Women, espionage, smuggling, journalism… and, above all, literature. Especially literature, above all, shaped the life of Josep Pla (Palafrugell, 1897-1981), who Xavier Pla biography in Un cor furtiu. Life of Josep Pla (Destino, May 29 in Spanish). There are more than 1,500 pages full of unpublished material extracted from the exhaustive documentation that Josep Pla and his family kept throughout his life – with more than 4,000 of the 35,000 unpublished letters consulted, but also vast documentation, whether agendas or invoices. , settlements, receipts, diaries or agendas–, which do not make the book the definitive biography of the Empordà writer, but, the author assures, “the most complete that I have been able to write.” He explains it “on the day of Sant Josep Pla” – jokes the editor Jordi Cornudella – in a meeting at Mas Pla, the Mas de Llofriu, still inhabited by the family, for whom the mania for keeping documentation is not new: the first The document they preserve about the farmhouse is from 1333.
Xavier Pla (Girona, 1966) had been working on the book for more than ten years and with each discovery, he acknowledges, he often moved away from certainty and came closer to the complexity of the character. One of the great difficulties that Xavier Pla – director of the Josep Pla Chair, of the University of Girona in collaboration with the Josep Pla Foundation and Grup 62 – has encountered is that Josep Pla wrote a lot and a lot about his own life and even half He commissioned his biography to be written four times, but it didn’t happen because “he wanted to control everything.” The last to reject the proposal was Baltasar Porcel, whom Pla even tried to convince by telling him that this way he would win the Josep Pla award, of course. Xavier Pla, in order to reach port, decided on the one hand to base himself on as many documentary sources as he could, although the profusion of materials in this case worked rather against him, and on the other hand he found that he could not write a traditional biography that began with the birth and out following the chronology, but although it obviously goes through the dates, it structures the text into thematic chapters that could be more or less independent: “There are so many threads to stretch that each chapter could give rise to a novel.” It is not until the very end of the book that he writes: “Em dic Josep Pla i Casadevall. “Vig neixer a Palafrugell (Empordà petit) el 8 de març de 1897…” (My name is Josep Pla i Casadevall. I was born in Palafrugell (Empordà petit) on March 8, 1897…).
The biographer has been concerned with “giving women a voice,” since in her works Pla barely talks about her partners. How to make Rosetta Lagomarsino, Aly Herscovitz, Adi Enberg, Lilian Hirsch, Aurora Perea or Consuelo Robles speak? Through letters, of course, but in some cases we had to go further. Xavier Pla got Hirsh’s daughters to send him letters and photographs, but the most complicated case was that of Robles, who was, in his words, “semi-literate.” But he was lucky, first, that the journalist Víctor Fernández let him read the letters that Pla sent him, and thanks to social networks he was able to listen to an interview they did with him in 1977. It is also thanks to the letters that you can read the “pornographic” missives that Perea sends him and they excite him. Xavier Pla confirms that the Empordà writer not only loved, but “was very loved and his relationships never ended abruptly.” There is still one last chapter tinged with platonic, romantic love, and it is that of Luz de Santa Coloma: a girl whom Pla meets on a boat returning from Barcelona in Buenos Aires – where he had gone to see Aurora Perea – who then has 17 years old and with whom Pla connects quickly, an eminently epistolary adventure – he invited her to Mas Pla, but she went with her mother and without staying the night there – for years, in a correspondence that according to Xavier Pla “reconciles us with Josep Pla” because it is full of “delicacy, sensitivity and respect.”
Thus, the Pla that can be seen in the biography has, following the same title, a heart that is sensitive – no matter how much Pla had always built an “anti-sentimental mask” –, and not only because of his romantic relationships, but also because The writer’s relationship with his family is shown, which he almost never talks about in his work either. The portrait that is extracted is also that of a Josep Pla who leads his family and is familiar with his parents – a very unusual fact at the time and even more so in a rural environment.
Another question that is half-answered has to do with the “stealth” component of the title, and one of the usual controversies is espionage during the Civil War. Here, Xavier Pla also found documentary oil, in this case in four pages written after the war in which he documents where he was day to day between July 1936 and January 1939 – when he entered Barcelona with Franco’s troops –, so that you can know its entire journey for the first time. This discovery also serves to undo a chronic misunderstanding: until now it had been thought that it was Cambó who had financed Pla during this time, but according to the researcher, it was actually Halfdan Enberg, father of his partner – although he was Norwegian married to a Swedish woman, was the Danish consul in Barcelona. It is clear that Pla worked for Sifne, (Information Service of Northeastern Spain) the Francoist anti-republican propaganda organization, but according to Xavier Pla it is not so clear what his role was, since even an agent from the same organization wrote a report against him. , while at a certain time a certificate is issued for the services provided “passing as a red element.” But there are more elements to decipher, especially when Xavier Pla finds “a small diary from 1944” where the writer records who he meets, eats and has dinner with each day. Many different people every day, says the biographer, but he highlights two North American engineers from the Armstrong cork company, based in Palamós, who turned out to be spies for the OSS (the precursor of the CIA) and two British journalists who “doing a simple search On the internet it is seen that they were agents of British intelligence, in this case MI9.” Xavier Pla’s thesis is that the writer was part of the Pat O’Leary network, based in l’Escala and dedicated to the evasion of those persecuted by the Nazis and especially of Allied soldiers who fell on occupied French soil. Furtive, and even more so being a journalist whom the Franco regime viewed favorably. At that time, he shared a house in l’Escala with Aurora Perea. Then Xavier Pla remembers that the writer dedicated himself intensely to building a boat, the Mestral, eleven meters long, with two cabins and four beds, and an engine so large and specific that it was difficult for him to find it. In September 1944, Pla obtained his navigation permit. That same year, the writer and his brother received a complaint for “American service, that is, activities against the regime.”
But in the case of Josep Pla there are always superimposed layers of mystery, confusion, complexity, and then Xavier Pla explains that a few years later, in 1947, the Pla brothers found themselves immersed in a smuggling case when with the Mestral they They embark to Genoa, where they load “mercury thermometers and other pharmaceutical utensils” to do business, but in Seta, France, the gendarmerie intercepts them and confiscates their cargo. It ends badly and they have to return home by train. Some time later, they offered the fabulous engine of the boat to the pages of La Vanguardia. In this case, Xavier Pla had the captain’s logbook, which detailed the circumstances of the navigation, but he even found the invoice for the map of Genoa that Pla bought in Barcelona. What need did the Pla brothers have to do smuggling? The adventure, the furtive life. And of course, like a good graphomaniac, Josep Pla takes advantage of the experience to write a book that can only be called Contraban.
At the same time that Jordi Puntí has ??published his “antibiography” of Xavier Cugat in Confetti (Proa), and when Julià de Jòdar continues her self-referential inquiry into her alter ego Gabriel Caballero in La casa tapiada (Comanegra), both kaleidoscopic narratives, Xavier Pla serves as the biography of the writer who also lived behind the mask that he created himself and from which he could never get rid of. The researcher says that thanks to the documentation that is preserved, perhaps he could have kept track of Josep Pla every day of his life, but more than breaking myths, “the great people of the art world are contradictory” and it was necessary to convey that ” “We are facing one of the great European writers.”
Catalan version, here
