COINCIDENTALLY, CATALAN

At the tail end of last month I made the final corrections to a book of mine about the father I never knew (because I hadn’t been born yet). He died back in 1994, but it wasn’t until 17 years later, after my mother’s death and the consequent obligation to clear everything out of the family flat, that I ran across a series of ten diaries which Dad had kept between the ages of seventeen and twenty-eight, which would end up providing much of the material for the aforesaid book.

My father was not an easy man: he suffered from fluctuating moods in one of which he could be affable and funny only to become devastatingly insulting in the following one. The result was to leave the people he loved - myself included - in a state of confusion that in my case turned into a total lack of self-confidence as soon as I hit adolescence: you can only be told so many times that you’re a ’perishing disappointment’, that deep inside you have ’a little piece of shit’ - etc. - before your mental carapace starts to crack; in my case, so wide that it gave rise to a severe case of OCD (I’m much better now, but still need to take the pills). I mention this because when I was in treatment my parents were invited to a meeting with the psychologist and myself.

A year earlier, for personal reasons, I had taught myself Catalan, at a time when hardly anyone in Europe had heard of the language, much less heard it. I forget how this subject came up, but when it did Dad boomed that my having learnt Catalan was a clear sign that I was mentally unstable, or words to that effect: a comment I never forgot.

After reading the diaries, I moved on to Dad’s three published novels, which I hadn’t read but knew were semi-autobiographical, hoping they would give me more clues about him. The first one, ’Contend No More ’came out in 1958 and tells the story of a love affair between a hospital administrator and a beautiful woman who ends up getting bored with him. They separate, and the administrator is left floundering in an emotional limbo, and it is while reflecting on this state of affairs that he comes out with a sentence that would have made my eyes pop out of their sockets if that were physically possible, which it isn’t: ’One ought, I told myself, to be philosophical, one ought to become absorbed in something, one ought to collect stamps or learn Catalan…’Learn Catalan! Written in 1958! So Dad’s fictional character and therefore Dad himself had heard of this language, even back then, when Franco’s regime was doing its level best to sweep it under the carpet and then stomp on it. So how on earth, 22 years later, could Dad have said my learning it was a sure sign I was a sandwich short of a picnic?

A couple of years afterwards, when some Catalans I knew visited my parents and I did the translating, Dad admitted that Catalan could be a useful language (and added, visibly impressed, that it was obvious I had made myself fluent in it). Indeed, it has proved very useful indeed: my new book, written in English by an Englishman about an Englishman and his English times, was rejected out of hand by English publishers, but will appear in print for the first time in a magnificent Catalan translation (by the writer and translator Jordi Dausà).

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