In the same, personal, opening section, he reveals his humorous disregard for the profession to which he belongs: he tells us that having to wrestle with hefty tomes by philosophers and writers in order to make room for a game of bottle-top football or toy soldiers accustomed him from an early age ‘to negotiating the words of the great philosophers and writers’ and led him to lose all respect for anyone who writes, himself included: ‘Having too much respect for the kind of individuals who partially soured my childhood and invaded the territory occupied by my thrilling games of bottle-top football would seem to me masochistic in the extreme,’ he says. That may also be why he has never thought of himself as a professional writer.
His love of toy soldiers, incidentally, has not diminished: they are still aligned along most of his bookshelves in his home and study. The reason they do so, he explains in ‘This Childish Task’, is that he does not want to lose sight of the fact that those childhood games are probably one of the origins of his chosen career. Comic books are another origin, which for him and many boys of his generation were companions and teachers, instead of being frowned on as a lesser art; ‘They weren’t called “graphic novels” then, a term invented by those who feel ashamed of writing or drawing them and, therefore, ashamed of having been a source of pleasure and fantasy for many children and grown-ups, as well as being partly responsible for the literary vocation of many writers, including myself’ (‘A Hero from 1957’). Javier Marías does not hesitate to criticize such pretentiousness, prejudice or, indeed, the megalomania of artists, writers and critics (real or resulting from their representation – see ‘Damned Artists!’). In his wonderful essay on film music, ‘Music for the Eyes’, he berates critics and academics for their (our) prejudices, which lead to blindness in judgements:
Artistic prejudices are always the most difficult to root out. Critics – whose duty should be to see beyond the pretensions of artists and the public’s passing fancies – often allow themselves to be persuaded by the way authors present their work, by what they say they have achieved, or else are guided by whatever has been a wild success – usually in order to take the opposing view – and which has been damningly labelled ‘popular’. So, in literature, it has taken almost a hundred years since the death of Robert Louis Stevenson for critics and scholars to consider his work to be ‘serious’ and to notice that one of his greatest admirers was Henry James, a writer who has always been venerated in academic circles. The fact that Stevenson wrote several brilliant novels enthusiastically devoured by children and adolescents – especially Treasure Island – was enough for him to be despised and for those same critics to forget that he was also the author of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and other extraordinary tales, as well as essays that were far more penetrating and profound than any written by the very critics and professors who dictate what does or does not deserve to be studied and respected.
He has often defended many instances of what in critical or academic circles used to be – or still are – frequently dismissed as popular or mass culture not on a par with other artistic endeavours. So, he has repeatedly championed not only film music or comics, but also allegedly lesser literary genres such as comic novels (by his contemporary Eduardo Mendoza, for example), adventure stories (by Stevenson, Dumas or the best-selling Arturo Pérez-Reverte), ghost stories, stories of the supernatural, or children’s literature, more often than not going against conventional wisdom.
He has done this in his essays, but also as a translator – in the 1980s he co-translated and edited a collection of ghost stories by little-known figures in English literature (Cuentos únicos /Unique Short Stories) – and as a publisher, for after becoming King of Redonda in 1997, Xavier I founded his own publishing house (as king he recovered his original name, pronounced in the same way as ‘Javier’), Reino de Redonda, for which select small imprint he chose to have translated volumes of lesser-known supernatural narratives by Richmal Crompton, The House and Mist and Other Stories, and by the duo Erckmann-Chatrian (Les Contes du bord du Rhin). (He has occasionally paid homage to Crompton, whose William Brown had such an influence on so many writers of his generation in Spain.) Let us also not forget, in this context, that the literary character he would most like to have been is Sherlock Holmes. His magnificent defence of the cinematic genre of the Western, laid bare in a number of articles in the final section of this volume, is another example of this tendency, as is his formidable championing of It’s a Wonderful Life and The Ghost and Mrs Muir as ambitious, ambiguous, intense and complex masterpieces of cinema.
