Saturday, July 25
I’m interested in the microscopic plots that proliferate in the novel (the same as in this diary).
Personal translations of miniature stories. “The lover doth polish the face of his beloved until he produces a skull,” John Updike.
“I came down the stairs with my usual innocence and pain right smack into her silence which is the sign that she has a weapon,” J. P. Donleavy.
X Series. At night with Roberto C.; he’s spending his vacation with us. He came yesterday, along with his beautiful wife, the heiress to a famous restaurant in the city. Anyway, he’s doing well despite the suspicions (?) that he inspires in me. Revolutionaries are simple men who conceal shady actions, in the face of which we all feel, in some sense, intimidated. He went into the room next door and left the pistol and leather shoulder holster that he wore under his overcoat in there. Throughout the conversation, without any mention of the weapon, the words seemed charged with a dark weight.
Sunday 26
First outline of the American novel. William Burroughs, technical hell. Comic delirium, LeRoi Jones. Revolution and violence, the Black Panthers.
We went out to dinner and stopped to find David. Tension about seeing his daughter (from his first marriage?), who doesn’t seem right in the head, and there was also an elderly, “long-suffering” woman present, who was missing her front teeth (it was his ex-wife). In the restaurant we made ideas spin, happily, at top speed. David was raving about a magazine (another one): monthly, not many pages, provocatory. Not a bad idea, a magazine that circulates from hand to hand like a pamphlet.
Tuesday 28
It is early morning, I spent the infinite night working with several books at the same time, like that night in 1964 in La Plata, in an attic, writing about Goodis and Jim Thompson.
Wednesday 29
Insomnia last night, as in my best times. It’s rare for me, it comes every now and then and, since it isn’t frequent, I have a feeling of being sick, delusional, my eyes open, one of the living dead, breathing and trying to sleep.
Lucas T. at Jacoby’s house. Roberto always very lucid, he shook people up at the Di Tella, proposed the dematerialization of art and also an artistic use of the media. Now he looks at political revolution through his artist’s eyes. He critiques the left’s tendency to see the State’s information services as being behind any political event that they can’t—or don’t want to—undertake. Aramburu’s death, for example. The night show, Sabina (?), the woman whose mother is a judge who spoke without parentheses, with histrionic determination, maybe so as to hide her beauty, deliberately degraded by her “display.”
Thursday 30
I get up after noon and accompany Julia to Congreso, she’s going to La Plata. On the way back, I ran into Osvaldo L., he spends eight hours selling books for a salary of forty thousand pesos. He complains ironically and always seems to be the only artist in the area and therefore the only one who needs economic advice and help.
Friday 31
It is five in the morning; I write little and read poorly, sustaining myself on infinite circles, turning over pieces of paper where I write down lost ideas. The heater warms the room, and Julia sleeps in the room next door while I, unable to sleep, pace from side to side in this room, passing two hours.
Saturday, August 1
Series E. I dreamed that the notebooks in which I write day after day were finished; I had just turned thirty, which coincided with “the beginning of the dictatorship,” that of age thirty, I guess. Sitting in a bookshop, I was waiting for someone, who looked very much like Portantiero, to finish convincing the salesman to give him one of the rubber-covered notebooks. The salesman refused. I think I had the thought: “If he manages to convince him then I’ve lost, he won’t want to give in again.”
I distance myself from the narrative tradition of the young writers “of my generation,” seeking a type of story that is at once more deliberate and more violent.
Sunday, August 2
At four in the morning I made some passes at the art of the essay and at noon David stopped by; we went out to walk around the city, and I (affectionately) disagreed with the way he tackles the entire history of Argentine literature with excessive certainty. Historical thought that only historicizes a confusing assemblage of relationships, attributing a single meaning to them. When I returned, as a result of that conversation, I euphorically wrote a brief panorama of contemporary American narrative (1960–1970) in a couple of hours.
Monday
Reading the weekly papers reveals a schematic coherence, created for cultural consumption. With three or four items or names, they also summarize what they call “the present,” the now, what emerges from within the ephemerality of cultural circulation.
What things would have changed if I’d lost my typewriter in 1966? “Mata-Hari 55,” maybe the whole book. I’d taken it to get cleaned when robbers broke into my room in the hotel on Calle Riobamba, stealing a suit and Cacho’s leather jacket. They didn’t find the typewriter, which was exactly what they’d come looking for.
As always, the immanence of working all night immediately provokes a feeling of joy within me. The darkness is a parenthesis, and reality lies waiting until the next morning.
Wednesday 5
I visit David this afternoon; he’s in a bad mood because the essay he’s writing “isn’t working,” but it seems to me that he’s trying to move on to Latin American literature and is confronting the difficulty of working with his method of drastic synthesis. Basically, it’s because he doesn’t know that culture or those writers in the way that he thinks he knows—and certainly does know—the Argentine tradition. David does a kind of micro, close reading, that is, he reads a few pages or dedications, or sometimes even a few book titles, and on that basis, he builds up theories that approach the context.
