Pla, the Rhapsody, and the Moonlight Sonata: El Canadell

Music plays a certain part in my childhood memories of El Canadell.

At the time, the instrument considered most effective at getting people to dance, and the most widely used one, was the barrel organ. But this contraption and its metallic and rustic notes didn’t imprint themselves on my memory: they have left in my nose the unpleasant smell of the gas lamps that lit outdoor dances.

 All the same, in El Canadell there was something of good quality: the Genover family’s piano. It was played by the two older siblings of the family—usually with four hands: Maria and Xicu. On very still days—in the terrible morning sun or at sunset, in the gentle half-light—you could hear the piano from a long way away, and in El Canadell a kind of abeyance was occasioned: the people who were going by the Genover place automatically tended to start walking on tiptoe.

Maria and Xicu would sit at the piano. Seen from afar—they played in a ground-floor parlor that had a big window facing the street—they looked like two automatons. They played stiffly and as if corseted. They were fans of select music. Maria, in addition to the playing piano, sang vaporous, sentimental ballads. Xicu, with the practice book in front of him, never tired of doing finger exercises. Cheap music is usually enjoyable, and it’s surely for that reason that those who cultivate it tend to make too great a show of it. Those who play select music are more closed to things, more difficult, and fussier. But Xicu and Maria—or Maria and Xicu—didn’t need as much persuading as corresponded to the notes they played. When an acquaintance came up to them with a friendly and pleasant look and said to them, “Oh, Xicu (or Maria), play the Rhapsody! It’s so pretty,” you contemplated the reassuring sight of seeing them—no matter how little free time they had—go over to the piano, sit down in front of the keys, open the music book, and play Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2. Before beginning, they looked at each other to confirm their cooperation in the performance: a serious look that turned into a weighty smile. Complete silence fell over the parlor. Everyone was concentrating. Everyone was making that face of feigned suffering that people are in the habit of making before refined music. And from the piano, with a brilliance slightly diminished by petty-bourgeois taste, came Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2.

This piece was quite the undertaking. It was hard to play. The furious parts gave the people—so they said—gooseflesh. But in the more contemplative moments—which perhaps coincided with an audience of greater refinement, an audience that made faces of solemnity rather than of suffering—there was another great piece: Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. If the Rhapsody was a work for fingers and vigor, the Moonlight Sonata was a piece for feeling. Together they made a complete musical microcosmos.

In this way, I, as a teenager in El Canadell, found myself literally saturated with the Rhapsody and the Moonlight Sonata. And there’s nothing to be done about it now: this is the select music that will waft in my memory of those days for the rest of my life. It’s the music that will bind me to El Canadell for as long as I live—as I am bound to it by a distinctive smell, very sweet, of rice powders and patchouli, a taste for roast mullet with oil and vinegar, the novels of Paul Bourget, and the form—barely glimpsed—of the calves of a few hazy, indistinct young ladies of the time.

--Josep Pla, El quadern gris

Léautaud, Pla, Ribeyro

Paul Léautaud's monumental diary is endlessly fascinating (it seems that only some of the earliest volumes have been published in English translation, and anyone seeking to publish translations of the rest of them would have to secure the rights from the French society for the protection of animals, to which the never-married and childless Léautaud left the rights to his work), and references to it sometimes turn up in somewhat surprising spots. In the Spanish translation of Josep Pla's diary, El cuaderno gris, for instance, one comes across an undated note consisting almost entirely of an entry taken from Léautaud. It is introduced by Pla with the simple words "an opinion":

Paul Léautaud

 

Verses are clearly a childish thing. People who write things in rhythmic patterns, to particular beats, each line ending in similar sounds, that singsong of a child's reciting--at bottom, it's ridiculous. I've thought for a long time that if I had a son and he had a literary bent or even an inclination for the life of the mind I'd keep all the poets from him, even though I don't like being a guide in that field. Those people cause you to waste a lot of time when it comes to the development of the mind. I wasted at least fifteen years letting myself be lulled by their nonsense. And the novel? How can a man, at fifty, still write novels? How can a person even read them? Poetry and novel--they are certainly the lower forms of literature.

Léautaud also makes several appearances in Julio Ramón Ribeyro's La tentación del fracaso, yet another excellent diary not available in English (it is published in Spanish through 1978; the diaries from later years, still only in manuscript, are being held in a bank vault in Paris). Ribeyro, perhaps not surprisingly, refers to Léautaud's "atrocious" death, which he approached with complete lucidity and surrounded by a menagerie of animals. Foutez-moi la paix, he supposedly said on his deathbed. Leave me the fuck alone.

