Nazi Literature in the Americas (New Directions Paperbook) (4 page)

FORERUNNERS AND FIGURES OF THE
ANTI-ENLIGHTENMENT

M
ATEO
A
GUIRRE
B
ENGOECHEA

Buenos Aires, 1880–Comodoro Rivadavia, 1940

O
wner of a vast ranch in
the province of Chubut, which he ran himself and to which few of his friends
were granted access, Mateo Aguirre Bengoechea was a living enigma, oscillating
between two poles: bucolic contemplation and titanic activity. He collected
pistols and knives, admired Florentine but detested Venetian painting, and had
an excellent knowledge of English literature. Although he ordered books
regularly from stores in Buenos Aires and Europe, his library never held more
than a thousand titles. A confirmed bachelor, he nourished a passion for Wagner,
a few French poets (Corbière, Catulle Mendès, Laforgue, Banville) and a few
German philosophers (Fichte, August-Wilhelm Schlegel, Friedrich Schlegel,
Schelling, Schleirmacher). In the room where he wrote as well as dispatched the
business of the ranch, there were many maps and farming implements; on the walls
and shelves, dictionaries and handbooks jostled peaceably with faded photographs
of the first Aguirres and bright photographs of his prize animals.

He wrote four well-wrought novels, spaced out over the years (
The
Storm and the Youths
, 1911;
The Devil’s River
, 1918;
Ana
and the Warriors
, 1928; and
The Soul of the Waterfall
, 1936),
as well as a brief collection of poems, in which he complained that he had been
born too soon, in a country that was too young.

He wrote a great many detailed letters to literary figures of all
persuasions in America and Europe, whose works he read attentively, although the
tone of the correspondence always remained formal.

He detested Alfonso Reyes with a tenacity worthy of a nobler
enterprise.

Shortly before his death, in a letter to a friend in Buenos Aires, he
foresaw a radiant epoch for the human race, the triumphant dawn of a new golden
age, and he wondered whether the Argentinean people would rise to the
occasion.

S
ILVIO
S
ALVÁTICO

Buenos Aires, 1901–Buenos Aires, 1994

A
s a young man Salvático
advocated, among other things, the re-establishment of the Inquisition; corporal
punishment in public; a permanent war against the Chileans, the Paraguayans, or
the Bolivians as a kind of gymnastics for the nation; polygamy; the
extermination of the Indians to prevent further contamination of the Argentinean
race; curtailing the rights of any citizen with Jewish blood; a massive influx
of migrants from the Scandinavian countries in order to effect a progressive
lightening of the national skin color, darkened by years of promiscuity with the
indigenous population; life-long writer’s grants; the abolition of tax on
artists’ incomes; the creation of the largest air force in South America; the
colonization of Antarctica; and the building of new cities in Patagonia.

He was a soccer player and a Futurist.

From 1920 to 1929, in addition to frequenting the literary salons and
fashionable cafes, he wrote and published more than twelve collections of poems,
some of which won municipal and provincial prizes. From 1930 on, burdened by a
disastrous marriage and numerous offspring, he worked as a gossip columnist and
copy-editor for various newspapers in the capital, hung out in dives, and
practised the art of the novel, which stubbornly declined to yield its secrets
to him. Three titles resulted:
Fields of Honor
(1936), about
semi-secret challenges and duels in a spectral Buenos Aires;
The French
Lady
(1949), a story of prostitutes with hearts of gold, tango singers
and detectives; and
The Eyes of the Assassin
(1962), a curious
precursor to the psycho-killer movies of the seventies and eighties.

He died in an old-age home in Villa Luro, his worldly possessions
consisting of a single suitcase full of books and unpublished manuscripts.

His books were never republished. His manuscripts were probably thrown
out with the trash or burned by the orderlies.

L
UIZ
F
ONTAINE
D
A
S
OUZA

Río de Janeiro, 1900—Río de Janeiro, 1977

A
precocious author, whose
Refutation of
Voltaire
(1921) was hailed by Catholic literary circles in Brazil and
admired by the academic community on account of its sheer bulk (it was 640 pages
long), its critical and bibliographical apparatus, and the author’s evident
youth. In 1925, as if to fulfill the hopes generated by his first book, Fontaine
da Souza published
A Refutation of Diderot
(530 pages), followed two
years later by
A Refutation of D’Alembert
(590 pages), thus
establishing himself as the country’s leading Catholic philosopher.

