Riding the Yellow Trolley Car: Selected Nonfiction

by William Kennedy

  Perhaps also, in his own language, the book is different from the product at hand. The translation of this new work is by Barbara Shelby and it is fine English. Yet it has the same quality to be found in the translations of Isaac Babel, another regionalist whose dialect and slang are not entirely lost in translation but arrive here like a package that has been too long at the bottom of the parcel-post truck. It’s not the same as it started out. Babel is a giant of concision. Amado is logorrheic, repetitious and in quite another literary dimension from the Russian maestro. Yet their language comes at us from the funhouse mirror, and that distortion—once the art is missing—may be at the heart of why Amado makes it in Portuguese but not English.

  Or is it simply that the art is clearly missing, even in Portuguese? Amado believes not only in repeating himself four, five, six times, but also in summarizing each of Teresa’s adventures in advance, so that we not only drown in verbosity but we are also denied the surprise that even rotten fiction usually dangles before us.

  He maneuvers us through the “wars” of his subtitle—all but one of the wars wholly involving Tereza, the yonic saint. We see her at the outset, in the full bloom of womanhood, falling in love with a sailor who sails away and leaves her forlorn during her time as a singularly sensual samba dancer. We flash backward then to her being sold as a child bride to the rich, vicious, sadistic, lecherous, one-dimensional brute, Captain Justo, and we carry along through the war she rages (and wins) against the captain’s bizarre abuse of her body and soul.

  On then we go to a smallpox epidemic when Tereza, like nurse Edith Cavell and other female bastions of grace under pressure, single-handedly stands up against the raging plague, while the whole town cowers in fear. She is the power who organizes the local whores to isolate and treat the sick, haul away and bury the putrefying corpses. She and the girls do not get the plague, lucky for them, and her doctor lover runs off like a cowardly dog to save his worthless self. Does the world reward Tereza for her selflessness? Nix.

  Tereza earns a respite from whoring, sadism and other poxy fates when she is taken in by the wonderful, thoughtful, refined, wealthy, intellectual, loving and kindly old aristocratic whoremaster, Dr. Emiliano Guedes. The randy old doc turns Tereza into a lady and is just about to write her into his will when, oops, he succumbs in the saddle. Amado then takes us back through the idyllic six years in which Tereza and the doc made sweet pudding together. And, in the words of Red Smith as he once watched a yacht race, Amado here opens up great new vistas of boredom to us.

  The final fragment of this book—which is really a series of independent novellas entwined with recurring characters—is the best part of the work, a low-level spin-off from Never on Sunday, in which the whores of the town go on strike against an evil cartel of cops and real estate opportunists, just as the American fleet pulls into port. Tereza plays a minimal role in this section, for which a reader must be thankful. A statue comes down off its pedestal and gods materialize to save the whores and give the evildoers their ironic justice; in all an entertaining social farce is played out with more suspense than Amado heretofore saw fit to generate.

  Tereza does have a small hand in this war and at the victorious end she is reunited with her sailor, who sails home from the sea just in time to save sweet Tess from a loveless marriage to a baker with plenty of dough. Our heroine is about to be mounted again at fadeout, but this time she likes it because it’s for truly true love, the truest she’s ever known.

  Amado has made his book dense with superficiality, and in doughty Tereza he has created an affectionate, affronting literary icon for these times of multi-angular sexuality: a composite of Wonder Woman, Mary Magdalene, Lola Montes, Lupe Velez, Melina Mercouri, Clara Barton, Foxy Brown and Little Annie Fanny. Ms. magazine will probably not print an excerpt.

