Tormented and immersed in permanent doubt; contradictory; haughty and sure of his own work and at the same time envious of the success of others; subjected to desires that he repressed; in permanent family crisis; dependent and at the same time critical of his friends and colleagues, but always intensely devoted to literature and literary creation as the first rule of life.
This is how the writer José Donoso appears in his Central Diaries. A season in hell (1966-1980), an autobiographical monument that has just been published by the Chilean Diego Portales University. Under the care of Professor Cecilia García Huidobro, who already dealt with the previous Donoso in progress (1950-1965), this volume also includes a selection of the unpublished files that the author sold to the American universities of Iowa and Princeton, as “a document by which José Donoso the man will be judged, after I have died.”
Often described as the “fifth musketeer of the boom in Latin American literature”, with the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez, the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, the Argentine Julio Cortázar and the Mexican Carlos Fuentes, the four indisputable, José Donoso (1924-1996), With important work translated into numerous languages and taken to film, he would represent the Chilean contribution, but competing for that fifth place with other renowned artists such as the Cuban Guillermo Cabrera Infante.
In fact, Donoso was the first chronicler of this moment in his Personal History of the Boom (1972), with which it was said that he wanted to secure his place in literary history.
These central Diaries focus on the years he lived in Spain, successively in Mallorca, Vallvidrera (where he was a neighbor of Baltasar Porcel), Calaceite, Sitges (where he directed a literary workshop that I had the privilege of attending) and for a short time Madrid, with some intermediate time to teach well-paid courses in academic centers in the US. The Spanish stay was decisive for his career.
In Mallorca and Vallvidrera he finished his best-known novel, The Obscene Bird of the Night, which established him internationally: the extensive dark and gothic story about a decadent family in Chilean high society, which had haunted him since the 1950s and during the writing of which He developed an ulcer and required an operation; Donoso always extraordinarily somatized his literary anguish.
In Calaceite and Sitges (he did not like big cities to live in) he wrote what is considered his second best work, Casa de campo: it began as a perverse children’s fable in the vein of Lord of the Flies, with very morbid moments collected in the first versions outlined here, ended up leading to political allegory.
On a personal level, it was in Madrid in 1967 where the writer and his wife María Pilar Serrano adopted their daughter Pilarcita, the protagonist of many of the newspapers. Now that she was older, and Donoso and his wife had died, Pilar Donoso Serrano accessed them, and the reading had a dramatic impact on her. She used them for her testimonial book Correr el tupido veil, published in 2009. Two years later Pilar was found dead in Santiago de Chile under strange circumstances; Different hypotheses pointed to suicide.
The handwritten diaries now edited by García Huidobro – a daunting task for which she must be congratulated – are of remarkable sincerity: the writer captures sufferings, expectations and low moments, with little makeup. Tormented by a bisexuality that he lives very conflictively, his marriage to María Pilar, of whom he records both his alcoholism and the frequency of his intimate relationships, is combined with his temporary homosexual contacts (three annual visits to the “Turkish baths”) and the very sporadic and generally frustrating with young people from the cultural environment.
Close friends appear such as the journalist Elsa Arana or the writers Jorge Edwards and Mauricio Wacquez, the cartoonist Fernando Krahn and his wife María Luz Uribe, and with almost everyone there are their pluses and minuses. He places his trust and hopes in the literary agent Carmen Balcells.
There are continuous lists of expected income for different reasons, and the corresponding joys and regrets for economic booms and disasters. He outlines numerous projects that would not come to fruition (such as a novel about the Catalan informalist painters, which possibly gave rise to the posthumous Lizard Without a Tail, or the script for a film about Rimbaud with Patty Smith with the title A season in hell, which gives its name. to this collection).
He returns again and again to the desire to create a rounded work that forces him to constantly rewrite. Expressions and even entire paragraphs in English are frequent. The depressive phases follow one another, and the reader is overwhelmed by the magnitude of the anguish expressed and hypnotized by the frankness of a first-rate document, although given its length it is suitable above all for those interested in the author and in Latin American literary life. of the 20th century.
