Biography
Juan Valera, whose full name is Juan Valera y Alcalá Galiano, was born on October 18, 1824, in Cabra, a hill town some thirty-five miles southeast of Córdoba, Spain. His parents were distinguished if not affluent, his mother of the Spanish nobility, his father a naval officer, and his maternal uncle the famous orator and politician Antonio Alcalá Galiano. Valera attended a good secondary school in Málaga from 1837 to 1840, studied law in Granada’s Colegio del Sacro Monte and in Madrid, and—back in Granada—graduated in 1844. Though an avid reader of literary classics, he was not a diligent student. It might be noted that many nineteenth century Spanish undergraduate law majors never intended a career in jurisprudence. Such degrees were closer to what would be considered today as the bachelor of arts. Valera, however, despite predictable excursions into the field of literature (a few poems in magazines and a volume of verses whose publication was subsidized by his father as a graduation present), actually attempted to practice law in Madrid.
Valera’s family connections gave him entrée into high society. It was a pleasant but unremunerative existence; he soon had to think of correcting his course. Diplomacy appeared a more likely choice, and, after a slow start, it proved a good one. He obtained an unofficial post in Naples, working for his friend the great Romantic author the Duque de Rivas, at the time Spanish Ambassador, from 1847 to 1849. Valera was sent to Lisbon in 1850 and to Rio de Janeiro in 1851. There followed a post in Dresden (1855) and a visit to Russia (1856).
Returning to Spain, Valera ran for the office of deputy (similar to the position of congressman) in 1858, an office he held during two not very outstanding terms. In 1865, he received his first really important diplomatic appointment as minister in Frankfurt. In 1868, Isabel II lost her throne; Valera became undersecretary of state for most of one year. He even helped choose Amadeo of Savoy as the new king of Spain in 1870 and was made director of public instruction, if only for a very short time. The king soon abdicated, leaving Valera out of political favor. For seven years, Valera devoted himself to writing.
During previous lulls in his public career, Valera had already managed to produce a volume of poetry in 1858, helped found two satiric literary magazines in the two succeeding years, and was editor in chief for the middle-of-the-road El contemporáneo (where his first, unfinished, novel Mariquita y Antonio appeared in 1861). Although he had only one book to his credit, the 1858 volume of poetry (an earlier one in 1844 had sold so poorly that he had had it withdrawn from the market), he was elected in 1861 into the Spanish Academy, whose standards, it must be admitted, were somewhat less strict than those of its sister institution in France.
Valera’s first collection of essays—Estudios críticos sobre literatura, política, y costumbres de nuestros días (critical studies on contemporary literature, politics, and customs)—appeared in 1864. In 1867, by then in his early forties, he married Dolores Delavat, a daughter of a career diplomat, whom he had first known in Rio de Janeiro in 1851. She was half his age, stubborn, and extravagant; he was usually strapped for funds, given to sarcasm, and notably fond of affairs of the heart (an early addiction still catered to long after his marriage). It was not an especially happy union, although they never separated, and the last few years proved somewhat calmer.
From 1881 to 1883, needing funds to support a growing family along with his extravagant wife, Valera accepted a post as minister in Lisbon, where the accusation of certain financial and political improprieties almost led to a duel. He resigned the position, supposing that his career was ruined but, on the contrary, the next year he was appointed minister to the United States in Washington, D.C. His wife stayed in Spain with the children.
Washington, D.C., like almost all of his appointments, seemed a mixed blessing. He was forever impugning the climate, the manners, the dress, or the tastes of the places—European or American—where he served his country. American men he termed dull money-grubbers; as always, however, he enjoyed the women. One of them, Katherine Lee Bayard, the twenty-eight-year-old daughter of the U.S. secretary of state, loved him deeply enough to commit suicide in 1886, on hearing that he was to return to Spain. Despite her death and that of his eldest son from typhoid, he seems to have enjoyed his transatlantic stay. Besides his usual active social life, he found time to read generously from American literature, even translating a few poems by James Russell Lowell and John Greenleaf Whittier with an eye to adding fifty or so more to make up a whole book, a project that died aborning.
