On July 27, 1994, the writer Rosa Chacel died in Madrid. She was 96 years old, a longevity that allowed her to enjoy, although late, recognition: Critics’ Prize 1976, National Literature Prize 1987, Gold Medal in Fine Arts 1993, among others. More importantly, she remained active: just a couple of months earlier she said she was working on a new novel, the fourth part of one of her greatest works, the cycle Plato’s schoolformed by Neighborhood of Wonders (1976), Acropolis (1984) y Natural Sciences (1988), which in the end was only a few pages long. Only her physical health – she had suffered a stroke in one eye, and the other was already very deteriorated – held her back. Her mind remained as lucid as ever.
Born in Valladolid on June 3, 1898, into a liberal family – she was the great-niece of the poet José Zorrilla – she barely attended school for a month; her mother, a teacher, educated her at home. Contrary to what might seem, this situation not only did not limit her, but contributed from an early age to stimulating her critical and independent spirit. When she was ten, they moved to Madrid, near her paternal grandmother’s house, to the Barrio de las Maravillas, which she would later evoke in her narrative, with an unusual capacity for observation that reinterpreted any detail, giving it new meaning. She studied at different centers until enrolling, in 1915, in the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, which brought her closer to the Madrid cultural scene and to the man who would become her husband and father of her only son, the painter Timoteo Pérez Rubio (1896-1977).
At that time she began to collaborate with magazines and to establish ties with the most illustrious figures of the bohemian scene. Between 1922 and 1927, the couple travelled around Europe, a period in which her stay in Rome stands out thanks to a scholarship that he was awarded. In the 1930s, already back, she became a mother and published her first book, Season. Round tripa novel that is difficult to categorize, a hybrid between narrative and essay, which laid the foundations for the literature of profound philosophical depth that he would develop later. In that debut he already showed off an exuberant language, which he owed to his parents: “They bequeathed me something of incalculable value: the good Spanish that was spoken at home and that is what I have written with,” he said in an interview for The country in May 1994.
The first major project was presented to him by his teacher, José Ortega y Gasset, who commissioned a fictionalized biography of Espronceda’s lover, for a collection called Extraordinary lives of the 19th century. The book, Teresa (1941), was published later than planned, and in Buenos Aires, because, like so many of her contemporaries, her career was cut short by the Civil War. With a small son, her priority was to protect him at all costs from the horror, and they went into exile in South America after a brief stay in France and Switzerland. Her husband followed them a little later, having initially remained in Spain, where he participated in the evacuation of the works from the Prado Museum to Geneva to save them from barbarism.
The family lived between Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro, and experienced serious economic problems. Chacel did not return to Spain until 1972, although it was only for a short time. During her exile, far from her homeland, she became even more discouraged by the restrictions of Franco’s censorship, which prevented her from publishing in her country (the only exception was Teresaalthough it arrived years after the original edition). Friend of writers such as Jorge Luis Borges and Silvina Ocampo, her intellectual curiosity remained alive: from that stage emerged The unreason (1960), which many consider her masterpiece, a vast novel of ideas dressed in detective fiction, with digressions, twists and turns and a character who, despite living her adventures mainly in Argentina, has much of the recent Spanish past, the trauma of the conflict. It was a constant in her: in addition to being inspired by international references, especially French – she was a translator of To the fishby Albert Camus, among others–, carried with it the Spanish tradition of Cervantes, Galdós, Larra and Unamuno, which led in other directions, a permanent search.
In exile, his uprooting was compensated for in the 1960s when he began a correspondence with some of the “new” Barcelona poets, such as Pere Gimferrer and Ana María Moix, who wrote to him after reading his works with amazement. Teresa. The letters with the latter, collected in From sea to seahighlight the spark that ignited in the veteran writer when she knew she was appreciated by that cultured and rebellious university youth, who gave her hope in her country. Moix informed her of the new voices on the literary scene and asked her for advice, both educational and vital. Chacel responded with affection, but without a soft maternal tone: she treated her interlocutor with intellectual respect, took her seriously, took her opinion into account; and she opened up in turn, sharing her loneliness and her pessimism about the future of her work.
