Nazi Literature in the Americas

by Roberto Bolaño

  What we know for certain is that Edelmira did not return to Argentina until 1955, by which time the rising star in literary Buenos Aires was her daughter, Luz Mendiluce.

  Edelmira’s later years were not prolific. Apart from her Collected Poems (the first volume appeared in 1962, the second in 1979), she was to publish only three more books: a volume of memoirs, The Century as I Have Lived It (1968), written with the help of the ever-faithful Carozzone; followed by a collection of very short stories, Churches and Cemeteries of Europe (1972), distinguished by the author’s abundant common sense; and, finally, a gathering of unpublished early poems, Fervor (1985).

  In her roles as patroness of the arts and promoter of young talent, however, Edelmira remained as active as ever. Countless volumes included a foreword, a preface or an afterword by the widow Mendiluce; she also personally financed the first editions of innumerable works. Of the books for which she wrote prefaces, two deserve a special mention: Stale Hearts and Young Hearts by Julián Rico Anaya, a novel which provoked a heated controversy both in Argentina and abroad on its publication in 1978, and The Invisible Adorers, by Carola Leyva, a collection of poems intended to put an end to the sterile poetry debate that had been going on in certain Argentinean circles since the Second Surrealist Manifesto. Among the books she subsidized, two titles stand out indisputably: The Kids of Puerto Argentino, a perhaps somewhat exaggerated memoir of the Falklands War, which catapulted the ex-soldier Jorge Esteban Petrovich to literary prominence, and The Darts and the Wind, an anthology of work by young, well-bred poets whose aesthetic objectives included avoiding cacophony, vulgar expressions, and ugly-sounding words, and which, with its preface by Juan Mendiluce, sold unexpectedly well.

  Edelmira spent the last three years of her life on her ranch in Azul, either in the Poe room, where she would doze and dream of the past, or out on the broad terrace of the main ranch house, absorbed in a book or contemplating the landscape.

  She remained lucid (or “furious,” as she liked to say) to the end.

  JUAN MENDILUCE THOMPSON

  Buenos Aires, 1920–Buenos Aires, 1991

  As the second child of Edelmira Thompson, Juan realized at an early age that he could do whatever he liked with his life. He tried his hand at sports (he was a passable tennis player and an appalling race-car driver), patronized the arts (or rather fraternized with bohemians and criminals, until prevented from doing so by his father and his vigorous older brother, whose prohibitions were backed up by threats and occasional violence), and studied law, before turning to literature.

  At the age of twenty he published his first novel, The Egoists, a tale of mystery and youthful exaltation, set in London, Paris and Buenos Aires. The events are precipitated by an apparently insignificant occurrence: a mild-mannered family man suddenly shouts at his wife, ordering her to take the children and leave the house immediately, or put them in a room and lock the door. He then locks himself in the bathroom. After an hour the woman emerges from the locked room in which she has obediently taken refuge, goes to the bathroom and finds her husband dead, with a razor in his hand and his throat slit. This suicide, which seems at first an open and shut case, is investigated by a Scotland Yard detective with a passion for spiritualism, and by one of the dead man’s sons. The investigation takes more than fifteen years and serves as a pretext for introducing a gallery of characters, including a young French neo-royalist and a young German Nazi, who are allowed to discourse at length and seem to serve as the author’s mouthpieces.

  The novel was a success (by 1943, four editions had sold out in Argentina, and sales were strong in Spain, as well as in Chile, Uruguay and other Latin American countries), but Juan Mendiluce decided to forego literature in favor of politics.

  For a time he considered himself to be a Falangist and a follower of José Antonio Primo de Rivera. He was anti-USA and anti-capitalist. Later he became a Peronist and held important government posts at the capital and in the province of Córdoba. His career in public service was impeccable. With the demise of Peronism his political inclinations underwent a further transformation: he turned pro-USA (in fact, the Argentinean Left accused him of publishing twenty-five CIA agents in his magazine—an exaggerated figure, by any reckoning), became a partner in one of the major legal firms in Buenos Aires, and was finally appointed ambassador to Spain. On his return from Madrid he published a novel, The Argentinean Horseman, in which he bewailed the spiritual poverty of the contemporary world, the decline of piety and compassion, and the incapacity of the modern novel, particularly in its crude and aimless French manifestations, to understand suffering and so to create characters.