  1975

  Carlos Castaneda:

  Tales of Power

  Carlos Castaneda’s new book, his fourth, should transport him once and for all out of the land of anthropological rationality and into the mysterious realm of fiction. The debate on whether the elusive little Latin from California really did turn up a turned-on Yaqui Indian named Don Juan Matus in the Sonora region of Mexico, there to be instructed in the ways of sorcery by this wise old man, has been part of the literary, philosophical, anthropological and head-culture dialogue of America since Castaneda’s first book, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, came out in 1968. The mystery attenuated in 1971 with the follow-up volume, A Separate Reality, in which, as with the first, the way to self-knowledge under Don Juan’s tutelage was gained in part through peyote and the magic mushroom. In his third work, published in 1972, Journey to Ixtlan, Castaneda (known in the books as Carlitos) forwent the drugs and began the task of seeing the world with only an apprentice sorcerer’s undrugged eye.

  Now in Tales of Power, which Castaneda says is his last book on Don Juan, his instruction is completed, again without drugs. The sorcerer’s apprentice graduates into his “totality” on dream and guidance only, and sets off at book’s end alone, with his two teachers, Don Juan and Don Genaro, receding from his life to become what they used to be, “dust on the road” of his life.

  The new book is the capstone of the tetralogy, wrapping up the teachings of Don Carlitos so completely that the other books are not really necessary to an understanding of what he’s been up to. One of the teachings for us all is that you can get away with literary grand larceny, even peddle your dreams, fantasies and fabrications, if you orchestrate them under the label of nonfiction. Norman Mailer knows this. Clifford Irving knows this. Hunter Thompson knows this.

  The nonfiction maneuver does not diminish the meaning of the work but it unquestionably enhances its marketability in an age when fiction struggles for a place on the shelves of the nation’s bookstores.

  Castaneda told a Time interviewer in early 1973: “Oh, I am a bullshitter! Oh, how I love to throw the bull around!”

  Why didn’t we believe him? A more genteel way of putting it would be that the man revels in his imagination. This new work is so clearly a product of Carlitos’s very special imaginative process that it is difficult to see why there has ever been any doubt about the fakery of his pose as a nonfictionist.

  But really, it isn’t entirely fakery, only a rare man’s way of hedging the bet of his life. Carlitos, who once thought he was a student and wrote his first book as a doctoral thesis, is unquestionably a teacher. His books are as didactic as Plato’s and just as fat with instructional dialogue. His Don Juan, who constantly tells Carlitos to end his own internal dialogue, is as garrulous as Jonathan Winters and just as fractured by his own jokes. And yet if Castaneda is not about to inseminate Western culture with a vision of how it really is, he is at least on the cusp of twisting its head a few millimeters. He is a cult figure now, especially with the young but not exclusively so, approaching Hesse, Vonnegut, Golding and Salinger. You think he’s popular this year? Wait till next.

  Remember Franny and Zooey? That finely honed little pair of short stories was as didactic as anything ever wrought by an American writer, including Dale Carnegie’s and Norman Vincent Peale’s combined oeuvres. Salinger was setting us up for a guru, the noted but still unfulfilled Seymour Glass, who according to his siblings had all the answers to how to get on in this world and maybe the next half dozen too. Jesus, Epictetus, Emerson, Zen. Put them all together you get Jeez, Seymour.

  Salinger fattened his bundle and both enhanced and diminished his literary reputation with his Franny and Zooey self-help didacticism; and Carlitos, so says his agent, either is or will be a millionaire from his books. Such is the contemporary addiction to random wisdom.

  What wisdom does Carlitos come to in this final episode of the quartet? First he goes out to one of those notable “power spots” where things happen, finds a murmuring shadow that looks like a man but turns out to be a moth and is really only his opening encounter with the “nagual,” a presumably Mexican word for all the unknown and i
ndescribable elements of life. Getting to know the nagual is the key to sorcery, for it is the means of controlling the “tonal” (another presumably Mexican word), which is all that is rational and knowable in life. The point: most of us live and drown in the tonal’s rationality. But if we can divide ourselves, if we can visit the nagual without being killed by its terrors or seduced by its sublimity, we will then be able to move in and out of dreams and fantasy, and the surreal phase of our existence will balance the oh-so-deadly real stuff. This will, in time and with practice, and with the opening of the bubble of perception, permit us to achieve the totality of ourselves.

