The Diaries of Emilio Renzi

by Ricardo Piglia

  I am going to make a note here of all my movements today. I got up at six, wrote until ten. From eleven to one, I read all of Pavese’s August Holiday. Then Néstor García Canclini came with a letter from Cortázar and other nonsense. Next I went to Andrés’s house and finished a piece about the CGTA for No Transar, signed as Sergio Tretiakov. Now I’m reading a book by Pierre Macherey, and in a while I’ll go to bed.

  Saturday 14

  It has been raining since last night. I find a striking handling of the abstract second person in James Cain’s Double Indemnity, the reference to an invisible interlocutor allows him to strengthen the narration and structure it.

  “The author does not make the materials with which he works,” Macherey. In that sense, he or she is not a “creator” who extracts something from nothing. A history of the motives, themes, techniques, and forms should be made, and a work should be inscribed in the space of that history in order to be understood.

  Monday 16

  Strikingly, some European writers (Gide, Sartre, Pavese) dismiss Faulkner; they see a great writer appearing and don’t want to believe it. They look for ways to discredit him, to “diminish him.” Today, the tendency is to use his techniques but talk about something else, the nouveau roman, for example. It’s impossible to understand a writer like Claude Simon without Faulkner’s prose, but they prefer to say that his poetics only results from a rejection of the traditional narrative of the nineteenth century. The same thing happens with present-tense narration and the rupture of narrative continuity which, of course, were present in Faulkner.

  As for Chandler, his greatest merit is the way he handles romantic irony, set against a cynical and cruel world. The naïveties of his novels are typical of the crime genre; for example, there must always be a character who has looked through a window and witnessed scenes that the detective—who is also the narrator—could not see.

  Just now, a walk down Corrientes to the offices where two books by Chandler were waiting for me as well as another two by David Goodis and a novel by Ross Macdonald, free of copyright, in Spanish, which we’re going to make an offer for.

  Tuesday 17

  I should reflect on the use of parentheses in a narration (they are a pause, or they are an interruption that must be pointed out).

  Ever since I went to see José Bianco, a few weeks ago, to give him the book that Virgilio Piñera sent him from Havana, dedicated to him (and with a photo), we have begun a telephone friendship; we talk early in the morning or in the evening, a way for me to start or end the day by talking to someone with whom I have an understanding, almost without having to explain anything, even though he comes from another generation.

  I looked at my face in the mirror and decided that I shouldn’t have a beard. Immediately some issues came up, and now I’m sure I’ll keep my face the way it is.

  Thursday 19

  In the morning I stopped by Jorge Álvarez’s place to drop off a list of books and had a very good talk with him, as is usual these days; he always has many projects and unexpected ideas. We go forward with the plan for a crime collection, in which we’ll publish American novels distinguished from the model of the English mystery novel. In the bookshop I ran into Walsh, who invited me to see The Hour of the Furnaces on Friday next week. Then I got lunch with Schmucler and we organized some things for next year. He brought me a very favorable review, published in La Nación, of my anthology of autobiographical texts. From there I went to the magazine meeting without much energy, trying to put together the program for a meeting among intellectuals of the left at the end of the month. Finally back at home with Daniel and B. having a very good discussion about the script, with compromises and agreements that allowed it to progress quickly.

  Friday 20

  At night I see Manuel Puig again, always infallible in his selections, he sees “the Argentine” in Isabel Sarli and Armando Bo’s films. There, he finds what he was looking for: passion and social politics, everything taken to an extreme and beyond. He also sees “the national” appear in Silvina Bullrich and in radio dramas, more clearly than it appears in writers from the left, who deliberately try to reflect reality.

  Today I reread Chandler’s The Long Goodbye in almost one sitting, it has all of the mystery, the mythical atmosphere, and the tone of a great novel like Gatsby or Fiesta or The Glass Key by Hammett. In a sense, all of his novels form one saga structured around the adventures leading up to the meeting with Marlowe; a character’s past becomes a novel you have read before. This heightens the sense of reality in the everyday life of the protagonist, whom you already know. Soon after the beginning of The Little Sister, after his meeting with Maioranos on the last page of the previous novel, he would have taken a shower and gone to his office to wait for a phone call. Rather, the structure of the novels allows them to be linked as a succession of Marlowe’s adventures as he grows old, not learning from experience.

  Saturday

  Last night a thwarted attempt to see The Hour of the Furnaces covertly. It was raining and we all crowded into El Foro. I’m writing the cover copy for Mailer’s Complete Stories.

  Sunday 22

  Amazed at the Americans’ arrival on the moon, which I watched on television yesterday at Daniel’s house.

  Before I go to Mar del Plata:

  M. Milano.

  Miguel Briante.

  Tiempo Contemporáneo publishing.

  Chandler.

  Magazine.

  Boccardo (meeting Thursday).

  Buy:

  Agenda.

  Notebook.

  Shoes.

  Tuesday 24

  A year ends, its merits reduced to money. I earned one hundred thousand pesos per month instead of the thirty thousand I earned last year. Autonomy, free time.