Indeed, it is in his essays on cinema that Javier Marías is often at his lucid, corrective and combative best. Here he will attack, for example, as he does often in his writings, the new puritanism, political correctness or pusillanimity that has taken hold of our societies, as he does when he speculates on the demise of the Western in ‘The Hero’s Dreadful Fate’:
Perhaps it’s because the Western, as a genre, has traditionally embodied attitudes and behaviour – which it always took seriously, without ever falling into caricature – that now seem shocking to the hypocritical mass of entrenched goody-goodies, who desperately want to dissociate themselves from a whole range of passions that have been common to humanity throughout the ages. For example, in the Western, nobody looks askance at hatred, ambition, the desire for revenge, the determined pursuit of an enemy, the wish to hurt or kill that enemy, the search for redress and sometimes justice for a wrong committed.
[…]
Our society does not accept that all men and all women are different. It does not accept that while some are horrified by what they are obliged or choose to do, others are not, and are prepared to bear whatever responsibility or sentence falls to them. It believes, rather, that everyone should think the same or at least abstain from doing what the majority deem reprehensible. It does not accept that some crimes are not as criminal as others, depending on who commits them and against whom, depending, too, on why. Society knows all about hatred, envy and revenge, but prefers to clothe itself in virtue and pretend ignorance …
Javier Marías’s lucidity is such that he is able to see and discover things that are there, so to speak, but which many of us have failed to notice or, indeed, things that we do, in fact, recognize, but have never put into words, certainly not so clearly and eloquently. And that is because he keeps looking at the things of this world long after most of us have turned away, and never contents himself with what he has already seen or thought. In Your Face Tomorrow: Dance and Dream, Javier recalls his father, Julián Marías, saying, ‘Go on, go on thinking,’ and urging his children ‘to keep on looking at things and at people, beyond what seemed necessary’. And that is what we see Javier Marías doing, lucidly, funnily, movingly, brilliantly in Between Eternities.
Alexis Grohmann, 2017
A BORROWED DREAM
* * *
A Borrowed Dream
Although I’m no great fan of people telling you their dreams, especially when characters in a novel or a film do so – why are they telling me this, I wonder, if it’s only a dream and we’re in the middle of a fiction anyway – today, I’m going to tell you about a dream told to me by my oldest brother, Miguel.
He had the dream five days after the death of our father, who took his leave of this world on 15 December 2005 at around ten o’clock in the morning. When Miguel described the dream to me, I sensed in his account some of his professional and private obsessions, because, although he’s an economist, he’s best known as a film critic, and I was aware in his description of various ‘influences’: Lubitsch (Heaven Can Wait), Powell and Pressburger (A Matter of Life and Death), Mankiewicz (The Ghost and Mrs Muir, one of my all-time favourites) and even Capra (It’s a Wonderful Life). Anyway, in the dream, Miguel saw our mother, who died in the early hours of 24 December 1977, sitting on a bench in La Dehesa, which is the name of the pretty park in Soria, a city where we spent many a childhood summer. My father came strolling along one of the avenues and stopped in front of her; sittin
g on her knee was our brother, Julianín, the oldest of the five brothers, who died on 25 June 1949 at the age of three and a half, except that in the dream he didn’t actually appear to Miguel (who was the only one of us to have known him) in physical or corporeal form; he was simply there unseen. And then my mother addressed these playful words of reproach to my father: ‘Honestly, Julián,’ she said, ‘fancy taking nearly twenty-nine years to get here. Do you have any idea what it’s been like, alone all this time with a three-year-old? Come on, you hold the little inquisitor for a while and be in charge of answering his questions. You know what children his age are like, they never stop asking questions, why this and why that. He’s quite worn me out.’ My father picked up the ethereal child in that awkward way so familiar to us, the four surviving brothers, Miguel, Fernando, Álvaro and myself, rather as if someone had placed in his hands a pile of plates and he could find nowhere to put them down. Anyway, he tried to justify his delay by saying: ‘I meant to come much sooner, almost straight away, but you know how it is, Lolita, one thing leads to another, and there were books to write, and people kept pestering me to do this and do that. So up until now, I simply haven’t had a chance.’ As with Julianín, my parents were both the age they had been when they died, so my mother, who, in life, had been a year older than my father, appeared in the dream with her sixty-three years and my father with his ninety-one years. ‘It’s odd, isn’t it,’ said our mother, ‘now I’m much younger than you are. And don’t worry, I know what you’re like, always in such a hurry when it comes to your own affairs, but with all the time in the world when it’s someone else.’