  We get there, says Carlitos, by seeing in a special way what few others see, by dreaming, by will, by stopping our internal dialogue. We get there by learning to end our self-pity and by taking responsibility for what we have done. We get there by eliminating our past as a source of anxiety and by living in the present, by being in touch with all the fine detail of life that those who wallow in their own grief or exhausted past histories never can appreciate.

  The message is at times very like Thornton Wilder’s in Our Town. It is also like Salinger invoking Zen to urge us not to seek rewards for our work. The direction is blessedly free from moral stricture (we are admittedly dealing in the black magic of the spirit), free also from sex (there are no significant women in this book), and free from any worldly temptation except that of slipping back into the muck and dreck of reason. Reason alone, says Carlitos-Juan, is slow death. Of course death, if we only knew it, is the way to life. Death is that solitary set of headlights behind us on the highway, always following us. The only way we’ll ever know we’re alive is if we realize death is going to overtake us at any moment.

  Being so full of such bromidic salvation, it would seem the book is useless. But Castaneda has the skills of a superb but flawed novelist. He has structured his philosophy novelistically and structured it with great care. For instance, before he fully advises us how to split ourselves, and how to dream ourselves into the nagual, he conjures up a “magical” event for Carlitos to experience—seeing himself sleeping in two different places, witnessing two separate sets of events. He is thus able to transcend space and time, which his teachers, Don Juan and especially Don Genaro, are so adept at doing. Don Genaro leaps up and down canyons, walks upside down on trees.

  By book’s end it is clear that Carlitos is not really talking about magic at all; that the whole work is, like that dual sleeping scene, an elaborate and admirably detailed metaphor with the aim of guiding the reader out of the humdrum and into self-awareness. The magical events are no further out of our reach than our next willfully weird daydream.

  It has been said that Castaneda has dressed out his Mexican spirit world as thoroughly as Faulkner detailed Yoknapatawpha County, a ridiculous thing to say. Castaneda’s strength is in pictorializing his philosophy with surreal metaphors. But when he begins to detail a man, or a real cabin, or a city park, he is as ill at ease as a brick mason trying to point up gold leaf on the Taj Mahal. His dialogue is fluid but often gawky, acceptable finally because you don’t believe he’s even trying to simulate reality. The behavior of Don Juan and Carlitos is so thinly and repetitiously imagined when they are not involved in dialogue or dream, that it would earn the author a revoked passport to any decent creative-writing class. Don Juan does almost nothing but laugh at all that Carlitos says. Carlitos spends his time taking notes or dropping his notebook or pencil. Don Juan laughs when he drops it. Carlitos takes notes on Don Juan laughing. Don Juan then laughs at that and Carlos drops his book again. Don Juan doubles up in glee. Carlos picks up his book and makes a note of the glee. Don Juan slaps his thigh and chuckles.

  This is a serious drag until you stop faulting him for inadequate anthropological definition and let him carry on with his plot. That plot, wherever it began in his personal life, whether on some mushroom orgy in a Los Angeles apartment or a spooky walk along some dusky chaparral in Mexico, has turned into something nifty for a great many people. Who can object to wising up the human race? If Richard Nixon had read Castaneda he’d know that not all artists are Jews. Too late for that, but Carlitos is still here for all the unborn and not-yet-undone.

  The way to his secrets is not easy. You have to wade through a lot of silly prose. But when you get there you like Castaneda for all his effort. He is as welcome as any other novelist who gives his whole being to his books. He really doesn’t know any more than any of the other would-be wise men among us, but he thinks he does. And that determines what winds up on our bookshelves.

  1974

  Ernesto Sábato:

  On Heroes and Tombs

  In an author’s note to his second novel, On Heroes and Tombs, Ernesto Sábato talks of a fictional narrative “whereby the author endeavors to free himself of an obsession that is not clear even to himself.” He says that he has written countless “incomprehensible” stories but put few of them in print.

