by Sergio Pitol
Just three or four years later, as a student in preparatory, I was able to devour—with passion and astonishment—those first two autobiographical volumes; later in university, I continued with the remaining two, but I did so then with waning interest and too often defeated by exasperation and displeasure. Nowhere did I stumble upon the risqué scenes I expected. The figure of Vasconcelos was already well known to me; I had read and heard none too enthusiastic comments about him, some brutal, some apathetic; all of them iconoclastic. For example, he was no longer called Maestro, unless the word was accompanied by a sarcastic tone of irony or scorn.
After reading Creole Ulysses and The Storm I felt electrified by the energy of the prose. Reading was becoming an extraordinarily sensual experience. Vasconcelos, at his best, is a writer of the senses. Voluptuousness penetrates his language. I saw images, yes, but I also shared the tastes of desserts and delicacies, I sensed an array of aromas, from the sweat of the horses of troops on the move to the perfume of the opulent women evoked in certain passages. I suppose had I read Mme. Blavatsky during that eager period of initiations I would not have fallen into such deep trances. I recognized the character’s heroic spirit but, fortunately, he was a hero who refused to allow himself to be transformed into a statue. I often became lost in the details. I knew the revolutionary period only in broad terms, and the frantic sequence of events and characters made me dizzy. The story of his passionate, tumultuous, and ill-fated love for a woman named Adriana did not seem at all unusual to me; I had often read similar things in novels and had seen worse in the movies, to the extent that I thought that it was completely normal, commonplace, something that awaited every man upon reaching a certain age. It seemed inconceivable to me that some readers would be scandalized by certain passages of his life because, of course, at the time I did not understand, and I only managed to during a later reading, to what extent the personal story recounted by Vasconcelos violated the traditional notion of Mexican respectability: that a man of his rank openly spoke out against marriage; that he opposed marriage as an institution; that he reveled in his wife’s insufferable nature and preferred to live for many years in the company of a woman who at every turn encouraged excesses of elation, passion, contempt, hatred, and even disgust, aware that the woman was cheating on him—at times with very close friends—and who, aware of her infidelities, would attempt to make her return to him, pleading and threatening, and that after insulting her would reassure her, prepare her food, and wash her clothes; who in his youth had been in love with a girl from the underworld and had accepted money from her to finance his carousing and drunkenness; and finally, distraught by the insolence of such whores would, like a madman, track them down in taverns and inns and then beg for their forgiveness: one could watch all these things on screen or read about them quietly in a novel of any nationality and time; but that a Mexican man, a gentleman who was also a macho, would live it—which, although sad and regrettable, was little more than personal tragedy—and confess it, especially in print. The fact that the person sharing such unfortunate intimacies, his darkest moments, with the world was a man who had known the smell of gunpowder up close and held important public positions and was recognized by the youth of the continent as the Teacher of America, represented a transgression of customs that was difficult to forgive. Societal pressure eventually triumphed. In the last edition of his Memoirs, published during his lifetime by a Catholic publisher, Vasconcelos suppressed those passages. Families could once again sleep peacefully.
As an adolescent, reading all of that meant nothing; it did not exist. What is astonishing, however, was sharing in some way the fate of an exceptional man and his capacity for adventure; a man born not to obey orders of which his conscience would not have approved in advance; who had known prison, poverty, victory; who had participated in conspiracies and uprisings; a man able to relate the accomplishments and vicissitudes of his political activity with the same intense mystical aura with which he spoke of his philosophical discoveries and amorous exploits.
I was excited to learn, for example, that Vasconcelos had crossed most of the country on horseback, accompanied by a small band of loyalists and his mistress, Adriana—a woman who on that occasion was worse than the most destructive plague imaginable—venturing for days and days along the riskiest trails of the Sierra Madre, fleeing his enemies, constantly at risk of being ambushed, until finally crossing the Rio Grande and knowing that for the time being his life was safe; only to then find him almost immediately in the library of San Antonio, Texas, gathering materials for his Aesthetics; and a few weeks later in Paris, attending the historic premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. Such was his life, and it was prodigious; that one day he would be conspiring for or against Pancho Villa, and in the next chapter studying Pythagoras or Plotinus in New York, or touring the Metropolitan Museum after diligently reviewing Burckhardt to better understand the painters of the Italian Renaissance. The upheavals in Mexico and his visions of the wider world alternate and overlap constantly. Sexual passion, intellectual desire, and a resolve to transform the country through spirit are the constants of the young Vasconcelos. Another, which spans everything, is the notion of “Glory,” which he considers inherent to his person; he senses it from childhood, develops it in his youth, and defends it by any means necessary in the moments following the disaster.
That first reading, of course, was incomplete, and could not be otherwise. But it left me with the impression of having come into contact with a man of surprising originality and multiple visions. Further readings have refined, stylized, or altered that view. I do not share the majority of the opinions that Vasconcelos sustains; despite that, however, my astonishment, admiration, and recognition of his courage to confront the world and, above all, his refusal to follow the herd, still remain.
