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Xavier Pla

Joan Sales and Incerta glòria The polyphonies of a roman-fleuve

In the wake of the , contemporary Catalan literature in general and the novel in particular broke radically with the existing narrative tradition. Then came an inevitable step back, which led writers to reappropriate mainly the realist and comedy of manners currents of the second half of the 19th century.

Over the long, slow and limited return In 1956 the publication of the novel to the novel, the subject of the Spanish Incerta glòria (Uncertain Glory) by Joan Civil War was one of the last to be tackled Sales marked the beginning of the end by creators. A perfectly understandable of that long silence. It is now almost a silence about the conflict as a whole commonplace to say that Incerta glòria reigned: first of all, it could only be is the first Catalan novel which presents spoken of from the winners’ point of the Civil War from the losers’ point of view, and when they began to do so view and, moreover, tries to convey to the their novels were written in Spanish. reader the deep, inherent complexity of And so, at least for the first fifteen years the suffering inflicted on its characters of the Franco dictatorship, death, the by three years of war. It is undoubtedly fighting on the front or in the trenches, a novel about the Civil War which has the resistance, the jails, the concentration high ambitions and is controversial at camps or the executions of the losers the same time. Sales describes the war in made very rare appearances in the novels its full complexity, avoids any simplistic published in . The situation division into good and bad, all from a of the novelists in exile was different: Catalan nationalist, Republican but also they could reflect a world which had no catholic perspective, and denounces both voice inside Catalonia, a world which fascism and anarchism, both blacks and consequently could hardly be recognised, reds, with virulence. recreated and thus reappropriated and That is no doubt why, when the novel reinterpreted by Catalan society. was first published in Catalonia the 112/113 II Joan Sales and Incerta glòria Xavier Pla

indifference or silent indignation of and novelist Rafael Tasis stated so rightly some and the rancour or open hostility of in July 1938: others met a decidedly awkward “A novel has to be thought and constructed work with respectful silence. with time and rest. The best novels about When we examine the different war, like the most sensational ones published about the 1914-1918 war, were written a few options available to Catalan writers years later, once the embers of the combat had and intellectuals during the Civil War, burned out. It was then that experience and we often forget to mention the delicate maturity brought their magnificent harvest. position the people who were both It was then that we could have a true Republicans and Catalan nationalists war literature”. must have found themselves in when they had to stand firm against Franco’s The enormous symbolic potential troops. Not only that: while remaining Incerta glòria is a catholic novel, although catholics, they found themselves at the it has often been quoted as one of the heart of a moral conflict of the greatest ways Existentialism was introduced into importance to their own personal, contemporary Catalan literature. Through ideological and even aesthetic evolution. the lives of four characters (a Republican soldier on the Aragón front, a We can only count a small number anarchist converted to catholicism, of active participants in the war who a young priest obviously influenced managed to extract a work, a definitive by Sartre, and Juli Soleràs, eccentric novel, from it immediately after it was and wild, one of the most fascinating over. That may have been because of characters in contemporary Catalan the excessive closeness of their tragic literature), the four parts (including El experiences or their literary immaturity vent de la nit, The Night Wind) of this or, naturally, their radical and sometimes novel provide an exceptional testimony. dogmatic party spirit. That testimony is endowed with The same does not hold for the foreign enormous symbolic potential about novelists “devoted to the last great the war and the moral evolution of the cause”. Most of them published their characters who, sunk in a deep moral most important works during the war crisis, face youth, loneliness and their or shortly afterwards, mostly novels destiny with tenacity. Moreover, the supporting the republican side: we may different threads of the narrative make recall Georges Bernanos’ Les grands up a great classical novel about love and cimetières sous la lune, which appeared war, with three men in love with the in 1937, André Malraux’s L’Espoir and same woman, about youth and maturity, George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia about war and revolution. Not forgetting in 1938, or Ernest Hemingway’s For one of the most intense memento mori Whom the Bell Tolls in 1940. in Catalan literature about the death However it turns out, a civil war leaves of President Lluís Companys, arrested a wound which is so deep, so lacerating, by the Gestapo in France, deported to that it certainly prevents those involved and executed by Franco’s army at in it, at least for a time, from facing the Montjuïc Castle in Barcelona. difficulties inherent to any fictional or The author, Joan Sales i Vallès, who was novelistic reaction. That is what the critic born in Barcelona in 1912 and died in 113 II

