reading

Introduction

‘Go on, Go on Thinking’

A Family

Javier Marías’s parents, Dolores (Lolita) Franco and Julián Marías, were fervent readers, scholars and writers. They met at university in the 1930s, during the turbulent years of Spain’s Second Republic, and Lolita gradually set aside much of her scholarly work to bring up her sons, although she continued to be intellectually active and later published a significant book on Spain seen through its literature. Javier was the fourth of five sons (the firstborn, Julianín, died tragically at the age of three and a half in 1949 and has been movingly evoked by Javier Marías in Dark Back of Time and by Julián Marías in his memoirs). Julián Marías was a philosopher, teacher, writer, intellectual and a figure found rarely in Spain. A disciple and friend of Spain’s greatest philosopher, José Ortega y Gasset, he was a truly upright and principled person, gentle in private, religious, but at the same time politically progressive. He had the misfortune of looking for the political middle in a period of extremes and blind party loyalty, and his profound dedication to his country rendered him incapable of going into exile, as so many of his contemporaries did after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 and the establishment of Franco’s dictatorial regime from 1939. Julián was equally incapable of complicity with the dictatorship. Though he had forged affiliations with the Second Spanish Republic, he was denounced on mostly false charges at the outset of the Franco regime by a treacherous friend, was subsequently imprisoned and only escaped the firing squad thanks to an honest witness called by the prosecution (Javier has described this incident in the first novel of his trilogy, Your Face Tomorrow). He suffered reprisals thereafter, was shunned by the establishment and by Spanish universities and travelled to the United States to undertake teaching at various universities there, occasionally accompanied by his family. Thus, Javier spent the first year of his life in Massachusetts, at Wellesley College (as he recalls in ‘Air-Ships’), where he was to return many decades later to teach a course on Cervantes’s Don Quixote, and another period in New Haven, when his father worked at Yale. During Spain’s transition from dictatorship to democracy in the 1970s and 80s, as Senator by Royal Decree and in discussions with the then young King Juan Carlos I and President Adolfo Suárez in particular, Julián Marías contributed to the careful reform and democratization of Spanish society, as well as to the drafting of the Constitution of 1978.

His sons Miguel, Fernando, Javier and Álvaro grew up in a house brimming with culture, books and paintings – from an early age, Javier had to learn to wrestle with his parents’ books in order to make space on the floor to play with his toy soldiers (see ‘The Invading Library’) – as well as a constant stream of visitors, ranging from North American exchange students (his father also taught US students on their year abroad) to writers, artists and intellectuals. Javier and his brothers thus received a lively and extraordinarily open-minded, progressive and international education, both at home and at the uniquely secular, liberal and co-educational Colegio Estudio, in stark contrast with the dominant nationalist, Catholic, regressive and repressive tendencies of the dictatorial regime and all its institutions. Their upbringing was therefore in many ways quite uncommon and privileged, but this privilege had been gained by Lolita Franco and Julián Marías at a high personal, professional and financial cost – although they never spoke of it like that – through their unwavering uprightness and independence of mind and character.

‘Don’t specialize,’ they counselled their sons, ‘learn about everything.’ And while it may not be surprising, given their family background, that all four sons have made a name for themselves in the sphere of the arts and humanities – as film critics, art historians, musicians and music critics or writers – it is perhaps Javier Marías who has heeded this advice most.

A Novelist

Beyond Spain, Javier Marías is best known as one of Europe’s foremost writers, author of twelve novels translated into forty-three languages and published in fifty-five countries, with over a dozen, mostly international, literary prizes to his name and eight million volumes of his work sold worldwide. As someone who started writing at the still tender age of fourteen in 1965 – his first short story, ‘Life and Death of Marcelino Iturriaga’, was published in a Barcelona newspaper three years later – and who, at the age of fifteen, wrote his first novel (The Day Before, unpublished), he quickly emerged as a budding author, publishing The Dominions of the Wolf and Voyage along the Horizon at the age of nineteen and twenty-one respectively, while he was still studying English literature at university in Madrid and translating and co-authoring film scripts for both his uncle and his cousin, the filmmakers Jesús Franco (evoked in this collection) and Ricardo Franco, as well as occasionally working as a production assistant and extra in some of their films (once, as a Chinaman).

