TRUTH AND FICTION IN CONTEMPORARY SPANISH NOVEL

The main aim of the transition was to consolidate the monarchy, which was backed not only by supporters of Franco and European countries, but also by the USA and its secret services. Intellectuals are the conscience of a country and they militated to make a break with the past, as did the majority of those who were members of the PCE, the Spanish Communist Party, so it was necessary to neutralize them in some way, and the method chosen was to provide them with sinecures to buy their silence and acquiescence. The CIA already had much experience in this field. From the end of the Second World War to the sixties they had financed magazines all over Europe and organized congresses attended by orthodox writers from all over the world; in the United States itself, they manipulated newspapers, magazines and publishing houses making them publish articles and books supporting their ideas, they made use of highly considered foundations to transfer dirty money which would find itself in the hands of sinecurists, those who, swimming in abundance, spent more time on airplanes and at cocktail parties than in front of a typewriter. Frances Stonor, who has been able to investigate all this, affirms that "whether they liked it or not many intellectuals were bound to the CIA by the 'umbilical cord of gold'".

All those who were not "politically correct", were black-listed, slandered and censored. On the other hand, hundreds of novels in favor of their opinions were translated, financed and distributed. The CIA also entered the world of the cinema, leaving their mark on film scripts and blocking films which they thought problematic, and helping others which favored their cause. A madness which appalls us but which we cannot doubt if we read the magnificent book by Frances Stonor, The CIA and the cultural cold war, which has erupted like a bomb in the literary world and which lays before us devastating examples like the following: the translations into other languages of orthodox American books at the behest of the Psychological Warfare Division amounted to hundreds of titles, including books suitable for children at the most impressionable ages. The same criteria was used to promote European writers who were believed to serve the official propaganda line, among them, Andre Gide, Ignacio Zilone, John Foster and Arthur Koestler, whose novel, Darkness at Noon, was purchased and distributed by the Foreign Office itself to the tune of 50,000 copies. They had only to send an agent to the publishers, Little Brown, who were going to publish Spartacus, by Howard Fast, saying that the director of the FBI did not wish to see the work in print for the publishers to reject it. And this was enough for it to be rejected by seven other publishing houses ! One of them, Knopf, returned the manuscript to Fast without even opening it, with the excuse that they did not want to look at a traitor's work. After several nightmarish years, Howard Fast had no choice but to publish the book at his own expense. In 1953, a number of authors were censored and eliminated from the bookshops of the country as well as from foreign legations and cultural centers, including books by Sartre, Dashiell Hammett, Howard Fast, William Foster, Maximo Gorki, Herman Melville, Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud and William Carlos Williams. The CIA even left its mark on travel guides. On occasions, reviews of books in the New York Times and other respected newspapers, were penned by writers on contract to the CIA. Abstract expressionism was promoted and exploited by the Agency, simply because its very abstraction was in opposition to social realism.

