Torrente Balester Gonsalo

TORRENTE BALLESTER (Torrente Ballester), Gonzalo (b. 1910), Spanish writer and literary critic. He was born in the town of Serantes (now Ferrol). He graduated from secondary school in La Coruña. Later, in 1921, illness prevented him from beginning a naval military career. The following year his grandfather died; the man who had greatly influenced his upbringing and education gave the boy, in consolation, his first copy of Don Quixote. He read extensively and avidly, and in 1926 enrolled as an auditor at the University of Santiago de Compostela. He burned his early works. He was interested in the works of Nietzsche and Oswald Spengler. For family reasons, Gonzalo moved to Oviedo. There he studied law and also made his first acquaintances in literary circles. He began working as a journalist for the newspaper El Carbayón. In 1928 he moved to Vigo, read Joyce, Proust, Miguel de Unamuno, and José Ortega y Gasset. He went to Madrid and a year later decided to settle there. He began studying philosophy and philology, worked for the anarchist newspaper La Tierra, which, however, was closed in 1930. Gonzalo was forced to move back to Ferrol. In 1931 the family moved again, and in 1932 Gonzalo married Josefina Malvido. In 1933 they returned to Ferrol because of Josefina’s asthma. Gonzalo worked at an academy where he taught Spanish, Latin, and history for 16 hours a day. He again enrolled as an auditor at the University of Santiago and received his degree in 1935. Between 1934 and 1938, his first four children were born. Before the war began, Gonzalo went to Paris, where he intended to defend his doctoral dissertation. Even then he was troubled by the military speeches, but in October he returned to Spain to be with his family. On the way home, from the bus window, he saw the bodies of victims of repression. Instead of a greeting, his father said to him: “Don’t you know that many of your friends have been shot?” On the advice of a priest, he joined the Falange. In 1939 he began teaching at the University of Santiago. In 1943 he published his first novel, Javier Mariño, but after only twenty days its sale was