Luis Felipe Vivanco: contemplación y entrega (review)

Abstract

ALARCON sierra, rafael. Luis Felipe Vivanco: contemplacion y entrega. Madrid: iMadrid!, 2007. 197 pp.Luis Felipe Vivanco (1907-1975) was a prominent poet and intellectual of the Franco era, with roots in the avant-garde ferment of the Second Republic. He was a friend of Miguel Hernandez and of Pablo Neruda, and the nephew of Jose Bergamin, but he joined the Falange during the war because of his family background, his devout Catholicism, and his close friendship with Luis Rosales. Later, he would come to the trenchant conclusion that [t]odo lo que tiene calidad en Espana antifranquista (80), expressing a sense of deep shame for his participation in the movimiento nacional during the Civil War and the early days of the postwar period. In this respect, he is typical of disillusioned right-wing intellectuals of the period, like his friend Dionisio Ridruejo.As Rafael Alarcon Sierra points out in this well-written and informative biographical sketch, Vivanco es un poeta apenas leido (9). This, then, is an attempt to remedy a certain critical neglect and bring his work to the attention of readers who might have a distorted or simplified view of him as simply another rightwardleaning poet of the Generation of 1936 - a categorization that Alarcon Sierra astutely rejects. The book is particularly good in tracing the complexity of Vivanco's trajectory, from his literary youth in the Republic to his participation in the neoromantic and neoclassical trends of the immediate postwar period. Vivanco often wrote in the mode of intimate existentialism that was in vogue among poets of his circle. His interest in German poetry, especially Rilke, was also fairly typical of this epoch. Vivanco's Heideggerian approach to modern Spanish poetry, which to some extent foreshadows the later poetics of Jose Angel Valente and Chantal Maillard, is evident in his Introduccion a la poesia espanola, a critical work that Alarcon discusses at length. Vivanco was a fervent reader of Juan Larrea, Cesar Vallejo, and Luis Cernuda. His broad intellectual interests also led him to make a contribution to the study of Leandro Fernandez de Moratin.In 1958, Vivanco republished some avant-garde poems from the years 1927-1931, mixing in some imitations of his own earlier style, in a book entitled Memoria de la plata. This volume has led to some confusion, since some readers have naturally assumed that the entire book was written during the earlier dates. Relying on Vivanco's diaries, Alarcon Sierra corrects this chronological mistake, pointing out that the book was the recuperation del otro poeta que pudo ser (104) rather than a historically accurate representation of the poet that he really was. This return to the avant-garde is continued in Vivanco's final work, the posthumous Prosas propicias. Vivanco died on November 21, 1975, one day after Franco's own death, and this refreshingly outspoken work, whose title echoes the Prosas profanas of Dario, was published in 1976.One view of Vivanco would be to see him as a representative intellectual of the Franco period, whose life and work illuminate a significant period of Spanish literary history. Alarcon Sierra situates Vivanco in relation to other figures of the day, referring frequently to names like Ricardo Gullon, Dionisio Ridruejo, Jose Luis Cano, Damaso Alonso, and Gerardo Diego. This book would be useful, then, for scholars interested in contexutalizing the work of these other writers. …