Josep Pla, Cherries, and Sparrows

Cherry trees haven't set fruit yet--it's too early--but it's hard to resist posting a brief entry, premature though it may be, from Josep Pla's El quadern gris. It is dated 19 June 1918:

A delicious combination these June days: desserts based on cheese and cherries. The taste of cheese and that of cherries are, in my opinion, complementary on the palate. Too bad that the cheese in this country is so tasteless and mediocre. The best cherries aren't the first ones, the blanquelles, but the firm red ones with dense flesh that we call heart of dove or matapedra. The ones slightly pecked by the beak of a sparrow are especially delicious.

Josep Pla and the Gray Notebook

Josep Pla is the modern Catalan writer most widely admired by his countrymen (okay: and women). It’s disappointing, but hardly surprising, that none of his work has ever been published in English. Some of the reasons for this neglect are obvious: Pla wrote non-fiction rather than fiction, his relative conservatism kept him, to an extent, on the margins of post-Franco Catalan literary and cultural life, dominated by the Left, and, above all, English-language publishers are notoriously hesitant to publish work in translation, regardless of the author’s political leanings or his preferred genre (exceptions are made for an occasional international celebrity). But it is perhaps also that in the United States and other English-speaking countries there is a puritanical streak, a prejudice against simplicity, against the delights of irony: literature must be work. Anything else is a mere entertainment not worth the serious reader’s time.

At least two of the precious few American publishers that bring out translations trumpet their Catalan lists; but until they publish something of Pla’s—anything—these boasts will be little more than hollow rodomontade. 

The first entry of El quadern gris (The gray notebook), Pla’s diary, appears below. The diary has been translated into Spanish, French, and perhaps Serbian, so it isn’t entirely inaccessible to those who don’t read Catalan (one suspects that these translations may well be of little consolation to the vast majority of English speakers, but there’s nothing stopping you from learning to read Catalan; go ahead and give it a shot; you’ll be glad you did).

Josep Pla

8 March 1918

Since there’s so much flu around, they had to shut down the university. Since then, my brother and I have been living at home, in Palafrugell, with our parents. We are two idle students. I see my brother, who is a great fan of playing soccer—even though he has broken an arm and a leg at it—only at mealtimes. He is doing his thing. I don’t miss Barcelona and much less the university. I like life in the village, with the friends I have here.

At dessert time, at lunch, a big dish of burnt cream and a delicious, spongy, golden-brown pound cake with a light sprinkling of powdered sugar appear on the table.

“You know you turn twenty-one today, don’t you?”

Indeed: it would be absurd to argue: I turn twenty-one today. I take a look around. My father is eating in silence, in a state of absolute normality. My mother seems no more agitated than usual. Since only saints’ days are celebrated in this country, the presence of the pound cake and the cream make me wary. I wonder if they were really made to celebrate my birthday or to remind me that the total on the bottom line after the first years is altogether negative, downright paltry. This finishing touch, I think, is so natural. Having children in the form of mystery, of vagueness, must be unpleasant. My frivolity, all the same, is so great that not even the problems of conscience posed by the sweets is enough to keep me from finding the pound cake extraordinarily tasty and the cream literally exquisite. When I help myself to seconds, the indifference becomes visibly greater. Twenty-one!

Family! An odd and complicated thing. . . . 

By mid-afternoon it starts raining—a light, vaporous, steady drizzle. There’s no wind at all. The sky is gray and low. I hear the rain falling on the ground and on the trees in the yard. It makes a muffled and distant sound, like the sea in winter. A cold, bitter March rain. As the day wanes, the sky goes from gray to a gauzy white—pallid, unreal. Above the village, weighing on the tiled roofs, is a heavy silence, a palpable silence. The sound of the falling water spins it out into a indistinct music. I see, wafting above this patter, my obsession of the day: twenty-one years old!

Seeing the rain fall, in the end, makes me drowsy. I don’t know what to do. It’s clear I should study, go over my textbooks, to get these boring law studies out of the way. Not a chance. I may often have trouble resisting the temptation to read papers I find in the street, but in front of this sort of book my curiosity gets put under lock and key. 

I decide to start this diary. I’ll write in it—just to kill time, any which way—whatever occurs to me. My mother is a very tidy woman governed by an obsession with keeping the house in a frosty order. She likes to tear up papers, burn old pieces of junk, sell to the ragman everything that, for her, is of no immediate practical or decorative use. It will be enough, then, if these papers are rescued from her admirable housekeeping virtues. If they aren’t, don’t think, in any case, that there’s anything to be sorry about. . . .