1983, belonged to one of the generations society between the wars, and tried that lived the years of the Spanish to find a framework for its members’ Republic, and most of all the outbreak concerns about the metaphysical and progress of the Civil War, most dimensions of existence. intensely. He took an active part because Joan Sales was above all an independent of his age and ended up devoting his man, an outsider of Catalan literature, entire youth to it. Moreover, as a member certainly less self-taught than he of the losing side, like other authors of pretended, a creator who never “married” that generation he had to be constantly anyone and whom we might define as justifying himself to History. an action writer who, since his youth, Sales, who had a degree in law but never had manufactured his own image as an practised, started work at the age of intellectual we might call a “militant”. 15 as editor of the newspaper La Nau. The militant writer, the soldier writer, After working sporadically as corrector placed himself at the service of a and typesetter he was one of the first cause; he was the “combatant”. Catalan teachers for the Republican A militant of , Catalan government. While he was still Republicanism and catholicism, Sales very young, under the Primo de Rivera always felt a need to explain everything, dictatorship, he was a member of the to explain himself and justify himself first and clandestine Catalan Communist ceaselessly, whether in prologues, Party, founded in 1928 by Jordi Arquer, epilogues or footnotes, as if he wanted which tried to combine communism to preserve his long life experience from and nationalism. After the outbreak of oblivion or confusion. A friend and the war he ended up turning towards editor of Màrius Torres1, an associate of catholicism and quickly and definitively Joan Coromines2, publisher of Llorenç distanced himself from the communist Villalonga and Mercè Rodoreda, director and anarchist world. of the publishing house El Club dels We can place Sales’ evolution parallel Novel·listes, Sales was first and foremost to, though distant from, that of the a great reader. He was first excited by young intellectuals who were close to Stendhal’s work, and then definitively the catholic and independent Catalan by the novels of Dostoyevsky (he newspaper El Matí, founded in 1929 by translated The Brothers Karamazov), a group led by Josep M. Capedevila, who and the literature of the great French tried to confirm Christian positions in catholic writers and philosophers such Catalonia intellectually. Incidentally, he as François Mauriac (he translated never met them or worked with them. Thérèse Desqueyroux), Georges Bernanos, That group of writers, among whom we Emmanuel Mounier, Gabriel Marcel or might mention Pau Romeva, Maurici Teilhard de Chardin. Serrahima or Ramon Esquerra, much influenced by French catholicism, called into question the values of Christianity amid the ideological tensions of European

■ 1 Màrius Torres (1910-1942), poet. 2 Joan Coromines (1905-1997), philologist, author of the dictionary known as the Coromines. 114/115 II Joan Sales and Incerta glòria Xavier Pla

