Cultural Organizations, Networks and Mediators in Contemporary Ibero

11 The International Relations of the Catalan PEN Until 1936 Guests, Congressors and Visitors Joan Safont Plumed 1922. Founding Ambition On February 28, 1922, in a letter addressed to an unidentified person in the English PEN, the anthropologist and writer Josep Maria Batista Roca announced the first members of the hypothetical committee of Catalan PEN: the director of La Revista and noucentista poet Josep Maria Lpez- Pic, who was to be the president; poet and translator—“translator of Tagore’s poems in Catalan”, Batista declared to his contact—Josep Maria Millàs-Raurell; writer and journalist Carles Soldevila; and Josep Barbey, “all well-known among the young intellectual peoples”.1 Shortly thereafter, on April 19, at Barcelona’s Hotel Ritz, the founding meal of the Catalan branch of the PEN Club took place. Around the founding table were gathered Lpez-Pic; the writer and translator Josep Maria Millàs-Raurell; Batista Roca; a young English professor, the poet John Langdon-Davies, who had arrived in Catalonia a year before and who was preparing an anthology of Catalan poets to translate and publish in English; and the young humanist, philosopher, and economist Joan Crexells, who left for Munich a few days later. According to Josep Pla, Crexells was “perhaps the best, the most cultured, the most complete, one of the richest natures of young (very young) man to breathe the air of this land”,2 and his premature death just four years later hit the Catalan intellectual world hard. This Catalan PEN group became the third in the world, after the English and French. Lpez-Pic was elected president of the managing board of Catalan PEN, and Millàs-Raurell was its secretary until the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. The married writers Carles Riba and Clementina Arderiu did not attend the dinner; some weeks ear- lier they had gone to Germany, where they spent a year. Riba had been awarded a scholarship from the Pedagogy Council of the Mancomuni- tat of Catalonia; he frequented the lectures of Karl Vossler and along the way discovered the poetry of Hlderlin. Riba’s teacher Lpez-Pic told him about the dinner in a diary-like letter from Barcelona: “Day 19. First dinner of the PEN Club, Catalan branch, at the Ritz. Poets, editors, essayists, novelists, a contemporary cosmopolitan herd that wants the certainty of a banal monthly dinner with murmuring company. However, 214 Joan Safont Plumed we began modestly with a basis of Crexells, Millàs-Raurell, Batista, and a young English professor, whose name we have forgotten.”3 To understand this speed when forming a Catalan PEN Club, one must keep in mind the historical moment for Catalan culture and language. Nearly a century after the beginning of the so-called Catalan Renaixença, a modern national culture had begun to be articulated, with its own institutions, the Mancomunitat of Catalonia and later the Republican Gen- eralitat, with the interruption of Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship; its own intellectuals connected to the main currents of European thought; its own narrative, poetic, and dramatic works, which had a widening audience; its own place within a growing mass public, including press, radio, maga- zines, and books; and its own constant dialogue with the works of the writers, poets, novelists, and dramatists of the cultural environment. The project of the post-noucentism generation continued to situate Catalan culture at the European level, and in this sense the visits of foreign writers in Catalonia, translations and publications into Catalan, and the stints of Catalans as press correspondents, diplomats, or students fed Catalan culture in the twenties with modernity, new vision, and exposure. If, for the post-war international literary world, PEN was a way of bringing nations and writers together after the Great War, for Catalans it was a way of participating directly in this cosmopolitan construction by means of an international organization of intellectuals, without intermediaries and on an equal playing field. The premature foundation of Catalan PEN, just after the English and French, gives a sense of the open and global mental- ity of Catalan culture. A few days later, on May 5, the managing board, presided by Lpez-Pic, organized a luncheon in honour of the French poet and novelist Jules Romains, future president of PEN International, who was in the city on those days to give a cycle of conferences at the French Institute and who, moreover, had published an article about Cata- lan literature.4 A year after its formation, the Catalan Pen Club plenary was com- posed of Clementina Arderiu, Carles Riba, Pompeu Fabra, Josep Bar- bey, Joan Estelrich, Joaquim Horta Conill, Josep Farran Mayoral, Marià Manent, Lluís Nicolau d’Olwer, Joan Puig Ferrater, Carles Soldevila, Magí Morera i Galícia, Alexandre Plana, Josep Maria de Sagarra, Miquel Ferrà, Enric Martínez