ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the troubled history of the first Spanish (Madrilenian) Center of the International PEN, which was founded a few months after the London Club to serve an ideal of internationalization of the Spanish culture, but lasted only two years. Quickly, debates began to rage around the Spanish PEN, showing the struggles inside the Spanish literary field. What started as an international collaborative project ended by revealing the conflict around the literary hierarchies of Madrilenian literary sociability. Although it seemed that the idea of building some form of literary network was taking shape at the time (several other writers’ associations, such as the Association of Escritores Españoles, were born precisely in 1922) and that the foundation of the Madrilenian Club could be considered part of this intent to serve the interests of Spanish writers by creating an international network for them, in practice, however, what Spaniards perceived in that Club had to do with the inherent tensions within the Spanish literary field rather than with international solidarity. Therefore, it seems that the Madrilenian literary scene was opposed both to adopting this idealistic vision of international relationships between writers and to the possibility of creating a shared transnational space.
