The hive It became an obsession for its author, Camilo José Cela (1916-2002). He worked on that work, now canonical, about that miserable post-war Madrid for six years, “correcting, polishing and rubbing, removing here, putting there and always suffering”, as he explains in the 1965 prologue. He fought on many fronts until he finally managed to print it and strongly insisted that the Francoist authorities allow its publication and distribution in Spain. He obtained it first in Argentina in 1951 and, finally, in a Spanish edition in 1963, almost twenty years after submitting an initial version of the book to censors. Now, the chance discovery, advanced by Eldiario.es and confirmed this week by the Ministry of Culture, a first full version from 1946 revised by censors adds a new piece to the complex puzzle that surrounds the history of the work.
The historical figures in this twisted literary and philological intrigue range from a civil censor close to Cela (Leopoldo Panero) and another Catholic (Father Andrés Lucas de Casla) to the Argentine Peronist censors. Also to a French Hispanist member of the Communist Party and scholar of the Golden Age (Noël Salomon), and to a publisher from Barcelona (Carlos F. Maristany), who ended up bankrupt in 1949, but who achieved their goal with Cela’s first novel (Pasqual Duarte’s family) and decided to bet big on this new work, paid advances and planned a large print run.
Professor Álex Agudo of the City College of New York found this summer in the Archive of the General Administration (AGA) of Alcalá de Henares (Madrid) the typescript that Cela presented on 7 January 1946 to Franco’s censors to authorize the departure of The hive in the Zodiaco editions of Carlos F. Maristany. Ten days later, in 1946, the writer’s only son was born. “Without needing to force things, it can be said, therefore, that the novel and I were twins, growing up hand in hand,” writes Camilo José Cela Conde in a text included in the RAE’s commemorative edition of the novel in 2016. That same January, the authorities responded with a resounding no to the publication of the work: the civil censors did not raise major objections, but the Catholic censors deemed it “frankly immoral and sometimes pornographic.” and sometimes irreverent.
Just a month later, in February 1946, Cela once again pressed the Government with his new novel, trying to obtain a deluxe edition of The hivethat is, smaller. The Galician also made some public readings and continued to work on the text. After posting New adventures and misadventures of Lazarillo de Tormescritics and author friends encouraged him to focus his attention on the Madrid of that time. He thought of a trilogy, Uncertain pathsof which The hive It would be the first delivery. There were different titles for the book, censorship obstacles here and in Argentina, economic difficulties. Cela himself was working as a magazine censor at the time, but this did not prevent his novel from being roundly rejected. Thus, in the story of that book we can see the portrait of a literary world prisoner of a peaceful and cruel dictatorship.
This summer Professor Agudo found the 1946 novel in a box that supposedly contained the 1953 censor’s report on the version of The hive which had been published in Argentina. It is the 100-page novel with censor’s deletions and annotations, second Eldiario.es, and Agudo himself explained in another article on that medium. “Two or three copies were presented and reviewed by a civil censor and a Catholic censor,” explains the professor, in a telephone conversation from New York.
One of those Cela typescripts sent to the censor in 1946 was donated in 2014 to the National Library by the daughter of Noël Solomon, a French Hispanist who studied censorship in Golden Age theatre. It seems he wanted to see some examples of Franco’s censorship to compare and that’s why he ended up with that first copy of The hive In the papers donated by his daughter, some pages were missing and there were subsequent additions by Cela, as explained by professor emeritus Adolfo Sotelo, the greatest specialist in the work of the Spanish Nobel prize winner, who included that peculiar version of The hive in that 2016 RAE edition, published on the occasion of the author’s centenary. Sotelo underlines the unknowns that still surround that copy of the novel (How did that incomplete typescript end up in Salomon’s hands? Why did Cela never claim it? Did he include scenes that he knew the censors would reject, trusting that the body of the work could then be published?). Sotelo claims that now the discovery of the complete 1946 version will allow us to understand “how censorship proceeded” and to understand that Francoism “was not monolithic”.
Professor Agudo, for his part, underlines that the recovered copy raises questions about why it was kept in a box since 1953. «The censorship was a bit chaotic, it was not a well-oiled machine and perhaps, at a certain point, all the reports and copies of The hive and they rearranged them badly,” he proposes.
Be that as it may, Alcalá’s new discovery adds to the study of how Cela worked on his “city novel”, a book strongly influenced by the narrative technique of John Dos Passos and Transfer to Manhattan. “The hive It is a ruthless portrait of the post-war period, very modern; a book in which testimonial realism advances, the style that Cela will continue to develop in that vision of society as an anthill of thousands of voices”, underlines the critic Ignacio Echevarría, responsible for the publication of Cela’s novels in circulation on the Debolsillo brand.
The version that the author considers good and which is the one in bookstores is the 1962 version included in the first volume of his Complete works and which a year later was published exempt. “This discovery is a curiosity, it has a philological value, it is a new layer, but it is not essential. To think that we have not read the authentic novel would be absurd, Cela was very attentive to his work and was aware of his own value, one cannot suspect oblivion in him”, says Echevarría.
Regarding Cela’s role as a magazine censor for the Ministry of Information and Tourism, the critic maintains that it was not something that really marked his career and his figure. “In the 1940s in Spain you earned a living as you could, and was a kind of civil servant. Cela was an unscrupulous man, a swindler, but in Spain censorship has become very inflated. The most serious thing is what was not written, not what was erased,” says Echevarría, who adds that in translations of foreign literature, changes made by censorship have survived and have not yet been erased.
Agudo warns, despite everything, that in Alcalá’s archive we must escape “the seduction of the red pencil”, and clarifies that the intervention of the censor in the version of The hive of 1946 did not result in the loss of any substantial material from the work. Finally, says the discoverer of the first full version of The hivewhat is important is the richness of the archive which houses works that many authors have not preserved. There is still much to save. “It is the cultural history of that time,” he concludes.