The fraught history of a novel that, while concealing the source: the title At the outbreak of the Civil War, Sales is taken from some verses at the end of entered the Catalan government War Act I Scene 3 of Shakespeare’s Two School to acquire the necessary military Gentlemen of Verona, which he had found training to take part in the fighting as an quoted in chapter XVII of Le rouge officer. At the end of 1936 he joined the et le noir by Stendhal: Durruti column in Madrid and it was in “O, how this spring of love resembleth Xàtiva where he continued his military The uncertain glory of an April day, training (April 1937). Later, he was on Which now shows all the beauty of the sun, the Aragón front (May 1937-March 1938) And by and by a cloud takes all away!” and lastly on the Catalan front, in the Incerta glòria was published in 1956, Macià-Companys columns (April-June despite difficulties of every kind and 1938). When the war ended, he was the suppressions inflicted by Franco’s commander of the Republican army. censors, who accused the novel of He left Catalonia, defeated, via Coll “religious immorality”. It was finally to d’Ares. A year later he stated: appear after eight years of reflections “For me the war was the greatest experience and additions, of experiences and of of my life, the most interesting thing, what disappointments. Sales even had to excited me most. I think a writer must appeal to the archbishop of Barcelona become a witness to the truth.” to obtain the nihil obstat which was Between January and December 1939 he indispensable for publication. Indeed, lived in exile in Paris until, after a trip to it seems that he appealed to Abbot Haiti, he finally settled in , where Escarré, who had his personal secretary, he clung to hopes for an allied victory Father Maur Boix, brother of Josep M. to drive Franco from power. Back in Boix i Selva, read the novel. Although Barcelona in 1948, he had to earn a living. little taken with it, he found nothing He was a corrector and typesetter and contrary to dogma or morality. By way worked for publishing companies. His of an epitaph it had the phrase ‘Mentre first publication, Viatge d’un moribund che’l danno e la vergogna dura’, from (Journey of a Dying Man, Barcelona, a terrifying poem by Michelangelo Ariel, 1952) is an impressive collection referring to the power of the Medicis and of poems clearly influenced by which also closed his collection of poetry Baudelaire, which gives proof of a sound Viatge d’un moribund. language training and an extraordinary Owing to a fortuitous circumstance, mastery of form and metre. Maison Gallimard showed an interest in In 1948 he began to write what would be a translation, which appeared in 1962 his only published novel, Incerta glòria. He in the prestigious Du monde entier probably embarked on it in his last years collection. Since 1956 Juan Goytisolo in exile in Mexico. The title was naturally had been living in Paris and working as chosen in memory of that far-off 14th April reader of originals at Gallimard thanks 1931, the date of the proclamation of the to the American hispanicist John B. Republic, “the happiest day of my life”, in Rust. Goytisolo’s presence favoured the his own words. He never ceased to repeat translation of most of the best Spanish

Harar (Ethiopia) I Lalibela (Ethiopia) Toni Catany (2007) 115 II 116/117 II Joan Sales and Incerta glòria Xavier Pla

novels of the post-war (Ana María nihil obstat from the Francoist church, Matute, Camilo José Cela, Rafael Sánchez had the same permission refused by the Ferlosio, Jesús Fernández Santos) and, French church. on the rebound, some novels in Catalan, In a bitter letter dated 15th November beginning with Incerta glòria and La 1960, François Amiot wrote: Plaça del Diamant by Mercè Rodoreda. “It did not seem to the examiner that this The publication date for the novel was work could be in any way sanctioned by set for March 1958. Four years were to the religious authority. It contains far too pass before it finally appeared. There was much indecency and too many scabrous a great delay in the process, attributed to scenes concerning the Spanish Civil War; some men of the church and the Spanish a delay by the translator due essentially bishopric are judged in a manner that is not to Sales’ incessant rewritings and other even-handed. It is the work of a partisan; important extraliterary reasons. the author obviously has the right to express his opinions, but it is for him and him alone For example, Sales asked Michel Mohrt, to bear the responsibility. The examiner director of Éditions Gallimard, for wonders whether the imprimatur has really the company to intervene with the been given by a Spanish bishop, given the archbishop of Paris to obtain the nihil tenor of the book and the atmosphere in obstat in order to show up the existence Spain. I do nor consider it useful to submit of Spanish censorship. His request, this work to another examiner, the result would be the same… completely out of order in the French PS I would be grateful if you would publishing context, was received with send the usual fee to the censor, stupefaction by the directors. Sales Canon Grimard…” suffered agonies over the idea of possible political repercussions in Spain and most Moreover, thanks to the correspondence of all feared police reprisals. And so on between Sales and Bernard Lesfargues, 30th June 1960 he insisted and wrote the translator, we can have access to a to Gallimard, once again demanding large amount of information about the genesis of the original edition and the religious consent for his book: work in progress. We must first point out “For me it is a matter of self-esteem, if you that the first French translation does not like, but nevertheless rather humiliating, and correspond to the full or complete edition that is why I insist. Gross insults have been heaped on me, ‘heretic and immoral’ is the of the Catalan original, that is, to the least of the things said, and they even told the addition of the censored parts of the book: publisher when he insisted on publishing my in fact it is a new, far longer, novel which novel that ‘the author should think himself Sales must have rewritten somewhere lucky he hasn’t been shot”’. between 1957 and 1959. The translator’s Finally, and in the face of Sales’ great concern was to be able to calculate insistence, Michel Mohrt passed on his the final number of pages. The writer’s demand to François Amiot, secretary of only reply was to send new chapters. the Imprimatur and teacher at the Saint- Sales explains, for example, in a letter Sulpice seminary in Paris. Nevertheless, dated 8th July 1957, the first one he sent to and most surprisingly, not only was the his translator, that the censors have kept archbishop’s answer negative, but also the the first part of the novel almost intact response was unexpected. And so Incerta and that the second and third parts are glòria, which in 1956 had obtained the the ones that have been cut, so much so 117 II

