Gabriel García Márquez

by Gerald Martin

  Writing books is a suicidal profession. No other demands as much time, as much work, as much dedication, by comparison with its immediate benefits. I don’t think many readers finishing a book ask themselves how many hours of anguish and domestic calamities those two hundred pages have cost the author or how much he received for his work … After this grim assessment of misfortunes, it is elementary to ask why we writers write. The reply, inevitably, is as melodramatic as it is sincere. One is a writer, simply, as one is a Jew or a Black. Success is encouraging, the favour of one’s readers is stimulating, but these are mere additional gains because a good writer will go on writing anyway, even though his shoes need mending and even if his books don’t sell.25

  The new García Márquez, the first sight of whom could be glimpsed in the interviews he gave when he arrived in Cartagena the previous March, has been born. He has started to say almost the exact opposite of what he means. He writes about his misfortunes because his misfortunes are almost over. The man who never complained, never made a fuss in even the most straitened circumstances, is intending to make a fuss henceforth about everything—not least about the cupidity of publishers and booksellers, a topic that will become an obsession. Here he is, the García Márquez who will endlessly fascinate the public and permanently irritate the critics, particularly those who will be convinced that he does not deserve his success and that they who are far more sophisticated, far less vulgar and far more important literarily speaking, should have his glittering prizes. This new personage—a true man of the sixties, apparently—is provocative, opinionated, demagogic, hypocritical, wilfully uncouth and yet impossible to pin down; but the people will love him for all this because he seems to be one of them, making it big and getting away with it thanks to his wit, which is their wit, their view of the world.

  Around the same time, soon after completing the novel, García Márquez wrote a long letter to Plinio Mendoza. It begins with a striking statement of his feelings at the time and then moves on to an explanation of his newly finished masterpiece and what it means to him:

  After so many years of working like an animal I feel overwhelmed by tiredness, without clear prospects, except in the only thing that I like but which doesn’t feed me: the novel. My decision, which speaks to an overwhelming impulse, is to arrange things any way I have to in order to go on writing my stuff. Believe me, dramatic or not, I don’t know what’s going to happen.

  What you’ve said about the first chapter of One Hundred Years of Solitude has made me very happy. That’s why I published it. When I got back from Colombia and read what I’d already written I suddenly had the demoralizing feeling that I was embarked on an adventure that could as easily be catastrophic as successful. So to find out how it would be viewed by other eyes I sent that chapter to Guillermo Cano and here I brought together the most demanding, expert and candid people and I read them another one. The result was great, above all because the chapter I read was the riskiest: Remedios the Beauty’s ascent to heaven, in body and soul…

  I’m trying to answer, without any modesty, your question as to how I write my things. In reality One Hundred Years of Solitude was the first novel I tried to write, when I was seventeen, entitled “The House,” which I gave up after a while because it was too much for me. Since then I’ve never stopped thinking about it, trying to see it mentally, to find the most effective way of narrating it, and I can tell you that the first paragraph hasn’t a comma more or less than the first paragraph written twenty years ago. My conclusion from all of this is that when you have a topic that pursues you it starts growing in your head for a long time and the day it explodes you have to sit down at the typewriter or run the risk of murdering your wife …26

  The letter makes it clear that in writing all this he is partly preparing himself to defend his views—and his novel—in public and that he is expecting a parallel high-profile career in journalism. He also says he now has three different projects for novels which are “pushing” him.

  In early August, two weeks after writing that letter, García Márquez accompanied Mercedes to the post office to mail the finished manuscript to Buenos Aires. They were like two survivors of a catastrophe. The package contained 490 typed pages. The counter official said: “Eighty-two pesos.” García Márquez watched as Mercedes searched in her purse for the money. They only had fifty and could only send about half of the book García Márquez made the man behind the counter take sheets off like slices of bacon until the fifty pesos were enough. They went home, pawned the heater, hairdryer and liquidizer, went back to the post office and sent the second tranche. As they came out of the post office Mercedes stopped and turned to her husband: “Hey, Gabo, all we need now is for the book to be no good.”27

  16

  Fame at Last

  1966–1967

  GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ HIMSELF was less anxious about the book’s eventual success than whether the two packages would even arrive in Buenos Aires. Alvaro Mutis had been working as the Latin American representative of 20th Century Fox for a year and was shortly off to Argentina; García Márquez asked him to take another copy to Paco Porrúa in the Sudamericana office in Buenos Aires. Mutis phoned Porrúa on arrival and said he had the manuscript. Porrúa said: “Forget it. I’ve already read it, and it’s absolutely brilliant.”1 If Porrúa thought the book was “absolutely brilliant,” it was likely to be a sensation.

