Sometimes I think I shouldn’t publish the book of short stories yet, wait a couple years longer and see what happens, but I have to follow the enthusiasm it has earned from some readers and my conviction that the book has nothing to do with what’s being written in Argentina now. That, for me, is a virtue, even if no one realizes it. I am certain that the volume is on the same level as the best works published in the genre in recent times (El inocente, Palo y hueso, Cabecita negra, and Los oficios terrestres), but of course that means nothing or, anyway, I don’t know if that’s enough to legitimize it.
While looking through this notebook, I find a file card from the National Library, which I will transcribe as a trace of my life at this time.
National Library – Buenos Aires – May 29, 1967
Title of work: Tratados en La Habana
Author: José Lezama Lima
Número: 339,260
First and last names of the reader: Emilio Renzi
Address: Martín García 896
ID Card Number: 186,526
Date of birth: November 24, 1941
On the back of the card is this information:
Collections of the Library, as of December 31, 1959
Books, magazines, newspapers, and periodicals: 496,604
Folders: 110,495
Archives of the Indies copies: 6,000
Maps: 6,555
Plates: 1,995
Music: 36,112
Photographs: 366
Microfilms: 68
Total bibliographic items: 658,155
Comparative quantities
Collected from 1810 to 1934: 276,477 bibliographic items
Added from 1934 to 1952: 376,908 bibliographic items
Added from 1953 to 1959: 44,947 bibliographic items
Total: 698,332 bibliographic items
Manuscripts subtracted: 40,177
Current total: 659,155 bibliographic items
Monday, June 12
I went to the magazine to get paid for my notes on youth—four thousand pesos. Then I went to the destitute National Library, came back home with my shoes broken, not from too much walking. Now I’m ready to read Onetti’s short novels.
Last night Julia tells me with an indifferent tone that the essence of my notebooks is that, by writing them, I imagine I can change reality; reading them, then, will be a way of living in the present once more. What is memorable is not the boring motion of sitting down to write them: only the future justifies them, according to her.
Tuesday 13
An incredible cold, several degrees below zero in the city. I unsuccessfully try to warm up the room.
The current debate predicting the disappearance of the novel, erased by the popular voracity of the mass media, holds some truth. Part of the public leaves the novel behind and seeks fiction in the movie theater or on television. At the same time, the novel can be an impoverished bastion of resistance and negation of the state of things. A culture of opposition can emerge, isolated from the “industry” of propaganda. Precisely because of that, a writer can embark on a venture of resistance, keeping his separation and attempting to cut away from what he is given. Although formal techniques and discoveries are universalized, the novel can preserve a passion for free experimentation.
I am not refusing the possibility of pop being included in the literary tradition. The other issue is that, as writers, we live “pursued” by politics. We can’t forget that, in its own way, and before anyone else, literature has narrated this tension, or rather the consequences of this persecution (Stendhal was the first to perceive the problem).
Of course, this discussion originates with the strong presence of Marshall McLuhan, philosopher of mass-communication media, who wrote, “Our technology is, also, ahead of its time, if we reckon by the ability to recognize it for what it is. To prevent undue wreckage in society, the artist tends now to move from the ivory tower to the control tower of society.”
In other words, in the electronic age, books (very primitive machines for the diffusion of thought) will disappear and writers will turn into technocrats. The issue, of course, boils down to knowing who will control the system of the mechanisms for diffusion.
An example of the industrialized and impersonal standardization of prose is the style connecting all of the articles in the magazine Primera Plana: everything comes from Borges—surprising use of adjectives, indecisive verbs, baroque structure. An example is seeing what journalists from the magazine write or have written in other times or places—for example, Silvia Rudni in Issue 8 of Mundo Nuevo, or Ramiro de Casasbellas’s old notes in the newspaper El Mundo, Tomás Eloy Martínez’s notes on cinema in La Nación, before they learned to write the generalized prose that comes from Borges.
Sunday 18
Yesterday, a disjointed conversation with Noé Jitrik that concluded with a reading of each other’s short stories—and, as always, the certainty of my intuitive advantage in literary standing.
Wednesday 21
Taking refuge in the National Library, between baroque walls and chill air, I read Mansilla.
“Only great minds can afford a simple style,” Stendhal.
Monday 26
I am in the National Library. After walking down Corrientes and selling Point Counter Point by A. Huxley, La Bâtarde by V. Leduc, several history books, and several police novels, I got back five hundred pesos to make it to the end of the month. Then, at Jorge Álvarez, I signed the contract for the publication of my book of short stories. He had already put me in charge of an anthology of Latin American stories in exchange for twenty thousand pesos. Earlier with Pirí Lugones, a veiled reference to a possible literary magazine with Walsh, Gelman, and Rivera. And a meeting with Allen, an American critic whom Beatriz Guido and Walsh introduced to my short stories. Then a meeting with Viñas, who offered for me to lead a reading on new Latin American literature. As we were leaving, José Sazbón appeared and the three of us ended up in the Japanese café. Viñas half-deaf, insulting Sabato and going in circles about Argentine literature.
