More fun with footnotes in Angel Guerra, naturally

There's a footnote on page 95 of Angel Guerra (Pérez, Galdós Benito. A Translation of "Angel Guerra" by Benito Pérez Galdós. Lewiston (N.Y.: E. Mellen Press, 1990.), translated by Karen O. Austin, where Angel signals he is supporting his seven-year-old daughter's anarchy instead of imposing order, as the governess has requested. Angel’s phrase, translated, is Let us proceed, and I the first, along the constitutional path.

Angel’s phrase here—Marchemos, y yo el primero, por la senda constitucional—is an almost perfect reproduction of the phrase Marchemos francamente, yo el primero, por la senda constitucional uttered by Fernando VII when he finally found himself forced to accept—temporarily at least—the Constitution. Given that, and Angel’s own political orientation, it comes across as being both bitter and ironic. A short but very stinging Galdosian portrait of this monarch can be found in La Fontana de Oro (1870). It is perhaps worth noting in passing that one of Galdós’more famous tag-lines—francamente, naturalmente (frankly, naturally—constantly voiced by the character of Ido in Fortunata and Jacinta (1886-87), and earlier by the narrator himself at the end of The Bringas Woman (1884), may stem in part from Galdós’ disgust at Fernando’s hypocrisy.

Notice the omission of the word francamente in Angel’s phrasing. OK, this caused me to look up some of the references from the books I've read and I was surprised at what I found. (I hope to get to La Fontana de Oro in a few months…it's in the TBR stacks.)

The Bringas Woman (The Spendthrifts) first: I look to the end of my edition and do see the word “natural” near the end but doesn’t see anything worthy of pointing out. To the online Spanish edition. Francamente appears 10 times in the text, naturalmente twice, both appearing together at the end of the novel. “Francamente, naturalmente, les vi salir con pena. My Spanish is awful, but something along the lines of “Frankly, naturally, I watched them leave with regret.” Heh. That does sound like a dig at Fernando VII now that I know what to look for. As to my translation, though, I now notice there are only 47 chapters. The Spanish edition has 50. Sigh. Was something left out, or was it only reconfigured? Looks like I need to revisit this in a different translation.

On to Fortunata and Jacinta. Francamente appears only once in the online Spanish edition, naturalmente twenty times. Sr. Ido, for those that have read the novel, was the publications salesman that first shows up on the Santa Cruz doorstep on page 119 of the English translation by Agnes Moncy Gullón. He turns “electric” when he eats meat and believes his wife is having an affair. (He also provides Jacinta with some delicate “information,” but I won’t spoil it for those that haven’t read the novel.) 

Six “naturally” referenced quotes are by him just in the subchapter he’s introduced (Volume One, Chapter 8, sub-chapter 4). I’m not sure why Galdós puts the word in this character's mouth so often. My best guess is that Ido is both truthful and a fraud, a paradox the author brilliantly depicts, although he's not willingly a hypocrite. Regardless, I love little tidbits like this.

Pérez Galdós: The Illusion of Life itself

At the risk of turning into the Galdós channel (all Galdós, all the time), I plan on intermittent posts on the author and Fortunata and Jacinta over the next few weeks. Hopefully they will be helpful for anyone thinking about exploring the author or book. In this post I want to highlight The Pérez Galdós Editions Project as a great resource. The Annual Pérez Galdós Lecture page (currently) has the transcripts for ten of the lectures.

The first lecture, given by Roy Hattersley (the British Labour politician and author), focuses on the question of realism in Galdós’ novels and provides the title of this post. He delves into issues in That Bringas Woman, which I recently covered (translated as The Spendthrifts), and several other novels including Fortunata and Jacinta. Along the way he references a wide range of material, from Thomas Hardy to Monty Python’s Flying Circus to East Enders.

I’d also like to mention the fifth lecture given by Professor James Whiston—Galdós: Our Contemporary. Focusing on Galdós’ output from 1884 to 1887, he touches on the relevance of Galdós today:

What never ceases to amaze those of us who have given over significant portions of our lives to studying Galdós's work is how this Canary Islander, from the then very provincial backwater of Las Palmas, is of relevance today. He came from a background and a period many of whose great social institutions of his time, which were the subject of his novels, have since passed into history: the power of the Church, the culture of arranged marriages, the tight restricting bonds and conventions of family and social life, the legal and social subordination of women, the pivotal role as social centres of the coffee houses of Madrid, the marginalization of what the Victorians called the lower classes. Galdós was able to use such institutions and conventions when writing about the personal search for some authentic means of finding one's role in the human drama. Galdós was fortunate to live at a time when the tension between the search for personal authenticity (following the European Romantic movement) and the demands of institutions and social conventions was at a sufficient pitch to enable him to exploit this tension, for artistic as well as for commercial purposes. It is in his artistic conjugation of these three words, 'personal', 'social' and 'human' that Galdós found a voice in his contemporary novels to speak to us today.

