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Félix Martí-Ibáñez, All the Wonders We Seek

The author bio inserted at the end of the short story collection, All the Wonders We Seek: Thirteen Tales of Surprise and Prodigy (1963), is coy:

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born in Cartagena, Spain, Felix Marti-Ibanez received his Doctorate in Medicine from the Medical School of the University of Madrid. He then practiced psychiatry in Barcelona and lectured throughout Spain on psychology, medical history, art and literature. During this period, he also edited several medical and literary journals and wrote novels and many books on the history of medicine and psychology. In 1937 he was appointed General Director of Public Health and Social Services of Catalonia, and later, Secretary of Public Health and Social Service for Spain. Dr. Marti-Ibanez came to reside in the United States in 1939 and subsequently became an American citizen. He has participated in the International Congresses of History of Medicine, History of Science, Psychology, and Psychiatry, held in Amsterdam, Paris, Stockholm, Nice and Zurich. He has also lectured extensively throughout the Western Hemisphere, Europe, Japan and the Philippines. Dr. Martí-Ibáñez undertook the publication of several medical journals in 1950 and founded the publishing house of MD Publications, Inc., and in 1957 he created and launched the Medical Newsmagazine MD, of which he is the Editor-in-Chief and publisher. In January, 1960, he launched MD of Canada and in 1962, MD en Español.

The Order of Carlos J. Finlay was presented to Dr. Martí-Ibáñez in 1955 in recognition of his educational work in the field of medicine. In 1956 the New York Medical College, Flower and Fifth Avenue Hospitals, appointed Dr. Martí-Ibáñez Professor and Chairman of the Department of the History of Medicine.

Medicohistorical papers by Dr. Felix Martí-Ibáñez have been published in journals throughout the world. He is also the author of the section on the history of Medicine in the latest edition of the Encyclopedia Americana. Articles and short stories of his have appeared in Town and Country, Esquire, Gentry, Cosmopolitan, Art & Architecture, and Fantasy and Science Fiction, and he contributes a column to Latin American newspapers.

Dr. Marti-Ibanez is now completing a pentalogy on the history of medicine, of which four books have been published: Centaur (Essays on the History of Medical Ideas), Men, Molds, and History, A Prelude to Medical History, and Ariel (Essays on the Arts and the History and Philosophy of Medicine). The fifth volume, The Fabric of Medicine, is a work in progress. Among Dr. Martí-Ibáñez’ current books is The Crystal Arrow (Essays on Literature, Travel, Art, Love, and the History of Medicine). His literary works in progress are Waltz, a collection of short stories; A Sword From Toledo, a historical novel on the times of Vesalius; The Pagodas, a humorous novel; and Journey Around Myself, a narration of his journeys around the world.

What is left unmentioned, in this apparently exhaustive list of distinctions, is that at the time of his service to Catalonia and Spain, it was unclear whether these nations numbered one, two, or three: the Spanish Civil War was in full swing, and the anarchist CNT-FAI faction had agreed, in order to fight off the fascist forces of Generalissimo Franco, to enter into the Catalonian and Republican Spanish governments.  The young doctor Martí-Ibáñez was working as a representative of the anarchist faction, and in order to emigrate to the U.S., he had to flee for his life across the Pyrenees with the remnants of the anti-fascist forces.  He in fact was, and had long been known as, an anarchist.

It is unclear exactly what year Félix Martí-Ibáñez was actually born in Cartagena, Spain — different sources put it as early as 1903 and as late as 1915 — but the earlier dates are perhaps more credible.  Son of the writer and teacher Félix Martí Alpera, he also took the name of his mother, Josefina Ibáñez (and, thereby, of his illustrious literary uncle, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez).  His polymath abilities were evident early on: as a medical student at the University of Madrid, specializing in psychiatry, he wrote his dissertation on the psychology and physiology of Indian mysticism (1935) — all while making a reputation for himself through his contributions of articles on sexual issues to anarchist publications like Estudios, Tiempos Nuevos, and Ruta.  His take on sexuality and gender norms was refreshingly libertarian and egalitarian for the times, and while he exercised governmental authority, he made it a priority to provide working-class women with unrestricted access to abortion and family planning services — putting Catholic Catalonia well in advance of the rest of Europe.

In the middle of all this, the young doctor penned two novels: Yo, Rebelde: Novela Juvenil y de Inquietudes, published by the Biblioteca Estudios (1936), and Aventura: Poema de Juventudes (1938), published by the FIJL (Federación Ibérica de Juventudes Libertarias or Libertarian Youth Federation, the youth wing of the FAI).

The dedication to All the Wonders We Seek reads:

To William Somerset Maugham, greatest modern example of the physician as homme de lettres, whose friendship has been throughout the years an evergreen source of joy, inspiration, and enlightenment.

In his biography of Maugham, Ted Morgan writes:

During the South Ebro campaign he [Martí-Ibáñez] was hit in the arm and scalp by a dumdum bullet and took refuge in a bombed house in the village of Torre del Espanol. In the house he found a tattered volume of Maugham’s short stories, and marveled at the prose, which he found “taut and dry as Toledan leather, and endowed with that ‘difficult simplicity’ so dear to Cervantes.” Settling in New York, Martí-Ibáñez also wrote short stories, which he sent to Maugham for criticism. Of one of his stories Maugham wrote him: “Of course you are a scientist, a psychologist and a moralist. These are very good things, but the writer of fiction must take care that his special interests do not cause harm to his fiction. In effect your story is a piece of propaganda in condemnation of the atom bomb.”