Valera’s last two diplomatic posts were as minister in Brussels, from 1886 to 1887, and, after a six-year lapse, in Vienna, from 1893 to 1895. There ended his diplomatic career, rendered untenable by questionable health and increasing blindness. Returning to Madrid, he resumed his pursuit of literature. Even in government harness, he had produced Cartas americanas and Nuevas cartas americanas (1890; new American letters), discussing Latin American writers such as the Nicaraguan Modernismo poet Rubén Darío. Full-time commitment allowed for three more novels—Juanita la larga (shrewd Juanita), usually considered his best after Pepita Ximenez; Genio y figura (the title a shortened version of “genio y figura hasta la sepultura,” an expression signifying “what’s bred in the bone will be with you until you die”); and his historical novel, Morsamor—as well as short stories, essays, polemics, and an extensively annotated five-volume anthology of nineteenth century Spanish poetry. Valera died peacefully on April 18, 1905, while composing a discourse to be delivered before his beloved Spanish Academy.
The author-cum-diplomat was a proud man, at times even haughty, a chronic complainer, occasionally belligerent. He was often guilty of provincialism, not above denigrating foreign writers who dared pass judgment on things Spanish. He could be superficial and flighty, traits he exhibited all of his adult years. That he utilized some dozen publishers during his writing career is somewhat unusual, though the large body of his oeuvre may to some extent justify what seems to indicate a difficult personality. He was quite outspoken, a characteristic not always found among professional diplomats. Yet, despite his thorniness, he was normally kind to writers of his own generation in Spain (even too kind, some critics have objected), and he encouraged young writers and scholars. The public tends to expect social and moral perfection in its famous men. Valera might fail his critics, but he remains basically someone to honor and respect.
Analysis
Juan Valera’s constant preoccupation with language and form (not merely in a restricted but also in a spiritual sense); his knowledge of and deep respect for the classics, which he doubted modern authors could surpass; his demand for balance and moderation; his belief in absolute ideals; his rejection of Romantic excesses and imperfections—all bespeak a latter-day classicist. Where he diverges somewhat from classicism is in what could be called the pleasure principle. The aim of art is to please; it has no intrinsic end, moral or instructive. Its goal is beauty alone. Valera derided the ancient Roman Horace’s famous precept that art should be at once useful and delightful. Valera’s demand, so often heard from nineteenth century writers, was “art for art’s sake,” a phrase capable of various interpretations and inevitably given them, as often occurs with aesthetic theories.
Valera’s most famous pronouncement on his concept of the ideal novel is to be found in the preface to Pepita Ximenez:
A pretty novel cannot be a servile, prosaic, common representation of life; a pretty novel should be poetry, not history; it should depict things, not as they are, but more beautiful than they are, casting upon them a light with a certain magical charm.
He disliked the prevailing doctrine of naturalism, enunciated byÉmile Zola in France and taken up in Spain by Pardo Bazán and Clarín, which to Valera justified wallowing in things filthy and unpleasant, sexually degraded, morbid, and diseased, in an attempt to show what life was really like, especially for the great masses of the poor.
Valera’s word bonita (pretty), as opposed to the naturalists’ seeming preference for the ugly, must not, however, be understood to justify insipidity or smothering the reader in sweetness and light. Even the rather idyllic Pepita Ximenez hints strongly at seduction and presents a sixteen-year-old heroine forced to marry an unlovable old man in his eighties, as well as a bastard hero who breaks his religious vows to marry her. Furthermore, Valera confessed that this early novel echoed his benevolent view of life at the time. His later novels often describe more unpleasant events, tragic failures, broken loves—one novel even features a prostitute asprotagonist. Valera knew the seamier side of life and could on occasion depict it. Some of his uncharacteristic short stories (in the 1898 collection Cuentos y chascarrillos andaluces) are actually pornographic, but normally, with good classicist reticence, he chose to select aspects of life refined through the sieve of artistry. If the expression “pretty novel” must be taken with a grain of salt, Valera still remains far from Zolaesque naturalism.
Finally, Valera’s psychological acumen warrants mention. More than his rather conventional, occasionally clumsy plots and as much as his fine eye for the accurate physical detail, it is his knowledge of the human psyche that lends depth and credibility to his fiction. His characters convince because their creator accurately sounds the wellsprings of their actions. His long life and his experiences around the world served him well.
What term, then, best fits his literary theory and practice? “Neoclassicism” as well as any, yet his predilection for heroes that mirror, if imperfectly, his own character and events from his own life, heroines who embody his ideals of womanhood, his love of outer nature, his sensuous side—all indicate Romanticist. His mocking, detached, worldly, rational attitude toward life suggests eighteenth century rationalism. He can reflect paganism and Christianity in turn. He really is not like any other Spanish writer of his day: a genius unto himself. Many critics have foundered trying to categorize the elusive quality of his literary production.
