The Diaries of Emilio Renzi Read online

  Tuesday 6

  Yesterday I wasted the afternoon in Galerna with Toto Schmucler, who wants to make me share leadership of the magazine; I have to find an argument that will let me bow out gracefully. The magazine seems interesting to me in general, since it wouldn’t use certain people who are too closely tied to cultural journalism and I could also take it in another direction (more tied to a critique of criticism in the media).

  Pavese. “He had made a mistake I would not have expected of my literature professor: confusing biography with criticism and applauding some texts for documentary reasons. By contrast my idea of literature is this: to represent a world in which the author enters as a simple character and with the self-important security of a lyric sung to oneself.” Letters, 1932.

  Wednesday

  Notes on Tolstoy (7). The idea that religion lies in feelings and practices and not in beliefs is a recurrent theme in Wittgenstein. [Primitive] Christianity is the only certain path to happiness, not because it would promise life after death, but rather because it provided an example in the words and the figure of Christ, a behavior to follow, which made suffering endurable. Religion as practice. (To become Christ.) In Tolstoy, the ethical takes precedence over the personal and the aesthetic, leading him to sacrifice his wife’s happiness, his comfortable family life, and his elevated literary position in exchange for what he considered to be a moral imperative: to live according to the principles of rational Christian morality, to live the simple and austere life of humanity in general instead of the enticing adventure of individual art. And when he realized, in 1910, that as long as he went on living on his estate, at the heart of his tempestuous family, he would continue to betray his ideal of simple and pious existence, Tolstoy, an octogenarian, abandoned his home and set himself on the road toward a monastery, but he would never arrive, and he died in the waiting room of a little train station.

  Thursday

  Both arrive at the same time: a letter from David (coming up with projects based on his stay in Europe) and David himself, ringing the bell with the mischievous expression of a guilty man. Clear metaphysics, if such a thing exists.

  Sunday

  A long walk around the city with David, ending at a movie theater on Calle Corrientes where we watched a watered-down Soviet documentary about fascism.

  I spent the morning throwing out unusable little papers, old loves.

  Tuesday

  Last night, all of the bad faith from being with David as he idealizes his attraction toward Europe, which awakens the rage of Julia and Beba, and I listen, impassive, without making too much bad blood for myself.

  Wednesday 14

  Last night I dealt a low blow to myself: I weigh 72 kilos (above my average of 65). A feeling of being controlled by my body, which takes on weight of its own accord.

  Series C. As I left the publishing office I ran into Inés, absurd, a kind of ridiculous stranger, and I said goodbye to her as soon as we reached the sidewalk, brushing her off so that I wouldn’t have to accept the stupidity of having spent three years of my life with her.

  Style, for me, consists of seeing the events I am living through now with the view through which I will see them five years from now. Clearly, that is cynicism: critical control of what I have in my hands. In literature (at least), it is infallible. I also exaggerate that view with women. A kind of definition, carefully examined: add five years to the present to calm down the commotion. Just as effective as my theory that flaws (when made worse) are transformed into virtues. God knows.

  Saturday

  David returns after two or three days of “absence” because of the argument with Julia and Beba about his trip to Europe. (He enthusiastically suggested that we all go live in Europe.) He is depressed and, as always, defines reality according to his own condition; he either has faith in literature or rejects it according to his state of mind. In any case, he lives out his situation tragically and is too intelligent not to turn his compensatory ideologies into brilliant dissertations, in which what matters least is the subject. He sold his novel Cosas concretas to Tiempo Contemporáneo for twelve hundred dollars (five hundred thousand pesos), but he has no desire to publish it and even less to rewrite it, and so he quarrels with himself without making any decisions and talks about the abundance of books that are inundating the country and its surroundings.

  Sunday

  Friday with Nicolás Rosa and Schmucler at the magazine, trying to differentiate the few from the rest.

  I come up with a regimen to lose weight; even if it refers to the regimens of the armed forces, there’s no doubt that it’s a ridiculous and rather useless activity (not to mention the hunger).

  Yesterday a letter from Mom, who reproaches me for having forgotten her birthday and on top of that tells me that Dad had a relapse of his ulcer and will need an operation. What bothers me is the situation that I’ll have to endure: a visit to the hospital, solemnity, comforting; I would like to be able to isolate myself without it being seen as something it is not, a lack of love.

  Monday

  At the magazine I ran into David. I walked back down Corrientes with him, after getting a coffee at Paulista, while the neighborhood filled with people in the darkness and drizzle. David is doing badly, with no desire to work on the novel, worried because of the collapse of the publishing houses that everyone predicts (the breakup of Schapiro and the Centro Editor, the retirement of J. Álvarez), obsessed with his fears: he imagines seeing his books on the bargain table, becoming an old writer who everyone knows but no one reads, lost and forgotten amid juvenile successes (Gálvez, Verbitsky, Castelnuovo). If it doesn’t happen, suicide always remains, because David’s true fear is suicide. Rather, he fears the events that could make suicide imperative. That explains his ideal to go to Europe as a “rebirth,” starting there anew, forgetting, and leaving this reality behind. His eyes were shining as he told me about the shops in Rome where he would go alone for lunch, like someone who has left his parents’ house and is learning how to live.

