Jorge Bustos
Updated Monday, January 22, 2024-15:46
Anniversary Luis Martín-Santos, the red psychiatrist who changed Spanish literature forever: "He is our Joyce"
Interview Álvaro Pombo: "I am a difficult person. My life is lonely. There is a community that is only me"
Julio Camba
(Vilanova de Arousa, 1884-Madrid, 1962) emerges
in the history of our letters as a rarity with the same number of parents as children: few or none.
His anti-rhetorical rebellion soon emancipated him from the great nineteenth-century style after some modernist attempts as a teenager.
And he has not had disciples (although he has willing imitators), because
his talent is the son of an exceptional personality and time
, and he remains unscathed like the mosquito in amber.
In that originality he is rewarded, since his journalism does not lack readers a century after it was written.
How is that possible?
What keeps Camba alive at the top of the canon of Spanish journalism?
The answer is found in abundance among the thousand masterful pages that make up the edition of correspondent chronicles under the care of Professor
Francisco Fuster
, perhaps our greatest specialist in the Galician author.
The six travel books that Camba himself published during his lifetime - carried out with a blatant economic purpose: it was a way of charging twice for the same pieces - are now offered together in a single volume, titled
Travel Books
(Ed. Castro Library ), to categorically refute
Cyril Connolly
's statement
that journalism, by its very ephemeral nature, is made to be read only once and is excluded from any participation in tomorrow.
They are
Beaches, cities and mountains
,
London
,
Germany
,
A year in the other world
,
Adventures of a peseta
and
The automatic city
, the latter surely his most accomplished work.
To know more
Journalism.
From Josep Pla to Julio Camba: the simple tastes of the greats of literature
Editor: VÍCTOR DE LA SERNA
From Josep Pla to Julio Camba: the simple tastes of the greats of literature
Journalism.
The eternal mystery of Julio Camba: "I am a difficult man to stand"
Editor: JORGE BUSTOS Madrid
The eternal mystery of Julio Camba: "I am a difficult man to stand"
In my opinion, Camba crowns with
Ruano
the pinnacle of newspaper writing during the first half of the 20th century.
One is Apollonian and the other Dionysian;
one conceives the round structure and the other flows in linear improvisation;
one lives in intimacy with irony and the other secretes prose poetry
.
But the truth is that Ruano considered Camba a teacher, he was one of the few who visited him at the end of his days and when he died he portrayed his final loneliness in an anthological obituary.
Now, the
Palace
's recalcitrant solitary cannot be explained without the unrepentant traveler with a trained eye whose world sank under the bombs of three wars.
No journalist has shone like him in the travel chronicle, just as
Wenceslao Fernández Flórez
has not been surpassed in the parliamentary chronicle nor has Ruano been surpassed in the costumbrista article and the obituary.
When Camba felt that he was beginning to get used to the host country, he moved to preserve his capacity for wonder.
José Carlos Mainer has pointed out the key to
Cambion
durability
.
He calls it “strategic distance.”
Like good fighters, our chronicler always finds himself at the balance point between familiarity and strangeness.
From there his observations take on a constant acuity,
unavailable to the corny, the pedantic or the intense alike
.
When he felt that he was beginning to get used to the host country he moved to preserve the capacity for wonder.
He thus spent a quarter of a century traveling, writing for the best Spanish newspapers, also changing headlines for money or a challenge.
That concern has finally preserved the smoothness of his texts.
Other powerful preservatives of Cambian
prose
are
lack of vanity and political detachment
.
He confessed to Ruano without pose that he hated literature and that he always wrote for money.
"He was not at all interested in current events or the great men who make them," noted his friend
Josep Pla
.
But he didn't know how to make a defective article.
When he traveled he did not follow the news, but customs.
The Camba correspondent operates by contrast and metonymy: he starts from the Spanish idiosyncrasy and confronts it with the target culture.
It relies on national topics, of course, but only to gain momentum,
turning them from its most innovative and humorous angle
.
Thus he uses the London fog to explain British conservatism - that lack of interest in everything that happens two meters from one - or he mocks Islamic machismo by denouncing the imposition of the veil on Turkish women.
«Galician regionalism is desperately corny.
Galicia
is a charming country, but it has a drawback: Galicianism.
The young Camba soon shook off the folklore that encourages all nationalism and embraced the cosmopolitan condition before the two world wars destroyed his world, which was that of
Zweig
.
But at the same time he avoids falling into papanatism, and laughs at the Spanish bourgeois who are indifferent to the game of
bridge
("a dragged tute") in bad English comedies.
From an incipient Galician activist he became an anarchist militant, ending up settling into a conservative skepticism.
Camba had its ideological journey.
From an incipient Galician he first became an anarchist militant in
Buenos Aires
and
Madrid
, ending up settling into a conservative skepticism that he reached before he turned 30.
His first serious contracts and his great triumphs came to him through the liberal and monarchical press.
But he was never partisan: his individualism was as irreducible as his sense of humanism.
Thanks to him he was able to denounce capitalist standardization - mocking both the nascent mass tourism in
Switzerland
and corporate power and the
Chaplinesque
mechanization of the individual in
New York
- while remaining allergic to left-wing collectivism.
Camba was presented as a comedian, but for him humor was the alibi of insight.
When from
Manhattan
he warns that American journalism gives more importance to the personal process of obtaining news than to the news itself, he is anticipating one of the hallmarks of media sensationalism, but also of the
New Journalism
of several decades later.
And his introductory letter in
ABC
, when he urges readers to take him neither completely seriously nor completely jokingly,
is an antidote to the literal fool and the vocationally offended
that could not be more relevant today.
But, all in all, Camba would not have lasted without his style.
That perfect concision where each sentence serves the general idea, without adjectives of mere ornament and without unnecessary subordinate clauses, speaks directly to the reader of this accelerated century.
He always respected the intelligence of his reader, without lowering himself
.
He molded it to his non-negotiable formula, light and deep at the same time.
And that is why the formula survives.