  He became known as the Argentinean Cato. He fought with his sister, Luz Mendiluce, over control of the family magazine. Having won the fight, he tried to lead a crusade against the lack of feeling in the contemporary novel. To coincide with the publication of his third novel, Springtime in Madrid, he launched a campaign against francophilia, the cult of violence, atheism and foreign ideas. American Letters and Modern Argentina served as platforms, along with the various Buenos Aires dailies, which were keen to publish, although sometimes flabbergasted by, his denunciations of Cortázar, whom he described as unreal and bloodthirsty, and Borges, whose stories, so he claimed, were “parodies of parodies” and whose lifeless characters were derived from worn-out traditions of English and French literature, clearly in decline, “repeating the same old plots ad nauseam.” His attacks took in Bioy Casares, Mujica Lainez, Ernesto Sabato (who, in his eyes, personified the cult of violence and gratuitous aggression), Leopoldo Marechal and others.

  He was to publish three more novels: Youthful Ardor, a look back to the Argentina of 1940; Pedrito Saldaña the Patagonian, a story of adventures in the south, a cross between Stevenson and Conrad; and Luminous Obscurity, a novel about order and disorder, justice and injustice, God and the Void.

  In 1975, he gave up literature once again in favor of politics. He served the Peronist and military governments with equal loyalty. In 1985, after the death of his elder brother, he took over the running of the family businesses, a task he delegated to his nephews and his son in 1989, in order to work on a novel, which he did not finish. This last work, Sinking Islands, was published in a critical edition prepared by Edelmiro Carozzone, the son of his mother’s secretary. Fifty pages. Conversations among indistinct characters and chaotic descriptions of an endless welter of rivers and seas.

  LUZ MENDILUCE THOMPSON

  Berlin 1928–Buenos Aires 1976

  Luz Mendiluce was a lively pretty child, a pensive plump adolescent, and a hapless alcoholic adult. That said, of all the writers in her family, she was the most talented.

  Throughout her life she treasured the famous photo of her baby self in Hitler’s arms. Set in a richly worked silver frame, it had pride of place in each of her successive living rooms, along with portraits by Argentinean painters, showing her as a child or a teenager, generally accompanied by her mother. Some of those paintings were very fine works of art, yet had a fire broken out in her house, had there been time to save only one thing, it is conceivable that she would have left them to burn and chosen the photograph, even over her own unpublished manuscripts.

  She had various stories for the guests who inquired about that remarkable snapshot. Sometimes she simply said that the baby was an orphan: the photo had been taken at an orphanage, during one of the visits that politicians frequently make to such institutions in a bid for votes and publicity. On other occasions she explained that it was one of Hitler’s nieces, a heroic and unfortunate girl, who had died in combat at the age of seventeen, defending Berlin from the Communist hordes. And sometimes she frankly admitted that it was her: Yes, she had been dandled by the Führer. In dreams, she could still feel his strong arms and his warm breath on the top of her head. She said it had probably been one of the happiest moments of her life. And perhaps she was right.

