino. Meanwhile, culture in the Catalan language was reappearing little by little.

After Francoism was terminated by the Spanish Constitution of 1978, despite already being the most-read writer in the Catalan language, fellow authors in Catalan (overwhelmingly on the Left) did not forgive him for his past support of the Francoists during the Civil War and his later coexistence with the régime (Pla had counted on a peaceful and ordered evolution towards democracy). He was also criticized by fellow Catalan authors because of his disdain for fiction as a literary form.

He proved himself equally distant: his often sarcastic criticism of some Catalan political and cultural figures had the result, similar to the case of the artist Salvador Dalí, that Catalan culture denied him recognition in the form of prizes (the refusal to grant him the Premi d’Honor de les Lletres). They alienated him from his magazine for life, and they did not recognize his extraordinary worth until many years later.

Even so, in 1980, near the end of his life, Josep Tarradellas gave him the Medalla d'Or de la Generalitat de Catalunya (The Gold Medal of the Autonomous Government of Catalonia). It is worth mentioning, as it represented a minor fissure within the so-far monolithic rejection of Pla by writers in Catalan, that Joan Coromines, a fundamental Catalan etymologist, supported Pla in his own acceptance speech for the gold medal Coromines was also granted.

Pla died in 1981 in his native Empordà, leaving thirty-eight volumes (over twenty-five thousand pages) of Obra Completa (Complete Works) published, and many unedited papers that have been published since his death.

Notability of his work

Pla had to live under censorship for much of his life: first during Primo de Rivera's dictatorship, later in Italy and Germany (where he worked as a correspondent during the rise of the Falange), and during Francisco Franco's long rule. Although he initially sympathized with the dictatorship (he wrote in 1940 that it was "in the general interest"), his support only lasted a few months. He soon began to show skepticism, especially as it became impossible to publish in Catalan. Although he always maintained a moderate political stance that allowed him to publish, he was deeply uncomfortable with Franco's tireless censorship (he wrote in one of his diaries that it was "the worst that [I] have known", carried out by "servants of fanaticism"). He hated the regime’s disdain for Catalan language and culture and its stubborn inability to turn itself into a democracy, not even a tutelary one.

The most important characteristics of the “Planian” literary style are simplicity, irony, and clarity. Extremely modest and sensitive to ridicule, he detested artifice and empty rhetoric. Throughout his literary life, he remained faithful to his own style: “the necessity of a clear, precise, and restrained writing” and his lack of interest in literary fiction, cultivating a dry style, apparently simple, practical, and devoted to that which is real. He was an acute observer of reality in its smallest details and he gave a faithful testimony of the society of his time.

His works show a subjective and colloquial vision, anti-literary, in which he stresses, nevertheless, an enormous stylistic effort by calling things by their names and “coming up with the precise adjective”, one of his most persistent literary obsessions. An untiring writer, from his viewpoint life is chaotic, irrational, and unjust, while the longing for equality and revolutions are a delusion that incites worse wrongs than those that it tries to put a stop to. Conservative and rational, he was not inclined to action, but voluptuousness and sensuality: the pleasure of putting the world down on paper. A good conservative, he ate well and drank better (as an old man, whisky made up a good part of his diet), an inveterate smoker, he wore a bowler hat from his youth and later was inseparable from his country beret. He hated banality, cultural affectations (he never included quotations in his works, despite being a reader of the classics) and “people who talk just to hear themselves.” So he wrote: “It is more difficult to write than to think, much more difficult: so everyone thinks”.

Works

Pla lived a life completely dedicated to writing. The extent of his Obres Completes (Complete Works, 46 volumes and nearly 30,000 pages), which is a collection of all his journals, reports, articles, essays, biographies, novels, and some poems gives an idea of its daunting work schedule while complicating its chronological classification. Many of these pages are the fruit of a hard process of rewriting texts from his youth and weekly articles that were published in Destino for nearly 40 years, as well as hundreds of articles published in different newspapers and an abundance of correspondences.

Thematic classification is not easy either, as many articles appeared in different locations with some changes, his thematic repertoire is extensive and, above all, the boundaries between the genres that he developed are not always clear.

However, we can make an attempt at organizing into genres (the years outlined correspond to the original publication, not to the translation or the reissue of Complete Works).

During the first years of the Francoist regime, due of the complete restriction of the Catalan edition, the following works were published in Spanish: Guía de la Costa Brava (1941), Las ciudades del mar (1942), Viaje en autobús (1942) – considered one of his greatest works, and which proves his skillful grasp of the Spanish language -, Rusiñol y su tiempo (1942), El pintor Joaquín Mir (1944), Un señor de Barcelona (1945) and La huida del tiempo (1945). In 1947, as soon as censorship was lifted, he returned to publishing in Catalan (Cadaqués, one of his most successful books).

After 1956 he started the first series of his Complete Works, which extended to 29 volumes and in which he began to publish his extraordinary portrayals Homenots (Great men). In 1966, Ediciones Destino began the publication of this series. The first volume was an unpublished work, El quadern gris, a book of notable events initially written when he was only a little over 20 years of age (although rewritten and substantially expanded later). It was translated into Spanish as El cuaderno gris by Dionisio Ridruejo and into English as The Gray Notebook by Peter Bush. It was considered a before and after in the public consideration of Pla, much more than as a journalist, as the best narrator of contemporary Catalan literature. The success of the criticism and publicity of this work convinced Vergés to continue publishing the complete work, which has reached volume XLVI, with unpublished manuscripts (such as his Notas para un diario, written in the mid-1960s), not free from controversy, by the supposed amendments and manipulations to which Vergés himself was subjected (apparently, in order to suppress certain obscene passages). Later Keerl, his heir, became much more preoccupied with economically exploiting the documents than putting them at the disposal of investigators or the Josep Pla Foundation.

Even though he did not write plays, his life and work inspired various significant works after his death, among which are: Ara que els ametllers ja estan batuts (Now that the almond trees have been knocked down) 1990, in which Josep Maria Flotats creates a portrait of Pla through a collage of his texts. Also La increíble historia del Dr. Floït & Mr. Pla (1997), a production by Els Joglars, which recreates the work of Robert Louis Stevenson where the characters Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are, respectively, a Catalan industrialist obsessed with wealth and, on the other side, an educated and indulgent writer which personifies the opposed values of industrial bourgeoisie, based on Pla.

His liberal-conservative thought, skeptical and uncompromising, filled with irony and common sense, still resounds today, even though it seems to contradict the current cultural establishment the same as it did the previous establishment. His books remain in print, and both Spanish and Catalan critics have unanimously recognized him as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.

During the Franco period, a literary prize was established, under his name, for works written and published in Catalan.