Nazi Literature in the Americas (New Directions Paperbook) (9 page)

A
MADO
C
OUTO

Juiz de Fora, Brazil, 1948–Paris, 1989

C
outo wrote a book of
stories, which all the publishers rejected. The manuscript went astray. Then he
began work with the death squads, kidnapping, participating in torture and
witnessing the killing of certain prisoners, but he went on thinking about
literature, and specifically what it was that Brazilian literature needed. It
needed avant-garde, experimental writing, a real shake-up, but not like the
Campos brothers, they were boring, a pair of insipid professors, and not like
Osman Lins, who was downright unreadable. (Why did they publish Osman Lins and
not Couto’s stories?) No, something modern but more up his alley, a kind of
crime thriller (Brazilian, though, not North American), a new Rubem Fonseca, in
a word. Now there was a good writer; he was rumored to be a son of a bitch, but
Couto was keeping an open mind. One day, while he was waiting in a field with
the car, he had an idea: why not kidnap Fonseca and give him a going-over. He
told his superiors and they listened. But the idea never came to fruition.
Couto’s dreams were clouded and illuminated by the possibility of making Fonseca
the focus of a real-life novel. The superiors had superiors in turn and
somewhere up the chain of command Fonseca’s name evaporated—disappeared—but in
the chain of Couto’s thoughts, the name continued to grow and accrue prestige,
opening itself to his thrust, as if the name Fonseca were a wound and the name
Couto a knife. He read Fonseca, he read the wound until it began to suppurate;
then he fell ill and his colleagues took him to hospital, where they say he
became delirious: he saw the great Brazilian crime thriller in a hepatology
unit; he saw it in detail, the plot complete with set-up and resolution, and he
saw himself in the Egyptian desert approaching the unfinished pyramids like a
wave (he
was
the wave). So he wrote the novel and had it published.
Entitled
Nothing to Say,
it was a crime thriller. The hero was called
Paulinho. Sometimes Paulinho worked for certain gentlemen as a chauffeur,
sometimes he was a detective, and sometimes he was a skeleton smoking in a
corridor, listening to distant cries, a skeleton who visited every dwelling (no,
in fact only middle-class dwellings and those of the seriously poor) but never
came too close to the inhabitants. The novel was published on the Black Pistol
list, which was made up of North American, French and Brazilian thrillers, the
proportion of local titles having risen as funds to buy foreign rights ran
short. His colleagues read the novel and almost all of them found it
incomprehensible. By then they were no longer cruising in the car or kidnapping
and torturing, although they did still occasionally kill. I have to dissociate
myself from these people and be a writer, Couto wrote. But he was conscientious.
Once he tried to meet Fonseca. According to Couto, they looked at each other.
And Couto thought: He’s so old; he’s not Mandrake any more, or anybody else. But
he would gladly have changed places with Fonseca, if only for a week. He also
thought that Fonseca’s gaze was harder than his own. I live among pirañas, he
wrote, but Don Rubem Fonseca lives in a tank full of metaphysical sharks. He
wrote a letter to his hero, but received no reply. So he wrote another novel,
The Last Word
, published by Black Pistol, in which the return of
Paulinho is a pretext for Couto to bare his soul to Fonseca, shamelessly, as if
saying, Here I am, alone with my pirañas, while my colleagues drive around the
city center in the small hours of the morning, like the Tonton Macoute who come
to take bad children away . . . such are the mysteries of literature. And
although he probably knew that Fonseca would never read his novels, he went on
writing. In
The Last Word
more skeletons appear. Paulinho is a skeleton
almost all day long. His clients are skeletons. The people he talks to, fucks
and eats with (although he usually eats alone) are also skeletons. And in the
third novel,
The Mute Girl
, the major cities of Brazil are like
enormous skeletons, while the villages are like little children’s skeletons, and
sometimes even the words are transformed into bones. After that Couto stopped
writing. Someone told him that his colleagues from the patrol had begun to
disappear, and fear took hold of him, or rather tightened its grip and entered
his body. He tried to retrace his steps and find familiar faces, but everything
had changed while he was writing. Certain strangers began to talk about his
novels. One of them could have been Fonseca, but wasn’t. I had him in the palm
of my hand, he noted in his diary before disappearing like a dream. He had gone
to Paris, where he hanged himself in a room at the Hôtel La Grèce.

C
ARLOS
H
EVIA

Montevideo, 1940–Montevideo, 2006

A
uthor of a monumental and
largely unreliable biography of San Martín, in which, among other inaccuracies,
the general is said to have been Uruguayan, Hevia also wrote stories, collected
in the volume
Seas and Offices
, and two novels:
Jason’s Prize
,
a fable suggesting that life on Earth is the result of a disastrous
intergalactic television game show; and
Montevideo—Buenos Aires
, a
novel about friendship, full of exhaustive all-night conversations.