  He published, in 1948, his first novel, El Túnel (translated into English by Harriet de Onís as The Outsider in 1950), and in the thirteen years between that novel and his second, “I continued to explore the dark labyrinth that leads to the central secret of our life. I tried at one time or another to express in writing the outcome of my research, until I grew discouraged at the poor results and ended up destroying the majority of my manuscripts.”

  He says friends persuaded him to publish what survived, and On Heroes and Tombs is among the survivors. It is a very remarkable survivor, a book which derives its main motive power from incest, and which at the same time aspires to be a work of national significance: the Great Argentine Novel as of 1955, perhaps.

  Helen R. Lane’s translation does high justice to Sábato’s prose, which ranges from syntax that is lush and fluid and baroque to dialogue that is irreducibly spare.

  Sábato, born in 1911, has been active politically throughout his life: an early Communist, disillusioned; an editor, a polemical essayist, anti-Perónist; and so it is natural that politics plays a role in his fiction. In this novel politics is metaphorically central. He focuses the modern segments of his tale on the first Perón era (1946–1955) and also saves his most elegiac prose for a historical section set in 1841—the story of rebel soldiers in terminal retreat toward the Bolivian border, which powerfully and movingly captures the manic spirituality that in spite of temporary defeat eventually freed the nation from tyranny and shaped its democratic future. But tyranny returns under Perón, and Sábato explores its effect on the soul, but in a way which is open to myriad interpretations.

  Principally the novel is the story of a young man named Martín del Castillo and his love for Alejandra Vidal Olmos, a young woman from a decadent aristocratic family which has been a part of the Argentine oligarchy that opposed Perón. Alejandra is living a secret life as a high-level prostitute for affluent Perónists. Her father, the third figure of significance, is a paranoid anarchist–bank robber named Fernando Vidal Olmos, with whom Alejandra seems to be having a prolonged incestuous relationship. A fourth character is Bruno Bassan, all but faceless, a childhood friend of Fernando, who narrates three of the novel’s four sections and is Sábato’s opinionated surrogate.

  The novel, through Bruno, is a discursive, distracting, sometimes fascinating pastiche of Sábato’s attitudes toward Buenos Aires as Babylon, toward Peronism, Marxism, the Reader’s Digest, graffiti, Don Quixote, Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine oligarchy, football, Patagonia, Italians, Jews, blacks, fascism and much more.

  Sábato reveals in a prologue that Alejandra shoots and kills her father in June 1955 (the year of Perón’s overthrow) and then commits suicide by setting fire to herself and to the decaying Olmos mansion. He then opens the book with the young Martín encountering Alejandra at a public park. There is an immediate spark and after they talk and start to separate she says to him: “You and I have something in common, something very important.… Even though I think I shouldn’t ever see you again. But I’ll see you because I need you.
”

  This meeting all but destroys Martín’s young life. Lovesick, he moons insipidly after Alejandra, who keeps him at arm’s length, tells him that she is “garbage” after she reluctantly makes love to him. Passion has nothing to do with why she likes him; neither he nor we ever learn precisely why she does, though he seems to be her lone link to innocence, to a healthy relationship with the male sex.

  Martín follows her, begins to understand something of her secret life, but only dimly, then sees her with a man who seems to be her lover. “The man was cruel and capable of anything … reminiscent of a bird of prey.” Martín suspects this is a cousin of whom she has spoken, and he confronts her with that notion. She is horrified at what Martín has seen (has he uncovered her incestuous passion?) and she angrily shakes him and tells him the man is Fernando, her father.

  Sábato abruptly intrudes on this story with a discourse on the turbulent condition of Argentina under Perón, linking it to Martín’s continuing quest for an absolute to cling to, “a warm cave in which to take refuge.” But Martín, he concludes, had neither a home nor a homeland, “or what was worse, he had a home built on dung and disillusionment [he thinks of his mother as a sewer], and a tottering, enigmatic homeland.” He had flung himself, like a shipwreck victim, on Alejandra: “But that had been like seeking refuge in a cavern from whose depths voracious wild beasts had immediately rushed forth.”