There is Arequipa Festival. Chilean writer animated one of the tables of this event in 2015. Photo: La República. | The Republic
During his visit to Arequipa, Jorge Edwards, recalled that in the seventies of the previous century, there was a risk of war with Chile. The government of Juan Velasco Alvarado he set out to recover the territories lost in the conflict of 1879. Faced with this difficult circumstance, he and Mario Vargas Llosa, in their respective countries, they collected signatures to avoid confrontation. Similarly, they did when the The Hague Court issued its ruling on the maritime delimitation that had not satisfied any of the countries.
Edwards he was a career diplomat. He embraced the profession, like many writers, with the certainty that he would do nothing and would have plenty of time to read and write. But he was wrong. “We diplomats do a lot of nonsense,” he said ironically one morning in December 2015 at the There is Festival of Arequipa, remembering the incidents in the work of foreign policy.
Mario Vargas Llosa He has defined the Edwards of that time as shy and polite, capable of wearing a coat and tie to the bathroom or keeping them even in bed. However, that formality, according to MVLl, ended with two whiskeys involved. He remembers seeing him perched on a table dancing a very elaborate Hindu dance. Vargas Llosa quotes Pablo Neruda to delve into the eccentricities of his Chilean colleague. The poet and his wife Matilda They found him in a nightclub Chile, climbed on a balcony and from there haranguing the audience: “Enough of the hypocrisy, let’s all get down to business.” We approached the Chilean writer on that occasion for an editorial project. The still unpublished interview was made with the journalist Cristian Ticona.
Jorge Edwards with Mario Vargas Llosa. Photo: Diffusion.
—What is the first image that comes to mind of the literature boom?
—My meeting with Vargas Llosa on a radio station in Paris. He was running in the year 62. The boom had not yet been known. Mario was 25 or 26 years old, he worked nights at Radio y Televisión Radio Francesa, which produced programs for the world in Spanish. And the other first image that I remember is seeing Carlos Fuentes in Santiago when he was leaving for a conference at the Universidad Concepción. Vargas Llosa had just published “Los jefes” in a local edition that I did not know. I didn’t know he was a writer.
—What memories do you have of him as a sidekick?
“I’ll tell you how I met him.” I arrived in Paris as the third secretary of the Chilean embassy in France. There was a Chilean of Polish origin there, a friend of my wife, Beatriz Peteatkowicz, who married Jean Supervielle, son of the famous poet Jules Supervielle. He invites me to a program on French Radio Television where he was director, called “Literature up to date.” They gave us a book in French and we commented on it in Spanish to make it known to the Spanish-speaking world. A young Peruvian who reads a lot goes to that program, Supervielle tells me. In that edition there was a discussion of a French novel that had really bored us all. Then we came to a cafe on the corner. There the young Peruvian caught my attention. He had a strong literary notion, he had an idea of the chivalric novel, the Russian, French novel, etc.
We became quite a few friends, then I found out his name was Mario Vargas Llosa, I didn’t know he was a writer. Then he gives me the book “The bosses” and I give him my book of stories “People from the city.” This young Peruvian, five years younger than me, was very fond of cinema in a different way from me. I really liked European cinema, Wild Strawberry, some French and Italian films like Federico Fellini. Instead, Mario liked the American cowboy novel. We traded. I would take him to see one of Fellini and he would take me to see one of jeans. After the movie he had to run to his work, he works at the night radio. He then he released “The City and the Dogs.”
—But there was a lot of literary complicity with Vargas Llosa, what did they read at that time?
—We had shared readings. He was a great follower of Flaubert and I of some English and Russian authors. We agreed on many readings.
—You published “Persona non grata” (1973) which summarizes your troubled time at the Chilean embassy in Cuba due to the permanent criticism you made of Fidel Castro’s totalitarian style. Were the first to read that book Carlos Barral and Mario Vargas Llosa?
I think they were the first.
—Was the disappointment with Cuba due to the totalitarian style that was beginning to appear in Fidel Castro?
—Vargas Llosa and I knew Cuba. We viewed the censorship with concern. We were shocked by the lack of freedom of expression. I remember meeting him once in Havana, we had lunch with José Lezama Lima, a poet from that country, where we were very concerned about the lack of freedom of expression. Like many young people, I was first enthusiastic about the Cuban Revolution, but when I got there I was disillusioned.
—Speaking of Jean-Paul Sartre, who was an influential writer in the literature boom, do you think he has aged a lot?
“I don’t give a damn about Jean-Paul Sartre. It is a completely old-fashioned subject. It doesn’t interest anyone. I was in France for four years and you think someone remembers him. Today we talk about Albert Camus, surrealism and some new philosophers. Sartre is an anachronism. Fidel Castro is in the square of the revolution with Jean-Paul Sartre. Fidel tells him: “I give the people what they ask of me.” And he couldn’t give her even the most basic food. Sartre asks him: “And if he asks for the moon?”. Fidel responds: “I give you the moon.” Jean-Paul Sartre is ecstatic with this response that was truly stupid. A politician has to promise what can be delivered and he has to find means to do things effectively. He was one of the most complicated philosophers, somewhat tangled in mind, he was very Hedegerian, he came from German philosophy.
