Llorenç Villalonga

Llorenç Villalonga (1897-1980), born in Palma de Mallorca, was a multifaceted man of letters. As a psychiatrist, a profession he practised all his life in the island of Majorca, he was capable of capturing the moods, the moments and the whys and wherefores of the human soul in a unique way. His novel Bearn (published in English as The Doll's Room) is without doubt one of the great twentieth-century works of Catalan literature. Essentially, it is a reflection on the passing of time and the effects of this on individuals (the myth of Faust applied sui generis to a Mallorcan nobleman) and society (the decline of the minor rural nobility).

The life and work of the controversial Mallorcan writer Llorenç Villalonga Pons reveal three quite distinct and often contradictory stages, each of which merits separate consideration. In fact, however, he was also the sum of his career and the result is highly visible: fifteen novels, five collections of short stories, five volumes of plays and more than 1,500 newspaper articles. Distributed over a half a century of active life (1924-1975), this oeuvre, if contemplated in perspective, is somewhat proteiform, its shifts activated by the ferment of constant evolution. Better said, in trying to make an approximation to his weltanschauung, one might speak of the three differentiated cycles as if they were three concentric circles - three serpents eating their tails - traversed by the common axis of existence itself, which was solicited by different forces over the years.

Villalonga chose to study medicine in open opposition to his father Miquel Villalonga Muntaner, a military man by profession who would eventually reach the rank of general. After declining the possibility of a career in the Church or as a lawyer, Llorenç Villalonga decided on Medicine, a profession that was well-established in the family of his mother, Joana Pons Marquès, who came from Maó in Menorca.

He began to write for the newspaper El Día de Palma when he was still a student at the University of Zaragoza, where he would obtain his degree in 1926, after having studied in the faculties of Medicine in Múrcia (1919), Barcelona (1920-23) and Madrid (1923-24). This journalistic writing was the opening of his first literary phase (1924-1939). He started out as something of a snob, inquiring, curious and attracted by any novelty or avant-garde tendencies. He had cut his literary teeth reading Anatole France, Voltaire, Freud, Ortega y Gasset, and some of the writers of the Generation of '98. A little later, in 1925, Damià Ferrà-Ponç tells us, he discovered the work of Marcel Proust, which was decisive when it comes to considering the major influences on Villalonga's fiction. In this early stage, he produced a considerable number of short stories - later to be collected, reworked and translated into Catalan - along with quite a number of literary, artistic and cultural pieces. This was the high point he would never go beyond in the domain of journalism. However, much more important is his novelistic debut when he irrupted on to the scene with Mort de dama (Death of a Lady, 1931), written in Catalan and with a prologue by Gabriel Alomar Villalonga, an event that would earn him the eternal enmity of the regionalists and, above all, the writers of the Mallorca School. He also took over as literary director of the review Brisas (1934-36) where he would bring out five short stories, the play Silvia Ocampo and the beginning of Madame Dillon, a novel which would finally be published in its complete form in 1937. This novel, the play and the tragedy Fedra (Phaedra, 1932), reveal how deeply he was affected by his relationship with the Cuban poetess, Emilia Bernal. These three works that Jaume Vidal Alcover called the "Phaedra cycle" were initially written in Spanish but later underwent thoroughgoing metamorphosis and were translated into Catalan by the author. They constitute quite an accurate document of tourism in Mallorca before the Civil War and the transformation that this had wrought in the traditional forms of life in the island society. Continue reading...