Riding the Yellow Trolley Car

by William Kennedy

  Mario Vargas Llosa:

  Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter

  And now for something entirely different from Latin America: a comic novel that is also genuinely funny. This is a screwball fantasy on the workings of the imagination that stands also as Mario Vargas Llosa’s confession to the world that he was weaned on soap opera as a writer, and that he made the leap out of adolescence by marrying his very delectable aunt.

  A main element of the book is an excursion into a vast comic landscape populated by soap-opera heroes, victims and villains, and at first glance this seems to be the same manic world a hero like Garp inhabits. But Vargas Llosa is as interested in naturalistic fiction as he is in fantasy, and so he creates a parallel landscape, a pastoral place where tender romance thrives. He then fuses both worlds to shape a reality far more complex than either could represent by standing alone.

  Vargas Llosa is one of the most widely known Latin American writers of this age, a scholar, a critic, a playwright, a novelist (The Green House, Conversation in the Cathedral) whose work has made him a progenitor of the so-called boom in modern Latin American literature, even though he is only forty-six.

  He has lately become a talk-show host as well, and his book under discussion here, originally published in Barcelona in 1977, has been made into what his publishers say is a “top-rated television series in Colombia.” This is a tidy little recycling that belongs among his novel’s nest of ironies. Out of soap it came, back to soap it goes. But in its intermediate stage as a novel, it functions as a most accomplished work of comic art.

  The book has three principal characters: Aunt Julia, a lovely, intelligent coquette, a thirty-two-year-old divorcee with a splendid lack of common sense about love; Pedro Camacho, a small man, not quite a dwarf, fastidious in threadbare suit and bow tie, who comes to Lima from Bolivia to write, direct and act in radio soap operas; and Mario Vargas, a young radio newsman, age eighteen, whose life in the early 1950s intersects with Julia’s and Camacho’s.

  The realistic sections about Mario’s life, which he narrates amiably in the first person, are pleasant, suspenseful in a small way, but too often tedious and overlong in their willful reconstruction of the ordinary. Yet they ground the tale with their low-keyed realism; and within them, as well as in the histories of most lives, lurks the snappy stuff of soap opera; and Vargas Llosa takes pains to uncover all of that.

  Mario’s romance with the flirtatious Julia is an idyllic story fraught with the perils of a 1940s Hollywood romance: as if Greer Garson went suddenly mad for Donald O’Connor. The lovers meet secretly to avoid a scandal in their upper-class family, for incest is in the air as a social evil even though Julia is not Mario’s blood relative; she is the sister of his uncle’s wife. They hold hands, coo, sit in the last row of the movies so they can kiss; and in time they pet. They eventually get on to some serious improprieties, but only when marriage is imminent, and what they do then is rather chastely narrated by the author.

  Even so, some consider Vargas Llosa’s treatment of the romance and the family as rather scandalous exposure, for it is heavily autobiographical. Real names are used, and Julia was the author’s first wife in real life. He dedicates the book “To Julia Urquidi Illanes, to whom this novel and I owe so much.” The novel recounts only the story of their courtship and marriage. They remained together eight years, which is revealed in a few sentences at book’s end. When they separated, says the family-oriented Mario, he married his cousin.

  Pedro Camacho is little more than a cartoon in the first half of the book, but as the story progresses, Mario the newsman views him with increasing awe; and as Vargas Llosa imposes his own formidable imagination on Camacho’s soaps, the man becomes a cartoon of substance, a brain worth scanning.

  Camacho is as solemn as a totem pole. When Mario remarks that he seems to be an early riser, Camacho explains: “Clock time means nothing where art is concerned.” His inspiration for writing, he says, “dawns with the sun and gradually grows warmer along with it. I begin to write at first light. By noon, my brain is a blazing torch. Then the fire dies down little by little and around dusk I stop, inasmuch as only embers remain.” He won’t read other writers, fearing influence on his work. His long companion is a book of quotations, subtitled, “What Cervantes, Shakespeare, Moliere etc. have had to say about God, Life, Death, Love, Suffering, etc.…”

  He writes ten half-hour installments a day for his serials, one an hour, then works seven more hours rehearsing and recording them. “The scripts,” Mario recalls, “came pouring out … each of them exactly the right length, like strings of sausages out of a machine.… I once told him I was reminded of the theory of the French Surrealists with regard to automatic writing, which according to them flowed directly from the subconscious, bypassing the censorship of reason.” Camacho replies: “Our mestizo Latin American brains can give birth to better things than those Frogs.”