Thursday, August 6
This afternoon Rubén K. came over, proposing that I take part in the editing committee for Cuadernos Rojos, where I would be in charge of special issues. He’s very interested in my theories about new nonfiction literature, the Soviets’ literatura fakta, the possibility of recording the life stories of people usually outside of written culture. It’s a way to keep myself close to politics without getting too involved, working based on what I know or am familiar with.
I never let politics have a direct impact on what I write. I collaborate with my friends on magazines and newspapers. I keep literature separate. I try to convince them to leave fictional prose in peace, instead using testimony and the tape recorder as outlets for the attempt to politicize writing.
Friday, August 7
Maybe one day I’ll have to confront the phantoms that sometimes come upon me: fixed ideas, psychotic ceremonies, and at the center of the circle there is only the figure of Steve, walking away in his white bomber jacket; I see him from behind and know that it’s the last time, that he’s going to kill himself. I didn’t know it in the moment, but what would I have done if I had? I wasn’t capable of saving anyone at that age. For me, it isn’t about guilt but rather shame, a different and more noble feeling. Not being up to the task, or not saying what I would have said now. Steve’s memory comes and goes without my looking for it. I haven’t made up my mind whether to write about him, and the things I note down here have to do with me and not him…
A difficult time, Raúl Sendic was imprisoned. The Tupamaros abducted an American this morning. The police confronted them in Malvín and seventeen fell, among them B., the military commander.
Saturday 8
I finished writing the article about American narrative. In a sense, I used Burroughs’s cut-up method by interspersing phrases and sayings from other writers in the essay, trying, for the first time, to use collage form.
Monday 10
I was up all night and don’t intend to go to bed now because I’m trying to recover my sleep schedule and catch up on the day. I just finished revising the article on the United States and am confid
ent that I can soon return to the novel waiting for me in green binders.
Wednesday 12
I am writing this at a table in La Paz at seven, after determining to change my hours of sleep. Yesterday I went to see Umberto Eco with Jacoby. Jacoby brought him the magazine Sobre, and Eco was surprised. He couldn’t understand the “publication,” which consisted of a brown paper envelope that could be bought in any bookshop, containing, in no order, comics, stories, interviews, and political manifestos. Eco looked at us without quite understanding, and we (or Roberto at any rate) understood, yet again, that we could do some things that were ahead of the official avant-garde. Eco, superficial, a tourist.
Friday 14
Jacoby, Schmucler, Funes, and I recorded a conversation with Eco for the magazine. We went back to discussing McLuhan’s theory with him, as well as his book about those who deny the mass media and those who extol it. Is there a third way? For us, it’s about uniting one sphere with another. What Jacoby calls “the art of the media.”
Saturday 15
A meeting with Haroldo Conti after not seeing each other for months. He finished his novel En vida; he always has that melancholy air, the same dull strain while writing his personal stories of spies, English sailors, voyages to Antarctica. He gives me back Lajolo’s book on Pavese, which I had lent to Daniel Moyano. On that afternoon, I went up to the room in the boarding house on Medrano and Rivadavia with him, looking for the book in the cardboard box under the bed with piles of magazines and books. Haroldo showed me a copy of Los oficios terrestres in which Walsh had written an inscription when he gave him the book: “Haroldo, between you and me we’re going to do this thing.” That is, we’re going to define the future of Argentine literature. The same thing Briante and I said to one another, one afternoon five or six years ago, with the same anger at what we had been given and the same confidence.
Monday 17
There’s a tension between the short form and the novel that I want to confront, that is, bringing the swiftness and precision of short story prose to the novel, trying to work with multiple micro-stories that combine and expand over the course of the book. Creating a style based on digression.
Tuesday 18
I stopped by the magazine and found Germán García and Toto; we made up the same proposals as usual, all of us attached to projects that languish with no clear resolution. Then I stopped by Luna’s place, picked up sixty-four thousand pesos, and went to eat with Julia at Churrasquita. There were two beautiful and sophisticated women, wearing large hats, fine furs; the waiter, acting as a guide for two rather stupid Americans, spoke to them in a monosyllabic English, fascinated by his international customers. A typical scene from a film about colonial tourism.
Sunday 23
In Brodie’s Report, Borges’s latest book, there’s a certain loss of words that affects the prose and turns the style into a kind of previous version. Borges no longer writes because he can’t read, so he dictates, and his texts suffer from the lack of the complexity that has always brought such a convincing tone to his fiction. This book is good, but one is nostalgic for his short stories from the forties.
Tuesday 25
Jacoby and I worked on his article about the Di Tella for Los Libros. The large old house with its high roof, empty, the bed unmade, the past coming and going, and Roberto trying to smuggle Peronist versions of the Cordobazo.