It was several nights since he’d had the dream, and Miguel could really only remember snippets, but apparently my father reported to my mother what had happened in her absence and, she, quite contradictorily, on the one hand, listened to him with great interest, and on the other, kept telling him that she knew all about it already (‘Don’t go thinking I don’t know what’s been going on’). ‘There’s only one thing I would reproach you with,’ she said, smiling, ‘the fact that none of the boys is religious.’ I don’t know about my brothers’ beliefs, because we never talk about such personal matters, but it might be true, because I understand there were some mutterings among certain pious, gossipy friends of my father when, at the two masses held after his death, none of us went up to take communion. And my parents, of course, were believers. ‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘but they’ve all turned out pretty well.’ ‘And you could have done more to persuade Javier to get married,’ was my mother’s second, mocking reproach. ‘Well, he’s always been a bit of a butterfly in that respect, as you know, and although it’s not quite the same thing, he does seem to have paired up with someone now, a very pleasant, cheerful woman, whom I met in fact.’ ‘Several of the grandchildren are paired up too,’ said my mother, determined to needle him a little more, ‘but not one of them is married.’ To which our father responded incongruously and untruthfully: ‘Well, the thing is, you see, only homosexuals get married nowadays,’ to which our mother, very well informed on her park bench, retorted: ‘Don’t tell such fibs. Homosexuals can and do get married, it’s true, but so can anyone else who cares to.’
As often happens in dreams, the scene was a mixture of verisimilitude – of domesticity almost – and the absurd. It amused me to find my father slightly caught on the hop, although for no real reason, poor man, and that he should agree with her that he had delayed far too long in coming to join her. I’m not, in fact, religious, but I do love films, and I particularly like the films I mentioned earlier and other similar ones that feature ghosts or people who continue to feel engaged with what’s going on in the world they’ve left behind, and so I found my brother’s dream at once amusing and consoling. There is, after all, a territory – if I can call it that – in which all three, my father, my mother and Julianín, are gathered together, and not just in the same tomb: all three are now the past, a memory, and that, at least, they share in common. And when you think about it, being the past doesn’t seem so very dreadful: it’s a time, or possibly a place, full of interesting people, as well as some who are much loved.
(2006)
Air-Ships
A few years ago, I wrote an article in which I confessed, in rather jocular fashion, to a fear of flying, even though – with no little show of courage – I board a plane about twenty times a year. I’m pleased to say that I now feel much more confident during flights, perhaps because I’ve grown used to it or perhaps, as the trail of years behind us grows, we become more scornful about our possible future life and more satisfied with the life we’ve already accumulated. However, over a period of at least twenty years, plane journeys – of fifty minutes, two, seven or even twelve hours – could be relied upon to transform me into a highly superstitious little boy, who reached his various destinations feeling utterly drained after the hours of tension and the indescribable effort of having to ‘carry’ the plane.
