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Interview
2 April 2017 2.00 h

Agustí Pons

'The aim is to build a life, not research'

One of Catalonia's most experienced biographers, Pons has written the lives of Joan Triadú, Pere Calders, Maria Aurèlia Capmany, Nèstor Luján, Raimon Noguera and Salvador Espriu.

How did you ap­proach your first bi­og­ra­phy?
It was com­mis­sioned by Joan Triadú's es­tate and the ex­pe­ri­ence went so well that I thought I would do the same with Pere Calders. Then came Maria Aurèlia Cap­many, fol­lowed by Nèstor Luján, Rai­mon Noguera and fi­nally Sal­vador Es­priu. They are all bi­ogra­phies I wanted to do be­cause they were peo­ple from the gen­er­a­tions im­me­di­ately be­fore mine, and who I owe a great deal.
What is the hard­est thing about telling a life story?
Find­ing the main thread. I am a jour­nal­ist, not a scholar. One of my mas­ters is Ste­fan Zweig: he al­ways finds a thread that seems true to the reader. We can­not call it a real thread be­cause no mat­ter how close you want to get to the sub­ject, a bi­og­ra­phy is al­ways just an ap­prox­i­ma­tion, as peo­ple's lives are so com­plex. I de­fend the work of good bi­og­ra­phers, who has to mas­ter his­tory, lit­er­a­ture, so­ci­ol­ogy, psy­chol­ogy, with­out for­get­ting nar­ra­tive tech­niques.
What is your model, is it more sci­en­tific or lit­er­ary?
A prob­lem with bi­og­ra­phy is that there are no mod­els. At least that is what I think from the crit­i­cisms I have re­ceived, es­pe­cially from aca­d­e­mics. In the uni­ver­sity, bi­og­ra­phy is seen as re­search, which is not ex­actly what it is. Bi­og­ra­phy is putting the work of a fig­ure within reach of the reader, and that some­times re­quires re­search, and in other cases not. Re­search is not the main aim; it is to build a life.
So you don't re­search?
For the bi­og­ra­phy of Néstor Luján I had to do a lot be­cause many of his ar­ti­cles had not been pub­lished. In the book I focus on what he was writ­ing, un­like in the bi­og­ra­phy I did of Sal­vador Es­priu, whose com­plete works had been pub­lished in 10 vol­umes, as well as there being hun­dreds of stud­ies. In that case, more than find­ing some­thing new, it was about bring­ing his con­tri­bu­tions to­gether and put it within the reader's reach. Then it was crit­i­cised for not of­fer­ing any­thing new. The reader comes first, mean­ing we must in­clude every­thing that will help them to un­der­stand the sub­ject's life.
There must also be a process of self-cen­sor­ship.
This is the prob­lem I have found. I would have liked, for ex­am­ple, if cer­tain sec­tors of the aca­d­e­mic world had helped me, to see where the lim­its are. My con­clu­sion is that I have to put in all the sub­stan­tial data so as to bet­ter un­der­stand the sub­ject.But what are they? On the other hand, a bi­og­ra­pher, in a small coun­try, has to make sure that when he writes a bi­og­ra­phy he will be able to do an­other one... ob­vi­ously you have to step care­fully.A lot can be said, even if the reader does not see it at first. The proof is that I have had some prob­lems with more than one bi­og­ra­phy.
Is it a risky genre?
To­tally. More­over, the bi­og­ra­pher has to do every­thing: find spon­sors, a pub­lisher, re­solve legal mat­ters; it is tough work and not prof­itable. The coun­try needs to be aware that writ­ing a bi­og­ra­phy is not cheap if you want first rate work, like the bi­ogra­phies of Paul Pre­ston.
What about sources?
Oral tes­ti­mony was fash­ion­able, but if you don't know what you want from wit­nesses it can be a waste of time. It is not their fault; we all have a se­lec­tive mem­ory. I have often found after pub­lish­ing a bi­og­ra­phy that peo­ple tell me: “It wasn't ex­actly like that.” There are al­ways wit­nesses to pro­vide cor­rob­o­ra­tion, but they change their opin­ion. There are al­ways as­pects that can be re­vised but you can't put every­thing in a bi­og­ra­phy, but rather offer co­her­ent in­for­ma­tion about the life and work of the sub­ject.
Will you write more bi­ogra­phies?
I don't have any plans to write any more bi­ogra­phies. In Sep­tem­ber I will be bring­ing out a book on the meet­ing of Lenin, Joyce and Tris­tan Tzara in Zurich in 1917. So far there have only been aca­d­e­mic stud­ies and what I have done is look at the every­day lives of these three peo­ple who turned in­tel­lec­tual Eu­rope up­side down.
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