Her definitive return to Spain occurred in the eighties, after the death of her husband, when she settled in Madrid with her son. The democratic transition opened the door to her books, which were finally published and gained recognition. She worked tirelessly, signed her splendid trilogy and several essays, and took advantage of her moment of good fortune with the humility of someone who has been in the shadows for many years. Only her readers resisted her: those she had venerated her, and among them were many authors of the new generations, but they were never many, she did not top the best-seller lists. She cultivated all genres – novel, short story, poetry, essay, biography, memoirs, diary – and in all of them she left her mark, a mark perhaps too singular to seduce the masses. Although she is usually included in the Generation of ’27, she always went her own way; a rare reviews.
Chacel had ideas about childhood and femininity that may seem shocking today. She declared, on the one hand, that she was never a girl, because she was never treated as such; this was not a reproach, but rather the opposite: she felt rejection of the tendency, a product of mass culture that prevailed in the second half of the twentieth century, to infantilize children, either with too much attention or with saccharine stories or films. She wrote that “being a girl is wanting to stop being one (…). From our maturity we see the charm of childhood; from childhood we see the desirable puberty and we are distressed by our impotence to reach it with the speed of lightning or thought.” In novels such as Memories of Leticia Valle (1945), about the awakening of a teenager, demystifies that stage with a protagonist who is far from being a candid young woman.
As for her identity as a woman, she found it uncomfortable from the beginning, in the sense that she did not want to be what was expected of women, to keep the house and remain submissive to her husband. She did not want to be like her grandmother or her mother; she did not like to play with other girls, she found them uninteresting. She refused to be pigeonholed by her gender, to value the creations of men and women with different parameters. She set the highest standards for herself, and this involved speaking as equals with the best. A disciple of Ortega y Gasset and Gómez de la Serna, an admirer of Joyce and Proust, her work has a philosophical background and joins the renewing spirit of the avant-garde, in which she found modernity in the expression she sought to escape from conventions. Her literary corpus was therefore far from being the traditional feminine sphere of emotions and domesticity. This earned her the respect of many colleagues, although the complexity gave her a reputation as a “difficult” author that scared away readers.
Her refusal to fit into the model of women of the time went beyond her production: she was not afraid to express her opinion out loud, to be critical or to stand up when the occasion required it.
Her refusal to fit into the model of women of the time went beyond her work: she was not afraid to express her opinion out loud, to be critical or to stand up when the occasion required it. She said that she was not named an academic or awarded the Cervantes Prize because she did not work hard enough to make contacts; she did not back down when Francisco Umbral suggested that she was flirting with young girls; she treated aspiring writers who asked her for advice without condescension, pointing out their shortcomings and urging them not only to the vague concept of improvement, but to be more ambitious, to ask questions, to explore. Her intellectual stature was evident in everything she wrote and spoke, as was her nature that she herself described as “know-it-all.” She was certainly not the endearing author adored by everyone; but she never wanted to be that either.
She was one of the few women Javier Marías mentioned when he spoke of great authors: Chacel, a family friend – her father, Julián Marías, tried to be her editor in Spain while she was in exile – had advised her in her early days as a novelist. She was tough, but because she knew she could be, she saw her potential and did not want her to lose her way or lower her standards. Marías, by the way, also mentioned Mercè Rodoreda – herself exiled, in her case between France and Switzerland – with whom Chacel corresponded; the two writers professed mutual admiration for each other. Both were pioneers of literature, and, after the break that exile represented, they were able to redeem themselves to a certain extent upon their return, since Rodoreda also received honours in the Catalan circle.
Chacel, so self-demanding, instilled a severity that perhaps would not be well received today, either, but there is no doubt that anyone who wants to know the best of the Spanish literary tradition cannot miss it. If we start with The unreason It’s dizzying, you can try with Teresamore conventional, whose denunciation of the situation of women is still current; or for her non-fiction, so forceful and honest, like her memoirs Since sunrise (1972) or his diaries, Piggy bankrecovered this year. Introspective, elusive and profound, its narrative is like a rugged terrain, but, as Plato warned, the truth is only reached after an arduous path, which forces one to remove the cobwebs from one’s eyes and dare to look towards the light, however much it may blind one at first. It is never too late to take that path; good books know how to wait.
Source: www.eldiario.es
