From some writers we remember certain books and from others we remember their work, as a whole, as an inseparable whole, a solid block perforated by passages that led from one page to another and that made the independence of each title fade away amid the overpowering sum. In that second group I include Javier Marías. I can forget exactly what happened in a given volume of Your Face Tomorrow or fail in the attempt to detail the plot of A Heart So White, but by no means can I stop keeping in mind his unmistakable cadence, his way of ordering the words, that rhythm that stays with you even after the reading is finished. It has happened to me again with Here I Stop, the posthumous volume that Alfaguara has just published containing scattered texts written between 2001 and 2020. There are articles, memories, speeches, prologues; there is literature, politics, cinema, football; there are the dead and the living, friends and masters, admirations and irritations. There are, in short, many of the things that interested Javier Marías throughout his life. All of them held interest, but as I moved through the book I increasingly felt that all of them were, in a sense, incidental. Because the important, the substantial, was Marías writing.
Imagining this seems to be one of the traits that set truly great writers apart. There comes a moment when their style transcends what they narrate and becomes a matter in itself. One does not read only this book by Marías to learn what he thought about Shakespeare, or about a particular film, or about a certain footballer, or about one of those small social shifts that managed to irritate him to sometimes picturesque extremes. One reads it, in fact, because one wants to see him think; because in Marías writing was not the outcome of thought, but thought itself, or at least its faithful reproduction following an almost alchemical method. The sentence advanced, hesitated, retraced, introduced a caveat, corrected what it had just stated and set off again until, many lines later, it reached the exact place where it should land. That explains why some of the best texts in Here I Stop are biographical. When Marías writes about his parents, about his friends, about those who were disappearing around him, that strange relationship between memory and time that also threaded through his novels emerges. Remembering never consists simply of recovering something that happened. Between what happened and who remembers it there have accumulated too many years, too many losses and too many versions of oneself. And perhaps Marías wrote so well about the dead because he knew we do not stop relating to them when they disappear, but only manage to relate to them in another way.
It also seems defining to me the texts he dedicates to other writers. There is something revealing in an author’s literary admirations. Perhaps we know more about a writer from the books he loves than from the ones he detests, and Marías knew how to admire without reservations. When he speaks of Shakespeare, of Cervantes, and of authors who form part of his sentimental education as a reader, there disappears any temptation to compete with them. He contemplates them from gratitude, which—in a literary world where it often seems you cannot raise a statue without knocking down the one beside it— remains comforting. The matter becomes more complex when he deals with contemporary issues, because it is well known that the present ages badly age and what on a Tuesday may seem a matter of national importance can become incomprehensible ten years later, not to mention twenty. Some of the battles Marías fought have already lost much of their meaning; certain irritations are now distant and some opinions perhaps have not withstood the passage of time very well. It also would not make sense to pretend otherwise, because after all writing weekly about the world forces you to take sides, or to reject it, with excessive urgency and often without having all the cards on the table. But even in those cases one keeps reading, even if the controversy is forgotten, or does not share the conclusion; even if one thinks that that time Marías overdid it, or turned a minor grievance into a nearly metaphysical issue, or simply was wrong by a wide margin. And one keeps reading because the sentences work even when whatever provoked them has stopped running. If one looks closely, it is an extraordinary victory. The journalistic article is born doomed to disappear with the newspaper that bears it, but some writers manage to rescue it from that expiry date; not necessarily because they guessed their forecasts, but because they wrote so well that time could not take it all away.
That is where Here I Stop ends up reminding us of something that sometimes becomes obscured by the stature of the novelist: Javier Marías was also one of the great Spanish intellectuals of the last decades. I use the word without solemnity. Intellectual not because he was always right—which would have been impossible, and surely dull—but because he believed that a writer could and should look beyond his own books. He cared about the world; he watched it, he formed opinions about it, he grew angry with it, and sometimes he was also mistaken about it, and all of that became writing. Several years have passed since his death and we are getting used to there not being, in the Sunday supplement or in the newspaper, a new article of his, another anger, some digressions; those long, almost endless sentences that seem about to vanish into the void and that, suddenly, set out on their return. That is why the title Here I Stop seems to carry something definitive, as if Marías, from the other side, had decided to determine the exact place where he ought to stop. It turns out that writers do not stop exactly where they think or wish to, but where others stop reading them. And he still has a long road ahead.