Biography and Its Discontents
Jorge Sempru?n’s life was an open book. His substantial body of work—memoirs, fictional works and screenplays—drew heavily from his experiences growing up in exile, fighting in the French Resistance, surviving 18 months in a Nazi concentration camp and then working clandestinely from France to overthrow Spain’s military regime.
But to Soledad Fox, professor of Spanish and chair of Romance languages at Williams, it’s what Sempru?n chose not to reveal about his life that’s most interesting.
“He was an expert at self-fashioning,” says Fox, who’s at work on a biography of Sempru?n due out in 2016. “He was a novelist and memoirist, so he rightly took advantage of his artistic license.”
Fox is using extensive archival research and interviews (primarily from Russia, France and Spain) to “provide the larger context of his life,” including his tragic childhood and adolescence. His mother died when he was young, and a military coup forced the family—the father and seven children—from a comfortable, middle-class lifestyle in Madrid into exile under “brutal circumstances” in France, she says.
In his own stories, Sempru?n de-emphasized the “real suffering” of the first 22 years of his life, Fox says, “because he was macho. It was the 1940s, and there was this attitude of the stoic hero, the Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca type. But I find that focusing on the more personal aspects of his life makes him more sympathetic and adds real depth to his story.
“In a way, I am turning a feminine gaze on a male subject,” Fox says, by paying attention to the influence his mother and her death had on Sempru?n’s life. Fox is also focusing on other personal experiences and relationships that were crucial in shaping his political and artistic choices.
Fox’s biography, and her research and writing process, were the basis of her February talk “Biography and its Discontents,” part of the college’s annual Faculty Lecture Series. A spring-semester tradition that’s more than a century old, the series is an opportunity for faculty members to present their scholarship to the campus and wider community.
Fox has written extensively about Sempru?n and teaches classes on his work. She’s also the author of the biography Constancia De La Mora in War and Exile and Flaubert and Don Quijote: The Influence of Cervantes on Madame Bovary. While the Flaubert book was written as a work of comparative literature, Fox says she now realizes it’s also biographical at heart. “I fell in love with reading Flaubert’s letters—there were close to 8,000 pages of correspondence,” she says. “I always want to know what’s going on behind the scenes.”
Photo courtesy Family Archive, D.R.
Other Faculty Lectures this Spring
Sara Dubow ’91, associate professor of history: “‘A Constitutional Right Rendered Utterly Meaningless’: Religious Exemptions and Reproductive Politics, 1973-2014”
Gage McWeeny, associate professor of English: “Maximalism and the Novel”
Steven J. Miller, associate professor of mathematics: ”Why the IRS Cares about the Riemann Zeta Function and Number Theory (and why you should, too!)”
Mihai Stoiciu, associate professor of mathematics: “Multidimensional Spaces and Their Mathematics: Matrices, Operators and Eigenvalues”