The Impact of the Civil War on the Life and Work of Antonio Buero Vallejo

Abstract

This essay begins with an account of the third decade of Buero Vallejo's life, from the outbreak of the Civil War to his release from imprisonment thereafter in 1946, in the course of which he abandoned his original vocation as a graphic artist to become Spain's leading playwright throughout the second half of the century. It proceeds to demonstrate the enormous influence of those ten years on almost all his thirty works for the stage, and concludes with a discussion of his last, Misión al pueblo desierto (1999). In this, characteristically an open-ended ‘tragedia esperanzada’, an imaginary episode early in the War is framed by a debate in the present which insists on the need to confront today the issues that that conflict raised.

Key words:

• Antonio Buero Vallejo
• release from imprisonment
• Misión al pueblo desierto

Notes

1 Many of his early drawings were reproduced in Antonio Buero Vallejo, Libro de estampas (Murcia: Fundación Cultural CAM, 1993). The pages of this volume bear no numbers; those in references later are based on my own calculations.

2 Texts reproduced in the indispensable volume on his life and works before 1939 that I have drawn on heavily here, Buero antes de Buero, ed. and commentary by Luis Iglesias Feijoo (Toledo: Junta de Comunidades de Castilla-La Mancha, 2006), 109–19.

3 Buero antes de Buero, ed. Iglesias Feijoo, 125–36.

4 Buero antes de Buero, ed. Iglesias Feijoo, 137–288. For a drawing of Goryan dated 1938, and for Buero's praise of him, see Buero antes de Buero, ed. Iglesias Feijoo, 274–75, and Buero Vallejo, Libro de estampas, 44–45.

5 For what follows, I have drawn in particular on interviews given by Buero and published in Mariano de Paco, De re bueriana (Murcia: Univ. de Murcia, 1994), 13–35, and in Patricia W. O'Connor, Antonio Buero Vallejo en sus espejos (Madrid: Editorial Fundamentos, 1996), 261–356.

6 On their friendship, see especially Antonio Buero Vallejo, Obra completa, ed. Luis Iglesias Feijoo and Mariano de Paco, 2 vols (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1994), II, Poesía, narrativa, ensayos y artículos, 1203–05, 1234–36. The famous portrait, drawn in 1940, was reproduced with further comments in Buero Vallejo, Libro de estampas, [46–47].

7 De Paco, De re bueriana, 24.

8 Buero Vallejo, Obra completa, ed. Iglesias Feijoo and de Paco, II, 291.

9 See Victor Dixon, ‘ “Pintar de otra manera”: Art in the Life and Work of Antonio Buero Vallejo’, Estreno, 27:1 (2001), 13–21.

10 O'Connor, Antonio Buero Vallejo en sus espejos, 264–65.

11 See for instance, in his discourse ‘García Lorca ante el esperpento’, the section ‘Concepto de lo trágico’ (Buero Vallejo, Obra completa, ed. Iglesias Feijoo and de Paco, II, 260–67).

12 Interview with Tulio H. Demicheli, ABC, 29 April 2000, ‘Cultura’, p. 45.

13 Martha T. Halsey, ‘El tiempo y la historia: Misión al pueblo desierto desde el contexto del teatro de Buero’, Estreno, 27:1 (2001), 22–28 (p. 22).

14 See for instance his long article of 1960, ‘Obligada precisión acerca del “imposibilismo” ’ (Buero Vallejo, Obra completa, ed. Iglesias Feijoo and De Paco, II, 668–80).

15 My quotations from all Buero's works for the stage, apart from the last two he wrote, are taken from Buero Vallejo, Obra completa, ed. Iglesias Feijoo and de Paco, I, Teatro; page references will be given as here.

16 Antonio Buero Vallejo, ‘Prólogo’, Historia de una escalera. Las Meninas, ed., with intro, by Ricardo Doménech (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1975), 9–28 (p. 16).

17 See the fundamental study of Buero's plays up to 1979 by Luis Iglesias Feijoo, La trayectoria dramática de Antonio Buero Vallejo (Santiago de Compostela: Univ. de Santiago de Compostela, 1982), 84–85, 80, n. 71.

