It is interesting but not surprising that in the choice of marriage partner both Catalan and immigrant preferred mates from any part of Spain, even ill-regarded Murcia, to foreigners; religion had much to do with this, because if one chose a Spaniard no matter how lowly, he was at least sure of catching a Catholic. In all columns the social distance between the Murcian and the highest-ranking foreigner was considerable.
1 concluded from my reading of Dr. del Campo’s study that the dilution of Cataluña was inescapable. Immigration into the area is more massive than I have been able to convey; word has gone out to the other parts of Spain that here is the good place to live and that for generations to come there will be jobs along the Catalan coast. I would expect the immigration to increase rather than diminish, for if I were a young Spanish laborer in some backward Extremaduran or Andalusian village I would cut out for Barcelona tomorrow. I would be homesick, to be sure, and I might long for the intimacy and love of my native pueblo, but it would see me no more. I would not subject myself to its humiliation when I could live in the freedom of Barcelona.
Since my earliest days in Spain I had wanted to see how the publishing business operated, for I bought many books and knew a few writers, but always I had been advised, ‘Hold that till you reach Barcelona. It’s the publishing capital of Spain.’ So one morning I reported to Ediciones Destino, whose president, Señor José Vergés Matas, proved generous with his time. He was an unusually handsome man who looked to be about forty-two with prematurely white hair and a large mobile face featuring even teeth and a modern type of eyeglass. ‘The old firms die out,’ he said gravely. ‘You won’t believe it, but I founded this company. Yes. First we published magazines and made a big success. This one here,’ and he showed me his firm’s leader, a magazine of opinion and news, ‘sells about sixty thousand copies a week.’ I looked at the cover and saw that it was in its thirtieth year.
“Did you say you founded this?’
‘Yes. Thirty years ago.’ He was obviously somewhat older than the forty-two I had guessed. Then he added. ‘I was quite young at the time, believe me. Today I wouldn’t have the courage. Well, when the magazines made money we turned to books, and in Spain that’s an adventure because in this country we don’t have many readers. In North America you have two hundred million people.’ I was constantly being surprised at how much educated Spaniards knew about my country and how little we know about theirs. ‘Some good books in your country can hope to sell a hundred thousand copies. In Spain we have one-sixth as many people, about thirty-four million, so we should expect to sell one-sixth as many books, or sixteen thousand. How many do you suppose we do sell?’
I knew that Spanish readers bought fewer books than Americans did, just as Americans bought fewer than English or Japanese, but I had no idea that the editions of important books were so minute. Señor Matas said, ‘We’re lucky if we sell three thousand copies. We print that number, hopefully, and we keep our costs so low that we break even if we sell twelve hundred. We put only fifteen hundred in covers. We bind the rest only if we sell our first effort. If not, and this is usually the case, we throw away the second fifteen hundred sets of sheets.
As a Catalan, which region’s people do you like best? As an immigrant, which region’s people do you like best? If you were to marry, from which would you choose?
1 Cataluña 1 Aragón 1 Cataluña
2 Valencia 2 Cataluña 2 Valencia
3 Baleares 3 Navarra 3 Baleares
4 Basque region 4 Castilla 4 Basque region
5 Navarra 5 Valencia 5 Navarra
6 Aragón 6 Asturias 6 Aragón
7 Asturias 7 Basque region 7 Asturias
8 Castilla 8 Extremadura 8 Castilla
9 Extremadura 9 Andalucía 9 Extremadura
10 Galicia 10 Baleares 10 Andalucía
11 Andalucía 11 Galicia 11 Galicia
12 Murcia 12 Murcia 12 Murcia
13 France 13 Mexico 13 Mexico
14 Mexico 14 France 14 France
15 Italy 15 Brazil 15 Brazil
16 Brazil 16 North America 16 Italy
17 Germany 17 Italy 17 North America
18 England 18 Germany 18 Germany
19 Sweden 19 England 19 Sweden
20 North America 20 Sweden 20 England
21 Argentina 21 Morocco 21 Argentina
22 Venezuela 22 Argentina 22 Venezuela
23 Morocco 23 Venezuela 23 Norway
24 Norway 24 Norway 24 Morocco
‘We pay about the same royalties to authors that you do. On the first eight thousand copies, ten percent. On the next two thousand, twelve percent. Above ten thousand copies, fifteen percent. But not many writers can live off what they earn publishing books in Spain.’
