Final Fridays Page 12

  What a formidable cien años ours has been! As a novelist, I make occasional use of what are called in English “time lines”: those reference books and computer software programs that attempt to show, like an orchestral concert score, what was happening more or less simultaneously in various fields in various parts of the world at particular periods of history. To look back upon the closing years of the 19th century and at the year 1898 in particular with the help of these time lines is to be impressed by their busyness, by their sheer activity in just about every area of human endeavor, and by what their remarkable accomplishments can now be seen to have portended for the century that followed. Perhaps the same could be said of virtually any decade in recent centuries if one examines it through the lens of hindsight; but just consider: The years 1890 through 1899 gave us the Nobel prizes and the modern Olympic games, Social Darwinism, the Dreyfus Affair, Gobineau’s “scientific” racism, and the Klondike Gold Rush. They saw the triumph of Europe’s colonization of Africa (except for Ethiopia and Liberia) and the suppression of our North American Indians at the battle of Wounded Knee, along with our westward expansion into the new states of Idaho, Wyoming, and Utah. They gave us the Sino-Japanese War and the Cuban Revolution and Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee; they gave us the first cinema and the first comic strip; they gave us the discovery of radioactivity and the invention of wireless telegraphy, the diesel engine, the automobile, electromagnetic sound recording, rocket propulsion, synthetic fibers, electric subways, the clothing zipper, the safety razor, and the “safety bicycle.” They gave us Frazer’s Golden Bough and Freud’s Studien über Hysterie and Havelock Ellis’s Psychopathia Sexualis; Karl Marx’s Das Kapital (Volume 3) and Bergson’s Matiere et Memoire and Herzl’s Der Judenstraat and John Dewey’s School and Society. It was the decade of Post-Impressionism and Art Nouveau; of Debussy and Puccini and Richard Strauss and Sibelius and Mahler and Massenet; of Chekhov and Darío and young Yeats and old Tolstoy, of Ibsen and Shaw and Conrad and Henry James and Machado de Assis.

  As for our “baseline” year: The timelines tell us that 1898 saw the opening of the Paris Metro, the construction of Count Zeppelin’s first dirigible, the discovery of radium and xenon and neon and the dysentery bacillus, and the first successful photography with artificial light. In China, the Boxer Rebellion against Western influences began. Bismarck and Gladstone died that year; so did Lewis Carroll and Stefan Mallarmé. On the other hand, Bertolt Brecht and Ernest Hemingway were born (as was my mother), and, if my obstetrical arithmetic is correct, both Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov were conceived in 1898. Zola’s “J’Accuse” was published that year, as were Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw and Knut Hamsun’s Victory and H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds and Oscar Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol and Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra and J. K. Huysman’s La Cathédrale.

  All very impressive and rich in promise. But then we reflect upon the staggering century that followed—two world wars and abundant smaller but also dreadful ones; poison gas, automatic weapons, aerial bombing, nuclear and biological weapons; totalitarianism and massacre on an unprecedented scale, despite which our species overruns and despoils the planet and its atmosphere, et cetera ad nauseam—and I am reminded of a cartoon in our New Yorker magazine a few years ago: Our astronauts have landed on a beautiful, verdant new planet, a virtual paradise; indeed, as they step out of their space vehicle they see in the near distance a fruit tree, under which stand a man and a woman, naked; there is a serpent in the tree; the woman holds an apple in her hand, from which she seems about to take a bite—and one of the astronauts runs toward her, shouting “Wait!” Looking back at the timelines for the pre-dawn of this century, I feel like that astronaut: “¡Cuidado! ¡Un momento, por dios!”

  Too late: Consummatum est, or almost so—for who knows what may yet happen to us in the small remaining interval between today and the next century, not to mention what that century may have in store for us?

  Cien años de plenitud; cien años de turpitud (I’ll use the word, even though it doesn’t exist in Spanish and doesn’t rhyme with soledad ). As for gratitud . . . well: In the face of our century’s human catastrophes—the hundreds of millions of victims of militant nationalism and colonialism, of ideology in general and totalitarianism in particular—one feels that there is something unseemly, perhaps even obscene, about reviewing its positive accomplishments in science, technology, and the arts, including the Hundred Years of Literary Plenitude that inspired this conference: the century of modernismo and of Modernism; of Postmodernism and Magic Realism and El Boom.3 As if, for example, the scientific and cultural enrichment of the United States (and the world) by refugees from European Fascism and Russian Communism—by Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann and Pablo Casals and Vladimir Nabokov and dozens of others in every field, including my own Johns Hopkins professors Leo Spitzer and Pedro Salinas—as if their achievements somehow mitigate the evils that they fled! Or, to come closer to home, as if, in some humanistic double-entry bookkeeping, Pablo Picasso’s Guernica can somehow be balanced against the Guernica of Francisco Franco. Something obscene, I say, about that. And yet....