  Her talent bloomed early; she published a first collection of poems when she was still
seventeen. By the age of eighteen, with three books to her name, she was living more or less on her own, and had decided to marry the Argentinean poet Julio César Lacouture. The marriage proceeded with the family’s blessing, in spite of her fiancé’s evident deficiencies. Lacouture was young, refined and stylish, as well as remarkably handsome, but penniless and a mediocre poet. For their honeymoon the couple went to the United States and Mexico, and in Mexico City Luz Mendiluce gave a poetry reading. The problems had already begun. Lacouture was a jealous husband. He took revenge by cheating on his wife. One night in Acapulco, Luz went out to find him. Lacouture was at the house of the novelist Pedro de Medina. During the day, a barbecue had been held there in honor of the Argentinean poetess; by night, the house had been transformed into a brothel, in honor of her husband. Luz found Lacouture with two whores. At first she remained calm. She drank a couple of tequilas in the library with Pedro de Medina and the social-realist poet Augusto Zamora, both of whom tried to calm her down. They talked about Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Claudel and Soviet poetry, Paul Valéry and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Sor Juana was the straw that broke the camel’s back; Luz exploded. She grabbed the first thing she could find and returned to the bedroom in search of her husband. Lacouture was attempting to get dressed, in an advanced state of inebriation. The scantily clad whores looked on from a corner of the room. Unable to restrain herself, Luz struck her husband on the head with a bronze sculpture of Pallas Athena. Lacouture had to be hospitalized for fifteen days with a severe concussion. They returned to Argentina together but separated after four months.

  The failure of her marriage plunged Luz into despair. She took to drinking in dives and having affairs with some of the most unsavory individuals in Buenos Aires. Her well-known poem “I Was Happy with Hitler,” misunderstood by the Right and the Left alike, dates from this period. Her mother tried to send her to Europe, but Luz refused. At the time she weighed more than two hundred pounds (she was only five foot two inches tall) and was drinking a bottle of whisky a day.

  In 1953, the year in which Stalin and Dylan Thomas died, she published the collection Tangos of Buenos Aires, which, as well as a revised version of “I Was Happy with Hitler,” contained some of her finest poems: “Stalin,” a chaotic fable set among bottles of vodka and incomprehensible shrieks; “Self Portrait,” one of the cruelest poems written in Argentina during the fifties, which is no mean claim; “Luz Mendiluce and Love,” in the same vein as her self-portrait, but with doses of irony and black humor, which make it somewhat less grueling; and “Apocalypse at Fifty,” a promise to kill herself when she reached that age, which those who knew her regarded as optimistic: given her lifestyle, Luz Mendiluce would be lucky to reach the age of thirty.

  Little by little there gathered about her a clique of writers too peculiar for her mother’s taste and too radical for her brother. American Letters became an essential reference point for Nazis and the embittered, for alcoholics and the sexually or economically marginal. Luz Mendiluce assumed the roles of mother figure and high priestess of a new Argentinean poetry, which a fearful literary community would thenceforth attempt to suppress.

  In 1958 she fell in love again. This time the object of her affections was a twenty-five-year-old painter. He was blond, blue-eyed and disarmingly stupid. The relationship lasted until 1960, when the painter went to Paris on a fellowship that Luz had obtained for him, through the good offices of her brother Juan. This new disappointment fuelled the elaboration of another major poem, “Argentinean Painting,” in which Luz revisited her often stormy relationships with Argentinean painters in her various capacities—as collector, wife and (from an early age) model.

  In 1961, having obtained the annulment of her first marriage, Luz took as her wedded husband the poet Mauricio Cáceres, a regular contributor to American Letters, and an exponent of what he himself called the “neo-gaucho” style. Having learned her lesson, this time Luz decided to become a model helpmeet and homemaker: she let her husband take control of American Letters (which led to numerous disputes with Juan Mendiluce, who accused Cáceres of appropriating funds), gave up writing and dedicated herself body and soul to her wifely duties. With Cáceres in charge of the magazine, the Nazis, the embittered and the sociopaths unanimously espoused the neo-gaucho style. Success went to Cáceres’ head. At one point he came to believe that he could do without Luz and the Mendiluce clan. He attacked Juan and Edelmira when he saw fit. He even allowed himself the pleasure of belittling his wife. New muses soon appeared on the scene: young female converts to the manly cause of neo-gaucho poetry who succeeded in catching the master’s eye. Until one day Luz, who had seemed completely unaware of her husband’s activities, suddenly exploded once again. The incident was extensively covered in the crime pages and gossip columns of the Buenos Aires newspapers. Cáceres and an editor from American Letters ended up in the hospital with bullet wounds. While the editor’s injuries were minor, Cáceres was not discharged for a month and a half. Luz did not fare much better. Having shot her husband and her husband’s friend, she shut herself in the bathroom and swallowed the contents of the medicine chest. This time, there was nothing for it; she had to leave for Europe.