I had noticed on the shelves lining his office a series of what looked like novels, all published in the same format and stretching for some distance around the room. When I asked what they were, his wide face broke into a smile of satisfaction. One of the best ideas I ever had. The Premio Eugenio Nadal. He was an editor of ours. We’ve given this prize each year since 1944, and we’ve found some sensationally fine books. All novels. In 1947 Miguel Delibes’ The Shadows of the Cypresses Lengthen, in 1959 Ana María Matute’s Earliest Memories. And of course this one in 1946, José María Gironella’s A Man. Because we’ve held our standards so high, and partly because of luck, we can assure the author’who wins this prize a sale of at least twenty thousand. He earns some real money if he wins the Premio Nadal. Maybe four hundred manuscripts will be submitted.’
Señor Vergés told me that of all the books published in Spain, ninety percent are handled by Barcelona firms, and of books of high quality, about ninety-eight percent. Much of the actual printing, however, is done on big presses in cities like Bilbao. ‘What we’re finding profitable is joint publication with houses in Italy, Berlin, Geneva and Amsterdam. We bring out expensive books in color, like the paintings of Goya or Life in Prehistoric Times. We print all the editions, regardless of language, in Switzerland and especially Italy, which seems to have the best color presses in the world these days. and this enables us to keep costs so low that we all make money. But here is something we do that you don’t do any longer in America, and our authors appreciate it.’
He pointed to a shelf on which rested thirty volumes, bound in leather and most handsomely designed, representing the complete works of a novelist held in much esteem locally, The Complete Works of Josep Pla. ‘They sell for six dollars and forty cents a copy and large numbers of people feel that they must have the complete set.’
“When did Pla die?’ I asked.
‘He’s still alive. We do this for our living authors,’ and he pointed to four or five other such series.
I picked up one of Señor Vergés’ books and saw that it was not in Spanish but in Catalan. ‘There’s a problem for you!’ he said. ‘Of our thirty-four million population, thirty-one million read Spanish and they will buy three thousand copies of a book. Only three million read Catalan, but they will also buy three thousand copies of a book published in Catalan. Therefore, it’s just as profitable for us to publish in Catalan as it is in Spanish.’ I could not believe this, but Señor Vergés referred to two editions of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, one in Spanish, one in Catalan. ‘The publisher will sell about the same number of each,’ he said. ‘Catalans read. They’re the Bostonians of Spain.’
Most travelers believe that Barcelona’s Las Ramblas is the most beautiful street of the north.
Recalling the way in which English and American authors jump from one publisher to another, I pointed to the Premio Nadal novels and asked, ‘When you give a man the prize, are you able to hold on to him for his subsequent books?”
Apparently this was as touchy a point in Barcelona as it was in New York, for Señor Vergés frowned and said, Alas, the prize is often the nudge they need to go off to some other publisher. Look at him.’ He pointed at José María Gironella’s novel, the winner in 1946. ‘He left us, and yo
u know what happened with his later books.’
Friends had arranged for me to meet Gironella, Spain’s phenomenal success. His last three books, dealing with the Civil War, had been tremendously read, The Cypresses Believe in God, A Million Dead and the one currently in the windows of every bookstore, Peace Has Broken Out. Within a few weeks of publication the last had sold a hundred and fifty thousand copies, fifty times normal expectations, which would be comparable to the unheard-of figure of five million for the United States. In other words, Gironella was the man who broke the restraints of Spanish publishing.
I found him in a neat, book-crowded apartment, with a group of unexpected works lying handy to his desk: a life of Franklin D. Roosevelt, a critical study of Lenin, biographies of Gandhi, Stalin; De Gaulle. William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich was prominent and on a table by the davenport Capote’s En sangre fría.
