THE BOOK THAT SURVIVES
Although it may seem like a memory exercise, it isn’t. The first book I was given by the first girl I fell in love with and lived with was a book by Mircea Eliade. I still don’t know what she was trying to tell me. Somebody else, somebody less foolish, would have realized immediately that the relationship wouldn’t last and would’ve taken the proper steps to protect himself from suffering. I can’t remember the first book my mother gave me. I do vaguely recall a fat illustrated history, almost a comic book, though closer to Prince Valiant than Superman, about the War of the Pacific, that is, the war between Chile and the Peruvian-Bolivian alliance. If I remember right, the hero of the book — a kind of War and Peace of underdevelopment — was a volunteer who had enlisted in the Séptimo de la Línea, a famous infantry regiment. I’ll always be grateful to my mother for giving me that book instead of the children’s classic Papelucho. As for my father, I don’t remember him ever giving me a book, although occasionally we would pass a bookstore and at my request he would buy me a magazine with a long article in it on the French electric poets. All those books, including the magazine, along with many other books, were lost during my travels and moves, or else I let people borrow them and never saw them again, or I sold them or gave them away.
But there’s one book I’ll never forget. Not only do I remember when and where I was when I bought it, but also the time of day, the person waiting for me outside the bookstore, what I did that night, and the happiness (completely irrational) that I felt when I had it in my hands. It was the first book I bought in Europe and I still have it. It’s Borges’s Obra poetica, published by Alianza/Emecé in 1972 and long out of print. I bought it in Madrid in 1977 and, although Borges’s poetry wasn’t unfamiliar to me, I started to read it that night and didn’t stop until eight the next morning, as if there was nothing in the world worth reading except those poems, nothing else that could change the course of the wild life that I’d lived up until then, nothing else that could lead me to reflect (because Borges’s poetry possesses a natural intelligence and also bravery and despair — in other words, the only things that inspire reflection and that keep poetry alive).
Bloom maintains that it’s Pablo Neruda, more than any other poet, who carries on Whitman’s legacy. In Bloom’s opinion, however, Neruda’s effort to keep the Whitmanian tree growing and thriving ends in failure. I think that Bloom is wrong, as he so often is, even as on many other subjects he’s probably our continent’s best literary critic. It’s true that all American poets must — for better or for worse, sooner or later — face up to Whitman. Unfailingly, Neruda does so as the obedient son. Vallejo does so as the disobedient or prodigal son. Borges — and this is the source of his originality and his cool head — does so as a nephew, and not even a very close one, a nephew whose curiosity vacillates between the chilly interest of the entomologist and the stoical ardor of the lover. Nothing more alien to him than the quest to shock or to stir admiration. No one more indifferent to the vast masses of America on the march, although somewhere he wrote that what happens to one man happens to all men.
And yet Borges’s poetry is the most Whitmanian of all: Whitman’s themes are always present in his verse, as are their counterarguments and rebuttals, the reverse and the obverse of history, the heads and tails of the amalgam that is America and whose success or failure is yet to be decided. But that isn’t all he is, which is no small feat.
I began with my first love and with Mircea Eliade. She still lives in my memory; the Romanian has long since been banished to the purgatory of unsolved crimes. I end with Borges and with my gratitude and astonishment, though careful not to forget the lines of “Almost Final Judgment,” a poem that Borges hated: “I have said astonishment where others say only habit.”
BLOOD MERIDIAN
Blood Meridian is a Western, a cowboy novel by a writer who seems to specialize in the genre. Many enterprising types thought that Cormac McCarthy would never be translated into Spanish and they ransacked him shamelessly, abetted by ignorance and a rather curious understanding of intertextuality. And yet Blood Meridian, set in the mid-nineteenth century, isn’t just a Western but also a fevered, ultra-violent novel about life and death, with all kinds of underlying themes (nature as man’s great enemy, the absolute impossibility of redemption, life as inertia); a novel that, in part, tells the story of a group of Americans who launch a murderous raid into the state of Chihuahua and then, after crossing the Sierra Madres, into the neighboring state of Sonora, and whose mission, for which they’re well compensated by the governments of both states, is to hunt down and scalp Indians, which isn’t just difficult but also costly in time and lives, and so they end up massacring whole Mexican towns, where the scalps are ultimately similar enough that it makes no difference.