In Spain they were also active and with even greater ease as the Franco regime supported many of its aims. We know that at the end of the forties and in the early fifties the whole of one family, the Mellons, spied for the Agency in Madrid. One of their members, Paul Mellon, was the creator of the Bollingen-Mellon prizes, of 20000 dollars each, because following the advice of his friend Allen Tate, "writers always need money and it is necessary to set up grant , prizes or anything else that will make them happier and less inclined to revolution". Although I have no proof, I suspect that Agustín Penón was also a member of the CIA and was sent to Granada to investigate Garcia Lorca's death. I am assured that the local writer José Fernández Castro was sought as an informer, perhaps on account of his privileged position in civil government and as a member of the original Socialist Party he had excellent contacts with the left in Granada. Subsequently , I was assured on the best authority that he was not the only writer Penón proposed for work with the Agency.
There is not the slightest doubt that the CIA was set up in Granada (just as must have happened in other Spanish cities). As proof we have the following anecdote , which besides sounding like a story by Borges , is startling and clearly indicative of how far any intellectual activity was controlled during the transition from a dictatorship under Francisco Franco to democracy. The poet, José G. Ladrón de Guevara (Granada, 1929)wrote some amusing and trenchant satires on the occasion of Franco's death. Those were turbulent times, full of uncertainty and tremendously dangerous, given that the extreme right-wing, which dominated the most important centers of power in the country , had decided to seal with fire and blood the perceived opening up in Spain. One of their most sinister acts was the so-called Atocha blood-bath, when on the 24th January 1977 five labor lawyers were murdered. It was in this atmosphere that the friends of Ladrón de Guevara advised him to destroy the satires, which he did but not without first recording them on a tape at a gathering with several colleagues, including the late Javier Egea. However the danger remained practically the same, as the recording was also incriminating to its author. Ladrón de Guevara did not wish to destroy it but rather to find a safe place for it. When shortly afterwards he saw a friend (whose name we prudently omit), a lecturer in English Philology at the University who later went on to direct the Granada Institute of Languages, he mentioned the problem to him . His friend immediately offered to look after the tape.
"They won't suspect me," he assured him.
Ladrón de Guevara agreed and handed over the recording.
Time passed and the author forgot about the matter. Years later, someone reminded him and when he asked the said lecturer where it was he replied that he could not remember.
In 1996, Jesús Méndez, a History lecturer who was also a friend of Ladrón de Guevara's went to the United States to carry out some research at the Congress Library. While he was consulting the catalogues he was struck by the title: Verses on the Death of Franco. Out of sheer curiosity, he requested the item and was served a tape. As he listened to it, he realized to his astonishment that the voice reciting was none other than that of his friend José G. Ladrón de Guevara! He made a copy and on his return to Spain complimented his friend:
"I didn't know you were so famous. I heard your verses in the United States!"
"What verses?" he asked in surprise.
"The ones you composed on the death of Franco. They are on catalogue in the Congress Library."
It was only then that Ladrón de Guevara remembered his friend, the lecturer in English Philology. It could not have been anyone else! Suddenly the truth dawned as he recalled a rumor, which had circulated some years previously, claiming that the very same gentleman was a member of the CIA. A few days later Jesús Méndez was to hand him a copy of the tape which had returned like a boomerang to its owner.
It is also suspected that the Madrid branch of the Reader's Digest was somehow connected with the CIA. When I examined four numbers chosen at random from January to April 1963, I found not only obsessive references to the free world in opposition to Communism, but also the following hot articles "The protest against Nixon in South America", written by Nixon himself, where it affirms that "bands of demonstrators , led by communists, ran through the streets…"; "When American Business goes abroad" "Who benefits from capital profits?" "Is Finland playing Russian roulette?"(against the agreement between Finland and the USSR); "The frightening Minuteman projectile" subtitled "The impressive story of how the weapon awaited by the whole world was perfected.·; "Why Europeans criticize the United States" written by André Maurois; "How the Kremlin took over Cuba", subtitled "The unpublished story of another great deceit"…to give you only a sample. There are many more in just four numbers. What is even more incredible is that even subliminal propaganda is used. In the April number there is a test titled "Are you really free?" which asks innocent questions like "Have you moved from one city to another?" "Have you ever left one job to take up a better one?" "Have you compared prices and quality in different shops before buying a product?" In the instructions for scoring we were amazed to read: "Count the number of affirmative answers. Then think that if you lived behind the Iron Curtain, this little test would probably give zero results. Nevertheless, the foregoing questionnaire constitutes a small sample of the many liberties which we enjoy daily."

It is the style of the CIA; employed in other publications which we now know for sure were financed directly by the Agency, like the British Encounter, the French Preuves or the Latin American Cuadernos, directed by the Spaniard, Julián Gorkin.

The complete list of Spanish writers on the payroll of the Reader's Digest should be investigated at some stage. This is not to say that all of them were aware of the manipulation they were being subjected to, although they should have realized because some of them have told how they clocked in and did nothing, calmly returning home after a while at work. It is clear that they were paid, on Tate's advice, "to keep them happier and away from the revolution". Perhaps Cela's offer to betray red writers should be set in this context of collaboration with the CIA, in search of his generous stipend. I also suspect that Cela's protector, the General Director of the Press at that time, might well have been connected in some way to the Agency. Be that as it may, we know that, between 1960 and 1963, the International Institute in Madrid (an institution which exists to this day) received funds from the CIA to conserve the private libraries of Lorca, Ortega and Fernández Almagro.

