Francisco Ayala, novelist and literary scholar

Published on Monday 23 November 2009 21:35

Born: 16 March, 1906, in Granada, Spain. Died: 3 November, 2009, in Madrid, aged 103.

FRANCISCO Ayala was an eminent Spanish novelist whose work explored societies in which there is much despotism and little benevolence.

Considered one of 20th-century Spain's most distinguished intellectuals, Ayala was routinely mentioned as a contender for the Nobel Prize in literature. Besides being a novelist, he was a poet, critic, essayist, lawyer and academic sociologist. Much of his work was banned in Spain during the Franco era, years Ayala spent in exile, teaching in the United States and elsewhere.

Among many laurels, Ayala was awarded the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's highest literary honour, in 1991. In 1998 he received the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature. Often described as the Spanish Nobel Prize, it honours world-class achievements in a range of fields.

Though Ayala wrote close to 100 books, his work is little known outside the Spanish-speaking world. Much of it, fiction and non-fiction, is concerned with examinations of abuse of power, the nature of morality and the often irreconcilable tension in societies between the needs of the individual and those of the collective.

Only a few of his books have been published in English translation. Among them is Death as a Way of Life (Macmillan, 1964; translated by Joan MacLean), originally published in Spanish in 1958 as Muertes de Perro – literally, Deaths of a Dog. An ironic satire, the novel is set in a fictionalised Latin American nation ruled by a dictator widely assumed to be modelled on Juan Pern, the former Argentine president.

Another title, Usurpers (Schocken, 1987; translated by Carolyn Richmond), first appeared in 1949 as Los Usurpadores. A collection of short stories, it explores the lives of people forced to submit to the will of others. Among the book's best-known stories is El Hechizado (The Bewitched). A Kafkaesque allegory, it centres on a man's urgent petition for aid from King Carlos II, the late 17th-century Spanish monarch, portrayed by Ayala as a drooling mental defective. No aid is forthcoming, nor, the story makes clear, will it ever be.

Ayala's other works in Spanish include La Cabeza del Cordero (The Lamb's Head), a story collection first published in 1949, and a memoir, Recuerdos y Olvidos (Remembrances and Forgotten Things), published most recently in 2006, when he was 100. He also wrote non-fiction books on law and sociology as well as volumes of film and literary criticism.

Francisco Ayala Garca-Duarte was born in Granada in 1906. He began writing poetry as a boy, and by the age of 19, in 1925, he had published his first novel, Tragicomedia de un Hombre sin Espritu (Tragicomedy of a Man Without Spirit).

He received a doctoral degree in law from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid in the early 1930s and later joined the faculty there.

After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Ayala's father, a mid-level bureaucrat in Burgos, in northern Spain, was jailed by Franco's forces, along with one of Francisco's brothers. Both were later executed.

During the civil war Francisco Ayala held several high-level posts in the Republican government and represented it as a diplomat in Prague. After the government fell to Franco's forces in 1939 he went into exile, first in Argentina, then in Puerto Rico and, starting in the 1950s, on the United States mainland.

In the years that followed, Ayala taught at a series of colleges and universities in the US, among them Princeton, Rutgers, Bryn Mawr, New York University, Brooklyn College and the University of Chicago. He resettled in Spain permanently in 1978.

In an interview in 2006, Ayala reflected on his long, eventful career as an observer of social derangement.

"It's not often someone witnesses a century of life, and especially with a conscience more or less alert," he said. "This is a privilege which nature has bestowed on me."

Ayala's first wife, Etelvina Silva Vargas, died before him. He is survived by their daughter, his second wife, Carolyn Richmond, a scholar of Spanish literature and the translator of Usurpers, one grandchild and three great-grandchildren.