Ferrando, Alexandre Galí, Ventura Gassol, and Lluís Bertran Pijoan. The respected and celebrated linguist and father of modern Catalan, Pompeu Fabra, was chosen president. In May 1923, the first International Congress of the PEN Club took place in London. With the English novelist and dramatist John Galsworthy as president, 164 writers attended, representing the eleven PEN centres that were then in existence.5 Pompeu Fabra and Josep Maria Millàs-Raurell went as representatives of the Catalan centre. A few months after, on September 13, 1923, the Captain General of Catalonia, Miguel Primo de Rivera, headed a coup d’etat that resulted in a dictatorial regime sanctioned by International Relations of Catalan PEN Until 1936 215 King Alfonso XIII. The situation of deep social crisis, the unravelling of the Restoration system, the bloody war in Morocco, and the radical- ization of the Catalanist and workers’ movements had been detonated by the appearance of an “iron surgeon” who intended to resolve all the great problems of the country with a hard hand. The dictatorship that began was especially hostile to Catalanism and especially to Catalan language and culture, which also had consequences for the activity of PEN. The highly active Millàs-Raurell, in a letter to Galsworthy early in 1924, commented: All the expressions of our national soul are persecuted by the Mili- tary Directory of Spain, and the popular authorities, that represents the aim of Catalunya, and all the aspirations and ideals of our people, has been driven away from the places they have been elected by our country. I think, nevertheless, that a near future shall permit to us the public demonstration of our national aims and that shall facilitate the organisation of one May international meeting at Barcelona.6 As Millàs-Raurell explained, the Mancomunitat of Catalonia was dissolved and many of its cultural institutions had been denatured or had to survive clandestinely. Thus, the PEN Club, with its headquarters at the Barcelona Ateneu, immediately became one of the centres of affrmation of a Catalan culture repressed and persecuted by the dictator and prompted its presence in the world in search of solidarity and wider reach. Catalan writers found in the PEN Club a means to increase international exposure in a domain where culture had pre-eminence over state. In this way, Cata- lan PEN became the global representative of a culture persecuted by a dictatorial government, a premonition of what would shortly thereafter happen in Europe. For the first day of Sant Jordi during the dictatorship, and as a form of affirmation, Catalan PEN organized various events. After a reorga- nization, the newest president emerged: Magí Morera Galícia, a lawyer, politician, and translator of William Shakespeare. He headed the club, with Lpez-Pic; Millàs-Raurell; poet and politician Jaume Bofill Mates; poet and repeat winner of the Jocs Florals Joan Maria Guasch Mir; and Ramon Suriach Senties, author of El tresor dels pobres. This was the committee that on April 22 informed the poet, dramatist, and Nobel can- didate, Àngel Guimerà, of his appointment as honorary member of the International PEN Club, a restricted group which already included Eng- lishman Thomas Hardy, Irishman William Butler Yeats, Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck, Russian Maxim Gorky, Germans Hermann Sudermann and Gerhart Hauptmann, and Frenchman Anatole France. On April 23, the PEN organized a supper at the Hotel Coln presided by Àngel Guimerà, Narcís Oller, Víctor Català, Jaume Bofill Mates, Clementina Arderiu, and Magí Morera. Bofill Mates had been part of the political structure of the 216 Joan Safont Plumed Mancomunitat, which in that moment was eviscerated and on the verge of being dissolved by the regime, and in 1922 had founded the party Acci Catalana, of which he was the president. In his dual role of poet and nationalist politician, Bofill gave an important speech that invoked the Catalan language as “the lady of the rose in hand”, on behalf of whom he implored an imaginary fairy who could grant three wishes, while referring to the period of persecution experienced by Catalan language and culture: My lady: Let every people love its natural language. Only he who has a mother and honours her with dignity knows to be respectful towards women. Hate for an alien tongue, the persecution of a civil language, would be more than an injustice; it would be an injustice and an impropriety. [. .] My lady, let all of those men—if there are some—whether within or outside of Catalonia, Catalans or strang- ers, who hate our word and our culture, and cannot desist from com- batting them, let them have a personal, decorous, and fervent word, inborn or borrowed, that they may know, love, and honour [. .] I ask you, my lady, for a third gift, this one for us: the gift of the unity of all Catalans in love for our tongue, in fidelity to our tongue.

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