Valera, who was seemingly born to write, who took up the career of diplomacy as a livelihood rather than as a vocation, who published a volume of poetry at age twenty, who, in high school, read extensively from such literary masters as Voltaire, William Shakespeare, and Sir Walter Scott, still failed to compose anything in the field of the novel—his one real claim to greatness—until well into maturity. He had written criticism since 1853 and a second volume of poetry in 1858, helped found two literary reviews, and edited a newspaper between 1859 and 1863, but his first novel began to appear in 1861 in the literary section of his own newspaper. Even then, he abandoned it in midstream. Its main importance lies in its foreshadowing of many of the characteristics of his later fiction, from 1874 on.
To understand what Valera was offering his public, it is necessary to say a word about the status of the nineteenth century Spanish novel. In the 1830’s and 1840’s, Spain was copying the Romantic novel of the school of Scott, but not the social novels of Charles Dickens or William Makepeace Thackeray. Eighteenth century Spanish literature had not enjoyed the richness of French and English literature of the period, particularly in the field of the novel. Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605, 1615), often termed the first modern novel and a unique masterpiece, had had no worthy offspring. Hence, Spain’s reentry into the mainstream of the European novel came about by a different route.
In the 1830’s, a popular literary form was a little local-color sketch describing regional customs—a country fair, peasant dances, a religious holiday, and the like—which in Spain is called costumbrismo (costumbres meaning “customs” in Spanish). The costumbrista format permitted realism but downplayed reality’s drab side. In 1849, the writer Fernán Caballero was the first to combine a group of related costumbrista sketches with a story line into a novel, La gaviota (1856; The Seagull, 1864). From this badly flawed effort, the Spanish regional novel of the second half of the nineteenth century was born, destined to produce a distinguished group of practitioners: Pereda, Pérez Galdós, Pedro Antonio, and Valera himself, among others.
Mariquita y Antonio
Mariquita y Antonio is such a regional novel, a genre to which Valera was to turn again and again. The beautiful, capable heroine Mariquita is the niece of the keeper of the pension (depicted realistically, even humorously) where the law student, Antonio, is staying. The latter is hardly the serious type. He gambles, indulges in love affairs, composes poetry. He is, in short, the amorous Valera as young law student (1840-1844), in the same city (autobiographical elements do not prove uncommon in Valera’s later work). Improbably, Mariquita is kidnapped, and the story breaks off before one learns whether Antonio, for all of his taking her disappearances to heart, really loved her. Originally, his aim simply had been to seduce this woman whom he considered beneath him socially.
Valera lost interest in or could not find time to continue the work. The reader cannot feel any deep sense of loss: The novel, at least in the chapters at hand, is not well developed; the heroine, who is, as usual with Valera, the principal character, is not clearly defined; there is on the face of it no good reason for the melodramatic kidnapping. It would not have been easy to rectify these flaws in the unfinished section, as perhaps Valera realized in abandoning his project.
Pepita Ximenez
Valera’s next attempt at full-length fiction, Pepita Ximenez, almost certainly his finest work, became an immediate success and has remained a staple of Spanish literature ever since. The author was almost fifty; he had spent more than thirty years polishing his craft when he sent his first completed novel to press. He had lived in Madrid, Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro, Dresden, St. Petersburg, and Frankfurt; he was an experienced diplomat; he had had several love affairs and had already been married for six years. This novel was hardly the first fruit of an apprentice in literature or in the business of life itself.
The setting is once again Andalusia. The structure is classically tight, almost too intricate. Section 1 is titled “Letters from My Nephew,” given the reader by the dean of a religious seminary, the uncle of the protagonist, Luis. Section 2, “Paralipómenos” (“Supplementary Revelations”), is followed by the coda “Letters from My Brother.” The Greek title for section 2, many occasional phrases in the text itself, references in the preface and elsewhere in his writings approving of an idealized depiction of reality, and his meticulous attention to form and style all hint at Valera’s leanings toward classicism. He shows an equal love and appreciation for and knowledge of the sixteenth century Spanish mystics, such as Saint Teresa de Ávila and Saint John of the Cross. Robert Lott, in his Language and Psychology in “Pepita Jiménez” (1970), has revealed the extent of Valera’s debt to both of these mystics, from whom he borrowed many ideas and much religious terminology (here sometimes used profanely). Lott has also analyzed Valera’s style, a carefully balanced mixture of Spanish Golden Age turns of phrase, archaisms, and grammar with nineteenth century refinements.