The Dominions of the Wolf bears witness to this fascination with cinema, and these two early novels were his way of rejecting the realist mode of writing that had characterized much of Spanish literature up to that point and trying to break with the Spanish literary tradition more generally, by renouncing Spain as a theme and any form of Spanishness in narratives set exclusively outside of Spain and populated solely by non-Spanish characters, North American and European, in turn. Both are deliberately imitative, of foreign cinema (Hollywood comedies, melodramas, gangster movies and films noirs of the 1930s, 40s and 50s) and Edwardian literature (Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Arthur Conan Doyle) respectively, and are also one of the main reasons why, for many decades, Javier could not shake off the epithet of ‘goddamn Anglosaxonist’ (as he reminds us in ‘Chamberí’).

The other reason is that after publishing these two novels, in a conscious decision to further his literary apprenticeship, he dedicated the following few years almost exclusively to translating English-language literature (prose and poetry) into Spanish, specifically, works by John Ashbery, W. H. Auden, Sir Thomas Browne, Joseph Conrad, Isak Dinesen, William Faulkner, Thomas Hardy, Edith Holden, Vladimir Nabokov, Frank O’Hara, J. D. Salinger, Wallace Stevens, Robert Louis Stevenson and W. B. Yeats. His most notable translation is undoubtedly that of Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (his favourite work of literature, as he explains in ‘My Favourite Book’), which earned him Spain’s National Translation Prize in 1979. It had a great bearing on the development of his writing, not least its digressiveness (a subject he tackles in ‘Roving with a Compass’). Three more novels followed, in which Marías continued to hone his prose, before he left Spain in 1983, taking up a fixed-term appointment as lecturer at the University of Oxford, where he taught in the Sub-Faculty of Spanish, a sojourn that inspired his 1989 novel, All Souls (see ‘Who is Who?’), the work that established him as one of Spain’s most noteworthy writers, and the novelistic leap that landed him squarely within the world’s republic of letters. From then on, his stature has continued to grow with A Heart So White (1992), Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me (1994), Dark Back of Time (1998) – all published in the Penguin Modern Classics series – Your Face Tomorrow (1: Fever and Spear (2002); 2: Dance and Dream (2004); 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell (2007)), The Infatuations (2011) and Thus Bad Begins (2014).

An Essayist

Within Spain, however, Javier Marías is nowadays no less renowned for his essays, including articles and feature writing and, particularly, his weekly newspaper columns, which he has been publishing every Sunday since 4 December 1994 (except for the Sundays of the month of August when he takes a holiday). It is to this Javier Marías that the present collection seeks to introduce the reader. Drawing mainly on the pieces Margaret Jull Costa has translated over the years for the New York Times and the Threepenny Review, we have included a series of texts of a personal or autobiographical nature (they make up the first part, A Borrowed Dream), instances of travel writing or ‘anatomies’ of the character of cities he has lived in (The Most Conceited of Cities), pieces of a wide-ranging miscellaneous nature (All Too Few), a section on books and literary matters (from second-hand books and bookshops, to why he shies away from computers and still does all his writing on a typewriter: Dusty Spectacle) and one on cinema (Those Who are Still Here).

