The Vertical Smile: the pink Venus of books

• Megan Maxwell. Fifty Gray's Spanish Names

Some ideas that should be taken into account about Luis García Berlanga and eroticism: although the filmmaker conveyed that almost comic image of the cheerful old green, eroticism was in his life the expression of something very intimate, probably painful and unspeakable. «We can't play Berlanga's psychoanalysis but if we think about his life, what do we find? Above all, a complex relationship with the women of his house. He had grown up with the care and overwhelming attention of his mother and felt a strong desire to break with that love.

Luis Parés, historian and former director of the Spanish Film Library, acts as a berlangologist on duty to explain the sexual history of the author of Life Size : «Eroticism is a strictly private pleasure for Berlanga. It does not even belong to the couple, it is not transferable. Think of the Piccoli character in Natural Size . When his love of dolls becomes public, he enters a process of self-destruction. Or think of the Marquis de Leguineche , with his collection of pubic hairs. When they discover him, he becomes hysterical. Berlanga himself had a space for eroticism, a studio where he had his collection and locked himself in reading. It was a kind of annex to his house that nobody could enter. Not even the lady who cleaned .

And something else: «Eroticism in Berlanga has nothing to do with romanticism. It has to do, rather, with personal demons . And it was a compulsion. However, it was not a problem in his personal life, ”concludes Parés.

The explanation of Luis García Berlanga's relationship with eroticism comes to mind to try to explain the story of La Sonrisa Vertical, the collection of erotic novel of the Tusquets publishing house of which the filmmaker was a promoter and editor and that 40 years ago launched his prize. Nine and a half weeks , Dangerous friendships , History of O, The ages of Lulu, History of the eye, The evil world, Opus Pistorum , The 120 days of Sodom , The German singer ... Hundreds of books of unforgettable pink covers came to the Spanish libraries between the years of the uncovering and those of the carefree convergence with Europe. Economic and also sexual convergence. The Vertical Smile award was last called in 2004 (it was deserted). Berlanga died in 2010. And the last book in the collection (Look what I have, by José María Valtueña) appeared in 2014.

... The lady's face contorted, she struggled entirely to shout inward, not to manifest, not to disturb ...

Let's start at the beginning, in the 70s. Luis García Berlanga had some relationship with Óscar Tusquets, the architect and, at that time, a member of the publishing house that bears his last name. Through Oscar, Berlanga met his then wife, Beatriz de Moura, the publisher of the label, and they immediately recognized each other . The two obsessively longed for their parents' libraries and the two shared many readings in the French gallant tradition and the old López Barbadillo Library. In one of those meetings, in Madrid, in a bank in La Castellana, Berlanga proposed to De Moura to prepare a book about all that erotic culture.

The idea, after all, went further and became a collection that debuted with La ilustre and glorious feat of Cipote de Archidona (1977), by Camilo José Cela, a grotesque and somewhat archaizing vocation, written from the news of a couple who had been surprised in a loving attitude in a village cinema. "Spain is getting horny," Cela said in the presentation of the collection.

There is a doctoral thesis, The vertical smile collection and the literary representation of sexual minorities , by Estrella Díaz Fernández, in which all these details appear in great detail. There, it is explained that Berlanga and De Moura, after attracting attention with Cela, wanted the seal to have a more refined meaning. Their plan was to publish all the high European erotic literature that had never been translated into Spanish: Memories of a German singer , a couple of titles by Marguerite Duras, some by ETA Hoffmann, The Venus of the Skins ... That kind of thing.

As the collection found readers, Berlanga developed an intuition: Spain must be full of obscene manuscripts that the authors would have hidden during the dictatorship. A literary prize would bring out all these hidden treasures. Thus was born in 1979 the Vertical Smile Award.

"Every conversation is an imposture," said the captain, shaking with the sharp, polished tip of his index finger an excess of ash that had accumulated in his cigarette on the young, unsuspecting and clean arm that rested on the green plush of the adjoining armchair. . The face of the lady contorted, she struggled all to shout inward, not to manifest, not to bother with stridence the course of the thought of her interlocutor. A discreet globito of saliva appeared in the left corner of the - on the other hand - full, and perfectly in its place, mouth ».

Thus begins the sentimental education of Miss Sonia , by Susana Constante, the first winning novel of the Vertical Smile Award. The paragraph serves to get an idea of ​​what the novel was: a game of predators and victims where, in the end, the characters exchange roles. A little bit of Sade, a bit of Apollinaire, a cold and sumptuous prose ...