In 1956, at the request of the editor Rafael Giménez Siles, I visited Vasconcelos on two occasions at the National Library, the Biblioteca México, to clarify some doubts that arose while correcting the proofs of the first volume of his Collected Works, which were being prepared by one of the many publishing houses belonging to Don Rafael. He had put me in charge of the first volume. The purpose of the visits, if I remember correctly, was to standardize the spelling of some names that the author employed arbitrarily. On both occasions, he received me in his office, in the company of the ambassador of the Dominican Republic. Vasconcelos had become in his final years a very pleasant man, always smiling, but at the same time very distant. He seemed not to take interest in the fate of that edition that would finally bring together all his books, some having been out of circulation for thirty or forty years. I stressed the desirability of standardizing the different ways he had written some geographical or biographical names and, above all, the various spellings of Russian and Asian names, sometimes copied from a French or English transcription, as well as obvious misprints in the original editions. He asked me to leave him the proofs and the list of possible corrections and return a few days later to pick them up. I went to see him a second time and again found him talking with the same diplomat. He apologized for not being able to review the papers. He then began to review the proofs with me, as well as the list that the proofreader had sent. With each of the items he would pause thoughtfully for a moment, continue his interrupted conversation with Trujillo’s ambassador, and finally give his opinion; after five or six consultations of a relatively long list, he said there was no point in worrying about such minutiae, that the publisher should decide for him, that he had full confidence in Giménez Siles, and when it was all said and done the only thing that mattered were his thoughts and not such insignificant trivialities.
I had long since ceased to admire him. His articles in the press were dreadful. His defense of Francoism, of the totalitarian regimes in Latin America, his sympathies with the most reactionary sectors within the country, his raging anti-indigenism, his anti-Semitism, his disdain for modern literature—all preached in a tiresome and humorless way—tur
ned their reading into a tedious enterprise. His philosophical books, of which he had long boasted, no longer interested anyone; his books on the history of Mexico no longer convinced anyone but the most intractable conservatives. His stories and literary meditations had aged. The youth had turned their back on him, and even his memoirs had paid a heavy price. None of this seemed to discourage him. On the contrary, he enjoyed the fight. If for a quarter century he had continuously said that Mexico was a debased nation and that all the revolutionary governments after Madero had been made up of thieves and scoundrels, he accepted as acknowledgment of his integrity the insults that the nation and the handful of crooks and incompetents hurled at his person. He seemed to be aware of the role he played: even if Mexican society no longer supported him and rejoiced in his downfall, even if it turned its back when he was ready to redeem it, even if politicians and their followers regarded him as a clown (a term that seemed to offend him more than any other, having said so many times, he continued to behave as he liked, in order to show what the politicians had managed to do to the country and even to him. If the world had grown debased and unhinged, if reason had lost its way, he would play a role commensurate with the circumstances. The real culprit was not the individual but the machinery of corruption manufactured by the governments that betrayed the Revolution.
To understand Creole Ulysses and his other memoirs it is worth recalling certain events. Vasconcelos begins to write his first volume in 1931, two years after his defeat in the presidential elections. He never recognized the official results. During the campaign he and his supporters were repeatedly harassed and ridiculed. Some Vasconcelists were killed, many others imprisoned. José Vasconcelos had been, at home and abroad, the great symbol of the revolution: educator of the nation, literary apostle, thinker, and, most importantly, the creator of an authentic and extraordinary cultural renaissance in the country, an effort in which all his gifts and prestige came together. Even now, our debt to the period of cultural renewal initiated by him seventy ago years is still immense. Universal education and textbook distribution became national causes during that period. They were christened “the years of the eagle” by Claude Fell in an excellent book on the period, borrowing an exhortation that Vasconcelos himself used with teachers. Although immense, it was the only triumph of his political life. The three times he ran for elected office he was defeated. First, as a potential candidate for a deputy position during the period of Francisco Madero; then in 1924, following his brilliant tenure in the Secretariat of Public Education, as candidate for governor of Oaxaca; and finally in 1929 as candidate for the presidency of the Republic. The rest is known by everyone: long years of exile, vain attempts to maintain a political presence in Mexico from abroad, long stays in Spain, speaking tours in South America, an invitation to the United States where several universities opened their doors to him. Gradually, active politics began to take a backseat, and the void left by that pursuit was filled by what he considered his essential vocation: philosophy. During this period, while working on his Aesthetics, he also wrote his autobiographical books to which he attributed a rather utilitarian character and in which he defended himself against the smear campaign orchestrated by his detractors; at the same time he went on the offensive and began to war ferociously against his enemies, old and new—those who had suddenly become turncoats. In his zeal to disparage his detractors he committed more than one injustice, sometimes by mere whim, or out of personal disagreement—and even over aesthetic disagreements.
The years of disillusionment, frustration, and resentment following the electoral defeat of 1929 play a major role in the development and content of the narrative about his life he would soon undertake. Upon leaving Mexico he discovered that his intellectual stature lacked the dimension he attributed to it, deluded by the arrogant conviction of his greatness, the blind devotion that his disciples and closest collaborators rendered, and, also, by the praise of some foreign intellectuals who had been invited to Mexico during his term as secretary.
