In the autumn of 1924, Josep Pla writes to Francesc Macià. He wants to collaborate in one of the bulletins that he promotes from his Parisian exile. The Estat Català leader is interested, but he has a lot of work to do maintaining the group of young people from the amateur army with whom he intends to promote an insurrection in Catalonia to free it from the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera and proclaim the republic. The letters between the two are found in the Arxiu Nacional de Catalunya.
The man from Empordà visits, together with fellow journalist Eugeni Xammar, the office of the political-military movement in Bois-Colombes, on the outskirts of Paris. He knows his pretensions, but his implication does not go beyond that. At the beginning of November 1926, when Prats de Molló's undertaking of the events failed, he wrote to Joan Estelrich from Leeds. “With Macià, all of you have carried out a wrong policy –he says to the close collaborator of Francesc Cambó–. You have started, all the parties, on the basis that it was something negligible when in fact it was and is the only good thing for this moment: good for propaganda, for action and, if you want smoke, for nonsense. You wouldn't have taken any chances controlling the movement underwater."
And next, he details what in his opinion the Regionalist League would have had to do to instrumentalize the insurrection. “If at the time of the bomb [the start of the operation] you had had the Havas and Le Temps agency in your hands, you would have been able to make real watermarks. If by working in any way your office [Expansió Catalana] has been able to notoriously influence the French press, calculate if everything had been prepared”. The reasoning to the Majorcan journalist follows. “Everyone would have been able to work without the slightest risk, the people of Macià would not produce today the impression that they give of suffocated isolates and the result, which is already good, would have been greater”. He refers to the propagandistic resonance of the arrest on the northern slopes of the Pyrenees of the hundred Macianistas.
“If the abortion in Perpignan has caused so much noise, where would it have gone if those boys had been able to fire four shots? It would have been sensational and in all of Spain there would have been a convulsion of consequences I think optimistically imponderable. And he adds: “You have to know that the Comintern would have given him money if Macià had taken powers from the other Catalan nuclei of opinion. With these powers, America, on the other hand, would have been more responsive. Everyone has believed that Macià would not do anything and everyone has been wrong”.
The unknown letter, which helps to clarify the game between Catalans during the primorriverist dictatorship, is collected in Joan Estelrich - Josep Pla. Journalism and freedom. Cards 1920-1950. Volume published by the Editorial Destino, the result of collaboration with the Empordà chair at the University of Girona and the collection of the former at the Biblioteca de Catalunya. Sílvia Coll-Vinent, responsible for the edition, places in a very illuminating introduction the context of the hundred letters that reviews the trajectory and the relationship of these two generation companions.
Estelrich is the great champion of Plan before the patronage of Francesc Cambó. Enmity with Antoni Rovira and Virgili and, as a consequence, with the closed doors of La Publicitat, Palafrugell ended up becoming an essential column in La Veu de Catalunya in the 1930s and, like Estelrich, bishop of Expansió Catalana, the office of internationalization of Catalanism. Both recognize themselves as employees of the leader of the League and that they owe "the bourgeois". They are pure conservatives, literate, well-travelled and passionate about Mallorca.
At the end of the cross correspondence, the professor of Catalan literature at Ramon Llull University serves an unpublished text in which Estelrich analyzes the literary Pla. She says of him that he manages to humanize a landscape and capture living types, but that he is not good at intrigue, nor does he have the gift of invention. He can't be a good novelist, she concludes. After the Civil War, the relationship cools. For Pla, the intellectual and politician from Felanitx has "the great condition of the captains of work, giving a lot of performance for little price".
Estelrich collaborated with the magazine Destino from March 1946. There he met up again with Pla, who had been writing since February 1940. Also from the collaboration with his professorship and with the oceanic project of digitalization of all its articles that it promotes, Xavier Febrés presents Calendar without dates, also in the Editorial Destino. A selection of 52 columns from among those written every week under this title until 1980. Articles never before republished in their original version.
In them, according to the precise initial study of the Planian expert, localism and cosmopolitanism alternate with "a style in terms of the Castilian language model plagued with Catalan twists with no intention of disguising it". Written from the militancy of wanting to do it in Catalan, even when they couldn't. And refusing that he could be classified as a bilingual writer. "Bilingualism is not an incident," said Pla in one of his articles, "but a tragedy."
The volume covers the change of time, the evolution of the regime, the trips –to Ceret, in an oil tanker–, the growing role of women, or explains how to write a good article, while taking advantage of the loopholes that censorship allows. And also the disenchantment, from 1975, after the founder, Josep Vergés, sold the magazine. The new owner, as he stated in Notes del capvesprol, was “a conceited man with great political ambition named Jordi Pujol, from the Catalan Bank. This gentleman, very rich, who first advocated for this country the implantation of Swedish socialism – in this country the Swedes are few – and later has shown to have an excessive and public ambition, typical of the typical ignorant politician”.
Baltasar Porcel, who acted as director, acted as a firewall. Pla intended to publish articles in favor of the Greek colonels and the Portuguese dictator Oliveira Salazar. Then, the authoritarian solutions that Cambó had dreamed of were no longer relevant. Rereading his articles today, however, is not an exercise in archaeology. On the contrary, says Febrés, “it constitutes the palpitating discovery of a living style in its original, youthful, jet-like form”.
