An unexpected appearance from Amanda, who as usual comes to see me when she feels lost. Nothing, except for some tension.
On Arlt. Careful, if the “novel” that appears in the notebook grows too much, the effect of the lost story will be lost.
Monday 17
Weekend on the Tigre, the river, my skin burning. Helios Prieto’s short stories. The Dostoevskian scene of Indio Bonnet, who returns from Cuba with money for the ERP and stops over in Rome; he has the day free and leaves to walk around the city, letting himself be won by passion and daring. In a plaza he bets in the shell game, three cups hiding a little black marble. He loses two thousand dollars…
I reread my essay “Roberto Arlt and the Fiction of Money.” Written in 1973, about to come out.
“Borges: The Two Lineages,” written in 1974, about to come out.
Wednesday, February 19
I finished a first draft of “Homage to Roberto Arlt.” Kostia’s mystery is that Arlt, short on money, has rewritten a story by Andreyev. But the narrator does not know it.
Friday 21
I finished the first revision of “Homage to Arlt”: the footnotes and the other story still have to be done.
Last night an encounter with Amanda. We ate in the restaurant on Carlos Pellegrini and then went to La Paz. We went back to her place to listen to the Charlie Parker record that I gave her at the beginning of everything. No desire, nothing, except nostalgia for other days.
The book of short stories (I still don’t have the title) is finished and is fairly good.
For the first time, I have confirmed that literature does not solve life’s imperfections. Write a work. And what do you do with that? A curious confirmation at this age.
Thursday 27
I meet David at La Paz at noon; he brings me the Cuban edition of my first book of short stories and tells me his misfortunes working as a ghost writer on the script of The Dead Man.
Saturday, March 1
I go to Martín Fierro in the morning, and in the bookshop I run into Gusmán. (The caves or crevices where his family’s “accomplices” shut themselves in.) Difficulties, on my part, in talking about the fiction I write.
Two titles for the book: Partial Vision or Assumed Name.
Monday 3
I’m buried in Stendhal, from whom I learned all of my creed in 1963: strategy, control, clear prose.
I spend the afternoon sorting through my library, throwing out papers, not getting around to going over the short stories I’ve written (I don’t want to read them again).
Tuesday 4
I want to clarify that, in rereading, I like the stories less and less.
Wednesday 5
I go to Crisis magazine to drop off my story “The Price of Love.” I meet with the successful “young” writers (Eduardo G., Jorge A.) who discuss their literature in the way it was discussed ten years ago. Presumptuous, self-satisfied. Eduardo G. talks about the letters that his readers send him and reads a letter from the woman who translates him into Czech. Jorge A. “quotes” his own novels. No future in that direction. Aníbal Ford seems more promising, he has written a good short story with an indirect tone and a “simple” character, a truck driver. Lastly Juan Gelman, asking them to write to Spain for his newly published book, etc.
Tuesday 11
Dream. The crime is in the handkerchief, someone says. A puzzle can be seen, and in the dream it remains unsolved. Suddenly we are in the theater: all improvised.
Thursday
Opposite, in the window, two young people eat lunch as though on stage in a theater. I have nothing to eat; I’ll have to go out despite the rain and walk to the deli where they sell prepared food.
Friday 21
At Jacoby’s invitation, I’m going to give a course at the CICSO on Arlt and Borges on Monday nights at nine thirty.
Wednesday 26
Yesterday José Sazbón spends the afternoon at my place. We talk about Borges, listen to songs by Brecht. He remains the same, very intelligent and very shy.
Rumors of a coup d’état are growing.
April
I have finished correcting Assumed Name. Except for some roughness in the style, this book is good enough to show how far I can go at this time. The prose could possibly be improved, but the book was written in a short time, in a sort of blind space where I had little choice.
In a sense, “The End of the Ride” brings the poetics that I began in 1961 with “La honda” to an end; it is impossible to go any further. It contains the Americans, Pavese, “narration.” “Homage to Roberto Arlt,” on the other hand, opens a certain path, the possibility to “think” in the middle of a story and break the structure. In any case, I can’t comment on the value of these stories. I have few illusions, as though I have finally managed to write with no pretense other than following the rhythm of the prose. This explains the indifference, the strange lethargy that rereading it causes in me, as though someone other than me had written it.
Wednesday 2
I rediscover a certain lost emotion of the city, intermingled with the empty hours. The walk along Corrientes, the bar on Santa Fe and Pueyrredón with the veneered walls and the young girls who laugh and drink beer. I end up at the theater, watching a regular film (Rosemary’s Baby) among the single men there to kill the tedium of the afternoon.
Earlier I saw Germán, Oscar Steimberg, Luis Gusmán; they have veered toward the baroque, studying rhetoric. Some emotional bond, anyway, especially with Luis (who has dedicated his novel to me).
I kill time in another bar, read a Borges story, an anachronistic utopia, men of the future complaining, gloomy.
Thursday 3
Norberto comes over, the critic acts stubborn toward everyone as a mask for all of the texts he announces and does not write. He will say the same things about me that he says to me about others.