  Back in Mexico City García Márquez had all his daily notes and his family trees written in forty school notebooks. He and Mercedes claim to have torn them up and burned them as soon as they heard the manuscript had arrived safely in Argentina. They were mainly about structural and procedural questions, he has said. His friends, much more aware of academic and historical considerations, were appalled and said he should not have destroyed them but rather saved them for posterity (or even, as things turned out, to make a handy profit out of them).2 But García Márquez has always defended himself by explaining his sense of embarrassment (“pudor”), which means that he would no more want people to sift over his literary scraps than his household scraps or bits of gossip about his family intimacies. “It’s like being caught in your underwear.”3 Of course there is also something about the artist—or the magician—wanting to protect the tricks of the trade. Unfortunately for biographers he has the same attitude to revealing the most innocent details about his own life. He has always wanted to control the version of his life that would be told—or tell several versions so that no one version can ever be told—as if to cover over for ever the feelings of loss, betrayal, abandonment and inferiority that came to him from his childhood.

  He was already being talked about as the fourth member of that small band of brothers who were leading the Latin American narrative vanguard to international attention through the so-called literary Boom. These four writers—Cortázar, Fuentes, Vargas Llosa and, from this moment, García Márquez—would receive unparalleled publicity in the years to come but at that particular time the movement had not entirely gelled and no one writer had emerged as what might be called the brand leader of this extraordinary range of new products. But his peers already knew; metaphorically, they had already bowed their heads: Gabriel García Márquez was it. Nothing would ever be the same again in Latin America after the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude. The first people to realize this were the Argentinians.

  Argentina, in terms of high culture, was the leading nation in Latin America. Buenos Aires, its glamorous cosmopolitan capital, where García Márquez’s novel was soon to be published, was something like a fusion of Paris and London in the New World. Literary culture there was intense and sometimes pretentious but the quality of debate was always high and its influence on the rest of Latin America undeniable, particularly after the Spanish Civil War when the mother country ceased to have significant intellectual or literary impact on the great continent to the south. When García Márquez read Kafka in Bogotá in 1947, and so many other writers in Barranquilla between 1950 and 1953, it was invar
iably in Argentinian editions that he did so. Losada had turned down his first novel fifteen years before; now his early dream was about to come true and that early wrong was about to be righted: he was about to be published in Buenos Aires.

  Down in the Argentinian capital the publishers at Sudamericana were making no secret of the fact that they thought they had a Latin American prodigy—and possibly a critical sensation—on their hands. As it happened, the name García Márquez had already received a modest amount of publicity in Buenos Aires over the preceding months. Around the middle of 1966 the Jorge Alvarez Editorial published The Ten Commandments (Los diez mandamientos), an anthology of Latin American short stories which included “There Are No Thieves in This Town.” This book, which was an early attempt to cash in on the growing Boom, was a best-seller throughout the second half of 1966.4 The publishers had invited each writer to give a literary self-portrait. García Márquez’s was emblematic of his new approach to self-advertising once he became convinced that he was about to become a literary success:

  My name, Señor, is Gabriel García Márquez. I’m sorry: I don’t like the name either because it is a string of commonplaces I’ve never been able to connect to myself. I was born in Aracataca, Colombia, forty years ago and I’m still not sorry. My sign is Pisces and my wife Mercedes. Those are the two most important things that have happened in my life because thanks to them, at least until now, I’ve been able to survive by writing.

  I am a writer through timidity. My true vocation is that of magician, but I get so flustered trying to do tricks that I’ve had to take refuge in the solitude of literature. Both activities, in any case, lead to the only thing that has interested me since I was a child: that my friends should love me more.

  In my case, being a writer is an exceptional achievement because I am very bad at writing. I have had to subject myself to an atrocious discipline in order to finish half a page after eight hours of work; I fight physically with every word and it is almost always the word that wins, but I am so stubborn that I have managed to publish four books in twenty years. The fifth, which I am writing now, is going slower than the others, because between my debtors and my headaches I have very little free time.

  I never talk about literature because I don’t know what it is and besides I’m convinced the world would be just the same without it. On the other hand, I’m convinced it would be completely different without the police. I therefore think I’d have been much more useful to humanity if instead of being a writer I’d been a terrorist.5

  Here, patently, was a writer expecting to be famous. Once more he had mainly said the opposite of the truth in a way calculated to make himself not only more visible but also more lovable. The image is of the ordinary guy with—implicitly, sheepishly—the extraordinary gift. The contrast between the surface timidity and self-deprecation and the underlying confidence and desire for attention is notable, and would irritate future adversaries beyond measure. Readers of the statement would also have divined that this ordinary guy was politically progressive too, though with a great sense of humour about politics and everything else. He was a man of his age, a man of the moment. Who, reading this, would not look out for his books?