Luis de Vargas, twenty-two years of age, reared by his uncle in the relative seclusion of a religious seminary, returns to visit his worldly-wise father, a local political power and small-town leader, before taking his final vows as a priest. He happens to be illegitimate and as a result experiences a sense of guilt mixed with pride in the brilliant future he envisages for himself, converting heathens in faraway lands. Valera suggests that Luis is only falsely devout; he intends to achieve union with God through effecting salvation for others, not by mortifying himself before Him. In short, he is a dubious candidate for the rigors of missionary life.
This proud, naïve young man meets the irresistible Pepita Ximenez, one in a long line of Valera’s vivacious Andalusian heroines, beautiful, charming, clever, an idealized version of most men’s concept of the perfect wife. The formula may vary on occasion: mistress, not wife, her perfection perhaps flawed, not merely clever but scheming. Rarely, however, are these women actually antipathetic, Pepita least of all. She had already been married at the age of sixteen to a very elderly, unprepossessing moneylender and is now a widow of only twenty. Luis, as is clearly shown in letters to his uncle, gradually becomes infatuated with her. The uncle warns him to break short his visit. Obviously, Luis will not. His attempts to explain away his newfound attraction for Pepita are scarcely convincing (nor are they meant to be), and his naïveté in failing to diagnose his love borders on the incredible, but he is such a likable chap, she so desirable, that from the very start the reader wants him to abandon his priestly vocation and opt for marriage. Thus, his growing worldliness, his pleasure in the sensual beauty of the Andalusian countryside, his pride in finding that he can ride a horse well, his gradual if reluctant feeling of congeniality with his father, and his final spiritual downfall (which outraged certain Spanish religious conservatives) are all quite palatable.
This downfall, fittingly occurring on Saint John’s Eve—that is, Midsummer’s Eve, from time immemorial devoted to merrymaking and amorous escapades the world over—is spectacular. Luis announces to Pepita his decision to give her up and return to the seminary. There is a tearful scene in her parlor; she runs into her bedroom; he follows her; and when he emerges some time later, he has obviously succumbed. The language—Valera is rarely crude, and certainly not in this novel—is oblique but realistic, the whole scene effective, even somewhat humorous. Neither author nor reader thinks Heaven has lost a sinner. Rather, an innocent young man has grown up. Now considering himself in a position to retaliate more properly, he returns to the casino where he had earlier been forced to endure insults to Pepita’s morals uttered by a rejected suitor, challenges him to a duel, and nearly kills him. The former seminarian’s transformation is now complete. He becomes his father’s son and marries Pepita. The obligatory costumbrista village wedding scene concludes the novel.
This bare outline cannot do more than hint at the felicities of style, the charm of the local color (if not as pronounced here as in some of Valera’s later novels, still quite in evidence), the author’s psychological perspicacity, and his feeling for the beauty of outer nature used to symbolize Luis’s increasingly secular love. There may be countless novels more powerful than this one, but few more captivating or better crafted. The reader’s joy echoes the writer’s own; as Valera said, it came when he felt most healthy, optimistic, and warm toward the whole world. He added, “Unfortunately, it will not happen again.”
Las ilusiones del doctor Faustino
No sooner had Valera published Pepita Ximenez serially in the distinguished Revista de España than the first installments of his next novel, Las ilusiones del doctor Faustino, started to appear in the same magazine, in October, 1874. Much longer than any of his other novels, it is at the same time philosophically his most ambitious. Valera fully intended the allusive name he bestowed on his protagonist. “Although,” he wrote,
I am not very fond of symbols or allegories…Dr. Faustino has something of the symbolic or allegorical about him…a man for a whole contemporary generation…Dr. Faust in miniature, without magic, without a devil…a composite of the vices, ambitions, dreams, scepticism, disbelief, and longings that afflicted the youth of my day.
In a word, Faustino is a Romantic, one of those who embodies “useless knowledge, political ambitions, aristocratic prejudices,” according to Valera, who considered his creation his most real literary achievement. It is nevertheless debatable whether this petty Faust is strong enough to support so lofty a philosophical superstructure, even if Christopher Marlowe’s original was equally lightweight. It is Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s later incarnation that possesses the grandeur more naturally inviting comparison.
