Francisco Ayala, the acclaimed Spanish novelist and sociologist, was the last survivor of the “Generation of ’27”, the group of Spanish poets, artists and writers who sought to mesh Hispanic folklore with classical literary tradition and the European avant-garde.
The poet Federico García Lorca was a leading member of this amorphous group, founded in Seville on May 23, 1927, on the 300th anniversary of the death of the Baroque poet Luis de G?ngora. Ayala wrote his first novels, in a realist style, while lecturing in law in Madrid. But it was only when exiled to the Americas after Spain’s civil war that his finest work and dominant narrative obsession — with the theme of power — began to emerge.
Ayala’s debut collection of short stories, Los Usurpadores (The Usurpers) written in Buenos Aires, was instantly acclaimed as a masterpiece by Jorge Luís Borges. El Hechizado (The Bewitched), perhaps the finest story in the collection, is set in medieval Spain and narrates the story of a Spaniard who fights through a Kafkaesque bureaucracy to meet the king — only to find him so handicapped mentally and physically as to be incapable of coherent speech, let alone governing a country. Some saw this as a dig at General Franco. Another story involved a rabbi who converts to Catholicism, and in his eagerness to prove the purity of his faith allows his daughter to be arrested for denouncing his work.
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Ayala’s novel Muertes de Perro (1958), published in English in 1964 as Death as a Way of Life, took an equally ironic look at the Machiavellian shenanigans and struggles for power in a South American dictatorship. “Power,” Ayala declared, “is a terrible thing — but indispensable.”
His writing often depicted inhuman characters who symbolised human rottenness, such as those in El jardín de las delicias (The Garden of Earthly Delights, 1971), a work inspired by Hieronymus Bosch’s painting of the same name. Ayala maintained a gloomy view of human nature, commenting in an interview towards the end of his life: “Technology has progressed, arms . . . but it’s the same barbarity that beats a child to death as drops bombs on hundreds of people or cities. War can be repeated indefinitely; human beings haven’t essentially changed. Bestiality is part of the human condition.”
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Francisco Ayala García-Duarte was born in Granada in 1906. At 14 he moved with his family to Madrid, where five years later he published his first novella, Tragicomedia de un hombre sin espíritu, (The Tragicomedy of a Man with no Spirit). While studying law at Madrid University he worked as a critic for the Revista de Occidente, (The Western Review) a modernist journal founded by the philosopher Jos? Ortega y Gasset.
In 1929 Ayala obtained a law degree and went to study political philosophy and sociology in Berlin. While there, he met his future first wife, the Chilean Etelvina Silva Vargas, whom he married in 1931. The following year he began to work as a law lecturer at the Complutense University, Madrid.
When the Spanish Civil War broke out in July 1936, Ayala was on a lecture tour in Argentina but immediately returned to Spain to offer his services to the Republican Government. The following year he was sent as the Republicans’ diplomatic envoy to Czechoslovakia. A year earlier his father and brother Rafael had been executed by Nationalists in Burgos.
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When the conflict ended in 1939, Ayala was obliged to flee Spain for Argentina, where he taught sociology at the Universidad de la Plata and also founded Realidad (Reality), a literary magazine that published contributions from writers including Borges and Julio Cort?zar. In 1944 Ayala became an Argentine citizen and six years later moved to Puerto Rico. In 1952 his Introducci?n a las ciencias sociales (Introduction to Social Sciences) was published in Spain, the first book of his to be published in his native country since the end of the civil war. In 1957 Ayala moved to North America, teaching Spanish literature at Princeton University and Bryn Mawr College, New York. He lectured before that in Chicago. In 1976, a year after the death of Franco, Ayala returned to Madrid.
In 1984 Ayala was elected a member of the Real Academia Española, making his maiden speech on the topic “The Rhetoric of Journalism”. He wrote more than 50 novels and collections of short stories as well as essays on sociology and the cinema. In 1991 he was awarded the Cervantes Prize, Spain’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Ayala confessed that he had read Don Quixote every year since childhood and that each reading brought forth fresh insights and impressions. In 1998 he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Letters and the following year he was married to the American Hispanist Carolyn Richmond.
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Ayala’s centenary year began with a dinner with King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia of Spain, and was marked by a cycle of seminars, congresses and conferences. But Ayala was tiring of life, comparing himself two years ago to a comedian waiting for the final curtain to fall. He added: “I have lived too long, and intensely and written too much.” He never recovered from a bout of bronchitis last spring but remained to the last mentally alert and regularly updated his Facebook page. His wife and a daughter from his first marriage survive him.
Francisco Ayala, novelist, essayist and critic, was born on March 16, 1906. He died on November 3, 2009, aged 103