After a researcher has found the unpublished original of The hive that Cela sent to the censorship in 1946, as elDiario.es has exclusively revealed, the Camilo José Cela Foundation celebrates the “important discovery” and emphasizes that in the institution “all this news is received with joy.” This is what its director, Covadonga Rodríguez del Corral, tells this newspaper, who celebrates having the “complete file” of the work and having 80 years later with the “reference of what the writer thinks about how his novel has been censored or what scholars can think about having reality written.”
Rodríguez del Corral highlights that this discovery is very relevant “within the gestation” of the work and “from the point of view of the writer”, although he points out that “it does not change the importance” that it already had. The hive nor its “historical reality”: “What changes is the point of view of the investigation and, above all, the point of view of post-war Spain, since there will be a complete file of how this censorship passed.”
From the Camino José Cela Foundation they point out that this discovery, which means reaching the original and until now unpublished version of what ended up being the Nobel Prize's crowning work, as it was written in 1945 to be published, “definitively completes” a process that the daughter of the French Hispanist Nöel Salomon already started by donating in 2014 to the National Library a manuscript that Cela had bequeathed to her father. With this material, which still did not contain the complete novel, the Royal Academy of Language promoted a special edition of The hive in 2016. It is now that the entire 100 pages, without jumps or interruptions, of Cela's original text are known, just as he presented it to the censors after Christmas 1946.
The copy in France that was not the original version either
Rodríguez del Corral explains to elDiario.es that the Foundation keeps the manuscripts of Cela's 14 novels in the sense of what the author considered his manuscripts to be: from the author's first version written in pen, which is sometimes the only one that exists, and, in other cases such as The hiveeven the typewritten copies that Cela created with people around him. These typewritten copies were corrected and reworked until the final version was reached, which was sent to the printer and publishers.
However, the director of the Camino José Cela Foundation confirms that, with The hivebetween the first manuscript and the second version they always understood that something was missing. “Not even the great scholars of Camilo José Cela's work, such as Fernando Ugarte or Adolfo Sotelo from the University of Barcelona, understood it,” says Covadonga Rodríguez del Corral. When the leaves of Nöel Salomon's manuscript appeared, they considered it to be the “missing link in the history of The hive”.
These parts of Cela's work motivated a “qualitative leap in the world of research,” according to Rodríguez del Corral, since sexual connotations and deletions of large paragraphs were observed, which led to a relevant “preliminary study on the importance of that manuscript.” “It has nothing to do with The hive end. The censorship was so cruel that the novel practically had to be rewritten,” adds the director, who explains that it was striking that something as important as the copy presented to the censorship appeared in France and was not in the Foundation, where all of her life's work is kept.
The original material appears 80 years later
Now, everything changes with the appearance of the original material that includes some notes by Cela himself as a prologue and recommendations from authors of the time, such as Dámaso Alonso, Pío Baroja or Leopoldo Panero. The novel is made up of a total of 100 pages, which, in reality, were 98 because, on page 83, Cela points out in the upper right margin that corresponds to pages 83, 84 and 85. The regime crossed out many more, but 28 gives them as an example of a work that is “frankly immoral and sometimes pornographic and sometimes irreverent.” It is more than a quarter of the original text that served as the basis for the masterpiece of Camilo José Cela, who 44 years after the diagnosis of censorship, would receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The work appears thanks to a researcher who was not looking for it and who discovered it in the wrong box in the General Administration Archive in Alcalá de Henares. The professor of Contemporary Literature Álex Alonso who was looking for examples of censorship between 1950 and 1954 to compare it with that applied to Ignacio Aldecoa, the author he was studying.
Throughout the 98 pages that remain in the Alcalá archive there are enormous red pencil marks from the censorship that increase from the first third of the novel on everything that could offend Catholic morality and what the dictatorship considered good customs. The frequent allusions in the plot to sexual issues and those, more sporadic, that could be interpreted as criticism of the church, were discarded by the censor until reaching its conclusion: prohibited for attacking dogma and morality, although not the institutions of the regime.