When in '76, many of these activities were discovered by the free press in America, the CIA was forbidden to intervene in culture, but this was not to apply abroad. In consequence, after Franco's death, and in an operation identical to that carried out previously in the rest of Europe, the writers the new regime gave special attention to were from the Spanish Communist Party. As from then, we began to see how it was enough for one of those writers to publish their first novel or book of poems, whatever the quality, for them to be called upon to collaborate with the newspaper ABC, one of the organs which most helped in this "war of forgetting", or pompously invited to the traditional royal reception to celebrate Book Day.

As from 1989, the distortion became even more perverse. With the progressive fall of communist regimes all over the world, the red threat weakened, and one might have expected that equality of opportunity would return in its wake. But this was far from the case . In the first place inertia must have been to blame together with the overwhelming success obtained in previous years when 99% of Communist writers kissed the king's hand. Moreover the apparatus was appropriated, not now on account of reasons of state, but for the greater honor and glory of the party currently in power. Thus the channels created were used to the utmost from the late 80s to the middle of the next decade, reaching a degree of inflexibility, colonization and abuse without parallel in European cultural history.

It was in this context that the Salon de Independientes was formed. Sixty writers from all over Spain raised their voices in the spring of 1994 to say that it was time to destroy the labyrinth which had poisoned and confused our literary panorama during the last decades placing justice and impartiality in this immense wound. The writers pointed out that "fast success which had imposed itself in recent years is a painful symptom that we are not being offered alternatives or innovations in the world in which we live". Accustomed to docile and unconditional support, a storm fell on the literary world. Endless polemic discussions ensued. The most unimaginable calumnies were cast at those who had signed.

The powers that be clearly did not wish to change the policy under attack. Extraordinary things suddenly began to happen as if dark forces were trying to seize the movement from its legitimate protagonists. Towards the end of that summer the Association of Independent Journalists was created. Surely too close in time and name to the Salón de Independientes! The hand of ABC was behind it. Nevertheless, for the next few months the Salon carried on its work with renewed energy, pointing out the sad state to which Spanish culture had been reduced. Then suddenly a section termed "Salón de Independientes" appeared in one of the daily newspapers. But it had nothing to do with the original Salón de Independientes. None of the names who figured there had either protested or criticized anything. Once again they were docile and pro-system… It was clearly an astute maneuver to neutralize the movement which had brought authors together. And which newspaper was behind this maneuver? How strange! Once again ABC.

The intelligence services tend to be the least intelligent in a country. Far from considering the appearance of the Salón de Independientes as a symptom of a disease for which a remedy needed to be found, the hawks closed their ranks, tightening their control over institutions, supplements, magazines and even publishers, who, responsible for literary collections, began to recruit only the most strictly orthodox.

For there to be a black list, it is not necessary for the incriminated name to be written down anywhere. The political commissioner's memory, which is usually portentous, is enough. The mud thrown in any defamatory campaign, be it public or secret, is enough. A report requested from the local literature expert is enough. The relegating of an author to silence is enough. Eliminating a name from the official lists is enough. However, although all this is done again and again, black lists materially speaking do exist. In a recent conversation, one of the most brilliant poets of the most recent generation said that he had seen several of them. In this way, the unanimity and uniformity present in the literary world has become so great that some of us have begun to think, not without certain irony that , now that the monarchy has been consolidated and seems safely established, the CIA has passed the task of control to the CESID (the future CNI), the Spanish secret service who have taken over, directly or indirectly, the cultural framework.

Truth and fiction have never been so confused as they are now. Truth seems like fiction. Fiction like truth. The truth is that the Spanish novel is being written in the shadows. And what comes to light forms the greatest part of fiction. This perverse inversion is characteristic of totalitarianism disguised as democracy: it occurred in Soviet Russia. It occurred in the United States. It is occurring in Spain now.

Gregorio Morales