Keep this lecture in mind when you get to the end of Fortunata and Jacinta--Professor Whiston goes into detail on several scenes in the novel and provides the original version of a pivotal scene near the end.

The Spendthrifts (La de Bringas) by Benito Pérez Galdós

The Spendthrifts by Benito Pérez Galdós
Translation by Gamel Woolsey; illustrations by Charles Mozley; introduction by Gerald Brenan
Farrar Straus & Young Inc.: New York, 1952.

My previous posts on The Spendthrifts:

One: a Spain that does not understand anything except eating and digesting

Two: The ceremony? It was nothing.

Three: Me-ow! Torquemada! Krausism!

My introduction from the first post on the novel:

Set in 1868, the year of Spain’s Glorious Revolution, the novel takes place in the Royal Palace of Madrid among members of the court’s bureaucracy. Galdós’ title of the novel was La de Bringas, but the translated title reflects many residents of the Palace were ruining themselves through extravagance. Galdós uses these individuals as symbols for the decay that has progressed throughout the entire administration. From the introduction by Gerald Brenan:

The rottenness of the whole regime becomes apparent and when, at the close of the sweltering summer, the Army, the Navy and the entire country rise with one accord and the queen flees to France, the curtain falls on this phantasmagoric society, so brilliant when viewed from outside but built on poverty and debt and emptiness. Thus The Spendthrifts is both an allegory of the ruling classes of Spain and a sermon on the classic Spanish theme, made familiar to us in Don Quixote, of illusion and reality. It is also a very brilliant, well designed and amusing novel.

Galdós has a message, but he seems to have more fun with the way he delivers it. At several points I wondered if he creates his characters in order to play with them—acting like a god, alternately rewarding or punishing them whether he agrees or disagrees with them. Don Francisco de Bringas represents the sober side of what Galdós would like to see in Spain, a willingness to spend within its means and recognize its limitations. Yet Galdós toys with him, having him blinded at one point. Every prediction Don Francisco makes about the revolution proves wrong. He turns out to be the least adaptable to the post-revolution Spain, although Galdós seems to admire him for holding fast to his ideals.

Galdós, a lifelong bachelor, paints extremely strong female characters. Refugio Sánchez Emperador, “a girl of doubtful character remotely connected with the Bringas family,” may be financially naïve but she is remarkably insightful when evaluating people. Her values are aligned differently from many of the other women who look down on her, although Galdós casts her in a favorable light and provides her the delicious scene of toying with Rosalía de Bringas, Don Francisco’s wife, in Rosalía’s hour of greatest need. Rosalía incorporates many aspects of Spain that Galdós wanted to show—willing to do almost anything to satisfy her fashion fix, only worrying later about how to get out of debt. Rosalía learns from her mistakes, eventually, and turns out to be the most flexible of the family in adapting to post-revolution Spain.

The opening chapter of The Spendthrifts starts with the narrator describing a mausoleum and the landscape surrounding it. Soon the reader realizes he’s describing a “beautiful work of art.” Eventually he provides the detail that the “cenotaph was, in fact, a hair picture, a form of art which once had a certain vogue.” The hair picture provides the novel’s conceit, a memorial for a bygone era that has passed, not to mention being at the center of several key plot points. For anyone not joining in the Fortunata and Jacinta read-along, The Spendthrifts is a wonderful introduction to Galdós. The scale is much smaller, although just as detailed, plus the narrator-games are just as playful. A “very brilliant, well designed and amusing novel” indeed. Highly recommended.

Updates

Article: Imagery of light and darkness in La de Bringas

Galdós, as a man of the self-conscious nineteenth century, was indelibly impressed with the many advances and changes of the epoch in which he lived. The century was self-contradictory; it contained both stifling darkness and blinding light. The Monarchy fell because it was an emblem of darkness in a more and more light-filled world. In this sense, the antinomy of light and darkness serves as a political symbol. ... By extending Galdós' light and darkness imagery in the novel further, however, we see his implicit hope that the twilight and darkness of the Isabelline reign would give way to a dawning of political glory with the new republic to follow.

