Josep Pla: an encyclopedic biography

Until now there was a Josep Pla; From this ungovernable volume there is another Pla, truer, more authentic, millimetrically followed in many episodes of his life and, too many times, suffocatingly crushed by an indiscriminate amount of unnecessary information in these more than 1,500 tight pages. The quantity and quality of new documentation available on the most influential and most vivid name in Catalan literature of the 20th century is truly exceptional: an unmitigated great of Spanish literature.

The amazing thing is that the same giant book contains very brilliant and very well-written episodes along with others hypertrophied with secondary data, overrated information and very extensive quotes that hopelessly weaken the book. Luckily, the sections or chapters tend to have their own autonomy, like subthemes of a life that span decades: a book, his many women, the true shipwreck he suffered on the Costa Brava, the construction of a boat, his political journalism. and his relations with Portela Valladares but also with Dionisio Ridruejo or Josep Tarradellas, his youthful and natural independence, his outdated reactionism in old age due, at least, to the Portuguese carnation revolution. The only way to explain this is that the book results in a kind of encyclopedic archive that suffocates the very biography of the writer: it is, without a doubt, and with exemplary passages of synthesis and recapitulation by Xavier Pla, but you have to find them in the jungle wild of quotes (including dozens of postcards from his faithful readers at the end of his life). The obsession of Josep Pla and his family with keeping everything, everything, everything has ended up making this biography sick with acute documentary dropsy.

In some chapters it is impossible to disengage if one accepts the inflationary immersion in the Pla galaxy and its cynicism, its contradictions, its lies, its double games, its writing activated like animal respiration, its ungovernable family and friendly epistolary, its unfinished and now rescued novels , his erotic fantasies, his political and literally mercenary opportunism, his methodical and charming self-abasement, his minor tone as a maxim of bravery and literary resistance in the postwar period and his aptitude for unique observation, the inimitable and a thousand times imitated style: genius, but now also seen from within as never before, in the interludes of musings, satanic pride, the highest self-esteem disguised as ironic humility and the almost always anguishing apprehensions of a dry, pale, worn-out intimacy, so often very sad and almost always frustrated

The book enriches Pla’s vision in a truly implausible way thanks to the unrestricted access, it seems, to the family archive, after the purge that his brother Pere undertook in the weeks immediately after his death in 1981. What he left, and what he has found an inexhaustible Xavier Pla on his own, is phenomenal. Without denying the previous biographies, he systematically corrects or records both the stories that Pla told about himself (uncountable) and the ferocious attacks he received before and after the war or deplores the most biased and intemperate views after the publication of his work. absolute teacher, The gray quadern (more neglected than expected, although its intricate literary and publishing history is well told). The pyramid of simplifications that the most naive readers believed and repeated often collapses here, largely thanks to Pla’s highly sophisticated and precocious cynicism to fictionalize his life without fainting and with impudence.

The notarial chronology format that the war section adopts does not help the narrative fluidity, but it contains very powerful information, in particular about the break with Francesc Cambó and the vital desolation that the war leaves him with, with an unsatisfactory but continued relationship with Adi Enberg, abusively quoted or paraphrased in multiple transcripts of his letters. The private and public lives of Pla’s lovers and friends have taken up a disproportionate amount of space in the volume, along with innumerable very painful coves, like this one about the drama of forbidden Catalan from 1945: “Can we never write in Catalan again? (…) Will we always live in this climate of fear, anguish and hope without conviction?”

Maybe not. In the following ten years he published more than twenty books in Catalan, and mobilized everyone who was close to him, courageous, combative and convinced of being a crucial (and real) piece of the reconstruction of the resistance, even if it had victorious origins, as it is. Their case. At the same time, the plague of alcoholism makes him feel guilty and distressed; for decades he has been “drinking a lot, non-stop, unrestrained, all the time,” says Xavier Pla, who is usually inconclusive or categorical. The analyzes of Pla’s most accomplished works are very selective (the best are those dedicated to Trip by bus and The narrow street), while the reader comes face to face with fascinating material at every step, such as a shocking denunciation of the repression of Catalan addressed to the authorities in 1950, or gets lost in the intricacies of clandestine information with the British and Americans or in various businesses shady black market or smuggling, he witnesses the nocturnal viscosity of Havana and the dazzle before New York on his long-awaited visit, he detects the vengeful Pla in the homenots of Josep Maria de Sagarra or Joan Estelrich or you see him dabbling in the most fragile tenderness in some of the letters that Josep Pla calls “pornographic” to Aurora Perea or Consuelo, or he enjoys the love of maturity, beyond his sixty years. , from a young, mega-rich Argentine teenager: “I would like to write you a correspondence,” says Pla when she returns to Buenos Aires, “so that you could keep it so that in twenty years I could become a vague memory of your adolescence.”

I would say that what is truly new about this book is in the subsoil, in the moral substratum that it provides from a writer and journalist who so often reveals exasperated fatigue and irrepressible sadness, unhappiness and dispersion, depression and alcoholic dependence, solitary nomadism and graphomania as slavery vital of a character who was happy only very occasionally or only installed in the fantasy of writing.

Xavier Pla
Destiny, 2024
1,536 pages, 34.90 euros

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