Josep Pla - Biography

Biography

The son of rural business owners of modest means from Baix Empordà, he obtained his high school diploma in Girona, where, beginning in 1909, he was a boarding student at the Colegio de los Maristas (Marist School). In his last academic year (1912–13), he had to take his final exams without having taken the courses because he was expelled from the boarding school. In 1913 he registered to study science at the University of Barcelona and began his studies in medicine, but in the middle of his first course, he changed his mind and registered to study law. The emptiness that he felt in his life at the university did not prevent him from involving himself in another environment that would focus the intellectual disorientation of his youth - the Barcelona Ateneo Club, with its library and above all the daily tertulia (discussion group) led by Dr. Joaquim Borralleras and attended by celebrities such as Josep Maria de Sagarra, Eugeni d'Ors and Francesc Pujols. His admiration for Pío Baroja came from this period – a constant reference for his generation — as well as the influence of Alexandre Plana, a childhood friend and teacher, whom he credits with his decision to distance himself from the pretentious style of the 19th century and to support “a literature for the whole world” based on “intelligibility, clarity, and simplicity”, ideas which would be constant features through his literary career.

In 1919 he graduated with a degree in Law and began to work in journalism, first in Las Noticias (The News) and soon after in night publication of La Publicidad (Publicity). He started his journey as a correspondent in various European cities (Paris, Madrid, Portugal, Italy, Berlin). A modern Catalan nationalist, in 1921 he was elected as a “diputado” (Member of Parliament) of the Commonwealth of Catalonia (Commonwealth of Catalonia) by the “Lliga Regionalista” (Regionalist League” in his native region, Baix Empordà. En 1924, under the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, he underwent a military proceeding and was condemned to exile because of a critical article about the Spanish military policy in Morocco, published in Majorca’s El Día (The Day).

During the years of his exile, he negotiated with some of the principal Catalan opponents of the dictatorship such as Francesc Macià. He continued traveling though Europe (Paris, Russia, England), and in 1925 he published his first book, Coses Vistes, which was a great success and sold out in a week. It was a good preview of his aesthetic: “to write about the things which one has seen”. In 1927 he returned to Spain, left La Publicidad and began to collaborate with La Veu de Catalunya, Lliga’s newspaper, of a liberal-conservative tendency, to the orders of Francesc Cambó –leader of moderate Catalan nationalism, whose famous tertulias he attended regularly.

In April 1931, on the same morning of the proclamation of the Republic, he was invited to Madrid by Cambó as parliamentary correspondent of La Veu and became a witness to the first days of the Republic. Madrid’s book of the notable events of these months, of great historic value is El advenimiento de la República (The coming of the Republic). He remained in Madrid during nearly all of the Republican period, writing features about Parliament,which allowed him to mix with the Spanish political and cultural elite. Pla, who was neither an anti-republican nor an anti-monarchist but a pragmatist who wanted to see a modernization of the State, at first expressed a certain sympathy for the Republic. He believed that the new political system could get off the ground in Spain if it consolidated itself according to the French Republican model, even though little by little he was becoming disillusioned with the course of events until he eventually considered it “a frantic and destructive madness”.

Claiming health reasons, he abandoned an agitated and dangerous Madrid a few months before the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. Not even Barcelona seemed safe to him, and he fled in a boat of the Catalan republic towards Marseille, in September 1938, in the company of Adi Enberg, a Norwegian citizen born in Barcelona who worked for the Francoist espionage service. She was the only person from his secretive and often meagre romantic life who we can be certain that he was involved with. He continued his exile in Rome, where he wrote a good part of the immense Historia de la Segunda República Española (History of the Second Spanish Republic), an assignment for Francesc Cambó –one of the financiers of the military uprising, which Pla would refuse to re-publish during his lifetime, despite being a historical work of great interest. In the autumn of 1938, Adi and Pla traveled to Biarritz and from there they managed to reach San Sebastián, where they joined the Francoist controlled portion of Spain. In January 1939 he, Manuel Aznar and other journalists entered Barcelona along with the victorious Francoist troops. Between February and April 1939, when the war ended, he became the assistant manager of the newspaper La Vanguardia under the direction of Aznar. Overwhelmed by the course of events of the immediate post-war period and before the unexpected failure of his project at La Vanguardia, he moved to the Empordà (Girona) and separated from Adi Enberg.

In September 1939 he published his first article in Destino, the weekly publication that his Catalan friends created in Burgos and for which he started to write weekly a few months later, from February 1940. These are the years he spent travelling around his native region, discovering its landscapes and people, small towns and, of course, the sea. Also he finally accepted his role of lower rural bourgeois and never again lived in Barcelona.

Due to his regular work with Destino, although he was no longer one of its principal driving forces, he returned to travelling the world, not as a correspondent, but as a journalistic observer, which allowed him to write magnificent travel reports: he visited France, Israel, Cuba, New York, the Middle East, South America, and Russia. Regarding Israel, for instance, he left a unique testimony of its first years of existence as a State - he visited it in 1957, arriving in Tel Aviv in a boat from Marseille full of displaced Jews. He arrived during the enthusiastic construction of the cities and Hebrew infrastructures in the middle of the desert. As a curiosity, Pla had a fondness for travels in very slow oil tankers, which allowed him to write his works peacefully and without distractions from contact with tourists.

In the 1970s Pla dedicated himself fully to the preparation of his complete works, a crucial stage since it involved an almost total re-writing of his work and the development of his own unique style. In order to publish these works, he counted on invaluable support of his fellow countryman Josep Vergés, editor of Destino. Meanwhile, culture in the Catalan language was reappearing little by little.

After Francoism was terminated by the Spanish Constitution of 1978, despite already being the most read writer in the Catalan language, fellow authors in Catalan (overwhelmingly on the Left) did not forgive him for his past support of the Francoists during the Civil War and his later coexistence with the régime (Pla counted on a peaceful and ordered evolution towards democracy). He was also criticized by fellow Catalan authors because of his disdain for fiction as a literary form.

He proved himself equally distant: his often sarcastic criticism of some Catalan political and cultural figures had the result, similar to the case of the artist Salvador Dalí, that Catalan culture denied him recognition in the form of prizes (the refusal to grant him the Premi d’Honor de les Lletres). They alienated him from his magazine for life, and they did not recognize his extraordinary worth until many years later.

Even so, in 1980, near the end of his life, Josep Tarradellas gave him the Medalla d'Or de la Generalitat de Catalunya (The Gold Medal of the Autonomous Government of Catalonia). It is worth mentioning, as it represented a minor fissure within the so-far monolithic rejection of Pla by writers in Catalan, that Joan Coromines, a fundamental Catalan etymologist, supported Pla in his own acceptance speech for the gold medal Coromines was also granted.

Pla died in 1981 in his native Empordà, leaving thirty-eight volumes (over twenty-five thousand pages) of Obra Completa (Complete Works) published, and many unedited papers that have been published since his death.