that they have become incomprehensible slow, but at the same time very fast and to the reader. as intense as the current of water in an And so the writer’s work from the outset enormous river, powerful and sure of itself. consisted of retrieving the censored parts It is a novel overflowing with life, energy to rebuild the story according to some and talent. The quantity indeed turns narrative cohesion. But very soon, thanks out to be one of the qualities of Sales’ to his correspondence, we discover that novel insofar as this aspect allows him the novelist, excited by his tale, driven to give space to the dimension of time. by the need to tell all, to forget nothing, The ambition to include time, historical has in fact begun to rewrite from duration, allows him to incorporate the beginning to end. And so Sales began to post-war into the narrative flow. He even write fragments he had never thought went so far as to add a second, shorter of including in the first edition, making novel, El vent de la nit, which became an excess one of the cornerstones of his integral part of the work. creative poetics. Incerta glòria is a polyphonic novel Moreover, his fears were not in vain: after that interweaves a host of narrative the appearance of the French translation voices in a deliberate realism with great of Incerta glòria the Spanish police symbolic potential. Sales conceived the confiscated his passport for a time and novel as a dialectical game, made up of refused to allow him to leave Spain. contradictions and shifting perspectives, The volume contained four hundred with a will to exorcise and conjure pages. In May of the same year Incerta his own ghosts, ‘metaphysical ghosts’ glòria and its author Joan Sales appeared according to Joan Fuster, to paint a great with Juan Goytisolo, Camilo José Cela historical fresco characterised by constant and Ana María Matute in the Cahiers des straying from the narrative, interruptions librairies, a free publication of the French and digressions, anecdotes and different booksellers’ association. The reception thematic threads. The polyphony and by the French critics was, from the the variety of points of view produce a beginning, spectacular. Apart from the picture that offers a plural and realistic negative review in the catholic journal vision of a tale that would grow as time Libre Belgique, they were all positive, passed, parallel to its creator’s own even enthusiastic in La Croix, Le Monde, biography. The fifth version, published in Combat, the magazines Esprit and La June 1981, was the definitive edition. Nouvelle Critique, linked to the French The perpetual conflict the characters Communist Party. are in allows them to reach the ethical or moral dimensions of their own A deliberate realism consciences and, most of all, allows the There is no doubt that Incerta glòria is reader to reconstruct mentally the central an excessive novel, but what is also true messages of the novel. Each character is a is that any good novel, any novel with subjective interpreter of the world around pretensions to representing a whole world, him and is not just a witness or observer is inevitably excessive. Sales constructs of reality, since all of them fill the world a kind of roman-fleuve which spreads with their personalities. And so Sales’ out on every side. The textual scope is skill prevents the ideological discourse overwhelming. The work is long, fluid and lent by the narrator to his characters 118/119 II Joan Sales and Incerta glòria Xavier Pla