Blood Meridian is also a novel about place, about the landscape of Texas and Chihuahua and Sonora; a kind of anti-pastoral novel in which the landscape looms in its leading role, imposingly — truly the new world, silent and paradigmatic and hideous, with room for everything except human beings. It could be said that the landscape of Blood Meridian is a landscape out of de Sade, a thirsty and indifferent landscape ruled by strange laws involving pain and anesthesia, the laws by which time often manifests itself.
The other two characters in the novel, Judge Holden and a boy known only as the kid, are antagonists, though they belong to the same gang: the judge is a learned man and a child killer, a musician and a pederast, a naturalist and a gunslinger, a man who yearns to know everything and destroy everything. The kid, by contrast, is a survivor; he’s wild but he’s a human being or, in other words, a victim. According to the distinguished Harold Bloom, Blood Meridian is one of the best American novels of the twentieth century.
Cormac McCarthy was born in 1933 and his life has been rich in adventure and risk. Blood Meridian was first published in 1985. The edition reviewed here was published by Debate in 2001, in a translation by Luis Murillo Fort.
TROUBADOURS
What do the troubadours have to say to us today? What’s the source of their appeal, their excellence? I don’t know. I remember that I was inspired to read them by Pound, and especially by Martín de Riquer’s dazzling studies. From then on, little by little I began amassing books and anthologies in which there appeared the names of Arnaut Daniel, Marcabrú, Bertrán de Born, Peire Vidal, Giraut de Bornelh. By the nature of their trade, most were travelers and globetrotters. Some only traveled one or two provinces, but there were others who crossed Europe, fought as soldiers, sailed the Mediterranean, visited Muslim lands.
Carlos Alvar makes a distinction between troubadours, trouvères, and minnesingers. The real difference is geographic. The troubadours were mostly from southern France, Provençal, although some were Catalan too. The trouvères were from the north of France. The minnesingers were German. Time, which has yet to erase their names and some of their works, will finally erase these national differences.
When I was young, in Mexico City, we played a game in which we divided ourselves into champions of the trobar leu and the trobar clus. The trobar leu was, of course, the light song, simple and intelligible to everyone. The trobar clus, by contrast, was dark and opaque, formally complex. Despite its conceptual richness, however, the trobar clus could often be more violent and brutal than the trobar leu (which was generally delicate), like Góngora written by a convict, or more precisely, like foreshadowings of Villon’s black star.
Because we were young and ignorant, we didn’t know that the trobar clus could in turn be divided into two categories, the trobar clus properly speaking, and the trobar ric, which as its name indicates is sumptuous verse, full of flourishes, and generally empty. In other words: the trobar clus trapped in the halls of academe or the court, the trobar clus stripped of the vertigo of words and life. We knew that without the troubadours the Italian dolce stil novo would never have existed, and accordingly that without the dolce stil novo there would be no Dante, but what we liked best wer
e the misspent lives of some of the troubadours. For example: Jaufre Rudel, who fell in love literally by hearsay with a countess who lived in Tripoli, crossed the Mediterranean on what amounted to a crusade in search of her, got sick, and finally ended his days in a Tripoli boarding house, where the countess, aware that here was a man who had celebrated her in many songs and poems, came and permitted Rudel — who now awaited only death — to rest his head in her lap.
I don’t know what they have to say to us today, the troubadours. So far away in their twelfth century, they seem naïve. But I wouldn’t be too sure about that. I know they invented love, and they also invented or reinvented the pride of being a writer, of gazing fearlessly into the depths.
HERRALDE
Editors tend to be bad people. Not to mention critics and the readers at publishing houses and the thousands of lackeys who travel the dim or brightly lit corridors of publishing houses. But writers are often worse, among other things because they believe in lasting glory or in a world ruled by Darwinian laws or maybe because lurking in their innermost souls is a slavishness even more base.
