Snippets from Spain
Tracking Down Hemingway’s Antithesis in Madrid
I’ve given up channeling Ernest Hemingway in Madrid’s bars. His habits are not conducive to my writing life. Instead, I ventured to a home and gravesite of Concha Espina, a Spanish woman writer nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1926, 1927, and 1928. I’d never heard of her. That’s embarrassing for an aspiring writer in Madrid. Espina’s fame has been washed out by her pro-Franco stance. She couldn’t be farther removed from Hemingway. I had to track her down.
Born María de la Concepción Jesusa Basilisa Rodríguez-Espina y García-Tagle in 1891 into a traditional, devout Catholic family, Espina grew up in a village in Cantabria in northern Spain. She wrote stories as a girl. When she was twenty-two, her mother, who encouraged her writing, died. With no income and little schooling, Concha took the only route available. She married. Shortly thereafter, she and her husband Ramón left for Chile where he managed his family’s business. Ramón soon ran the enterprise into the ground. Concha, defying tradition, picked up her pen and wrote for Chilean newspapers to bring in some money.
Her income couldn’t maintain the family. Concha, Ramón, and two children returned broke to Cantabria. Writing again for newspapers, she gained recognition for her powerful craft. She won her first literary prize, giving her confidence to scribe in 1909 La Niña de Luzmela (That Luzmela Girl). This novel’s elegant prose and deep emotion detailed a girl’s life in Cantabria. It received much acclaim from the public and literary circles. A Spanish scholar, historian, and literary critic encouraged Espina to move to Madrid where she’d find more opportunity and visibility.
Ramón grew jealous of his wife’s success, even though it supported the family. When he ripped up one of her drafts, she separated from him, despite her staunch Catholicism. She took responsibility for their four children, sent Ramón packing to Mexico where she had found him a job, and moved to Madrid.
Since her final home in Madrid was forty minutes from our apartment, I headed there on foot. She lived on a street parallel to Parque Retiro, Madrid’s equivalent of New York’s Central Park. Fabio and I used to run along a path opposite her home. I never knew who had resided across the street. Through grit and defiance, Espina had moved from poverty to one of Madrid’s best addresses.
She flourished. In 1929, King Alfonso XIII sent her to Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo as ambassador extraordinaire. She held stints as a professor in American universities. New York’s Hispanic Society named her vice president, and the Academy of Letters and Arts gave her an honorary membership.
Espina’s political viewpoints and writing genres ran all shades of gray. She supported the Second Republic of Spain, the new democracy that ended the monarchy in 1931. However, her enthusiasm soured in 1934 when she opposed a miners’ strike in the northern region of Asturias. The workers’ actions and socialist beliefs contradicted her conservative and Catholic values. She viewed the uprising as an attack on social order, property, and religion.
Even though the revolt angered her, she ventured into the pits to talk to the copper miners to learn about their horrible living and labor conditions. In 1936, based on this experience, she wrote El metal de los muertos (The Metal of the Dead).
Espina was sixty-seven when the Civil War started in 1936. She chronicled her experiences in Cantabria of a year under house arrest and in Republican detention centers where she faced threats of execution. She turned this into a memoir, Diario de un Prisionero (Diary of a Prisoner), describing from a woman’s perspective executions, disappearances, house searches, soldiers demanding money, and bombings.
During the siege, Espina criticized Spain’s Republican president. She despised Marxism-Leninism. She wrote, “The communist people only want to win in order to advance themselves, to destroy all the basic religious and cultural principles.” She joined the women’s section of the Falangists, which supported Franco’s regime and advocated fascism, nationalism, and authoritarianism.
The author worked daily and constantly. Women were always the protagonists in her books. She wrote romantic and propaganda novels, poetry, and plays. She was a journalist for an Argentinian and three Spanish newspapers. Espina surrounded herself with art and literature critics, poets, writers, and international journalists in a weekly Wednesday literary group at her home on Calle de Goya.
Twice, the Spanish Royal Academy gave her an award. She received a national prize for literature and was nominated for the Nobel Literature prize. Her granddaughters, among others, believe she never won it because she was a woman among male authors in a traditional society.
In 1938, Espina began to lose her sight. Two years later, she went blind. This didn’t change her writing routine. She used a cardboard frame with cutout lines under which she placed paper. Her fingers felt for the ridges in the cardboard, and she wrote in the spaces between. Her tone became more introspective and fervently Catholic. She deepened her traditional outlook. Critics believed this shift signaled that her best writing of complex social narratives and characters was behind her.
Espina died in 1955 writing at a table in her home across from Retiro Park. She was buried in Cementerio de la Almudena, Madrid’s largest burial ground.
The walk to this cemetery took me an hour and twenty minutes. Upon arrival, I faced five million graves with no idea where to find Espina’s. I hadn’t traveled all that way for nothing. I turned on Google Maps which miraculously guided me. Her and her parents’ name appeared on the granite slab. A cross marked the top. Her tomb lay amid hundreds, an ironic ending for an author who had received international honors and fame for her journalism and detailed emotional stories.
After the end of Franco’s regime, she fell on the wrong side of history. The political environment masked a pioneer female writer who’d received international fame and honors in a world dominated by men.
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In case you missed the prior Snippet about drinking sherry in a bar Hemingway frequented, I announced these Snippets will be bi-monthly. I aim to make faster progress on my historical narrative book project about my great grandfather.
Another fascinating person who was quite well-known yet exists in the shadows now. So wonderful that you are finding these very interesting women and then sharing their stories with us. And I love that your walks have a purpose! You are weaving these stories from what seems like so long ago with similar contemporary issues that we are weighing ourselves. Nicely done!
Really great post. I had no idea... I think it would be really interesting for someone, so inclined, to have a look at how the Nobel Prize for Literature spreads across time. I am uneducated here, but it would seem doubtful to me that a Lutheran country, a liberal democracy, historically centre-left leaning politically, could strike a Nobel Committee that is unbiased. It would be unlikely that said committee would award the literary prize to a right-leaning, sometimes fascist, hardline Catholic, who believes in hierarchy and heavy political and church doctrine, dating back to Queen Isabella the Catholic.
I would guess that the Nobel Committee, more than likely, will be diametrically opposite in political and social outlook to anyone from that background. Never say never, but politics and belief systems can no doubt get in the way of great writing. There is a PhD for someone here, if it has not already been written.
Thank you, Andrea, for the lesson. Spain is so historically complicated.