In 1930,
A Refutation of Montesquieu
(620 pages) appeared,
and in 1932
A Refutation of Rousseau
(605 pages).

In 1935 he spent four months at a clinic for the mentally ill in
Petropolis.

In 1937
The Jewish Question in Europe Followed by a Memorandum on
the Brazilian Question
came out: a characteristically capacious book
(552 pages), in which Fontaine explained the threats that widespread
miscegenation would pose to Brazilian society (disorder, promiscuity,
criminality).

The year 1938 saw the publication of
A Refutation of Hegel
Followed by a Brief Refutation of Marx and Feuerbach
(635 pages), which
many philosophers and even a few general readers considered the work of a
lunatic. Fontaine was, irrefutably, well versed in French philosophy (his
command of the language was excellent), but not, by any means, in the work of
the German philosophers. His “refutation” of Hegel, whom he confuses with Kant
on several occasions, and, worse still, with Jean Paul, Hölderlin and Ludwig
Tieck, is, according to the critics, a sorry affair.

In 1939, he surprised everyone by publishing a sentimental novella. In
a mere 108 pages (another surprise), the book tells how a professor of
Portuguese literature set about wooing a rich, young and almost illiterate woman
from Novo Hamburgo. Entitled
The Conflict of Opposites
, it sold very
few copies, but its delicate style, its intellectual acuity, and the perfect
economy of its construction were not lost on certain critics, who praised the
book unreservedly.

In 1940, Fontaine was interned again in the Petropolis clinic, where
he would remain for three years. During that long stay, broken by Christmas
holidays and vacations with his family (always under the strict supervision of a
nurse), he wrote a sequel to
The Conflict of Opposites
called
Evening in Porto Alegre
, whose subtitle (
Apocalypse in Novo
Hamburgo
) sheds light retrospectively on his work as a whole. The story
takes up where
The Conflict of Opposites
left off. Roughly written,
with none of the previous volume’s delicacy, acuity or economy,
Evening in
Porto Alegre
adopts various points of view without changing the
narrative voice, which is that of the professor of Portuguese literature, who
recounts an interminable yet hectic evening in the southern Brazilian city of
Porto Alegre, while simultaneously in Novo Hamburgo (hence the subtitle)
servants, family members and later the police are confronted with the body of a
rich, illiterate heiress, found in her bedroom,
under
the large
canopied bed, with multiple stab wounds. The novel remained unpublished until
well into the sixties, for family reasons.

A long silence ensued. In 1943, Fontaine published an article in a Rio
newspaper, protesting Brazil’s entry into the Second World War. In 1948 he
contributed an article to a magazine called
Brazilian Woman
on the
flowers and legends of Pará, especially the region between the rivers Tapajoz
and Xingu.

And that was all until 1955 and the publication of his
Critique of
Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, Volume I
(350 pages), which deals only
with sections two and three of Sartre’s introduction, “In Pursuit of Being”:
“The Phenomenon of Being and the Being of the Phenomenon” and “The Prereflective
Cogito and the Being of the
Percipere
.” In his denigration, Fontaine
ranges from the pre-Socratic philosophers to the movies of Chaplin and Buster
Keaton. Volume II (320 pages) appeared in 1957, dealing with the fifth and sixth
sections of the introduction to Sartre’s work, “The Ontological Proof” and
“Being-in-Itself.” It would be an exaggeration to say that either book sent so
much as a ripple through philosophical and academic circles in Brazil.

In 1960, the third volume appeared. In exactly 600 pages it broaches
the third, fourth and fifth sections (“The Dialectical Concept of Nothingness,”
“The Phenomenological Concept of Nothingness” and “The Origin of Nothingness”)
of the first chapter (“The Origin of Negation”) in Part I (“The Problem of
Nothingness”) and the first, second and third sections (“Bad Faith and
Falsehood,” “Patterns of Bad Faith,” “The ‘Faith’ of Bad Faith”) of the second
chapter (“Bad Faith”).

In 1961, a sepulchral silence, which Fontaine’s publisher made no
effort to break, greeted the publication of the fourth volume (555 pages), which
tackles the five sections (“Presence to Self,” “The Facticity of the
For-Itself,” “The For-Itself and the Being of Value,” “The For-Itself and the
Being of Possibilities,” “The Self and the Circuit of Selfness”) of the first
chapter (“Immediate Structures of the For-Itself”) of Part II
(“Being-for-Itself”) and the second and third sections (“The Ontology of
Temporality” and “Original Temporality and Psychic Temporality: Reflection”) of
the second chapter (“Temporality”).

