Miguel Delibes


Miguel Delibes Setién MML was a Spanish novelist, journalist and newspaper editor associated with the Generation of '36 movement. From 1975 until his death, he was a member of the Royal Spanish Academy, where he occupied letter "e" seat. Licensed in commerce, he began his career as a cartoonist and columnist. He later became the editor for the regional newspaper El Norte de Castilla before gradually devoting himself exclusively to writing novels.
He was a connoisseur of the flora and fauna of Castile and was passionate about hunting and the countryside. Therefore, these were common themes in his writing, and he often wrote from the perspective of a city-dweller who had not lost touch with the rural world.
He was one of the leading figures of post-Civil War Spanish literature, winning numerous literary prizes. Several of his works have been adapted into plays or have been turned into films, winning awards at the Cannes Film Festival among others. He has been ranked with Heinrich Böll and Graham Greene as one of the most prominent Catholic writers of the second half of the twentieth century. He was deeply affected by the death of his wife in 1974. In 1998 he was diagnosed with colon cancer, from which he never fully recovered. He died in 2010.

Biography

Early life and training

Miguel Delibes was born in Valladolid on 17 October 1920, the third of eight children from the marriage between María Setién and Adolfo Delibes. His father was born and died in the Cantabrian town Molledo, where Miguel spent many summers. The writer was named an adopted son of Valladolid in 2009. The name Delibes was of French origin and came from Toulouse. Miguel's grandfather was the brother of the French composer Léo Delibes, and had moved to Spain to participate in the construction of the railway in Cantabria. His father was a law professor at the Valladolid Business School. Miguel attended the College of Our Lady of Lourdes in Valladolid. After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he enlisted in the Navy on the Nationalist side. He served on the cruiser Canarias, which operated in the Mallorcan region. At the end of the war in 1939, he returned to his home town, where he studied commerce and law. He then enrolled at the Escuela de Artes y Oficios of Valladolid, where he honed his artistic skills. In 1941 he secured a job as a cartoonist with the leading newspaper of Valladolid, El Norte de Castilla.
On April 23, 1946, he married Ángeles de Castro, who later became one of his greatest literary inspirations. They spent their honeymoon in Molledo, Cantabria.

Early literary career

After his marriage, Delibes' literary career really started to take off, beginning a three-year period that defined his career. In 1947 he began writing his first novel, La sombra del ciprés es alargada, which won the Premio Nadal the following year, marking his emergence on the Spanish literary scene. His novel Aún es de día was published, heavily censored, in 1948.
His family grew during this same period. His son Miguel, who would later become a famous biologist, was born in 1947. His daughter Ángeles, who would also become a renowned biologist and researcher, was born the following year, and in 1949 his third child, Germán, was born.
In 1950, a new stage in the writer's literary career commenced. After suffering a bout of tuberculosis, he published El camino, his third novel. The novel tells the discovery of life and the experiences of a boy who moves from the countryside to the city. The work constituted his final consecration in the Spanish post-war narrative. That year saw the birth of his daughter Elisa, who later became a graduate of Hispanic and French Studies.
In 1952, he was appointed deputy director of the newspaper El Norte de Castilla, and his battles with censorship became increasingly direct and frequent. The writer entered a new phase in his life in which he would publish a new work virtually every year, namely: Mi idolatrado hijo Sisí 1953, La partida 1954, Diario de un cazador 1955, Premio Nacional de Narrativa, Un novelista descubre América 1956, Siestas con viento sur 1957, Fastenrath Award, Diario de un emigrante 1958, and La hoja roja, 1959. This last novel was existentialist in content and deals with a photographer who recalls his life on the brink of his retirement. In 1956, his son Juan Delibes was born. He would become a biologist like his siblings and fan of hunting and fishing like his father. In 1958, the writer was appointed director of El Norte de Castilla''.