The Spendthrifts (La de Bringas) by Benito Pérez Galdós: Me-ow! Torquemada! Krausism!

Sorry for the tabloid-style heading, but this post will be a jumble of things that turned up in the book that I enjoyed and wanted to share.

So far Galdós’ novel has shown him at his cattiest of the few books I’ve read by him, as the posts so far have demonstrated some good examples. In focusing on a few individuals and their desire to live well above their means, presenting a false front with no substance, Galdós frames his novel as a commentary on the bankruptcy (moral and fiscal) of Spain leading up to the Glorious Revolution. His targets include almost everyone associated with the administration and much of the society. The previous two posts make it clear that Galdós valued competence over titles, effective acts over empty gestures. But there are so many snide whispers he makes that I wanted to post a couple more in order to share Galdós’ mischievous side. In La Regenta, a book that was critical about most of what it described, I mentioned Leopoldo Alas does plenty of this as well, almost sounding like a scold at times. In The Spendthrifts, another novel that is sharply critical of Spanish life (although set a little earlier), Galdós’ catty side is much more playful. A couple of examples of his sharp parenthetical style:

What is certain is that the supper was a splendid affair and that a celebrated salon chronicler, writing in that emasculated style which is peculiar to them, praised it to the skies, making use of phrases something between French and Spanish which I shall not reproduce here for fear of making my readers sick. (page 125)

After she had said it she fell into a sort of convulsive fit—what women call an attack of nerves, since they have to call it something… . (page 129)

One of Rosalía Bringas desperate means to cover her debt includes going to a moneylender, who turns out to be Torquemada! We will see him in Fortunata and Jacinta, too. In The Spendthrifts he still has the hard edge about him that will not soften until his own series, although he does grant a slight reprieve to Rosalía that helps her. Here is his description in this book:

Torquemada was a gray haired man of medium height with a four days growth of beard. He was dark and had somehow a clerical air about him; and it was his invariable custom to ask after the health of his client’s family, whether he knew them or not. When he spoke, he separated the words and put asthmatic pauses that made paragraphs in the wrong places, in such a way that the listener could not help feeling that he was catching this difficulty in breathing from him. He accompanied his tiresome discourse with a slow elevation of the right arm, while his thumb and index finger described a sort of doughnut in the air, which he held up before the eyes of the person he was talking to as if it were an object of veneration. (pages 206-7)

My final highlight—a specific mention of Krausism in The Spendthrifts. For more on Krausism, see this post on La Regenta or this article (pages 16-170) for its influence and attempted goals. Don Francisco de Bringas, a first official of the Privy Purse, holds the Queen in high esteem and is quite happy the way things are in Spain. He views all the talk of revolution as subversive, believing that if a revolt happens it will be much worse than the French Revolution. He scolds his son Paquito, a law student, for many of the thoughts he promotes at home:

Another mania with which the boy was poisoning his mind, and which infuriated Don Francisco, was a perverse doctrine known as Krausism. Bringas had heard it described as pestilential by a learned chaplain of his acquaintance. For some time Paquito had been babbling about the I and the Not I, and the other, and the one further off, until he had nearly driven his father crazy. Don Francisco had finally told his son in so many words that, if he didn’t forget all about these new-fangle philosophies, he would take him away from the University and put him in a shop as a clerk. (pages 240-1)

Don Francisco represents a sober side of Spain that Galdós would like to see but the author still toys with him, temporarily blinding him and poking fun at his reactionary ways. I’ll try and wrap up the novel in the next post.

The Spendthrifts by Benito Pérez Galdós; translation by Gamel Woolsey; illustrations by Charles Mozley. Farrar Straus & Young Inc.: New York, 1952.

The Spendthrifts (La de Bringas) by Benito Pérez Galdós: The ceremony? It was nothing.

In Chapter 7 of The Spendthrifts, Galdós highlights some part of the farcical nature of Queen Isabella II’s court by detailing the Maundy Thursday ceremony held in the palace. Two dozen members of the lowest class (after being scrubbed, of course) are selected to eat in the palace, served by the Queen and her staff. The spectacle proves to be popular with the crowds, as adults and children fight over places to view the “pompous act of Royal humility”:

Seen like that from the roof, the spectacle in the Hall of Columns was an exceedingly curious one. The table at which the twelve poor old men were sitting was hardly visible; but the table for the twelve old women was just opposite the windows in the ceiling and everything that happened at it could be clearly seen. And how embarrassed the poor things looked in their new woolen dresses and shawls and new head handkerchiefs, shocked to find themselves in such a scene of pomp, served by the Queen herself—they who only the day before had been begging a sad penny outside some Church door. They never lifted their eyes from their plates except to stare with alarm at the personages who served them. Some of them even shed tears, more of distress than of gratitude—for their situation among the powerful of the earth as recipients of this formal charity was one more calculated to humiliate them than to make them proud. …