  A meeting for the magazine (which is coming out on Thursday), then at the publishing house, nothing else.

  Wednesday 25

  I spent Christmas Eve alone.

  The end of the year, empty days, not reading or writing, waiting for something to change, not quite knowing why.

  Thursday

  An interview with Borges on Monday; my idea is to have him select a set of short stories by Conrad and write a preface for the classics collection.

  Tuesday

  Yesterday a visit with Borges (brief, hindered by María Esther Vázquez), which will be repeated next Monday.

  Monday

  At ten thirty I meet Borges. I arrive and the maid opens the door and lets me in. Borges is having breakfast, the tablecloth is an English flag, he seems to be eating ham. He gropes around in the air and bends forward in greeting, and the bones of his face are visible under his transparent skin. While responding to the imperative questions of a young man, trying to “make him talk” about Perón and about Russian communism, Borges confirms what the other man says but then starts talking about Stevenson. Finally, as he is leaving, Borges tells him not to put in anything about politics except for one line that amuses him: “What we need in this country is a good-natured Swiss dictator.” Finally he comes toward where I wait for him in an upholstered armchair by the window, carrying a piece of furniture in front of him, and he says: “It’s very dark. Is it still raining?” We begin to choose the stories by Conrad. “The Duel” is the first, and then I was able to see the mechanism of Borgesian fiction almost laid bare. First, he talked to me about Conrad’s story; his reading emphasized the symmetry between the duelists’ private war and the Napoleonic wars that went along with them. At the same time, he insisted on the difference between the duelists, they’re different, not similar, he said. One of them doesn’t want to fight and the other forces him to. Immediately, the theme of “duels” starts to be organized as an uninterrupted succession or an endless chain. He describes them as though they were his own and constructs a series linked by thematic unity.

  1) Sainte-Beuve condemned duels. He was fat, very tall, and bald, and he snuck around with Victor Hugo’s wife, disguising himself as a woman
to enter his lover’s house. Someone challenged him to a duel one day, but he couldn’t accept since his convictions forbid dueling, but at the same time, he had to accept so that people wouldn’t think his stance came from a fear of combat. He accepts, and on the field of honor, Borges tells me, he grips the pistol in his right hand and a yellow-painted umbrella in his left hand as a way to mock the whole procedure.

  2) In the middle of the war, Julius Caesar was challenged to a duel by a general from the enemy army. Julius Caesar would not accept and told him he would send a gladiator if he wanted to die. Napoleon did the same thing, saying he was very busy and offered to send a fencing master.

  3) Dr. Johnson, in a tavern in London, had a coarse argument about theology and his opponent, enraged, threw a glass of wine at his face, Dr. Johnson looked at him, “That is a digression,” he said, “I await your arguments.”

  4) Conrad was about to fight B. Shaw, who had said that he didn’t like his novels and couldn’t remember the reason why. H. G. Wells intervened, convincing Conrad that he only wanted to fight because he didn’t understand the rules of English humor.

  5) An employee at the National Library told the story of a gardener, Narciso, who had fought with a man and killed him. They went out into the street to fight so that they wouldn’t make a mess of the house (the unexpected gentlemen did this even though they were in a brothel). They fought for half an hour, and Narciso received serious wounds on his left arm but killed his rival. The whole town attended the duel, even the watchman. They fought near the drug store, Borges clarified, so that they could be treated.

  6) A lion tamer named Soto comes to San Antonio de Areco with a circus. Everyone in town is amazed at his courage: the man puts his head between the lion’s jaws. A tough guy named Soto, whom they call “Toro negro,” challenged the tamer every time he came near the small village and went into a bar to have a gin. “There’s only room for one Soto,” he said, and in the end he killed him in a pasture, even though the other refused to fight.

  ‌2

  Diary 1969

  January

  Looking at the relationship between writing and stigma, the scar in the form of the sword, my Uncle Sergio’s face covered with a cloth. He imagined that he had a skin deformity and didn’t want anyone to see his face for two years. One day he decided he’d been cured and returned to his usual routines.

  Thursday 2

  Notes on Tolstoy (5). The logic of Tolstoy’s morality must have led him to complete inaction, to a refusal to confront any concrete problem, to the epoché and apatheia of the stoics or to a passive contemplation of the mystery of being, typical of the Buddhist monk. All evil, he sometimes says in his Diaries, comes from doing. Thus, Tolstoyan morality is a negative morality because it is based on negation and the renunciation of all values recognized and exalted by society. Logically, the critique of society is not accompanied by any concrete alternative for a fairer society. His fundamental ideas about common ownership of the land, the exigency of manual labor, the abolition of any form of violence and any State control over the citizen, vegetarianism, disavowal of alcohol and tobacco, nonviolence, and the vote for the poor actually seem to be forms of religious life without transcendence or faith.

  Friday 3

  Yesterday a covert, discrete walk on San Telmo with Dalmiro Sáenz, Ricardo Carpani, Lorenzo Amengual, etc., until we entered an apartment and all crowded in to watch The Hour of the Furnaces, a very good film by Solanas, a documentary in the same vein as the agitprop of the Russian avant-garde.