  Camacho lives monastically, loathes money, snubs the fame his serials give him. When he writes he assumes roles physically, wearing false mustaches, a fireman’s hat, the mask of a fat woman. Mario finds him at his enormous typewriter, writing about the birth of triplets. He is in a white smock, surgeon’s skullcap and long, rabbinical black beard. “I’ll do a Caesarean on the girl,” he tells his visitor, “and then I’ll go and have … tea with you.”

  Camacho’s soaps are written as narratives in the novel, not as scripts, and they alternate with the realistic story. In the first one I encountered I faulted the translator for a rush of clichés, not yet aware this was the work of Camacho and not of Helen R. Lane, whose formidable translating skills are equal to both the manic tone of Camacho’s madness and the ruffled normalcy of Mario’s daily life.

  The Camacho serials start simply and grow in complexity. His first is an ordinary, everyday story of incest and marital deceit; his second the tale of a policeman who discovers a starving, naked, Stone Age African savage muttering gibberish in a deserted warehouse, and arrests him for burglary. When nobody knows what to do with the savage, the policeman is ordered to take him to the dump and murder him. Will he do it? A boy whose sister is reduced to a pile of bones by hungry rats takes up rodent genocide as a career and brutalizes his family, which turns on him and beats him to the edge of death. As he lies unconscious, a mouse with sharp teeth comes out of its hole and studies him. An aspirin salesman kills a child with his car and grows phobic about vehicles, but is cured of his guilt by a psychiatrist who teaches him to hate children. An industrialist raises a son, stupid beyond belief, who nevertheless grows up to be Peru’s most famous soccer referee. The father puts the son in charge of a factory, which he swiftly bankrupts, ruining the father, who develops a humiliating tic: sticking out his tongue and trying to lick his ear.

  The stories grow progressively more confused, the aspirin salesman becoming a psychopathic rapist-killer in another story; a policeman dying in a fire and then turning up in a different serial in order to drown. Camacho imposes his own psychic ailments, some of them revealed in his chats with Mario, on the characters in his soaps: his niggling comic hatred of Argentines (he was married to one), his constipation, his championing of masturbation for priests. But his memory boggles under the strain of juggling ten soaps, and he finds himself uncertain as to who is who. To solve this he kills off everybody in assorted apocalypses—an earthquake, a sinking ship, fires, massacres—as a way of starting fresh. But it’s too late. He snaps and is carted off to the madhouse. Will he remain there? Can this be the end of Pedro Camacho? No.

  What Vargas Llosa has done in this book is to diagram myriad levels of the writing life, and chart the arcane, volcanic reaches of a writer’s psyche. His early self, Mario, is writing unpublishable short stories all during Camacho’s hegemony over the Peruvian air waves, and the young man begins to wonder:

  Why should those persons who used literature as an ornament or a pretext have any more right to be considered real writers than Pedro Camacho, who lived only to write? Because th
ey had read (or at least knew that they should have read) Proust, Faulkner, Joyce, while Pedro Camacho was very nearly illiterate? I felt sad and upset. It was becoming clearer and clearer to me each day that the only thing I wanted to be in life was a writer.… I didn’t want in the least to be a hack writer or a part-time one, but a real one, like—who?

  We know who.

  Camacho is not only an exemplar of the committed writer; his seriousness also elevates the lives of those around him, most notably the radio actors who, before Camacho gave them self-respect, were merely articulate scum. “Thanks to him,” one actor says, “we discovered that ours was an artistic profession.” And an actress wonders plaintively as Camacho is fading away: “… what would people do without us? Who else gives them the illusions and emotions that help them to go on living?”

