Delibes, must know

He is a weird mixture between Professor and peasant, half refined, half natural whose calm voice can explode in a laughter, great communicator and a sad man dressed with a jacket, corduroy trousers and boots, not keen on watching TV or having debates, nowadays he would be something like a guerrilla member a resistance. He is, no doubt, a fellow from other time.

[…] He is, in a way, an outsider, a sniper who has one foot in his class while he kicks it with the other. Some would have loved that he kicked that class with both feet. Linked to the Upper-middle class of Valladolid because of his family ties, Commerce Professor, journalist, director and counselor of El Norte de Castilla, father of seven, faithful until his death to his wife, their “rupture” is not theatrical nor definitive. He is a hunter of minor scale. His safaris last only for one day. At night he likes having his feet wrapped up in his sleepers and read with the warmth of a nice fire in his home of Paseo Zorrilla. He loves routine. He always stays at the same hotel when he travels to another city and if possible he asks to sleep in the same bed each time. He claims that being faithful in him has no great value. But he says all this with some distress by some means. Firmly settled in his city, his family, his friends, in the newspaper he is an intimately displaced. The world that he graps is in a horizontal sense, the province towns and that exotic world that starts where interstate roads end. In a vertical sense he has the upper-middle class and the peasant class. He describes the daily drama of the province towns and the archeological of the rural means.

Madrid, Magisterio Español, 1971, pp. 16-18.

Those years were as matter of fact, a period of time when we had to pay attention to the subjects, verbs and predicates, but we also ha d to learn how to enphasize, keep silent and deal throughout the language in some areas of the newspaper […].

“The room of the draftsman” received that name because in previous years it was in this room where the draftsmen of the newspaper udes to work, and from those years there were remainings of a big old desk and a cork panel that afterwards became half a notice board and half a panel to pin there cut outs and interesting things. At the back there was a sort of bookshelf which one door could be bent over and could be used a a desk to, ther was where Delibes installed himself and made his working place when he abandoned his Manager office: that became, as I like to call it, his grammar trench. There everything could be told as if it was a novel: the plot and the characters were always fighting for supremacy and then the eternal dilemma of how to say or not to say; saying not to say, how to insinuate without giving the feelling that it was an insinuation and how to spin round and round without ever landing but giving the sensation that you were touching the ground, or sometimes simply hit the bullseye. There was really nothing more stupid that the rules of a prining house- it doesn´t matter the name that it has- but maybe there nothing better than that to really learn what language means and no one better than a writer to teach that sometimes you can target one objective and hit a completely differnet one and it still will be real.

El Urogallo, 73 (junio 1992), p. 48.

Delibes who is a highly methodical man, had the sense of humor during half a century to note down in several samll note books, with lovely hand writing all the details about his hunting excursions, in those note books there no date before 1949, quite surely because his excursions were few. Also is quite likely that the intensive preparation for the public examinations for the post of professor of business law, had something to do with the absence of notes about his very few hunting excursions as well as his incipient relationship with Ángeles, his wedding and the birth of his first few children.

Once again the unpublished notes of his note books, and also indirectly, the testimony of Lorenzo, the main character in Diario de un cazador (sometimes it was said that Lorenzo is an alter ego of Delibes), reveal that his fondness to hunting had come back during the following decade. Since then his writing about fishing and hunting kept on naturally flowing from his feather pen to conform these important collection of pages […] that collects eight booksand two minor written works that appear between 1963 and 1996. […] These works analyse the hunting world from different perspectives from the motivation of the hunting act to the regulations that control its practice and the analysis of its different modalities to the daily experiences of the author- and that when it comes to its creation, as Delibes himself has admted, mean for its spontaneity, a liberation of the rest of conditions that rule the rest of his literary production, for this reason the author preferred to calle himself “ a hunter that writes” more than a writer that hunts.

Barcelona, Destino-Círculo de Lectores, 2009, pp. X-XI

It is no secret that the type of hunting that Delibes loves the most is the red partridge hunting, the real “queen” catch and number one objective of our Sunday excursions. […] The rest of catches that we have a look at the fields are mere complements. […] The same accidental motivation (as rabbits and hares) have in our catches a noble piece such as chocha […]

To this and the quails in summer id¡s what Delibes limits his hunting practice whose hunting preferences […] coincide with those of the modest hunters of Catilla. Once or twice I heard to some members of the hunting club Alcyón, to which Miguel Delibes was part since 1965, “¡How great are his tales about hunting but such a few ways of hunting he knows about!”. The truth is that indeed he knew about more hunting modalitites, but he only felt really captivated by the primitive forms of hunting, in which the hunter mst do everything, search the catch, wake it up, shoot it and retrieve it. A type of hunting in which shooting the shotgun and retrieving some bird requires to get exhausted and be precise with an stratergie in which a whole group takes part. A type of hunting, on the other hand, that does not end with the shot since retrieving the kill, examining it and hang it on your hanger was part of the hunter´s pleasures to which he will not give up or leave to the hands of an assistant. And a type of hunting that considers the final but no leat important part the victory of seeing the kill transformed into delicious culinary dish.

