The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (55 page)

Finally in the spring of 1580 two monks arrived from Spain with ransom money contributed by Cervantes’s family and friends. Finding that it was not quite the five hundred gold crowns demanded, Cervantes’s local admirers, Spanish merchants in Algiers, made up the required sum. Returning to Madrid in late 1580, the thirty-three-year-old Miguel de Cervantes already had a heavy investment in a military career. With no other way to make a living, he was acutely conscious that for his ransom “the entire property of his parents, as well as the dowries of his two sisters, now left in poverty, had been sacrificed.” He found sporadic employment in the campaign in Portugal and as the king’s messenger to Oran. But his valorous services to the king were not properly rewarded.

In 1584 he married the daughter of a respectable family, eighteen years his junior, in a village near Madrid. She brought him a small farm, a vineyard, chickens and beehives, and furnished a household with silver and alabaster images of the Virgin. This brief interlude was the most comfortable period of his life.

Of respectable occupations in Spain at this time, literary production was probably the most unregulated. Madrid, becoming the headquarters of an
aggressive world empire, offered the liveliest opportunities. Ignatius Loyola had founded the Society of Jesus (1540) only a few years before. This was Spain’s Golden Age when the newly flourishing Castilian language was becoming a national vernacular. The classic chivalric romance,
Amadis de Gaula
(1508) had lately appeared. Poetry was a hobby for lawyers, doctors, priests—and why not for soldiers too? The printing press had not yet displaced the written word. Following the medieval custom of circulating manuscripts, many who would not have dared write for the press wrote for friends. When Cervantes had left for military service the Madrid theater was four planks laid across benches with a blanket for backdrop, and plays were loosely connected scenes with vaudeville interludes. But when he returned from captivity, there were permanent theater structures, and plays were plotted into clearly separated acts. Playwrights were beginning to make money.

In this informal literary life of Madrid, Cervantes, though not a university man, somehow made his way. He wrote dedicatory poems for other people’s books on all sorts of subjects. He tried the theater. Later Cervantes would claim credit for a new three-act format for plays, and for staging moral characters who revealed their inner thoughts. Of the thirty plays he wrote in these years only two have survived. But his desperate efforts to earn a living from the stage did not succeed. On the Madrid literary scene he had to compete with “the Spanish phoenix,” the prolific and versatile Lope de Vega (1562–1635), whom Cervantes himself called “nature’s prodigy.” After three decades the best Cervantes could boast of his plays was that they “were recited without offering of cucumbers or other missiles, and ran their career without hisses, shouts, or uproar.”

Cervantes’s self-discovery took time. His first extended literary work off the stage was
La Galatea
(1585), in the familiar escapist genre of the day. A diffuse pastoral romance, it recounted the loves of shepherds and shepherdesses on the idyllic countryside. But it must have suited some public taste, for Cervantes sold the publishing rights for a substantial sum, and it was widely appreciated abroad. An unschooled soldier at thirty-three had suddenly produced a work of fashionable literary elegance.

Before Cervantes found his literary vocation, he had to serve another disastrous tour in the School of Hard Knocks. The “Invincible Armada,” Spain’s ill-starred naval force in one of the decisive battles of modern history, was the product of a national effort in which Cervantes would have a small unlucky role. As commissary assigned to requisition wheat and oil, he recklessly enforced his authority against the Dean and Chapter of Seville. They promptly responded with his excommunication, and 1588 proved a bad year all around. Cervantes’s surviving literary efforts of that time were a preliminary sonnet to a treatise on a kidney disease and two odes (one of
prophecy, the other of condolence) on the Armada. A soft-hearted and erratic bookkeeper, he was not well suited to the exacting task of purchasing agent. After the defeat of the Armada he petitioned the king for a position in America. What he received was high commendation, and reduction in pay from twelve reales a day to ten.

Cervantes’s punishment for loyal government service was not yet complete. In 1592, charged with unauthorized seizure of barley and wheat, irregularities in his accounts, and a huge deficit that he could not explain, he tried to meet his financial emergency by a six-play contract. With a Seville theatrical manager, Cervantes signed a money-back guarantee. If the plays were not among the best ever staged in Spain, he would not have to be paid. Even before he could fulfill this contract he was jailed. Troubles accumulated. After release from prison he was conned out of his savings by an absconding Seville banker. Then he was remanded to jail for another three months for failing to obey the court’s order that he fully settle his garbled accounts. A decade later government officials were still harassing the forty-four-year-old veteran of battles and bureaucracy.

The next years (1600–1604), when Cervantes must have been writing his great work, are a mystery. We do not know where he was or even how he earned his living. His chivalrous ventures had been rewarded only by a maimed left arm, a loss of reputation, terms in prison, poverty, and destitution. His life so far was a disillusioning experience for which the popular romances of chivalry were no antidote. The Spanish emperor Charles V had them read to him during his siestas. But Saint Theresa listed addiction to these romances among the sins of her youth. A law of 1553 prohibited the printing and sale of any such books in the Indies, and the Cortes was considering a law to have them burned.

Cervantes claimed that his
Don Quixote
was designed to kill off these romances of chivalry. Incidentally he created a prototype of the novel, the most popular form of modern literature. Cervantes had already experimented in still another literary form, also a progenitor of modern fiction. In his Prologue to
Two Exemplary Novels
(not published until 1613, but probably written at least ten years earlier), Cervantes boasts that he is “the first to have written novels [short stories] in the Castilian tongue … these are my own, neither imitated nor stolen. My mind conceived them, my pen brought them forth, and they have grown in the arms of the printing press.” He meant these tales to be morally “exemplary.” “If I believed that the reading of these Novels would in any way arouse an evil thought or desire, I would sooner cut off the hand that wrote them than see them published. At my age one does not trifle with the life to come.” Quite a pledge from a man of sixty-six who had already lost the use of his left hand!