In 1962, the fifth volume (720 pages) appeared, in which, passing over
the third chapter (“Transcendence”) of Part II, almost all the sections of the
first chapter (“The Existence of Others”) of Part III (“Being-for-Others”), and
the whole of the second chapter (“The Body”), Fontaine makes a wild and reckless
leap to the third section (“Husserl, Hegel, Heidegger”) of the first chapter and
the three sections (“First Attitude Toward Others: Love, Language, Masochism,”
“Second Attitude Toward Others: Indifference, Desire, Hate, Sadism” and
“‘Being-With’ (
Mitsein
) and the ‘We’”) of the third chapter (“Concrete
Relations with Others”) of Part III.

In 1963, while he was working on the sixth volume, his siblings and
nephews were obliged to have him interned once again in the clinic, where he
remained until 1970. He never resumed his writing. Death took him by surprise
seven years later in his comfortable apartment in the Leblon neighborhood of
Rio, as he listened to a record by the Argentinean composer Tito Vásquez, and
looked out of the window at night falling over the city, passing cars, people
chatting on the sidewalks, lights coming on and going out, and windows being
closed.

E
RNESTO
P
ÉREZ
M
ASÓN

Matanzas, 1908–New York, 1980

T
he reputation of Ernesto
Pérez Masón, realist, naturalist and expressionist novelist, exponent of the
decadent style and social realism, rests on a series of twenty works, beginning
with the splendid story “Heartless” (Havana, 1930), a nightmare with Kafkaesque
echoes, written at a time when the work of Kafka was little known in the
Caribbean, and ending with the abrasive, caustic, embittered prose of
Don
Juan in Havana
(Miami, 1979).

A rather atypical member of the group that formed around the magazine
Orígenes
, he maintained a legendary feud with Lezama Lima. On three
occasions, he challenged the author of
Paradiso
to a duel. The first
time, in 1945, the affair was to be decided, so he declared, on the little field
he owned outside Pinar del Río, which had inspired him to write numerous pages
about the deep joy of land ownership, a condition he had come to see as the
ontological equivalent of destiny. Naturally Lezama spurned his challenge.

On the second occasion, in 1954, the site chosen for the duel, to be
fought with sabers, was the patio of a brothel in Havana. Once again, Lezama
failed to appear.

The third and final challenge took place in 1963; the designated field
of honor was the back garden of a house belonging to Dr. Antonio Nualart, in
which a party attended by painters and poets was under way, and it was to be a
fist fight, in the traditional Cuban manner. Lezama, who by pure chance happened
to be at the party, managed to slip away again, with the help of Eliseo Diego
and Cintio Vitier. But this time Pérez Masón’s show of bravado landed him in
trouble. Half an hour later the police arrived and, after a short discussion,
arrested him. The situation degenerated at the police station. According to the
police, Pérez Masón hit an officer in the eye. According to Pérez Masón, the
whole thing was an ambush cleverly contrived by Lezama and Castro’s regime, in
an unholy alliance forged with the express purpose of destroying him. The upshot
of the incident was a fifteen-day prison term.

That was not to be Pérez Masón’s last visit to the jails of socialist
Cuba. In 1965 he published
Poor Man’s Soup
, which related—in an
irreproachable style, worthy of Sholokov—the hardships of a large family living
in Havana in 1950. The novel comprised fourteen chapters. The first began:
“Lucia was a black woman from . . .”; the second: “Only after serving her father
. . .”; the third: “Nothing had come easily to Juan . . .”; the fourth:
“Gradually, tenderly, she drew him towards her . . .” The censor quickly smelled
a rat. The first letters of each chapter made up the acrostic LONG LIVE HITLER.
A major scandal broke out. Pérez Masón defended himself haughtily: it was a
simple coincidence. The censors set to work in earnest, and made a fresh
discovery: the first letters of each chapter’s second paragraph made up another
acrostic—THIS PLACE SUCKS. And those of the third paragraph spelled: USA WHERE
ARE YOU. And the fourth paragraph: KISS MY CUBAN ASS. And so, since each
chapter, without exception, contained twenty-five paragraphs, the censors and
the general public soon discovered twenty-five acrostics. I screwed up, Pérez
Masón would say later: They were too obvious, but if I’d made it much harder, no
one would have realized.

