Carmen Laforet, extranjera

Author(s): Roberta Johnson

Source: Letras Femeninas , Verano 2005, Vol. 31, No. 1, Número especial Encuentros
Transatlánticos: La identidad femenina en voces españolas y latinas actuales (Verano
2005), pp. 28-29
Published by: Asociación de Estudios de Género y Sexualidades; Michigan State
University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23021512

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 Carmen Laforet, extranjera

Roberta Johnson
University of Kansas

On one of the first five lecture tours that Carmen Laforet made to the
United States in the 1980s, she said to me, "A mi me gusta ser extranjera."
Carmen found it liberating to travel outside Spain, beyond the confining
parameters that Spanish law and social norms had placed on her life for so
many years. And travel was a continual stimulus to her writer's vocation.
She composed Nada (which reflected her move from the Canary Islands to
Barcelona) after moving from Barcelona to Madrid. La isla y los demonios
also echoes her transplantation from the Canaries to the mainland. La
insolation recalls the Alicante where she vacationed away from Madrid
with her children in the 1950s and 1960s. All the characters in Al volver la
esquina, the posthumously published sequel to La insolation, are itinerant,
displaced. Laforet wrote much of Al volver la esquina after she separated
from her husband in 1970 and lived a peripatetic existence in Alicante,
Paris, and Rome. Leaving Spanish soil meant freedom from the oppres
sive atmosphere for women under the regime of Francisco Franco, whom
Laforet referred to as "ese hombre" in a letter to Ramon Sender.
When her husband was director of the newspaper La Espana de Tdnger
in the 1950s, Carmen visited him in Morocco and with obvious delight
entered the bohemian world of Tangier, where she met people as diverse
as photographer Cecil Beaton, writers Paul and Jane Bowles, and beat poet
Allen Ginsburg. The contrast between Tangier and Madrid in those years
could not have been more stark. In 1965 Carmen made an extensive trip

Roberta Johnson is professor emerita at the University of Kansas. She has published
books on Carmen Laforet (1980), El ser y la palabra en Gabriel Mird (1985), Crossfire:
Philosophy and the Novel in Spain 1900-1934 (1993), Las bibliotecas de Azorin (1996),
Gender and Nation in the Spanish Modernist Novel (2003), and more than 60 articles on
nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spanish prose.

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Johnson 29

to the United States at the invitation of the State Department, which she
chronicled in Paralelo 35. In the book she describes the spirit with which
she approached this foreign adventure: "Voy con el mismo espiritu de los
viajeros que atravesaron las selvas sin conocer el idioma de los indigenas y
sin entender el significado de los golpes de tam-tam con que se avisaban
las tribus salvajes su paso por la selva." During the 1965 tour of the United
States, she met Ramon Sender in Los Angeles, and she maintained a cor
respondence with him for many years, thus sustaining the connection to
a country where she had felt so free.
In 1967 she traveled to Poland under the sponsorship of the journal
Actualidad, for which she wrote a series of articles on her experiences there.
Carmen's travels to the United States and to Poland in the 1960s were per
sonally very important to her, because they helped elevate her spirits, which
were beginning to flag under the weight of the emphasis placed on marriage
and motherhood in Francoist Spain. A few years after her marital separation,
Carmen finally settled in Rome in 1975, where she resided in the Trastevere
and enjoyed conversations with Rafael Alberti, Maria Teresa Leon, Maria
Zambrano, and other Spanish exiles. I met her for the first time in Rome in
1976; she was filled with a desire to renew her writing career that had gradually
diminished in the Spanish ambience. One is reminded of Maria Zambrano's
famous phrase, "Amo mi exilio" (Zambrano likewise found a certain lib
eration away from Spain). In 1976 Laforet told me of her plans to complete
the trilogy Tres pasos fuera del tiempo, compose a book of "Encuentros en el
Trastevere," and write on "El gineceo de la mujer." Unfortunately, none of
these projects came to fruition, and in 1979 she returned to Spain.
Carmen's travels to the United States in the 1980s (the first visit in
1982 and the last in 1989) once again revived the embers of the writer's
craft that were never completely snuffed out, and after each visit she
would write me that she felt inspired to return to her unfinished trilogy.
She did publish a series of columns for El Pais in 1983, two of them on
her visits to U.S. universities. In October of 1988 the creative gene (again
sparked by an experience abroad) made one last appearance. While
staying in my home in Altadena, California, Carmen disappeared into
the guest bedroom one afternoon and emerged several hours later with
a handwritten copy of her version of the children's story "Medio pol
lito." She presented it as a gift to Howard and Edra Young's small child
Timothy, who had charmed her a few days before. As far as I know, this
was her last piece of creative writing; significantly, it was penned during
her travels in the United States.

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