The first call of the Vertical Smile was a small disappointment: the great secret mine of the Spanish erotic novel did not exist or, if it existed, had not reached Tusquets. Constante herself was an Argentine exiled in a town in Aragon. Her subsequent career included three more novels, a book of stories and an essay, but he stood out more for his work as a translator. Michael Ende, Stephen King and Katherine Neville passed through his hands. Constant died in Sitges in 1993.

By then, the Vertical Smile Award had already become something else, a commercial tool that worked well. The winning titles took to the streets with runs of 15,000 copies and the ages of Lulu had broken the mold in 1989: Tusquets launched 25 editions, not counting the subsequent lives that Lulu had, as one of the black books of the label.

[A subsection: according to the thesis data of Estrella Díaz Fernández, one in six books of La Sonrisa was written by women; however, all best sellers are female : Grandes, Wilhelmine Shroeder-Devrient, Mercedes Abad, Elizabeth McNeill, Pauline Réage ... We all intuit why this paradox]

The writer and screenwriter Pep Bras entered that record in 1987 with a novel El vaixell de les vagines voraginoses (translated from Catalan into Spanish as El bajel de la vaginas voraginosas). "I was 24 years old and I was just getting married. I was in that moment of vital fullness ... I wrote the novel as a kind of pique in class with my friend Mercedes Abad, who had won the award a couple of years before. The prize put me first suddenly . But it also pigeonholed me a little bit. A few years ago I reread The Vaixel and I rewrote it a little, not much, because there were things that had remained to be polished, but I liked the novel. I had a point of madness, of wanting to link the humor and joy ... It's the kind of thing you lose. You grow and acquire wisdom, but you always long for that unconsciousness, ”says Bras. And that happened to him that, after the prize, he liked women more? "Not by God, not that."

Luis Antonio de Villena also entered the medal winners of the La Sonrisa Vertical Award. «I had two short erotic novels that I thought fit very well in The Vertical Smile. I sent them to [the editor] Toni López Lamadrid, which was a small betrayal of my editorial at the time, Planet. Toni told me to present it to the prize. And it came out. The book was called El mal mundo , as one of the two texts, and Javier Marías liked the title so much that, when he became King of Round, he named me Duke of Malmundo ... Now that it has happened time can already be said: the prize was very little for the reputation it had. When I knew what the amount was, I complained to Toni and Toni doubled my check ».

De Villena has a fairly precise idea of ​​the reasons for that splendor of the erotic novel and its slow abandonment in recent decades. «I remember that in the 60s there was a kiosk literature that, with the aspect of offering novels of police or mystery genre, actually offered eroticism. They were anonymous works, they had Anglo-Saxon signatures of which we know nothing or almost nothing. Well, we know that the first two books that Terenci Moix published were of this type. And many times they were good, they were well-constructed texts that achieved their purpose.

In the 60's there was a kiosk literature that, with the aspect of offering police or mystery novels, actually offered eroticism

That was the beginning of the road. The end was already sensed in the time of The Bad World . «That same year, I published another novel called Madrid has died and did not have the label of erotic literature. However, I don't think it was less explicit than the bad world. Eroticism had normalized , it was everywhere and, for that same reason, a collection like The Vertical Smile was beginning to be unnecessary, ”explains Luis Antonio de Villena.

“There is also an irrational part that has to do with the fad of fashion. Who would have thought that Harry Potter was what millions of readers were waiting for? The erotic novel is no longer fashionable and nobody knows if it will be again next year, ”replies Bras.

There is one issue we haven't talked about: pornography. "I don't know what Berlanga thought of pornography," explains Luis Parés. «I would say that he was not very interested but there is an anecdote that ... Jaime Chávarri had made a porn movie but had lost the copy he had. Do you know who could replace that lost movie? Luis García Berlanga, who had a copy in his collection ».

From Aphrodite and Silence to Mr. Gray

The Vertical Smile had emuli: Aphrodite, Silena, The Sex Sense and The Fountain of Jade were some of the erotic collections that appeared later and disappeared before the Tusquets brand. What a surprise to discover that 'noble' literature disappeared while her poor sister, the romantic novel, was going to survive it and with great market success. What erotic novel of recent years do we know how to name all? 50 shades of Gray, which, in reality, is a princess novel in which the characters go to bed a lot.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

• literature

Culture The work and memory of the poet Miguel Hernández travel to the Philippines whose legacy custody Jaén

Catalonia Penguin Random House acquires La Campana Llibres to strengthen its presence in the Catalan market

Culture Summer reading, music and cinema