from imprisoning the whole discourse autobiographical account, thus three of the novel; quite the opposite, it favours different narrators, Sales manages to an unfinished, constantly interrupted avoid the monotony of a single point discourse. But Sales rejects the exemplary of view. But in that way he resolves the novel or the thesis novel because he is creation of the characters who, far from well aware that the aesthetic quality of being flat, are in full relief, endowed a novel ceases to be seen as such when with a broad, complex spirit, a real moral it reads like a sermon. In a letter of 25th density, with brio and a history of their September 1975 to Bernard Lesfargues, own. They are involved in a war which for example, Sales cautioned: is sometimes a simple backdrop, others “That is indeed the subject of my book. a full element of their lives. Thanks to a I wanted to lead it in such a way that the perfect match between narrative form reader, without ever having the annoying and content, Sales, with literary learning, feeling of a ‘thesis’ or, even worse, a ‘sermon’, uses three different narrative techniques would come of his own accord to the following conclusion: the thirst for glory is which he does not mix, though he congenital to all men and yet it cannot be manages to make each of them fulfil quenched by anything in the world; there is its function in the development of the a mystery which can only be explained by story. With the aim of conveying to the another world, an essentially glorious one. reader the full complexity of the war, he But one must avoid philosophy in a novel, and there is my great difficulty. This thought uses Lluís’s diary. The role of his wife’s must emerge as if it sprang from the letters from Barcelona is to portray the reader, barely hinted at by the author.” rearguard, from where the combatants receive sparse news. And when the A novel that is at once unique and novelist decides to make the war seem multiple, the novel of a generation who over and distant, he uses the memoirs, lived through the war in the flower of which enable him to stretch time in a their youth with love and desire, Incerta duration that includes a view of the post- glòria is an open work, no doubt owing war in Barcelona twenty years later. to Sales’ excited reading of Tirant lo Blanc, the work of Cervantes and, most Sales built the novel around the of all, the novels of Dostoyevsky. Thus enigmatic, eccentric and original figure four almost independent accounts follow of Juli Soleràs, who serves as a link. on one another: that of Lluís de Broca, However, Juli Soleràs (note that the a bourgeois anarchist with a complex initials of his name and coincide idealistic and egotistical personality, with the novelist’s and also with those of whose diary forms the first part of the Julien Sorel, the famous central character novel; the letters sent by Trini Malmany, of Le rouge et le noir) is never in fact the first mistress and then wife of Lluís de hero of the novel, but rather the anti-hero. Broca, to Juli Soleràs, which make up An intelligent, highly cultured, egocentric the second part; and lastly the twofold boy, particularly drawn by the forbidden autobiographical account of Cruells, and the unknown, he is one of the a soldier in the Republican ranks and guiding threads of the story. By his a definitely heterodox priest from the sudden appearances and disappearances diocese of Barcelona in the post-war years. he creates an effect of surprise in the By using traditional narrative forms like other characters, and the reader ends up the diary, the epistolary novel and the having a global idea of what he is like 119 II