Dialogue was not his forte, it never had been. One of the few childhood friends who dared to address him during the height of his career with the same familiarity as years before, during the period of the legendary meetings of the Mexican Youth Athenaeum, was Alfonso Reyes, who in a short period of particularly active correspondence offered the following advice: “…as I am in conversation with you, I am rereading some of your things, as I want to absorb everything you have published all at once, before continuing with my Hindustani studies. I must make two caveats that my experience as a reader demands: first, try to be clearer in defining your philosophical ideas; sometimes you only say half of what you should. Rise above yourself: read yourself objectively, do not allow yourself to become bogged down or consumed by the course of your feelings. To write you must think with your hand also, not just your head and heart. Second, put your ideas in successive order: do not insert one into another. You have paragraphs that are confusing by dint of addressing completely different things, and that do not even seem to be written seriously. One thing is the vital order of ideas, the order in which they are generated in every mind (which is only of interest to the psychologist and his experiments), and another is the literary order of ideas: which should be used, like a language or common denominator, when what we want is to communicate with others.” Following this direct and cordial advice communicated in a letter of May 25, 1921, the tone of their correspondence continues to cool over a period of years to the mere exchange of formal, friendly cards.
While in exile, Vasconcelos visits José Ortega y Gasset in Spain, who received him and some close disciples in his office. Shortly before his death, Vasconcelos expressed disappointment at the meeting: “He did not make a good impression on me, nor I on him.” There could be no dialogue: the Mexican’s philosophical tools—a composite of vitalism, irrational energy, Bergson, Hinduism, Schopenhauer, refutations of Nietzsche, messianism, Dionysian exaltation—all nineteenth-century concepts, at time taken from second-rate treatises—in no way reconciled with the philosophical discourse that Ortega had resolved to introduce in Spain through the journal Revista de Occidente. In Buenos Aires, one of his former strongholds, he was considered by modern writers to be a completely dispensable figure, an eccentric character, irascible and obsolete. His old liberal and socialist friends no longer interested him, and the group from the journal Sur, where his companions from the Athenaeum, Reyes, and Henríquez Ureña, were like fish in water, represented for him the caste of literati “preoccupied with the trivialities of style,” which he hated. He began touring the world, like a ghost, and that wandering deeply colors the emotional and conceptual content of his memoirs.
The more distant Creole Ulysses is from the present, the more imbued it becomes with a brilliance, a passion, and an innocence that do not appear in subsequent volumes. It is, from beginning to end, the account of a sentimental education and a chronicle of numerous initiatory experiences. It is the transcription of the astonished gaze of a child who engages in the task of becoming acquainted with and recognizing the world; a task that is renewed in each of the character’s biological changes. The world is real, there is no doubt; what differs, and therein lies one of the largest enigmas of this formidable book, are the perceptions that the author attributes to the character: the child, the adolescent, the young student, the successful professional, and, later, the revolutionary he was before writing the book. Not only do the opinions disagree, they are often radically different from those he sustained in letters, books, speeches, and interviews before 1929.
The only explanation that comes to mind is that Creole Ulysses belongs to a different genre than the other three books that make up his so-called Memoirs. Is it really an autobiography? Creole Ulysses is usually included in collections of “novels of the Revolution,” while in literary histories it is placed in the same section with Luis Martín Guzmán’s Shadow of the Caudillo and Maríano Azuela’s The Underdogs. Historians of literature and critics are right. Cre
ole Ulysses can be a novel whose protagonist is called José Vasconcelos, just as the main character in In Search of Lost Time is called Marcel. Both authors fictionalize their circumstances, their setting; they linger on their love for their mother and on other loves; they narrate their initiation into an aesthetic universe, their passion for Bergson and a thousand other situations. If they had met, they would not have had anything to do with each other; on the contrary, it is much more likely that they would have despised each other. And even though they never met, Vasconcelos was viscerally repulsed by Proust the figure and his style. Just as Swann’s Way is a work of fiction closely linked to Proust’s real life—a life that is filtered, distorted, created with liberties that characterize the novelistic creation, which the historian or memoirist cannot take—in Creole Ulysses the Mexican author fashions and recreates at his discretion a series of events he has lived. The character José Vasconcelos inherits from the author José Vasconcelos his temperament and messianic vision, as well as many other coincidences: date of birth; parents and siblings; travels around the country and to cities of the world; an insufferable wife; and a mistress named Adriana who drives him mad daily; his studies and mutual friends; and the same revolution in which author and protagonist do battle and triumph and are ultimately defeated. The objective circumstances may be identical, but the novelist can afford to breathe into his creature feelings, emotions, ideas, philias, and phobias that are radically different from his own. This is what the novel is for! Under the guise of establishing the novelistic nature of his character, Vasconcelos makes him proffer opinions that he, the author, did not sustain during the time in which he situates them. To accomplish this, “he develops a theory of social resentment that he applies to his earliest memories,” as the Argentine Noé Jitrik points out.