  AND YET, SINCE Guernica was destroyed in any case, we are surely no worse off for having Picasso’s rendition of that atrocity to contemplate in Madrid. If, in Ezra Pound’s bitter formulation, all that the ravages of history have left to us of classical Greece and Rome are “a gross of broken statues and a fewscore battered books,” then we are not only no worse off for having those souvenirs; we would be considerably worse off if we didn’t have them, much as we may lament what was lost of these cultures in the Christian Dark Ages, for example.

  Consider the case of my compatriot Raymond Federman, an avant-garde North American writer and my former colleague at the State University of New York in Buffalo: Born in Paris to a family of modest French-Jewish tailors, Federman was destined to be apprenticed to his father’s trade; but when the Nazis invaded France, he and his family were rounded up along with most other French Jews and shipped off to the death camps. Young Raymond and some other boys in his boxcar managed to escape almost accidentally before the train crossed the border; he made his way somehow to the south of France, where he worked as a farm laborer while his family and the rest of European Jewry were being exterminated in the Holocaust. Ultimately and fortunately he got himself to the USA, where he was able to finish high school, attend Columbia University, complete a doctorate in French literature at the University of California, and become a respected American university professor and writer instead of a small-time Parisian neighborhood tailor. “So what am I supposed to do?” Raymond once asked me: “Thank Hitler?”

  Well, no, of course not. If we could magically undo the Holocaust by giving up the collected works of Raymond Federman, I am quite sure that even the author would consent.4 William Faulkner, whom I’ve quoted already, once made the casually cruel remark that one poem by John Keats is worth “any number of old ladies.” One would like to have asked him, Any number? Six million, for example? Or perhaps just a mere handful, but including your own mother and grandmother? Fortunately for us, history doesn’t offer such options—at least not to most of us—and so we are free to be grateful for Raymond Federman and Anne Frank and Primo Levi without having to be grateful to Adolf Hitler. We can thank Vladimir Nabokov for his beautiful novels in English without thanking Lenin and Stalin for dispossessing him of pre-Revolutionary Russia. Muchas gracias, Pablo Picasso y Pablo Casals; no gracias necessary to the Generalissimo. And (to circle back toward my subject) I can thank Poet-Professor Pedro Salinas for leading us ignorant undergraduate gringos through Don Quijote and Lazarillo de Tormes and Lope de Vega and Calderón de la Barca and Unamuno and Ortega y Gasset without thanking the Loyalistas for driving Salinas into American exile.

  INDEED, ON THE assumption that I have by now made my position clear enough not to be mistaken for Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss, I am tempted to return to 1898, as follows: Even the United States Navy, I und
erstand, has come virtually to admit that the explosion that sank our battleship U.S.S. Maine in Havana Harbor at 9:40 PM on 15 February 1898 and killed 268 of its crew was almost certainly caused not by a Spanish anti-ship mine, but by an accidental fire in the vessel’s coal bunkers, next to its reserve gunpowder magazines. Our own distinguished Admiral Hyman Rickover, commander of the U.S. nuclear submarine fleet, came to that conclusion in his official reinvestigation of the matter in 1976; Rickover’s report (which our government in general and our Navy in particular received with loud silence) confirmed what Spanish investigators had been saying all along. But ah, my friends: If the powerful U.S. newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, along with President McKinley’s hyper-macho Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Theodore Roosevelt, had not seized that opportunity to whip up American war hysteria with their cry “Remember the Maine!” there would have been no Spanish-American War to deprive Spain of its last colonies in the Western Hemisphere, and hence no Generación de Noventa y Ocho, and hence perhaps a different set of historical circumstances in Spain from those that led to the Guerra Civil and Franco’s dictatorship, and hence no exile for the likes of Pedro Salinas (first in Puerto Rico, then in the USA), and hence no quietly inspiring exemplar for this particular 18-year-old Yankee fumbling his way toward a literary vocation: the first living, breathing writer of any sort, not to mention the first bona fide internationally distinguished poet, whom I had ever been in the gentle, dignified, good-humored presence of....

