"Gaziel is part, along with Julio Camba, Josep Pla or Manuel Chaves Nogales, of the best generation of Spanish journalism of the 20th century", proclaims Francisco Fuster, Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Valencia and author of Insobornable (Galaxia Gutenberg), the first biography written in Spanish that reviews the life, work and transcendence of Agustí Calvet, alias Gaziel.
"They were modern and cosmopolitan journalists, because all of them worked as correspondents. They traveled all over the world and established contacts with other journalists. They knew Spanish journalism, but also European and American journalism," adds this academic, specialized in the history of Spanish culture of the 20th century with a marked focus on the biographical study of great writers and journalists of that period.
Born into a bourgeois family in Sant Feliu de Guíxols in 1887, Calvet moved to Barcelona as a child, where he endured an arid family life full of disappointments. "He was the son of a bourgeois rentier, who had made a lot of money with his businesses. He received an education in accordance with his status, training in religious schools, run by the Jesuits, where he coincided with the children of the Catalan bourgeoisie of the turn of the century," argues Fuster.
Cultured and sensitive, a persistent reader in love with the Catalan language and culture and French culture, he abandoned his law studies and ended up with a doctorate in Philosophy with the idea of entering the university world. In this sense, journalism crossed his path almost by chance, and he began to practice it for La Veu de Catalunya of the Lliga Regionalista with some reluctance, with a distant classism that treated the act of writing about current affairs as a minor profession of little transcendence. It is then that he chose the nickname Gaziel –which alludes to the daimon, or Socratic genius– to mark a distance between being a journalist and his desire to use his real name and surname, in his academic facet.
Change of course, and coordinates
The outbreak of the First World War catches Gaziel in Paris, which will always be the city of his loves, the city where one breathes, in total freedom, that great humanist culture that gives him his proverbial life. From the French capital, he begins to send articles to La Veu, but Prat de la Riba, director of the newspaper and a staunch Germanophile, doesn't quite like them. Even so, enchanted by the style of those chronicles that mix erudition and lucidity, combined with an elegant and serene, temporizing style, the then co-director of La Vanguardia, Miquel dels Sants Oliver, signs up that young man to send his writings to the Godó family's newspaper.Thus began a relationship with La Vanguardia that would last until 1936 and that, in addition to changing his vital coordinates, would change the course of Catalan journalism for the better. First as a correspondent, then as an editor and, later, as a director, this "liberal and open-minded man, though perfectly aware of his social class" marked a before and after in the modernization process of the Catalan press.
Even so, his abandonment of Catalan in favor of Castilian was not well received by the most radical sector of Catalanism. "In reality, Gaziel was highly appreciated and respected in almost all of Spain, both by people on the right and by left-wing readers. The only resentment he received came from secessionist Catalanism, which considered him a botifler for, supposedly, having betrayed his homeland by starting to write in Castilian for an anti-Catalan newspaper, as La Vanguardia was considered at that time," explains Fuster. Among his great detractors were Prat de la Riba or Josep Pla, with whom, however, years later he would end up forming a good friendship.
The fact is that, thanks to his humanist education and his (let's say) bourgeois and cultured moderation, Gaziel imprinted a new style on the newspaper. A modern, Catalanist and conciliatory journalism of opinion and analysis, with federalist leanings and a deeply European soul. "He was not a man of extreme attitudes", recalls the author of Incorruptible, "which is an adjective with which he defined himself in one of his articles, and with which I have titled the work in allusion to his trajectory as a journalist, in which he maintained a coherence that lasted his entire life."
Flight and collapse
A deep connoisseur of history, the human condition, and the Cainism typical of these latitudes, between 1931 and 1936, Gaziel repeatedly anticipates the outbreak of a Civil War in his articles. "Without verbalizing it so expressly, he does warn that the direction the Republic is taking does not bode well," Fuster reasons. "Since the new regime was proclaimed, his greatest effort has been to make the right and the left aware that they must get involved and accept the new rules of the game. He very soon sees that this will be very difficult, because Spain is a country without a strong middle class: 'A Republic without republicans'."In the rarefied atmosphere of the rear, and facing threats from anarchists to assassinate him, he flees to Paris, where he exiles himself with his family. And there his downfall begins, first, by capitulating to Francesc Cambó, who makes him sign a document of adherence to the coup d'état. Much to his regret, Gaziel signs that document. "He was a victim of his own contradictions and had to compromise with certain things, such as signing that manifesto, which, in another context, he would have loved to avoid. I don't intend to justify him, but it is true that, as explained in the book, when he went into exile in Paris, his personal and economic situation was quite desperate," reasons his biographer.
