A literary guardian angel

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http://www.elpais.com/articulo/english/literary/guardian/angel/elpepueng/20111122elpeng_6/Ten


Literary agent Carmen Balcells poses in front of a portrait of her, by Gonzalo Goytisolo.- M. SÀENZ

She made publishing giants out of them and they returned the favor by turning her into a literary agent of superhero dimensions. Carmen Balcells has a place of her own in literary history. Her stable of writers includes more Nobel winners than fingers on one hand (Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez, Camilo José Cela, Pablo Neruda, Miguel Ángel Asturias and Vicente Aleixandre). The Latin American boom exploded from within her agency. She signed on Spanish writers (Miguel Delibes, Ana María Matute, Juan Marsé, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán...) long before they became 20th-century classics. These facts point to the relevance of the documents the Carmen Balcells literary agency has accumulated since 1960 ? a cache of historical material that the Culture Ministry purchased in 2010 for three million euros.

The archive comprises nearly 2,000 boxes (placed in a straight line, the documents would stretch for 2.5 kilometers) that lie in the General Archive of the Administration (AGA) in Alcalá de Henares, 30 kilometers east of Madrid, although its future location is still up in the air. The Socialist government wanted to build a national center focusing on literary creation and publishing on the strength of this material, but the regional government of Catalonia (where Balcells was born) wants the boxes back in Barcelona.

EL PAÍS was the first media outlet to have access to the collection of correspondence, original manuscripts, corrections, copyright payment receipts and drafts by writers who wanted Balcells to represent them. The holdings include the personal library of the writer Miguel Ángel Asturias and the Paul Bowles archive. But scholars will have to wait a while before sinking their teeth into all this material. At the request of Balcells, no more access will be granted to the documents for the time being ? at least until they are reclassified according to archival criteria (see box).

To delve into those overstuffed boxes is to confirm what pretty much everyone already knew: that Balcells has been an all-powerful figure in the publishing world, an octopus with a tentacle in every country. She is the only Spaniard likely to be on personal terms with Andrew Wylie, "The Jackal," considered the leading literary agent in the world. But long before Wylie, Balcells was already being described as a "literary super-agent" by the now-deceased publisher Carlos Barral.

[NJCher]

1. what a woman, what a story!

I like how she stood up for her writers with the publishing houses. There is a choice paragraph in that story that quotes her.


Cher

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2. indeed -- and i've been such a huge fan of some

her writers.