Trays of food were brought to the door by men servants and handed to the distinguished persons who acted as waiters on this pious occasion. These ladies and gentlemen formed a chain and passed the trays along until they reached the hands of the King and Queen, who presented the food to the poor people with a certain air of benevolence and courtesy, which was the only sympathetic note in their theatrical farce. But the unfortunate creatures at the table did not eat; they were much too frightened. Their trembling hands could hardly have found the way to the mouths. So after the food had been placed before them, other men servants went about collecting it again and packing it into the baskets which were placed behind each poor person’s chair. Shortly afterwards, when the Royalties and nobles had left the Hall, the old men and women went out too carrying their baskets. And near the Palace Confectionery various Madrid inn-keepers and other people in the catering trade were waiting to buy the food they had been given for a few duros.

The descriptions given, some through the eyes of children, play up how small and trivial the ceremony ends up being. The children view the charade from high up in the palace Hall of Columns, close to the ceilings, where the

“figures which decorate them are monstrous and the painting looks very coarse. Huge angels and nymphs stretch their enormous legs out towards Scotland, riding on clouds which look like bales of gray cotton. Other figures seem to be lifting the framework of the ceiling into the air with the force of their colossal muscles; while the flowers of the carpet far below look like flowers painted in a miniature.”

The farce turns out to be insignificant in many ways but it terrified more than just the chosen poor. Among the children fighting for a view was little Isabelita Bringas, a “weak, rickety, clever child”. The choice of her name, a namesake of the Queen, heightens Galdós’ criticism. The little Isabel is troubled by the ceremonial farce, experiencing fevers and delirium during her sleep. Her nightmares confuse actual incidents during the day and the monstrous figures from the Hall’s ceilings. The dreams become more absurd and cause a reaction (and a troubling reassurance from her mother):

At this point the poor child felt her whole being wrapped up in this idea of whiteness, and at the same time felt a horrible fullness and obstruction, as if all the scenes and objects her mind was producing were contained in side her small stomach. With agonized convulsions she threw it all out; and the delirium decreased and she felt an immense relief. Her mother had sprung from her bed to come to her assistance; and Isabelita, now wide awake, could hear the affectionate voice say: “It’s all over now, darling. It was nothing.”

Ouch.

The Spendthrifts by Benito Pérez Galdós; translation by Gamel Woolsey; illustrations by Charles Mozley. Farrar Straus & Young Inc.: New York, 1952.

The Spendthrifts (La de Bringas) by Benito Pérez Galdós: a Spain that does not understand anything except eating and digesting

A stop at Powell’s Books is always in order when I’m in Portland. Last week I escaped (using restraint I didn’t know I had) spending less than $20 for a few books, one of which was The Spendthrifts by Benito Pérez Galdós, the second release in the 1950’s series The Illustrated Novel Library. There’s another Galdós novel in the series, Torment, which I'll get to later this year.

Set in 1868, the year of Spain’s Glorious Revolution, the novel takes place in the Royal Palace of Madrid among members of the court’s bureaucracy. Galdós’ title of the novel was La de Bringas, but the translated title reflects many residents of the Palace were ruining themselves through extravagance. Galdós uses these individuals as symbols for the decay that has progressed throughout the entire administration. From the introduction by Gerald Brenan:

The rottenness of the whole regime becomes apparent and when, at the close of the sweltering summer, the Army, the Navy and the entire country rise with one accord and the queen flees to France, the curtain falls on this phantasmagoric society, so brilliant when viewed from outside but built on poverty and debt and emptiness. Thus The Spendthrifts is both an allegory of the ruling classes of Spain and a sermon on the classic Spanish theme, made familiar to us in Don Quixote, of illusion and reality. It is also a very brilliant, well designed and amusing novel.