  A Peruvian critic some years ago asked Vargas Llosa the meaning of this novel and he said he hadn’t posed that question to himself, but one of his intentions was to prove his own early world and the world of soap opera were not so very different from each other. He illustrates that by tracking a family tragedy that impends as a consequence of the romance with Aunt Julia—the threat to murder Mario, by his father: “I shall put five bullets through you and kill you like a dog, right in the middle of the street,” which suggests that everybody’s apocalypse is just around the corner, Mario’s reality just a short walk from Camacho’s fantasy.

  Both Julia’s and Camacho’s tales are parodistic of myriad life-styles and classes, and both are awash in satire and sentimental soapsuds. And yet both come to moments of poignant revelation because they are so very solidly real. They are not ready-to-wear metaphors but curious forms of flesh that endured in the memory of the artist and were finally given shape by an organizing principle he could not define when asked about it. But why should he try to be simplistic after creating such a complex piece of work? “I don’t like novels with a moral,” he has said, and he offers none overtly. His soufflé of tales might be taken as an argument on behalf of story as pure pleasure, however devoid of sanity or moral tone; or story as a form of salvation and pacification through emotional massage; or story as the vehicle for exploring the rat killers, the compulsive ear lickers, and the wacko script writers who may or may not walk abroad, as a way of proving they’re just folks after all: products of the same imagination that invented thee, and me.

  1982

  PART FIVE

  Exotic Life Forms Beyond Fiction

  Frank Sinatra:

  Pluperfect Music

  So Frank is seventy-five this year, and what does that mean? I remember what it meant when he was sixty-eight in June 1984. He was at Carnegie Hall singing “Pennies from Heaven” and “Fly Me to the Moon” and he was in great voice. When he did “Come Rain or Come Shine,” a woman in a box called out to him, “Frankie, baby, you’re the best.”

  Frank asked her name and she said it was Angie and he said to her, “You ain’t so bad yourself, Angie, you know what I mean?”

  “I just wanted to warn you that I love you,” Angie said.

  “Is that a threat or a request?” Frank inquired.

  “I’m leaving my husband for you,” she said.

  “I think we gotta talk that over a little bit,” Frank said.

  Angie turned to the audience below to tell us: “I’m gonna wash his underwear, too. I don’t care.”

  “I’m gettin’ scared now,” Frank said, raising his glass of whiskey. “I’ll drink to you.”

  “You’re still twenty-five to me,” Angie said.

  I’d bumped into Jilly Rizzo, a friend of Frank’s, in a New York saloon a few weeks earlier and we talked about the upcoming Carnegie Hall concert, for which tickets were scarce. Jilly said he could get me two, and what’s more he’d introduce me to Frank backstage, and would I like that? I said that’d be a little bit of all right, and so there we were (Jilly; my wife, Dana; and me) in Frank’s backstage parlor, where half a dozen others were bending his ear.

  It was intermission between acts. Buddy Rich and his band, the opening act, had just concluded a hot session and Frank was on next. A roving waiter brought us a drink and I tried to imagine what you could possibly say to Frank. You couldn’t gush. You couldn’t say you’d been a fan for forty-eight years. Also, you had no friends in common you knew of. Yes, it’s true you were in love with Ava thirty-five years ago and once watched her dance barefoot in Puerto Rico, but you couldn’t bring that up, and you didn’t know his wife or kids.

  Jilly broke the ice by telling Frank that I traveled with tapes, meaning, of course, Frank’s tapes. So I talked then about my Pluperfect Sinatra tapes, which a friend of mine and I had concocted to take the best of Sinatra from forever forward to right now and tape them, leaving out all songs that do not make you climb the wall.

  Frank listened to my Pluperfect story without much surprise, for his record producers had been doing this for him all his life: Frank Sinatra’s Greatest Hits and Sinatra’s Sinatra, for example. But I have to say that nobody ever put together seven tapes such as the Pluperfects, in which you climb the wall every time out.