These are years of hardship, of failed businesses and jobs, of self-induced silence, of oceanic uncertainties in a Paris over which the political shadows of a tense Europe are tightening, while, inch by inch, the war destroys Spain. Gaziel can no longer practice the journalism he loves, he is no longer free. His broad, dialogic, analytical vision, capable of sitting down with whoever is necessary, of reasoning, clashes with a world that seems to have learned nothing from the previous world conflict. A world where dialogue is replaced by threat, where silence ceases to be an option. A world of irreconcilable blacks and whites in which an erudite and peacemaking figure like his not only has no place, but is suspicious.
The Madrid purgatory
The Parisian exile ends in 1941, with a desperate trip at the wheel of a Studebaker while the Nazis invade France, to return to a Spain that offers him uncertainties. In the bloody heyday of the post-war period, the new regime seeks revenge. To annihilate the enemy, the real and the imagined. There are still eleven years before the executions cease at Camp de la Bota.
In this context, Gaziel chooses to go to Madrid instead of Barcelona, which would have been the most logical. Francisco Fuster explains it in the following terms: "Upon his return, he is aware that he must start from scratch, with all that this entails for a man of his age. His first intention is to return to Barcelona, but seeing that Francoist Barcelona has nothing to do with the one he knew, he is terrified. He prefers to live in Madrid, where he already assumes the atmosphere of moral misery he will find, than in a city that is unrecognizable and unbearable to him, because nothing remains of the Barcelona that once was."
"In 1953 he published Una vila del vuitcents and, from that moment on, he dedicated himself with fervor to writing books in Catalan, almost desperately, to make up for lost time"Nor is it a strategy to enter a Madrid intellectual circle "with which he never ingratiates himself, because in his post-war diary he speaks terribly of all of them, except Unamuno." It almost gives the impression that he self-condemns himself to a kind of purgatory, in a city that is not his, that he does not love, that weighs on his shoulders, but in which he remains until the early 50s, directing the Plus Ultra publishing house and writing diaries and books in Catalan for himself. In this stage, he also faces calamities and, of course, a trial by the regime incited by the then owner of La Vanguardia, Carlos Godó.
And with old age, comes a second youth
Paradoxically, what brings Gaziel closer to independentism, to the desire for separation –at least spiritual– between Catalonia and Spain, is Franco's own regime. He, who "had always been a very moderate man, whose model was an Iberianism in which Catalonia would assume the role of economic and cultural engine of the Iberian Peninsula," wrote in 1944, in the context of clandestine Jocs Florals during those first years of Francoism, The Discomfort. An essay on the collapse of the Catalanist project, the unease of a generation (his own) that wanted to regenerate its land, rethink the relationship with the state and shipwrecked in an ocean of bitterness.This and other texts are what the old journalist and now editor is treasuring, far from censorship, far from the spotlight, but the insistence of his friend Josep Pla opens the door for him to publish work in Catalan for the Selecta publishing house, owned by Josep Maria Cruzet. And that changes everything.
"In 1953 he publishes Una vila del vuitcents, a book he dedicates to his native Sant Feliu de Guíxols and, from that moment, he dedicates himself fervently to writing books in Catalan, almost desperately, to make up for lost time." In this second youth, he writes several travel books such as Castella endins, Portugal enfora or La península inacabada, the book Seny treball i llibertat, as well as his imposing memoirs, Tots els camins duen a Roma, which are an absolute success, making him the second leading author of Selecta, behind Pla.
Given this reunion with his language, with his intellectual and sentimental world, he abandons Madrid and returns to Barcelona, where he lives "some very happy years for him, because that's when he dedicates himself to writing about the topics he likes, without any pressure." His hyperactivity clashes, however, with a fragile state of health. A heart attack anticipates, on April 12, 1964, the stomach cancer that was consuming him. That day, Gaziel is found dead in his apartment on Copèrnic Street in Barcelona. Ideas and writings remain in the pipeline, which will gradually see the light, especially when, after the Franco regime ends, the censorship that would have silenced his works such as his Meditacions en el desert (his diary of the long and agonizing post-war period) or Quina mena de gent som (which brings together four essays on Catalonia).
"For me, Gaziel is a fundamental author of whom there was no modern and updated biography in Spanish," explains Francisco Fuster, who had already written biographies of Julio Camba and Azorín. With Insobornable, he remedies this omission, making available to millions of readers the life and legacy of that kind and enlightened freethinker who paid all the prices that could be paid for never quite laughing at anyone's jokes.