Jordi Amat returns after the success of ‘The son of the driver’ with ‘Overcome fear’, where he delves into the life of man beyond the myth
“Mother, do not suffer. I am a specialist in death. It is my subject,” he wrote to her in 1963. gabriel ferrater (Reus, 1922 – Sant Cugat del Vallès, 1972) to his mother. “She lived with the anguish and fear of knowing that she couldn’t have a full life, she lived with a ghost. Fear clearly runs through her life,” she notes. Jordi Amat, author of ‘Overcome fear’ (Tusquets / Edicions 62), the awaited biography of the damned poet, alcoholic and suicidal. “I don’t want to fall into cheap psychology, but his father shot himself in the head [a los 56 años] to collect life insurance after going bankrupt, the mother threw herself into the courtyard of lights, and her brother Joan [el también escritor Joan Ferraté] he stopped taking the diabetes medication to let himself die”, points out the biographer, who returns after the success of ‘The son of the driver’ (where he delved into the murky life of the journalist Alfons Quintà) unraveling the Ferrater behind the myth and the legend of who, in his opinion, was “the most attractive and intellectual figure of the second half of the 20th century in Catalan literature”.
This is probably the most awaited publishing novelty of the Any Ferrater, that this 2022 commemorates the centenary of the poet’s birth and 50 of his death. Amat (Barcelona, 1978), philologist and writer, faces the challenge after solid good work as the author of biographies -of Ramon Trias Fargas (Gaziel Prize 2009), of Josep Benet (Octavi Pellissa Prize 2017)- and essays (‘Spring of Munich’, ‘The voices of dialogue and ‘The long process’). “Ferrater believed that children and the elderly are afraid and that youth is the only one that doesn’t; that is why he always tried to be close to young women who loved him. ‘Les dones i els dies’ is the collection of love poems in Catalan that has moved me like no other”, confesses Amat.
“His depressions were continuous, he took medication to sleep and antidepressants, until an unexpected angel crossed his path, Jill Jarrell“. A young 22-year-old American journalist he met at Carme Balcells’s agency. “She does everything possible so that he can overcome fear, but it doesn’t work. We know that she takes valium and the consequences of drinking while he is on medication. We know the moment when the situation overflows and the previous peace is broken”, continues the biographer.
“Passionate love”
Despite that “passionate love”, they would divorce Jarrell after two years of marriage (1964 to 1966). New unpublished telegrams and consulted letters, “a precious crossed corpus”, give clues as to how that relationship lived. Before her, also with Helena Valenti, daughter of some friends. In a poem, ‘Xifra’, she recalls the day she was 7,765 days old, just over 21 years old; he 39. “When he talks about love with her he comes to say that we are animals of desire, animal beings and wild hearts and assumes that when your body does not work, life is not worth living.”
Amat, who has also just published, together with Josep M. Fonalleras and Jaume Subirana, ‘Xavier Folch, editor and politician’ (Anagram), the result of the conversations that the three had with the missing editor, has listened to Josep Maria Castellet, who believed that to write the life of Ferrater it was not reliable to resort to oral testimonies. “Because there are a thousand anecdotes that feed the myth of the suicidal poet, from when he drank & mldr; Truths that made it difficult to understand him from within. That is why I became obsessed with understanding a complex psychology character through all possible documentation, both public and private, from articles, many little known, to unseen letters, telegrams and postcards”.
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“Ferrater changes the history of Catalan poetry and deepens the understanding of Catalan culture in the 20th century like no other. He is a necessary author of the Spanish literary and publishing system and a European literary reader like few others. It was a luxury for a publisher to have someone who read with that intelligence. At the Formentor Awards, the world literary elite perceives him as a brilliant figure. He is an interlocutor of Witold Gombrowichread to Susan Sontag and sees that she can become a great writer…”, glosses the biographer of the man who was literary director of Seix Barral in the years of Carlos Barral, and a friend of Jaime Gil de Biedma and of Carles Ribawhom he admired as his teacher. In fact, with his death and how it affected a 37-year-old Ferrater to contemplate his corpse at the wake, ‘Overcome fear’ begins. His face, he writes, suggested “the image of a collapsed house.”
economic precariousness
Like his father, who ended his life beset by debt, Ferrater was also distressed by “precariousness”. “To understand his fear, the issue of money is decisive, he always wants to collect quickly from publishers, he suffers when he receives a letter from Herder…”. Important for him was attending “a first family deficiency, the collapse of the bourgeois class, of their world, which implies loss of freedom and security”, perceptions that, Amat considers, the poet distilled in a text he wrote about James Joyce, where he concludes that “the experience that marked Joyce’s childhood and youth was that of the progressive, and finally almost total, ruin of his family”. However, adds Amat, despite his demons, “his life had bright moments.”