He worked in television journalism, discharging lowly tasks for the
most part, with occasional stints as a producer.

For some years he lived in Paris, where he became acquainted with the
theories espoused by
The Review of Contemporary History
, which were to
make a deep and lasting impression on him. He was a friend of the French
philosopher Étienne de Saint Étienne, whose work he translated.

H
ARRY
S
IBELIUS

Richmond, 1949—Richmond, 2014

H
arry Sibelius was
prompted to write one of the most complex and dense works of his day (and
possibly also one of the most futile) by his reading of Norman Spinrad and
Philip K. Dick, and perhaps also by reflecting on a story by Borges. The novel,
since it is a novel and not a work of history, is simple in appearance. It is
founded on the following supposition: Germany, in alliance with Italy, Spain and
the Vichy government in France, defeats England in the autumn of 1941. In the
summer of the following year, four million soldiers are mobilized in an attack
on the Soviet Union, which capitulates in 1944, except for pockets of sporadic
resistance in Siberia. In the spring of 1946, European troops attack the United
States from the East, while Japan invades from the West. In the winter of the
same year New York falls, then Boston, Washington, Richmond, San Francisco and
Los Angeles. The infantry and German Panzers cross the Appalachians; the
Canadians withdraw to the interior; the United States government shifts its seat
to Kansas City; and defeat is imminent on every front. The capitulation takes
place in 1948. Alaska, part of California and part of Mexico are handed over to
Japan. The rest of North America is occupied by the Germans. Harry Sibelius
perfunctorily explains all these developments in a ten-page introduction (which
is in fact little more than a list of key dates to give the reader historical
points of reference), entitled “A Bird’s Eye View.” Then the novel
proper—
The True Son of Job
—begins: 1,333 pages darkly mirroring
Arnold J. Toynbee’s
Hitler’s Europe
.

The structure of the book is modeled on the work of the English
historian. The second introduction (which is in fact the real prologue) is
entitled “The Elusiveness of History,” exactly like Toynbee’s prologue. The
following sentence from Toynbee expresses one of the pivotal themes of
Sibelius’s introductory text: “The historian’s view is conditioned, always and
everywhere, by his own location in time and place; and, since time and place are
continually changing, no history, in the subjective sense of the word, can ever
be a permanent record that will tell the story, once for all, in a form that
will be equally acceptable to readers in all ages, or even in all quarters of
the Earth.” Sibelius, of course, is animated by intentions of an entirely
different nature. In the final analysis, the British professor’s aim is to
testify against crime and ignominy, lest we forget. The Virginian novelist seems
to believe that “somewhere in time and space” the crime in question has
definitively triumphed, so he proceeds to catalogue it.

The first part of Toynbee’s book is entitled “The Political Structure
of Hitler’s Europe,” which becomes, in Sibelius, “The Political Structure of
Hitler’s America.” Both parts comprise six chapters, but where Toynbee’s account
is factual, only a distorted reflection of reality is perceptible in Sibelius’s
welter of stories. His characters, who sometimes seem to have stepped straight
out of a Russian novel (
War and Peace
was one of his favorites) and
sometimes to have escaped from an animated cartoon, move, speak and indeed live
(although their lives have little continuity) in chapters that seem inhospitable
to fiction, such as the fourth, “Administration,” in which Sibelius imagines in
detail life in (1) the incorporated territories, (2) the territories under a
chief of civil administration, (3) the appended territories, (4) the occupied
territories, and (5) the “zones of operation.”

It is not unusual for Sibelius to spend twenty pages simply
introducing a character, specifying his physical and moral traits, his tastes in
food and sports, his ambitions and frustrations, after which the character
vanishes, never to be mentioned again in the course of the novel; while others,
who are barely given names, reappear over and over, in widely separated
locations, engaged in dissimilar if not incompatible or mutually exclusive
activities. The workings of the bureaucratic machinery are described implacably.
The 250 pages of the fourth chapter of the second part, “Transport,” subdivided
into (a) Position of German Transport at the Outbreak of the War, (b) Effects of
the Changing Military Situation on the German Transport Position, (c) German
Methods of controlling Transport throughout America, and (d) German Organization
of American Transport, are overwhelming for all but the specialist.

The stories are often borrowed, as are almost all the characters. In
the third chapter of the second part, “Industry and Raw Materials,” we find
Hemingway’s Harry Morgan and Robert Jordan, along with characters from Robert
Heinlein and plot devices from
Reader’s Digest
. In the seventh chapter,
“Finance,” section (b), “German Exploitation of Foreign Countries,” the informed
reader will recognize a series of characters (sometimes Sibelius doesn’t even go
to the trouble of changing their names!): Faulkner’s Sartorius and the Snopes
(in
“Reichkreditkassen
”); Walt Disney’s Bambi, and Gore Vidal’s John
Cave and Myra Breckenridge (in “Seizure of Gold and Foreign Assets”); Scarlett
O’Hara and Rhett Butler along with Gertrude Stein’s Herslands and Dehnings (in
“Occupation Costs and other Levies”), which led a caustic critic to wonder
whether Sibelius was the only American who had read
The Making of
Americans
; various characters from John Dos Passos, Capote’s Holly
Golightly, and Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley, Charles Bruno and Guy Daniel Haines
(in “Clearing Agreements”); Hammet’s Sam Spade and Vonnegut’s Eliot Rosewater,
Howard Campbell and Bokonon (in “Manipulation of Exchange Rates”); and F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s Amory Blaine, Gatsby and Monroe Starr, along with poems by Robert
Frost and Wallace Stevens, and the abstract, oblique, shadowy characters they
imply (in “German Control over American Banking”).

Sibelius’s stories—the hundreds of stories that intersect willy-nilly,
without apparently affecting one another, in
The True Son of Job
—are
not guided by any principle, nor do they constitute an overall vision (as one
New York critic absurdly supposed, comparing the book to
War and
Peace
). The stories simply happen, period—produced by the sovereign power
of chance unleashed, operating outside time and space, at the dawn of a new age,
as it were, in which spatio-temporal perception is undergoing transformation and
even becoming obsolete. When Sibelius explains the political, economic and
military order of the new America, he is intelligible. When he expounds the new
religious, racial, judicial and industrial order, he is objective and clear.
Administration is his strength. But it is only when his characters and stories,
be they borrowed or original, infiltrate and overrun the painstakingly assembled
bureaucratic machinery that he reaches the summit of his narrative art. The best
of Sibelius is to be found in his tangled, implacably unfolding stories.

And, from a literary point of view, that is all there is to be
found.

After the publication of his novel, Sibelius withdrew from the
literary scene as quietly as he had arrived. He wrote articles for various war
games magazines and fanzines in the United States. And he helped to design a
number of games: one based on the battle of Antietam, another based on
Chancellorsville, an operational Gettysburg game, a tactical Wilderness 1864, a
Shiloh, a Bull Run. . . .

THE MANY MASKS OF
MAX MIREBALAIS

M
AX
M
IREBALAIS
,
alias
M
AX
K
ASIMIR
, M
AX VON
H
AUPTMAN
, M
AX
L
E
G
UEULE
, J
ACQUES
A
RTIBONITO

Port-au-Prince, 1941–Les Cayes, 1998

H
is real name was probably
Max Mirebalais, although we will never know for sure. His first steps in
literature remain mysterious: one day he turned up in a newspaper editor’s
office; the next, he was out on the streets, looking for stories, or more often
running errands for the senior staff. In the course of his apprenticeship, he
was subjected to all the miseries and servitudes of Haitian journalism. But
thanks to his determination, after two years, he rose to the position of
assistant social columnist for the Port-au-Prince
Monitor
, and in that
capacity, awed and puzzled, he attended parties and soirées held in the
capital’s grandest houses. There can be no doubt that as soon as he glimpsed
that world, he wanted to belong to it. He soon realized that there were only two
ways to achieve his aim: through violence, which was out of the question, since
he was peaceable and timorous by nature, appalled by the mere sight of blood; or
through literature, which is a surreptitious form of violence, a passport to
respectability, and can, in certain young and sensitive nations, disguise the
social climber’s origins.

He opted for literature and decided to spare himself the difficult
years of apprenticeship. His first poems, published in the
Monitor
’s
cultural supplement, were copied from Aimé Césaire, and met with a rather
negative reception from certain intellectuals in Port-au-Prince, who openly
mocked the young poet.

His next exercises in plagiarism demonstrated that he had learned his
lesson: this time the poet imitated was René Depestre, and the result, if not
unanimous acclaim, was the respect of a number of professors and critics, who
predicted a brilliant future for the neophyte.

He could have continued with Depestre, but Max Mirebalais was no fool;
he decided to multiply his sources. With patient craftsmanship, sacrificing
hours of sleep, he plagiarized Anthony Phelps and Davertige, and created his
first heteronym: Max Kasimir, the cousin of Max Mirebalais, to whom he
attributed poems borrowed from those who had ridiculed his first ventures into
print: Philoctète, Morisseau and Legagneur, founding members of the Haiti
Littéraire group. The poets Lucien Lemoine and Jean Dieudonné Garçon came in for
the same treatment.

With the passage of time he became expert in the art of breaking down
the work of another poet in order to make it his own. Vanity soon got the better
of him and he tried to conquer the world. French poetry provided a boundless
hunting ground, but he decided to start closer to home. His plan, noted
somewhere in his papers, was to exhaust the expressive repertoire of
négritude
.

So, after expressing and exhausting more than twenty authors, whose
collections, although extremely hard to come by, were placed at his disposal
free of charge by the Apollinaire French Bookshop, he decided to let Mirebalais
take charge of Georges Desportes and Edouard Glissant from Martinique, while Max
Kasimir assumed responsibility for Flavien Ranaivo from Madagascar and
Leopold-Sedhar Senghor from Senegal. In plagiarizing Senghor his art reached a
summit of perfection: no one realized that the five poems that appeared in the
Monitor
in the second week of September 1971 signed Max Kasimir
were texts that Senghor had published in
Hosties noires
(Seuil, 1948)
and
Ethiopiques
(Seuil, 1956).

He came to the attention of the powerful. As a society columnist he
went on covering the soirées of Port-au-Prince, with greater enthusiasm if
anything, and now he was greeted by the hosts and introduced in various ways
(much to the confusion of the less literary guests), as our treasured poet Max
Mirebalais, or our beloved poet Max Kasimir or, as certain jovial military men
used to say, our esteemed bard Kasimir Mirebalais. He did not have to wait long
for his reward: he was offered the post of cultural attaché in Bonn, which he
accepted. It was the first time he had left the country.

Life abroad turned out to be awful. After an unbroken series of
illnesses that kept him hospitalized for more than three months, he decided to
create a new heteronym: the half-German, half-Haitian poet Max von Hauptman.
This time he copied Fernand Rolland, Pierre Vasseur-Decroix and Julien Dunilac,
whom he presumed were little known in Haiti. From the manipulated, made-over,
metamorphosed texts rose the figure of a bard who even-handedly explored and
sang the magnificence of the Aryan and the Masai races. After three rejections,
the poems were accepted by a Parisian publisher. Von Hauptman was an immediate
success. So while Mirebalais spent his days enduring the boredom of his work at
the embassy or undergoing endless medical tests, he was coming to be known, in
certain Parisian literary circles, as the Caribbean’s bizarre answer to Pessoa.
Naturally no one (not even the poets who had been plagiarized, some of whom
could well have come across the curious texts of von Hauptman) noticed the
fraud.

Mirebalais, it seems, was excited by the idea of being a Nazi poet
while continuing to espouse a certain kind of
négritude
. He decided to
pursue von Hauptman’s creative work in greater depth. He began by clarifying—or
obscuring—his origins. Von Hauptman was not one of Mirebalais’ heteronyms.
Mirebalais was a heteronym of von Hauptman, whose father, so he said, had been a
sergeant in Doenitz’s submarine fleet, cast up on the Haitian coast, a Robinson
stranded in a hostile land, protected by a few Masai who sensed that he was
their friend. He married the prettiest of the Masai girls, and Max was born in
1944 (which was a lie: he was born in 1941, but fame had gone to his head, and
since he was enhancing the truth, he thought he might as well take three years
off his age). Predictably, the French did not believe him, but neither did they
take exception to his outlandish claims. All poets invent their past, as the
French know better than anyone. In Haiti, however, reactions were diverse. Some
saw Mirebalais as a pathetic fool. Others promptly invented European fathers or
grandfathers of their own: shipwrecked seamen from German, English or French
vessels, adventurers gone astray in some corner of the island. Overnight, the
Mirebalais-von Hauptman phenomenon spread like a virus through the island’s
ruling class. Von Hauptman’s poems were published in Port-au-Prince,
affirmations of Masai identity ran riot (in a country where Masai ancestry is so
rare as to be probably non-existent) accompanied by legends and family
histories. A pair of adepts of the New Protestant Church even tried their hand
at plagiarizing the plagiarist, without much success.

Fame, however, is quick to perish in the tropics. By the time he
returned from Europe, the von Hauptman craze had been forgotten. Those who
wielded real power—the Duvalier dynasty, the few wealthy families and the
army—had little time for the preoccupations of an idealized, bogus half-breed.
Dazzled by the Haitian sun, Mirebalais was sad to discover that order and the
struggle against Communism carried more weight than the Aryan race, the Masai
race and their common destiny in the universal realm. But quite undeterred, he
prepared himself to unleash another heteronym upon the world, in a gesture of
defiance. And so Max Le Gueule was born: the crowning glory of the plagiarist’s
art, a concoction of poets from Quebec, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Lebanon,
Cameroon, The Congo, the Central African Republic and Nigeria (not to mention
the Malian poet Siriman Cissoko and the Guinean Keita Fodeba, to whose works,
kindly lent by the old manic-depressive owner of the Apollinaire French
Bookshop, Mirebalais initially reacted with howls and later with trembling).

The result was excellent; the reception non-existent.

This time Mirebalais’ pride was wounded; for some years he withdrew to
the dwindling, spectral Society section of the
Monitor
, and was obliged
to supplement his income by taking up an obscure position in the Haitian
Telephone Company.

The years of relegation were also years of poetic labor. The works of
Mirebalais multiplied, as did those of Kasimir, von Hauptman and Le Gueule. The
poets gained in depth; the differences between them became more clearly marked
(von Hauptman the bard of the Aryan race, a fanatical mulatto Nazi; Le Gueule
the model of the practical man, hard-headed and militaristic; Mirebalais the
lyrical poet, the patriot, calling forth the shades of Toussaint L’Ouverture,
Dessalines and Christophe, while Kasimir celebrated
négritude
, the
landscapes of the fatherland and mother Africa, and the rhythm of the tam-tams).
The similarities emerged more clearly too: they were all passionately devoted to
Haiti, order and the family. In religious matters there was some disagreement:
while Mirebalais and Le Gueule were Catholic and reasonably tolerant, Kasimir
practised voodoo rites, and the vaguely Protestant von Hauptman was definitely
intolerant. Clashes among the heteronyms were organized (especially between von
Hauptman and Le Gueule, who were always spoiling for a fight), followed by
reconciliations. They interviewed one another. The
Monitor
published
some of the interviews. It is not absurd to suppose that one night, in a moment
of inspiration and ambition, Mirebalais dreamed of constituting the whole of
contemporary Haitian poetry on his own.

Feeling that he had been pigeonholed as picturesque (and this in a
context where all the literature officially sanctioned by the Haitian regime was
picturesque to say the least), Mirebalais made one last bid for fame or
respectability.

Literature, as it had been conceived in the nineteenth century, had
ceased to be relevant to the public, he thought. Poetry was dying. The novel
wasn’t, but he didn’t know how to write novels. There were nights when he cried
with rage. Then he began searching for a solution, and he didn’t let up until he
found one.

In the course of his long career as a society columnist, he had come
across a young fellow who was an extraordinary guitarist. He was the lover of a
police colonel and lived rough in the slums of Port-au-Prince. Mirebalais sought
him out and became his friend, without a precise plan at first, simply for the
pleasure of hearing him play. Then he suggested they form a musical duo. The
young man accepted.

And so Mirebalais’ last heteronym was born: Jacques Artibonito,
composer and singer. His lyrics were plagiarized from Nacro Alidou, a poet from
Upper Volta, Germany’s Gottfried Benn, and the Frenchman Armand Lanoux. The
arrangements were the work of the guitarist, Eustache Descharnes, who ceded his
copyright, in exchange for God knows what.

The duo’s career was uneven. Mirebalais had a bad voice but insisted
on singing. He had no sense of rhythm but insisted on dancing. They made a
record. Eustache, who followed him everywhere with an utterly resigned docility,
seemed more like a zombie than a guitarist. Together they toured all the venues
in the country, from Port-au-Prince to Cap-Haîtien, from Gonaîves to Leogane.
After two years, they could only get dates in the dingiest dives. One night
Eustache hanged himself in the hotel room he was sharing with Mirebalais. The
poet spent a week in prison until the death was declared a suicide. He received
death threats on his release. Eustache’s colonel friend promised publicly to
teach him a lesson. The
Monitor
would no longer employ him as a
journalist. His friends turned their backs on him.

Mirebalais withdrew into solitude. He worked at the humblest jobs and
quietly pursued what he called “the work of my only friends,” composing the
books of Kasimir, von Hauptman and Le Gueule, whose sources he
diversified—whether out of sheer pride in his craft or because by this stage
difficulty had become an antidote to boredom—effecting extraordinary
metamorphoses.

In 1994, while visiting a military police sergeant who fondly
remembered Mirebalais’ society columns and von Hauptman’s poems, he just escaped
being lynched at the hands of a ragged mob, along with a group of military
officers who were preparing to leave the country. Indignant and frightened,
Mirebalais retired to Les Cayes, capital of the
Département du sud,
where he rhapsodized in bars and served as a broker on the docks.

Death found him composing the posthumous works of his heteronyms.