Tuesday 27
An amusing conversation with Beatriz Guido, who inundated me with generous suggestions and “obliged” me to send a story to Mundo Nuevo, according to her after “begging” from Rodríguez Monegal, who is “crazy” about “Las actas del juicio,” and she arranged a meeting for me with that guy Allen, an American professor who came to study Argentine literature. At the end, I mentioned my problems with work and she automatically asked me, “Do you want Primera Plana?”… these relations make the (new) world go round.
Wednesday
At night in Jorge Lafforgue’s house I am meeting with a study group about Borges, directed by Noé Jitrik, connected to the attempt to create an Institute of Arts and Humanities as an alternative to the University taken over by the military.
On Sunday, at Beatriz Guido’s house, I met Juan Manuel Puig, the author of a novel that Edgardo Cozarinsky got for me. Today with León Rozitchner, who offers to have me direct a collection of Argentine literature for Lautaro. Then with Jorge Álvarez, who raised the amount he is going to pay me for putting together a chronicle of Latin America to twenty thousand pesos and, finally, in a bookshop on Corrientes where I got Holy Place by Fuentes, before running into the very friendly Horacio Verbitsky on the subway.
Wednesday 19
Yesterday, a meeting in Rozitchner’s house with people from the Lautaro publishing house, very interested in my plan for a collection of nouvelles. A good possibility for work.
Monday 24
Today I finally signed the contract for La invasión with Jorge Álvarez. Three years.
On Friday, a meeting with everyone on the left: Ismael and David Viñas, Rodolfo Walsh, León Rozitchner, Andrés Rivera, Roberto Cossa, putting together a magazine that I would help direct.
Today I submitted the prologue and notes for the Latin American anthology.
Several meetings lately in Pirí’s house, discussions about Peronism and c
ulture with Ismael Viñas and Rodolfo Walsh.
Meetings with Beatriz Guido and L. Torre Nilsson. I go with them to watch rehearsals of the work by Pinter that they are putting together.
Borges’s style is a colloquial one, written and not spoken (like the kind I’m looking for). The route for me is Martín Fierro and Los ranqueles by Mansilla.
A list of things I want:
Swim in the sea.
Clifford Brown with Max Roach.
Go through the antiquarian bookshops.
Listen to A German Requiem by Brahms.
Policastro’s painting.
Borges’s prose.
Aníbal Troilo playing at Caño 14.
Ignacio Corsini singing “Pensalo bien.”
Go to the cinema during the day and come out while there’s still sun.
Sergi wine, ’40 vintage.
Pirí calls me, she has the proofs of La invasión.
Wednesday 30
A long talk with Haroldo Conti, going south down San Telmo.
After an opinion from Pirí Lugones about my security in the future, I started thinking honestly about my work. It seems that, at some point, I said to Rodolfo Walsh, “In ten years I will be the best Argentine writer.” Careful, then, because it’s too easy for me to assume the success of what I’m trying to do. We’ll see what I think about these chaotically written lines after a while.
Thursday 7
The outbursts begin, the fury. Rodolfo Walsh reminding me, too precisely, about my prophecy (forgotten by me) that I will become the best Argentine writer in ten years. Esteban Peicovich goes ahead and says I am “the best Argentine short-story writer.” My book has come out in Havana and has been confirmed as the best book in the competition. Álvarez has decided to publish ten thousand copies of La invasión and is talking about my book to everyone.
I propose Miguel Briante’s book Hombre en la orilla at the Lautaro publishing house.
Romberg, B. Studies in the Narrative Technique of the First-Person Novel.
Monday, September 4
Last night, in the building with the golden dome on Carlos Pellegrini, on the other side of Rivadavia, after ascending a spiral staircase that rises from the street, an event organized by Álvarez and Pirí Lugones to honor García Márquez. Many people, many friends, Tata Cedrón sang some tangos, lots of whiskey, very little space. In one of my circuits around the apartment, I found myself face to face with García Márquez. Rodolfo Walsh introduced me to him, playing the competitive game, à la Hemingway, and announced me like a national boxing prodigy, as though I were a welterweight with great promise and a secret mission to defeat the champions in the category, García Márquez and Walsh himself among them. A friendly and “male” way of demonstrating the ruthless competition that defines the world of literature. I suspect that is also García Márquez’s style. The fact is that, after his sporting preamble, we found ourselves talking about the results of the Primera Plana-Sudamericana novel competition, in which the Colombian had been a judge. They gave the award to El oscuro by Daniel Moyano, but García Márquez said he had gone back and forth a great deal because he liked El hacedor de silencio by Antonio di Benedetto, but hadn’t given it the award because it was a nouvelle and not a novel. But that doesn’t make sense, I said, more or less, Pedro Páramo or, if you’ll allow me, No One Writes to the Colonel wouldn’t have been considered in a novel competition either, to everyone’s embarrassment. The conversation grew interesting because we started to distinguish between short forms, medium-length stories, and novels. García Márquez entered the discussion eagerly; he knows the methods and techniques of narrative well, and for a while the conversation focused exclusively on literary form and we set aside Latin American demagoguery, the subjects that are specific to this region of the world, and we spoke about styles and methods of storytelling and made a rapid catalog of the great medium-length writers, like Kafka, Hemingway, and Chekhov, and of the problems with the excess of words needed to write a novel. A conversation about literature between writers is something unusual for us these days, so I was very interested in our discussion. Walsh also suspects that the novel is a form without control. (As for García Márquez’s novel, Borges, who is always abreast of everything, apparently said to Enrique Pezzoni, “It is good, but there are fifty years too many.”)
