Jacinto Benavente, a prolific Spanish playwright, was another Nobel Prize winner (1922), which I am sure is the reason he has turned up on this list. I am glad that he did, because he is a kind of author that I like--a true old European, deeply rooted in one of the central cultural traditions of the continent, wry, humane, familiar without being stodgy or obvious. Born into a comfortable family--his father was a surgeon in Madrid--in 1866, Benavente was studying law when he abandoned this to lead a Bohemian lifestyle in the cafes of the Spanish capital. From this point up until about World War I he led what I would regard as a charmed existence. His witty personality, fashionable dress, and ready supply of money caused him to be readily welcomed into the interesting society of Madrid's leading young artists and intellectuals. Developing an especial interest in the theater, he began to try his hand at writing plays, and after about ten failed efforts, he succeeded in persuading the director of the Comedy Theater to produce one, at which time he was 28 years, which seems in most cases to be right around the make or break age for being embarked upon the road to literary greatness. This initial play was not a huge success, but it enabled him to produce other, and increasingly better, plays in the ensuing years, by which time it was 1898, a year of crisis in Spain--she was defeated in the Spanish-American War and lost her last two colonies, Cuba and the Philippines--and Benavente, belonging to the rising generation of writers who seemed comparatively modern and fresh, rose to pre-eminence in the Spanish theater for the next two decades. The later part of his life after he won the Nobel Prize saw him increasingly buffeted by the ever more complicated turns of Spanish politics after World War I. He had a falling out with the Royalist government in the 1920s which caused his plays to be banned for a number of years. During the Spanish Civil War, by which time he was nearly seventy, he came out so strongly against the Republican side that he was placed under house arrest, though later "the editor of a Marxist paper...extracted a declaration from him which was in principle favorable to the Republican people's cause." The biographical sketch of him given in the Nobel Prize Library (1971) notes that "This kind of turnabout, of which there were many examples in Benavente's life, seems to be opportunism ever so slightly tinged with cynicism. Perhaps Benavente's veerings of opinion and tackings to and fro were simply the results of momentary enthusiasm, all the more keen if the subject was a new one, or of an impulse which was sincere at the time, but which he was unable to sustain for long." He died in 1954 at age 88 in his house in Madrid, "almost completely forgotten", according to my edition of his book.
I do not usually go on at such great biographical length in these reports, but I found this author's life to be particularly interesting at least for my favored themes, and I also think he is comparatively unknown to present day Americans.
The IWE introduction does not say anything particularly noteworthy. It notes that Benavente "wrote this play as a farce along the traditional lines of the Italian comedy" and that it "is set in the 17th century and uses an old theme (its similarity to Farquhar's The Beaux' Stratagem is immediately apparent)." I did not actually think of the Beaux' Stratagem at all while I was reading this, probably because the setting, rather than taking place in the inns and carriages and dark nighttime roads of 18th century England, is in the southern European world of sunshine, poor itinerant poets, swarthy sequestered beauties, haughty quick-tempered gentlemen, and the general atmosphere of social life as partaking of the elements of a carnival which has been carried through well into our own time in the movies of Fellini and the various artwork of the magic realism school. My being a more emotionally responsive than cerebral type of art-consumer, it is to be expected that I would be struck in this way.
The general plot of this is that there is one character in the play who possesses a great deal of money, and around fifteen who are either in debt to or owed money by each other which they have no means of paying or collecting, so a number of conspiracies are set afoot which involve luring the rich man's daughter into a marriage by which each of the various characters, by their particular role in the procurement/upholding the necessary deceptions, etc, will in the end be paid off. It is pretty clever and lends itself to humorous exchanges and self-justifications for deceitful behaviors and so forth.
In the prologue, the main character and architect of the outrageous scheme, Crispin, addresses the audience. "The author is aware that so primitive a spectacle is unworthy of the culture of these days...He only asks that you should make yourself as young as possible. The world has grown old, but art never can reconcile itself to growing old, and so, to seem young again, it descends to these fripperies."