Yes it is, and Galdós provides more direct criticisms and snide remarks than I encountered in the few other works of his I’ve read. I’ll provide a couple of extended quotes that showcases these criticisms. The first quote looks at Doña Tula, considered the “person of highest rank who lived in the city” [the Palace] and highlights the rottenness surrounding the military and administration. While not attacking the royal family directly, the fact that such incompetence is held in high esteem and promoted does not speak kindly toward it. (More direct, but still shaded, is his portrayal of Rosalía Bringas which provides a thinly veiled attack on Queen Isabella II.) There seems little good to say about the past or the future from Doña Tula’s vantage point:

The two sisters were married on the same day; Milagros to the Marques de Tellería and Gertrudis [Doña Tula], the elder, to Colonel Minio, who rapidly rose to be a general by winning courtiers’ battles in the Palace antechamber. Not a Royal Birthday passed without his receiving a Cross or being advanced a grade in rank; and when he could rise no higher in his profession they made him the Conde de Santa Barbara, a title taken from a property he had in Navarre. And the name has a certain suggestion of gunpowder, which went well with his vocation, although it was said of him that he had never smelled any powder except what is wasted in salutes. The reputation for valour which he enjoyed was probably only founded on the fact that he was extremely stupid; for our ideas are in such a state of confusion that we find it easier to turn people into heroes if they can hardly write their names. … He will go down to posterity however as the author of those celebrated remarks about the Sword of Demosthenes and the Cloth of Pentecost and by his suggestion about ‘going to Havana by way of the Philippines’. These sayings of his were diligently collected by his subordinates and form a diverting collection of absurdities. The Queen knew them all by heart and used to tell them very amusingly. But let us not waste any more time in disturbing the ashes of this Nobody, of whom his widow used to say in the most secret depths of intimacy that he was an ox with decorations, and talk of her instead.

Doña Tula was so unlike the Marquesa de Tellería that it hardly seemed possible that they could be children of the same parents, and she was unequally unlike her brother. The rare gifts with which she was adorned came from quite another sort of human distinction—from misfortune, the privilege of those who are advancing towards perfection. Her two sons had inherited along with the general’s name his stupidity and crudeness, and were both complete ne’er-do-wells. It would be impossible to tell what their unfortunate mother suffered while she was trying to get them through their schooling and into the cavalry; she passed five or six years of continual struggle against the stupidity and laziness of the boys and their difficulties with their reluctant teachers. Thanks to the name they bore and to the letters which the Queen wrote whenever it became necessary, they were finally graduated, became officers and were gazette. And then a new series of difficulties began, to embitter Doña Tula’s existence. Quarrels, duels, drunken bouts, summonses, reckless gambling, unpaid debts were everyday occurrences. And their mother had to smooth everything over by using her influence or by paying out money. It came to such a point at last that when the elder, who was called Pedro Minio like his father, determined to go off to Cuba, she had no energy left to oppose him. The other son was set on marrying a woman of bad character, and this was another contest for the mother. It was after this that she made her famous remark. They were speaking of children, and of the mothers who want them, and the mothers who have to many.

“Oh, children—“ Doña Tula said, with the saddest of accents. “They are a nine months illness and a convalescence that lasts all your life.” (pages 37-38)

Another resident in the Royal Palace is Don Manuel Maria José del Pez (“fish”), a character Galdós’ describes, then uses as a symbol for much of what he sees wrong with Spain. It’s not an upbeat view—the corruption in which Pez excels is looked on favorably, even by his opponents:

A man tanned inside and out and quite incapable of enthusiasm, Pez’s face yet had in repose a look of peace which resembled that of the Saints who are enjoying Eternal happiness. In fact his face seemed to be saying: ‘I have attained my desire.’ It was the face of someone who does not mean to worry himself about anything or take anything seriously; and that after all is one way of resolving the great problem of life. For him the administration was simply a cloak of empty formulas created to cover up the working system of personal favours, the key to which lay in bribes and recommendations. No one could help his friends so effectively as Pez; it was this that gave him the reputation of being such a good fellow. And there was no one like him for getting on with everyone. Even among the revolutionaries he had his admirers. … His eyes were pure Spanish eyes, so serene and gentle that they suggested the eyes Murillo painted when he was portraying St. Joseph. … Those eyes said to everyone who looked at them:

“I am the expression of that Spain which is sleeping beatifically, taking pleasure in being the plaything of events and never interfering in anything so long as she is allowed to eat in peace: the Spain which is not going anywhere, and expects nothing, living in the illusion of the present with a flowering spray in her hand: the Spain which submits to everyone who cares to command her, while professing a tame socialism; which does not understand ideas, or actions, or indeed anything except eating and digesting.” (pages 65-66)

Next: vomiting in response to the farce in the palace.

The Spendthrifts by Benito Pérez Galdós; translation by Gamel Woolsey; illustrations by Charles Mozley. Farrar Straus & Young Inc.: New York, 1952.