  Wednesday

  At the publishing house, news that Álvarez “kicked Pirí out” in order to save himself from the collapse, a way, I guess, to find a scapegoat or give up a hostage and so outlive his Beat Generation kids and survive economic hardship.

  Thursday 22

  The conflicts between students and the police go on, with three dead so far this month. Yesterday in Rosario the students took control of the city center. I have a strange feeling when I think about how I’m looking at them from the outside because they’re twenty years old. My age back in 1960.

  Correcting Cosas concretas with David. It’s incredible, instead of cutting down he adds more text, he doesn’t have the slightest idea of what structure is.

  Friday, May 23

  In Rosario the students force the police to retreat, one more killed, the fourth, several casualties, the army intervenes.

  I put up little signs on the door that say I’m not home, trying to prevent “visits.”

  Saturday 24

  “There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing… I am a recording instrument… I do not presume to impose ‘story’ ‘plot’ ‘continuity,’” W. Burroughs, Naked Lunch.

  Sunday 25

  I worked all day, happy but with few results: a review of Pynchon, the back-cover copy for the Bruce Friedman novel, and a piece for the magazine about the latest university conflicts. Later I ended the night at David’s house while he worked ferociously on Cosas concretas; he wants to replicate the tone from a year ago, but he has lost it and so is ruining the novel.

  Friday 30

  Yesterday in Córdoba the workers and students took control of the city from 11 in the morning onward, forcing the army to intervene. The struggle continued until midnight. Undoubtedly the activist groups moved through the city like fish in water, with help from everyone.

  Saturday 31

  “The writer needs a capacity for critical
reflection, familiarity with speculative texts and thought that the writer of yesteryear could dismiss. The work of Joyce or Beckett cannot be conceived without Freudian theory and the reading of philosophy,” E. Sanguineti.

  I have a cold; my stomach hurts. I ended the night by watching The Human Condition with David. We left halfway through because David was shifting around too much in his seat. He doesn’t like American cinema but doesn’t like the rest either… In the bar, David was very fired up about the events in Córdoba, needing to frame that struggle as a qualitative leap and a validation.

  David has an interesting project to write a novel whose subject—and title—would be editing: La redacción. The text of a political manifesto devised collectively with a group of Latin Americans; working with language as political material, a novel that is ultimately nothing more than a text.

  Wednesday 4

  It is very clear: when I have a lot to do, I let myself go. I sit there with my head in my hands (metaphorically). I don’t do anything. I let things pile up. Now I’m writing a piece on Catch-22 (for Monday), preparing a lecture on Arlt for Friday at the Teatro Sha (Hebraica), finishing the section with information about all of the books published this month for the magazine (comments on every book), writing a manifesto about the events in Córdoba for the intellectuals to sign at the meeting of Los Libros, writing a piece for Luna by Thursday, visiting Lucas T. (in jail) at San Martín. Preparing for tonight’s recorded roundtable with Onetti, Sarduy, and María Rosa Oliver, and meetings with Schmucler, Jorge Álvarez, and the guys from Tiempo Contemporáneo publishing. Besides that, dealing with the surprise appearances of visitors who’ve been coming to interrupt my peace for the last week, an average of two people per day. Overextended, I get up late (today at eight thirty), work badly on the novel, a mess, but it’s no use complaining. Imagine if Robinson Crusoe were visited by a cruise ship full of tourists every afternoon…

  As soon as I come round and have some distance, I start to feel better and get excited about my work. I’m reading Walter Benjamin’s extraordinary essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” and some of my intuitions about the current state of literature are confirmed. The key, more than the market (which doesn’t exist in Argentina), is the mass media. Sabato and Cortázar expand their audiences thanks to Primera Plana and Siete Días. I could write something about that this afternoon for the magazine if I can set the morning aside for the novel.

  Thursday

  What I said before about cultural journalism once again reinforces my idea that Los Libros magazine should be dedicated to critiquing the review pages in the newspapers and magazines, analyzing their cultural sections, etc. We live in the age of critiquing critical critique.

  In Malcolm Lowry, the theme is written fate: not the man who is writing but rather the man who is written by another novelist, whose life is a text. In this sense, Lowry changes the tradition of novels that relate the life of an artist (as in Joyce with Stephen Dedalus or Faulkner with Quentin Compson): S. Wilderness, the protagonist in his final novels, senses that he is living the life written by Lowry in Under the Volcano. Isn’t the same thing happening to me?