While not attempting to be wholly representative – his collaborations in the press and periodicals date back to the 1970s and amount, in total, to well over a thousand pieces, and we have, for example, omitted many more specialized texts on football, language or overtly political matters – this selection does allow us to discover someone whose all-encompassing gaze seems to have been directed at everything under the sun. So, in one part alone (All Too Few), he tackles topics as varied as those of neighbours and their mysterious noises; the plight of a dead stork; the perils of book signings (‘Lady with Bombs’); Berlusconi (‘No Narrative Shame’); football (‘The Weekly Return to Childhood’); a generalized obsession with recovering the bones of the dead (‘All in Our Imagination’); and even imagines liberal gun laws in the EU (‘A Horrific Nightmare’). In ‘In Praise of the Egotist’ he argues that egotists are among the few capable of seeing the truth; elsewhere, he explains ‘Why Almost No One Can be Trusted’; and he sympathetically and sensitively talks about the grief ‘that dare not speak its name’ experienced by mothers when ‘a long period of their existence is coming to a close, and their life will never be the same’ (‘All Too Few’). Marías writes here with a voice, a world-view and a prose style quite different to those of his novels and more akin to those of the ‘father’ of the genre Marías cultivates, the sixteenth-century essayist Michel de Montaigne.

Marías’s essays are the product of someone who thinks and judges for himself, unconstrained by preconceived ideas, and whose starting point is, in Montaigne’s well-known formulation, ‘What do I know?’, rather than ‘What am I supposed to know?’ He says what he thinks about the topics he touches on without censoring himself for fear of causing offence or reprisals of any kind. (There have been a few. To name but one, the first of his subsequently many pieces on the Catholic Church, all very critical of the institution, was suppressed in 2002 by the supplement that housed his columns at the time, El Semanal. He objected to this act of censorship, seeing it as too reminiscent of Francoism, and did not hesitate to terminate his collaboration with that publication.)

Not unlike Montaigne, Marías gives us the fruits of his readings, his experience of the world and his reflections on it, and treats, as has been said of Montaigne, ‘the deepest subjects in the least pompous of manners’. His essays share Montaigne’s search for truth, keenness of observation, humour, intimacy, informality and human morality, as well as a great range of interests. It has been said that Montaigne, despite his profound engagement with philosophy, Latin and Greek texts, was a gentleman, not a scholar; Marías, too, writes his pieces as a gentleman, a citizen, rather than as a novelist or academic (let’s not forget that he taught literature and translation at Oxford, Wellesley and at the Complutense University in Spain, and that in 2007 he was elected a member of the Real Academia Española, Spain’s Royal Academy). Marías’s voice emerges, as did that of his sixteenth-century predecessor, as a sane voice in a world that, in his view, has gone mad.

It is in this vein, then, that he ‘talks’ to us on paper. Thus he often recalls the past and the dead, paying homage to family, friends and admired artists or writers, such as ‘the blackest sheep of his family’ – there were, apparently, a few – his Uncle Jesús and the above-mentioned film director, Jesús Franco, who had a considerable influence on the cinematic and sentimental education of the young Marías; the second King of Redonda, John Gawsworth (whose kingdom Marías would end up inheriting), and his desolate final days (‘Too Much Snow’); the ghosts of Joseph Conrad and Juan Benet; Vincent Price, ‘The Supernatural Master of the World’, who ‘succeeded in doing what few actors in any genre have managed to do, namely, he gave us the immediate, unequivocal impression that he had a past, that he was once quite different from the person he appears to be’; George Sanders, ‘The Man Who Appeared to Want Nothing’; or Ann-Margret, with whom he had his ‘first platonic’ or, in fact, ‘frustrated carnal love affair’, ‘frustrated’ only ‘because of the very different dimensions in which we moved, her and me’ (‘Earthly Sighs’). In the opening piece of our collection, Marías recounts a dream of his brother’s that prompts him to speculate that his deceased parents and Julianín are now reunited not only in a tomb, but also in a territory, the past, ‘which doesn’t seem so very dreadful: it’s a time, or possibly a place, full of interesting people, as well as some who are much loved’, he concludes.