  In one sense, the conversation was good practice for writing this memoir on behalf of Frank’s seventy-fifth birthday disks, for I climb the wall more often with these Reprise tunes than I ever did before, given this many choices. There are certain exceptions we will not go into, and even if I am tortured I will not mention their titles, for this is not the critic’s corner. This is a story of listening to Frank for forty-eight years, maybe forty-nine, and finding out what it means that he is now turning seventy-five.

  So I told Frank how I’d planned to be a drummer in 1942, and when I saw Buddy Rich in a movie playing a tom-tom solo called “Not So Quiet Please” I went out and bought the record before I had a phonograph. I would set it on top of my dresser and let my eyes be the needle and I listened to that solo for six months before I came up with enough cash to buy a friend’s used phonograph. Frank remembered the solo. It was in a movie called Ship Ahoy, with Eleanor Powell and Red Skelton and Tommy Dorsey and guess who else: Frank. You knew that.

  I then enhanced the conversation by asking him a historical question: how he decided to record “There’s a Flaw in My Flue,” one of my favorites among his romantic ballads, whose lyrics, in part, go like this:

  Your lovely face in my fireplace, was all that I saw

  But now it won’t draw, ’cause my flue has a flaw.

  From every beautiful ember a memory arose,

  Now I try to remember and smoke gets in my nose.…

  Frank liked the question and said he’d heard the song on Bing Crosby’s Kraft Music Hall radio show, a segment called “The Flop Parade,” and he thought it was funny; what’s more Bing had never recorded it. So Frank—who felt that the executives at his record company never really listened to his songs—wanted to make that point; and he asked Nelson Riddle to orchestrate “Flue” for an opening slot in an upcoming record.

  “When they played it,” Frank said, “one of the record company guys says to me, ‘What is this?’ and I said, ‘It’s a love song.’ I said, ‘There’s a flaw in my flue, beautiful.’” And so it flawlessly became, and Frank made his point doubly, with a leg pull that stands as a comic gem.

  The other significant thing that happened at Carnegie Hall was my wife. She had been a tepid Sinatra fan, growing, if not fond of, then at least used to him as I played his tapes. She knew him as an actor before I came along but not really as a singer and here I was clogging her brain with him on every trip we took. She would sometimes look at me and say, quietly, “Overdose,” and I’d then have to put on the Kiri Te Kanawa tape.

  But unbeknownst, Frank had been growing on her ever since she’d heard him do “Lonely Town” better than anybody else had ever done it, and then here he was singing “Mack the Knife” and “Luck Be a Lady” and swinging everybody’s brain from the highest trapeze and even dancing (which also got to her, for she’d been both a ballerina, and a gypsy on Br
oadway), and suddenly there she was on her feet like everybody else when he wound up with “New York, New York”: Dana, a convert, no longer susceptible to overdose.

  That is the remarkable thing about Sinatra recordings: that you can listen to them not only forever, but also at great length without overdosing, once you have been infected. I say this not only on my own behalf but on behalf of the entire set in which I move, and which I have helped infect to the point that Frank is now a common denominator among this group of seriously disparate ages and types. I am the Methuselah of the set and can remember not only Frank’s hits with Tommy Dorsey’s orchestra when they were new—“I’ll Never Smile Again” and “There Are Such Things”—but also tunes that never quite made it—“Everything Happens to Me,” for instance, which I knew by heart in 1943 and still remember from that era when listening to records was what you did with your friends when the baseball diamond was a major mud puddle.

  In the 1950s, there came In the Wee Small Hours, which conditioned your life, especially with a young woman with lush blond hair who used to put the record on and pray to Frank for a lover. All that perfumed hair, and it came undone. That certainly was a good year, but it remained for another album, Swing Easy, to teach you how to play a record twelve times in one night, which was merely a warm-up for 1983 when you listened to “New York, New York” for the first time seriously and then played it sixty times until 5:00 A.M., also calling your friends in New York and San Juan and Aspen and permitting them to stop sleeping and get out of bed and listen along.