  Friday, June 6

  Meeting Onetti. Much taller than I’d thought, very well dressed in a dark flannel suit that accentuated his long hands, white and fragile. A face like rubber, a certain difficulty breathing that cuts his words short, a furtive air, never looking straight ahead. I had imagined him fat and much shorter, disheveled and with an air like Dylan Thomas has in the photographs from when he came to New York to die. His wife imposed with a mixture of fear and strength, almost forcing me to stay for lunch because he felt bad being among old people (M. R. Oliver, José Bianco, Sara de Jorge) and wanted a young man sitting at the table: he looked at me without saying anything, and I felt more uncomfortable and timid than I ever had before. We looked at each other across the counter, and I tried to defend him against that strange imposture. I thought about him while he talked, but it was only at the end, when we started to talk about American literature, that I could really respond to him as needed. Then we turned toward the detective novel. He’s an obsessive reader of the genre; we both consider David Goodis to be the best of all. Let’s not tell anyone, he said, with a complicit look in his dark eyes.

  To understand the situation, maybe I should recall that when I arrived at María Rosa’s house and entered the living room, I approached Onetti, who was sitting in an armchair, and told him how much I admired his story “The Stolen Bride” and started to recite it from memory because I knew the beginning by heart. I asked him about publishing it in the collection of nouvelles that I’m doing for Siglo XXI, and he agreed that I could send him some questions and include his responses in the book.

  Wednesday

  A little crisis when they told me I had to talk to Jorge Álvarez, since he had paid me four hundred thousand pesos so far, and they might cut off my supplies. Today, all the same, Jorge, charming and intelligent, took my side, talking about “slight difficulties,” payment installments, etc. He is very enthusiastic about the Serie Negra.

  A time of chaos and fury.

  Saturday

  Whenever I happen to get paid (and wherever: yesterday at the Hebraica), I feel that in that precise moment when I collect it, I really am “earning” it, as though everything depended on the impression that I can give to whoever is about to pay me. A metaphor for my general relationship with money: it is always given in the present, and so I try to convince people of my merits in that pure present, as though I had no depth or past and they were paying me for my performances in the moment when I receive the money (and not for the work that I did).

  Yesterday everything went well in my lecture, with many people in the room, I spoke well and without pausing, without reading, and almost without looking at my notes. Afterward, to celebrate, I went to eat alone at Arturito, on Corrientes near 9 de Julio.

  Monday 16

  I spent the weekend inventing epigraphs to describe every book that has come out in the city this month. Interesting work for the future; a reader leaves behind a record of the impression caused on him by all of the books that come out in his time.

  Tuesday 17

  I’ve never been able to control reality, and what I call my schizophrenia is nothing more than my inability to choose with clarity, out of the tangle of events, only those that correspond to my central project. I’ve always put literature first, and that is why I now have the feeling that I’m being carried by Toto, who “forces me” (?) to publish a magazine with him that I don’t believe in. That feeling of being forced has always followed me. It is connected to my lack of any anchor to reality. Since I don’t have needs (I never have), I foster my desires to the point of turning them into my only way of living (in short, into a simulacrum of real need). I live as though it were always Sunday, and I had enough money to satisfy any possible need: the step after that is having no time to live, since “everything” seems to take place in a single holiday. I turn from side to side and announce fundamental changes that I’ll make tomorrow (how long have I been doing this?).

  Wednesday 18

  Today I bought an agenda, a space to organize the chaos.

  A hellish journey: at eleven with Toto in Galerna trying to finish up Issue 1 of the magazine. While there I run into Alberto Lagunas, a short story writer from Zárate, who is moved by the “strength” of my work and says some nonsense in the tone of the “illuminated creator,” typical of El Escarabajo de Oro. From there I went to the Álvarez bookshop: four hours waiting for a delivery boy to bring a check so that I could pay my rent (crossed and unsigned).

  In the middle of that I meet Víctor Grippo, intoxicated, pursued by the CIA, obsessed with money. Then Germán García comes, undergoing a serious crisis with his second novel; alone and against the world, he appeals to me to decide (after reading it) if it makes sense to publish it or not (it seems to me that he puts on that whole circus just so I’ll rea
d his book). To complete the day David comes over, after dinner, looking for me at home “because La Negra is really messed up,” he lies to cover up his own depression, his need to be with people makes him talk to me in a fraternal tone, objectifying his own dependence on others when things are going badly.

  Further confirmation that either I’ll have done with people or vice versa.

  Friday, June 20

  I know clearly, with perfect certainty, what I’m looking for, an aggressive and self-deprecating tone, making an analysis of my life as though it belonged to someone else, “drawing conclusions,” citing some events and experiences as examples.

  Taking a real biography and writing it as though it were my own. Introducing my personal tone and my own consciousness through that jumble of strange information would be a way to escape from myself and be left with style alone.

  Friday 27

  I go to the CGT action in Plaza Once. A turn to the left from Peronism, according to the CP. Combative speeches, rioting, police oppression. I have to run; I turn down Yatay and I’m alone.