Francisco Ayala, a Spanish Novelist and Literary Scholar, Is Dies at 103

November 5, 2009
Francisco Ayala, a Spanish Novelist and Literary Scholar, Is Dies at 103
By MARGALIT FOX and ANDRÉS CALA

Francisco Ayala, an eminent Spanish novelist whose work explored
societies in which there is much despotism and little benevolence, died
on Tuesday at his home in Madrid. He was 103.

His death was confirmed by Rafael Juárez, director of the Francisco
Ayala Foundation in Granada, Spain.

Considered one of 20th-century Spain's most distinguished intellectuals,
Mr. Ayala was routinely mentioned as a contender for the Nobel Prize in
Literature. Besides being a novelist, he was a poet, critic, essayist,
lawyer and academic sociologist. Much of his work was banned in Spain
during the Franco era, and Mr. Ayala spent those years in exile,
teaching in the United States and elsewhere.

Among many laurels, Mr. Ayala was awarded the Cervantes Prize, the
Spanish-speaking world's highest literary honor, in 1991. In 1998 he
received the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature; often described as
the Spanish Nobel Prize, the award honors world-class achievements in a
range of fields.

Though Mr. Ayala wrote close to a hundred books, his work is little
known in the United States. Much of it, both fiction and nonfiction,
examines abuses of power, the nature of morality and the often
irreconcilable tension in societies between the needs of the individual
and those of the collective.

Only a few of his books have been published in the United States in
English translation, and they are out of print. Among them is "Death as
a Way of Life" (Macmillan, 1964; translated by Joan MacLean), originally
published in Spanish in 1958 as "Muertes de Perro" - literally, "Deaths
of a Dog." An ironic satire, the novel is set in a fictionalized Latin
American nation ruled by a dictator widely assumed to be modeled on Juan
Perón, the former Argentine president.

Another title, "Usurpers" (Schocken, 1987; translated by Carolyn
Richmond), first appeared in 1949 as "Los Usurpadores." A collection of
short stories, it explores the lives of people forced to submit to the
will of others. Among the book's best-known stories is "El Hechizado"
("The Bewitched"). A Kafkaesque allegory, it centers on a man's urgent
petition for aid from King Carlos II, the late-17th-century Spanish
monarch, portrayed by Mr. Ayala as a drooling mental defective. No aid
is forthcoming, nor, the story makes clear, will it ever be.

Mr. Ayala's other works in Spanish include "La Cabeza del Cordero" ("The
Lamb's Head"), a story collection first published in 1949, and a memoir,
"Recuerdos y Olvidos" ("Remembrances and Forgotten Things"), published
most recently in 2006, when he was 100. He also wrote nonfiction books
on law and sociology as well as volumes of film and literary criticism.

Francisco Ayala García-Duarte was born in Granada on March 16, 1906. He
began writing poetry as a boy, and by the age of 19, in 1925, he had
published his first novel, "Tragicomedia de un Hombre sin Espíritu"
("Tragicomedy of a Man Without Spirit"). He received a doctoral degree
in law from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid in the early 1930s and
afterward joined the faculty there.

After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Mr. Ayala's father,
a midlevel bureaucrat in Burgos, in northern Spain, was jailed by Franco's
forces, along with one of Francisco's brothers. Both were later
executed.

During the war Francisco Ayala held several high-level posts in the
Republican government and represented it as a diplomat in Prague. After
the government fell to Franco's forces in 1939 he went into exile, first
in Argentina, then in Puerto Rico and, starting in the 1950s, on the
United States mainland.

In the years that followed, Mr. Ayala taught at a series of colleges and
universities in the United States, among them Princeton, Rutgers, Bryn
Mawr, New York University, Brooklyn College and the University of
Chicago. He resettled in Spain permanently in 1978.

Mr. Ayala's first wife, Etelvina Silva Vargas, died before him. He is
survived by their daughter, Nina Ayala Mallory; his second wife, Carolyn
Richmond, a scholar of Spanish literature and the translator of
"Usurpers"; one grandchild; and three great-grandchildren.

In an interview with The Associated Press in 2006, Mr. Ayala reflected
on his long, eventful career as an observer of social derangement.

"It's not often someone witnesses a century of life, and especially with
a conscience more or less alert," he said. "This is a privilege which
nature has bestowed on me."

Margalit Fox reported from New York and Andrés Cala from Madrid.

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