The Age of Disenchantments by Aaron Shulman

Author:Aaron Shulman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-01-24T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 27

Rivalry and Referendum

A Battle for Inheritance, 1966−1967

Juan Luis knocked on the green metal door of the house at 3 Velintonia Street. It was a chilly November day in Madrid. He held a blue folder in his hand. Ordered inside it was a sheaf of poems he had written for what he hoped would be his first book. He still didn’t know if he was truly a poet or just a young man with a last name that made him want to be one. That was why he had come here, to the home of Vicente Aleixandre, to find out.

One of the greatest living poets writing in Spanish, Vicente Aleixandre was more than a man—he was a destination. Back in the 1930s, his family’s home had been a gathering place for Lorca, Neruda, Cernuda, Miguel Hernández, and the rest of that vanished and scattered generation from before the war. Aleixandre was a mentor to Leopoldo, who sought him out on his weekends away from the mountains of Guadarrama while recovering from tuberculosis in the late 1920s. Aleixandre had remained in Spain after the war and become a symbol of the “internal exile,” a term that he coined. He refused to cozy up to the regime, though he maintained a cordial relationship with many poets who did, like Leopoldo and Luis Rosales. Aleixandre suffered from fragile health that imposed a shut-in’s lifestyle, which only increased the magnetism that the spacious cottage on Velintonia, near the rebuilt University City, seemed to radiate.

Nearly seventy, Aleixandre had become the elder statesman of Spanish poetry not only because of his body of work, which would earn him the Nobel Prize the following decade. He was singularly generous with his time and goodwill. Over the years, his house had become a mecca and visiting it was a rite of passage for aspiring poets. Timid young versifiers telephoned Aleixandre and made an appointment to see him—just as Juan Luis had done after slugging down a brandy to work up the nerve to call—then made the pilgrimage to knock on his door with their poems in hand, hoping to return home confirmed in their calling. Like an infirm monarch confined to his castle, Aleixandre received his subjects, then chose whether or not to knight them with his praise. He was curious about the poetry of the Panero boy, whom he noted had the same voice as his deceased father.

A maid opened the door and led Juan Luis down a hallway. The house was quiet and austere, though not unwelcoming. He was both excited and uneasy. He had shared some of his poems with Felicidad, who had encouraged him to continue writing, but had barely shown his work to anyone else, especially not his father’s friends, in spite of their eagerness to read it. He trusted Aleixandre and whatever his assessment might be.

Luis stepped into a book-filled living room where a Calder mobile dangled from the ceiling and a Miró canvas hung on a wall. There was Aleixandre, with

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