I’ve had the misfortune of meeting a number of editors who were a burden to their own mothers and I’ve also been lucky enough to meet several, maybe seven or eight, who were and are responsible people, rather gloomy (melancholy is a mark of the trade), intelligent, with guts to spare and a sense of humor, editors who’re determined, for example, to publish authors and books that they know from the start will sell very few copies.
A little while ago the second Targa d’Argento Prize was awarded to the best European publisher, and the recipient was my editor, Jorge Herralde, who beat out many other editors, some about to be wreathed or already wreathed in an aura of legend. Now Herralde has written this book, Opiniones mohicanas [Mohican Opinions] (2001), published by El Acantilado, the house of another remarkable editor and writer, Jaume Vallcorba. To read this book, a collection of assorted pieces and jottings scarcely twenty lines long, is to plunge into the recent history of the Barcelona publishing industry and the European and Latin American publishing world, as well as to step into the circle of Herralde’s friends, his editorial battles, and the political changes undergone in Spain since the end of the dictatorship.
All kinds of writers parade across its pages. Bukowski, whom Herralde and Lali Gubern visit in California. Patricia Highsmith, with whom they dine in Madrid, along with the mayor Tierno Galván. Carlos Monsiváis, the great Sergio Pitol, Carlos Barral, whose ghost is still bowed by the shame of having rejected One Hundred Years of Solitude. Soledad Puértolas, Carmen Martín Gaite, Esther Tusquets, Belén Gopegui — probably the best four women prose writers in Spain. Not to mention a host of British, French, Italian, and American writers, as well as some Latin Americans and Catalans.
What can I say about Herralde that no one, not even Herralde, can later hold against me? I could say that his prose is elegant and ironic, like Herralde himself. But that’s not saying much. What I should really say is that once, during a trip that I made in the grips of the most extreme paranoia, when I reached my destination I discovered several faxes from Herralde at my hotel, in which he told me not to worry and offered all the means at his disposal to get me out of the country at a moment’s notice in case my paranoia should grow more acute.
I also remember another time, at his office, when — after I told him I didn’t plan to attend a party to which I had been invited because I didn’t know the order in which to use the five forks, six spoons, and four knives sure to be standing guard next to my plate — Herralde very patiently explained to me the specific use of each piece of cutlery and the pace of usage or non-usage of the objects in question. It goes without saying that as Herralde explained all this I stared at him in a mixture of confusion, awe, and rage. In this sense Herralde is a proud son of the Catalan bourgeoisie, that cultivated and in no way cowardly bourgeoisie which is vanishing by leaps and bounds.
And what else can I say about him? That literature in the Spanish language wouldn’t be the same if Anagrama had never existed, and that if I ever leave the publishing house (home to seven of my books), I’ll probably especially miss Lali Gubern, Teresa, Ana Jornet, Noemí, Emma, Marta, Izaskun, and sweet María Cortés, now retired, among all the other pretty (and smart) girls who work there, but I’ll also miss Herralde, the interminable afternoons spent arguing about advances, his brief and always pithy remarks, his devastating opinions, lunches at El Tragaluz and dinners at Il Giardinetto, more devastating opinions, more clashing memories from different perspectives — and his independence as chief of the unvanquishable Mohicans.
SPECULATIONS ON A REMARK BY BRETON
A while ago, in an interview I can’t find now, André Breton said that the time might have come for surrealism to go underground. Only there, thought Breton, could it survive and prepare itself for future challenges. He said this toward the end of his life, in the early ’60s.
The suggestion, attractive and ambiguous, was never repeated, either by Breton in the many interviews he later gave or by his surrealist disciples, busy directing terrible films or editing literary magazines that by this point had little or nothing to contribute to literature or to the revolution that Breton and his early comrades saw as something convulsive and vague, that familiar amorphous thing.