through the news, the experiences and as Charles Péguy, François Mauriac or the feelings he arouses in others. Georges Bernanos. Sales was a convert, When he is absent the other characters or a “returnee”, to catholicism, a man are sorry. Whoever has to do with who went through a long ideological and him feels drawn to him, though he moral evolution which recalls the words may also inspire repulsion. Sunk in he himself applied to the Kazantzakis permanent doubt, he is interested in he admired so much: a man who sought sexual perversions and, for shock effect, justice above all, who defended his sense he answers rudely. He has a quite of truth at every moment of his life with particular taste for failure and a spirit of incorrigible spontaneity. contradiction, which he practises with It is easy, though not very satisfactory, to everyone; we feel him thirsty for glory include Sales’ work in what is called the and moved by his singular search for the catholic novel because, as is the case with absolute. Half philosopher, half cynic, every label, it forces us to establish an locked in a struggle with himself, he is impoverishing reductionism. The catholic ceaselessly quoting Baudelaire, Nietzsche, novel is not a coherent and uniform Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard and Sartre. ideological, aesthetic or formal current, Lively and contradictory, eccentric, but it is true that it was a meeting point a tireless traveller, he is a character for the literary and religious interests who feels the absurd. His concern of some authors who, mainly after the with nothingness consumes him. He Second World War, on a collective quest is obsessed with “the obscene and the for new human values, called Christianity macabre”. A wild man, in search of an into question, and for whom the novel absolute destiny whose meaning he proved to be an instrument that enabled himself seems not to know, he wanders them to have an influence on the moral alone through the novel in a setting laden conscience of contemporary society. with symbolic intensity, the Aragón front. Suddenly he disappears without Joan Sales’ literature, with its vigorous explanation until the moment when he style, is laden with metaphysical abandons the Republican trenches and resonances and puts forward a global crosses over to his adversaries. At the end vision of the human adventure, so that of the novel we learn that he had gone the reader is plunged into thrilling world, over to the other side but, realising that charged with physical and intellectual the Francoists had won, he returned to energy. The authors of the epigraphs the Republicans and was killed. Soleràs that introduce some of the chapters of is the only character in the novel to die Incerta glòria prove it: Pascal, Baudelaire, young, and he could only die a loser, Bergson, Chesterton, Kierkegaard, Simone perhaps because the only glory seems to Weil, Albert Camus and a remarkable be the glory of youth. His end is dramatic, Dostoyevsky, who had already become a he renounces becoming a victor. His great sometimes controversial reference point lesson is to accept defeat and failure as for the novel between the wars. Sales essential components of human life. presented him as the finest example of There is an evident connection between a model of literature that penetrated Joan Sales and the work of great French deep into the human condition, with catholic writers and intellectuals such characters whose psychology cannot 120/121 II Joan Sales and Incerta glòria Xavier Pla

be reduced to the rules of reason or “Dear Sir. How grateful we must be conventional psychology. to you for having revealed Gloire incertaine, which I am now reading. I find it altogether However, what characterises the novel remarkable, and the translation is first class. the most and most surprises the reader If you have another Catalan novel of just is its very particular realism, a realism comparable quality to suggest, that belongs to the spiritual meaning of do not hesitate.” existence, a realism impregnated with It is in that sense, the presentation of a signs and dreams that melt into the very tense moral conflict, that we must include essence of things. It is the realism of Joan Sales among the novelists of the transfiguration, of the revelatory power “torn conscience” and a subject matter of of a writing that may start from reality salvation, in other words the resolution but which nevertheless feeds on of the inner conflict thanks to a growing faith and spirituality. awareness. From there too come the Sales is thus in tune with the defence of essentially subjective qualities of the an individualism we might conceive of novel. Its lyricism breaks the objective as the first step towards giving man the development of the story and the necessary instruments for the resolution metaphysical perspective nourishes the of that very individualism. According subject of evil and its reasons (distress, hatred, violence, suicide) and the subject to Sales, the evolution of society pushes of salvation (grace, love, inner man towards a common, collective and outer combats). destiny which may be either utopian or tragic. The novel then becomes an appeal “My youth was no more than a dark to personal conscience and sacrifice. storm”: Joan Sales often repeated that Christians must take part in a spiritual line by Baudelaire (in ‘L’ennemi’, poem community in full evolution instead X of Spleen et Idéal), words that seem to of devoting themselves to personal confirm that the only glory is found in flowering for individual salvation. the time of being young, understood as being the only period of life shot through And so Sales cleaves to a clear with love and death in the constant quest personalism, as reader and follower of the for the absolute. Shunning Manichaeism thought of both Emmanuel Mounier and of any kind, with a grave and deep Gabriel Marcel, with whom he kept up a solemnity, endowed with supreme correspondence for some time after the lucidity, the pages of Incerta glòria are publication of the French translation. a very human spiritual monologue that Gabriel Marcel himself wrote to Bernard makes the novel a genuine lesson in Lesfargues on 14th March 1962: tolerance in life and in literature II

Xavier Pla is a literay critic and lecturer in Catalan literature at the University of Girona.