Youth Llorenç Villalonga, unlike his two brothers —Guillem and Miquel— did not want to follow a military career like his father, Miquel Villalonga Muntaner. He studied Medicine, his initial call inherited from his mother’s Minorcan family (Joana Pons Marquès, from Maó). 

Group of students at the hall of residence of the University  of Zaragoza. Llorenç Villalonga is the first one sitting at left.

During the first period (1924-1939) he was a snobbish, restless, curious young man attracted by European vanguards. In his formation the work of Anatole France, Voltaire, Freud, Ortega y Gasset and the Spanish Generation of 98 were crucial. In 1925 he discovered Marcel Proust, who will be of great importance for his activity as a novelist. He debutated as a writer with Mort de dama (1931) (The death of a Lady), prologized by Gabriel Alomar, supposing a colossal entry in the literary world.

But he received adverse reviews from Majorca's regionalist critics, especially Miquel Ferrà and Antoni Salvà, who felt insulted by his satire of the Escola Mallorquina (Majorcan School), represented by the poetess Aina Cohen and the weekly publication Bé hem dinat.

Mort de Dama

It continues the literary direction of Brisas, a cosmopolitan magazine published in Palma between 1934 and 1936. Villalonga published there 5 short stories, the play Silvia Ocampo (1935) and the first parts of Madame Dillon, a novel published in 1937 in an author's edition. These two works, as well as Fedra (1932) (Phaedra), were inspired on the one year sentimental relationship between Llorenç Villalonga and the Cuban poetess Emilia Bernal.

These three books reflect the difference of age and formation. This justifies Jaume Vidal Alcover’s designation "Fedra’s cycle". 

His anti-catalanism took him to write in Spanish, but the success of Bearn, wrote in Catalan, led him to continue his work in his native language. All Spanish works translated by him into Majorca’s Catalan suffered enormous changes with this process.

The most interesting aspect of the Fedra’s Cicle is the panoramic vision of tourism in Majorca before the Civil War. During the 30’s, several luxurious hotels were inaugurated —Hotel Formentor, the materialized dream of Adán Diehl, is a paradigmatic example of it— and Gènova, Bonanova and El Terreno, three Palma suburbs, became a foreign colony, whose inhabitants had a kind of life and ways very different from the Majorcan ones. In Vienna and London, Freud diagnosed the neurosis as a symptom of western civilization’s decomposition. The tourists who arrived during this period, with their complex human problems, were an alternative to the conservative and Leviticus Majorcan society.

Villalonga understands the lifestyle of these new visitors and even has sentimental or friendly relationships with some of its most relevant members. In 1933, the beginning of Hitler’s age, represented a new diaspora and several intellectuals, artists and other professionals arrived to Majorca. Socializing with these people meant for Villalonga some changes in his work, both as a journalist and writer. 

Brisas was the meeting point of this European fauna, easy reflected in Villalonga’s books. With Eva Tay, a Centre-European dancer, the author lives wild years of profligacy. Near them, in the city by night, there are figurants and masquerades: Natasha Rambova, Rodolfo Valentino’s widow; Werner Schulz, an illustrated and also an important catalanophyl; the German baroness Sybille von Kasskel, a creative photographer who wants to liberate herself; Arthur E. Middlehurst, a vanguard architect who, with Francesc Casas, introduced rational architecture in Majorca; Madame Louise Albert Lasard, a German expressionist painter who was Rainer Maria Rilke’s beloved; Eda Urbani, whose photographs fill the pages of Brisas; Enriqueta Albéniz, the refined and cultivated daughter of the well-known composer; the Jacob brothers, Pazzis and Pere Sureda Montaner, etc.

Most of them participate in social gatherings at doctors Vicente and Virgilio Peñaranda’s house, representants of Majorca’s illustrated bourgeoisie, open minded, cosmopolitan and politically leftist. They all march, transformed by the magical and mythical literary process, throughout the large gallery of characters, who, by the hand of Llorenç Villalonga, talk about an epoch, a culture and a land. This was his scripture’s meaning, before Europe’s commotion due to the enraged radicalism which, during ten years, damaged the soft curtain of our western civilization.