It always seemed strange to me that a veil should have been drawn over this strategic possibility, if we can call it that. It raises a number of questions, in my opinion. Did surrealism really go into hiding, and did it die there, in the sewers? Did just a part of it — the least visible part, the young people, for example — go underground while the old guard covered the retreat with exquisite corpses and found objects, thereby making it seem as if all had fallen silent when in fact a retrenchment was taking place? What did this underground branch of surrealism become after 1965, a year before Breton’s death? How involved was it, along with the situationists, in May 1968? Was there an operational underground movement during the last thirty years of the twentieth century? And if there was, how did it evolve, what did it achieve in the fields of fine arts, literature, architecture, film? What was its relationship with official surrealism, in other words the surrealism of the widows, the cinephiles, and Alain Jouffroy? Did any of these subgroups maintain contact with the surrealists in hiding? Was the area of operations of this underground surrealism limited to Europe and the United States or were there also Asian, African, Latin American branches? Could the underground surrealists have split, in time, into subgroups, first at odds with one another and then lost like wandering tribes in the desert? Might they have forgotten, in a relatively short time, that they were actually underground surrealists? And how are the new underground surrealists recruited? Who calls them at midnight and informs them that from now on they can consider themselves part of the group? And what do the people who get the calls think? That they’ve fallen prey to a joke, that the voice with the French accent is really the voice of some practical joker of a friend, that they’re hearing things? And what orders do the new underground surrealists receive? To hurry up and learn to read and speak French? To report to a place in Paris where someone will be waiting for them? Not to be afraid? Above all: Not to be afraid? And what if that place is a cemetery, one of the many legendary cemeteries of Paris, or a church or a bourgeois house on a bourgeois street? And what if it’s a basement located in the darkest corner of the Arab quarter? Should the new underground surrealist — who on top of everything isn’t entirely sure he’s not the victim of a prank that’s gone on too long — report for duty?
It may be that no one ever will receive this call. It may be that the underground surrealists never existed or that by now they’re just a handful of old tricksters. It may be that those who receive the call never keep the appointment, because they think it’s a joke or because they can’t make it. “After centuries of philosophy, we’re still living off the poetic ideas of the first men,” wrote Breton. This sentence isn’t a reproach, as one might think, but a statement
of fact on the threshhold of mystery.
AN ATTEMPT AT AN EXHAUSTIVE CATALOG OF PATRONS
I never had a patron. No one ever hooked me up with anyone so I could get a grant. No government or institution ever offered me money, no elegant gentleman ever pulled out his checkbook for me, no tremulous lady (quivering with a passion for literature) ever invited me to tea and committed herself to providing me with a meal a day. But over the years I’ve come across many patrons, in person or in books.
Most common of all is the fortyish homosexual who suddenly realizes that his life is empty and who devotes himself, belatedly, to filling it with meaning. Deep down, this kind of patron wants to be an artist with a patron of his own, a fortyish and violent patron, who in turn also has a patron, who in turn is taken up by other patrons, and so on ad infinitum. Generally the works that excite this kind of patron are faux self-portraits.
There’s also the patron with blood ties. It’s usually the brother or sister of the artist or poet in question and the relationship between the two of them is like the bond between a bird and a crag. In these circumstances desperation goes by the name of love. Defeat on all fronts is assured.
Then comes the invisible patron. His protegé will never be on first-name terms with him. In fact, in some cases he’ll never see him. The invisible patron is capable of raping a writer without the writer even noticing. The invisible patron isn’t a meek and prudent soul, as one might imagine. On the contrary: he’s usually a clever brute.
Then we have the melancholy grandma. Who isn’t the grandmother of her protegés, of course, or even a great aunt, and who to a certain degree resembles those elderly Russian ladies, lovers of literature, who for a time filled the streets of Paris, Venice, and Geneva. The grandmas dress impeccably. They talk about Proust as if they’d known him. Sometimes they reminisce about candlelit evenings in palaces one has never heard of. They possess (out of ignorance) a high regard for authors who’ve been translated into more than three languages, and their collections of dictionaries and encyclopedias are often impressive. They’re in danger of extinction.
Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles, and Speeches, 1998-2003 Page 18