  Voltaire’s Candide asks his friend Martin, “For what purpose was the world formed?” “To infuriate us,” Martin replies. Also, I would add, to dismay and humble us with its staggering contingencies , both general and specific: Had it not been for the anti-Semitic pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe and the relative poverty of village life in Germany toward the end of the 19th century, my wife’s grandparents would not have immigrated to America from Minsk and Latvia and my own grandparents from Sachsen-Altenburg, and Shelly and I would not exist, much less have met each other. If not for a certain snowstorm in Boston at the end of the 1960s, we would not have re-met in romantic and happily consequential circumstances. A different sort of spontaneous combustion aboard the U.S.S. Maine in 1898 may be imagined to have led to my reading Don Quijote, en español, with Pedro Salinas in Baltimore 50 years ago and, thanks in part to that fortuitous experience, to my subsequent evolution into a novelist sufficiently attracted to things Iberian and Iberian-American to be powerfully affected by Joaquim Machado de Assis at the beginning of my career and by Jorge Luis Borges at its midpoint, and to visit Spain and Portugal (if not Brazil and Argentina) at every opportunity. Therefore, while I duly regret the death of those 268 U.S. Navy personnel aboard the Maine and the later casualties on both sides in Theodore Roosevelt’s “splendid little war,” not to mention the horrors of the Guerra Civil, it bemuses me to think of my obras todavía no completas as part of the fallout from—shall we say—el boom of 15 February 1898.

  SPEAKING OF El Boom—that literary phenomenon so impressive that it prompted my comrade William H. Gass to declare not long ago that we Yanquis “no longer own the Novel; we just rent it from South America”—I must confess that although I would not go quite that far in my admiration for all those wonderful writers, it is the case that whereas Iberia (especially Spain) has been of perhaps more interest and importance to me than its contemporary literature has been, Latin-American literature from Machado de Assis to García Márquez has been, perhaps regrettably, of more interest and importance to me than have been the countries of its origin—or at least of its authors’ origins, inasmuch as a considerable percentage of El Boom was detonated in either voluntary or involuntary expatriation. Reading Cervantes with Salinas made me yearn to come to Spain as soon as possible, and as soon as possible thereafter (on my first sabbatical leave from teaching) I came, even though in 1963 el patriarca was still in his long otoño, and the scars of the Guerra Civil, both physical and human, were still quite in evidence. Reading Machado de Assis and Borges and García Márquez, on the other hand—and Allende, Cortázar, Donoso, Fuentes, Piñon, Puig, Vargas Llosa, et cetera almost ad infinitum—seems not to have inspired me with any comparable craving to visit the locales of their excellent fiction, any more than reading Franz Kafka makes me yearn for the Czech Republic or reading William Gass impels me toward the American midwest.

  No offense intended, comrades—and, after all, if I had in fact traveled to Chile, Argentina, Peru, Colombia, or Cuba in search of you, as I came to Spain in search of Cervantes, I would have found many of you not at home, whereas here in Spain I encounter Don Miguel or his characters again and again. I have sat at what is supposed to have been his writing-desk in Valladolid, and I have drunk deep from the little water fountain in his courtyard there. And I have, in fact, had the privilege of meeting and conversing with Jorge Luis Borges, José Donoso, Manuel Puig, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Nelida Piñon, for example—not on their home grounds, however, but on mine, as guests of my university or as fellow conferees at other U.S. universities.

