Nazi Literature in the Americas (New Directions Paperbook) (5 page)

POÈTES
MAUDITS

P
EDRO
G
ONZÁLEZ
C
ARRERA

Concepción, 1920–Valdivia, 1961

A
few hagiographies of
Pedro González Carrera have come down to us; all concur in affirming, and
perhaps with good reason, that his work was as brilliant as his life was dull.
He came from a humble background, worked as a grammar school teacher, got
married at twenty and fathered seven children; his life was a series of moves
from post to post—always in small towns or mountain villages—and economic
hardships, seasoned with family tragedies and personal affronts.

His first poems were adolescent imitations of Campoamor, Espronceda
and the Spanish Romantics. At the age of twenty-one, he was published for the
first time in
Southern Flowers
, a magazine devoted to “agriculture,
stockbreeding, education and fishing,” edited at the time by a group of grammar
school teachers from Concepción and Talcahuano, whose leading light was
Florencio Capó, a friend of the poet since childhood. At twenty-four, according
to his biographers, González tried to get a second poem published, this time in
the
Journal of the Pedagogical Institute of Santiago
. Capó, who by then
had moved to the capital and was among the journal’s contributors, submitted the
poem, as he would later say, sight unseen, and it was published along with
twenty other texts by as many poets, who were teachers in Santiago or, for the
most part, in the provinces, and who made up the core of the magazine’s
readership. The scandal was immediate and momentous, albeit limited to Chile’s
teaching community.

The poem was a far, far cry from the blandishments of Campoamor; in
thirty precise and limpid verses, it vindicated Il Duce’s vilified armies and
the derided courage of the Italians (who, at the time, in both pro-Allied and
pro-German circles, were assumed to be a race of cowards; for instance, in
relation to a possible border conflict with the Italianized Argentineans, a
Santiago politician had famously remarked that with a company of good Chilean
border guards the government could halt and rout a division of invading wops),
while also, and here lay its originality, denying Italy’s flagrant defeat, and
promising an ultimate victory, to be achieved “by novel, unexpected, marvelous
means.”

As a result of the furor—of which González, teaching at the time in a
remote village somewhere near Santa Bárbara, was informed by three letters, in
one of which Capó disapproved of González’s position, reaffirmed his friendship
and washed his hands of the whole matter—the magazine
Iron Heart
attempted to contact the poet, and the Ministry of Education added his name to a
long and futile list of possible Fascist fifth columnists.

His next venture into print dates from 1947. It consists of three
poems which blend lyric and narrative impulses, as well as modernist and
surrealist metaphors, employing images that are, at times, disconcerting:
González sees men in armor, “Merovingians from another planet,” walking down
endless wooden corridors; he sees blond women sleeping in the open beside putrid
streams; he sees machines whose functions he dimly intuits as they move through
dark nights, their headlights shining “like diadems of canine teeth.” He sees,
but does not describe, acts that frighten him, but to which he feels
irresistibly drawn. The action unfolds not in this world but in a parallel
universe where “Will and Fear are one and the same.”

The following year, he published another three poems in
Iron
Heart
, which by then had moved its editorial operations to Punta
Arenas. These poems revisit the same scenes and recreate the same atmospheres as
the previous three, with slight variations. In a letter to his friend Capó,
dated March 8, 1947, along with the usual complaints about his job and tales of
familial woe, González reveals that his poetic illumination took place in the
summer of 1943, during which he was visited for the first time by the
extraterrestrial Merovingians. But did they visit him in a dream or in reality?
On that point González remains unclear. In the letter to Capó, he reflects at
length on glossolalia, epiphanies and the miraculous images that appear at the
ends of tunnels. He explains how, having worked until nightfall in his little
country school, feeling very sleepy and hungry, he tried to get up and go home.
Unsuccessfully, at least in part, as far as one can tell from his account. An
hour later he woke up in a nearby field, lying on the ground, face up, under an
exceptionally starry night sky, with all of the poems, from the first word to
the last, in his head. Having read the copy of
Iron Heart
sent by
González along with his letter, Capó advised his friend to make an urgent
request for a transfer, or else the solitude would end up driving him crazy.

González took his advice about the transfer but stubbornly continued
to exploit his peculiar poetic vein. The next three poems he published (not in
Iron Heart
, which had folded, but in the cultural supplement of a
Santiago newspaper) are free of surrealist images, symbolist baggage and
modernist vagaries (González, it must be said, knew almost nothing of the three
schools in question). His verse has become concise, his images simple; the
figures that recurred in the six previous poems have also undergone a
transformation: the Merovingian warriors have become robots, the women are now
dying beside putrid streams of consciousness, and the mysterious tractors
plowing the fields without rhyme or reason are either secret vessels sent from
Antarctica, or Miracles (with a capital letter). And now these figures are
counterbalanced by a sketchy presence, that of the author himself, adrift in the
vast spaces of the fatherland, observing the apparitions like a registrar of
marvels, but unenlightened finally as to their causes, phenomenology or ultimate
purpose.