  Sunday 5

  Yesterday an unnecessary trap: Daniel invites me to have dinner and look at a series of slides from China, but after a while Roberto C., the boss, unexpectedly appears with a heavy pedagogical lesson about the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.” In the middle of his dissertation—according to Julia—I jump up, fall asleep, and go out to the balcony, annoying everyone by leaving when I shouldn’t have. A repeated lesson: I don’t like the language of the politicians on the left, although I try not to dismiss their positions. I must defend my solitude and isolate myself (not only from politics, though politics is too present these days).

  I don’t like the affected styles that circulate in my generation’s narrative either: everyone writes in someone else’s voice (especially in those of Borges, Onetti, and Cortázar); for my part, in spite of everything, I use a personal voice that may not necessarily be my own, that is, the one I speak with in my life. I write with the sincerity of a subject I don’t know, who only appears—or shows his face—when I write. Call him “H,” as people now habitually say in Buenos Aires when they can’t talk accurately about a topic.

  I’m interested in the way Scott Fitzgerald writes about cinema and the experience of a screenwriter in the studios. He uses a key, for example, in the story “Pat Hobby and Orson Welles,” mythologizing Welles in the title, not only through the formal similarities between Citizen Kane and The Great Gatsby (via Conrad), but rather because both are metaphors for the failure of the artist in the United States, something both writers have described over and over again: geniuses, famous before age thirty, broken, forgotten after forty. “There are no second acts in American lives,” F. S. Fitzgerald.

  Half a day spent organizing the classics collection for Jorge Álvarez. Notes from Underground with a prologue by George Steiner, Robinson Crusoe with a prologue by Joyce, Bouvard et Pécuchet with a prologue by R. Queneau. Also Les Liaisons dangereuses with a prologue by M. Butor. I prepared a draft of the general introduction for the series and decided on material for the covers.

  Then to the movies. The Charge of the Light Brigade by Tony Richardson. De-dramatization, Brechtian handling of crowd scenes; romantic heroes, rather naïve and poignant, destroyed by the absurdity of their own heroism.

  Monday 6

  I rose early, took a walk to clear my head through the empty plaza, its unforgettable shades of green from the trees. I also quite like the art deco streetlights in Plaza Rodríguez Peña.

  Series E. “I understand,” I said, but she knew how to shop. “So,” she said, “deep down, understanding is the same thing as buying.” I understand that everything must be linked to my personal history, and I buy the idea of my own life (but what property could that mean?). We could use my early morning walk as a metaphor: a writer traverses his territories, which may be an infinite plain, or the sea (as in Melville), or a circular walled cave (as in Kafka), or a plaza in the city. What is important is to have one’s own ground and to delve in there.

  The need to be on top of language is the same as swimming, moving forward over the sea (the depths hold a temptation that must be watched). A superficial prose, a short-distance swimmer; in all my life, I’ve never written stories longer than fifty thousand words. The impression that I’d get lost if I strayed too far from the shore. I remember the feeling of swimming in the sea at night, the terror that I could be lost from view and go farther out even while thinking I was going back.

  I have a place that I can only lose if I let myself get excited by the kind of poetics I deplore (automatic writing, spontaneous prose), which is in fashion this season (the effect of Cortázar’s writing and gravity toward the Beat Generation).

  It is clear that, in order to survive the Boom, one has to remain apart. Keeping still, writing stories that go against the grain of the growth that is leading Latin American literature today. Writing without being interested in circulation (with luck, I’ll never exceed three thousand copies). Less is more. Waiting. One who can stay calm amid the avalanche will go further, not burning up along the way. We shall see.

  Tuesday 7

  I awoke in terror, seeing strange creatures running along the wall, an effect of the heat, or who knows, a dream in which all of my fears organized themselves (I was crossing a weak and narrow bridge in a storm that pulled at me, moving one foot and then the other on the moving surface suspended in the air). Once I got up, I tried to get away while I recalled the details of the nightma
re, sitting facing the window, drinking maté, and feeling that it was absurd to attempt anything in such heat; the whole city is an oven after six in the morning.

  In the late afternoon I found my intuitions confirmed in a mysterious meeting with Walsh to see the first and second parts of The Hour of the Furnaces, which interested me less than the previous time. In the second part, the ideological arbitrariness becomes an aesthetic error. Solanas has invented the Peronism of the left.

  Wednesday 8

  The cultural industry’s renewed, multitudinous criticism (Briante, De Brasi, Espartaco, González Trejo, Sebreli) forgets that art can’t be thought about in terms of the circulation of works or its effects on the media and that it is crucial to think about it in the moment of creation.

  Friday 10

  Back then—I will one day say—I discovered that it was a beautiful thing to go out early into the streets and walk through the empty city in the crisp air of dawn.

  Write about tragedy cynically, write the love story in an anti-sentimental way. Irony, detail, and distance to conceal vulnerability. A schizoid style to write about passions. Style isn’t made from “belles lettres,” but rather from changes in direction over the course of the sentence. A form that is an attack on “natural” feelings. A language that only shows the—disguised—intensity of the emotion.