The “exemplary novel” which many think his best, “The Man of Glass,”
recounts the strange malady that a brilliant student caught from drinking a poisonous love potion. “The unhappy man imagined that he was entirely made of glass, and under this delusion, when anyone came near him, he used to utter piteous cries … that he should not approach him, because he would break him, for he was not really and truly as other men, but was all of glass from head to foot.” His fellow townsmen valued him for his ideas and insights. “Glass,” the student explained, “is a subtle and delicate material: the soul acts through it with more promptitude and efficiency than through the body, which is heavy and earthy.” He understood the world differently from those made of flesh and blood. Enticed by his “glassy” state of mind, the people of Salamanca believed the student could answer all their questions and of course he was harmless, for he dared not risk any act of violence. As he wandered about town he uttered penetrating witticisms on the charlatanry that he saw everywhere—bad poets, perverse judges, crooked lawyers, murderous physicians, and swindling merchants. He saw through them all. This madness lasts for two years. After the student was cured by a clever monk, he tried to resume his custom of preaching in the public square, where people had once hung on his every word. But now that he was sane, no one was interested. He was nothing more than a brilliant law graduate of Salamanca.

It is possible that
Don Quixote
was conceived when Cervantes was lying in the Royal Prison of Seville in 1597. The publisher did not have high hopes when the first part of Cervantes’s masterpiece was published in Madrid in January 1605, for he bothered to secure the official privilege only for Castile. The book was an immediate popular success. When King Philip III, looking out from his palace, saw a student in gales of laughter over a book, he was reported to have said, “He must be mad—or he’s reading
Don Quixote
.” The book would be a commercial success, too, at least for the publishers, who now had the license extended to Aragon and Portugal. Pirated editions were issued at once, and the book soon appeared in Brussels and Milan, and an English translation came out in 1612. Cervantes had sold all his rights to the first publisher in Madrid and so had little to profit from his success.

Don Quixote
, a pretended knight-errant, would have an enduring appeal matched by no real one. This “ingenious gentleman of La Mancha” in south-central Spain had stocked his library with romances of chivalry, which addled his brain and nourished his illusion that he must himself become a knight-errant. Outfitted with a suit of rusty armor and a decrepit horse, Rosinante, he enlisted for his squire a local peasant, Sancho Panza, to whom he promised the governorship of an island. Traveling the countryside to right the wrongs of the world, he defended the honor of his lady love, Dulcinea del Toboso, from a nearby village. She, however, was unaware of
his devotion. His imagination transformed rustic inns, roguish innkeepers, rude goatherds, and flocks of sheep into an enchanted landscape of moated castles, gallant knights, and their supporting troops. Windmills became enemies against which he had to battle. Whether falling awkwardly off his knightly nag or being cudgeled by peasants and innkeepers, Don Quixote remained indomitable. “Bear in mind, Sancho, that one man is no more than another, unless he does more than another. All these tempests that fall upon us are signs that fair weather is coming shortly, and that things will go well with us, for it is impossible for good or evil to last forever. Hence it follows that the evil having lasted long, the good must be now nigh at hand.…” After their saddlebags were stolen, Sancho recommended that Don Quixote, like ancient knights-errant, live off the herbs of the field. To which the knight replied:

The meandering narrative, interrupted by ballads and interludes, finally leaves the reader in the air, ready for a second part.

But, like Rabelais before him, Cervantes needed the incentive of an impostor. In ten years Cervantes had reached the fifty-ninth chapter of his Part Two when he discovered that someone had already published a spurious Second Part, licensed on July 4, 1614. Riding on Cervantes’s reputation, this fake Part Two was about to preempt the market.

The impostor prefaced his work by brutally ridiculing Cervantes himself. Better this sequel, he boasted, than another work from an author who cackled, whose tongue wagged more freely than the one hand he had left, whose books written in a dungeon bore the brand of the convict and the ill temper of the jailbird. This insolent plagiarist has never been identified, but in the marketplace he appears to have profited from his haste. And Cervantes responded in haste, which would mar his last fifteen chapters.

This second part, like the first, when it finally emerged from the censor’s bureaucracy, sold well, was translated into French, and was soon being bound and marketed together with Part One. As Cervantes testified and
prophesied, already in that early age of literacy Part One had been a spectacular seller. The student, Sanson, who shared Don Quixote’s illusion, boasts:

Part Two continues the familiar roles of the two leading characters, and describes the enchantment and disenchantment of the peerless Dulcinea. The leading characters have somehow changed places—Quixote has become a Sancho, Sancho a Quixote. We hear Don Quixote advising Sancho how to govern his “island.” “Eat neither garlic nor onions that your breath may not betray your rustic origin. Walk slowly and speak with deliberation, but not in such a manner as to give the impression that you are listening to yourself; for all affectation is bad.”

The work ends with the frustrating return of Don Quixote’s sanity. When the Knight of the White Moon unhorses Don Quixote in a chivalric encounter, Don Quixote begs, “Drive home your lance, O knight, and take my life since you already have deprived me of my honor.” The Knight of the White Moon refuses, but asks that “the great Don Quixote” retire to his own village for a year. The downcast Don Quixote agrees. Sancho, brokenhearted, “feared that Rosinante was maimed for life, his master’s bones permanently dislocated—it would have been a bit of luck if his madness also had been jolted out of him.” And so it had. On leaving Barcelona, the site of this encounter, Don Quixote looked back. “Here,” he said, “was Troy; here my luck and not my cowardice robbed me of the glory I had won; here it was that fortune practiced upon me her whims and caprices; here my exploits were dimmed; and here, finally, my star set never to rise again.” As they approach their village Sancho falls on his knees.