In the end, he was sentenced to three years in prison, but served only
two, during which his early novels came out in English and French. They include
The Witches
, a misogynistic book full of stories opening onto other
stories, which in turn open onto yet others, and whose structure or lack of
structure recalls certain works of Raymond Roussel;
The Enterprise of the
Masons
, a paradigmatic and paradoxical work, saluted on its publication
in 1940 by Virgilio Piñera (who saw it as a Cuban version of
Gargantua and
Pantagruel),
in which it is never entirely clear whether Pérez Masón is
talking about the business acumen of his ancestors or about the members of a
Masonic lodge who met at the end of the nineteenth century in a sugar refinery
to plan the Cuban Revolution and the worldwide revolution to follow; and
The
Gallows Tree
(1946), written in a dark, Caribbean Gothic vein,
unprecedented at the time, in which the author reveals his hatred of Communists
(although, oddly, he devotes a whole chapter, the third, to the military
fortunes and misfortunes of Marshall Zhukov, the hero of Moscow, Stalingrad and
Berlin, and that chapter, taken on its own—it has in fact little to do with the
rest of the book—is one of the strangest and most brilliant passages in Latin
American literature between 1900 and 1950), as well as his hatred of
homosexuals, Jews and blacks, thus earning the enmity of Virgilio Piñera, who
always admitted, nevertheless, that the novel, arguably the author’s best, had a
disquieting power, like a sleeping crocodile.

Until the triumph of the revolution, that is, for almost all of his
working life, Pérez Masón taught graduate-level French literature classes.
During the fifties he tried unsuccessfully to cultivate peanuts and yams in his
inspiring little field near Pinar del Río, which was eventually expropriated by
the new authorities. There are endless stories in circulation about his life in
Havana after getting out of jail, most of them pure fiction. He is said to have
been a police informer, to have written speeches and tirades for one of the
regime’s well-known political figures, founded a secret society of fascist poets
and assassins, practiced Afro-Cuban rituals, and visited all the island’s
writers, painters and musicians, asking them to plead his cause with the
authorities. All I want is to work, he said, just work and live doing the only
thing I know how to do. That is, writing.

At the time of his release from prison he had finished a 200-page
novel, which no Cuban publisher dared to take on. The action took place in the
sixties, during the early years of the literacy campaign. It was an impeccably
accomplished book, and the censors sifted its pages searching for encrypted
messages, but in vain. Even so, it was unpublishable, and Pérez Masón finally
burned the only three manuscript copies. Years later, in his memoirs, he would
claim that the whole novel, from the first to the last page, was a handbook of
cryptography, a “Super Enigma,” although of course he no longer had the text to
prove it, and the exiled Cubans of Miami, who had not forgotten his early and
somewhat hasty hagiographies of Fidel and Raúl Castro, Camilo Cienfuegos and Che
Guevara, received his assertion with indifference, if not disbelief. Pérez Masón
answered them by publishing a curious novella under the pseudonym Abelard of
Rotterdam: an erotic and fiercely anti-USA fantasy, whose protagonists were
General Eisenhower and General Patton.

In 1970, or so Pérez Masón claims in his memoirs, he managed to found
a group called Artists and Writers of the Counterrevolution. The group consisted
of the painter Alcides Urrutia and the poet Juan José Lasa Mardones, two
entirely mysterious individuals, probably invented by Pérez Masón himself,
unless they were pseudonyms used by never-identified pro-Castro writers who at
some point went crazy or decided to play a double game. According to some
critics, the acronym AWC secretly stood for the Aryan Writers of Cuba. In any
case the Artists and Writers of the Counterrevolution or the Aryan Writers of
Cuba (or the Caribbean?) remained entirely unknown until Pérez Masón, who by
that stage was comfortably settled in New York, published his memoirs.

The years of his ostracism are shrouded in legend. Perhaps he was
jailed again, perhaps not.

But in 1975, after many failed attempts, he managed to get out of Cuba
and settle in New York, where he devoted his time and energy—working more than
ten hours a day—to writing and polemics. He died five years later. Surprisingly,
his name figures in the
Dictionary of Cuban Authors
(Havana, 1978),
which omits Guillermo Cabrera Infante.