  In 1964, after sojourns in various clinics, Luz surprised her scarce but faithful readers once again with a new a collection entitled Like a Hurricane: ten poems, one hundred and twenty pages, with a preface by Susy D’Amato (who could hardly understand a line of Luz’s poetry but was one of her few remaining friends), brought out by feminist publishers in Mexico, who would soon come to regret having gambled on a “well-known far-Right activist,” although, at the time, they had been unaware of Luz’s real allegiances, and the poems themselves were free of political allusions, except for the odd unfortunate metaphor (such as “in my heart I am the last Nazi”), always in the context of personal relationships. The book was republished a year later in Argentina, where it garnered a number of favorable reviews.

  In 1967, Luz returned to Buenos Aires, where she was to remain for the rest of her life. An aura of mystery enveloped her. In Paris, Jules Albert Ramis had translated practically all of her poetry. She was accompanied by a young Spanish poet, Pedro Barbero, who acted as her secretary and whom she called Pedrito. This Pedrito, as opposed to her Argentinean husbands and lovers, was helpful, attentive (although perhaps a little uncouth) and above all loyal. Luz took control of American Letters once again and set up a new publishing house, The Wounded Eagle. She was soon surrounded by a host of followers who laughed at all her jokes. She weighed two hundred and twenty pounds. Her hair came down to her waist. She rarely washed. Her clothes were old and often ragged.

  Luz Mendiluce’s emotional life now entered a calmer phase. In other words, she ceased to suffer. She took lovers, drank to excess and was prone to occasional cocaine abuse, but always maintained her spiritual balance. She was severe. Her reviews were feared, and eagerly anticipated by those who were not the targets of her venomous, barbed wit. She entered into bitter, public feuds with certain Argentinean poets (all male and famous), cruelly satirizing their homosexuality (a practice of which she disapproved in public, although many of her friends were gay), their humble social backgrounds, or their Communist convictions. Many women writers in Argentina admired her and read her work, although not all of them would admit to it.

  The struggle with her brother Juan over the control of American Letters (the magazine in which she had invested so much, and the source of so many disappointments) took on epic proportions. She was defeated, but the young remained loyal. She divided her time between a large apartment in Buenos Aires and a ranch in Paraná, which became an artistic commune over which she could reign unopposed. There, by the river, artists conversed, took siestas, drank and painted, unaffected by the political violence beginning to ravage the rest of the country.

  But no one could remain safe from harm. One afternoon, Claudia Saldaña visited the ranch with a friend. She was young, she wrote poetry and she was beautiful. For Luz it was love at fir
st sight. Quickly arranging an introduction, the hostess lavished attention upon her visitor. Claudia Saldaña spent an afternoon and a night at the ranch, returning to Rosario, where she lived, the next morning. Luz recited poems, displayed the French translations of her books and the photo of herself as a baby with Hitler, encouraged the young woman to write, asked to read her poems (Claudia Saldaña said they were no good, she was just a beginner), insisted that her guest keep a little wooden figure she happened to pick up, and finally tried to get her drunk, hoping to make her too ill to leave, but Claudia Saldaña left anyway.

  After two days spent in an utter daze, Luz realized that she was in love. She felt like a girl. She got hold of Claudia’s telephone number in Rosario and called her. She was almost sober; she could barely control her emotions. She asked if they could meet. Claudia agreed: they could meet in Rosario in three days’ time. Luz was beside herself; she wanted to see Claudia that night or the next day at the latest. Claudia stood firm: she had binding, prior engagements. What cannot be cannot be, besides which, it’s impossible. Luz accepted her conditions with a joyful resignation. That night she cried and danced and drank until she passed out. No doubt it was the first time that anyone had made her feel that way. True love, she confessed to Pedrito, who agreed with everything she said.