Josep Pla (1897 - 1981) wanted a biography to crown himself as the great author he had always wanted to be. In life, he asked four different people, but all of them ended up backing out, no matter that he offered them to win the Premi Josep Pla if they accepted, as he did with the writer Baltasar Porcel. "They realized that he wanted to control every last word they wrote. He wanted a transcriber of the biographical version that he himself wanted to fix for posterity," explains Xavier Pla. He has ended up becoming his final biographer with Un cor furtiu (Destino), an extensive cartography of a ---real--- character who lived many lives and played hide-and-seek, even putting on other people's clothes. It can already be found in Catalan in bookstores; in Spanish, it will be published by the same publisher starting May 29.
Xavier Pla (Girona, 1966), professor of Contemporary Catalan Literature at the Universitat de Girona and director of the Josep Pla Chair, has spent a decade tracing the life of the controversial prose writer, immersing himself in the infinite amount of documents he bequeathed. The planian expert has read more than 4,000 unpublished letters, selected from the 35,000 deposited in the Josep Pla foundation, in Palafrugell, and are still being classified, and has processed some 1,800 hitherto unknown documents that were preserved in Mas Pla de Llofriu, "the shell where the mollusk hides, a house that protects you from the inclemencies of time and different historical episodes, but also an anchor to which you can cling, where you have an identity that you know will make you rooted to the land," according to his biographer, what it meant to him. It is there where the author wrote, alone, away from everything, sheltered at the table under the hood and, in his last years, in his bed.
"He kept everything. He kept any document that bore witness to his existence, even the most trivial ones, at least apparently," Xavier Pla remarks. This not only means a wide repertoire of notebooks, diaries, letters, and notes, but also includes contracts, royalty statements, electricity and water bills, taxi tickets, hotel and restaurant invoices, subway and plane tickets, postcards, medical prescriptions, business cards, party invitations... "From the age of 16, he was fully aware that he was a writer and wanted to be one with unlimited ambition. All of this responds to his personal project of thinking that someone would write his biography," Xavier Pla explains. Amidst so much paperwork, Josep Pla's nephew, Frank Keerl Pla, would offer him potatoes or a gin and tonic when he saw him lost in his research.
A morass of information that his biographer has had to filter and make sense of in Un cor furtiu. "With all the documentation he had, I could reproduce his life day by day, week by week, month by month, and year by year," he points out. All this, without forgetting that Josep Pla had spent his entire life fictionalizing himself: "I had to explain the life of a writer who, in fact, had constantly dedicated himself to explaining his life. For a biographer, this is a problem. The biography had to fight against the very biography that Pla had explained."
"I needed to know how others saw him, especially his partners," he indicates, "they had to have their own voice, the one Pla didn't give them." A long list of passionate relationships formed by Mercedes Costa, Aly Herscovitz, Adi Enberg, who called him Joe, Lilian Hirsch, Aurora Perea, and Consuelo Robles, with letters that reveal how they treated each other, breaking with his reputation for being unsentimental. "He was a romantic, it was a secret that will now cease to be one," says the editorial director of Destino and Edicions 62, Emili Rosales. The biography comes with a surprise included, since Xavier Pla has stumbled upon another relationship that has not aged too well, a platonic one, he says, with a girl who was only 16 years old when he met her and for whom he, who was already over 60, felt a deep admiration.
However, Xavier Pla has put together a biography of no less than 1,500 pages ---and an index of 1,400 names---. Aware of the overwhelming length, he has divided it into brief chapters that deal with specific issues, such as his friendships, loves, and travels, allowing for independent reading to make it more digestible. "It's in favor of the reader. He has been choosing threads and, each time he picks one, he pulls it and follows it to the end. It's a single novel and a compilation of 80 narratives," says his editor, Jordi Cornudella. "I have made the most complete biography I could, putting on the table everything I have discovered and the questions that have arisen for me," states the author of Un cor furtiu.
Undoubtedly, one of the questions was what Josep Pla did during the Civil War, an episode without documentation and without any mention in his prolific work. This was the case until he found four unpublished pages in which the writer recounted all the places he was between July 1936 and January 1939, when he entered Barcelona with Franco's troops. He did not go through the conflict alone, but with Adi Enberg. With the financial support of her father, the Danish consul in Barcelona, and not Francesc Cambó as had always been believed, they traveled frantically through France, Switzerland, and Italy, also through already Francoist Spain, staying only a few days in each place, visiting many cities in a week. Xavier Pla is not clear about the reason for the route they traced, whether they were fleeing or had some mission. What is documented is that he ended up working for the SIFNE, an intelligence service of the rebel side.
"He constantly plays a double or triple morality," defends the biographer. This is evident in the meetings he had in Llofriu during the first years of the dictatorship with members of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), precursor to the CIA. Also with agents of MI9, the British intelligence services, responsible for organizing the escape of soldiers persecuted by the Nazis, which has led Xavier Pla to corroborate that the writer and his brother Pere were part of this network in favor of the allies, in addition to being caught in a smuggling mess.
"He was a rural gentleman, adventurous and a traveler all over the world, but also someone who participated in the front line of conspiracies and counter-revolutions," Rosales values. "Readers will think they are reading War and Peace, here is the war and peace of 20th century Catalan society, full of novelistic chapters and collective adventures that Pla lived," he adds. After all, a game of mirrors, as Cornudella emphasizes, that allows understanding the complex figure that Josep Pla had. Even if it's just some pieces of a puzzle that he dedicated himself to mixing.