Corner of the library at the Circulo where Joaquim Verdaguer organized his social gatherings

The military revolution in July 1936, when Villalonga was in Majorca, made him join the Falange Española, the extreme right political party created by José Antonio Primo de Rivera. By then, in his articles and radio conferences he defends the Fascist ideology. When the Civil War started, he got married to a far away relative, rich and conscious, Maria Teresa Gelabert Gelabert, from Binissalem. This union —a convenience marriage— represents the end of his youth. He leaves behind his pseudonym "Dhey", and all his scandalous actions, he leaves the cocktail parties, the swimming pools and the great parties at the foreign colony. After war was over, he started a deep meditation on all of it. There is no longer satire and the author starts working on an elegy to past times.

Villalonga’s office, in Can Sabater

The ending of Civil War meant to Llorenç Villalonga the beginning of a silent period. He is staying with his brother Miquel, who returned ill from the north front and he lives, in Bunyola, the quotidie morior written on the top of his letters. Miquel represents the intellectual winner, addicted to the laws of the government, a literary and journalistic prestigious man. He was a great friend of Juan Aparicio, the right hand of Franco in matters of culture, the founder of four important publications during the post-war period: La Estafeta Literaria, El Español, Fantasía and Garcilaso. Aparicio wanted to regain Llorenç Villalonga for Spanish literature, although he knew well the liberal ideals of the author of Madame Dillon, a work which could not be reprinted during the 40’s in spite of all Aparicio’s intents. The few colaborations in El Español (10 articles between 1942 and 1947, some of them remakes of previously published works), show until what point Llorenç Villalonga’s personality was not enthusiastic about the new political situation.

After World War II, more precisely from 1947 on, he starts publishing again, now in the newspaper Baleares, of Palma, an official journal of the government resulting from the fusion between El Día and Falange. Returns "Dhey", his pseudonym, but now the contents of his articles is different. Now Dhey sees two post-wars, the post-civil war and the post-world war. He observes the destruction of his world and longs for peace and harmony. Villalonga feels inside himself the crisis of modern western civilization.

Here a second period begins in his career (1939-1961), the period of remembrance and regret. Memory becomes the central point of his works. He uses all his imagination to write a memory book. He follows Proust’s model, which only considers as paradise the lost paradises.

In 1940 he starts writing a few short theatrical pieces —or spoken stories— published later as Desbarats (Nonsense). Here two literary characters were born, two characters based upon himself and his wife, Teresa, who represent the first sketch of the lords of Bearn, characters of Villalonga’s chef d’oeuvre. Initially, the couple is called Minos and Amaranta, later Tonet and Maria Antònia (at La novel·la de Palmira) and, finally, they are don Toni and dona Maria Antònia, from Bearn o la sala de les nines (Bearn or the doll’s room). This mythologisation process, and the recreation of the natural landscape of Alaró and Bunyola, with references to the Serra de Tramuntana and human aspects from Binissalem —all of them towns at Majorca’s region Raiguer— are the groundwork of Bearn’s myth.

In the 50’s, Villalonga kept strong relationships with the partisans of catalanism in Majorca: Manuel Sanchis Guarner and some poets, especially Llorenç Moyà, Jaume Vidal Alcover and Josep M. Llompart. Villalonga returns to literature with La novel·la de Palmira (Palmira’s Novel) (1952), written in Catalan. This is particularly important. Sanchis Guarner, a man persecuted by franquism after his participation in the Civil War, is essential to Villalonga’s return to literature written in Majorca’s Catalan. But the second edition, printed in Barcelone, of Mort de dama (1954) caused a big problem between Villalonga and the style correctors from Catalonia. The moment was not at all inclined to the dialectal varieties of Catalan which Villalonga considered essentially enriching for the language. When he saw his own novel written in a language in which he could not recognize himself and his way of writing, he felt strongly irritated —as he used to feel in this kind of situations— and changed radically his linguistic ideology.

