Women, espionage, smuggling, journalism… and, above all, literature. Especially literature, above all, shaped the life of Josep Pla (Palafrugell, 1897-1981), which Xavier Pla biographies in Un cor furtiu. Life of Josep Pla (Destino). There are more than 1,500 pages filled with unpublished materials taken from the exhaustive documentation that Josep Pla and his family kept throughout his life – with more than 4,000 of the 35,000 unpublished letters consulted, but also a vast documentation, whether diaries such as invoices, settlements, receipts, diaries or agendas – which do not make the book the definitive biography of the writer from Emporda, but yes, the author assures, “the most complete I have been able to write”. He explains it “on Sant Josep Pla day” – jokes editor Jordi Cornudella – in a meeting at Mas Pla, the Llofriu farmhouse, still inhabited by the family, for which the desire to keep documentation is not new: the first document they keep about the farm is from 1333.
Xavier Pla (Girona, 1966) had been working there for more than ten years and with each discovery, he admits, he often moved away from certainty and got closer to the complexity of the character. One of the major difficulties encountered by Xavier Pla – director of the Josep Pla Chair, at the University of Girona in collaboration with the Josep Pla Foundation and Grup 62 – is that Josep Pla wrote a lot and a lot about his life and he even half ordered his biography to be written four times, but it didn’t go through 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 he would win the Josep Pla prize, of course. Xavier Pla, in order to get to port, decided on the one hand to rely on as many documentary sources as he could, although the profusion of materials in this case rather played against him, and on the other hand he found that no he could write a biography in the usual style that would start with the birth and go through the chronology, but although he obviously follows the dates, he structures the text in thematic chapters that could be more or less independent: “There are so many threads to pull that each chapter could give rise to a novel”. In fact, it is not until the very end of the book that he writes: “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 his works Pla barely talks about his partners. How to get Rosetta Lagomarsino, Aly Herscovitz, Adi Enberg, Lilian Hirsch, Aurora Perea or Consuelo Robles to speak? Through letters, yes, but in some cases it was necessary to go further. Xavier Pla managed to get 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 even thanks to social networks he had the possibility to listen to an interview that was done to him in 1977. It is also thanks in the letters you can read the “pornographic” missives that Perea sends him and excite him. Xavier Pla states that the writer from Emporda not only loved, but that “he was very loved and his relationships never ended abruptly”. Now, there is 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 to Buenos Aires – where he had gone to see Aurora Perea – who then she is 17 years old and with whom Pla connects quickly, an eminently epistolary adventure – he invited her to Mas Pla, but she went there with her mother and did not stay there to sleep – 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 sentimental relationships, but also because it shows the writer’s relationship with his family, which he also almost never talks about in his work. The portrait that is taken from it is, this too, that of a Josep Pla who leads the family and protects the parents – a very unusual fact at the time and even more so in a rural environment.
Another half-answered question 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 quarters written after the war in which he documents where he was day by day between July 1936 and January 1939 – when he entered Barcelona with Franco’s troops – , so that you can know for the first time its entire route. This discovery also serves to undo a chronic misunderstanding: until now it had been thought that it had been Cambó who had financed Pla during this time, but according to Xavier Pla, it was actually Halfdan Enberg, father of his partner – although he was Norwegian married to a Swedish woman, he was the Danish consul in Barcelona. It is clear that Pla worked for Sifne (Servicio de Información del Nordeste de España), Franco’s anti-republican propaganda body, but according to Xavier Pla it is not so clear what his role was either, since even an agent of the the same body wrote a report against him, while at a certain moment a certificate was issued for his services rendered “pasando como elemento rojo”. But there are more elements to decipher, especially when Xavier Pla finds “a small agenda from 1944” where the writer records who he meets, has lunch and dinner with every day. Many different people every day, the biographer assures, but he highlights two American engineers from the Armstrong cork company, based in Palamós, who turned out to be spies for the OSS (the forerunner of the CIA) and two British journalists that “doing a simple search on the internet shows 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 escape of those persecuted by the Nazis and especially Allied soldiers who fell on occupied French soil. Furtive, and more like a journalist that the Franco regime looked on favorably. At that time, he shared a house in l’Escala with Aurora Perea. Then Xavier Pla remembers that the writer devoted himself intensely to building a boat, the Mestral, eleven meters long, two cabins and four beds, and an engine so large and specific that it was difficult for him to find . In September 1944, Pla was stripped of his navigation permit. That same year, the writer and his brother received a complaint for “servicio americano, that is, activities against the regime”.
But in the case of Josep Pla there are always superimposed layers of mystery, of confusion, of complexity, and then Xavier Pla explains how a few years later the Pla brothers find themselves immersed in a smuggling case when they embark on the Mistral in 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 go home by train. Some time later, they offer the fabulous engine of the boat in 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 Plan brothers have to smuggle? The adventure, the furtive life. And of course, as a good graphomaniac, Josep Pla takes advantage of the experience to write a book about it that can only be called Contraban.
At the same time that Jordi Puntí has ??published his “anti-biography” of Xavier Cugat in Confeti (Proa), and when Julià de Jòdar continues his self-referential inquiry about his alter ego Gabriel Caballero in La casa tapiada (Comanegra), both narratives kaleidoscopic, Xavier Pla serves up the biography of the writer who also lived behind the mask that he himself created and from which he could never detach himself. The author explains that thanks to the documentation that is preserved, he could perhaps have followed the life of Josep Pla every day of his life, but more than breaking myths, “great people in the world of art are contradictory” and it was necessary to convey that “we are dealing with one of the great European writers”.