The meeting with the new generation of writers who run the magazine Uno más uno reminds me of my own juvenile years. Impunity, radicalism, abstract theories. Was I any different six or seven years ago?
Wednesday, August 26
Suddenly, I think that I’d like to live in Paris, in an apartment, in a loft, not knowing anyone, shut in and alone, dedicated to writing. Living on what? I still didn’t think about that. Between the hours, the long walks along the street, among people who speak another language, secure in myself, not thinking about validation, and publishing my books—or a single book—under a pseudonym. To be dead to everyone except for me. Tied to that, I should see why I’ve stopped showing my friends what I’m writing.
Thursday 27
The Beatles are playing on Boccardo’s tape player. In a flash, I remember hearing them for the first time in La Plata in ’60 or ’61.
I do complicated but amusing things after I finish working, trying to distract myself so that my temptation toward bad thinking isn’t realized. And I remain in a placid state of mind in which I’m like a seventy-year-old man, without a future, empty, yet still not wanting the day to pass so as not to come closer to the end.
I go down to buy a paper on the corner of Corrientes and Montevideo and find out that they killed José Alonso this morning. When I find out about these things, before I make any political analysis, I always think: who did it? But I can imagine it, and then ask: are the Peronist union leaders the ones who must be confronted? I don’t think so.
I’m reading the newspaper No transar, which Elías brought me. Immediately I notice: future tense and potential verbs used for the working-class sections. The present tense for quotes and axioms (Mao says, the working class knows). The past tense for the bourgeoisie (the evacuation started on June 4), which lives in the past. Lots of apocalyptic descriptions (rotten, suffocating, dirty, monstrosity, deadly swamp, savagely) directed at the enemy. And, at the same time, angelic descriptions (magnificent treasure, flourishing communist jungle, happily receives) for the working class, which in this way is depoliticized by moralistic writing and blind optimism. Another key element is the kind of exhortative writing (we must rebel, compañeros, and then we call, we organize, we act). This style, then, is composed of an excess of verbs in future tense for predictions, corresponding to exhortation, appealing to the present of a future awareness that they alone can decipher (the working class knows). I should make an analysis and write an essay about the political language of the left, looking at the clichés, the style of translation (workers of the world, unite), the proliferation of quotes from sacred texts, which are never relevant.
Friday 28
I stopped by Siete Días and went to lunch with Osvaldo Tcherkaski; he gave me a book of short stories that has good moments and flowing writing. Then with Andrés, who has just come from Uruguay, where, according to him, the Tupamaros number seven thousand. I ended the day in the publishing house talking to Alberto, who complains about the economic situation and can see no way out for the publications. At home, Edgardo F. pays me a visit. I take note of all this in order to leave a record showing the fatigue of social life, which is the cause of the stylistic weakness of this fragment. As though I couldn’t narrate my encounter yesterday with Osvaldo at the restaurant in Bajo, the waiters who obsequiously recognize magazine editors. Then a greeting from Mario B., who comes over to me, “moved,” and transfers his awkwardness onto me, so I distance myself ironically and talk to him about his beard (you look like Melville). Then Gusmán, at a table with Rozenmacher.
And so he tries not to succumb, holding on to the remains of a sharp and free-flowing intelligence, squandered by distraction, because he can clearly see that he has few chances left and that, if he has decided to bet everything on a single hand, he has to lay down the cards without a shudder. He had to return to the values of that fast and easygoing young man, always disparaging the value of effort and tenacity. Bursts of clarity that came in my moments of deepest confidence, so sure of myself (thinking about his life in third-person).
Sunday 30
The murder of Alonso provokes reactions that are worth analyzing. On the left, the event seems too “well done and efficient” not to be attributed to the right (it’s the army services, they say), as though the right were the only ones capable of a true control of reality. The right doesn’t suffer from the break between words and actions that the left berates itself for repeatedly. What’s more, “coldly killing” isn’t a pardonable offense for those who attempt to be respected as “serious” politicians.
X Series. As Rubén K. said the
other day, the point is not to heroically contemplate the smoke as our own ships burn, but to be able to jump into the sea and get onto another ship. He meant that he wasn’t just trying to change his thinking, tied to the past, but rather that he was trying, by changing his life, to gain access to the thinking of those in the avant-garde.
Series E. Perhaps, when I transcribe these notebooks and type up copies, I’ll have to say something about the gap produced in 1962 and so tell the story of how I burned a notebook on the floor of the hotel in the winter of 1967; a spectacular, empty gesture that erased several months of my life.
Eduardo came to see me, along with his inseparable friend; the two are married and seem like well-integrated heterosexuals, yet some gestures and words show the true reality of his desire. Like the atmosphere of James Purdy’s stories. Remember, for example, the accident when the two friends who are together all the time fall asleep in a car and wake up in the middle of the country, having crashed into a pole.
The Diaries of Emilio Renzi Page 26