18 Iglesias Feijoo, La trayectoria dramática de Antonio Buero Vallejo, 109.

19 Iglesias Feijoo, La trayectoria dramática de Antonio Buero Vallejo, 109.

20 Iglesias Feijoo, La trayectoria dramática de Antonio Buero Vallejo, 109.

21 See for instance Victor Dixon, ‘ “Pero todo partió de allí …”: El concierto de San Ovidio a través del prisma de su epílogo’, in El teatro de Buero Vallejo: homenaje del hispanismo británico e irlandés, ed. Victor Dixon and David Johnston (Liverpool: Liverpool U. P., 1996), 29–56 (esp. pp. 38–40).

22 See esp. OC, II, 1278–81 and 1281–85, and O'Connor, Antonio Buero Vallejo en sus espejos, 286.

23 See O'Connor, Antonio Buero Vallejo en sus espejos, 274, 282.

24 Similar refusals to recall the past had appeared before in the never-performed El terror inmóvil (1949), Irene, o el tesoro (1954) and Las cartas boca abajo (1957), as pointed out by Catherine O'Leary, ‘History and Remembering in the Post-Franco Theatre of Antonio Buero Vallejo’, in Cultural Memory: Essays on European Literature and History, ed. Edric Caldicott and Anne Fuchs (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2003), 377–89 (p. 382).

25 See also El concierto de San Ovidio. El tragaluz, ed., intro. and notes by Ricardo Doménech (Madrid: Castalia, 1971), 305.

26 The phrase was coined by Ricardo Doménech in his El teatro de Buero Vallejo: una meditación española (Madrid: Gredos, 1973), 49–51.

27 See Victor Dixon, ‘The “Immersion-Effect” in the Plays of Antonio Buero Vallejo’, in Themes in Drama, II: Drama and Mimesis, ed. James Redmond (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1980), 113–37; reprinted in Estudios sobre Buero Vallejo, ed. Mariano de Paco (Murcia: Univ. de Murcia, 1984), 159–83 (p. 160).

28 Amusingly, there is an autobiographical echo. Fernando's creature Calomarde so savagely criticizes Goya that the king asks whether the artist has offended him; he replies: ‘Se negó a retratarme […] Aunque su pintura me desagrada, quise favorecerle […] Y ese insolente alegó que le faltaba tiempo’ (OC, I, 1269).

29 See Victor Dixon, ‘Music in the Later Dramatic Works of Antonio Buero Vallejo’, in Studies in Modern Hispanic Literatures in Honour of Donald L. Shaw, ed. Robin W. Fiddian and C. Alex Longhurst, BSS, 82:3–4 (2005), 567–88 (pp. 573–74).

30 Derek Gagen, ‘Conciencia individual y colectiva en Jueces en la noche’, in El teatro de Buero Vallejo, ed. Dixon and Johnston, 71–84 (p. 77); see also the poem ‘De vivos y de muertos’ that Buero published in 1977 (OC, II, 24–26).

31 See O'Connor, Antonio Buero Vallejo en sus espejos, 271.

32 Quotations will be from the edition of Misión al pueblo desierto by Virtudes Serrano and Mariano de Paco (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1999).

33 The editors quote the following statement attributed to Azaña: ‘Es más interesante salvar el Tesoro Artístico que la propia República: ésta, si se pierde, puede ser siempre restaurada, pero aquél ya no se podría jamás recuperar, en caso de perderse’ (Serrano and de Paco, ‘Introducción’, en Misión al pueblo desierto, ed. Serrano and de Paco, ix–xlvi [p. xxxv, n. 30]).

34 See also the possible interpretations proposed in Antonio Buero Vallejo, Four Tragedies of Conscience, ed. and trans. Patricia O'Connor (Boulder: Univ. Press of Colorado, 2008), 28.

35 O'Leary, ‘History and Remembering’, 387–88.

36 Catherine O'Leary, ‘Civil War Memories in the Post-Franco Theatre of Antonio Buero Vallejo’, in Guerra y memoria en la España contemporánea/War and Memory in Contemporary Spain, ed. Alison Ribeiro de Menezes, Roberta Ann Quance and Anne L. Walsh (Madrid: Verbum, 2009), 129–46 (pp. 142–43). I must express my gratitude to Dr O'Leary for allowing me to see a copy of this excellent article before its publication.

37 Serrano and de Paco, ‘Introducción’, in Misión al pueblo desierto, ed. Serrano and De Paco, xliv–xlv.

38 Buero Vallejo, Obra completa, ed. Iglesias Feijoo and De Paco, II, 570.