Perhaps he took this advice a little too much to heart.  The fiction Martí-Ibáñez writes in exile — like his medical-historical essays — seems to meticulously avoid reference to anarchism. It is not hard to see, however, that his stories constitute a certain refusal to surrender the old libertarian dream. “In our hurried life,” the doctor writes, “[we] do not dream enough, and daydreams are important [...]” He admits to being “a romantic”: “To be a romantic means that a man lets his heart go to his head [...] [adopting] a quixotic attitude, a sort of magic lens that transfigures the world and its inhabitants so that they can be viewed in a different perspective.”

He sends fiction to Weird Tales and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction as well as to Esquire.  The stories are florid, dreamy, filled with a kind of exuberance that is at the same time strangely melancholy.  A “recurring theme,” Evelyn C. Leeper notes, is “the desire to escape from ‘the commonplace and hopeless’”: in “The Star Hunt,” for example, a rather grouchy, punctilious pharmacist, Don Zoilo, “goes out one morning on an errand and finds himself drawn into a series of extraordinary adventures far beyond his normal banal existence.” Drawn into is perhaps soft-pedaling it; Don Zoilo experiences all of this as a kind of unexpected assault on his person, his character, his sense of what is right, “respectable,” rational, and real.  “I think I am going mad,” he protests to one of his magical abductors, a violet-eyed girl who frequents his shop but whom he has never noticed before; “You must be joking.”

“Joking?” The girl’s eyes froze into two amethysts. “There’s nothing funny about this. You have lived alone with your pills entirely too long. Your world is confined to your drugstore and your bottles. Your imagination stops at your prescriptions. You never even noticed the young girl who day in day out sat at her sewing machine looking out her window at a tiny fragment of street.  One can stand that sort of existence only so long and no more. One day something bursts in one’s heart like a spring, and one can bear it no longer. Either one escapes from the cage or one suffocates. [...]“

The “cage” seems to be something like what Freud called the “reality principle“(the tendency to avoid pain, as opposed to the “pleasure principle” that drives us to seek greater pleasure); indispensable as a means of self-preservation and adjustment to the contours of the natural and social worlds, pain-avoidance can overtake pleasure-seeking to such an extent that we hobble ourselves, curbing our imaginations, limiting our explorations to what social conventions have decreed to be safe.  No wonder that the process that takes Don Zoilo out of his tidy routine, which the others in the story experience as a great self-fulfillment and liberation, feels to him like disintegration, like a threat to his very being, a cracking-apart of the world. What would our world look like if the pleasure principle were given a wider field for expression?

In “The Threshold of the Door,” Martí-Ibáñez imagines such a world in the form of a parallel dimension (Leeper thinks of E. A. Abbott’s Flatland — not a bad comparison). A visitor from the parallel-dimensional Caracas teaches an inhabitant of the mundane Caracas to step sideways into his “poetic world” where the desires of each intersect with the desires of every other — a heady, magic-realist take on the utopian socialist Charles Fourier’s “new loving world,” one might say.  In Fourier’s utopia, nobody would ever “work” — i.e., do anything he or he didn’t want to — but productive activity would be constant, driven by “passional attraction.” Likewise, in Martí-Ibáñez’s “poetic world,” as the mysterious visitor explains, “[e]veryone’s desires complement everyone else’s”:

“In your world you are a wheel that spins around things. Here, everything spins around you.  Why do you think all these people have listened to you all day? Why have they willingly given you caviar and champagne instead of coffee and toast? Why did the conductor steer the streetcar into a street where there are no tracks? Why did the girl accept your love? Because in this world everything centers around you.”

“But what about the others?”

“Everyone here is lord and master of himself. If they followed you in your desires and whims, it was because these fitted in perfectly with their own desires and whims. In carrying out your fantastic dreams you were actually helping the others to carry out theirs. You are the center diamond in the crown, but so are the others. That is what is so marvelous about this world [...] The waiter who served your exotic breakfast had always dreamed of doing just that; the aviary attendant had dreamed many times of freeing his birds, and so on down the line.  In this world, unrealized desires, the lost I’s, the unlived lives, all are fulfilled [...]“

If this fantasy seems purely fantastic, it is only by way of literary flourish. The organizing principles of the “poetic world” are essentially the same as those postulated by the CNT-FAI: linked together by mutual aid, the egoistic pleasure-seeking of autonomous individuals becomes a social principle. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon borrows a similar metaphor from Pascal to describe the non-authoritarian structure of anarchy, comparing it to a sphere: “the center is everywhere, the circumference nowhere.” If there is a gap between Proudhon’s rational description of anarchy (mutuality, free contract, federation . . .) and Martí-Ibáñez’s romantic description of it (absurd coincidences, parallel worlds, mysterious convergences of strangers . . .), the difference is largely in the distance between 1936 and 1963. The possible, having lost its chance to become real, returns disguised as the impossible.

This is how dreams live in exile.