Gironella was a slim, tense man in his late forties, I judged, although my experience with the publisher had somewhat unnerved me where guessing ages was concerned. He smiled easily and said, ‘I’m surprised a norteamericano writer would want to speak with me. When my first book was published in America, Spanish Marxists living abroad crucified it and charged me with being a Fascist lackey. The publisher, I won’t bore you with his name, wrote and told me he wouldn’t be taking any more of my books because he couldn’t afford to have a Fascist on his list. Later somebody told me that the real reason he cut me off was that my book didn’t sell very well. I’d cut an author off too, it he was a disappointment financially as well as politically.
Actually. I doubt that the tag “Fascist lackey” applies to me. At home I’m accused of being a dangerous liberal. I believe the fact is that I have described the war pretty much as it occurred, and to do this would enrage norteamericanos who saw it otherwise and Spaniards who had their own version.’
Gironella, who in appearance reminded me of Arthur Miller, had traveled widely throughout Europe. ‘Almost all the countries. Communist too. I understand you’ve been to Asia. I found it wildly exciting. Japan, India, Egypt. This year I want to see Israel. I don’t understand how a serious writer these days can judge his own terrain if he knows no other.’
I asked him why he continued to live in Cataluña, and he grinned. ‘I grew up in a town near Gerona [Catalan, Gironal. I suppose that’s where my family got its name. Gironella. The Girl from Girona. It’s a grand region. The other day this fellow heard a lecture on the glories of Castilian literature, and which writers did the speaker refer to? Valle Inclán, a Galician. Pardo Bazán, another Galician. Ibáñez, a Valencian. Pío Baroja, a Basque. Unamuno, a Basque. Lorca, an Andalusian. Jiménez, another Andulusian. And at the end of the list he referred to me, a Catalan. I love the regions of Spain.’
I asked whether he thought the influx of Andalusians would modify Cataluña. ‘For the better. In my little town they’ve opened a night club. Stiff, suspicious Catalans go there, listen to the guitars till midnight, then raise their right forefinger, whisper one reserved “Ole” and go home satisfied that they’ve participated in the glories of Old Spain.’
I saw a good deal of the book business in Spain and constantly had the feeling that it stood about where it had in the United States fifty years ago. There was much peddling of illustrated Bibles on street corners, where fast-talking men in overcoats spread their big volumes on collapsible tables and buttonholed people as they climbed out of the subway or left the cinema. The Bibles seemed poorly put together and were far below the quality of similar ventures in Italy or Germany.
What to me was wholly incomprehensible was the hawking of complete sets of authors like Honoré de Balzac and Victor Hugo in poor translation encased in cheap impermanent binding. Some of these sets, whose authors I cannot now remember, were truly grotesque; the average Spanish family had no conceivable need for the collected works of Bret Harte, for such books could not possibly relate to their needs. There seemed to be two reasons for this phenomenon. Spain did not encourage or at times even allow honest discussion of contemporary problems, so it was understandable that publishers would look to foreign literatures for sets of books which might sell because of clandestine reputations. Certainly the ideas of Balzac and Hugo were at odds with those of Generalísimo Franco’s Spain, but they were French ideas and therefore to be discounted. For example, one could not possibly publish in Spain the kind of book attacking Franco that one pubishes in the United States attacking whoever is President at the time, nor would one publish a novel on any significant contemporary issue, so for first-rate treatment of the human condition one must look abroad. The second reason we have already uncovered. Spanish families love to buy sets of books, whether they read them or not, and since Balzac wrote many books, he produces an impressive set.
This accounts, too, for the sale of encyclopedias, often wretched in scholarship. One finds sets of volumes on almost anything, not as banal perhaps as the comparable volumes now being peddled in the United States on our history, the nature of science or great moments of discovery, but still pretty bad. From time to time I consulted these miserable works in search of rudimentary data and they had nothing to offer, yet they appear proudly in many homes, gathering a dust of respectability that is rarely disturbed and never with profit.