In ‘The Lederhosen’, prompted by some old photographs (including one in which he is wearing said shorts or short trousers), he revisits the past and discovers that ‘the adult we are was already contained in the child that we were’. This insight has guided Javier Marías in his relations with others to such an extent that: ‘Often, in order to get a sense of someone with whom, sooner or later, I’m going to have dealings, I try to imagine what they would have been like as a child and how we would have got on, whether we would have been good friends or have hated each other’s guts.’

In the same, personal, opening section, he reveals his humorous disregard for the profession to which he belongs: he tells us that having to wrestle with hefty tomes by philosophers and writers in order to make room for a game of bottle-top football or toy soldiers accustomed him from an early age ‘to negotiating the words of the great philosophers and writers’ and led him to lose all respect for anyone who writes, himself included: ‘Having too much respect for the kind of individuals who partially soured my childhood and invaded the territory occupied by my thrilling games of bottle-top football would seem to me masochistic in the extreme,’ he says. That may also be why he has never thought of himself as a professional writer.

His love of toy soldiers, incidentally, has not diminished: they are still aligned along most of his bookshelves in his home and study. The reason they do so, he explains in ‘This Childish Task’, is that he does not want to lose sight of the fact that those childhood games are probably one of the origins of his chosen career. Comic books are another origin, which for him and many boys of his generation were companions and teachers, instead of being frowned on as a lesser art; ‘They weren’t called “graphic novels” then, a term invented by those who feel ashamed of writing or drawing them and, therefore, ashamed of having been a source of pleasure and fantasy for many children and grown-ups, as well as being partly responsible for the literary vocation of many writers, including myself’ (‘A Hero from 1957’). Javier Marías does not hesitate to criticize such pretentiousness, prejudice or, indeed, the megalomania of artists, writers and critics (real or resulting from their representation – see ‘Damned Artists!’). In his wonderful essay on film music, ‘Music for the Eyes’, he berates critics and academics for their (our) prejudices, which lead to blindness in judgements:

Artistic prejudices are always the most difficult to root out. Critics – whose duty should be to see beyond the pretensions of artists and the public’s passing fancies – often allow themselves to be persuaded by the way authors present their work, by what they say they have achieved, or else are guided by whatever has been a wild success – usually in order to take the opposing view – and which has been damningly labelled ‘popular’. So, in literature, it has taken almost a hundred years since the death of Robert Louis Stevenson for critics and scholars to consider his work to be ‘serious’ and to notice that one of his greatest admirers was Henry James, a writer who has always been venerated in academic circles. The fact that Stevenson wrote several brilliant novels enthusiastically devoured by children and adolescents – especially Treasure Island – was enough for him to be despised and for those same critics to forget that he was also the author of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and other extraordinary tales, as well as essays that were far more penetrating and profound than any written by the very critics and professors who dictate what does or does not deserve to be studied and respected.

He has often defended many instances of what in critical or academic circles used to be – or still are – frequently dismissed as popular or mass culture not on a par with other artistic endeavours. So, he has repeatedly championed not only film music or comics, but also allegedly lesser literary genres such as comic novels (by his contemporary Eduardo Mendoza, for example), adventure stories (by Stevenson, Dumas or the best-selling Arturo Pérez-Reverte), ghost stories, stories of the supernatural, or children’s literature, more often than not going against conventional wisdom.

He has done this in his essays, but also as a translator – in the 1980s he co-translated and edited a collection of ghost stories by little-known figures in English literature (Cuentos únicos /Unique Short Stories) – and as a publisher, for after becoming King of Redonda in 1997, Xavier I founded his own publishing house (as king he recovered his original name, pronounced in the same way as ‘Javier’), Reino de Redonda, for which select small imprint he chose to have translated volumes of lesser-known supernatural narratives by Richmal Crompton, The House and Mist and Other Stories, and by the duo Erckmann-Chatrian (Les Contes du bord du Rhin). (He has occasionally paid homage to Crompton, whose William Brown had such an influence on so many writers of his generation in Spain.) Let us also not forget, in this context, that the literary character he would most like to have been is Sherlock Holmes. His magnificent defence of the cinematic genre of the Western, laid bare in a number of articles in the final section of this volume, is another example of this tendency, as is his formidable championing of It’s a Wonderful Life and The Ghost and Mrs Muir as ambitious, ambiguous, intense and complex masterpieces of cinema.