Clarín, Valera’s fellow novelist and a percipient critic as well, considering the novel one of the most important in nineteenth century Spanish literature, compared it to Gustave Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale (1869; A Sentimental Education, 1898). Frédéric, like Faustino, is indeed a Romantic weakling, buffeted by the fates of his time, but Flaubert did not ask him to stand for a Romantic Everyman as Valera expected of Faustino. Few critics today would rank Valera’s novel very high, much less in a class with Flaubert’s counterpart.
The plot involves most of Faustino’s life. It begins with his days as a young law student at the University of Granada (another of the autobiographical details so numerous in Valera’s fiction), from which he is graduated without having burned much midnight oil.
He hopes for an important career in Madrid in law, the government, or perhaps journalism, but realizes that his talents are not matched by the necessary wealth. Marriage with his rather well-to-do cousin, Costanza, fails to materialize. Back in his small hometown, he takes up with Rosita, though considering her beneath him. They spend a night together, but he abandons her for María, who turns out to be the illegitimate daughter of a bandit by whom Faustino is later kidnapped. In all fairness to Valera, it should be noted that this bit of melodrama is to an extent necessary for the plot, and capture by highwaymen was a recurrent nightmare for Spanish travelers at the time, but the author is never especially felicitous in his handling of action scenes. They rarely ring true or seem well motivated. This one at least keeps the hero out of town long enough to let Rosita, the woman scorned, have her father foreclose on the property of Faustino’s mother, who dies from worry and sorrow.
Faustino moves to Madrid and, by now middle-aged, is eking out a living as a subordinate government bureaucrat. María arrives in the city with a sixteen-year-old daughter; María and Faustino marry. He should at last find success and happiness with the only woman who really loves him, but he dissipates his opportunities and, worse, resumes his old affair with cousin Costanza. Rosita, ever vindictive, avenges herself on the man who jilted her by telling his wife. María dies of sorrow; Faustino kills himself. This weak Romantic, suffering from what a later generation of Spanish writers at the turn of the twentieth century came to call abulia (“lack of willpower,” “apathy,” after the psychological term “aboulia”), a disease afflicting the whole country in their eyes, falls victim to his own flawed character and the faults of his day: bad education, political chaos, aristocratic social climbing.
Is Faustino really Valera’s alter ego? They had the same education, the same trouble in deciding on a career. Valera eventually became internationally famous, but in 1874 he was only beginning to find himself as a writer, and successes in his diplomatic career were balanced by some notable failures. He quite likely saw himself in many ways as another Romantic Faustino. At the least, his is a cautionary tale, with himself an example for those who could read between the lines.
Some of the early parts of the story recall the unfinished Mariquita y Antonio, while Cyrus C. DeCoster, in Bibliografía crítica de Juan Valera (1970), notes a similarity between the theme and the character of Faustino and those of a projected novel Valera titled “Currito the Optimist,” about a spendthrift who tried to make a pact with the Devil. DeCoster dates the few extant pages of the manuscript as probably early 1850’s. Valera’s plots tend toward repetition; his male characters are often himself as a youth or idealized, while his women are cast much in the same mold. His early creation, Pepita, for example, is replicated in Juanita la larga near the very end of his career. Regardless of its originality, the novel is at best only moderately successful. The plot suffers from imbalance: Most of the book deals with a very few months; the next twenty years are merely summarized; then the story again slows to set the stage for Faustino’s suicide. Finally, the philosophical contents do not fit comfortably into the dimensions of the plot, and Faustino seems ill at ease carrying them.
Commander Mendoza
Commander Mendoza started to appear serially in 1876. Unlike Valera’s other long fiction, with the exception of his one historical novel, it lacks a contemporary setting. The novel is set in the eighteenth century; Mendoza is a sort of French philosophe; a rationalistic Deist; a skeptic; a believer in the infinite perfectibility of humans, in freedom and justice; a sensualist with Condillac; and perforce, another persona of his author. Middle-aged, now wealthy, and disgusted with Spanish atrocities that he has seen committed against the Indians in Peru, where he has made his fortune, he goes to Paris but runs into the French Revolution, equally marred by inhuman excesses. He returns to his native Andalusia, to Villabermeja, the same small fictional town in which Valera had located some of the action of Las ilusiones del doctor Faustino. This place, under one name or another, turns up in most of Valera’s novels, being an idealization of Doña Mencía, a hill-town where the author had spent a good part of his early life.
An equally strong role in the novel is played by the formidable Doña Blanca, seduced many years before in Peru by Mendoza himself. Soon after this affair, she married; with her husband, she has also returned to Villabermeja, leading a life of exemplary expiation in a world she views as cursed with moral evil, a cross to be borne on the road to eventual salvation. She has reared her daughter, Clara, strictly, in an effort to shelter her from a mistake like her own. The daughter is Mendoza’s, though the husband does not suspect.