On the other hand, Spain has produced one of the world’s outstanding encyclopedias, the great Espasa-Calpe in some ninety volumes, publication of which began in the 1920s. It is a reputable work, unbalanced perhaps in its emphasis on Spanish history and thought, but with a mature coverage that makes one wonder how Spain, with so few readers, could have produced such a work, whereas the United States, with infinitely greater resources, has not. Of course, the Espasa-Calpeis not found in many private homes, but Señor Porter, the bookseller, had one in his, and I was surprised in other homes I visited to see the endless rows of this extraordinary work. It was the exhibition set nonpareil, but it was also a gold mine of material in which to prospect. For example, the article on Don Quijote covered pages 1117–1214 of Volume 48, and like several other such entries, was a book in itself, for the pages of Espasa-Calpe are quite large. Experts told me that in coverage of topics the Spanish encyclopedia surpassed Mussolini’s distinguished Enciclopedia Italiana and in thoroughness of treating those topics, the Britannica. It was, however, less distinguished in scholarship than the famous Eleventh Edition of the Britannica, but not inferior to the later editions.
This matter of Spanish scholarship baffled me. Repeatedly I bought books whose titles led me to expect an orderly development of an idea, as for example, History of Spanish Colonization in Africa, only to find that the accurate title should have been Some Casual Reflections on Random Aspects of a Gentleman’s Travels in Our African Colonies and Elsewhere, in which the first chapter dealt with a trip the author once made to Kenya, the second with a hippopotamus hunt in the Congo, the third with a hortatory essay on the need for more Catholic missions, and the fourth with God knows what. I doubt if there is another country in the world, except Japan, in which books are so poorly organized and so dependent upon the personal whims of the writer. Especially aggravating is the fact that few Spanish books contain indexes, at least none of the hundreds I have bought, and some which pretend to scholarly completeness, such as the history of the zarzuela which I have before me as I write, lack both index and table of contents, even though they are the kind of book one consults for particular items rather than reading seriatim. Can one take seriously the scholarship of a man who fails to provide even a table of contents?
On the other hand, if, as I sometimes think, the measure of a contemporary society is whether it can support poets, Spain is far ahead of the United States, for poetry is published in Spain, as it is in Russia and Israel, and it is not much published, with honorable exceptions, in the United States. A man in Spain can build an enviable reputation from a few volumes of poems and is then held in an esteem which knows no parallel in America, for poets like Lorca and Jiménez are worshiped in Spa
in.
I met many Spanish writers and studied the lives of more, and concluded that there is no nation in the world where it is so good to be a dead writer. Wherever I went I saw placards announcing grand assemblies of Homenaje a (Homage to) Benito Pérez Galdós (1843–1920) or Vicente Blasco Ibáñez (1867–1928) or Pío Baroja (1872–1956). I attended three such homenajes to writers, and they were moving affairs at which men rose to give orations the like of which I had not heard for fifty years. Alt aspects of the life and writings of the man in question were reviewed and true homage was paid him as a continuing cultural force. In the parks I found statues to these writers and in the newspapers a constant series of essays on their significance. Subjected to such a continuing barrage, I began to believe that Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, the author of the story from which Falla’s El sombrero de tres picos was adopted, was a much greater writer than Walt Whitman, because I had never heard of anyone in Camden holding a Homage to Walt Whitman. He was dead, so forget him because in life he had been troublesome.
The case of Pío Baroja is interesting. This acidulous Basque wrote strongly anti-clerical novels, as did Blasco Ibáñez, and during their lifetimes they were anathema, but now that they are dead they are the subject of frequent homenajes and their accomplishments are praised as having brought real honor to Spain. I was present when the tenth anniversary of Baroja’s death was observed, and the enmity which the state had held against him as an anticlerical radical was forgiven and he was ushered into the pantheon with editorials and homenajes that would have been impossible even five years before. In a way, the same thing has happened to Hemingway; he was a foe of the Franco government and while he lived was more or less persona non grata, but now his greatness is being acknowledged: ‘A few days before the death of Baroja, he was visited by Hemingway, who wished to tell the old man that the Nobel Prize for Literature which the norteamericano had won belonged really to Baroja. Hemingway, who was a gallant man, spoke only the truth and we are proud that he had the elegance to proclaim it when others of less pundonor would have remained silent.’
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