Between Eternities: And Other Writings Read online

  Javier Marías

  * * *

  BETWEEN ETERNITIES

  Translated from the Spanish by

  Margaret Jull Costa

  Edited with an introduction by

  Alexis Grohmann

  Contents

  Introduction BY ALEXIS GROHMANN

  A BORROWED DREAM

  A Borrowed Dream

  Air-Ships

  The Lederhosen

  An Unknowable Mystery

  Ghosts and Antiquities

  The Invading Library

  Uncle Jesús

  Old Friends

  I’m Going to Have Fun

  THE MOST CONCEITED OF CITIES

  Chamberí

  The Most Conceited of Cities

  The Keys of Wisdom

  Venice, An Interior

  ALL TOO FEW

  Noises in the Night

  The Modest Case of the Dead Stork

  Lady with Bombs

  A Horrific Nightmare

  No Narrative Shame

  All in Our Imagination

  The Weekly Return to Childhood

  Why Almost No One Can be Trusted

  In Praise of the Egotist

  All Too Few

  DUSTY SPECTACLE

  Damned Artists!

  Dusty Spectacle

  My Favourite Book

  This Childish Task

  For Me Alone to Read

  Hating The Leopard

  Writing a Little More

  Roving with a Compass

  Who is Who?

  Time Machines

  The Isolated Writer

  Too Much Snow

  The Much-Persecuted Spirit of Joseph Conrad

  The Improbable Ghost of Juan Benet

  THOSE WHO ARE STILL HERE

  The Hero’s Dreadful Fate

  Riding Time

  Travelling between Eternities

  A Hero from 1957

  Those Who are Still Here

  Why Don’t They Come Back?

  Music for the Eyes

  Earthly Sighs

  The Man Who Appeared to Want Nothing

  The Supernatural Master of the World

  What If You Had Never been Born?

  The Ghost and Mrs Muir

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  BETWEEN ETERNITIES

  Javier Marías was born in Madrid in 1951. He has published sixteen novels, including The Infatuations and Thus Bad Begins, as well as two collections of short stories and several volumes of essays. His work has been translated into forty-two languages and won a dazzling array of international literary awards, including the prestigious Dublin IMPAC award for A Heart So White. He is also a highly practised translator into Spanish of English authors, including Joseph Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Thomas Browne and Laurence Sterne. He has held academic posts in Spain and the United States, and in Britain as Lecturer in Spanish Literature at Oxford University.

  Margaret Jull Costa has been a literary translator for over thirty years and has translated works by novelists such as Eça de Queiroz, José Saramago and Bernardo Atxaga, as well as poets such as Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen and Ana Luísa Amaral. She has won various prizes, most recently the 2017 Best Translated Book Award. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and holds an OBE for services to literature and an honorary doctorate from the University of Leeds.

  Alexis Grohmann is Professor of Contemporary Spanish Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Coming into One’s Own: The Novelistic Development of Javier Marías, amongst other studies and edited collections of essays on Spanish and European literature. He is a corresponding member of the Real Academia Española.

  By the same author

  All Souls

  A Heart So White

  Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me

  When I was Mortal

  Dark Back of Time

  The Man of Feeling

  Your Face Tomorrow 1: Fever and Spear

  Voyage along the Horizon

  Written Lives

  Your Face Tomorrow 2: Dance and Dream

  Your Face Tomorrow 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell

  Bad Nature, or with Elvis in Mexico

  While the Women are Sleeping

  The Infatuations

  Thus Bad Begins

  Venice, An Interior

  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 Mar
ías 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 de
ad, 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.’