Final Fridays (16 page)

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 understand, 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!