The terrible “torment” of Galdos in his last years of life: “Poor, sick and alone”
In the last decade, the program “Save me” has become the king induscutible of television in Spain. Very few people are there in Spain that you have not heard ever of its employees. From Belén Esteban, Kiko Matamoros, passing by Terelu Campos, Kiko Hernáncdez, Chelo García Cortés, Lydia Lozano, Mila Ximenez and Maria Patiño, all much loved as hated by the treatment of news as sensitive as the rescue of Julen, the boy that died trapped some months ago in a well; by the lack of respect with some guests or any fights between teammates.
Few of those who see with good eyes what disparagingly have referred to as the “program of the tale behind”, know now that the tabloids was not always so. That the ancestors of Jesus Mariñas and Karmele Marchante were great writers of the stature of Gustavo Adolfo Becquer, Pedro Antonio de Alarcón and Juan Varela. Writers, novelists and essayists historical whose chronicles of the gossip of high society, for more than a century and a half, were worthy of the admiration of other great intellectuals such as Azorín, Galdós or Emilia Pardo Bazán.
however, even before all of them, there was another journalist that they step into history as the first chronicler of social media in Spanish. That is to say, what we might consider as our first journalist to heart, that we have forgotten, that yes, his prolific work as a novelist and playwright. Your name: Ramon de Navarrete.
“- era”
In 1849, this writer madrid had the wisdom to incorporate in the pages of the newspaper “The times”, of which he was its first director, a space dedicated to the chronicle of society. To do so took advantage of his position as visitor of the most luxurious salons of the court to get information that had never been within the range of the pubelo. The journalist was a regular at the festivities organised by dukes and marquises, which led him to air the dirty linen of the best families of the capital, from their disputes to his infidelities.
Navarrete, who was born in Madrid, 1822, he wrote his chronicles with such elegance and literary quality, which its protagonists not only not annoyed, but, in addition, were becoming their main readers. This made his section the key to the success of this elegant conservative newspaper that came to be the dean of the Spanish press until its demise in 1936 [ query your last number]. Aristocrats, financiers, statesmen, bankers, and other members of the privileged classes rapidly became subscribers… in addition to their victims.
to read their pages end-to-end, always with the intention of stopping with great satisfaction in the pages of Society, not that they were to appear in them. And, taking note of the latest dress or hairstyle of the nobles. “The readers of a newspaper like “The Times” they need to know and comment on seven times a week, dance of the countess, the white handkerchief of the generala, the yellow rose of brilliant the lady of the banker, the suit of the Sandoval, the dominoes white of the unknowns of the opera and the “soirées” of both cachupines with money,” said the writer and poet Eusebio Blasco, in the prologue of “The Crime of Villaviciosa”, a story of Navarrere published in 1883.
What a store of dramas!
According to Blasco, “his chronicles, brought together in volumes, would be the history of our world in Madrid and an array of news curious. How many changes in fortune! What a store of dramas, comedies, and novels! If I were rich, I would offer to Asmodeo, the most famous of the many aliases that signed Navarrete, my fortune for to publish those sixty or eighty volumes of the Chronicles of madrid. Once born, would have no price”.
he was right, because the quality of the chronicles of “Asmodeo”, it was not for less. He was not a mere journalist of “gossip”, but one of the precursors of the realistic novel. A writer with a voice that was in the first row of the literary life of Spanish during the greater part of the NINETEENTH century.
After his death, however, was to become a curious oddity of a bibliography of the that few remember today. His novels were forgotten, their important articles of literary criticism, relegated to a second plane, and his plays have been neglected by scholars of the playwright. It didn’t matter that I had enjoyed a fame out of the ordinary, becoming an institution at the time, worthy to appear in the “Episodes Nacionales” de Benito Pérez Galdós. The writer canary what he described as “the great critic of society”. Also refierió to him Juan de Valera in his novel “Juanita la Larga”, in which he said that was the biggest connoisseur of the aristocracy and its customs.
“Article classroom”
The first “article of classrooms”, by Ramón Navarrete, as it is also known to these chronicles, appeared in issue 25 of “The Times” on the 25th day of April 1849. Did not bear signature or pseudonym, but everyone knew who was the author of that text where he gave detail about the opening of the theater, “home”, organized in the Palace by Queen Elizabeth II.
Since that first chronic, Navarrete had to “be in a thousand occasions to allude to the grief caused by the coqueterías of the promiscuous woman, the abduction of the daughter of the marquis, the scandal occurred in the marriage To***”, he wrote to Eusebio Blasco, in relation to the difficulty of the chroniclers of the classrooms to tell the tale behind the subtlety enough as to not offend.
A skill forgotten today, without a doubt, by some journalists and pundits of the press, rosa, who also admired Emilia Pardo Bazán. The novelist of galicia in the late NINETEENTH century and early TWENTIETH century also wrote about him in the prologue of The “halls of Madrid” (1870), a work of Monte Cristo, the famous chronicler of social the magazine “Blanco y Negro”. “The chronicle of classrooms -said-that, far from being a genre easy, it is fraught with dangers and difficulties and requires a great brilliance of style, finery of diction, erudition, tact, sense of propriety and discernment of people. The chronicler of classrooms is much more skillful by what it leaves unsaid than for what it says. Your rhetoric is the understatement, omission and silence. The chronicler of salons you need to know inside out the history, the background, to the manias of each one of the individuals and the individual who parade between eleven at night and two in the morning by the houses lit and full of people smiling and shaking hands. And that history and that background, after you learn them, you need to do as if you forget and remember only when it matters”
And he continued: “Those who read a chronicle of classrooms and see in it that all the generals are “brave”, all the young ladies “youth beldades”, all soft drinks are “delicate”, all the porcelain of Sévres, and all sockets of the “old Mechelen”, maybe we do not believe that the chronicler does not have eyes or has not ever seen beautiful young women, and lace up authentic. Desengáñense: the chronicler knows well where you tightens the shoe, although it is not more that the effect of the continuous friction and the familiarity with the beautiful, the sumptuous, what a rare and precious thing. Leedle slowly, between the lines, and not it will take you to distinguish between the sincere praise and an enthusiastic supporter of the forced dithyramb”.
