So, strictly speaking, it cannot be claimed that Sánchez Mazas was a politician during the post-war period; it would seem more contentious to maintain, as does clever Foxá, that nor was he a writer. Because it's true that in these years, as the political activity decreased, the literary increased: in the two decades following the war, novels, short stories, essays and theatre adaptations came out under his name, as well as innumerable articles appearing in Arriba, La Tarde, and ABC. Some of these articles are exceptional, finely crafted verbal jewels, and certain books he published then, like The New Life of Pedrito de Andía (1951) and The Waters of Arbeloa and OtherMatters (1956), figure among the best of his oeuvre. And yet it is also true that, although between the mid-forties and the mid-fifties he occupied a pre-eminent place in Spanish literature, he never bothered about having a literary career (an effort, like that of a political career, he always thought beneath the dignity of a gentleman), and as time went on he practised, with increasing skill, the subtle art of concealment, to the point where, for five years starting in 1955, he signed his ABC articles with three enigmatic asterisks. As to the rest, his social life was confined to assiduously keeping up with the few friends who, like Ignacio Agusti or Mariano Gomez Santos, had managed to survive the excesses of his character and, from the beginning of the fifties, the very occasional visit to the literary circle that Cesar González-Ruano brought together at the Café Comercial at the Glorieta de Bilbao in Madrid. González-Ruano, who knew him well, at that time saw Sánchez Mazas 'as a great amateur, like a senior gentleman of letters, like a great, unmatched Senor who hadn't ever needed to make a profession of his vocations, but rather wrote verse and prose exercises during his vacations'.
In other words, Foxa was probably right after alclass="underline" from the end of the war until his death, perhaps Sánchez Mazas was not essentially anything except a millionaire. A millionaire without many millions, languid and a bit decadent, given over to slightly extravagant passions clocks, botany, magic, astrology and the no less extravagant passion for literature. He divided his time between the mansion in Coria, where he spent long spells of vie en chateau, the Hotel Velasquez in Madrid, and the cottage in the suburb Viso, surrounded by cats, Italian flagstones, travel books, Spanish paintings and French engravings, with a big drawing room dominated by a fireplace, and a garden full of rose-bushes. He'd get up about midday and, after lunch, write until supper time; nights, which often stretched till dawn, he spent reading. He left the house very rarely; he smoked a lot. Probably by then he no longer believed in anything. Probably in his heart, never in his life had he truly believed in anything, and least of all, in what he'd defended or preached. He practised politics, but deep down always scorned them. He exalted time-honoured values — loyalty, courage — but practised treachery and cowardice, and contributed more than most to the brutalization the Falange's rhetoric inflicted on these values; he also exalted old institutions — the monarchy, the family, religion, the fatherland — but didn't lift a finger to bring a king to Spain, ignored his family, often living apart from them, would have exchanged all of Catholicism for a single canto of the Divine Comedy and as for the fatherland, well, no one knows what the fatherland is, or maybe it's simply an excuse for venality or sloth. Those who had dealings with him in his later years recall that he often remembered the vicissitudes of the war and the firing squad at Collell. 'It's incredible how much one learned in those few seconds of the execution,' he told a journalist in 1959, to whom, nevertheless, he did not reveal the learning he'd gained from the imminence of death. Perhaps he was no more than a survivor, and that's why at the end of his life he liked to imagine himself as a failed, autumnal gentleman, like someone who, having been capable of great things, had done almost nothing. 'I have but only in the most mediocre way measured up to the hope placed in me and help given me,' he confessed around this time to González-Ruano, and years before a character in The New Life of Pedro de Andia seems to speak for Sánchez Mazas when he proclaims from his deathbed: 'I've never been able to finish anything in this life.' In fact, it was in this way, melancholic, defeated and futureless, that he liked to portray himself from very early on. In July 1913, in Bilbao, barely nineteen years of age, Sánchez Mazas wrote, with the title 'Under an Ancient Sun', three sonnets, the last of which goes like this:
In my twilight years as an old libertine
and old courtly poet
I'd spend the evenings, in contest
with a devout Theatine Padre.
Increasingly gouty and ever more Catholic,
in the manner of an antiquated gentleman,
my impertinent and haughty genius
turning brittle and melancholic.
And finding to end the story
Masses and debts in my will,
they'll give me a charity funeral.
And fate in its final insult
would wreathe its immortal laurels on me
for a Moral Epistle to Fabius!*
I don't know if at the end of his days, fifty years after writing those words, Sánchez Mazas was an old libertine, but there's no doubt he was an old courtly poet. He was still Catholic, although only outwardly, and also an antiquated gentleman. He always had an impertinent, haughty, brittle and melancholic genius. He died one October night in 1966, of pulmonary emphysema; few people attended his funeral. He left little money and not much property. He was a writer who didn't fulfil his promise and for that reason and perhaps also because he was not worthy of it — did not write a Moral Epistle to Fabius. He was the best of the Falangist writers, leaving a handful of good poems and a handful of good prose pieces, which is much more than almost any writer can aspire to leave, but he left much less than his talent demanded, and his talent was always superior to his work. Andrés Trapiello says that, like so many Falangist writers, Sánchez Mazas won the war and lost the history of literature. The phrase is brilliant and, true in part — or at least it was, because for a while Sánchez Mazas paid for his brutal responsibility in a brutal war with oblivion but it is also true that, having won the war, perhaps Sánchez Mazas lost himself as a writer. He was a romantic after all, would he not have judged deep down all victory to be contaminated by unworthiness, and the first thing he noticed upon arriving in paradise albeit that illusory bourgeois paradise of leisure, chintz and slippers that, like a needy travesty of old privileges, hierarchies and securities, he constructed in his last years was that he could live there, but not write, because writing and plenitude are incompatible. Few people remember him today, and perhaps that's what he deserves. There's a street named after him in Bilbao.