  Argentina’s most influential weekly magazine at the time was Primera Plana. Its editor was Porrúa’s friend the writer Tomás Eloy Martínez, who would later become a good friend of García Márquez himself. Primera Plana was a major opinion former and sold 60,000 copies a week. Its proprietors were always looking for the next big cultural sensation and in December 1966, primed by Paco Porrúa, they decided to send Ernesto Schóo, their star reporter and a member of the editorial board, to interview García Márquez in Mexico. Given the cost of air fares in those days this was quite an investment for any magazine but Primera Plana trusted Porrúa and knew what they were about. The Argentinian journalist effectively lived with the García Barcha family in Mexico for an entire week. When the magazine eventually published his piece six months later it put García Márquez on the cover, not in his own unglamorous street but in the picturesque cobbled lanes of old San Angel. The photos were taken by Schóo himself and showed García Márquez clowning about in typical sixties style wearing his familiar black and red checked jacket. This was not the way Argentinian writers dressed, it was more Jack Kerouac; soon it would just be García Márquez; then “Gabo.” So instead of the gloomy writer described by Luis Harss in that influential book published only a few weeks before Schóo’s interview, Schóo’s pictures would show a happy, indeed euphoric, novelist essentially at home in the world.6

  In April Mario Vargas Llosa, who had recently published his scintillating second novel The Green House, rode one of his own hobby horses into battle by announcing that García Márquez’s forthcoming book was, not Latin America’s “Bible,” as Carlos Fuentes had asserted, but Latin America’s great “novel of chivalry.” Vargas Llosa must have been stunned by the sudden appearance of this unexpected rival from Colombia but, like Fuentes, he opted, appropriately enough, for the chivalrous approach. His groundbreaking article, “Amadís in America,” appeared in Primera Plana in April and declared that One Hundred Years of Solitude was at one and the same time a family saga and an adventure story: “A sharply focused prose, an infallible technical wizardry and a diabolical imagination are the weapons which have made this narrative deed possible, the secret of this exceptional book.”7

  The Argentinians decided to give García Márquez the full treatment. He was invited to visit Buenos Aires in June, both to publicize the novel and as the member of a jury of the Primera Plana/Sudamericana fiction prize. In the interim both Sudamericana and Primera Plana redoubled their efforts to publicize the novel. One Hundred Years of Solitude was finally printed on 30 May 1967. It was 352 pages long and cost 650 pesos, about U.S.$2. The initial idea had been to produce the standard print run of 3,000 copies, high by Latin American standards but fairly normal in Argentina. But the overwhelming enthusiasm of Fuentes, Vargas Llosa and Cortázar, plus Porrúa’s own intuition, made them take a chance. So they moved to 5,000; but demand from booksellers for pre-publication copies put it up to 8,000 two weeks before printing. They expected these to sell in six months if things went well. After a week the book had sold 1,800 copies and was third in the list of best-sellers, an unheard-of achievement for a Latin American novel by a virtually unknown writer. By the end of the second week it had tripled that number in Buenos Aires alone and was out in first place, with the initial print run of 8,000 now looking totally inadequate.

  Ironically enough, Primera Plana itself, after all the staff’s efforts, was a little slow out of the blocks. The intention had been to publish Schóo’s six-month-old report with García Márquez’s picture on the front page of the edition for the week 13 to 19 June but the Six Day War in the Middle East broke out on the 5th at 3.10 a.m. Buenos Aires time and García Márquez’s moment was postponed until the 29th. Inside the magazine a note introducing the issue said that this was not just an extraordinary event but that it (the book but also, implicitly, this issue of Primera Plana) was the baptismal font from which the new Latin American novel would emerge. Schóo’s essay was entitled “The Journeys of Sinbad,” implicitly comparing García Márquez’s work from the outset with the One Thousand and One Nights which had indeed been so important in the fashioning of his imagination. Magic was in the air. Between the book being printed and going on sale the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper, also destined for mythical status, appeared in record shops all over the world.

  García Márquez had tried to placate his friend Vicente Rojo, sore at the Colombian not selling the book to his friends at Era in Mexico, by inviting him to design the cover. Rojo worked hard to communicate the chaotic, multiple, popular flavour of the novel. He put the E of SOLEDAD backwards, leading in due course to the most recondite and esoteric theories of literary critics and to a letter from a bookseller in Guayaquil protesting the receipt of defective copies which he had had to correct by hand so as not to annoy his customers.8 Rojo�
��s cover would eventually appear on more than a million copies of the book, and become a Latin American cultural icon; but it did not appear in the first printing because it failed to arrive in time. So for the first edition a house designer, Iris Pagano, drew up a blueish galleon floating in a blueish jungle against a grey background, with three orange flowers blooming beneath the ship. This is the cover which collectors would later seek for their transactions, not the much more sophisticated cover designed by one of Mexico’s leading artists. The second, third and fourth editions in June, September and December each carried Rojo’s design and were produced in print runs of 20,000 copies, a phenomenon without precedent in the history of Latin American publishing.