  AND HERE I shall digress for a moment from my expression of gratitud for all this literary plenitud in order to praise our Yanqui university system as an indispensable facilitator of cultural interaction. It was in our universities, after all, that the likes of Einstein and Spitzer and Salinas and Nabokov found supportive sanctuary, and that the likes of Borges and Donoso and Fuentes and Vargas Llosa found their most appreciative North American audiences (my daughter, for example, though not officially enrolled at Harvard University, was able to sit in for a whole semester on Carlos Fuentes’s lecture-course there called “Time and the Novel”—a course that I would gladly have attended myself). Moreover, whatever one might think of the peculiar Yankee phenomenon in the second half of this century of university programs in “creative writing” and the related phenomenon of novelists and poets as university professors—a phenomenon about which I myself have mixed feelings, although I have been one of its grateful beneficiaries—it cannot be doubted that two generations of apprentice writers in the United States have thereby been enabled and encouraged not only to read and study such writers as los Boomeros, but in many cases to hear and meet and speak and even work with them. My own apprentices at Johns Hopkins, for instance, were thus exposed and introduced to all of those writers whom I mentioned a moment ago—and one interesting consequence of this contact is that they sometimes asked our distinguished visitors questions that I myself would have considered undiplomatic, although I listened with interest to the replies. Thus for example during Jorge Luis Borges’s last visit to Johns Hopkins in 1984, we were all disappointed that the old fellow had been passed over once again for the Nobel Prize, but of course none of us mentioned that subject to him—until one of our students asked him publicly how he felt about being passed over once again for the Nobel Prize. While we blushed with embarrassment, Borges himself merely smiled as if happy to have been asked that question, and then replied, “Well, you know, I have been on their short list for so many years now that I suspect that they think that they’ve already given me the prize.” ¡Olé, Jorge! And why did Manuel Puig choose the epistolary form for his novel Heartbreak Tango? Because (so he mischievously declared to my students when one of them asked him that question) he had been working for so long as an airline ticket-clerk in New York City that he had lost confidence in his Spanish; in the epistolary mode, he reasoned, any mistakes in his spelling, grammar, or punctuation would be attributed to the fictional authors of the letters. ¡Bravo, Manuel!

  Et cetera. And of course, like any young artists in any medium, these university apprentice writers must undoubtedly have sometimes found from their exposure to such eminent visitors and their works the sort of navigational assistance that I myself found in the works of Machado de Assis and Borges. Just recently, for example, I picked up a new novel by one of our distinguished alumnae from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars—a novel called The Antelope Wife, by Louise Erdrich5—and I read its marvel
ous opening passage, called “A Father’s Milk,” in which a U.S. cavalry troop in the 1880s slaughters a village of Ojibwa Indians (Ms. Erdrich herself is of half Ojibwa and half German ancestry). One of the soldiers, for reasons that he himself does not understand, deserts his company in mid-massacre, rescues an Indian baby girl, and flees with her into the wilderness. Unable to feed her or to silence her crying, in desperation he puts the infant to his own breast, which she suckles with fierce contentment but without nourishment—until, mirabile dictu, “half asleep one early morning [with] her beside him, he felt a slight warmth, then a rush in one side of his chest, a pleasurable burning. He thought it was an odd dream and fell asleep again only to wake to a huge burp from the baby, whose lips curled back . . . in bliss, who . . . looked, impossibly, well fed.... He put his hand to his chest and then tasted a thin blue drop of his own watery, appalling, God-given milk.” The renegade soldier believes that his breast-milk has come from God; my strong suspicion is that although North American Indian cultures have their own sorts of Magic Realism, this particular miraculous lactation came from Ms. Erdrich via Gabriel García Márquez, whose fiction she would certainly have been exposed to, and was perhaps nourished by, during her apprenticeship at Johns Hopkins.

  I wonder whether that benign and nourishing leche de padre flows in both directions. Have any young Latin-American writers been inspired by the likes of Flannery O’Connor, Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, Thomas Pynchon, Grace Paley, John Hawkes, Philip Roth, or Toni Morrison? I don’t know. I do know that it pleased me a few years ago to hear Sr. García Márquez acknowledge Hemingway and Faulkner to have been “[his] masters,” and even more to hear him remark (in an interview in the Harvard Advocate6) that Faulkner “is really, you know, a Caribbean writer”—an observation that certainly gave me a fresh perspective on the sage of Oxford, Mississippi. Here is a conspicuous instance of a great writer “creating his own precursors,” as Borges said with respect to Franz Kafka: One reads Faulkner somewhat differently after reading Cien Años de Soledad. Even a few such seminal exchanges (excuse the expression: “seminal exchanges” comes more naturally to me than “father’s milk”) may suffice for cultural cross-fertilization. If there are traces of Faulkner in the literary DNA of Gabriel García Márquez, then no literary paternity suits should be filed by chauvinistic critics who see Magic Realism in Toni Morrison and Louise Erdrich.