Barcelona, Destino-Círculo de Lectores, 2009, pp. XIII-XV.

At the age of seventy two and with half a hundred catches on the fields, the writer starts looking back. He is aware of this Lot´s complex and the consequences that it means and that he wants to deal with a sense of humor in El ultimo coto. “The episode of the story about lot makes sense for me if I think about the similarities with lumbago. I also became a salt statue last Thursday when I finished having a bath and I tried to rescue a sock that was lying on the floor”.

This tendency to melancholic revision of events could be dramatic for his depressive and pessimist ways if it wasn´t compensated by his long urban walks and, for him exhausting, hunting seasons. Even if some years ago his legs became alittle more of a “middle class” kind of legs, he continued chasing red partridges along the fields of Castilla. The title of his most recent book-El ultimo coto– makes inevitable reffernece to a farewell. I t won´t be me who really belives that. I think the Hunter will dies with his boots on. In fact, between the date of the Foreword- in which he announces his hunting retirement- and the date of his latest short story with the totle “La despedida” something like five years have gone by: from 1986 to 1991. And he keeps on going out on the search of whatever he finds, wood pidgeons or fine meat quails…For Delibes his physical decline coincides with the extinction of the wild partridge, a sign of worse and more severe declines.

The fact is that if Delibes decided to end seventy years of hunting adventures it wouls also mean the end of that series of precise writing, beautiful, and classical books which lastest title is El ultimo coto, a highlight piece of work that started in the form of a novel with Diario de un cazador and in for of a chronicle with La caza de la perdiz roja. (About a thousand pages which would be enough to conside Delibes an exceptional writer.)

Winter text in which are decribed sleepy landscapes and wet foggy early hours, text with happy feelings so breve as the rays of sun light that find their way throughout the castillian wastelands or the happiness of a good catch. “I caught for the comunity satchel five red partridges, one hare and a rabbit… Moral of the story: I still can catch them. Which doesn´t mean that I kill all the partridges I shoot. Yesterday I spooked the ones that came on my way, only that, and those which flew like lightening passing me by I couldn´t even smell them. Becoming old has its prove in those kind of things”.

Barcelona, Destino, 1993, pp. 11-13.

For me the acceptance of the hunting titles of Delibes has always caught my attention.[…] In my case[…] hunting is an activity that is not appealing at all, I could even dare to say that the only feeling that I have towards a “so called” sport is rejection. Nevertheless I have read all those works form Delibes with attention and fondness. I was never completely convinced by the preservation concepts that Delibes claimed in favor of hunting, but in his books where he chases red partridges, rabbits and hares are in the group of book that I sometimes re-read. Leaving aside the hunting topic there must be thus other aspects that make these books attractive.
In the first palce I think, we fell attracted to the sincere and self confessional tone of a man that has lived in an alert way the unexpected events of our time. He offers cold, aseptic and hyperbolic stories […] of the hunting practice and are often interwoven with the self experiences, emotions and fellings of the narrator provoked by the landscape or an anecdote. Without any tenderness the human being that the hunter hides can be seen in these stories. That is why he was ver y rght when he defined himself as a hunter that writes. It seems that he is not creating literature, but literature is there in all his stories with his simple way of saying things […]

The reason why these stories catch us, independently of the topics, comes from the fact that this man from Valladolid offers a clean, clear, rich, expressive and simple language with which he says many things […], a common language […] that the writer rescues […] because he is keen on the precise and exact language and giving things their correspondant name.

[…] That affection and simplicity so typical of Delibes, a pure and alive language that he uses to construct pilots of his books and testimonial chronicles. All those aspects only serve to a precise conception of Literature as a form of communication and a way of directly transmiting a personal experience. And there, I think, it is the success of his lietarture, saying things in a close and loving way that readers accept as an authentic way of expressing real life experiences.

Premio Cervantes 1993. Diputación de Valladolid-Fundación Municipal de Cultura, 1995, pp. 42-43.

When I read “Los santos inocentes” I was shocked by the strenght and the virtue of Miguel Delibes, on the other hand I find those characteristics frequent in other Spanish writers from the fifties: their extraordinary listening skills… They are writers who listened in a wonderful way to the people in bars, on the streets, on the fields, and when they make the characters of their novels speak, we can immediately recognize them, they are plausible and authentic characters…

El País Dominical 13. 05. 1984.

Madrid, Ministerio de Cultura, 1994, p. 259.