On March 22, the centenary of the birth of Antonio Vilanova (1923-2008) was celebrated. For this reason and to remember the memory of the man who was Professor of Spanish Literature at the University of Barcelona and during the 50s and 60s of the last century, a leading literary critic from the pages of the weekly Destino, Publicacions de la UB has published the Diary he wrote during the last months of the Civil War, under the supervision of Professor Alba Guimerà. In these columns I want to report some passages from the notes of a fragmentary and still unpublished diary (a small puzzle that I am building) that goes from 1948 to 1952. It is -I say it with a label used by Cela- a gloss of the world around it, in which autobiographical confessions are often amalgamated that reveal his personality, as well as his last attempts to write novels or his constant passion for opera and classical music.
The first passage is dated November 22, 1948, in the last hours of Vicente Aleixandre’s stay in Barcelona. It is a brief note about the meeting held in the afternoon at the home of the poet Tomás Garcés. Attending were Juan Ramón Masoliver, Martínez Barbeito and his wife, “a beautiful, exotic, fine girl”, Gloria Ros and “Vicente Aleixandre as guest of honor. Long dissertation by Juan Ramón on Jewish names and surnames, which I don’t know to what extent Aleixandre will have been amused. Masoliver is an eternally exorbitant man in his things. He has told us that he wants to resume the publication of ‘Deliveries of poetry’ ”.
December 2, 1948. Conference by Josep M. de Sagarra at the Ateneu on his translation of the Divine Comedy. Vilanova observes that “the old Roman patrician” was “a bit embarrassed and insecure at the beginning”, given the expectation that the act had aroused. And he notes: “It must be taken into account that for the Catalanists of the resistance, Sagarra’s act of giving a lecture in Spanish and at the current Ateneo, constitutes a shameful betrayal and what has been called a flagrant act of collaboration. On the other hand, [José] Pardo as Head of Press and Propaganda, and the other servants of the regime who confuse the Spanish conscience with the colonial mentality, are very happy with their political victory. When it is true that there is neither collaborationism nor political victory, but rather this tragic reality that is life, which imposes itself on all of us and forces us to compromise, to hide, to concede and to be hypocritical, so as not to perish in solitude and misery”.
December 5, 1948. Vilanova attended the performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni at the Gran Teatro del Liceo the afternoon before. “Comfortably stretched out in my amphitheater seat, enjoying the exquisite Mozartian melody of the opening…” When reviewing the opera’s staging (“Don Giovanni is probably the most beautiful of all Mozart’s operas, something like the Requiem of Mozartian operas”), he notes: “I don’t know why, Mozart always reminds me of Sthendal and especially the pages of ”.
February 14, 1949. Conference by José María Pemán at the Ateneu on “The Barcelona chapters of Don Quixote”. A veritable conclave awaits the speaker in the Board Room: Luys Santa Marina, Sagarra, Félix Ros, Guillermo Díaz-Plaja, Martín de Riquer, Elisabeth Mulder, Ángel Zúñiga, José Pardo, etc. Vilanova notes with poorly concealed cunning: “Masoliver has not come, I don’t know if due to poetic principles or political resentments. Although it could well be because of love commitments, because Esther de Andreis was not there”.
Vilanova laconically portrays the speaker: “Pemán is a great Andalusian gentleman, of prosperous stature and a beautiful head of white hair, which grants noble dignity to his upright gesture, full of nobility.” In contrast, he judges “the embarrassing vulgarity” of his presenter, Luis de Galinsoga, “abject provincial magazine publisher, promoted to director of a large newspaper.” He also refers to the content of the conference: “How tragic this, so Spanish, of natural genius, overflowing in luminous flares of rhetoric all possible reflective creation!”. Adding a very brilliant comment, but perhaps not very rigorous: “Potro is gallant, but he goes without brake, said Góngora, a minority, hermetic and severe intellectual, of Lope’s overflowing genius.”
The notes and the fragmentary diary is a good compendium of Barcelona’s cultural life from the 1948-49 biennium, but it also has moments of self-reflection, such as the one dated September 12, 1949: “One of the secret tragedies of my life consists of the uncertainty about my own talent. I am not referring to my provisional competence or to my critical and scholarly talent, which I believe to be true, but to my creative capacity. Sometimes I despair at the idea that all my immense intellectual curiosity, my entire world of ideas and feelings is lost as a work due to a lack of artistic genius. Being a novelist would be my greatest illusion and my greatest aesthetic ambition.
Last passage. Regarding a dinner on December 21, 1949 at the Siete Puertas. Vilanova shares a table with the Riquer, the Agustí, the Reguera and Esther de Andreis. In the afternoon they had attended a conference by the Arabist Emilio García Gómez. The next day he recalls in his diary how he met Joan Estelrich (“At the age of seventeen I met Estelrich and at his house I was received as a dear friend and I talked as an equal with someone who was so superior to me in talent and human experience only because of the excessive breadth of my reading, my natural gravity, inappropriate for an adolescent and my friendship with Ana María”), Josep M. de Sagarra, Carles Riba or Xavier Zubiri (“I was a nineteen-year-old when I met Xavier Zubiri through Asenchi [Madinaveitia], my dearest and dearest friend”).
The reader can intuit that, when this puzzle is finished, these notes (some very brief), this fragmentary diary, will not only reveal the stature of a great intellectual personality, but will also be an essential testimony of Barcelona’s cultural life in the immediate post-war period.
Antonio Vilanova Diary of a young reader UB Editions
286 pages 18.00 euro