Insistent that Clara should not unjustly inherit her husband’s estate, Doña Blanca plans to marry her off to his rightful heir, an elderly, undesirable cousin. Mendoza sees through her plan and, though admitting that Clara should not inherit unjustly, still cannot bear to see her married to the old cousin (compare Pepita’s old husband in Valera’s earlier novel). Clara meanwhile decides to enter a convent, because she cannot have the man whom she really loves. Mendoza solves the dilemma by posing as the father of the woman whom the cousin is currently courting, giving her a generous dowry that the cousin will receive in lieu of Clara’s inheritance. Before these improbable subterfuges can be effected, Mendoza must soften Doña Blanca’s indomitable will, for she remains adamant, at first that Clara and her cousin wed, then—when that solution proves untenable—that she enter the convent. Doña Blanca suffers a stroke; on her deathbed, she forgives Mendoza and releases Clara from her vows so that she can marry Carlos, the young man whom she has loved all along.
Doña Blanca, though absent in person from most of the story, remains a spiritual force throughout, and when she does appear, she easily bests her antagonists. The only likely solution was to have her removed from the stage, as Valera did. The story ends with the marriage of Clara and Carlos and, less credibly, with Mendoza, who has been having many long discussions of family problems with his young niece, Lucía, finding that they share a mutual affection. The concept of the union of old age with youth, already found in Pepita Ximenez and in the aborted marriage of Clara and her cousin, reappears in Valera’s next novel, Don Braulio, and in Juanita la larga almost twenty years later.
The plot complications in Commander Mendoza are badly contrived, the happy ending is barely convincing, and the long contest of wills between a stubborn, overly possessive, dominant woman and a tolerant yet persistent male adversary is the sort of thing that Spaniards perhaps even more than other European readers of that day accepted but that today seems childish at best and at worst risible. It must be remembered, however, that those drawn battles between moral imperatives were a commonplace of Victorian fiction.
If the plot is handled somewhat clumsily, the characters come off better. Mendoza is attractive and credible. Doña Blanca, though shown to be harsh and domineering, is treated nobly. Mendoza’s friend, the village priest, Jacinto, is admirably humanistic, acting as a worthy foil for the skeptical protagonist. Lucía represents Valera’s usual vivacious and charming young female lead. The story possesses a tragic undertone that lends depth, although the contrived happy ending mitigates it, as do the obligatory bits of local color that Valera almost always inserts. The considered judgment of most of the modern critics gives Commander Mendoza qualified approval as a good novel but certainly not a great one.
Don Braulio
The following season, Valera produced another novel, Don Braulio. The original title, Pasarse de listo, is a colloquial Spanish idiom meaning something like “to be too clever for one’s own good.” The protagonist, Braulio, another study in frustration, has indeed outsmarted himself. Talented, bright, and lazy (compare Las illusiones del doctor Faustino only three years before), Braulio remains in his mediocre position with the Department of the Treasury. Valera, as the omniscient narrator, observes that his hero is mistaken: Brains are not enough to ensure success in government positions; it takes drive and character as well. Braulio unjustly suspects his beautiful young wife (not half his age—a recurring theme with Valera) of having an affair with a nobleman and commits suicide. Actually, the Count is courting Braulio’s sister-in-law, whom he later weds. Braulio’s widow remarries, to a childhood friend. Though all the principal characters act irresponsibly, all but Braulio achieve a measure of happiness.
Although this is Valera’s shortest novel, it is still fleshed out with authorial digressions. There are also costumbrismo sketches (the bullfight, for example, a common set piece with many Spanish novelists). Andalusian country life is compared with the mores of Madrid, to the detriment of the latter. Valera paints a black picture of the capital, the idle-rich Count, and his coterie of friends.
Doña Luz
In the late 1870’s, Valera was averaging a novel a year, and Doña Luz appeared on schedule. The author complained that serial publication had hurt his previous work, Don Braulio, a fact that writers as great as Dickens and Honoré de Balzac had already learned. The demands of story segments that can stand on their own, with enough excitement to hold reader interest and satisfy magazine editors bent on increasing circulation, force compromises, pander to lowered standards of taste, and control the flow of the story line, often to its disadvantage. Valera had expensive tastes, however, as well as family obligations: Doña Luz began in Revista contemporánea, in the fall of 1878.
