As happens every 21 February, the archipelago marks the Día de las Letras Canarias (Canarian Literature Day), an occasion with which the Government of the Canary Islands seeks to pay tribute to the writers who have stood out in the islands' cultural history. On this occasion, the focus falls on Lanzarote-born Ángel Guerra, an author with a fascinating career in the Spain of the early twentieth century, a friend of Benito Pérez Galdós, Emilia Pardo Bazán, Carmen de Burgos and Manuel de Falla. Of humble origins, his work stood out above all for giving visibility to the ways of life of the most disadvantaged people of his native island. He is the author of some thirty books spanning fiction, essays and poetry. He spoke several languages and translated foreign work, with a particular commitment to making that of women writers better known.
A wandering walker, friends and other journeys
José Betancort, better known by the pen name Ángel Guerra (1874-1950), was born in Teguise, in Lanzarote, into a humble family of farmers. When he was seven, his father emigrated to Uruguay and never returned, which led his mother to send the boy to Gran Canaria to stay with relatives, in an attempt to give him an education through the Seminary. His personality did not sit well with a religious education, but it allowed him to work as a teacher and support himself, as well as to write columns in various Canarian newspapers. In 1891 he published his first literary creation, the poetry collection ‘Una hoja de mi álbum’.
In 1894, at the age of twenty, he met Benito Pérez Galdós in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, during one of the few trips the writer made back to his home city. Of this first encounter, the author later wrote how he remembered ‘the great pleasure of shaking the hand of the man who was his great master of letters”. The friendship that blossomed between them would determine the course of his life: two years later, the young José Betancort began to sign his work as Ángel Guerra, in homage to Galdós's novel of the same name, which paints the portrait of a man in conflict with himself.
In 1900, encouraged by Galdós, Guerra packed his bags and moved to Madrid. “I long only for the glory of art,” he declared to those around him. Once in the capital, and under the protection of the great author and his family, the young Lanzarote native managed to carve out a place for himself as a journalist at most of the leading newspapers of Restoration Spain, such as ABC and La Correspondencia de España, surprising readers with fresh articles that looked to the future in the apathetic context of the Disaster of ’98. He began studying Law and Philosophy and Letters at the Universidad Central and made his way into the city's literary circles, striking up friendships with other great literary figures such as Emilia Pardo Bazán and Carmen de Burgos. Some described him as the ‘leader of Canarian intellectual youth’. During these years he published what would become some of his most iconic works, such as ‘Al jallo’ in 1907 and ‘La lapa’ in 1908. His eyes remained fixed on the farming and seafaring life of Lanzarote and, like his mentor, he denounced poor conditions through realism.
His standing as a writer and journalist consolidated over the years. Between 1908 and 1910 he worked as a correspondent for La Correspondencia de España, sharing a flat with Manuel de Falla and Luis Bonafoux. There, too, he would form ties with Zuloaga and Fernando León y Castillo. In 1910 he was sent to Lisbon, where he witnessed the establishment of the Portuguese First Republic.
Literature and political commitment
After his stay in Portugal, he returned to Spain and became active in the Liberal Party, alongside Benito Pérez Galdós. In 1912, following the approval of the Island Cabildos in the Canary Islands, he became a member of the Congress of Deputies for the Lanzarote constituency. He served for eleven years in the lower house, until the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. In 1930, by then under Dámaso Berenguer, he became director general of Prisons, where he drove through changes of enormous significance for the Spanish penitentiary system, on the premise of prison as a system of social reintegration and not merely a punitive space.
In 1933, with the Second Spanish Republic now established, Manuel Azaña proposed that he become Minister of Defence. He turned the offer down, since he was in favour of a parliamentary monarchy. All trace of him is lost during the Spanish Civil War. He stopped writing in the press and fled, thanks to the help of Juan Negrín, the last president of the Republic, who had been his pupil in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. He would return to Spain some years later, far removed from the cultural, literary and political circles of the dictatorship. He died in 1950.
Eyes full of earth
He wrote for more than 200 national and international newspapers. He is the author of some thirty books spanning fiction, essays and poetry. He spoke several languages and translated foreign work, with a particular commitment to making that of women writers better known. In his youth he had written an article entitled ‘Polvo en el camino’, in which he describes how “an untenable contempt for women has been reached, and how woman is the victim of systematic punishment at the hands of man”.
As a literary critic he set out to study the image of women in the work of world literature, through the work of great writers who were little known in Spain. In his later stories, the protagonists become women. ‘Al son del remo’, from 1917, portrays a woman who manages the assets of her family of fishermen, who after 40 years own no property and go out to fish in a boat belonging to a wealthy family. His narrative was a tool for denouncing the poor conditions endured by the humble classes of the Canary Islands. Farmers without land, fishermen without a boat.
Zebensuí Rodríguez, a philologist and expert on his figure, states that “Ángel Guerra understood life as a constant pilgrimage, both his own and that of his characters. Life as a road. In this he comes close to poets such as Rosalía de Castro and Machado. While they regard the road as a search for the meaning of one's own existence, Guerra understands the journey as a way of encountering the pain of others; and that is why his characters are pilgrims too.”