In 1955, at the cost of great personal sacrifice and tremendous
effort, González financed the publication of a chapbook containing twelve poems,
printed by a press in Cauquenes, capital of the province of Maul, where he had
been transferred. The little book was entitled
Twelve
, and the cover,
which was the author’s own work, is noteworthy in its own right, as it was the
first of many drawings he produced to accompany his poems (the others came to
light only after his death). The letters of the word
Twelve
on the
cover, equipped with eagle talons, grip a swastika in flames, beneath which
there seems to be a sea with waves, drawn in a childlike style. And under the
sea, between the waves, a child can in fact be glimpsed, crying, “Mom, I’m
scared!” The speech bubble is blurred. Under the child and the sea are lines and
blotches, which might be volcanoes or printing defects.

The twelve new poems add new figures and landscapes to the repertoire
developed in the previous nine. The robots, the streams of consciousness and the
ships are supplemented with Destiny and Will, personified by two stowaways in
the holds of a ship, as well as The Disease Machine, The Language Machine, The
Memory Machine (which has been damaged since the beginning of time), The
Potentiality Machine and The Precision Machine. The only human figure in the
earlier poems (that of González himself) is joined by the Advocate of Cruelty, a
strange character who sometimes speaks like a regular Chilean guy (or rather,
like a grammar school teacher’s
idea
of a regular guy) and sometimes
like a sibyl or a Greek soothsayer. The setting is the same as for the earlier
poems: an open field in the middle of the night, or a theater of colossal
dimensions situated in the heart of Chile.

González sent the chapbook to various newspapers in Santiago and the
provinces, but in spite of his best efforts, it made almost no impression. A
gossip columnist in Valparaiso wrote a humorous review entitled “Our Rural Jules
Verne.” A left-wing paper cited González, along with many others, as an example
of the growing Fascist influence on the nation’s cultural life. But in fact no
one, on the Right or the Left, was reading his poems, much less supporting him,
except perhaps Florencio Capó, who lived far away, and whose friendship had been
sorely tried by the cover of
Twelve
. In Cauquenes, two stationery
stores displayed the book for a month. Then they returned the copies to the
author.

Stubbornly, González went on writing and drawing. In 1959 he sent the
manuscript of a novel to two publishers in Santiago. Both rejected it. In a
letter to Capó he refers to the novel as his scientific work, a compendium of
his scientific knowledge, which he will bequeath to posterity, although it was
no secret that he knew next to nothing about physics, astrophysics, chemistry,
biology or astronomy. When he was transferred to a village near Valdivia, his
health, which had been delicate at the best of times, deteriorated sharply. In
June 1961, he died in the Valdivia Provincial Hospital at the age of forty. He
was buried in a common grave.

Many years later, thanks to the efforts of Ezequiel Arancibia and Juan
Herring Lazo, who had read González’s contribution to
Iron Heart
,
scholarly research into the poet’s work began in earnest. Luckily, most of his
papers had been kept, first by his widow, then by one of his daughters. And in
1976, Florencio Capó entrusted the scholars with the letters he had received
from his old friend.

The first volume of the
Complete Poems
(350 pages), edited
and annotated by Arancibia, appeared in 1975.

The second and final volume (480 pages) followed in 1977. It included
González’s overall plan for his works, sketched out in note form back in 1945,
and a great many drawings, which were highly original in a number of respects,
and whose function was to help the author himself to understand, as he put it,
the “avalanche of novel revelations troubling my soul.”

In 1980,
The Advocate of Cruelty
was published, with the
strange dedication: “To my Italian friend, the unknown soldier, the laughing
victim.” The novel is 150 pages long, and elicits a certain wariness on the part
of the reader. It makes no concessions to fashion (although exiled as he was in
Maule, González can hardly have been aware of the literary fashions of his day),
or to the reader, or to the author himself. Cold, but spellbound and
spellbinding, as Arancibia writes in his preface.

In 1982, a slim, ninety-page volume containing his entire
correspondence concluded the series of posthumous publications. It contains the
letters he wrote to his fiancée, to his friend Capó (which account for the
greater part of the book), to magazine editors, colleagues, and officials in the
Ministry of Education. The letters reveal little about his work, but a great
deal about the suffering he had to endure.

Today, thanks to the enterprising promoters and editors of the
Southern Hemisphere Review
, two streets bear the name of Pedro
González Carrera, one in a far-flung suburb of Cauquenes, the other near a
treeless square in the northern part of Valvidia. Few people know whom they
commemorate.