With this story, Valera returns to the problem of secular versus religious love. Doña Luz, the proud but illegitimate daughter of a Madrid nobleman, elects to remain a spinster and live as her poverty prescribes. She strikes up a warm Platonic friendship with Enrique, an older priest, who has come back to Andalusia to regain his health, shattered while he was a missionary in the Philippines. Late in the story, her mother dies, and she is suddenly rich. She is courted by a local politician, marries him only to find that he was after her money, and leaves him. The priest, meanwhile, realizes that he actually loves Doña Luz. His health further undermined by the ravages of his concealed passion, he takes to his bed, finally in a coma. Sitting beside him, Doña Luz bestows a kiss. He dies soon after. As one of his heirs, she is privileged to read his private diary, in which he confesses his criminal love. Remorseful for having unintentionally aroused his passion, yet flattered, she will name her unborn child after him.
In his preface, Valera claimed that the novel teaches a lesson: to guard against the possibility of erotic sin. Was he serious, or was he merely attempting to avoid the kind of criticism that Roman Catholic conservatives heaped on Pepita Ximenez four years earlier? His sympathies undeniably lay with Doña Luz and her priest, facing a love whose only solution was the latter’s death, but in none of his books did he ever go so far as to depict a priest actually succumbing to sexual temptation, as Anatole France was to do in Thaïs (some ten years later and as Zola had already done in 1875 with La Faute de l’abbé Mouret (Albine: Or, The Abbé’s Temptation, 1882; better known as The Sin of Father Mouret, 1904, 1969). If Luis opted for the secular life in Pepita Ximenez, he had not taken his final vows. Conscience permitting, he was free to break them and marry. Enrique was not. Nevertheless, Valera consistently preached the basic rightness of earthly love.
A larger point involves the matter of “preaching” in the first place. Like many European novelists of his day, Valera professed avoidance of didacticism, yet Doña Luz comes rather close to preaching. To be sure, the many nineteenth century novelists who abjured preachments in favor of art for art’s sake did not always follow their own advice strictly. Indeed, their favorite technique of the omniscient narrator favors commentary and judgment. Valera is really following a tradition at least as ancient as Vergil: the writer as seer, bringer of light to the public. The particular subject he chooses, priestly versus secular love, has long been a mainstay of Catholic Spanish fiction and drama, from the seventeenth century plays of Pedro Calderón de la Barca and Tirso de Molina to the twentieth century existentialist novels of Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo. The reading public was conditioned to expect it, whatever stand Valera might choose to take.
Luckily, the heavy religious moral tone of the book is leavened with greater than usual attention paid by Valera to descriptions of village life. Next to Juanita la larga, not destined to appear until seventeen years later, Doña Luz is Valera’s most strongly costumbristic novel, with its detailed scenes of the life, dwellings, customs, and character of the villagers. The town is here named Villafría, but as always, it remains a composite of the places where Valera lived out his younger years.
In the doomed priest Enrique, Valera created one of his few really fine male protagonists, a truly tragic figure deeply appealing to the reader; his Doña Luz is an interesting, well-rounded portrait as well. Among secondary characters, her father’s former overseer and Enrique’s uncle, the unscrupulous Don Acisclo, is a minor masterpiece, a picturesque old scoundrel whose clever financial schemes have drained Luz’s father dry and filled his own coffers. Any artistic problems with the novel involve Valera’s usual shortcomings. He narrates and describes well, his style is admirable, his characters incisively drawn, his psychology penetrating, but his plots are artificial and contrived. Events occur because the plots demand them.
Juanita la larga
Improbably, Juanita la larga (the word larga also suggesting something of the Amazon), which appeared serially, like his earlier novels, had the verve and charm of Valera’s youthful period. Indeed, the novel is almost as fine a production as Pepita Ximenez, though Valera was in his early seventies at the time of its publication. It is another idyll of life in his beloved small-town Andalusia. His earlier depictions of this milieu are often darkened by thematic profundities—religious, economic, and social clouds on the horizon. It is a simple love story, grinding no ideological axes. In outlook, intent, tone, and conclusion, it compares with Pepita Ximenez, his first great work, dating back twenty years. It might seem to differ in one substantial respect in that Pepita and Luis face the formidable barrier of the latter’s priestly vocation. Actually, the reader knows very well that the barrier is paper-thin. No one really expects Luis to withstand for long Pepita’s charms or to be shorn of his prize. The novels that follow, however, turn more somber. Their problems of religion and social ambition and their character flaws raise truly resistant walls. Happy outcomes are no longer certain. With Juanita la larga, once again, and for one last time, the weather turns fair.
