Spain’s Cantankerous Nobel Laureate

After nearly 50 years in which he has had an opinion, usually acerbic, on nearly everything, Camilo Jose Cela is now one of the most accessible and quoted public figures in Spain--and among the least patient in an interview. Any chance that late-arriving international fame might mute a life’s pattern? No way.

“Begin,” Cela commanded by way of greeting one recent morning, incurious whether a stranger had had trouble finding his calculatedly isolated house-on-a-hill, or what brand of Spanish he spoke, or what the latest was in Madrid.

Awaiting questions that might provoke him--he is easily provoked or, more likely, bored--Cela settled onto a couch in his living room. Before him, a coffee table groaned with congratulatory telegrams and letters from friends old and instant, the sort of mail a Nobel laureate gets. It was Cela’s due on an autumn day in 1989, and his burden.

“Picasso once told me that without great solitude no serious work is possible. Since the news, I haven’t written anything, except to answer a few telegrams.”

The “news” was that he had been awarded the 1989 Nobel Prize for Literature.

About that Cela said: “I knew I was a candidate, and I had great hope this year because I wasn’t the candidate of the Spanish press, and that was very important.”

He tosses such practiced darts with an iconoclast’s aplomb, observing, for example, at a press conference after he won the prize: “Spain is a wonderful country. It’s a shame that such an important place has some politicians and some journalists it doesn’t deserve.”

Cela is a practiced outsider. He has little time for critics, fellow writers or long-winded intellectuals.

“I can’t stand foolishness,” he said.

In rebuttal to public comments about him and his work, Cela asserts what he called in a recent newspaper column “the right of nonreply.”

Camilo Jose Cela, who writes in longhand at any handy table and plots his novels wherever their characters lead him, accepts the Nobel Prize in Stockholm next month as a writer with a short international shadow but household fame at home.

On the Spanish stage, the 73-year-old Cela is a larger-than-life character, The Writer, sardonic, quixotic, loner author of more than 60 works, novels to travel books.

Cela, as he reminds a visitor, is the most translated Spaniard since Miguel de Cervantes.

“The Family of Pascal Duarte,” his brutal and vivid 1942 first novel about a peasant murderer awaiting execution, is a stunning portrait of violence and vengeance in the Spanish countryside--and the most read novel in the Spanish language since Cervantes’ “Don Quixote.”

These days, though, most young Spaniards know Cela best as an entertaining/outraging television talk-show guest, sometime road-map salesman and, thanks to the gossip glossies, the pear-shaped septuagenarian bon vivant who not long ago left his wife of four decades to set up housekeeping with a blond radio reporter less than half his age.

“A leading figure in Spain’s literary renewal during the postwar era,” said the Swedish Academy in making Cela Spain’s fifth Nobel laureate. It praised his “rich and intensive prose, which with restrained compassion forms a challenging vision of man’s vulnerability.”

As Spanish schoolchildren are taught, “Pascal Duarte” and the 1951 “La Colmena” (“The Beehive”) about life in Madrid squalor in the 1940s, embody a style called tremendismo in which a grim reality is distorted until it becomes odd-angled, almost grotesque.

“If that is what they say, let them say it,” said Cela. “One writes without the aim of making an impression on anybody. One writes what he has inside, and afterward there are all sorts of possible interpretations.” One critic, Cela recalled, said that his first novel had been greatly influenced by a bucolic Finnish writer. “I had never read him.”

Cela says a stranger-than-fiction world is his research laboratory for novels on themes that are universal: life, love, death, misery, sickness. His last novel, the 1988 “Christ versus Arizona,” is described by one critic as a “rhapsodic monologue with an Old West setting in which the force of primary instincts dominate.”

“I don’t have to invent anything,” said Cela. “You just have to look around to see that reality goes beyond fiction. I think it was Proust who said that everything has already been said but since no one pays attention, it has to be repeated every morning.”

Cela’s 11th novel--”which I’d like very much to finish”--will portray rural-maritime-peasant life in Galicia, where the novelist was born May 11, 1916, in the village of Padron to a Spanish father and an English mother. At his father’s command, a nanny would encourage the young Cela toward a bicycle or a soccer ball, when he really craved a pen with which to immortalize verses. English was his first language. Cela says with some regret that he has long since lost it, but thinks that a gene of British aplomb lingers.

On the day he won the Nobel, Cela routinely kept a commitment for an unscripted television talk show on which he appears two afternoons a week. His university professor son, who has just published a fond at-home biography of his father as irreverent as the famous Cela himself, was teaching when word came. He grinned in private jubilation, and finished his lecture.

The Rabelaisian side of Cela, by contrast, is commemorated by an occasionally troubling scar from a nasty buttocks slash incurred in a bar brawl in high-spirited youth.

“I spent 14 years at university and succeeded in not getting a degree, which is different from not being able to get a degree. Now, even better, I have seven honorary doctorates.”

During the Spanish Civil War, Cela was wounded while fighting with Franco’s forces. In the early 1940s, he supported himself for four years as government censor of small special interest magazines. For such reasons, Cela has never been a favorite of Spain’s intellectual establishment, although he too has felt the censor’s lash.

The second edition of “Pascal Duarte” was seized--”nauseating,” said the censor--and “La Colmena” was banned altogether. In the end it was first published in Buenos Aires, and Cela signs copies of “La Colmena” with the inscription: “a bitter chronicle of a bitter time.”

In Spain, more has been written about Cela than he himself has written. In the midst of it, he offers neither explanations nor apologies for a life as full as it has been controversial.

“Language is the instrument of the writer. Literature is the word, and nothing else. The thinking of writers is in their books. In my case, that’s where people should look. I don’t have time to answer coffee shop gossip,” he said.

As a young man, Cela took handsome pay from a Venezuelan dictator on the condition that he set a novel (“La Catira”) in Venezuela. He did. “That was the only condition. And I’d do it again.”

Not long ago, Cela toured Spain for a television travel series in a Rolls-Royce chauffeured by a stunning black woman in flowing white robes. He does television advertisements, road maps for a gasoline company among other things, but doesn’t write the scripts: “I correct them.”

At a rich, contented and famous 73, nearly 70 pounds down from his peak weight, Cela is not a reader of Cela, or very much else.

“Truthfully, I haven’t read any of my books, never.” But the writer’s message? “No, not me, not anybody. No message, none. One writes, and it is finished,” he said.

“Every day I write more and read less, but I think that happens to all writers. We start by reading a lot and, as time passes, the balance changes. Anyway, I’ve done all the reading I need to do. I only read new books that friends strongly recommend.”

When the shouting ends, Cela says he plans “to sleep for two weeks” and turn then to his next writer’s chore: “I have to write the speech for the Nobel ceremony in Stockholm. I haven’t had a chance to work it out, but something will occur to me. It would be very strange if it didn’t.”

Perhaps his Nobel address will evoke a story about life and literature that Cela likes to tell: “A young man once said to Flaubert, ‘Give me a plot, and I’ll write a novel.’ Flaubert said: ‘Write this down. A man and woman fall in love. That’s the story. Now you have to provide the talent.’

“That’s what I think. You need patience and minimal understanding.”