Archive. Edwards along with Nicanor Parra and Oscar Navarro. Photo: The Republic.
—He wrote a personal vision of the boom in Latin American literature. After more than 40 years, do you think this phenomenon is unrepeatable?
—It was an important movement that marked a historical stage of Latin American literature that has some characteristics. It does not reject the description of the Latin American world that naturalistic or Creole literature did, but it does introduce some elements such as fantasy. Juan Rulfo is a great example. He introduces language that is not purely informative or descriptive, that has elements of pre-boom poetry. The authors of the boom caught my attention, their readings of César Vallejo, Pablo Neruda, the poetry of Borges. And also the reading of narrative currents of literature, Kafka, William Faulkner, James Joyce, etc.
—To capture the technique when capturing their stories?
—Not necessarily, that’s reducing things a lot. Those authors were creators of great literary worlds, of poetic atmospheres that one wanted to introduce into the narrative of the Latin American language. For the rest there is a coincidence with what the young Spaniards were doing, Juan Benet, Juan García Hortelano.
—But in Spanish-language literature, I don’t think there is a phenomenon similar to the boom?
—No… it’s just that I haven’t seen a group that has a coherent united trend like the literature boom. Now there is diversity. Some are fantastic, others historical or realistic. My generation had basically literary aspirations. Now the issue of sales and prizes in literary creation also interferes a lot. In my generation there were poets who wrote novels and novelists who wrote poetry. And there was a fundamental literary ambition that I now see perverted by the obsession with big sales, everything is more commercialized and that meaning has lost its depth.
—The growth of the boom in Latin American literature is helped by the Cuban Revolution.
—The influence of the Cuban Revolution in the literature of that time is quite exaggerated. In Cuba there were great writers who were not the product of the revolution, but rather came before it and who continued to write at the time of the revolution. One of them was Lezama Lima, he was a modern writer who did not write naturalistic prose, but imaginative, highly creative language. Lezama was in the 40s doing the Orígenes magazine; if you read that magazine today you will be amazed, it was an interesting phenomenon. Long before the Cuban Revolution there was a great literary magazine in which the best writers of the time contributed texts; for example, the Spanish exile Pedro Salinas, the North Americans Wallace Stevens. Some magazines prepare the appearance of the boom, for example in Argentina the magazine Sur is published, from there Borges, Pepe Vianco, Bioy Casares come out. In Peru there is a formidable magazine Amaru that is made by Emilio Westphalen. To say that Lezama is a writer of the revolution is absurd, what if it happens is that Lezama at a time when the revolution was highly mediated appeared as a great writer who was involved there. So they translated it into French and English, it became widely known, in the same way Alejo Carpentier, his first books are published in Argentina. Carpentier becomes a diplomat of the revolution. Just as there were other writers who are left out, for example Enrique Labrador Ruiz, a contemporary and close friend of Neruda, they describe him as an old skeptic and crafty, the revolution does not care about him out of ignorance. I went to visit him and he lived in a house on the verge of collapsing and full of mice.
—What is the contribution of Vargas Llosa in universal literature?
—Europe arrived in the 50s and brought a vision of Peru, even of the jungle world that he expressed in a very advanced way in his time, that literary form comes from Flaubert and William Faulkner in a different Spanish, the colloquial and popular speech of Peru then enters with a cultured language and reaches a synthesis. So the Europeans find themselves with a literary world that they are completely unaware of and that speaks of a geographical, cultural, sociological world. Europeans begin to discover Latin America through what Fidel Castro was doing in Cuba and in the literature of Vargas Llosa, Carpentier, Fuentes to a certain extent and Rulfo, let’s not forget Brazilian literature with Gimaraes Rosa with Gran Sertao translated into all languages. languages and has an influence on all European thought.
—Mario and you made peace pronouncements when relations between Peru and Chile were strained. Before the Hague ruling, they invoked in July 2012 for the Hague ruling to serve as a true reconciliation between the two countries.
—Mario and I talked about the subject of Peru Chile at a time when it was said that Peru would wage a war against Chile, on the centenary of the War of the Pacific. In the 70s of the last century. Juan Velasco Alvarado was its president. We made a Chilean and Peruvian statement. I led the Chilean side and collected signatures in my country and he collected signatures in Peru to avoid war. Later, in the trial in The Hague, a call was made to respect the ruling in The Hague and that it not sow discord and enmity.
—Are writers, in that sense, more stripped of nationalism?
—Nationalism is a form of disease but it is a difficult disease to suppress, think about the issue of Catalonia, Spain: if there is a separation, Spain loses and Catalonia loses.