What I’ve always found so odd about my fears – or is this, perhaps, the explanation – is the fact that I first flew in a plane when I was only one month old, in the days when, for most people, flying was still a rare experience. I was born in Madrid on 20 September 1951, and on that very date – it had been planned beforehand, so it wasn’t that he took one look at me and fled – my father set off on the first of his Atlantic crossings and travelled to America with a contract to teach at Wellesley College, Massachusetts – a college for young ladies – for the academic year of 1951–52. My mother followed a month later, taking with her my two older brothers, Miguel and Fernando, as well as me, the newborn baby. I don’t know what the travelling conditions were like (apart from the fact that I was all dressed in pink, because they had been expecting a girl), or whether I cried a little or a lot as we crossed the ocean, or whether the crew members of Iberia or TWA made a fuss of me or loathed me. And I recall nothing either of the return journey – New York–Madrid – nine or ten months later. I do, however, have a vague recollection of my third trip by plane. I was just four years old, had acquired another brother, Álvaro, and my father had decided to take us all to New Haven, Connecticut, at the behest of Yale University. It’s not a very pleasant memory: I can see myself – not crying, but very, very angry – lying in the aisle, refusing to get up and doubtless obstructing crew and passengers alike. I don’t know how long the tantrum lasted – possibly a couple of minutes, possibly much longer – but I’m sure that if, as an adult, I had seen the child that was me, I would have hated him for blocking the aisle; more than that, I would have thought it a bad omen, which is always rather worrying when in mid-flight.
It’s probably a well-known fact – although I can’t be sure because people don’t talk about it much – that those of us who suffer in planes tend to invest a great deal of feverish, exhausting mental activity in our role as, how can I put it, ‘imaginary co-pilots’. As I said, my fear of flying is now abating, but throughout my life I’ve spent many hours on board in a state of permanent alertness, attentive not only to any possible changes of mood in the engines, or to the plane’s recognizable or unexpected noises, or to its scheduled or unscheduled ups and downs, but also to everything else around me, in particular the air hostesses and the stewards and even the captain’s variable tones of voice over the intercom – whether he sounds calm or nervous. I have tended to see ‘signs’ or ‘premonitions’ in the tiniest details and, given that all superstitions are arbitrary, it always used to make me feel uneasy if a passenger stood talking in the aisle for too long, especially if he or she was Japanese, don’t ask me why. Nor was I soothed, particularly on long-haul flights, by the sight of other excessively relaxed and uninhibited passengers, who, far from keeping a close eye on our flight path, as is the duty of all caring and committed travellers, laughed and drank, moved around the cabin, played cards or performed other equally grave and reckless acts, or so it seemed to me. In short, I spend or spent the entire journey ‘controlling’ and ‘helping’ and ‘protecting’ t
he whole hazardous crossing with my tireless thoughts. A four-year-old child blocking the aisle would definitely have strained my nerves. I’m not sure I would have been able to refrain from giving him a good slap. No, I would doubtless have contained my irritation because since I reached the age of shaving, I’ve always behaved myself onboard planes, unlike the callow creature I was then. I have limited myself to keeping a firm grip on an open newspaper (of the broadsheet variety, so that there’s no chance of my sneaking a glance out of the windows), either pretending to read it or actually reading it – although without taking in a single word – meanwhile fending off any attempts at conversation (one doesn’t want to become distracted and neglect one’s duty as lookout), demolishing at high speed whatever food is placed in front of me, and all the while clutching some wooden object I’ve brought with me for the purpose, since there doesn’t tend to be any wood – a major oversight – on those flying submarines.
It was a similar remark, made in that earlier article, and my subsequent confession that I’d worn out the wooden toothpicks and matches I grasped between my fingers, that provoked a charming Iberia air hostess into sending me a letter and a little wooden key ring in the form of a plane, so that, in future, I wouldn’t have to make a fool of myself abroad, holding those grubby matches and toothpicks. And that same air hostess, as well as recounting a few anecdotes from her long experience in the air, made me think of planes, for the first time, as relatively ‘humanizable’ objects, which one could, in a way, and depending on the circumstances, mentally direct. Not that there’s anything very remarkable about that. Indeed, it’s perfectly normal. She told me in her letter that, whenever the plane she was on lurched or bumped about a bit or jolted, she would issue a silent order: ‘Down, boy!’ Yes, an order, an exorcism, a persuasive word.