I’ve decided to quit Los Libros magazine. My differences with Carlos and Beatriz are more and more definitive; it isn’t about literary discrepancies, which have always been there, but rather political views, which so far have always determined the positions I’ve published (for example, renouncing El Escarabajo de Oro for jumping on the Communist Party bandwagon). I never publicly discuss literary matters or cultural positions that refer to me, I never respond to reviews and try to never get into useless “artistic” polemics, but I do have qualms with political labels. In this case, opportunism toward López Rega, ravings about a supposed Soviet strike… Anyway, I won’t be able to leave until the next issue. I see Beatriz (having said nothing to her), and she talks about my article on Brecht, which is already written.
At Juárez’s house with Julio G., who seems intimidated, undecided, outside of politics. I remember him years ago in the College as an optimistic militant of the CP; I had lost the election for president of the Students’ Center by three votes, and Julio got up on a table and proclaimed that the defeat was a victory. It has always been hard for me to take in the idiotic optimism of progressivism.
Friday 4
Why was I astonished by Scott Fitzgerald, now so many years ago? (I read him for the first time in 1958 and have gone back to him several times since then.) Maybe it is his lyrical and nostalgic way of recounting failure, and at the same time a certain fragile arrogance; like him, I hoped “to be” better than any other writer in my generation.
Sometimes I would sit down to write only so that I could look at the river in the distance, among the buildings, especially at six in the afternoon when the sun was gone and the light was gray, the same color as the water.
Our enemy these days is one Luis G., stupid and pretentious; today in La Opinión he wrote a venomous critique of Ludmer’s excellent work on Toward a Nameless Grave by Onetti. Before that, several references to me because of my prologue for Gusmán and my project on Borges, which he branded—like a good cultural policeman—“Maoist.” He nicely expresses the dominant thought in the media and among people with little education; he demands simp
licity, demands that writing be clear, that is, done in his heavy and mediocre manner.
At Corregidor publishing, Juan Carlos Martini offers to publish Assumed Name “without reading it.” Schmucler is sick, so the Siglo XXI work is postponed.
I will let this month come to an end before I decide what writing to continue. Really, I should “have to” finish with Borges, but I don’t have much desire to do it. I prefer to continue with the fiction, writing my bildungsroman (there are not many in this country: Mad Toy and Betrayed by Rita Hayworth). The only issue is that I detest autobiographies and so would have to write the novel in third person.
I am reading a biography of Scott Fitzgerald. Some scenes: Zelda (“crazy”) who comes out of the house naked while Scott is playing tennis with a friend. Grand theme: success and collapse. (Fitzgerald and Pavese replace Byron and Rimbaud for us; they are our myths.)
As always, I try to read every novel by an author who interests me, in recent weeks it was Katherine Anne Porter, before her—long before—it was Stendhal, now it’s Fitzgerald: his stories with ridiculous heroes, with inelegance as a mortal sin, are the signal (the oracle) announcing failure and death. To lose natural grace is to experience—ahead of time—collapse. His stories from the thirties—“Babylon Revisited” in particular—have a tragic strength and can only be written “with the authority of failure.”
Saturday 5
It remains a joy, these days, to enter the study in the morning with the river in the background, where I sit down in the armchair and read the newspapers.
Over the last few months it is as if, for some reason I do not know, the writer I have been trying to construct for years has taken form. And so I feel myself detached and cold toward criticism (despite the fact that I will need it to earn my living in the coming years).
Fitzgerald’s point of view, as in Conrad, can also be found in the work of Borges: the narrator is stunned, faced with a story he does not entirely understand. For me, on the other hand, the point is to maintain that uncertainty in order to think at that level. The witness avoids having to “heat up” the prose in relation to the storyline. I have to find something like that in the coming-of-age novel: maybe use him as a witness in La Plata and then turn him into a protagonist. For example, in The Last Tycoon, the point of view is shown in the middle of the story: “There was an eager to-do in the eastern sky, and Wylie could see me plain: thin with good features and lots of style, and the kicking fetus of a mind. I wonder what I looked like in that dawn, five years ago. A little rumpled and pale, I suppose.” The witness describes himself in the way he imagines another sees, or has seen, him. That is also Chandler’s method (that is why he calls his protagonist Marlowe, a narrative double of the Marlow in Conrad).
Today I saw a film by John Huston with Bette Davis, a cruel story with some memorable moments: Bette Davis steals her sister’s husband. Bette goes to visit her, and the sister has the photo of the husband in her bed; she is lying there with the photograph. Bette takes the photo and stands there, staring at it.
Sunday 6
In the novel, I will try to narrate the way into that dangerous place where some lost desire is reactivated. That way in is motivated by the arrival of the student in La Plata. Remember what André Green pointed out: “The dominant feature is the distinction between the idea and the emotional state. Whereas the idea will be submitted to change, the emotional state will remain identical.” This distinction is key for me and is tied to the relationship that the hero maintains with his own experience: when he narrates it, he is detached and looks with irony at his emotional state, which, nevertheless (and in spite of him), remains alive. Often, for example in Hemingway or in Conrad, narrators will tell the story from a time long after the events, and so they cannot transmit the emotional states they felt in the past but can contemplate them.
