I have found few books to be so masterful in the field of cultural journalism, and I have recommended them as much, as 24×24, which collected the interviews published by Ana María Moix in the first half of the 70s.
Ana María (1947-2024) was then primarily Terenci’s sister, who had already made a spectacular appearance on the Catalan literary scene. But she soon made a prominent place for herself as a poet selected by Josep Maria Castellet in his famous anthology of the Novísimos, and also as a narrator (although the Barral prize for novels eluded her due to animosity within the label itself).
The point is that Ana María was a rising figure and it occurred to the then director of the evening newspaper Tele/eXpress, Manuel Ibáñez Escofet, to propose a novel formula, probably inspired by some French news media, which were then the prescribers, or by a famous title by Stefan Zweig. It was about following an interesting figure for a day and recounting, along with her reflections, what was happening to her, to thus explain her daily life.
The writer got to work, and the reports, illustrated with a photo of Colita, were published weekly in the section titled 24 hours in the life of, although, in her own words, she had not spent all of them with any of them. the interviewees, “which in some cases they would have liked and in others not, and which would undoubtedly have annoyed those who agreed to the talk.”
They are insightful texts, with abundant notes of humor, which very well capture the atmospheres of characters who expand with frankness, largely due to the complicity with an interviewer from their own environment. The compendium was published by Ediciones de Bolsillo/Península in 1973.
Now the Amarillo publishing house recovers them, under the title Conversaciones en el tiempo, adding five texts that had been left out. Some have been widely cited later, such as Jaime Gil de Biedma (“I am very sensual. The day my sensuality fails me, life would be an inhospitable place”), Gabriel García Márquez embarking on the writing of The Autumn of the Patriarch ( “tired, listless appearance, indifferent gesture, as if nothing around him mattered”), or that of Terenci, whom he accompanies in a hilarious selection of photos in Fotogramas magazine for a book about Hollywood, and his chaotic apartment in a seventh without elevator on Casanova street.
Josep Maria Castellet (“the maestro”), Ana María Matute, a young Eugenio Trías, Oriol Regàs, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jaume Perich, Joan Ponç, Núria Espert, Salvador Dalí (with whom he does not connect and compares to “a scratched disco” ), Pere Gimferrer absorbed in the Italian translation – a thousand pages – of the Historia de Genji, Victoria de los Ángeles, Montserrat Caballé… draw a brilliant moment of Barcelona culture, which the twenty-year-old author contributed decisively, with these profiles, to mythologize
Shortly before, a leading publication had been reactivated in Madrid. The Revista de Occident, founded in 1923 by José Ortega y Gasset and disappeared with the Civil War, reappeared in 1963 at the hands of José Ortega Spottorno, and with some interruption it has continued until today, when it has just inaugurated a new era with Fernando Vallespín (director) and Juan Claudio de Ramón (editorial secretary) at the helm.
The exhibition “Clarity, clarity” opened at the Ortega Marañón Foundation in Madrid reflects this second stage. And it highlights the great reference that exiled intellectuals represented in the 60s, and in the 70s the constellation of the Benets, Martín Gaite, Sánchez Ferlosio, Umbral, etc., totemic figures of the transition.
Reading Moix’s book and visiting the Revista de Occident exhibition, despite their very different magnitudes, invites a comparison between the Barcelona and Madrid cultural environments of that time. To see their very different styles – serious and with an academic circulation that of the Magazine, informal, sophisticated and with a frivolous touch the divine gauche world that the “24 hours” collect.
But there is also a trace of their mutual attention (Moix interviews the philosopher Aranguren and the novelist García Hortelano, while the Magazine talks about Ignacio Agustí – with an article titled “Mariona Rebull or the useless bourgeoisie” – and pays tribute to Salvador Espriu. Thus as well as the different but shared treatment of phenomena such as the aforementioned culture of exile (Moix also follows the days of Rosa Chacel and Max Aub) or the Latin American boom, whose main figures resided at that time in Barcelona (the Magazine celebrates very soon as “masterpiece” One Hundred Years of Solitude.) The prevailing concerns in both intellectual worlds 500 kilometers away, and in the death throes of Francoism, were not so far away.