The Brave Librarian
He started out as a poet. He admired German expressionist literature (he learned French out of obligation and German out of something that might be called love, and he learned it without teachers, on his own, the way one learns all the most important things), but he may never have read Hans Henny Jahnn. In photographs from the 1920s he looks haughty and sad, a young man with few rough edges, someone whose body tended toward plumpness, softness. He cultivated friendships, and he was loyal. His first friends, from Switzerland and Mallorca, lived on in his memory with adolescent fervor or the fervor of innocent adolescent memory. And he was lucky: he got to know Cansinos-Assens and he gained a unique perspective on Spain that he never lost. But he returned to the country of his birth and encountered the possibility of destiny. The destiny of his dreams, in a country shaped by his dreams. In the American vastnesses he dreamed of courage and its shadow, the immaculate loneliness of the brave, days perfectly fitted to the contours of life. And he was lucky again: he met Macedonio Fernández and Ricardo Güiraldes and Xul Solar, who were worth more than most of the Spanish intellectuals he had gotten to know, or so he believed, and he was hardly ever wrong. And yet his sister married a Spanish poet. It was the age of the Argentine Empire, when everything seemed within reach and Buenos Aires could call itself the Chicago of the southern hemisphere without blushing. And the Chicago of the southern hemisphere had its Carl Sandburg (a poet, incidentally, admired by our writer), and his name was Roberto Arlt. Time brought them together and then drove them apart forever, when one of the two plunged into the abyss and the other set off in search of the word. From Arlt’s abyss was born the most demented kind of utopia: a story of sad gunmen that anticipated, like Sábato’s Abaddón, el exterminador [Abaddón, the Exterminator], the horror that much later would hover over the country and the continent. From the search for the word, meanwhile, came patience and a modest certainty of the joys of literature. Boedo and Florida were the names of the groups that grew up around the two men. The first refers to a poor neighborhood, the second to a main street, and today the two names march together toward oblivion. Arlt, Gombrowicz: he might have been friends with them and he wasn’t. This lack of dialogue left a great void that is also a part of our literature. Of course, Arlt died young, after a tumultuous life full of hardships. And he was essentially a writer of prose. Not our man. He was a poet, and a very good one, and he wrote essays, and only when he was well into his thirties did he begin to write fiction. It must be said that the reason he did was because he realized he couldn’t be the greatest poet in the Spanish language. There was Neruda, for whom he never felt much affection, and the shadow of Vallejo, whom he didn’t often read. There was Huidobro, who was a friend and later an enemy of his sad and inevitable Spanish brother-in-law, and Oliverio Girondo, whom he considered to be superficial, and then there was García Lorca, whom he called a professional Andalusian, and Juan Ramón, at whom he laughed, and Cernuda, to whom he paid scarcely any attention. Actually, there was only Neruda. There was Whitman, there was Neruda, and there was the epic. The thing he thought he loved. The thing he loved best. And then he began to write a book in which the epic is simply the flip side of misfortune, in which irony and humor and a few human beings, valiant and adrift, replace the epic. The book is indebted to Retratos reales e imaginarios [Real and Imaginary Portraits], by his friend and teacher Alfonso Reyes, and, through the Mexican writer’s book, to Imaginary Lives, by Schwob, whom they both loved. Many years later, now blind and more celebrated than his teacher, he visited Reyes’s library in Mexico City, officially dubbed the “Alphonsine Chapel” and he couldn’t help imagining how Argentines would react to the indecorous notion of calling Leopoldo Lugones’s house the “Leopoldine Chapel.” This inability to keep quiet, his perpetual readiness to engage, was something he always lost in the company of idiots. He claimed to have read Don Quixote for the first time in English, and said that it had never seemed as good to him since. The caped avengers of Spanish criticism rent their cloaks. And they forgot that the truest words about Don Quixote were written not by Unamuno, or by any of Unamuno’s flock of moth-eaten followers, like the regrettable Ramiro de Maeztu, but by our man. After his book on pirates and other outlaws, he wrote two story collections that are probably the best written in Spanish in the twentieth century. The first appeared in 1941, the second in 1949. From that moment on our literature was forever changed. Then he wrote indisputably superb books of poetry that went unremarked in the midst of his own glory as a teller of fantastic tales and amid his tremendous number of muses, male and female. And yet his poetry has many merits: clarity of language, a response to Whitman unmatched by any other contemporary response, a dialogue and monologue with history, an honest tribute to English verse. And he gives us classes in literature that everyone ignores. And lessons in humor that everyone claims to understand and no one does. At the end of his life he asked for forgiveness and he confessed that he liked to travel. He admired courage and intelligence.
Bomarzo
During the first half of the twentieth century, in Buenos Aires, there lived a generation of writers of the stature of Roberto Arlt, Ernesto Sábato, Julio Cortázar, Adolfo Bioy Casares, José Bianco, Eduardo Mallea, Jorges Luis Borges. Some learned their craft under the tutelage of Macedonio Fernández. As if that weren’t enough, one day Witold Gombrowicz came to Argentina and decided to stay. To this diverse group belonged Manuel Mujica Láinez, at first glance the least professional of them all, in the sense that it’s hard for us to imagine Mujica Láinez as a writer living for the sake of literature and making a living from literature. It’s easier to see him as a man of independent means who devotes his free time, of which he has very little, to writing novels with the sole ambition that they be read by his wide circle of friends. And yet Mujica Láinez was perhaps the most prolific Argentine novelist of his day. Not the most ambitious or the most seminal (roles probably reserved for Cortázar or Sábato), or the closest to Argentine reality (a role assigned to Arlt, Cortázar, Sábato, or Bioy, depending on the degree of madness), or the most forward-looking in devising literary structures that could make strides into undiscovered territory (like Borges and Cortázar), or the one who forged deepest into the mystery of language (the undisputed realm of Borges, who, it must be remembered, wasn’t just a great prose writer but also a great poet). Mujica Láinez, in this sense, was a modest figure. In fact, when viewed in the company of such exceptional writers and literary giants as Borges, Cortázar, Arlt, Bioy Casares, and Sábato, he seems to shrink and seek quiet refuge in Argentine literature, in provincial literature, but upon even the most cursory reading of his work, this impression turns out to be completely mistaken.