Those readers already familiar with the character will miss some light on certain episodes. A classic of publishing history tells that Donoso planned to compete with El obscene bird of the night for the Biblioteca Breve de Seix Barral prize, which he had dedicated to Vargas Llosa, and assumed that he would win it. Carlos Barral’s break with the Seix family left the award in suspense.
“In fact, many times fundamental things are not mentioned in the newspaper -acknowledges Cecilia García-Huidobro-. The Seix Barral prize for The Bird was his greatest desire and in 1970 he passed what happened, inaugurating what would be the Donosian curse in the face of distinctions, which were rather elusive. It is difficult to understand that he did not receive the FIL award from the Guadalajara fair or the Cervantes, for example. In any case, there are no further references in the newspaper about the conflict that left him without the award. Maybe he thought of some kind of revenge because around that same time there are notes for a roman à clef with Carlos Barral, Carmen Balcells, Sergio Pitol, Luis Goytisolo and his wife María Antonia. ‘A kind of Point Counter Point, by Aldous Huxley,’ he writes. And he notes ‘Barral case’ more than once.”
The newspaper also does not have references to the “Padilla case”, the trial of the Cuban poet that divided the writers of the boom: “Donoso always kept a certain distance from the Cuban revolution; He was invited to Casa de las Américas as a jury in the sixties but he managed not to go… He looked at him with distrust and did not share the enthusiasm of the other members of the boom. It probably influences that for a year and a half he did not keep a diary, between October 1971 and May 1973, the height of the confrontation between supporters and disappointed critics of the Castro regime. The ‘Padilla case’ may have triggered the impulse to write Personal History of the Boom, where it gives it great relevance as a watershed among writers and intellectuals from across the continent.”
Another crucial issue was Pinochet’s coup in Chile on September 11, 1973, which shocked international public opinion. Donoso was reproached for his lack of commitment towards the issue, and on September 16 he recorded the first, cautious mention (“Everything that has happened in Chile. The horror. Not belonging to it. That is the issue.” ). In the following months there are hardly any allusions and he even writes that he plans to use the torture of Víctor Jara as a literary “anecdote.”
“Donoso experiences things through the sieve of writing. And in that sense there is a certain distance in the way the dictatorship lived. I would not say that he takes Jara’s torture as an ‘anecdote’, on the contrary he considers incorporating it into Casa de Campo as a brutal image of repression by the dictatorship. In fact, this novel, which began in May, after the coup of September 11, focuses on representing the situation in Chile under an allegory as if wanting to highlight that there are atrocities that language is not enough to account for. Directly, the blow affected him because he had planned to travel to Chile after 10 years in December 1973, and he canceled it. Donoso was not an enthusiast of the Allende government, he slips some criticism, but he rejected the coup from the first day. In his way, of course,” says the editor.
“The truth – adds García Huidobro – is that the newspapers reflect that Donoso is not a political animal, although he does not ignore what is happening. He talks about the murder of Carmelo Soria, a renowned Spanish editor living in Chile, and in 1980 when Roger Vergara, director of the Military Intelligence School, the DINA, was murdered, the analysis he makes is that of an informed person.
Finally, the reticent view towards the Catalans is striking, despite living among them for several years (he even refers to some residents of Calaceite as “these shitty Catalans”).
“Discomfort is inherent to Donoso,” says the editor of the ‘Diarios’. He has a bad opinion of the Catalans but it must be said that he has an even worse opinion of the Chileans. As he reiterated many times, Chilean society suffocated him, and from the age of 20 he was trying to live away. He also felt that overwhelmingness during his years in Catalonia. Because of his own restlessness and probably because of what he perceived as a certain supremacy of Catalan culture and, above all, the language. The speech around him was essential for writing. He would not even rule out that the fact that he did not settle in an Anglo-Saxon country despite his knowledge and appreciation of its literature was due to the fact that he could not distance himself from a Spanish-speaking environment.
The book, which would deserve a Spanish edition, even if it were in a summarized version, ends with the return of José Donoso with his family to Santiago de Chile in December 1980.