At that moment Bearn was not finish, he still had two more chapters to write. The original novel had been written in Catalan between 1952 and 1954. After the episode with the correctors from Barcelona, he decided to write it all again in Spanish, moved by impetuous anger. The novel participated in two literary contests, the Nadal Prize and the City of Barcelona Award and, published in 1956, it was not understood by both critics and readers. This first version was prologized by Camilo José Cela, with a "Parabolic Prologue" which led Villalonga to write two other prologues to show his dissidence from it. The matter was that Cela had said that Villalonga "is probably jew". Once again our author shows us his ambivalence, ambiguity and contradiction, three constant distinctive traits of his personality.

Later, in the Catalan version of 1961, Bearn was awarded with the Critics Prize 1963 and in an inquiry made by the magazine Serra d’Or it was considered the second best post-war novel; the first one was La plaça del Diamant by Mercè Rodoreda.

Llorenç Villalonga, looking forward, besides Joan Bonet. Gafim at left. Dinner with the members of the jury of the City of Palma Award (1961)

The couple Toni and Maria Antònia from Bearn had a long and prosperous life in Villalonga’s work, especially in the third period books, written during the 60’s and 70’s. These last works are strongly essayistic, a kind of joining point between Bearn’s myth and his critical papers on contemporary society. But now these characters act in a drama which has nothing to do with the real intention for what they have been created for.

Fragment from Bearn’s manuscript, in Catalan

This third period goes from 1961 to 1975, year in which ends his activity. During these years he publishes some important autobiographical works as well as the novels from the Flo la Vigne’s Cicle or Lulu’s Cicle, not as accomplished as the first ones.

We shall stand out L’àngel rebel (The Rebel Angel) (1961), Falses memòries de Salvador Orlan (False Memories of Salvador Orlan) (1967), Les Fures (The Ferrets) (1967) and, the most important, El misantrop (The Mysanthrop) (1972), in which he reconstructs his years as a medical student at the University of Zaragoza, with his group of friends from the Pais Basco, Navarra and La Rioja.

In Falses memòries..., when El misantrop is almost unknown by most readers —who remembers some articles and narrations published in the 20’s in El Día?—, he says: «two years at Lerma Real [Zaragoza during his student years] are the most intense ones in my whole life, in spite I did not study a line. It is not all Lerna’s merit, it was especially all the comical or serious or ingenuous characters surrounding me, most of them from the Pais Basco or Navarra. There was also the hall of residence, placed in an old park at the University, and the channel, where we used to row all afternoons...» He also remarks: «In El Misantrop I wanted to describe a small world, Alcaloide de les Espanyes, where so many young destinies are stirred together» 

Photograph: Toni Catany

El misantrop (1972) was written between 1958 and 1960, and in that moment Villalonga felt an attraction towards autobiographical novel. His anguish for not having any children and the great fond for the young writer Baltasar Porcel made him restate his literary life and his own biographical process. Les Fures (The Ferrets) (1967), Falses memòries de Salvador Orlan (1967) and, in a certain way, La "Virreyna" (The Vice-queen) (1969), are good examples of this aspect. Some time after, with Lulu’s Cicle or Flo la Vigne’s Cicle, he entered a critical period of creation, facing the technological process of our society, a consumption society. Villalonga turns back in some way to his first phase using the satire as a metaphor of the crisis and fall of western civilization.

All the works of Flo la Vigne’s Cicle are a kind of tribute and satire to Baltasar Porcel and show a new face, integrated and apocalyptical, of Villalonga’s personality. La gran batuda (The great round-up) (1968), La Lulú o la princesa que somreia a totes les conjuntures (Lulu or the Princess who smiled to all conjunctures) (1970) and Lulú regina (1972) show a regression in his ideals, a kind of thinking against modernity. He criticizes industrialization, the machine, consumption.

At the end of his literary trajectory, he will obtain a great success with Andrea Víctrix, a futuristic work influenced by Aldous Huxley, and Un estiu a Mallorca (A summer in Majorca) (1975), a narrative version of Silvia Ocampo. These two works close brightly his activity.