Seeing some of the greatest authors of the 20th century talking to each other in confidence, without thinking that no one is going to find out what they are saying, turns the reader of their correspondence into a spy for the history of literature. This is how one feels before the volume Las cartas del boom that goes on sale on the 15th and whose content has been accessed by this newspaper: a total of 207 letters from 1955 to 2012, several of them unpublished.
The most careful was the Mexican Carlos Fuentes (1928-2012) –who kept the ones he sent and received–, followed by the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa (Arequipa, 1936), who has always kept the ones he received, while the Argentine Julio Cortázar (1914-1984) and the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014) never gave importance to it, and even decided to destroy some.
The material comes from the archives of the universities of Princeton, Texas, Poitiers and family collections. The edition is in charge of the Peruvians Carlos Aguirre and Augusto Wong Campos, the Mexican Javier Munguía and the British Gerald Martin, who finalizes the biography of Vargas Llosa after having written that of García Márquez.
The work is accompanied by appendices such as the articles that some wrote about others and the manifestos that they signed. Although the Latin American boom was made up of more authors (at least the Chilean José Donoso should be added), the editors consider that these are the four most representative authors of the movement. "The only precedent for a friendship of this caliber in Hispanic literature is that of the generation of '27," they say.
Carlos Fuentes, for example, acts as a mediator with Luis Buñuel so that he adapts the works of his friends to the cinema: the story Las Ménades de Cortázar, according to what he told him in a letter on October 2, 1962, where he added that he He has given the filmmaker a copy of End of the game, the Argentine's book that contains that story. Cortázar answered him from Paris, on October 29, 1962: “What you tell me about Buñuel seems almost incredible to me, and above all the possibility that one of my stories and another of yours – none other than Aura – enter together in the terrible and Buñuel's fabulous surrealist machine (and with Gradiva, which is an extraordinary story). Just a couple of months ago, I saw The Exterminating Angel in Paris, which left me sick for a week. It had been a long time since I had such a tremendous shock.” In the end, the project was not carried out, although Buñuel and Cortázar entered into negotiations: the Argentine asked him for $4,000 and finally the director opted to adapt Tristana by Benito Pérez Galdós. Likewise, on July 25, 1964, the Mexican told Vargas Llosa that “Buñuel is crazy with The City and the Dogs, although the filmmaker believes that censorship would not allow it to be filmed in any country.
On February 29, 1964, Fuentes became aware of the importance of the Latin American boom and wrote to Vargas Llosa from Mexico: “Now, reading one after the other The Century of Lights, Hopscotch, The Colonel has no one to write to him and The City and the Dogs, I feel confirmed in this optimism: I believe that there was no other cultural community last year that produced four novels of that range”. In his response, on April 7, Vargas Llosa, from Paris, charges against the nouveau roman: "I also believe that the nerve center of narrative is today in Latin America and that energy, myths, procedures capable of saving the genre, which here in Europe everyone seems determined to liquidate in one way or another. It is truly dismaying to read contemporary French novels: they are irritatingly frivolous and one comes out of them half suffocated with boredom. He criticizes Robbe-Grillet and concludes: "Definitely not, in no way can we admit that these slimes do with the novel what they did with the painting."
While Gabriel García Márquez finalizes One Hundred Years of Solitude, he doubts whether to offer it to the Sudamericana publishing house, based in Buenos Aires, or try it with the Barcelona-based Seix Barral. His friend Fuentes advised him, from Rome, on November 19, 1965: “Sudamericana locates you excessively, makes you circulate only in the Latin American world, takes away the wealth of projection and contacts that Carlos Barral offers. I think that with Sudamericana you stay in Sudamericana, while with Barral you have already won the path to translations and a presence in Europe and the United States.
But in any case, with Barral, read the fine print of the contract, because (very entre nous) Mario Vargas has just been fooled into inserting a clause taking away 60% of the foreign rights he receives through Barral – and Barral handles all foreign rights. He clears that obstacle and continues with Barral ”. Fuentes was not right, because Gabo published with Sudamericana and his novel became the most translated work of a living author in Spanish in the world. Before that happened, Gabo often laments about his financial problems. So much so that on August 26, 1966, Fuentes, from Paris, came to offer him a job: assistant director of the literary magazine Mundo Nuevo, based in the French capital, after the departure of Tomás Segovia: "The schedule is ten to twelve and from two to five. The work, little and interesting –some critical and informative notes, correspondence with writers, tests–”. But Gabo rejects that offer, on September 30 from Mexico, which would have made him an authority on the magazine that launched the boom to the world.
The reason he gives is that the funders of the publication have close ties to the CIA: “One day, hopefully far away, you and I and the entire international mafia [as they called the boom] will have to sign a letter against the magazine, and that's the time when I don't want to be inside”, which is why, he says, he will limit himself to collaborating sporadically given the high quality of the publication.
After the success of One Hundred Years... everything changed. On December 2, 1967, already from Barcelona (in Calle República Argentina, number 168), García Márquez confirmed to Fuentes that, a few months after its release, the novel "continues to sell like sausages and the fourth edition is already out (...) For me, the famous Boom is not so much a boom in writers as a boom in readers”. His vision of Franco's Barcelona –which he calls a “strange planet”–, in which he calculates to stay for one or two years –in the end there were eight– is far removed from the myth that some people submit to that time today: “The only thing What worries me is the terrible lack of information in which we live here. Worse than in Kafkahuamilpa. I have just taken a subscription to Le Nouvel Observateur, which is the only way to receive it. It seems absurd to me to live in Europe as if it were in Toluca: at this point, I still have not been able to find out to the right what De Gaulle said”, on a trip that the president made in those days to Canada.
On July 30, 1966, from Mexico, the Colombian lamented to Fuentes the negative criticism that La casa verde by Vargas Llosa is receiving: “They accuse it of being confusing, difficult, traditional, empty and a thousand other idiocies, and it is because this book lacks of the spectacularity of the other [The city and the dogs], but it is denser and broader, and much more mature. I would like the news bastards to sit down to write a book so that they know how things are and do not speak so lightly.
On March 20, 1967, from Mexico, García Márquez gave Vargas Llosa the reasons why he had decided to move to live in Barcelona. They are not too romantic: “The decision for Barcelona is not due, as everyone believes, to the fact that it will be easier to get money from Carmen Balcells there, but because it seems to be the last city in Europe where my wife will be able to have a Bonifacia –which is the name she gives to all the maids since she read La casa verde” (this was so because of the low value of the peseta compared to the dollars the authors charged). On April 11 of that same year, Gabo revealed to Vargas that, after receiving “no less than fifty calls” asking about it, “the news broke here that you had shot yourself. Although the rumor seemed completely crazy, I had a few hours of doubts, because I, who am the anti-suicide par excellence, understand that one blows his brains out, with pure rage, in one of those horrible binge that is found in the middle of a novel".
In confidence, the friends – apart from praising each other – tell each other what they thought of other books. Thus, Cortázar told Fuentes from Saignon, on June 2, 1967, that Tres tristes tigres, by the Cuban Guillermo Cabrera Infante, is a “curious book, full of magnificent things, but totally unsuccessful as a novel structure, as a book. Ingenuity is sometimes the worst enemy of talent, and in this case Cabrera Infante has not been able to resist the almost infernal ingenuity that inhabits it”.
A month later, on July 3, from the same place, Cortázar explained to Vargas Llosa what he felt when he saw Blow-Up, Antonioni's film based on one of his works, the story Las babas del diablo "I will tell you what I only recognized myself in a very brief moment, which moved me a lot: when the photographer returns to the park and discovers that the corpse has disappeared, the camera focuses on the sky and the branches of a tree that the wind shakes. There, in that take that lasts just two seconds, I felt that there was something of mine. The rest, perhaps luckily, belongs entirely to Antonioni”.
Cuba politically divides the writers, but they don't allow that to interfere with their friendship. When Vargas Llosa promotes a manifesto critical of Fidel Castro, Gabo, on November 12, 1968, agrees with what he says (he speaks of an "excellent text") but warns him that "it will be of no use. Fidel will answer, as delicately as possible, that what he does with his writers and artists is his business, and therefore we can go to hell.
On January 20, 1969, Vargas Llosa – still very much on the left – wrote to Fuentes from Pullman (USA) and told him: “I am extremely worried, saddened and scared with what is happening in Cuba”. He tells her that he has accepted an offer to teach classes in Puerto Rico, "which is like putting your head in the lion's den, because Cuban worms abound on the island (there are, they also tell me, forty thousand female poets)" .
When the Padilla case broke out in 1971 (the writer imprisoned in Havana and forced to pronounce a public self-criticism), Cortázar thus justified before Fuentes, on May 23, not signing any protest manifesto: "It seemed to me that it was a pure loss of contact with a reality that is much more complex than it may seem to Europeans" and stays with "the fact that the Cuban Revolution continues to be something that essentially differs from what happens in our multiple gorillas" and that "me forces to be with them, without silence my point of view”.
From Barcelona, Gabo tells his friends about the writing process for El otoño del patriarca. Thus, on March 17, 1969, he explained to Fuentes that "now I have discovered that Christopher Columbus, like my dictator, had no lines on the palm of his hand, and therefore it is not known in which of his three tombs are his bones (...) Now I am writing the chapter of a conqueror who never managed to get out of the rusty armor, and died inside it after living many years as a ghost in the dictator's palace, desperate for the love of a nun who he couldn't sleep with because of his terrible full-length chastity belt. The bad thing is that now the novel is dragging me along, that I no longer know where the hell it is taking me or how many volumes it will have, or if it will be good or bad. The only thing I know is that I'm doing what I wanted, that is, whatever came out of my balls”. On July 15 of that year, he told her that he had gone to the Italian island of Pantelleria because he suffered, at his house in Barcelona, the annoying visits from Latin American friends that made him lose concentration: “Strange species of American lizards appeared every two hours, and the house that was destined to be a corner of peace had become a brothel where there was hardly enough time to take out empty bottles”. And he continues: "The idea that now accompanies me is that I have never known how to write, that it is impossible to do it, that it was all your invention, but I calmly think that this is due to the disastrous influence of Pepe Donoso, whom I left perched on a house in Vallvidrera, inventing strange nocturnal illnesses and trying to show everyone that he is the only writer on earth who finds it hard to write”.
The following year, on May 15, 1970, from Barcelona, García Márquez confessed to Vargas Llosa that he no longer drank alcohol “because an undertaker (...) found my liver bigger than my heart, and without the slightest show of mercy cut me off from dramatic drinks for the rest of my long life. Later I found out, from my drunkards in Colombia, that everyone in the tropics has the biggest liver—something that European Cartesians don't know—but I was beginning to feel so good without my daily half-bottle of whiskey that I preferred to give it up forever. ”.
Among the many anecdotes, on December 12, 1970, from Mexico, Fuentes proposed to Cortázar to get involved together in a musical projected by Jorge Lavelli: “The idea is to make a Latin American musical comedy, with critical and political intent, with the collaboration, for sketches and musical ideas, by Julio Cortázar plus Gabo, Mario, Alejo, Donoso and me. The guiding thread would be very simple: the fate of a dagger, forged in Spain in the 16th century, through time and space in Latin America: a dagger that is used for work, exploitation, crime, love, party and rebellion It would be about each one writing half a dozen scenes (you from Argentina, me from Mexico, etc.) integrating the music and the anecdote”. What could have been the musical of the boom (can you imagine?) is rejected, a few days later, on December 19, by Cortázar: "Lavelli's idea excites me little." The other truncated project – this one advanced a little more – is The Book of Dictators, in which each one would have written a story about a dictator from their respective countries. Even the Spanish Juan Goytisolo (1931-2017) slipped in, who wanted to make “a parallel vision of El Escorial and the Valley of the Fallen”, according to what Fuentes told Vargas Llosa on July 5, 1967. The reading of Las cartas of the boom makes it clear that they were, in addition to great writers, a group of friends with common projects and who loved each other and helped each other when necessary.