Indeed, it is in his essays on cinema that Javier Marías is often at his lucid, corrective and combative best. Here he will attack, for example, as he does often in his writings, the new puritanism, political correctness or pusillanimity that has taken hold of our societies, as he does when he speculates on the demise of the Western in ‘The Hero’s Dreadful Fate’:

Perhaps it’s because the Western, as a genre, has traditionally embodied attitudes and behaviour – which it always took seriously, without ever falling into caricature – that now seem shocking to the hypocritical mass of entrenched goody-goodies, who desperately want to dissociate themselves from a whole range of passions that have been common to humanity throughout the ages. For example, in the Western, nobody looks askance at hatred, ambition, the desire for revenge, the determined pursuit of an enemy, the wish to hurt or kill that enemy, the search for redress and sometimes justice for a wrong committed.

[…]

Our society does not accept that all men and all women are different. It does not accept that while some are horrified by what they are obliged or choose to do, others are not, and are prepared to bear whatever responsibility or sentence falls to them. It believes, rather, that everyone should think the same or at least abstain from doing what the majority deem reprehensible. It does not accept that some crimes are not as criminal as others, depending on who commits them and against whom, depending, too, on why. Society knows all about hatred, envy and revenge, but prefers to clothe itself in virtue and pretend ignorance …

Javier Marías’s lucidity is such that he is able to see and discover things that are there, so to speak, but which many of us have failed to notice or, indeed, things that we do, in fact, recognize, but have never put into words, certainly not so clearly and eloquently. And that is because he keeps looking at the things of this world long after most of us have turned away, and never contents himself with what he has already seen or thought. In Your Face Tomorrow: Dance and Dream, Javier recalls his father, Julián Marías, saying, ‘Go on, go on thinking,’ and urging his children ‘to keep on looking at things and at people, beyond what seemed necessary’. And that is what we see Javier Marías doing, lucidly, funnily, movingly, brilliantly in Between Eternities.

Alexis Grohmann, 2017

A Borrowed Dream

Although I’m no great fan of people telling you their dreams, especially when characters in a novel or a film do so – why are they telling me this, I wonder, if it’s only a dream and we’re in the middle of a fiction anyway – today, I’m going to tell you about a dream told to me by my oldest brother, Miguel.

He had the dream five days after the death of our father, who took his leave of this world on 15 December 2005 at around ten o’clock in the morning. When Miguel described the dream to me, I sensed in his account some of his professional and private obsessions, because, although he’s an economist, he’s best known as a film critic, and I was aware in his description of various ‘influences’: Lubitsch (Heaven Can Wait), Powell and Pressburger (A Matter of Life and Death), Mankiewicz (The Ghost and Mrs Muir, one of my all-time favourites) and even Capra (It’s a Wonderful Life). Anyway, in the dream, Miguel saw our mother, who died in the early hours of 24 December 1977, sitting on a bench in La Dehesa, which is the name of the pretty park in Soria, a city where we spent many a childhood summer. My father came strolling along one of the avenues and stopped in front of her; sitting on her knee was our brother, Julianín, the oldest of the five brothers, who died on 25 June 1949 at the age of three and a half, except that in the dream he didn’t actually appear to Miguel (who was the only one of us to have known him) in physical or corporeal form; he was simply there unseen. And then my mother addressed these playful words of reproach to my father: ‘Honestly, Julián,’ she said, ‘fancy taking nearly twenty-nine years to get here. Do you have any idea what it’s been like, alone all this time with a three-year-old? Come on, you hold the little inquisitor for a while and be in charge of answering his questions. You know what children his age are like, they never stop asking questions, why this and why that. He’s quite worn me out.’ My father picked up the ethereal child in that awkward way so familiar to us, the four surviving brothers, Miguel, Fernando, Álvaro and myself, rather as if someone had placed in his hands a pile of plates and he could find nowhere to put them down. Anyway, he tried to justify his delay by saying: ‘I meant to come much sooner, almost straight away, but you know how it is, Lolita, one thing leads to another, and there were books to write, and people kept pestering me to do this and do that. So up until now, I simply haven’t had a chance.’ As with Julianín, my parents were both the age they had been when they died, so my mother, who, in life, had been a year older than my father, appeared in the dream with her sixty-three years and my father with his ninety-one years. ‘It’s odd, isn’t it,’ said our mother, ‘now I’m much younger than you are. And don’t worry, I know what you’re like, always in such a hurry when it comes to your own affairs, but with all the time in the world when it’s someone else.’