Literary apogee

The 1960s represented the heyday of Delibes' literary career. The period was marked by the birth of his sixth son, Adolfo and a visit to Germany, where he visited several universities. The literary period opened with the publication of Viejas historias de Castilla la Vieja in 1960, and Por esos mundos in 1961. In 1962, Delibes published Las ratas, one of his masterpieces. It constructs a story from a series of autobiographical anecdotes which evoke the rural environment of a Castilian village that has disappeared. The book won the Premio de la Crítica. In the same year Camino, the last of his seven children, would be born. Camino later graduated in Philosophy and Letters. Also in that year, the film version of El camino, directed by Ana Mariscal, was shot. 1963 was a turbulent year: Delibes resigned on June 8th as director of El Norte de Castilla after several disagreements with Manuel Fraga, Minister of Information and Tourism. In 1964, he spent six months in the United States as a visiting professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature of the University of Maryland. After his return, he wrote and published Cinco horas con Mario, which is considered his masterpiece. The novel is the monologue of a woman who holds a wake for her late husband while she recounts the memories of him. Other books published upon his return from the US included USA y yo and La milana. In the following years he visited Czechoslovakia and published Parábola del náufrago. Later in the 1970s, he followed up with several books about hunting, an activity about which he was passionate, and stories. Subsequently, he published Un año de mi vida, a personal diary.
On 1 February 1973, Miguel Delibes was elected to the Royal Spanish Academy, occupying chair "E", which was left vacant after the death of Julio Guillén. That same year, in December, he was also elected to the Hispanic Society of America. Before the end of the year, he published El príncipe destronado, his eleventh novel. On 22 November 1974 his wife, Angela de Castro, died at the age of 50. Her death profoundly marked the writer for the rest of his life.
Finally, on 25 May 1975, he delivered his inaugural address to the Royal Spanish Academy. Damaso Alonso, one of the leading members of the Generation of '27 and then president of the Royal Spanish Academy handed the academic medal to Miguel Delibes His induction speech, which dealt with The meaning of progress from my work, which he later edited into a book entitled Un mundo que agoniza. That same year, his twelfth novel Las guerras de nuestros antepasados saw the light. In the next three years, he published several books on hunting and his only book about fishing, Mis amigas las truchas. This time period closed with the publication of El disputado voto del señor Cayo, his thirteenth novel. In 1979, the stage adaptation of Five hours with Mario premiered in Spain starring the leading actress of Valladolid Lola Herrera. Due to its success, the play was revived several times. That year, he released Castilla, lo castellano, los castellanos, a narrative anthology.

Years 1980 and 1990: awards

In 1980, the International Booksellers Seventh Congress that was held in Valladolid paid tribute to the writer. The big title of this period was Los santos inocentes, published in 1981. The book is a form of social radiography that recounts the degradation of a rural family through the actions of the caciques of rural Extremadura. In 1982, he received the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature, sharing it with Gonzalo Torrente Ballester; and participated in the Congress "A literature for man", held in Reggio Emilia, Italy. During this decade he published books on hunting, stories, and collections of newspaper articles. In 1983, he was inducted as Doctor honoris causa by the University of Valladolid. The following year, the Junta of Castile and León awarded him the Literature Prize. In the same year, Miguel Delibes was named "author of the year" by the Spanish booksellers who bestowed the Golden Book award on him in recognition. At the end of the year, The holy innocents was adapted into a film. The actors Alfredo Landa and Francisco Rabal received the actor's award at the Cannes Film Festival for their roles in the movie. In 1985, he published El tesoro and received the Knight of Arts and Letters of the French Republic. In the following years he was named a favorite son of Valladolid, he published Castilla habla, got an honorary doctorate of the Complutense University of Madrid and attended the theatrical adaptation of works like The red leaf and The wars of our ancestors. His 1987 book Madera de héroe deals with the notion of heroism during the Spanish Civil War. It won the Premio Ciudad de Barcelona.
On 7 May 1990, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Saarland University, Germany. A year later, on 30 May 1991, the Ministry of Culture awarded him the National Prize for Spanish Literature. The University of Málaga paid homage to him at the V Contemporary Spanish Literature Congress, under the title Miguel Delibes: the writer, his work and readers. That year, he published Señora de rojo sobre fondo gris, a clear evocation of his wife. In the following year the Meeting with Miguel Delibes was held in Madrid. It was organized on the occasion of the National Prize for Spanish Literature and included a total of seven conferences and four round tables that dealt with the works of Miguel Delibes.