Green analyzes substance abuse, that is, addiction, as a shattering of the transactional ways of the ego: all mediations are lost. In my case, it has to do with the relationship between writing and the drugs.
Monday
I stop by Crisis magazine, where I receive eighty thousand pesos for the publication of my story “The Price of Love.” Earlier, in the morning, I prepared the program on narrations of the ego for the course in Parera. They will pay me forty thousand per class (the dollar is at three thousand pesos).
Amid the rain I walk down Viamonte to Los Libros. I find Beatriz Sarlo in the office. We look at the proofs of my article on Brecht. Then I hand in my resignation. One phase comes to a close.
Tuesday 8
I spend the morning at a table in La Paz, overlooking the street corner, finishing my corrections on Assumed Name, and in the middle of my work Juan Carlos Martini appears and stays for an hour. I have lunch with Schmucler and leave the book with him, we’ll see what happens. Then I go over the proofs for the essay on Brecht and don’t end up writing a final version, as I had thought, so I’ll turn it in as it is.
Wednesday
In therapy, C. says to him: “You give your father time, you hold back because of him, waiting for him.” A strange history that he resists understanding.
A meeting with Beatriz Sarlo and Carlos Altamirano, rather gloomy. Carlos “politically” laments the end of our work together.
Friday 11
A melancholy and asseverative meeting with Andrés R., Norberto S., and Jorge F. Experience at Los Libros, critique of Pasado y Presente, the possibility of a new magazine, etc. Everything ends at three in the morning and I stay over at Norberto’s house.
A meeting with Beatriz and Carlos at six in the afternoon where I submit my letter of resignation; little goodbyes and an end to my work at Los Libros.
I am reading The Charterhouse of Parma. The secret, the disguise, the conspiracy, the Bovarysme are built around Napoleon (Fabrizio in battle: he cannot understand what is happening and sees Bonaparte passing on horseback like a phantom).
Sunday 13
A peaceful day at Iris’s house. We go to the movie theater and return in the rain.
Monday
A certain chain of memories that have remained fixed reappear, summoned by the present: that trip, sitting in the last seat of the bus from La Plata to Buenos Aires with Virginia, Manolo, and Pochi Francia. The discussion about the CP and Russian poets in Cuba. That morning at the end of 1967 when I peeked out the window of my room in the hotel on Rue Cujas and saw snow on the dark rooftops.
I see Gusmán, Altamirano, Steimberg, and Germán García in the bars near the Martín Fierro bookshop. A letter from Oscar Masotta in London, references to Brillos and to my prologue for El frasquito (Luis’s first two books).
José Sazbón with his amusing son, who is growing up and worries him; he is always worried about money, always wise. With a smile he dismissed Emilio de Ípola and his thesis on Lévi-Strauss (“very superficial”).
Tuesday 15
An invitation—via Germán García—to give a talk at the Escuela Freudiana de Buenos Aires (effect of Masotta’s letter): I will talk about Borges, psychoanalysis of “Emma Zunz,” equivalencies, substitutions, one name in place of another.
It would be interesting and enlightening to make an historical analysis of the successive speeches by the Commanders in Chief of the Army on May 29 (Army Day). They have been delivering them since 1870: see whom they are directed to in each instance and who is the enemy.
A meeting at Siglo XXI to inaugurate a main office on Calle Perú. A dizzying succession of the faces of friends, acquaintances, and rivals. We took a photo in which China L., Luis, Pezzoni, Toto, and I are smiling. Schmucler (excessively) praises my “Homage to Roberto Arlt,” but (I’m sure) they don’t like the other stories. Luis G. detains me to talk despite the void that surrounds him. Tense because Lola Estrada is there, I take refuge with Iris in a corner, surrounded by Gusmán, Máximo Soto, and Urbanyi until Andrés R. and Norberto S. arrive. We end up in a restaurant in the area having dinner with lots of alcohol, and I decide ou
t of nowhere to pay ten thousand pesos for a team flag of Peñarol de Montevideo.
Wednesday
Tired because of the two courses I teach every week, I take things calmly all the same. In the middle of the afternoon León R. comes over and then Tristana, who takes me for a car ride and gives me a memo book that someone left behind.
Thursday
Both courses are going well. I’ve made a hundred twenty thousand pesos from three classes with the psychoanalysts, and I’m at ease. I prepare for tonight’s course on Borges; demands from outside erase the emptiness, and it seems that work (at least reading and preparing for the classes) may be something necessary, recalling the sailors’ saying (sailing is necessary, living is not necessary).
Friday, April 18
I meet Schmucler at the Grill on Santa Fe and Salguero. We planned for one in the afternoon, and he’s delayed. I order chicken and rice and convince myself that he isn’t coming, that he has rejected the book. But instead he does arrive, excited about “Homage,” and differing on the other stories in this decreasing order: “The End of the Ride,” “Benítez,” “The Price of Love.” He suggests releasing the book before October and paying an advance of five hundred thousand pesos.
The Diaries of Emilio Renzi Page 49