No more notes until Act II. Dona Sirena, who needs her fete for the heiress to go off so that she can get paid off by whichever indigent gentleman she can mange to get her married to, is unhappy that the cooks, musicians and servants are threatening to refuse to show up unless they are paid beforehand. "The rogues! The brood of vipers! Whence does such insolence spring? Were these people not born to serve? Are they to be paid nowadays in nothing but money? Is money the only thing which has value in the world?"
I am already to the 3rd and final act, though at this point my note-taking picks up a little. I just like the expression here. "Come in, my beautiful Columbine! Do not be afraid...We are all your friends, and our mutual friendship will protect you from our mutual admiration."
There are not many options for finding this play in English. I ordered Volume I of a set of Benavente's plays published by Scribner's in 1923, just after he won the Nobel, but unfortunately the morons I ordered it from sent me Volume II, which contains "No Smoking", "Princess Bebe", The Governor's Wife", and "Autumnal Roses", doubtless all fine works, which I would be interested in reading some day, but no "Bonds of Interest." So I went back to the drawing board and ordered this Nobel Prize Library edition, which seemed like it might be less easy for the flunkeys in the shipping department to mess up. These are the kind of books made for wannabes like myself that look handsome and classy but if you actually try to read them the spine comes off in about three days (I own a lot of these types of books). The other work of Benavente's included in this collection by the way is "La Malquerida" ("The Wrongly Loved") which is widely regarded as his other great work along with "Los Intereses Creados".
"Love is all subtleties and the greatest subtlety of them all is not that lovers deceive others--it is that they can so easily deceive themselves." A common sentiment but worth repeating.
A lawyer joke. "Can it be that all those glorious exploits of Mantua and Florence have been forgotten? Don't you recall that famous lawsuit in Bologna? Three thousand two hundred pages of testimony already admitted against us before we withdrew in alarm at the sight of such prodigious expansive ability!" The evocation of the glorious ancient cities of Italy, where do they go from here? They remained something of what they have always been even down to our own times, but can they really go on as they have been in this relentless 21st century world that seems to despise and suspect anything that smacks of the past? I also think on my first reading of this passage I read "expensive" instead of "expansive" which to me would have made for a funnier joke.
The chief qualities of this play are its good-nature and ingenuity.
Since I had the Nobel Prize Library edition, there was some more inside information about the 1922 prizes than you would get elsewhere. The other finalists for the literature prize that year were another Spaniard (Angel Guimera y Jorge) and two Czechs (Alois Jirasek and Otokar Brezina) whom I have never heard of, and the by then 82 year old Thomas Hardy, who had however been nominated several times by that point and whom the committee seemed to have determined never to award the Prize, as has been the case with numerous prominent English-speaking writers through the years. Benavente was in South America at the time of his victory and did not attend the award ceremony in Stockholm. "Was it because he knew of the coolness with which the news of his award had been received by the literary world...?" the Nobel Prize Library asks, "Or was it because he was afraid of having to play too obscure a part, overshadowed by those two world-famous giants of science, Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, who were going to collect their prizes at the same time?" I suppose we'll never know, but it is true that one advantage the literature prize winner usually has over the genius scientists is that his celebrity and cultural influence, at least in his home language, is usually somewhat greater, and his acceptance speech generally the one of most interest to the ordinary educated public. It is not often that they run up against crossover rock stars of the likes of Einstein and Bohr.
One thing I look forward to in helping me speed up my course through this list in the (still distant) future is that I will have more time to bang out these reports more quickly. It only took me a couple of days to read the play but it's taken me nearly two weeks to write this blog post, without completing which I cannot move on to the next book. I am so desperate to finish this tonight that I typing this at 1 am on the computer in my basement, which room reeks of cat urine, in partial darkness because my overhead light bulb has burnt out. I am a serious blog writer, and these are the conditions I find myself having to work in.
Illustration from the Nobel Prize Library. I like it, it's kind of early Picasso-esque, right, it evokes an idea of the Spanish artistic sensibility in the early 20th century for the type of person who would collect cheaply bound volumes with the Nobel Prize seal on their covers.
The Challenge
1. Kevin Kwan--Crazy Rich Asians...…………………………………..5,027
2. John Boyne--The Heart's Invisible Furies...………………………….1,598
3. Kate Morton--The Distant Hours...…………………………………..1,509
4. Brenda Jackson--A Lover's Vow...……………………………………...602
5. Sarah MacDonald--Holy Cow: An Indian Adventure...………………...327
6. The Exterminating Angel (movie-1962)………………………………..114
7. Miranda Kennedy--Sideways on a Scooter...…………………………...110
8. Namwali Serpell--The Old Drift...……………………………………….82
9. Frank Abagnale--The Art of the Steal...………………………………….77
10. Shoshan Bantwal--The Dowry Bride...…………………………………54
11. J. S. Le Fanu--Uncle Silas...…………………………………………….43
12. Jessa Crispin--The Dead Ladies Project...……………………………...29
13. The New Interpreter's Bible...…………………………………………..17
14. John Vorhaus--Comedy Writing For Life...……………..……………...13
15. Maryvonne Fent--The 35 Cent Dowry...………………………………..13
16. Dannagal Goldthwaite Young--Irony & Outrage...……………………...9
One of the keywords in this edition of the competition was "dowry" which seems to account for the preponderance of books with an Indian setting or theme.
Round of 16
#16 Young over #1 Kwan
I had been interested in reading the Crazy Rich Asian books and at least anticipated Kwan's going deep into the tournament at least, but it got a first round matchup against a shorter book that I can actually read (about polarization in American media) so it goes down in something of a shock.
#15 Fent over #2 Boyne
Boyne is over 700 pages and it sounds formulaic rather than thought-provoking--sounds.
#14 Vorhaus over #3 Morton
Another contest decided by the length of the books.
#4 Jackson over #13 New Bible
Because I am not going to read this Bible.
#5 MacDonald over #12 Crispin
This was a pretty even battle, both books appearing to be travelogues of sorts written by Generation X women. MacDonald wins based on the seeding.
#11 Le Fanu over #6 Exterminating Angel
The movie actually should win here, but I mainly have them in here as a way to jumble up the early rounds for the books. I put all of the ones that qualify into my watch list anyway.
#7 Kennedy over #10 Bantwal
Kennedy is yet another Generation X woman who walked away from the rat race (in which she at least appeared to have been not just taking part, but succeeding) to go have adventures and gain insight into the human condition in India. I can't get enough of this.
#9 Abagnale over #8 Serpell
The Serpell book has been hailed in some quarters as a masterpiece, or near masterpiece, but it's a tournament of matchups, and generally speaking, a shorter book that is plausibly entertaining is going to beat you.
Elite 8
#16 Young over #4 Jackson
The Jackson looks like some kind of romance novel.
#5 MacDonald over #15 Fent
#14 Vorhaus over #7 Kennedy
Vorhaus is really short. That is deadly to opponents in the early rounds.
#9 Abagnale over #11 Le Fanu
Le Fanu's book is a Victorian Gothic mystery. This was a competitive game, but I am in the mood for a more modern book at this time.
Final Four
#5 MacDonald over #16 Young
I'm kind of leaning towards seeing a travel book win here.
#9 Abagnale over #14 Vorhaus
Maybe I should read a guide to comedy writing at some point, but I don't feel like doing it now.
Championship
#5 MacDonald over #9 Abagnale
The book put up for this competition was not Abagnale's chef d'oeuvre, Catch Me If You Can, which was famously adapted for the movies by Steve Spielberg. So I'm going with the white Australian lady's journey to India. I haven't read a travel book in a while, maybe since Bruce Chatwin's epic victory here?
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