Literary halt and final years

His last major work, El hereje, a tribute to Valladolid, was published in 1998 and was awarded the National Fiction Prize. When receiving the award, the author stated that at 79 years of age he "had hung up his writing tackle." At the beginning of the millennium, the Miguel Delibes Chair was founded. The chair has its seat at the universities of New York and Valladolid, and has as its objectives to promote the study of contemporary Spanish literature, make this literature known in the United States and disseminate it through new technologies.
Following the publication of The heretic his writing career came virtually to a halt, mainly because of the colon cancer that affected the writer during the final phase of writing his last great novel. He was largely disabled and fell victim to an ever-greater apathy. His last book, La Tierra Herida published in 2005, takes the form of a dialogue between him and his eldest son, Miguel Delibes, the former head of Doñana national park. The book is a moving account of climate change. In 2007 he received the Quijote Prize for Spanish Literature, although in later years his literary production was practically nil, with just a few titles, such as De Valladolid . Since he was disabled, Juan Carlos I and Sofia of Greece, the king and queen of Spain, personally visited the writer at his home in Valladolid after he was awarded the Vocento Prize for Human Values. He was recognized by his city with the creation of the Route of the Heretic based on his novel and the construction of the Centro Cultural Miguel Delibes, which is both a conservatory and auditorium as well as a convention center.
The president of the autonomous community of Castile and León gave him in November 2009 the Gold Medal of Castile and León in recognition of "his defense of Castillan" and described the author as a "master storyteller".
Similarly, the Junta of Castile and León as well as numerous Spanish and international cultural and intellectual institutions proposed him repeatedly as a candidate for the Nobel Prize, the last time by the Society of Authors and Publishers in 2010 along with Ernesto Cardenal and Ernesto Sabato.

Politics

Although Delibes fought with the Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War, he was appalled by the level of repression, turned against Franco, and worked to restore democracy to Spain. In 1963, he was forced to resign from his position as director of the newspaper El Norte de Castilla for refusing to follow official instructions limiting the freedom of the press. In Delibes's view, the Reformation had enriched the Catholic faith. He held the opinion that the Spanish Civil War could've been avoided if the Church had a reformist pope like John XXIII who reconciled with modernity at the time. He has been described as a liberal Catholic, who sought to find a middle ground in between liberation theology and the authoritarian Catholicism of Franco.

Death

During the early days of March 2010 his health worsened, and on 11 March, the writer was in critical condition, conscious but heavily sedated, and his family expected his death within hours. Miguel Delibes finally died at his home in Valladolid early in the morning of March 12, 2010, at the age of 89 years as a result of the colon cancer that was first diagnosed in 1998. His funeral chapel was installed that morning in the reception room of the Town Hall of Valladolid. It was visited by such personalities as Lola Herrera, Concha Velasco, the Deputy Prime Minister Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega, the President of Castile and León Juan Vicente Herrera and the Minister of Culture Ángeles González-Sinde, among others, as well as over 18,000 people.
His funeral was held in the morning of March 13 in the Cathedral of Valladolid. His remains were cremated and buried in the Pantheon of Illustrious Men of Valladolid among personalities such as José Zorrilla and Rosa Chacel. Valladolid City Council granted the privilege of moving the cremated remains of Ángeles, his wife, to that cemetery to bury with Delibes, thus honouring his long-expressed wish.

Works

The following novels of Miguel Delibes have been adapted for the cinema: