Cervantes

THE LIFE AND MISADVENTURES OF MIGUEL DE CERVANTES--Mariano Tomas--Houghton Mifflin ($3). Few writers of anything except bad checks have spent more time in jail than Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, author of the world-famed Don Quixote. According to Biographer Tomas, it was bad luck, not bad management, that was responsible. Author Tomas does his Spanish best to scrub clean the grimy pane of history that separates Cervantes' 16th-Century day from ours but Cervantes' human figure remains darkly obscured. To many a U. S. reader, however, accustomed to paying lip-service to Cervantes' unread classic, any facts about its author's life will be all news.

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547-1616) was the child of a middle-class professional family of Madrid which had fallen on evil days. Miguel left home early to seek his fortune. In Italy he became a Spanish footsoldier, lounged about Rome and Naples in a brilliant uniform with little money in his purse. Though some of his biographers say he was a born soldier, Author Tomas disagrees, thinks Cervantes loathed the life but preferred it to starvation. He acquitted himself creditably in the great sea-battle of Lepanto, in which Don John of Austria destroyed the Turkish fleet, and won a slight raise in pay and a permanently maimed left hand. On his way back to Spain his ship was captured by Algerian corsairs. In Algiers, Cervantes spent five years in prison, made four unsuccessful attempts to escape, was finally ransomed.

Home at last, he could think of nothing better than joining the army again, but in those days there was competition, and Cervantes' crippled hand made him ineligible. While he was looking around for something to do he acquired a mistress and fathered a daughter; later with great difficulty (for he was no catch) he made a respectable marriage. A kinsman of his wife's, one Alonso Quijada, had been so disagreeably opposed to the marriage that Cervantes made a mental note of him. When he began Don Quixote it was with the intention of caricaturing this country squire. Foiled in his attempts at a more glorious career, Cervantes turned to letters, published his first book (Galatea), wrote many a play, some of which were staged. While he was frequenting theatrical alleys his wife left him, went home to her family. Then at last Cervantes got a job, as a collector of supplies for Philip II's great Armada against England. When this temporary job was finished he landed a post as tax-collecter.

Graft is as old as mankind. Cervantes, suspected of falsifying his accounts, went to jail again. Three months later his innocence was established and he was released. Six years later he was jailed once more for the same reason. This time he turned his enforced leisure to good account, wrote two stories. Fourth and last time Cervantes saw the inside of a prison was for suspected complicity in a murder; again he was acquitted. Though this uncertain freedom gave Cervantes a liberal education in human nature it did not encourage him in regular habits. "All his work was in disorder, just like his life. He wrote his pages in fits and starts, and then left them alone for months at a time." He had a high opinion of his own ability, which was not shared by his great rival, Playwright-Poet Lope de Vega. Biographer Tomas thinks Lope de Vega was responsible for the pirated parody of Don Quixote which was published before Cervantes' own conclusion.

Within a few months of the publication of Don Quixote's first part it was a popular success in Spain, but not until long after Cervantes' death was he acknowledged as a great writer by the more respectable members of his fraternity. "Only the lowly understood him and praised him." A realist to the end, Cervantes penned his farewell in the last book he wrote, Persiles y Sigismunda: "Goodbye to thanks, goodbye to compliments, goodbye to good friends. . . ." Though he was buried in a Trinitarian monastery at Madrid his grave is unmarked, unknown.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.