Juana and her daughter, Juanita, live in the little southern town of Villalegre. Significantly, the name Valera has coined for it means “Happytown” (in contrast to Villafría, “Coldtown,” his name for the locale of the more somber Doña Luz). Like the Villabermeja (“Redtown”) of several of his other stories, it is modeled on the Doña Mencía of his earliest days. There is something of the Edenic myth, the withdrawal from Paradise into the evil big city and the return, sometimes unrealizable, sometimes fatally too late, in Valera’s longing, not only novelistically but in real life as well, for the simple country life of his youth. The old Valera manages to return home through the persona of Paco López, fifty-three years old and in love with Juanita, thirty-six years his junior.
Juanita, as is so common with Valera’s characters, is illegitimate. She and her mother, Juana, are of the less favored class, the latter earning a good living as cook, seamstress, and midwife. Juanita is proud for all of her lowly birth, beautiful, energetic, sturdy, and sufficiently strong-willed that when she realizes her love for the older Paco, nothing will prevent her getting him, even if she has to knock another suitor down, kneel on him, and choke him until he agrees to support her own suit. Nor is she above using the same suitor to make Paco jealous. There are complications, however spurious. Paco’s daughter, Inés, a snob married into one of the town’s upper-crust families, opposes her father’s wedding out of his own class. She is domineering, a meddler into the affairs of the whole town, miserly, and speciously mystical. This unsympathetic woman is in league with a narrowly orthodox priest (the first time Valera has presented a basically unlikable man of the cloth). Another repugnant character is Inés’s immoral, profligate nobleman husband, given his just deserts at the story’s end when he becomes senile. No force, no characters, however evil or mean, will prevail against the marriage. Juanita and Paco are happily wed at the conclusion of the book.
No more than in his other novels is Valera’s success in this one primarily the result of a strong story line. The plot is reasonably credible, simple enough not to detract from the reader’s joy in cheering for the protagonists. Inés’s opposition is determined but destined for failure. The plot is adequate, no more, but things work out satisfactorily. Valera himself, in the dedicatory preface, writes of his concept of the novel in general and of Juanita la larga as well, “I do not know whether this book is a novel or not. I have written it very artlessly, combining recollections of my earliest youth.” In all fairness, his novel is not merely a series of costumbristic sketches or youthful personal reminiscences held together by anarrative thread, for all of its heavy burden of costumbrismo.
Even more oddly, in the selfsame preface, Valera characterizes his novel, which most would call something close to a pastoral idyll, as a true copy of reality. He even goes on to speak of it as a photographic reproduction and calls himself more historian than novelist. He would seem to be breaking bread with the naturalistic school of Zola, who called himself a literary scientist and recorder of truths, or at least to be enlisting in the ranks of realists such as Flaubert and Balzac. Could Valera be saying that reality and the realists’ method need not be applied exclusively to scenes of brutality, unpleasantness, stark passion, and the like, or is he simply using the term “reality” in a different sense? Juanita la larga contains more costumbrismo than any of his other novels. Country life, the many local dishes, lovingly and accurately described, local deformations of the Spanish language, the wines, legends, festivals, the Holy Week procession—all of these and more take up a good part of the novel. This attention to the details of regional peculiarities and distinctions necessarily helps bind the characters and their actions to their environment, a fact in keeping with the general tenets of realism and naturalism. Nevertheless, the tone of the book remains determinedly antirealist.
A word, too, must be said about the author’s charmingly light, humorous touch. Valera always displays an ironic temper, a distancing of writer from the problems of his own characters, the double vision that allows the creator, even one given, like Valera, to autobiographical incidents and to characters who to some extent represent himself, to mock, however gently, their trials, tribulations, and shortcomings. It is what keeps him from falling into the Romantics’ solipsistic trap. Never is his touch lighter than in this novel of his late years. He can let Juanita make fun of the very relationship he has made possible: her youth and Paco’s middle age. He can write a wonderful scene in which the despondent lover escapes to the hills and contemplates suicide but fills his knapsack with meat and bread to avoid starving. Valera’s customary mockery has become true humor.
Juanita la larga and Pepita Ximenez are the works on which Valera’s reputation will continue to rest—his contribution to the impressive reemergence of the novel in Spain in the later years of the nineteenth century.