Monday, September 11
Some choices present themselves clearly; I just rejected the work that Esteban Peicovich offered me at La Razón—thirty-eight thousand pesos per month in exchange for a nine-to-five schedule. I told him no, despite my economic uncertainties, my salary of twelve thousand per month. I prefer being responsible for myself. I have abandoned so many things for literature that continuing down this path is now a kind of destiny. The initial choice defined all the others, and, as always, that choice was unexpected and surprising. “So, what are you thinking about studying?” E.’s sister asked me once, having said that she was studying French at the time. “Well, I’m going to be a writer,” I said; I was sixteen years old and had the same odds of being a writer as being a pilot or a mercenary. Treating literature as a destiny in life doesn’t guarantee the quality of your work, but it insures that you have the conviction needed to choose at every moment. You live the life of a writer because you have already chosen it, but then your work has to be up to the level of that decision.
This all sounds sentimental, but it is the result of always finding myself with no security other than what I create for myself. I guess that, someday, I will have time to remake these notebooks, recover the rhythm of the years being filtered through my hands. In the end, if the diaries are all that remains, it will be possible to see them as the endeavor of a person who first decides to be a writer and then starts writing a series of notebooks, before anything else, in which he records his devotion to that imaginary profession. One day I’ll try to shape it into something and leave behind a loose thread, clear and strong, from which the spool of my life can be unraveled. Maybe that is why I write them; sometimes they bother me, but I go on ahead as though there were a contract, the meaning of which will become clear at the end (of what?). In my literature, more clearly than anywhere else, you can see something I’ll call overthinking “my personality”: I seem very rational and aware, but I’ll never know why I chose to dedicate my life to literature, nor do I know what forces or winds allow me, once in a while, to produce some acceptable pages. I allow myself to be led by a very nineteenth-century instinct: I have chosen some women or left them, I have made sure to study something else at the College (history) so that nothing can disturb my impromptu readings—and therefore, when faced with decisions that demand clarity, I am not disturbed and make up my mind spontaneously and instinctively, without hesitation. Instead I uproot myself from this blue table by the open window in the breeze that heralds the summer and, to avoid new confused outpourings, I stand, light the fire, put on the kettle, and prepare some yerba maté.
All stories that leave their mark are constructed based on something dark: for example, in “Streetcorner Man,” Borges hides the crime—at least, he hides the result of the fight—and does not narrate it; it happens in the darkness and is never seen, and everything is hinted at imperceptibly. In this case, it deals with an action that is snatched away; I have to think about which other elements of a story can be removed for its implicit contents to become greater. In Pavese’s “The Leather Jacket,” the boy narrating is only half-aware and is recounting the story of his sadness at losing his friend; the real story (centered around the woman) is not told but is woven secretly underneath the other.
Kafka: “Goethe’s diaries. A person who keeps none is in a false position in the face of a diary.”
When Kafka reads in Goethe’s diary that he spent an entire day occupied with his concerns, he thinks that he, personally, has never done so little in a day. In the future, someone will be able to read my reflection on the diary and then will see Kafka’s reflection on the diary and also Goethe’s refle
ction on a day in his life.
In Pavese’s diary, the “subject” seems to be the impossibility of suicide (“I will never be able to do it, it’s more difficult than a murder”). R. Akutagawa: “Isn’t there someone kind enough to strangle me in my sleep?” Working on diaries, fragmented narrative, open ending.
As for La invasión, I have started to move away from the book more and more, imperceptibly. I have complete confidence in its future, but that can’t help me now. You are once again defenseless when you start another book, whether you have better control over technique or have learned to be more spontaneous; regardless, it won’t help you much in the moment you start over again.
To write a story about madmen, a story of madness, it is essential to avoid the hallucinatory stereotype. Therefore, I hope to be able to tell a logical, geometric story, in which everything is organized in such a way that the frenzied wind of insanity only passes through in the final scene. That doesn’t mean a surprise ending, but rather a wind that begins as an imperceptible breeze and grows amid the events until it turns into a sort of whirlwind, making all of the words fly.
Tuesday 12
The Diaries of Emilio Renzi- Formative Years Page 39