Although it is no secret that Joan Fuster and Josep Pla were friends and collaborators, their affinity is still surprising given the differences in character between the two, with a great ideological distance that was also fuel for their ideas, and a -relative- heterodoxy that rather than separating them united them. An important relationship for both: Fuster’s first paid article – on August 16, 1952 in the newspaper Levante, and which made him realize that he could earn a living by writing – was about Plan, as he to be his last public intervention, in a conference in Bellreguard (La Safor), on April 23, 1992, eleven years after the death of the writer from Emporda and two months before that of the Valencian.
In between, a great friendship born of a mutual curiosity, first through reading, until one day in 1959, returning from a trip to the Persian Gulf, Pla took a bus from Ceuta to Sueca to meet Fuster, whom later, in 1966, he would even ask me to write him the foreword to the Complete Works.
At the Palau Robert in Barcelona you can see until November 19 two exhibitions dedicated to the genius of Sueca: Joan Fuster-Josep Pla: an infinite conversation, curated by Antoni Martí Monterde – produced by the Josep Pla Foundation – and Joan Fuster in his time, by Francesc Pérez Moragón and Edelmir Galdón Casanoves – originally from the Consortium of Museums of the Valencian Community and the Valencian Academy of the Language–, opened not by chance to coincide with “Valencian Country Day”, as remember the president of the Generalitat – the Catalan one – Pere Aragonès. Both samples have been exhibited in Valencia, and for the director of the Institution of Catalan Letters, Izaskun Arretxe, “it was very important that it was the same as what was seen there and here”, and that it be the colophon of the Carpenter’s Year .
Joan Fuster in his time has an eminently divulgative spirit and traces the life and work of the Valencian writer, while the other show evidences the “elective complicity” between Fuster and Plan, as Martí Monterde writes in the catalogue, which he sees them parallel in “the ironic look, skepticism and methodical suspicion”, who “made writing a trade and profession and saw the world in the form of an article” and were able to bring together the around him a multitude of creators, because “their respective houses were places of pilgrimage for writers, artists, intellectuals…”.
In addition to texts and photographs about both, the exhibition can see original manuscripts and typescripts, as well as the typewriter with which Fuster wrote We, the Valencians.
The director of the Josep Pla Foundation, Francesc Montero, explains that he himself was “surprised by the amount of intersections between them” despite the difference in age and apparently ways of being, with common references such as Montaigne and D’Ors , and hence also the pull to the essay and also to dieting to build a personal look.