It was several nights since he’d had the dream, and Miguel could really only remember snippets, but apparently my father reported to my mother what had happened in her absence and, she, quite contradictorily, on the one hand, listened to him with great interest, and on the other, kept telling him that she knew all about it already (‘Don’t go thinking I don’t know what’s been going on’). ‘There’s only one thing I would reproach you with,’ she said, smiling, ‘the fact that none of the boys is religious.’ I don’t know about my brothers’ beliefs, because we never talk about such personal matters, but it might be true, because I understand there were some mutterings among certain pious, gossipy friends of my father when, at the two masses held after his death, none of us went up to take communion. And my parents, of course, were believers. ‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘but they’ve all turned out pretty well.’ ‘And you could have done more to persuade Javier to get married,’ was my mother’s second, mocking reproach. ‘Well, he’s always been a bit of a butterfly in that respect, as you know, and although it’s not quite the same thing, he does seem to have paired up with someone now, a very pleasant, cheerful woman, whom I met in fact.’ ‘Several of the grandchildren are paired up too,’ said my mother, determined to needle him a little more, ‘but not one of them is married.’ To which our father responded incongruously and untruthfully: ‘Well, the thing is, you see, only homosexuals get married nowadays,’ to which our mother, very well informed on her park bench, retorted: ‘Don’t tell such fibs. Homosexuals can and do get married, it’s true, but so can anyone else who cares to.’

As often happens in dreams, the scene was a mixture of verisimilitude – of domesticity almost – and the absurd. It amused me to find my father slightly caught on the hop, although for no real reason, poor man, and that he should agree with her that he had delayed far too long in coming to join her. I’m not, in fact, religious, but I do love films, and I particularly like the films I mentioned earlier and other similar ones that feature ghosts or people who continue to feel engaged with what’s going on in the world they’ve left behind, and so I found my brother’s dream at once amusing and consoling. There is, after all, a territory – if I can call it that – in which all three, my father, my mother and Julianín, are gathered together, and not just in the same tomb: all three are now the past, a memory, and that, at least, they share in common. And when you think about it, being the past doesn’t seem so very dreadful: it’s a time, or possibly a place, full of interesting people, as well as some who are much loved.

(2006)

By the same author

BETWEEN ETERNITIES

Javier Marías

BETWEEN ETERNITIES

Translated from the Spanish by
Margaret Jull Costa
Edited with an introduction by
Alexis Grohmann

HAMISH HAMILTON

Contents

Introduction

‘Go on, Go on Thinking’

A Family

A Novelist

An Essayist

A BORROWED DREAM

A Borrowed Dream

By the same author

BETWEEN ETERNITIES

Javier Marías

BETWEEN ETERNITIES

Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull CostaEdited with an introduction by Alexis Grohmann

HAMISH HAMILTON

Contents

Introduction

‘Go on, Go on Thinking’

A Family

A Novelist

An Essayist

A BORROWED DREAM

A Borrowed Dream

Translated from the Spanish by
Margaret Jull Costa
Edited with an introduction by
Alexis Grohmann