A
NDRÉS
C
EPEDA
C
EPEDA
known as
The Page

Arequipa, 1940–Arequipa, 1986

T
he first literary
ventures of Andrés Cepeda Cepeda were marked by the beneficent influence of
Marcos Ricardo Alarcón Chamiso, a local poet and musician with whom he used to
spend afternoons jointly composing poems in a restaurant called La Góndola
Andina, in his hometown of Arequipa. In 1960 he published a slim volume entitled
The Destiny of Pizarro Street
, whose subtitle,
The Infinite
Doors
, suggests a series of Pizarro Streets, scattered throughout the
continent, which, once discovered (although as a rule they remain hidden) have
the power to provide a new framework for
American perception
, in which
will
and
dream
shall blend in a new vision of reality—an
American awakening
. The thirteen poems of
The Destiny of
Pizarro Street
, composed in rather uncertain hendecasyllabics, failed
to attract critical attention: only Alarcón Chamiso reviewed the book, in the
Arequipa Herald
, praising its musicality above all, the “syllabic
mystery that lurks behind the fiery style” of the author.

In 1962, Cepeda began to contribute to the bimonthly magazine
Panorama,
edited in Lima by the controversial lawyer Antonio
Sánchez Luján. The two men met when Sánchez Luján came to Arequipa to be the
guest of honor at a Rotary Club dinner. As a result, The Page was born;
henceforth Cepeda used that pseudonym to sign articles ranging from political
diatribes to movie and book reviews. In 1965 he combined his work for
Panorama
with a daily column in the
Peruvian Evening News
,
which belonged to Pedro Argote, the flour and seafood magnate, an old friend of
Sánchez Luján. There Andrés Cepeda enjoyed his few moments of glory: his
articles, ranging widely, like those of Dr. Johnson, provoked hostility and
lasting resentment. He gave his opinion on any topic, and believed he had a
solution for everything. He made errors of judgment, was sued along with the
paper, and, one by one, lost every case. In 1968, while leading a whirlwind life
in Lima, he republished
The Destiny of Pizarro Street
, supplementing
the original thirteen poems with five new ones, the elaboration of which, he
confessed in his column (“A Poet’s Work”), had cost him eight years of intense
effort. This time, because of The Page’s notoriety, the critics did not ignore
the book but fell upon it, each trying to outdo the savagery of his peers. Among
the expressions employed were the following: prehistoric Nazi, moron, champion
of the bourgeoisie, puppet of capitalism, CIA agent, poetaster intent on
debasing public taste, plagiarist (he was accused of copying Eguren, Salazar
Bondy, and Saint-John Perse, in the last case by a very young poet from San
Marcos, whose accusation sparked another polemic opposing academic followers and
detractors of Saint-John Perse), gutter thug, cut-rate prophet, rapist of the
Spanish language, satanically inspired versifier, product of a provincial
education, upstart, delirious half-blood, etc., etc.

The differences between the first and second editions of
The
Destiny of Pizarro
Street
are not especially striking. Some, nevertheless, are worthy of
note. The most obvious difference is that the Arequipa edition is made up of
thirteen poems and is dedicated to Cepeda’s mentor, Alarcón Chamiso, while the
Lima edition contains eighteen poems but no dedication. Of the original thirteen
poems, only the eighth, the twelfth and the thirteenth have been revised, and
the changes are slight—simple word-substitutions (
impasse
instead of
difficulty
,
judgment
instead of
talent
,
miscellaneous
instead of
various
)—which do not greatly
alter the original meaning. As to the five new poems, they seem to be cut from
the same cloth: hendecasyllabics, a supposedly vigorous tone, an overall aim
that remains rather vague, regular versification with occasional shoe-horning,
and nothing in the least bit original. And yet the addition of these five poems
changes the meaning or deepens and illuminates the interpretation of the first
thirteen. What seemed a welter of mystery, murkiness and hackneyed allusions to
mythical figures resolves into clarity and method, explicit commitments and
proposals. And what does The Page propose? To what is he committed? A return to
the Iron Age, which for him coincides roughly with the life and times of
Pizarro. Inter-racial conflict in Peru (although when he says Peru, and this is
perhaps more important than his theory of racial struggle, to which he devotes
no more than a couplet, he is also including Chile, Bolivia and Ecuador). The
ensuing conflict between Peru and Argentina (including Uruguay and Paraguay),
which he dubs “the Combat of Castor and Pollux.” The uncertain victory. The
possible defeat of both sides, which he prophesies for the thirty-third year of
the third millennium. In the final three lines, he alludes laboriously to the
birth of a blond child in the ruins of a sepulchral Lima.

Cepeda’s notoriety as a poet lasted no more than a month. The Page’s
career continued for some time, although his glory days were over. Losing the
libel cases was a rude awakening; then he was sacked by the
Peruvian Evening
News
, which offered him up as a propitiatory victim to placate both a
beer magnate of indigenous origins and the secretary of a certain ministry whom
Cepeda had publicly taken to task for his ineptitude (which was widely
acknowledged and admitted).

He did not publish any more books.

In his final years he relied on
Panorama
and stints of radio
journalism. He also worked occasionally as a copy-editor. Initially he was
surrounded by a small group of admirers, known as The Pages, but gradually time
dispersed them. In 1982, he returned to Arequipa, where he set up a small fruit
store. He died of a stroke in the spring of 1986.