The most intimate face of the enigmatic Víctor Català

Barcelona"What grace and what freshness, what naturalness, in her stories!", he wrote in 1958, in Mercè Rodoreda, an almost nonagenarian Victor Catalan, the pseudonym under which Caterina Albert (l'Escala, 1869-1966) signed all her books. The author of Loneliness had been impressed by Twenty-two stories, which Rodoreda had published after a two-decade hiatus in publishing. "Too often, some who claim to write in Catalan use such a fantastical vocabulary and construction that, when I come across language as natural and authentic as yours, it feels like a major celebration," he insists. "How charming and fresh your stories are!" he said.

This is the only letter from Català to Rodoreda that we find in Letters to Friends. 1905-1965 (Pagès, 2025), which brings together six decades of correspondence from an author "about whose private life we know relatively little," notes literary critic and writer M. Àngels Cabré, editor of the volume and author of the prologue. Cabré describes Catalán with these words: "Single, a rural landowner, the first woman admitted to the Academy of Belles Lettres, a brilliant author who passed for a bourgeois woman dedicated to her chores, who, from time to time, wrote like someone knitting, without fanfare, but she wrote brilliant texts."

Debunking the reputation of Català as a loner

One of the "fake images" that Letters to friends What contributes to "dismantling" is the writer's "reputation for being a loner": this is made possible by Català's correspondence with the more than forty women featured in the volume. The book's second objective, Cabré continues, is this: "Given that it is an exclusively female epistolary collection, it aims to show how women have been able to build support networks, also in the case of the writer from L'Escala, the grande dame of Catalan literature."

Although she "somewhat shunned social life, it is no less true that she neither shirked the obligations of her position as a writer nor the time spent with friends, which she thoroughly enjoyed." In the letter that opens the volume—sent on August 29, 1905, the same year that she completed Loneliness, one of the pinnacles of 20th-century Catalan fiction—to the writer and journalist Carme Karr (Barcelona, ​​1865-1943), Català admits that she is going through a period in which it is impossible for her to "pick up her pen" and details the reasons: "In summer, the small colony of visitors who gather in this little village stay very close together, and, as it is largely made up of friends, we have to spend more time with them; during the summer months at home, we already owe them the hours of freedom that others leave us; and we dedicate them to them in such a way and with such pleasure, that since I've been here I've hardly had any time left to reply to the occasional letter."

Born in 1869 into a well-to-do landowning family in L'Escala, Caterina Albert began to cultivate her artistic interests in the attic of the family home, located at number 37 on Enric Serra Street. "She considered herself a 'homemaker by habit and temperament,' as she said at the beginning of her speech Civic-mindedness and civility"It was delivered on the occasion of the Floral Games of 1917, which he had the honor of presiding over," Cabré explains. One of the recent findings relating to the writer's early life These were the seventeen texts that make up Fossils, a hundred pages that head the new edition of Mosaic (Club Editor, 2021), edited by Agnès Prats and Blanca Llum Vidal: Català evokes childhood and some family memories, sometimes nostalgic and idyllic, at other times with a disturbing edge.

"Sneaking a goal" through censorship

First published in 1946 by the Dalmau Bookstore, Mosaic "It was the first book published in Catalan after the great break caused by the war," the editor explains. Maria BohigasThe book "outsmarted Francoist censorship," presenting itself as a collection of "literary impressions on domestic themes." Following descriptions of the animals Víctor Català loved, the house where he lived, and some of his family members, there are chapters such as Cave paintingsIn it, the author explains the consequences of the drawing she crossed out as a child on the dining room wall: her father, who was "instinctive" and "uncontrollable when he got going," beats her "for real," and the maids and grandmother also visit.

When she made it known MosaicVíctor Català was 77 years old and had not yet finished his literary work: the collections of short stories remained to be published. Ground life (Selecta, 1950) and Jubilee (Selecta, 1951). The difficult resumption of publishing in the 1940s is reflected in Letters to friends through messages to close friends such as Roser Matheu and Teresa Bartomeu Tissy and Rosa Guillot, but also writers like María Luz Morales (A Coruña, 1890 - Barcelona, ​​1980) and Concha Espina (Santander, 1869 - Madrid, 1955), and actresses like Lola Membrives (Buenos Aires, 1888-1969). Shortly before publishing MosaicCatalà had debuted in Spanish with a book of short stories, Altarpiece (Ediciones Mediterráneas, 1944), and Concha Espina dedicated a laudatory article to her, to which the writer responded with these words of gratitude: "You have been with me of boundless generosity, so that, reading again and again the magnificent things you say to me in public, I think that we are plain, you have created a beautiful entity of fiction for the pleasure of applying to it the delicacies of your magic pen."

Catalan, "revolutionary pioneer"

Between the Víctor Català who wrote to Carme Karr in 1905 and the one who communicated with Concha Espina in 1945 lies a large part of the Empordà author's literary trajectory. This has been thoroughly studied over the last two decades by Irene Muñoz Pairet, who has edited the two volumes of theCorrespondencePublished in 2005 and 2009 in a co-edition between the L'Escala City Council and Curbet – where there are interesting letters between the author and Lluís Via, director of the magazine Youthand with the editor and writer Francesc Matheu—and has gathered his scattered writings and lectures in Looking back (Girona Provincial Council, 2022).

Also Margarida Casacuberta, author of the essay Víctor Català, the masked writer (L'Avenç, 2019), where she defines her as a "revolutionary pioneer" of Catalan literature. "They tried to silence her from all sides, but she continued writing and remained true to herself with that mask she never took off," says Casacuberta, who in the book reconstructs, among other delicate moments, the back-and-forth between Català and the poet Joan Maragall (Barcelona, ​​1860-1911) throughout the years. It all begins when "Maragall criticizes the Rural dramas (1902) in Barcelona Daily and he reproaches him for offering a sensationalist and biased view of reality, because he starts from the premise that there is a cosmic harmony, but in reality the two visions of the poet are opposed: the eagle poet, who sees the whole, and the poet sea"...that shakes the soul."

Víctor Català "had a very clear aesthetic perspective of wanting to show the dark corner," Casacuberta continues. And he adds: "He aspires to construct the macrocosm and show the little creatures of the Lord situated in the midst of an immensity characterized by violence." Letters to friends The reader will find a much gentler voice than that of her narratives and novels. In 1920, she praised the work of the educator Maria Montessori (Chiaravalle, 1870 - Noordwijk, 1952); seven years later, she confessed her admiration for the "extraordinary abilities" of a young Maria Teresa Vernet (Barcelona, ​​1907-1974), who had just published her second novel. Silent love (1927); also in 1927 he praises Clementina Arderiu (Barcelona, ​​1889-1976), asserting that, "in our pantheon [...] it represents grace, that winged gift that completes inspiration and makes the spell of verses doubly poetic."

One of the longest and most surprising letters in the volume is the one he sends to his friend and admirer Antònia Bartomeu, in which he recommends she read a contemporary Norwegian author who has impressed him, Knut Hamsun (Lom, 1859 - Grimstad, 1952): "All things considered, I am like him: he sings of men and things in a similar way [...] and I feel more in common with this man from other latitudes than with all the French people who have ever lived or will live, within their affectations and conceptual affectations: one looks without worrying about being looked at, the others worry about being looked at."